Saturday, September 27, 2025

Saturday Night Radio Drama - JP McMahon - The Last Room

 The Last Room 


The play took third place in the 2024 PJ O'Connor Awards.

Cast

Ronan Leahy (Paul)

Tadhg Murphy (Adam)

Special Thanks to Éala Hewson and Sharon McGlone for voicing additional roles.

Production Credits

Composer: Irene Buckley

Sound Design & Sound Supervision: Ruth Kennington

Director: Jessica Dromgoole

Producer for RTÉ: Kevin Brew

Series Producer, Drama On One: Kevin Reynolds

Head of Drama, RTÉ: David Crean

I'm not big on competition among artists but if it ends up with a production of the winning plays, it's not all bad.  This is one I think would be less effective if you saw it than hearing it is.  Given the choice between seeing what I've already seen and hearing new plays, I'll always try the new one. 

"He that died o' Wednesday"

A WORTHIER BLOGGER WHO I WILL NOT NAME reminds me that I have some unanswered hate mail over me dishonoring Kirk.  

. . .  Who hath it?

he that died o’ Wednesday. 

Doth he feel it? no.

Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible, then. 

Yea, to the dead. 

But will it not live with the living?

no. 

Why? detraction will not suffer it. 

Therefore I’ll none of it. 

Honour is a mere scutcheon: 

and so ends my catechism.

September 10, 2025  was a Wednesday.   

Them selling merch at his memorial infomercial was the official end of any pretense of honoring him,  he's a commodity to his company, his fan base, his financial backers and, apparently, even his family now otherwise they wouldn't have let that disgusting thing happen.   

We outside of those circles don't have to pretend more, if we ever were saps enough to pretend that and as can be seen,  I never have been one.    I don't hold with the custom of lying about the dead anymore than I do when they were alive.   I had occasion this morning to remember what Walt Whitman said he overheard among two veterans in Specimen Days

95. Calhoun’s Real Monument

IN one of the hospital tents for special cases, as I sat to-day tending a new amputation, I heard a couple of neighboring soldiers talking to each other from their cots. One down with fever, but improving, had come up belated from Charleston not long before. The other was what we now call an “old veteran,” (i. e., he was a Connecticut youth, probably of less than the age of twenty-five years, the four last of which he had spent in active service in the war in all parts of the country.) The two were chatting of one thing and another. The fever soldier spoke of John C. Calhoun’s monument, which he had seen, and was describing it. The veteran said: “I have seen Calhoun’s monument. That you saw is not the real monument. But I have seen it. It is the desolated, ruined south; nearly the whole generation of young men between seventeen and thirty destroyed or maim’d; all the old families used up—the rich impoverish’d, the plantations cover’d with weeds, the slaves unloos’d and become the masters, and the name of southerner blacken’d with every shame—all that is Calhoun’s real monument.”

I'll leave it to you to identify what the real monuments of today's white-supremacist influencers and politicians and "justices" are, what Bush I and II's are, what the Roberts six fascists on the Supreme Court are.  

For Anyone Interested in Lilypond Music Engraving

these introductory tutorials are among the best of all Youtube tutorials I've yet found on any topic,  right up there with the Frugal Computer Guy's.




Trolls Must Have Taken A Holiday

 or they didn't notice either.

At least twice in Yesterday's posts I reversed the two last names of The Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson, as I so often will when someone uses two last names.   I have so much respect for her,  despite her ruling on the 14th Amendment's ban on insurrectionists holding federal office, that I will, for once, apologize for the oversight.   I blame the singer songwriter Jackson Browne whose name got into my head long before I heard of Ketanji Brown Jackson.   Browne wrote what might be the best Christmas song ever written by a pagan since the medieval period.  Maybe I'll post it during the season.  

I'm surprised the tireless meter-maid of orthography who trolls me didn't put on his little uniform and write me a ticket over it.   Or at least I was when I got round to re-reading it and saw I hadn't corrected what I wrote rather quickly, despite the right name order appearing in what I copied from another website.  I'm posting this to get his goat.  

Friday, September 26, 2025

Wish I'd Taken The Text Route Instead Of The Graphic One Twenty So Years Ago

that is instead of going with the now totally defunct Finale music publishing program.  I liked Finale well enough though it was expensive, clunky,  often didn't exactly work exactly as advertised and in some ways was very frustrating.   I wasn't exactly thrilled with its graphic-base which I'm pretty disillusioned with - though I have been experimenting with MuseScore as a replacement.  But the most frustrating thing about it was that after decades of investment into it in work and buying updates,  the goddamned company that made it discontinued it making a deal with another outfit for a whole different replacement that I'd have to buy and which doesn't look to me to be compatible with my previous work preserved in a soon to be useless format.   I'm now suspicious of anything that might get pulled out from under such an investment in work and money which I think any graphic-based music engraving program will probably turn out to be.    But there was and still is an alternative that is free, open-source and text-based - making it far, far more flexible and portable in that the score is contained in a text file that can be moved on to any platform and stored that way.   And Lilypond is available for all of the main operating systems and hardware architectures.   I haven't tried to take a text file from one to another to see if the portability is 100% but I'm betting it is. 

I've started, in my old age, to learn Lilypond programming for music engraving and am shocked to find that once you've learned the commands,  it's far, far easier to use than any graphic-based program I've tried,  and I've tried about four of those.   It has its limits though if I were smart enough to program what I wanted into it,  those could be overcome.   I've been working on a major project which is still in the pencil on music paper stage,  I think I'll try to put it into print with Lilypond instead of the alternatives.   Granted I won't be able to take advantage of some of the features of those  but I'm guessing I'll be able to use the simple find and replace features of one of the simple text editors I use to do a lot of that.  And I may find someone has already programmed that feature into it somewhere.     If it works I'll let you know but if I was advising a student on such things these days,  I'd suggest they try it out and see if it works for them.   One thing,  I'd advise them never to invest years of work into a complex graphic interface or other such complex program because you never know when some company or owner of it will pull the whole thing down.  

Constitutional government under the present Court regime is a fiction.

Weaponizing Regular Court Procedure Is One Of The Main Venues Of Lawerly And Judicial Corruption of Our Government 

AS IS OFTEN THE CASE one of the best analyses of the doings among lawyers and judges I read comes from RMJ.   After attracting me with a tweet by Ron Filipkowski that says what I feel about the indictment of the original Trump enabler,  James Comey:

I honestly don’t care about James Comey.

But I want to live in a democratic republic.

His indictment proves we live in a banana republic, where the autocrat personally orders indictments of his political enemies, and when his own officials refuse he finds new ones that will.

RMJ  goes on to comment on a statement by Representative Dan Goldman as to why the prosecution has to fail because it's based on a false summary of testimony by Andrew McCabe*  by the sleazy Senator Ted Cruz.  

Goldman: Fundamentally, there's a major flaw here, which is that this false statements count is predicated on Ted Cruz's summary of Andy Mccabe's testimony…

Which summary, I understand, was not a fair representation of McCabe’s testimony. The whole perjury charge is based on he said/he said, and it may be what Cruz said, is not what McCabe said. OTOH, all Comey did was stand by his statement, so did he lie? Or did he just testify differently than McCabe did? Aside from the fact that perjury requires a willful lie, not just a misrepresentation or a disagreement between witnesses (why isn’t McCabe indicted? That way lies the malicious prosecution defense Trump has opened the door for.). Perjury is probably going to be impossible to prove in court. Not that Comey should have to incur attorneys fees to remain out of prison. But any lawyer for DOJ who appears in this case can be challenged for ethics violations before the bar that issued their license. I can even see them losing their federal license (not to practice law, but to appear in D.C. federal court). The trial court could easily do that, for the grossly unethical nature of this case.

While I expect that will ultimately work to either win a case by Comey or to get the charges thrown out,  that doesn't count on the level of corruption in the higher levels of the federal judiciary put there by Republican-fascists in the Senate,  Republican-fascist presidents,  mostly Bush II and Trump, and the ultimate corruption of the Roberts Court majority, the most corrupt Supreme Court in our history.  They summarily abolish century old laws and nullify and amend even older parts of the Constitution, itself, on behalf of the stupidest, most corrupt, most criminal president in American history,  Trump.   

These days they aren't even much coming up with a plausibly rational argument for upending even the most "settled" of legal lore,  they are ripping up everything, proceedures, regulations, rules, laws,  and, yes,  even those things in the Constitution that don't serve their financial, political and ideological desires. 

They are making  WHATEVER THEY WANT the law of the United States. 

Eventually you have to look at what motivates Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Goresuch, Kvanaugh and Barrett in what is the most sustained attack on a democratic republic in our history,  more effective and longer lasting than the treason of the Confederates,  more effective and longer lasting than the Taney Court's imposition of slavery on even the free states,  more effective than the Plessey Court imposing American apartheid - which the Roberts Court is reinstalling by overturning the Civil Rights and, especially, the Voting Rights Acts which were the very laws that for the first time sought to make the United States the true democracy it was alleged to be since the Jeffersonian revolution sought to take the first major step in doing that.

They certainly know what they're doing when they enable Trump in breaking the law by nullifying it,  they are destroying good government on behalf of Trump family and billionaire oligarch corrupted government.   The next time they have one of those Supreme Court Historical Society cotillions I wish one of the invitees would throw that in their faces but, of course, the kind of courtly crooks and corrupt lawyer types that go to those would never do that, making their "honors" have to notice that real People notice they are filthy corrupt liars and crooks, themselves.    

They certainly have motives of self-interest in that.   All of them either grew up in relative affluence - affluence their chosen profession of the law is generally entered into to pursue,  I doubt anyone goes into the law not expecting to make lots of money from it.   I suspect some of them either had no talent for or liking for the harder work of lawyering so they went into the somewhat less money making ends of it - though still handsomely compensated.    I will note that of all of them,  Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is the only one who ever acted as a defense lawyer.**    I might suspect some of them had a liking for dabbling in the aristocratic folklore that a lifetime in legal scholarship boils down to.   But like all folklore, it is flexible and easily bent into whatever form you want it to take or to amend it into a new piece of lore to suit your present purposes.   THAT IS PRACTICALLY THE DEFINITION OF A SUPREME COURT DECISION AFTER THE MARBURY V MADISON POWER GRAB BY THE SUPREME COURT, ITSELF.    You can read the many posts I made from Government by Judiciary by Louis Boudin [see my archive] to see that that is the actual truth of what they do.  As early as 1911, Louis Boudin was warning that under Marbury and its dependent rulings, the first significant one of which was the infamous Dred Scott decision and on which virtually every corrupt ruling by the Rehnquist and Roberts Court rests,  the Constitution meant only what a simple majority or more of fewer than ten black robed men said it did - and that given their ability to do so under Marbury, that even that meaning was temporary at best.   He noted the frequency of the corruption of that system and its destruction of equality under the law and democracy.   Yet Marbury is such a basic part of the folklore of the law - though entirely absent from the Constitution - that it, itself serves as the one and only securely basic law of the United States.   Constitutional government under the present Court regime is a fiction. 

I do think that ultimate it all comes down to getting the most money for themselves, their families, their class and those who they figure are in the best position to give them more of that.   They may have some emotions invested in the bull-shit excuses to overturn egalitarian democratic republican governance to do that,  the "Constitutional folklore that they learned from their equally corrupt and fascistic law profs at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. who, no doubt, learned it from others of the same fascistic and larcenous predilections.   

But I think their personal bigotry, prejudice, racism and misogyny are as easily served by the same legal bullshiteese that is the very stuff of lawyer talk and Supreme Court decisions.   As was found out in such as the Prigg decision, Dred Scott, Plessy, . . . Dobbs,  Shelby County v. Holder, Bronovich v. Democratic National Committee, Trump v United States,  there are no limits to the lies, the twisting of words,  the outright fabrication that the Supreme Court doesn't get away with because there is no real democratic or even rational limit placed on them.    The worst things the president or congress or anyone has ever gotten away with with Supreme Court blessing IS THE REAL DEFINITION OF WHAT IS CONSTITUTIONAL UNDER SUCH A DANGEROUSLY FLAWED CONSTITUTION AS WE HAVE AND HAVE HAD SINCE MARBURY IF NOT FROM THE START.    People complaining that Supreme Court decisions aren't based on the letter of the Constitution are fools playing that game because as the Court has proven over and over again in our history,  what that letter says doesn't really mean anything except what they say it means.  

Until the Constitution is changed to reign in the corrupt Supreme Court, there will be no safety for egalitarian democratic republican government and there will be no such a thing as enduring change for the better.    It is the engine of corruption that can demolish even the emergency salvage operation mounted by the Congress after the Civil War and in the adoption of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and that rarest of all things under our Constitution,  Court led progress such as in Roe v Wade.  

The Roberts Court will either be the last of the flagrantly corrupt Supreme Courts or it will be the proof that the reservations of the antifederalists, such as "Brutus" were well founded, far more so than the claims of Madison, Hamilton, John Jay and their colleagues.    I would bet that the Roberts Court won't be the last or even the worst of them unless there is sweeping Constitutional reform in the wake of Trump and what I believe will be even worse under Vance. 


*  I have entirely more respect for Andrew McCabe than I do for Comey and I'd trust what he said far more than the rest of them.   I have to say that in this attack on Comey and the one on his daughter,  he is getting what he promoted in his sandbagging of Hillary Clinton late in the 2016 campaign, along with the New York Times and other organs of the "free press."   Whole lotta karma going down, these days. 

** This summary of her CV at her nomination says, interestingly.

Jackson would be the first public defender to become a Supreme Court justice in the history of the Court.   She would be the first justice with substantial criminal defense experience since Thurgood Marshall retired in 1991.

It is certainly no accident that the other most recent "justice" to have practiced in that low-compensation area was the first Black Man to have been put on the Court,  Thurgood Marshall.   Just as it is no accident that no Republican nominee in recent history has had such a history, if there ever was one.  There are few who get nominated to the Supreme Court that you'd be tempted to sell as someone uninterested in making money out of the law but she is certainly one of those you could make a case for in that area.   None of the Republican-fascists would go into that category. 

Considering that the Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson  was one of those the white supremacist idol,  Kirk slandered I'm going to give the rest of her qualifications which are compared to the fascists on the Supreme Court:

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is One of the Most Qualified Nominees for the Supreme Court Ever

February 25, 2022

JACKSON WOULD BRING AN UNPARALLELED BREADTH AND DEPTH OF EXPERIENCE 

Jackson would be the most experienced trial court judge to join the Supreme Court in almost a century.

Jackson served on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for nearly 8 years, giving her more trial court experience than any sitting Supreme Court justice and more than any justice since Edward Sanford, who was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1923.

Jackson would be only the second sitting justice to serve at all three levels of the federal judiciary.

Only Justice Sonia Sotomayor has also served as a District judge, Circuit judge and Supreme Court justice.

Jackson would bring more years of experience as a judge than four of the sitting justices combined.

Jackson has more than eight years of experience as a judge; that’s more than Justices Thomas, Roberts, Kagan, and Barrett had combined when they were confirmed.

Jackson would be the first public defender to become a Supreme Court justice in the history of the Court.

She would be the first justice with substantial criminal defense experience since Thurgood Marshall retired in 1991.

JACKSON HAS WON BIPARTISAN SUPPORT AND PRAISE

Jackson has been confirmed by the Senate on a bipartisan basis three times. In 2021, Jackson was confirmed to the United States Circuit Court for the District of Columbia with the support of Republican Sens. Murkowski, Collins, and Graham. 

Former Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan: “My praise for Ketanji’s intellect, for her character, for her integrity – it is unequivocal.”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX): “Very impressive background … extensive trial court experience.”

Republican-appointed judge Thomas Griffith, who supported Jackson’s elevation to the D.C. Circuit after observing her work as a judge, recently said: “Her academic record is remarkable. She has a breadth of experience, which is really quite unique.”

When Jackson was nominated to the D.C. Circuit, she received support from Supreme Court clerks for Justices Scalia, Thomas, Rehnquist, Kennedy, Souter, and O’Connor.

INDEPENDENT ANALYSTS: JACKSON IS ‘HIGHLY QUALIFIED’ WITH A ‘GLITTERING RESUME’ AND A ‘VERY DISTINGUISHED RECORD’

CNN: “She has a very distinguished record as a trial court judge and now an appellate court judge.”

Boston Globe: “A sterling educational background, a distinguished track record on the federal bench, and a reputation for both brilliance and an even judicial temperament. … A reputation as brilliant and meticulous”

PBS: “Jackson has a resume seemingly tailor-fit for the moment.”

Vox: “Well qualified for the job. … Significant judicial experience.”

CNN: “A glittering resume.”

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: “Top-flight academic qualifications” 

Elie Honig, CNN Senior Legal Analyst: “Ranking among the absolute finest judges I’ve ever seen in action … a truly exceptional federal judge”

Paul Bulter, Washington Post Columnist: “[A] résumé … from central casting”

SCOTUS Blog: “She would bring a wide range of experiences”

Bloomberg: “The most complete resume [among frontrunners on Biden’s reported list] for a seat on the high court.”

LA Times: “Those who know Jackson say she always drew praise and respect.”

Financial Times: “Her rise in the legal profession has been widely regarded as formidable”

Slate: “A deep understanding of labor law”

Wednesday, September 24, 2025

So you made it through the rapture? Now what? by Rev Ed Trevors



Catholics May Include Some Real Nutters But They Aren't Typically Superstitious Schofield Reading Nutcases - Hate Mail From An Idiot Atheist

TYPICALLY, CATHOLICS DON'T believe in "the rapture" and if anyone knew anything about what I say about religion, they would know I especially wouldn't.   It is bull shit.  I'm not saying a few idiots who remain nominal Catholics while having read the lower ends of popular protestantism (so low that I won't honor it with an upper case letter) or, more likely, listening to it in the media fall for that dispensationalist crap but that, as your snarky question if I'm all ready for this only latest prediction of the date when all those clothes will suddenly be left on the floor as their naked owners are raptured up into the air, only shows they don't read much about the religion they profess.   I'm no sure but I think that imagery is either "Late Great Planet Earth"* or the even bull shittier "Left Behind" fiction, so far more of the TV age than anything biblical.  

It was popularized through the various dispensationalist cults of the late 19th century and especially by the bull shit commentary on the KJV by Cyrus I. Schofield.** 

There are nutcase Catholics and catholics but this rapture bull shit isn't part of Catholicism and predicting the date of the "end of the world" is something that's surprising to find so popular within Protestantism.  Here's how the old King James Version in Matthew 24 debunks that practice:

36 But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. 37 But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. 38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, 39 And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. 40 Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. 41Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.

42 Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. 43 But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up. 44 Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.

45 Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season? 46 Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. 47 Verily I say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his goods. 48 But and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; 49 And shall begin to smite his fellowservants, and to eat and drink with the drunken; 50 The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of, 51 And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Jesus didn't know the date but some evangelical carny huckster does?   

I apologize for that KJV stuff,  if I wasn't talking about that kind of protestantism I'd have given it in the Good News or Common English Bible.   I don't know about you but the use of the language KJV and its imitators sets off my B.S.  alarm due to that being the use it's generally put to in American culture.   It's too bad because despite its defects as a translation (ALL TRANSLATIONS AS WELL AS ALL EDITIONS OF SCRIPTURE HAVE DEFECTS) as a literary project it was excellent. 

I think the evangelicals will all be in place the day after today just as they were when the original Adventist apocalypse failed to arrive on schedule.   And the second one and every one set since then and believed in as fervently by such nutcases as who take such bull shit seriously but not to do to the least among them what they would do for God, to love others as they love themselves or to do unto others as they would have done unto them.  No one who professes Christianity but who fails at even approximating those acts should ever be taken as a representative of Christianity.  

* Someday I might write again about what a two-faced, pseudo-lefty the very cynical and bitterly aging Orson Welles was.  If I'm skeptical of evangelical "christianity" I'm far more skeptical about anything that derives from show-biz, either "christianity" or "leftist" politics.  

** Schofield was one of those family-abandonning,  divorcing, remarrying adulterers I talked about the other day.   I think he was probably screwing around on his wife even before he abandoned her and his kids.  That didn't keep him from a second career (he'd been a particularly shifty law-readin' lawyer and sleazy politician) in "evangelical ministry."   He had absolutely no academic or scholarly credentials when the frickin' Oxford University Press published his massive "Schofield Bible," almost 1400 pages of the KJV with his extensive on-the-same-page commentary.   That book was massively marketed by the various evangelical outfits and popularized such nonsense as well as such dodgy stuff as "christian zionism" (lower case intended) which was a superstitious reading of Scripture popular with many a rabid antisemite of the time and down to today.   I find the suspicion that the Oxford University publishing of such a book by a man without any academic credentials or career was funded by the zionist Baron Edmond de Rothschield - who would have had the pull to get them to do it in the first place - is believable if not provable.   Its popularization of millennialist protestant notions about that most unfortunate of all Biblical books, Revelations, in which all the Jews will be living in Palestine and either convert to "christianity" or be obliterated,  drives American foreign policy far, far more strongly than any Jewish zionism that there is.   It would seem that Oxford is still cashing in on that franchise, today  


Tuesday, September 23, 2025

So Did Grinder Really Get Crashed

by the Charlie Kirk memorial shopping channel show?*   I'm seeing reports of that all over,  not that I'm happy to find out there are that many screwed up neo-fascist gay men that they could do that looking to get hooked up in AZ.   

* I mean, merch.   They were selling merch at a "memorial service."   These guys are trashy.   

Monday, September 22, 2025

Republican-fascism Has Reached The American Satyricon Level Of Decay

 


The corrupt brain worm addled ambulance chaser lawyer put the even more feeble-minded (I'm thinking untreated syphilis is a real possibility) and corrupt Trump in front of the camera - maybe RFK bought some stock in horse medicine and wants the price to go up.  

On the worst day of his life Joe Biden was more articulate and with it than Trump is ever, these days and for a good part of the past decade.   

Proud of what you've wrought,  Roberts?   OK with the addled tyrant you and your Ivy educated, unitary executive fascist elite lawyers have created?    You will go down as the most corrupt and vile members of the frequently compromised Court in its history, even Taney and the concurring "justices" in Dred Scott didn't do the damage to the country you have. 


Hey, hey RFK how many kids did you kill today?

And Roberts, Alito Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barret?  You will all go down as the most corrupt and partisan "justices" in history.   Your only hope is for Trump and/or Vance to nominate more corrupt than you.  Cannon is rumored to be the next one up,  she'll fit right in with the Roberts Court majority. 


Already With The Hate Mail On My Morning Post

A COMMENTATOR AT the great Seneca Project Youtube channel where that compilation of Kirk in his own hateful,  violence advocating words said it best 

 "When MLK was murdered, his supporters were not ashamed of the statements he made."

As I believe Keith Olbermann pointed out, one of the things that the Kirk brigade of Trumpler Junger and on air Republican-fascists are targeting People for IS QUOTING WHAT KIRK SAID!  

Here's the original posting of what should become the classic expose of the hypocrisy of the Kirk deification campaign.   

Charlie Kirk in his own words. We Report. You Decide.



Similarly we find nowhere in the New Testament an understanding of Christian discipleship compatible with a life devoted to one's own success,

I AM GETTING THE FEELING that the Charlie Kirk deification is already getting old and is soon going to turn into a backlash,  if it follows the typical example, it will be more like The Onion's already satirical view of that  His life and sayings don't lend themselves to long-term durability on that count because the most of them were generally disgusting advocacy of rottenness and evil,  the things which got him the patronage of rich Republican-fascists and which made him rich on top of that.   His was a career in peddling racism, ethnic and religious bigotry, hatred of the least among us, hatred of LGBTQ+ People all with a sickly high-fructose glaze of religious hypocrisy.   I am not above mentioning his oh-so-recent widow embarking on a major fund-raising effort themed on his death

After vowing that her husband’s mission will continue, the widow of Charlie Kirk has made a major fundraising push following the right-wing political activist’s assassination.

It comes as the reverberations to the shocking, fatal shooting of the 31-year-old pro-MAGA firebrand on September 10 continue throughout the U.S. and around the world.

Some American leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, have called for unity and an end to political violence in the wake of his tragic death in Utah last week. Others have used the assassination as a rallying cry.

On Sunday alone, a blitz of fundraising texts went out under Erika Kirk’s name for both the organization co-founded by Kirk, Turning Point USA, which organizes and trains young conservatives, as well as its political advocacy arm, Turning Point Action.

How touching.   If by "touching" you mean not touching at all.   Among those I know the only effort like that would be to aid a young widow with children whose bereavement would mean immediate economic hardship and perhaps ruin,   most often with ruinous medical expenses not to mention funeral costs.  Kirk reportedly left $12 million from his career in peddling hate and economic inequality, his family will not be immediately destitute.   

I think they leave us with no alternative but to point out the evil that he spread,  



. . . including hatred towards Christians who, instead of making a broadcast display of their putative "Christianity" instead practiced what Kirk and his ilk would vilify as "woke"* which is, in fact, to follow The Gospel, The Law and The Prophets,  it is in advocating that that Jesus said you were to love your neighbor as yourself and immediately following that with the parable of the Good Samaritan which proved that "your neighbor" wasn't only a stranger but a stranger of a different People.    I didn't realize that until I read some of what he said slamming those who were faithful to Scripture - such as Ms. Rachel advocated when her Pride Month program advocated loving everyone, the occasion that Kirk called stoning Gay People as “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”    Like all straight men I've ever known of he ignores that by "God's perfect law" he would have to have favored the stoning death of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump as well as a whole host of other straight, white Republican-fascist adulterers,  as I pointed out last week, if you took the Gospel of Jesus seriously,  you would have to include every straight, white, Republican "christian" man and woman who had committed adultery, including those who divorce and remarry.   Of course "THAT'S DIFFERENT"  it always is when it's straight, white, affluent, "christians" whether they be a "Most Christian Monarch" who lives an adulterous lifestyle or a right-wing Republican like Trump or Reagan violating their marriage vows while wrapping themselves in the phony aura of Protestant Bible worship -  I doubt either of them ever read a passage of it.    

Reading about these things this morning reminded me of this passage from a book which I find I continually go back to,  Living Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson.  In his concluding chapter he said:

It is at this point, in fact, that we find the most consistent testimony in the writings of the New Testament - namely, that there is a necessary congruence between the character of Jesus' human life and the character of Christian discipleship

Nowhere in the New Testament is there an image of the human Jesus that is compatible with attitudes of hubris, hedonism, envy, arrogance acquisitiveness, self-aggrandizement, hostility or violence.  Jesus is everywhere associated with the faithful obedience toward God and meek, compassionate, self-emptying service toward other people. 

Jesus' character reveals him to be someone who hopes in the power of God rather than in human manipulation, who faithfully obeys God rather than his own project, and who loves with a self-giving of time and energy and presence to the needs of others in preference to his own.   

That is why the cross of Jesus stands as the central symbol for his entire life;  his death was in faithful obedience to God even when he wanted to live;  his death was an act of love to overcome alienation between humans; his death was the ultimate expression of hope in God who can call into being that which does not exist and therefore can give life to the dead.

Similarly we find nowhere in the New Testament an understanding of Christian discipleship compatible with a life devoted to one's own success,  pleasure, comfort, freedom from suffering, or power at the expense of others.  Everywhere we find the qualities that are found in Jesus advanced as essential to the following of Jesus;   the same faith, the same love, the same hope.  The basic pattern of faithful obedience to God and loving service to others is the image of Christ that the Spirit replicates in the freedom of those who belong to Christ. 

Jesus was certainly not one of the white-racist Republican bros,  Jesus lived a thoroughly woke life and so do those who try to follow him.  There is no room in that for the current American Republican ideology, lifestyle or . . . well, I guess I'll resort to calling it culture.  

Christians who do try to practice Christian discipleship are going to have to make that the final test of the public profession of Christianity.   It is entirely incompatible with the life that Kirk advocated, he said the man who did advocate that, The Reverend Martin Luther King jr, was a phony and rotten.  Kirk said that of a man whose career before his assassination did, in fact, leave his wife and children without millions of dollars, a man whose memory Kirk lied about to vilify him.     We have to point out the hypocrisy of those Republican-fascists and others who profess Christianity while advocating late-stage capitalist materialism in its most fascistic form, such as Kirk did. 

* THERE IS NO MISTAKING THE RACISM OF THE ANTI-"WOKE" BULLSHIT OF TRUMPIAN-FASCISM.   "Woke" is a word from the Black American vocabulary, originally specifically referring to those who had become fully aware of and opposed to racism.   It's no accident that it was turned into a dirty word among the current and most overtly fascist of our indigenous facists, the white supremacists who the financiers first tried to harness in the 1950s and 60s to fuel the Republican-fascist ascendency,  something that that hypocritical homosexual William Rusher and his buddy, the silver-plated tongued William F. Buckley pioneered and which Nixon Reagan, Bush, Bush II and Trump brought to power - along with the Republicans on the Rehnquist and Roberts Court.   When you hear one of them say "woke" you can hear the "N" word implied.