"Minority" - Dan Wilson - Jared Gold - Sylvia Cuenca

Dan Wilson - guitar
Jared Gold - organ
Sylvia Cuenca - drums

Another thing I've posted years back that could stand another listen.  Great musicians.

Update:  Work Song 

Dave Stryker - Wichita Linesman

Dave Stryker guitar, Jared Gold organ, Steve Nelson vibes, Steve Johns drums ~ recorded live on February 20, 2015  ~ at The Falcon ~ by Betty Gennarelli

I came across this again while looking for organ jazz, I know I posted it once a few years back.  Here it is again.  I love all of the musicians on it, Dave Stryker is one of the most subtle jazz guitarists.  Steve Nelson is my favorite working vibes player, matching Dave Stryker in subtlety.   

Stupid Mail - Circle Jerks

I'll note that it is more than a trifle funny that it was two of Duncan's regular dolts, Simels and "R McGeddon" who had the clueless exchange about my post on the definition of "antisemitism" yesterday.  What's funny is it was an exchange of what would certainly be considered antisemitic and anti-Roma "jokes" between that pair of idiots that triggered the war Simels declared on me and not the ass who made the joke using a Jewish stereotype.   You can see that documented in this post, with a link to the original Eschaton comment thread. 

They don't do much reading at Eschaton, Duncan's idea of an Athenaeum.  Or thinking.  I have gone from being an increasingly disenchanted participant to seeing it as useful only to find specimens of why the secular-left has failed, fails still and will always fail.  I got out of it.

Also, it's interesting that the reason I stopped going there the first time, the sexist Hillary Clinton bashing during the 2008 primary season would seem to still be going on along with the bashing of Nancy Pelosi and Democrats in general by the rump Bernie or Busters there.   As Anne Sexton said, "There are no prayers here. Here there is no change."  I should have known not to go back after the election.  In 2008.  Never wait to break a bad habit. 

The Uses And Utility Of Morality For Those Who Reject Morality

Update important enough that I'm putting it at the top of the post: In presenting, below,  how the Shoah is inevitably dealt with as an issue in theology, I should have pointed out that theology often includes everything up to and including the discussion of it being a total discrediting of the existence of God, the only reason for theology to exist as part of that theological investigation of the Shoah and other occasions of tremendous and even everyday evil.  Those within science, technology, the various scientistic ideologies that were used to carry out or the generators of those mass murders never question themselves and their field  in regard to those issues.  I should also point out that I didn't even mention the far greater numbers of the totally atheistic Marxist murders of the 20th, 21st centuries and other mass murders .  That is also something I try to no longer overlook anymore.  It's obscene in exactly the same way as the  Holocaust denial, though almost never considered that way.

I have been re-reading Elizabeth A. Johnson's Quest For The Living God, a book about modern theology this week and it occurred to me as I was reading the inevitable chapter of the book in which deals with the Shoah and the other genocides committed by the Nazis that, in light of my reading of the Wannsee Conference documents there is something wrong in the entire current of post-war culture which that issue spotlights.

Thinking about what I read yesterday, that chapter, in light of my reading of the Wannsee documents as posted by the Holocaust Museum and the fact that religion is mentioned nowhere in the planning session of the Holocaust - given what I know about the men who planned it, many of them atheists and I would bet most if not all of them so - certainly none of them following The Law, the Prophets or The Gospels, all products of the Judaism they were bent on wiping out - it's remarkable that, by far, the individuals and institutions that have taken on the guilt for what they did have been religious.  I haven't done it yet but might go through all of the books on modern theology written in the post-war period that I can find to see which of them have "Shoah" or "Holocaust" as an item in their index, my guess would be that any theology book on any issue in which that most crucial event in modern history could possibly,  could possibly impinge would address it, in horror, in shame, in sorrow, in repentance, in abject repentance.   I wonder how many works of the science and technology which comprised the majority of the sentences and lines of the actual planning documents of the final solution written in the post-war period would mention that use to which science and technology, efficient planning and coordination or mention the pivotal role that science and scientists had in carrying out that scientific-industrial process of mass murder.  

Of course, anyone who bothered to read that last paragraph would think it was insane to even ask that question of science, of technology or any other academic study, perhaps excluding history, probably the only other academic topic aside from theology and religious studies which has addressed the Shoah.  Philosophy might have almost approached that, though as philosophy, in one of the more obscene of post-war ironies, the branch of that which calls itself "ethics" is still engaged in coming up with reasons to kill innocent people in the pre-war manner, I'm not willing to credit academic philosophy with having addressed the issue in the same way.  

I have pointed out that science is an entirely human invention, it exists nowhere else in nature, something which I've had push back on by atheists who absurdly enough want to pretend that science has some existence independent of human minds when it does exist in, literally no other place in the known universe.  We know some of the men who invented science, we know its major figures certainly since modern science, science in the proper sense of the word, arose.  It is as much a creation of the imagination of human beings as atheists claim God is but it is to be held to not be what humans made and make it to be.  It was by human choice that science was exempted from the consideration of questions of morality, questions of good and evil.  Though that exemption from consideration was done for logical reasons of efficiency and convenience,  it is only safe the extent to which science exists as a purely intellectual thing.  As soon as science is applied, as it was, in fact, meant to be from the beginning of it, its enhancement of power in the very real world of living beings and living systems makes the immunity from questions of morality, of good and evil, dangerous in a way that is just about never considered, apart from productions of one or another version of Faust and that's never done within science but by theater or opera companies.  

Science enhances power, it is used to generate things and products for sale, science is and has always been funded by governments and businesses in order for it to produce things, especially armaments to conduct warfare and mount conquests.  In the industrial revolution and the increase in the profitability of manufactured goods for sale, scientific research into making new things and their efficient production has meant that rich men (lately women, too) will pay scientists a lot of money to do that work for them.   The processes discussed in the Wannsee document combined the two activities of science, as I mentioned, those comprise the largest number of the sentences in the documents as was the scientific idea, natural selection, which was mentioned as giving the reason for what they were doing. 

That situation, the economic profitability of science and technology, as well as the somewhat over-sold omniscience of at least the science part of that, not to mention the envy for its status and the status of its professional staff,  made the imitation of its methods nearly ubiquitous in other academic fields and in the professions and in the general culture.   You were nothing if you didn't put a gloss coat of scientific method or, as in the case of popular articulation and journalism, sciencyness on things.  The writing of history didn't escape that influence or at least the general tenor of the culture that that aping of science produced.  One of the foremost of those was the demotion or elimination of questions of morality and good and evil, which could not be defined with the rigor and alleged complete reliability that was supposed to be a product of the new sciencyness.  I think the more unattractive motive for that, though, is the inconvenience to that human activity in which that elimination of moral considerations preceeded even the exemption given to science in such matters, the making and accumulation of wealth.  I think that apart from the purely utilitarian convenience of not letting question of morality impinge on a quest for reliable information about physical objects and forces, the exemption from morality that wealth accumulation found useful for those who amassed wealth was granted to science as its tool.  

I think that it is as a part of the hankering after more money, more stuff, more physical gratification by those with the power to get it,  that accounts, in the end, for the modernistic demotion of questions of morality and good and evil and the erection of a convenient moral relativism and the scientific-materialistic rejection of morality, entirely.  Modernism, science, is morally nihilistic, science couldn't find morality or come up with any way to determine good and evil so modernism held they didn't exist and that people, to the extent they had power, could do what they wanted.  

But, even as they reject morality,  the use of questions of morality are useful for attacking the weakened, shattered remnants of the religion which is an inconvenience to people who dislike moral constraints on them and who reject it in all other institutions and all other contexts in life and modern society - until they want to claim the benefits of morality, for themselves.  IT'S ALWAYS DIFFERENT WHEN ITS A QUESTION OF EVIL DONE TO "ME".  That use is in holding religion responsible for things like the Shoah, which those who planned and carried out the mass murder rejected, indeed, while the Nazis were planning their scientific-industrial genocide, they were also planning the post-war destruction of Christianity, replacing The Bible with Mein Kampf, a book which led Hitler's second in command to define Nazism as "nothing but applied biology".  

This strange state of affairs shows up, sans science, for the most part,  in the issue I wrote about yesterday, the child raping epidemic of which only that which happened in the Catholic church seems to have any journalistic or cultural legs even as that accounts for a tiny percentage of the widespread rape of children.  And, lest it be forgotten, that is the same journalism which, by and large, holds that the world-wide porn industry is a flower of the "free speech-free press" regime they hold as one of the few ersatz moral principles they recognize.  

I can easily imagine a future in which the Catholic Church is the only world-wide institution which was anything like thoroughly investigated and held responsible and tried to make some kind of effort to abolish the practice, even as the rape of children flourishes as a world wide business, a business allowed and enhanced by modern technology as, in fact, it has been through the online distribution of pornography and spread of information for men procuring opportunities to rape children has grown by staggering numbers.  As I mentioned yesterday, I don't see much in the way of that secular, very materialistic child sex abuse scandal being covered as the journalists concentrate on that one aspect of it.   As I said, their refusal to look at the large majority of the moral atrocity leads me to think that protecting children isn't their primary motive in covering the issue.  It's the generation of a religion-bashing scandal.  I have no problem with anyone being held accountable for doing wrong, that's one of the reasons I read so much more theology than when I was a cowardly agnostic who willfully cast a blind eye on the right kinds and categories of immorality.  That's what I do now that I didn't do then.  I have every problem with the general culture of scientific-industrial-modernist ideology that grants immunity to the very things that do the most of that evil.

The family of Mollie Tibbetts is a profile in great character in a time of cheap imitations as seen on TV and in Twitter. 

They deserve the nation's condolences and also the nation's gratitude that they rejected the disgusting use of their daughter to promote bigotry and racism. 

Rhoda Scott - Moanin'

Rhoda Scott live on the Hammond C3 with one speed 22H Leslie + drummer Cees Kranenburg jr.

I just realized it's almost September and I haven't posted any Hammond organ jazz yet.

Update:   Rhoda Scott Sarah Morrow Julie Saury 2006 - Pistaccio 

Arron Copland Looking Backwards - Night Thoughts (Hommage To Ives) 1972

Leo Smit, piano

Copland had long admired Charles Ives and corresponded with him about a pivotal performance of several of the older composer's songs at Yaddo in the 30's. After composing Night Thoughts for the Van Cliburn Competition in 1971, Copland paid his respects to Ives by adding a dedication to Ives in the title. Copland wrote, "While not a virtuosic work, it presented certain difficulties for the three hundred entrants who were required to sight-read it."

-Vivian Perlis

Hadn't known that Copland corresponded with Ives till I read this the other day.
It takes a very high form of musical class to compose a non-virtuosic work as a competition piece.  This is so much more than a mere competition piece.

Shitforbrainz Simels - Got A Nice Ring To It, I think I'll Use It More

Duncan Black's Shitforbrainz-Simels is accusing me of "trying to redefine antisemitism" when it's the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance who came up with the definition I commented on. And other assorted libels.  I only proposed they cut the ideological crap from their proposals that will guarantee that no one takes any of it seriously but ideologues.  

Duncan doesn't care if his regulars lie on his comment boards as long as they don't use ad-block software while they lie.  Especially if they hit his Amazon link so he'll get a cut.  The Horse must be so proud of her protogée.

Q&A&A

Q. Did you see Spotlight?

A.  Didn't need to.  I read the reporting while they were reporting it.

I'm allergic to movies that pretend to deal with complex issues of history, even relatively recent history.  I don't trust Hollywood one bit for reasons I'll set out below. 

I had heard that Vigano's putsch against Pope Francis was turning out to be a bust due to a. his lies, b. his hypocrisy, c. his lies and those of his fellow putschitsts and their hypocrisy but the automatic Spotlight wannabee practice of the media whenever the search terms are sex abuse and Catholic has kicked in. 

Vigano is a liar who is sore because Pope Francis fired him for trying to get him mired in American anti-LGBT politics, he's a liar who has serious issues of protecting clerical abusers, himself.  The right wing media, EWTN, Lifeblahblahblah, etc. have about as little credibility.  They've been laying for Francis since he started getting rid of corrupt Vatican hacks and thugs, who they had no problem with under John Paul II and Benedict XVI even as THEY WERE THE ONES WHO PROMOTED THE LIKES OF THEODORE MCCARRICK.  

The American media has its things to answer for, too, it's spotlight on the sexual abuse of children would seem be focused like a Maglite at narrowest beam, missing the huge majority of ongoing sex trafficking of children, the sexual exploitation of children within secular institutions and contexts, in the media. I turned off my protection and went looking through the freely available online porn universe and the obvious images of children being raped by adult men, the sadistic use of children by porn, pedophile and incest themed porn (which really, truly believes all "models" are 18 or older. really they do) even as the themes of the sites, blogs, Tumblrs, etc. are about Daddies, coaches, policemen, truckers, cowboys, general sleazes of no thematic category, having sex with children.  And that's not to mention the allied empire of various sex industries which do a heavy trade in world wide sex tourism when they don't deliver the product right to the rapists.  

Certainly it's not that it's just easier to nail Catholic priests than these others, though it's probably a lot safer than to go after the gangsters of the porn empires and sex slavery.  So much of the priestly pedophile abuse happens in safe countries to report from with targets who seldom are armed or hire hit men or have business relationships with the wealthy social media companies and entertainment. 

I have absolutely no problem with what the Boston Globe Spotlight team or the Grand Jury in Pennsylvania did in exposing crimes by men who raped children and who covered up for them.  All of that is good as long as it is accurate.  I have a problem with the near complete lack of effective coverage of the large, large majority of ongoing child rape, child abuse, child destruction by men who don't wear a Roman collar, who aren't called Fr. and who aren't an easy target.   

So, have you looked into that story?  It just takes a few search terms and good malware and the ability to be disgusted, horrified and angered.   I haven't smashed my computer yet but it could happen. 

What I Meant

I am asked what I meant when I criticized the effort to come up with a standard definition of "antisemitism".  I've seen at least two versions of the effort, I'll concentrate on the one found here.

Most of the eleven points are fairly straight forward and would fit within any definition of any kind of racist bigotry, especially the perennials that Trump engages in with Latinos, Muslims and others.   Group responsibility for the actions of individuals and small groups of individuals is high in those.  But there are some real problems, most of them centered around the obvious use of the word "antisemitism" to shield Israel and, more specifically, the Israeli government and military from legitimate criticism as well, not to mention prohibiting criticism of the actions of agents of the Israeli government.

For example. there is this point:

Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

If that means a blanket accusation, then, of course, that would be a classic instance of group characterization, stereotyping, bigotry, racism, antisemitism.   It would be as stupid and bigoted as an accusation that all Irish were supporters of the IRA or the accusation against Japanese Americans that led to their internment in concentration camps and the theft of their property and shaming.  It is not only wrong, it is despicable. 

But if it means individuals, that changes everything.  It's quite possible that there are Jewish citizens of other countries, such as the United States who are more loyal to Israel than they are the interests of the United States.  That's no different from people of other ethnicity who are more loyal to another country, such people exist.  There were Communists who were more loyal to the Soviet Union than they were the United States.  I would say that was promoted as the real, right way to be a Communist for most of the existence of organized Communism in the United States.  And there are certainly people who are willing to coerce the United States government into disasters they imagine are in the interests of Israel, or are told is, such things as the campaign to invade Iraq, bomb Lebanon, and the current campaign to foment a war against Iran which the Israeli government is such a big part of. Of course, other governments were part of that, such as the Saudi gangsters.  That is an organized campaign of talking the Trump regime into something which will be a catastrophe for the United States and the entire region if not world.

Not to mention those like the convicted spy Jonathan Pollard who are undoubtedly guilty of that, he admitted his spying.  To that you can add the far less widely known but far more outrageous attempt of the perhaps wanna-be-Jewish David Nozette to sell out to Israel (the boob sold out to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli agent) about which The Forward rather jaw-droppingly said:

Fans of Israeli espionage melodrama are having a hard time digesting the latest episode, the October 19 arrest of scientist Stewart David Nozette on charges of trying to spy for Israel. From what’s known so far, the case seems to defy traditional understandings of Israel as either victim or menace.

For that sub-group of Israel-boosters whose frame of reference is Jonathan Pollard, serving life in prison for giving American secrets to Israel, Nozette makes an awkward martyr. He offers no overt Jewish identity markers to rally around, no visible passion for Israel, indeed no evidence of having actually helped Israel in this affair. As the FBI admits, the whole gambit was the bureau’s idea, not his.

Nor does the case help critics who view Israel as a threat to American security. His arrest, a sting operation with no links to Israel, appears anomalous. Israel is a bystander this time, a plot device in someone else’s play.

In reality, this is a psychodrama about America’s counterintelligence services and their bottomless fear of Israeli spies. The fear dates back to the 1985 arrest of Jonathan Pollard, the civilian Naval Intelligence analyst caught passing classified information to Israel. Pollard traumatized the intelligence community, insiders say. Ever since, the feds have been haunted by fears that Pollard was only a cog in a larger but impenetrable Israeli spy machine.

I read that and I couldn't believe they'd have such a take on the story or that they'd say those things in print.

First, note that The Forward states that the presumably American supporters of Pollard's espionage are real and implies that they are organized.  "For that sub-group of Israel-boosters whose frame of reference is Jonathan Pollard, serving life in prison for giving American secrets to Israel."  What are we to conclude about the "Israeli-boosters whose frame of reference is . . . "  Does The Forward not imply that they would fit right in with the suspicion that they are "more loyal to Israel" than "to their own country"? 

I would have no problem with that suspicion about that specific "sub-group of Israel-boosters" in the article though I'd be willing to knock to the ground anyone who wanted to extend that position to Jews in general.  If they were Nazis or neo-Nazis, to crush them.  I don't hold the stupid pseudo-liberal superstition that Nazis should be allowed to have another try or even that we should take the chance of letting them organize to do that.  I don't want to be part of any First Amendment that empowers genocidalists.

But I'm struck by the implications of the sentence "He offers no overt Jewish identity markers to rally around, no visible passion for Israel, indeed no evidence of having actually helped Israel in this affair."   I'm kind of shocked that they'd even say say such a thing considering the history of the paranoid antisemitic use of accusations of such disloyalty as a means of discriminating against Jews.  It was one of the most effective tools of early Nazi propaganda right through till the end of the Hitler regime, it is a mainstay of post-war neo-Nazism and antisemitism.  It's like giving them a shot of steroids.

What are we to make of that, especially considering the decades long campaign to spring the admitted, convicted spy Jonathan Pollard by Israel and the wider Israeli lobby?   Would any of those vectors being flipped have led them to try to spring the idiot Nozette as well?   You can't have it both ways, or, at least, I'm going to break the news to you that you're not going to have it both ways.  No matter how many such provisions or codiciles you put in such attempted international definitions.   Israel is a country, all countries spy, all countries try to pressure other countries into doing what they want them to even when it is not in the interest of those other countries.  That part of the definition, UNLESS IT IS SPECIFIED THAT IT MEANS ONLY A BLANKET ASSERTION OF DISLOYALTY,  is dishonest and stupid.  No one who does value another country over their own should be able to hide behind such a provision.  There are certainly people within Israel who may have more loyalty to other countries, should they be able to operate shielded by such a definition?

There are two other parts of that 11-fold definition I have similar problems with.

Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

The problem with that is the e.g.,  because the existence of the State of Israel is not something which can be shielded from the fact of the expulsion of the Palestinian people from land they occupied, by a combination of planning, of force and terror and military action, etc. nor that the plans for putting Israel on Palestine didn't include plans to do exactly that on the basis of ethnicity and, to some extent, religion.  Zionism was and is a European colonial scheme.  That is the simple fact of it.  It was noted to be such by critics of Zionism from the start, it has turned out to be that in reality, the constant state of war that Israel has existed under is a result of that fact.   Israel is not alone in that, you could certainly say the same thing about the United States, Canada and Australia.  To claim that any of those countries were not racist endeavors when they are based on the displacement of other people is a huge lie.  Hitler was a huge fan of the fact that the United States was a result of the murder and displacement of the native People of North America.  That the same was done to the Palestinian People is a hard fact of history which will not change and will certainly not be found acceptable until there is a secure, viable and acceptable Palestinian state.  But even that won't change the obvious fact that that displacement on the basis of ethnicity was basic to the founding of Israel.  As with the United States, Canada, Australia, that fact is an ongoing issue that can only be addressed justly if it is admitted and faced squarely.  As long as Israel does not do that, it will never know peace, it will become the fascist military state which I think it is almost on the verge of becoming because it has never dealt with that fact.

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

That is only a possible act of antisemitism for as long as Israeli policy isn't aptly compared to those of the Nazis.  That's something that only the Israeli government can make a lie and not something that is justifiable.  If they do make Israeli policy comparable to that of the Nazis, no definition should shield them from that comparison being made.   And there are certainly factions in Israel about which that comparison is justly made.

Given the problems with the way that the word "antisemitism" is misused to mean whatever any asshole like those I deal with weekly who wants it to mean at any time, I think coming up with this definition might have been a good idea but the way they're trying to do it is rather stupid because such a definition with such features in it will not be acceptable.  I think the ideological and propaganda motives behind such provisions in it are obvious.

These Israel-specific provisions being considered unreservedly antisemitic, I agree with, entirely.

Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

Those certainly belong within the definition of antisemitc acts as do the others which I didn't specifically criticize, though the last one is more a matter of disgusting taste and incredible stupidly, at times.

The effort could be fixed and it might be useful.  Though not as long as any definition includes such provisions or what makes the present use of the word so fraught with problems.  I wouldn't be surprised if other issues come up which could need to fit into it.  As I said the other day, the word was invented for some pretty dodgy reasons, it has continued to be dodgy.

One Thing Is Clear, Now We Can See What Pope Francis Has Been Up Against

I don't spend a lot of my time looking into Vatican-hierarcy politics in the Catholic Church so when something like the smear job that the guy Pope Francis fired as Vatican Ambassador to the United States launched this weekend happens, I've got to depend on those who do follow those.  The scandal, launched in hard-right wing Catholic publications and obviously coordinated with key right-wing opponents of Pope Francis - witness the rapid deployment mounted by them, looks like it was well planned and, like a Trump security clearance removal, it was held ready for just the right time.  The trigger to that seems to have been the release of the Grand Jury report on child sex abuse in Pennsylvania,  though I think that might have just been fortuitous timing, I think it was Francis's visit to the scandal ravaged country of Ireland.

The prime vehicle that Vigano and his fellow putschists used was the far-right National Catholic Register, a publication obviously named to confuse people with the source I've relied on as a window into Vatican politics, the independent and harder to classify National Catholic Reporter.  This article by Michael Sean Winters exposes the central lie that Vigano uses, the supposed demotion of the disgraced Cardinal Theodore McCarrick by the retired Pope Benedict XVI and the alleged restoring of status to him under Pope Francis.  Something that obviously isn't true.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano’s testimony proves one thing: The former Vatican ambassador to the United States is to the clergy sex abuse crisis what Oliver Stone is to the assassination of President John Kennedy, a trafficker in conspiracy theories who mixes fact, fiction and venom to produce something explosive but also suspicious. When you finish reading this testimony, as at the end of Stone’s 1991 movie “JFK,” you can only conclude that the product tells us more about the author than it does about the subject.

Vigano is certainly correct that Cardinal Angelo Sodano, longtime Secretary of State to Pope John Paul II, was a patron of disgraced former-cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Stone recognized the assassination happened in Dallas. But why does Vigno fail to mention the key role played by Cardinal Stanislaus Dsiwisz in protecting McCarrick?

Vigano alleges that Pope Francis lifted sanctions against McCarrick that had been imposed by Pope Benedict. Indeed, the headline on the Edward Pentin story that broke the news of this testimony reads “Ex-nuncio Accuses Pope Francis of Failing to Act on McCarrick’s Abuse.” But, Francis did act. He is the one who removed McCarrick from ministry in June. The central focus of this testimony is the claim that Benedict issued sanctions against McCarrick: “the Cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living, he was forbidden to celebrate [Mass] in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance,” Vigano writes.

During the Benedict papacy, with my own eyes I witnessed McCarrick celebrate Mass in public, participate in meetings, travel, etc. More importantly, so did Pope Benedict! If Benedict imposed these penalties, he certainly did not apply them. He continued to receive McCarrick with the rest of the Papal Foundation, continued to allow him to celebrate Mass publicly at the Vatican, even concelebrating with Benedict at events like consistories. (See photo above taken in 2010.) But, as Vigano tell is, it is all Pope Francis’ fault.

Vigano is more than a little obsessed with homosexuality and names prelates whom he accuses of supporting efforts at “subverting Catholic doctrine on homosexuality.” Filmmaker Stone was obsessed with the grassy knoll. Back in my seminary days, when one of the seminarians would give evidence of this kind of obsession, making wild claims about homosexuality, its sources and its effects, ignoring the emerging scientific and psychological data, the rest of us would look at each other and someone would say, “I would like to take a look at her dance card.”

I don't, for a second, believe that the putschists intent on trying to force Pope Francis to resign or, failing that, to discredit him, care about gay priests, faithful to their vows of chastity or failing in that most human way to honor them, I certainly don't think they care about child sex abuse except in so far as they can use it as a weapon to mount their political campaigns.  None of them with power seems to have done a single thing about any of those things before they became items in the news.  I do think they are organized, well financed by wealthy right-wing Catholics and some of the more disgustingly obscene hold overs of medieval corruption - Knights, Dukes, etc.  And all of the shady and entirely secular not to mention Mafia style connections that those have always been.   The best way to understand them is the way you understand Trump or Putin, they are gangsters.

What you see in this effort is the part of the hierarchy and the all too worldly kingdom that has always plagued the Catholic church and which, to an extent, will always plague large human institutions, especially those with large property holdings.  You also see the really awful role that the corrupt Curia has had in the governance of the Church, money has more than a little bit to do with a lot of that corruption.

One of the things which I know very little about is the shadowy cult of priests, Order of the Incarnate Word a scandalous political-connected group not unlike those favored by John Paul II and Benedict, the Popes whose good-old-days the putschists want to return to.  I'm not yet entirely clear on the part they're supposed to play in the accusations against Pope Francis but which, when he was a Bishop in Argentina, he was one of the major forces opposing.   While he and the other Argentinian bishops opposed the group, refusing to ordain deacons and priests for the order, Theodore McCarrick, an American bishop, was their go-to guy for ordination even as the scandal plagued and massively corrupt super-power Cardinal Angelo Sodano played that role for them in Rome.  I don't know how a group that Pope Francis opposed becomes his responsibility except that I know the American media knows even less about this than I do and they're carrying that kind of stuff because they don't really care about this except in so far as it has American political impact and it boosts their ratings.

The pay-back for Vigano is that Pope Francis fired him as ambassador when he set him up to meet the gay-hating county clerk Kim Davis when Francis visited the United States.   Being busy being Pope, trying to force the hierarchy full to the top of corrupt appointees of his two long-serving predecessors, dealing with the sex abuse scandal and everything else a Pope has to know about, clearly, wasn't aware of that low level of American politics when met with someone he should have been able to depend on his ambassador to not set him up to meet.   Vigano was obviously playing American politics in setting it up, that's obviously the kind of guy he is, he is not credible.

The Catholic Church is paying a huge price for the papacies of John Paul II and his hand-chosen successor,  Benedict XVI.  It's paying a huge price for the corruption that has flourished in the Vatican and which installed bishops and Cardinials who had no business being put in charge of anything.  I think given the neo-medieval, power centralizing proclivities of, especially, John Paul II, it's not a huge surprise that a full-blown political power struggle like this has broken out.  I had hopes that Pope Francis would be able to at least beat that back and he has made an effort, though I didn't understand the huge size of the task.

In the popular imagination, unfortunately many Catholics as clueless as many protestants on this count, the Pope is an absolute dictator who can make heads role at the flick of a wrist.  The secular media who are reporting this, as unaware of that as the most ignorant lay person, even as large parts or the Catholic media are in on the corruption. Well, John Paul II certainly ruled after that fashion to the best of his ability,  though, even with the corrupt Vatican establishment and right-wing political powers behind him, he couldn't personally destroy Vatican II and set up a renewal of neo-medieval autocracy which was clearly one of their goals.

Things got worse under Benedict who was totally out of his depth in dealing with the Vatican establishment, which apparently learned how to play him far better than he learned about it during his long years as part of them.   Pope Francis is having to deal with the opposite, trying to reform while doing justice, giving due process to those accused of things like sex abuse.   One thing that is clear, cleaning out even the upper hierarchy of the Church is something a Pope just can't decide to do and just make it happen.   Especially when there are powerful bishops, Cardinals and others opposed to him and ready to lie and use every dirty tool they've got to maintain their power and the status quo they have created.   They've got lots of very dirty, very secular wealth behind them.

In reading about this, one of the things I thought was that if Pope Francis slept in the papal apartment he might have ended up like the short-reigned, well hoped for reformer, Pope John Paul I.   Given the extent to which his enemies are taking this, I don't believe that the theorists of how Albino Luciani died are unjustified to be wondering about how he died.  I wonder if some day he will have a feast day with red vestments worn, a modern martyr-Pope.   I hope Pope Francis doesn't become another. 

I am concentrating on Karl Rahner's idea of "winter" Christianity and listening to women religious and the Roman Catholic Women Priests.  If Francis doesn't open up the real power of the Catholic Church beyond the unmarried men who rule it, it will not recover moral authority.  He has to remove those who have to be removed, no matter what their political positions are, no matter how much influence they have with billionaires and millionaires.  I hope those who believe that this putsch attempt will backfire are right but until their hold on power is ended, they'll be back.

Stupy Wants To Brawl About The Late Neil Simon I Don't Want To

Murder by Death.   Well, now he's dead so we can't ask him but I'll bet if you said it's the only one of his pieces that would survive him, Simon would have wished he'd died before he was told. 

It is shit. 

Stupid Mail - All About Simps

Oh, so Madonna gives a tribute to Aretha Franklin that's all about Madonna, Simps gives a 100th shout out to Leonard Bernstein that's all about him.  

I wasn't going to say anything about Lenny.   If people want to listen to that Candide Overture for the 253rd time they've got every right to do so.  

I can say that I do genuinely like the dances from West Side Story and there are a few of his songs I genuinely like.  The 2nd movement of the Psalms.  And a bit of the music from On the Waterfront, though I really didn't like the movie, at all.  Some of the "best Bernstein pieces" lists I've seen today are, truly, more insulting than anything I ever said about him.  Then there's Simps posting a picture of himself.  

Update:  Yeah, I do like the music he wrote for On the Waterfront 

New York Philharmonic
Leonard Bernstein, Composer-conductor

Update [Upchuck warning] 2

I'm not making this up, you know, this is the link I was sent.   [Not for those with a delicate constitution or who have eaten a challenging supper.]  He looks like the Yellow Kid's great, great,  grand idiot.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - George Orwell - A Clergyman's Daughter

A Clergyman's Daughter 

Dramatisation of one of Orwell's lesser novels. A strictly conservative clergyman's daughter goes missing from home. 8 days later, she finds herself, suffering from amnesia and no memory of her previous life, in south London with a group of homeless people, about to depart to Kent for the hop picking.

I'm doing something I haven't done before, posting a play that I haven't listened to, myself, yet.   It's been a crazy week and I haven't had time to look for a new play I haven't posted before.  So, I'll be hearing it for the first time, too. 

The book was adapted, though, from what I understand, Orwell wrote some of it in dramatic form, himself.  It was an experimental novel that Orwell reportedly wasn't happy with, at one point saying he didn't want it reprinted. Though he changed his mind, apparently, authorizing all of his work to be re-released.   

Notes On Yesterday's Posts

I made a crucial error in the second of my posts from yesterday, in this paragraph, I mistakenly typed the word "inferior" when it should have been "superior" as given in blue, below.

And it certainly doesn't explain anything about that situation within a species as the "traits" of those theorized to be in some way regressive or inferior life - and in many of Darwin's own imaginary scenarios - are warned as having superior reproductive potential than those assigned the category of "superior".   That habit of Darwinist thought is as rampant today as it was at any period after Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, it is why, even with the potent example of the Nazis eugenic murders, post-war scientists maintain a belief in eugenics , including the most eminent of them, R. A. Fischer, James Watson, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, William Shockley (physicists, ha!), and in numbers constituting ubiquity, the social sciences,  Eugenic thinking is alive and as dangerous as it ever was.

I could have noted that that very basis of eugenics, based in the most notably Malthusian feature of Darwinism, is one of the most basic of absurdities in his theory of natural selection.  You will often hear it claimed that natural selection is not a claim of progressivity or teleology attributed to nature when that assertion is present all through the entire scientific literature of Darwinism from beginning to today, though not admitted to.  When, as they disclaim their own assertions of progress and purpose in natural selection, they will say that it is merely based on reproductive advantage.  Well, if those people categorized as "inferior" have superior reproductive capability, that should mark them as those who have won the "struggle for life" that Darwin sets up, regardless of whatever "traits" they carry.  I first noted that when I realized that in the contradictions between his claims about "savages" as opposed to "civilised men" in which he praised the superiority of the winners of "savages" culling their inferior members and bemoaning the failure of "civilised men" to do the same, which he said was bound to lead to dysgenic catastrophe, but he nevertheless held that "civilised men" were the superiors of those very "savages" that he claimed were the winners in a "struggle for existence".  The doublespeak in Darwin is ubiquitous.

As I've mentioned over and over again, when I started this about twelve years ago, now, I was a conventional though relatively passive  believer in natural selection in the typical college-credentialed manner.  I started this looking for Darwin's rejection of eugenics I'd been assured were there but, as soon as I started reading him, literally all there was was his acceptance of and support for eugenics.

The more I looked at it the worse I realized it was, not only as what Marx criticized* it as being in his own reconsideration of it,  Darwin imposing the British class system on all of nature, but its absurdity as a logical structure and scientific theory became ever more apparent.  I am at a loss to explain how anyone could believe that it was a real thing without having an aristocratic motive in maintaining its assertions of inequality in the human population.  I do believe that and its use as an attack on the traditional Protestant literal reading of the Bible story of creation - a feature of not only the naive faith of the imagined ignorant masses but as much of religion as even most college credentialed people comprehend - are the entire reason it was kept even as its acceptance among biologists was very shaky around the beginning of the 20th century.  I haven't read Vernon Kellogg's contemporary account of that period**, yet, though I've skimmed passages of it.

I think for most people, it's no different from being a fan of a sports team only it's a team in the great struggle of atheism vs. religion, anti-Christianity vs. Christianity, college-credentialed vs. non-college credentialed, modernism vs. tradition,  etc.  Not to mention the features of regional resentment and the class-interest that was such a big part of how it took the affluent establishment by storm even from the start.  It was always the good news to the affluent and those who hoped to become affluent, Darwin's assurance that nature had crowned them as the superiors they always felt themselves to be.  I certainly haven't found that Darwin's greatest fans have ever so much as read him or his disciples.  Not even those with PhDs.   They're often as ignorant as anyone in the brawl.

* As someone who rejects Marx's prescription for politics, I will admit he was one of the most astute and brilliant critics in the history of Western thought.  Einstein said about Eddington's failed Fundamental Theory that for all his brilliance, his critical faculty failed in that case.   I think the same is true of Marx whose critical brilliance nailed the worst feature of natural selection as a scientific theory but couldn't see the problems in his own theory of history.   I think that's often what happens when they try to extend science past where science can actually make the necessary observations to find reliable knowledge.  That seems to be a general defect in science when their ambitions exceed their observational abilities.  You can't make that up by adopting an ideological foundation and pretending it can make up for that.

** Darwinism To-day; a discussion of present-day scientific criticism of the Darwinian selection theories, together with a brief account of the principal other proposed auxiliary and alternative theories of species-forming

Update Hate:  Um, from what I've read Wilhelm Marr was an atheist who detested Christianity and he was also heavily influenced by Darwin's own named chief disciple in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, as well an atheist who despised Christianity.

Darwin, himself, said that Haeckel's theories concerning natural selection within the human population, including such things as his racist classification of human groups, his claims of severe inferiority for named groups, his assertion that such groups would be inevitably wiped out and that that murder would be benefical for the surviving (murdering) human population, etc.  were so in line with his own that if he had known Haeckel was putting them into a book Darwin wouldn't have written The Descent of Man.  So, yeah, there was everything in common with the two parts of that post.

I do think it's remarkable that the current push to come up with an, if I recall correctly, eleven part definition of "antisemitism" includes, for obvious ideological reasons, everything that makes the word so problematic without that push for such a definition.  It's obviously a project that floundered in ideological interest even if it didn't start that way.  It's bound to fail.  I think they should come up with different words to mean different things, many of which are not like the others.

I have read that very late in life Marr repented of his antisemitism because he was already disturbed at the direction his own organized antisemitic group was going.  Too little, too late.  His legacy, as can be seen from it being reprinted by Kevin Macdonald, is still used to promote the hatred of Jews. 

Just Read Him You Idiot - Hate Mail

Darwin did two things in On the Origin of Species and, even more so, The Descent of Man. Or, rather, he claimed to.

He claimed that "natural selection" was an explanation of how species evolved from other species, in the most common imagination of that, with the extinction of the parent species which didn't have "traits" that both led to increased numbers of offspring for those who had the biologically inheritable "traits" and, with their descendants increasing dominance in the percentage of the parent species, eventually those "traits" would generate a new species which was not the same as the parent species.

But his entirely imaginary scenario doesn't actually explain the origin of species.  I don't think such an all encompassing explanation of how the present day diversity of life evolved will ever be had, the phenomenon is a. too big with too many diverse numbers of organisms and even "species" involved, all with their own histories, b. those histories, certainly at least a thousand billion* to one, of the organisms comprising evolution are not only unknown, they are forever lost and are unknowable and always will be.  You can't do science on that basis.  Or at least that's the pretense of scientific method as it is taught about in school.

That is true if you take what I was taught as defining "species," as distinct from other species, the ability of members of a species to successfully mate with others and to produce viable, reproducing offspring of the same species.  Those with such "traits" could breed with those who don't have such traits within the parent species, they are members of the same species.  The survival of those members of the species which don't have the Darwinistically imagined "traits" that would, eventually change the species into a new species proves that they weren't members of a different species than those they could mate with which had those "traits".  How those would come to define a new species unable to mate with the members of the parent species is in no way explained by "natural selection".

How that imagined scenario gave rise to new species is as unexplained as it would be if natural selection were never invented.   And that doesn't even begin to present problems for it in the form of such scientific alternative explanations as genetic drift and the mere facts of chance survivals based on luck and not any inheritable biological trait.  Not to mention complications as the recent discovery of epigenetic inheritance, which I don't think anyone really understands as a discrete phenomenon, if it even is all the same thing.

And it certainly doesn't explain anything about that situation within a species as the "traits" of those theorized to be in some way regressive or inferior life - and in many of Darwin's own imaginary scenarios - are warned as having superior reproductive potential than those assigned the category of "superior".   That habit of Darwinist thought is as rampant today as it was at any period after Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, it is why, even with the potent example of the Nazis eugenic murders, post-war scientists maintain a belief in eugenics , including the most eminent of them, R. A. Fischer, James Watson, Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, William Shockley (physicists, ha!), and in numbers constituting ubiquity, the social sciences,  Eugenic thinking is alive and as dangerous as it ever was. 

Eugenics, though not called that or admitted,  is still the common popular "understanding of science" if Darwinism is the topic, or, in a minor tragedy of intellectual life, the common conception of "evolution".   I don't think the science of evolution will ever be free of that until natural selection is relegated to the dustbin of history.  The Malthusian origins of natural selection, founded in the imaginations of the British aristocracy that Malthusianism was whipped up to benefit by suppressing the lower orders of society are its most potent features, no matter what aristocracy of the mind is adopting it.  It's even common among those who, in the imagination of others, are a degenerate class, ethnicity or race.  Among my fellow Irishmen, as well as among members of other groups, I find it grimly amusing when I find out one of us designated as biologically inferior by Charles Darwin are his biggest fan-boys.

I am going to advocate that you do what the Darwin fan club never seems to advocate, read his scientific books, read the things he cites as reliable science, note the people whose ideas he supports, fact check all of them.  Don't cut them any slack, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE GODDAMNED SCIENCE.   That's how I got here.

* I made up that number,  you might as well say "a bazillion to one".  We don't even know that number how can we know something as complex as the lives of those unnumbered organisms?

The Deadly Uses Of Words Especially Those Presented As Having The Power Of Science

Yesterday I criticized the scholars who take on that most dismal and so necessary of scholarly topics, the Shoah, the genocides of the Nazis, a study that is matched in grim awfulness only by the study of other genocides, especially those of the modern period.  I said that they had been reticent to state the obvious fact, as obvious as the Nazis own advocacy of and elucidation of their plans, that their genocide against the Jews and others they identified as national groups was based on Darwin's theory of natural selection - in German natürliche Auslese.  As I showed yesterday, in the actual documents from the Wannsee Conference in which the criminals planned the largest program of mass murder in the history of planned mass murders, they used those very words. 

My criticism accused that area of scholarship of being afraid of rousing the ire of the Darwin industry and cult which mounted the post-Nazi, post-WWII fraud of the eugenics free Darwin who had nothing to do with eugenics as (what is considered, by scientists to be) science and as political policy, even though that connection between natural selection is only deniable by telling a whopper of a lie, a lie whose selling to at least the educated class of the English Speaking Peoples is a huge success in salesmanship.  That sales job has been done through costume dramas on the BBC and PBS and by popular science, it has been done through the para-scientific media and it has even become a part of "liberal religion".   "Darwin Sunday" is becoming a fixture in many churches, even as the people turning Darwin into some kind of Christian figure are entirely ignorant of what the man advocated and the fact that natural selection is a total and complete negation of the Gospel, the Prophets and The Law.   If you want to see what a really awful thing this is, google "darwin sunday" in light of what his actual writing shows and in all of its church hall kitchiness.

I should have mentioned that in thinking about this it occurred to me that the  academic suppression of the obvious Darwinism of the Nazi's genocidal thinking could have had a less craven motive, they may fear that pointing out that natural selection is a component of such genocidal thinking will empower it for that purpose. The use of natural selection to advocate removing groups from the human future predates Nazism, it started immediately after the theory was published turning up in the 1860s in the work of Ernst Haeckel and, in a seemingly more benign form, with typical British understatement, in the work of Francis Galton and in a form between those by Charles Darwin, himself*.  They may well fear exactly what I said was true, that science in the form of natural selection, can be used as a potent justification of genocide, as it, in fact was justified by scientists.  They might fear that with the retention of the theory that pointing out the obvious would be used politically and legally to support genocide in exactly the same way it was used to justify lesser forms of eugenics.

That fear is not only well founded, it is absolutely founded in the history of Darwinism in real history, in real life, in real law, in everything from the forced and coerced sterilizations in the United States, Canada and elsewhere to the actual murders of the Nazis and others, which preceded the Nazis in East Africa in the first decade of the 20th century.  I have looked at the documentation of English and American eugenicists, Eugen Fischer, the scientific officer of the African genocide, its Mengele, was an honored participant in English language eugenics in the 1920s and 30s, he was a professional scientist even in the post-war period when at least one person I've read advocated he be hanged along with the rest of the Nazi war criminals. 

As even the academic study of the Shoah is finding, it cannot avoid the fact that those who planned, advocated and carried out the Nazi genocides were instructed on how and what to do by American and other eugenicists, it will not be able to give an accurate account of the Final Solution as planned at the Wannsee Conference without addressing its Darwinistic foundation in natural selection.  Which is part of why I have come to conclude that as long as that theory has currency in science it is a real danger if not a guarantee that what was done as a result of believing it will happen again.  It happened more than once already, it started happening as soon as the first actual laws based on natural selection were put into place, it happened as soon as war gave scientific officers like Fischer a chance to practice it for the advancement of science.   All of that is part of the same continuum of Darwinism in real life, in real history, in the phenomenon of human thought in human culture.

It is interesting, though horribly grim, to read how the thinking of the sheer and calculating evil of Reinhardt Heydrich, the sadistic and proudly efficient murderer, the man with a "heart of iron" was confused in exactly the same way that natural selection required to be to be accepted as a scientific theory.  His assertion that even those Jews who had survived the first selection, to be murdered immediately, due to their presumed lack of economic utility to Nazism (they even called Germans placed in that category "useless eaters"), even the ones of those who they could not manage to work to death, the survivors of even the program to work them to death, would have to be murdered despite their economic utility due to their survival proving they were superior - "the fruit of natural selection" - because they could be counted on to restart a Jewish race.   No doubt one that Heydrich suspected would be biologically superior to the one the Nazis planned on wiping out.

What is so striking in that is that he and the Wannsee documents give the entirely human planned and artificial selection of the Nazis the status of being "natural".  That is exactly what Darwin did to sell his theory of natural selection when he used the entirely artificial practice of animal husbandry in commercial animal breeding of farm animals and pets as an instance of  and proof of "natural selection."   There is nothing "natural" about human breeding of animals anymore than there was the genocide of the Nazis, but that basic category error is the foundation of the theory as an explanation of the evolution of species, only one of the huge problems with the theory.  There is no secure means of identifying the artificial selection of human beings and their intentional choosing of animals for early slaughter and those chosen to be allowed to breed with anything that happens naturally, there was never any reason to believe that the one artificial practice was what actually happens in nature resulting in new species.

The category errors don't stop there, though, as from the time of Darwin it was also used to confuse the difference between diversity within a species with difference among different species - if "species" diverging is based on an inability to mate to produce live, reproducing offspring.  Clearly the two categories have hard, biological differences of the most basic and extensive meaning.

Bad articulation almost inevitably produces bad science, that is something that has been known from the time of at least Lavoisier,

It is impossible to disassociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based, the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind, and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality.

Antoine Lavoisier, 1789

And when one word is used to portray different phenomena, the results are not a representation of reality.  That leads to confusion but it can lead to entirely more horrible things than mere confusion.  Especially when science is granted such omnipotence on the basis of its presumed omniscience.  It can even be used to justify mass murder.  It was used to justify the French Revolution cutting off Lavoisier's head in the name of reason.  Bad science has real life consequences.

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

The word "antisemitism" is a fairly new word, having been invented in the 19th century, in German, in one of the more enormous of contemporary ironies, by a raging antisemite, Wilhelm Marr,  to give sciency cachet to his hated of Jews and to his political program using hatred of Jews to gain power and to harm Jews.

And the ironies never seem to end with Marr, all three of his wives had Jewish ancestry even as he developed one of the pillars of Nazi ideology, the biological impossibility of Jews becoming Germans.

I am going to spend a little time with Marr, the inventor of the word "antisemitism" to illustrate one of the really big problems with the way the word is used.  It is used to describe everything from a desire by Christians to convert Jews to Christianity, a desire by some Christians who believe being Christian is essential for salvation, for Jews to be saved and it is used to describe those who hate Jews and want do destroy them in the most horrific of tortures, to obliterate them on the basis of their biological identity.  And it is a word used to describe everything between those two opposite ends and so much more beside that.  It is used to describe Jews who criticize the policy of the Israeli government but who, nevertheless, support the existence and flourishing of Israel.

In one of Marr's antisemitic pamphlets, The Victory of Judaism Over Germany: From a nonreligious point of view,**  Marr identifies Christians as "new-jews" attributing to them one of the most vicious of perennial attributes given to Jews.

The Roman world of the day as well as all of classical antiquity was in the throes of disintegration at the time the Jews were imported. Semitism therefore encountered fertile ground for its realistic approach and already in Constantine’s days the “new-Jews” (Christians) were the power behind the money.

All the nations of antiquity, including the trading Phoenicians and Carthaginians, did not think well of engaging in, what we now call dotage, profiteering and usury. If in the Middle Ages we encounter a “Mr. Moneybag” he was a Jew. Jews were made use of but despised. This attitude is similar to its modern form, in which traitors are met with contempt while their treason may be welcome.

The abstract realism of Judaism had thus been forcibly imported into western society by the Romans. Times and circumstances proved favorable for Judaism’s development and proliferation. Judaism had turned into the realistic helper in history and encountered a more fertile ground for its indolent and speculative realism in the West than it ever possessed in Palestine. 

This, of course, provoked envy among the peoples of the West and since the mob has always preferred to use religion as a cover for its ends, so the spread of Christianity was accompanied by the spread of an (apparent) religious hatred of Jews in the Occident.

I am not a student of Marr's writing so I have not looked for confirmation of this being a feature of his, the coiner of the term's, antisemitism, an equation of Christianity with Judaism, any Christian hatred of Jews covering up the fact that Christianity is how Judaism spread and, in Marr's assertion, was victorious over Germany.  I haven't but will be looking into that, I'm sure, though I don't have the time to, right now.

It does, though illustrate how fraught with ambiguities and contradictions and ideological opportunities that badly defined words, especially neologisms intended to be scientific can be.  The present program to come up with an international definition of "antisemitism" is full to the top with all three, the desire being to use the word to describe entirely different things and to associate all of those things, everything from wanting Jews to achieve salvation through conversion (not something I think is necessary for Jews to be saved, by the way)  with the Nazi genocide and those who would like to do that again, to those who are critical of Israeli military and domestic policy.   That present day project is bound to only make things worse because, though the idea of fixing on a definite definition for the term might be a good one, they want to reproduce all of the problems with the word within their definition and many of them want to do so for ideological purposes instead of lexicographical clarity.

*  It infact predates Nazism, turning up in the 1860s in the work of Ernst Haeckel and, in a seemingly more benign form, or, at any rate, expressed with typical British understatement, in the work of Francis Galton.  And in a form between those by Charles Darwin, himself.  Not to mention the sons of Charles Darwin, George and Leonard as well as others in the direct line of scientific and quasi-scientific-political Darwinism.

**  In researching this post the ironies came on fast and hard.  Note who this translated version of the pamphlet comes through, one of the most noted of scientific antisemites, the man David Irving called on to be his scientific witness in his lawsuit to shut-up the fine scholar of the Shoah, Deborah Lipstadt,  Kevin Macdonald.  I can only wonder at his motives in posting the translation of Marr but I am pretty sure it is not my motive in citing it.  Macdonald is a proponent of the ultra-Darwinism of evolutionary psychology, a man who published peer-reviewed antisemitism as science in reviewed journals and who was honored by late 20th, early 21st century science based in California, the state which wrote the eugenic law the Nazi used as the model for their eugenics laws.  I wouldn't be surprised if Macdonald takes it down if he finds out about this post.

Update:  If what I wrote wasn't provocative enough, already, I will note that I've never seen, anywhere, that along with the categories of "war criminal", those who committed "cries against humanity" I've never seen anyone propose categorizing those who committed atrocities in the name of science as having committed "crimes against science" or even "crimes against intellectual decency".  By agreement and out of utilitarian expediency those last two areas have been exempted from considerations of morality.   I think that when they are granted an assumption of omnipotence on the basis of presumed omniscience along with that exemption, they are bound to become fruitful generators of murderous depravity for which the perpetrators will be granted an exemption by reason of science.  The history of post-war Nazi scientists, even those who produced some of the most potent excuses for mass murder and whose work was part of that industrialization of human lives and bodies demonstrates that that suspicion is, as well, securely founded.

I wonder if Saturday Night Live has ever asked if Vicki Lawrence would be available to do Lindsay Graham.   Someone has to parody him.  I mean someone other than himself. 

Aaron Copland Looking Backward - Threnody 2: In Memoriam Beatrice Cunningham

Walden Chamber Players · Ashima Scripp · Curtis Macomber · Marianne Gedigian · Christof Huebner

I've been called out to care for a family member so, oh, dear, I won't be able to carry on brawling for now.   

Here's the second to last entry in the chronological listing of the works of Aaron Copland, composed in 1973.   I thought it might be interesting to go backward instead of forward, as I did when I posted many of the works of Copland that I think don't get nearly enough performances a couple of years back.  It was based on the brawl I had over the idiotic claim that because a composer reuses thematic material, that means the later piece was already in existence before it was composed.  I am beginning to suspect that dyschronia is one of the symptoms of the materialist-atheist mindset. 

"eine natürliche Auslese darstellend"

These are the actual pages of the notes from the Wannsee conference which seem to constitute some of the clearest direct evidence that the Nazis planned the industrial genocide of the Jewish People, as reproduced at the Holocaust Museum.  It is clear from this passage that natural selection (natürliche Auslese) was the basis of their intentions.  I don't know but I believe that is why the passage so like the passage that I gave in translation the other day is highlighted from the browned pages.

As in the posts in which I demonstrated that even if Charles Darwin had never endorsed eugenics all that would need to prove that Darwin's theories inspired eugenics is for the man who invented eugenics, Francis Galton to say that is what inspired him in creating it, which he did AS WELL AS REPRODUCING HIS COUSIN'S ENCOURAGEMENT OF HIS EARLIEST EUGENIC WRITING.  All it takes to prove the Darwinian nature of not only the intended genocide of Jews as well as Poles, Czech and Slovak People, the Roma People, etc. is to consult what the Nazis gave as their motives, what they exposed as being the basis of their eugenic-genocidal thinking.  And they did.

I think the academic study of the Shoah has fallen entirely short of what's necessary in not only exposing the motives of the Nazis, what made them turn petty antisemitic feelings into a biological imperative to conduct a struggle for life in which they intended to wipe out their rivals and those they saw as a danger due to intermarriage, lowering the "fitness" of the Germanic population.  And the entirely more important part of it, to make sure what inspired them is preventing from having that result, again.   I think the obvious reason that they have demurred from stating the obvious Darwinist nature of the Shoah, all of the Nazi genocides is that they don't want to upset the Darwin cult, both in popular culture and within science, itself.   As long as the basis of the Nazi genocides are in place, "never again" is an empty phrase.  As long as those are current in science, in popular understanding, in politics and in law, it is almost certain to happen again.  If not with the same victims, with enough to make it matter.  Ten would be more than enough for it to matter.

The Nazis were explicit in their planning, they didn't think they'd be able to kill the mixed-heritage population because it would be found to be unacceptable.  That is reflected in other Nazi documents that talk about how difficult it would be to get the German soldiers to kill Jews who seemed too German to them and how it would be easier to get them to kill Jews who seemed Polish or Russian.  They intended to do that with those of part German heritage the American way as endorsed by the eminent Supreme Court justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.* through forced sterilization which would have the same outcome as genocide, eliminating them from the future.  In that they could be paraphrasing directly from Darwin, Karl Pearson or just about any Western Darwinist of the time,  merely changing the categories of those to be cut off from the future and applying German scientific-industrial diligence to accomplish what was desired.   However, I'm not going to translate the documents, myself and open myself up for the kind of dishonest wrangling that always happens when the Darwin industry and cult denies what is there in plain sight to anyone who reads the originals.

* I've just started looking into the claim I came across that Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an early advocate of Darwinism and eugenics, though it's not anywhere near as easy researching him as it is his son.