Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Can Anyone Tell Me?
I just got one of those really annoying robo-calls that simulate someone on the other end of the line from Murder inc. also known as the NRA. They wanted to ask me a few push-poll questions after they played a recorded message from the gun industry Goebbels. I was going to hang up but then I remembered someone told me that if you just didn't hang up the phone but left it for 20 minutes the line would remain open and they couldn't call someone else on it. Is that true? It's what I did.
Phineas Newborn - Oleo
Phineas Newborn, piano
Al McKibbon, bass
Kenny Dennis, drums
The Sermon
Phineas Newborn, piano
Leroy Vinnegar, bass
Frank Butler, drums
Grooveyard
Hampton Hawes Quartet - The Awful Truth
Hampton Hawes - piano
Barney Kessel - guitar
Red Mitchell - double bass
Shelly Manne - drums
For Real
Hampton Hawes - piano
Harold Land - tenor saxophone
Scott LaFaro - bass
Frank Butler - drums
Imagine recording two albums with totally different groups of first rate musicians in the same year.
What I'm Afraid We Are Going To Learn Through The Hardest School of Experience
Looking around the web, I found this fascinatingly disturbing map from the Southern Poverty Law Center of where known organized hate groups are to be found in the United States. It's kind of a surprise that some states which I'd have been led to believe would be covered with them have relatively few icons specifying hate groups. I'm gratified and slightly surprised that my state seems to have only one while our only neighboring state, New Hampshire, has far more. It's interesting where the real centers of heavy-duty organized hatred are and the various distributions of those in other states.
[Update I clicked on the icons on the blown up map and other than one of those icons, the ones that looked like they were in New Hampshire were, actually, in Massachusetts. Sorry, New Hampshire. ]
It is entirely insane that any of the groups mapped which have an actual, documented history of violence and an announced ideology advocating that violence are allowed to legally and openly exist in the United States. It is one of the most insane things about the United States Constitution after the horrific experiences of. the 20th century where they held power. They should be suppressed into extinction, their hate propaganda suppressed into silence. Klan activity here and with the proven history of Nazism and fascism and Communism, that those anti-democratic groups which maintain ideologies which would destroy the very rights they are granted are allowed to propagate in the United States is insane and irresponsible. Egalitarian democracy, and those who wish to benefit from its establishment, have an overriding interest in being able to suppress a limited number of expressions aimed at destroying it held by people prepared to do that. Doing that would extinguish none of the other rights of those who maintain those political-ideological pathologies. As is seen this year, those hate cults can gain political power through the enabling media (including the holy New York Times) and endanger all of the rights of other people who innocently wish to live out their lives at peace with their fellow citizens.
The 18th century naivete that, somehow, by some naturalistic magic, things would just work themselves out - something especially popular with the slave holders and land grabbers here - has been definitively disproved by the hard history of 20th century dictatorships. The world would be a better place if Nazism and fascism and Communism had all been effectively suppressed. Millions, running into the hundreds of millions, would not have been murdered. The mountain of bodies could stand as a monument to the idiocy of allowing violent, murderous ideologies their "free speech" rights, their "rights of association" and "freedom of the press" as much as it could a monument to what happens when such groups gain power and destroy all of the rights of hundreds of millions, running into the billions if you include those who aren't murdered, outright. Only the most enormous of fools doesn't learn something from the lessons our generation and those in the recent past have been given.
[Update I clicked on the icons on the blown up map and other than one of those icons, the ones that looked like they were in New Hampshire were, actually, in Massachusetts. Sorry, New Hampshire. ]
It is entirely insane that any of the groups mapped which have an actual, documented history of violence and an announced ideology advocating that violence are allowed to legally and openly exist in the United States. It is one of the most insane things about the United States Constitution after the horrific experiences of. the 20th century where they held power. They should be suppressed into extinction, their hate propaganda suppressed into silence. Klan activity here and with the proven history of Nazism and fascism and Communism, that those anti-democratic groups which maintain ideologies which would destroy the very rights they are granted are allowed to propagate in the United States is insane and irresponsible. Egalitarian democracy, and those who wish to benefit from its establishment, have an overriding interest in being able to suppress a limited number of expressions aimed at destroying it held by people prepared to do that. Doing that would extinguish none of the other rights of those who maintain those political-ideological pathologies. As is seen this year, those hate cults can gain political power through the enabling media (including the holy New York Times) and endanger all of the rights of other people who innocently wish to live out their lives at peace with their fellow citizens.
The 18th century naivete that, somehow, by some naturalistic magic, things would just work themselves out - something especially popular with the slave holders and land grabbers here - has been definitively disproved by the hard history of 20th century dictatorships. The world would be a better place if Nazism and fascism and Communism had all been effectively suppressed. Millions, running into the hundreds of millions, would not have been murdered. The mountain of bodies could stand as a monument to the idiocy of allowing violent, murderous ideologies their "free speech" rights, their "rights of association" and "freedom of the press" as much as it could a monument to what happens when such groups gain power and destroy all of the rights of hundreds of millions, running into the billions if you include those who aren't murdered, outright. Only the most enormous of fools doesn't learn something from the lessons our generation and those in the recent past have been given.
Jack Levine: Prophet of Our Time
The more I see the Trump regime coming together the more I feel like we're living in a world as illustrated by Jack Levine. It just came to me while thinking of Rudy Giuliani that he, especially in his present form in which his inner evil is obvious in his appearance, that he could have stepped right out of one of the paintings of gangsters or plutocrats or oligarchs, which are all one in the same in his commentary on American society.
David Bentley Hart - Mind and Spirit: The Irreducibility of Consciousness to Matter.
Some of you will remember that a while back I posted a monthly challenge to materialist-atheists to explain how the favorite "brain-only" model of the mind in which all of our thoughts are the product of physical structures present in the brain could account for new ideas entering into our minds.
If all thoughts are dependent on a physical structure in the brain new thoughts would require new and different physical structures in the brain of each person to "be" that new idea.
If that new structure in the brain comes to be in a brain where it wasn't before, our brain would have to construct that new structure.
My question developed over the course of asking it for a year.
The brain would have to know it needed to make a new structure to "be" that new idea before it could make the structures, how could the brain know that before that structure could be present in the brain?
How would the brain know what kind of structure it had to build in order to be the right physical form of that idea BEFORE THAT IDEA COULD EXIST IN THE BRAIN TO TELL IT THAT?
How would the brain know how to make that new structure to be precisely the right form and character to be an precise and accurate generator of that idea, again BEFORE THE IDEA COULD BE PRESENT IN THE BRAIN TO TELL IT THAT?
I also raised other problems, I believe insurmountable problems for the dogma that our ideas are physical structures in our brains. One of the most pressing for such atheists is how could our brains create the same structure so that any two peoples' brains could contain the same laws of mathematics or science or logic. How would our brains be able to create the same structure, either exactly identical or even identical to within a tolerable variation so that it could be rationally held that two peoples' minds contained the same physical law. That problem leads to how such a physically based law of science could permit differences in articulation due to differences of language, culture, personal experience, etc. It would seem to me one of the most vulnerable ideas in human culture under their materialist "brain-only" ideology would be science which, inevitably, must be a social activity and entity.
But the ideologues of materialist-atheism, even the most intelligent of them such as Sean Carroll or Jerry Coyne - not considering such materialist meatheads as would seem to populate the cognitive, behavioral and, these days, alas, even the biological sciences, are reduced to less than rigorous thought in order to protect their ideology, held far more out of emotional preference than intellectual integrity. In a possible order of most common to less common those include:
Coercive bullying insistence that their materialism is the only allowable point of view and so whatever is concluded must uphold it. In that we can see that their materialism is merely another rigid, fundamentalist denomination that relies on its ability to bully its critics into silence or acquiescence. This bullying is how atheism conquered academia.
Dishonestly trying to cut corners, shift denotations and definitions - often relying on ambiguity when words have more than one meaning. I would include the frequent refusal to take philosophical criticism of their ideas seriously because philosophers, other than those who practice their same ideological faith practices, will often find lapses, if not gaping holes in their pronouncements and fiats. I think that's what really accounts for the arrogant dismissal of so many scientists for philosophy, the kind of scientist who likes to pretend they are on the verge of sewing up a Theory of some Everything or other.
Vulgar appeal to the ignorance of those who are too lazy to even understand the problem. The new atheism was entirely an appeal to the ignorance of so many atheists who could sometimes be said to know a little but who mostly knew how to recite atheist slogans and snark. I know lots of them like to believe they are the intellectual class of the age but what they really are is the indictment of intellectualism in a world which confers credentials in the place of educating people.
Here is an excellent talk by David Bentley Hart which is so worth listening to that it's too bad the audio is at such a low level and only one channel, the left one. You might want to use earphones or put it through your stereo system. If it weren't such a good talk I wouldn't post it.
If all thoughts are dependent on a physical structure in the brain new thoughts would require new and different physical structures in the brain of each person to "be" that new idea.
If that new structure in the brain comes to be in a brain where it wasn't before, our brain would have to construct that new structure.
My question developed over the course of asking it for a year.
The brain would have to know it needed to make a new structure to "be" that new idea before it could make the structures, how could the brain know that before that structure could be present in the brain?
How would the brain know what kind of structure it had to build in order to be the right physical form of that idea BEFORE THAT IDEA COULD EXIST IN THE BRAIN TO TELL IT THAT?
How would the brain know how to make that new structure to be precisely the right form and character to be an precise and accurate generator of that idea, again BEFORE THE IDEA COULD BE PRESENT IN THE BRAIN TO TELL IT THAT?
I also raised other problems, I believe insurmountable problems for the dogma that our ideas are physical structures in our brains. One of the most pressing for such atheists is how could our brains create the same structure so that any two peoples' brains could contain the same laws of mathematics or science or logic. How would our brains be able to create the same structure, either exactly identical or even identical to within a tolerable variation so that it could be rationally held that two peoples' minds contained the same physical law. That problem leads to how such a physically based law of science could permit differences in articulation due to differences of language, culture, personal experience, etc. It would seem to me one of the most vulnerable ideas in human culture under their materialist "brain-only" ideology would be science which, inevitably, must be a social activity and entity.
But the ideologues of materialist-atheism, even the most intelligent of them such as Sean Carroll or Jerry Coyne - not considering such materialist meatheads as would seem to populate the cognitive, behavioral and, these days, alas, even the biological sciences, are reduced to less than rigorous thought in order to protect their ideology, held far more out of emotional preference than intellectual integrity. In a possible order of most common to less common those include:
Coercive bullying insistence that their materialism is the only allowable point of view and so whatever is concluded must uphold it. In that we can see that their materialism is merely another rigid, fundamentalist denomination that relies on its ability to bully its critics into silence or acquiescence. This bullying is how atheism conquered academia.
Dishonestly trying to cut corners, shift denotations and definitions - often relying on ambiguity when words have more than one meaning. I would include the frequent refusal to take philosophical criticism of their ideas seriously because philosophers, other than those who practice their same ideological faith practices, will often find lapses, if not gaping holes in their pronouncements and fiats. I think that's what really accounts for the arrogant dismissal of so many scientists for philosophy, the kind of scientist who likes to pretend they are on the verge of sewing up a Theory of some Everything or other.
Vulgar appeal to the ignorance of those who are too lazy to even understand the problem. The new atheism was entirely an appeal to the ignorance of so many atheists who could sometimes be said to know a little but who mostly knew how to recite atheist slogans and snark. I know lots of them like to believe they are the intellectual class of the age but what they really are is the indictment of intellectualism in a world which confers credentials in the place of educating people.
Here is an excellent talk by David Bentley Hart which is so worth listening to that it's too bad the audio is at such a low level and only one channel, the left one. You might want to use earphones or put it through your stereo system. If it weren't such a good talk I wouldn't post it.
You'll probably want to skip the five or so minute pause they took before the question period.
I will add, that other than to magically intone such terms as "DNA" and "natural selection" and for one of the would-be "Brights" to say that "the brain just does what it does" no atheist here or any of the other places I posted that question over that year came up to a start on answering even the first one of how the brain would know it needed to make a new idea before that idea existed in the brain, never mind the other hard questions that would have to be answered for the materialist-atheist brain model to even account for that one, essential aspect of our minds. They quickly went to the more vulgar of the dodges listed above.
Monday, November 28, 2016
FOXophrenia
I've been thinking about the definition of mental illness, the kind of mental illness of being convinced that things that aren't true are true and believing things that are true are false and, really, isn't that the definition of what our media produces, regularly?
I think a realistic DSM would have to include FOXophrenia and Baron Trumphausen syndrome among its listed disorders.
I'm serious about the American media producing widespread mental illness, paranoia, xenophobia, delusion, an inability to tell the truth from blatant lies, reality and non-reality.
I think a realistic DSM would have to include FOXophrenia and Baron Trumphausen syndrome among its listed disorders.
I'm serious about the American media producing widespread mental illness, paranoia, xenophobia, delusion, an inability to tell the truth from blatant lies, reality and non-reality.
Hate Mail -
".... incompetent prose stylist..."
Prose stylist. You know what, dopey, I've said from the first thing I ever wrote on a blog that I'm not a writer, I don't aspire to be a writer, I don't care to nurture a style and would probably avoid doing that if someone credibly accused me of being a "stylist". I said, "credibly" so that doesn't include anything you come up with.
All I do is write. Now, why don't you try reading it at more than a 3rd grade reading level, you know, the level you think at when you're trying really hard.
Prose stylist. You know what, dopey, I've said from the first thing I ever wrote on a blog that I'm not a writer, I don't aspire to be a writer, I don't care to nurture a style and would probably avoid doing that if someone credibly accused me of being a "stylist". I said, "credibly" so that doesn't include anything you come up with.
All I do is write. Now, why don't you try reading it at more than a 3rd grade reading level, you know, the level you think at when you're trying really hard.
A Welcome Mat For A Would-Be Dictator A Prediction From Ten Years Ago
To start with, any news broadcast that says that Hillary Clinton lost the election is promoting a lie, I heard it this morning on the radio. She didn't lose the election, she won it by more than two-million votes. In any other country that would mean that if the man who lost the vote to her by that many votes assumed the office it would define political corruption and his regime would be seen as illegitimate or tainted at best. So, we shouldn't put up with people saying she lost the election, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE lost the election because our Constitution and many of the individual states are set up so that the loser of the popular vote can become president. Considering the blatant attempts at partisan vote suppression in states ruled by Republicans, the corruption of this election couldn't be more obvious. I strongly suspect if another country held such an election and got the result we have, it would go on some State Department list of countries with rigged elections.
Another thing, we really have to stop protecting the United States Constitution which so obviously doesn't protect us from this kind of disaster. It is in serious need of major revisions that will never be done as long as it is considered a sacred scripture instead of the document cobbled together by slave-owning aristocrats with provisions to prevent democratic rule which would not be profitable to them. It was born in corruption, it only avoids that on those rare occasions when the Supreme Court has members who value democracy and who override its inherent corruptions. And, as seen in the Warren Court, even some of those courts institute interpretations that knee cap democracy even as they promote it in other ways. Our courts, our politics doesn't learn from experience that should have made those revisions in that document over the past two centuries. The anti-democratic provisions in it are endangering us now.
I wrote in 2006 that if we didn't fix the elections in this country it was just a matter of time before the Republicans would steal another election. We haven't and they have.
It is clear that Donald Trump is nervous that the results that were announced on election night will be found to be wrong or the result of ballot suppression or any of a number of possible means for Republican governors and state governments to have done for him what Jeb Bush did for his brother in Florida in 2000. His preemptive lying about 3 million illegitimate votes is part of a clear effort for him to suppress any attempt to look, seriously at this issue before the Electoral College meets. If, as some have speculated, there could have been computer tampering with those state elections, it could expose his "win" as being the result of not only losing the actual election but rigging by the Republican Party, the party which has openly been doing exactly that since 2010 and which more covertly has done it for decades.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
What If We Dodge The Bullet?
What if they lose? What if the congress investigates the crimes of the Bush regime and those are stopped? What if things go back to normal?
After what we've seen in the past six years, if things can go back to normal it won't be a blessed relief, it will be a disaster. Our recent history proves that we have fatal problems in the foundation of the American government.
Our elections have to be fixed, not just returned to c. 1964. We have to secure the vote, from before it is cast, to counting it, to reporting the results and to their fulfillment. No elections official, secretary of state, or judge can ever be allowed to prevent another legal ballot being cast or counted or made to count. The sleazy behavior we've seen from every level from elections clerk to Supreme Court and the Executive wouldn't be tolerated in a real democracy. A democracy needs it to be an impeachable crime for a Supreme Court Justice to say that a Citizen of the United States does not have a right to vote. That is a fundamental contradiction of the role of the court in a democracy. Anyone who believes that has no place on our court or in our government.
The media, and today that means the electronic media, have to have their self-interested bias exposed and it's pollution scrubbed out of our politics. They have to be forced to perform the public service they promised, including standards of fairness. Broadcast stations must provide real news, including local news, which has to be unbiased and fair. And without diverse ownership of the media, they won't serve the entire public. Women and minority groups have to control parts of the electronic media.
The cable "news" channels have betrayed the public trust even more flagrantly than broadcast, spreading lies effective enough to start the most idiotic and dangerous war of our history. We will pay the cost of their lies for decades, in blood as well as in money.
They also aided the Bush putsch of 2000 and the earlier scheme to remove a genuinely elected President on trumped up charges and lies. Pretending that a rogue cable industry isn't a danger to freedom has to stop. Anyone who defends them on their crimes against democracy is a dupe or a profiteer. Put them under the same public service requirements as broadcast media. Media passes itself off as the voice of the people, then let them show it by putting the public before their investors and owners.
Recent history proves that self-government can't depend on leaving it to chance. Laissez faire democracy dies and the death is never a natural one. It lets the powerful and wealthy swamp the Peoples's voice almost all of the time. The Supreme Court rulings making corporations artificial people made that all the more true
Our government is always presented as being those who hold office , that is where almost all of the pitiful efforts at reform are concentrated. And that hasn't worked. We have the most dishonest government of our lifetimes. Putting patches on the process to make it a level field is unrealistic to the level of willful blindness. Powerful interests have power. They will always win when they have equal access to the process and own the media. The handful of examples where individuals or small groups win over the big guy make for sentimental TV movies, using them as proof that the system works is calculated dishonesty.
If the People are neglected then it all goes wrong. They won't even show up to vote. That step isn't a naive social studies lesson that you stop thinking about after the test in fourth grade. You don't go on to the higher study of civics and leave it behind. There is nothing higher in a democracy than the People, there is no act of government more important than their Vote. Abraham Lincoln, one of the real founders of the country we live in today, gave the formula for it. You know it by heart. He didn't mention the congress, the executive or the high church of the judiciary. He said that the enormous sacrifice of the American People in the Civil War was so that government of the People, by the People, and for the People shall not perish from the earth.
Any aftermath of the Bush II disaster that doesn't include changes to these laws will be just the beginning of the next time. Not securing the Vote, the will of the People; and forcing their own chosen responsibilities on the media, the only guarantee of an informed and realistic Vote, is a welcome mat for the next would-be dictator. Any liberal, leftist, Democrat, independent, even "moderate" Republican who lets two years go by without enacting real electoral and media reform had better beware. It's just a matter of waiting before the same coalition of corporate interests, bigots, oligarches and haters tries again. They might be as slow and stealthy as they were this time, buying up media, using it to spread lies that "more speech" can't drown out. And they'll make their come back having learned from the mistakes they made this time. Like the aristocratic conspirators in ancient Athens, they will be more dangerous than ever.
Along with these two absolute prerequisites to securing democracy there is the necessity for a full and public appraisal of the thefts and other crimes of the Bush II and previous presidencies. There has to be a full program of congressional hearings, done in public, of what has happened. They have to be congressional hearings because that is their responsibility. A commission or blue ribbon panel or other kind of establishment dodge won’t do it. Those are mechanisms for obscuring and stalling. This is a job for those appointed by The People. They asked for the responsibility, no one forced them to run.
There will be a chorus of media and politicians and the Republican talking points network telling us to “get over it”. They are the PR voice of the criminals. We have to be prepared to force these reforms over their constant lies and slogans.
Just going along as we have been is a guarantee that the disasters will continue. We will have to push the next Democratic congress to work simultaneously on all these issues while taking up new business. They are not extras they are the only way we are going to find out how to go forward, to make progress instead of making the same mistakes we have made before.
If the Republican who have created this disaster win a majority next week, the problems will not disappear they will certainly get worse. Giving up before those problems are fixed securely is not an option for us.
Update: 2016. There has to be a federal law that mandates that all elections for President, Vice President, Senate and the House of Representatives be done on a paper ballot, set out in a uniform way to avoid rigging with the form by a latter day Katherine Harris, the woman who played such an important role in rigging the Florida election in 2000. There has to be a uniform method of voting for those federal offices that can be taught in elementary school and which is as familiar as a Lincoln penny in its form. The ballots should be required to be kept in a secure manner so they can be counted and inspected by hand if necessary, there should never be any form of voting for those four federal offices which is not verifiable, computer voting should be relegated to the corrupt past.
Elections Canada, the last time I looked into it, ran some of the most efficient, clean and honest elections there were. That would certainly be a better model for us than the hodge podge of corruption that our antiquated Constitution and the corrupt priesthood of the Supreme Court allows.
We've had two obviously rigged elections, installing Republicans who lost the popular vote in the past sixteen years. It is a national shame that we have not done anything to improve our elections, instead the courts have allowed Republican governors and legislatures to make them clearly more corrupt, especially through suppressing votes of Black and Latino and other groups which vote more heavily for Democrats. That is something that can't be allowed to go unchallenged and any Supreme Court justice who supports their ability to corrupt our elections should be considered to have committed an impeachable offense. I have only the slightest of threads of hopes that some miracle or some revelation will prevent the clearly fascistic Donald Trump from taking office in under two months. He is, clearly, the most dangerous man to have ever been handed power by our insanely worshiped Constitution, he is clearly under the influence of a foreign dictator who meddled in our elections as well. He was also aided by the corrupted FBI under the direction of the criminal James Comey.
Some of our oldest citizens have seen the country devolve from the being governed by one of the greatest of presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, to being put into the hands of, succesively, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and now Donald Trump. That, friends, is what a country in a nose dive to disaster looks like.
At this point if the Electoral College flipped, something I would normally be against, I'd welcome it because, at this point, it's our last hope, barring a miracle revealing corruption in several states. After four years of Trump-Pence, democracy won't come back anytime in our lifetimes barring a disaster even bigger than the Civil War. I suspect millions would die in it, anyone who would hope for that is criminally insane. I'm not advocating it, I'm predicting it. It is either that or overt fascism perhaps lasting as long as the Soviet-red-fascist government did. And, as can be seen in Russia and most of the former "republics" of the Soviet Union, living under dictatorship doesn't provide a guaranteed education in how to do democracy.
We really have to fix the First Amendment, explicitly calling any "freedom of the press" the privilege GRANTED ONLY IN SO FAR AS THEY SERVE THE PEOPLES' RIGHT TO TRUE AND ACCURATE INFORMATION and allowing people they lie about to sue them with high enough fines to keep them from lying. I read that someone pointed out to Donald Trump that if the libel laws were in force that he could be sued, I read that he expressed surprise saying he'd never thought of that. Well, I have, Donald Trump could never have been more than the shady real estate thug he was if he could be sued for lying. The cabloids, hate-talk radio and networks that created his public persona would never have done it if they could have been sued by the people they lied about.
Another thing, we really have to stop protecting the United States Constitution which so obviously doesn't protect us from this kind of disaster. It is in serious need of major revisions that will never be done as long as it is considered a sacred scripture instead of the document cobbled together by slave-owning aristocrats with provisions to prevent democratic rule which would not be profitable to them. It was born in corruption, it only avoids that on those rare occasions when the Supreme Court has members who value democracy and who override its inherent corruptions. And, as seen in the Warren Court, even some of those courts institute interpretations that knee cap democracy even as they promote it in other ways. Our courts, our politics doesn't learn from experience that should have made those revisions in that document over the past two centuries. The anti-democratic provisions in it are endangering us now.
I wrote in 2006 that if we didn't fix the elections in this country it was just a matter of time before the Republicans would steal another election. We haven't and they have.
It is clear that Donald Trump is nervous that the results that were announced on election night will be found to be wrong or the result of ballot suppression or any of a number of possible means for Republican governors and state governments to have done for him what Jeb Bush did for his brother in Florida in 2000. His preemptive lying about 3 million illegitimate votes is part of a clear effort for him to suppress any attempt to look, seriously at this issue before the Electoral College meets. If, as some have speculated, there could have been computer tampering with those state elections, it could expose his "win" as being the result of not only losing the actual election but rigging by the Republican Party, the party which has openly been doing exactly that since 2010 and which more covertly has done it for decades.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
What If We Dodge The Bullet?
What if they lose? What if the congress investigates the crimes of the Bush regime and those are stopped? What if things go back to normal?
After what we've seen in the past six years, if things can go back to normal it won't be a blessed relief, it will be a disaster. Our recent history proves that we have fatal problems in the foundation of the American government.
Our elections have to be fixed, not just returned to c. 1964. We have to secure the vote, from before it is cast, to counting it, to reporting the results and to their fulfillment. No elections official, secretary of state, or judge can ever be allowed to prevent another legal ballot being cast or counted or made to count. The sleazy behavior we've seen from every level from elections clerk to Supreme Court and the Executive wouldn't be tolerated in a real democracy. A democracy needs it to be an impeachable crime for a Supreme Court Justice to say that a Citizen of the United States does not have a right to vote. That is a fundamental contradiction of the role of the court in a democracy. Anyone who believes that has no place on our court or in our government.
The media, and today that means the electronic media, have to have their self-interested bias exposed and it's pollution scrubbed out of our politics. They have to be forced to perform the public service they promised, including standards of fairness. Broadcast stations must provide real news, including local news, which has to be unbiased and fair. And without diverse ownership of the media, they won't serve the entire public. Women and minority groups have to control parts of the electronic media.
The cable "news" channels have betrayed the public trust even more flagrantly than broadcast, spreading lies effective enough to start the most idiotic and dangerous war of our history. We will pay the cost of their lies for decades, in blood as well as in money.
They also aided the Bush putsch of 2000 and the earlier scheme to remove a genuinely elected President on trumped up charges and lies. Pretending that a rogue cable industry isn't a danger to freedom has to stop. Anyone who defends them on their crimes against democracy is a dupe or a profiteer. Put them under the same public service requirements as broadcast media. Media passes itself off as the voice of the people, then let them show it by putting the public before their investors and owners.
Recent history proves that self-government can't depend on leaving it to chance. Laissez faire democracy dies and the death is never a natural one. It lets the powerful and wealthy swamp the Peoples's voice almost all of the time. The Supreme Court rulings making corporations artificial people made that all the more true
Our government is always presented as being those who hold office , that is where almost all of the pitiful efforts at reform are concentrated. And that hasn't worked. We have the most dishonest government of our lifetimes. Putting patches on the process to make it a level field is unrealistic to the level of willful blindness. Powerful interests have power. They will always win when they have equal access to the process and own the media. The handful of examples where individuals or small groups win over the big guy make for sentimental TV movies, using them as proof that the system works is calculated dishonesty.
If the People are neglected then it all goes wrong. They won't even show up to vote. That step isn't a naive social studies lesson that you stop thinking about after the test in fourth grade. You don't go on to the higher study of civics and leave it behind. There is nothing higher in a democracy than the People, there is no act of government more important than their Vote. Abraham Lincoln, one of the real founders of the country we live in today, gave the formula for it. You know it by heart. He didn't mention the congress, the executive or the high church of the judiciary. He said that the enormous sacrifice of the American People in the Civil War was so that government of the People, by the People, and for the People shall not perish from the earth.
Any aftermath of the Bush II disaster that doesn't include changes to these laws will be just the beginning of the next time. Not securing the Vote, the will of the People; and forcing their own chosen responsibilities on the media, the only guarantee of an informed and realistic Vote, is a welcome mat for the next would-be dictator. Any liberal, leftist, Democrat, independent, even "moderate" Republican who lets two years go by without enacting real electoral and media reform had better beware. It's just a matter of waiting before the same coalition of corporate interests, bigots, oligarches and haters tries again. They might be as slow and stealthy as they were this time, buying up media, using it to spread lies that "more speech" can't drown out. And they'll make their come back having learned from the mistakes they made this time. Like the aristocratic conspirators in ancient Athens, they will be more dangerous than ever.
Along with these two absolute prerequisites to securing democracy there is the necessity for a full and public appraisal of the thefts and other crimes of the Bush II and previous presidencies. There has to be a full program of congressional hearings, done in public, of what has happened. They have to be congressional hearings because that is their responsibility. A commission or blue ribbon panel or other kind of establishment dodge won’t do it. Those are mechanisms for obscuring and stalling. This is a job for those appointed by The People. They asked for the responsibility, no one forced them to run.
There will be a chorus of media and politicians and the Republican talking points network telling us to “get over it”. They are the PR voice of the criminals. We have to be prepared to force these reforms over their constant lies and slogans.
Just going along as we have been is a guarantee that the disasters will continue. We will have to push the next Democratic congress to work simultaneously on all these issues while taking up new business. They are not extras they are the only way we are going to find out how to go forward, to make progress instead of making the same mistakes we have made before.
If the Republican who have created this disaster win a majority next week, the problems will not disappear they will certainly get worse. Giving up before those problems are fixed securely is not an option for us.
Update: 2016. There has to be a federal law that mandates that all elections for President, Vice President, Senate and the House of Representatives be done on a paper ballot, set out in a uniform way to avoid rigging with the form by a latter day Katherine Harris, the woman who played such an important role in rigging the Florida election in 2000. There has to be a uniform method of voting for those federal offices that can be taught in elementary school and which is as familiar as a Lincoln penny in its form. The ballots should be required to be kept in a secure manner so they can be counted and inspected by hand if necessary, there should never be any form of voting for those four federal offices which is not verifiable, computer voting should be relegated to the corrupt past.
Elections Canada, the last time I looked into it, ran some of the most efficient, clean and honest elections there were. That would certainly be a better model for us than the hodge podge of corruption that our antiquated Constitution and the corrupt priesthood of the Supreme Court allows.
We've had two obviously rigged elections, installing Republicans who lost the popular vote in the past sixteen years. It is a national shame that we have not done anything to improve our elections, instead the courts have allowed Republican governors and legislatures to make them clearly more corrupt, especially through suppressing votes of Black and Latino and other groups which vote more heavily for Democrats. That is something that can't be allowed to go unchallenged and any Supreme Court justice who supports their ability to corrupt our elections should be considered to have committed an impeachable offense. I have only the slightest of threads of hopes that some miracle or some revelation will prevent the clearly fascistic Donald Trump from taking office in under two months. He is, clearly, the most dangerous man to have ever been handed power by our insanely worshiped Constitution, he is clearly under the influence of a foreign dictator who meddled in our elections as well. He was also aided by the corrupted FBI under the direction of the criminal James Comey.
Some of our oldest citizens have seen the country devolve from the being governed by one of the greatest of presidents, Franklin Roosevelt, to being put into the hands of, succesively, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and now Donald Trump. That, friends, is what a country in a nose dive to disaster looks like.
At this point if the Electoral College flipped, something I would normally be against, I'd welcome it because, at this point, it's our last hope, barring a miracle revealing corruption in several states. After four years of Trump-Pence, democracy won't come back anytime in our lifetimes barring a disaster even bigger than the Civil War. I suspect millions would die in it, anyone who would hope for that is criminally insane. I'm not advocating it, I'm predicting it. It is either that or overt fascism perhaps lasting as long as the Soviet-red-fascist government did. And, as can be seen in Russia and most of the former "republics" of the Soviet Union, living under dictatorship doesn't provide a guaranteed education in how to do democracy.
We really have to fix the First Amendment, explicitly calling any "freedom of the press" the privilege GRANTED ONLY IN SO FAR AS THEY SERVE THE PEOPLES' RIGHT TO TRUE AND ACCURATE INFORMATION and allowing people they lie about to sue them with high enough fines to keep them from lying. I read that someone pointed out to Donald Trump that if the libel laws were in force that he could be sued, I read that he expressed surprise saying he'd never thought of that. Well, I have, Donald Trump could never have been more than the shady real estate thug he was if he could be sued for lying. The cabloids, hate-talk radio and networks that created his public persona would never have done it if they could have been sued by the people they lied about.
Sunday, November 27, 2016
The Opposite Of Idolatry
What an honor to think that all of you before me are Christ! Even the humblest peasant, maybe pondering there next to a radio, you are Christ!
St. Archbishop Oscar Romero: Sermon of 13 January 1980
If anyone had expressed scandal at what Oscar Romero said in that sermon, he could have cited the best authority on the matter, what he said in the Gospel according to Matthew, 25:40, in which Jesus says that what you do to the least of people you do to God. That is as radical an identification of the lowest level of humanity with God as is possible to articulate in human terms.*
The intellectual sterility and emotional puerility of popular atheism as posted about here last night shows in how stupid and barren its proposed blasphemy is. Even that is banal. To call it the depth of bathos would be to give it too high a status. One of the things I've learned is that even a fairly simple level of engagement with what the scriptures actually say is beyond such goofy stupidity. They either don't know about or they can't get what those really say so they're left to take pot shots at stuff like people who imagine they see a - usually white-European style picture - of Jesus or Mary or something like that. What Christ looks like is someone who is destitute, someone who is burdened under terrible debt that is destroying them, someone who is sick, someone who is a victim of addiction, someone who is discriminated against. Our various economic schemes and political systems generate a continual stream of living images of divinity, all of them as variable as the faces of those people. "He that has pity on the poor lends to the LORD" Proverbs 19:17.** And, as pointed out recently, secular, would-be liberals are as likely to add to that as anyone through their clear hatred of the underclass. "Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him." Proverbs 14:31
So, you can snark about images of Jesus on a grilled-cheese sandwich or a dog's anus all you want. The reality is that anyone who mistook the pattern on the grilled cheese or a tortilla or a potato chip or in the water stains on a building is missing the face of Jesus all around them in the entirely more impressive manifestation that image in living beings. That is the real, miraculous and hard, demanding manifestation of God all around us.
* The first theological insight I learned from Gregory of Nyssa—and I suspect the last to which I shall cling when all others fall away—is that the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is not merely a cosmological or metaphysical claim, but also an eschatological claim about the world’s relation to God, and hence a moral claim about the nature of God in himself. In the end of all things is their beginning, and only from the perspective of the end can one know what they are, why they have been made, and who the God is who has called them forth from nothingness. And in Gregory’s thought, with an integrity found only also in Origen and Maximus, protology and eschatology are a single science, a single revelation disclosed in the God-man. There is no profounder meditation on the meaning of creation than Gregory’s eschatological treatise On the Soul and Resurrection, and no more brilliantly realized eschatological vision than his On the Making of Humanity. For him, clearly, one can say that the cosmos has been truly created only when it reaches its consummation in “the union of all things with the first good,” and that humanity has truly been created only when all human beings, united in the living body of Christ, become at last that “Godlike thing” that is “humankind according to the image.”
David Bentley Hart: God, Creation and Evil The moral meaning of creatio ex nihilo
I defy any secular radical to come up with any framing of reality more likely to lead to the elevation of the destitute, the discriminated against, the other than this.
** I can't imagine most Christians, right-wing or liberal, even those who allegedly believe every word of the scripture is literally true in the most naive sense of that and, even a command, would want to follow that policy of lending. I'd love to hear someone bring up that verse at some Congressional or Senate hearing on financial policy just to hear what the discussion of it would be. Obviously, hardly anyone really trusts God to be in their credit, no matter what characters they insist on engraving on the currency.
As has been pointed out many times, the Gospel is radical in a way that secular radicalism can't begin to fathom.
It reminds me of the story that Brueggemann told of the Georgia lawmaker who insisted on posting the 10 Commandments in courthouses or some such other place. Someone had the wit to ask him if he knew what the 10 Commandments commanded, he didn't know though he vaguely recalled one of them said something about adultery. Since he was almost certainly a Republican he might tell it to Trump or Giuliani or Gingrich or .....
St. Archbishop Oscar Romero: Sermon of 13 January 1980
If anyone had expressed scandal at what Oscar Romero said in that sermon, he could have cited the best authority on the matter, what he said in the Gospel according to Matthew, 25:40, in which Jesus says that what you do to the least of people you do to God. That is as radical an identification of the lowest level of humanity with God as is possible to articulate in human terms.*
The intellectual sterility and emotional puerility of popular atheism as posted about here last night shows in how stupid and barren its proposed blasphemy is. Even that is banal. To call it the depth of bathos would be to give it too high a status. One of the things I've learned is that even a fairly simple level of engagement with what the scriptures actually say is beyond such goofy stupidity. They either don't know about or they can't get what those really say so they're left to take pot shots at stuff like people who imagine they see a - usually white-European style picture - of Jesus or Mary or something like that. What Christ looks like is someone who is destitute, someone who is burdened under terrible debt that is destroying them, someone who is sick, someone who is a victim of addiction, someone who is discriminated against. Our various economic schemes and political systems generate a continual stream of living images of divinity, all of them as variable as the faces of those people. "He that has pity on the poor lends to the LORD" Proverbs 19:17.** And, as pointed out recently, secular, would-be liberals are as likely to add to that as anyone through their clear hatred of the underclass. "Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him." Proverbs 14:31
So, you can snark about images of Jesus on a grilled-cheese sandwich or a dog's anus all you want. The reality is that anyone who mistook the pattern on the grilled cheese or a tortilla or a potato chip or in the water stains on a building is missing the face of Jesus all around them in the entirely more impressive manifestation that image in living beings. That is the real, miraculous and hard, demanding manifestation of God all around us.
* The first theological insight I learned from Gregory of Nyssa—and I suspect the last to which I shall cling when all others fall away—is that the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is not merely a cosmological or metaphysical claim, but also an eschatological claim about the world’s relation to God, and hence a moral claim about the nature of God in himself. In the end of all things is their beginning, and only from the perspective of the end can one know what they are, why they have been made, and who the God is who has called them forth from nothingness. And in Gregory’s thought, with an integrity found only also in Origen and Maximus, protology and eschatology are a single science, a single revelation disclosed in the God-man. There is no profounder meditation on the meaning of creation than Gregory’s eschatological treatise On the Soul and Resurrection, and no more brilliantly realized eschatological vision than his On the Making of Humanity. For him, clearly, one can say that the cosmos has been truly created only when it reaches its consummation in “the union of all things with the first good,” and that humanity has truly been created only when all human beings, united in the living body of Christ, become at last that “Godlike thing” that is “humankind according to the image.”
David Bentley Hart: God, Creation and Evil The moral meaning of creatio ex nihilo
I defy any secular radical to come up with any framing of reality more likely to lead to the elevation of the destitute, the discriminated against, the other than this.
** I can't imagine most Christians, right-wing or liberal, even those who allegedly believe every word of the scripture is literally true in the most naive sense of that and, even a command, would want to follow that policy of lending. I'd love to hear someone bring up that verse at some Congressional or Senate hearing on financial policy just to hear what the discussion of it would be. Obviously, hardly anyone really trusts God to be in their credit, no matter what characters they insist on engraving on the currency.
As has been pointed out many times, the Gospel is radical in a way that secular radicalism can't begin to fathom.
It reminds me of the story that Brueggemann told of the Georgia lawmaker who insisted on posting the 10 Commandments in courthouses or some such other place. Someone had the wit to ask him if he knew what the 10 Commandments commanded, he didn't know though he vaguely recalled one of them said something about adultery. Since he was almost certainly a Republican he might tell it to Trump or Giuliani or Gingrich or .....
New Year - Magnificat in the Eighth Mode
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children forever.
Luke 1:46-55 (followed by the Glory Be To The Father)
Chanting the Magnificat on the various modes is similar to chanting the Psalms:
There is an initial melodic pattern used in each verse
Followed by sung on the "reciting tone" on which most of the words are recited (c in this case)
a melodic patter to be used at the end of the first half of the verse, more words sung on the reciting tone
and a closing melodic patter at the end of each verse.
As you can see in this "chant notation" the noting of each reciting tone is not literal but left to the understanding of the singer. There are a few kind of confusing things about this notation which doesn't really show rhythm, which is left more or less to the choir master's conception of how the speech rhythm of the text should go but the differences are usually less than that would lead you to suspect. Of course, you can sing along with the monks as you read the notation in this video. It will probably tell you more than my going on about it will.
If you want to read about that method the section in the Liber Usualis on the Ordinary Chants of the Office can tell you quite a bit and it gives the melodic patterns used in each mode. That starts on page 207 of the book (page 319 of the PDF).
This book Chants of the ChurchIn Modern Notation gives a less ornamented version of the Magnificat on Pages 132 and 133 (148 and 149 of the PDF). Note that the first half of the verse is on the first of those pages and the second half of it is on the next page. Especially useful are the interlinear style translations of the texts, the texts and their meanings are the most important thing in this. It is prayer and meditation, after all.
Why the priests and monks who publish even the easier to use chant books don't just give it to you straight forward is something I don't understand. The savings in paper, I suppose. That's understandable when it's chanting the 150 Psalms on the various melodic patters, though that savings is slight in the case of the Magnificat which isn't that long and only has a couple of handfuls of different ways to chant it.
Of course, if you are doing it alone, the best thing to do would be to come up with your own melodic setting. Who's going to tell you you can't do that? If you're doing it for yourself, in private, you don't have to worry about what someone else thinks. If you decide something isn't right, you just try something else. Critics have never added a single thing to music, they're in the business of preventing music, not creating it. That's not the purpose of this, to start with, it's the meaning of the text. About which, more later.
I don't think the Gregorian melodies work well with any English translation of the Magnificat I can think of. English has far different rhythms and patters of meaning. If you want to do this in English or, I'd guess, other languages, coming up with your own ways of doing it is probably best.
Saturday, November 26, 2016
Grant Green - Idle Moments
Grant Green - guitar
Joe Henderson - tenor saxophone
Bobby Hutcherson - vibraphone
Bob Cranshaw - double bass
Duke Pearson - piano
Al Harewood - drums
And for the guy who complains I never post standards
Laura
Jimmy Forrest: Tenor Sax
Harold Mabern: Piano
Gene Ramey: Bass
Elvin Jones: Drums
Jimmy Forrest almost takes it away but Grant Green was an amazing inventor of brilliant solos too.
I'd get into it with the guy who thinks Elvin Jones is inferior to his idea of a brilliant pop music skins banger but it's a waste of time, the guy's not only got no class, he's got no ears.
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Bailey's Way - Logan's Lost Herd
Cast: Thomas Hauff; John Wright; Heather Lea
McCallum; Christian Goutsis; Tiffany Thomas;
Joyce Doolittle; Brian Smith; Tim Koetting
Cast: Donna Belleville; Russell Moore; Paul Coeur;
Lindsay Burns; Mark Bellamy;John Wright.
Esther Purves Smith as Tanis Bailey
David LeReaney as SergeantMann
Grant Linneberg as Detective Donaldson
Hate Mail - The Clever Simels
I am sent a picture that Steve Simels posted of a dog's anus that he claims looks like Jesus. I don't know, it looks more Brit to me, more like a mop head from the period when they did that lame-ass cartoon of them.
Doesn't look Semitic to me.
It is ironic considering it's a horse's ass that posted it. And here Simps said I have no sense of irony. Shows what he knows.
What's really funny is he thinks him being a jerk is going to upset someone. Anyone who would get upset about that needs to rearrange their priorities.
Doesn't look Semitic to me.
It is ironic considering it's a horse's ass that posted it. And here Simps said I have no sense of irony. Shows what he knows.
What's really funny is he thinks him being a jerk is going to upset someone. Anyone who would get upset about that needs to rearrange their priorities.
Friday, November 25, 2016
Horace Parlan - Speakin' My Piece
Horace Parlan - piano
Tommy Turrentine - trumpet
Stanley Turrentine - tenor saxophone
George Tucker - bass
Al Harewood - drums
Skoo Chee
The Badness of My Method - Hate Mail
As I've noted in the past, I have very bad eyesight. That means that I need to see what I've written in several different forms in order to edit it, I can't really see the word-processing feature of Blogger very well, even when it's increased in size. I suppose I should buy one of those giant screens but I can't afford one. Also, the "save" button on it is right next to the "publish" button so I have been known to push the wrong button, publishing things in a draft instead of a more finished form.
Editing in the deep shadows has its own perils, quite often when a sentence is changed I'll miss where I should have changed the number of the noun or pronoun or verb or where I should have changed a preposition. That's especially true because I tend to write long sentences. I can't see punctuation marks on it either, usually guessing where those are by the spacing. You can read in my archive my thoughts on that too. I'd suggest searching with the terms Strunk White for those.
I try to post things by nine-o'clock in the morning Eastern Standard Time in the United States, trying to post the semi-final draft by seven so I can look at it on a couple of different monitors, looking for problems. Obviously that doesn't always do the job. Needless to say, I continually edit as I see problems, sometimes I don't catch them till later in the day or days later, if ever.
If you don't like what I write, you know, you're not obligated to read it.
Editing in the deep shadows has its own perils, quite often when a sentence is changed I'll miss where I should have changed the number of the noun or pronoun or verb or where I should have changed a preposition. That's especially true because I tend to write long sentences. I can't see punctuation marks on it either, usually guessing where those are by the spacing. You can read in my archive my thoughts on that too. I'd suggest searching with the terms Strunk White for those.
I try to post things by nine-o'clock in the morning Eastern Standard Time in the United States, trying to post the semi-final draft by seven so I can look at it on a couple of different monitors, looking for problems. Obviously that doesn't always do the job. Needless to say, I continually edit as I see problems, sometimes I don't catch them till later in the day or days later, if ever.
If you don't like what I write, you know, you're not obligated to read it.
No, I Don't Retract - Hate Mail
I won't take back a word of my criticism of Barack Obama, if anything I'd say that a Democratic president who entered office with his Republican predecessor having allowed the oligarchs to blow up the economy, stealing the life savings and security of millions of Americans BUT WHOSE ADMINISTRATION, IN EIGHT YEARS, PUT NONE OF THE BIGGEST CROOKS IN HISTORY IN PRISON is the definition of a failed Democratic president. If Barack Obama had gone after the oligarchic gangsters and jailed them and oversaw breaking up the banks and other financial institutions which are the primary vehicles of that massive theft, Democrats would have been the heroes of America instead of having been cheated out of office.
Barack Obama has done little to nothing to really reform the corrupt American system, the little that he did, the little that was done by Congress in the first two years of his administration, before the Republicans took back the congress as a result of Barack Obama's failure and refusal to lead or even really talk to the American People. He chose to be aloof, he chose to be unassertive, he chose to be a weak president when he had played a strong politician, successfully, during his 2008 campaign and, again in 2012. He was lucky in both elections by having a weak Republican nominee, but the American People elected him as a leader and instead they got what he was willing to give them.
I think one of the emblematic events of Brack Obama's presidency was that the great and strong public servant, Elizabeth Warren started working to build the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau within his administration, was denied the leadership of that bureau, being as undercut by members of Obama's administration as she was Republicans and left to run and win the Senate Seat she holds where she has had to, repeatedly, attack people who Obama appointed to do those things. One thing I really wish I knew it was who told her that she had to hire Leonard Chanin for that agency over her reservations because she knew he had been among the worst of those responsible for failing to prevent and who, in fact, facilitated the collapse of the economy in 2008. I can imagine who in the Obama administration - the MEN he listened to instead of Elizabeth warren, would have likely been the ones she referred to. I strongly suspect that that other supposed genius, Lawrence Summers, was one of them. He's the man who, after having to leave his administration due to his continued incompetence and arrogance was reported to be the man who Obama wanted to head the Federal Reserve. That is even given his disastrous track record of administering the finances of Harvard that Garrison Keillor noted in his 2009 Christmas column I linked to the other day.
And that's not even getting to the failure of his Attorneys General, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch in that area and many others.
Barack Obama will go down as a failed president because he chose to be a weak president. He chose to maintain his persona of a cool, aloof intellectual who, on occasion, could pull off skits of him having the common touch.
I voted for him twice but it was not because I expected much more than we got from him, it was because the alternative would be a disaster on the George W. Bush - Dick Cheney level. I didn't especially favor him in the primaries of 2008, I thought Hillary Clinton was a better candidate with a better record, though I would certainly have rather had other choices then. I do think that Hillary Clinton would have been a far, far better president than Barack Obama has been, she is more than his intellectual equal and she has few of the typical male ego problems that have been a real detriment through the history of only male American presidents. SHE CERTAINLY HAS NONE OF HIS CO-DEPENDENCY HANGUPS ABOUT REPUBLICAN APPROVAL. The corruption built into the system through the Constitution kept that from happening. I doubt the investigations into likely corruption of the vote in states such as Ohio and Michigan will overturn the obviously corrupted election of the most corrupt, interest conflicted and sleazy man to have ever been handed the presidency while losing the vote.
Donald Trump is a result of the failures of Barack Obama as much as it is the corruption of our media and the corrupt Constitution and Supreme Courts we are governed by. If he will benefit from nostalgia for his term in office as compared to the Trump disaster is hardly a safe bet. In many ways Bill Clinton was a more successful president, though that was mostly due to the chance timing of the tech bubble. And he's seldom remembered fondly as compared to what came after, today.
Barack Obama was not a total disaster like the alternatives or his predecessor, but he was hardly a success. We needed him to be a success, his refusal to get down and fight hard, putting pressure on recalcitrant Democrats and putting the screws to Republicanfascists is the reason he wasn't. The last thing we need is another handsome, smart, cool guy as a Democratic president, we're voting for a President, not the next embodiment of 007.
If Democrats voting in primaries in 2020 will learn anything from putting their trust in Barack Obama is doubtful, though that's what we need for them to understand. Looking at his administration nostalgically or in anything but 20 20 vision in the hard light of the burning country and world will not get us out of this. That's why I wrote that piece you hated so much and why I wrote this.
Update: The Boston Globe, today, has a piece whining about how Harvard is likely to be "frozen out as the source of personnel for a Trump regime as it was one of the major sources for the Obama administration.
When President Obama needed to stock his administration, there was one place he could reliably turn to for talent: his alma mater, Harvard University.
Lawrence Summers, who was a top economic aide, Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court justice, Ashton Carter, the defense secretary, and Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, are among a long list of Harvard faculty members summoned to Washington by Obama.
But now that Donald Trump is taking over the White House, Harvard, the ultimate insiders’ club, could find itself in an unfamiliar position: frozen out.
Between Larry Summers whose widely touted genius is something I don't see in his CV other than that he's gotten a lot of suckers to believe in it and Elena Kagan who seems to think one of her major duties on the Court is to recuse herself in ways that I doubt many if any others have ever felt it necessary to do, it makes me wish he'd tapped the talent from more land grant universities. I could go on and on with why the Ivy League product has been tried and found disastrously wanting.
Before my most ignorant trolls can bring it up, as I've pointed out before, Elizabeth Warren is a product of public schools and universities including Rutgers. Being absolutely brilliant she was snapped up by Harvard. While she may have been hired by the Harvard set, she has proven over and over again that she is not by or for the Harvard class of society.
I'd give a link but you'll have to pay to read the whole thing and it's not especially informative.
Update: Simples is upset that I've dissed the prep-school->Ivy League->high income professional class. As I recall it was me doing that about seven years ago at the blog of that product of the lesser Ivys (as Harvard boy Ted Cruz would have put it) Brown, Baby Blue, that first got the Simels ire up.
For my part, looking at the enormous numbers of Ivy League and Might as Well be Ivy league people who are the stewards of corruption in everything from the media, to finance, to industry, to the government, they are the real indigenous criminal class of the United States.
Update 2: Apparently Simps has the idiots of Eschaton duped into thinking that what I wrote was from a Republican point of view. Which shows another of his habits, distorting what was said by closely clipping it. They never bother reading stuff before they gas about it at the ol' "Brain Trust" (yeah, some of them really do call it that), it's why Duncan stopped going through the motions of doing more than getting money from his geezer chat room.
As a commenting community of some blogs ages and enters a eutrophic condition, there are often symptoms of oxygen deprivation. Baby Blue is blue in the lips and fingers from that.
Barack Obama has done little to nothing to really reform the corrupt American system, the little that he did, the little that was done by Congress in the first two years of his administration, before the Republicans took back the congress as a result of Barack Obama's failure and refusal to lead or even really talk to the American People. He chose to be aloof, he chose to be unassertive, he chose to be a weak president when he had played a strong politician, successfully, during his 2008 campaign and, again in 2012. He was lucky in both elections by having a weak Republican nominee, but the American People elected him as a leader and instead they got what he was willing to give them.
I think one of the emblematic events of Brack Obama's presidency was that the great and strong public servant, Elizabeth Warren started working to build the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau within his administration, was denied the leadership of that bureau, being as undercut by members of Obama's administration as she was Republicans and left to run and win the Senate Seat she holds where she has had to, repeatedly, attack people who Obama appointed to do those things. One thing I really wish I knew it was who told her that she had to hire Leonard Chanin for that agency over her reservations because she knew he had been among the worst of those responsible for failing to prevent and who, in fact, facilitated the collapse of the economy in 2008. I can imagine who in the Obama administration - the MEN he listened to instead of Elizabeth warren, would have likely been the ones she referred to. I strongly suspect that that other supposed genius, Lawrence Summers, was one of them. He's the man who, after having to leave his administration due to his continued incompetence and arrogance was reported to be the man who Obama wanted to head the Federal Reserve. That is even given his disastrous track record of administering the finances of Harvard that Garrison Keillor noted in his 2009 Christmas column I linked to the other day.
And that's not even getting to the failure of his Attorneys General, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch in that area and many others.
Barack Obama will go down as a failed president because he chose to be a weak president. He chose to maintain his persona of a cool, aloof intellectual who, on occasion, could pull off skits of him having the common touch.
I voted for him twice but it was not because I expected much more than we got from him, it was because the alternative would be a disaster on the George W. Bush - Dick Cheney level. I didn't especially favor him in the primaries of 2008, I thought Hillary Clinton was a better candidate with a better record, though I would certainly have rather had other choices then. I do think that Hillary Clinton would have been a far, far better president than Barack Obama has been, she is more than his intellectual equal and she has few of the typical male ego problems that have been a real detriment through the history of only male American presidents. SHE CERTAINLY HAS NONE OF HIS CO-DEPENDENCY HANGUPS ABOUT REPUBLICAN APPROVAL. The corruption built into the system through the Constitution kept that from happening. I doubt the investigations into likely corruption of the vote in states such as Ohio and Michigan will overturn the obviously corrupted election of the most corrupt, interest conflicted and sleazy man to have ever been handed the presidency while losing the vote.
Donald Trump is a result of the failures of Barack Obama as much as it is the corruption of our media and the corrupt Constitution and Supreme Courts we are governed by. If he will benefit from nostalgia for his term in office as compared to the Trump disaster is hardly a safe bet. In many ways Bill Clinton was a more successful president, though that was mostly due to the chance timing of the tech bubble. And he's seldom remembered fondly as compared to what came after, today.
Barack Obama was not a total disaster like the alternatives or his predecessor, but he was hardly a success. We needed him to be a success, his refusal to get down and fight hard, putting pressure on recalcitrant Democrats and putting the screws to Republicanfascists is the reason he wasn't. The last thing we need is another handsome, smart, cool guy as a Democratic president, we're voting for a President, not the next embodiment of 007.
If Democrats voting in primaries in 2020 will learn anything from putting their trust in Barack Obama is doubtful, though that's what we need for them to understand. Looking at his administration nostalgically or in anything but 20 20 vision in the hard light of the burning country and world will not get us out of this. That's why I wrote that piece you hated so much and why I wrote this.
Update: The Boston Globe, today, has a piece whining about how Harvard is likely to be "frozen out as the source of personnel for a Trump regime as it was one of the major sources for the Obama administration.
When President Obama needed to stock his administration, there was one place he could reliably turn to for talent: his alma mater, Harvard University.
Lawrence Summers, who was a top economic aide, Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court justice, Ashton Carter, the defense secretary, and Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, are among a long list of Harvard faculty members summoned to Washington by Obama.
But now that Donald Trump is taking over the White House, Harvard, the ultimate insiders’ club, could find itself in an unfamiliar position: frozen out.
Between Larry Summers whose widely touted genius is something I don't see in his CV other than that he's gotten a lot of suckers to believe in it and Elena Kagan who seems to think one of her major duties on the Court is to recuse herself in ways that I doubt many if any others have ever felt it necessary to do, it makes me wish he'd tapped the talent from more land grant universities. I could go on and on with why the Ivy League product has been tried and found disastrously wanting.
Before my most ignorant trolls can bring it up, as I've pointed out before, Elizabeth Warren is a product of public schools and universities including Rutgers. Being absolutely brilliant she was snapped up by Harvard. While she may have been hired by the Harvard set, she has proven over and over again that she is not by or for the Harvard class of society.
I'd give a link but you'll have to pay to read the whole thing and it's not especially informative.
Update: Simples is upset that I've dissed the prep-school->Ivy League->high income professional class. As I recall it was me doing that about seven years ago at the blog of that product of the lesser Ivys (as Harvard boy Ted Cruz would have put it) Brown, Baby Blue, that first got the Simels ire up.
For my part, looking at the enormous numbers of Ivy League and Might as Well be Ivy league people who are the stewards of corruption in everything from the media, to finance, to industry, to the government, they are the real indigenous criminal class of the United States.
Update 2: Apparently Simps has the idiots of Eschaton duped into thinking that what I wrote was from a Republican point of view. Which shows another of his habits, distorting what was said by closely clipping it. They never bother reading stuff before they gas about it at the ol' "Brain Trust" (yeah, some of them really do call it that), it's why Duncan stopped going through the motions of doing more than getting money from his geezer chat room.
As a commenting community of some blogs ages and enters a eutrophic condition, there are often symptoms of oxygen deprivation. Baby Blue is blue in the lips and fingers from that.
In both his mercy and his expectations, it means we are being taken with ultimate seriousness. Walter Brueggemann - The Bible Makes Sense - The Covenantal - Historical Model
As might be guessed from the title of his book, Walter Brueggemann presented the three previously posted framings of reality so he could contrast them to what he presents as the framing that the Hebrew-Christian scriptures present as the nature of reality or, better, the human experience of it.
In most of what I've heard of his recent presentations, he, unsurprisingly, contrasts it to the "Modern Industrial-Scientific Model" because that is the predominant world view of those in the West, especially the United States where he is based. And it is what is killing our plant and us.
That is the world model that the overwhelming majority of those who call themselves "conservatives" and those who call themselves "liberals, or progressives or leftists" hold. It is the shared framing of many who would consider themselves Christians thought it is basically and inevitably in complete conflict with their professed religion. It is the framing of every, single atheist I've ever encountered, even most of those who believe themselves to be Buddhists, which, if they take the teachings of the Buddha seriously, can't be reconciled with it, either.
It is the official and required framing of virtually all of academia. I'm unaware of any university that, unless you are majoring in some aspect of religion, requires you to do any reading which force you to consider any other framing than that one.
In my experience of writing things online, in the past decade, if you push on its contradictions and incompatibilities with experience and even the existence of life, you will be met with everything from total incomprehension to outrage and anger to derision but most often to a confused and vague incomprehension and fear that you are not safely held to be respectable.
I think that is because most people must realize it is completely inadequate and can't explain their experience or account for why life under it leaves them with a feeling of discontented unease and not infrequent crises of faith in its reason and demand for control and predictability. The lapses between those and their real experience in life cause crises which their habits of thought, learned through that framing, can't manage or escape while remaining in that required framing. I think those crises are the most common reason that even very conventional people will seek refuge in the Transcendentalist Model or in some quasi or pseudo-religious model of fundamentalism. If they are fortunate, they will realize a different way of viewing reality was lying there, hidden by the uninformed and naive reading of the Scriptures which could consider them only as if they were written as historical or scientific reports. More on that later.
The Covenantal-Historical Model
This view may be contrasted at important points with the “different faith models” we have already reviewed. Distinct from the modern-scientific-industrial view, covenantal-historical faith affirms that human existence does not consist primarily in the capacity to know and control and manage. Against a this-for-that world based on success and competence, it asserts that real life with God consists in risking commitments, in powerful memories and compelling visions. Distinct from existentialism, this perspective asserts that meanings are never private but always communal, never to be found in an isolated “now,” but always in an ongoing process of trust and betrayal, and never with individual persons as the only actors. It insists that life consists I a dialogue with a powerful, compelling Other who bestows mercy and compels accountability. The God whom we confess is a serious partner in our lives. We may pray to him for mercy because he does not give us what we have coming to us. He does not settle for quid pro quo. He does not deal with us according to our iniquities. But he also takes our loyalty seriously. He leaves us not free but requires that our lives be lived in answer to his expectations. In both his mercy and his expectations, it means we are being taken with ultimate seriousness. Distinct from transcendentalism, the biblical frame of reference denies that meaning can be immune to the incongruities and discontinuities of history. These discontinuities include such things as the real grief and loss of death which cannot be explained as a “growth point,” the real failures of relationships, the real collapse of institutions upon which we have relied. It asserts that discursive meanings are located in and derived precisely from historical hurts and historical amazements which judge and heal and call to repentance.
When we read the Bible, then, we need to learn to pay attention to the understandings of reality which permeate the texts. Unless we do this, we may fail to discern what is in fact present to the text and to the church. For the believing community is always confronted by the text as summoning it to make a new decision about perspective.
Thus one main reason why we read Scripture is so that we may not settle easily for any other notion of life, forgetting who we are and the understanding of life that we have confessed and embraced. Informed by the Bible, we are invited to live in faithful response to this faithful covenant partner. Such a possibility is not guaranteed by Scripture study, but it is peculiar to our faith tradition and provides us with a context for living quite different from the reigning alternatives. In other words, one of the most important gifts the Bible can give us is a frame of reference for our lives. Given that frame of reference, we are still left with major decisions to make about our world, our freedom, and our responsibility. But scripture reading can provide us with resources and images enabling us to understand, embrace, and respond to life in all its richness. For the Bible presents human life in terms of the vitality of being in history with a covenantal partner who speaks newness in a world which always seems fatigued and exhausted. That is what is most deeply characteristic about this view of reality: that we are in covenant with One who speaks newness, who dismantles what is old in our lives, and who calls us to welcome and live toward his newness.
From the viewpoint of the alternatives, the Bible presents a curious reading of reality quite out of harmony with that proposed by other viewpoints. Of course the elements about which we are speaking are nowhere neatly spelled out in systematic fashion. But they do emerge, and their emergence in diverse times and places is important as resource and context for all of us in the church. Four dimensions of covenant summarized below are especially important as they hint of a new history in which we might live.
I will post more of this section soon.
One of the consequences of materialism and especially in its most popular scientistic sect is the absurd notion that all of reality is reducible to entities and definition of events simple enough to subject to a pose of quantitative analysis and, so, BE science. Though that idea is among the most absurd superstitions about both what science is, claiming for it powers and abilities it can't have and claiming for it realms of human experience and phenomena that can't be honestly squeezed into its corset. The obvious fact is that our everyday experience, never mind less straight forward human activity and experience is of a complexity which science can't be applied to. It can to some though far from all individual aspects of that experience and action which are simple enough to be successfully treated with science. But the experience of life, any life is not really able to have more than a few things things isolated from it for scientific treatment, neither those things which are amenable to scientific treatment when taken in the abstract instead of within real, living organisms, nor those which aren't. And what you can say about individual lives is even more true of society and the world of human beings. I'll point out that due to our inability to understand even our closest mammal and bird cousins thinking about their experience, it is ever more and always removed from being honestly treated with science.
Science often works when it chooses its problems carefully and honestly, its success diminishes rather rapidly when scientists propose biting off more than they can process and insist on applying scientific methods to things which can't be sufficiently discerned to be characterized, measured and analyzed or which are too varied and complex to be characterized both honestly and succinctly enough to be treated scientifically.
Yet the habits of the Modern Industrial-Scientific model are so ingrained that huge numbers of people are hoodwinked by anything which a University and their colleagues in their "specialty" allows to be called science. The social-sciences are the perfect example because they have repeatedly, over and over, built enormous towers of papers and books and careers and university departments much of it alleged to be scientific research, only for those, after decades of building them, to collapse due to the weight of the accretions of their inevitable corner cutting. And they begin by building on the sand of desired assumptions and prerequisites instead of the rock of adequate observation.
But the social sciences are hardly the only ones. I heard a biologist once remark that nutrition is far, far from a successful science, though it has come up with some basic facts about human and animal needs by way of food. I would guess that is because that our organisms are far too complex to be easily observed in real life and far too variable, both within a population and even over time in an individual. The problems they propose to deal with are, past a fairly simple level, too complex to produce real science, the results are seen in the constant contradictions of studies and the not infrequent falling of dogmas and commandments concerning what you must eat and not eat to maintain a real life.
I have talked, at length, before about contemporary cosmology in this regard as well as the Darwinian dogma about the phenomenon of evolution and its horrible impact on human history [You can search my blog for those posts].
Of course, I'm presenting the inadequacy of the most common opposition of the Covenantal - Historical model that Walter Brueggemann wrote about because that Covenantal-Historical way of viewing the world is quite new to me, though I read plenty of scripture and I read more theology and history of religion than, I'd guess, the average college educated American.
If you want to really understand it, you should read the book, The Bible Makes Sense, or some of his many others, or listen to any of his lectures or sermons or interviews available online. And not only him but any of a large number of other such scholars who you can hear on Youtube of Vimeo or on podcasts. They don't always agree with each other or choose to emphasize the same things - which, unlike in the Modern Industrial - Scientific model, is OK. They can even be friends with and respect those who disagree with them.
I would mostly recommend that when you read or think about the writings that make up The Bible or, indeed, any scripture that you read them in the ways that Brueggemann recommends, not in the fundamentalist-atheist manner of a literal discourse nor as mere allegory but as something far more complex and difficult to understand, the insights, inspired quite often, though sometimes less so, of human beings thinking very hard and quite often at a stunningly deep level about human experience and action and the human societies they lived in. I do believe much of it is divinely inspired, by which I mean inspired by the insight we, as potentially rational beings and, more important, beings capable of unselfish love are capable of when we are at our best. And much of the rest of it, the Psalms of anger and revenge, for example, can give you a deeper understanding of our less worthy emotions and the temptations and traps we can set for ourselves and which, if we don't, life can for us.
In most of what I've heard of his recent presentations, he, unsurprisingly, contrasts it to the "Modern Industrial-Scientific Model" because that is the predominant world view of those in the West, especially the United States where he is based. And it is what is killing our plant and us.
That is the world model that the overwhelming majority of those who call themselves "conservatives" and those who call themselves "liberals, or progressives or leftists" hold. It is the shared framing of many who would consider themselves Christians thought it is basically and inevitably in complete conflict with their professed religion. It is the framing of every, single atheist I've ever encountered, even most of those who believe themselves to be Buddhists, which, if they take the teachings of the Buddha seriously, can't be reconciled with it, either.
It is the official and required framing of virtually all of academia. I'm unaware of any university that, unless you are majoring in some aspect of religion, requires you to do any reading which force you to consider any other framing than that one.
In my experience of writing things online, in the past decade, if you push on its contradictions and incompatibilities with experience and even the existence of life, you will be met with everything from total incomprehension to outrage and anger to derision but most often to a confused and vague incomprehension and fear that you are not safely held to be respectable.
I think that is because most people must realize it is completely inadequate and can't explain their experience or account for why life under it leaves them with a feeling of discontented unease and not infrequent crises of faith in its reason and demand for control and predictability. The lapses between those and their real experience in life cause crises which their habits of thought, learned through that framing, can't manage or escape while remaining in that required framing. I think those crises are the most common reason that even very conventional people will seek refuge in the Transcendentalist Model or in some quasi or pseudo-religious model of fundamentalism. If they are fortunate, they will realize a different way of viewing reality was lying there, hidden by the uninformed and naive reading of the Scriptures which could consider them only as if they were written as historical or scientific reports. More on that later.
The Covenantal-Historical Model
This view may be contrasted at important points with the “different faith models” we have already reviewed. Distinct from the modern-scientific-industrial view, covenantal-historical faith affirms that human existence does not consist primarily in the capacity to know and control and manage. Against a this-for-that world based on success and competence, it asserts that real life with God consists in risking commitments, in powerful memories and compelling visions. Distinct from existentialism, this perspective asserts that meanings are never private but always communal, never to be found in an isolated “now,” but always in an ongoing process of trust and betrayal, and never with individual persons as the only actors. It insists that life consists I a dialogue with a powerful, compelling Other who bestows mercy and compels accountability. The God whom we confess is a serious partner in our lives. We may pray to him for mercy because he does not give us what we have coming to us. He does not settle for quid pro quo. He does not deal with us according to our iniquities. But he also takes our loyalty seriously. He leaves us not free but requires that our lives be lived in answer to his expectations. In both his mercy and his expectations, it means we are being taken with ultimate seriousness. Distinct from transcendentalism, the biblical frame of reference denies that meaning can be immune to the incongruities and discontinuities of history. These discontinuities include such things as the real grief and loss of death which cannot be explained as a “growth point,” the real failures of relationships, the real collapse of institutions upon which we have relied. It asserts that discursive meanings are located in and derived precisely from historical hurts and historical amazements which judge and heal and call to repentance.
When we read the Bible, then, we need to learn to pay attention to the understandings of reality which permeate the texts. Unless we do this, we may fail to discern what is in fact present to the text and to the church. For the believing community is always confronted by the text as summoning it to make a new decision about perspective.
Thus one main reason why we read Scripture is so that we may not settle easily for any other notion of life, forgetting who we are and the understanding of life that we have confessed and embraced. Informed by the Bible, we are invited to live in faithful response to this faithful covenant partner. Such a possibility is not guaranteed by Scripture study, but it is peculiar to our faith tradition and provides us with a context for living quite different from the reigning alternatives. In other words, one of the most important gifts the Bible can give us is a frame of reference for our lives. Given that frame of reference, we are still left with major decisions to make about our world, our freedom, and our responsibility. But scripture reading can provide us with resources and images enabling us to understand, embrace, and respond to life in all its richness. For the Bible presents human life in terms of the vitality of being in history with a covenantal partner who speaks newness in a world which always seems fatigued and exhausted. That is what is most deeply characteristic about this view of reality: that we are in covenant with One who speaks newness, who dismantles what is old in our lives, and who calls us to welcome and live toward his newness.
From the viewpoint of the alternatives, the Bible presents a curious reading of reality quite out of harmony with that proposed by other viewpoints. Of course the elements about which we are speaking are nowhere neatly spelled out in systematic fashion. But they do emerge, and their emergence in diverse times and places is important as resource and context for all of us in the church. Four dimensions of covenant summarized below are especially important as they hint of a new history in which we might live.
I will post more of this section soon.
One of the consequences of materialism and especially in its most popular scientistic sect is the absurd notion that all of reality is reducible to entities and definition of events simple enough to subject to a pose of quantitative analysis and, so, BE science. Though that idea is among the most absurd superstitions about both what science is, claiming for it powers and abilities it can't have and claiming for it realms of human experience and phenomena that can't be honestly squeezed into its corset. The obvious fact is that our everyday experience, never mind less straight forward human activity and experience is of a complexity which science can't be applied to. It can to some though far from all individual aspects of that experience and action which are simple enough to be successfully treated with science. But the experience of life, any life is not really able to have more than a few things things isolated from it for scientific treatment, neither those things which are amenable to scientific treatment when taken in the abstract instead of within real, living organisms, nor those which aren't. And what you can say about individual lives is even more true of society and the world of human beings. I'll point out that due to our inability to understand even our closest mammal and bird cousins thinking about their experience, it is ever more and always removed from being honestly treated with science.
Science often works when it chooses its problems carefully and honestly, its success diminishes rather rapidly when scientists propose biting off more than they can process and insist on applying scientific methods to things which can't be sufficiently discerned to be characterized, measured and analyzed or which are too varied and complex to be characterized both honestly and succinctly enough to be treated scientifically.
Yet the habits of the Modern Industrial-Scientific model are so ingrained that huge numbers of people are hoodwinked by anything which a University and their colleagues in their "specialty" allows to be called science. The social-sciences are the perfect example because they have repeatedly, over and over, built enormous towers of papers and books and careers and university departments much of it alleged to be scientific research, only for those, after decades of building them, to collapse due to the weight of the accretions of their inevitable corner cutting. And they begin by building on the sand of desired assumptions and prerequisites instead of the rock of adequate observation.
But the social sciences are hardly the only ones. I heard a biologist once remark that nutrition is far, far from a successful science, though it has come up with some basic facts about human and animal needs by way of food. I would guess that is because that our organisms are far too complex to be easily observed in real life and far too variable, both within a population and even over time in an individual. The problems they propose to deal with are, past a fairly simple level, too complex to produce real science, the results are seen in the constant contradictions of studies and the not infrequent falling of dogmas and commandments concerning what you must eat and not eat to maintain a real life.
I have talked, at length, before about contemporary cosmology in this regard as well as the Darwinian dogma about the phenomenon of evolution and its horrible impact on human history [You can search my blog for those posts].
Of course, I'm presenting the inadequacy of the most common opposition of the Covenantal - Historical model that Walter Brueggemann wrote about because that Covenantal-Historical way of viewing the world is quite new to me, though I read plenty of scripture and I read more theology and history of religion than, I'd guess, the average college educated American.
If you want to really understand it, you should read the book, The Bible Makes Sense, or some of his many others, or listen to any of his lectures or sermons or interviews available online. And not only him but any of a large number of other such scholars who you can hear on Youtube of Vimeo or on podcasts. They don't always agree with each other or choose to emphasize the same things - which, unlike in the Modern Industrial - Scientific model, is OK. They can even be friends with and respect those who disagree with them.
I would mostly recommend that when you read or think about the writings that make up The Bible or, indeed, any scripture that you read them in the ways that Brueggemann recommends, not in the fundamentalist-atheist manner of a literal discourse nor as mere allegory but as something far more complex and difficult to understand, the insights, inspired quite often, though sometimes less so, of human beings thinking very hard and quite often at a stunningly deep level about human experience and action and the human societies they lived in. I do believe much of it is divinely inspired, by which I mean inspired by the insight we, as potentially rational beings and, more important, beings capable of unselfish love are capable of when we are at our best. And much of the rest of it, the Psalms of anger and revenge, for example, can give you a deeper understanding of our less worthy emotions and the temptations and traps we can set for ourselves and which, if we don't, life can for us.
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