Saturday Night Radio Drama - David Helwig - Unlived Lives and Disappearance

  

Unlived Lives 

A series of creepy phone calls and mysterious letters force a mild-mannered theater owner to reconsider the choices he’s made in life.

 

Disappearance 

A bartender's quest for spiritual enlightenment leads him to question the importance of the material world. But as he finds himself plagued by a host of baffling disappearances, he - and the listener - must finally question the nature of reality itself.

Again I don't have the time to type out the credits.  I have  become interested in the writer, David Helwig but haven't had that much time to do more than find a website dedicated to him, alas, starting with obituaries to him.  He was a good writer.  Makes you think of how many good writers there are you never find out about as the media promotes garbage.   These are from the long ago ended CBC series Vanishing Point.  I wish the CBC would revive its radio drama department, of all the radio dramas I tend to like theirs the most.  There was an interesting sound to a lot of them I wish I could reproduce, something I'd think of as high-fi AM sound.

No One Did More To Pollute Dentist Waiting Rooms Than The Mop Heads

SIMPS LEFT A COMMENT comparing "Under It All" to easy-listening in the same week he held up "The White Album" of the Mop Heads as an example of neo-classicism.  I think it's meant to be revenge for me pointing out that The Byrds had a lot in common with that genre after he drooled, probably for the 83rd time over a 12-string guitar lick on Turn, Turn, Turn, no doubt he read that he was supposed to do that from another such "critic'.*  What's really funny is that I doubt there has been a group which has contributed more to the easy-listening, elevator and dentist office music than the "fab four".  I don't know if it has made its way to the kind of music you might be subjected to in a supermarket but the White Album cut "Good Night" wouldn't have to jump far because it started out being that under the orchestration (some say recomposition) by George Martin - none of the mop heads having the chops to orchestrate much.   Martin might have had some knowledge of neo-classicism, enough to copy the style years after it was abandoned by Stravinsky, but the kind of stuff he did with the mop heads isn't what I was talking about the other day.

I doubt that Kurt Rosenwinkle's music will ever suffer a similar fate.  I don't think a guy who has been praised by his fellow guitarists such as Pat Metheny and who regularly works with the finest musicians of his time such as Chris Potter and Joshua Redman needs to worry about a long ago washed-up pop music "critic."  

* I imagine he drools over the  vocal harmonies of The Association, too, though it's probably not as kew-el to praise them.  I got glutted on their music when one of my sisters played it constantly.  Another one tortured me with Gilbert O'Sullivan.   Is he groovy too, along with that TV show band, The Monkees?  Another of Simp's genius bands? 

This is just summer stock theater, it will go away.  My morals generally improve around the end of August.  Summer heat makes me grouchy. 

Hate Mail

 HOW CHILDISH.   As far as I know of, there are no known relatives more than four steps removed who live or have ever lived in California and no one remotely likely to be anymore closely related to Kevin McCarthy, I may be more closely related to you,  not that I'd be any more likely to claim the association.  

I propose that from now on everyone call him "Craven McCarthy," with apologies to my Craven relations by marriage.  If that didn't just occur to me I wouldn't have bothered answering your stupid troll scat.

Blah, blah, blah . . . Tedious Tandum Hate Mail

 ". . . you dictating what people are supposed to think"

You really don't get me, do you.  Everything I write I would welcome people to a. fact check (why do you think I give links and citations?) b. examine for logical coherence, c. treat as skeptically as I do things I would like to be true or believed were true or were told by my teachers was true back in college.  

Don't just accept it like a lazy blog rat, buffalo butt.  

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU THINK I CALL THIS PLACE THE THOUGHT CRIMINAL?  Because I support some kind of common received credulity? 

Hate Mail From Someone Who Is A Source Of The Motivation For What They Are Complaining About

ASKED TO JUSTIFY why I write about atheism so much, in response I'll begin with this, part of one of my answers to the unintentionally accurately self-named Eschatots who came here and got their asses kicked, "Skeptic Tank'.

Atheists have had an influence on the left way out of keeping with their puny numbers because liberals have been such suckers for them and their slogans. It was the stupid idea that people didn't have a right to not vote for an atheist because it supposedly violated the "non establishment" and "no religious test" provisions of the Constitution that was a watershed in my understanding of that malignant influence. It's so stupid yet it is so widely believed to such damage to the real left that I figured I'd study the issue more. You can thank Amanda Marcotte for me getting that insight into the problem.

I will forego how well that fits into my current obsession of how pat phrases such as "no religious test,"  "First (or in the case of Republican-fascist use, Second) Amendment rights,"  "free speech,"  "free press," etc. have been turned into meaningless slogans and markers of dishonest babbling.  That's going to be something that I'm sure I'll be going into a lot farther because I think that corruption of language, thinking and discourse is one of the unintended consequences of separating the idea of "rights" from the responsibility to exercise legitimate rights honestly and on the ground of equality and of the creation of ersatz "rights' at will and generally to lie and peddle inequality and privilege.  

But this is about why I brawl with the atheists.  It all started several years into the atheist fad of the 00's when I generally ignored the big mouth blog atheists at several of the lefty blogs I frequented.  In the run up to the 2006 election, Democrats first real chance to finally end the Bush II, Republican-fascist monopoly on power in DC was when I finally realized I'd have to say something.  I said this at Echidne of the Snakes:

You Don’t Have To Believe It But Ridicule Won’t Win Their Support
Posted by olvlzl

You know it is one of the clearest realities of American life, so clear that it is beyond question; for the left’s agenda to be put into effect it will need the support of religious people. Some kind of religious belief is held by a very large majority of Americans, you don’t win elections without the support of the majority of the voters. If the left, by its own actions or by caricature, can be made the enemy of religion in general then the left can forget about holding power in the United States, ever again.

Reading leftist blogs you have certainly seen comments hostile to religion. The sometimes witty slurs against people who believe in one or more gods are certainly well known to you. If not, just wait around, one more is on its way. While sometimes quite funny, they tend to be repetitive. They could be intended as a fairly harmless indulgence for those hostile to religion but it isn’t politically innocuous.

I am bringing this up because I suspect there is an effort to stir up these questions just now. Articles in MSNBC-Newsweek and elsewhere might indicate an attempt to kick up a religious fight before the fall election. My interest in this is entirely in its effect on practical politics, I want the left to win this election, winning is the most important thing for the next two months. We can live with a certain level of atheist-religionist animosity, we cannot win an election with leftists falling for the bait the Republican right puts out for it. Leftists can be counted on to come to the defense of atheists who are targeted for discrimination. If atheists are in danger of life and limb, we must do that. But this all too timely row has nothing to do with life and limb. It is not pressing.

Absurdly, this time the bait seems to feature the question of an atheist not being electable as president. Since it’s proving hard enough to get any moderate-liberal elected you wonder why the left needs to deal with that just now.

Does an atheist have the right to be President? No. Let’s get that straight. No one has a right to be President. Holding an elected office is an assumed responsibility, assumed only with the permission of the voters, not a right. Our democracy would be a lot safer if everyone would remember this. Atheists have a right to run for President but no one has what is constantly mislabeled a right to assume the office except the legitimate winner of the election.

Is it unfair that an atheist who is honest about it has no chance of being elected as President? Yes, unfair. It is as unfair as the fact that a vegetarian, a Buddhist, an Animist or a Zoroastrian has no realistic chance of winning a real party’s nomination or gaining enough votes to win a presidential election. If you point out that the Constitution says there will be no test of faith to hold office, that’s enforceable against the congress, executive or judiciary, how are you going to enforce it against voters?

Will it remain so? Almost certainly it will remain so for the rest of our lives, there’s not much we do about it. Changing that situation cannot be done politically or by court ruling. It is a matter of cultural change, and, ironically, it will be a change that depends entirely on the acceptance of atheists by religious believers. Atheists who would like to change that might profitably ask themselves if insulting religious believers will hasten that day. They might consider if their, at times brilliant, mockery of religion* has perhaps played any role in their present day status with believers. When we talk about religion we are talking about people. Religion doesn’t exist outside of people who have feelings that inform their opinions and votes. Some religious people will never vote for us and we don’t have to worry about them. But there are many, I hope most, who we can convince to vote with the left. Those are the ones we need.

Atheists on the left should cut out the blanket mocking of religious people. What do they hope to gain by it? Nothing that is worth the cost. Interestingly, it almost always lacks the objective observational acuity necessary for realism, usually the pride of atheists. “Religion” takes in an enormous range of beliefs**. It is safe to assume that the range of religious variation is at least as wide as that found in politics. To lump together Quakers, Unitarian Universalists, Catholics, Jains, Oomotists, etc. and to ridicule them over their religion as if it was any one thing is the sign of a lazy mind. The variation in these beliefs and the actions that come from them do make a huge difference. Pretending that they are all the same thing is just as unrealistic as conflating all political parties, ideologies, rump caucuses and majorities of one for characterization - based on the worst of the bunch- as “political people”. Attack away, as long as it is religious fascists who are the target, there is nothing to lose by doing so. But ask yourself if you really want to drive away people who might vote the same way you would.

A lot of the most important success of the left was grounded in the religion of the activists who did the necessary work. We have that on the best possible authority, the activists themselves. What good is there in mocking liberal religion? Atheists have also done good work for the left but you don’t usually hear religious leftists slamming them because of their atheism just as a matter of course. That kind of injustice would be remarkably atypical of religious liberals. It is a matter of fact that religious liberals have been outspoken supporters of the rights of atheists and other religious non-adherents.

I’m not going to insult your intelligence by phrasing it as a question. This conflict will be promoted by the supporters of the Republican Party during this election season. It is brought up now because they know it could provide them with the margin they need to win this election. Atheists and knee-jerk leftists who ignore that this is a well worn tactic of the Republican right are counted on to do most of their work for them. Remember this, these kinds of wedge issues don’t have to succeed with a majority of the voters to work. They just have to deliver the margin of victory. Leftists who choose to strike a pose should be asked if they really think their ephemeral self-satisfaction is worth remaining out of power. It isn’t a price that is worth it to any rational leftist.

* Some of the mockery, when it has been against criminal behavior and moral hypocrisy by the religious establishment, has been well worth the cost. As the urgency of the problem addressed diminishes the benefit over cost ratio plummets.

** Including non-theistic forms of Buddhism 

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

Wish you could still access the comments that came in on that. It was the response to that and my running responses to those, especially by Amanda Marcotte, as I recall at Pandagonn (perhaps she removed some of her more angry-12-year-old style stuff from back then when she started getting paid scribbling work), and others in her orbit copying what she said that led me on the road to conclude that atheists are more inclined to be liars than people who believed in sin, so they believed it was s sin to lie and that sins came with actual consequences to them.  

Few of the atheists I've engaged in discussing this with have given me any reason to doubt that there are very real consequences in not believing that there is such a thing as sin.   Certainly not much in the way of the atheists who have trolled me and lied their heads off.   Maybe that's why seeing the "death of truth" during the Trump regime wasn't such a shock to me.  I'd dealt with it so much so recently.  

I have also come to believe, with an in depth study of the influence of atheist on American politics, going back more than a century, that they don't seem to really care much about gaining power to form a more perfectly egalitarian-democratic government, preferring their own petty turf battles and raging like said angry-12-year-olds to doing anything much else.

Not a single one of them, in the intervening years, has told me where the morality that held that it's better to tell the truth than tell a lie you'd like to be believed comes from in their ideological beliefs.  Nor such things as rights and moral obligations to observe other peoples' rights on an equal basis.  Not one.  And some of the ones I've ended up asking to explain that are smarter than your typical online atheist idiot - and don't make the mistake of thinking that not many of those idiots could have PhDs in the STEM fields because some of those have been among the worst of them.  I prefer an atheist who admits they can't do that on more than a "just because" basis.  Not that I think they are especially reliable or wise in terms of elections, which is what my concern still boils down to.  If they were politically undamaging to Democratic politicians and egalitarian democracy,  I'd have preferred to ignore them for the past fifteen years.  

The Permission To Lie With Impunity Is Matched By A Ban On Telling The Truth About It

 

Kurt Rosenwinkel, The Heartcore Orchestra - Under It All

 

 

Tempted to say I could use a lullaby right now, so I said it.  Already been a long, long week for me.   Wish I could post the entire list of the players. 

A TV Upvote Is Worth About As Much As A TV Poll

OH,  THAT TACITUS VOLTAIRE PUTZ, is it.  Ha.  It did strike me as mildly ironic that one of Simps' biggest fan boy buddies at Eschaton took the name of one of the most vicious classical Roman antisemites and one of the worst and earliest modern antisemites in the line of antisemitism that the Nazis were in line with, someone who pretty much said that Jews were biologically depraved.  

Of course Simps knows that, or should have because when he demanded the "proof" of that I quoted long and relevant passages from Tacitus and Voltaire (his rabid racism as well) along with articles documenting the Nazis adoration of Tacitus and their propaganda use of his antisemtic writings as well as his pro-Germanic stuff.  

Eschaton, still ineducable after all these years. They never learn a thing, they never have.  I learned something there, get out of it as soon as you can.  Before you know you should. 

For extra discredit, here's what happened when I went after TV on his contention that mass murders were exclusively a religious thing.  Note Simps in the comments doing the typical thing of moving the goal posts when I not only met TVs original challenge but mopped the floor with him.  That's a proper use of mop heads.   This one with a long back and forth with another of Simps' tag-team buddies and him on a similar topic. 

Update:  I saw that I neglected to provide one of the links needed in this last night, in penance I'll give you this exchange from the comments:

steve simelsJanuary 9, 2015 at 6:23 PM

Jim Jones was a minister.
\
Replies

    The Thought CriminalJanuary 9, 2015 at 6:38 PM

    " While denying his own responsibility in the course of events and claiming the role of a victim, Jones goes further in claiming it divine responsibility for them to continue on with the plan of suicide. This is interesting in the sense that Jones himself claimed to be an atheist (Q622). Yet he knew that many of his followers came from a religious background. This kind of comment seems to serve the authority of Jones’ message."

    http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=40229

    The Reverend Jim Jones, an ordained Christian minister in the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, echoed this when he said – among many other places – said “We [Peoples Temple] are not religious; we are atheist(Bracketed notes by the author). Q 887.

    http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=61363

    The Russian Pentecostals believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior of the world, and his blood is precious, and it says, to obey no man, not– no– uh, no man, they take that literally, so they won’t even obey their own country and spit on a flag or stomp on it when it’s raised. Give me a few weeks of (unintelligible word) that guy (unintelligible word) Russian, give us a few weeks uh, give me my gospel tears, and we’ll get by– we’ll forget– we’ll forget some of this liberation, we’ll sing some of them ol’ Jesus songs and we’ll whip it all up to a frenzy, and in two or three weeks, we’ll have ‘em thinking atheist, they won’t know what the hell happened to them.

    http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=60632

    I could go on and on and on. Jones didn't make any secret of it except in the beginning. He bragged that the religion thing was a cover to gull people in like that.


   
    The Thought CriminalJanuary 9, 2015 at 6:56 PM

    Oh, and this one:

    "Jones: Well, thank you for the feedback, ‘cause, I must say, I felt somewhat hypocritical for the last years as I became uh, an atheist, uh, I have become uh, you— you feel uh, tainted, uh, by being in the church situation. But of course, everyone knows where I’m at. My bishop knows that I’m an atheist."

    http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=27498

Rights Without Responsibility Are Not Rights

HAVING IN MY YOUTH HEARD THE REAL THING I NEVER HAVING ADMIRED anything much about Eric Clapton, it didn't surprise me when he, years ago, went into a racist, English chauvinistic rant sounding like Enoch Powell at his most demented, it didn't surprise me when he joined in the geezer-rocker whine against public health measures designed to stop the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic which he whined was costing him money and it doesn't surprise me to read today that he's gonna refuse to play venues that require proof of vaccination - something which this past month has convinced me is eventually going to be pretty much a universal requirement because this pandemic isn't going away and the refuse-nuts are volunteering to be the medium in which newer, worse variants are arising. 

Maybe they can call one of those deadly new variants the Eric-clap to honor his lifetime work like they might name an asteroid that's headed for the Earth.  Having already had enough, I don't exactly welcome a new reason to disdain him but, welcomed or not, he gave it to me.

His reason, as given in The Guardian is what this is really about.  

Eric Clapton has said he will not perform at any venues that require attendees to show proof of vaccination.

In response to the government announcement that vaccination passports will be required to access nightclubs and venues by the end of September, the musician has issued a statement saying he would not play “any stage where there is a discriminated audience present.

“Unless there is provision made for all people to attend, I reserve the right to cancel the show.”

Clapton shared the statement via the Telegram account of Italian architect and Covid sceptic Robin Monotti. It was accompanied by a link to Clapton’s anti-lockdown collaboration with Van Morrison, Stand and Deliver, in which they sing: “Do you wanna be a free man / Or do you wanna be a slave?”

On top of Marjorie Taylor Greene's refusal to disclose that she (like Clapton) has been vaccinated by claiming that a reporter asking her to say if she had violated her "HIPAA rights,"  people claiming a huge swaths of "Constitutional rights" that not only appear nowhere in the Constitution or in the law or case law, people claiming rights to break laws and violate the Constitution (Donald Trump does that regularly) it's clear there's a world of trouble surrounding those "rights" which we have been trained like Pavlov's dog to have a positive reaction to whenever we hear it.  Clearly it's got the American fascists drooling ever more than before these days and there's held to be a right to not only overturn elections and the Constitution as a "Constitutional right" there is held to be a right to get innocent people killed so a bunch of fucking rich white rockers can make even more money as they kill their audience.  What's the difference between that and the depraved scene in the John Waters movie where the Divine Character, in a theatrical display of depravity and crime as art turns a gun on her audience and kills a number of them.  I can tell you the difference, in that case it was only in a really bad shock-trash movie, in the case of these asshole rockers and members of Congress, they won't be prosecuted for doing what they're doing as they are shielded from that reality of what they are doing by an imaginary wall of "rights."  

There is no right to get someone killed.

There is no right to go where you may infect other people by a refusal to be vaccinated and, or to wear a mask. 

There is no right to lie.

There is no right to hold that someone has a right to do either of those.  I would favor making the punishment for that being socked over the head with a rubber chicken and evermore being held up to ridicule.  It might eliminate entire "news" networks who do all of those.  I wish getting those a-hole rockers in the linked to story to disappear were as easy but rock has never been about honesty and responsibility and growing the fuck up.

The Chasm Between High Art And Decency Is Dug By Money And Power

I WILL ADMIT, in answer to the question,  that I was a bit of a sucker for the James Levine legend, though I could hear with my own ears that under his direction the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra played at an incredibly high level.  Maybe I wouldn't have if I didn't hear that.   Over the seven years of him being musical director of the Boston Symphony it was good to hear some modern repertoire, something that the previous music director had not been very interested in.  I will admit that as his tenure continued the bloom was off the rose, some of those performances were nothing like as good as those I heard on the Met broadcasts and there were constant rumblings of frustration with Levine coming out of those who would have the most credibility to judge his work with them, the musicians.  His demands on them were ridiculous and the frustration of him wasting the extremely expensive and demanding extra rehearsals he made a condition of them hiring him AS HE SIGHT READ AND GOT LOST IN SCORES HE HAD NOT STUDIED SUFFICIENTLY BEFORE WASTING TIME SIGHT-READING THEM IN FRONT OF SOME OF THE BEST MUSICIANS IN THE WORLD didn't make it down to me.  

When his health problems that would have led a responsible conductor to retire  forced the musicians to call it quits - reportedly after a rehearsal where he was so ga-ga on pain killers that it was a total disaster - I'd figured he was ready for retirement.  

And that was before any of the scandal of his serial rape, torture (literally), humiliation, degradation, blackmailing and grooming of young men, but also some young women AND CHILDREN WELL UNDER THE AGE OF CONSENT, some as young as 12 years old THAT WE KNOW OF had made it to my ears.  I'm kind of shocked that none of the musicians I knew of, including a member of the Met chorus didn't tell me about that, some of it going back more than fifty years, I'd never have gotten suckered by the legend.

I don't care who it is who performs or composes at the top level, there are some things you never overlook.  If such stuff were proven about my favorite composer, I'd never touch or listen to his music again, I wouldn't teach it.  Ironically in terms of last weekend's little brawl here, there were a number of years when I gave up Stravinsky because in 1930 he made statements in favor of Mussolini who was all the rage in modernist circles in the arts and lit, and disparaging of democracy.   I don't think I've listened to or looked at the score for the Symphony of Psalms since I read those remarks (other than that I've never been a fan of his neo-classical period stuff, neo-classicism often being a symptom of fascism).  He did change his mind quite a bit with the start of WWII and the revelations of the crimes of the fascists and, especially the Nazis.   America had a generally positive influence on him.  For me, his personal recovery of some of his status was due to Susanna Heschel pointing out that someone who joined the Nazi Party in 1930 may well have not understood what they were joining up to - especially if they left it later - but that someone who joined it in 1937 doesn't have that excuse. Someone who acts the way a fascist would act starting in the late 1960s doesn't get any slack with me.  Especially if they rape children and otherwise use them like Levine did.

One of the articles linked to pointed out the enormous risk that the management and board of the Boston Symphony took in hiring him when they would certainly have known the rumors and maybe even the covered-up arrests of James Levine, the article pointed out what could have happened if he were still working as music director there when the inevitable scandal broke.  He was, in fact, banned from entire countries, cities, etc. due to his criminal behavior.  It pointed out that the luck they had in having let him go a few years before the scandal broke may have meant that the august BSO didn't get shut down but it also meant the irresponsible jerks who took that risk never had to answer for their irresponsibility.   I haven't gone into the $40 million dollar slush fund Levine demanded and got - something I hadn't seen reported but would have thought was outrageous in itself.  What they were thinking of I can't imagine though I might wonder if kickbacks didn't figure into it.  There would have had to be some inducement either in graft or in star-struck idiocy to make them do something that incredibly irresponsible and stupid. 

Needless to say, I don't play my relatively few recordings he conducted anymore.  I might eventually throw them out to make room for something else.  I never did much buy opera on disc, listening to it on the radio, instead.

The high end of the classical music world is far more corrupt than I used to think it was, I think that's almost inevitable with the salaries and money involved in it.  I am thankful that I never worked at that level, I'd rather work down where I have where there is less incentive to cover up wrongdoing and far less of a motive for victims of it to keep silent.  Levine, like stage directors and producers got away with a lot because of their power to make or break careers their victims aspired to have.  No one in the arts should have that kind of power, certainly not without a far higher level of scrutiny that would prevent that kind of abuse of power and manipulation of those with less power.   It makes me sick to think of what he got away with, what others, no doubt, still get away with.  He belonged in prison, not waving a baton in front of an orchestra.

Jesus Said To Feed, Clothe, Heal and Visit The Least Among You Not To Polish Up Your Friggin' Latin

READING AROUND AND ABOUT POPE FRANCIS' new apostolic letter in which he issues restrictions on the use of the 1962 Tridentine Mass, popularly, "the Latin mass,"  I was kind of shocked at how fast the actual use of the permissions granted by two of the more clueless recent popes, John Paul II (in 1988) and even more permissively Benedict XVI (in 2007) for the expanded use of it was given away.  In short, the "Latin mass" was easily and effortlessly hijacked by Neo-fascists as a rallying point:

Among the first instances of the Tridentine Mass being celebrated in D.C. was at the prompting of Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan in 1992. In his book Right From the Beginning, Buchanan said that even during the Tridentine Mass he would read a book during the homily because after Vatican II the Catholic Church had become "the First Church of Christ Socialist."

So much for the Holy Spirit guiding the bishops as teachers at Vatican II. At the same time, Buchanan may have been ahead of his time by hiring a priest to celebrate "their" Mass in a high school chapel. I regret to say it, but I can sadly envision the volume of requests that those who want the (then) extraordinary form to be celebrated will make of schools and seminaries.

I believe his speech at the Republican convention that year was the one about which Molly Ivins said it must have sounded better in the original German.  But, then, JPII originally gave permission for the use of the Latin mass in a move to woo the fascist schismatic movement of Marcel Lefebvre back into the fold - you remember the scandal about some of those Benedict welcomed back turned out to be Holocaust deniers, something that Benedict didn't look into before he made nice with that far right.  Benedict's choice of aids and advisors may be among the dumbest in the history of the modern papacy.  His secretary should certainly have checked stuff like that out even if Benedict, noted as a careful scholar, neglected to.  I admit I have come to blame "Gorgeous Georg" for a lot of the worst that has happened during and after Benedict's papacy.

Some of the commentators I've read noted that with the rise of the internet, something which probably neither JPII nor Benedict would have predicted nor noticed much once it happened, there has been an enormous organization by Catholic conservatives many politically fascist, all of whom hold an ahistorical, romantic view of what pre-Vatican II Catholicism was, those I have encountered are positively addicted to bearing false witness, slander, libel, QAnon level fantasizing.  Some of them read like an inversion of Dan Brown, ironically sounding about the modern Catholic church a lot like the anti-Catholic invective of Chick Publications.  

I can understand the entirely more pastorally clued in and far less sympathetic to right-wing fascists Francis not wanting to so dramatically overturn his still-living immediate predecessor's fascist enabling (I assume clueless enabling) act at least not until Benedict dies but he was right not to wait any longer, he already waited too long.  I think it might be too late as that cult which has the financial and media support of billionaire and millionaire loot is not going to disappear anytime soon.  My guess is that they will, in fact, become a schismatic sect, probably taking with them some of the most corrupt current members of the hierarchy and getting the funding of billionaire and millionaire gangsters because they will be useful to their political and so financial purposes.  

Someone who knew Benedict very well, as a colleague and friend when, as young theologians, they were advisors at the Vatican II sessions, the late Hans Kung, said that a lot of the worst things he did as Pope were due to him having lived entirely in the artificial realms of a university faculty and then in the most inside of the inner circles at the Vatican during the long pontificate of John Paul II.  He may, as pope, have been slightly less of a generator of scandal than JPII, he certainly saw more of the dangers of not doing something more dramatic about the clergy sex abuse crisis than JPII did - though his own response was hardly sufficient (perhaps he didn't want to do something implying serious criticism of his immediate predecessor, either - he should have extradited Bernard Law's ass back to face the music).  But his permission for the expanded use of the Latin mass and the entirely awful accompanying creation of the cult of the Latin mass has done great damage which will persist for a long time.   And I don't mean only to the Catholic liturgy or the unity of Catholics I mean in promoting entirely secular and cultural right-wing gangster fascism of the kind that Pat Buchanan no doubt has been pleased by.  

I hope that the bishops who are asked by young priests (pretty much anyone younger than 60, these days) for permission to say the mass in Latin is told to spend their time on more urgent pastoral matters:

If you doubt that the pope really understands the nature of the problem, look to Article 4 of the new letter. It states: "Priests ordained after the publication of the present Motu Proprio, who wish to celebrate using the Missale Romanum of 1962, should submit a formal request to the diocesan Bishop who shall consult the Apostolic See before granting this authorization." Seminarians who are asking older priests to teach them how to say the old rite need to be more focused on improving their bedside manner for hospital visits.

I'll go into what I'd like to add about the world spawned by EWTN here but that would take something a lot longer than I've already written. 

If You Think I Despised Ol' Leopold

NO, I ACTUALLY POSTED a recording Leopold Stokowski conducted of the sadly neglected American composer Ben Weber's Symphony on Poems Of William Blake along with the reminiscences of one of Weber's students, a good composer himself, Roger Tréfousse.  Alas the links to Youtubes of the movements of the symphony are broken.  If I had time I'd edit in those that replaced them at Youtube (the 4th movement seems to be missing), it's worth going to find them as the piece is very good even if the balance of the voice and instruments isn't great.   

The text contains an anecdote Weber told about the rehearsals for the recording that oddly matches one of those told about James Levine only Stokowski comes off a lot better as he and the singer were having a fight over something whereas it was typical of Levine when dealing imperiously with those he thought were too unimportant for him to address sitting in the same room except through his body-guard brother.   It's funny, too, because in the comments I had pretty much the same argument with Simps of Eschaton that we had here yesterday, so he knew the points I made, or, rather, had been exposed to them four years aback.  He's ineducable.  No doubt something that his parents heard from a teacher or more.

I'd recommend listening to the other two works on the album that the old label CRI put out, where I first heard it, also conducted by him, Henry Cowell's Persian Set and Roger Goeb's 3rd Symphony.  You can find all of those at Youtube, as well.  If they might not exactly be to my taste, you might like them. 

Why Did You Put "Self-Replicating" In Quotes?

NOT THE FIRST TIME someone has asked that kind of question.  "Self replicating DNA" doesn't exist. It is a mythological "creature".   In cells DNA is replicated by the action of a complex, precise  internal cellular chemical and physical actions, DNA without that doesn't replicate.  It and RNA are, as Francis Crick speculated and which I agree with him on, probably molecules that evolved in already existing life of a kind which we do not know but are, somehow, related to.  What the biology of such organisms might be?  [Shrugs]

The idea that artificial, scientist synthesized "DNA" can self-anything is even more absurd because any such replication will only happen by the intelligent design of the scientists doing the experiment and whatever chemical and energy carefully planned and provided in the vessel containing the synthesized molecule.  It's no  more "self-replicating" than a ventriloquist's dummy is self-talking or self-moving or self-delivering a punchline.   I'd accuse scientists who talk about "self-replicating DNA" of being careless when they're talking about naturally occurring DNA and even more clueless when they claim they've produced something that creates itself.  That is due to the component of ideological assertion that is the motivation of those who invented abiogenesis becoming the controlling cultural basis of their field.   Abiogenesists, from the first ones till today who believe they are "proving" that intelligent design is not needed to produce "DNA" or life are cluelessly doing  what I pointed out they were doing, proving that "DNA" or, maybe, someday "life" can be created by intelligent design, their work leaving their ideological claim that it could come about by spontaneous chemical combination under random chance in as unproven a state as it was before the whole Frankenstein effort was begun. 

Nothing a scientist does as science can demonstrate that the effects they produce can be done without intelligent design and conscious intention because there is absolutely no way for them to cleanse those out of what they produce.  And, by the way, they can't demonstrate that in nature, either.  

I doubt that consciousness of the kind that we do science and all of our other such thought with can really conceive of what that would be, probably one of the reason that atheist ideologues are always, constantly and cluelessly creating unadmittedly deific creator idols out of things like "DNA," "natural selection," "random chance," "probability," "natural law," etc.   Those always fall short of the claims made about them.   Some start out stupider than others though none of them work very well as explanations of why things are as they are.  Maybe our minds are as they are, unable to do that, to clue us in to the reality that it all is through God's intention.  Someday I'll go through a theory of truth and fiction that I've been thinking through, if there's time to bring it that far. 

UPDATE:  Looking this over again, it occurs to me that "self-replicating DNA" would be even more like a ventriloquist's dummy reproducing itself, not even with the aid of a dummy of the opposite sex, something that even the stupidest among us can't manage single-handed.

Nope, Those Celebrity Atheists Unintelligently Moved Things Farther In The Direction Of Intelligent Design - It must be Hate Mail

IF, AS THEY CLAIM, life on Earth got here as a result of an experiment or tech application by "intelligent aliens" such as Crick and Sagan and their colleagues proposed could become a "scientific hypothesis" - just how you're supposed to test that hypothesis with the methods of science don't seem to have bothered them much - then what they are arguing for is, in fact, intelligent design of life on Earth.  It doesn't much matter if the intelligence took existing life forms, perhaps altered them and then intentionally seeded Earth with them or if they "created life" to do that from scratch for, by their proposal the answer to life on Earth is, in fact, that we are here by intelligent design.  

Such atheist-materialist-scientistic types don't seem to be very good at thinking out their ideological campaign to "prove scientifically" that life is living by the Intelligent Design of The Creator, God is an "unnecessary hypothesis" because literally nothing they can do can be separated from the intelligent design behind a. experiments and what results from them, b. their analysis, c. their ideological motives to start with.   To try to claim that they can do any of that, from "creating 'self-replicating' DNA" to "directed panspermia" without it demonstrating the opposite of what they claim, that it could happen without "intelligent design" is philosophically inept because intelligence is a vital component in everything they produce in that line.  

What they have "proven" if anything, is that intelligent design CAN produce life.  The dumb bunnies.

If the very limited intelligence of life can do that then the proposed far greater intelligence and potency of God certainly could.  They've just moved human intelligence a bit farther in that direction instead of away from it as they claim they are doing.  Men are often not very good at things like which direction they're headed in.   William Blake warned them about that and the intellectual incompetence of the "enlightenment" project,
 

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau, 

Mock on, mock on, tis all in vain. . . . 

They really should require that these tech specialists be exposed more to general culture than their academic programs require them to be.  And I don't mean the humanities faculty who long for the repute and glamor (and compensation) and the falsified history of the "enlightenment" and the sciences.  I mean a real liberal education.  Materialism is decadent and ever was. 

As with my point about the CSICOP-CSI "skeptics" (read ideological atheist old farts) liking the UFOlogy they liked as done by themselves* and that which they despised, derided and disdained,  so it is with atheist-materialist-scientistic claims of intelligent design (sometimes, now, with space aliens).   I think Michael Behe is more intellectually honest than Sagan or Crick or the like were.  Though if it's any comfort to them, the inability to distance the human activity of science from intelligent design is also a hurdle for the proposed science proving Intelligent Design because they can't work with what might falsify it.  Though maybe that recent holding of the philosophy of science isn't valid.   I do think some of their arguments are a lot more persuasive than those of the materialists but that's not on the basis of science.

* Just why Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovskii's proposed ancient astronauts were more intellectually reputable than those of the popularizers WHO HAD EXACTLY AS MUCH EVIDENCE AS SAGAN DID NOT HAVE EITHER, but the others were ridiculed by the CSICOPers is an interesting question.  Sagan even took credit for inspiring the later perhaps slightly less ass-covering writers.   I think it had more to do with in-crowd-out-crowd ridicule, fashion and snobbery than anything inherently more disreputable about popular UFOlogy and ancient astronaut junk.  I rejected all of it on the basis of there being no real way to figure out if they were right or wrong.  I recall thinking some of what Sagan said about that, the stuff based on anthropological crap, was kind of condescending to People of Color. 

UPDATE:  It would be irresponsible to not add that though I wasn't anything like a frequent reader of it,  I did think the few Saucer Smear magazines I saw were amusing.

Stupy Watched A Movie About Klassical Music

I ASSUME HE MEANS the redone Fantasia of 2000, the one that the disgraced James Levine arranged and conducted.  No, never saw it.  It's a kiddie movie.   I don't watch kiddie movies anymore.  Or many other movies.  I preferred to grow up.  Who needs the cartoons when you can listen to the real thing? You say a bunch of the Eschatots upvoted his comment?   Well, there's a reason I call them "tots."  I am not greatly bothered that they don't like me, I don't want their good opinion, it's not worth the price in saying stupid stuff to get it.

James Levine who I took my hat off to as a great conductor is someone who, when I learned what he was really like, not only in his abuse of young musicians and, especially students but, also, with others I put my hat back on a thousand times.  He's dead and gone now.   May his victims find peace.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Rex Stout - Adventures Of Nero Wolfe - Stamped For Murder

 

 

Another Riverside Township Players re-performance.  I'd love to know that there were more of these kinds of companies coming together.  While this can't compete with the CBC's 1980s Nero Wolfe Series or the great TV ones with the great Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton and some of the best and most flexible actors of their generations, it is fun and shows possibilities of what might be done.  If they did it on recordings with chances for editing and inserting corrections the results would be more polished.  If Covid were over I'd certainly pay to hear them do it on stage, though.

Nature Again Nurtures Ideological Contamination Of Science

WHILE DOING THE READING that led to my earlier post this morning, looking at things from Scientific American, scientific journals, etc.  I came across something at Retraction Watch about a study allegedly concerning religion published in Nature which has now been retracted, sort of.  The original study was one I remembered because as it says in the piece:

A  widely-touted 2019 study in Nature which argued that large societies gave rise to belief in fire-and-brimstone gods — and not the other way around — has been retracted by the authors after their reanalysis of the data in the wake of criticism diluted the strength of their conclusions.

The article, “Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history,” came from a group of scholars in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere, and was led by Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist and the the director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford.

The study prompted a significant amount of interest on social media and in the global press, according to Altmetric, with articles in Scientific American, Yahoo! News, PBS, El Pais and many other publications worldwide. As Scientific American put it, Whitehouse’s group found that the advent of moralizing gods did not lead to the formation of complex societies. [Note, you can see the links to the popular press coverage at the link.]

And the media-social media coverage - they're always quick to cover anything that could discredit religion - led to the certainly anticipated and expected comment thread babblage by the God haters, the Christian bashers are the primary audience for this kind of audience-pleasing science.  And that popularity isn't found only on the popular level but among other scientists one expects from allied fields:

The paper, which has been cited 49 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — giving it a Highly Cited Paper designation among papers of the same age.

Well, typical for the social sciences, entirely expectable for anyone of any experience of them, their methodology was dodgy and so their results were:

[The paper]  also met with skepticism. Immediately after publication, a group led by Bret Beheim, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, submitted a response to the journal questioning the validity of the results. Beheim and his colleagues posted a preprint of their argument on PsyArXiv in early May 2019. Nature accepted the article on Feb. 18, 2021, roughly 21 months later.

The core challenge from Beheim et al. is rather that the original paper treats absence of evidence for moralizing gods as evidence of their absence. It changes all N/A (not available) values to absent. In other words, the original paper considers that if there is no information on the presence of moralizing gods in a certain region at a certain time, there is no moralizing god.

After reanalyzing their results in light of the challenge, Whitehouse’s group agreed that the findings weren’t quite as robust as they’d initially claimed.

I have to wonder what would happen to a student taking an introduction to statistics course at any of the universities that employ these researchers who made that kind of an obvious error in their analysis of and misapplication of data. I wonder if some statistics teacher catching such an error would write the old rule of thumb popularized by the Milton Berle of such aphorisms, Carl Sagan, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  I would imagine a lot of those guys who did that had said that, themselves.

What might be most telling in this is not only did that most august of science journals, Nature accept the original obviously flawed study (you do have to wonder about the review process that did not catch the flaws) but in how they dragged their feet in publishing the critique of it once that was pre-published. 

Beheim told us his group was surprised by the long delay between the submission of their article and publication:
 

[It] took nearly two years from submission to acceptance, with only clarifying revisions made to the analysis. Our three referees were excellent, but the journal was not forthcoming about anything for over a year. Thank god we posted a preprint at submission.
 

I look forward to reading the … revised argument. The objection I had to the original analysis wasn’t so much their conclusion, but that they weren’t transparent about the amount of missing data involved. If our critique can help them nail that problem down, I think the field will progress.

It being anthropology I wouldn't count on that.  Anthropology as in all the sciences allegedly dealing with human minds is never going to actually practice rigorous science because rigorous science cannot be done on the object of its supposed study.  It can, though, make up stuff that is a simulation of science, in which case their imitation should be held to a higher standard of pretense than Nature let them get away with.   As he admitted, even the anthropologist who led the criticism wasn't bothered by the result but in the way they got to it.  

Nature's excuse for the long delay in allowing such a frequently cited, much followed in pop-sci followage is pretty telling in a way that made me decide to write about this.

Matters Arising submissions that meet Nature‘s initial selection criteria are sent to the authors of the original paper for a formal response. The comments and formal response may then be sent to independent referees for peer review, as was the case in this instance. As with primary research papers, the period between submission and acceptance for Matters Arising can vary, as it incorporates peer review, careful consideration and evaluation by the editors of the issues raised, and author revisions. In addition, the consideration of the Matters Arising in this case was associated with the retraction of the original paper, which added complexity to the process.

I strongly suspect that the comparative speed and obvious lack of adequate publishing of the original paper was due to its ideological usefulness for the dominating ideology of Nature and of British-English language scientific establishment.  A part of that general establishment such as gave it all of those popular-press citations.  All of which are supposedly cleansed out by the rigorous application of the scientific method.  Though, clearly, that gets out far less than 100% of that kind of pollution when it's of use to that ideology.

Hate Mail - Useful Lies, Suppressed Truths and Prison Bitches Of Billionaires

PRESIDENT BIDEN SAID IT,  Facebook's libertarian actions allowing Covid-19 liars to say what they want to is getting people killed.  As mentioned yesterday in the grim and often vulgar debate over just how many millions Hitler or Stalin or others had murdered, how many hundreds of thousands of those who died under the Trump-Facebook-Twitter-FOX reign of lies, how many deaths those lies were responsible for will be vulgarly argued, those supporting Trump-Facebook etc merely arguing just how many scores or hundreds of millions, not any with any attachment to the truth denying that the lies killed people.  

The fact is that lies kill people, lies permitted by the First Amendment, especially as interpreted under the fashion of "free speech-press absolutism" will be responsible for an increasing proportion of the further death tole of Covid-19 in just this one instance of a pandemic of this potential, I'd say that today that percentage is close to if not 100% of those dying in the United States right now.  The liberals and libertarians who say that must continue must be held responsible for their part in that carnage.  It is that sloppy, generalized language, as made worse by the courts in the last half of the 20th century which has given rise to the insanity that because Madison and the First Congress reluctantly took up a Bill of Rights because he had promised to do so as a condition for Virginia adopting his Constitution and they wished to avoid hard thinking and, no doubt, a protracted debate over it, which has given those who empower Facebook, FOX, Twitter, etc the excuse for not looking at the complexity of this situation as it really is EVEN AS IT IS GETTING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF US KILLED, GOING ON TO A MILLION. 

I'll forgo mentioning the position of Hamilton because that's for another day.

That is not sustainable, if we do not learn from this hard experience of these hundreds of thousands, perhaps in the end millions of deaths, things will end far more badly than they need to.   We have to the hard work of thinking and working our way out of this, to see that we may be able to  have a measure of freedom but not every possible free expression of every possible lie designed (often now with entirely amoral expert advice) for no good purpose.  If we fail to change things  then we will have the choice between a dictator who has the power to order all people to be vaccinated (as I believe one of Trump's admired thugs, the dictator of the Philippines is moving to) or the reign of death we are just beginning to get a fuller picture of in low-vaccination - REPUBLICAN-FASCIST RULED STATES.

As Einstein is frequently said to have said, everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.   The problem is that the First Amendment is too simple, it doesn't begin to match the complexity of the use of propaganda and lies and their planned use as under the Cambridge Analyitica - billionaire, Mercer - Putin, Koch, Murdoch-FOX, etc. use of a simplistic notion of free-speech, free press to not only destroy equality, not only destroy democracy but to get millions killed so the Republican-fascists can use a pandemic to try to get electoral victory.  The idiot judges and sleazy Republican-fascist "justices" on the Supreme Court can rule the remainder of the population and so hand everything over to the billionaires, oligarchs and plutocrats.   There's a reason that the Repuiblican-fascists applauded when at their recent  gathering the failure to meet vaccination goals was announced, it's because they plan on using that planned, Facebook-FOX fueled failure to win elections.  That's their plan, that was Trump's plan, the reason for his use of the pandemic through his lies and his failure to protect the American People by telling the truth about it.

Anyone who doesn't learn from this experience that "free speech" and especially "free press" as it is now practiced cannot be allowed to continue, that while all truth has a right to be told, lies have no right to be and that what we have now is seriously in need of change is too stupid or irresponsibly insouciant to have any say in how the law is going to proceed from the wreckage.  But our legal minds and jurists are just that stupid, seemingly trained to be, they have been as bad in addressing other terrible defects in the Constitution from the earliest days when the Supreme Court empowered the Slave Power that most of its members were members of, even as most of them, today, are Republican-fascists.  Liberals who don't see the problem with their position are their cowardly prison bitches.

Hate Mail

THE FIRST "FREE SPEECH" ABSOLUTIST load of crap that I saw for the transparently obvious load of crap it was was in the wake of the ACLU championing the "right" of Nazis to parade in Skokie, Illinois said to be the home of the largest concentration of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel at the time.  The idea that Nazis had "a right of free speech" that overrode the right of the victims of Nazis to not be re-victimized by Nazis was only the start of it.  The idea that in 1977, a mere 32 years after Hitler shot himself and was burned in a Berlin gutter THAT ANY NAZI ANYWHERE, ANY TRUE BELIEVER IN HITLER'S INSANE, GENOCIDAL IDEOLOGY HAD THE RIGHT TO A CHANCE TO TRY TO DO IT AGAIN WAS COMPLETE AND UTTER AND IRRESPONSIBLE INSANITY.  It was only obviously anything else to idiots who didn't believe what had happened once could happen again or, which I believe was the case, that they didn't happen to believe that THEY AND THEIR LOVED ONES were the ones who would be taking the chance on them being wrong. Clearly, the ACLU lawyers who argued the case never for a second believed they and their loved ones might be targeted as a result of their advocacy, those idiots never do, though they are clearly not much bothered by those who are put in danger by their clients.

I never sent another cent to the goddamned ACLU after that, I never said anything good about them, I found out that not only their past but their present and, with time, future, was far from pure and pristine and in line with egalitarian democracy and the quest for a universally decent life for all.  Nor was it anything like entirely distanced from mercenary motives.  

As a reluctant further student of genocidal, oppressive dictatorships, I have come to believe there are two forms of government, egalitarian democracy and government by gangsters, there only being a difference in degree as to the gangsterism of even relatively benign governments. 

The genocidal history of 20th century and now 21st century governments have produced not only the rivals of Nazism but its equals.  Stalinism, Leninism, Maoism, various other Marxist and fascist and other regimes have amassed mountains of murder victims and generations of people oppressed and enslaved.  The crimes of many of those are totally documented as having happened, merely the statistics of how many tens or scores of millions so murdered, how many billions oppressed being open to any rational or quasi-rational argument.

To pretend any ideology, Nazism, fascism, Stalinism, Leninism, Maoism, etc which have had their test of time SO WE KNOW THAT THEY ARE POSSIBILITIES and which have produced those murderous results, to pretend that in 2021 any of them or their adherents today have a right to try to do it again is the most irresponsible and irrational common received talking point of American liberals and the left and the center.  NONE OF THEM OR THEIR LIKE, APARTHEID IN WHITE SUPREMACIST SOUTH AFRICA OR THE SUPREME COURT SANCTIONED JIM CROW APARTHEID OF THE UNITED STATES HAS A RIGHT TO ANYTHING BUT SUPPRESSION AND EXTINCTION.

It remains to be seen how many Americans the Covid-19 Trumpian-Republican-fascist anti-vaxxers will kill but a body-count that can be avoided is a body count and they already have the record for one year premature death in American history.  For anyone to pretend that because some idiots in the First Congress didn't realize they should make a distinction between true speech and fucking lies we must allow them to lie us into another half million or tens or scores of millions of dead to make Jemmy Madison happy is total and complete insanity that matches anything Trump and his most fevered nutcases have said to get us this far.  

I'm not going to lie about that no matter how extreme people think it is and how unpleasant making they find it.

OLBERMANN VS...UNVACCINATED ATHLETES WHO THREATEN THE GAMES AND ENABLE ANTI-VAX COWARDS - GET. OUT.

 

 

I didn't know unvaccinated pro-athletes was a thing.  Considering how much they get paid, how much the owners have invested in the health of their players, how stupid are they to not require it?    And if some idiot state like Florida wants to make that requirement illegal, fine, their teams don't get to play with teams from sane states.   Same with everything else.  

It should be a felony for media figures to promote anti-vaxx lies.  They not only get those who believe their lies and suck up their advertising and pay their cable profits killed, they kill those who know they are fucking liars for fascism.   Any constitution, any law that allows that in a modern society is an 18th century, pre-Pasteur era hold over that should be scrapped for a constitutional and legal system that learns the hard lessons of history and mass death.  Our system, just such an 18th century holdover, refuses to learn "on principle" don't you know.