Death In Venice - Benjamin Britten, Libretto By Myfanwy Piper, After Thomas Mann

 

Glyndebourne Festival production, 1990

Starring: Robert Tear, Alan Opie, Michael Chance, Gerald Finley, Christopher Ventris, Paul Zeplichal...

London Sinfonietta, conducted by Graeme Jenkins

Directed by Stephen Lowless

I've long considered this to be Benjamin Britten's finest work,  the most compositionally developed,  the most uninhibited,  and most original,  rivaled maybe by the War Requiem and it is probably his most disturbing one due to the clear relevance of the work to his own known attraction to young teenage boys - though the only two of those who ever talked about their relationship with him claimed there was no actual sex outside of one who said they had kissed.   So far as anyone has been able to establish and there have been many who have looked into it,  his actual relationships with young boys were close to the mark but, so far, don't seem to have crossed to actual physical abuse, rape.   

I don't know what to think of this, his last major work - he put off heart surgery that he was told was necessary to keep him alive to finish it.   Was he using Thomas Mann's famous story as a confession or an attempt at him explaining himself or, maybe trying to understand himself, finally.  The original novella is based on Mann's own experience during a trip,  virtually every major event in the action having actually happened to Mann though at a far earlier age, the creepy mysterious encounter in the first scene, the disturbing encounter on ship, the gondolier. . .  the unrequited infatuation with a young boy.     

He wrote the role of Aschenbach for his long time lover Peter Pears who premiered the extremely difficult role when he was in his early 60s.   It's almost continual singing of a very complex and difficult text with some of Britten's most chromatic melody.   Pears certainty had to have found playing Aschenbach extremely difficult, especially considering his closeness to the subject matter, perhaps playing out Britten's confession or self-revelation or self analysis on stage.   He seems to have had the same kind of ambivalent relation to what he certainly knew was one of if not Britten's finest composition,  he once called it an "evil opera."  

This production is one of those you see on screen and wish you could have seen it staged,  it is spectacularly brilliant in its handling of the piece and an extremely difficult subject matter, it is like a memory in the mind of Aschenbach as he was dying of cholera - that's another thing that is part of Mann's experience, while he was on the trip that inspired this he narrowly escaped the last major cholera outbreak in Europe.   The singing of the roles is extremely good.  I'm not much of a judge of dancing so the role of the boy who is the topic of the infatuation, a danced and silent role, isn't something I'm qualified to judge.  That part of it I find disturbing as I think we're supposed to feel Aschenbach's and maybe Britten's or Mann's unease at his own immoral desire even as it turns into a febrile obsession.  The role that it plays in Achenbach's reason for taking his fatal trip, to revive his authorial inspiration which has fled,  is certainly part of what Britten felt.  He had something a loss of confidence after the War Requiem's spectacular success, perhaps exacerbated by his next opera Owen Wingrave's lackluster reception.  I think Owen Wingrave is one of his best works but not as much so as Death in Venice.  Aschenbach is certainly troubled by his obsession with the boy as he is with the various frivolous and decadent delight's of Venice and on ship board he's offered.   He is there to revive his artistic inspiration, not to party.  

The opera, as the novella it's based on, is no positive presentation of the author's desires for the boy, seeing that it is never consummated even by so much as a close encounter between them and with the author ending up dying of cholera - Britten knew he was dying even as he was writing it.   Maybe this was him saying that despite his own desires, he had resisted acting on them. 

What to think of this all in terms of Benjamin Britten's now minutely investigated relationship with young teenage boys?   What to think of that since there is only one report of so much of some kissing, which doesn't seem to have been unwelcome but which is still something an adult shouldn't engage in with a child?   There is one supposed quote in which Britten is supposed to have admitted he'd had anal sex with boys but we have no idea what age he'd have been when that happened.   He could have never said it (the provenance of the sentence isn't something I've ever seen) or it could have referred to something that happened when he, himself, was a teenager.  

I'm not going to pretend to have an answer for any of those questions,  I certainly don't think adults should have sex with children - and that means considerably older than 14.  Sometimes I think that the age of consent should be somewhere in the mid thirties.   For some maybe in their seventies.  But what to do with this masterpiece of an opera?    And the novella, itself. 

Benjamin Britten - St. Nicholas

 

Text (by Eric Crozier)

Saint Nicolas, Benjamin Britten (Op 42)

Caio Guimarães, conductor

Chris Albanese, tenor

University Chorale (University of Indiana)

Conductors Orchestra 

February 20, 2024

I once turned pages, pulling stops for a friend who was the organist in a performance of this piece,  not nearly as well done as this one. Though the organist was excellent.   The part I recall the best is the legend of the pickled boys.   It's a pretty good piece.  

Coventry Carol - Robert Shaw Chamber Singers

 

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,

Bye bye, lully, lullay.

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,

Bye bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do

For to preserve this day

This poor youngling for whom we do sing,

"Bye bye, lully, lullay"?

Herod the king, in his raging,

Charged he hath this day

His men of might in his own sight

All young children to slay.

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,

Bye bye, lully, lullay.

That woe is me, poor child, for thee

And ever mourn and may

For thy parting neither say nor sing,

"Bye bye, lully, lullay."

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,

Bye bye, lully, lullay.

The painting is Massacre of the Innocents by Léon Cogniet

The Roberts Court Is A Jim Crow Court

This is the most white supremacist Court since the one that was sitting in 1896 and I'm not saying that the one back then was more white supremacist.    They are, including little miss "trad" Catholic,  white supremacists who will always try to benefit the white supremacist,  Republican-fascist party which they are operatives of as they sit on the court.

Garisson Keillor

 has a new substack post I want to share with you.  

The Second Strike on the Caribbean Boat: A Resistance History Lesson in Normalizing Authoritarianism

Tad Stoermer has it right, what about the legality and justification of the other 21, or is it now 22 strikes? 

Virgin Birth Hate Mail

IN WHAT IS UNFORTUNATELY* his best known book,  The Real Jesus,  Luke Timothy Johnson said some worthwhile things about the birth narratives of Jesus in response to popular books by the now late Bishop John Spong and such other popular writers who had jumped on the "historical Jesus" gravy-train of the last decades of the last century.  I'll quote much of what he said.

John Spong, an Episcopal bishop, has been for some years waging a rather public war against "fundamentalists,"  by whom he appears to mean anyone who takes the literal meaning meaning of the New Testament texts seriously.  He clearly conceives of himself as heir o the tradition of maverick Anglican and Episcopal bishops like J. A. T. Robinson and James pike,  who also had reputations for being radical and "provocative."  His first foray into the Historical Jesus market was through Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus (Harper SanFrancisco, 1992).  Both he and the publisher undoubtedly grasped and intended the provocative character of he book's subtitle, "A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus."  The reader is primed to expect precisely what the reductionist rereading of the Gospels that Spong provides.  

In Spong's "rethinking," the unexceptional observation that the infancy accounts of the Gospels are late in composition and yield little significant historical information - a position shared by such mainline scholars as R. E. Brown in his Birth of the Messiah (Doubleday, 1979) - quickly becomes the claim that "what really happened has been "covered up" by the evangelists.  If the virgin birth seems historically unlikely,  one would think that a normal birth would be the logical alternative.  In such a reading,  Christians would have exercised the widespread Hellenistic practice of giving their hero (perceived in hindsight as extraordinary and indeed divine) an exceptional birth.   But Spong's rage against "literalists,"whose belief in the virgin birth and whose honor of Mary have apparently been responsible for every oppression against women in Western history,*** demands a conspiracy of more sinister character.   Thus Spong's therapeutic rereading:  Mary was "really" a teenaged girl who was raped and became pregnant with an illegitimate child.  She was then taken under the protection of Joseph.  

Spong is not so much interested, however, in what "really happened as he is in freeing Christianity from its dogmatic entanglements  which he more or less identifies with fundamentalism.  Spong is hostile to the birth narratives in the first case, he says, because they represent a displacement in Christianity, which made Christmas rather than Easter the focal event.   But what is Easter for Spong?  It appears to have been "not so much . . . a supernatural external miracle but . . . the dawning internal realization that this life of Jesus reflected a new image of God, an image that defied the conventional wisdom,  an image that called into question the exalted king as the primary analogy by which God could be understood."  The resurrection, it seems, is really a mental adjustment by the first disciples, a shift of their perception in the direction of the politically correct.  But then Spong goes on to argue that Christians also got "Easter" wrong,  since they concluded from the resurrection that Jesus was divine.  Thus, if I have his argument right,  the infancy accounts represent a further extension of the fundamental error that birthed Christianity.  

Having a bishop with opinions like these is a bit like hiring a plumber who wants to 'rethink pipes"  Spong imagines that he has escaped his own fundamentalist past,  but he has not.   He remains defined by the literalism he so doggedly battles.   His vaulted "liberalism" is in reality a tired rationalism.  Readers who struggle on to the end through his repetitions, non sequiturs and narcissistic self-referentiality are not really surprised to find Spong arguing that Jesus might have been married to Mary Magdalene, and that it was his own wedding at Cana for which he catered the wine.   Bishop Spong seems to think that having Jesus born illegitimately and married to a prostitute** will be received as good news by unliberated women everywhere. 

I've noted before that those playing the "historical Jesus" game always seem to want to be able to practice what they debunk when it comes to the New Testament.   If the birth narratives are to be distrusted based on their supposed "late composition,"  that is less than a hundred years after the death of Jesus,  why doesn't something made up by a 20th century scholar or even scribbler like Spong have correspondingly less credibility?    I would say that one shouldn't be too hard on the bish who was nothing like a New Testament scholar of the kind who LTJ usually addresses but a celebrity cleric because the first one I noticed doing that was, in fact, a notable New Testament scholar,  John Dominic Crossan and I was as critical of him when he rather blatantly practiced the same double-standard with his invented narratives.   As I have discovered during my decades of arguing with atheists only to realize that they are constantly inventing gods to replace the God they deny, even as they deny that's what they're doing,  it would seem that the "historical Jesus" guys do little but invent new Jesuses without the possibility of them ever knowing and talking to eye-witnesses of the real Jesus or perhaps having known him.   I think it's quite possible that the Letter of James was from the James who was one of the leaders of the first Jerusalem Church and that the reports of Levi (Matthew) are embedded in the many sayings and, perhaps, some of the narrative in that Gospel.  I'm not even entirely convinced with the common claim that the author of Mark didn't know him or at least talk with those who did know him.   What I am sure of is that none of the "historical Jesus" writers and media babblers have any claim to that level of acquaintance with the source of Christianity.   

I do well remember seeing Spong on a number of talk shows going pretty far back and I always found him rather full of himself and not at all convincing, even though we certainly agreed on any number of things in politics and society, even on some points of morality.   I can say that Luke Timothy Johnson and I also agree and differ on things - I'm on a two-year program of reading as much of his writing as I can afford to get hold of, including his textbook The Writings of the New Testament which I've read large parts of but haven't really studied, yet.   I'm not entirely sold on his handling of the authorship of the Pauline material, though I can sort of understand why, given the ambiguities of the competing claims of their sourcing,  assuming that Paul was behind it is as good a way of dealing with that and getting on with what it means for the practice of Christianity, which he, at least, seems to understand is the point of it all.  

One of the things I think is important in Johnson's book, The Real Jesus, is to point out that the anti-fundamentalists (which Johnson as well as I am, actually) is that the "historical Jesus" guys are reading the Scripture out of the same early modern on assumptions of how to read a text and what its potential value comes from.   Elsewhere he discusses how going from being a Benedictine monk who prayed and lived and encountered in an almost "kinetic way" Scripture for five hours every day to studying it at Yale in the way of academics was pretty shocking and, though he is one of the most respected New Testament scholars around today, he wasn't entirely sold on the academic way of doing it.  

And as a monk, we sang the psalms and read scripture out loud, five hours a day. So when I went to Yale to get a Ph.D. in New Testament, I was stunned by sort of the academization of all of this and especially by the privileging of history as somehow, if we could get the history right, then, you know, everything would be OK. We have to find the historical antecedent. And that was quite a contrast from living within, in fact, a living tradition in which scripture was almost kinetically inhabited. I mean, you bowed and scraped and genuflected and sang scripture. So the notion of scripture as being a cadaver that one performs an autopsy on, as opposed to a living body with which one danced, was stunning to me, and I never have completely bought it. And I think that part of my peculiar position within scholarship is that I actually am not only postmodern but premodern. I have never bought the premise of modernity that history is the only way of knowing.

He and I share a deep skepticism of modernism.   I'm always a little reluctant to point that out because just about everyone figures that means that you yearn after some past, medieval or classical or, heaven help us, the cartoon or Hallmark card view of 19th century Protestant America, or whatever.   No, Christianity like Judaism is a faith which believes that history, while not progressive does move on towards an end.  I think it's a moral flaw at the very least to want to return to the past, we have to face forward to the future while trying to learn what we can from the past and the present.   It is one of the ironies that modernism carries embedded in such things as the academic and the literalists' reading of things that that ideology will, eventually, have to be seen as living in that particular past.   Which I think you atheists and mockers and despisers of Christianity do while thinking you are pushing forward.   You're not, you're living in a past which has already fallen through its own success.  

I was researching a review of the now 88-year-old Dennis Rawlins,  someone who was right about one thing and whose public persona was formed by it, the sTARBABY scandal that proved that CSICOP was an intellectual and academic fraud and many of the academics who fomented the scandal and tried to cover it up exposed some of the worst aspects of materialist-atheist-scientism which is, still, largely the orthodoxy of modernism and modern intellectualism.   It relates to this in ways that are too complex to go into without writing a long piece which I hope to get back to.    That might happen later this month or in the new year. 

* Unfortunate not because there's anything wrong with the book,  it's quite good,  but because he has written much more important books which are not polemical in nature. 

** This is one point I think LTJ may have gone over the line,  I am quite certain that he, rightly, has held that the common Western Christian identification as one of the most important of the apostles of Jesus had been a prostitute was wrong,   though I have not seen that particular book and what Johnson says may accurately report what Spong said in it.   I believe Spong either then or later admitted that that picture of Mary Magdalene was a later invention or misunderstanding by Pope Gregory I.  That given, there is no evidence at all that Jesus married her or anyone, none.   Even the Harvard faculty Jesus Seminar member who got spectacularly suckered by two obvious and sleazy conmen,  Karen King, had to admit she'd been duped after the figured the "wife of Jesus" fragment of forged papyrus she figured would make her reputation blew up in her face.  

I don't know what to think of his comment I wouldn't be surprised if Johnson's statement is accurate as of that date, he's one of the more careful scholars I've looked into.   Perhaps Spong said it in that book. 

***  The notion that Women were better off under classical period Roman, Greek, etc. or such as Druidic or Odinic religion, law and society than under Christianity is so absurd that it has to be held by seeing of those with the daffiest of 19th century romantic bullshit covered glasses.   Yet such is ubiquitous among everyone from famous academics to popular scribblers to the lower ends of internet trolls to those too lazy and stupid to even be internet trolls. 

John Mehegan

Last night while looking for something in my very large and very disorganized shelves of sheet music and music books, etc.  I came across the first volume of the 4 part "method" Jazz Improvisation by John Mehegan and the thought came that I don't ever recall actually hearing any of his recordings,  he was a respected piano player before the went on the faculty at Julliard and a bunch of other high reputation schools.  Anyway, you can look him up if you're interested in his biography and career.   I went to my go to for such information,  Youtube and found what I think is his first album.  He plays on it with some really great musicians,  Charles Mingus, . . . I'll just post the notes as on the Youtube.  He's one of those fine musicians who isn't much mentioned nowadays but who are certainly worth hearing.  

 John Mehegan – "The First Mehegan"

Label:Savoy Records – MG-15054

Format:Vinyl, LP, Album, 10", Mono

Country:US

Released:1955

Genre:Jazz

Tracklist:

A1  Cherokee

A2  The Boy Next Door

A3  Blue's Too Much

A4  Thou Swell

B1  Taking A Chance On Love

B2  Uncus

B3  Sirod

B4  Stella By Starlight

Credits

Bass – Charlie Mingus* (tracks: A1 to A4), Vinnie Burke (tracks: B1 to B4)

Directed By – Jack McKinney (tracks: B1 to B4), Ozzie Cadena (tracks: A1 to A4)

Drums – Joe Morello (tracks: B1 to B4), Kenny "Klook" Clarke* (tracks: A1 to A4)

Engineer – Rudy Van Gelder (tracks: A1 to A4)

Guitar – Chuck Wayne (tracks: B1 to B4)

Liner Notes – Jack McKinney

Piano – John Mehegan

April 4th, 1984

IT IS OBVIOUS THAT THE MASS MURDERER AND WAR CRIMINAL PETE HEGSETH is an alcoholic who has rather obviously been drunk in public several times very recently but I strongly suspect he is also a steroid user as it's fairly evident that RFK jr. is using them.  It is certain that would be a clear explanation of how he relishes committing the crimes that should mean he cannot travel outside of the United States without being in danger of being arrested and tried in either international courts or courts in various countries which would have the status to do that.  What is clear is that in the United States, the country that has always bragged about being a country of laws and not men, he is under little to no danger of being arrested for murder, no more than the man who he served,  the equally murderous war criminal Trump.   Trump is, of course, a notorious drug addict, himself.  

I would love the presidential immunity 6 to be forced to answer for their role in this,  their star example of just what their unitary executive theory given the test of time has been - it has blown up spectacularly in less than a year,  killing many more than those eighty or more fishermen Trump and Hegseth have killed in their Orwellian delight,  and in this case the adjective is exact.   You know that Hegseth and Trump would be sitting and watching and having the same reaction:

 April 4th, 1984 Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank.  then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never

George Orwell, 1984

That is exactly what Trump,  Hegseth and those who have no qualms about what they're doing think, or, rather feel about their murders.   And it's not just the ones they're killing by drone attack in boats.  I think those who are killing millions by denying them food aid and medical aid are just as happy about that.   And these are the ones who by a combination of the immunity decision for Trump and the insane presidential pardon power are safe from prosecution due to the action of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas,  Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.   Oh, and the Republicans of the U.S. Senate who failed to convict him in either impeachment and who would certainly prevent either Trump or Hegseth or the other mass murderers in his regime from being removed from office in the only way the corrupt Court has left for that.   And don't forget that Hegseth was confirmed in his position by the relevant committee and by a majority vote by Republicans in the Senate.  They all have blood on them, and that's only for what Hegseth and Trump have done in this case.  They've got hundreds of thousands and millions of deaths on them, as well.   I'd love to grill little Ms. "Trad" Catholic about the morality she's enmeshed in with her unitary executive votes. 

to follow Christ in his incarnation - As Always RMJ Does Great Advent Posts

HIS FIRST POST OF TODAY is about the Martyrs of El Salvador,  on the anniversary of the murders of the four North American Churchwomen,  Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan, Ita Ford and Dorothy Kazel.  They were murdered by soldiers of the fascist El Salvadoran government which was (and still does) carrying on a war against the poor People of El Salvador, especially the indigenous People supported by the American government,  though President Carter cut off funding for that after these murders.   Later the Reagan administration supported the fascist government and its war against the poor even more than before aid had been cut off,  just as Trump supports and pays off the current dictator of the country.  

To his post I'll add the last two entries in Here I Am Lord:  The letters and writings of Ita Ford who, with her fellow Maryknoll Sister, Maura Clarke, had been attending a meeting of Maryknoll missionaries in Managua, Nicaragua.  Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan had driven to the airport to give them a ride back to their mission.  On their way back they were abducted, assaulted and raped and murdered by El Salvadoran soldiers.  Members of the Reagan administration,  Jeanne Kirkpatrick,  Al Haig and others either slandered them (especially Kirkpatrick) or joked about their murder (Haig) and the lie campaign against them was hardly limited to those two.  Maybe I'll expand on that if I can find my notebook from back then. 

123.  Ita's last letter to her mother, from Nicaragua,  December 1, 1980

Dear Mom,

I guess we're into celebrating life - birth, birthdays, and my own grudging acknowledgement that I'm still alive for some reason.  So here's to three generations of Fords thankful for the gift of life!

I should have known better than to plan on the time for a tape at the Assembly.  We generate work for all the margins of the day - sigh.

Central America is so different from Chile! But they're a good group of supportive ladies.

Much love, Ita 

124,  Translation by Ita for prayer service,  December 1, 1980

For a prayer service at the conclusion of the Maryknowll Sisters' regional meeting in Managua,  Sr. Maria Rikleman asked Ita to translate this text by Archbishop Oscar Romero,  "The Poverty of the Beatitudes."  The next day Ita and Maura Clare flew back to San Salvador.

"The Poverty of the Beatitudes" by Archbishop Oscar Romero

In my thought today,  I would like you to hear this idea . . . that poverty is a force of liberation because in addition to being a denouncement of sin and a force of Christian spirituality, it is also a commitment.  These words of scripture are a call.  Christians, this word is for me first of all.  I must give an example of being a Christian.  And it is for all of you,  my brother priests, and for you religious and for all baptized people who call themselves Christian.

Listen to what the Medellin conference says.

"Poverty is a commitment which assumes, voluntarily and through love - the condition of the needy of the world in order to give testimony to the evil this represents.  It also is a spiritual freedom towards goods - following Christ's example who made his own all the consequence of man's sinful condition and who "being rich, became poor" to save us."

The commitment to be a Christian is this:  to follow Christ in his incarnation.  If Christ is the majestic God who became humble undo death on a cross and who lives with the poor so should be our Christian faith.  The Christian who doesn't wish to live the commitment of solidarity with the poor isn't worthy to call himself a Christian.

Christ invites us not to fear persecution.  Believe me brothers, he who is committed to the poor mus suffer the same fate as the poor.  And in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies, to disappear, to be tortured, to be captive, to be found dead . . . 

He who wold want the privileges of this world and not the persecutions of this commitment - hear the tremendous antithesis of today's Gospel.

Happy you, when people hate you and exclude you, insult you and consider you an outcast for the sake of the Son of Man.  Rejoice and be glad because your reward will be great in heaven. 

I pointed out yesterday that issues surrounding the birth of Jesus, the Incarnation are never far from continuing affairs.  I'd like to expand on this part of Romero's sermon as translated by St. Ita Ford some other time but I'll just point it out for now, since it's Advent now as it was then.

The commitment to be a Christian is this:  to follow Christ in his incarnation.  If Christ is the majestic God who became humble undo death on a cross and who lives with the poor so should be our Christian faith.  The Christian who doesn't wish to live the commitment of solidarity with the poor isn't worthy to call himself a Christian.

Posting On Too Little Sleep

MY VERY OLD CAT and my sister's puppy (14 months old) who I'm watching have figured out that if one of them makes noise at 2:30 in the morning, the other one will join in and I will have to get up to bring the dog out and, once awake, can tend to the cat's desires.   Apparently a new dog can teach an old cat new tricks. 

I typed out and posted yesterday's post without full editing.   I think I've taken care of at least the worst of it.  I'm not ga-ga, just tired.  

It lies in our power to put God into our lives or to deny God's presence

BACK DURING THE ATHEISM FAD OF THE OO'S,  after the sci-ranger-neo-atheists were disappointed to find out that I believe in evolution and even the speculation that all life is descended from an original organism (though they just hated to have it pointed out that that last one was based on absolutely no evidence because you would need the remains of that, specific individual organism to know anything of the sort,  they'd get on the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth.

I could have, to annoy them, said that there is actually more evidence for both of those than there is any statement made about the conjectural first organism in the line of life on Earth.  If I really wanted to piss them off I could have pointed out there is actually more evidence for the them than there is for any contention that even one species evolved by natural selection.  There is massive physical evidence that life evolved,  the actual reason for that happening is simply not in evidence because it happened over too many millennia, with too little evidence to show why and how it happened in even one actual species evolving from another one and there is absolutely no way to know if there was one reason and way it happened or if, perhaps, the evolution of every species is sui generis. 

As it's the second day of Advent I'll say that I choose to believe that something happened to give rise to the stories of the Virgin Birth of Jesus because no one wanting to get a new faith accepted would invent such a story which was bound,  from the start, to provoke ridicule and mockery and the kind of 12-year-old boy stuff that is probably still popular among the sci-rangers and out of fashion neo-atheists though I'd guess that even among their stunted sensibilities,  that got old as, in fact, the new atheism got old fast.  

Of the two canonical stories,  I like Luke's better though that one and the one found in Matthew are not incompatible,  they deal with different events.   There's no reason NOT to believe the Shepherds got the news first and they are the first to go pay regard and respect to Jesus and his mother and father and that,  depending on their astrology, the wise-men came far later.   I would not be entirely unprepared to find that the paternity of Jesus was unique and the consequence of God choosing to enter directly into human history as a Human.   I choose to believe that because I think Jesus was unique among human beings even as he was truly one of us - Paul says like us in everything but that he didn't sin,  something I'm ready to believe, as well. 

Why do I choose to believe that?  Because I choose to believe we are divinely ordered to do so many things that are  against our natural or humanly chosen desires but which have the result of making things better.  Loving our neighbors as ourselves, loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us (you can do it if you choose to practice those,  it takes a lot of years to start for it to work but it is possible),  to feed the hungry,  clothe and house those without clothing or housing,  treat the sick,  visit those in prison (I'm without transport so those are kind of out for me) and,  if we really want to be perfect, to sell everything we have and give the money to the poor and take up a cross and follow.    I'd like to live that way knowing it would probably get me killed,  I'd like to be that courageous as Jesus was when he went to Jerusalem knowing what was going to happen there, as the Scriptures told him and his followers what happened to Prophets in that city.  If you can't do it all you should at least do as much of it as you can.  And I'm still working up to it.  

In the late John McNeill's memoir, Taking a Chance On God,  in the first chapter where he talks about his experience as a WWII soldier fighting against Nazism and fascism and as a prisoner of war under the Nazis he tells this story: taken from Heinz Heger's book The Men With The Pink Triangle 

"Toward the end of February, 1940, a priest arrived in our block, a man some 60 years of age, tall and with distinguished features.  We later discovered that he came from Sudetenland, from an aristocratic German family. 

He found the torment of the arrival procedure especially trying, particularly the long wait naked and barefoot outside the block [remember this is in a German winter].  When his tonsure was discovered after the shower, the SS corporal in charge took a razor and said;  "I'll go to work on this one's head myself, and extend his tonsure a bit. " And he shaved the priest's head with the razor, taking little trouble to avoid cutting his scalp.  Quite the contrary. 

The priest returned to the day-room in our block with his head cut open and blood streaming down.  His face was ashen and his eyes stared uncomprehendingly into the distance.  He sat down on a bench, folded his hands in his lap and said softly,  more to himself than anyone else: "And yet man is good, he is a creature of God!"

I was sitting beside him,  and said softly but firmly:  "Not all men;  there are also beasts in human form, whom the devil must have made."

The priest paid no attention to my words, he just prayed silently, merely moving his lips.  I was deeply moved, even though I was by then already numbed by all the suffering I had so often seen, and indeed experienced myself.  But I had always had a great respect for priests,  so that his silent pray this mute appeal to God, whom he called on for help and strength in his bodily pain and mental torment, went straight to my heart.

Our block Capo, however, a repulsive and brutal "green,"  must have reported the priests praying to the SS, for our block Sargent suddenly burst into the day-room accompanied by a second NCO,  seizing the terrified priest for from the bench and punching and insulting him.  The priest bore the beating and abuse without complaint,  and just stared at the two SS men with wide, astonished eyes.  This must simply have made them angrier,  for they now took one of the benches and tied the priest to it. 

They started to beat him indiscriminately with their sticks, on his stomach, his belly and sexual organs.  They seemed to get more and more ecstatic and gloated;  We'll drive the prayer out of you! You bum-fucker! bum-fucker!"

The priest collapsed into unconsciousness,  was shaken awake and then fell unconscious again.

Finally the two SS sadists ceased their blows and left the day-room, though not without scornfully calling back to the man they had now quite destroyed:  "OK, you randy old rat-bag,  you can piss with your arese-hole in future."

The priest just rattled and groaned.  We released him and laid him in his bed.  He tried to raise his hand in thanks, but he hadn't the strength, and his voice gave out when he tried to say "thank you."  He just lay without stirring, his eyes open, each movement contorting his face with pain.   

I felt I was witnessing the crucifixion of Christ in modern guise.  Instead of Roman soldiers, Hitler's SS thugs, and a bench instead of a cross.  The torment of the Saviour, however, was scarcely greater than that inflicted on one of his representatives nineteen hundred years later here in Sachsenhausen. 

The next morning, when we marched to the parade-ground we had almost to carry the priest,  who seemed about to collapse again from pain and weakness  When our block senior reported to the SS bock sergeant  the later came over to the priest and shouted:  "Can't you stand up,  you arese-hole," adding:  "You filthy queer, you filthy swine, say what you are!"  The priest was supposed to repeat the insults but no sound came from the lips of the broken man.  The SS man angrily fell on him and was about to start beating him again  

Suddenly the unimaginable happened, something that is still inexplicable to me and that I could only see as a miracle,  the finger of God.

From the overcast sky a sudden ray of sunshine that illuminated the priests battered face.

Out of the thousands of assembled prisoners,  only him, and at the very moment when e was going to be beaten again .    There was a remarkable silence, and all present started fixedly at the sky, astonished by what had happened.  The SS sergeant himself looked up at the clouds in wonder for a few seconds then let his hand raised for a beating, sink slowly to his side, and walked away wordlessly away to take up his position at the end of our ranks.  

The priest bowed his head and murmured with a dying voice;  "Thank you Lord . . . I know that my time has come. . . "

He was still with us for the evening parade  But we o longer needed to carry him,  we laid him down at the end of the line with the other dead of the day,  so that our numbers would be complete for the roll-call no matter whether living or dead." 

Heinz Heger  The Men With The Pink Triangle,  translated by David Fernbach Alyson Publications 1980

You can choose to believe that story, told from eye witness, or you can choose not to.  I believe it.   Just as we choose what we believe in, we also choose what we don't want to believe in - though that's not a point I ever remember an atheist admitting.  

John McNeill, the former Jesuit, kicked out of his order for writing controversially on the Bible's mentions of same-sex sex,  recommended this anonymous priest-martyr and ended with a prayer:

We gays and lesbians have a model and a patron in this anonymous priest who was martyred because he dared to be both gay and a man of prayer.

Almighty God, help us, your lesbian daughters and gay sons, to grow and mature in our faith.  Free us from the spirit of fear and cowardice.  Grant that all the suffering and pain experienced in the past by those who were persecuted because they were gay or lesbian will not have been in vain,  but will help win for us and for all our people in the future the grace of true liberation.  Fill our hearts with a deep awareness of your love for us so that we may be free to love one another in the spirit of gratitude.  Amen

Later in the book he said: 

We lesbian and gay believers must ask for the grace to be intensely aware that in all human encounters God is present.  We must keep in mind Mary's fiat:  Let what you have said be done to me [You never get far from the Advent literature, in which the baby was born on his way to the cross.]  It lies in our power to put God into our lives or to deny God's presence  God will be in our lives insofar as we are ready to live lives of unselfish love as a response of gratitude for the love God has shown us in Jesus.  

Hate Mail - It Took Me A While To Find It

but here is something I asked in a Lenten post called  How "It Works" To Really Believe In The Christian View Of Reality As Opposed To The Materialistic-Scientistic-Atheist View Of It

Who would you rather live next to, someone who believes that the morality of the Gospel is something they are going to have to answer for, if not now then in the life after death,  or someone who believed they didn't need to do unto others as they would do unto them, to do for the least among us what we would do to God, to love their enemies and pray for them, to love their neighbor as themselves, so long as they could rig things to act accordingly and get away with doing it?    Who would you rather have conduct national policy in this pandemic?  Someone who believes in the Gospel and that there will be consequences for our conduct in an afterlife, or in the people who are in charge in the United States?  

Answer that question and I'll expand on that as an answer.   Though I'll point out that the Trumpzis certainly don't follow the morality of the Gospel because they deny and don't practice any of those points of it listed above.   Materialist-atheist-scientism is in no absolute or even implicated way opposed to what Trump is or, in fact, what any of the 20th century or 18th century science claiming reigns of terror and genoicde was,  totally unconnected with the Gospel of Jesus.   That's an observation that works for my slam on "trad" Catholics, white supremacist Baptists, Pentecostals  etc  as it does many of the libertarian atheists online and elsewhere.    Whatever morality you hold to that is in line with that list of the Gospel of Jesus is held, unwittingly by you, against the logical conclusions of your own claimed ideology.   You're a bit more Christian than you'd ever like to think you are. 

Dunking on Israel Bot Sarah Hurwitz for 15 MINS Straight

 "She sounds like Alex Jones."

My only reservation about this video aren't the observations that Sarah Hurwitz was acting as more than an apologist for genocide by pulling the IHRA style "antisemitism" lie it is that the focus on only her lets off the others like Melanie Phillips who said things as immoral and degenerate.  It's also that more focus should be on the Jewish Federation of North America for holding what should be seen as the moral equivalent of a German American Bund rally in 2025 as the most contemporaneously reported genocide in history is taking place as they support it. 

One thing, that lying pro-scribbler who wrote for Hillary Clinton, Michelle and Barack Obama and other Democrats should never work for any Democrat anywhere or have any kind of respectable status among anyone who is opposed to genocide.  Her continuing status as a member of tje U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council discredits the Council and the current such efforts as what Norman Finkelstein accused them of in his book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. 

Any study of or mention of or remembering of the Shoah that isn't directly and completely tied to the condemnation and exposure of genocide anywhere it is happening is the ultimate in "Holocaust denial" and there are none more prominent in that denial than many of those who have made it either their career or their sideline.   And that always goes back to their Zionism which is as tied to the genocide of the Palestinian People and the other moral degeneracies of the state of Israel as any other ideology with ties to genocide and moral atrocity are.   That ideology should be as rejected as that which committed the Shoah and the Soviet, Chinese fascist etc. genocides.   I would  say that that extends to US and British and French, etc. imperialist ideologies.   I don't play favorites for my own country and its citizens.   I have no intention of doing so for Israel. 

Katie Halper's Youtube channel is one of those I listen to regularly.   

I Am Giving Food And Money To The Poor This Year

everybody else gets my services or, food I grew or things I've made without spending money as a present.

I am participating in the anti-Trump, anti-billionaire, anti-Republican-fascist, anti-Roberts Court fascist, etc. 

BLACKOUT

Someone Asked Me At Dinner What I Thought Of Simon Cowell

saying that Bob Dylan has no talent. 

I answered, Who's Simon Cowell?  

As soon as I heard he had something to do with American Idol - which I'm sorry to say I've been exposed to I felt like saying it should have been called "American can caterwaul"   He's also the ears behind several other such franchises which I'm somewhat aware of and avoid even more rigorously than I avoid Hallmark Christmas Movies. 

Bob Dylan has probably not been paid such a huge complement in decades,  I'd never want the likes of this Cowell creature to be a fan.    I said something more toned down because I knew one other at table likes that kind of crap and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. 

Thanksgiving 2025

 

She Should Be Detroyed But Don't Make Her Their Scapegoat, Nuzzi Isn't An Outlier She's Just Been Living The Life

I'M OLD AND DON'T follow every flash in the pan of crap that is American journalism so I was only vaguely aware of Olivia Nuzzi before now,   I'd known about her scribblage about RFK jr. even before their epically gross and vulgar sexting became public in the early phases when her jilted fiance started spilling the beans on her.  I didn't have a real idea of how she's weaponized being a skank to get ahead in the journalism racket until I heard Keith Olbermann talking about his history with her (she was a legal adult when they started living together so what they were doing is officially none of my business).   But it wasn't until reading this article in The New Republic that I had a real appreciation for how sleazy and slimy she AND THE MEN WHO WERE INVOLVED WITH HER have been.   It is one of those rare pieces of journalism about someone in the racket which admits that what they do can lead to catastrophe in real life. 

It’s all scintillating, and it’s all a distraction. The only thing you need to know about Olivia Nuzzi is that she used her position of power, as a journalist, to advise and elevate the world’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist to the most influential health position in the United States. The latest bombshell revelations about what they did or didn’t do together risk obscuring the important part of the story: The beliefs RFK Jr. espouses kill people. These beliefs have already killed people. As secretary of the Department of Health and Human services, he now holds the well-being of millions of Americans in his hands. And Olivia Nuzzi is joking about it in The New York Times.

“All I think about is how this woman was part of mainstreaming this guy,” Aparna Nair, professor at the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto, told me. RFK Jr. “will do profound damage on a global scale—that’s all that matters,” she said. The global health program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was among the first to be cut under RFK Jr.’s tenure, and outbreaks of illnesses like Ebola, Marburg, and mpox are now expanding across countries and borders.

As the public fixated on fresh Nuzzi scandals last week, RFK Jr. was instructing the CDC to add language on its website about the possibility of vaccines leading to autism. It’s the latest in his expanding focus on autistic individuals; he has also overseen the creation of a national autism research registry and blamed parents for taking Tylenol during pregnancy. 

“In elevating someone who has now become essentially the most powerful person in public health in the country and who is taking a wrecking ball to public health institutions, she has done untold damage,” Gavin Yamey, professor of global health at the Duke Global Health Institute, said of Nuzzi. “She certainly contributed to his rise.”

Yes, she did and she did it knowing full well how dangerous it would be for him to have any role in public policy - as bad as he is in charge of HHS imagine an RFK jr. presidency.  

I want to in no way diminish the moral atrocity of Olivia Nuzzi and what she did but it's necessary to point out that she was hardly the only one in the journalism racket who is responsible for all of the above LITERALLY THE LARGE MAJORITY OF THOSE WITH A WIDELY RECOGNIZABLE NAME IN THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM RACKET HAD AS MUCH AND MANY HAD MORE OF A HAND IN THIS.   Jake Tapper and  Dana Bash and many others at CNN, those at every one of the other networks, cable, TV, radio, the goddamned New York Times, the WaPo the LA Times and many of the surviving ink on paper entities.  Virtually the entire American media of any size and influence had a hand in the sandbagging of Joe Biden which led directly to Trump II and with full and absolute knowledge of who he was, what he intended,  the Heritage goons of Project 2025 who had laid out the plan for his destruction of democracy and the country.

It isn't something you'll get from Ken Burns or any "public intellectual" but one of the greatest and most horrifying lessons that should but almost certainly won't be learned from the decade of Trump is that the free press, those whose free speech is magnified the most by money and technology and, so, influence, is not anything like an asset of democracy,  certainly not of egalitarian democracy.   It has served as a total and willing part of the fascists' attempt to destroy democracy.   

The real history of the American "free press" isn't honestly told in the fable of Elijiah Lovejoy or Peter Zenger it's more honestly told in terms that we are being force fed in the bio of Olivia Nuzzi,  THAT, PERHAPS USUALLY MINUS THE SEX, IS THE REAL CHARACTER OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM.  

As I must always point out this has been made ever worse by the Supreme Court starting with the Warren Courts carte blanche issued to the media to lie about politicians and other public figures with impunity.   Though I've come to think that there is no more obtusity encouraging a professional training than one in the law - that pose of obtusity directly related to the ubiquitous professional practice of lying with impunity by lawyers -  there has never been a stupider ruling than the one that ended up profiting the wealthy oligarchs who owned and ran the media and the oligarchs who could buy media companies and lie to their own profit.   I don't believe for a second that any of the Warren Court members who issued that ruling were not fully competent enough to understand that would be the result of it,  though they pretended that wasn't a fully and confidently predictable consequence of that "free speech" ruling, and ever more so the Buckley v Valeo ruling that was the first to call the corruption of money in our elections "free speech."    If I slam the scribblers and babblers AND PUBLISHERS of the free press,  I slam the lying-lawyers even more so.  

Only a press that tells the truth is an asset and necessary part of egalitarian democracy.   One that lies will destroy it. 

" I plead guilty here to writing ‘program music.’ I am passionately concerned with, even frightened by, the American psyche and I deeply believe that, as we enter what may be the most perilous passage in our history, we need to understand ourselves better – otherwise certain disaster will follow."

I wasn't imposing my interpretation on William Bolcom's Piano Quartet I was honoring what he said about it at the time the original recording I posted was issued:

Both my major commissions for the 1976 bicentennial observance took for their themes what I think of as a tragic flaw in the American psyche that seems to lead inexorably towards violence. While the Piano Concerto’s last movement was a cavalcade of brutal clichés and naïveté in constant juxtaposition, the impulse that leads the Piano Quartet to a (to me) terrifying conclusion is internal and psychological, having as much to do with the inner forces of the previous movements as with the overriding contrary principle. I plead guilty here to writing ‘program music.’ I am passionately concerned with, even frightened by, the American psyche and I deeply believe that, as we enter what may be the most perilous passage in our history, we need to understand ourselves better – otherwise certain disaster will follow. The contrary principle in the quartet derives as much from my own emotional fix on our nation's spiritual state as from Blakean philosophy.

“I find that this piece has grown with time even in my understanding of it, and now I can indicate more clearly to performers what I meant. The present recording reflects my intentions as well as any performance can and I endorse it heartily.”

Apart from the Quartet and William Bolcom's wonderful First Piano Concerto, I can think of exactly two other such compositions as significantly controversial related to national birthdays, one was Roy Harris's Bicentennial Symphony and the other is the Canadian Opera Riel by Harry Somers to a libretto written by Mavor Moore and Jacques Languirand commissioned by the CBC for the Canadian centennial.

I think this piece and the Concerto are only two of the certain signs of Bolcom's greatness as a composer and as a thinker.  I think he is, after or along with Charles Ives among our greatest composers.   

A Much Older Straight Man

 many years my senior told me about ten years ago that he couldn't support LGBTQ+ equality because of anal sex and his disgust for it.   I usually wouldn't discuss sex with him because I because I was brought up with a particularly old fashioned habit of not talking that way in front of my elders.   It took me a long time to get used to calling him by his name as he asked instead of "Mr."  It still feels strange to me to call people significantly older than I am by their names.

Anyway,  he annoyed me enough with that that I pointed out that considering the percentage of Gay Men there are in the population and the significant percentage of gay men who seldom or never engage in anal sex that most of the anal sex that happens probably happens between men and women.   Not to mention virtually every description of sex acts that straight people think of as "gay" but which are engaged in by straight People in no small numbers.  He was surprised by the statistics I cited to him at the time - I wouldn't argue from them the same way today.   He didn't realize how many straight men and women did anal. 

So the revelations of the porn-poetry of the incumbent Sec of Health and Human Services in which Little Bobby seemingly tried to entice an alleged journalist gal decades younger than him to engage in the repulsive act of feltching (repulsive because it is disgustingly anti-hygienic and, so, degrading) and force being used by him in the act shines a light on what many may have figured was a "'gay thing" being very much a "straight thing."   It's clear it was certainly part of at least his active sexual imagination as something he'd want to do. 

It certainly did nothing to make me think of my life experience - I'm ever more respectful of other People and their health than just using a honorific title with them - it made me think of the media and political treatment of one of my heroines the Clinton Administration's first Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders when she was asked if Children should be encouraged to masturbate so as to delay the dangers of them engaging in sex with others.   She took the question and bravely answered that she thought that should be considered as a possibility and she was vilified and fired for that great service to public health.   Dr.  Elders is,  I'm glad to say, still with us, though I don't know if she's still practicing in one of the finer examples of public health careers I know of.   I hadn't known of her stellar record in preventing prengancy among her patients in Arkansas, especially girls with diabetes.  For that, alone, she's a heroine. 

It is an example of the pornographication of America (thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Gingrich era Republican caucus in the House an, particularly,   the scumbag Henry Hyde) that RFJ jr. isn't being raked over the coals in such a pursuit of something so grotesquely health and dignity destroying an act - I'm sure he's done it if he's broken out all poesy about it.  If he's writing like that,  he's almost certainly doin' it."    We're a long way down the road from the hypocrisy of Newt and Hyde and the 1990s media.  And about that, shouldn't sexting be considered adultery these days?  I don't mean the law, the law shouldn't get to define such things because the law tends to rather favor the guys. 

If you're waiting for the media and the hypocritical morality police to drive him from office over this? Well, what?   Do you think they're going to hold the CDC destorying rich, white, straight ambulance chaser lawyer who should never have been allowed to hold that office to the standards they held for a fully qualified Female-Black-Physician suggesting we consider what would be responsibly given sound medical advice?   Not when you can have an incompetent, dishonest, ambulance-chasing rich, straight, white, male Harvard Law oligarch who promotes the most dangerous of self-profiting medical quackery instead.   This is America where someone like the total scumbag Little Bobby will get away with everything as the most responsible and honest and competent Black Woman won't get away with doing what's right.   Our free press would certainly never hold him accountable, even as it's probably (and properly) cost his sexting partner her career in "journalism." 

And while I'm at it,  Hey, hey, RFK.  How many kids did you kill today?  

I Have Not Watched The Ken Burns Treatment Of The American Revolutionary War - A Response

MY RECENT CRITICISM OF KEN BURNS isn't specifically about that series, it's about his stuff I've seen in the past and the idea that you can replace READING HISTORY from books and, especially, reading entire primary documents with something as limited and expensive to produce (and so the limits) aimed at a popular audience.  IF and that big if is too small, it led viewers to think of the movie as a brief intro and if the movie led them to the primary documents - many of which are easily available for free online (I haven't looked, have Burns of PBS made such available in an easily used form online?)  a lot of my criticism would be answered.   Certainly it would cost them little to do such a thing, though if they didn't give enough emphasis to, for example, the anti-federalists and the opponents and critics of the revolution and the activities of the oligarchs and enslavers that proved their hypocrisy and hatred of equality and democracy,  they shouldn't bother.   We've already got that kind of bullshit history everywhere and don't need PBS pushing it any more than they do. 

But the problem with even that is that you can lead only a few to viewing and, even those  being "information age" People, you can't make them read, it's not going to be effective.   I don't know if his self-admittedly flawed magnum opus which I did see all of,  The Civil War, had been effective we would not be living through the Republican-fascist, Roberts Court effort to reestablish the Confederacy generally in the exact way that those who wrote and signed onto the Dred Scott decision tried to do in 1857,   I don't think that was due to his reliance on the folksy-drawling Confederacy romanticism of Shelby Foote,  it was because the ambition to maintain the lies set in motion by those who were following Lewis Powell's road-map to American oligarchy from Hollywood to NYC to DC to Atlanta in those years had the bigger megaphone, including that most dangerous of all venues for such lies,  entertainment media.  

I think Burns has a habit of relying on celebrity pop historians and writers which doesn't help much.  Pop history becomes pop history because it supports existing, established narratives.  If his use of easily identified Hollywood actors for reading stuff helps,  I don't know but sometimes I have found it distracting and occasionally annoying.  I don't recall who pointed out that part of Burns' method is to find appealing characters such as Foote was (to many, I found him unappealing) and to feature them based on that.  I think that criticism was true in his case and perhaps in others.   

He's hardly the worst of the type,  that may have been Frederick Wiseman, whose movies teach nothing and seem to try to teach nothing.   I think part of my problem with documentaries in general is that compared to real research into a subject, especially viewing a large range of primary documents, it gives a false sense of having learned about a topic when reading a range of relevant articles in the old World Book Encyclopedia would probably give you more actual knowledge of it and would certainly give you more lasting clues of what to search for online or in a good library.   It's the old "I saw the movie" approach as compared to reading the book.   When it's fiction,  that doesn't matter much.   When it's history,  you end up with Confederacy romantics and idiots who believed the founders and framers were gods whose ideas and Constitution should regulate our lives and laws in ways that no fundamentalist Baptist or Pentacostalist would ever try to use Scripture for (except to regulate and control OTHER PEOPLES' LIVES).  If Burns' series turned into a rejection of Roberts Court "originalism" and "textualism" bullshit it would be useful though I doubt it could be effective for that and still get the NYT media mainstream approval and do anything for eventually, getting PBS's funding restored.  

No Sarah Hurwitz,

YOU DON'T "SOUND OBSCENE" when you try to cover up GENOCIDE BY THE ISRAELI APARTHEID STATE 

YOU ARE OBSCENE.    

You have placed yourself not only at the same moral level as David Irving who lied about genocide carried out decades before he denied it had happened,  you place yourself at the moral level of those who knew about the genocide while it was happening and they covered it up or tried to dismiss knowledge of it as it came out.   

I don't know the name of the man who was interviewing her who called the reality of Israel murdering children "emotional blackmail" but his name should be as infamous as hers deserves to be from now on.   As, in fact, the combined Jewish Federations of North America who don't do far more than disavow what was said at that conference where she said this.   They are the equivalent of the American Bund in the face of the genocide Israel has been carrying out for years and which has intensified since they agreed to the phony "peace deal" announced several weeks ago.   Israel is a moral atrocity. 

She's a product of Harvard and Harvard Law, to tell you where she got her credentials in lying and her connections that got her the Obama job.   Harvard and, especially Harvard Law are vile institutions. 

When Ana Kasparian Finally Did The Joseph Welch Thing On Dershowitz And He Was The One To Bawl Out "McCarthyism" My Question Is Why Isn't "Cohnism" A Thing

THE DEGENERATE LIAR-LAWYER ALAN DERSHOWITZ is crying "McCarthyism" because Ana Kasparian has succinctly and memorably and so, perhaps virally articulated his history with Jeffrey-Epstein, including his role in getting the perverted child-rapist-child-trafficking-almost certain intelligence service and who knows who else peddling blackmail collector a sweetheart deal that allowed him the freedom to carry on as before and,  etc. etc. etc.   I'd add to the indictment, literally everything the shame of Harvard Law has done in support of his fellow Epstein-Maxwell sleaze, Trump, which becomes entirely understandable just in terms of his confidence that Trump in power would do everything he could to suppress the Epstein evidence and crimes BECAUSE HE HAD GOOD REASON TO BELIEVE MAKING THAT PUBLIC  WOULD EXPOSE HIM.

About the promiscuous use of the "M" word including by those who are full blown imitators of Wisconsin's worst senator before Ron Johnson.  

No one is accusing the Dersh of being a fucking commie,  he'd never do something so unprofitable for himself or to put him at any real risk.   BUT HIS ROLE IN THIS IS - WITH THAT KIND OF MEDIA PERPLEXING IRONY THAT THE GODDAMNED AMERICAN FREE PRESS ALWAYS FALLS FOR AND NEVER NOTICES  - COULD HONESTLY BE CALLED "COHNISM."   

Like Roy Cohn Dershowitz has been an ambulance chaser for the rich, the powerful, the criminal, a series of scumbag millionaire-billionaire rich white men, he has never been what McCarthy and Cohn and HUAC went after.   It should be a rule that no one who has been a whore of a lawyer for the likes that Dershowitz has and who has been a supporter of genocidal fascism and neo-apartheid gets to claim the role of the victim of those who were nothing like that in history.   Am I not remembering correctly but didn't he claim somewhere in the media that Epstein didn't pay him which the records of him being paid millions reveal to be a frickin lie?  

Alan Dershowitz is playing the Roy Cohn role in what could be a new spin-off franchise of the longest series of sequels to every Hollywood-Broadway-Made for TV movie about the red scares of the late 40s to early 69s.  I'm saying that because I hope that someday Hollywood will pull it's head out of the asses of those first few producers, directors and writers who started the interminable sequels of red scare shows* AND GOD NO,  I DON'T MEAN AARON SORKIN OR GEORGE CLOONEY , some competent and honest playwright or script writer they might profitably give the same kind of treatment to the career of Dershowitz.   Hey, Kushner, you might do it before the degen-liar-lawyer croaks.   Just don't go all sympathetic to Dershowitz, though, he doesn't have even the claims to possible sympathy that Cohn might be imagined to have as a self-hating faggot.   Dershowitz hasn't risked anything more than being denied service at a pirogi stand on the Vinyard, 

Considering how many lawyer-liars and liar-lawyers have public roles that are far, far better identified as like that of Trump's first brain,  Roy Cohn, you have to wonder why that hasn't come to be called "Cohnism"  because the Dersh isn't the only one who has modeled his public career on him. 

*  At this point they're just bouncing the rubble without revealing much new.  I mean, what's been discovered since it was revealed that Julius Rosenberg was, in fact, a Stalinist Stalin-era spy?   That was like 30 years ago.   If someone like Cloony wants to deal with the disaster that Trump and Republican-fascism are,  raking over the early 1950s is about as stupid a way to do it as exists outside of a Broadway musical,  

William Bolcom Piano Quartet

It was an accident of my ordering the recording of this piece and it arriving two days before Thanksgiving that year - of course I listened to it immediately and repeatedly for the next several days - that accounts for why I associate it with American Thanksgiving.    Like others of his pieces,  such as his first Piano Concerto,  it is topical in its prophetic warning of disaster under the American system and culture.   Only its topicality has only grown through the years.   I am grateful the pianist has posted these videos. 

 I. Barcarolle / Ketjak

II. Largo fantastico (Nachtstuck)

III. Intermezzo 

IV. Marcia risoluto

Jerome Jelinek, cello

Charles Asharian, violin

David Ireland, viola

Joseph Gurt, piano

I Am Trolled Over Trans People

I RECALL LISTENING TO A THEOLOGICAL LECTURE by Luke Timothy Johnson in which he gave an estimate based in medical reporting of the number of those born with inter-sexual bodies in the Atlanta area,  he was delivering the lecture at the Chandler School of Theology Emory University where he worked.  I can't find the notes I made on the lecture so I don't know what figure he gave though it was rather surprisingly large - the lecture was in favor of the possibility of living a moral life as an LGBTQ+ Person.   When you do the math a seemingly small percentage of a large population adds up very fast, even if the factor is 1% of it. 

So in answering you I've looked up the estimates of how many biologically Intersex People there are as compared to how many People self-identify as Transgender.   Certainly the biologically intersex population is relevant to any discussion of the question,  though I hardly ever see it included in that discussion. 

As I pointed out the other day, such estimates are of wildly varying  and ultimately unknowable reliability due to the same problems that all self-reporting is liable to,  though I doubt anyone would self-identify as "Transgender" unless they really thought they were transgendered given the social and, thanks to the goddamned Roberts Republican-fascist Court legal problems it brings.  For that reason I'd guess it may be among the more reliable of such statistics.   

You would think that the medical statistics on those born with indeterminate gender based on the genitalia they are born with is probably more reliable.   You would be wrong about that, though I suspect that's probably largely due to political-professional reasons rather than it being inspecific as to what that indeterminacy is.    The widely given statistic of 1.7 percent of the population who are born "Intersex" and the range often given of more than 1 to 2 percent  are disputed.  Though a lot of that dispute comes from psychologists and psychiatrists with a clear political-professional motive in pushing a far,  almost certainly ridiculously low number for that.  One of the worst of those a prolific LGBTQ+ hating shrink with a bad record of publishing nonsense far, far outside of their area of alleged expertise.  

I will say that based on what I think is probably the most believable range of percentages that between more than about 3.5 and 7 million Americans are biologically intersex.  Though if that number was 1000 or less that wouldn't make their own self-identification any less a matter of their right to self-determination in the face of the whipped up ignorant bigotry against them which is rampant on the Republican-fascist and in the media pushed shrink-professional hater racket.  There are a number of those out there, often featured in Republican-fascist media and organizations and published by them.  You can take your pick of which of them I mean as I type this.  I won't give you the gender because they come in both of the standard ones,  though most of those I'm seeing are male. 

The UCLA Law School's Williams Institute gives an estimate that 2.8 million Americans identify as Transgender.  One third identify as Transwomen, one third identify as Transmen and one third self-identify as Nonbinary.  724,000 of those Americans are between the ages of 13 and 17 who as children are the only ones that any legal consideration has any business discussing.  I won't even begin to address any claims about anyone else having any business telling adults who they are or how they interpret their own bodies and minds, that's their business, not yours or the goddamned Trump regime or the fascists on the Roberts Court.    I will note the hypocrisy of those who claim to figure their concern about the welfare of Transgender People below the age of adulthood is cruelly hypocritical given the known damage of Transgender hate to them. whipped up by the fascists' campaign to make a political target of them as they proclaim their concern for them.   As if they and their parents and their own physicians decisions about their welfare are not more valid than those of right-wing, often professional haters who whip up hatred of them for their own profit and gain.  Many of those paid millions in the media and those who have made billions of dollars,  not a little of that made from selling books to Transkids.   

I don't buy the validity of concern of the small percentage of anti-trans feminists whose reaction to he very small percentage of Transwomen* in the population is far, far larger than their reaction would warrant if mere principle was at stake.   Most of the feminists I know of have no problem with Transwomen.   But, then,  most of them aren't billionaires who have way too big an idea of their own opinion and too much money to spread that around with. 

The Williams Institute figures indicate that there is considerable regional variation in the percentage of those who self-identify as Transgender, though in almost every state for which a figure is given, they are well within and often far fewer than those who are medically, biologically identified as Intersex.   What to make of that,  I have no idea and I doubt anyone else does, either.  

As I said above, if there were fewer than a thousand biologically Intersex People in the United States,  their right to define their own identity is as absolute as a biologically cis-gendered, straight, white male or female to define their identity.    I am 100% in favor of the right of all People to come to their own conclusions about their bodies, their minds, their lives TO THE EXTENT THAT THOSE DECISIONS DON'T IMPINGE ON THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS TO DO THE SAME.   That's the basis of my thinking on this.  You don't need a medical statistician or a legal theorist to come up with a percentage of the population to figure that out.   You don't need to trust anyone's' self-interested, professionally advantaging claims about that to come to the conclusion on that.   The self-proclaimed defenders of "biological gender" will always have the issue of those who are not assigned a "biological gender" at birth based on their "ambiguous" genitalia or other reasons will always have that as an issue either that they won't or don't address but those very real People are still there as are those who have a right to the self-knowledge of their own minds.    That's something the hating cis-gender, straight, white males and females claim as their right even as they also claim it as their right to make that decision for other People.   That's the difference between egalitarian democracy and the varying degrees of fascist trending tendencies apart from that. 

* The Republican-fascists here in Maine were collecting signatures from the haters at the polls this month to ban Transathletes from playing sports in the state.   Since their signs claimed they wanted to protect women's sports they clearly were targeting Transwomen.   I asked one of them how many there were on school sports teams in Maine, they had no idea.  I asked someone who knew the issue and he told me no more than two in the entire state, if that.    

I told the ass that if it were up to me I'd get rid of sports in the public schools because it was dangerous in the case of many of the major school sports.  I'll bet that the injuries from sports are far more of a health and life endangering for thousands of athletes to the number of Transchildren in the state.   Not getting to the fact that sports take resources from the major business of schools, teaching.   Phys-ed should be teaching children to exercise and eat sensibly and getting medical care,  not now to play games.