Somewhat Random Thoughts On the Republican Murder of Democracy Facilitated By Manchin and Sinema

ONE OF THE PROBLEMS with the idolatry and absurd romanticism surrounding the cult of the Constitution is, as I mentioned, all human creations have flaws in them, both unintentional ones and those inserted intentionally for evil purposes.  The United States Constitution has both and, in abundance, those intended for evil and to thwart democracy. 

That is a fact of history, the representatives, a large majority of the fetishized "founders," fully intended to protect the basis of their wealth, slavery as an evil institution that they feared democracy would endanger.  The Southern states, of course, were the primary locus of that though slavery was present and not insignificant in Northern States as well, most of that slavery practiced by the very class of rich, white men who comprised the ruling elite, including the "founders". 

Every single attempt at progress, the abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of Women, workers rights, etc. has been a struggle against the flaws embedded in the original document and the accretions of laws and court rulings and Supreme Court decisions that have been far from a steady march of progress towards equality and equal justice, economic, social and legal.  And working against that progress there has been a steady and constant and well financed body of lawyers and law scholars who have as a profession sought to exploit every flaw, intended and unintended in that document and as enabled by further laws and court decisions - the legal  being a potentially lucrative profession, the larger part of lawyers and law professors and - yes, judges and "justices" have been hirelings to bend the law for those who pay the best.  Like it or not, as practiced by many if not most lawyers, it is nothing more than a form of intellectual prostitution, one which unlike that using the bodies of women, children and vulnerable men, has carried little personal risk and no generally respectable opprobrium and legal consequence for the pro. 

The United States is in a crisis due to the decisions of the Supreme Court and the corrupt institution of the Senate, for the most part.  Without the Supreme Court permitting the media to lie with impunity when it lies about Democratic politicians and other figures, a line of decisions starting with "liberals" on the court for the benefit of the New York Times and the porn industry - or Hollywood and Broadway  - as if there's a signficant difference among them.  

Yet due to the sacralized language of the Constitution, though everyone acknowledges democracy is being murdered with lies, everyone holds that there is nothing to be done about that.  Which is among the most widespread of insanities and mass delusions afflicting modern life.  Remember that today as you hear the Rachel Maddows, the Stephen Colberts, etc. use the until recently forbidden "L" word, both of them and all others in the media knowing that there is a total and absolute ban on any rational criticism of free speech absolutism - something which I assure you will never be allowed under what we are coming to if any speech in any way endangers Republican-fascist unitary rule.  I recall the shock and surprise when the gray old slut herself allowed the calling of lies lies during the Trump regime. 

And that is only one of a myriad of such forbidden ideas, including one that notes that it is exactly those things embedded by the slave power along with their Northern financier allies into the structure of the United States government, the absurdly lauded "balance of powers" and the enumerated as well as the self-created powers of the United States Supreme Court which is destroying even the semblance of democracy as something to realistically aspire to under the Constitution.  

We are reaching crisis point where states with a majority of Republican voters are making sure they will be a permanent minority one-party state and, with them, the United States no matter what a majority of Americans want and that will, I guarantee you, force facing the evils embedded in the Constitution at the start.  The unequal, anti-democratic Senate, the abomination of the Electoral College, the rigging of congressional, state and local elections in the various states, the dictatorial anti-democratic and elitist nature of the Supreme Court.  Those crisis comprise the real underlying history of the United States, the real thing in which real People have had to struggle against the Constitution and, with the terribly written First and Second amendments, the most ridiculously sacralized parts of it, in the hastily written Bill of Rights.  

No document should ever be worshiped as that document is, no group of vastly imperfect and often dishonest and self-serving men should ever be deified as those who wrote the Constitution have been.  Our crisis is founded in the worship of false gods under a secular religion as absurdly ahistorical and calculatedly dishonest as the worst of 20th century European nationalism.  A lot of that religion is based squarely in cheap entertainment of the kind George M. Cohan cynically formalized to save many a bum show.  

Entertainment has been the primary vehicle for delivering the lies that are destroying democracy.  It was during the late 1970s with the falsification of the war in Vietnam the deification of fascists such as Dirty Harry and the rise of what I started calling "fascist chic" as Hollywood provided us with the first president it provided, Ronald Reagan.  I said that I thought it was an intentional promotion of fascism under Republican rule then, I have seen nothing to dissuade me that it has been anything but an attempt to bring us further down the road to fascist hell, the second Hollywood president, Trump being installed by the lies of the New York Times and other media against Hillary Clinton, the sleazy conventionally pious head of the FBI, James Comey and the goddamned Electoral College. 

We change the Constitution to get rid of those tools for destroying democracy, including that permission to lie and the permission for facists to amass an extremely dangerous arsenal or democracy is not even going to be the plausible false front that it has been for most of our history as a country.   The Republican-fascists are doing without the facade that is there only to cover up for the queasier members of the media and the college-credentialed who still spout the old pieties of a dead religion.  

And lots of us will be killed in the modern form of civil war which may make the old one look orderly and polite by comparison.  The United States as we have known it will not survive the shit show that is coming with no one really stopping it. 

Jackie McLean - Condition Blue

Direct link to video

Jackie McLean, alto saxophone 

Blue Mitchell, trumpet 

Walter Bishop Jr., piano 

Paul Chambers, double-bass 

Art Taylor, drums

The Radicalism Of King Is Buried By Those Who Control His Words

THE REPUBLICAN-FASCIST use of Martin Luther King jr. has been aided and abetted by those who have kept his words behind a rigid pay-wall, something that I've criticized for a long time.   In the absence of the real Reverend Martin Luther King jr. a white-supremacy friendly puppet using one and only one quote from his most over-played speech to bury what was a far more complete and complex and important figure.  There are a few instances where that pay-wall doesn't extend, things that were published, to which his children do not own the rights to it being said such as the interview Alex Haley conducted which was published in Playboy Magazine, of all places.  I assume that is why I found this refutation of the Republican-fascist, white-supremacist friendly puppet online:

Alex Haley: "Do you feel it's fair to request a multibillion-dollar program of preferential treatment for the Negro, or for any other minority group?"

 Martin Luther King jr. : "I do indeed. Can any fair-minded citizen deny that the Negro has been deprived? Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was enslaved, and robbed of any wages--potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America's wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation. It is an economic fact that a program such as I propose would certainly cost far less than any computation of two centuries of unpaid wages plus accumulated interest. In any case, I do not intend that this program of economic aid should apply only to the Negro; it should benefit the disadvantaged of all races."

In the few minutes I have between power outages - we're having a winter storm right now - I see that part of the same interview he noted that Poor-Whites were in the same boat as Black People, which has always been true.   The oligarchs and power elites have always used Black People and the racism promoted in the media and general culture to deprive both of their natural allies in seeking the common economic and social justice that all of them need.

I would say that another part of that was the myth that college was the answer to all that ailed both groups when it is and always will be the truth that most People won't go to college and get an education and that those who are deprived of not only a living wage BUT AN INCOME THAT WILL ALLOW THEM TO HAVE A DECENT LIFE have a right to them no matter what their work or lack of work is.  The Reverend Martin Luther King jr.'s martyrdom came when he was working on behalf of economic justice for garbage collectors and other low-wage blue-collar workers.   And it's clear from what he said during that last campaign of his life that he knew he was about to die.  One of the greatest dangers to the white power elite is the fact that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. died for the least among us, not the Hollywood picture of those who had been to college, were doctors and lawyers and had brilliant minds and characters not in need of redemption.  I think those words in that speech were not some of his greatest but some of the most uncharacteristic and problematic.  At best they don't move things on, at worst they are the tools of his enemies, something which might be better known if his words were not silenced now in a way that his enemies could only dream of, rarely carved in stone instead of engraved on the hearts and minds of living People to inform their deeds and beliefs.

 

I Think Pope Francis Needs A Pet In His Life

I LIKE POPE FRANCIS who has been so much better a pastor and moral figure than his pastorally disastrous immediate predecessors,  a Pope who has tried to implement the non-centralized view of the Catholic Church that JPII and Benedict XVI thwarted as they sought to centralize power in the Vatican and the hierarchy staffed with their hand-picked hacks and sycophants.  

I especially like the Encyclicals of Francis, especially Laudato Si which, if we have a future, may be the most important document ever issued by any Pope in the history of the papacy.  And Fratelli Tutti

But I profoundly disagree with parts of what he said about people who have pets who don't have children.  For a man who never married and who, presumably, has no children and who, likewise, administers a bureaucracy where married parents have little to no position or say, I don't think Francis was speaking out of his experience gained expertise on the topic. 

In one way it reminds me of an old friend of mine who died last year, my last direct link to anyone with a remembered experience from before WWII, who used to assert that People who cared about their pets didn't care about People, that pets used up all their concern.  My experience of pet owners is the opposite, I think people who care about animals are MORE LIKELY to care about People as well.  I think People who are indifferent to animals are more likely to be indifferent to People, too. 

I liked this article chiding Pope Francis on the issues of those who have animals as friends, suggesting that he might benefit from taking an animal into his home.  You're never too old to learn.   One of the things cited to back up what the author of the article says would be familiar to Francis. 

 One of the great insights of his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si' is that the natural world exists as an end in itself, a source of delight to its creator. It is in extending ourselves to care for the nonhuman other — yes, even dogs and cats! — that we enact a care for creation that celebrates the creator. "Each organism, as a creature of God, is good and admirable in itself," Francis wrote, and for some of us it is easier to start to come to that spiritual awareness with the nonhuman companions with whom we share hearth and home.

It is ironic that the first, perhaps only Pope to take the name and example of the great Saint Francis to have made such a wrong step on the topic of caring for animals.  He made the statement at a general audience on January 5th, I don't know if it was part of a planned statement or if it was a spontaneous thought that went through his head and out of his mouth.  I suspect it was unplanned and I would bet that if he had a chance to either take it back or to make a more nuanced statement he would have said it better and no such article would be needed.  I hope he makes friends with a cat or dog or some other animal soon, I think he needs a friend like that.  I've learned a lot from both species, as well as the others I've lived with.   People have a lot to learn about morality and fidelity from dogs, our moral superiors in almost every way.  Those I live with taught me more about both than at least three of the Popes of my lifetime.

An Answer To A Complaint That I Said The Struggle For Civil Rights Has Lost Everything Through An IllConsidered Compact With Modernism

FIFTY YEARS after the resurgence of feminism in the 1960s and 70s, I think it's telling that the predominant prescribed role of women in literature, in movies, on TV, online, in popular culture and not in a little of the garbage that is considered science is as sex objects.   The decay of second-wave feminism in the face of the porn-industry financed "sex positive feminist" accommodation of the use of women as sex objects is typical of 20th and 21st century secular modernism.  

When an ideological framing insists that people are merely rather complex physical objects of no transcendent character that surpasses the banality of material causation, there isn't anything else for them to be.  That is an issue that dominant straight, white, affluent people, especially males can comfortably ignore but it is something that anyone who is not of the dominant and comfortable class constantly has to deal with.  If they get suckered out of a belief in their own AND OTHER PEOPLES' transcendent character, not of their value but of their rightful dignity and self-determination, their right to be treated with respect and dignity and decency by the predominant culture and its media, there's no one who's going to help them.

All subjugated people have to get past scientistic, atheistic, materialistic modernism or they will never get out of where it has gotten us this far into the catastrophic experiment with it that began in the early 20th century.  

One of the major defects in our thinking is the inability of English speakers to distinguish between linguistically similar terms that are entirely different in their motives and endpoints.  "Civil liberties" of the kind that enables the Republican-fascism and corporate oligarchic reversion to old lines of racism, sexism, etc. have nothing to do with the civil rights agitation, the progress of which is dying in the total-war that the civil liberties industry and the Supreme Court under Roberts Republican-fascist domination are waging against it.  

The ACLU is one of the primary engines that gave that war some of its most dangerous and potent fuel in words that are on the mouths of neo-facists and neo-Nazis and Republican-fasicsts today.  They were champions of the modernism that led us to where we are now.   Our side should have been a lot more careful about making common cause with the materialists because they have cost us everything.

McCoy Tyner Quartet - Moment's Notice

 

Direct link to video  

McCoy Tyner - piano
Bobby Hutcherson - vibes
Charnett Moffett - bass
Eric Harland - drums

Coda

SOREN KIERKEGAARD famously said: 

If someone lives in the midst of Christianity and enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol - where, then, is there more truth?  The one prays in truth to God although he is worshiping an idol the other prays in untruth to the true God and therefore in truth worshiping an idol.

The answer God gave Moses when he asked what he was to tell the People, the Children of Israel which god sent him to liberate them, that he was to tell them that "I Am" sent him, that God was I Am might be the most satisfactory and accurate identification of "the true idea of God" that there could be.  The Hebrew tradition, when you think about it deeply and without denominational glasses never fails to impress.

It is certainly related to the commandment against the making of graven images of God, even the pious abbreviation of the Hebrew name of God going to far in that direction for safety.

No matter what we do as soon as we settle on a human conception of God we are failing in the way Kierkegaard warned about.  

That's as much of an answer as I can give to your objection to that point.  Living in a largely media mythical evangelical "Christian" mono-culture America or a Roman Catholic one wouldn't do much to give us a God susceptible to academic methods, scientific ones are, by plan and design, incapable of dealing with God. 

The "Christian" America was only as Christian as it put the economic justice and social justice teachings of Jesus into practice and some of the greatest proponents of that have been non-Christians, Jews, Native Americans, Muslims, etc.  Christianity as an appendage of secular republicanism and secular democracy is more likely to miss that.  You get entirely closer in the doing of it than in the talking about it or proclaiming about it or believing about it.  I don't agree with the "faith alone" stuff, I agree with the Epistle of James on that.  As I said, Jesus said his Kingdom was not of this world, it's only present in so far as God's will is done and it's not going to be one by anyone but us creatures.   Anything else isn't something we have a say in.

Jimmie Noone's Apex Club Orchestra - Four Or Five Times 1928

Direct link to video 

Jimmie Noone,clarinet.
Joe Poston,alto sax.
Earl Hines,piano.
Buddy Scot,banjo.
Johnny Wells,drums.

It's nice to be reminded what a good piano player Earl Hines was.   He was the only person from this era of jazz I got to hear in person,  when he was very old. 

I've always loved Jimmie Noone's playing and his singing.  Some people in so-called "jazz criticism" slammed his playing but he was admired by Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Maurice Ravel and he played with people like Earl Hines so who cares what John Hammond and his ilk said?   Criticism is artistic vampirism.

Noon Whine

I'LL WARN YOU, that adult-ed writing course I took last year is being offered again.  I've signed up for it.  Only if he assigns that stupid football story this time mine's going to be about how sports builds bad character.  

I got into a brawl over why anyone would figure Hulk Hogan or anyone who comes out of that industry would expect him to be anything other than a big-mouthed, ignorant, superstitious, neo-fascist ass because sports builds that far more often than not.  If he assigned a golfing story it would probably be even worse, from what I've read golfers are even worse than soap-opera wrestlers.  

Update:  I should have finished the thought, hearing recordings of the deranged musings of Herschel Walker, it's sad what football does to the brains of its players.  It reminds me of Paul Robeson's son being convinced that his father's dementia was caused by a government conspiracy against a man who, by then, had long ceased to be of any political effect in the United States when his college football playing was a far more likely reason for it.  The adulation of football doesn't only cause cognitive decline in the players but in everyone who focuses on it with a cheesy soft-focus lens and sentimental amber light.

Krysten Sinema Is A Champion Of Segregation And White Supremacy With A "D" After Her Name

I HADN'T SEEN the video of white-supremacist Krysten Sinema as she lied her friggin' head off in her anti-voting-rights speech last night so I didn't know that the allegedly former-Green, widely touted to be if not an atheist then a "non-theist" win for the anti-religion side Senator was wearing what looked to me not only like a cross on a chain around her neck but maybe even a crucifix?   I've gone looking for a closer view of her and couldn't see it.  Does this mean that as the lying, hypocritical, groovy-gal, thumbs-down on the worker-is-worthy-of-his-wage Senator has got religion as part of her ever changing, ever shifting shifty and always calculated identity?  Or is it just part of her current theatrical costuming?   She certainly hasn't shown any indication that she's gained a devotion to the teachings of Jesus so, as it generally is when someone shows they're wearing a cross like that, it's for show.

My conclusion at having watched her is that she is and always has been an amoral, self-seeking grifter who is far more interested in meeting with millionaires and billionaires to get money for her campaign fund, and, by the crooked laws of the land, herself than she is in anything she has purported to stand for.  The truth as can be heard in her 2010 season act of opposing the filibuster and contrasting that to that disgusting, dishonest speech of yesterday in which she claimed to have not been that person is the piece of crap stands for nothing except her own attention-getting gain. 

Arizona Democrats got duped by a con-artist, especially those on the left who probably thought it was groovy to have an ex-Green, pseudo-lefty, atheist as their Senator.  There are other con-artists in that vile body but she has got to take the cake among those sitting with a "D" after their names now.  

I called her speech an anti-voting rights speech and her a white-supremacist because she joins the long list of segregationist, white supremacists of the past who thwarted every civil-rights bill that was ever brought up in the past.  The results of what someone does is what they really mean, not the lying words that they say as a fig leaf covering their shame.  Only I doubt the racist piece of shit is capable of shame.

Never Trust A Green Or A Former Green They Are Republican Assets

I WILL ASSERT that there is almost certainly a financial payoff to Krysten Sinema that explains her perfidy.   What she proves is that Democrats actually do not have control of the Senate.  She's hoping to benefit from sinking democracy and from her actions it's just about certain she's planning to profit financially from it. 

She and Manchin are beneath contempt.

McCoy Tyner and the Latin Allstars Bossa Blue

 

Direct link to video  

    McCoy Tyner - piano
    Gary Bartz - saxophones
    Claudio Roditi - trumpet, flugelhorn
    Steve Turre - trombone
    Dave Valentin - flute
    Avery Sharpe - bass
    Ignacio Berroa - drums
    Johnny Almendra - timbales
    Giovanni Hidalgo - congas & percussion

Religion's Reduction Redux, Redux

THROUGH THE ESTIMABLE columnist Michael Sean Winters, I found out about a recently published book that asks if the West is reverting to paganism in the supposed death of Christianity.   The linked-to NYT article says, with me breaking in for comments: 

Many Americans have a sense that their country is less religious than it used to be. But is it really? The interplay among institutions, behaviors and beliefs is notoriously hard to chart. Even if we could determine that religious sentiment was in flux, it would be hard to say whether we were talking about this year’s fad or this century’s trend.

"Many Americans" mistake appearances for the real thing, the margarine of  "religion" of "Christianity" for the real thing.  Journalism and the scribbling professions encourage that substitution.  "Death of Christianity" is the bread and butter of many a person in the scribbling and academic rackets.

I remember my intense skepticism when, in the late 1970s the fad for people declaring themselves to be "reborn" was presented by the media as being a huge resurgence of "Christianity" in the United States.  Having grown up a Catholic and, at that time, a self-declared agnostic, not as a Christian, I'd say that such stuff is constantly in flux and as is the nature of things in flux, making a definitive statement about it is a. unlikely to be accurate and b. unlikely to even describe the state of affairs that will last, indeed, it's probably already unlike what it was when you made what you think was an observation of it.  I doubt that anyone who even sincerely was and remained an honest Christian during this entire time has not had their beliefs in anything but a state of fluctuation for the entire time.  To describe the ideas, the beliefs, the life experience that informs them in any fixed way is to distort or falsify the ongoing nature of all of those.   That is an error of thought that precedes all of those problems with scientific modernism I have been so critical of here.

Or perhaps we are dealing with an even deeper process. That is the argument of a much-discussed book published in Paris this fall. In it, the French political theorist Chantal Delsol contends that we are living through the end of Christian civilization — a civilization that began (roughly) with the Roman rout of pagan holdouts in the late fourth century and ended (roughly) with Pope John XXIII’s embrace of religious pluralism and the West’s legalization of abortion.

From what we can know of that enormous period of time I'd like to know exactly what stretch of it does anyone believe the nominally Christian West was actually governed by the teachings of Jesus?  The entire period of monarchies which claimed to be led by "Most Christian Princes" were better characterized by a continuation of the culture and practices and legal systems of the preceding pre-Christian epoch than anything based in turning the other cheek,  selling all you had and giving the money to those who wouldn't repay it, to the least among us, or any of the other commandments articulated by Jesus.  

I will be the first to note that there was much actual improvement when the Gospels, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets entered into the imaginations and beliefs of at least some of the baptized pagans which Soren Kierkegaard suspected most nominal Christians are.  Christianity even has had some, limited and various but consequential influence on laws and legal systems in the alleged Christian period of Europe and the Americas.  But that has certainly not anywhere swamped either the traditional remains of paganism or other counter-forces that have arisen since then, the "enlightenment" slammed here foremost among those.  

The past isn't what it used to be and it never was, my skepticism about figuring out the cultural identity of the fleeting present is as true about any generalization made about the past, especially a period of one and a half thousand years. 

There's a reason that the problem with Christianity is its absence, not its practice.

The book is called “La Fin de la Chrétienté,” which might be translated as “The End of the Christian World.” Ms. Delsol is quite clear that what is ending is not the Christian faith, with its rites and dogmas, but only Christian culture — the way Christian societies are governed and the art, philosophy and lore that have arisen under Christianity’s influence. 

To mistake the trappings and decorations for feeding the poor, clothing the naked, treating the ill, visiting the prisoner, etc. is to ignore the substance for the appearance. 

That is still quite a lot. In the West, Christian society is the source of our cultural norms and moral proscriptions, not to mention the territory of our present-day culture wars, with their strident arguments over pronouns and statues and gay bridegrooms and pedophile priests.

For the most part, Ms. Delsol rues what is being lost as Christian civilization ends. Yet her arguments, though they are strong and pointed, are almost secondary to the tone of the book, which is a model for polite engagement with hotly contested subjects. A beneficiary of the trends she deplores — say, an atheist, a feminist, a transgender person, a Muslim immigrant — will likely recognize the world she describes as the world he lives in.

The Gospel of Jesus would be far, far more in line with treating all of those so named with the decency which has only recently started, in fits and starts and entirely imperfectly in the post-WWII period.   I have said that much as I deplore the origins of the Anglican tradition with Henry VIII, the Tudors, the Stuarts, etc. in the later 20th century to today it has been more Christian, in much of it, than it ever has been.  It is certainly far more Christian today than it was in the 18th and most of the 19th century when it was, almost thoroughly an appendage of industrial age British capitalist feudalism.  Like the equally pagan periods of the Papacy, the hierarchy and so most of the Roman Catholic Church, during its long and ambiguously moral history, it contained people who took the Gospel of Jesus seriously.  The same is true for most of the Christian denominations that writers and scribblers and social-scientists love to characterize in a way that crushes a view of their diversity.   

To take only two of those categories, there are vigorous and living and important Christian feminist and LGBTQ people who are some of the most important thinkers AND MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL DOERS* attempting to live their lives according to the teachings of Jesus and who evangelize to convert others to their most Christian and most "non-evangelical" points of view and points of departure. I think some of the most vigorous signs of the living vitality of Christianity are found in Christian feminism, in what is so often called Queer theology.  There is a lot of that which I think is wrong, some of the most paid attention to is the kind of religious attention getting that I found distasteful in the writing of the late Bishop John Spong.   But that's going to be true of any period of any of this.  

No one should ever go far into reading, thinking or writing about Christianity more certain of themselves and proud of themselves than they first went into it.  Anyone who doesn't come out of it questioning themselves, their expectations and conclusions - temporary as those are bound to be - hasn't really been doing it the right way.  The same is true to a lesser degree in history or other huge, person surpassing subjects. 

I think anyone who chooses to attempt to make a study of or a general statement about any of this should start with the knowledge that they are biting off more than anyone can chew. 

I'm not worried about the future of Christianity.  I believe it was the late Shaker Sister Mildred Barker who, when asked if she was worried about the likely extinction of the Shaker religion said she wasn't because it was the work of God and that that would continue.  She wasn't stupid, she knew that hers would almost certainly be the penultimate period of the United Society of Shakers at Sabbathday Lake, the last active Shaker community.  Last I looked they were down to their last three members.  Christianity didn't end with the extinction of the Ebionites or other early sects of it or the original Jerusalem Church that Paul talked about.  I think that Christianity, the belief in the Gospel of Jesus, the teachings of his followers, those who take it seriously and live their lives that way to the imperfect best of their abilities will not end.   

The extent to which doing unto others as we would have them do unto us, to loving God according to the Jewish creed and our neighbor as ourselves (the only creed Jesus is ever quoted as requiring) is expressed in the watered-down general culture is the extent to which decency, equality and democracy are possible.  Democracy, in the modern egalitarian understanding of it, is not a gift from the pagan Greeks, it is a modern development of an understanding of the Law of Moses and the Gospel of Jesus.  It is an imperfect human attempt to approximate something less dangerous than monarchy or other forms of gangster-oligarchy and to make something in the imperfect human terms that is closer to the entirely not-of-this-world Kingdom that Jesus announced as a possibility, perhaps one that is inevitable as creation continues.   It's that which I am in deepest fear for under the neo-pagan-"enlightenment" negation of everything Jesus taught.  Especially that which is called "Christian." 

* This article which was posted as I was writing this is exactly relevant to that point and to the anti-Christianity of much of hierarchical "Christianity" including Catholicism.  I think for Christianity to flourish in the churches, where it so often doesn't, much of "Christianity" will have to leave it.  Much of official, hierarchical, empowered "Christianity" left the church or never entered it to start with. 

Jesus said those who do the will of God are his brothers and sisters, etc.  Not those who uphold dogma, doctrine and man-made laws and regulations.  Churches have mostly been about those other things. 

On The Compliant That I Posted That Jimmie Noone Record Instead Of Posing And Posturing Over Ronnie Spector Passing Over

WHAT AM I SUPPOSED to do about a 78-year-old pop singer dying?   Open a vein? Tear my hair out and theatrically pose about the terrible injustice of a woman who lived a long and full life dying of cancer, not something at all uncommon among people in our age cohort?  

What did you do to prevent it?  If she hadn't fled that homicidal a-hole you hold up as a hero, she'd have died a lot younger. 

You don't see me posing and posturing over Jimmie Noone dying when he was 48, do you? 

The Price We Pay For Upholding Ideological Conformity Under That Framing I Talked About Yesterday Can Be Our LIves

I CONDUCTED AN UNSCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT last night.  I was in a small group of completely vaccinated, boosted distanced people, at my insistence distanced farther than the CDC ever recommended, and I decided to voice some of my skepticism about the wisdom of focusing biological education on the topic of evolution and it quickly developed in several interesting ways, including those who seemed to be panicked over my apostasy on that quickly bringing up the behavioral alleged sciences.  

I asked them what practical use anything they believed they knew about evolution has been in their lives or professional careers - one of them is a working though not usually teaching biologist -  and if they wouldn't rather, especially in this pandemic, preferred it if the People they encounter had a more accurate and realistic view of public health, immunology, virology and how to avoid catching and spreading the disease.  

The discussion that followed showed how anxious these college-credentialed people were with the idea that a perhaps interesting but otherwise practically useless topic in biology was of lesser importance to the list of practical biological issues of daily life, like how to avoid and deal with illness, the entirely related issue of sexual responsibility and the practical morality of not hurting anyone, giving them an STD, doing physical damage, THE UNWANTED PREGNANCIES THAT I KNOW SOME OF THEM HAVE HAD TO DEAL WITH, EITHER DIRECTLY OR THROUGH THEIR CHILDREN, etc.   None of which is helped by spending much time in the one high school biology class and/or the Intro class that they might take if they go to college on what is essentially a topic of only ideological value, such value as such junk generally is.  Less than an hour, five times a week, if that, approximately 185 days of their lives are probably as much time as most people spend on the topic of biology - what they would have needed to have even a basic, accurate view of viruses, the diseases they cause, how those develop, how to avoid them, etc. is a life and death matter.  

Is it any wonder that so many of the American People were such suckers for the shit they got sold online and over the cabloid venue of FOX?    Even the elderly now, among the most vulnerable of those who got suckered,  mostly took a biology or other science class in school where they could have been sucker-proofed to a larger extent, but, no, that didn't happen.

The panic that they felt was entirely related to the enormous weight that the mostly ideologically emphasis that the topic of evolution has in intellectual and class coercion and conformity to the common received block-thought and the unusual idea that someone like me might challenge its all-consuming importance. 

Other than the professional biologist, I may have known as much as any others in the group on the topic, having read so much of it in my own ideological war against eugenics and scientific racism and it became obvious how deeply it has been embedded in the thought of the college-credentialed - the biologist admitted he'd never read either On the Origin of Species or The Descent of Man, no one else in the group had, either.  Though one of them had read the Voyage of the Beagle.   Of course I had to diss Darwin and Huxley (they didn't know the names of Haeckel or any of the others) which really shocked some of them.  None of them had read Huxley either but they remembered him as the costume drama cum BBC-PBS presentation of the topic.  I wish there had been time for me to go into the lies about the Huxley-Wilberforce encounter but there wasn't.   I think the BBC and PBS have been largely responsible for the ideological propagandistic indoctrination on this topic among the TV watching credentialed public, and they sold us all a bunch of badly documented bull shit along the way.   Even a practical and accurate in-school education would have had to counter that concerted campaign that inflated the importance of this largely unimportant topic.

If I had another 20 years to devote to it I'd track down some of the other idols of the culture of the college credentialed.  I've noticed there are loads of things about which people of that credentialing and of even the more modest class of them are not only expected to hold with but are required to believe and uphold if they are to retain their respectability.    Respectability isn't something that I much care about anymore, it costs too much and once you see through it you lose your desire to have it. 

Jimmie Noone - You Rascal you

 

Direct link to video  

Felt like hearing some Jimmie Noone and his Apex Orchestra and his Albert system clarinet.  

Late Resolution: Last Hate Mail? Let's See If I Can Hold Out In The Future

WE IMPOSE STRUCTURES ON TIME, time doesn't seem to notice.  That structure we put on the past is what we think of as history.   That doesn't mean the structure is real but it does comprise what we story-telling animals can consider an understanding of it.  Though there isn't any real reason to think some of that isn't spot on, too.  Only time doesn't care.

I think it's extremely helpful to consider that the 20th century till today was the culmination of the test of time for modernism, whether the modernism that started with the Baconian-Descratian scientific revolution and its impact on world culture starting in Europe in the 17th century, the 18th century with one of the greatest achievements in the history of science or, indeed, in human culture, the Newtonian revolution of physics and cosmology.  And the subsequent and, I think entirely unfortunate, attempt to extend that far past its knowably valid realm into the general culture well outside of the process of Baconian observation, measurement and rigorous analysis.*  The so-called "enlightenment."  

The American "Founders" and many of the criticisms I've made of their Constitution and other writings are directly attributable to that cultural milieu.   The extent to which the "enlightenment" led to such milestones of actual progress such as the destruction of some, not all ghettos under the military despotism and bloodshed of the same Napoleon who John Adams credited in that quote I went over yesterday, that's a validly positive development from it.  But the concomitant violence and destruction and despotism that accompanied it is as real an evil as the ghetto was.  I think that a military dictator who crowned himself Emperor, widely considered a major milestone of "enlightenment" is worth considering as a warning of what was to come, one which is still not taken as such.

 The 19th century with its major figures in valid science and the ossification of the "enlightenment" into the ideological programs I've slammed, endlessly here, scientism, materialism, atheism, anti-religious secularism, Darwinism and the amorality that Nietzsche very insightfully and very accurately deduced from them and then developed with depraved abandonment.  

Those developed in the late 19th and early 20th century into what is more popularly understood to be "modernism" in philosophy, especially in literature, in the visual and solid arts, not as validly in most music**, though there are some generally lesser aspects of music that were self-consciously "modernistic."  And in what are considered sciences starting in the same period which I have also slammed endlessly here, sociology, psychology, anthropology (though there have been movements in anthropology to be more honest about the dubious scientific nature of what they do in that one) economics, etc. which, as I went through earlier here, jettisoned the use of Baconian methods, something that Darwinism had done before that and gotten away with. 

In politics and morality and real life modernism was given a test of time, especially in the 20th century until today and the results have been a disaster.  The environmental catastrophe that has come is directly attributable to the thing that Bacon hoped for in his science, the imperialistic domination of all of nature, turning it to human material advantage and profit without regard for anything like the sacred.  It is one of the reasons that I cannot believe, on reading much of him the past several years, that he, despite his intellectual and scholarly brilliance and experience, wrote the "Shakespeare" plays.  

The link between self-conscious modernism, especially literary modernism, scientific modernism, intellectual and philosophical modernism and all of the most horrific of the regimes which regarded what they do as  based in science, Communism, fascism, Nazism and the non-regime program of much of anarchism - never forget that the phony saint of anarchism Emma Goldman was a devotee of Nietzsche with all his moral depravity, violence and love of elitist inequality - is enough for me to have rejected modernism altogether.  Not in the stupid manner of longing for some lost past, which is not only a stupidly romantic and dishonest way to structure understanding of the past BUT AN ABSOLUTE IMPOSSIBILITY  but to get beyond modernism, including the malignant parts of the inheritance from Bacon and Descarte and a whole host of those who came with it.   Science, for better or worse, and there is much of both in it, we are not going to abandon.

We can't go back in time, we should not delude ourselves we can nor should we want to.  Time goes in one direction, the universe goes on as creation continues, we are to go into the future, our imaginations about that may make plans, we cannot know even as much about that as we do the past

One thing that I think is a reliable conclusion about that,  we have to try to do better or we will get worse.  Wallowing in the things that haven't worked are reliably suspected of producing the problem of the past, they are rightly believed to produce the same in the future and it is the highest immorality to retain them.

Doing to others as we would have them to do to us, treating the least among us as we would treat God, forgiving the wrongs done to us as we would have the wrongs we do forgiven, trying to act as People of good will while being fully aware that there are people of bad will that we have an obligation to thwart in their desires work.  Darwinism gave us eugenics, scientific racism, World War One, the mass murders of the Nazis and many other depravities.  Scientism, atheism and materialism have done nothing but made people arrogant and conceited and, in so far as science is involved, more efficient and effective in doing evil. 

And I don't care who says saying that gives me a case of the cooties.  Grow the fuck up and face history.

* In fairness, Bacon and Descartes were the originators of those far too ambitious extensions, Bacon put the ambitions for his science in terms taken from English imperialism,  his achievements in creating science are entirely admirable, his goals for it in life have been a disaster.  The same can be said of Descartes's to some extent.  His treatment of animals on the basis of his ideological conclusions has to mask a sadistic callous love of inflicting pain which even someone of his ideology would have been able to restrain themselves from if it were not a product of his malignant desire.  I could make a long list from Hobbes to the big names in "public intellectualism" today to go with it. 

**  In music the attachment to fascism largely came from the retrospective hankering after and attempt to regain the past in neo-classicism of such composers as Stravinsky who in 1930 declared his admiration for Mussolini and disdainfully rejected democracy,  I've never liked his neo-classical period with a very few exceptions though I have to admit since I read what he said then has soured me of all of it.  As a composer I would take off my hat to him but I can't stand it anymore.  There are things more important than music, literature, art and being attuned to the zeitgeist.   Hell with the zeitgeist, it's dead as soon as it develops.

Update:  I should add, in so far as music is concerned, the "folk music" revival was another thing which had its bad side.   The early, nationalistic-romantic view of folk lore and folk music isn't that far removed from some of the things which developed into various national fascisms and Nazism (doing a lot of original language reading of the literature of Nazism has done more to put me off of "volkisher" talk than even the singer-songwriter "folk musicians" of my youth did).  Though it also is as true that a truly universalist collector and researcher into folklore such as Bela Bartok was, was the opposite of that malignant trend. 

Update 2:  I could have mentioned the music of the Soviet and other Communist establishments, excepting that of Cuba, which have been characterized by retrogressive bathos and self-conscious populism.  There's a reason that even the neo-classicism of fine composers such as Prokofiev and, though I really don't care for his music, Shostakovitch, got them in trouble with Stalin and the mostly forgettable Soviet music establishment, their condemnations including terms and names describing some of the greatest music being composed and played at the time.  

Even When Law May Not Have Been An Ass As Written, Asses As Judges Will Make It So

I TAKE NO COMFORT from the obvious fact that the law is an ass in Australia as it is in the United States, if as much of an ass as the Republican-fascist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, we'll see.   A selfish, conceited, ignorant Serbian tennis star was allowed to break the public safety regulations by an ass of a judge named Anthony Kelley whose knowledge of mathematics and science is something I'd very much like to know.  From the NYT.

Novak Djokovic, the Serbian tennis star, moved one step closer to competing for his record 21st Grand Slam title after an Australian judge ordered his release from immigration detention on Monday, the latest turn in a five-day saga over his refusal to be vaccinated for Covid-19.

The judge, Anthony Kelly, found that Djokovic had been treated unfairly after his arrival at a Melbourne airport for the Australian Open, where he had been cleared to play with a vaccination exemption. After detaining Djokovic, the border authorities promised to let him speak with tournament organizers and his lawyers early Thursday morning, only to cancel his visa before he was given a chance.

Restoring the visa does not, however, guarantee that Djokovic will be able to vie for his 10th Open title when the tournament begins next Monday. In court, the government’s lawyers warned that the immigration minister could still cancel his visa, which would lead to an automatic three-year ban on his entering the country.

What's fair about letting someone who could make himself safe for admission into the country by getting vaccinated because he, through his selfishness, conceit and ignorance, chooses not to, putting who knows how many other people at potential risk.

What is clear from the actions of too many judges in the English speaking Peoples is that too many of those hired to administer the law are dangerously ignorant of the risks and consequences of a dangerously contagious infectious disease and, this far into this pandemic, it's clear that just as some members of the U. S. Supreme Court have openly said that their legal training and judicial habits are a sufficient replacement for knowledge,  their arrogant ignorance makes the law the engine of danger to all of us.   They have absolutely no business making court-bench law on matters they clearly don't understand or take seriously.

Making it impossible for elected officials who have to face the public and, so, the consequences for their decisions and actions in office to do that on the basis of some judge's sense of "fairness" to a pampered elite entity such as this man who is a rich celebrity on the basis of playing a fucking game is not something compatible with public safety.   It's clear that too many judges and "justices" have contempt for public safety but not for the whims and preferences of those who want to endanger the public.   "Liberty," "freedom" turned from real entities that entail responsibility into libertarian idols being used to do that.

I think judges and "justices" in more than just the United States need to be taken down a few pegs and made a little more humble.  Humility through imposing responsibility for their decisions and actions might help a lot, just kow-towing to them when they do what this ass of an Aussie judge and what I have every reason to believe the malicious members of the U. S. Supreme Court will soon do.   I don't favor an elected judiciary, the voters hiring them, the vileness of the Supreme Court in a place like Wisconsin or Michigan proves that's no answer.  But maybe the voting public should have the ability to directly fire them, since the impeachment process is so broken under Republican-fascist fascism.   Having them serve for life, imagined to shield them from the temptations of using their office for gain in their often sleazy profession, has not worked.  The U. S. Supreme Court is probably the most open to corruption of any court in the United States through the power of lifetime appointment and their self-given powers of dictatorial fiat.  I don't know enough about the Australian system to know if it's true there but I think a lot of the arrogance of a lot of lower level judges might be restrained if we could make the Supreme Court and its members follow some kind of real ethics code instead of what's there now.

McCoy Tyner - La Habana Sol

Direct link to video
 

McCoy Tyner, piano

Aaron Scott, drums 

Avery Sharpe, bass

Really cold night here, needed to hear this.  Rest in Peace McCoy Tyner 

The Tireless Tiresome Meter Maid of Orthography Is On The Case

 OH I think it was OK for someone running the fever I've been today.  Maybe I'll correct it.   Maybe I'll leave it like it is.  Gherry is the name of someone I used to e-mail with.