"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
Denis Robinson Ty Hammes Bill Davidson Paul Whitney Kent Gelly Blair Haines Don Hill Chris Moore
Rhonda Tron I guessed at the spellings of some of the names I wasn't familiar with , I transcribed the names from the recordings
Longtime readers - don't laugh, I do have a few - might remember I posted these on a weekday to provide an alternative to those who weren't going to listen to Trump delivering what passes as a SoTU speech. I didn't include them in the series I did of Gordon Pengilly's plays last summer but here they are again now.
I love Gordon Pengilly's work, it stands more than one hearing.
Randy Credico. I was unaware of his existence as I am so many of those on the marginal fringe of pseudo-lefty comedy that maintains they are important in the NYC area. I was unaware of his existence until he started showing up in the Trump treason scandal and from there I looked back at him on Youtube and those surrounding him and his stunt candidacies and bull-shit "activism" that activated nothing more than stupidity. Mostly his "comedy" career these days seems to be going on d-level talk shows and podcasts to indulge in nostalgia about past non-glories with other marginal figures in NYC media and to mouth slogans. While I'm prepared to hate Roger Stone for threatening Randy's dog - just one more item in why I've longed to see Stone in prison for more than four decades, Credico is a friggin' asshole, marginally mentally functional, who is a better symptom of why the play-left has more in common with the fascists than anyone should ignore. He is the kind of person more likely to harm any worthwhile cause he presumes to speak for than to ever do anything. I wish his dog well. He should be in custodial care, not presented as anyone of any importance. He and the show-biz play lefties are counterproductive, not important. Update: Oh, I forgot to mention it since he isn't, he's not funny.
I am not "in the middle" I'm not "taking a centrist position" I'm no where in between Nazis and fascists and Marxists and Maoists. If you insist on a simplistic geometrical graph you're still stuck in the "left - center -right" one that is based on ignoring the tieensy little matters of modern, industrial scale mass murder, mountains of murdered corpses that are still a central component of Marxism as well as Nazism and fascism, and the power to oppress billions in favor of defining them by their assertions of what the mass murderers and enslavers intend to do about things like banking and markets. As if mass murderers can be counted on to tell you the truth about money and how they intend to steal it.
If you insist on a geometrical model, you can imagine a line segment with one end marked Gangster Governance and the other end marked Egalitarian Democracy with all governments (and economics) that aren't based in the adequately informed choice of The People of their government which is Of The People, By The People and For The People being merely degrees of gangster government, by far the most characteristic nature of human governments in humans' abysmal history. I would be at the most extreme end of that line representing egalitarian democracy.
I have, of course, not mentioned a component of such egalitarian democracy which is even more vital to its existence than adequate knowledge for The People to wrest their government out of the hands of the gangsters, the moral character of The People*. People who are not People of good will won't be any more successful in avoiding gangsterism than people who are maintained in TV addled, entertainment encouraged ignorance. That is my political position, I think one of the better expressions of it was when Franklin Roosevelt was asked if he was a communist and he said, "I am a Christian and a Democrat, that's all." He may not have been perfect in carrying it out but that's the formulation. Lincoln, by the way, fell short of his great formulation, as well. That doesn't mean it's not what we should be working for.
* A brilliant person who is selfish and evil is just a selfish and evil person who is made more dangerous by their intelligence. I've known of lots of smart people the world would be better off without, I'm hard put to identify a good one you can say the same thing about.
If you knew how big a role that the fact checking of the Communists and Marxists promoted as martyrs and heroes by the academic-show-biz left played in my disillusionment with atheism and that I see them as all part of the same thing,you would be shocked. And the Marxists were just the most significant part of that, there were others. What I found is there for anyone to find. You might consider that the same facts of everything from knowing indifference of to approval of the mass murders of Marxism are there for anyone else to take seriously and come to a similar conclusion.
Pretending that Communists, Marxists don't have a record in mass murder and oppression that is right up there with the Nazis certainly is a bigger intellectual lapse than being skeptical of those things held sacred by current intellectual culture. In my case, my conclusion that natural selection is no more than an ideological and mistaken human invention that exists nowhere in nature. Going up a step in the denial of actual reality, it's a far clearer and more obvious lapse of both the human head and the human heart than the denial that evolution is the best explanation of speciation as found in biological evidence. It is far more on the order of intellectual dishonesty that is the denial of human-made climate change and environmental catastrophe caused by us. It is a far greater lapse than the similar lapse that religion is sometimes guilty of, far more in the past than now, of ignoring the far fewer murders committed in the name of religion. I will point out that the murders committed in the name of Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions have the distinct quality of being in conflict with central moral teachings of those religions, you can't claim that the murders of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Kim family, etc. were in conflict with any holding of Marxism, they certainly violate no durably held moral position found by atheism. Violence, murderous, oppressive is an inherent feature of Marxism, no less than in Darwinism (the basis of Nazism), violence - often expressed in euphemistic words - is inherent to a Marxist conception of progress.
Once your eyes are open, the result of looking at the primary documentary evidence and its character as expressed in the actual laboratory of history, of what such heroes said, what they knowingly either chose not to believe or to deny or to approve of, the illusion cast by novels, by Hollywood movies about the Hollywood 10, the scribbling class - academic industry in peddling such bullshit the whole thing is laid bare for you for good. Lester Cole is no better than a Holocaust denier, he's their exact equal. Sartre was a proponent of one of the worst mass murderers even as his murders were being committed and known to the world. There's no going back, that part of my life is over, for good. I can say that if I went back and looked at that stuff again that I'd see it in an entirely different light than I did when I was ignorant and stupid enough to buy it. I go back and see a bunch of posturing hypocrites and liars just as I do when I look at those who want to peddle fascism and Nazism and other ideologies assigned the term "right wing" just as I do those who polluted Christianity with nationalism and the service of Mammon.
The idiotic notion which was a part of that, that either you chose the communist side or you chose the side of the Red Scare and the fascist intellectual opposition to communism, was part of the sucker duping of it. YOU CAN REJECT THEM BOTH, YOU CAN REJECT ALL OF THEM BECAUSE ALL OF THEM ARE PEDDLING THE SAME STUFF, GANGSTER GOVERNANCE, VIOLENCE, MURDER AND THE AMASSING OF WEALTH INTO THE HANDS OF THE MOST RUTHLESS OF THE GANGSTERS. All of the academic bull shit that pretends there's anymore to it than that is a bunch of either incredibly stupid people with degrees writing it or they're base and servile appendages of the corruption looking for the pitiful crumbs of money and notice that come with service to gangster governance. There are no worse of those than the ones whom make movies, write plays and books to that end. Especially the ones that make the most money from it. I have yet to find anything they have produced that isn't saturated with lies. And, yes, to get to your point, organized atheism is an especially typical example of that, even those who are merely useful tools instead of knowing parts of it.
Someone complains that I said that the MAGA hat as seen on Trump Junger was our contemporary equivalent of the Nazi's red armband, as seen on Hitler Junger, it is complained that there should be no comparison to the horrors that the Nazis committed in Europe in the 30s and 40s. Well, there was a period of Nazi activity before the first atrocities were committed, before the worst of those were committed. Trump has been in office two years, the Nazi phenomenon started in 1919 and ended (or at least its initial phase ended) in 1945. They went from a body count of zero to more than 24 million in that period. I'd rather not ignore that potential until it is fully manifested. As a White, Gay Man I see young White Men wearing MAGA hats as being those who would likely attack me. And I as an old Gay Man who can easily pass have little to worry about as compared to Women, Black People, Latino People, LGBTQ People, and others who have been targeted for hate speech by Trump and Pence and Stephen Miller and John F. Kelly and FOX. The Black People, the Native Americans who were in that location, seeing a large group of MAGA wearing young White Men coming their way had every reason to consider them as a potential danger. Women such as the ones they were harassing as documented by video had every reason to consider them a potential danger. Trump's supporters and fans have a history of violence. If they don't like that reaction to Trumpler gear they only have themselves to blame. Them and their fake fur covered Fuhrer and the diseased troupe of haters he maintains and encourages.
As I've been laid up in bed I haven't been exposed to a lot of the paid-public relations campaign to garner that kind of disgusting himpathy that they can create for the little creeps from Covington Prep, not dissimilar to the himpathy campaign worked up for the serial sexual assaulter who was put on the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh. I know that the habits of giving privileged white boys every benefit of the doubt can be evoked to cover up white boys being really bad. Especially those who are jocks in a popular team sport. I read they broke into the football jock's idea of a Polynesian war dance featured in the incident. That display, appropriated and bastardized from a group of dark-skinned people, by a group of white prep-school boys wearing Trumpler Junger regalia - our version of a Nazi arm band - in an incident involving Black people on the one hand and Native Americans on the other saturates the incident with racism just as the video footage of some of the Covington boys harassing young women BEFORE THE WIDELY VIEWED INCIDENT shows that misogyny was also part of it. That those boys were in DC as part of an anti-choice demonstration is certainly included in the package of privileged vileness that comes through every time I see footage of the incident.
But, this being TV-Hollywood-hate-talk radio saturated America in the Trump era, there is a very good chance that those privileged boys will not only get away without consequences, they will be presented as martyrs, victims of the very people and groups they harassed and who in the fullness of time, like Kavanaugh, they will be empowered to screw using the power of the government to do it.
There should be a rule that any group of affluent white boys whose parents need to hire a public relations firm to get off without consequences for their bad behavior have that professional PR campaign held against them.
The Catholic school they come from may or may not hold them responsible but I'm betting that there will be a successful campaign by Covington parents to prevent the brats from being punished. That is part of the corruption of religion that comes with the maintenance of elite schools servicing the affluent - I would suggest that those in charge of such prep schools meditate on the Epistle of James for a year and they close those training grounds for teaching those who go into them with too much privilege an even greater sense of entitlement, a pipeline to the Ivy-Ivy Equivalent system which is part of the creation of oligarchy.
There is, at least, questioning of that kind being raised, this time. A Kentucky bishop is expressing serious reservations about how close the anti-choice movement, supposedly "pro-life" is to American's first overtly pagan-Mammonist ruler.
In a strongly worded newspaper column, a Kentucky bishop urged Catholics to consider the church’s full teaching on life and to resist temptations to align themselves with the “Make America Great Again” movement started by President Trump. Bishop John Stowe wrote on Wednesday that it “astonishes” him that some students gathered in Washington, D.C., last week to protest abortion at the March for Life—including students caught on video in an exchange with a Native American tribal leader—wore so-called MAGA caps, which he said support a president whose policies are putting lives at risk.
“Without engaging the discussion about the context of the viral video or placing the blame entirely on these adolescents,” the Lexington, Ky., bishop wrote in the Lexington Herald-Leader, “it astonishes me that any students participating in a pro-life activity on behalf of their school and their Catholic faith could be wearing apparel sporting the slogans of a president who denigrates the lives of immigrants, refugees and people from countries that he describes with indecent words and haphazardly endangers with life-threatening policies.” Well, it's a start let's hope it more than just a start. Though anyone who has failed to notice the anti-choice movement was thick as thieves with Republicans even as they devolved into fascists couldn't have been paying attention. They were allied with them even as the Reagan-Bush I administration were running a terror war that murdered people who are being canonized now. The assassin of St. Oscar Romero was trained at the School of the Americas. There has been a satanic two-step between right-wing Catholics and those sponsors of murderers for the entire modern era. It would take a whole new blog to go over just the outlines of that scandal. The elite Catholic school system was not unrelated to that, it is certainly producing some of the most depraved of of them as can be seen in the staffing of the Trump regime and the Republican establishment.
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There is something up at Raw Story, co-posted at Salon that could have been valuable but which is rather ruined by including the de rigueur slam against Christianity. I started looking a bit at the comments attached to the article at Raw Story - didn't bother to look at Salon, where it's copied from - and the opportunity to take up the Christian-bashing cat calls was taken.* At least one of them points out that Trump is not in any sense of the word Christian. You could not intuit the morality of Jesus, the theology of Paul and James and the others who provide the absolute foundation of Christianity from the Trump regime or the Trump family.
There are many things you can say about the Trump regime's similarities to the Nazis and other antisemetic governments but one thing you can't claim is that it is "Christian". While it contains many pseudo-Christians, some of the actually quite fanatical, it also contains quite a few Jews in the highest positions, Jared Kushner, for Pete's sake, Ivanak, Stephen Miller, Steven Mnuchin, and many whose names don't get in the news as often (Jason Greenblatt, David Miller, etc.).
Of course the issue of religion is largely beside the point with these guys, they are, heart, soul, mind and strength, the servants of Mammon, that swamps any other matters of identity just as thoroughly as Trump's tiny handful of Black supporters, supporters of what would be normally be considered higher aspects of their persons are entirely obliterated by their devotion to money and power for the purpose of getting more money.
Trump is certainly a racist, his hatred of Black People and Latinos, something that was part of his business practice, is real and controlling (his wall obsession). His maintenance of some ugly as well as other just stupid beliefs surrounding identity is real and often comes through. His conception of religion is best seen by the incident during his campaign when he visited the Presbyterian Church that he was confirmed in as a teenage and he was so abysmally ignorant of the religion he was confirmed in that he had to ask the, now Black, pastor if Presbyterians were Christians. "Christianity" in the minds and mouths of such people has nothing to do with Jesus or Paul or even, in many cases, God, it is a tool of working things for advantage. For Trump I'm sure being Jewish means no more than that his daughter who people say is probably the only person he really cares about converted when she married into another rich real-estate family and his grandchildren from her are Jewish. I am just as sure that anything else about Jewish identity is as meaningless to him as the slogans of American nationalism he mouths as he sold us out to Putin and the Saudi establishment, China and the Kim regime. So is the identity, "Christian". Christianity is meaningless without the morality of Jesus. It is incompatible with Republican-fascism.
* I noticed that Ron Reagan jr's Freedom From Religion ad was on Rachel's show again last night. I was watching on a pirated feed on Youtube and as soon as it was on the chats in the sidebar were immediately swayed from attacking Republicans by the typical atheist-vs "Xian" stuff. The left doesn't have the time to be swayed by those jerks for another decade. The FFRF is worse than a waste of time, it is a distraction for something that is not only not useful, it is counterproductive. They are most useful for Republican-fascists, not the productive left.
The repulsive Susan Collins has announced in her typical style her intention of voting both ways today, for Trump's non-starter wall and for the bill that Nancy Pelosi passed in the House of Representatives which does not have money for the wall. I don't know when that vote is scheduled but, as you can, you can count on Susan Collins to be cowardly and hypocritical, merely relying on the Maine media to present her hypocrisy as principle. I think she's gotten lazy with the media covering her shame, it's what they've done for her all along.
My other Senator, Angus King, correctly and honestly points out why letting Trump get away with this monumentally irresponsible and treasonous stunt would be only to invite him to do it again and again.
King bluntly said on CNN that he would oppose the Trump plan, saying the Democratic caucus fears government shutdowns “will become the routine way to do business around here” if they cave to the president, adding that the new asylum changes represented a “typical” late shift by Trump to gain leverage. “Now, we’ve got something that really makes it impossible to vote for,” he said.
I'll say this for Angus King, I didn't much like him as governor as he was quite a little to the right of me (little did I know how bad it could get) but he's been a very, very good Senator. I've been extremely proud of him in that office. Susan Collins can always be counted on to do the right thing, sometimes, occasionally, when it doesn't matter and she's afraid that not doing the right thing might cost her an election and she'll go on all the talk shows doing her patented dance of indecision and her shameful act leading up to it. She is an empty suit and a hypocrite and the voters of Maine should be ashamed that they've been suckered into keeping her in the Senate. She should get the boot she so richly deserves.
I am asked, or, taunted, rather, over Ron Reagan jr. appearing in a paid-promo ad for the Freedom From Religion Foundation during last nights MSNBC liberal ghetto hours. To which I give a small, uninterested (meh!).
If someone can tell me why I should care what Ron Reagan jr. thinks about anything my meh! might be a little less but, putting in the minimal research on him this morning, his thinking on atheism would seem to be the product of his mind at 12 when he made his declaration of disbelief. There aren't many 12-year-olds whose thinking on anything is important, generally only those who gained experience through tragedy or terrible oppression neither of which the young Ron Reagan seemed to have experienced. Since he's now five times that age (according to Wikipedia, I said I'd done minimal research, after all) and from what I saw of the ad it wouldn't seem that he's put much thought into the matter in the intervening forty-eight years. As someone who is radically different from when I was 48 and even 58 on the basis of lots of reading and thinking and writing to clarify things, I don't get why I'm supposed to be impressed with people who brag about having decided such issues when they were dopey kids.
I don't much look at the print editions of the lefty magazines anymore, the only place I ever came into contact with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and in that period other than atheists giving it a shout out in their rants, the only thing I ever saw were its fund-raising ads. I've had several occasions of fact checking stuff they published on their website, perhaps other places and found that they're pretty unreliable when it comes to claims and very superficial in their thinking. I can say that it is pretty much a family business the founder passing it on to her daughter and son-in-law in that hive of impotent but mightily self-important atheist-leftiness, Madison, Wisconsin. I think it's pretty much a rule that lefty stuff coming out of college towns is bound to generate idiotically ideological ballot box poison. Beware university based radicalism, its tenured proponents are mostly idiots.
It's one of the things that the internet made far easier and so possible to a non-specialist, fact checking claims made by ideologues of all kinds, the heroes of ideological movements, discerning the actual character of so many of these non-profits which are actually minor business enterprises, that almost all of them have clay feet and often clay heads as well. I've got to say that on the left the unreliability of atheist propaganda is rather breathtaking when you fact check them. Replacing reliability with the kind of celebrity fame fucking that having Ron Reagan jr. in such an ad is might get you donations enough to keep the family business running, it isn't any way to be honest and above board. Really, why would anyone base their decision on such a thing on the basis of celebrity? Such a decision based on such a foundation is not likely to be very impressive, it's the kind of thing you can imagine wowing a 12-year-old but not a serious adult.
I have no intention of getting drawn into further arguments with an idiot from NYC who doesn't realize that cast albums have been a thing since the 1940s, excerpted numbers from B-way shows have been a thing since B-way started doing musicals and both illegally posted on Youtube is a thing since shortly after Youtube was started. Not to mention, you know, productions of B-way crap around the world. I know that there are a lot of people from NYC who are as abysmally ignorant of life outside of their tiny little bubble which they mistake for the entire universe but the ones who grew up there can be the worst of them all. They are always shocked when the fact that their tiny little bit of territory isn't even the United States, which it isn't, not to mention the universe they imagine it is.
Why should I refute lies that I've refuted over and over again only to have them lied over and over again? The people he lies them to don't care, why should I? It's not as if the couple of dozen who will read them and are still stupid enough to believe him have important ideas. If they did, they wouldn't be there.
Nancy Pelosi is definitely in the running as the most courageous Speaker of the House in the history of that office. I agree with RMJ, it's too bad that we won't be able to see Trump being humiliated by yelling in a dark, empty House chamber without mics and without cameras and without an audience. Maybe Kellyanne will live cast it on her phone. I wonder if the Speaker has access to blocking technology. I can think of few things that would be better for us right now than to have a woman humiliate the would-be strong-man dictator of the United States as he is destroying his credibility even with those credulous enough to still support him. If they cast a second Statue of Liberty, they should put Nancy Pelosi's face on it.
This is going to be a troll free year here. That won't change.
Being sick, yesterday, I didn't much feel like listening to the news. I took the time to think more about my theory that, despite the left-right graph of political identity, spreading in two directions from the "sensible middle" the alleged point of safety, there are really only two forms of government, egalitarian democracy in which adequately informed people of good-will choose their governments and regularly get to vote on whether or not to change them and governance by gangsters. Gangster governments go from bad to Stalin-Hitler-Mao-Kim levels of horrific oppression and murder through various lesser levels of horrific oppression and inequality, the Saudi system - American apartheid states (based on racial, ethnic and gender inequality), various fascist systems, the lesser police states of Marxism such as Cuba up to and including the conservative governments of places like the United States and quasi democracies, Venezuela right now, Nicaragua under the Ortegas, . . .
The division between egalitarian democracies and gangster governance reaches a fuzzy line in the United States and places like Canada and Germany, with there always being a danger of gangsterism exerting influence, previously, here, through such corruptions as lobbyists wining and dining and, sometimes, paying off members of municipal councils, legislatures, the Congress has given way to Supreme Court sanctioned corruption that, in Trump and under Republican-fascism, has a real potential to destroy the potential of the United States to secure its position outside of the system of gangster governance. There is a reason that Putin, one of the most successful of gangster dictators in recent history, wanted to put someone like Trump in office, someone who gangsters in the House of Saud and the Communist gangsters who run China were eager to do business with, it's because gangsters able to control a puppet gangster in the White House was far better for gangsters than having one who was answerable to the American People. America's indigenous gangsters had always had that ability, especially thanks to the Supreme Court, the most efficient engine of corruption in the set-up of the American Constitutional regime- itself set up to thwart egalitarian government, every aspect of progress away from rule by gangster-oligarchs. The Electoral College, the anti-democratic structure of the Senate, those are potent tools for the prevention of egalitarian democracy, set up by the original gangsters for their benefit and the benefit of their heirs.
Abolitionism, Womens' suffrage, opening up the vote to even White Men who didn't own property and, eventually, who couldn't afford to pay poll taxes, culminating in the all-too-temporary Voting Rights Act were all steps and, in some cases strides away from the gangster favoring aspects of the original Constitution, many of those gangster empowering provisions demanded by the slave owners in slave states and gladly granted by Northern merchants, banksters and others in the North who were only somewhat less crooked. It is no accident that it is the "originalists" the "strict constructionists" the Federalists-fascists who have James Madison as their trade mark who have been working to destroy that progress away from gangster governance and who hold a majority on the Court. They are the direct enablers of the Putin putsch just as they have been enablers of our domestic gangster-oligarchs in thwarting egalitarian democracy.
A lot becomes far clearer when you give up the old Poli-sci model that largely leaves out the question of equality and the right of The People to both a level of adequate information necessary to govern themselves and an unhampered ability to determine their governments and which contains such absurd assertions that Hitler and Stalin were polar opposites when their systems had everything of the most importance in common. That the old poli-sci model rested mostly on asserted intentions surrounding economics instead of on the hardest of realities, justice, love, neighborliness, the precursors of egalitarian democracy, has distorted our politics in the most profound way.
I was thinking about the Majority Report crew and their frequent citations and references of Marx and Marxist thinkers and wondering why even the smartest ones among them don't see that everything they claim to favor in life is nothing that Marxism will bring about. I wonder how they can ignore, since they know the reality, of the total oppression that the Soviet and Chinese systems were, the scores of millions murdered by Marxist regimes, a figure far higher than those Nazism managed to pile up, more durably entrenched terror and police states that are better models for Nazis and fascists than they are in opposition to them. It's no great mystery how the Marxists of the later days of the Soviet system immediately morphed into today's most successful fascist oligarchs, they were always the same thing only with a different label. It was the idiocy of Western academic analysis that insisted on the model of line balanced on a pivot instead of one based in reality that has misled the atheist would-be left.
Perhaps it's their worship of science and mathematical symmetry that blinds them to the idiocy, still, even now that Marxism has been given a lavish test of time costing hundreds of millions of lives and billions of lives blighted by terror and oppression, Marxism is discredited as anything other than an anti-democratic system that would never do more than generalize oppression. It has been given that test of time, it has produced those results. For crying out loud, Putin's greatest dream would be for him to reproduce the Soviet system and even he wouldn't go through the motions of pretending he was reviving the Marxist clap-trap that people in the United States - save those in the academic and scribbling professions - understood as making Marxism nothing they wanted. That discrediting here has been quite similar to the discrediting of capitalism in so much of the third-world. One of the tragedies of that is the extent to which capitalists have been able to gull people into the foolish idea that capitalism is an inherent aspect of democracy when it is merely an enduring engine of gangster governance of a more antique and less ideological character.
It is the continuing tragedy of Martin Luther King jr. that his heirs have done what his enemies tried to do during his lifetime, thwart the delivery of his message and inspiration and, yes, what his killers hoped to do, silence his words.
I have commented on that for too many Martin Luther King days, though last year, after the scandal of some of his words finally being released, for payment in a Ram Truck commercial to be broadcast during that most anti-Christian of holidays, Superbowl Sunday, through the advice of Jimmy Carter, his three surviving children, those who blocked so many of his words, came together in April last year to say that they were "getting out of the family business".
It being the nature of the tragically diminished legacy of Martin Luther King jr. in the half century after his death that was caused in no small part by the suppression of his full message, that was the biggest news I heard about his words last year. I hope they have been doing it and that they will, finally, release his words so they can have the potency they should have had all these years.
Martin Luther King jr. being turned into another holiday made meaningless by putting it on a Monday and, so, turning it into a long weekend was a big mistake if the meaning of his message was the goal. Limiting the access to his words by scholars as well as by others intimidated out of using them turned even that attempt at honoring into occasions on which the few words that can be quoted and cooled down to make them safe for the very oligarchic gangsters and racist institutions he opposed were quoted and immediately forgotten for another year, stuffed into journalists' files to be opened next January to be mouthed, again.
If those who have control of the words of Martin Luther King jr. were sincere in getting out of the sordid business of commercial exploitation of memorabilia and, most importantly, his words, his real message, so radical that he was murdered to stop him as he was fighting for justice for trash haulers and as the Poor Peoples' March was being planned, might finally have something like their full value realized. I hope they were sincere. The world needs his testimony, it's gone to hell since he was murdered.
Another ugly incident rooted in another Catholic boy's prep-school is in the news.
It's been an eye-opening few months for just what amoral jerks are being educated in Catholic schools, yesterday it was the Covington School in Park Hill, Kentucky who were at an anti-abortion demonstration when a group of them, wearing Covington hoodies and Trump MAGA hats mocked and harassed Nathan Phillips, an Omaha elder and a Vietnam War veteran who was engaged in a sacred ceremony.
You can read the disgusting details and, I'll point out, there is talk about the offenders being expelled. You'll also note that this time, at least, the school's officials joined local officials of the Catholic church in issuing an apology.
I look at this and all of the other scandals coming from Catholic boys schools and I've got to wonder why the behavior of the boys and men who they are producing isn't considered an obvious and disgusting moral failure, one largely flowing from the kind of right-wing Catholic culture that has been enhanced and produced from such elite Catholic education. While, as I've been documenting here for months, the product of Catholic prep-schools and universities who have careers as amoral thugs and gangsters with economic and political power, the greatest number of those come from the mixture of entitled educational credentialing with jock culture. Covington was in the news last month due to one of its basketball stars Jake Walters (6-10, 265lbs) being accused of raping and sodomizing a woman and laughing at her after he seriously injured her.
The violent, criminal mix of team sports and the kind of entitlement that is a part of prep-school culture isn't a specifically Catholic school problem BUT FOR PETE'S SAKE, WHEN IT HAPPENS AT A CATHOLIC SCHOOL IT'S A CATHOLIC SCHOOL IT'S HAPPENING AT.
Added into that is the disgusting focus on nationalism - the schools motto is Pro Deo et patria (For God and country) and the obvious pollution of American-fascism as seen in the MAGA hats.
I doubt that this kind of elite all-male institution can exist without these kinds of scandals coming out of them, if they were co-educational and elite they would still generate scandals. There is obviously something deeply unChristian about the culture of such institutions, not to mention the "pro-life" movement that these brats were part of. As can be seen in the scandalous behavior of the product of such Catholic schools during the Trump regime, it produces thugs, gangsters and criminals of the worst kind, the kind who hold power and make their thuggery and gangsterism legal. The whole system should be scrapped, schools that produce those kinds of graduates are a disgrace and a scandal. The Catholic Church, Catholic religious orders shouldn't be engaged in running elite schools for the scions of the entitled and those who hope, through that credentialing to become the kind of thugs that Brett Kavanaugh is, that Jake Walters is credibly accused of being of the likes of the Catholics in the Trump regime and who are on the Supreme Court.
I got an anonymous comment this morning that said that when a new comment is added to this blog they get three notices that a new comment has been added, so I didn't add the comment, I don't add most of those I get because they violate my ban on comments rude to third parties or they're just stupid and false.
The anonymous comment said something about having clicked a box to be notified when a new comment is added. I don't know anything about that or that it's something in my control. If I could fix it I would but I can't find that it's something I have control over.
I would ask for comments on this but don't want to make the problem worse, if it is a problem. The comment didn't look like the typical spam comments I don't add because they are clearly auto-spam for some purpose I can't discern or they are offering male erectile products for which, I don't hesitate to say, I've never had any need for even if I were credulous enough to believe they might work. While I don't believe I'd ever "need a crane" for such a purpose, if I were stupid enough to think such a thing is possible I'd really rather not live with the day to day effects of such a thing. See the kinds of things I spare you from getting notice about.
Update: Have you tried deleting the cookies from your blog? I find that takes care of a lot of problems. I use C Cleaner regularly, from what I recall the first "C" stands for "crap".
When a dead body is discovered at an inner city hotel DCI Stone is forced to navigate the murky and transient world of catering. DCI JOHN STONE.....Hugo Speer DS SUE KELLY.....Deborah McAndrew DI MIKE TANNER.....Craig Cheetham ELENA/ KAREN.....Lizzie Stavrou TERRY QUINN/DC HALE…Jason Done ALICE STONE...…Millie Gibson JOLENE/ DIANA..…Angela Lonsdale ASADI QADIR/ GARETH......George Bukhari Directed by Nadia Molinari
DCI Stone is a popular currently produced radio drama on the BBC. This is more a link to what I think is the current season than a single drama. My only question is why the kids in Brit dramas are always such little assholes, most of the kids I know are pretty OK. Don't they know how to write nice kids? Other than that it's pretty good.
As Rachel Maddow pointed out last night, the now disputed story in BuzzFeed was only the most sensational of the scandals reported about Trump, his campaign and his regime last week. It was a confusing and exhausting week of those. Now that the Special Council's office has denied, in vague terms, that they were in possession of evidence that Trump ordered his then attorney Michael Cohen to lie to the congress, the veracity of BuzzFeed and, by artificial amplification of what might be a single, though spectacular, faux pas by one news organization, the entire investigation into the massive Trump scandal in which so many key figures have pled guilty already, is being attacked.
I have to admit that I was so bewildered by the thick forest of decaying trees and falling widow makers from them from last week I wasn't giving the BuzzFeed one my full attention and have been taking a few hours to try to catch up. One of the most interesting things I read this morning was at Politico (of all places)
Former federal prosecutor and current George Washington University law professor Randall Eliason surmised that BuzzFeed’s likely source was FBI agents working the Southern District of New York case against Cohen. For one thing, Mueller doesn’t leak and FBI agents, who have been known to leak, “would know about all things Cohen, including materials seized during search warrants at his home & office that may be some of ‘cache’ of supporting evidence,” Eliason tweeted. If Eliason is right, that might explain some of the confusion: The BuzzFeed story could be right about what the Southern District had concluded about Cohen’s behavior but have overshot what Mueller’s team thinks. Remember, the Friday evening statement from Mueller doesn’t say the BuzzFeed account is all wet, just that it’s inaccurate in its description of what the Mueller office has learned.
Is that what happened? Will it matter now that the idea that BuzzFeed got it wrong is the story?
What I find most interesting in this is how this IS the story this morning in exactly the way that more than a quarter of a century of false reporting about the criminality of Hillary Clinton, reported by many, many news operations, from the sewer that FOX and Breitbart reside in up to the loftier heights of the New York Times has never been as much of a story. It's a rule in American journalism that any slander against any Democrat, everything from staffer to presidents, is nothing much to be bothered with but one POSSIBLY inaccurate story told about the most corrupt of Republicans is treated as a scandal.
POOR RAND PAUL, REDUCED TO DEPENDING ON SLAVE LABOR MEDICINE, WHAT'S WRONG, CAN'T HE FIND THAT LEVEL OF SERVICE HERE IN THE LAND OF THE (REALITY) FREE AND HOME OF THE CRAVEN? Rand, his daddy, Ron, Ben Carson? Have you ever seen a more obvious collection of mental defectives who are allowed to practice medicine?
Oh, yes. The blog-rat atheist allergy to fact checking, something they hold in common with the burning Trumpster school of political thought, is as strong as ever.
I have never belonged to any political party except the Democratic Socialists of America; I am a member even now. Moreover, contrary to some opinions expressed online, my membership in the DSA is not simply an act of ironic political theatre, or a sullen expression of my contrarian disposition. I am quite a contented and convinced son of the European Christian Socialist tradition; I was formed in early in life by William Morris and John Ruskin, among other worthies of that sort; and socialism is my politics in the short term. In the long term, as the eschatological horizon of my political vision, as it were, I am drawn to something like Pyotr Kropotkin’s anarcho-communism, however unrealizable it may be within history. One needs a Utopia to strive for and fall short of. I have, moreover, no interest in or sympathy for—in fact, am temperamentally averse and morally hostile to—any forms of political conservatism: neo-conservatism, palaeo-conservatism, “lost-cause” conservatism, monarcho-conservatism, theo-conservatism, or any other. The true conservatives I have known in my life have generally struck me as suffering from a somewhat bilious resentment of the simple and inevitable fact of social change, and from a jealous desire to freeze reality in an image of a past they only think they recall or understand. To me, that would be an emotionally exhausting way to live. I take Heracleitus as my guide here, and recognize that you really cannot step in the same river twice. If the present appalls you, seek things eternal, like love and justice; but let the dead bury their dead. I also dislike every form of libertarianism, which among all the expressions of the American political mind strikes me as the most incompatible with Christianity. I realize that in America, alone among nations with developed economies, the word “socialism” has a sinister ring in many ears. I take this as a symptom of our unique national genius for stupidity. I am well aware of how badly the various parts of a “socialized” economy can at times be managed (the tales I could tell of my experiences with the NHS); but, well managed, they make for a far more humane governing philosophy than ours, and one that comes as close to something like “Distributist” justice in the use of property and wealth as we can hope for under current circumstances. So I find it very odd that, when we look at those nations of northern and western Europe that enjoy the benefits of sane socialist policies, as a result of both their Social Democratic and their Christian Democratic traditions—nations, like Germany or Denmark or France, where the cost of healthcare per capita is far lower and yet coverage is universal, where life spans are longer, where working people are not rendered bankrupt by serious illnesses, where the children of the poor cannot be denied expensive treatments by predatory insurance adjusters, where people have far more savings in bank and endure much lower levels of debt, where wages generally keep pace with inflation, where every worker has decent vacation time each year, where suicide and opioid addiction are not the default lifestyle of the working poor, where homelessness has been nearly abolished, where retirement care is humane and comprehensive, where schools are immeasurably better, where literacy is far higher…—we recoil in horror and thank God that we are free from such things. Surely, we tell ourselves, these are curses, only a few steps away from the gulags. We know that civic wealth is not meant for civic welfare, but is supposed to be diverted into the pockets of the military-industrial complex, by the needless purchase each year of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons systems that will never be used, or is supposed to be squandered through unneeded tax cuts for the very richest of the investment class. We know that when the child of a working family is diagnosed with cancer, that the child should be denied the most expensive treatments, even if they alone can possibly save him or her, and then should probably die, and that his or her family should be utterly impoverished in the process. We call this, I believe, being free. And, as long as we have access to all the guns we could ever need to fight off invasions from Venus, what more can we ask? Anyway, there it is. Excuse the interruption. Best to all—DBH.
I have recently read the exchange between David Bentley Hart and his fellow theologian and scholar N. T. Wright over objections that Wright had about Hart's translation of the Greek New Testament which was published not long ago, that N. T. Wright had written a critique of it was, from what I understand, something of a departure from the often violated scholarly convention that you don't review a book which is in competition with one you've recently published, N. T. Wright had published his own translation. But that's not as interesting to me as the way that the disagreement pointed out some of the major problems within the long history of Christianity, especially the divide between the West and East of Europe, between Orthodoxy and Catholicism-Protestantism. A lot of that seems to be due to the great influence of Augustine and his line of thought in the West and certain basic concepts some invented or popularized by Augustine, original sin, predestination, eternal damnation, etc. and the accusation that some of that is due to Augustine's inability to understand the distinctions among ideas which depend on a more subtle knowledge of Greek which, being the continued language of the early Greek Church was far clearer to them than it was to Western theologians who didn't know Greek and who depended on faulty translation starting with Jerome. Or at least that's my understanding of the problem.
Considering such things as the damnation of unbaptized infants and the scandalous character given to God to make him conform to that Augustinian innovation by some of the major figures in Western Christianity have been of the most use to those who want to produce religious neurosis and depravity and, in the fullness of time, atheism, it's an important issue to finally get cleared up. But that's only one of the issues that arise when you look at the understanding that an educated Greek speaking Pharisee like Paul and why he used different words which we don't understand did, actually, mean quite different and distinct things. These issues tend to hinge on what Paul, the second and second greatest theologian in Christian history said, that is if you consider Jesus as the first and greatest of all Christian theologians, a theologian being a person who tries to make God comprehensible, in part, to human understanding. I do have to say it is rather remarkable, as Hart pointed out, how many of the major figures in Western Christianity have turned the Good News of Jesus into the worst of all possible news and turn God into someone we have to be saved from. I am hardly a great reader of Augustine but in almost every instance I've run up against the angry insistence on such things the angry protector of eternal damnation, the damnation of infants, predestination, is more interested in protecting the thoughts of Augustine than they are the Gospel or the Epistles.
This article by David Bentley Hart, The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients, was a real eye-opener to me, pointing out that it is the misunderstanding, distortion through simplification, confused changes in meaning of words that Paul and the other writers of the Second Testament when those were translated from the Greek original to Latin and other languages and how even modern translations are often made by those who are unable to understand their mistake because they are thoroughly bound up in things like the thinking of Augustine and through him Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, etc. I am not a scholar of 1st century Greek, though I have started learning to read it, but the examples in the article become far clearer if you take the real and serious difference in meaning that Hart points out to into consideration. I have to say that some of N. T. Wright's ideas about the nature of the life to come, the life after the Judgement, that I'd heard from his lectures didn't exactly sit well with me so maybe that colors my judgement, nor does it make sense to me considering the accounts of the risen Jesus in the Gospels or in Paul's experience, which does, actually make more sense if those distinctions in the meaning of words was part of Paul's daily use of language.
I do have to say that Hart's criticism of the common habits in imagining 1st century Judaism and, so, of earliest Christianity of that period has been something I've come to to see the more I've read about the period:
I can think of no other popular writer on the early church these days whose picture of Judaism in the Roman Hellenistic world seems better to exemplify what I regard as a dangerous triumph of theological predispositions over historical fact in biblical studies—one that occasionally so distorts the picture of the intellectual and spiritual environment of the apostolic church as effectively to create an entirely fictional early Christianity. Naturally, this also entails the simultaneous creation of an equally fictional late antique Judaism, of the sort that once dominated Protestant biblical scholarship: a fantastic “pure” Judaism situated outside cultural history, purged of every Hellenistic and Persian “alloy,” stripped of those shining hierarchies of spirits and powers and morally ambiguous angels and demi-angelic nefilim that had been incubated in the intertestamental literature, largely ignorant even of those Septuagintal books that were omitted from the Masoretic text of the Jewish bible, and precociously conformed to later rabbinic orthodoxy—and, even then, this last turns out to be a fantasy rabbinic orthodoxy, one robbed of its native genius and variety, and imperiously reduced to a kind of Protestantism without Jesus.
No such Judaism ever existed, either in the days of Christ and the apostles or in any other period; but it has enjoyed a long and vigorous life in Protestant dogmatics and biblical criticism. And I was recently reminded of this by Wright himself, when he publicly objected to a footnote in my own recent translation of the New Testament. In that note, I mentioned more or less in passing that Paul seems to have thought that some of the narratives of the Jewish Bible not only were apt for allegorical readings, but might also have originally been written as allegories. For Wright, this was tantamount to a suggestion that Paul did not believe in the reality of God’s covenants with Israel. Now, needless to say, nothing of the sort follows logically from my observation; more to the point, my footnote did nothing more than call attention to Paul’s own words. (And, really, how often does Paul not employ allegory in reading scripture?) But Wright’s anxiety is quite in keeping with a certain traditional Protestant picture of the pagan and Jewish worlds of late antiquity, one that involves an impermeable cultural partition between them—between, that is, the “philosophy” of the Greeks and the “pure” covenantal piety of the Jews. And, as I say, the results are sometimes comic. Unfortunately, they are at other times positively disastrous. Nowhere is this more strikingly the case—and nowhere does Wright’s work in particular present a more troubling specimen of pious exegetical violence to scripture—than in regard to the New Testament’s use of the words πνεῦμα (spirit), ψυχή (soul), and σάρξ (flesh), as well as to the theologies of resurrection that attach to them.
Which, if nothing else, points out how dangerous it is for understanding to read the Scriptures naively, as if you could reach any deep understanding of them without understanding such issues. The Bible, even the New Testament can't be read as a modern History book or science, which hadn't been invented and, so, they weren't written to be used like that. Nor can it be read as an introductory textbook or a novel which doesn't require you to have previous knowledge of the kinds of things that Hart talks about. And even knowing that isn't enough. It's not that a scholar like N. T. Wright could be accused of being unprepared to read the books more on their own terms, Hart's accusation that he reads the books of the Bible, shaping his understanding of them on later theology instead of on what the authors said is the way that all of us read it to some extent, it's the way we read everything. It takes an enormous effort to strip away things like the through saturation of Western culture in Augustine's thinking, to understand that he, also, read the Scriptures from his own experience, to make distinctions and come to understandings at odds with those.
I agree with Hart that Gregory of Nyssa had a far deeper understanding of the Scriptures than later, especially Latin speaking and writing theologians did. His conclusions are certainly far more consonant with the definition of God as the ultimate source of love in the universe than Augustine's or Aquinas or Calvin or Luther or, I'll have to say, Karl Rahner, though I think Rahner's readings are more due to his saturation in modern, contemporary German philosophy than Augustine. I'm not sure I think those are all that much of an improvement. With the great advance in rigorous modern scholarship comes the problem of modernism, though they can be divorced. Modernism, itself, can become a polluting hermenutic.
That's not to say that in many instances those theologians are worthless, it means that they have to be read with the same care and understanding of where they're coming from and where they wanted to go to. I think Augustine turned sour when he saw the Roman Empire falling in the West and he was way too involved with politics. And speaking of which . . .
Reading more Orthodox thinking it is striking to me how different it is in so many ways from the Western thinking I grew up in. That's not to say that it's perfect, as one Orthodox thinker I listened to recently pointed out that Orthodoxy has a huge problem of being, so often, bound up in nationalism and the politics of the countries they are tied to. In that, I think that, to some extent, Catholicism and many of the Protestant churches have left much of that behind, in many cases.
For more examples of such differences, here's a recent lecture and Q&A "Is Everyone Saved? Universalism and the Nature of Persons."
I'll point out that the quote I used about Pope Francis the other day comes at about 58:00
I can say that this all points out that the slam that Protestants made against Catholics, that they were against non-specialists reading the Bible being both right and wrong. If the motives of keeping the Bible locked away from the common people by authorizing only the Latin Vulgate were bad, they did, at least, protect Catholics from coming to The Bible totally unprepared with the myriad of problems that can lead to. If it's going to be read, and it should be, it should be read for an actual understanding of the language and minds of those who composed it, the extent to which that can be had. I hope we call all, eventually, get past Augustine. My rule of thumb is that anything inconsistent with God being good, of God's love, with God holding out against even the most intransigent of stubborn humans of God being as depraved as the worst of predestination and those eager to send people to eternal torment is suspect to the highest degree. I don't believe any of it.
I suppose I should come out and say that I've been ill and apparently it's more serious than I'd thought. While the doctor tells me that the condition I've got isn't often fatal, it's serious. I should be able to write posts, just not at the volume I have been until it passes or I do. Not to get anyone's hopes up, just to explain the sudden fall in verbiage. Maybe I'll fill in with posted lectures and music. There are lots of those that should be heard.
