Music For A Sad Anniversary - Doc Watson - Honey Baby Blues

 

Ben Shapiro vs. Barbie: The Movie, Part 2 with John Fugelsang

 

Errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum - More Confessions

I REMEMBERED that I'd called Rufus Jones "Rufus Fox" right after I went home from posting one of my recent pieces and then forgot to fix it when I got around to posting again.  I seem to do that a lot, one of the few down-sides I've found to not having internet in the home, anymore.  I was going to have it put in again but I'm getting so much more done offline than I did when I had it right there.   I guess embarrassment is the price I pay to not waste time online.  I hadn't even heard about the Peruvian aliens until my sister told me about them, though I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it even now that I've seen the smudgy looking pictures of them now that I have. 

I'd thought I'd gotten another name wrong after leaving the place I go to go online and couldn't check it but that one was OK as posted.   I don't want to get too casual about it but don't want to get obsessive either. 

Those "aliens" I'll believe it when they're shown to have a different physiology than earthly beings.  I'll be a real hard sell if they've got DNA, for example.    Absent a conclusive conclusion that aliens with DNA are proof of God's design of life,  it would be too stupendously improbable for that to have evolved earth-like in two places in the universe independently. 

From The Confessions Of A Thought Criminal - Peter Brown On Wealth, Work and the Holy Poor: Early Christian Monasticism between Syria and Egypt

I HAD NOT paid enough attention to the great late-classical historian Peter Brown because I'd been turned off to him by a review I read of one of his books from around the turn of the millennium.  I'd gotten the wrong idea from reading the review in one of the lefty publications that Brown was the kind of dismissive disciple of the "enlightenment" who rejected Christianity in that most modern of intellectual follies, believing that anti-Christians from some suburb of the all encompassing megalopolis, "modernism," could see Jesus and his followers and the later development of early Christianity better than those who lived it.  That review couldn't have been more wrong about that.  

It was lazy and stupid of me to not go to the bother of reading Peter Brown's scholarship because I'd been given an entirely wrong idea about him and his work not even second-hand but through the ideological filter of an enemy of Christianity.  I've recently started on Brown's work through listening to his lectures and will soon go to the books as I have access to them and have found that that secondary level view of his work is a complete distortion of him.  That's a good example of what's wrong with the typical modern scholastic view of early Christianity and the times and, so, world it arose in.  If I could get a seriously wrong view of a scholar who lives at the same time I and the reviewer does, who lives in roughly the same world from the filtering of a typically modernistic, as I recall academic scribbler, how much more wrong will they get texts and the People who wrote them or spoke them from two thousand years ago?  

That's not to say that modern scholars aren't at a considerable advantage from those of that decisive period in the development of the "enlightenment," as Peter Brown points out in the lecture I'm posting here, today's scholars have an enormously larger corpus of primary source material than even the greatest scholars of the past had available to them.  He specifically mentions the iconic "enlightenment" interpreter of late Classical history, Edmund Gibbons.  Not only is his still influential writing obviously deficient through his lack of knowledge of the   enormous troves of previously unpublished manuscripts discovered preserved in desert sands and in ancient monastic libraries but also in having more direct access to enormous amounts of material that have been published.  The scope of his knowledge was severely limited by the scope of his focus and it's blindingly obvious that his scholarship was led by his prejudices and biases.  

It's bizarre that so much 18th and even 19th century scholarship is still the basis of the common received non-wisdom about things like that.   I think it was Luke Timothy Johnson who pointed out that a student right now, with access to the internet has available to them enormously greater amounts of published materials, primary documents, not only printed and published but also legible imaging of manuscripts which only those with access to the greatest libraries of the early 20th century might have had.  And I'd doubt that any library of ink on paper before the internet could have competed with what's available for free, now. I will point out that what's less available is the published scholarship of the recent past which is generally behind pay-walls.  Unless you have access to the largest of university libraries, most of that is sealed off of any would be scholar or student without the ability to access it.   I would add to that the enormously useful tools of word search and immediate access to a text on the screen that it would have taken many minutes if not hours of time to track down in the stacks, in the series, in the individual volumes, even when those were well indexed that you can find in seconds.  Those hours and minutes and seconds really add up fast when you're doing research - I still remember the days I spent pouring through PDFs of a Victorian Anthropological journal only to find out that Darwin had lied about what another scientist had said.  I wish all old journals, at least, were fully digitized. 
 

Unfortunately, I can't provide a free link to a printed version of this lecture which is behind a pay wall.    But the lecture itself is a revelation about the differing relationship to real work in Egyptian and Western monasticism and the rejection of labor for monks in Eastern Christian and other monasticism.  It's really astonishing how much of Christianity is sealed off from most of the minds of most Christians and, far more so, those who think they know something about Christianity from the outside of it.  It's a temptation to try to transcribe it but I'm not ready to do that yet.  The questions and answers are almost as important as the lecture, itself.  

I have found that Peter Brown is a far better and far more honest a  scholar than the reviews had led me to believe and one with a really welcomed sense of humor.  I will point out that several times in the lecture his severe stammer comes out but it's more than worth it to wait for him to continue.  I'm glad he had the courage to give lectures despite that.   This is one of the best historical lectures and one of the best lectures on early Christianity and late antiquity that I've yet heard.  He is a great historian and a great scholar and I suspect a real Christian.   

Catholic Women Preach - September 10, 2023

 

 Jacobs, MSW, Ph.D.

"For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

Several years before my aunt died, she spoke of the need for family healing. She was the matriarch who carried family secrets and negotiated disputes. I remember her saying she was tired of this mediator role and that before she died, we needed to find ways to dialogue and to forgive one another, not just once but every time there was a need.

I asked a friend whose background was in family counseling and spiritual direction to facilitate a family meeting. Her opening prayer invited the Holy Spirit to be present in our time together. The session was one of compassionate listening and reconciliation. My aunt was at peace with the outcome and reminded us until the day she died of the importance of family prayer and dialogue.

Years later as I thought about the African philosophy of Ubuntu, I am because we are, I remember the coming together of my family who represented different religious traditions in the spirit of oneness of family and all of humanity held together by the Holy Spirit’s presence.

There is a healing power for those gathered in prayer who trust that God is in the midst of them. While we may share hope for a specific outcome, we must remember that line of the Lord’s prayer where we ask for God’s will to be done. Trusting in God, frees us to hear the Holy Spirit’s guidance, not just our own desired outcome, for in the midst of the community and in our hearts as we become open to new ways of hearing the other, we realize that whatever the outcome may be, we are not alone on our journey. We are in the family and community where God calls us.

In Pope Francis’ catechesis on discernment, he said that the Bible reminds us that God’s voice is one of peace. Be silent, witness what your heart is feeling. At that moment, the Lord’s voice comes to us individually and collectively.  Nothing can hinder the love that comes from being in contact with the Lord. The Holy Spirit who is present in us makes the Word of God come alive, suggests new meanings, opens doors that seem closed, indicates lifegiving paths where the road seems to be dark and, filled with loss and confusion.

Discernment is the process of listening to God during our journey. A praying community is important for the journey. We find that we are blessed with the joys and sorrows of family, community, and our world. While we may not have received the companions we want, we will always receive the companions we need.

Blessings coming during the sorrows of the covid pandemic may have resulted in being drawn to companions in new ways as zoom communities developed for prayer and sharing. They may have meant expanding networks in local communities for food deliveries and wellness checks. We were invited to create new ways and include others as family as we found creative ways to gather in God’s name. As the restrictions of Covid pass, we may choose to continue those gatherings virtually or in person to acknowledge the gifts of those who have now become members of our extended family and to discern how God is calling us to be in community and to serve one another.

Being at peace with God’s presence in our life allows us to be open to other ways of serving. To remember that each day when we hear His voice, our heart is not to be hardened from past experiences, for God invites us to come to the present moment with forgiveness, thanksgiving, love, and joy.

The challenges of our church and our world are invitations to continuous discernment of how to dialogue, to forgive, and to be obedient to the urgings of the Spirit. We live in a time when we need to step out and invite others to prayer, dialogue, and action. We need to trust the Holy Spirit to guide us. For the challenges invite us to become open to our personal and collective vulnerabilities in creating and nurturing communities of faith that are inclusive. To remember that we are not alone, that we are because others exist in the world surrounding us.   We trust that whatever challenging circumstances or people we meet on our journeys, we are called to listen for God’s voice as we gather in groups of two or more and hold in our hearts the love of our neighbors as ourselves.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Alf Silver - Waltzing With Hilda

 Waltzing With Hilda

 

This play is the one with Mennonites in it, I won't go into more about the plot because what I'd want to say about it would be a plot spoiler.   

I'll give you another one since it's only a half an hour.

Play Mystery For Me 

 

It's too bad that the CBC stopped producing radio dramas, it was one of my favorite sources for it, listening to these going in and out of tune on short-wave when this was broadcast.

I'm posting this quickly so I don't have time to type out the credits.  I'll try to update later.   

What I Did During Summer Vacation

IN GOING OVER some of the series I posted radio dramas from, I listened to one that I'll try to post soon in which Mennonites play a major role, not Old Order Mennonites or even very conservative Mennonites, which are another matter entirely.  Though not entirely unconnected.  By chance listening to it soon meshed with my reading Studies in Mystical Religion by Rufus Jones.  The Anabaptists play a large role in the book,  leading up to both the present day Mennonites and Amish but also the Baptists (English Anabaptists) and Quakers. I hadn't understood the connection before.  Jones also ties them in with much earlier movements like the Lollards though he admitted there weren't documentary links to prove that. Once there is a literary paper-trail, the links are more secure.  

It's certainly a different kind of Christianity than I'm used to, having been originally a Catholic and now a Catholic+ accepting whatever I find in other kinds of Christianity, Judaism, etc. which seems to be on the right way to me.  I've read and listened to a number of things, not by Old Order or the kinds of conservative Mennonites or Anabaptists who don't use that kind of technology.  It seems wise to limit exposure to that kind of media if you have impressionable adults or children around, it's what's made so many Americans into amoral idiots.  Some use of technology by some Mennonites might give some hints for using it while not being corrupted by it.  

Many of the Mennonites, even some quite conservative ones who I am reading and hearing are remarkably reasonable about their religion and those who don't follow it.  Some of them are downright liberal in some things as even some of the conservative ones are quite radical by current American secular Mammonist standards.  Of course they don't tend to be libertarian liberals because they have a moral center and motive in what they do, they take the New Testament quite seriously, which would lead someone in most cases to be radical if you take equality and justice and economic justice as seriously as that would tend to make you.  I can't really take to things like the fixed notion of gender roles in much of it and most of the various denominations are far from welcoming to LBGTQ+ People.   

In giving up ideas of an ordained priesthood, the ideas of the Sacraments that are held by Orthodox, Catholic, many Protestants, they certainly give up some things valued in those traditions but they also gain other things, a remarkable flexibility in the creation, implosions and rearrangements of local congregations and larger groupings.  They base much of their religion on the local congregations, some of which split voluntarily if the members feel those are getting too large.  There's a lot to be said for that.  As well as splitting due to what seems to outsiders as minor or major theological disagreements, details of discipline or interpretation of the Bible.  There is a great deal of that and there has been from the very beginning of the movement.  

It's a bit ironic that most of the public consciousness of Anabaptists is based on the rigid holding to ways of life and conduct that were passed by in the general culture in the 19th, 18th or even 16th century, minor things like buttons and lengths of shirt sleeves have been enough to split up over.  If those seem minor to me, well, I'm not in the groups so I don't have any way to know what it means to those who are.  

I have a problem with the limits of education some of the groups impose because if the children choose to leave, are kicked out or otherwise lose the support of their family and community, they can be left in a serious state of distress.  I've never thought that a religious choice made out of ignorance of the wider world is a real choice or a safe means of finding solid belief.  But the same thing can be said of children who go to other private or even many public schools.  I doubt that a child whose education was, in reality, replaced by TV, the internet or mindless entertainment so common in secular, a-religious America is much better off.  I know of a 19 year old who graduated from high school last year who is as up the creek as anyone who was never educated past an 8th grade level in antique Plat-Deutsch.   

I am most interested in what would probably be called "liberal Mennonites" some groups of which have stopped calling themselves Mennonites while staying identified as Anabaptists.  One of the things I've listened to were the presentations of the Mennonite Writers Conference held at Goshen College in 2022, the keynote address was given by Casey Platt, a Mennonite trans-woman whose writing I'm planning on reading when I can get around to finding them.  The others who spoke were as interesting.  It gave me an insight into a world that I never knew existed before.  It's a different kind of "evangelical" Christianity than you're going to get from the American media.  It's certainly more centered in the radicalism of the Gospel, Acts and Epistles than 95% of what you'll hear called "evangelical Christianity" in the media.

Christianity is changing, that's certainly the case, just as it always has. Reading Gregory of Nyssa and some others, I'm convinced it's supposed to change as the universe and our life in it is always changing. I believe in The Living God and the Living Christ, there is no past that we can ever recover or long preserve.  I would bet that even the most reactionary of Mennonites or Amish congregations really live in the past of their families and groups.  The trad-Catholic cult may be able to continue to make believe it's still 1952 for quite a while with the billionaires trying to harness Catholicism to push capitalist-fascism in politics - though I'm hoping Francis and his successor can suppress that heresy.   "Mainline churches" in Protestantism seem to have problems similar to Mennonites only translated to their own vocabularies.  I don't consider many of the Baptists to be Christians anymore, they having gone over to Mammon worship like the trad-Catholics have, and from what I gather from listening to critics in American Orthodoxy they feel Orthodoxy has undergone the same kind of hostile takeover that Catholicism in America has.  

Reading in Rufus Joneses book how 17th century English Protestantism devolved into the Ranters looks remarkably familiar in the general outlines of the majority of "white evangelicals" in America.  Only those People were more marginal with less money and generally didn't have automatic weapons and memberships in fascists and Nazi organizations.  They weren't getting billionaire money or its equivalent.  The "white evangelical" and "trad-Catholics" of the Republican Party are if anything more ga-ga than the Ranters were.  And I'd include a number of the members of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops in that, Strickland in Tyler, Texas is certainly in their number as is the putrid Raymond Burke.  I'd put Barron among them, too, though he has more media savvy. 

Maybe the future of Christianity is in small independent churches, probably a lot of them house churches supported by their local congregation and householders.  I have a friend who is working on writing and compiling a small hymnal for such a small congregation.  Believe me, he never thought he'd be doing that fifty years after we were in college together. But I'd never have thought I'd be writing something like this.   Maybe the future of Christianity is going to be a lot like the ferment of the early Reformation in which old forms and ways are going to have to give way to newer ones, Women's roles, LGBTQ+ issues, different cultural and regional ways found where old forms and ways have failed.  I don't think that big churches and even many small church buildings are going to play much of a role in it. And there is also the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement and the Intentional Eucharistic Community movement.   Maybe that was where things started to go wrong, to start with, building big churches. Earliest Christianity was pretty much a home-church affair, that's what the Protestants imagined they were restoring, though that's not possible or, perhaps, even what we're supposed to be doing.  

I would recommend Rufus Foxes book readable from the link above, though there is some of it I don't agree with.  He has slight regard for the great Orthodox tradition in favor of the later Western, Latin tradition.  I find St. Gregory of Nyssa quite a bit better than St. Augustine who I think led Western Christianity down a terrible path which it still is far from recovering from.  I think his analysis of the early corruption of Protestantism through Luther's and Zwingli's dependence on secular powers and, so, allowed their reforms to conform with what secular powers were comfortable with.  The enormous and deadly attempt to suppress and summarily murder to get rid of  Anabaptism was, I think, a combination of the attempt to protect the power of both the state and the established churches - I do agree with Jones that the persecution and mass murder of Anabaptists is one of the darkest episodes in Christianity, not that there were not other such mortal sins committed by the Churches as soon as those allied themselves to secular power in the early centuries of Christianity.   

I would also recommend reading and listening to the Mennonites and other Anabaptists, even if things like Women covering their hair or the rejection of LGBTQ+ People by some of them might make you angry.  

One thing I did like is that so many of them have such a robust practice of congregational singing.  I'd heard how impressive it can be to hear how Mennonites who come together from different places can sing in 4-part harmony at the drop of a hymn title.  While some of it has the limits of mediocre 19th century Protestant hymnody, some of it is quite a bit better than that.  One of the articles I read about churches splitting over being welcoming to LGBTQ+ People ended with a minister saying, well, we can still sing together.  

Let Me Say It So You Hear It - THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A RIGHT TO DO WHAT'S WRONG!

WHILE LISTENING TO some lawyers commenting on the obvious truth that Mark Meadows twisted his legitimate role as Chief of Staff to criminally participating in the planning of the January 6th insurrection into a proper function of a federal official it occurred to me that his claim has some of the same thinking behind it as the even more dangerous idea that someone has a "right" to lie.  In fact, that his lawyer would ever leave him unaware of the obvious nature of the lie he has told in court that what he did was a legitimate function of a presidential chief-of-staff is a fine example of how the legal profession has digested that slogan and it makes them unable to appreciate that there is not only a difference between the truth and lies but that the difference is often of the greatest possible consequence. I hope he is successfully tried and convicted of perjury, though I hope even more that lawyers will stop reciting the terrible lie that someone "has a right to lie."  It would seem that the rule of thumb under current notions of such things is that a lie is as good as the truth if you can work it the way you want it to.  Such thinking would seem to be endemic to our legal system,  yet people wonder at how Trump has managed to avoid conviction his entire privileged, rich-straight-white-male life.

I still keep hearing media lawyers like Maya Wiley use the pat phrase "has a right to lie," which it is so far beneath her to say, and many who are not usually at tall above saying such an untrue thing.    It is insane that this many years into the deadly examples of why there is no "right to lie," Trump, Bush II (never forget how the Bush II regime lied us into what is still the biggest military-political disaster the United States ever entered into), Reagan's lies that fomented terrorist fascist movements in Central America leading to consequences that we are still dealing with, etc.  That is well after the media itself, maybe the greatest source of that kind of criminally insane thinking, has finally noticed that lies are destructive of decent government and the greatest friend that fascism has had apart from armed violence.  

Someone, someday, should make a real study of the price that American democracy has paid for the permission of the media to lie given to it by the Warren Court and expanded enormously by every subsequent arrangement of the Supreme Court, the Roberts Court accelerating the empowerment of lies like no other.  It's probably at least as great as the enormous cost to American democracy and American decency that our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy and racism has cost us.  Which is not to underestimate the cost of male supremacy, the universal form of fascism that keeps half of the human population under the inhibitions of a reign of terror so ubiquitous that many Women think it's some kind of natural order that they have been gulled into rather liking.  American racism is the evil fruit of lies.  

There is no right to do something that is wrong.

That is a moral truth that should fall far more easily from the lips of civil rights lawyers, other lawyers, anyone who is entrusted to teach lawyers in any law school, it should be required to be posted in the front of every classroom in the country and preached from every pulpit.  I would say that any school that wouldn't post it should be disqualified from presenting itself as a school, any denomination that wouldn't agree with it and so act should be defined as a pseudo-religious cult that shouldn't be allowed to pass itself off as a religion.  

I've been having this argument long enough to know the moves of those who defend lying and the liars who lie.

What about lying to save the life of someone you know is in hiding from someone who will harm or kill them.   The "is it wrong to lie to the Nazis about where the Jews are hiding" ruse.

Of course that is not a often encountered moral dilemma so easily 99% of the lying shouldn't be allowed to pass on that extreme exception.  You could make up any possible hypothetical to demolish any possible assertion of morality.  There are certainly times when it is morally responsible to kill someone, that doesn't make murder wrong, it's generally the wrong that makes killing a killer the right thing to do.  It's the reason it's morally responsible to lie to a Nazi.  Of course it's right to lie to the Nazis under such a circumstance BUT THAT IS A CONSEQUENCE OF THEIR FAR MORE CONSEQUENTIAL EVIL.  I would point out that while it would be the right thing to do to lie to the Nazis like that IT'S A FAR DIFFERENT THING THAN CONSIDERING DOING THAT A "RIGHT".  That the English language uses the same word for two quite different and far from equivalent ideas shouldn't lead us to pretend that the moral necessity of protecting would-be victims from their killers is the same thing as that the killers had a right to lie in order to whip up violence against those victims.  Lying through the limits of our languages is a common form of lying to defraud us of the truth.   Failing to navigate such features of language make us idiots such as so many base their professional lives on pretending to be.

It's a rather obvious truth that the empowerment of the Nazis was enormously facilitated by lies permitted to be told, THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL OF THOSE TOLD IN THE MASS MEDIA and by journalists, lawyers, and, it should never be forgotten, academics, including respected scientists of of the time.  It's as true that empowering American white supremacy from lies such as the pseudo-history of Gone With The Wind and other fiction and, more obviously dangerous, lies told as "news" was given "First Amendment" protection in ways that the very lives of the victims of lives never has been protected under the U.S. Constitution.  We are idiots if we don't understand the malignant effect that lies spread in novels, plays, movies and other entertainment has in enslavement, oppression, murder and genocide.  Though suppressing lies as "news" or "information" is and always has been a pressing issue.

What about people who tell lies because they believe they're true?   Well, IF there is little consequence to such internalized lies there might not be any good in attaching criminal or administrative consequences to lies like that which are harmless in their effects.  But it is certainly a moral good and it should be a legal duty to tell them the truth when those lies are spread casually.  When they're spread by the mass media, sold to millions or even many thousands who are so gulled into believing lies are truth, the dangers of lies are enormous - Trump rose on such lies, Bush II sold the illegal invasion of Iraq which has to date resulted in hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths on such lies CARRIED WITH TOTAL IMPUNITY BY THE FREEST PRESS IN OUR HISTORY.  To allow lies such as Trump pretends to believe in the belief that he will get off by that ruse - as it's clear his hireling lawyers are telling those stupid enough to take their word for it to tell lies like "I don't recall," is stupid and absurd.  Yet you'll hear lawyers in the media pushing that line, too.

Lies told during the Covid pandemic cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, not a few people died because of lies told by Trump, by Republican governors such as those in South Dakota, Florida, Texas, etc. by media figures, by members of Congress and by those in the media and countless lying preachers on the make.  One of those two towns over got People in his cult and out of it killed.  They were sold by MDs and scientists and pseudo-scientists such as "Darwinian economists."  I doubt there were many of those who ever lost their professional credentials or even faculty positions as a consequence of the most consequential lies they told on FOX Lies, CNN, etc.   No doubt the media lawyers, even the supposed liberal ones would call that a "right to lie."  

Getting back to the "lying to the Nazis" ruse above, the idea that such homicidal liars "have a right to lie" has killed a hell of a lot of People, so it has a demonstrated effect of doing exactly what the Nazis do.  It is an enormous irony of the 18th century "enlightenment" pseudo-virtue that there is a moral duty to "defend to the death" a right to tell such malicious lies has the same effect as Nazism or any other oppressive dictatorial regime.  It should never be forgotten that that great event of the "enlightenment" the French Revolution immediately turned into a reign of terror by serially elevated homicidal gangster factions of intellectuals who lied about each other and immediately sent their political rivals to the guillotine.  I think the reign of terror is a short quick trip into what will come when such idiotic ideas such as that there is a right to tell lies gain hold.   It was and still is a regular feature of "Marxist" regimes and, now, it would seem it's being proposed for whenever Republican-fascists (white supremacists) here take control. 

I have pointed out that my opinion of lawyers fell enormously during the House Judiciary and Intelligence committee hearings in which it was the diplomats and the military officers testifying at professional and even personal risk to expose Trump's crimes and it was the lawyers who covered their asses.  I believe such professional ass-covering is a large part of most legal educations.  Like taking professional advantages and going for the deep pockets.  During and after the Trump regime, hearing lawyers saying that someone "has a right to lie" has done nothing to revive my once better opinion of the profession.  

Don't bother asking about my opinion of the alleged profession of journalism.  It was listening to and reading the lies carried by the mass media, especially such allegedly august organs of it as NPR, PBS, the New York Times, etc. on the "people are saying" and "both-sides" excuses and tracing those back to the Sullivan Decision of the Supreme Court that opened my eyes to the basic dishonesty of our culture under "free speech-press" absolutism.  The idea that you can long allow the publication of lies and not suffer enormous consequences is best illustrated to be a meta-lie by how white supremacy has flourished in the United States before and after the adoption of the Bill of Rights.  There could never have been the oppressive violence against Black People, against Native Americans and others without the regime of lies that supported it.  Subjugated populations, slaves then de facto slaves under Jim Crow - even after legal emancipation and the adoption of the Civil War Amendments* - would never have faced oppression without a tidal wave of lies.  Lies fed the terrorism of the slave patrols (as promoted and protected by the 2nd Amendment), of lynch mobs, the KKK and all American fascist groups and gangs.  Lies are the power behind Trumpism and Republican-fascism.   

The pretenses of the legal profession and, especially, the courts are among the most consequential of lies.  It is from such lawyers and judges and "justices" that the idea that someone can "have a right to lie" comes.  It was a consequence of the idiotically truncated writing of the golden calf of American liberalism, The First Amendment, drafted by some of the most respected lawyers of the time.  That it does not specify that there is a right to tell the truth but there is no right to lie is its major and glaring flaw.  Another is that there is no such thing as a "right" which does not inhere to a living being, the "press" has no rights because "the press" is an artificial human construct.  So is a religion.  There may be a right for a person to believe what they choose to or to associate with others but that does not give their shared belief or an organization they want to associate in anything like a right to do something like discriminate when operating a public accommodation.  I am inclined to suspect that some of the language of the Bill of Rights was inserted to thwart the rights of those who were enslaved by James Madison and the others who adopted the wording of them but I think much else was put in because they didn't really give it much thought.  I don't think it's possible to hold other People as slaves without it totally corrupting the slaver.  And some of the founders were quite OK with genocide, as well. I don't think there is any such thing as a racist or genocidalist who is safe for a democracy to enable and nurture.  Or any whose moral or even political authority is safely held up as sacrosanct and above the strongest critical analysis. 

Some of it was probably the casual adoption of slogans of "liberty" or "freedom" that didn't have much thought put into them, I don't remember ever hearing those associated with the less audience pleasing feature of responsibility.   Such conventional slogans are used with little thought, certainly less thought than Supreme Court "justices" have put into twisting them in directions it's clear no one ever intended in the 1790s  or even till 1964 and under which no sane person could still consider them as virtues.  Such legalistic lying is certainly consequential.  As consequential as that huge whopper put into American legal lore and practices that corporations enjoy "rights" such as the Roberts Court has put over the rights of natural human beings in their "religious liberties" codification of bigotry.  Such lies make it clear that it's time for those of us targeted by the Supreme Court regime of lies, think seriously about these issues because it's clear, they're coming for us.  Black People and their rights to full citizenship, Native Americans or even their lives, other targeted minorities, Women who are being denied the most basic of rights to determine what happens within their own skin, LGBTQ+ People.   The old "civil liberties" lawyers and their slogans and come-ons are no help to us in the end, they have put the "right to lie"  AND EVEN TO OWN AUTOMATIC WEAPONS of white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and others ahead of our very lives.  They peddle as virtue their enablement of Nazis and the KKK and corporations to get us addicted to alcohol and opiates, etc.  And addled by such slogans as I am critical of above, even sober American liberals suck it up like "free press" fentanyl.  Even as it leads to the election of Republican-fascists who lose elections.

That old lie that there is a right to lie has had its trial in history and its results are obviously catastrophic.  Whatever dangers that can be imagined-up by an acknowledgement that there is no right to lie are conjectural, the dangers of lies allowed is a clear and present danger.  We can't live with a First Amendment that permits lying, especially in the mass media.  Democracy can't survive it.  Equality certainly can't, it has been the continual first casualty in the liars lies against the Truth and it has been the entire time the First Amendment in its present flawed form has been the law of the land.

* Which the Supreme Court has twisted out of any semblance of their obvious meaning and original intent, especially the 14th Amendment.  That's one of the reasons I am skeptical that the corrupt Roberts Court will apply the obviously intended disqualification of the insurrectionist-president Trump when the case gets to it.  There has been no branch of the government more addicted to lying than the Supreme Court, and it doesn't even have to run for the offices they hold.  That goes back to John Marshall and Joseph Story in their white supremacist slavery decisions, which, by the way, fundamentally and enormously enriched the legendary John Marshall whose enormous wealth was founded in slavery.  That such self-enrichment by Supreme Court "justices" has been permitted since the start is another important flaw of the U.S. Constitution, one which we are required to lie about but I'm a bit of a thought criminal, after all.  I will go so far as to say the Constitution as it is written has become an impediment to us learning from even the most severe lessons in the hard school of experience, the First Amendment as it is written, among the greatest inhibitions of that national lesson learning.

Phyllis Zagano Preaches for the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

 

Today, September 3, is midway through Labor Day weekend in the United States and Canada. Labor Day is a day to celebrate workers, for all to rest from labor. It marks the ending of Summer, as the Northern Hemisphere moves toward Autumn. The weather will be getting cooler, even cold. Our dear neighbors in the Southern Hemisphere are looking forward to the first sight of Spring, as they shed the dark and cold of Winter. No matter the season, travel can be difficult.

Do you ever wonder how the traveling people are doing when you hear about a hurricane or flood? Where were they going? Why? Who was with them? Who even knew they went away?

Today, for the Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary time, the Church gives us three readings about our journeys. When called, we went. On arrival, we got instructions. On settling in, we learned what it was all about.

Today the Church also remembers two saints, one ancient, one medieval. Each spent a good deal of time “on the road.”

Saint Phoebe, Deacon of the Church at Cenchreae, lived in the first century near the Greek port of Corinth. She, as you may know, brought Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans. We know very little else about her, except that she made the trip—it would be some 750 miles by sea and over land, even farther only by boat.

Saint Gregory the Great came along later. In the sixth-century, Gregory was classically educated in the liberal arts and in law. He was religious—his great-great grandfather was Pope Felix III—and he left his position as prefect of Rome to become a Benedictine monk. Soon, Pope Pelagius II called Gregory to become a deacon of Rome but sent him off to Constantinople (perhaps 750 miles away) as his legate. By the time the Deacon Gregory was fifty he was elected bishop of Rome, and pope.

What were they thinking? Phoebe, sent off to the small Christian community in Rome, Gregory to negotiate peace terms in Constantinople? Did the words of Jeremiah echo in their minds: “You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped.” They were called by God to be Christians. They accepted the call and went where they were asked. Did a ship they sailed on leak? Was the weather hot, or freezing cold? Did their traveling companions, once they found out where they were going, avoid them, snickering in the background about their stupidity, getting involved in the Christian story? Did Jeremiah’s words haunt them? “…the word of the Lord has brought me derision and reproach all the day.” How many times did they want to quit? Did they say aloud, or hear the voice in their sleepless nights, “I will not mention him, I will speak his name no more.”?

They got where they were going. Gregory had Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the one Phoebe carried five centuries before. The words they brought were their own instructions, too. Can you hear Phoebe preach? “Brothers and sisters, Paul sends greetings and instructions. ‘Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is pleasing and perfect.’ This is from the 12th chapter of the letter he sends you.” Will you imagine Gregory, turning these words over and over in his mind? He would have preferred to stay in his monastery, you know.

No doubt at some point they each learned what it is all about. Today’s reading from Matthew recalls Jesus explaining things to his apostles. Jesus told them things would get rough, very rough. He would be tortured and killed, but “raised on the third day.” Peter, as Matthew writes, was having nothing of it. But Jesus insisted, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” At what point did Phoebe and Gregory accept, fully accept their crosses? Was it when some Roman man made a snide comment to Phoebe? Did he ask why she was in Rome? Did he threaten her, even screaming that no woman should be teaching? And what about Gregory? Were there comments often, maybe always, made behind his back? Was there jealousy of his family, of their land holdings in Rome and Sicily? Did someone mutter, “he’s not so smart, he’s only well-connected”?

No doubt they heard the comments. People are only too happy to let you know when you, your work, your very life has been discredited. Slander is a favorite indoor sport of too many people, even some who claim to be religious.

How has your journey been? How many times have you quit, or at least threatened to?  How many times have you thought it is just too hard, too far, too dangerous, to be and to do what God calls you to be and to do? How many times have you tried to ignore the truth of the Cross of Christ, the reality of what it means to be a Christian?

Nobody said it would be easy. Surely Phoebe and Gregory had deep joy and welcomed rest when they were with their own communities. No doubt there were more people who listened to them than who turned away. The people who ignored them did not really bother them because they knew, you see, it was not about them. They were, at heart, both deacons, and their hearts contained the Good News, the message of the Gospels.

When called, they went, and when they got where they were going, they knew (somehow) what they had to do and to say. As days turned into weeks, then months, they understood more deeply what it was all about.

It is the same with each of us. At some point we brush away the doubts and fears and understand that where we are is most probably where we ought to be. Then we can rest. We can rest from our labors in the shadow of the Cross.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Patrick Fogarty - The Last High King of Ireland

 The Last High King of Ireland 

The play took 1st place in the 2022 PJ O'Connor Radio Drama Awards.

The Last, High King of Ireland tells the story of a day in the life of a hard-drinking man who has bestowed upon himself the title The Last, High King of Ireland. We follow the 'High King’ or ‘Tapper’ as he is better known to the locals, on his daily travels from morning to night in the fictional town of Molinheer.

The High King’s world is full of myth, mirth, and magic. The play is a snippet of the life of a forgotten man on the fringes of society, and those who he encounters.

Pat Kinevane Plays Tapper (The Last, High King of Ireland)
Joe Taylor played the part of Maloney
John D Ruddy was McCann
Sharon Mannion was Lisa of the Tithe.
The Tailor was played by Enda Oates
Dawn Bradfield was Lady of the Spuds
Bab the Barwoman was Noni Stapleton
Ellie Brosnan - Corkery played the child
All other parts were played by the company

Harpist Geraldine Doherty arranged and performed the music

Sound design and sound supervision was by Damian Chennells

The Last, High King of Ireland by Patrick Fogarty was directed by Gorretti Slavin

If you've been affected by any of the issue raised in the play, help is available at www.rte.ie/helplines

In the United States or elsewhere, Alcoholics Anonymous is a good place to start.  

When I listened to this the main character was really annoying, but people in trouble often can be.   It annoys me a lot less than the way show biz usually treats this condition. 

Lawyers Are Soooooo Touchy, And So Are Their Fanboys

THE DANGERS OF SUPPRESSING LIES may be real, though I think most of the claimed dangers are imaginary dangers based in a pretense that judges and jurors can't discern easily 90% of lies they're told from something close to the truth.  It's absurd to base an entire system of government on the small percentage and few times when it's impossible to sharply distinguish the truth from a lie, such as happens in our inadequate liberal democracy.  By allowing 90% of the lies, you also allow the evil that comes with the enormous amount of lying that represents.  Just figuring that's the cost of not accepting responsibility for punishing lies is too dangerous, as the past eight years of the rise of Trump has proved.  Trumpism is a product of lies permitted to be told in the mass media, we nearly lost even our imperfect democracy once and are still in danger of losing it, how much worse does it have to get before the lies that brought it are prohibited? 

The dangers of making lies actionable may be real but so is making them a matter of "rights,"  especially under the daffy Constitutional notion that media corporations or any corporations can have rights.  

Of course, unmentioned in that is the danger from dishonest, corrupt, ideologically anti-democratic judges and "justices" but pretending that isn't part of the system that results from the way things are now does nothing to avoid such dishonesty and corruption.   The system as it is has given us that, already, the legal profession is the source and the end of that sewer. 

I've mentioned how much care judges and "justices" are when it's a matter of who owes who money, sometimes in the most absurdly technical and attenuated cases, they'll figure out who was owed money.  Yet the same judges and, especially, "justices" will pretend they can't discern truth from bald-faced and obviously self-interested lies from the most glaring of truths.  It really isn't any great surprise, given how they have no real devotion to the truth, not enough to value it over bald-faced lies or the protection the truth has for equality and democracy.  If Americans had never lied, the worst of our history would probably have never happened.  Much of it certainly wouldn't have.

Lying is how we got here, to start with.  That and the kind of professional lying that lawyers learn in elite law schools.  Harvard, Yale, etc. were the schools that started the kind of fascist ideology that resulted in unitary-executive theory, MAGA, state legislative nullification of elections and the encouragement through permission of fascism.  Those are schools where the law became a matter of twisting words to suit those who could pay the most and come up with Constitutional excuses for lying to produce results that were entirely unequal and not infrequently evil. The legal profession has certainly never done much to kick out and de-license scumbag lawyers who serve some of the worst clients, enabling them to get away with murder, theft and the corruption of governments.  The Dishonor Roll of scumbag lawyers and politicians who were produced by elite universities is something those places should have to wear around their worst products around their necks, I think they're business and especially their obscene endowments should be taxed into a reduced status, the money used to fund public education, grade schools and high schools, 2-year and 4-year colleges and universities.  They certainly don't deserve the absurdly given respect and honor they are habitually given.  The same is true for other engines of fascism, such as big media and the social-disease media that has given the United States the equivalent of syphilitic dementia.  

The amorality of the legal profession also flows from the privilege given to lawyers that they use the formal privilege of client confidentiality to cover up obvious and even expressly articulated and admitted law breaking and the commission of evil.  While many lawyers wouldn't use secrecy to do that for a client, if someone wants to do that they can hire lawyers who will do that for them, depending on the secrecy rules and permissions even to break the law, themselves, and get away with it.   Gangster lawyers, such as those who serve Trump are obviously the kind of lawyers who do that, and he's the tip of the toxic iceberg.  That kind of thing is obviously bound to bleed over into politics, the number of lawyers who go into politics would guarantee that, many of the lawyer-liars who work for the rich and corrupt for the most money are the kind who have political careers, many of the worst of them are Ivy League level products.  Many of them also go into the media or, like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the judiciary.  

What really shocked me was hearing lawyers who are supposed to be better than that, even civil rights lawyers whose clients are the victims of lies sounding like Chatty Cathy went to law school and recorded the phrase, " they have a 'right' to lie."  It's clear they imbibed the same obvious immorality at law school that built the corruption we are endangered by and which will obviously destroy any progress made towards equality and the only legitimate government there is, egalitarian democracy.  The idea that there is a right to do something that is so objectively wrong is something you would hope a 9 year old would have learned better than that by then.  

I have gone into that before, I am not a liberal democrat,  someone who thinks that there is a right to say whatever and do whatever they can get away with doing. I'm an egalitarian democrat, I am also more radical than a socialist, I am a leveler.  Some idiot Marxist online accused me of being a capitalist because I told the truth about Marxism, that it has built such a huge mountain range of murders that it, like fascism and Nazism and capitalism, are only rightly seen as definitively discredited.   I believe that any alleged democracy that doesn't specifically choose to put morality above immorality, justice over injustice, equality over privilege is a fraudulent democracy that is bound to end up endangered by the likes of Trump, made vulnerable to billionaires foreign as well as domestic by a corrupt Supreme Court such as those which have put us on that road starting with the permission of the mass media to lie with impunity in 1964, permitted the corruption of money when the Congress tried to address what led to the Nixon crime spree in the Buckley v. Valeo ruling in 1976 and which subsequent Courts have made disastrously worse in rulings that followed on those.  It started in the "liberal" Warren Court but the Berger, Rehnquist and, especially the Robert's Court has made it steadily worse.  The majority in the Citizens United case were specifically warned they were opening up the political system to exactly the kind of corruption that Putin and other billionaire crooks aimed at the America's electoral democracy, the Ivy Leaguer Republican-fascists on that court did it anyway. They obviously don't want equality or even an effective electoral democracy.  They are all guilty to some extent.

So if you're going to cry like a baby that I slammed those slammed above, you are welcome to go soak your head.  You should have learned that much about the truth by the time you were nine.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama Extra - Peter Whalley - The Scapegoat

 The Scapegoat 

The Scapegoat was part of the Just Before Midnight series of plays and broadcast on 2 December 1978. Late at night, a stranger knocks at a man's door. His car has broken down and he wants. . .

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Peter Whalley - The Trial

 The Trial

 

Falling in love with a stranger has never been scarier: A gripping new thriller.

Vibrant, young, attractive, Mollie Spiers, signs up to internet dating. When the man she arranges to meet looks suspicious she spontaneously sits next to another man, Colin, and hurriedly asks him to pretend they're on a date. Molly and Colin fall for each other and what seems like serendipity turns into a chilling thriller. As Mollie falls headlong in love Colin is arrested on a murder charge. As we inter-cut between murder trial and action, Mollie's own life is in danger.
 

Mollie: Tracy Wiles

Colin: Graeme Hawley

Paul: Stephen Fletcher

Sarah: Natalie Grady

Prosecuting Counsel: Jonathan Keeble

 

Peter Whalley was a real master of this kind of unexpected endings.   And unanswered questions.

 215 in binary is 11010111

Dusan Bogdanovic, Folia Variations, Daniela Rossi, Guitar Solo

Daniela Rossi, Guitar Solo

Simp says

"You see "books" anywhere on it? " Here's a clue, Sparky -- "Mein Kampf," "The Turner Diaries" and "The Camp of the Saints" are all books. :-)

Since the topic is what replaces actual truth in the minds of most Americans in 2023, if you believe the average American has ever read any of those books you are even stupider than I had previously believed you to be.  

They may, may have heard of "Mein Kampf" the same way you did, it was mentioned in a movie or TV show or in some mid-brow magazine article.  Like you and easily a majority of those who have been credentialed by a college, they never read it.  

I would bet that fewer have ever even heard of The Turner Diaries, unless they were part of the American neo-Nazi cult and I'd bet you anything fewer than ten percent of those ever read it.   If you think that even .05 percent of Americans have ever heard of "The Camp of the Saints,"  well, I said you've convinced me you're even stupider than I thought you were before.  

Of course, since this graph is about where most Americans get what they mistakenly believe is information,  your comment is entirely beside the point because books don't even make the list.   I think they should require a course in basic statistics before anyone is eligible for a college degree, you wouldn't have passed.   Any legitimate course in statistics WOULD START WITH WHAT THE STUDY WAS ATTEMPTING TO MEASURE IN THE FIRST PLACE.  

Simps is upset that I dissed TV and Pop Kulcha As The Major Source Of Our Degenerating Democracy

 This is from the Media Literacy Clearing House.  You see "books" anywhere on it? 

"How Dare You Diss The Sacred Bill of Rights" - Hate Mail

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP in the early post-WWII years I heard a number of times variations on the claim that "it can't happen here."  Which in my family was considered to be nonsense.  The faith that the United States couldn't ever become something like the Third Reich or Italy under the fascists or other kind of "right-wing dictatorship" because of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was something easy for a middle-class or affluent white American male to believe because those things worked for affluent white males of the kind who comprised virtually all of the on-air and in print media producers.  Young people now might find it hard to believe how few of those were even white women back then.

I never believed it, our WWII veteran parents didn't believe it, my grandparents who had experienced anti-Irish bigotry and witnessed other kinds of bigotry didn't believe it. I have never believed in American exceptionalism. I don't believe any human group or nation is exceptional.  Perhaps it's being Vatican II Catholic in Northern New England at the very end of Protestant hegemony here but I have never believed that any People anywhere were reliably virtuous or reliably safe from their weakness and selfishness and our inevitable ignorance that "it" couldn't happen among them. Sin is a universal certainty.  No one is safe from evil, anywhere, anytime.  The closest thing there is to that kind of safety is to be found in actual equality, not in some daffy notion of absolute "rights" and "complete freedom" without mandatory responsibility for the results of actions and consequences under those.

It wasn't until much later that I read the statement of a Black Civil War soldier who made the point that whatever the Constitution said about freedoms and rights, Black People had lived as slaves under it for generations and he was not deluded that it was something under which Black Peoples' rights were protected.  On the contrary, as was proved by the then recent experience of the Dred Scott ruling, as much Constitutional law as Brown v Board or any other act of the government, proved that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were more than merely implicated in the subjugation and enslavement of Black People, they had been quite comfortable with it for more than a generation, by that point.  The Constitutionally established Supreme Court used it to deny the person-hood of Black People EVERYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES. And after the national baptism in blood, the Civil War, The Constitution was, in the post-Reconstruction period, intrinsic to the resubjugation of Black People under Jim Crow and lynch law and the dainty Supreme Court contribution to both, "separate but equal".  Which rested on the Supreme Court told Constitutional lie that things were equal. "Equal Justice Under Law" should be the first part of the Supreme Court's hideous secular-pagan temple that is removed and put in an exhibition of official hypocrisy and legal corruption.  

That the Roberts Court is using the First Amendment to reimpose voter suppression, racial segregation and discrimination and other features of Jim Crow and expanding that to discrimination against LGBTQ+ People, reimposing the subjugation of Women at the same time UNDER THE CONSTITUTION proves that it is MORE USEFUL FOR THAT than it has proven in history to be useful for establishing equal justice, equal rights and equal freedom under equal responsibility. That we are seeing a national resurgence of police killings of Black People as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts are demolished is not any great surprise considering what else is happening, especially in the entertainment media and, yes, even the "news division" of media corporations.   America has been led into fascism by Hollywood and TV shows, comedians who aren't funny and who replace racism and bigotry for humor, Trump being a product of that kind of entertainment as much as Reagan was.

Any Native American could have said the same thing, that the Constitution had been in effect as the American government had murdered their People and stolen their lands and tried to wipe them out.  I have pointed out the conclusive documentation that it was still an active governmental policy during the height of admitted eugenics in the 1930s in even states like Vermont to wipe out Native Americans. It is an absolute historical fact that the Nazis were learning some of what they soon would implement from American eugenicists. The Supreme Court had, less than ten years earlier found that such involuntary eugenics was not banned under the Constitution with the Bill of rights, EVEN WITH THE CIVIL WAR AMENDMENTS ON TOP OF THOSE.  Eugenics was, as established Supreme Court law by as lauded a Constitutional expert as Oliver Wendell Holmes jr, fully consonant with such a genocidal program.  As his secretary Francis Biddle discovered to his certain discomfort when he was a Judge at the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis lawyers could cite Holmes SUPREME COURT RULING to excuse the genocidal actions of their clients.  

Our national myth of freedom and justice for all has been a false front on the fact that our indigenous form of unequally applied fascism, white supremacy, has ruled us through a combination of voter suppression under a campaign slavery then of apartheid terrorism and murder and the Constitutionally set up inequality of the Senate and the Electoral College.  Jim Crow and the return of de facto slavery was first accomplished under the Electoral College by a corrupt deal between Rutherford Hayes and the slave power and appointments by that regime to the Supreme Court.  We are still living under that form of governance, today.  American Apartheid ruled for generations in the former slave states and elsewhere for decades without much of any opposition under the Constitution.  If the Civil War didn't wipe it out, the idea that the temporary fixes of the Civil Rights era would permanently end it without abolishing the mechanisms that empowered it from the star, is a delusion of college-credentialed People trained to not think about reality as opposed to the  mythology of the Constitution and, even more so, the Bill of Rights.  

I will point out that, in his more candid writing, John Marshall admitted that the adoption of the Constitution without the Bill of Rights was a close call for the document.  The main part of the Constitution which gives us the Electoral College, the anti-democratically constituted Senate, etc. was very far from universally acceptable to those at the time of its adoption.  One of the idiot Trumpers recently cited Patrick Henry to such stupid effect when he was among the more vocal skeptics of the thing.

I will also repeat that it is a fact that the most lauded of the Founders, Madison especially, was not enthusiastic for a Bill of Rights and it is not that surprising that as dedicated a group of slave owners and rich aristocrats as who governed the country and most of the states adopted a Bill of Rights that has proven to be so ineffective in guaranteeing equality.  Madison's part in its creation under the First Congress was his reluctant keeping of a bargain he had to make with the Virginia legislature for them to adopt the scheme to start with.  Do you think he and his fellow slavers really intended it to promote full equality and equal rights for all?  He became ever more cynical about democracy as even poor-whites of no property were enfranchised in the Jeffersonian revolution.  Though I don't suppose some Broadway song and dance guy is going to tell that in some pop music spectacle. 

Any progress towards equality from the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was through struggle against the order set up under both of those.  As the Trumpian danger to even that Constitutional order proves, the right to lie as granted so stupidly under the absolute language of The First Amendment endangers even the peaceful transfer of power, the lauded fruit of the Constitution, itself.   It's clear from both the Bush II and Trump regimes that the Electoral College is a corruption of that lauded practice of American Democracy, as well.  It has worked to thwart the majority of voters more than twice in our history, always to terrible effect, perhaps the Jeffersonian example being the sole exception where it might, might have been better.

It may be easy for affluent white People to believe that the Constitution and the golden calf of the Bill of Rights protects us from "it happening here" but that is as big a lie as anything that comes out of Trump's mouth or thumbs twitting on any given day. It certainly has happened, constantly and consistently for Black People, Native Americans, other People of Color, LGBTQ+ People, Women (especially Women belonging to those and other subjugated groups) . . .  And that's not to mention even white men in the economic underclass.  

In just about every way it has happened here and it is happening here under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights right now.  For Black People living under American apartheid it was always like living under fascist terror and it is still like that.  Government actions especially police actions, the administration of "justice" by the judicial system has always valued Black lives, the lives of other targeted minorities and Women and the economic underclass as worth far less to nothing as compared to those of affluent white lives. That our government acts against us in a system of unequal or, really, any scale of economic valuation is proof of the failure of egalitarian democracy under the Constitution.  I think it's dangerous to allow rich people to hire better or more lawyers than the poorest person can get, even in civil cases. If I were to write a new constitution, I'd put that into it.  

The media certainly has contributed to it happening here, not only the alleged news and what they choose to put on but far more potently in the entertainment media which constantly streams that message to fill the minds of the large majority of Americans who get all of their ideas primarily from that.  Or from the minds of their parents and associates who have spent decades absorbing that message.  The media are free to do that BECAUSE THE FIRST AMENDMENT SAYS THEY ARE AS FREE TO DO THAT. That we may be free to promote egalitarian democracy in the outskirts of the media is of piddling significance because it is such a harder sell and will never have as much money backing it up.  Of course the discrimination and devaluing of lives has an economic motive driving it, everything the media does is about money, in the end.  EQUALITY IS FAR LESS PROFITABLE FOR THOSE WITH MONEY AND SO POWER, so it is in their economic self-interest to promote inequality and discrimination JUST AS IT WAS FOR THE SLAVE POWER AND THEIR NORTHERN ALLIES TO PROTECT AND PROMOTE THE ENSLAVEMENT OF BLACK PEOPLE.  The media especially the entertainment media, has always devalued Women and objectified them, commercial culture, "pop culture" has been the main propaganda force doing that.

The Republican Party since 1964 when the Goldwater faction took it over sought to harness white racism as a means of achieving power, a trend which has only accelerated and swamped those of a milder oligarchic tendencies to the point where Trump and his Trumpzis now control the Rotten Old Party.  So racism and other forms of bigotry spread through paranoid rantings on FOX Lies and its imitators serve a double purpose for those who really do control the media and, so, politics in the United States.  The First Amendment with it's irresponsible, values neutral, pseudo-scientific objective language is less than no help in correcting that.  How can it when even "civil rights attorneys" who get on MSNBC declare that Trump and his allies "have a right to lie?"  

I could point out the role of the Republican Party, Republican women such as the putrid Phillis Schlafly, in  thwarting the movement for gender equality, using anti-LGBTQ+ hatred as their major propaganda too.  The media and "pop culture" made things much, much easier than it should have been considering Women outnumber men.  I will remind you that the Constitution as it is in 2023 as it was in the beginning, does not establish that Women are equal, the actual majority of the American People does not have that explicitly pointed out in the actual governing document of the country. The attempt to put that in fell to the First Amendment permitted regime of lying that has governed us as much as anything.  In America, one of the surest means of thwarting egalitarian democracy is through lying in the mass media.  One of the less effective means of obtaining equal justice is through telling the truth in opposition to those lies.  

So the complaint that I have told it plain, that it happens here (especially to targeted minority groups) and is getting worse BECAUSE OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS, as made worse under the Supreme Court and its extra-Constitutional usurpation of the power to nullify duly adopted federal laws giving "constitutional" excuses for it, is an expression of an entirely a-historical, white-supremacist parochial mythology which even a fairly cursory reading of American history refutes.  

Our relevant professionals are not required to tell the truth and serve justice and egalitarian democracy.  I'm talking about lawyers and the judges and other professions which are comprised entirely or mostly of lawyers. It is what lawyering turns into under any system which allows it, the highest end lawyers are largely in the business of gaming the law and The Constitution for the benefit of those who can pay the most and want inequality and the profits and psychopathic gratification they receive from feeling superior.  Trump's use of lawyers and their diligent devotion to aiding and abetting their criminality is an example.  The Constitution and its established order has let him get away with flagrant criminality almost every time.  The one time it didn't was when he and his Nazi father were prosecuted for discrimination under civil rights laws which the Roberts type Court will demolish.  They are under their use of the First Amendment for LGBTQ+ people, already.  In a way lawyering is set up to favor those who serve the gangsters, those who break "the law" and those who have enough power to make the wrong they want to do unillegal, to use O Henry's brilliant neologism which describes that perfectly.

Trump as a political disaster happened UNDER THE CONSTITUTION BY THE RULES SET BY IT.  Bush II happened under the Constitution as rigged by the five Republican-fascists of the Rehnquist court with the collusion of Bush family members in Florida and at FOX Lies.  The vilely sanctimonious Republican lawyer James Comey, as head of the FBI and the New York Time under its Supreme Court granted "right to lie" made it certain that he would prevail in the last weeks of the the 2016 election, the New York Times printed its Sullivan Decision protected lies that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted.  And Trump gained office with fewer votes under the Electoral College.   The same Electoral College he and his goon gang of lawyers and Republican-fascists in state governments tried to rig in 2020.   If they had not done that it is very likely Trump would never have been president and the Supreme Court would not be dominated by Republican-fascists right now.

The fact that we are in real danger of Republican-fascists winning in 2024, AFTER the hard experience of the Brooks Bros. putsch of 2000 and the Trumpzi insurrection of 2021, the basic Constitutional corruption AND THE SUPREME COURT USURPATION OF POWERS not having ever been fixed no matter how bad it has gotten up until now is a guarantee that sooner or later MUCH MORE OF IT THAN ROUTINELY HAS HAPPENED HERE WILL HAPPEN IN EVEN WORSE FORMS.  Never forget that the same Bill of Rights which got a right to lie for FOX and the NYT puts automatic weapons in the hands of the mass killing fascists and Neo-Nazis.

You can count on it happening here, the only difference now is that it is going to happen to a lot more White People than before, though a lot of those are obviously too TV and movie and internet addled to even understand who is doing it to them.  They think it's Black People, Latinos and drag queens who are their oppressors, that's how easy it is for the media to sell lies. That is another thing that has gotten worse. The mass media allowed to lie, to tell any lie, to deny even the worst lessons from the past, THE SHOAH FOR  THE LOVE OF MIKE!, is as free to tell those lies as the lies that the Nazis told and the fascists in Italy and the Imperial military establishment told in Japan and the Stalinists in the Soviet empire and the Communist Party in China or the Kim regime in North Korea are free to tell the lies that they depend on.  Lying always will be the foremost danger to equality and democracy.  Any First Amendment which does not explicitly say there is no right to lie is a guarantee of "its  happening" under it.  A first amendment that does not constantly have provide the incentive to get the truth right while permitting ever more lying is morally degenerate.  Egalitarian democracy, legitimate and decent government is a product of morality, in the end.  It cannot exist in moral relativism which permits lies and false witness to flourish. Democracy is equal or it cannot be legitimate government.  

Egalitarian democracy depends, absolutely, on the voters knowing and valuing the truth or it is vulnerable to lies and those who lie.  If even an effective minority of voters believe lies, democracy is damaged and endangered.  Allowing the mass media to carry lies is one of the greatest dangers to democracy there is, allowing those lies to weaponize prejudice and bigotry is the proven tool of then enemies of egalitarian democracy and even any would-be democracy short of equality under the law.  Ours is such a stupidly self-endangered democracy, I wonder if the reason that the slave-owners and land-stealers and financiers who adopted the Bill of Rights didn't fear the truth because they feared it would set Black People and Native Americans and Poor-whites free, to the cost of their own unequal wealth.  It doesn't much matter if it was intentional because that has been the effect of it. They certainly set poor-whites against their natural allies in seeking equality through lies and targeted meager privileges.  

The earliest and worst sins of America may have been racism and the murder which always comes of racism.  But along with that is the sin of lying, both of which are enshrined explicitly and implicitly in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  Not least of all they are embedded into the fabric of the country but in the scheme of government set up under it.  Even if lies can be overcome for a majority of the voters, the Electoral College and the usurping Supreme Court can overcome that to empower an effective minority of those who buy the lie and enslave us all.  The Roberts Court is making that worse than it was after the Voting Rights Act was passed, nothing will ever be fixed until an even more powerful Voting Rights Act is adopted and protected from future John Roberts and his gangster "justice" cronies.  But that won't even be enough until the "right to lie" is removed from the mass media and the idiotic idea removed from the collective lore of the lie-protecting lawyers.  

It's Later Than We Are Led To Think - Time To Learn To Shoot

From today's Countdown with Keith Olbermann

Dateline Lake Arrowhead, California.

If you think I overwork that phrase "stochastic terrorism" think again.  

Think of the "libs of tic-toc" psychos and everybody who has encourage hatred and distrust of the LGBTQ community like Ron DeSantis.

Friday night an as yet unidentified assailant went to fashion designer Laurie Carlton's Clothing Store in Southern California, ripped down the Pride Flag she had hanging outside and when she confronted him about it he shot her to death.  She was the mother of nine.  The murderer fled was confronted by police and killed.

This is a hate crime, it is hate encouraged by and often directed stochastically by the Republican Party. The sooner we start recognizing this the sooner we can do things to remove the threat that party and its cult represent, represent just to letting everybody not get killed.

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

Amen.

This is something that should be hung around the neck of every single Republican.  I'd say from Susan Collins to Roger Stone but I don't really believe there is any difference between Susan Collins and Roger Stone, not now that she's probably never going to have to depend on duping the eminently dupable voters of Maine.  The skank voted against impeaching Trump EVEN AFTER JANUARY 6TH,  even though that would have permanently removed him from ever, again, holding public office.  That is absolute proof that she is all-in with whatever the Republican-fascists do, a broken weather vane that always points whichever point to the right that she figures is as far right as she can go and still dupe Maine voters .    Those of use who were never duped by her should never let anyone who was forget it.  Every in-the-closet gay Republican-fascist, Lady G aka Lindsey Graham, every one of those whose names we don't all know should now and forever be outted and we should insist that the media not shield them as it has Lindsey Graham like forever.  No LGBTQ+ person who votes Republican should ever not be called on it in public.

The use of Black People, Latinos, other members of minority groups and Women as targets for violent hatred, scapegoating and objects of fear  by Republican-fascists before and during the Trump cult has always been stochastic terrorism just as it always has been, only it hasn't been this overt since the mid to late 1960s.  There was a reason white supremacists left the traditional Southern Democratic party for the Republican-fascist party and it was because the majority of the Democratic Party and its national and many of its state and local candidates rejected that kind of thing.  That is the reason that the Democratic Party is a truly diverse party while the Republican fascists are not.  

The use of violence by and on behalf of Republicans is only going to get worse, it is already much worse than idiots in the media used to make believe it would never be.  I always remember one of the smarmy NPR hosts on All Things Considered mouthed the cliche "The first person to say "fasist" loses."  Such idiotic rules still rule such venues of the media, I doubt those who believe the New York Times, as I think of them, "NYT wits" will see much of it, probably not even as the fascists take control of the nuclear weapons.   They are all in on it as certainly as Susan Collins always was in the absolute zero of her heart of cold hearts.   I despise Susan Collins

I think it's time for us to consider preparing for the violence they will unleash.  I'm considering doing things I never thought I would, like learning to shoot a gun.  I remember reading Ida Wells Barnett talking about how in the face of lynch law she decided to 

 "I had bought a pistol, the first thing after Tom Moss was lynched, because I expected some cowardly retaliation from the lynchers. I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked."

and I am well past beginning to think that LGBTQ+ People should consider that as a realistic responsibility, now.  Only they should practice regularly, probably together.  If the cowards thought we might shoot back better than them, they'd cower or go after those they figured wouldn't fight back.  

Margaret Susan Thompson Preaches for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

 

Have you ever been called a “dog”? That is what happens to the Canaanite woman in today’s gospel and, admittedly, the first time I read the passage, it came as a pretty big shock. This is not the sort of language we normally associate with Jesus. In modern terms, it comes dangerously close to calling her the “b-word” (which is, after all, the technical term for a female dog). And yet, by the end of the encounter they had, he is calling her a “woman of great faith” and granting her wish that he heal her daughter. Stated simply, the unnamed Canaanite woman—a foreigner, an alien—becomes one of only two women in scripture who manage to change Jesus’s mind. [The other, of course, is Mary during the wedding feast at Cana, but what nice Jewish boy is able to say no to his own mother?]

This anonymous seeker has a lot to teach us—ALL of us. How many of us find ourselves pleading with civil and ecclesial authorities, who tell us—as Jesus’s companions say here—to “shut up and go away,” because she (we!) keep shouting after them. [Actually, at that point, she’s spoken only once.] But as we might say about her today, “nevertheless, she persisted.” She truly is being “dogged,” isn’t she? So maybe Jesus’s epithet is not that problematic after all. And maybe we need to persist, as well.  

Also, let’s not forget that the Canaanite woman is petitioning not for herself, but for her daughter. If today’s prelates are, according to Catholic teaching, the descendants of those disciples accompanying Jesus, are we not the daughters of the one for whom she is asking to be made rid of a demon? Does this mean that, if she’s told that “her wish will come to pass,” then we, too, are going to be rid of the demons that plague us?

The Gospel of Matthew is largely directed to the Jewish people, and historians tell us that the Canaanites were their traditional enemies. [When Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, it was against the Canaanites, after all.] This is probably part of the reason that Jesus initially rejects the woman who calls out to him—though why he is in Tyre and Sidon, a region where there were no Jews, is never made clear. So when he eventually does respond to her plea, calls her faithful and promises to heal her daughter, he is opening up the promise of the Good News beyond the nation of Israel. And that, in turn is a fulfillment of the prophecy in today’s first reading, from Isaiah: “The foreigners who join themselves to the Lord… will be acceptable on my altar, for my house shall be called a house of prayer for ALL peoples.” As the response to today’s psalm proclaims: “Let ALL the nations praise you!” Paul, too, in his letter to the Romans, speaks to the gentiles and declares: that “God might have mercy upon ALL.”

ALL peoples. While this can be understood as referring to ethnic groups—to “gentiles”—there is nothing to suggest that it can’t be understood in other ways, too. God’s house is open to women, to the LGBTQ+ community, to the poor, to the stranger, to those of different abilities, and to so many more. Even to tax collectors, which Matthew was (and so he, too, like the Canaanite woman, was something of an outsider). Perhaps Pope Francis’s decision to invite women and other laypeople to participate in the upcoming Synod on Synodality is a step in the “all people” direction?

The words that the woman uses in addressing Jesus, “have pity on me,” can also translated as “have MERCY on me.” These are words we use in every Mass: kyrie eleison. At that moment, we are petitioning God in the same way that the Canaanite woman called out to Jesus. So, although we do not know her name, we commemorate her each time we gather. Her plea is our plea. She is our foremother and we express her petition in the same way she makes it: in hope and even expectation that God will respond. We do this, even when we are told by the successors to those who told her to “shut up and go away” that we ought to do the same.

Maybe it’s not surprising that this gospel reading is buried in the “dog” days of summer, because it truly is revolutionary. It resonates especially with me because I’m a woman, but it has much to say to all of us who feel like we don’t fit into a box, and who sometimes feel tormented by a demon, like the daughter in need of healing. In other words, it speaks to us all. And so it calls us all to be dogged, persistent—and, like the Canaanite woman, “of great faith.”

This is one of the stories in the Gospels that makes me think that preachers and priests don't read it right.   I think Jesus was teasing the woman, saying that she and he both knew she wasn't supposed to be talking to him and he wasn't supposed to be listening to her.  I think he was teasing his audience who certainly would have been inclined to think of her in those terms, both because she was a woman and outside of the in-crowd of Jesus and his disciples.   I can't for a second believe he didn't intend to help her.   I think he was making a point that would have scandalized many of his own followers and given his critics some material to use against him.   I think reading him any other way makes him seem like a bit of a prick.   Since she mentions Mary at the wedding feast telling him they'd run out of wine, I think Jesus's answer to his mother was probably some mother-son teasing of the same kind.   What am I supposed to do about it?   Probably said with a comic eye-roll and whatever expression of comic exasperation would have been appropriate for the occasion.  A pious priest or preacher-man who cultivated a pose of piety is probably the least likely to get it though I'd imagine any number of mothers who had a son with a sense of humor and a good relationship with her would have gotten it.