Matt Rouge, China is a notoriously corrupt dictatorship, there is plenty of libertarian economic activity that happens within it, especially if someone in a position of power is making a profit,that was true all during the overtly Marxist phase of the dictatorship as, indeed, it has always been for the elites of even totalitarian regimes. The only real interest in a dictatorship is the benefit of the dictators - which is actually a class of people, not even Stalin or the Kim regimes are actually in complete control of the central character, one of the reasons they are constantly killing off people in their inner circle of gangsters.
As to presenting a "range of possibilities" those can include everything up to and including the possibility that I heard the epidemiologist Matthew Meslson present to a stunned CBC radio announcer, that someday a viral disease will arise on some poultry farm that will spread through modern means of transportation and render the human species extinct. When said stunned announcer, after about fifteen seconds of dead air asked if he really meant that, he said, yes, that was a possibility given the size and concentration of the human population and modern transportation. And there is no way to know where, how or when such a point in the "range of possibilities" will arise. That lack of specific knowledge is no excuse for ignoring lesser pandemics.
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Hate Mail - Deifying "Culture" - The Condescending Objectification That Esteems Peoples' "Culture" More Highly Than The People Who Hold It
I do have to say it's something rather comical, how the people who will rise up in fury when a "westerner" (as they, themselves almost inevitably are) "wants to impose your morality" on, in this case "the Chinese people" will, then, have no problem with Buddhism, a foreign religion in China and much of the rest of the world where it is professed, after all, doing the same thing. I guess when it's one "exotic" entity being imposed on "exotic people" (and admit it, that's what these People are for you) that makes it OK.
There is nothing that honors "a culture" more than wanting the people who hold it to change their behavior SO THEY CONTINUE LIVING INSTEAD OF DYING. But, to do that you have to hold THE PEOPLE, THEMSELVES in higher regard than you do their habits, what "culture" consists of, in the end. The same reason I wish smokers and drinkers would change their consumption habits. Or are chain smoking and alcoholism equally sacrosanct as "culture" where those addictions are widespread? How about slavery and child rape, those are endemic to some cultures.
There is nothing that honors "a culture" more than wanting the people who hold it to change their behavior SO THEY CONTINUE LIVING INSTEAD OF DYING. But, to do that you have to hold THE PEOPLE, THEMSELVES in higher regard than you do their habits, what "culture" consists of, in the end. The same reason I wish smokers and drinkers would change their consumption habits. Or are chain smoking and alcoholism equally sacrosanct as "culture" where those addictions are widespread? How about slavery and child rape, those are endemic to some cultures.
IS - This Then Is The Meaning Of The Easter Message And The Easter Faith
The ultimate reality
The message with all its difficulties, its time-bound concrete expressions and amplifications, situational expansions, elaborations and shifts in emphasis is basically concerned with something simple. And - despite all discrepancies and inconsistencies of the different traditions in regard to place and time, persons and the sequence of events - the different primitive Christian witnesses, Peter, Paul and James, the letters, the Gospels and Acts, are agreed that the Crucified Jesus lives forever with God as obligation and hope for us. The men of the New Testament are sustained , even fascinated, by the certainty that the one who was killed did not remain dead but is alive and that person who clings to him will likewise live. This new, eternal life of the one is a challenge and real hope for all.
This then is the meaning of the Easter message and the Easter faith, completely unambiguous despite all the ambiguity of the different accounts and ideas of Easter. It is a truly revolutionary message, very easy to reject not only then but also today: "On this subject we will hear you again," said some skeptics to Paul on the Areopagus in Athens, according to Luke. Not of course that this held up the victorious progress of the message.
Hans Kung then gives several paragraphs showing how this message "had been prepared already in Judaism". Instead of giving you that, I'll give you this passage from Abraham Joshua Heschel's essay Death as Homecoming
In the language of the Bible to die, to be buried, is said to be "gathered to his people" (Genesis 25:8). They "were gathered to their fathers" (Judges 2:10). "When your days are fulfilled to go to be with your fathers" (I Chronicles 17:11).
Do souls become dust? Does spirit turn to ashes? How can souls, capable of creating immortal words, immortal works of thought and art, be completely dissolved, vanish forever?
Others may counter: The belief that man may have a share in eternal life is not only beyond proof; it is even presumptuous. Who could seriously maintain that members of the human species, a class of mammals, will attain eternity? What image of humanity is presupposed by the belief in immortality? Indeed, man's hope for eternal life presupposes that there is something about man that is worthy of eternity, that has some affinity to what is divine, that is made in the likeness of the divine…
The likeness of God means the likeness of Him who is unlike man. The likeness of God means the likeness of Him compared with whom all else is like nothing.
Indeed, the words "image and likeness of God" conceal more than they reveal. They signify something which we can neither comprehend nor verify. For what is our image? What is our likeness? Is there anything about man that may be compared with God? Our eyes do not see it; our minds cannot grasp it. Taken literally, these words are absurd, if not blasphemous. And still they hold the most important truth about the meaning of man.
Obscure as the meaning of these terms is, they undoubtedly denote something unearthly, something that belongs to the sphere of God. Demut [likeness]and tzelem [image]are of a higher sort of being than the things created in the six days. This, it seems, is what the verse intends to convey: Man partakes of an unearthly divine sort of being.
[Which I will admit, I copied and pasted from an online source (complete with typos which I hope I corrected, correctly) because I can't find my copy of the book it's in.]
I have been interested in finding through such authorities as Heschel that the widespread belief that Judaism rejected the idea of an afterlife is not shared universally among Jewish scholars and theologians though they seem to be very reluctant to talk about it as compared to Christians. I think the interpretation of the biblical language mentioned above does indicate that there was a belief, vaguely expressed, in an afterlife. This past year, thinking about the story of the Transfiguration in which three of the followers of Jesus saw him talking with Moses and Elijah, something which is apparently taken as much more significant in Eastern than in Western Christianity*, especially taken in relationship with the passages in which Jesus confounds the Sadducees with God's declaration that he IS the God of Abraham Issac and Jacob, on the matter of the afterlife, it's clear that even before the Resurrection, the people who wrote those stories down had to have believed at least some of their ancestors were alive in God.
Kung continues.
This Jewish faith, with its apocalyptic background is taken for granted in the New Testament as a whole. The Christian faith on the other hand - which must of course be freed from purely time-conditioned apocalyptic ideas - includes that Jewish faith in a final concentration. Jews and Christians believe in the resurrection. The faith of Jews and Christians rests on the fact that for them the living God is the unshakably faithful God as we constantly encounter him in the history of Israel. He is the Creator who keeps faith with his creature and partner, come what may. He does not withdraw his yes to lie, but at the decisive frontier itself adds another yest to his first yes. He is faithful in death and beyond death.
* The past week of going through this exercise during the Easter season has made me wonder at how odd it is in Western Christianity that the preparatory period of Lent is so much more observed and kept in mind than the season between Easter and the Pentecost, I don't know if that's a product of an attraction to gloom and a fear of joy, the pessimistic, fatalistic fear of bad news and a fear of not only good news but of the best possible news, universal eternal life in God. I have the feeling that the long period of Lenten gloom in Christianity should end and the "ultimate reality" that Kung talks about in this passage should replace it. Though I do have to admit, I rather like Lent, it seems to me that it should certainly not replace this reality.
Update: I should also say that doing this, typing out these passages, thinking about them, comparing them with other passages from Scripture and from other theologians has sustained and helped me a lot during this terrible period. I think it's something I'll continue doing even after Pentecost. I've been doing it for myself with passages I haven't posted or written about. I don't have the patience or time to do it the way the old monks did in the scriptoria, putting the book in a book holder and typing the text out has become a real pleasure, a really effective way to engage with the texts and what they say. I recommend it.
The message with all its difficulties, its time-bound concrete expressions and amplifications, situational expansions, elaborations and shifts in emphasis is basically concerned with something simple. And - despite all discrepancies and inconsistencies of the different traditions in regard to place and time, persons and the sequence of events - the different primitive Christian witnesses, Peter, Paul and James, the letters, the Gospels and Acts, are agreed that the Crucified Jesus lives forever with God as obligation and hope for us. The men of the New Testament are sustained , even fascinated, by the certainty that the one who was killed did not remain dead but is alive and that person who clings to him will likewise live. This new, eternal life of the one is a challenge and real hope for all.
This then is the meaning of the Easter message and the Easter faith, completely unambiguous despite all the ambiguity of the different accounts and ideas of Easter. It is a truly revolutionary message, very easy to reject not only then but also today: "On this subject we will hear you again," said some skeptics to Paul on the Areopagus in Athens, according to Luke. Not of course that this held up the victorious progress of the message.
Hans Kung then gives several paragraphs showing how this message "had been prepared already in Judaism". Instead of giving you that, I'll give you this passage from Abraham Joshua Heschel's essay Death as Homecoming
In the language of the Bible to die, to be buried, is said to be "gathered to his people" (Genesis 25:8). They "were gathered to their fathers" (Judges 2:10). "When your days are fulfilled to go to be with your fathers" (I Chronicles 17:11).
Do souls become dust? Does spirit turn to ashes? How can souls, capable of creating immortal words, immortal works of thought and art, be completely dissolved, vanish forever?
Others may counter: The belief that man may have a share in eternal life is not only beyond proof; it is even presumptuous. Who could seriously maintain that members of the human species, a class of mammals, will attain eternity? What image of humanity is presupposed by the belief in immortality? Indeed, man's hope for eternal life presupposes that there is something about man that is worthy of eternity, that has some affinity to what is divine, that is made in the likeness of the divine…
The likeness of God means the likeness of Him who is unlike man. The likeness of God means the likeness of Him compared with whom all else is like nothing.
Indeed, the words "image and likeness of God" conceal more than they reveal. They signify something which we can neither comprehend nor verify. For what is our image? What is our likeness? Is there anything about man that may be compared with God? Our eyes do not see it; our minds cannot grasp it. Taken literally, these words are absurd, if not blasphemous. And still they hold the most important truth about the meaning of man.
Obscure as the meaning of these terms is, they undoubtedly denote something unearthly, something that belongs to the sphere of God. Demut [likeness]and tzelem [image]are of a higher sort of being than the things created in the six days. This, it seems, is what the verse intends to convey: Man partakes of an unearthly divine sort of being.
[Which I will admit, I copied and pasted from an online source (complete with typos which I hope I corrected, correctly) because I can't find my copy of the book it's in.]
I have been interested in finding through such authorities as Heschel that the widespread belief that Judaism rejected the idea of an afterlife is not shared universally among Jewish scholars and theologians though they seem to be very reluctant to talk about it as compared to Christians. I think the interpretation of the biblical language mentioned above does indicate that there was a belief, vaguely expressed, in an afterlife. This past year, thinking about the story of the Transfiguration in which three of the followers of Jesus saw him talking with Moses and Elijah, something which is apparently taken as much more significant in Eastern than in Western Christianity*, especially taken in relationship with the passages in which Jesus confounds the Sadducees with God's declaration that he IS the God of Abraham Issac and Jacob, on the matter of the afterlife, it's clear that even before the Resurrection, the people who wrote those stories down had to have believed at least some of their ancestors were alive in God.
Kung continues.
This Jewish faith, with its apocalyptic background is taken for granted in the New Testament as a whole. The Christian faith on the other hand - which must of course be freed from purely time-conditioned apocalyptic ideas - includes that Jewish faith in a final concentration. Jews and Christians believe in the resurrection. The faith of Jews and Christians rests on the fact that for them the living God is the unshakably faithful God as we constantly encounter him in the history of Israel. He is the Creator who keeps faith with his creature and partner, come what may. He does not withdraw his yes to lie, but at the decisive frontier itself adds another yest to his first yes. He is faithful in death and beyond death.
* The past week of going through this exercise during the Easter season has made me wonder at how odd it is in Western Christianity that the preparatory period of Lent is so much more observed and kept in mind than the season between Easter and the Pentecost, I don't know if that's a product of an attraction to gloom and a fear of joy, the pessimistic, fatalistic fear of bad news and a fear of not only good news but of the best possible news, universal eternal life in God. I have the feeling that the long period of Lenten gloom in Christianity should end and the "ultimate reality" that Kung talks about in this passage should replace it. Though I do have to admit, I rather like Lent, it seems to me that it should certainly not replace this reality.
Update: I should also say that doing this, typing out these passages, thinking about them, comparing them with other passages from Scripture and from other theologians has sustained and helped me a lot during this terrible period. I think it's something I'll continue doing even after Pentecost. I've been doing it for myself with passages I haven't posted or written about. I don't have the patience or time to do it the way the old monks did in the scriptoria, putting the book in a book holder and typing the text out has become a real pleasure, a really effective way to engage with the texts and what they say. I recommend it.
The Valuing Of Science Is A Sometimes Thing As Is The Honoring Of "Cultural Tradition" and Less Romantic Aspects of Morality
Anyone who bothered to read the excerpts from the paper and articles I posted and linked to in my post about the direct relationship between eating meat and the epidemic and pandemic diseases that evolve in animals kept to be slaughtered and eaten or, though not mentioned, for eggs - to be slaughtered after their production falls - might have noticed that the last one was not only somewhat different in tone, it carried clearly now discredited claims that the now infamous wet-markets in China and elsewhere are blameless for having the potential that the Covid-19 pandemic has proven they did and do have. I included it for two reasons, to test whether or not the same self-declared super-champions of evidence, science, what is now fashionably referred to as "the data" as to their willingness to read for about five minutes or if they had the reading ability to understand what they've read so as to notice the discrepancy in what I chose to post. That's why I put the half-right and entirely wrong extract from a half-right and, as the pandemic we are going through proves, quite wrong advocacy group for small farmers and marketers over factory farms at the very end of the extracts.
This pandemic has made me extremely pessimistic about the ability of our entertainment addled population to do what is needed to prevent or mitigate such man-created natural disasters. It has confirmed my skepticism of the actual devotion to reasoned assessment of what "the data" shows, of what science can demonstrate. It is a great example of how science actually works in the modern culture of the allegedly educated in which a. the large majority of those who understand some of what is said by scientists will have far from complete understanding, b. that anything the science shows that they don't like or seems too unusual to them or would impinge unfavorably on their preferences and habits will be ignored or rejected. c. that a dangerously large percentage of the allegedly-educated, allegedly liberal or leftist population is as ready to reject good science as the yahoos, the Trump, the Koch family, other billionaire manipulators of the FOX-Sinclair-Limbaugh audience are.
The people whose hearts might be in the right place - at least if you don't mind the obvious cruelty to animals involved - at GRAIN and they certainly know the issue, going back well before the Covid-19 epidemic, the article I linked to shows that. But the excerpt I took, instead of the extremely informative information contained at the link showed their romantic view of small animal husbandry operations and the appalling "small traders" at the wet markets shows that they are unable to overcome their romanticism and political-economic preferences to face, squarely what was warned about by science even as they must have been reading it. The direct or probable link between epidemic diseases in people and wild animals, probably the consumption of them by poor people or for sale or as a matter of "tradition" or "culture"* has been long established in previous outbreaks of diseases.
I don't know much about GRAIN apart from having read that article and briefly looked at the links contained in it but it is clear that their devotion to evidence and science isn't enough to overcome their non-factual, political and ethical positions. In the case of the "brain trusters" who mocked what I said before, it comes down to nothing so much as not wanting their enjoyment of eating meat impeded by the part that meat-eating played in producing this and other pandemics and epidemics on a smaller scale.
The idea that "tradition" or "culture" should swamp the general health and safety of those having those habits or, as in the case of epidemics and pandemics, wider populations up to and including the world is totally daffy. And the claims of honoring such traditions and culture are never done evenly or equally, I would guess that the very same people who get misty eyed over the "tradition" of the wet-marketing of wild animals would be opposed to fox-hunting or many of the various ways that animals are cruelly tortured and killed by human beings, especially if such people are not denoted to be sufficiently "ethnic" or, well, what it comes down to is "exotic".
As to how "traditional" the infamous wet-markets of China were, I don't know but I read in the past few months that they arose as a desperation measure of Mao dictatorship when their theory based Marxist mismanagement of agriculture caused famines, something that has happened a number of times as Marxist dictatorship has been imposed on countries. I also read that, far from feeding the poor, that the wet-market trade served an affluent clientele. But even if it were a well-established part of the romantically viewed, peasant-based habits, the "culture" the world does not owe any culture, anywhere the body-count in these pandemics that are the price we will pay for continuing such "cultural practices" that is as true a cost to the human population as the cost of allowing enormous factory farming of pigs, chickens, ducks, etc. brings us so that someone can cook the recipe as found in the New York Times Sunday feuilleton or as handed down by dear old grandma.
And that doesn't even begin to get to the most obvious thing about this, the enormous cruelty to animals involved in it. Having grown up on a small farm, having grown up around agriculture, I have seen animals slaughtered to be eaten, there is no way to do so humanely, it is cruel and painful, no matter if that is done in an industrial slaughter house or by a peasant in the farmyard or a "small trader" in a wet market or Donald Trump jr. trying to prove his manhood to his daddy and his pals. Such "cultural practices" are certainly nothing the animals killed would choose, the cost to them is obvious, the cost to the general human population that comes from it requires the kind of knowledge that modern people, "western culture" if you want to put it in ways more congenial to the racist white and privileged, are alleged to value. But that valuing of science is certainly a sometimes thing.
Update: Well, it certainly was known that eating wild animals could be dangerous, here's an excerpt from the CDC, from back in the days before the Republicans started destroying it.
How is Lassa fever virus spread?
Lassa fever is spread primarily by rats. Rats that carry the Lassa fever virus live in homes and areas where food is stored. People usually become ill with Lassa fever after accidentally eating or breathing in rat droppings or urine. This can happen through touching objects or eating food contaminated with rat droppings or urine, or after cleaning activities like sweeping. People who prepare or eat infected rats for food can also become ill with Lassa fever. Lassa fever may also spread when a person comes into contact with an infected person’s blood, tissue, or body fluids, especially when that person is seriously ill.
And, though it hasn't happened yet, there is a good chance that that terrible disease could mutate into a form that spreads easily from human to human.
The study published on 17 October in the New England Journal of Medicine, eases fears that Lassa had mutated into a super-bug that was spreading swiftly between people. Instead, the viral genomes harvested from 220 patients were surprisingly diverse, indicating that most people had not acquired their infections from someone else . . .
. . . People can contract Lassa virus from direct contact with the African soft-furred rat (Mastomys natalensis) — such as by eating them. And infected rodents can indirectly transmit the virus by salivating or urinating on rice, cassava and other crops stored in barrels or left to dry in the sun. The infection can also pass from person to person through bodily fluids — which is how many health workers contract the virus.
As with Ebola, Lassa causes fevers and can lead to death as a result of internal bleeding. Mortality rates range from 25% to 69% in West Africa.
Just to point out what might be coming our way in the future, though there is absolutely nothing to say that something as bad or worse won't come from a factory farm in the United States or from someone here eating wild animals. There is nothing special about the animals Westerners are used to eating that prevents them from being the source of such potentially pandemic illnesses. Not to mention many bacterial diseases that routinely are featured in our news as American means of slaughter guarantee that if you're eating the meat America loves to eat you're eating chicken shit or cow shit or pig shit.
That article was from the source held as authoritative by educated and allegedly-educated people in the US and elsewhere, Nature, less than two years ago.
This pandemic has made me extremely pessimistic about the ability of our entertainment addled population to do what is needed to prevent or mitigate such man-created natural disasters. It has confirmed my skepticism of the actual devotion to reasoned assessment of what "the data" shows, of what science can demonstrate. It is a great example of how science actually works in the modern culture of the allegedly educated in which a. the large majority of those who understand some of what is said by scientists will have far from complete understanding, b. that anything the science shows that they don't like or seems too unusual to them or would impinge unfavorably on their preferences and habits will be ignored or rejected. c. that a dangerously large percentage of the allegedly-educated, allegedly liberal or leftist population is as ready to reject good science as the yahoos, the Trump, the Koch family, other billionaire manipulators of the FOX-Sinclair-Limbaugh audience are.
The people whose hearts might be in the right place - at least if you don't mind the obvious cruelty to animals involved - at GRAIN and they certainly know the issue, going back well before the Covid-19 epidemic, the article I linked to shows that. But the excerpt I took, instead of the extremely informative information contained at the link showed their romantic view of small animal husbandry operations and the appalling "small traders" at the wet markets shows that they are unable to overcome their romanticism and political-economic preferences to face, squarely what was warned about by science even as they must have been reading it. The direct or probable link between epidemic diseases in people and wild animals, probably the consumption of them by poor people or for sale or as a matter of "tradition" or "culture"* has been long established in previous outbreaks of diseases.
I don't know much about GRAIN apart from having read that article and briefly looked at the links contained in it but it is clear that their devotion to evidence and science isn't enough to overcome their non-factual, political and ethical positions. In the case of the "brain trusters" who mocked what I said before, it comes down to nothing so much as not wanting their enjoyment of eating meat impeded by the part that meat-eating played in producing this and other pandemics and epidemics on a smaller scale.
The idea that "tradition" or "culture" should swamp the general health and safety of those having those habits or, as in the case of epidemics and pandemics, wider populations up to and including the world is totally daffy. And the claims of honoring such traditions and culture are never done evenly or equally, I would guess that the very same people who get misty eyed over the "tradition" of the wet-marketing of wild animals would be opposed to fox-hunting or many of the various ways that animals are cruelly tortured and killed by human beings, especially if such people are not denoted to be sufficiently "ethnic" or, well, what it comes down to is "exotic".
As to how "traditional" the infamous wet-markets of China were, I don't know but I read in the past few months that they arose as a desperation measure of Mao dictatorship when their theory based Marxist mismanagement of agriculture caused famines, something that has happened a number of times as Marxist dictatorship has been imposed on countries. I also read that, far from feeding the poor, that the wet-market trade served an affluent clientele. But even if it were a well-established part of the romantically viewed, peasant-based habits, the "culture" the world does not owe any culture, anywhere the body-count in these pandemics that are the price we will pay for continuing such "cultural practices" that is as true a cost to the human population as the cost of allowing enormous factory farming of pigs, chickens, ducks, etc. brings us so that someone can cook the recipe as found in the New York Times Sunday feuilleton or as handed down by dear old grandma.
And that doesn't even begin to get to the most obvious thing about this, the enormous cruelty to animals involved in it. Having grown up on a small farm, having grown up around agriculture, I have seen animals slaughtered to be eaten, there is no way to do so humanely, it is cruel and painful, no matter if that is done in an industrial slaughter house or by a peasant in the farmyard or a "small trader" in a wet market or Donald Trump jr. trying to prove his manhood to his daddy and his pals. Such "cultural practices" are certainly nothing the animals killed would choose, the cost to them is obvious, the cost to the general human population that comes from it requires the kind of knowledge that modern people, "western culture" if you want to put it in ways more congenial to the racist white and privileged, are alleged to value. But that valuing of science is certainly a sometimes thing.
Update: Well, it certainly was known that eating wild animals could be dangerous, here's an excerpt from the CDC, from back in the days before the Republicans started destroying it.
How is Lassa fever virus spread?
Lassa fever is spread primarily by rats. Rats that carry the Lassa fever virus live in homes and areas where food is stored. People usually become ill with Lassa fever after accidentally eating or breathing in rat droppings or urine. This can happen through touching objects or eating food contaminated with rat droppings or urine, or after cleaning activities like sweeping. People who prepare or eat infected rats for food can also become ill with Lassa fever. Lassa fever may also spread when a person comes into contact with an infected person’s blood, tissue, or body fluids, especially when that person is seriously ill.
And, though it hasn't happened yet, there is a good chance that that terrible disease could mutate into a form that spreads easily from human to human.
The study published on 17 October in the New England Journal of Medicine, eases fears that Lassa had mutated into a super-bug that was spreading swiftly between people. Instead, the viral genomes harvested from 220 patients were surprisingly diverse, indicating that most people had not acquired their infections from someone else . . .
. . . People can contract Lassa virus from direct contact with the African soft-furred rat (Mastomys natalensis) — such as by eating them. And infected rodents can indirectly transmit the virus by salivating or urinating on rice, cassava and other crops stored in barrels or left to dry in the sun. The infection can also pass from person to person through bodily fluids — which is how many health workers contract the virus.
As with Ebola, Lassa causes fevers and can lead to death as a result of internal bleeding. Mortality rates range from 25% to 69% in West Africa.
Just to point out what might be coming our way in the future, though there is absolutely nothing to say that something as bad or worse won't come from a factory farm in the United States or from someone here eating wild animals. There is nothing special about the animals Westerners are used to eating that prevents them from being the source of such potentially pandemic illnesses. Not to mention many bacterial diseases that routinely are featured in our news as American means of slaughter guarantee that if you're eating the meat America loves to eat you're eating chicken shit or cow shit or pig shit.
That article was from the source held as authoritative by educated and allegedly-educated people in the US and elsewhere, Nature, less than two years ago.
Monday, April 20, 2020
I'm Betting Kushner and Mnuchin Have Money Coming In Off Of That American Test
Though I have been exposed to one possible case of Covid-19 and one confirmed case, though I've had the symptoms of a mild case of it, contracted during that period, I'm still unable to get tested. I'm kind of numb from worrying about every sore throat and cough for the past two months. But I'm not too numb to telling Democratic campaigns that I'm stuck with a lot of time on my hands that I'd love to put to their use.
My Answer To The Sci-Ranger Fan Boys And Gals Who Snarked About My Mention of The Role of Meat Eating In Pandemics
I had planned on going through my files of things I've read and copied on the topic of epidemic and pandemic diseases that make the leap from farm animals to human to human transmission but the list would be very long so I just chose these few examples and decided to give some excerpts, not that it will change the meat head champions of, um, "science" and uh, "reason" and, . . . .yeah, "evidence based thinking." Don't even believe for a second that they'll read them, they don't read, they spew stupidity and mutual admiration.
One Root Cause of Pandemics Few People Think About
It’s our seemingly insatiable desire to eat meat
By Paul Shapiro on March 24, 2020
It’s easy for those of us in the Western world to shake our heads at the live wildlife markets in China that appear to be the origin of the coronavirus pandemic now paralyzing the globe. Easy, that is, since such a practice is so literally quite foreign to us. (In their defense, at least, China has now banned such markets.)
But what’s more difficult is to be honest with ourselves about what kinds of pandemics we may be brewing through own risky animal-use practices. And while the new coronavirus, crippling as it is, might have a somewhat merciful case fatality rate (proportion of those infected who die) of less than 1 percent, we know that this catastrophe may be just a dress rehearsal for an even more serious pandemic that could take a more gruesome toll—akin to the 1918 global flu pandemic, which originated in Kansas and killed at least 50 million people.
When that day comes, it’s very likely that such a virus will also have its origin in humanity’s seemingly insatiable desire to eat animals, whether wild or domestic. The conditions in which we often farm animals today—crowding tens of thousands of animals wing-to-wing or snout-to-snout—serve as “amplifiers” for viral pandemics.
Indeed, the H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009 appears to have originated in a pig confinement operation in North Carolina. And while the H5N1 bird flu outbreak in 1997 evidently originated in Chinese chicken farms (case fatality rate 60 percent), a similar bird flu in the U.S. just five years ago led American poultry farmers to kill tens of millions of their birds to contain the outbreak, which thankfully never made the jump into the human population. And at this very moment, both India and China have announced bird flu outbreaks among their chicken factories. Similarly, these are not yet affecting human health.
Factory Farms: A Hotspot for Emerging Pandemics
By Scott Weathers
US Global Health Policy
Last week, the World Health Organization elected Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as its next Director General. Amid his controversial campaign, I coauthored an open letter to the next Director General to prioritize factory farming, an eminent threat to global health. This letter, signed by over 200 experts in relevant fields, attracted a large degree of media attention in the New York Times, Lancet, Guardian, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. The announcement of this letter on Twitter was the top trending post on nearly all relevant hashtags for the World Health Assembly, even during its busiest day.
Factory farming, in its simplest definition, is the intense, large-scale confinement of animals in order to produce meat. The vast majority of meat consumed in the United States, and increasingly in Low-Income Countries, is produced in this manner. Perhaps the most terrifying risks of factory farms are to global health security, which manifest themselves in two major ways.
Livestock infectious diseases and zoonoses
Fiona M. Tomley* and Martin W. Shirley
Infectious diseases of livestock are a major threat to global animal health and welfare and their effective control is crucial for agronomic health, for safeguarding and securing national and international food supplies and for alleviating rural poverty in developing countries. Some devastating livestock diseases are endemic in many parts of the world and threats from old and new pathogens continue to emerge, with changes to global climate, agricultural practices and demography presenting conditions that are especially favourable for the spread of arthropod-borne diseases into new geographical areas. Zoonotic infections that are transmissible either directly or indirectly between animals and humans are on the increase and pose significant additional threats to human health and the current pandemic status of new influenza A (H1N1) is a topical example of the challenge presented by zoonotic viruses. In this article, we provide a brief overview of some of the issues relating to infectious diseases of livestock, which will be discussed in more detail in the papers that follow.
Keywords: emerging infectious diseases, livestock and zoonotic pathogens, vector-borne diseases, global impact, food security.
Building a factory farmed future, one pandemic at a time
by GRAIN
GRAIN began working on global livestock diseases in 2006, when we launched a report on the global bird flu pandemic. That report punched a hole in the accepted wisdom, promoted by meat companies and international agencies, that the disease was mainly being spread by wild birds and backyard farms. It exposed the rapid rise of factory farms in Asia as the likely source of this highly pathogenic virus, and the global meat industry as the principal conduit for its spread. We wanted to help the small farmers and wet market traders challenge the punitive measures that they were being unfairly subjected to, and to push for an effective global response to the disease that would also prevent the industrial meat system from producing more such lethal diseases. Unfortunately this has, for the most part, not happened, and more outbreaks have occurred, notably the swine flu outbreak in Mexico in 2009. Sadly, our investigations into today's ASF pandemic read like a déja vu of the work we began over a decade ago.
Some of GRAIN's reports on livestock diseases:
Fowl play: The poultry industry's central role in the bird flu crisis, 2006: https://grain.org/e/22
Viral times - The politics of emerging global animal diseases, 2008: https://grain.org/e/614
A food system that kills - Swine flu is meat industry's latest plague, 2009: https://grain.org/e/189
One Root Cause of Pandemics Few People Think About
It’s our seemingly insatiable desire to eat meat
By Paul Shapiro on March 24, 2020
It’s easy for those of us in the Western world to shake our heads at the live wildlife markets in China that appear to be the origin of the coronavirus pandemic now paralyzing the globe. Easy, that is, since such a practice is so literally quite foreign to us. (In their defense, at least, China has now banned such markets.)
But what’s more difficult is to be honest with ourselves about what kinds of pandemics we may be brewing through own risky animal-use practices. And while the new coronavirus, crippling as it is, might have a somewhat merciful case fatality rate (proportion of those infected who die) of less than 1 percent, we know that this catastrophe may be just a dress rehearsal for an even more serious pandemic that could take a more gruesome toll—akin to the 1918 global flu pandemic, which originated in Kansas and killed at least 50 million people.
When that day comes, it’s very likely that such a virus will also have its origin in humanity’s seemingly insatiable desire to eat animals, whether wild or domestic. The conditions in which we often farm animals today—crowding tens of thousands of animals wing-to-wing or snout-to-snout—serve as “amplifiers” for viral pandemics.
Indeed, the H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009 appears to have originated in a pig confinement operation in North Carolina. And while the H5N1 bird flu outbreak in 1997 evidently originated in Chinese chicken farms (case fatality rate 60 percent), a similar bird flu in the U.S. just five years ago led American poultry farmers to kill tens of millions of their birds to contain the outbreak, which thankfully never made the jump into the human population. And at this very moment, both India and China have announced bird flu outbreaks among their chicken factories. Similarly, these are not yet affecting human health.
Factory Farms: A Hotspot for Emerging Pandemics
By Scott Weathers
US Global Health Policy
Last week, the World Health Organization elected Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as its next Director General. Amid his controversial campaign, I coauthored an open letter to the next Director General to prioritize factory farming, an eminent threat to global health. This letter, signed by over 200 experts in relevant fields, attracted a large degree of media attention in the New York Times, Lancet, Guardian, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. The announcement of this letter on Twitter was the top trending post on nearly all relevant hashtags for the World Health Assembly, even during its busiest day.
Factory farming, in its simplest definition, is the intense, large-scale confinement of animals in order to produce meat. The vast majority of meat consumed in the United States, and increasingly in Low-Income Countries, is produced in this manner. Perhaps the most terrifying risks of factory farms are to global health security, which manifest themselves in two major ways.
Livestock infectious diseases and zoonoses
Fiona M. Tomley* and Martin W. Shirley
Infectious diseases of livestock are a major threat to global animal health and welfare and their effective control is crucial for agronomic health, for safeguarding and securing national and international food supplies and for alleviating rural poverty in developing countries. Some devastating livestock diseases are endemic in many parts of the world and threats from old and new pathogens continue to emerge, with changes to global climate, agricultural practices and demography presenting conditions that are especially favourable for the spread of arthropod-borne diseases into new geographical areas. Zoonotic infections that are transmissible either directly or indirectly between animals and humans are on the increase and pose significant additional threats to human health and the current pandemic status of new influenza A (H1N1) is a topical example of the challenge presented by zoonotic viruses. In this article, we provide a brief overview of some of the issues relating to infectious diseases of livestock, which will be discussed in more detail in the papers that follow.
Keywords: emerging infectious diseases, livestock and zoonotic pathogens, vector-borne diseases, global impact, food security.
Building a factory farmed future, one pandemic at a time
by GRAIN
GRAIN began working on global livestock diseases in 2006, when we launched a report on the global bird flu pandemic. That report punched a hole in the accepted wisdom, promoted by meat companies and international agencies, that the disease was mainly being spread by wild birds and backyard farms. It exposed the rapid rise of factory farms in Asia as the likely source of this highly pathogenic virus, and the global meat industry as the principal conduit for its spread. We wanted to help the small farmers and wet market traders challenge the punitive measures that they were being unfairly subjected to, and to push for an effective global response to the disease that would also prevent the industrial meat system from producing more such lethal diseases. Unfortunately this has, for the most part, not happened, and more outbreaks have occurred, notably the swine flu outbreak in Mexico in 2009. Sadly, our investigations into today's ASF pandemic read like a déja vu of the work we began over a decade ago.
Some of GRAIN's reports on livestock diseases:
Fowl play: The poultry industry's central role in the bird flu crisis, 2006: https://grain.org/e/22
Viral times - The politics of emerging global animal diseases, 2008: https://grain.org/e/614
A food system that kills - Swine flu is meat industry's latest plague, 2009: https://grain.org/e/189
Sunday, April 19, 2020
Frank Nicholas - Danse A Lanmou
Franck Nicolas : Bugle
Jimmy Felvia : Piano
Charles Huck : Basse
Jony Lerond : Marker Ka
Frantz Flereau : Boula Ka
Roger Josepheau : Ka
I needed this.
Comment To A Libertarian Who Assumes Himself To Not Be "At High Risk" And Is Whining About Social Distancing
Modified from a comment made on another website.
There is no way of knowing who is "at high risk" and who someone who is "not at high risk" would kill if they acted selfishly and irresponsibly, the very character traits championed by "libertarians".
In 1918, among others, the Surgeon General urged that the military institute social distancing as a means of fighting the outbreak of influenza and the pneumonia resulting from it, only to be rebuffed by the military authorities, which led to more deaths among not only those "at risk" in the general population but for many young, healthy people, as well. This far into that pandemic the actual nature of those who would die in the pandemic,which far exceed the numbers of war-dead, was not known, then. We don't know what more weeks or months into this pandemic will show, the conventional wisdom of a month ago has in some cases been superseded by more information. We do know that right now we don't even know how many people in the population have died from it now or how many have been infected due to insufficient data collection and testing.
In short, your libertarian conclusions are based on insufficient information for them to be safely assumed. One thing we do know is that previous viral outbreaks from animal that entered into to human transmission have been a result of a libertarian view of the factory farming of animals for meat and eggs. That is a hard fact that is a result of libertarian ideology, right now.
There is no way of knowing who is "at high risk" and who someone who is "not at high risk" would kill if they acted selfishly and irresponsibly, the very character traits championed by "libertarians".
In 1918, among others, the Surgeon General urged that the military institute social distancing as a means of fighting the outbreak of influenza and the pneumonia resulting from it, only to be rebuffed by the military authorities, which led to more deaths among not only those "at risk" in the general population but for many young, healthy people, as well. This far into that pandemic the actual nature of those who would die in the pandemic,which far exceed the numbers of war-dead, was not known, then. We don't know what more weeks or months into this pandemic will show, the conventional wisdom of a month ago has in some cases been superseded by more information. We do know that right now we don't even know how many people in the population have died from it now or how many have been infected due to insufficient data collection and testing.
In short, your libertarian conclusions are based on insufficient information for them to be safely assumed. One thing we do know is that previous viral outbreaks from animal that entered into to human transmission have been a result of a libertarian view of the factory farming of animals for meat and eggs. That is a hard fact that is a result of libertarian ideology, right now.
Sometimes Atheists Being So Allergic To Knowing What They're Talking About Makes It Too Easy
To the moronic instant atheist hate-mailer who took objection to my point about atheists claiming "the atom" as their replacement for a cross or star of David . . . Here's what the online-atheist equivalent of sacred scripture, Wikipedia says.
The atomic whirl is the logo of the American Atheists, and has come to be used as a symbol of atheism in general as some American Atheist members claim.
The Atomic Whirl is based on the Rutherford model of the atom which is proven wrong, erroneously showing the orbital paths of electrons around the central nucleus, and not on the atomic orbitals which is a near perfect experimental approximation. [which, by the way, don't "look like" one of those, either.] It resembles the authoritative logos and symbols of the United States Atomic Energy Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency who also based their designs on the erroneous Rutherford Model. The symbol is used by the American Atheists organization to symbolize that "only through the use of scientific analysis and free, open inquiry can humankind reach out for a better life".
Yeah, tell them that at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Lake Chagan, Fukushima, Chernobyl and the environs around such scientific-industrial sites as are found in Britain, the United States and elsewhere.
Though, atheism always being, essentially, an ideology stuck in late 18th, through late 19th century scientistic materialism, their being out of date with modern science on their symbolism is to be expected.
Update: Well, I've been telling you that the atheist "brain trust" were too stupid to even keep up with their own ideology, why are you surprised when they prove it over and over again? I didn't even bother to look at the link, I can guess which pseudonyms are involved. They are conceited idiots by choice. Informed, they ain't.
The atomic whirl is the logo of the American Atheists, and has come to be used as a symbol of atheism in general as some American Atheist members claim.
The Atomic Whirl is based on the Rutherford model of the atom which is proven wrong, erroneously showing the orbital paths of electrons around the central nucleus, and not on the atomic orbitals which is a near perfect experimental approximation. [which, by the way, don't "look like" one of those, either.] It resembles the authoritative logos and symbols of the United States Atomic Energy Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency who also based their designs on the erroneous Rutherford Model. The symbol is used by the American Atheists organization to symbolize that "only through the use of scientific analysis and free, open inquiry can humankind reach out for a better life".
Yeah, tell them that at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Lake Chagan, Fukushima, Chernobyl and the environs around such scientific-industrial sites as are found in Britain, the United States and elsewhere.
Though, atheism always being, essentially, an ideology stuck in late 18th, through late 19th century scientistic materialism, their being out of date with modern science on their symbolism is to be expected.
Update: Well, I've been telling you that the atheist "brain trust" were too stupid to even keep up with their own ideology, why are you surprised when they prove it over and over again? I didn't even bother to look at the link, I can guess which pseudonyms are involved. They are conceited idiots by choice. Informed, they ain't.
About The Ascension
A resurrection? In the earliest stage of the Church there was no tradition of a visible ascension of Jesus in sight of the disciples. But there is one exception. Luke is more interested than others from the start in demonstrating the corporeal reality of the risen Jesus and in the apostles as eyewitnesses; unlike the other witnesses, he separates resurrection and exaltation in time. He alone mentions a separate ascension in Bethany which closes the time of Jesus' appearances on earth (before the heavenly appearance to Paul) and definitely opens the period of the Church's world mission lasting until Jesus' second coming. This is particularly clear in the Acts of the Apostles which follows on Luke's gospel (after 70) and was probably first written between 80 and 90. In the conclusion added subsequently to Mark, stemming from the second century, this idea of a separate ascension is adopted, under the influence both of the phraseology used to describe the taking up of Elijah and of the words of the Psalm about sitting on the right hand of the the Father.
Obviously Jesus did not go on a journey into space. In which direction would he have ascended, at what speed, and how long would it have taken? An ascension in these terms is inconceivable to modern man, but it was familiar enough to people at the time. We hear of an ascension, not only in connection with Elijah and Enoch in the Old Testament, but also with other great figures in antiquity like Hercules, Empedocles, Romulus, Alexander the Great and Apollonius of Tyana. It was a question of being carried up, not of a "journey to heaven" neither the way to heaven, nor the arrival there being described, but only the disappearance from earth. In this aspect the cloud signifies both the closeness and the unapproachability of God. The taking up pattern was therefore at Luke's disposal as ideal type and narrative form.
Presumably he himself turned the traditional exaltation statement into a taking up story, for which all the essential structural elements were available in the earlier stories of the tomb and the appearances. Why? Luke was probably not concerned only with visualizing the statement of a non-visual exaltation. As in his whole Gospel, he was determined to correct quite firmly the still widespread expectation of the parousia, the second coming of Jesus, at an early date; instead of inactive waiting, there had to be the mission to the world. Jesus himself had gone to heaven and left the task to his disciples for the imminent missionary age - the time of the Church in continuity with the time of Jesus - until at the end of time Jesus will return as palpably as before. Luke wants to say that only those have understood Easter who do not look up to heaven in amazement but bear witness to Jesus in the world.
Walter Brueggemann in talking about the central narrative of the Old Testament, and so also central to Christianity, of the liberation of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, he points out that in Chapter 3 of Exodus, God says to Moses:
Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.’
Which Brueggeman points out that God says, I will do all of these things, YOU do it. Which is both funny to hear from a Christian minister but also points out that God acting through human agency is central to the Jewish, and so Christian traditions. God sent Moses and Aaron to change the stubborn mind and heard heart of one man, the risen Jesus was commissioning his followers to change the hearts and minds of the world.
I have warmed up to what Kung says about Luke - the author of the Gospel I generally find most congenial - because, as he points out, Luke announced his intentions of correcting, of giving his understanding of the many things said about Jesus by those who knew and watched and heard him, which is what all writers, all reporters of anything do, they do it conscientiously and honestly or they do it badly, that's as true for science, politics, etc. as it is is for religion only in religion it will be dissected as it is never done in any other area of life.
As for Luke telling the truth about what Kung calls the "non-visual exaltation" in images, concepts, even in the creation of symbolically fraught events, that's also something that is done all the time. For those atheist-materialist devotees of scientism, science does this as a regular part of its operations, creations of pictures that are not "what atoms look like" but are visual symbols of the ideas and theories scientists create about atoms, molecules, etc. in order to explain phenomena and the data they collect to support what they say. Most plainly that is done whenever a large number of disparate measurements of events are crunched down into a number or a list of numbers which are then presented as the typical example of what happens or what is most probable to happen, even though in some cases documented within their very data, that typical example can be very unrepresentative in many if not every actual case in life. The generalizations made about human beings and animals within that practice can be everything from innocuous or generally useful to extraordinarily harmful, especially when used to support prejudice and negative stereotypes and even murderous hatred harnessed for political purposes to enhance the power of some of the worst among us.
I will note that the make believe "picture" of an atom is adopted by many ideological atheists as "their" symbol. Just added for fun and to show how they practice the same kinds of mistaking symbols for the things symbolized.
Luke's method is common to the culture of his time though, as in so much old literature, you have to know enough about that culture and the intent of the author to read through it to the meaning.* Luke was one of the few authors of the classical period to do us the enormous favor of honestly stating his intent at the start.
So the story of the ascension - especially in the subsequent version of Acts, with cloud and angels - seems almost like a parousia story in reverse. In Luke's Gospel as also in Mark's supplement the Easter appearances and the ascension seem to have taken place on the same Easter day. Only the Acts of the Apostles, which is later - obviously influenced by the sacred biblical number of forty (Israel's forty years in the desert, forty days of fasting on the part of Elijah and Jesus) -mentions forty days between Easter and ascension; the symbolic figure for a time of grace. the ascension is not to be understood or celebrated as a second "salvation fact" after Easter but as a specially emphasized aspect of the one Easter event.
-----------------
Note: I will continue posting relevant parts of Hans Kung's On Being Christian covering the Resurrection for the next few weeks, maybe I should make up for the bad Lent with a better Easter season series of posts. Pentecost, or so the internet tells me, is on May 31st. Though I would recommend his books because just about every paragraph in them is full of points to consider and information.
* The rigorous, informed methods of reading them recommended in the Vatican II document Dei Verbum seems to me to be something that many areas of writing could benefit from. Not just history or literature. Many of the points could be adjusted and modified to improve the reporting on science, much of which is totally unreliable. I have pointed out here before that some pretty eminent scientists have admitted and complained about reporters and their own scientific colleagues mistaking metaphors and illustrative diagrams for the things they are only stand-ins for.
Obviously Jesus did not go on a journey into space. In which direction would he have ascended, at what speed, and how long would it have taken? An ascension in these terms is inconceivable to modern man, but it was familiar enough to people at the time. We hear of an ascension, not only in connection with Elijah and Enoch in the Old Testament, but also with other great figures in antiquity like Hercules, Empedocles, Romulus, Alexander the Great and Apollonius of Tyana. It was a question of being carried up, not of a "journey to heaven" neither the way to heaven, nor the arrival there being described, but only the disappearance from earth. In this aspect the cloud signifies both the closeness and the unapproachability of God. The taking up pattern was therefore at Luke's disposal as ideal type and narrative form.
Presumably he himself turned the traditional exaltation statement into a taking up story, for which all the essential structural elements were available in the earlier stories of the tomb and the appearances. Why? Luke was probably not concerned only with visualizing the statement of a non-visual exaltation. As in his whole Gospel, he was determined to correct quite firmly the still widespread expectation of the parousia, the second coming of Jesus, at an early date; instead of inactive waiting, there had to be the mission to the world. Jesus himself had gone to heaven and left the task to his disciples for the imminent missionary age - the time of the Church in continuity with the time of Jesus - until at the end of time Jesus will return as palpably as before. Luke wants to say that only those have understood Easter who do not look up to heaven in amazement but bear witness to Jesus in the world.
Walter Brueggemann in talking about the central narrative of the Old Testament, and so also central to Christianity, of the liberation of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, he points out that in Chapter 3 of Exodus, God says to Moses:
Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.’
Which Brueggeman points out that God says, I will do all of these things, YOU do it. Which is both funny to hear from a Christian minister but also points out that God acting through human agency is central to the Jewish, and so Christian traditions. God sent Moses and Aaron to change the stubborn mind and heard heart of one man, the risen Jesus was commissioning his followers to change the hearts and minds of the world.
I have warmed up to what Kung says about Luke - the author of the Gospel I generally find most congenial - because, as he points out, Luke announced his intentions of correcting, of giving his understanding of the many things said about Jesus by those who knew and watched and heard him, which is what all writers, all reporters of anything do, they do it conscientiously and honestly or they do it badly, that's as true for science, politics, etc. as it is is for religion only in religion it will be dissected as it is never done in any other area of life.
As for Luke telling the truth about what Kung calls the "non-visual exaltation" in images, concepts, even in the creation of symbolically fraught events, that's also something that is done all the time. For those atheist-materialist devotees of scientism, science does this as a regular part of its operations, creations of pictures that are not "what atoms look like" but are visual symbols of the ideas and theories scientists create about atoms, molecules, etc. in order to explain phenomena and the data they collect to support what they say. Most plainly that is done whenever a large number of disparate measurements of events are crunched down into a number or a list of numbers which are then presented as the typical example of what happens or what is most probable to happen, even though in some cases documented within their very data, that typical example can be very unrepresentative in many if not every actual case in life. The generalizations made about human beings and animals within that practice can be everything from innocuous or generally useful to extraordinarily harmful, especially when used to support prejudice and negative stereotypes and even murderous hatred harnessed for political purposes to enhance the power of some of the worst among us.
I will note that the make believe "picture" of an atom is adopted by many ideological atheists as "their" symbol. Just added for fun and to show how they practice the same kinds of mistaking symbols for the things symbolized.
Luke's method is common to the culture of his time though, as in so much old literature, you have to know enough about that culture and the intent of the author to read through it to the meaning.* Luke was one of the few authors of the classical period to do us the enormous favor of honestly stating his intent at the start.
So the story of the ascension - especially in the subsequent version of Acts, with cloud and angels - seems almost like a parousia story in reverse. In Luke's Gospel as also in Mark's supplement the Easter appearances and the ascension seem to have taken place on the same Easter day. Only the Acts of the Apostles, which is later - obviously influenced by the sacred biblical number of forty (Israel's forty years in the desert, forty days of fasting on the part of Elijah and Jesus) -mentions forty days between Easter and ascension; the symbolic figure for a time of grace. the ascension is not to be understood or celebrated as a second "salvation fact" after Easter but as a specially emphasized aspect of the one Easter event.
-----------------
Note: I will continue posting relevant parts of Hans Kung's On Being Christian covering the Resurrection for the next few weeks, maybe I should make up for the bad Lent with a better Easter season series of posts. Pentecost, or so the internet tells me, is on May 31st. Though I would recommend his books because just about every paragraph in them is full of points to consider and information.
* The rigorous, informed methods of reading them recommended in the Vatican II document Dei Verbum seems to me to be something that many areas of writing could benefit from. Not just history or literature. Many of the points could be adjusted and modified to improve the reporting on science, much of which is totally unreliable. I have pointed out here before that some pretty eminent scientists have admitted and complained about reporters and their own scientific colleagues mistaking metaphors and illustrative diagrams for the things they are only stand-ins for.
Saturday, April 18, 2020
Saturday Night Radio Drama - John Mortimer (?) - Rumpole And The Old Boy Net
It's not uncommon for hit TV BBC series to have started out as a radio series first, Rumpole of the Bailey seems to have gone the other direction, from the TV series, the prose versions of the stories published by John Mortimer and collected in the Rumpole Omnibi and then on to a number of different radio drama iterations. I don't now if the considerable liberties taken in this version of this story were done by John Mortimer or there was a different hand in it but it's kind of interesting for someone who is familiar with the original to hear it. It's not great art so maybe that isn't as annoying as it would have been if it were. It's a bit of fun during a week when I really haven't been thinking of radio drama.
Hilda Jasmine Hyde
Erskine-Brown Nigel Anthony
Sir Cuthbert Ewan Bailey
Mr Lee Ewan Bailey
Phillida Trant Cathy Sara
Judge Bullingham Stephen Critchlow
Stephen Lucas Stephen Critchlow
Director Marilyn Imrie
Update: Here is an example of an earlier radio series.
Rumpole And The Age of Retirement
My experience is that these on Youtube disappear fairly fast so you might want to try it soon.
"but did not prevail" The Voluntary Mental Retardation of the Republican Money Grubbers Is Going To Get Potentially Thousands If Not Millions Killed.
Deaths per 1,000 soldiers each week during 1918–1919 in the U.S. Army
Source: Ayres LP. The war with Germany: a statistical summary. Washington: Government Printing Office; 1919. p. 127.
Looking into how criminally stupid the Republican-fascists, libertarians, FOX based fascist cultists, etc. of 2020 are being, I have been looking at the last similar pandemic to see what happened and parallels that made things worse. This paper has this passage that shows even in 1918, before they had discovered the existence of viruses and how they operate, they know this.
Medical officers such as Chesney wanted clean barracks and also worried about crowding. Surgeon General Gorgas had recommended that Army housing provide 60 square feet per man, but did not often prevail. As Gorgas told one training camp commander, “We know perfectly well that we can control pneumonia absolutely if we could avoid crowding the men, but it is not practicable in military life to avoid this crowding.”14 The Medical Department even asserted that “there is to be expected a definite relation between the degree of crowding and the amount of respiratory infection.”2 (p. 111) But if it was difficult to control crowding in the training camps, it was impossible in the battlefields.
Yet the Republican-fascists, etc. are urging an end to social-distancing here, a century and two years after that huge mistake was made. Only in our case, there is nothing comparable to the war-time conditions that gave them an excuse.
As they conducted their analyses, military medical officers soon understood that the wave of influenza that had run through many U.S. training camps during the spring of 1918 constituted a first wave of the pandemic. Fourteen of the largest training camps had reported influenza outbreaks in March, April, or May, and some of the infected troops carried the virus with them aboard ships to France.12 In the late spring and summer, influenza visited all of the armies of Europe, including the AEF, but because influenza was common in the military, and few patients became critically ill, medical officers were not alarmed. But by the late summer some saw the emergence of a new, lethal influenza.
Captain Alan M. Chesney, medical officer with an AEF hospital at Valdahon, an artillery training camp behind the front lines in France, documented the evolution of a more virulent influenza from his vantage point. A physician who was later dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, Chesney noted that three different infantry brigades of 4,000 men occupied the post in succession, “thus every three or four weeks there occurred a marked change in the population of the post.” He theorized that “the history of the epidemic, therefore, resolved itself into distinct periods corresponding to the various brigades which entered the post,” and “the frequent changes in the population of the post, brought about by the short stay of each brigade, exercised considerable influence upon the course of the epidemic of influenza.”
During Chesney's first documented period, the month of June to July 27, the 5th Artillery Brigade had 77 “relatively mild” cases of influenza. During the second phase, July 27 to August 23, 200 men of the 58th Artillery Brigade became ill, about 6.5%. None of them died, but the outbreak was serious enough that the next brigade cleaned out the barracks, even washing the walls, before they moved in. Despite this precaution, during Chesney's third phase, August 23 to November 8, more than one-third of the 6th Artillery Brigade, 1,636 soldiers, contracted influenza and 151 died. Chesney concluded that “…these successive outbreaks tended to be progressively more severe both in character and extent, which would speak for an increasing virulence of the causative agent.”13
Medical officers such as Chesney wanted clean barracks and also worried about crowding. Surgeon General Gorgas had recommended that Army housing provide 60 square feet per man, but did not often prevail. As Gorgas told one training camp commander, “We know perfectly well that we can control pneumonia absolutely if we could avoid crowding the men, but it is not practicable in military life to avoid this crowding.”14 The Medical Department even asserted that “there is to be expected a definite relation between the degree of crowding and the amount of respiratory infection.”2 (p. 111) But if it was difficult to control crowding in the training camps, it was impossible in the battlefields. Evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald has argued that trench warfare and its crowded conditions enabled an especially aggressive and deadly influenza virus to gain footing in humans.15 As soldiers in the trenches became sick, the military evacuated them from the front lines and replaced them with healthy men. This process continuously brought the virus into contact with new hosts—young, healthy soldiers in which it could adapt, reproduce, and become extremely virulent without danger of burning out. From there, according to a Navy report, “It is reasonable to suppose that late in August influenza of severe type was spread from French, Spanish, and Portuguese seaports to the Orient, South Africa, the United States, and South America.”5 (p. 2427) As Chesney and Ewald suggest, the influenza of 1918 was a product of trench warfare, and the influenza that attacked the 6th Artillery at Valdahon would travel the highways of war, circling the globe.
I don't know if the quote I saw online is true, that people grew tired of being quarantined in 1918 and that the celebrations at the end of the war spiked the deadlier wave among the general population, I don't know enough to know if that's the case. What was clearly true is that the recommendations for social distancing as a means of preventing infections was made and not taken and the results were a far worse pandemic than might have been.
I do know that if the brief period of far from complete social distancing is being promoted as being "too much" or "too long" or a "violation of civil liberties (libertarians match their emotional development of the "terrible twos" with an intellectual development of a stupid 12-year-old) then there is no prospect that they will give up eating the animals which have been the vectors of one after another pandemic virus. If people aren't wised up by these experiences, we are doomed to this cycle of idiocy and irresponsibility continuing.
The Danger Of The Necessity Of Metaphors Used To Talk About These Things
Exaltation? In the older texts of the New Testament the "exaltation" or "taking up" of Jesus is simply a form of expression for Jesus' raising or resurrection, with a different emphasis. The fact that Jesus was raised meant in the New Testament nothing more than that he was elevated to God by the very fact of being raised: exaltation as completion of the resurrection.
But does not exaltation mean assumption into heaven? At the same time it is clear that the blue firmament can no longer be understood as in biblical times as the external side of God's presence chamber. But it can certainly be understood as the visible symbol or image for the real heaven, the invisible domain ("living space") of God. The heaven of faith is not the heaven of the astronauts, even though the astronauts themselves expressed it that way when they recited in outer space the biblical account of creation. [And didn't some of the atheists have a hissy fit when that innocuous event happened.] The heaven of faith is the hidden invisible incomprehensible sphere of God which no journey into space ever reaches. It is not a place but a mode of being; not one beyond earth's confines, but bringing all to perfection in God and giving a share in the reign of God.
Jesus then is taken up into the glory of the Father, Resurrection and exaltation, when linked in Old Testament phraseology, means ascension to power (enthronement) on the part of him who has conquered death; assumed into God's sphere of life, he shares God's rule and glory and so can excise his claims to universal dominion for men. The Crucified is Lord and calls men to follow him. He is thus installed in his heavenly, divine dignity, which again finds its traditional expression in a metaphor referring to the son or representative of the ruler: "Sits at the right hand of the Father." That is he is nearest to the Father in authority and exercises it vicariously with the same dignity and status. In the earliest Christological formulas, as used for instance in the apostles' sermons in Acts, Jesus was indeed man in lowliness, but after raising him, God made him Lord and Messiah. It is only to the exalted and not to the earthly Jesus that Messiahship and divine sonship are ascribed.
This is important for the Easter appearances, however they are ultimately to be understood. It is from this heavenly state of divine power and glory that he "appears to those whom he will make his "instruments"; this is what Paul leart and what is quite naturally assumed in the appearances in Matthew John, and in Mark's supplement, where there is no mention of the whence and whither of the one who appears. Easter appearances are manifestations of the already exalted Jesus. It is always the exalted Jesus who appears, coming from God, whether it is Paul hearing the one who calls him from heaven or - as in Matthew and John - the risen Jesus appearing on earth.
In the New Testament then - apart from an exception to be discussed immediately - raising from death and exaltation to God are one. Whenever there is a mention only of the one, the other is implied. Easter faith is faith in Jesus as the Lord who is risen (=exalted to God). He is both the Lord of his Church present in the Spirit, and the hidden Lord of the word (cosmocrator) with whose rule the definitive rule of God has already begun.
I was tempted to leave this passage out except it was so interesting a demonstration of how the incomprehensible nature of the Resurrection, alien not only to human language but human experience of space and time, leaves us relying on metaphors to talk about what of it was experienced in the post-Resurrection passages of the New Testament, the experiences that explain the subsequent actions of those who had known Jesus and saw him put to death - by their own confession abandoning him, no doubt Peter standing in as the quintessential examples of his most devoted follower who, as soon as he was taken into custody denied he even knew him three times. Something clearly caused him to go from someone who could have probably gone back to his boat and resumed his life as a married fisherman but who, instead, became one of the leaders of a tiny, beleaguered sect of religious non-conformists constantly under danger of being killed as his co-leader of it, James, the brother of Jesus soon was and as others were being killed or at least persecuted by the likes of Saul who would, himself have experiences of the risen Jesus that set him on an even more startling and otherwise unexplained turn-around.
Hans Kung who is certainly a master of word-use, immediately after talking about how incomprehensible the experience of the Resurrection is in terms of humanly perceived reality is forced to talk about heaven as the "sphere of God " how the status of Jesus exalted is put in the crudest of human political terms of power and rule and terms invented to describe physical coercion. Given that the Gospels and other New Testament books were written by people whose language and manner of thinking was bound up in their experience of their world, it is entirely understandable that they would use the language they did, even as, occasionally, they talked about the inadequacy of such descriptions, and that things would get worse as medieval writers and thinkers put it into terms of early European feudalism, the mystics more often than conventional writers breaking out of it in terms that strike a modern reader as more poetic, though no less reliant on metaphors when there is an attempt at specificity.
I think the rule of God is through the subtle forces, as was the experience of God to Elijah and that passage would have been known to the writers of the Gospels, acts and certainly was known by Paul and James. The problem of human metaphors is that they are too crude and too blatant. The passage in which Elijah experiences God is one of the best I know about and it's the opposite of the language describing the status of the risen Jesus. God was not in the great wind, the earthquake or the fire but in silence. It's worth considering what that passage from 1 Kings ends up with, Elijah is told to anoint new Kings and a prophet who will do some pretty violent stuff. But the new rule described in the New Testament, despite the same kind of metaphorical language used to describe it, quite conclusively won't be one of the sword. It is not describable in human terms, certainly not in legalese.
Christians, especially when they are a majority make all kinds of trouble and bring Christianity into complete disrepute when, for example, "most Christian" princes and kings, presidents and prime ministers, generals and Popes and inquisitors have set up all-too worldly kingdoms to exercise their own power for immoral purposes. They choose to ignore that difference, it is in that lapse of meaning into the crudeness of the metaphors that has accounted for the scandalous history of Christianity as a constant and continual violation of just about everything Jesus, Paul, James, etc. said. Which shows how dangerous it is to forget that these are metaphors.
But does not exaltation mean assumption into heaven? At the same time it is clear that the blue firmament can no longer be understood as in biblical times as the external side of God's presence chamber. But it can certainly be understood as the visible symbol or image for the real heaven, the invisible domain ("living space") of God. The heaven of faith is not the heaven of the astronauts, even though the astronauts themselves expressed it that way when they recited in outer space the biblical account of creation. [And didn't some of the atheists have a hissy fit when that innocuous event happened.] The heaven of faith is the hidden invisible incomprehensible sphere of God which no journey into space ever reaches. It is not a place but a mode of being; not one beyond earth's confines, but bringing all to perfection in God and giving a share in the reign of God.
Jesus then is taken up into the glory of the Father, Resurrection and exaltation, when linked in Old Testament phraseology, means ascension to power (enthronement) on the part of him who has conquered death; assumed into God's sphere of life, he shares God's rule and glory and so can excise his claims to universal dominion for men. The Crucified is Lord and calls men to follow him. He is thus installed in his heavenly, divine dignity, which again finds its traditional expression in a metaphor referring to the son or representative of the ruler: "Sits at the right hand of the Father." That is he is nearest to the Father in authority and exercises it vicariously with the same dignity and status. In the earliest Christological formulas, as used for instance in the apostles' sermons in Acts, Jesus was indeed man in lowliness, but after raising him, God made him Lord and Messiah. It is only to the exalted and not to the earthly Jesus that Messiahship and divine sonship are ascribed.
This is important for the Easter appearances, however they are ultimately to be understood. It is from this heavenly state of divine power and glory that he "appears to those whom he will make his "instruments"; this is what Paul leart and what is quite naturally assumed in the appearances in Matthew John, and in Mark's supplement, where there is no mention of the whence and whither of the one who appears. Easter appearances are manifestations of the already exalted Jesus. It is always the exalted Jesus who appears, coming from God, whether it is Paul hearing the one who calls him from heaven or - as in Matthew and John - the risen Jesus appearing on earth.
In the New Testament then - apart from an exception to be discussed immediately - raising from death and exaltation to God are one. Whenever there is a mention only of the one, the other is implied. Easter faith is faith in Jesus as the Lord who is risen (=exalted to God). He is both the Lord of his Church present in the Spirit, and the hidden Lord of the word (cosmocrator) with whose rule the definitive rule of God has already begun.
I was tempted to leave this passage out except it was so interesting a demonstration of how the incomprehensible nature of the Resurrection, alien not only to human language but human experience of space and time, leaves us relying on metaphors to talk about what of it was experienced in the post-Resurrection passages of the New Testament, the experiences that explain the subsequent actions of those who had known Jesus and saw him put to death - by their own confession abandoning him, no doubt Peter standing in as the quintessential examples of his most devoted follower who, as soon as he was taken into custody denied he even knew him three times. Something clearly caused him to go from someone who could have probably gone back to his boat and resumed his life as a married fisherman but who, instead, became one of the leaders of a tiny, beleaguered sect of religious non-conformists constantly under danger of being killed as his co-leader of it, James, the brother of Jesus soon was and as others were being killed or at least persecuted by the likes of Saul who would, himself have experiences of the risen Jesus that set him on an even more startling and otherwise unexplained turn-around.
Hans Kung who is certainly a master of word-use, immediately after talking about how incomprehensible the experience of the Resurrection is in terms of humanly perceived reality is forced to talk about heaven as the "sphere of God " how the status of Jesus exalted is put in the crudest of human political terms of power and rule and terms invented to describe physical coercion. Given that the Gospels and other New Testament books were written by people whose language and manner of thinking was bound up in their experience of their world, it is entirely understandable that they would use the language they did, even as, occasionally, they talked about the inadequacy of such descriptions, and that things would get worse as medieval writers and thinkers put it into terms of early European feudalism, the mystics more often than conventional writers breaking out of it in terms that strike a modern reader as more poetic, though no less reliant on metaphors when there is an attempt at specificity.
I think the rule of God is through the subtle forces, as was the experience of God to Elijah and that passage would have been known to the writers of the Gospels, acts and certainly was known by Paul and James. The problem of human metaphors is that they are too crude and too blatant. The passage in which Elijah experiences God is one of the best I know about and it's the opposite of the language describing the status of the risen Jesus. God was not in the great wind, the earthquake or the fire but in silence. It's worth considering what that passage from 1 Kings ends up with, Elijah is told to anoint new Kings and a prophet who will do some pretty violent stuff. But the new rule described in the New Testament, despite the same kind of metaphorical language used to describe it, quite conclusively won't be one of the sword. It is not describable in human terms, certainly not in legalese.
Christians, especially when they are a majority make all kinds of trouble and bring Christianity into complete disrepute when, for example, "most Christian" princes and kings, presidents and prime ministers, generals and Popes and inquisitors have set up all-too worldly kingdoms to exercise their own power for immoral purposes. They choose to ignore that difference, it is in that lapse of meaning into the crudeness of the metaphors that has accounted for the scandalous history of Christianity as a constant and continual violation of just about everything Jesus, Paul, James, etc. said. Which shows how dangerous it is to forget that these are metaphors.
Friday, April 17, 2020
If God is the ultimate reality, then death is not destruction but metamorphosis - not a diminishing, but a finishing.
Corporeal resurrection? Yes and no, if I may recall a personal conversation with Rudolf Bultmann. No if "body" simply means the physiologically identical body. Yes, if "body" means in the sense of the New Testament soma the identical personal reality, the same self with its whole history. In other words, no continuity of the body; questions of natural science, like that of the persistence of the molecules, do not arise. But an identity of the person; the question does arise of the lasting significance of the person's whole life ad fate. In any case therefore not a diminished but a finished being. The view of Eastern thinkers, that the self does not survive death and that only the works live on, is certainly worth consideration in the sense that death means a transition into dimensions other than those of space and time. But it is inadequate. If God is the ultimate reality, then death is not destruction but metamorphosis - not a diminishing, but a finishing.
If then the resurrection of Jesus was not an event in human space and human time, neither can it be regarded merely as a way of expressing the significance of his death. It was admittedly not an historical event (verifiable by means of historical research), but it was certainly (for faith) a real event. Consequently the resurrection cannot mean merely that his "cause" goes on and remains historically linked to his name, while he himself no longer exists, no longer lives, but is and remains dead. it is not like the "cause" of monsieur Eiffel, which lives on in the Eiffel Tower, though the man himself is dead; nor is there any similarity to Goethe, who "speaks" even today," being remembered in his work. With Jesus it is a question of the living person and therefore of the cause. The reality of the risen Jesus therefore cannot be left out of consideration. Jesus' cause - which his disciples had given up as lost - was decided at Easter by God, himself. Jesus' cause makes sense and continues, because he himself did not remain - a failure - in death, but lives on completely justified by God.
Easter therefore is not a happening merely for the disciples and their faith. Jesus does not live through their faith. The Easter faith is not a function of the disciples' faith. He was not - as some think - simply too great to die; he did die. But Easter is an event primarily for Jesus himself; Jesus lives again through God, - for their faith. The precondition of the new life is God's action which is not chronologically but objectively prior to it, in advance of it. Thus this faith is first made possible, established, in which the living Jesus himself proves to be alive. Even according to Bultmann, the formula, "Jesus is risen into the kerygma (proclamation), is liable to be misunderstood. Even according to Bultmann, it does not mean that Jesus lives because he is proclaimed; he is proclaimed because he lives. It is therefore a very different situation in Rodion Shchedrin's oratorio, Lenin in the Heart of the People, * where the Red Guardsman sings at Lenin's deathbed; No, no, no! That cannot be! Lenin lives lives lives! here it is only "Lenin's cause" that continues.
This passage made me think of Thomas Jefferson's cut and paste job made of the Gospels, cutting out anything of any religious character from it which offended Jefferson's materialist-rationalist (atheist) scientism, and its entire and complete moral non-effect, not only on the many "freethinkers" who have made reference to it (as to their having read it, call me a skeptic), the many members of Congress in the past to whom a copy was given (when I was very young I believe hearing that a copy of the "Jefferson Bible" was given to every incoming member of Congress) but on Jefferson, himself who performed the exercise of making a new and improved Jesus much in the way of more recent efforts. As he was doing so he was at the height of his activity as a slaver, having rationally turned the human beings he held in bondage into property for his use, including the children he had fathered with at least one of them, encouraging his fellow aristocratic land barons that they should do anything they could to hold people in slavery because every child they produced was property and an increase in their wealth, not a person having the very same rights that the young Jefferson had proclaimed were the gift of the Creator equally bestowed on humanity. And that was aside from the very, many acts as a politician and president that were entirely at odds with the very words of Jesus that Jefferson chose to retain in his exercise in natural religion (I don't think I could honestly accuse Jefferson of doing theology or anything like what Kung and Niebuhr have done) . I honestly think that Jefferson's naturalism is what led him to view people as their physical bodies, rejecting any transcendent character that their whole persons (to use the phrase Kung does above) and which he so clearly did not hold that Jesus had.
One thing he doesn't seem to have had any inclination of doing was selling all he had and giving the money to the poor. Though an habitual profligate perhaps Jefferson might have been more inclined to want people to take the commandment to give your money away to those who won't pay it back, forgiving debts, more to heart.
Jefferson scholars note that as he got older his materialistic-scientistic inclinations came to dominate his thinking and, I would assert, his actions. As I had cause to point out last year, the radical doctor, public health expert, Catholic nun, Teresa Forscades pointed out that that modernism which made rationality the supreme value of people inevitably carried with that the idea of radical inequality because, even if someone had the intellectual capacity to do so, the economic and social reality was that not everyone would have equal access to education but that everyone had the capacity to be holy, to sanctity, and that if you made that the basis of valuation then it led to viewing people as being equal.
-------------------
I think the view of Jesus IN THE RESURRECTION of the risen Jesus as not merely physical but radically more than merely physical is not the non-essential add-on that I had taken it to have been twenty-five or so years ago, a distraction from the moral content, the radical equality of his Gospel, I THINK IT IS ESSENTIAL TO HOW THAT RADICAL EQUALITY, THAT RADICAL MORAL CONTENT CAN BE UNDERSTANDABLE TO HUMAN BEINGS. I think that without it the bland unitarian-deistic-mish-mosh that the Jeffersonian-Priestlyan view of Christianity that exhibited itself among the New England transcendentalists is probably what you can expect to happen. There are certainly other problems with other traditions that take Jesus at all seriously, or pretend to, there are certainly enormous problems in the various churches - among those that one or another aspect of the teachings of Jesus are ignored or rationalized into nothing. But Christianity dissolving into meaninglessness through natural theology, perhaps in line with the passage about Karl Barth given yesterday, or through 18th century enlightenment rejection of the Resurrection as a real thing with real consequences for how we are to consider people as more than their bodies, their brains, their genes (or, rather, the radically naive view of those which currently dominates the college-credentialed culture) is inadequate to bring about behavior which treats people and other living beings as more than objects for use or disposal.
I am going to continue with this series of postings through the Easter season, I think, because Kung addresses questions about the Resurrection very well and with far more of a regard for the actual texts of the New Testament than for later dogmas and doctrines of the various churches. I have mentioned that one of the right-wing slams against him has been that he's more of a Protestant than a Catholic, though I think what he actually is is a good scholar and an honest thinker.
* It's impressive to me that Kung would know to make this comparison with such a minor work of music. I wish I had access to a translation of the libretto. But even more interesting than that was this interview with the composer (who is apparently still living) in 1990, as Soviet Communism was falling away, if you can overlook the stupid question about the serial music which is stupid.
RS: Yeah, of course this new move is fantastic! It's really something happened! Something happened! In the East Europe it's miracle! It's miracle, but our tradition, we are 72 years of this meat grinder! They had only 40. It's not ended there, but for us, everything is ended. I'm afraid that Russian Volk is absolutely crushed! Morale crushed.
BD: Devastated?
RS: Yes! Absolutely! Before, people believes in God. Now they believe in communism idea. This next generation everybody will be equal; everybody will have this. Now, in the last 20 years, nobody believe in anything because everything is lie! Everybody knows it! Now they try religion again, but this is very difficult because this tradition has been interrupted.
BD: Is there any connection, is there a parallel between communism in economics and atonality in music?
RS: Atonality? [Thinks for a moment, and takes a deep breath] Mmmm. I think that art is very connected with economics.
BD: But I mean is the communist system, and its oppression, like the atonal, or the 12-tone system, oppressive in music?
RS: Mmmm. I think that the communism system, this is not only twelve-tone system, in music; this is also a twelve tone system in rhythm, timbre, color, every aspect of music. Then is quite the same. But it's not like in prison. Communism system is a big, big prison for everybody. Somebody a little top, somebody a little lower, but everybody's prisoners! This includes winners who is the same with slaves! It's everybody is all together! Not one free people. Nobody is free. Now you are really free, spiritual free. If you go on the street and say, [shouts] "Gorbachev is shit!!!", nobody take you in prison. Nobody take you to prison. And this is absolutely miracle! Absolutely miracle.
BD: Is this not happening also in music?
RS: In all place now there is absolutely freedom in music, too! In one very curious work, they crushed a piano. It's 25 years after Cage, and so on, but they think this is new! Something like this!
What I thought was most interesting in this was what Shchedrin said in those heady days, before Yeltsen and then Putin reimposed gangster government in Russia and various Stalinists did in the about to be "freed" Republics. when he talked about how the Russian people, after 72 years in the "meat grinder" were totally demoralized, totally crushed. I can say that I came to see the same thing in the failure of Russian democracy and directly related it to the difficulties of even longer oppressed people, Black People in the United States, the Native People here and elsewhere under genocide and colonization. If the Russians people have found it impossible to rise above the conditions that lead them to be led by gangsters like Putin then it is no surprise that populations with a history of similar serfdom and slavery elsewhere have the same difficulty of getting free of it. That takes a truly radical change in individuals and in societies, radical changes that the static view of life in materialism will never, ever make possible.
If then the resurrection of Jesus was not an event in human space and human time, neither can it be regarded merely as a way of expressing the significance of his death. It was admittedly not an historical event (verifiable by means of historical research), but it was certainly (for faith) a real event. Consequently the resurrection cannot mean merely that his "cause" goes on and remains historically linked to his name, while he himself no longer exists, no longer lives, but is and remains dead. it is not like the "cause" of monsieur Eiffel, which lives on in the Eiffel Tower, though the man himself is dead; nor is there any similarity to Goethe, who "speaks" even today," being remembered in his work. With Jesus it is a question of the living person and therefore of the cause. The reality of the risen Jesus therefore cannot be left out of consideration. Jesus' cause - which his disciples had given up as lost - was decided at Easter by God, himself. Jesus' cause makes sense and continues, because he himself did not remain - a failure - in death, but lives on completely justified by God.
Easter therefore is not a happening merely for the disciples and their faith. Jesus does not live through their faith. The Easter faith is not a function of the disciples' faith. He was not - as some think - simply too great to die; he did die. But Easter is an event primarily for Jesus himself; Jesus lives again through God, - for their faith. The precondition of the new life is God's action which is not chronologically but objectively prior to it, in advance of it. Thus this faith is first made possible, established, in which the living Jesus himself proves to be alive. Even according to Bultmann, the formula, "Jesus is risen into the kerygma (proclamation), is liable to be misunderstood. Even according to Bultmann, it does not mean that Jesus lives because he is proclaimed; he is proclaimed because he lives. It is therefore a very different situation in Rodion Shchedrin's oratorio, Lenin in the Heart of the People, * where the Red Guardsman sings at Lenin's deathbed; No, no, no! That cannot be! Lenin lives lives lives! here it is only "Lenin's cause" that continues.
This passage made me think of Thomas Jefferson's cut and paste job made of the Gospels, cutting out anything of any religious character from it which offended Jefferson's materialist-rationalist (atheist) scientism, and its entire and complete moral non-effect, not only on the many "freethinkers" who have made reference to it (as to their having read it, call me a skeptic), the many members of Congress in the past to whom a copy was given (when I was very young I believe hearing that a copy of the "Jefferson Bible" was given to every incoming member of Congress) but on Jefferson, himself who performed the exercise of making a new and improved Jesus much in the way of more recent efforts. As he was doing so he was at the height of his activity as a slaver, having rationally turned the human beings he held in bondage into property for his use, including the children he had fathered with at least one of them, encouraging his fellow aristocratic land barons that they should do anything they could to hold people in slavery because every child they produced was property and an increase in their wealth, not a person having the very same rights that the young Jefferson had proclaimed were the gift of the Creator equally bestowed on humanity. And that was aside from the very, many acts as a politician and president that were entirely at odds with the very words of Jesus that Jefferson chose to retain in his exercise in natural religion (I don't think I could honestly accuse Jefferson of doing theology or anything like what Kung and Niebuhr have done) . I honestly think that Jefferson's naturalism is what led him to view people as their physical bodies, rejecting any transcendent character that their whole persons (to use the phrase Kung does above) and which he so clearly did not hold that Jesus had.
One thing he doesn't seem to have had any inclination of doing was selling all he had and giving the money to the poor. Though an habitual profligate perhaps Jefferson might have been more inclined to want people to take the commandment to give your money away to those who won't pay it back, forgiving debts, more to heart.
Jefferson scholars note that as he got older his materialistic-scientistic inclinations came to dominate his thinking and, I would assert, his actions. As I had cause to point out last year, the radical doctor, public health expert, Catholic nun, Teresa Forscades pointed out that that modernism which made rationality the supreme value of people inevitably carried with that the idea of radical inequality because, even if someone had the intellectual capacity to do so, the economic and social reality was that not everyone would have equal access to education but that everyone had the capacity to be holy, to sanctity, and that if you made that the basis of valuation then it led to viewing people as being equal.
-------------------
I think the view of Jesus IN THE RESURRECTION of the risen Jesus as not merely physical but radically more than merely physical is not the non-essential add-on that I had taken it to have been twenty-five or so years ago, a distraction from the moral content, the radical equality of his Gospel, I THINK IT IS ESSENTIAL TO HOW THAT RADICAL EQUALITY, THAT RADICAL MORAL CONTENT CAN BE UNDERSTANDABLE TO HUMAN BEINGS. I think that without it the bland unitarian-deistic-mish-mosh that the Jeffersonian-Priestlyan view of Christianity that exhibited itself among the New England transcendentalists is probably what you can expect to happen. There are certainly other problems with other traditions that take Jesus at all seriously, or pretend to, there are certainly enormous problems in the various churches - among those that one or another aspect of the teachings of Jesus are ignored or rationalized into nothing. But Christianity dissolving into meaninglessness through natural theology, perhaps in line with the passage about Karl Barth given yesterday, or through 18th century enlightenment rejection of the Resurrection as a real thing with real consequences for how we are to consider people as more than their bodies, their brains, their genes (or, rather, the radically naive view of those which currently dominates the college-credentialed culture) is inadequate to bring about behavior which treats people and other living beings as more than objects for use or disposal.
I am going to continue with this series of postings through the Easter season, I think, because Kung addresses questions about the Resurrection very well and with far more of a regard for the actual texts of the New Testament than for later dogmas and doctrines of the various churches. I have mentioned that one of the right-wing slams against him has been that he's more of a Protestant than a Catholic, though I think what he actually is is a good scholar and an honest thinker.
* It's impressive to me that Kung would know to make this comparison with such a minor work of music. I wish I had access to a translation of the libretto. But even more interesting than that was this interview with the composer (who is apparently still living) in 1990, as Soviet Communism was falling away, if you can overlook the stupid question about the serial music which is stupid.
RS: Yeah, of course this new move is fantastic! It's really something happened! Something happened! In the East Europe it's miracle! It's miracle, but our tradition, we are 72 years of this meat grinder! They had only 40. It's not ended there, but for us, everything is ended. I'm afraid that Russian Volk is absolutely crushed! Morale crushed.
BD: Devastated?
RS: Yes! Absolutely! Before, people believes in God. Now they believe in communism idea. This next generation everybody will be equal; everybody will have this. Now, in the last 20 years, nobody believe in anything because everything is lie! Everybody knows it! Now they try religion again, but this is very difficult because this tradition has been interrupted.
BD: Is there any connection, is there a parallel between communism in economics and atonality in music?
RS: Atonality? [Thinks for a moment, and takes a deep breath] Mmmm. I think that art is very connected with economics.
BD: But I mean is the communist system, and its oppression, like the atonal, or the 12-tone system, oppressive in music?
RS: Mmmm. I think that the communism system, this is not only twelve-tone system, in music; this is also a twelve tone system in rhythm, timbre, color, every aspect of music. Then is quite the same. But it's not like in prison. Communism system is a big, big prison for everybody. Somebody a little top, somebody a little lower, but everybody's prisoners! This includes winners who is the same with slaves! It's everybody is all together! Not one free people. Nobody is free. Now you are really free, spiritual free. If you go on the street and say, [shouts] "Gorbachev is shit!!!", nobody take you in prison. Nobody take you to prison. And this is absolutely miracle! Absolutely miracle.
BD: Is this not happening also in music?
RS: In all place now there is absolutely freedom in music, too! In one very curious work, they crushed a piano. It's 25 years after Cage, and so on, but they think this is new! Something like this!
What I thought was most interesting in this was what Shchedrin said in those heady days, before Yeltsen and then Putin reimposed gangster government in Russia and various Stalinists did in the about to be "freed" Republics. when he talked about how the Russian people, after 72 years in the "meat grinder" were totally demoralized, totally crushed. I can say that I came to see the same thing in the failure of Russian democracy and directly related it to the difficulties of even longer oppressed people, Black People in the United States, the Native People here and elsewhere under genocide and colonization. If the Russians people have found it impossible to rise above the conditions that lead them to be led by gangsters like Putin then it is no surprise that populations with a history of similar serfdom and slavery elsewhere have the same difficulty of getting free of it. That takes a truly radical change in individuals and in societies, radical changes that the static view of life in materialism will never, ever make possible.
Thursday, April 16, 2020
I've Answered Enough Hate Mail Today, If You Think The Kind Of Things Kung Described Are Ridiculous Watch This
Only don't make the mistake of thinking that the models of multidimensional objects are more than a cartoon of them, the description of them by the mathematician sometimes admits that they are deceptive but he talks about them as if they're a lot more real than he, then, goes on to admit they are not what they look like in 2 and 3 dimensions.
And these figures aren't known to be real in the way that people are. They are complete abstractions that may be entirely imaginary.
Hate Mail - I Won't Be Fair To Fascists, I Won't Be Nice To Nazis, I Won't Be The Sap of "Socialists"
I have apparently adopted a simple rule when it comes to whose "first amendment rights" I'm going to be bothered to defend. The issue is egalitarian democracy, those who support it and its foundations are worth defending, those whose ideologies, from alleged left to all too real right, oppose and undermine egalitarian democracy are not only not worthy of being defended, it is a danger to egalitarian democracy and morality to give them a defense. The Court has proven itself to be the enemy of egaltarian democracy far more reliably than it has proven to promote egalitarian democracy. Even the Warren Court proved to be total chumps when it came to unintentionally, perhaps, undermining what was needed to protect, defend and promote equality and democracy. There have been none stupider on that count than some of the smartest "liberals" on the court. I would bet no more than two of the sitting "justices" might even be willing to entertain considering that reality of the past half-century.
The only "socialism" that doesn't quickly turn bad is the socialism that holds that those who produce wealth are the rightful owners of the means of that production. I believe in that. All other so-called "socialism" appropriates the word as a false-front for some kind of gangsterism. Marxists are some of the worst of those. I don't ascribe positive meanings to the word, "socialism" anymore because it has been thoroughly trashed by such jerks.
Even many "socialists" of good will are suckered by ill considered collaboration with Marxists and other anti-democratic ideologues.
The only "socialism" that doesn't quickly turn bad is the socialism that holds that those who produce wealth are the rightful owners of the means of that production. I believe in that. All other so-called "socialism" appropriates the word as a false-front for some kind of gangsterism. Marxists are some of the worst of those. I don't ascribe positive meanings to the word, "socialism" anymore because it has been thoroughly trashed by such jerks.
Even many "socialists" of good will are suckered by ill considered collaboration with Marxists and other anti-democratic ideologues.
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