George Walker Piano Sonata No. 2

George Walker, composer and pianist

I Theme and Ten Variations
II (@ 02:43) Presto
II (@ 04:00) Adagio
IV (@ 08:00) Allegretto tranquillo

I love this sonata and this is, by definition, a definitive rendition of it. I mean, he's the composer and a very fine pianist.

Bollocks From The Freedom From Religion Website

Note:  I see in the paper that it's the anniversary of Mozart's death.  Here's a re-run for the occasion.

On this date in 1756, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born. Son of a Catholic musician, the child prodigy conducted his first original Mass at age 12 in Vienna, was later made a Knight of the Golden Spur by the pope, and was concert master to the Archbishop of Salzburg for many years. Accused of neglecting his religion, he resigned the appointment in 1781. Mozart joined the Freemasons, who were condemned by the Catholic Church, in 1781. Mozart refused to ask for a priest when dying. His wife sent for one anyway, who refused to attend. Mozart was buried in a pauper's grave without a religious service. Referring to the orthodoxy of his youth, he said: "That is all over, and will never come back. (Mozart's Leben, by A. Ulibichev, 1847, i, 243). D. 1791.

I think that inch for inch, this might be the most deceptive thing I've ever read about Mozart, apart from the fictitious play, "Amadeus". 

The first thing to note about this little bit of tripe claiming Mozart for the atheists is that he was known to be a Mason.   While there are conflicting sources as to whether or not a Catholic in Vienna could manage to be both a Mason and a Catholic, one thing, it seems,  wasn't possible, to be an atheist and a Mason.  Atheists were explicitly barred from being a Mason.  You would have had to believe in the creator of the universe, a designer of the universe, to have been a Mason.  Some of the sources say that the ban on Catholics joining the Masons wasn't promulgated in Austria until the year after Mozart's death.  I have been unable to find verification of that.

While Mozart might have had his differences with the Catholic Bishop of  Salzburg, for the record, he quit the gig with the Bishop to run away to Vienna.  He was repeatedly away from his post, touring, which is what he was accused of neglecting.  Far from getting canned, the Bishop was not very happy to have his resident prodigy take it on the lam and rather belatedly fired him and, to express his unhappiness, his father, Leopold.  Though apparently Leopold kept his job, in the end.

Why would young Mozart want to leave? 


Salzburg is no place for my talents. In the first place, professional musicians there are not held in much consideration; and secondly, one hears nothing, there is no theatre, no opera; and even if they wanted one, who is there to sing?
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to his good friend, Fr Joseph Bullinger SJ  (Summer 1778).


As for the death and funeral of Mozart, so many myths has been told about it that it's very difficult to get any kind of accurate picture of what happened.   Two things are known, he had a funeral at St. Stephen's Cathedral and a Requiem at St. Michael's Church. 

In 1791, the year he died,  Mozart had been appointed assistant organist at St. Stephen's so his relationship with the church couldn't have been all that bad.   The story about a priest refusing to give him the last rights would seem to originate with his sister-in-law Sophie, (I believe she was there at his death) and Constanze, his widow's second husband G. Nicholas von Nissen, who said he had received extreme unction. [see update below]  Which I was taught comprised the last rites.  His burial in a "common grave" (that would be a grave of a commoner, as opposed to one where the myriad of aristocrats in the city would have been buried, not a mass grave) was in accordance with local customs.  The idea that Mozart "refused to ask for a priest" would seem to be an exaggeration.  From what I've read, all that is known is that Mozart doesn't seem to have asked for a priest.  Given the descriptions of his physical and mental condition, his desperation to complete the Requiem Mass he was working on, he might well have not been in any condition to have accepted it was time.   Apparently the evidence from his sister-in-law is that one came and gave him the last rites.  Though, like so much to do with that day, it is ambiguous. 

Given the amount of religious music, both Catholic and Masonic, that Mozart wrote right up to the day of his death, for atheists to claim him as one of their own is pretty silly.   While his letters don't seem to contain a lot about his developed thoughts about religion on the cusp of middle age, some of what he is known to have said probably wouldn't be very welcomed news for atheists.


I must give you a piece of intelligence that you perhaps already know, namely that the ungodly arch-villain Voltaire has died miserably like a dog, just like a brute. That is his reward! 
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Letter to Leopold Mozart (3 July 1778)

I have been unable to make any sense of the last sentence from the Freedom From Religion Foundation.   Looking at page 243 of Ulibichev's book, I find a rather nonsensical letter to a friend.   Another book translates it:


To Herr von Hefner 

I hope that we shall still find you in Salzburg, my friendly slug. 

I hope that you are well and are not an enemy spider, for if so I'll be an enemy fly Or even a friendly bug. 

So I strongly advise you to write better rhymes, for If not, our Salzburg Cathedral will see me no more.  For I'm quite capax to go off to Constantinople, that city whose praises all chant. 
And then you won't see me again nor I you; yet When horses are hungry, some oats they get. 
Farewell, my lad, I'm ever to infinity 

Or else I'll go mad. From now to all eternity. 

As the previous letter on the same page in the book the FFRF cites contains the phrase "All good souls praise the Lord God", the idea that Mozart had become an atheist at that time is entirely absurd. 

In googling to find Mozarts Leben by Ulibichev, I found that this little passage has been adopted as fact all over the atheist internet, repeating the blatant distortions and errors contained in it.  Such has been my experience just about whenever I go online to research things said by organized atheism. 

UPDATE  What Mozart's sister-in-law Sophie and his widow, Constanze's second husband said in their statements is extremely confused and its interpretation by different scholars seems to differ.  Some read Sophie's statement as I first did, that the priest was slow in coming but eventually came, some read it to mean that they didn't come.   G. Nicholas von Nissen, Constanze's second husband, is translated to say both that that Mozart didn't receive last rites and that he received extreme unction.  Some assert that the priests might have been confused because Constanze seems to have wanted the priest to come but for Mozart to not understand he was there to give him the last rights.  From looking at various assertions about their accounts, it would seem that the nature of what is asserted depends largely on what other motives are held by those asserting it. 

What is clear is that by the 1820s when Sophie and Nissen were writing about the confusing night of Mozart's death, the lurid romanticization of the event was well underway. If you want a good idea at what a total mess the narratives  surrounding the death of Mozart are, this is an interesting paper dealing with just the medical theories and conspiracies invented to "explain" things.  About the only thing I'm pretty sure of, other than the documented facts,  is that, thanks to a second rate playwright what most people think they know, that Antonio Salieri did him in, is an absurd fiction. 

UPDATE 2.   This account of the funeral mass and requiem said for Mozart are far more detailed than what was known when I took a course in Mozart in the late 1960s.   It goes a long way to dispelling some of the more lurid myths about the days after his death, though it does little to clear up the actual night of his death.  The account by his friend, Benedikt Schack, of Mozart wanting to get together with other musicians to go over parts of the requiem eleven hours before his death is quite compelling.  I don't see any reason to not believe it.  It reminds me of the stories of how Alban Berg was caught up in his opera, Lulu, as he was lapsing into his final delirium and Bach dictating an appropriate chorale to his son-in-law.  Note the very end of the paper, where poor Sophie seems to be confused as to whether she went to St. Peters and St. Michael's church to find a priest that night, perhaps remembering the requiem sung for Mozart in her memory lapse. 

The picture of Mozart being surrounded by his friends and fellow musicians in the hours before his death is certainly more humane, though less romantically tragic -as if tragedy had to be heightened in this case - than the traditional stories. 

UPDATE 3.  One of the results of doing this day of research into the question has made me a lot more skeptical of the Mozart biography that is attributed to von Nissen.  It was, apparently, largely unfinished at his death, completed by two of his friends.  While von Nissen seems to have been making a real effort at documentation, it's difficult to know how much of the ambiguity of the account of Mozarts death could have been the product of so many different hands being involved in producing it.  I sort of get the idea that the account might have been written by someone who wasn't familiar with the Catholic sacraments.

Also, the picture I have now of Constanze, Mozart's widow, is a lot more positive than the ditzy flighty songbird presented by a male professor during my college years.   She seems to have done a good job of managing the family finances, especially considering the debts that Mozart left.  She effectively promoted and preserved his music, and did a fairly good job of raising her sons.   How she might have seen or used the ridiculous romantic legends that began growing up around Mozart as soon as he died, I don't know.  I'm left imagining a lot of it must have made her discretely roll her eyes but figuring if she couldn't stop it she might be able to use it to the advantage of her family.  She became quite well off and took care of her sisters and reconciled with Mozart's sister, Nannerl  late in their lives.   I've got a lot more respect for her than I used to have.

Issues In Long Term Care Giving

The problem isn't whether or not you're going to burn out, you are.  The question is how many times you can burn out.  

We're still taking care of our very old mother.  She's able to tell us that she hurts and where she hurts and she knows who we all are now.  She's off of the morphine, which is a far more devastating drug than I'd been aware of before.  That was no picnic.  And she's down to three halves of a Lorazepam but only on her really bad days.   It's no fun, getting your very old mother off of drugs her incompetent doctor got her addicted to.   

She, a woman who worked in some of the most well known hospitals in Boston and Philadelphia during the period before and during the introduction of penicillin, "It was like a miracle, the first cases we used it on," someone who had complete faith in the medical profession, has been led to being a skeptical victim of it.  She has been trying alternative treatment, having some good results with some of it. That was something she was extremely skeptical of before this happened.   I am hoping she will recover enough to write about her experience.  She is totally disillusioned with the for-profit hospitals, the only kind around, these days. 

Anyone in a country where they're trying to make medicine more market based, beware.  What happens here is what they want to do to you. 

Leo Brouwer Un Dia de Noviembre

Tatyana Ryzhkova

You hear all kinds of interpretations of this piece.  I kind of chose this one at random from the ones I liked.

From A Virtual Life Observed

Facebook has probably divided more families and friends than living together.   Why in the world to people air the dirty family linen on it?

Considering how worked up people got over the NSA revelations (I'd always figured they were doing a hell of a lot more than that, and still suspect they might be) you wonder why there is so little said about people surrendering their privacy voluntarily and other people giving theirs away on social media sites.  This weekend,  I heard of yet another family bitterly divided by it. 

Leo Brouwer Sonata

I posted a very good recording of this sonata last year but this is a somewhat different approach.   It's worth listening to as played by different artists.

Tal Hurwitz plays a guitar built by Andreas Kirmse

Charles Ives: Song for the Harvest Season

Charles Ives

Song for the Harvest Season

Jan DeGaetani, soprano
American Brass Quintet

Gerard Schwarz - trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn
John Eckert - trumpet
Edward Birdwell - french horn
Arnold Fromme - tenor trombone

Robert Biddlecome - bass trombone.

Slow Recoveries

Our mother is better but far from well.  One of our friends, who is a doctor, looked at things and said that the hospital nearly killed her, though not for attribution in a court of law.   She requires round the clock care so we're not getting a lot of extra things done.   Unfortunately, she has developed bed sores so there is also that to deal with.  But her doctor says there is nothing imminently life threatening in her condition.  

It's exhausting but it's a good reminder that there is no experience in life better than being able to do things for others.  Maybe that's the purpose of suffering, the answer to the problem of evil.  

Frightening Episode In Medical Mismanagement

It's been quite the fortnight of medical adventures for me and my family.  The latest was a terrifying episode of our mother going from a fully conscious, rational person who could discuss her replacing the front door of her house sixty years ago, to being admitted to a local hospital for overnight observation due to severe sciatic pain, to having her sent home, against the advice of her doctor, quite literally delirious, irrational and in a state of severe dehydration.  We found out that the "Hospitalist" had given her Xanax for anxiety, on top of morphine for the pain.  Her medical records say, distinctly, that she should never be given Xanax, due to a problem with it when she was mis-prescribed the medication before.   She was in her mid-90s at the time and, as the doctor who got her off of it said, no one in her age group should be given Xanax.  

We've been sitting up with her round the clock, dealing with the delirious episodes, learning too-late that someone her age has to be constantly checked for urinary tract infections, dehydration and that you should always question when a doctor prescribes mind altering drugs.  She's made some improvement though she is far from lucid.  One of the definite statements she has made is that she doesn't want to ever go back to that hospital.  It is the first time in her life that I have ever heard her make a negative comment about the medical profession in any way.   

Needless to say, it has taken up most of my attention for the past week and put me on guard concerning my own condition.   I had never heard of a "hospitalist" before but, in her case, it is a doctor who looks out for the health of the hospital's bottom line instead of patient care.   

The next person I hear talk about tort "reform" might have to go to the hospital.  

That's It, No More Downloading Software or Updates

I just spent several hours trying to get rid of the putrid Sweet Packs zombie software that I got from a well known source that bills itself as "virus free".  I was trying to find a simple foreign language word processing program and that was the result.

I'm keeping a list of software that has given people these kinds of hidden add-ons. From my search of the problem I've seen some people advise against the quick "recommended" express type of installation but to laboriously go through the features you are downloading to see if you can avoid this kind of trash but I'm guessing even that is no guarantee.  I guess you get what you don't pay for.  I'd hate to have to give up open source software but I'm not interested in getting infected again.

For The Day After Veterans Day

Now that the wreaths are laid and the easy, inexpensive "honoring" of those the country uses in wars is done until the end of May, here is an outrageous story about how the military has been dumping the soldiers it disables with repeated deployments such as the ones that have become common since the invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

Dave Philipps is a reporter at the Colorado Springs Gazette, located in Fort Carson’s hometown. He began to hear stories about soldiers like Jensen, and has spent months writing a series documenting numerous battle-damaged soldiers forced out of the military without benefits.

"If they kick out these soldiers in a way that they get anything other than honorable discharge, then they don’t automatically qualify for the VA [federal benefits for veterans]," Philipps said. "They get their education benefits taken away. They can’t even apply for unemployment. And so, they’re really left with nothing."

It’s called being "chaptered out." Soldiers may be discharged for reasons ranging anywhere from tardiness to substance abuse, and more serious crimes like assault. Many have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and some also have traumatic brain injuries (TBI), both of which can influence behavior and judgment.

Philipps said the number of soldiers getting kicked out for misconduct has gone up every year since the war in Iraq began. Since 2006, 76,000 soldiers have been chaptered out, Philipps calculates.

"If you just look at the army combat post where the most soldiers are, the post that might be most affected by PTSD, [there is a] 67-percent increase," he told America Tonight. "So it seems to suggest that a lot of the misconduct is being driven by these constant deployments."

Read the story of Jerrald Jensen who enlisted at the age of 34 after September 11th, was sent to Iraq in 2006 and in 2007

his patrol was attacked, and an explosive blew off part of his face and pierced his body with shrapnel. Jensen still managed to drive away from the attack, saving his commander, before being shot in the arm and the back. That incident resulted in a Purple Heart.

Doctors had to rebuild his jaw with titanium. After two years and 16 surgeries, Jensen volunteered for a second combat tour, this time in Afghanistan. He was assigned to Bari Alai, a remote U.S. outpost that faced nearly daily attacks from the Taliban. Six months into his tour, he fell while running to a gun post and again broke his jaw.


Doctors did their best to patch him up, but half of Jensen's face was permanently numb, and he lost his remaining teeth. He felt he'd had enough. Soon, he was transferred to the Warrior Transition Unit, a special unit in Fort Carson, Colo., set up to help wounded active-duty soldiers heal and transition into civilian life.

Once there, Jensen told America Tonight that WTU commanders seemed bent on getting rid of him. He said they wrote him up for minor infractions, like showing up late to a medical appointment, or making an incomplete stop at a stop sign.

Then, on a routine urine test, Jensen came up positive for amphetamines. He had been prescribed the decongestant pseudoephedrine and narcotics for his injuries, which can cause a false positive, so he asked to be re-tested. Instead, WTU commanders told him they were kicking him out of the Army for what they called a pattern of misconduct.


Not only did the Army want to discharge him without benefits like unemployment or access to GI Bill money, said Jensen, they also wanted to give him a discharge that was other than "honorable." That would likely keep him from getting any benefits for the rest of his life.

Apparently the bean counters in uniform are looking for every excuse to dump the soldiers it uses up  just like those who work for insurance companies and the corporations who want to dump employees who they've injured or killed.  It is estimated that there here have been about 76,000 of these used up soldiers dumped this way since 2006.

This is a real cost of war, America, the war that so many of you support as long as it's not your sons and daughters, your sons and daughters-in-law, your loved ones aren't the ones doing the fighting.  

It should be a law that any congressional representative, any president and vice-president who votes to send Americans to war have immediately entered their children and eligible family members in a draft.  Any media figures and pundits who promote wars should be hounded out of the public if their families don't already have family members in the military, and I don't mean in state-side offices but in combat ready units.  Those who are of at least the age and fitness level of Jerrald Jensen should also be entered into this draft of the war mongers.   That's when we might avoid wars no one should believe in, when we can have even the slightest confidence that we aren't being led into another of the quagmires that the corporate media have gotten us into on behalf of the decadent corporate oligarchs, leaving the fighting to working class and poor people who they have such an easy time of dumping onto the garbage tip when they've used them up. 

Mauro Giuliani Rondo op. 68 no. 2

This piece, posted here the other night, really caught my fancy, I think I'll find a guitarist and play it.   Here it is on a modern piano and guitar.    Giuliani was a pretty good composer.

Celebrating Pseudo-Scientific Doodley-Doo As If It Is Science

Ok, Google.  So, really.  In 2013, we're really supposed to think that Hermann Rorschach and his claim to fame are anything other than overwhelming evidence that materialism is as prone to generating the rankest of florid, absurd, superstition and that, unlike religion in the modern west, it can attain legal power through its pseudo-scientific assertions?

In my research into the prophet of 19th and early 20th materialist monism, Ernst Haeckel, I came across Rorschach.  He was one who sought guidance from the expert of scientistic German atheism as to whether or not he should pursue his interest in art or in "natural science".  I use the scare quotes because I won't honor either man or his product with the designation of science because they're evidence of the decay of science instead of specimens of science.  Haeckel advised him to leave art behind.  I assume, given it was the young Rorschach who sought out Haeckel in this regard that he shared his disdain of religion.  Rorschach published on the topic of religion, choosing to focus on the most atypical of bizarre cults, symptomatic of the mental illness of the leaders and those they gulled.  Which, one might suspect, made what they said about religion as relevant to most peoples' understanding of it as what the most insane of pseudo-scientists said about science told us about sane scientists.  Rorschach being one of those, both as a cultist of pseudo-scientific Freudianism and as an originator and practitioner of some of its most pseudo-scientific and unfounded nonsense.

I am pressed for time today or I'd go into the folly that a faith that every single aspect of the experienced universe fits into a neat scheme of materialist cosmology and the emotional necessity of such materialists to jam everything they come across into one, but that would take more words than I can spare just now.  The field of psychology and the related pseudo and ersatz sciences never fail to reveal how insane the results of that can be, when you look at it in light of the expressed materialist faith of its expositors.  But that will take books instead of a blog post.

The position of that materialist faith in our legal apparatus is the product of the desperation of dealing with those dangerously and tragically unable to function as rational beings, past the point of toleration.   That any legal use has been made of the assertions of psychologists, psychiatrists, etc. on the basis of their interpretations of what they have gotten people to say about ink blots us a troubling sign as to how irrational a faith in something asserted to be science can be.  It is as valid as the opinion of an entrails reader or an astrologer but with the pretense that it was ever scientifically validated makes it far more potently dangerous.  And that is only one of the absurdities of psychology that can literally mean life or death, freedom or incarceration under our scientific regime.

Mauro Giuliani Two Rondos op 68

Maximilian Mangold "hitorical guitar"
Kristian Nyquist Hammerflügel

I think the guitar is either made by the early maker Staufer of someone influenced by him, the head design is his distinctive style.  I seem to recall that Giuliani played a Staufer.   It matches the period piano far better than a modern guitar does a modern piano.

score:   Note:  The rondos in the score are give in opposite order from the recording and they are given as parts.   It's a gloomy, overly warm November rain here, the first one matches the night.

Wikipedia Is Far Far Worse Than I'd Thought

Long time readers will know I've got a big problem with Wikipedia and the influence it has on what people think they're thinking.   The problem starts with there being no ultimate quality control of the content found at Wikipedia.  In lieu of a general editorship there is the superstitious belief that having an "open editing" regime in which people contending conflicting ideas will fight it out in editing struggles and war and, magically, the right idea will prevail.  Of course, if you happen to consult an article while it asserts patent nonsense or intentional slander, libel, lies or malicious pranking,  you may never come back and check to see where the battle for that topic comes out in the end.  That is if there is any such thing as a final product at Wikipedia, any final determination as to what is reliable information on that topic.

In a very serious issue raised in  my last post on the topic, I noted how, after I found out about organized efforts to twist Wikipedia entries to suit a specific ideology, the first thing I thought of was that neo-Nazis and their allies were bound to take advantage of that.  And it turns out that they do know about it but nothing is apparently being done about it.
_________

Snježana Koren, a historian at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, has judged the disputed articles as “biased and malicious, partly even illiterate”. She further added that “These are the types of articles you can find on the pages of fringe organizations and movements, but there should be no place for that on Wikipedia”, expressing doubts on the ability of its authors to distinguish good from evil.

Although the situation was discussed at length on Jimmy Wales’ talk page, there seems to be little progress in remedying it.

Extreme right-wing views can apparently be found even among the Wikimedia Foundation’s own staff. Its Education Program Consultant for the Arab World, Faris El-Gwely, sports a little green userbox with a black and white picture of Adolf Hitler on his user page in the Arabic Wikipedia. The Arabic text next to that image reads, “This user respects Adolf Hitler”.

This user respects Adolf Hitler
(هذا المستخدم يحترم أدولف هتلر).

Alerted to this fact by discussions in the German Wikipedia, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager LiAnna Davis commented there on September 17, 2013: “The comments posted in this discussion have brought this issue to our attention, and we are looking into the situation.” Three weeks later, the Hitler userbox on Faris El-Gwely’s Arabic user page is as proudly displayed as ever.

If anyone does not have an enormous problem with that situation which must be seen as definitively discrediting of any entity which tolerates it,  you are part of the problem.

--------

I came across Wikipediocracy, on which that piece is found, it has some of the most developed criticism of Wikipedia, its content, its (non)methodology and its establishement, both formal and de facto.   And, due to the gross irresponsibility of its formal establishment - Jimmy Wales et al. sometimes the de facto establishment on any one topic is in the hands of 14-year-olds (of all ages) with absolutely no real credibility to make assertions about it and the ability to mob the topic driving out people with the educational and professional expertise to actually speak authoritatively on the topic.

What makes all of this possible, is the anonymity built into the method by which Wikipedia is generated and "edited". The great lesson that the mess of Wikipedia teaches is that it really matters whether or not someone is willing to put their name, their identity, their credibility and their professional standing on the line by owning up to what they put out there. Another thing is that it is dangerous to not distinguish between sources of information which are backed up by the chance a serious, informed scholar takes when they write publicly and the risk-free act of posting something anonymously. One is serious scholarship with a rational presumption of responsibility, the other is blogging, if not tweeting.

In article after article, with ample citation and documentation, Wikipediocracy shows how dangerous Wikipedia, which is very likely to come up at the top of the page in any web search, potentially is.  It documents how irresponsible it was to come up with its (non)process for the generation and development of Wikipedia is, and, with a decade of experience of what that process produces, how grotesquely irresponsible it is to tolerate its sometimes good, sometimes neutral and often malignant influence on thinking can be.

In every way, the failed Wikipedia experiment exposes the problems of a powerful entity for which no identified people exercise responsibility.   The idea that Wikipedia's processes would come out any other way is pure superstition that some some unseen force apart from actual human intention is produced when an allegedly neutral situation is set up.  Where that force is supposed to come from, fully equipped with infallible or at least reliable judgement, needs to be asked.   It is the same superstition that pretends that an "unseen hand" is produced from a market economy, which posses wisdom and insight and produces the "right result" and the superstition that the truth will arise whenever there is a theoretical possibility of "more speech" answering the evil intentions of massive ideological lies.   The fact is that there is no such benevolent force created as a byproduct of setting up human systems.  The experience of their creation has shown that it is far more likely that bad money will drive out the good, that lies will travel around the world while the truth is getting its shoes on and that a swarming bunch of 14-year-olds will drown out and drive out the most well informed and idealistic of PhDs.

For more on how bad things are,  read about Jimmy Wales' impotent gesture of setting up a "Bright Line" to drive out trolls hired to write Wikipedia entries on behalf of companies and corporations, a rule with no enforcement mechanism but the same kind of "honors system" that so notably has not worked for Wikipedia.   Such a system has allowed  people to "edit" and write their own entries and others, if you could imagine such a thing occurring to people.

That last sentence was sarcasm.  For people who were surprised to discover that possibility.   Jimmy et al, a clue.  Honor only works when the person is honorable. So many aren't.  And, reviewing your behavior, I don't have any confidence that includes you.  Wikipedia and those who could fix it but won't deserve to be thoroughly and universally discredited.  They are among the more irresponsible people in the wreckage of our intellectual life.

Update:  This article about Jimmy Wales' and Wiki's relationship to the Stalinist dictatorship in Kazakhstan is stunning.

Note that this openly states that the National Academy of an authoritarian regime provides a “content and quality review process” in the Kazakh Wikipedia, and that two government ministries are involved in organising the work.

According to an interview given to the Harvard Crimson in October 2012, WikiBilim currently has 25 full-time employees, who have been busy transferring the content of the Kazakh state-published national encyclopedia and other state-published reference works into the Kazakh Wikipedia.

But what about other contributors who may believe in Wales’ vision of anonymous crowdsourcing? Kazakhstan’s government clearly has the technological and financial means to scrutinise volunteers’ contributions to the Kazakh Wikipedia for political correctness, and to identify the authors. What if they cite Western sources describing Nazarbaev as a dictator? Wikipedians have voiced concerns that Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation may be blissfully unaware just how much risk Wikipedia contributors in Kazakhstan who do not toe the party line might be exposed to if they contribute material to Wikipedia that cites foreign sources.

Yet Wales bestowed the "Wikipedian of the Year" on Rauan Kenzhekhanuly, the founder of WikiBilim.  For anyone who wants an idea of how serious he is about his "method".

This alone would discredit most people and organizations and it is only one aspect of the problem with Wikipedia and its establishement.  

Mike Michaud Deserves Election Because He Has Been A Champion of the Working and Poor People

Mike Michaud isn't my congressman, I wish he were.  Don't get me wrong, I love my congress woman, Chellie Pingree, I only wish I could have them both. Mike was sent to the House by the northern, more rural, more conservative, Second District.  He entered politics after more than two decades working in paper mills, a strong union member who knows things about real life that you can only get that way.  His character, formed by a sense of duty to the people he lived with and worked with, in a district which has widespread poverty matched with intelligence and good sense have made him a hard politician to beat.  People know he is for them and they are happy to give him the job of representing them.     Michaud has been winning election to the Maine legislature, both the House and Senate, becoming the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and winning unanimous election as the President of the Senate.  A former legislator who is a friend told me that Mike Michaud was one of the most able legislators he served with.  And that was his record before he was elected to the United States Congress.   For more of his career in politics, a record of distinguished service to the working people of his district and those who are out of work or poor see here.

Mike Michaud is running for governor of Maine and yesterday he came out as a gay man, saying the most sensible thing that can be said about running for governor while being gay, "why should it matter?"  We will find out the extent to which it will matter to voters in Maine.  I, of course, hope that they will decide it shouldn't matter.  They certainly know what they get when they hire Mike Michaud to work for them in political office, they get a long and overwhelming record of dedicated service from a man who is happy to be one of us, who doesn't look down on us, who puts our welfare above the attractions available to a member of congress who chooses to leave The People of Maine behind for the soft-handed, perfumed, well compensated crooks in the lobbying class.   The contrast between him and the incumbent Paul LePage, notorious for his vulgar, divisive, politics of hate couldn't be more different from Mike Michaud's record.   He is also quite different from the millionaire independent lawyer and businessman Eliot Cutler.

I supported Mike Michaud before and was extremely happy when he announced he was running for governor and this will make me work even harder for him.  I have to admit that it does matter to me that he is gay, it makes me all the prouder to have him in office from my state.   I can't wait to vote for him for the first time.

HA! PZ Myers Hates It When Christians Play The Victim

Francis Spufford, who I am not familiar with, has recently had an excerpt of his book, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, published on Salon.   You will probably not be shocked to discover PZ Myers hated what he read there.  He especially objected to this long paragraph, listing what his daughter was going to hear about what it means to be a Christian:

It means that we’re dogmatic. That we’re self-righteous. That we fetishize pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we promise the oppressed pie in the sky when they die. That we’re bleeding hearts who don’t understand the wealth-creating powers of the market. That we’re too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures, full of meaningless distinctions, on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy. That we uphold the nuclear family, with all its micro-tyrannies and imprisoning stereotypes. That we’re the hairshirted enemies of the ordinary family pleasures of parenthood, shopping, sex and car ownership. That we’re savagely judgmental. That we’d free murderers to kill again. That we think everyone who disagrees with us is going to roast for all eternity. That we’re as bad as Muslims. That we’re worse than Muslims, because Muslims are primitives who can’t be expected to know any better. That we’re better than Muslims, but only because we’ve lost the courage of our convictions. That we’re infantile and can’t do without an illusory daddy in the sky. That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children by implanting a sick mythology in your minds. That we oppose freedom, human rights, gay rights, individual moral autonomy, a woman’s right to choose, stem cell research, the use of condoms in fighting AIDS, the teaching of evolutionary biology. Modernity. Progress. That we think everyone should be cowering before authority. That we sanctify the idea of hierarchy. That we get all snooty and yuck-no-thanks about transsexuals, but think it’s perfectly normal for middle-aged men to wear purple dresses. That we cover up child abuse, because we care more about power than justice. That we’re the villains in history, on the wrong side of every struggle for human liberty. That if we sometimes seem to have been on the right side of one of said struggles, we weren’t really; or the struggle wasn’t about what it appeared to be about; or we didn’t really do the right thing for the reasons we said we did. That we’ve provided pious cover stories for racism, imperialism, wars of conquest, slavery, exploitation. That we’ve manufactured imaginary causes for real people to kill each other. That we’re stuck in the past. That we destroy tribal cultures. That we think the world’s going to end. That we want to help the world to end. That we teach people to hate their own natural selves. That we want people to be afraid. That we want people to be ashamed. That we have an imaginary friend; that we believe in a sky pixie; that we prostrate ourselves before a god who has the reality status of Santa Claus. That we prefer scripture to novels, preaching to storytelling, certainty to doubt, faith to reason, law to mercy, primary colors to shades, censorship to debate, silence to eloquence, death to life.

Where, oh where, oh where, could Spufford have gotten that list of specimen anti-Christian invective from, you are almost certainly not asking yourself unless you happened to dodge the past decades tsunami of anti-Christian invective, especially that issuing from blogs such as PZ's Pharyngula as a putative "Scienceblog" and now found under the even more ironic heading as a "Freethought blog".   For example, the second comment on PZ's post reads:

Wait, how are those misconceptions? Of course, all Christians don’t do or embody all the things on that list, but good luck finding even a single Christian who doesn’t live up to at least a few of them.

to be frankly seconded as soon as comment 5

A. Noyd has it. There are indeed some lovely, compassionate christians who don’t personally hate gay people or women at all … but how does that excuse or redeem the appalling record of the christian churches? And how does that make a mythological supernatural being real? No amount of kind-hearted and ethically minded individuals can make christianity itself any more factually true than it is – i.e. not at all.

And the vast majority do live up to far too many of the items on that list.

As anyone who is familiar with the PZnut gallery will know, those are two of the milder confirmations of exactly the list of anti-Christian invective that abounds on atheist blogs and in atheist books and as found on most non-atheist comment threads on even non-religious themed blogs these days.  And if you need more proof, here is what Myers said about it:

"Jesus fucking Christ, man, get down off that giant cross you’ve erected! You’re going to hurt yourself!"

Convincing and rational rebuttal to Spufford's point, no?  [Private message to Mr Myers:  Uh, PZ, for a self-anointed figure of rational discourse to confirm something in your rebuttal of it is sort of, as we say, stupid.]

And it has been thus on PZ's blogs as can be seen on his archives.   For example, from September 17 

I am quite able to agree that you Christians are mostly harmless. But when you look objectively at the goofball ideas that you consider to be essential core beliefs of your religious philosophy, it’s a fair cop to say that you also look like freakin’ idiots.

And that's mighty mild Myers, if you know what I mean. 

You would be far harder put to find examples of atheists online who don't parrot exactly those lines Spufford lists even as they whine about the surveys that show Christians and other religious believers quite often say they'd probably not vote for an atheist for president.  I'd love it if PZ would ask his cult if they'd vote for a candidate who says the same kinds of things about atheists that he regularly lets loose.  

-----------------------

Being a gay man, a rather small minority group which it has only very recently become unfashionable to target for hate speech, in a limited number of places,  one of the stupider things I ever heard from other gay folk is that we could, somehow, obtain our civil rights without the support of the majority, straight, population.  It was a stupid idea that was especially prevalent in the late 1970s when it became fashionable among some dolts to, as one guy I knew put it, just sit there and hate straight people."  Within a few years that stupid pose would be abandoned in the circles during the AIDS crisis.  It became obvious that everything about our civil rights depended on the support of allies who were not gay.  No minority group anywhere, at any time has not needed allies in the majority population.   Numbers matter in a democracy.  

Atheists have had a fuller range of civil rights protections far longer than GLBT folks have today.  I'm unaware of any time when atheists were, for example, denied the right to marry.  White, straight, atheist men like Myers have had rights under the constitution from the beginning that women, African-Americans, and a host of others have not had during the longest part of the life of our country and today they have the full range of rights protected by law.   Their atheism was no impediment to their practice of those rights.  

Let me clue you in on something, atheists, GLBT folks, any minority group, can exercise their rights only with the support of the majority.  Even women, a truly, suppressed and oppressed majority of the population, needed the support of men in order to exercise their rights.  It was only when the minority of white men in the Congress and state legislatures were convinced to amend the Constitution that women could exercise the more basic political rights of full citizens.   You don't change the constitution or make law to extend the protection of the exercise of rights unless you convince the majority of those with power to change them. 

Atheists were included in those classes protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, an act passed and signed into law by people who were, overwhelmingly, Christians.  That act conferred the full range of protection to those classes covered in it and those of us not covered do not yet have protection of those rights for ourselves.  That protection for the covered groups is sustained in a country in which the overwhelming majority of voters are Christians.  The separation of church and state and the disestablishment clauses of the Constitution have stood on the basis of the non-opposition of the majority of Christians. 

If Christians wanted to, I expect they could amend the constitution to remove those protections of equality and freedom of thought. It certainly could have been done in an earlier period when the separation of church and state didn't enjoy the iconic status that it has had in the post-WWII period.   That hasn't been done in the more than two centuries that the Constitution has been in place and it was, obviously, not the tiny faction of atheists that sustained them all these years.   Most often, when atheists complain of their "rights" being violated, it isn't more than a matter of anger that the majority of people are free to express their religion in ways that atheists want to complain about.  The ridiculous assertion that people have an obligation to vote for an atheist if they would rather not, the annoyance that religious people talk about their religion in pubic and express their political choices in terms of religious morality, atheists don't have a right to the majority of people suppressing their thoughts in those areas anymore than gay men have to straight men expressing their gender preference.   It would be an extremely stupid gay man who insisted that he did have that right.   There would be nothing to gain from it anymore than calling straight folks "breeders" brought. 

To Myers and the PZites I say:

It's Beginning to Look Like a Charcteristic Habit: Another Alternet Atheist Lies About What Their Citations Say

Valerie Tarico, a "psychologist and writer in Seattle" who writes often for Alternet rather remarkably misrepresented a survey by the Barnes Group in order to support her contention that,  "Atheist Marriages May Last Longer Than Christian Ones."

She says, about the survey they conducted:

In 2008, Barna again sampled Americans about divorce rates. The numbers fluctuated a bit, but once again atheists came out painfully good from a prays-together-stays-together perspective. Thirty percent reported ever being divorced, in contrast to 32 percent of born-again Christians. Slicing the U.S. by region, the Bible belt has the highest divorce rate, and this has been the case for over a decade, with the institution of marriage faring better in those dens of blue-state iniquity to the north and west.

While what the report from the Barnes Group SHE LINKED TO actually said about that is:

Thirty percent of atheists and agnostics had been married and subsequently divorced. However, the three-point difference from the national average was within the range of sampling error, suggesting that their likelihood of experiencing a dissolved marriage is the same as that of the population at-large. A representative from Barna also pointed out the atheists and agnostics have lower rates of marriage and a higher likelihood of cohabitation, a combination of behaviors that distort comparisons with other segments.

Even a casual reading of Tarico's citation shows that it doesn't support her alleged theme, it impeaches its own usefulness for supporting that theme.   Down at the very bottom of the post she sort of gives herself an escape clause by saying:

Do atheists do it better? That is unlikely. Divorce rate differences between theists and nontheists tend to depend on how you slice the demographic pie, and for both groups, the shape of marriage itself is changing. As culture evolves, we’re all in uncharted territory together.

But she makes apparent from the rest of the post that wasn't really her theme, she didn't really have one, she had a goal of presenting a hodge podge of anti-religious talking points for the online atheist audience all while committing the original sins of the social, would-be, sciences, conflation, reification and false equivalency to group and attribute characteristics to quite disparate groups and individuals. Perhaps atheists don't really think the great differences among denominations on questions such as divorce, abortion, birth control, etc don't matter but they do the the large majority of the population.   Really, I've come to think that popular atheism, far from being an intellectual movement it is an a-intellectual fad.   For someone who is billed as a "psychologist" to so completely misrepresent the report of the statistics in their own citation leads you to wonder if she was allowed to get by without studying statistics.

---------------

In even older news, I've been having a dispute with the Darwin Fan Club again.   Most of it was boilerplate Darwin Industry nonsense that one reading of The Descent of Man would prove was total nonsense.   We have a weird situation in which Darwin's own words are not allowed to mean what he meant them to mean, in which a phony, mythical Darwin was replaced for the real one whose claim to fame was in the very books the Darwin Industry refuses to represent his thinking.

The most interesting feature of the argument this time is the guy who was upset that I cited the passage in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species in which Darwin said that "survival of the fittest" and Natural Selection were the same thing.   He said:

You try to suggest that the 5th and 6th addition magically alter the term ‘fitness’ to mean what YOU want it to mean rather than what Darwin in the previous 4 editions meant the term to mean. Again, this is academic fraud you are committing.

Since I gave the page number of the fifth edition where CHARLES DARWIN said,

This preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. 

we have a situation of a Darwin fan boy defending Darwin from his own words, of them impeaching the real man, in all of his rather sordid realness in favor of their phony, post-WWII plaster and very secular St. Darwin.  Darwin said what he said, there was no magical transformation, there was his own clarification of what he meant people to understand.

And in this, you can read " very secular" to mean " very atheist" because that's what it amounted to in the discussion.   I've come to the conlusion that the atheism fad is the result of the decline in reading ability and scholarship in the age of electronic mass entertainment.  What was supposed to be the "information age" would seem to be more of a mis-information age.   Valerie's piece, distorting the survey she cites was carried by Salon as well as were Jonny Scaramanga's evidence free assertions about the phony eugenics-free Darwin.   Welcome to the atheist dark age, as presented by the alleged news media.

Update:  Apparently Salon is blocking my comments claiming, "It seems you're attempting to post malformed content".  As I was noting what it said at the link Tarico put up, herself, that's rather rich.  

Does Salon do any review, whatsoever, of what appears on its website?  Who makes the determination that something is "misinformed"?

Total Accuracy As A Requirement For Thee And The Easy Side Order of Double Standard For Me

Recent experiences have led me back to the topic of science, what it is and what it isn't.  The experience was being cooped up with a loud-mouth who said the typical things, taunting me as if I were a biblical literalist, insisting that either the Bible is 100% accurate about everything or it falls before the superior oracle of science. The usual atheist lines about Genesis, Joshua, that kind of old stuff.  If it were not for loud mouthed atheists, I doubt I'd go much into the topic, though there are useful things to be thought on the topic.  And here I have never believed in either the creation account in Genesis or that the sun stopped for Joshua.   Though I see little harm in people believing in either, as long as they don't expect to teach those in public schools.

I felt well enough to point out that if something is either 100% accurate or it falls, then science can't possibly stand since science, at any given time, contains inaccurate, incomplete and outright false ideas that are presented as being temporarily,  "The Truth".

It didn't go down well but the truth is, thus has science always been, thus will it always be.  It does not build a wall of truth extending from the mists of time,to today and onward into the future. Science produces a series of tentative and contingent ideas that are only an approximation of what the nature of the reality sampled through physical evidence.  It is certain that none of it is an absolute and complete representation of that knowledge which recreates the one and only reality in our minds which will stand for all time.  If you want something like that, but not exactly like that, stick with math which can stand for absolute knowledge, if you ignore the entirely human context of that knowledge and what we may not be able to perceive or comprehend.   We talk about "science" as if it were a an independent entity when it is merely an agreement among an informally constituted group of human beings.  Science exists only on the content of that unstated agreement among people, it isn't "a thing," to use that rather superficial term which seems to be getting more use these days.

This is really not different from what some religious people mistake their religion to be, such people are generally considered fundamentalists, as people such as the guy in the next bed had no problem understanding.  But - of course unlike the religious fundamentalist - he knew he had the real and true oracle that can provide absolute knowledge.  In that is, perhaps, an even more invincible ignorance in this superficial and dark age which has made the artificial and human invention of "scientific method" a fundamentalist religion, its professionals and, even more so its popularizers, an infallible priesthood.   Only, not.  Not different at all in how religious fundamentalists view things, only in the objects they react to superstitiously.

The Bible is not a pure urtext edition showing exactly what God dictated to Moses and a series of other Jewish verbatim shorthand takers, it is a collection containing some very inspired text written by human beings with enormous insights but also with the complete human capacity to get things wrong or to have less than truthful intentions in what they are doing.   Some of it, such as the texts establishing the temple,  I strongly suspect were inspired by a priest caste looking to enrich themselves, as, perhaps, the later Prophets may have also suspected.  And it was not written in a time when the standards of history and science asserted in the 19th and 20th centuries were even known, standards which we, today, often breach instead of observe.  As my recent antagonist in this matter did in regard to both science and the history and recent events in science.

As mentioned, science has its own priest caste these days, and they have enormously more power than any religious priests have ever had in our history, with openly corrupt motives to lie.  They have created death and destruction, they have created, literally, the mechanisms that could bring about the end of the world, the human species and many others, at the very least.  No priesthood has ever accomplished anything as depraved as what science has given us.  The New Towers of Bable constructed in the modern world, the armaments industry, the oil and gas industries, the petro-chemical and just chemical industry and many others that are 100% reliant on the scientific priesthood which is from well to fabulously compensated for their efforts.  They lie about the dangers and the very nature of their professions, pointing to the beneficial side of things.   They claim the right to an indulgence from damnation, automatic and far more absolute than any which a Pope sold to medieval royals and nobles.  All of their actions are to be considered sacrosanct and above condemnation because, you see, it's science.  All of the evil done with their sacred and often proprietary revelation must be the work of those satanic legions, the engineers.

But the most hilarious thing about this assertion that, unlike the Bible, science is the sole channel of the truth is that the sci-guys are also always asserting that science is automatically self-correcting, overturning ideas that turn out to not be exactly what they were originally sold as being,  not infrequently entirely wrong and, also not infrequently, the product of outright fraud or incompetence.  It seems to me that as scientific publication has grown enormously in the past sixty or more years, the mechanisms of review, which are supposed to pre-sort the goats from the sheep, has earned our fully informed skepticism.  Science does a crappy job of keeping out false ideas, especially those which are profitable for the scientists peddling them or the companies or entities who pay them.   Have I recommended Retraction Watch recently*?

Rational scientists who aren't emotionally invested in the myth of the utter virtue of scientists and the absolute reliability of science and the total efficacy of its methods - and so the complete reliability of those ideas that constitute "science" at any given moment - don't lie about it being anything other than a totally human product, heir to all of the evils, intentional and inadvertant, which humanity is certain to produce.  To themselves at least.  There would seem to be a smaller percentage of those among scientists than there are religious folk who don't buy the fundamentalist line which is an exact parallel to the romantic view of science. Most religious folks aren't fundamentalists.   And I don't believe a lot of those who push that romantic fiction in either science or religion actually believe that lie, they couldn't if they were at all aware of what their faiths consist of. Many in both camps have an educational background and experience that proves the opposite.

I think their assertions are more like those surrounding another falsely elevated, pampered, flattered and rewarded priesthood, the judiciary, it is a professional danger to tell the truth that they are as open to corruption as any other inbred, invested group of aristocrats and their history is as sordid as any that can be written.  Eventually those lies produce a corruption that is impossible to ignore, risking damage to whatever good those institutions do on behalf of the corrupt motives of those in control of them.  Religion is brought into disrepute by the evil done by its hierarchy.  And I sincerely hope that the massive and increasing corruption of the federal and state judiciaries, up to and including the Berger, Rehnquist and, perhaps most corrupt of all, the Roberts courts, will soon bring an end to the danger that the undue deference to those pose for self-government, democracy, equality and freedom.   But I wouldn't bet on it.   The habits or respect built up during the all to brief Warren Court die hard, especially when surrounded by the liturgical and hierarchical trappings of the courts.   We are such suckers for shows of respectability, especially in a secular context.

But there is no sign that "science," the people who work in and hold science as a religion, is about to even admit the possibility that corruption pervades science.  If you look at the history of those honored with Nobel prizes in science it's a pretty mixed bag.  The motives and results of those discoveries, their existence in the real world outside of laboratories and the pages of scientific journals are not to be considered.  Neither is the fact that some of them are more appropriate candidates for international criminal tribunals than for a ceremony in Stockholm.  No, science honors some pretty putrid people and rewards them for some pretty evil work that they did for that kind of honor and profit.  And few people question that, exempting science and the scientists in which it resides from any kind of moral culpability because, you see, it's science.

The Truth, in a real sense, is what people believe it to be at any given time.  Or at least the truth in so far as it can be talked about and discussed.  Every single thing we can say about the world is the product of what we believe is true at the time we say it.   It is the product of our imaginations, even those things we think about the world which turn out to be accurate.  We couldn't talk about it, otherwise.

And, language being far more than merely a servant of information but of political and social intrigue as well, we can 1. be wrong about its accuracy, 2. be uncomfortable with telling the truth, 3. be consciously dishonest about it out of fear of consequences or in pursuit of personal advantage and gain.  That is the nature of all human discourse, all human thought, all of human social interaction. No one and nothing in our experience can avoid those, not even when, by assertion of a moral code or an intellectual methodology, they attempt to protect against them.  Forgetting that those codes and methods are imperfect and, in fact, don't prevent corruption of what is said makes them potentially far more dangerous for the attempt.  If you want an example of what that can produce, look at the massive crimes in the oil pollution of the Gulf of Mexico and spewing into the Pacific Ocean from the Fukushima nukes.  It wasn't the engineers alone who created those, they are the products of the reassurances of scientists as well. BP was headed by scientists, fully endowed by fully accredited science faculties at the time of the crime.

*  The headline today is about a retraction of a paper, not due to the quality of the data cited in the paper, but in a dispute over whether or not the authors of the paper stole it from another institution.   Pretty rum bunch, this priesthood of science.   And look, right below that is this story which asks, Can authors republish their own previous work as as review?

For some reason, that last one puts me in mind of something I recently read mentioning that Ann Coulter, in criticizing the conviction of Mark Fuhrman for perjury, backed up her assertion by citing the authority of Mark Fuhrman, convicted perjurer.

Oh, and, look, right below that one is, Sensing a pattern? Pattern Recognition Letters misses rampant plagiarism in modeling paper.   So, scientific review gets it 100% right, again, in an obvious display of analytic expertise in its reported specialty.

And, in old news for this blog, Marc Hauser is being allowed to publish a book, with glowing blurbs from, among others, Michael Shermer while not admitting to his documented misconduct.   In following up on the links, there is this interesting comment from Andrew Gelman:

I would think that, as a psychologist, Hauser would be interested in the psychological phenomenon that he acts as if his theories are so bullet-proof that he can never make a mistake, that somehow publication bestows upon a speculation some permanent air of authority.

But if I start going on about the rampant faith in the value of those promissory notes of materialism, among scientists, especially those which attract blurbs from the likes of Michael Shermer and especially those in the ersatz-sciences,  It will take another thousand words.

Note:  Preempting the remark made by Evelyn Waugh when Randloph Churchill went under the knife, they removed what might be the only benign thing about me.   So, all a lot less dramatic than my old quack presented it to me.   It has slowed me down, so, greatly reduced posting until the stitches disappear.   One thing I can say, convalescence is more painfully boring than getting cut up.   And I haven't touched an instrument in what seems like years.