Saturday, October 26, 2019

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Nick Warburton - Fridays When It Rains




A girl on a late night train journey meets a man with a strange tale to tell.

Dove ...... Clive Swift
Connie ...... Lyndsey Marshal

Directed by Claire Grove.
 
Figured I should acknowledge that it's Halloween this week.  As with all holidays, American consumerism has destroyed what fun it was.  But I still like a spooky story.   And it's often fun to hear what you can do with a two-hander script, a couple of actors a director and a recorder.  To inspire people to try.  I love people trying, as long as they're trying and not just repeating.

The Consequences Of Supreme Court Justices Pretending The Founders Were Omniscient, Butt Calls Could Kill Us All

 Image result for as seen on tv

The question as to why Donald Trump has been having the clearly decayed and decadent Rudy Giuliani as his personal lawyer has been best answered by the observation that he is the As Seen On TV legal genius of the As Seen On TV despot that Donald Trump is.  Trump is a 100% As Seen On TV creation, he is, even more than Ronald Reagan a product of the free "press" in the idiotically free-to-lie-with-impunity regime that the Supreme Court has set up.  It started out with the master criminal mind of Richard Nixon and it has spiraled down to where, one hopes, it is circling the drain in the Donald Trump regime.  

If there is a future that gets to satirize what the irresponsibility of our judicial system has produced, in a, hopefully, smarter time when people learn lessons from history, as not seen on TV and in the movies, Rudy's butt dialing of an investigative journalist could serve as the quintessence of what you get from that kind of As Seen On TV governance, what democracy turns into when people who watch TV eight hours a day, for whom it replaces schools, churches, civic engagement, talking with neighbors, etc. vote for who TV tells them to and, lest it be forgotten, in the media telling them to have a vague, undefined sense of suspicion around the opponent of the corporate media.  That isn't only an As Seen On TV thing, as I pointed out the other day the New York Times, the Washington Post and other ink on paper outlets of such "free press" "free speech" had as big a hand in it as CNN, FOX, ABC and CBS.  

Ironically, it was on TV that I heard the most important question asked in the Rudy Buttgate incident,   asked, not by a journalist but by Frank Figliuzzi, who had not been a journalist but an Assistant Director for National Intelligence, who else has Rudy butt dialed and what did the people he's got on redial learn about things from it.  It's a good question because anyone stupid enough to have done it twice in one month can be believed to have done it many times. *  Considering who our idiotic system has allowed Giuliani to get away with being in contact with, what sensitive intelligence he's certainly been given by Trump and, I have no doubt at all,  William Barr, his talking out of his butt could have serious consequences BY ACCIDENT that the friggin' founders couldn't have imagined possible.  The closest they might have imagined was some "honorable man" who had a tendency to get drunk, and a good number of the friggin' founders were drunks, would spout when drunk.  With our As Seen On TV idiots, they can do worse sober than what the founders could have imagined,  yet their useless 18th century wisdom is not updated by the serious members of the Supreme Court to rescue us from the results of their neo-scholastic "originalism".   

*  Someone I laughed about this with wondered where the practice of putting your cell phone in the back pocket came from (leading to many a broken screen - duh!).  I speculate that the idotic practice of people keeping their cell phones in their butt pocket is a hold over from the idiotic practice of stuffing a wallet back there.  I believe that's a product of Hollywood movies where I seem to recall first seeing it as a sign of some tough guy in tight pants showing how kewel they were, and for the director to emphasize the ass of the actor in tight pants.  Hollywood being all about selling sex and selling violence through selling sex.  Rudy's in my age cohort, more or less, and would have seen the same movies I did.   I realized it was stupid when I was a teenager and tried tight pants (I was so skinny that tight pants were definitely not an asset.) only to realize it was stupid so I didn't do it.   I love the idea that Rudy might have been given away by his stupid old ass making an ass of him.  

Update:  OK, I confess, I added that * just to get Simps in a lather.  It worked.  I know how to push his buttons.  He doesn't have many but one of the big ones are dissing Hollywood and TV.   I wonder when keeping a wallet in the back pocket started.  It's a pretty stupid place to keep a wallet, as Rudy proves, it's an even stupider place to keep your phone.   Try a web search, you'll read about the stupid things that are caused by keeping your phone in your back pocket. Including at least two teens whose i-phones caught fire back there.  

It's pretty pathetic, figuring that you've got to do something as dumb as putting your wallet in your back pocket to look kewel.    Apparently poeple who do that are more likely to cause back pain by throwing themselves off balance, especially if they sit a lot, which Simps definitely does. 

What I Did With My Day Off

Sorry for the last two days, the first was being an old man who needed to take a day off.  The second one was because I read this article about the 30th anniversary of the murders of Elba and Celina Ramos, the house keeper and her daughter along with Jesuit Frs. Ignacio Ellacuría; Ignacio Martín-Baró; Segundo Montes; Juan Ramón Moreno; Joaquín López y López; and Amando López the Six martyred Jesuit theologians in El Salvador led me into looking into the thinking of the primary target of the United States supported murderers,  Ignacio Ellacuría, a very important philosopher and liberation theologian.  

Unfortuntately, due to my limited knowledge of Spanish, I couldn't get too far. I had never read anything by Ignacio Ellacuría mostly, perhaps, because very little of what he's written has been translated into English and I don't generally try to read complex texts in a second language.  It's a shame that there aren't a lot of good translations of his work in English, readily available as there are for such writers as Hans Kung and Karl Rahner because the little I've seen in the past day, his work is very much worth reading. 

I do have to wonder what the role of him coming from a small, impoverished country plays in the wider obscurity of  Ellacuría, clearly a major intellectual that the richest English speaking country could find the trouble to help kill but who is not translated into the language.  I have to wonder what other thinkers from small, often poor countries have said that is generally unknown due to them never being translated into English.   English speakers don't deserve the power that they're given to determine such things.** 

That deficiency in translation also effects the wider knowledge of Xavier Zubrini, of whom I was totally unaware but who looks to me, on one day of looking at this beginner's introduction to his thinking, to be an extremely important philosopher whose work is little known to English speakers.  The introduction, alone, shows why it is a shame his thinking isn't available in English.*   Here are two excerpts to show why it makes me wish I knew more about it and Ellacuría's theology that was so influenced by his thinking.

Zubiri long pondered the great philosophical questions, and as befits serious philosopher, he did not adopt a "motto"; but had he done so, it would undoubtedly have been his friend Einstein's keen observation: "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them". Zubiri believes that previous philosophers have gone astray because they started to construct elaborate theories about human understanding, things of the world, and so forth, without first looking very hard at and trying to describe and understand the most basic aspects of human experience. This has led to bizarre theories which even their creators admit they do not believe. Start at the beginning, Zubiri says, and you will see that human understanding is divided into three modes or phases. These three modes or phases unfold logically if not chronologically as follows: 




  • Primordial apprehension of reality (or basic, direct installation in reality, giving us pure and simple reality). This is what one gets first, and is the basis on which all subsequent understanding is based. Perhaps it can be most easily understood if one thinks of a baby, which has only this apprehension: the baby perceives the real world around it, but as a congeries of sounds, colors, etc., which are real, but as yet undifferentiated into chairs, walls, spoken words, etc.
  • Logos (explanation of what something is vis à vis other things, or as Zubiri expresses it, what the real of primordial apprehension is in reality). This is the second step: differentiate things, give them names, and understand them in relation to each other. As a baby gets older, this is what he does: he learns to make out things in his environment, and he learns what their names are, eventually learning to speak and communicate with others verbally.
  • Reason (or ratio, methodological explanation of what things are and why they are, as is done in science, for example). This is the highest level of understanding; it encompasses all of our ways of understanding our environment. One naturally thinks of science, of course; but long before science as we know it existed, people sought explanations of things. And they found them in myths, legends, plays, poetry, art, and music-which are indeed examples of reason in the most general sense: they all seek to tell us something about reality. Later, of course, came philosophy and science; but no single way of access to reality, in this sense, is exhaustive; all have a role. 
and,

 The third level of intellection, ratio or reason-with the broad acceptation of explanation-encompasses far more than what is usually associated with this word in English-speaking countries, viz. discursive knowledge. In particular, knowledge is not just science and mathematics (important though they are); there are other modes of knowledge, for example poetic knowledge and religious knowledge, which fall under the scope of reason as Zubiri understands it. Correlatively, there are realities which are not things in the sense of objects of science; for example, there is the reality of the person. In Zubiri's words, reason is "measurant intellection of the real in depth", which means that reason seeks to know the real in a very probing, insightful way. There are three moments of reason to be distinguished: (1) intellection in depth, e.g., electromagnetic theory is intellection in depth of color; a poem or song may be intellection in depth of someone's emotions; and a great painting can be intellection in depth of a religious doctrine or of the beauty of nature. (2) Its character as measuring, in the most general sense, akin to the notion of measure in advanced mathematics. This may be, but is not necessarily quantitative; certainly a play can "take the measure of" a person or experience. (3) Reason as intellectus quaerens-which means that reason, with its dynamic, directional, and provisional structure, is only able to conquer things in a provisional manner. But provisional in the sense that our intellection cannot conquer all of reality, or all of any given thing; reality is too rich for our finite minds. 'Provisional' does not imply skepticism; it only means that we go on seeking the fullness of truth about reality which we shall never obtain, but of which pieces are delivered to us by science, art, music, literature, architecture, and all of the "higher" forms of knowledge

The text goes on from there, 

Zubiri's insight is that while human intelligence is not fundamentally flawed, and therefore is capable of truth, it is fundamentally limited, in ways not realized prior to this century because the pretensions of what he terms 'rational knowledge' were not recognized. In general, 'rational knowledge' was identified with some combination of philosophy and science, often combined with some form of reductionism (e.g., all experience and all of reality can be explained by science). Always there was the belief that somehow everything is capable of rational explanation. In no case was this ambitious program ever carried out, and in general it was only sketched as a project; but the belief was propagated with religious ferver. Alas, the bottom fell out in the 20th century, when even science was forced to come to grips with fundamental uncertainties. In Zubiri's view, far from this being a catastrophe, it was most liberating to the human mind, because it freed us from slavish adherence to excessively rational explanations that are inadequate to capture all of human experience, and at the same time opened other areas of knowledge as capable of delivering reality to us as well: history, literature, theology, art, and so forth. Correlatively, there are realities which are not things in the sense of objects of science; for example, there is the reality of the person. These multiple ways of understanding reality reflect its ultimate "openness", as opposed to the view held in previous philosophies which implied that reality is "closed" and hence fully capturable, usually by science.

That would indicate that he, more than many English language philosophers was keenly aware of the problems physicists were running up against, the limits of what is knowable through the powerful but limited practices of human reason.  The consequences of that general ignorance and denial of the consequences of those limits have infected more than just philosophy and the philosophy of physical science, they've had catastrophic consequences in history as allegedly "scientific" political ideologies have made it perfectly acceptable to people to accept the murders of scores of millions of people as essential to the progress towards a more scientific future.***

I think there is a temptation to think that the triumph of science, as in scientistic, materialistic modernism is due to the intellectual and philosophical success of scientific method when I think it is based on its ability to produce things that magnify human power which is generally, then, unwisely and disastrously implemented and gets the environment destroyed and lots of people killed.   Science was adopted largely for what it could get us, not out of some great devotion to reason and evidence and all of those other things claimed for it.  That Einstein quote might be worth considering because we are doing it now just as certainly as it did in Einstein's time and all others.  

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them". 


* It is worth considering how much better it would be to have a democratic, easily learned and mastered lingua franca, to play for modern democratic culture the same role that Latin played in medieval and late medieval times.  The texts could be competently translated or even written into the language and so accessible to anyone who had bothered to learn to read it - which would require a fraction of the time it takes to learn to read even a relatively easy second language.  I studied Spanish for years and can read it with some ease but no where near the level I'd need to read these kinds of texts.  I studied Esperanto for six months before I reached the same level of reading fluency and a far better ability to speak it.   Just thought I'd mention that since "Esperanto" was so recently in the news due to Trump's bizarre tweet.   As a samideano, just thought I'd get that in. 

** In the National Catholic Reporter article, above, it notes that the major theologian Jon Sobrino was at a conference in Thailand at the time of the murders - he would certainly have been a seventh theologian murdered by the El Salvador army if he hadn't been there IN THAILAND BECAUSE HE COULD SPEAK ENGLISH, instead of Leo Boff who couldn't.

*** Consider this paragraph from this recent New Yorker review of a new translation of Koestler's  Darkness At Noon. 

By the late nineteen-thirties, Western intellectuals who sympathized with Communism had already proved themselves capable of accepting a great deal of killing in the name of the cause. Such “fellow-travellers” usually justified Stalinism’s crimes as the necessary price of building a socialist future, and of defending it against a hostile capitalist world. Walter Duranty, the Times’ correspondent in Moscow, excused the three million famine deaths that were caused by the push to collectivize Soviet agriculture, writing that, “to put it brutally—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Just think about the concept behind that breezy high-journalistic dismissal of the murders of millions of people BY STARVATION, how totally fucked up it is considering the only purpose of agriculture IS TO FEED PEOPLE, TO KEEP THEM FROM DYING OF STARVATION but in the "scientific" modernistic thinking of people, making agriculture fit into their scheme of the real, right way to be all sciency, it was perfectly OK to do things that lead to the starvation deaths of millions because agriculture refused to be corseted into their science.   And it was so AOK with the right-thinking of modern culture, which deifies science, that journalists, academics, "public intellectuals" could spout their approval from the writing chairs and other venues of thought dispersal over and over again. THE ASSHOLE WAS GIVEN A PULITZER PRIZE EXACTLY FOR THE REPORTING HE DID THAT INCLUDED THAT!  The same kind of approval was given by good, right, thinking intellectuals and writers to Mao during the "great leap forward" and it is continually given by the right to fascist systems which regularly starve people and deprive them of subsistance through the similar logics of would-be scientific economics of completing sects.

I don't think it's likely to be a mere coincidence that Ignacio Ellacuría was murdered for being a theologian opposed to the instrumental thinking of both sides of such scientific thking and suspect his reading of Zubrini had a major part in being able to break out of a vicious dialectic that virtually every English speaking writer on politics and economics has been stuck in my entire life. 


Friday, October 25, 2019

Schoenberg Chamber Symphony No.1 Op.9 (Piano Solo Version)


Live at the Arnold Schoenberg Center Vienna 

Yannick Van de Velde, Piano

Unbelievable virtuosity and music making at the highest level, the solo piano version of one of the greatest pieces in the symphonic literature.

The Headline Says

99% of White Evangelicals Oppose Impeaching Trump

 

WWJS? 

 4 Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you. 5 For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many. Matthew 24:4-5 

 

WDTS?

 ‘I am the chosen one’ Donald Trump August 21, 2019

 

Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Look Closely, This Isn't Going To Happen Again

You're right, for once, Simps,  I don't care about that at all.  Now go mount the hissy fit you were counting on having when I said that.

The Real Left Must Dump The Play Left And Find More Reliable Allies Because We Can't Let Them Keep Ratfucking Us From The Play-Left

Bernie Sanders is dead to me, his play-lefty fan boys and gals online, at Majority Report, The Young Turks, other media of the alleged and play left are attacking Elizabeth Warren because she is the real left candidate who might get the nomination and might become president of the United States.  

I have to wonder where Cenk and Sam Ana and Michael believe their interests lie in what they're doing, just as I wondered where vanden Heuvel's and her husbands did as they did Putin's bidding at The Nation magazine.  Certainly it isn't highly placed in them helping the most liberal or leftist POSSIBLE candidate get the nomination and presidency, it's in striking a pose as the mostest-leftist to the thrill of their fan base and possibly their funders.  I have to wonder exactly who is funding their operations and what their perceptions of those supporters is.  Maybe I'll see what I can find on that or not.   Whatever part those play in their idiotic attacks on Warren and other Democrats, they may as well be doing it for money.

They are playing his recent heart attack as if that is some kind of vindication of his health and vigor, THAT is how delusional they are, that is how they sustain and encourage the delusion of his cult. 

Bernie Sanders, a man I used to admire, seems to me to be ever more a supreme egomaniac who bought the bullshit his adoring fans heaped on him and wants more.  I remember praising him for trying to heal the rift in the Democratic Party that his 2016 campaign opened up, to support the Woman his fan boys and gals hated more than they seemed to hate Trump.  Considering sanders wasn't a Democrat before or after he ran for President, then AND NOW,*  he is a ratfucker of another variety from Jill Stein and the Greens.   With this, not only is the man who is the center of his cult someone I will never respect again, after seeing the play-left do this kind of thing, literally for a half a century,  I am totally through with any of them, including Cenk and Ana, Sam and Michael and all of the idiot assholes, old and young enough to have something like an excuse. 

The real left- the left that can gain power had better look for more reliable allies than the Marxist-post-Marxist play-left, which I have to now also say includes the Democratic Socialists of America and most of those who call themselves in different meanings, "socialists".   As a guy who became a socialist when I found out how banking worked and found out what lobbyists were, always a democratic socialist, I'll have to stop calling myself one as I don't believe 95 out of 100 people who use the term mean what I did when I called myself one.  To start with, my socialism had a radical measure of economic leveling included in it as well as workers owning the means of production instead of investors.   And the prevention of great wealth accumulation.   I used to think of that in terms of modern economics but I think of it in modern interpretations of The Law as presented by Moses in the Jewish Bible.   I don't know what to call it but I know, as a radical leveler, it's to the left of the "socialists" and certainly to the left of the three members of "The Squad" who are hitching their wagons to a star who  will lead to disaster.  I've been telling people for a while that I thought Congresswoman Pressley was the best of the four, she's, so far, given me every reason to believe that she is.   Maybe the other three will mature, maybe they won't.  Bernie didn't.

*  Just to remind anyone who doesn't remember, he joined the party only to run for its presidential nomination, THEN LEFT THE PARTY AFTER THE ELECTION, only to rejoin it for another try to get the nomination of a party he's not a member of, AND HE'S ALREADY DECLARED HIS CANDIDACY FOR THE SENATE AS A FRIGGIN' INDEPENDENT when he ineviatbly is not president of the United States.

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Anita O'Day - Love Me Or Leave Me

 

Oscar Peterson – piano
Herb Ellis – guitar
Ray Brown – double bass
John Poole – drums
Milt Holland – drums

I don't know which drummer it was on this and I don't hear a guitar but these are the credits for the album this appeared on. 

"fuelled by speeches and public appearances" - Old Business New Business

In old business, I'm going to amend and extend a paragraph from my long Sunday post:

The idiocy that, today, we can draw the line over those who deny the decades ago Holocaust happened while we cannot draw it on those who want to reproduce it is one of the most astonishing and telling defects of modern libertarian-liberal culture.  It is sheer idiocy shown to be such through the subsequent history of mass murder and genocide by anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic governments and movements.   If you can't learn the lesson of your own time, whining about those who refuse to learn from history rings entirely hollow.  Such free speech advocacy is supremely irresponsible and immoral.  Egalitarian democrats owe the opponents of egalitarian the same rights that those opponents would take away from most people, except any that would lead to them taking power and destroying equality and democracy.   Anything that would lead the opponents of egalitarian democracy taking power or even having a malign effect on equality or democracy granted to them is an immoral and profoundly stupid license for them to succeed.   In so far as it may have that effect, and in the United States with hate-talk and other media creating then empowering Trump,  it is clear that in that line we owe them  the absolutely nothing, including allowing them a hearing.  Those hearings they were granted are how they got in a position to murder people to start with.  Dictators, those who enslave, oppress and commit genocide always gain power through words, spoken, written, or in the case of today's modern gangster governments, OFTEN BROUGHT TO POWER THROUGH ELECTIONS, through words amplified through mass electronic media.   If you want to know who and how will make those decisions, the same way all human decisions are made, they are made by people hopefully as honestly as they can be, MISTAKES GUARANTEED TO BE MADE, but in the case of egalitarian democrats, those will be mistakes.   Our occasional mistakes are the intended acts of gangster governments.  Unlike egalitarian democrats, they will not try to find and fix what they do.  Once the gangsters get power, they make their decisions as dishonestly as they figure they need to to get what they want.   Pretending that nature just sorts it all out better than we can is to give the gangsters what they want by irresponsible chosen impotence.   

To allow them the chance to get power and destroy democracy, to destroy the rights of those whose they target as scapegoats for their deluded followers, those they target for the worst treatment in their use of their followers to enforce their will, the chance to do that because people of good will are bound to make occasional mistakes is one of the stupidest thing about that deluded 18th century faith in the "nature" and "nature's god" those deist boobs installed in the Constitution.  We are the agents of moral responsibility or we are the ones who irresponsibly reject that responsibility.   That is the choice between keeping an egalitarian democracy or losing it.    The test of time of those lofty 18th century generalities would seem to be about up, if they gave us a Trump who cannot be removed from power, even after these first years of catastrophe, it has failed.   It allowed him to get and keep power in the sewer that absolute freedom to lie has created.  He gained power through speech, just as Lenin did, just as Hitler did, just as those who mounted the Reign of Terror did by swaying crowds with their words.  With the electronic mass media, Trump didn't even have to work hard at it and he's the stupidest person of those I just mentioned.  We are even stupider for allowing that to happen with the lessons of history we have. 

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

In new business,  I should point out that two of the themes I posted on last weekend meet in the anti-vaccine mania that is certain to be in the news, the dangers of a "freedom" of the press to lie and the disaster that lax scientific standards leads to.   I read a typical sci-ranger materialist-atheist claim that it was new-age "woo" that had started the anti-vaccine idiocy.   But it was largely fueled by journalism of the most esteemed and renowned scientific reputability and through the sloppy scientific standards that have become ubiquitious in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.  But you don't have to take my word for that

Twelve years after publishing a landmark study that turned tens of thousands of parents around the world against the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine because of an implied link between vaccinations and autism, The Lancet has retracted the paper.

In a statement published on Feb. 2, the British medical journal said that it is now clear that “several elements” of a 1998 paper it published by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues (Lancet 1998;351[9103]:637–41) “are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation.”
Dr. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, declined through a spokesperson to speak to CMAJ about this issue.

In the original paper, Wakefield and 12 coauthors claimed to have investigated “a consecutive series” of 12 children referred to the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine with chronic enterocolitis and regressive developmental disorder. The authors reported that the parents of eight of the 12 children associated their loss of acquired skills, including language, with the MMR vaccination. The authors concluded that “possible environmental triggers” (i.e. the vaccine) were associated with the onset of both the gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression.

In fact, as Britain’s General Medical Council ruled in January, the children that Wakefield studied were carefully selected and some of Wakefield’s research was funded by lawyers acting for parents who were involved in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers. The council found Wake-field had acted unethically and had shown “callous disregard” for the children in his study, upon whom invasive tests were performed.

When the original article was picked up by the general media, the findings were fuelled by speeches and public appearances in which Wakefield recommended single vaccines rather than the combined MMR. Many parents seeking a cause for their children’s illness seized upon the apparent link between the routine vaccination and autism, say Canadian researchers who laud the retraction.

The media carries lies, people die.  There is no right to lie, there isn't even a right to carry lies due to lax fact checking and just taking it on faith due to someone having a PhD or MD or having the right connections.   It took the goddamned Lancet 12 fucking years to retract it.   How's that for not making an effort to correct a mistake.   I doubt any of the myriads of talk show on TV and radio and podcast who have carried that poison have ever made much of an effort to dis-misinform the public on that count.  They don't have to, they're the free press, don'tcha know. 

Update:  Rereading the passage from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, it occurs to me that there is a third component I've written about contributing to the catestrophic defeat of modern medicine by lies, the media and lax scientific practice, sleazebag lawyers figured heavily in it, as they did in getting the media of the United States the ability to lie with impunity.   When lawyers are allowed to twist things for their paying clients, people die, too.  Their success at getting people killed by getting their clients the ability to lie is a mountain compared to the handfuls they save from the death penalty, brought back from near death in the 1970s by the ability they got their clients to lie with impunity.  

Monday, October 21, 2019

The Incompetent Incontinence Of Simps Dribbles Out Another Lie

I don't believe I ever said bacteria can reason.  Having had the experience of reasoning, if they can, they do it by means that I'm not familiar with.  It's like what I said about panpsychism and the claim that non-living entities have consciousness.   What bacteria exhibit in the long line of research James Shapiro discussed in the article that Simps never read would require some kind of processing of information but reasoning is probably not it. I don't know what they do but it's clear some kind of information external to the organisms, some collaborative behavior among organisms and their environmental experience is involved in their volitional behaviors.  That's not the same thing as reasoning.  Perhaps if Simps ever reasoned anything out, he'd realize that.

So, yeah, as always, Simps is making it up.  He may not be as fecund a liar as Trump but he shares the same propensity.   

Update:  I'm disinclined to go the route of trying to figure out if someone lies because they're too stupid to understand the truth.  I figure by the time someone gets to assume the status of an adult if they don't know the difference that's their problem.  I'm going with not only habitual but obsessive liar for Simps as for Trump.

Here Is Your Provocative Idea For The Day - Maybe I should Make This A Regular Feature

"Modernity began with the exclusion of women," Forcades said.
In "modernity" — the phrase she used to describe the post-Renaissance period of history that continues to this day — human reason was made out to be the highest "ideal of human life." From modernity's outset, Forcades said, women were excluded from pursuing this ideal because they were barred from receiving an education and attending university.
While reason is the ultimate ideal for secular society, Forcades made clear that the church has never said that the ideal of human life is the priesthood, which only men are allowed to attain.
"The ideal of human life is sanctity, and that has always been open to women," Forcades said, though she also mentioned she supports the Women's Ordination Conference and will continue to advocate for women's ordination to the priesthood.
Before turning it back over to Chittister, Forcades questioned if the best way to address the Catholic Church's sexism is by casting stones at the institutional church from a perspective that the society outside it is more welcoming to women.
"I don't know about that," she said.
Note:   Memory was at the core of an Oct. 11 exchange between two prominent Benedictine sisters both known as radical thinkers in their circles — Sr. Joan Chittister, 83, and Sr. Teresa Forcades, 53 — at All Souls Church Unitarian in Washington, D.C., for a fundraising event hosted by the Women's Ordination Conference titled "Radicals and the Rule."
I was familiar with Sr. Joan Chittister, a (in all the best ways) controversial theologian and writer, I'm not familiar with Sr. Teresa Forcades, but I'm hoping to become more familiar, now
This is from Bridget Mary Meehan's blog, a priest from The Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests
I share Sr. Forcades skepticism about the beneficial effects of modernism, especially in the era of Darwinism and neo-Darwinism, which matches notions of natural selection (which led Darwin and most of his followers to consider even women of their proposed superior groups, naturally inferior to men) and the early, entirely naive and crude conception of genetics which the neo-Darwinists glued to natural selection, complete with all of the worst features of both in regard to subjugated people, Women and Others.  Her point that women were excluded by modernism, if you measure it from the broadest meaning of the word, in that women were regularly deprived entrance to universities, is a good one to consider.  I would also note that the academic culture built up in that period, contains a good part of what women must adopt to be taken seriously by it - and so granted credentials, the real goal of academia - and which will continue to be a largely unexamined aspect of the culture of those who enjoy such credentials.  I think a good part of the damage done to feminism in the post-second wave retreat was directly due to such accommodation with the relics of that embedded, unexamined sexism.   The pro-porn pseudo-feminists are certainly able to be understood in those terms. 

Sunday, October 20, 2019

Lullaby Of The Leaves - Two Versions - Not Really A Fall Song But The Leaves Are Falling All Around As I Type This

Ella Fitzgerald



 Anita O'Day 


Not really a comparison, they're both incomparable.  I've never heard anyone else perform the verse other than Ella Fitzgerald.  

Ella's accompanied by Zoot Sims (ts) and Frank DeVol (cnd, arr). Recorded March 4, 1964. (Verve Records)

Anita O'Day and her Orchestra; Petkere; Young; Roy Eldridge; Bill Harris; Budd Johnson; Cecil Payne; Ralph Burns; Al McKibbon; Don Lamond; Norman Granz  1952 Mercury (8989) 

Update:  Look it up in a dictionary.  It's got a variant spelling listed.

Hate Mail

Oh.  No.  There's no "battle of wits".   Simps is a very few things.  One of those few is definitely not a wit.   

I have gone through entire weeks, even a month or so without mentioning Simps or responding to him but people seem to enjoy seeing me kick his ass.  It's gotten old for me but who am I to deprive them of that fun, especially when Simps keeps coming back for more?  I can understand even someone of his limited mind getting bored with the enforced consensus of Duncan's Prune Juice and Geritol bar, it's a hopeless task, getting him to learn something, but where there is barely life there is barely hope. 

The Right Of Genocidalists To Talk Themselves Into Power Doesn't Exist - I Didn't Want To Go Over This Again

For crying out loud, how much more explicit can I be?  I disagree with everything that William Barr represents and does.  The man is a fascist, finding out that he's a member of the chapter of the fascist organization Opus Dei* along with Brett Kvanaugh and the man Republicans have allowed to choose federal judges, Leonard Leo has explained why Barr is AOK with Trump stealing babies from their parents, Opus Dei had a child stealing and selling operation during the Spanish Civil War.   It is a secretive mafia style heresy which the CIA's Pope, John Paul II elevated to power within the Catholic Church, much to the opposition of many other Catholics who were familiar with the group.  It is a fascist cult, membership of which should disqualify them from participation in a democracies government and, especially, its judiciary.    I thought I'd start with that because I'm still getting trolls lying about Barr and I saying the same things. 

I have slammed the ubiquitous and stupidly held "enlightenment" notion that it is the business of egalitarian democratic government and law to be totally and absolutely neutral in matters of ideological expression.  It is even stupider for allegedly egalitarian-democratic culture to.   That idea runs head long into this controversy over William Barr spouting neo-fascist-Trumpian lies at Notre Dame University, as demonstrated by those who, like myself, despise what Barr said but who, unlike me, like Voltaire strike a pose of defending his right to say what he did.  In his case, to the death of someone else.   Well, him being able to say what he did isn't the question, as if the criminal AG doesn't get heard,  it's if Notre Dame's allowing him a prominent podium to spout neo-fascist and dangerous crap from is a decision that is beyond criticism.  

Before going into my criticism of what Michael Sean Winters said on my point, I will point out that his is one of the best criticisms of what William Barr actually said from the podium Notre Dame gave him (they certainly don't let every person speak there, I should point out, so there was an element of choice in them giving Barr the microphone).

Some people took to Twitter to complain about Notre Dame even hosting this man, given his apparent willingness to do everything and anything possible to shield the president from legal trouble. Bosh. A major seat of learning should feel free to invite any member of Congress or Cabinet to speak on campus. I dislike the censoriousness that has blossomed improbably on the left. My rule of thumb: Draw the line at Holocaust deniers. Everyone else should be heard. If you do not like what the person has to say, argue with them. That is what universities, and public discourse more generally, should be all about.  

What you might lose in the generally held view that Holocaust deniers should be excluded from who should be heard, is that the Nazis are hardly the only or the last people to engage in genocide.  Stalin and Mao murdered more poeple than the six million Jews and millions of others who the Nazis murdered.  What about people who deny or dismiss those scores of millions of murdered people?   What about this years Nobel Laureate in Lit.  Peter Handke, who has denied the mass murders of recently fascist Serbia under the gangster Slobodan Milosevic and acted as a denier of that more recent mass murderer?   What about those who lied about the murders of, largely, Catholic peasants in Central America WITH ILLEGAL AMERICAN AID during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, which William Barr helped to cover up by drafting the pardons George H. W. Bush issued to his fellow criminals who were part of those crimes?  

What about someone who is paid to lie EFFECTIVELY for gangsters - masking their PR campaign in the requisite disguise as an ideology as is generally the case with the Anglo-American-fascist right and, yes those who have held the torch for such foreign gangsters as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, . . . ?  Ah, yes, PUTIN?  What if the person has such enormous powers of speech that he can hold people spellbound so as to gain power for himself or his employer and the results are things like six million dead?   The obvious example shows what's wrong with Winter's upholding of the conventional, allowable view of "unlimited" free speech?   Speech has consequences, good as well as bad.  To pretend that we must remain neutral in view of the evil consequences of speech because, you know it's "speech" is one of the most amorally stupid ideas to have survived the 20th century blood bath. 

Egalitarian democracy owes its opponents no quarter,  given what the opponents of egalitarian democracy would do to the free speech of those who might effectively promote egalitarian democracy, - NO, NOT WHAT THEY "MIGHT" DO, WHAT THEY ARE GUARANTEED TO DO - violently suppress such speech, if their promotion of whatever form of gangsterism they advocate gained control, Nazi, fascist, quasi-fascist, Marxist, Stalinist, Maoist,  Trumpian, "Federalist" . . . it is absolutely stupid and morally abominable for people who scribble articles and speeches and books and who feel they are in little danger, themselves, to piously declaim for the rights of such enemies of equality and democracy to have the chance to gull the gullible in numbers effective to give them power.  It is especially true when, as Winters' notes, they lie through their fucking teeth like Barr did at Notre Dame, breaking the commandment against bearing false witness on behalf of the neo-pagan Mammonist who Barr serves to keep in power.   

The lessons of what happens when lies are successfully peddled, as is done so well by those who make it their business to figure out how to sell lies successfully is written in the blood, in the bones, in the ashes of those who are killed by those lies.  Those lessons are not unknown to anyone of any education - I am certain that even Peter Handke and the establishment hacks who award the Nobels know that Bosnians and others were murdered even as he chooses to lie about that.   But are writers writing on the formerly presumed safety of having their flabby asses on writing chairs on North America any less dishonest in saying that such liars as Handke, like Barr "must be allowed to" get a chance to continue and commit crimes as part of a gangster government by lying from a podium at a nominally Catholic, PRIVATE university?   

No.  I don't think we owe those who want to kill people, to destroy egalitarian democracy, the advocates of gangster governance of whatever ideological cover, a chance to lie themselves into a position where they can do that.  We used to be able to pretend that "it can't happen here" but with Trump, as with the Bushes, we can see it can and is happening here.  It is happening here largely through those who spout idiotic 18th century slogans pretending that the subsequent history of genocide sold through freely spoken words is of secondary importance to their feeling all nice and free speechy about playing Voltaire and Madison.  

The idiocy that, today, we can draw the line over those who deny the decades ago Holocaust happened while we cannot draw it on those who want to reproduce it is one of the most astonishing and telling defects of modern libertarian-liberal culture.  It is sheer idiocy shown to be such through the subsequent history of mass murder and genocide by anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic governments and movements.   If you can't learn the lesson of your own time, whining about those who refuse to learn from history rings entirely hollow.  Such free speech advocacy is supremely irresponsible and immoral.  Egalitarian democrats owe absolutely nothing, including allowing them a hearing.  Those hearings they were granted are how they got in a position to murder people to start with.   If you want to know who and how will make those decisions, the same way all human decisions are made, they are made by people hopefully as honestly as they can be.  Once the gangsters get power, they make their decisions as dishonestly as they figure they need to to get what they want.   Pretending that nature just sorts it all out better than we can is to give the gangsters what they want by irresponsible chosen impotence.

*  Knowing it's the first resort of so many, I wouldn't trust the Wikipedia article on Opus Dei, it's obviously been "edited" by apologists for it.  I had not known that NPR's and PBS's once go-to guy on everything Catholic John Allen seems to be an apologist for the mob.