"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
IN THE POST I DID THE OTHER NIGHT in which I talked so enthusiastically about the poetic parphrase of Scripture, The Message, I said it was composed by Edward Patterson, mixing up the novelist I knew of with the actual translator, Eugene Peterson who is also a novelist and poet. That's what comes of relying on hearing a name spoken instead of reading it on a page and writing before doing much real research. I apologize for that lapse in my usual practice.
I've been looking more at The Message and the man who produced it and am even more encouraged after hearing him and reading some interviews with him.
I was especially interested to see that he shared one of my enthusiasms, for the poetry of the too little remembered Denise Levertov. Here is what some of the program notes say.
“Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.” These are the words of the legendary pastor and writer Eugene Peterson, whose biblical imagination has formed generations of preachers. At the back of the church he led for nearly three decades, you’d be likely to find well-worn copies of books by Wallace Stegner or Denise Levertov. Frustrated with the unimaginative way he found his congregants treating their Bibles, he translated it himself — and that translation has sold millions of copies around the world. Eugene Peterson’s down-to-earth faith hinges on a love of metaphor and a commitment to the Bible’s poetry as what keeps it alive to the world.
I will be interested in reading his rendering of the Psalms, which even in the translations I like many of the just don't do it for me like they're supposed to.
guy who was asking why "Jews aren't addressing why so many of the Epstein circle are Jews?" Rememer my answer asking why he wasn't asking why rich, straight, white men aren't addressing why almost everyone in the Epstein child trafficking club were rich, stright, white men?
Here's an interesting and short video that, while it talks about her expereince at Harvard, could as easily be made about MIT, Stanford (where that Altman guy mentioned below went), and the rest of the elite Ivys and Ivy equivalent schools that turn out the goddamned ruling class,
RISKING VIOLATING FAIR USE I'm going to give you a big chunk of this article by Scott Hurd, without links, so you should definitely read it at the one I'm giving you the link for.
This Lent, will you "unplug " and "recharge" your religious "batteries"? Try to find the "bandwidth" for daily Mass? "Rewire" your prayer life or "reboot" your spiritual reading? Lent is, after all, a chance for an "upgrade" to a better, holier you: "Version 2.0," if you will.
Sound weird? That's because I've described typical Lenten goals with the computer jargon that's crept into our everyday talk. And I'm just as guilty of using it as anyone else. Which is why I'm making an appeal: This Lent, let's give up referring to ourselves as if we're machines. Because we aren't! But plenty of people think that we are — with serious consequences.
Pope Leo XIV seems to appreciate the threat, especially as AI creeps into more corners of our lives. In asking why life's busyness often leaves us feeling exhausted and empty, he said: "Because we are not machines, we have a 'heart.' " And he pointedly reminded the Italian bishops that "the person is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery."
This is all a consequence of the conscious adoption of materialist ideology as the default of academically, culturally and conventionally respectible life - so much of a default in the dim modernist past that even many of those who would claim they aren't materialists don't have any idea that is how they think about other People. Which, by the way, is the reason that I started capitalizing words that refer to People and other living Creatures a number of years ago, fall out from the atheist-materliast fad of the '00s. I suppose it's more of a personal discipline to remind myself not to revert to that materialist habit of thought than something I've advocated everyone do. Though maybe I should.
This part of the article, which is why I had the idea to write this, raises some questions I don't think the tweeting CEO below would like us going into very far.
But not everyone shares this understanding of the human person. To some — especially in tech circles — we are in fact "machines" driven by a "system of algorithms."
Consider the response made by Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, to an influential academic paper's claim that, unlike humans, AI chatbots don't understand what they generate because they're simply "stochastic parrots" that mimic their training data.
Altman didn't buy it. To mock the authors' conclusion, he turned to "X", the social media platform owned by his OpenAI co-founder, Elon Musk. "i am a stochastic parrot," Altman tweeted, "and so r u."
In other words, according to this billionaire tech titan, human beings are really no different from unthinking machines. You and I are simply computers whose output parrots our input. And nothing more.
While I'm sure it would be news to Altman and his, no doubt philosophy disdaining fellow CEOs, if we are just "stochastic parrots" as are the atomated "AI" content-theft and plagarizism machines he makes what I'd bet are billions from - WHAT IS THE PRINCIPLE ON WHICH COPYWRIGHT AND PATENT LAW BASED IN? It must be entirely make believe and nothing real if what he claims is true, especially for the things he makes his billions from. It is allegedly based on the rights to intellectual content by their HUMAN creators. Rights which do not inhere to machines or algorithms, themselves BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE SELVES. If all content is merely the parroting of previously existing content, which is stolen and monatized by those tech billionaires then there is no intellectual basis for the laws which allow them to amass the billions they have - NOR IS THERE ANY REAL AGENT WHICH WE HAVE ANY KIND OF PRINICIPLED, "ETHICAL" OR MORAL OBLIATION TO ALLOW THEM THE PRIVILEGES TO MAKE THOSE BILLIONS OR KEEP THEM.
Altman's arrogant confession that that's all there is to the creation of algorithms and programs and higher structures that corporations (imaginary entities given "personhood" by the corrupt lies of Supreme Courts and the corporpate lawyer who invented such artificial "persons) and those who are merely said to own them make those billions from . . . . all of that is something that we have eveyy right to use to mow down the kudzu of legal fiction that his entire professional life is founded in.
NOT that I expect that any part of the sleaziest part of the system of "justice" or the lawyers that service and man it would ever want to address such claims if they were ever made in a lawsuit by or against such a corporation and the billionaire eliminative matrialists like this Altman as to the most fundamental of consequences - lawyers, judges and "justices" are trained to lie on behalf of the super-rich and the corporations that such "justices" have endowed with "personhood." But I believe that, as the article points out, that it's high time we consider these things very, very seriously because we are beyond the tipping point in them treating us not only as individual objects but as specs and drops collectively considered as raw material resources FOR THEIR USE AND DISPOSAL.
"Remember you are dust and to dust you will return," may be the formular used to anoint a Person with ashes in some liturgical traditions but the intellectual basis of that, at least in Catholic theology, only refers to the material body, not the real person which is much more than the sum of its material parts . Secularism has no such basis, matrialist-atheist-scientism must negate it, though without applying their ideological claims to those artificial and profitable entities that they enjoy which their ideology has to, if honestly considered, impeach.
The prominent James Martin the editor at large of the Jesuit magazine, America, who has long served a ministry to LGBTQ+ People is, you won't be surprised to hear, a frequent target of right-wingers and the "trad cath" cult. I don't listen to all of his podcasts though I probably should, his fine interview with Anthea Butler was linked to here over the weekend.
This is an interview with the greatly respected Methodist Bible scholar Ben Witherington that covers many things, including how to pray the scriptures during Lent. There is a lot of practical information about that. One of the things that surprised me is his advice to those who are familiar with the scriptures, especially for Catholics those readings that recur in the three-year cycle of liturgical readings. He suggested reading them in a translation you're not familiar with. Something I've found useful, myself, was listening to the daily mass in another language as a way to keep up my French.
But his advice to read The Message by Edward Patterson really surprised me. Patterson, he noted was a Biblical scholar in his own right which I hadn't know, I'd only seen him described as a novelist which made me kind of suspicious on the basis of nothing but my own prejudice.
I'd known about The Message which goes beyond the so-called dynamic equivalence method of translation instead of the so-called word-for-word method of translation to put the content of the Bible into vernacular English. There are lots of good English vernacular translations, I like the Common English and Good News translations so I'd never thought to look at The Message.
It being late in the evening when my eyes give me trouble and I don't want to watch a screen, I looked for readings of it online. After trying a recording of the Message book of Mark which had music in the background -yuck!- I found a good one of a man with a working class English accent reading it very well. I was really surprised at how big the impact of hearing a close but not "literal" telling of the familiar content was. I don't know if reading the same on the page would have as big an impact on me - I'll be ordering it when I get around to that.
In his far more traditionally "literal" translation of the New Testament, David Bentley Hart said that Mark which was originally written in hardly sophisticated Greek is something he translated into the equivalent of that in English, including the use of the highly vernacular historical present tense when that's how it's said in the Greek. That kind of thing which even scholarly revieweres have noted gives his translation a bracing freshness, something I can attest to. The way that Patterson translated it has an even more bracing effect.
I wouldn't consider replacing a more scholarly and direct reading of the texts with The Message but it's as good as reading a good study bible commentary and more direct than consulting a more extensive learned commentary.
Also, I tried his youtube of Romans and even in that great theological, not narrative book, and found the same was true. I will be buying that and use it as I would a commentary. It's not hard to imagine someone finding that starting with The Message might be the most useful thing for them to do.
Never looked into Ben Witherington before but I'll try to get to him. One of the problems is that there are so many very fine Bible scholars, theologians, spiritual writers (as well as so many who are far less good) that it's impossible to read or listen to all of even the best of them.
His entire off-the-cuff discourse is worth listening to, it is pitch perfect. I will give you this passage that came after he noted part of what Jesse Jackson was doing in the 1990s after he started to be ignored by mainstream media.
I cannot allow it to go unmentioned that the man who lost the presidential electio spent his time after the election get securing the release of a US Navy pilot, 16 Americans in Cuba, 700 women and children in Iraq and two Gambian Americans from prison.
Our current president, after he lost in 2020, spent the entire four years trying to burn the country to the ground and we let him back in.
Jesse Jackson literally did more having not never been a president at all. Let's make that clear. And he wasn't out here begging for the Nobel Peace Prize.
THIS INTERVIEW OF CHRIS KNIGHT who has written about Noam Chomsky critically from the left, someonen who revealed things about his extensive ties to the milirary industrial complex as well as being supportive of his leftist politics AND, also knowing a good deal about the collapse of Chomskys theory of universal grammar, is the closest I've come to hearing or reading anyone come up with an explanation of how he could associate with and write supportively of the most notorious child rapist, trafficker and almost certainly blackmailer perhaps in human history. Owen Jones chose the one to come up with something like an explaination well.
I would like to read or hear someone go in to the deep relationships that a smart though hardly qualified con-man had with many of the figures in real as well as pseudo-sciences (and linguistics is, actually one of the latter) because I think that would not only tell us a lot about how someone like Chomsky could be successfully courted and compromised by him but how so many within the post-WWII materialist-atheist-scientistic academic world were far less confusingly compromised by him. I think that that relationship tells us a lot about the character and nature of that ideology and how it melds so easily with the world of anti-democratic politics, high finance and the modern cult of media driven celebrity.
One of the more insightful things I recall hearing Chomsky explain was how the French cultural and establishment that made figures such as philosophers promoted and brought to fame and inluence and celebrity - as I recall he called it "vedette culture," movie-star culture. And a lot of those who Epstein wooed and won, to some extent, fall into that category here as well as in Britain. Even some of those who had actual academic and even scientific careers. Some, such as those within the old Scienceblogs crowd were made such stars with Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner money.
As for the failure of Chomsky's "universal grammar," since it was based on the wildly over-sold and over-imagined ideas of mid-20th century evolutionary biology, including the things that evolutionary-psychology and sociobiology were based in, it's no wonder that it was just another of those edifaces of unevidenced science that grew, matured, decayed and was abandonned as academic pseudo-science went on to the next big thing. If Chomsky had died in his sixties or seventies instead of approaching a centenniel, he might have avoided witnessing that. E. O. Wilson is a similar case in that he came to publicly doubt kin selection, one of the the bases of his own claim to fame, Sociobiology, the extent to which a flock of his evolutionary-psychology academic heirs howled in protest when he expressed those doubts, some of whom also were charmed or came near to the orbit of Jeffrey Epstein, Richard Dawkins being foremost among those.
I will note that I'm skeptical of all theories deriving from natural selection which I think is an ideological theory and was never properly scientific due to the impossibility of observing the actual evolution of species. As with the the acquisition of and use of language being an undeniable phenomenon, the evolution of species is abundently supported by the geological and genetic record, its reality is not currently credibly denied. Someone may want to do basic science about how evolution happened, the strength and universal desire of biologists to have knowledge of how it happened, in the worst cases insisting that there must be one universal mechanism by which that happened. That doesn't stop almost all of them from pretending that they've got that mechanism when they have no such a thing. Chomsky's desire to find the equivalent in his chosen field of linguistics - which is as opaque as the billions of years of the history of the evolution of speices - cannot be made truly scientific for similar reasons. There is no way to make the necessary observations, measurements and honest analyses needed to produce science, no matter them making believe they can at MIT or the Pentagon.
Chomsky owed us an explaination of this and, if Knight is correct, he is too disabled to be able to give us one even if he was willing to do so. It is sadder than the implosion of his academic theory that his legacy as one of the major figures of moral criticism of governmental and corporate and oligarchic evil in our lifetimes fell under the sway of an evil, likely Israeli intelligence connected con-man who certainly was nothing like a friend to him. It is shocking that Noam Chomsky couldn't see through him even at close proximity to his evil doing. That's his tragedy and a tragedy of the secular left.
I decided to post the rest of this morning's post that came after what I successfully got posted this morning. I did so at my alternative, seldom posted to (originally more tabloid type content) blog. If you're curious to see what Blogger didn't like this morning or can try to figure out why it, combined with what I did post from it below, didn't get approved, you can read it here.
It's The World Of Appearances And Illusions And A Sign Of Why That Is So Morally Risky
I HADN'T HEARD about the revelations of the Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner child-trafficking, rape-blackmail ring and the supermodel so famous that someone like me who detests that world has heard of, Naomi Campbell, until yesterday.
Given the extensive, perhaps pervasive connections of the modeling and fashion and pagent industries to the most notorious child-rape and trafficking gang, I don't think I'll be able to think of any of those without thinking they're all just fronts for such things. Oh, and throw in the movies to that mix too. If someone who was at the top of the modeling racket like Campbell was in that sewer, I figure most of it must be, to some extent, that kind of thing.
I'd come to have some sense of that when I heard of the perverted and depraved world of beauty pagents using very young girls, such as the murdered J. B. Ramsay. Seeing the nauseating pictures and video of her dressed like a prostitute and vamping like one, it should be a crime for anyone, including parents, to present young children in such sexualized ways. But that is ubiquitious, not only here but in other countries.
In the past I'd have said that while that should be considered criminal abuse of minor children, it's clear from the reaction of many who want to minimalize the crimes of the billionaires, millionaires and others involved with the Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner ring, everyone from the piece of trash Megyn Kelly to the evolutionarly psychologist Robert Trivers and theoretical physicists and those in computer science that making allowances for the agency of older children of the absurdly low age of "consent" and adults "consenting" to becoming comodities in that trafficking is an invitation to go ever lower.
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If this posts note that most of the rest of it was a transcription of the part of this video in which Norman Finkelstein dissects the "civil liberties lawyer" career of noted "civil liberties" lawyer-liar Dershowitz.
FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, my morning post has apparetly gotten some kind of content warning notice from Blogger. At least there's a red triangle next to the index listing of it which I've never seen before saying that's what that means. I went and looked, for the first time ever, at its guidelines and can't see how what I wrote is covered by any of it. I don't have time to argue with Google about that right now, if you have trouble reading what I wrote, please let me know.
For now, a math item and a physics item, maybe more later…
Four years ago, after the decision to have the 2026 ICM in the US was announced, I wrote:
"With the 2022 experience in mind, hopefully the IMU will for next time have prepared a plan for what to do in case they again end up having a host country with a collapsed democracy being run by a dangerous autocrat."
We’re very much in that situation now, and as far as I can tell the IMU is still planning for a normal, in-person event this July in Philadelphia.
The French mathematical society (SMF) announced yesterday that they would not participate (in the sense of not having a presence such as a booth) in the ICM this year. I’m hearing that other national math societies have taken or are considering similar action.
Setting aside the problem of lots of people for good reason not wanting anything to do with travel to the US right now, even those who do want to come here are facing serious problems getting a visa, in particular not being able to even get an appointment for a visa interview at this time.
The murders and Gestapo tactics now going on in Minneapolis surely influenced the SMF decision and may cause people now planning on attending the ICM to change their plans. The nightmare scenario for ICM organizers is having ICE and its thuggery move on to Philadelphia, which unfortunately seems possible.
Hell, my entire family, apart from one ex-sister-in-law were born here, white, working and middle-class and I don't like it when my family is traveling in the USofA during the turd reich.
THIS DISCUSSION between Michael Popok and Anthony Davis about how Trump and the Republica-fascists have led to the eclipse of America as the dominating super-power among putative democracies should be listened to by everyone. One of the problems I have with such entities as Popok's channel is that they put out so much content that the real gems in it get swamped, I hope that doesn't happen with this one. I think of the two Anthony Davis certainly has the more realistic view of the consequences of Trump II, that America's position has been permanently and fatally damaged. In the end of the discussion when Popok is giving what I think is a rather naive, lawyerly, panglossian view of how America could regain that position, Davis said something very interesting to me, something which I've been saying here for years. I've done a rough transcription of the discussion starting at about 7:22 in the video, Davis is a lot easier to transcribe than the meandering Popok, trying to consolodate the ideas through the verbiage.
P: Let me ask you a question because you and I had a little bit of a debate, a soft debate . . when I was on your show last week. . . . There's a premise to my question, which is I said to you, that just as Biden was able to heal a lot of these [international, etc.] relationships after Trump I. And through diplomacy and civility, you know, through a combination of carrot and stick, which is always present with the United States since Teddy Roosevelt or before . . . he was able to fix a lot of scarring that Trump had done in the global relationship the first time around. But I guess implicit in my question was that is a good thing and that the next president, Newsom or otherwise, will and should do the same thing and your response was a version of "it's too late these are techtonic plates that are premanently shifted that are creating new mountain ranges and you're not getting them back."
Two questions:
1. Should that be a goal of the Americans and is important to American interests and that the next president fix everything that Donald Trump Broke and
2 is it possible. I think it is. to at least try.
AD: Well, it's a little bit like the relationship between Canada and the US, isn't it. It's like family, you don't choose your family so you put up with your family. But your friends you can choose, you can have far better friends than you can family. We just learn to live with our family and I think with Europe and the rest of the world verses America the best that they'll be able to do is turn it into a situation where there might not be animosity but they're certainly not going to do business together. I think that's the best that Newsom or any future Democratic president could do, yeah, we could resign a few treaties, the Paris Climate Accord and various things but in terms of infrastructure, no. It's done now, I honestly think that's the case because unless they make a change to the Constitution, to the Bill of Rights, to the way that the system works in America, there is nothing to stop a future Donald Trump from becoming king again.
Popok: See, I think if we get eight years of civil discourse back led by a leader America respects and the world does, that's a true banner holder for American values as they do exist in both our aspirational Declaration of Independents and in our governing document of the Constitution, and in combination with reengaging with the world, in a way that Donald Trump has pulled in all the orrs, right forget about America First get back to our global interests we start resigning all the peace accords for the United Nations and go into the World Court, who knows, maybe what and get the money flowing, right, reestablish money as soft power deplomacy. The US is great for rescuing People . . .
I will spare you more of the panglossian 2008 Obama campaign style aspirational drivel. While Micheal Popok is hardly the worst of the media lawyers, he is, to quote my late father, 'full of soup" about this. Needless to say, Anthony Davis is almost as skeptical as I am about that working. You can listen to the entire discussion here.
Notice that Popock resorts to citing the thing which has zero legal power to do anything, the "aspirational Declaration of Independence" which, if he'd paid attention to that base-level knowledge of recent truth telling about Amerian history, he would know that The Reverend MLK jr. cited in his Dream speech, noting that it was an unpaid promissory note. Here's news for him, after payment started to be made through the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the Roberts Court stopped payment on it yet again as has been done continually through our history. AT NO TIME SO MUCH AS THE WRITING OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS WHICH WERE NOT MEANT BY THE FRAMERS TO EVER REALLY DELIVER THE THINGS PROMISED IN THE DECLARATION. As I've noted here, even the great Civil War Amendments which aspired to make those Constitutional law had that payement stopped by a series of Supreme Court rulings which had them twisted, distorted and, as recently as two years ago, anulled by the Supreme Court. You would think he, as a practicing lawyer and commentator on current events would know that everything Davis said about what it would take to make others in the Americas - including a majority of those in the United States - Europe, Africa, Asia trust the United States again WOULD REQUIRE BASIC CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE AND BASIC STRUCTURAL CHANGE of a kind that an American lawyer just can't imagine ever being possible.
Trump is certainly the one who brought the "American Century" to a definitive end in Trump II BUT THAT HAS BEEN AN ONGOING PROJECT OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTS, CONGRESSES AND COURTS ALL DURING MY LIFETIME. That ending is now, indeed, definitive, and the world outside of the United States was not a party to that ending it or even a party in favor of ending it.
There is a reason that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee gave Barack Obama a Peace Prize JUST FOR WINNING THE PRESIDENCY IN 2008, it is because he ended the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Neo-con disaster that brought about many evils, the greatest of them the Iraq debacle which is still playing out in the Middle East, Asia and Africa as well as Europe. They really believed in 2009 that Obama was the promised one who would embody the fulfillment of the claims of American democracy, not in the least part because he did something no one believed was possible, having a Black American president, overcoming our more than two and a half century old regime of white supremacist hegemony, itself embedded in the Constitution in structural ways that the Civil War Amendments didn't address.
It is the plain as day, clear as air truth that cannot be mentioned that LIES IN THE MEDIA is what Trump as a politician is made of, you will notice that the erudite Anthony Davis included the holy of holies, the sacred idol, the Bill of Rights among those things that would have to be changed, fundamentally, to make America trustworty again. Lies are behind the success of the ever worsening presidents and congresses that we have suffered ever since the Sullivan Decision took full hold - which I would date to about 1966 and certainly the media lies for the profits of its owners were what determined the 1968 election that brought us what was then the landmark of corrupt presidencies, Richard Nixon. It has given us ever worse presidencies with weakend Democratic ones whenever the Republicans policies crashed the economy. Certainly that is what got Clinton in office in 1992, Obama in office and Biden after the disaster of Trump I. Americans may have media and entertainment induced amnesia but the rest of the world does not.
The world wanted so to believe that first Obama, then Joe Biden had righted things and the United States would be what it had been before Trump and George W. Bush had made it in the period after the Rehnquist Court installed him in 2000. They really wanted that to happen only to see the American Constitution AS IT REALLY IS IN REAL LIFE AND PRACTICE INSTEAD OF HOLLYWOOD-CIVICS TEXTBOOK BULLSHIT CLAIMED IT WAS. There is no way that they are going to believe it again with the Constitution as it is now, nor should they NOR SHOULD ANY AMERICAN WHO IS AN EGALIATARIAN DEMOCRAT OR EVEN JUST A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT (AND BY THAT I DON'T MEAN A CAPITALIST CROOK). The faster we drop that bull shit the faster something will be done about amending the goddamned thing, getting rid of the Electoral College which brought us the two worst presidents in our lifetimes, both Bush II and Trump, the Supreme Court which has been the major engine of the corruption of our politics on a blatantly Republican-fascist partisan basis, the First Amendement which has created the lie that there is such a thing as a "right to lie" and that mass media, corporate media has that right to lie the oligarch's tools into office. And that's not to mention that other opportunity for the most corruption, the anti-democratically constituted Senate and its absurdly allocated powers to thwart democracy.
