I haven't had a very successful Lent in 2019, I'd intended to write more appropriate posts and had intentions to do more in the way of personal practice than I have managed. This has not been a very successful period leading up to the most significant day in the Christian religious year. Maybe I should make amends during the Easter Time, from the great Easter Vigil to Pentecost, which is ten days longer than Lent.
Being old enough so I remember the dreadful, pseudo-medieval 1950s Catholicism of my youth, Latin masses that more than 99% of those attending didn't understand most of, the Index, banned movies (in itself maybe not really a bad idea, they're only movies), pseudo-medieval clap-trap, a whole host of awful stuff that neo-Integralist fascists funded by non-Christian-Catholic billionaires the Catholic right are trying to revive under the leadership of thugs like Cardinal Raymond Burke and Georg Ganswein, I remember how really pathological the end of Lent could be.
You can see vestiges of that in those putrid reenactments of crucifixion in places like the Philippines,* reenactments which, here, motivated by an obvious Republican-fascist political intent, things which show that that form of anti-Christianity is a sick death cult that has everything more to do with remnants of non-Christian paganism and, worse, Mammonism, than it does the Gospels and Letters, which are the only authentic accounts of the death and Resurrection of Jesus.
Yes, the Resurrection, something that cannot be separated from any aspect of the Crucifixion of Jesus without turning his death into a morbid fixation, a long, disgusting, simulated snuff, S&M flick as filmed by Mel Gibson, the rising from the dead pinned on as an afterthought.
Yes, I think this year I'll concentrate on having a more successful Easter Time. I might love Lent but it's only the preparation, Easter is the reason for it.
* I should point out that nailing people to crosses is something that the Catholic Church officially discourages, though I don't know why they don't go to the bother of issuing a ban on it. It is a sick spectacle that has nothing to do with healthy religious practice and isn't useful for understanding the kind of pathological conditions that produces it.
Thursday, April 18, 2019
About The Mentally Ill Woman Who Went To Colorado And Ended Up Killing Herself There - Bill Moyers Is Long Retired
There have been so many mass shootings in the 2nd Amendement, Freedom of the Press United States since 2006 when I wrote about the murders of the Amish school girls that you have to wonder about why the 18 year old girl who posted obsessively about the even earlier Columbine killings, things bad enough online that she was being watched, was obsessed with that one which happened even before she was born.
The only way she could have even known about it was through what she saw about it, what she watched, what she heard, what she may have read, though I think it's unlikely that such obsessions, these days, among media trained minds, a text report of fact is what started them down such a twisted cul de sac. If I were looking for her motivations, like the motivations of other such people such as the two young assholes who committed the murders, her heroes, who knows what else they were to her, I'd look at the TV shows and movies they watched, these days what online media and social media they looked at and read. That's what produced the ideas that led her to fly to Colorado where, under the out of date, ill considered and far from above board Bill of Rights as interpreted by Supreme Courts, she was able to get very far into her reproductive self-expression, her work of performance art, what she seems to have been intending in a reproduction of that mass murder.
We may never know what it was, in the end, that prevented her from doing what she seems to have been bent on doing. If it was some vestige of moral teaching that, in the end, overcame her obsessive sickness, if it was her finding herself incapable of doing it. That might be important to know too but it's certainly nothing you can depend on to prevent the next such sad, dangerous person from carrying through.
Not dependable, as well, is the sense of moral responsibility in the kind of media that encourages such mentally ill people or doesn't care that they're encouraging them as they try to figure out what will get them a larger part of the limited audience share in today's media business.
The only way she could have even known about it was through what she saw about it, what she watched, what she heard, what she may have read, though I think it's unlikely that such obsessions, these days, among media trained minds, a text report of fact is what started them down such a twisted cul de sac. If I were looking for her motivations, like the motivations of other such people such as the two young assholes who committed the murders, her heroes, who knows what else they were to her, I'd look at the TV shows and movies they watched, these days what online media and social media they looked at and read. That's what produced the ideas that led her to fly to Colorado where, under the out of date, ill considered and far from above board Bill of Rights as interpreted by Supreme Courts, she was able to get very far into her reproductive self-expression, her work of performance art, what she seems to have been intending in a reproduction of that mass murder.
We may never know what it was, in the end, that prevented her from doing what she seems to have been bent on doing. If it was some vestige of moral teaching that, in the end, overcame her obsessive sickness, if it was her finding herself incapable of doing it. That might be important to know too but it's certainly nothing you can depend on to prevent the next such sad, dangerous person from carrying through.
Not dependable, as well, is the sense of moral responsibility in the kind of media that encourages such mentally ill people or doesn't care that they're encouraging them as they try to figure out what will get them a larger part of the limited audience share in today's media business.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
The Murderers Hiding In The Audience Share
Posted by olvlzl
In the news coverage of the murders of the school girls in Pennsylvania there was talk about the similarities between the actions of the murderer and those of the man who took hostages and murdered a school girl in Colorado the week before. One report I heard went into quite a lot of detail about the similarities, a lot more detail than could have been useful to their audience. They’ve got to fill those 24 hours with something. I guess. But, considering what they were saying about copy-cat crime, you would think that it might have occurred to them that a particular segment of their audience might have found their descriptions very useful. I wonder why none of them seemed to think it was possible that some murderer of the near or distant future might have found their information quite instructive.
What is the use of crime reporting? It shouldn’t be useful for the trial, that’s certainly not the role of reporters but of police and prosecutors. Nancy Grace might be confused about that but real reporters shouldn’t be. Ideally jurors wouldn’t have heard any news reporting that could prejudice their decision about the evidence presented in trial. The right to a fair trial, both for the accused and the public, is clearly more important than whatever right the casual observer has to know most of the details as soon as possible.
There is some public interest served in reporting some facts of these crimes. The public needs to know that crimes are being committed and the nature of those crimes especially if the criminal is still at large. But there is a level of detail that goes past what is needed and risks becoming prurient or even dangerous.
Most people can listen to the sordid details and speculations generated by the cabloids with only their character damaged but pretending they are the only ones who could be listening is willful ignorance. The old justification for allowing pornography was true, most people who consume it don’t imitate it. But a study of the effects on the general population wouldn’t show much that was useful. It is the people who do commit horrible crimes who need to be studied. Where did they get the ideas for their crimes, especially those that don’t seem to be original ideas. What is the copy-cat effect of the crime shows on TV?
Is there a significant effect? Are there people susceptible to imitating the crimes spelled out in such loving detail on A&E and Discovery? On the cabloid news stations? And if there is an effect proven beyond a preponderance of the evidence what use should be made of that fact? I don’t know.
But since they are the ones who are always talking about copy-cat murderers don’t they have a responsibility to take that into account when they are structuring their dramatic recitations of these crimes? They certainly do write the shows for dramatic effect, to follow a saleable narrative. Can they make them profitable and responsible at the same time? Maybe they need to look for a good model of responsible reporting. They won’t find much of that on American TV outside of Bill Moyers.
Update: Someone asked me about "olvlzl". That was the second pseudonym I used to post comments under after I realized the first one I had EPT (the initials of E. P. Thompson) had associations with a pregnancy test involving urine. olvlzl were letters that came up in a confirmation code somewhere in my internet surfing and I liked the look of the letters. They meant nothing but I used it as the name of my first blog and the first year and a half or so as I was Echidne's weekend writer. I started using my name while under attack for the first pieces I wrote about the malignant and anti-democratic and, as I studied it more, pseudo-scientific nature of Darwinism.
In the news coverage of the murders of the school girls in Pennsylvania there was talk about the similarities between the actions of the murderer and those of the man who took hostages and murdered a school girl in Colorado the week before. One report I heard went into quite a lot of detail about the similarities, a lot more detail than could have been useful to their audience. They’ve got to fill those 24 hours with something. I guess. But, considering what they were saying about copy-cat crime, you would think that it might have occurred to them that a particular segment of their audience might have found their descriptions very useful. I wonder why none of them seemed to think it was possible that some murderer of the near or distant future might have found their information quite instructive.
What is the use of crime reporting? It shouldn’t be useful for the trial, that’s certainly not the role of reporters but of police and prosecutors. Nancy Grace might be confused about that but real reporters shouldn’t be. Ideally jurors wouldn’t have heard any news reporting that could prejudice their decision about the evidence presented in trial. The right to a fair trial, both for the accused and the public, is clearly more important than whatever right the casual observer has to know most of the details as soon as possible.
There is some public interest served in reporting some facts of these crimes. The public needs to know that crimes are being committed and the nature of those crimes especially if the criminal is still at large. But there is a level of detail that goes past what is needed and risks becoming prurient or even dangerous.
Most people can listen to the sordid details and speculations generated by the cabloids with only their character damaged but pretending they are the only ones who could be listening is willful ignorance. The old justification for allowing pornography was true, most people who consume it don’t imitate it. But a study of the effects on the general population wouldn’t show much that was useful. It is the people who do commit horrible crimes who need to be studied. Where did they get the ideas for their crimes, especially those that don’t seem to be original ideas. What is the copy-cat effect of the crime shows on TV?
Is there a significant effect? Are there people susceptible to imitating the crimes spelled out in such loving detail on A&E and Discovery? On the cabloid news stations? And if there is an effect proven beyond a preponderance of the evidence what use should be made of that fact? I don’t know.
But since they are the ones who are always talking about copy-cat murderers don’t they have a responsibility to take that into account when they are structuring their dramatic recitations of these crimes? They certainly do write the shows for dramatic effect, to follow a saleable narrative. Can they make them profitable and responsible at the same time? Maybe they need to look for a good model of responsible reporting. They won’t find much of that on American TV outside of Bill Moyers.
Update: Someone asked me about "olvlzl". That was the second pseudonym I used to post comments under after I realized the first one I had EPT (the initials of E. P. Thompson) had associations with a pregnancy test involving urine. olvlzl were letters that came up in a confirmation code somewhere in my internet surfing and I liked the look of the letters. They meant nothing but I used it as the name of my first blog and the first year and a half or so as I was Echidne's weekend writer. I started using my name while under attack for the first pieces I wrote about the malignant and anti-democratic and, as I studied it more, pseudo-scientific nature of Darwinism.
Wednesday, April 17, 2019
Cut Out The Tall Silent Type Act Mueller, It's Just Part Of The Cover Up At This Point
“He just did his job. For Mueller, it’s always about the work, and never about him.”
That's what Sally Yates, the acting top official of the Justice Department, during an all too brief period when you might call it that without a sense of sarcasm, said about Robert Mueller today. She said it in praise or the head of the Mueller Investigation, just the latest layer in the banana split of sweetness heaped on him.
I have respect for Sally Yates but, as I said yesterday, I have a lot less for the lawyers in and around the Department of Justice with each passing day, with each passing day as Mueller is going in to work to adjust the report he wrote so William Barr can release and, we now know, spin what Mueller concluded about his investigation into criminality in the Trump campaign and regime by people close to Trump and Trump himself.
With all due respect to Sally Yates, though, "always about the work" is not nearly enough when it comes to these issues. What is needed is the protection of democracy from a fascist strong man of obvious amorality and depravity and if "about the work" doesn't do that then what Robert Mueller was a part of will have furthered the goal of Trump and Mitch McConnell, Jim Jordan, Lindsay Graham, you could name a list of those trying to impose a one, Republican-fascist party rule on the United States through corrupting the elections process, rigging the anti-democratic features embedded into the Constitution and, most of all, stacking the courts with their fellow Republican-fascists.
Sally Yates, today, called Robert Mueller the “the inverse of the man he would ultimately come to investigate,” even as he's participating in William Barr's obvious manipulation of his report, participating in covering up what the House Democrats see of it and, probably of more importance, the supporting evidence of what Mueller and his team wrote. If he didn't know it before, he knows today that Barr and Rosenstein are going to further spin what is released, knowing that Barr's Department of "Justice" has been keeping the Trump regime informed of what the Report says even as he stiffs the Congress and the American People.
In such a circumstance, what she also says about Mueller, that he is, “Distinctly apolitical, he confounds those who can’t comprehend a person driven by his all too uncommon values: honor, integrity, humility, service,” I'll believe it when I see the full Report.
I can't remember which lawyer it was who I heard say something the other night, something I'd thought but hadn't heard anyone else say, How could Mueller have declared his work finish without getting a number of figures before a grand jury to answer questions or even to give a deposition, Donald Trump sr. the major one of those. Other information that has been coming out leads me to think he left major issues in this untouched, we may or may not know if that's the case. If that's true and he doesn't address that deficiency of his report, I don't trust him. If he leaves that as a dead letter as his report is peddled as a complete exoneration of Trump, as Barr is spinning it and as I have every expectation that Rosenstein will bare himself as the kind of Republican of repute who will do that for Trump, Robert Mueller's golden reputation is just more PR spin. I remember being told similar things about James Comey. The one person I didn't hear it about from top flight lawyers was Andrew McCabe and of all of them, he's the one who has come out least damaged in my thinking, so far. He's the one who lost the most, too.
That's what Sally Yates, the acting top official of the Justice Department, during an all too brief period when you might call it that without a sense of sarcasm, said about Robert Mueller today. She said it in praise or the head of the Mueller Investigation, just the latest layer in the banana split of sweetness heaped on him.
I have respect for Sally Yates but, as I said yesterday, I have a lot less for the lawyers in and around the Department of Justice with each passing day, with each passing day as Mueller is going in to work to adjust the report he wrote so William Barr can release and, we now know, spin what Mueller concluded about his investigation into criminality in the Trump campaign and regime by people close to Trump and Trump himself.
With all due respect to Sally Yates, though, "always about the work" is not nearly enough when it comes to these issues. What is needed is the protection of democracy from a fascist strong man of obvious amorality and depravity and if "about the work" doesn't do that then what Robert Mueller was a part of will have furthered the goal of Trump and Mitch McConnell, Jim Jordan, Lindsay Graham, you could name a list of those trying to impose a one, Republican-fascist party rule on the United States through corrupting the elections process, rigging the anti-democratic features embedded into the Constitution and, most of all, stacking the courts with their fellow Republican-fascists.
Sally Yates, today, called Robert Mueller the “the inverse of the man he would ultimately come to investigate,” even as he's participating in William Barr's obvious manipulation of his report, participating in covering up what the House Democrats see of it and, probably of more importance, the supporting evidence of what Mueller and his team wrote. If he didn't know it before, he knows today that Barr and Rosenstein are going to further spin what is released, knowing that Barr's Department of "Justice" has been keeping the Trump regime informed of what the Report says even as he stiffs the Congress and the American People.
In such a circumstance, what she also says about Mueller, that he is, “Distinctly apolitical, he confounds those who can’t comprehend a person driven by his all too uncommon values: honor, integrity, humility, service,” I'll believe it when I see the full Report.
I can't remember which lawyer it was who I heard say something the other night, something I'd thought but hadn't heard anyone else say, How could Mueller have declared his work finish without getting a number of figures before a grand jury to answer questions or even to give a deposition, Donald Trump sr. the major one of those. Other information that has been coming out leads me to think he left major issues in this untouched, we may or may not know if that's the case. If that's true and he doesn't address that deficiency of his report, I don't trust him. If he leaves that as a dead letter as his report is peddled as a complete exoneration of Trump, as Barr is spinning it and as I have every expectation that Rosenstein will bare himself as the kind of Republican of repute who will do that for Trump, Robert Mueller's golden reputation is just more PR spin. I remember being told similar things about James Comey. The one person I didn't hear it about from top flight lawyers was Andrew McCabe and of all of them, he's the one who has come out least damaged in my thinking, so far. He's the one who lost the most, too.
Stupid Mail
To the post-literate as to the never more than semi-literate (especially those with college credentials) all adult vocabulary sounds like what they would call "post-modernist" babble.
TV has made even the "educated" idiots. That blog is the home to some of the worst of those I've seen.
By the way, they don't know the meaning of "post-modernist" they just know they're not supposed to like it because that's how they heard the word used. Lots of the words they throw around are held in their minds as the most marginally informed, random sounds of passive vocabulary, recognized as words but without them understanding any of their denotative significance. They'd think that sentence didn't mean anything because of that. It's "haaarrrrrrd".
TV has made even the "educated" idiots. That blog is the home to some of the worst of those I've seen.
By the way, they don't know the meaning of "post-modernist" they just know they're not supposed to like it because that's how they heard the word used. Lots of the words they throw around are held in their minds as the most marginally informed, random sounds of passive vocabulary, recognized as words but without them understanding any of their denotative significance. They'd think that sentence didn't mean anything because of that. It's "haaarrrrrrd".
They Love To See Even Young Children Suffer: Republicans In 2019 Are Irredeemably Evil By Intent
Yesterday I more or less asked how any person of honor or morality could be a Republican after Bush II and, now, Trump but this story shows that no one who has any moral foundation or honor could be a Republican.
Most Republicans are rejecting Democrat-led state bills to tighten childhood immunization laws in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in two decades, alarming public health experts who fear the nation could become as divided over vaccines as it is over global warming.
Democrats in six states — Colorado, Arizona, New Jersey, Washington, New York and Maine — have authored or co-sponsored bills to make it harder for parents to avoid vaccinating their school-age children, and mostly faced GOP opposition. Meanwhile in West Virginia and Mississippi, states with some of the nation’s strictest vaccination laws, Republican lawmakers have introduced measures to expand vaccine exemptions, although it’s not yet clear how much traction they have.
Some of the worst of the Republicans doing this are MDs like Rand Paul, a Republican so devoid of morality that he uses his Congressional Socialized Medicine for himself, even as he is one of the most depraved of the assholes who support this depravity. And there is the depraved, mental degenerate brain surgeon, Ben Carson.
The political struggle over vaccination is complicated by the fact that President Donald Trump and two of his Republican primary foes, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) an ophthalmologist, and Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who is now HUD secretary, both voiced support for disproven theories linking vaccine to autism during a 2016 debate. Just last month, Paul said he had his own children vaccinated but railed against government mandates to do so.
Republicans are such moral degenerates that they knowingly want laws that will result in more children being exposed to diseases that could be prevented, who don't care if they suffer short or long term illness and health consequences, become disabled from various childhood and other illnesses, consequences including blindness, deafness, brain damage, permanent respiratory problems. Remember that at the same time they are grandstanding for the idiocy of allowing the most ignorant, superstitious and social-media-media retarded parents to practice a criminal level of neglect and abuse of their children, of endangering the life and well being of children as a "parental right" that they will certainly cut any kind of program for caring for such children, for providing them with aid, educational help - I can imagine Betsy Devos will be trying to schedule the use of her 19th yacht as she cuts that out of the budget - Trump and William Barr are trying to get the Republican-fascists on the courts to get them thrown off of any health insurance and, you know, I don't have any confidence that the Republican-fascists put there by McConnell, Grassley and Graham won't do that.
Republicans in 2019 are the worst political force in the history of the country, even the most vile segregationists and slave-owners and Indian murderers had higher standards than they do, as a group. Individuals, yes, but it was never as generally spread across an entire political party as it is now. The Republican Party is totally devoid of any virtue, no one who is a part of it has any right to be exempted from responsibility in what it is.
Most Republicans are rejecting Democrat-led state bills to tighten childhood immunization laws in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in two decades, alarming public health experts who fear the nation could become as divided over vaccines as it is over global warming.
Democrats in six states — Colorado, Arizona, New Jersey, Washington, New York and Maine — have authored or co-sponsored bills to make it harder for parents to avoid vaccinating their school-age children, and mostly faced GOP opposition. Meanwhile in West Virginia and Mississippi, states with some of the nation’s strictest vaccination laws, Republican lawmakers have introduced measures to expand vaccine exemptions, although it’s not yet clear how much traction they have.
Some of the worst of the Republicans doing this are MDs like Rand Paul, a Republican so devoid of morality that he uses his Congressional Socialized Medicine for himself, even as he is one of the most depraved of the assholes who support this depravity. And there is the depraved, mental degenerate brain surgeon, Ben Carson.
The political struggle over vaccination is complicated by the fact that President Donald Trump and two of his Republican primary foes, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) an ophthalmologist, and Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who is now HUD secretary, both voiced support for disproven theories linking vaccine to autism during a 2016 debate. Just last month, Paul said he had his own children vaccinated but railed against government mandates to do so.
Republicans are such moral degenerates that they knowingly want laws that will result in more children being exposed to diseases that could be prevented, who don't care if they suffer short or long term illness and health consequences, become disabled from various childhood and other illnesses, consequences including blindness, deafness, brain damage, permanent respiratory problems. Remember that at the same time they are grandstanding for the idiocy of allowing the most ignorant, superstitious and social-media-media retarded parents to practice a criminal level of neglect and abuse of their children, of endangering the life and well being of children as a "parental right" that they will certainly cut any kind of program for caring for such children, for providing them with aid, educational help - I can imagine Betsy Devos will be trying to schedule the use of her 19th yacht as she cuts that out of the budget - Trump and William Barr are trying to get the Republican-fascists on the courts to get them thrown off of any health insurance and, you know, I don't have any confidence that the Republican-fascists put there by McConnell, Grassley and Graham won't do that.
Republicans in 2019 are the worst political force in the history of the country, even the most vile segregationists and slave-owners and Indian murderers had higher standards than they do, as a group. Individuals, yes, but it was never as generally spread across an entire political party as it is now. The Republican Party is totally devoid of any virtue, no one who is a part of it has any right to be exempted from responsibility in what it is.
Tuesday, April 16, 2019
Hate Mail - Why Are You So Mad At Sam Seder and Michael Brooks - Why Do You Hate Assange
I have written enough about that. Instead of going into it, here's an excerpt of a piece I wrote in August, 2016:
In the mean time, here are some instances in which Julian Assange, complaining about the time and expense of "vetting" the stuff he has used and uses to gain fame and, I'd guess, fortune for himself, including the private information they or their contributors have stolen in the past.
WikiLeaks’ global crusade to expose government secrets is causing collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill.
In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial, or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.
‘‘They published everything: my phone, address, name, details,’’ said a Saudi man who said he was bewildered that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. ‘‘If the family of my wife saw this . . . Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people.’’
WikiLeaks’ mass publication of personal data is at odds with the site’s claim to have championed privacy, even as it laid bare the workings of international statecraft, and has drawn criticism from the site’s allies.
Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were unsuccessful; a set of questions left with his site wasn’t immediately answered Tuesday. WikiLeaks’ stated mission is to bring censored or restricted material ‘‘involving war, spying and corruption’’ into the public eye, describing the trove amassed thus far as a ‘‘giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents.’’
The library is growing quickly, with half a million files from the US Democratic National Committee, Turkey’s governing party, and the Saudi Foreign Ministry added in the last year or so. But the library is also filling with rogue data, including computer viruses, spam, and a compendium of personal records.
The Saudi diplomatic cables alone hold at least 124 medical files, according to a sample analyzed. Some described patients with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children, or refugees.
‘‘This has nothing to do with politics or corruption,’’ said Dr. Nayef al-Fayez, a consultant in the Jordanian capital of Amman who confirmed that a brain cancer patient of his was among those whose details were published to the web. Dr. Adnan Salhab, a retired practitioner in Jordan who also had a patient named in the files, expressed anger when shown the document
‘‘This is illegal what has happened,’’ he said in a telephone interview. ‘‘It is illegal!’’.
------------
Wikileaks is a bunch of irresponsible thugs, tools of the Putin regime (about which they don't seem to reveal much, Assange is a massive a-hole and so are his supporters. I don't recall who the journalist was, as I recall it was someone in the Guardian, who reported about a dinner with journalists where Assange had it pointed out that he could get people killed with some of the stuff he was planning on publishing which contained names of people, as I recall it was journalists, who had worked with western entities, naming them would make them targets for assassination. Assange said he thought they deserved to be killed, shocking the journalists. If that's Sam Seders and Michael Brooks' idea of journalism, they're dead to me.
I hope the scumbucket rots in prison.
Update: I found it,
You did not have to listen for too long to Julian Assange's half-educated condemnations of the American "military-industrial complex" to know that he was aching to betray better and braver people than he could ever be.
As soon as WikiLeaks received the State Department cables, Assange announced that the opponents of dictatorial regimes and movements were fair game. That the targets of the Taliban, for instance, were fighting a clerical-fascist force, which threatened every good liberal value, did not concern him. They had spoken to US diplomats. They had collaborated with the great Satan. Their safety was not his concern.
David Leigh and Luke Harding's history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro's, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange's disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose "informants" niggled in his mind.
Yeah, I hope the scumbag rots in jail. Sam and Micheal are chumps, so are the rest of his supporters who mistake him for a journalist.
Update 2: Also:
James Ball joined [Wikileaks] and thought that in his own small way he was making the world a better place. He realised that WikiLeaks was not what it seemed when an associate of Assange – a stocky man with a greying moustache, who called himself "Adam" – asked if he could pull out everything the State Department documents "had on the Jews". Ball discovered that "Adam" was Israel Shamir, a dangerous crank who uses six different names as he agitates among the antisemitic groups of the far right and far left. As well as signing up to the conspiracy theories of fascism, Shamir was happy to collaborate with Belarus's decayed Brezhnevian dictatorship. Leftwing tyranny, rightwing tyranny, as long as it was anti-western and anti-Israel, Shamir did not care.
Nor did Assange. He made Shamir WikiLeaks's representative in Russia and eastern Europe. Shamir praised the Belarusian dictatorship. He compared the pro-democracy protesters beaten and imprisoned by the KGB to football hooligans. On 19 December 2010, the Belarus-Telegraf, a state newspaper, said that WikiLeaks had allowed the dictatorship to identify the "organisers, instigators and rioters, including foreign ones" who had protested against rigged elections.
The proof of Assange and Shamir's treachery was strong but not conclusive. Given Shamir's history, there were reasonable grounds for fearing the worst. But even now, you cannot show beyond reasonable doubt that the state has charged this pro-democracy politician or that liberal artist with treason or collaborating with a foreign power because WikiLeaks named names.
One can say with certainty, however, that Assange's involvement with Shamir is enough to discredit his claim that he published the documents in full because my colleagues on the Guardian inadvertently revealed a link to a site he was meant to have taken down. WikiLeaks put the cables on the web last month with evident relish, and ever since I have been wondering who would be its first incontrovertible victim. China appeared a promising place to look. The authorities and pro-regime newspapers are going through the names of hundreds of dissidents and activists from ethnic minorities. To date, there have been no arrests, although in China, as elsewhere, the chilling effect WikiLeaks has spread has caused critics of the communists to bite their tongues.
In the mean time, here are some instances in which Julian Assange, complaining about the time and expense of "vetting" the stuff he has used and uses to gain fame and, I'd guess, fortune for himself, including the private information they or their contributors have stolen in the past.
WikiLeaks’ global crusade to expose government secrets is causing collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill.
In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial, or identity records posted to the web. In two particularly egregious cases, WikiLeaks named teenage rape victims. In a third case, the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.
‘‘They published everything: my phone, address, name, details,’’ said a Saudi man who said he was bewildered that WikiLeaks had revealed the details of a paternity dispute with a former partner. ‘‘If the family of my wife saw this . . . Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people.’’
WikiLeaks’ mass publication of personal data is at odds with the site’s claim to have championed privacy, even as it laid bare the workings of international statecraft, and has drawn criticism from the site’s allies.
Attempts to reach WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were unsuccessful; a set of questions left with his site wasn’t immediately answered Tuesday. WikiLeaks’ stated mission is to bring censored or restricted material ‘‘involving war, spying and corruption’’ into the public eye, describing the trove amassed thus far as a ‘‘giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents.’’
The library is growing quickly, with half a million files from the US Democratic National Committee, Turkey’s governing party, and the Saudi Foreign Ministry added in the last year or so. But the library is also filling with rogue data, including computer viruses, spam, and a compendium of personal records.
The Saudi diplomatic cables alone hold at least 124 medical files, according to a sample analyzed. Some described patients with psychiatric conditions, seriously ill children, or refugees.
‘‘This has nothing to do with politics or corruption,’’ said Dr. Nayef al-Fayez, a consultant in the Jordanian capital of Amman who confirmed that a brain cancer patient of his was among those whose details were published to the web. Dr. Adnan Salhab, a retired practitioner in Jordan who also had a patient named in the files, expressed anger when shown the document
‘‘This is illegal what has happened,’’ he said in a telephone interview. ‘‘It is illegal!’’.
------------
Wikileaks is a bunch of irresponsible thugs, tools of the Putin regime (about which they don't seem to reveal much, Assange is a massive a-hole and so are his supporters. I don't recall who the journalist was, as I recall it was someone in the Guardian, who reported about a dinner with journalists where Assange had it pointed out that he could get people killed with some of the stuff he was planning on publishing which contained names of people, as I recall it was journalists, who had worked with western entities, naming them would make them targets for assassination. Assange said he thought they deserved to be killed, shocking the journalists. If that's Sam Seders and Michael Brooks' idea of journalism, they're dead to me.
I hope the scumbucket rots in prison.
Update: I found it,
You did not have to listen for too long to Julian Assange's half-educated condemnations of the American "military-industrial complex" to know that he was aching to betray better and braver people than he could ever be.
As soon as WikiLeaks received the State Department cables, Assange announced that the opponents of dictatorial regimes and movements were fair game. That the targets of the Taliban, for instance, were fighting a clerical-fascist force, which threatened every good liberal value, did not concern him. They had spoken to US diplomats. They had collaborated with the great Satan. Their safety was not his concern.
David Leigh and Luke Harding's history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro's, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange's disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose "informants" niggled in his mind.
Yeah, I hope the scumbag rots in jail. Sam and Micheal are chumps, so are the rest of his supporters who mistake him for a journalist.
Update 2: Also:
James Ball joined [Wikileaks] and thought that in his own small way he was making the world a better place. He realised that WikiLeaks was not what it seemed when an associate of Assange – a stocky man with a greying moustache, who called himself "Adam" – asked if he could pull out everything the State Department documents "had on the Jews". Ball discovered that "Adam" was Israel Shamir, a dangerous crank who uses six different names as he agitates among the antisemitic groups of the far right and far left. As well as signing up to the conspiracy theories of fascism, Shamir was happy to collaborate with Belarus's decayed Brezhnevian dictatorship. Leftwing tyranny, rightwing tyranny, as long as it was anti-western and anti-Israel, Shamir did not care.
Nor did Assange. He made Shamir WikiLeaks's representative in Russia and eastern Europe. Shamir praised the Belarusian dictatorship. He compared the pro-democracy protesters beaten and imprisoned by the KGB to football hooligans. On 19 December 2010, the Belarus-Telegraf, a state newspaper, said that WikiLeaks had allowed the dictatorship to identify the "organisers, instigators and rioters, including foreign ones" who had protested against rigged elections.
The proof of Assange and Shamir's treachery was strong but not conclusive. Given Shamir's history, there were reasonable grounds for fearing the worst. But even now, you cannot show beyond reasonable doubt that the state has charged this pro-democracy politician or that liberal artist with treason or collaborating with a foreign power because WikiLeaks named names.
One can say with certainty, however, that Assange's involvement with Shamir is enough to discredit his claim that he published the documents in full because my colleagues on the Guardian inadvertently revealed a link to a site he was meant to have taken down. WikiLeaks put the cables on the web last month with evident relish, and ever since I have been wondering who would be its first incontrovertible victim. China appeared a promising place to look. The authorities and pro-regime newspapers are going through the names of hundreds of dissidents and activists from ethnic minorities. To date, there have been no arrests, although in China, as elsewhere, the chilling effect WikiLeaks has spread has caused critics of the communists to bite their tongues.
Hate Mail
If I'd really wanted to discredit the atheist pricks, I'd have pointed out that the two times the building of Notre Dame de Paris fell into atheist hands they tried to destroy it, during the French Revolution when it was looted of much of its most ancient art (some of which didn't turn up again until the 1970s) was descrated and, at one point as I recall, almost burned down by arsonists, something that was attempted again during that other event held up as a wonderful thing in atheist lore, the Paris Commune. Of course worse than them looting, vandalizing, trying to burn down the building and desecrating it was the murders of clergy and religious and lay people during those trial runs of atheist governance, something that, along with the destruction of churches and cathedrals and art has been a uniform feature of atheist governance every time it was done, possibly the Cuban government the least depraved in that regard.
Commentary On John 2:19
As I pointed out last night, in a world full of uncertainties one thing you can always count on is the pricks of the internet to come out on any occasion. And, as long time readers of my writing won't be surprised, the ones I'm talking about are the anti-religious, anti-Christian, anti-Catholic pricks, atheists, some "agnostics". Maybe it was the shock of seeing the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris destroyed by fire, of knowing one of the great icons of European Christianity, European Art, probably the central symbol of the French nation and culture was burning, but I was really surprised at how prickish the pricks were last night. especially prickish to Catholics who were horrified to see one of the central churches of their religion burning.
In many of the comments, some of them sent my way, atheists slammed Catholics for mentioning the fact that the building is a Cathedral, a church, a place of Christian worship, the entire reason the building was built, the reason all of the art in it was made, the reason the music that came from it was created and performed, in every aspect, in every way, the existence of Notre Dame Cathedral was an expression of the Christian religion. There is no honest way to try to turn it into a museum, as some Communist government would a famous Church under their domination and pretend it means that.
None of the artistic or architectural significance of the building is honestly, artistically or even rationally dissociable from that religion without doing damage to its integrity, any appreciation of that art which is not informed by that religious content is a distortion of it. You can get something out of the form, you can get something out of the attractiveness of religious art but if you don't experience it in line with those whose religious devotion was their motivation in creating what they did, your experience is a distortion of it. To an extent that can even be true if you are religious, a Christian, even a Catholic and have a different theological orientation to the creator. There are works by composers, such as Guillaume de Machaut which are almost impossible to experience as he intended because, as the writer of the words and the music, you would have to believe as he believed to really get what he wanted you to. You would, for example, have to really despise the devil, to hate sin, to believe in Redemption History which would mean you would have to believe both Testaments and share Machaut's view of both divine and chivalric love (he was a very French, very worldly, late Medieval cleric) to get the emotional intensity of this Motet
To really get it the beliefs behind it are as important as understanding the words and singing the right notes in the right rhythms. To get some idea of that, you can read the notes for the video. It is, in a very real way, not possible for us to fully understand art to the extent that we don't share its intellectual, emotional and credal basis. I learned that when I read a translation of Basho's Journey To The Interior and found myself doing nothing but floundering. And I was reading the included, far longer and more extensive explanatory commentary as I read the translation.
-------------------------
When I posted that passage, John 2:19, in which, confronted by the authorities Jesus scandalized them by saying if they demolished the temple, he would build it up in three days, a passage certainly known to almost everyone who was involved with building the Cathedral, something they would have heard read in that Cathedral many times over their lifetime. I was trying to understand what I was seeing and hearing. I am not an expert in liturgical history but I would be surprised if that passage were not part of the typical Lenten liturgy then, something which, if they witnessed the destruction of their Cathedral during Holy Week, they'd have thought of.
I was trying to imagine how the destruction of the Second Temple by the intentional looting and burning of it by the Romans was as devastating to the Jews in the Apostolic period as watching Notre Dame burn, maybe even worse because it was destroyed by the occupying army of Rome which would continue to occupy their country, its destruction part of their imperial domination, their program of destruction of their identity. It would have been like the Nazis buring it down, no doubt something that was all too imaginable during the war, as the pricks on the internet tried to whip up with lies, trying, Nazi-like, to pin the fire on Muslims, yesterday.
In John's Gospel, just the idea of the Temple being destoyed was horrible to imagine for those in Jerusalem. And, remember, it was the Second Temple, the one built after Solomon's temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, rebuilt five hundred years earlier. The people who built Notre Dame certainly knew what Jesus said, they would have either heard it read or would have heard it sung (I believe but don't know that the Gregorian antiphon was sung then) they would have fully believed that Jesus did what he said, only he didn't mean the building, he meant his Resurrection.
If you don't believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, I'm sorry, it couldn't mean the same thing to you that it does someone who does believe that. If you don't believe in The Blessed Virgin, even if you share my believer's skepticism of the Birth narrative, it couldn't mean the same thing to you as someone who does. It is called NOTRE DAME, for the love of Mike! People who believe it hear the music, they see the art, they see the architecture - the people who built would have believed those things as they built what even the most atheistic of asthetes sees. But it had to have meant more to them than it could to those who don't believe it.
As a Christian, as one who is still considered a Catholic and who, culturally has no choice but to be one, I don't apologize for taking the words of Jesus and James and Paul, the example of Mary. Notre Dame (who I am apostate enough to consider the first Christian priest) to be more important than the building and art that are admittedly important things about the whole thing. I don't apologize for thinking the lives of the firefighters is more important than any object rescued or destroyed. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't get any of the art that flows from the Gospels, the Letters, The Law and the Prophets. Any person who doesn't believe that doesn't get any of it, at all. If I didn't believe the lives of People was more important, the art would mean nothing to me.
In many of the comments, some of them sent my way, atheists slammed Catholics for mentioning the fact that the building is a Cathedral, a church, a place of Christian worship, the entire reason the building was built, the reason all of the art in it was made, the reason the music that came from it was created and performed, in every aspect, in every way, the existence of Notre Dame Cathedral was an expression of the Christian religion. There is no honest way to try to turn it into a museum, as some Communist government would a famous Church under their domination and pretend it means that.
None of the artistic or architectural significance of the building is honestly, artistically or even rationally dissociable from that religion without doing damage to its integrity, any appreciation of that art which is not informed by that religious content is a distortion of it. You can get something out of the form, you can get something out of the attractiveness of religious art but if you don't experience it in line with those whose religious devotion was their motivation in creating what they did, your experience is a distortion of it. To an extent that can even be true if you are religious, a Christian, even a Catholic and have a different theological orientation to the creator. There are works by composers, such as Guillaume de Machaut which are almost impossible to experience as he intended because, as the writer of the words and the music, you would have to believe as he believed to really get what he wanted you to. You would, for example, have to really despise the devil, to hate sin, to believe in Redemption History which would mean you would have to believe both Testaments and share Machaut's view of both divine and chivalric love (he was a very French, very worldly, late Medieval cleric) to get the emotional intensity of this Motet
To really get it the beliefs behind it are as important as understanding the words and singing the right notes in the right rhythms. To get some idea of that, you can read the notes for the video. It is, in a very real way, not possible for us to fully understand art to the extent that we don't share its intellectual, emotional and credal basis. I learned that when I read a translation of Basho's Journey To The Interior and found myself doing nothing but floundering. And I was reading the included, far longer and more extensive explanatory commentary as I read the translation.
-------------------------
When I posted that passage, John 2:19, in which, confronted by the authorities Jesus scandalized them by saying if they demolished the temple, he would build it up in three days, a passage certainly known to almost everyone who was involved with building the Cathedral, something they would have heard read in that Cathedral many times over their lifetime. I was trying to understand what I was seeing and hearing. I am not an expert in liturgical history but I would be surprised if that passage were not part of the typical Lenten liturgy then, something which, if they witnessed the destruction of their Cathedral during Holy Week, they'd have thought of.
I was trying to imagine how the destruction of the Second Temple by the intentional looting and burning of it by the Romans was as devastating to the Jews in the Apostolic period as watching Notre Dame burn, maybe even worse because it was destroyed by the occupying army of Rome which would continue to occupy their country, its destruction part of their imperial domination, their program of destruction of their identity. It would have been like the Nazis buring it down, no doubt something that was all too imaginable during the war, as the pricks on the internet tried to whip up with lies, trying, Nazi-like, to pin the fire on Muslims, yesterday.
In John's Gospel, just the idea of the Temple being destoyed was horrible to imagine for those in Jerusalem. And, remember, it was the Second Temple, the one built after Solomon's temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, rebuilt five hundred years earlier. The people who built Notre Dame certainly knew what Jesus said, they would have either heard it read or would have heard it sung (I believe but don't know that the Gregorian antiphon was sung then) they would have fully believed that Jesus did what he said, only he didn't mean the building, he meant his Resurrection.
If you don't believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, I'm sorry, it couldn't mean the same thing to you that it does someone who does believe that. If you don't believe in The Blessed Virgin, even if you share my believer's skepticism of the Birth narrative, it couldn't mean the same thing to you as someone who does. It is called NOTRE DAME, for the love of Mike! People who believe it hear the music, they see the art, they see the architecture - the people who built would have believed those things as they built what even the most atheistic of asthetes sees. But it had to have meant more to them than it could to those who don't believe it.
As a Christian, as one who is still considered a Catholic and who, culturally has no choice but to be one, I don't apologize for taking the words of Jesus and James and Paul, the example of Mary. Notre Dame (who I am apostate enough to consider the first Christian priest) to be more important than the building and art that are admittedly important things about the whole thing. I don't apologize for thinking the lives of the firefighters is more important than any object rescued or destroyed. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't get any of the art that flows from the Gospels, the Letters, The Law and the Prophets. Any person who doesn't believe that doesn't get any of it, at all. If I didn't believe the lives of People was more important, the art would mean nothing to me.
Robert Mueller Is Giving Us Every Reason To Believe He's Not Better Than His Good Buddy Barr
The sleaze beneath the elite patina of Republican lawyers involved with the investigation into Trump's family, campaign and administration with the Putin crime family and the cover-up into that is seeping out and it stinks. That is despite the assurances of other lawyers, Republican, of course, but also Democrats, that the lawyers, Rod Rosenstein, William Barr and, yes, Robert Mueller who is close, professionally and personally to both of his fellow Republican lawyers and officials, were men of integrity who you could put your trust in.
Dutifully, that is how the media, largely, covered all of them. That was despite well known reasons to not trust Barr from the time of his service to George H. W. Bush. Especially discrediting was Barr's participation in writing Bush I's pardons which were clearly issued to protect him from criminal involvement in serious crimes including terrorist killings in Central America in the Iran-Contra scandal. That should have been enough for anyone to identify Barr as not only a sleazy lawyer serving a powerful Republican politician, but someone who was willing to lie about it.
Rod Rosenstein, chosen to be Jeff Sessions #2 at the Department of Justice by Donald Trump, reason enough to have your sleaze sensors alerted, soon proved himself to be of dubious character by writing a memo in support of Trump's own admitted cover-up firing of James Comey. I'm no lawyer but . . . no, the right word is probably "so" that was enough to lead me to not trust him despite all of that professional comity as expressed by his fellow connected DC establishment lawyers on talk shows and news interviews.
Robert Mueller, who has the most cred of these three and, who knows, may actually be a man of the integrity attributed to him, has also been a member of the criminal administrations and, after the turn of the new century, Republican regimes. His appointment by Rosenstein after Rosenstein had given the world every reason to not trust him made me skeptical of Mueller's reputation, along with his previous appointments by some of the worst presidents in our history.
Robert Mueller's reported close professional and personal relationship to William Barr, apparently right up to the present, leads me to wonder just how much integrity he could have. The doubts I have about that are magnified because of the known sleaze committed while Barr was as a lawyer, an alleged law man who had used his credentials to enable powerful criminals in getting off. I have my doubts that someone like Robert Mueller would socialize and have warm relations with a minor blue collar wrongdoer who had done far less and whose crimes hadn't harmed nearly as many people, whose real crime was not having elite educational credentials, power, money and a place in the DC-NYC establishment.
And yesterday further reasons we shouldn't trust Barr at all and why Robert Mueller's relationship to him should diminish the automatic trust he's given came out. Barr has lied to Congress, misleading it about serious matters in the past in pretty much the way he seems to be with Robert Mueller's report.
On Friday the thirteenth October 1989, by happenstance the same day as the “Black Friday” market crash, news leaked of a legal memo authored by William Barr. He was then serving as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It is highly uncommon for any OLC memo to make headlines. This one did because it was issued in “unusual secrecy” and concluded that the FBI could forcibly abduct people in other countries without the consent of the foreign state. The headline also noted the implication of the legal opinion at that moment in time. It appeared to pave the way for abducting Panama’s leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega.
Members of Congress asked to see the full legal opinion. Barr refused, but said he would provide an account that “summarizes the principal conclusions.” Sound familiar? In March 2019, when Attorney General Barr was handed Robert Mueller’s final report, he wrote that he would “summarize the principal conclusions” of the special counsel’s report for the public.
When Barr withheld the full OLC opinion in 1989 and said to trust his summary of the principal conclusions, Yale law school professor Harold Koh wrote that Barr’s position was “particularly egregious.” Congress also had no appetite for Barr’s stance, and eventually issued a subpoena to successfully wrench the full OLC opinion out of the Department.
Read the whole thing and, while you're reading it, remember, this is all stuff that Robert Mueller would have known about for years. It makes his Sphinx act in regard to his report into Trump wrongdoing go from seeming like professional propriety to being something quite a bit less reassuring.
Barr's cover-up shouldn't have to wait years to be exposed, Congress should do everything necessary, if the judiciary is as corrupted with Republican-fascists as Trump is putting his hopes in and, clearly Congressional Republicans along with him, Democrats in the House should use everything it can do to force it into the daylight. I would include forcing Mueller to testify, both in closed session and in open session, as should key members of his investigative staff and others. Barr should be investigated for corruption and, if Rosenstein participates in his cover up, he should be investigated too. I, for the life of me, don't understand how Rosenstein's participation in the Comey firing isn't already the subject of a House investigation.
I am sick and tired of seeing these kinds of people, Barr, Rosenstein, getting away with things far, far worse than would land a working class person, a poor person a person with nothing in prison for years. I'm wouldn't be surprised if Rosenstein and Mueller felt very satisfied by putting people like that in prison even as they socialized and had cordial professional relationships with the likes of William Barr. I don't respect that class of lawyers, and from now on only by those rare figures in that world who show the slightest amount of moral discernment and judgement. This is a symptom of moral rot among the well connected and highly placed. If Robert Mueller is such an exception is something of which I am increasingly skeptical. If the cover up continues, if the Judiciary and Intelligence committees have to subpoena him to appear and blow the lid off of it, if his sense of petty professional propriety is not overcome by the outrageousness of Barr's and Rosenstein's cover up, he has never deserved the reputation given him by his fellow lawyers.
Dutifully, that is how the media, largely, covered all of them. That was despite well known reasons to not trust Barr from the time of his service to George H. W. Bush. Especially discrediting was Barr's participation in writing Bush I's pardons which were clearly issued to protect him from criminal involvement in serious crimes including terrorist killings in Central America in the Iran-Contra scandal. That should have been enough for anyone to identify Barr as not only a sleazy lawyer serving a powerful Republican politician, but someone who was willing to lie about it.
Rod Rosenstein, chosen to be Jeff Sessions #2 at the Department of Justice by Donald Trump, reason enough to have your sleaze sensors alerted, soon proved himself to be of dubious character by writing a memo in support of Trump's own admitted cover-up firing of James Comey. I'm no lawyer but . . . no, the right word is probably "so" that was enough to lead me to not trust him despite all of that professional comity as expressed by his fellow connected DC establishment lawyers on talk shows and news interviews.
Robert Mueller, who has the most cred of these three and, who knows, may actually be a man of the integrity attributed to him, has also been a member of the criminal administrations and, after the turn of the new century, Republican regimes. His appointment by Rosenstein after Rosenstein had given the world every reason to not trust him made me skeptical of Mueller's reputation, along with his previous appointments by some of the worst presidents in our history.
Robert Mueller's reported close professional and personal relationship to William Barr, apparently right up to the present, leads me to wonder just how much integrity he could have. The doubts I have about that are magnified because of the known sleaze committed while Barr was as a lawyer, an alleged law man who had used his credentials to enable powerful criminals in getting off. I have my doubts that someone like Robert Mueller would socialize and have warm relations with a minor blue collar wrongdoer who had done far less and whose crimes hadn't harmed nearly as many people, whose real crime was not having elite educational credentials, power, money and a place in the DC-NYC establishment.
And yesterday further reasons we shouldn't trust Barr at all and why Robert Mueller's relationship to him should diminish the automatic trust he's given came out. Barr has lied to Congress, misleading it about serious matters in the past in pretty much the way he seems to be with Robert Mueller's report.
On Friday the thirteenth October 1989, by happenstance the same day as the “Black Friday” market crash, news leaked of a legal memo authored by William Barr. He was then serving as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It is highly uncommon for any OLC memo to make headlines. This one did because it was issued in “unusual secrecy” and concluded that the FBI could forcibly abduct people in other countries without the consent of the foreign state. The headline also noted the implication of the legal opinion at that moment in time. It appeared to pave the way for abducting Panama’s leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega.
Members of Congress asked to see the full legal opinion. Barr refused, but said he would provide an account that “summarizes the principal conclusions.” Sound familiar? In March 2019, when Attorney General Barr was handed Robert Mueller’s final report, he wrote that he would “summarize the principal conclusions” of the special counsel’s report for the public.
When Barr withheld the full OLC opinion in 1989 and said to trust his summary of the principal conclusions, Yale law school professor Harold Koh wrote that Barr’s position was “particularly egregious.” Congress also had no appetite for Barr’s stance, and eventually issued a subpoena to successfully wrench the full OLC opinion out of the Department.
Read the whole thing and, while you're reading it, remember, this is all stuff that Robert Mueller would have known about for years. It makes his Sphinx act in regard to his report into Trump wrongdoing go from seeming like professional propriety to being something quite a bit less reassuring.
Barr's cover-up shouldn't have to wait years to be exposed, Congress should do everything necessary, if the judiciary is as corrupted with Republican-fascists as Trump is putting his hopes in and, clearly Congressional Republicans along with him, Democrats in the House should use everything it can do to force it into the daylight. I would include forcing Mueller to testify, both in closed session and in open session, as should key members of his investigative staff and others. Barr should be investigated for corruption and, if Rosenstein participates in his cover up, he should be investigated too. I, for the life of me, don't understand how Rosenstein's participation in the Comey firing isn't already the subject of a House investigation.
I am sick and tired of seeing these kinds of people, Barr, Rosenstein, getting away with things far, far worse than would land a working class person, a poor person a person with nothing in prison for years. I'm wouldn't be surprised if Rosenstein and Mueller felt very satisfied by putting people like that in prison even as they socialized and had cordial professional relationships with the likes of William Barr. I don't respect that class of lawyers, and from now on only by those rare figures in that world who show the slightest amount of moral discernment and judgement. This is a symptom of moral rot among the well connected and highly placed. If Robert Mueller is such an exception is something of which I am increasingly skeptical. If the cover up continues, if the Judiciary and Intelligence committees have to subpoena him to appear and blow the lid off of it, if his sense of petty professional propriety is not overcome by the outrageousness of Barr's and Rosenstein's cover up, he has never deserved the reputation given him by his fellow lawyers.
Monday, April 15, 2019
Hate Mail - Guess Who
That's what so special about the internet on tragic occasions, it's the pricks.
The Loss Of A Church Building
Démolissez ce temple, leur répondit Jésus, et en trois jours, je le relèverai. Jean 2:19
Watching the live video stream of the burning of Notre Dame de Paris, figuring it's pretty much a total loss, my first thought is hoping there is no loss of life as has been reported. That should always be the first reaction to a fire.
It feels so surreal. I've never been to Paris and, if I were to go to France would probably have avoided it, but so much of western culture is so tied up with that Cathedral. Sight unseen, it feels like a personal loss. Musically, it is one of the foremost birthplaces of counterpoint and has had importance in music right up till today. Its organs and choir and acoustics have been renowned, its musicians some of the finest in the world. Artistically, it was full of works of art that dated right back to its medieval beginning that are totally gone. Its architecture, like all old architecture, is unique, its landmark status too. The Black Churches which are being burned down have the same meaning for their congregations and communities.
I can't imagine that something won't be built to replace it, If there isn't enough to recover, as it looks from the video stream, I hope they won't try to reproduce what was there. That would turn it from a unique part of history into something phony. An imitation.
It is, first and foremost, a place of worship, whatever they replace it with I hope it is an authentic Christian place of worship, a Catholic place of worship and of Christian life. Christian churches should be places of provision for the poor, the outcast, the sojourner. If I were on any committee dealing with that, I would point to the description of worship among the followers of Jesus in the letters of James and Paul the other books of the New Testament.
I hope the reports that no one was killed are true. I'm afraid to go back to the coverage. Attending the memorial service of the fire fighter who died in Maine a few weeks back, that's foremost in my mind. Pray for the People, The People are the Church.
Update: They are reporting that a fire fighter was seriously injured but that's all I've read about it.
Update 2: No word on other injuries.
Thank heaven, they're saying there is no evidence of arson or terrorism, this could have turned a terrible catastrophe into something much worse. In the United States, fueled by our "free press" there would probably have already been acts of reprisal against totally innocent people.
One of the commentaries in the French media said one of the problems Notre Dame had was that too many different entities had authority over it and that hampered preservation and restoration planning. They're saying they structure, by which they seem to mean the towers that were largely saved and the outside shell have been saved and I guess they're going to rebuild inside that. President Macron has already announced a national subscription to rebuild, I read that 100 million euros have already been pledged.
Watching the live video stream of the burning of Notre Dame de Paris, figuring it's pretty much a total loss, my first thought is hoping there is no loss of life as has been reported. That should always be the first reaction to a fire.
It feels so surreal. I've never been to Paris and, if I were to go to France would probably have avoided it, but so much of western culture is so tied up with that Cathedral. Sight unseen, it feels like a personal loss. Musically, it is one of the foremost birthplaces of counterpoint and has had importance in music right up till today. Its organs and choir and acoustics have been renowned, its musicians some of the finest in the world. Artistically, it was full of works of art that dated right back to its medieval beginning that are totally gone. Its architecture, like all old architecture, is unique, its landmark status too. The Black Churches which are being burned down have the same meaning for their congregations and communities.
I can't imagine that something won't be built to replace it, If there isn't enough to recover, as it looks from the video stream, I hope they won't try to reproduce what was there. That would turn it from a unique part of history into something phony. An imitation.
It is, first and foremost, a place of worship, whatever they replace it with I hope it is an authentic Christian place of worship, a Catholic place of worship and of Christian life. Christian churches should be places of provision for the poor, the outcast, the sojourner. If I were on any committee dealing with that, I would point to the description of worship among the followers of Jesus in the letters of James and Paul the other books of the New Testament.
I hope the reports that no one was killed are true. I'm afraid to go back to the coverage. Attending the memorial service of the fire fighter who died in Maine a few weeks back, that's foremost in my mind. Pray for the People, The People are the Church.
Update: They are reporting that a fire fighter was seriously injured but that's all I've read about it.
Update 2: No word on other injuries.
Thank heaven, they're saying there is no evidence of arson or terrorism, this could have turned a terrible catastrophe into something much worse. In the United States, fueled by our "free press" there would probably have already been acts of reprisal against totally innocent people.
One of the commentaries in the French media said one of the problems Notre Dame had was that too many different entities had authority over it and that hampered preservation and restoration planning. They're saying they structure, by which they seem to mean the towers that were largely saved and the outside shell have been saved and I guess they're going to rebuild inside that. President Macron has already announced a national subscription to rebuild, I read that 100 million euros have already been pledged.
Whiny Mail
I will remind you that the quickest way to get your attempted comments sent to the Spam file is to slander third parties who don't get to decide what gets posted here. If you want me to post your comment, not doing that surprisingly common thing is the first hurdle to publication. There are others. Saying something really stupid will only get you published if I feel like making fun of it and I'm in a really grumpy mood these days.
Hate Mail - I'm Always So Happy When The Champions Of Free Speech Tell Me To Shut Up Over The ACLU
I've compared the ACLU's famous and far less effective advocacy for "good causes" to their lavishly successful campaign to promote the corporations' and other malignancies "right" to lie, the "right" to promote hate to a little boy who sticks his finger in the dike with one hand while he drills holes in it with the other. Here's a variation that also makes that point.
The ACLU's advocacy for the corporate media, for the massive porn industry is what would dominate if you did a chart of its actual effectiveness as compared to its public relations image. Its enablement of fascism, Nazism and the corporate lies that are behind the imposition of Trump on the United States are its most potent political product.
Of course, the very thing you're whining about, me slamming, that actual ACLU as opposed to the PR image myth, discredits one of the most transparently false lines of free-speech-free-press absolutism, that the messaging of fascists and Nazis, and pornographers is innocuous. If you really believed that you wouldn't slam me for writing what I've written, you would consider it innocuous. Did you ever consider that? No, of course you didn't because your piously held position on those is about as unconsidered as a Trump tweet or a Huckabee-Sanders lie.
Update: Way, way back, there was a SullyWatch blog, one of those watch blogs that kept track of specific media figures, this one Andrew Sullivan, its anonymous and very good author made a point that libertarians were opposed to government oppression because the private-sector could do it so much more efficiently.
How the real-life effect of the ACLU's "free-speech" and even more so its "free-press" advocacy, something which the increasingly overtly fascist right-wing media has used by the corporate media to promote vicious racism, anti-Latino, anti-Women, anti-LGBTQ, and, most of all, anti-poor people propaganda, getting a line of ever worsening Republicans and now Republican-fascists in office and, worst of all, on to courts where they can revive Jim Crow and every other of those former depravities that the ACLU makes such a public stance of opposing differs from what Sully Watch so trenchently put in so few words, I'd like someone to explain to me.
Secular liberalism of that kind is, when the hens come home to roost, a form of liberalish libertarianism which, unsurprisingly. leaves just about all of the former inequality and oppression in place. As an enormous fan of Marilynne Robinson's great book, Mother Country, it's exactly the same thing, in effect, as the traditional, elitist form of British Social thought, translated into American. In her description of the British philanthropic game, she brilliantly showed:
The rules of the game are very simple. One must justify things as they are by attacking things as they are. It is a philosophic game, perfectly suited to showing off a fine wit. It has even the thrill of risk, since it invites subversive ideas. But the point is always, of course, to achieve a resolution that will bring the argument right back where it began.
That is what I'm accusing the ACLU of. It's what they've done.
Update: Way, way back, there was a SullyWatch blog, one of those watch blogs that kept track of specific media figures, this one Andrew Sullivan, its anonymous and very good author made a point that libertarians were opposed to government oppression because the private-sector could do it so much more efficiently.
How the real-life effect of the ACLU's "free-speech" and even more so its "free-press" advocacy, something which the increasingly overtly fascist right-wing media has used by the corporate media to promote vicious racism, anti-Latino, anti-Women, anti-LGBTQ, and, most of all, anti-poor people propaganda, getting a line of ever worsening Republicans and now Republican-fascists in office and, worst of all, on to courts where they can revive Jim Crow and every other of those former depravities that the ACLU makes such a public stance of opposing differs from what Sully Watch so trenchently put in so few words, I'd like someone to explain to me.
Secular liberalism of that kind is, when the hens come home to roost, a form of liberalish libertarianism which, unsurprisingly. leaves just about all of the former inequality and oppression in place. As an enormous fan of Marilynne Robinson's great book, Mother Country, it's exactly the same thing, in effect, as the traditional, elitist form of British Social thought, translated into American. In her description of the British philanthropic game, she brilliantly showed:
The rules of the game are very simple. One must justify things as they are by attacking things as they are. It is a philosophic game, perfectly suited to showing off a fine wit. It has even the thrill of risk, since it invites subversive ideas. But the point is always, of course, to achieve a resolution that will bring the argument right back where it began.
That is what I'm accusing the ACLU of. It's what they've done.
Never Forget Who Protected Those Lies That Gave Us Trump: The Utterly Transparent And Dishonest Habits Of The ACLU On Display
Here is the money-shot of Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project's statement on the extradition of Julian Assange.
"Criminally prosecuting a publisher for the publication of truthful information would be a first in American history, and unconstitutional. The government did not cross that Rubicon with today’s indictment, but the worst case scenario cannot yet be ruled out. We have no assurance that these are the only charges the government plans to bring against Mr. Assange. Further, while there is no First Amendment right to crack a government password, this indictment characterizes as ‘part of’ a criminal conspiracy the routine and protected activities journalists often engage in as part of their daily jobs, such as encouraging a source to provide more information. Given President Trump’s and his administration’s well-documented attacks on the freedom of the press, such characterizations are especially worrisome.”
What assurances do any of us have that the government, especially under the depraved Republican domination the ACLU's concept of "speech" and "freedom of the press" has produced that the government won't over step at some point in prosecuting someone who, like Assange, has clearly violated the law? And note, Wizner's disingenuous insertion of the alleged and highly arguable journalistic character of Assange and his crime operation even as he admits that isn't what the American government is indicting him for. From what I understand (thanks largely to the erudite Phil) is that Britain has very stringent laws governing extradition that would prohibit sending him to the US that would bar the US government from bringing charges he was not extradited for.
What spy couldn't be protected if all you have to do is call yourself a "journalist" and get knee-jerk jerks to go along with that under Wizner's formulation? Who couldn't be protected from conducting espionage of the kind that Assange did? It leaves a country which has "free press" vulnerable to any attack by any agent of any gangster regime, anywhere. Which, I have to conclude, is AOK with the ACLU. "Free press" like "gun rights" language the gun lobby here fell for, is nothing that Assange's clear patron and cohort, Putin has any intention of allowing in the Russia he dictates over. That's the kind of criminal regime the ACLU's position leaves the United States and its past advocacy open to.
As to Wizners' playing the card of "government overreach", I can answer that, there is not and never has been any guarantee that any government, anywhere won't overreach. If that were a legitimate issue, no laws would be safely made because there is always a potential for governments, corrupt prosecutors, corrupt judges, etc. using any provision of the law illegitimately. Wizner's and the ACLU's rote, knee-jerky response to support this most illegitimate darling of the deluded play-left is a perfect example of ACLU style double speak. It is so stupid that I would classify it as a fund-raising statement, appealing to emotions and that lefty paranoia that so much ACLU fundraising has been centered around. Wizner's job description should be changed to "fund raiser".
It's also in line with the ACLU's entire line of "free speech" "free press" slogans which, having been adopted by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts (and the neo-Nazis the ACLU has championed in the past) have used (with supporting briefs from the ACLU) to stop every single instance of the Congress, past presidents, state legislatures and governors from trying to clean the corruption of big money out of our politics, the thing which has given us "President Trump’s and his administration’s well-documented attacks on the freedom of the press." Especially those which helped free the New York Times and the cabloid lie industry in their demonization and sandbagging of Hillary Clinton with well-placed lies right before the election. As I recall even the warning by some of its past officials didn't keep the ACLU from ignoring the warnings that the Citizens United ruling would open us up to the big money corruption of foreign billionaires. The "such characterizations" that to Wizner "are especially worrisome" are a direct result of the ACLU's idiotic absolutism in regard to the very issues that this putz, Wizner uses in his unadmitted fundraising PR. The Republican-fascists could never have lied Donald Trump, a 100% creation of the corporate media, into the presidency without that line of ACLU bromindes entering into US law through the Supreme Court.
The ACLU is one of the biggest and stupidest frauds that the American left has ever bought, it might be the biggest one. It's a lot to swallow to admit that some of the criticism of the ACLU by the right which I abhor, is, in fact, legitimate.
The ACLU is an example of the elite play-left's anti-Americanism, which is why it can overlook the fact that we are under attack THROUGH THE FREE PRESS THAT THEY HELPED FREE FROM AN OBLIGATION TO TELL THE TRUTH AND NOT LIES and to protect from civil actions when they told lies against liberals and others who were unprofitable for their fellow rich people. I'm sure you could go through their various briefs submitted in such cases and find all kinds of bull shit claiming that the lies of the press were innocuous and would be overcome by the truths told by the press they would take to be respectable when the history of lies spread in the mass media were known to be extremely damaging to democracy and to the lives of those lied about, especially minority groups who are discriminated against. The lawyers, most of them White and either from affluence or having great expectations of becoming affluent through their legal practice, were hardly the ones in danger of being the recipients of the end product of their "free speech - free press" theories.
In the past decade, looking at who some of those "liberal" lawyers take on as clients, everyone from Greg Craig sharing a dictator-client with Paul Manafort to the demi-god of conventional liberalism, Lawrence Tribe, hearing their excuses for representing dictators and coal companies in terms of their personal finances, listening to the Democratic lawyers who assured us that Rosenstein and Barr (perhaps Muller as well) were sterling fellows whose devotion to the institution of the Department of Justice meant we should trust them, I have come to distrust elite lawyers almost as much as I distrust the ACLU. One of the biggest hits in my respect for such lawyers was when I heard and read the number of "liberal" lawyers and members of courts (all of them with some professional relationship to him) who endorsed Samuel Alito's nomination and, in the most recent case, even Brett Kavanaugh. As I said the other day, I think when we hear someone say "institutionalist" we should translate that into the truth, "careerist". I think the confidence we have put in "liberal" lawyers has hardly been a sound investment. I stopped donating to the ACLU way back when they championed the soi disant "rights" of Nazis to terrorize Holocaust survivors in Skokie. That was the first of the huge cracks in my conventional secular liberalism. Reading more about the actual history of the ACLU helped bring down a lot more of it.
"Criminally prosecuting a publisher for the publication of truthful information would be a first in American history, and unconstitutional. The government did not cross that Rubicon with today’s indictment, but the worst case scenario cannot yet be ruled out. We have no assurance that these are the only charges the government plans to bring against Mr. Assange. Further, while there is no First Amendment right to crack a government password, this indictment characterizes as ‘part of’ a criminal conspiracy the routine and protected activities journalists often engage in as part of their daily jobs, such as encouraging a source to provide more information. Given President Trump’s and his administration’s well-documented attacks on the freedom of the press, such characterizations are especially worrisome.”
What assurances do any of us have that the government, especially under the depraved Republican domination the ACLU's concept of "speech" and "freedom of the press" has produced that the government won't over step at some point in prosecuting someone who, like Assange, has clearly violated the law? And note, Wizner's disingenuous insertion of the alleged and highly arguable journalistic character of Assange and his crime operation even as he admits that isn't what the American government is indicting him for. From what I understand (thanks largely to the erudite Phil) is that Britain has very stringent laws governing extradition that would prohibit sending him to the US that would bar the US government from bringing charges he was not extradited for.
What spy couldn't be protected if all you have to do is call yourself a "journalist" and get knee-jerk jerks to go along with that under Wizner's formulation? Who couldn't be protected from conducting espionage of the kind that Assange did? It leaves a country which has "free press" vulnerable to any attack by any agent of any gangster regime, anywhere. Which, I have to conclude, is AOK with the ACLU. "Free press" like "gun rights" language the gun lobby here fell for, is nothing that Assange's clear patron and cohort, Putin has any intention of allowing in the Russia he dictates over. That's the kind of criminal regime the ACLU's position leaves the United States and its past advocacy open to.
As to Wizners' playing the card of "government overreach", I can answer that, there is not and never has been any guarantee that any government, anywhere won't overreach. If that were a legitimate issue, no laws would be safely made because there is always a potential for governments, corrupt prosecutors, corrupt judges, etc. using any provision of the law illegitimately. Wizner's and the ACLU's rote, knee-jerky response to support this most illegitimate darling of the deluded play-left is a perfect example of ACLU style double speak. It is so stupid that I would classify it as a fund-raising statement, appealing to emotions and that lefty paranoia that so much ACLU fundraising has been centered around. Wizner's job description should be changed to "fund raiser".
It's also in line with the ACLU's entire line of "free speech" "free press" slogans which, having been adopted by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts (and the neo-Nazis the ACLU has championed in the past) have used (with supporting briefs from the ACLU) to stop every single instance of the Congress, past presidents, state legislatures and governors from trying to clean the corruption of big money out of our politics, the thing which has given us "President Trump’s and his administration’s well-documented attacks on the freedom of the press." Especially those which helped free the New York Times and the cabloid lie industry in their demonization and sandbagging of Hillary Clinton with well-placed lies right before the election. As I recall even the warning by some of its past officials didn't keep the ACLU from ignoring the warnings that the Citizens United ruling would open us up to the big money corruption of foreign billionaires. The "such characterizations" that to Wizner "are especially worrisome" are a direct result of the ACLU's idiotic absolutism in regard to the very issues that this putz, Wizner uses in his unadmitted fundraising PR. The Republican-fascists could never have lied Donald Trump, a 100% creation of the corporate media, into the presidency without that line of ACLU bromindes entering into US law through the Supreme Court.
The ACLU is one of the biggest and stupidest frauds that the American left has ever bought, it might be the biggest one. It's a lot to swallow to admit that some of the criticism of the ACLU by the right which I abhor, is, in fact, legitimate.
The ACLU is an example of the elite play-left's anti-Americanism, which is why it can overlook the fact that we are under attack THROUGH THE FREE PRESS THAT THEY HELPED FREE FROM AN OBLIGATION TO TELL THE TRUTH AND NOT LIES and to protect from civil actions when they told lies against liberals and others who were unprofitable for their fellow rich people. I'm sure you could go through their various briefs submitted in such cases and find all kinds of bull shit claiming that the lies of the press were innocuous and would be overcome by the truths told by the press they would take to be respectable when the history of lies spread in the mass media were known to be extremely damaging to democracy and to the lives of those lied about, especially minority groups who are discriminated against. The lawyers, most of them White and either from affluence or having great expectations of becoming affluent through their legal practice, were hardly the ones in danger of being the recipients of the end product of their "free speech - free press" theories.
In the past decade, looking at who some of those "liberal" lawyers take on as clients, everyone from Greg Craig sharing a dictator-client with Paul Manafort to the demi-god of conventional liberalism, Lawrence Tribe, hearing their excuses for representing dictators and coal companies in terms of their personal finances, listening to the Democratic lawyers who assured us that Rosenstein and Barr (perhaps Muller as well) were sterling fellows whose devotion to the institution of the Department of Justice meant we should trust them, I have come to distrust elite lawyers almost as much as I distrust the ACLU. One of the biggest hits in my respect for such lawyers was when I heard and read the number of "liberal" lawyers and members of courts (all of them with some professional relationship to him) who endorsed Samuel Alito's nomination and, in the most recent case, even Brett Kavanaugh. As I said the other day, I think when we hear someone say "institutionalist" we should translate that into the truth, "careerist". I think the confidence we have put in "liberal" lawyers has hardly been a sound investment. I stopped donating to the ACLU way back when they championed the soi disant "rights" of Nazis to terrorize Holocaust survivors in Skokie. That was the first of the huge cracks in my conventional secular liberalism. Reading more about the actual history of the ACLU helped bring down a lot more of it.
Sunday, April 14, 2019
This Is A Model Of How To Construct A Legitimate Criticism of An Ineffective Lefty Leader
I am ever more impressed with Phil's political analysis, here about his criticism of Jeremy Corbyn as a terrible leader of the left and in Parliament even as he defends him from the false attacks on him of personal antisemitism. Maybe it's because in his day job he's a science teacher that Phil can come up with such full and finely reasoned analyses, maybe it's just that he's extremely smart and honest. I really love his commentary. Maybe because, Britain, as the United States is a democracy under attack from the same forces, much of it flowing in the polluted sewer that is Rupert Murdoch's operation.
Problems With Imaging Reality According To Expectations
I gave up reading the misnamed Religion Dispatches long enough ago that I didn't know it had moved and, apparently, wisely gave up posting comments.
There's a kind of silly article on its new site about the black hole "photo" that wants to bring God into it, God Need Not Be Real, But the Black Hole Photo Is, which, I suppose, is inevitable though I can't help but feel it's oh, so last decade and more past it. He makes one mistake, sort of, in that the eminent astro-physicist who took the most famous photos in the history of Enistein's theory of relativity, Arthur Stanley Eddington wasn't only "the son of Quakers" he was an actively believing Quaker throughout his career. I was impressed enough with his Swathmore Lecture, Science And The Unseen World, that I typed it out to post online before the book, itself was available online, without typos. Given what he says about the risks of trying to mix theology with science, at least on the science side of it, I don't think this is exactly a successful article. I'd say anyone who wants to try to find theological or, even more, anti-theological implications in this image are fetching it pretty far. As to science disposing of God, Eddington, pointing out the folly of a materialist conception of consciousness and its inability to judge the wrong answer to 7x9 as inferior to the right answer, Eddington pointed out:
Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed*.
You could probably find other things in Eddington's Gifford Lectures, or Tarner Lectures to find some passages that, in the context of this image and article, are quite ironic.
I'd listened to Dr. Katie Bouman in an already out of date TED talk the other day and found her both informative and extremely appealing - does everyone younger than me sound like a bright, precocious, energetic, high school student from now on - and pretty honest about what leads me to continue to question this passage from the article:
For me the photograph (made possible by an algorithm developed by Dr. Katie Bouman) both confirmed and exceeded expectations; in many ways the picture appeared as I sort of assumed it would, but when I actually viewed the image it shattered my sense of what I was looking at, of what’s possible, of what lay at the center of distant galaxies.
I still would question the extent to which this "photo is real," considering it's a product of fitting together disparate data points and choosing among what Bouman said was "an infinity" of possible visual interpretations of that data using the artificial, human construct of algorithms, based in what would be expected to be seen, based on existing theories about black holes. It's not a philosophical game to ask in what sense the product of that kind of thing is "real". The "photo" isn't even like what Eddington took, the images of starlight as deflected in relation to the position of Mercury during a solar eclipse, that was light falling on a photographic plate - which didn't by the way, keep some sci-guys on the make from floating the idea that Eddington fudged it. Even the description in the article shows the problem, this is an image that is based, not on light hitting a photographic plate, but based in "expectations" on things "as [we] sort of assumed". I don't doubt that the picture very well might be as valid a "picture of a black hole" as we're going to get but it's worth asking if it's "real".
That's a question that has every similarity to my criticism of opinion polling, surveys, with so many other kinds of "science" as done in the social sciences which construct artificial stereotypes of human populations which are, then, taken as not only "real" but far more real than the individuals who comprise the real group in real life, in all of their variation from that type. Which, given its proven potential to blight lives, to blight the lives of entire groups of people, to promote discrimination against those who, oddly enough, are the groups already disadvantaged and to discriminate for those who are privileged and even gets huge numbers of people killed or forcibly sterilized, cutting them out of the future, there couldn't be a more important question to ask. That kind of algorithm based construction of "reality" is the reason I decided to comment on the article. Unless we're going to be sucked into a black hole sometime in the future (and what would we do to prevent that?) the reality of that picture is of vanishingly little importance as compared to the clear, present and immediate danger of repeating an all too humanly constructed past that hasn't really passed, considering the use of this construction of reality is entirely important.
* Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of “7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of “65.” What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought – that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces “7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces “7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law – laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.
There's a kind of silly article on its new site about the black hole "photo" that wants to bring God into it, God Need Not Be Real, But the Black Hole Photo Is, which, I suppose, is inevitable though I can't help but feel it's oh, so last decade and more past it. He makes one mistake, sort of, in that the eminent astro-physicist who took the most famous photos in the history of Enistein's theory of relativity, Arthur Stanley Eddington wasn't only "the son of Quakers" he was an actively believing Quaker throughout his career. I was impressed enough with his Swathmore Lecture, Science And The Unseen World, that I typed it out to post online before the book, itself was available online, without typos. Given what he says about the risks of trying to mix theology with science, at least on the science side of it, I don't think this is exactly a successful article. I'd say anyone who wants to try to find theological or, even more, anti-theological implications in this image are fetching it pretty far. As to science disposing of God, Eddington, pointing out the folly of a materialist conception of consciousness and its inability to judge the wrong answer to 7x9 as inferior to the right answer, Eddington pointed out:
Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed*.
You could probably find other things in Eddington's Gifford Lectures, or Tarner Lectures to find some passages that, in the context of this image and article, are quite ironic.
I'd listened to Dr. Katie Bouman in an already out of date TED talk the other day and found her both informative and extremely appealing - does everyone younger than me sound like a bright, precocious, energetic, high school student from now on - and pretty honest about what leads me to continue to question this passage from the article:
For me the photograph (made possible by an algorithm developed by Dr. Katie Bouman) both confirmed and exceeded expectations; in many ways the picture appeared as I sort of assumed it would, but when I actually viewed the image it shattered my sense of what I was looking at, of what’s possible, of what lay at the center of distant galaxies.
I still would question the extent to which this "photo is real," considering it's a product of fitting together disparate data points and choosing among what Bouman said was "an infinity" of possible visual interpretations of that data using the artificial, human construct of algorithms, based in what would be expected to be seen, based on existing theories about black holes. It's not a philosophical game to ask in what sense the product of that kind of thing is "real". The "photo" isn't even like what Eddington took, the images of starlight as deflected in relation to the position of Mercury during a solar eclipse, that was light falling on a photographic plate - which didn't by the way, keep some sci-guys on the make from floating the idea that Eddington fudged it. Even the description in the article shows the problem, this is an image that is based, not on light hitting a photographic plate, but based in "expectations" on things "as [we] sort of assumed". I don't doubt that the picture very well might be as valid a "picture of a black hole" as we're going to get but it's worth asking if it's "real".
That's a question that has every similarity to my criticism of opinion polling, surveys, with so many other kinds of "science" as done in the social sciences which construct artificial stereotypes of human populations which are, then, taken as not only "real" but far more real than the individuals who comprise the real group in real life, in all of their variation from that type. Which, given its proven potential to blight lives, to blight the lives of entire groups of people, to promote discrimination against those who, oddly enough, are the groups already disadvantaged and to discriminate for those who are privileged and even gets huge numbers of people killed or forcibly sterilized, cutting them out of the future, there couldn't be a more important question to ask. That kind of algorithm based construction of "reality" is the reason I decided to comment on the article. Unless we're going to be sucked into a black hole sometime in the future (and what would we do to prevent that?) the reality of that picture is of vanishingly little importance as compared to the clear, present and immediate danger of repeating an all too humanly constructed past that hasn't really passed, considering the use of this construction of reality is entirely important.
* Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of “7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of “65.” What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought – that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces “7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces “7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law – laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.
I Don't Care
Let me guess, the TV-retarded tool from Teaneck is saying I said something that I never said about something I never knew existed and don't intend to look into because it's not anything I care about.
That's not to say that I'd care if it was about something I'd said, by the time he and his fellow post-literates dealt with it (unread) it would be something I'd never said.
I'm scrapping useless junk this year, Youtube subscriptions, online liars from fading pastel colored blogs, the play-left (the Majority Report experiment was the last one I'm trying, the play-left is worse than a waste of time), etc. Life is too short to waste on that kind of stuff. Life is too important to get caught up in let's pretend.
That's not to say that I'd care if it was about something I'd said, by the time he and his fellow post-literates dealt with it (unread) it would be something I'd never said.
I'm scrapping useless junk this year, Youtube subscriptions, online liars from fading pastel colored blogs, the play-left (the Majority Report experiment was the last one I'm trying, the play-left is worse than a waste of time), etc. Life is too short to waste on that kind of stuff. Life is too important to get caught up in let's pretend.
With His Recent Letter, His anti-Papal Encyclical, Benedict Has Set Himself Up As A New Kind of Anti-Pope
Non-Catholics and a lot of Catholics impatient with Pope Francis's response to the pederast scandal in the Catholic clergy and hierarchy might imagine him as an absolute monarch or even the version of that which his next to last predecessor, John Paul II wished he was, or perhaps his immediate predecessor Benedict XVI who, in a number of ways, was JPII's William Barr, someone who went along with JPII even as he demonstrably knew JPII was wrong and making the breaking scandal worse. Those who went to see the movie Spotlight, about the Spotlight story that brought the abuse scandal to the world's notice would likely be unaware that it had been breaking for some time before the Boston Globe's renowned team of journalists took it up, there had been much earlier reporting in the Globe and elsewhere that there were serious crimes being committed by priests raping and molesting children and some adults, stories that were certainly known to the Bishops and Cardinals and in the Vatican, itself going back quite a way. In just about every way the papacy of John Paul II made that worse. And up until the time he succeeded JPII, Cardinal Ratzinger was a first hand witness to some of the worst enabling by the, then, Pope, we know that because as soon as he was Benedict XVI, he started to make some amends. Amends which he, in his long retirement, is undoing.
Now, with his recent letter, the self-retired pope in the wake of the recent world meeting of bishops to address the sexual abuse scandal, he is, again, making things worse.
Retired Pope Benedict XVI has published a new letter blaming the continuing Catholic clergy abuse crisis on the sexual revolution, developments in theology following the Second Vatican Council, and modern society's aversion to speaking about God.
The letter, one of a handful the ex-pontiff has shared publicly since his resignation in 2013, immediately drew criticism from theologians and Vatican watchers. They noted it does not address structural issues that abetted abuse cover-up, or Benedict's own contested 24-year role as head of the Vatican's powerful doctrinal office.
The former pope instead points the finger at a range of esoteric issues, from a supposed societal "mental collapse" brought on by the protests of 1968, to a claim that the sexual revolution declared pedophilia to be "allowed and appropriate," and to "vehement backlashes" by theologians against a 1993 encyclical by Pope John Paul II. . .
. . . A lengthy 5,500-word text, the former pope's letter was published overnight April 10 by several right-wing Catholic websites, including the EWTN-owned outlets National Catholic Register and Catholic News Agency.
The Vatican press office did not immediately respond to requests to verify the letter's authenticity, but the city-state's news portal reported on the text at length, saying it was first written for a German magazine for clergy, Klerusblatt.
As soon as a person informed on things Catholic saw the letters EWTN, they should have yelled, BINGO! because if there is anything that is a sign that Ratzinger is either participating in or being manipulated by the well-financed billionaire gangster funded attempt to take down Pope Francis, it is seeing those usual suspects in on it. EWTN is the right-wing kingdom of someone I called The Nazi Nun for decades before she died, the inaptly named Sr. (I can't bring myself to use the "M" word for her) Angelica.
Two other certain signposts that this is a politically motivated document is shown by how the gang around Benedict didn't inform Pope Francis' administration about it until it was released to right wing media and that his longtime secretary, Bishop Ganswein, someone who is decidedly on the record of being in the anti-Francis camp seems to have been involved.
Even the Vatican appears to be struggling to understand what to do with a former pope who wants to engage in public debate. As Benedict's latest letter appeared on several right-wing Catholic websites overnight April 10, the Holy See Press Office seemed unprepared, unable even to respond to questions about whether the text was authentic.
In fact it was Archbishop Georg Ganswein, Benedict's personal secretary, that confirmed for many journalists that the text was indeed from the former pontiff.
I haven't trusted Georg (Georgeous George) Ganswein* from the first time I laid eyes on his fashion plate picture next to the red Prada wearing Benedict. If you suspect there might be a story there, all I can say is lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. It's nothing the right-wing camp wouldn't go with if they thought they could make hay of it.
With this, if it is, in fact, his intention, the retired pope has set himself up as a modern form of anti-Pope, something which some wondered might happen if he lived long enough, especially the day that Pope Francis was elected and immediately proved he had no intention of continuing in the tradition of JPII and Benedict XVI. It was a big mistake to allow a self-retired Pope to maintain a status that did't make it clear that he is not a Pope any longer, something that as authoritarian but far more responsible Pope, Pius XII made clear when he produced a document saying that if, as many expected, he was taken hostage by the Nazis, he was, in every sense an ex-Pope and that he would revert to the status of a Cardinal, a document that, probably, only chance kept from its unprecedented execution with his kidnapping. I never trusted Cardinal Ratzinger and trusted him as Benedict XVI by the slightest of margins. He was a really terrible Pope, leading me to think that anyone who was as beholden as he was to Augustine's City of God theology was bound to be a disaster as a pastor.
If you want to have a more informed and more charitable view of what he is up to, this piece by Michael Sean Winters, which calls it "a regrettable text" implies that it is the product of a mind in decline.
When a friend first sent me Pope Emeritus Benedict's article about the root causes of clergy sex abuse, I thought the text was a hoax. Here, it seemed, was a caricature of both Joseph Ratzinger's once powerful intellect and of conservative explanations for the sex abuse crisis. Apparently the text is authentic, so we must search for other reasons why it gets so much wrong — and so much that the retired pope would know is wrong. Let us examine the difficulties with this text.
I will leave it to you to read Winters' fine analysis of the letter, he clearly criticizes it from a starting point more inclined to think well of Benedict XVI than I am as well as someone certainly more informed of the issues than I am. I would call your attention to what he says about the actual facts, as supported with statistics, that the seminary formation of the majority of those convicted of sexual crimes against children was pre-Vatican II, which, as he points out, was hardly fully implemented for decades, it, in fact, isn't now, having been undermined and attacked by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, though Benedict was one of the theologians who worked on some of the major documents of the Council. It is clear in his letter that he is still obsessed with the events that turned him from a moderately liberal theologian into an arch conservative, the student demonstrations of 1968 which upset his placid academic theologian's quiescence**. The sexual abuse crisis is a product of the elitist clericalism he and JPII reimposed on the Church and the twisted view of sexuality as well as the all male-unmarried priesthood. Anyone who doesn't admit the role that that exclusion played in producing so many child abusers as priests is denying an obvious reality.
My view of this is more along the lines of this article by Jamie Mason which points out that the glaringly wrong and politically reactionary nature of the anti-encyclical, that it is far better an explanation of how the past two Popes managed to make things worse and how they learned nothing from even the worst aspects of this. He certainly saw the corruption under the papal administration he was the second in command in, but that seems to have made no impression on him.
If you want more depth to the story, there is a fourth article dealing with various critiques by theologians, which I won't go into, though some of the things said in it are important to understanding that this has more to do with the billionaire, fascist financed war against Pope Francis and the Vatican II Church than it does the pedophile scandal.
* I seem to remember the house of Versache used Gorgeous George as a inspiration for a line of clothes for women, using his image in their ads.
** You have to wonder at the moral obtuseness of someone who learned so little from the sins of the Church while he has obsessed for a half a century over the very short and relatively harmless student demonstrations of 1968.
Now, with his recent letter, the self-retired pope in the wake of the recent world meeting of bishops to address the sexual abuse scandal, he is, again, making things worse.
Retired Pope Benedict XVI has published a new letter blaming the continuing Catholic clergy abuse crisis on the sexual revolution, developments in theology following the Second Vatican Council, and modern society's aversion to speaking about God.
The letter, one of a handful the ex-pontiff has shared publicly since his resignation in 2013, immediately drew criticism from theologians and Vatican watchers. They noted it does not address structural issues that abetted abuse cover-up, or Benedict's own contested 24-year role as head of the Vatican's powerful doctrinal office.
The former pope instead points the finger at a range of esoteric issues, from a supposed societal "mental collapse" brought on by the protests of 1968, to a claim that the sexual revolution declared pedophilia to be "allowed and appropriate," and to "vehement backlashes" by theologians against a 1993 encyclical by Pope John Paul II. . .
. . . A lengthy 5,500-word text, the former pope's letter was published overnight April 10 by several right-wing Catholic websites, including the EWTN-owned outlets National Catholic Register and Catholic News Agency.
The Vatican press office did not immediately respond to requests to verify the letter's authenticity, but the city-state's news portal reported on the text at length, saying it was first written for a German magazine for clergy, Klerusblatt.
As soon as a person informed on things Catholic saw the letters EWTN, they should have yelled, BINGO! because if there is anything that is a sign that Ratzinger is either participating in or being manipulated by the well-financed billionaire gangster funded attempt to take down Pope Francis, it is seeing those usual suspects in on it. EWTN is the right-wing kingdom of someone I called The Nazi Nun for decades before she died, the inaptly named Sr. (I can't bring myself to use the "M" word for her) Angelica.
Two other certain signposts that this is a politically motivated document is shown by how the gang around Benedict didn't inform Pope Francis' administration about it until it was released to right wing media and that his longtime secretary, Bishop Ganswein, someone who is decidedly on the record of being in the anti-Francis camp seems to have been involved.
Even the Vatican appears to be struggling to understand what to do with a former pope who wants to engage in public debate. As Benedict's latest letter appeared on several right-wing Catholic websites overnight April 10, the Holy See Press Office seemed unprepared, unable even to respond to questions about whether the text was authentic.
In fact it was Archbishop Georg Ganswein, Benedict's personal secretary, that confirmed for many journalists that the text was indeed from the former pontiff.
I haven't trusted Georg (Georgeous George) Ganswein* from the first time I laid eyes on his fashion plate picture next to the red Prada wearing Benedict. If you suspect there might be a story there, all I can say is lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. It's nothing the right-wing camp wouldn't go with if they thought they could make hay of it.
With this, if it is, in fact, his intention, the retired pope has set himself up as a modern form of anti-Pope, something which some wondered might happen if he lived long enough, especially the day that Pope Francis was elected and immediately proved he had no intention of continuing in the tradition of JPII and Benedict XVI. It was a big mistake to allow a self-retired Pope to maintain a status that did't make it clear that he is not a Pope any longer, something that as authoritarian but far more responsible Pope, Pius XII made clear when he produced a document saying that if, as many expected, he was taken hostage by the Nazis, he was, in every sense an ex-Pope and that he would revert to the status of a Cardinal, a document that, probably, only chance kept from its unprecedented execution with his kidnapping. I never trusted Cardinal Ratzinger and trusted him as Benedict XVI by the slightest of margins. He was a really terrible Pope, leading me to think that anyone who was as beholden as he was to Augustine's City of God theology was bound to be a disaster as a pastor.
If you want to have a more informed and more charitable view of what he is up to, this piece by Michael Sean Winters, which calls it "a regrettable text" implies that it is the product of a mind in decline.
When a friend first sent me Pope Emeritus Benedict's article about the root causes of clergy sex abuse, I thought the text was a hoax. Here, it seemed, was a caricature of both Joseph Ratzinger's once powerful intellect and of conservative explanations for the sex abuse crisis. Apparently the text is authentic, so we must search for other reasons why it gets so much wrong — and so much that the retired pope would know is wrong. Let us examine the difficulties with this text.
I will leave it to you to read Winters' fine analysis of the letter, he clearly criticizes it from a starting point more inclined to think well of Benedict XVI than I am as well as someone certainly more informed of the issues than I am. I would call your attention to what he says about the actual facts, as supported with statistics, that the seminary formation of the majority of those convicted of sexual crimes against children was pre-Vatican II, which, as he points out, was hardly fully implemented for decades, it, in fact, isn't now, having been undermined and attacked by John Paul II and Benedict XVI, though Benedict was one of the theologians who worked on some of the major documents of the Council. It is clear in his letter that he is still obsessed with the events that turned him from a moderately liberal theologian into an arch conservative, the student demonstrations of 1968 which upset his placid academic theologian's quiescence**. The sexual abuse crisis is a product of the elitist clericalism he and JPII reimposed on the Church and the twisted view of sexuality as well as the all male-unmarried priesthood. Anyone who doesn't admit the role that that exclusion played in producing so many child abusers as priests is denying an obvious reality.
My view of this is more along the lines of this article by Jamie Mason which points out that the glaringly wrong and politically reactionary nature of the anti-encyclical, that it is far better an explanation of how the past two Popes managed to make things worse and how they learned nothing from even the worst aspects of this. He certainly saw the corruption under the papal administration he was the second in command in, but that seems to have made no impression on him.
If you want more depth to the story, there is a fourth article dealing with various critiques by theologians, which I won't go into, though some of the things said in it are important to understanding that this has more to do with the billionaire, fascist financed war against Pope Francis and the Vatican II Church than it does the pedophile scandal.
* I seem to remember the house of Versache used Gorgeous George as a inspiration for a line of clothes for women, using his image in their ads.
** You have to wonder at the moral obtuseness of someone who learned so little from the sins of the Church while he has obsessed for a half a century over the very short and relatively harmless student demonstrations of 1968.
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