Saturday Night Radio Drama - Louis Kornfeld -Thankless

 

Thankless

To help her sick mother, Abigail needs to ask for help from her brother, a conspiracy-peddling radio host.

Monica Wyche, Abigale
PJ Sosko,  Jason
Jamie Newell, Kathy
Max Brand, Chris
Louis Kornfeld, Doctor
Alexis Lambright, Banker
Brian Morabito, Phil
Evan Barden, Intern
Liz Leimkuhler, Social Services
T.J. Mannix, TV Doctor


Written by Louis Kornfeld
Produced by Jonathan Mitchell
Associate produced by Cadence Mandybura

The rebirth of audio theater on the internet has produced lots of tries, some of them terrible, some of them bad, some of them mediocre and some of them very, very good.  The Truth is one of the sources of this new-radio theater that produces some of the best.  The thing I like most about the best of it is that it isn't movies that didn't make it to video production, it's better than that because it tries stuff they'd never try in the movies or on TV.  

What Rustypickup Said At RMJ's

 

rustypickup7:24 PM

https://mobile.twitter.com/heathr/status/1523399276348407808?s=21&t=vABZf469mS1GQk4YXeqtyg

I don't know how to embed the tweet, but here is the text.

"I wonder if Kavanaugh is having memories of college Take Back the Night marches when his frat would chant at the women marching, “Yes means No. No means anal.”

His frat would also throw crap at gay students like my roommate. Really, I have no issue with public shaming him at his house. 

I never learned how to embed tweets, either, if the putrid Musk takes it over, I never will. 

More On The Brain-Dead Brain-Only Ideological Model

THOUGH I HOLD that it was a largely destructive, extremely damaging exercise in ignorant pop cultural fashion, the atheist fad of the 00's was something that I benefited from enormously.  Seeing the unedited thinking of many thousands of ideological atheists online, in articles, blog posts, comments left in the commentage of the web, I found, over and over, confirmation of something I'd only had an inkling of in the ink-on-paper, babble on radio culture I lived in before going online, that atheists are generally not very deep thinkers or careful thinkers and, in an impressive number of instances, are not honest thinkers.  Even those who are not superficial or particularly dishonest, as the common run of that is, such as Bertrand Russell will, eventually, be forced into it by their ideological choices.*

That's not something you can say is exclusive to that ideological camp, I've come to think that it is typical of any strongly held ideological framing, but, probably through an association with academics, atheists also were once held as being better than that, largely by other atheists in academia, the publishing and scribbling profession and the reliably anti-religious cooky-cutter production of fiction and, especially, fiction acted out on stage and screen (theater about real people is inevitably full of lies). And if you didn't know that they were a cut above everyone else, you could depend on them to make that assertion before much time passed.

That's an introduction to my answer to a claim made to me by a sciency ideological atheist with credentials that what we have "in our brains" is the same thing as what the external universe is, that any other claim is "post modernist bull shit" and "anti-scientific".  Furthermore, that my arguments against his argument that what he alleged is "all made by our brains," depended on "meaningless questions." Which, I asserted, was a superficial though popular atheist dodge of 1930s era logical-positivists who had no better answers and so wanted to make perfectly meaningful questions go away or be disallowed, in itself some of the most transparent shallow thinking in the modern era.

The person arguing with me didn't have an answer for even the crudest argument that I brought up.  He made a statement that for any meaningful question of science, "what our brains made" was the same as what was out there in the "real world."  I asked him if that meant that when we thought of dimethylmercury that was present in our brains. I had to explain to him why that extremely dangerous nerve-toxin being present in anyone's brain was a guarantee of a slow and terrible death as it destroyed the brain, relating the tragic incident of that which happened at Dartmouth a couple of decades back (perhaps before the callow, shallow ideologue was born).  That anyone who didn't understand the difference between our idea of it and the real thing was a superficial thinker.  He seemed to only understand that he'd dug himself into a position that he couldn't support and he was was too immature to back out of. I'm not saying that atheists used to be smarter than this but along with the enormous educational opportunities that came with the internet, I think it's had the general effect of making more People stupider than such People used to be.

Materialism is a brain-dead, dead end. Atheism is, too.

I've been extremely busy this week catching up on garden work that my recent adventure with the medical industry put off - to disappoint my enemies, which to say I was sorry for would be a lie,  I didn't have a relapse - or I'd comment on this at greater length.  

The argument I had reminded me of another of H. Allen Orr's essay-book reviews that I read in the Boston Review, this one answering E. O. Wilson's absurd and philosophically inept claims in one of his perhaps lesser known books, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.  I will say that E. O. Wilson was a pretty good scientist when he was talking within his narrow area of expertise which was describing ant behavior, like Carl Sagan, when he stuck to what he really knew, he could be pretty good but like Sagan, when he ventured even a little outside of it, the shortcomings of his narrow training and those mandated by his materialist-atheist-scientistic ideological commitments had a rapidly increasingly destructive effect in the results. Though I think Wilson's specialties have guaranteed minefields in it than Sagan's, which is more in line with the classical physical scientific tradition.  

I think that in this passage Orr (who I disagree with about some things while admiring his thinking) hits a number of relevant nails on the head.  I was reminded of it when my opponent mentioned above made recourse to the idiotic idea that "artificial intelligence" was going to come to the rescue of his "brain only" diminution of consciousness which he seemed to not be that confident in as the argument progressed.  

The second general problem plaguing Wilson’s book is one of philosophical naiveté. We scientists are, of course, notorious for thinking all philosophical problems straightforward. Scientists tend to swagger into town, confident that a bit of straight shooting will set all aright. Though typically modest, Wilson slips into this cowboy role all too easily. A number of philosophical problems– mind-body, free will, the failure of logical positivism– pop up in the course of his book. And Wilson guns them down at a staggering rate. Unfortunately, his solutions are often surprisingly superficial. In the end it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Wilson often just doesn’t see the problem. He sees half of it, or less than half of it, and sets diligently to whittling away at some corner of it. When he announces his solution–often in a one-liner–he seems mildly astonished that no one previously saw so simple an answer.

Let me give an example. As a champion of unity of knowledge, Wilson is anxious to explain away the demise of that last great unification craze, logical positivism. The positivists believed that by formalizing scientific language and by following a few formulaic guidelines (e.g., verificationism) scientists could “close in on objective truth.” But logical positivism crashed and burned. And Wilson thinks he knows why: “Its failure, or put more generously, its shortcoming, was caused by ignorance of how the brain works. That in my opinion is the whole story.” But the good news, Wilson assures us, is that neurobiology and artificial intelligence are coming to our rescue. Once they reveal how the brain works–once they show us how to correct the distortions our nervous systems impose upon reality–“the grail of objective truth” might be ours.

It’s hard to know where to start with this sort of argument. For one thing, the idea that absolute objective knowledge can be built on a foundation of brain sciences faces an obvious problem: our knowledge of the brain must itself remain uncertain, tainted by the very subjective distortion and outright error that Wilson is trying to get rid of. For another, there’s more standing between science and the “ultimate goal of objective truth” than ignorance of the brain’s blueprints. Almost all scientific truths take the form of universal propositions reached by induction and are therefore permanently subject to doubt. As Russell said somewhere, induction for a chicken means the farmer comes to feed him each morning. But one morning the farmer comes and wrings his neck. The point is that most scientific truths are logically fated to remain un-absolute. And none of this goes away no matter how well you understand the hypothalamus. Unfortunately this is not an isolated incident. Much of Wilson’s book consists of such superficially attractive–but ultimately just superficial-philosophical talk.

If I had time I'd go back over the series I did going through A. S. Eddington's lecture on The Concept of Structure in which he gave a pretty detailed mathematical description of the mental modeling of things within modern physics, the very thing which such atheists as E. O. Wilson and their fan-boys online believe is the way to get to absolute knowledge.  The problem is that while the scientific and mathematical analysis is enormously impressive, it cannot help but draw you into the fact that compared to the real thing, the mathematical-scientific generalization is both intimately involved in our understanding of the external universe but, also, ever more distanced from the specific facts of our most intimate experience of the external universe.   Eddington pointed out far more simply that the experience of our consciousness is the most primitive fact we have access to, it preceeds ALL subsequent knowledge or thought.  To downgrade consciousness is to undermine everything that comes after it.  Which, I'd guess, a scientist of Eddington's eminence and accomplishment who is not an ideological atheist will have no problem with but which one who begins from that ideological starting point will never be able to entirely repose in, unless, like Wilson, they simply ignore the problems their ideological committment forces on them.

As Orr points out when someone specializes in something like "behavior" or "neuro" or "cognative" anything those problems are even more embedded in an intimate manner than someone who wants to describe the movements of electrons.

"our knowledge of the brain must itself remain uncertain, tainted by the very subjective distortion and outright error that Wilson is trying to get rid of"

While the scientist whose claims that gave rise to the argument is someone I admire when she limits herself to what she really knows - and what she knows is definitely more than what someone like Sagan or Wilson knows, she was educated in German universities - her ideological commitments have a similar effect on her when she wanders far outside of the particle physics she specialized in.  I may respect her when she speaks on what she knows, especially when she doesn't use her position and credentials to push her materialist ideology, when she speaks nonsense, I'm not going to ignore that.

One of the downsides of ideological materialist-atheist-scientism is it lacks any tradition of humility as it has an deep, deep commitment to intellectual hubris and overselling what science can ever do.  In that they have more in common with the biblical and other scriptural fundamentalist traditions in religion.  It's one of the more interesting ironies of life how the bitterest intellectual opponents end up thinking in similar ways. 

* I don't think that's inevitable.  H. Allen Orr's intellectual grandfather, the teacher of his teacher, Richard Lewontin, is someone whose rigor and intellectual honesty I've praised over and over again.  As I do Orr's even as I have no such respect for the link between them, Jerry Coyne who embodies what I've said above to the extent that one of his ideological buddies in the Jeffrey Epstein sponsored Science Blogs era said, "Jerry Coyne, he's 12."
 

Egalitarian Democracy Is Failing As Its One And Only Workable Substrate Is Rejected

ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING THINGS I read and have thought a lot about during my research into natural selection was the prominent geneticist H. Allen Orr's statement that, despite the claims of the neo-atheist philospher of the atheist zeitgeist, Daniel Dennett, natural selection could not work with just any random physical substrate, the physical aspects of what the theory allegedly explains.*  He said, back in the 1990s that natural selection could not work outside of a substrate of particulate (classical genetic) biological inheritance.  In fact he said it would work with any substrate and that it was his great discovery that it was responsible for practically everything.   Orr pointed out he was wrong, which, thinking about it in wake of reading that, makes sense to me in exactly the same way that Dennett is absurd.  

 

Though Orr didn't go into it and it may be because it didn't occur to him, that would mean that Darwin's and the first generation of Darwinists' conception of natural selection couldn't work because, as Darwin's foremost Continental disciple, Ernst Haeckel, said, Darwin believed in Lamarckian inheritance of traits - a statement endorsed by Darwin's son, Francis, among others - in which acquired traits were inherited, something Haeckel (and most) of Darwin's first generations of believers believed in as well.  You would have to know the background to understand Haeckle's somewhat snarky dismissial of the alternative proto-genetic theory of his rival German Darwinist, August Wisemann, the guy who experimented to refute Lamarck by cutting the tails off of mice - such was the naive ignorance of those generations in such matters.

I don't know if subsequent to that H. Allen Orr has tried to fit his conception of natural selection to the more recent resurgence of a far more scientifically supported theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, epigenetic inheritance, which is quite well supported and what that does to Darwinism, natural selection. A theory which already had to be massively modified to make it seem to work with the developing and undeniable genetic theory.  I don't see how you can accept that current science without it doing serious damage to even the highly altered, quite anti-Darwinist, altered to fit it to the naive and absolutist genetics c. the 1920s and 30s, Darwinism of the post-WWII generation which I grew up in.  He may have come up with some way to reconcile those two seemingly incompatible holdings of scientists or, more interestingly, he may have addressed their apparent incompatibility in those terms.  I think a far simpler and probably more reliable thing to do would be to scrap natural selection because it doesn't seem to be able to mean the same thing for much more than fifty-years at a time.

I do think his point that sometimes the substrate on which a higher level theory operates can be exclusively possible to that particular type of substrate is interesting in something I care much more deeply about, egalitarian democracy.

I have written a number of times about the statement of the eminent philosopher and political scholar Jurgen Habermas that modernistic egalitarian democracy was an exclusive product of the Jewish ethic of justice and the Christian extension of that in the commandments to love, something which I've defended from the dishonest distortion of what he said by anti-religious, academic liars and as something which, after thinking about it harder than I did what H. Allen Orr said about Darwinism, I think is true, certainly in the history of the conception of egalitarian democracy,  where it happened to the extent it ever has, how it happened, how it progresses or fails.  I think in this time when "Christianity" as it is generally understood - certainly as it has been defined in the mass media - is not an expression of either justice or love, it is unsurprising that egalitarian democracy is dying.

If that substrate of egalitarian democracy, that level of divinely commanded justice and love, is necessarily restricted to Jewish and Christian monotheism, I don't know, I hope those commandments are written on the hearts of others who may be of a different monotheistic or a reputedly polytheistic tradition or of those allegedly "non-theistic" such as Theravada Buddhism,  I've mentioned before that while reading and listening to some North American Native religious elders I think it's very much part of those traditions.  I believe some of the Afro-American religious traditions and what is claimed about their African predecessors show that that may not be exclusive to the Jewish monotheistic tradition that Christianity and Islam share in.

I don't believe that it can exist in anything like a strong enough thing to have social, national and international beneficial effects without a substrate of religious belief - AND ONLY THEN IF THOSE TWO THINGS, JUSTICE AND LOVE ARE CONSIDERED TO BE AMONG THE FOREMOST COMMANDS OF THE CREATOR.  I have watched atheist regimes during my lifetime and read about those of the past and I find absolutely nothing in them that will tend towards egalitarian democracy, universal justice and personal and social and political and judicial action that is an expression of that in support of love, the purpose of egalitarian democracy.  Atheist, materialist governance will always devolve into gangsterism of one degree or another and, when it's that substrate, I'm betting on the worst imaginable and probably worse than that.  I first started talking about that more than a decade ago, I am entirely more convinced of it today than I was then.  Among the things that leads me to believe that is watching the progress of Communism in China and the ruling thugs in Russia which is inseparable from their positions in the Communist government of the Soviet Union when that was still up and hobbling.  I don't buy Putin's corruption of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchy as an expression of religious believe when it is so obvious that it is a convenient fiction, one that the corrupt Patriarchy is willing to go along with just as it did under the Czars.  The ones they admitted were Czars.  Of course Communism, as Marxism, as an alleged carrier of the ideals that Marx claimed in the Communist Manifesto, is as much as a fiction.  Communism, Marxism would seem to lead to fascism under a more organized kind of Victorian capitalism on steroids. In so far as it tried to sell itself on Christian-like ethics and morals and social good, it was bound to turn out the way it did and has.

I really don't think Western egalitarian democracy can survive without a religious belief in the potency of the commandments to do justice and practice love, I think it would probably be easier to try to prune and bend and fit natural selection where it really can't go and fit because it's just theory whereas egalitarian democracy is performance and fulfillment or it is nothing but empty words on paper, in the mouths of politicians and judges and theoreticians but it won't be real.  Without that substrate, and our Constitution doesn't provide for that, it's bound to fail even as, like one of Roberts' Supreme Court Rulings, destroying something even as its foetid, carrion carrying skeleton is still held to be intact.

This has been more answers to hate mail. 

* Unfortunately, the original article from the Boston Review now seems to be behind a pay-wall.  Dennett's whiny and incoherent response is still available online, but without Orr's competent, fascinating refutation of it, so I'm not posting a link.

Things I've Had To Tell People For More Than Thirty Years 2022 Edition

Susan Collins knew exactly what she was voting for when she voted for Kavanaugh, she has been a lying hypocrite and a Republican-fascist scumbag. She has endorsed Paul LePage for governor in 2022. That should tell you everything you need to know about her

If I hear another person pretending she's not all-in on Republican-fascism I might start carrying around a rubber chicken to hit such people with from now on.  

Writing For Your Own Ends - More About The Necessity Of Imagining

It's Not Guaranteed To Work But Neither Is Seeing A Shrink

LAST YEAR when I took the advice of one of my quite young nieces and took an online writing class it turned out to be one of the better things I've done in the past two decades.  Geezers who refuse to learn from the young are stupid.

Not that it's made me a better editor, it hasn't. I'm not even convinced it made me a better writer.   But it gave me even more of an appreciation for the value of People writing, putting down significant words in writing, even if they have no intention of anyone but themselves reading what they write.  I'd written fiction before, with a pencil, in notebooks, I'd written poems and even a couple of plays, all for my own entertainment.  If I'd had more wit than I do, when I first tried a word-processor and increased my typing speed, I may have realized the biggest advantage of putting your thoughts in writing, there is nothing that has helped me clarify my thinking like writing those out in words, reading them, changing them to make them clearer, all of it has been very valuable to me.  And it's a good and potentially useful hobby.  It's enjoyable.

But this is about the use of writing fiction as a means of understanding ones own personality, of ones understanding of other People and situations, those in their own lives, those in others lives that we haven't experienced.  Fiction can help with that when the substance of non-fiction that might do that isn't available to you.

I wrote about the assignment in that class to write a story about football that the teacher said he assigned because if there are men in the class he wanted them to write about something they knew.  

Well, as I told him, I have always disliked sports and especially despised American football and the cult of sentimentality and cloying dishonesty about it.  I gave him the facts, from head-injury, violence against Women and others, exploitation by coaches (I HATE TED LASSO). . .  He wisely didn't give in and allow me to write on another topic but told me to write a story about that aspect of the cult of football.  I did write a story something like that - "Jesus, you wrote a novella, not the short story I asked for!" - and it taught me a lot.  He had the same assignment this time and I wrote a second, much shorter, story and I learned a lot about it, too.  And I hate football as much as I ever have.

This last year I had someone who knew I had experience of dealing with and living with family members who are severe alcoholics ask for some advice on how to cope with the terrible drinking problem of her granddaughter.  I have written about that experience several times though this person didn't know that - my online writing is known only to a couple of people in my family who really aren't interested.  

Thinking about what to tell her from that experience, from the experience of alcoholics I've known took a long time.  I didn't tell her that I doubted the 28-day spin cycle that they were putting their hopes in would work, it never did for anyone I saw.  The three-day dry-outs are only good for keeping someone from driving for that long.  I had no right to suggest that those might not work for her because I have no idea if maybe they would.

I am entirely skeptical of the talking-therapy industry, especially the pseudo-sciences of psychology and its allies, especially the drug-prescribing racket of psychiatry.  Those have an abysmal record of treating alcoholics and other substance abusers. One of my family members who died of his severe alcoholism went to one for eight years of three-figure per hour payments and all he got out of it was an addiction to happy pills on top of his alcoholism and dumped as a "patient" when he lost his job due to his drinking and, with that, the insurance that paid for his "treatment."   I told her that but said her granddaughter might find just the right one for her.

I DID tell her that I thought AA was something that she should encourage her to try and that if one of the many local meetings didn't work for her, she should try another one.  Though its success is far from 100% I am entirely in favor of AA.  I told her that if she tried pulling the atheist supplied excuse my brother did, "I don't believe in a higher power," she should point out that she has made the alcohol molecule her higher power, one that rules her and is destroying her life.  They won't tell you that in the "secular alternative" mounted by atheists in opposition to AA, which is a Potemkin village false front which exists not at all except a few of the largest cities and which isn't any more successful than AA where it is more than a mere figment of the imagination of ideologues.  

On top of that, I suggested that she recommend that the girl try writing stories about people who had lives like she'd like to have, only that the character she wrote as herself (if there's one thing I'm sure of, every author always puts themselves in their fiction) should totally abstain from alcohol and other drugs.  Perhaps someone who successfully stopped drinking.  That she should  write every day that she could manage, should read what she wrote, should edit and change it to make it more like she would like it to be.  How she would change things to make her life better.  ESPECIALLY THAT SHE SHOULD NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT HOW OTHER PEOPLE HAVE DONE HER WRONG.  And she shouldn't use her depression as an excuse and a reason for drinking. I think that that is one of the worst things that the psychologists and psychiatrists and other psych industry hacsk do, they hand alcoholics excuses they didn't have, depression, guilt, blaming other people, for continuing their substance abuse.

I said it might not work but if it didn't at she wouldn't have lost any money to the mountebanks of the psych industry and she might have found something out about how to become sober  the consequences of not imagining herself as sober.

Everything we think about ourselves, how we consciously manage our behavior is a product of imagination.  I don't think you can change your life for the better without having a strong and detailed imagination of what you want to change it to.  One strong enough to make a difference in your real life.   I don't think talking therapy, especially that which obsesses on the past, can do that to you nearly as well, as readily available, as cheaply as this kind of self-generated writing and, if you use a password on your computer, as privately.  

Last year I got some hate mail because I said writing was too important a practice to allow the professionals to restrict everyone from doing it, the pseudo-grammarians and devotees of mechanics and standardized spellings from inhibiting People from doing.   Trying to save our lives when we imagine ourselves into or fail to imagine ourselves out of trouble is even more important.  I don't think anyone with a professional ideological concept of how we are to be is likely to be much help to us and that's what the psych-industry is founded in.   I think you're more likely to find help for that in a number of other places, maybe in reading theology of the right kind, though there's lots of that that wouldn't help, either.  

The cheap, stock-image of the drunken author might show a possible danger of being dishonest with yourself.  But that will get me onto the stupidity of the pulp-writers like Hammett and Chandler, even too many of the better ones.  They were, for the most part, dishonest writers.  It will only work if you try to be honest with yourself.  I think keeping it to yourself instead of trying to make money out of it, using a password on your computer, might help to make it useful instead of an exercise in degredation.

What The Hell?

I HAVE NO IDEA how Maureen Dowd's crappy column ended up pasted into my piece.  I NEVER EVEN READ MAUREEN DOWD.   I doubt it would be worth my while to complain.

Hate Mail - Some Thoughts On The Pose Of Pretending To Not See The Most Obvious Distinctions When It Suits You - Hate Mail

AMONG THE THINGS I've grown entirely tired of there is none that is more tired than the pseudo-legalistic pose of "even-handed" treatment of entirely different and opposite things

Republican-fascists destroying egalitarian democracy - The Democratic Party,

anti-democratic ideologies, fascism, white supremacy (the same in the American context), Republican-fascism, Nazism, Marxism - egalitarian democracy

Violent insurrection against the legitimate electoral order - making the elected President, President according to law,

Lies - the truth,

Rampant evil - any level of morality,

The list could go on and on. 

The idiocy of refusing to make those kinds of distinctions is based in the "enlightenment" idea that nature is going to take care of everything in the end so People can safely pretend that they don't know the difference and that such distinctions are impossible to make on the level of mathematical certainty so we shouldn't bother - I maintain that that is the reason the idiots, Madison and others in the First Congress who scribbled the poesy of the First and other Bill of Rights Amendments were so inspecific as to leave corrupt judges and "justices" the ability to put blatant lies and hate speech on the same legal footing as the obvious truth and moral speech, the legal corruption that has gotten us where we are now.  Something they started doing in little and big ways almost from the start of judge-craft under the Constitution.

No where is that more obviously the case than in the courts* but "journalism" the "free press" is matching them and, in many cases, surpassing them in their "even-handed" treatment of obvious malignancy and anywhere from probable to certain benevolence.  I made the mistake of listening to NPR a bit during my recess and it was among the things about it that reminded me why I stopped giving to them two decades ago.  But that irresponsible non-feasant malfeasance is typical of the American media.  

The media in the United States is not a dependable friend of democracy,  it has been the most effective tool of the anti-democratic forces on the right and the calculated enablers of the anti-democratic "left" who are always ready to be the tool of the fascists.  But it's not only those who are corrupt and clueless, it's pretty much the foremost stand of the media that it's institutional prerogatives are never to sacrificed in the mere service of the truth, the public good, equality and, in the end, democracy.   In that they share the general habits of the legal industry, the lawyers, the prosecutors, the judges and the "justices" who go by or can credibly be labeled as "institutionalists,"   

I grew to despise that term during the Trump years as we were, over and over again, reassured by the media and their talking heads that this one or that one of Trump's goons were "institutionalists" who would never go past a certain point and so endanger the repute or alleged soundness of the institution to which they were attached.  I remember Comey being called that even as that hypocritical Republican boy-scout violated DoJ policy and threw the election to Trump in the last weeks of the campaign, I remember Rod Rosenstein being called that even as he appointed another famous fixture of the Department of "justice" the man of granite with feet of putty, Robert Mueller to conduct his investigation that never amounted to much even as even people I still have some respect for assured us he would not let it become the toy of his good buddy William Barr as he took over and Rosenstein did his stuffed dummy with the glass eyes acts as Barr lied about and suppressed Mueller's long waited for report.  And Mueller didn't do much more than that when he reluctantly appeared before the Congress to not much report on his report.

I further learned to despise it during the term of Merrick Garland when it has continued to be used.  I'm just about at the point of deciding that the case on that has been thrown and the jury will never come back on it.

In an honest, egalitarian democracy, there would be no "institutionalists" because they would hold as absolute bedrock that those institutions have no higher purpose than to serve egalitarian democracy, that the laws have no higher purpose than that and the service to the common good.  Without that the DoJ is no better under Garland than it was under the worst AGs, Sessions, Barr, Wittacker, John Mitchell, . . . you have to go way back before you can find any Democratic AGs who are as malignant as they are, though the media, especially the DC based Washington Press Whores will never acknowledge that fact.   

* A first draft of this went far into the "free speech" "justicing" that led to pitched legal battles over such matters as requirements for strippers to wear pasties and g-strings and that such bull shit was judged to be important "First Amendment" molehills such as idiot 1960s-> style "liberals" would stand and die on.   For those who object to me doubting the wisdom of the Warren Court and its stupidest rulings, of which there were quite a few.   Maybe I'll do more reading up on the speech of strip-joints and write what I started but it was so stupid I was wondering if the pain meds they had me on were doing the typing.  I have to wonder if those old white men sometimes wondered if they were in incipient dementia as they wrote and read that crap though the civil-libertarians who spouted it were just shameless paid-sills for it, no pasties or g-strings to hide their shamelessness.

Multiply This By Three And You Get To The Alito Court We've Got Now - Or tolt ya so.

 Tuesday, June 20, 2006

  EVERYONE IN THE ROOM KNEW THEY WERE LYING

Molly Ivins' most enduring statement might turn out to be her observation that everyone in Washington DC ends up saying the same things. One of the same things today is that the Senate Judiciary hearings for Supreme Court Justices have become a Kabuki dance. What do you think the chances are that even three of the parrots of the DC press corps knows anything about the high art of Kabuki? Given that within the past year we have been witness to two of these shows and what those were like I'd like to suggest we pass up the obvious "theater of the absurd" designation and go straight to "charades".

But charades isn't the right word either. In charades while the player says nothing they make gestures that are designed to get the audience to say what the player is thinking. In these hearings there were a flood of words and few gestures, give or take a staged bout of tears, and the exercise was to make the audience NOT say what everyone in the room and beyond knew was the subject of the play.

Roberts and Alito lied every single time they verbally mimed the pose of not having made up their minds before hearing a case. These kobe cattle were bred and hand raised to provide the most predictable results. They were nominated into the entirely predictable and safe Republican hands to be put on the court to join Scalia and Thomas to gut the Bill of Rights and Civil Rights amendments and to continue the Republican handover of the country to the oligarchs and their corporate properties.

Everyone in the room knew they were lying. Such press as had any knowledge of the Court and things judicial knew they were lying though I'm prepared to concede that the cabloid clack might not have even known what the Court was. The large majority of us who listened to the entire farce knew they were lying. And now the lies will continue as they do exactly what everyone knew they would do. The very rare times that one of them has a bit of a woozy stomach and does something slightly unpredictable will be held onto like a life raft to prove the myth of judicial independence but that won't happen very often.

The lesson for the left is that Earl Warren is dead. He's been dead a good long while now. We can stop pretending that the Supreme Court is going to be anything but the hand maiden of the corporate oligarchy. If we are going to fight this its going to be through the ballot and if not there God save us.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Zoë Comyns - Marconi & Me

 

Marconi & Me  

 

A podcast producer finds a set of code books. They are the Marconi International Code books. They contain 500 pages of 5-letter codes and their translations. The main character starts to read the codes obsessively and twist them into her own life story. In themselves the codes form extraordinarily poetic lists.The innovative drama charts a crumbling relationship from its origins, via a history of sound, telegraphy and communication, Marconi's telegraphic work in Ireland and a flight into family madness.

Written and narrated by Zoë Comyns.

Performed by Zoë Comyns and José Miguel Jiménez

Additional roles voiced by Nathalie Cazaux, Michael Comyns, Leo Oosterweghel,

Oliver Hochadel, Kerstin Aquaviva, Jesper Bergmann and Dora Vargha.

Extra recordings by Colette Kinsella

Sound Design by Brendan Rehill, Brendan Jenkinson, and Damian Chennells

Sound Supervision by Damian Chennells

Producer for RTÉ: Kevin Brew

Producer for New Normal Culture: Zoë Comyns

Series Producer, RTÉ Drama On One: Kevin Reynolds

The original text was published in the Australian journal The Lifted Brow under the title 'Owing to the Failure Of.’ An early version of the piece was performed at Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival and at Dublin Fringe Festival 2018, with direction by Caitriona McLaughlin

The beginning and some of the interludes in this remind me of the 1950s - far-out composer Kenneth Gaburo but it's a satisfying drama which much of his stuff wasn't, though some of it was musically interesting. 

I Freely Renounce My "Right" To Lie And Promote Bigotry When The Cost Of That "Right" Is The Lives Of Others

THE SCRIBBLING PROFESSIONS, the media have always had an interest in being able to publish anything they wanted without any regard for its consequences, that is apart from those absolute bans on publication and "speech," which they maintain as absolutely as they do "free press", are in its members interest, such as people who can be accused of stealing their literary property and making a profit off of it.  The legal fictions absolutely banning the alleged stealing of valuable scribblage and that to which scholars and "scholars" object is a huge exception to "free speech" absolutism for which those who maintain that ideological stand have little problem standing for.

And the ersatz heroes and heroines of "free speech - free press" etc. and their lawyers have had very notably flexible standards, I have before noted that heroine of such bilge as Lillian Hellman who paid her famously "free speech" lawyer Ephraim London big bucks to swallow his previous claim to fame to sue Mary McCarthy when Mary McCarthy told the truth, that Lillian Hellman was a prodigious liar and falsifier who, it should be noted, infamously stole the heroism of a woman who actually was in the anti-Nazi resistance to make herself a heroine in one of her alleged memoirs, the story made into the allegedly based-on-life movie which, no doubt, much of its audience mistook for truth, "Julia".  

The hypocrisies of the writing profession and so-called journalism on the issues of speech are so many, going from the subtle to the blatant, that it has provided me with lots of material over the years.  The language used to describe speech that is malignant in its content and obvious goals, terms such as "objectionable speech," "speech you don't personally like," "offensive speech," when applied to the kind of thing that leads to people being attacked, oppressed and murdered is speech of monumentally cynically calculated dismissal by those who never expect such speech will impinge on the lives of themselves or those they allegedly care about.  

And lets clear that up right now.  No lawyer, no judge, no "justice" no scribbler or babbler who would knowingly put at risk those they allegedly care about in this way, any of them DO NOT REALLY CARE ABOUT THOSE THEY PUT AT RISK.  Not putting people at such risk, putting their physical safety and lives at risk over the ersatz value of protecting hate speech is an act or real caring.  That is as true for family members as it is unknown Women, Black People, People of Color, LGBTQ, etc. who you have no real affectionate or personal connection to.  I don't think the civil liberties lawyers really do care about those their work victimizes. I dare you to explain how facilitating their endangerment on behalf of those who hate them and can be whipped up by those words is an act of caring.*

When it is lawyers, judges and "justices" who dismiss the clearly intended and frequently delivered harms of such speech, who often approve of that harm - and here I would name a long list including those sitting on the bench right now, including names like Powell, and Rehnquist and Roberts, Alito, Thomas, etc. many of the big names in the affluent ranks of civil liberties lawyers, that cynical and calculated dismissal will lead the scribblers and media to either excuse or praise those cynical and often evil men and women.

In an article in the very self-interested New York Times last year there was hand-wringing over the fact that a lot of younger lawyers who work in or are associated with one of the most misrepresented of all allegedly virtuous groups mistaken as liberal, the ACLU, were questioning its devotion to free-speech absolutism in face of the rise of neo-Nazism and neo-facism among those who the old ACLU could be counted on to represent or support in court.  It mentioned the Virginia ACLU who facilitated the neo-Nazis in Charlottsville Va.

A tragedy also haunts the A.C.L.U.’s wrenching debates over free speech.

In August 2017, officials in Charlottesville, Va., rescinded a permit for far-right groups to rally downtown in support of a statue to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Officials instead relocated the demonstration to outside the city’s core.

The A.C.L.U. of Virginia argued that this violated the free speech rights of the far-right groups and won, preserving the right for the group to parade downtown. With too few police officers who reacted too passively, the demonstration turned ugly and violent; in addition to fistfights, the far right loosed anti-Semitic and racist chants and a right-wing demonstrator plowed his car into counterprotesters, killing a woman. Dozens were injured in the tumult.

Revulsion swelled within the A.C.L.U., and many assailed its executive director, Anthony Romero, and legal director, Mr. Cole, as privileged and clueless. The A.C.L.U. unfurled new guidelines that suggested lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose “values are contrary to our values” against the potential such a case might give “offense to marginalized groups.”

A.C.L.U. leaders asserted that nothing substantive had changed. “We should recognize the cost to our allies but we are committed to represent those whose views we regard as repugnant,” Mr. Cole said in an interview with The New York Times.

Which, of course, is easy to say if YOU AND YOUR LOVED ONES are not under direct danger from the Nazis and fascists the ACLU represent as the major part of their fundraising schtick - a few of the higher salary levels at the ACLU are mentioned in the article.  

The blood of the victims of those the ACLU and the judge facilitated are rightly seen as being on their hands as much as those they enabled and, through that, encouraged.

Perhaps more should be considered as to just what it is that makes the speech facilitated by the ACLU and the judge is "repugnant".  

If hate speech were merely words of dislike or innocuous insult implied in the civil-liberties language, they would not achieve that level of objectionablity.  

Such speech isn't repugnant due to it offending the delicate sensibilities of the genteel and well heeled, IT IS REPUGANT BECAUSE IT GETS PEOPLE ATTACKED, MAIMED AND KILLED.  To maintain the line of not only the largely majority white affluent lawyer male and, in some cases, female civil liberties industry personnel, they cannot really believe themselves and their loved ones to be in any real danger from it.  I would go so far as to say that many of their minority members and allies who have a greater expectation of their loved ones or even themselves being the targets of hate speech must have become professionally acculturated to ignoring that risk out of professional advantage.

The twisted morality of such genteel-well-heeled professionals who will go home to their lives of protected affluence allows them to separate themselves from the consequences of what they champion AND THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT BOTH ADVOCATING HATE SPEECH ON THE PART OF LAWYERS AND ITS PERMISSION BY JUDGES AND "JUSTICES" ARE ACTS FACILITATING ITS RESULTS.

So is writing that kind of virtue-signaling liberalish, really libertarian, journalism or scribblage, babbling such babblage.  The blood of the victims of white-supremacists, fascists (in the American context that is a tautology) and Nazis is on those lawyers, those judges, those "justices" the virtuous journalists and scribblers AND THOSE WHO DONATE TO THAT FACILITATION OF THE RESULTS.   In the case of the New York Times, the defense of which is the substance of the comment this is an answer to, it has been right in the middle of this because, in pursuit of its profitable ability to print untruth in the Sullivan case, it got one of the stupidest and most dangerous decisions a sometimes  muddled court made in its favor.  It could have asked to print a harmless retraction and paid the court costs during the first hearing and the judge may well have let them off for pennies, instead, for the want of and cost of fact checking of a paid ad in that rag, the demons of lies was unleashed in the name of the First Amendment.   I have to wonder if hate speech had not the year before gotten a Supreme Court "justice" killed instead of a president if they would have felt so virtuous in handing down that decision by an all-white, affluent, lawyer staffed Court.

* The old ACLU style dodge "if they can suppress the speech of Nazis they can suppress the speech of anyone" is a symptom of how susceptible otherwise allegedly intelligent People are to slogans that that, itself accentuates the danger of such speech.  In the United States, in the golden age of "free speech-press" it is the benevolent and positive speech which has not flourished as hate-talk-jockery, hate talk TV, FOX, etc. have swamped the truth with hate talk and lies.  That theory is so disproved in real life that its maintenance is evidence for the study of popular delusions.

As a gay man who has several times experienced real violence due to my identity and a lifetime of threats, I'd rather sacrifice the privilege to lie and spout hate that the likes of the ACLU have protected -WHICH, IF I USED THEM, I WOULD KNOW I WAS DOING SOMETHING WRONG - in favor of the safety and security of other members of targeted minorities and Women.  You can take my "right" to lie and spread hate from me and I doubt I'd feel anything but an enhanced practice of using speech and writing responsibly and morally.

Still Faking A Swivet About The Leak Instead Of The Nationalization of Womens' Bodies

IF THE SUPREME COURT were up to all good, they never would have adopted the pose of judicial secrecy that is so much in the news now that, almost certainly a conservative, associated with the court has leaked a draft opinion, clearly coordinated with right-wing media, The Wall Street Journal and Senate Republican-fascists, leaked a draft opinion bound to be as bad in its effect as the Dred Scott decision, perhaps its nearest historical like. Nothing about the leak to POLITICO! has any benefit to liberals.

The Supreme Court should be required to conduct almost all of its business in public, little to nothing about almost all of its case load has anything like a national security character that requires that.  It is not like a grand-jury which is justifiably conducted under strict secrecy rules until its final decision is made.  It should certainly have more stringent reporting and anti-corruption measures enforced by law and removal - we've got to make a way to do that other than the myth of impeachment - if those are violated.  The Court is and has been for almost all of its history the most corrupt branch of government.

The publications and replication and associated scandals in scientific and so-called scientific research has had a small effect in forcing some measure of transparency in very recent years.  Something similar is clearly necessary in the Supreme Court BECAUSE ITS MEMBERS CANNOT BE TRUSTED TO POLICE THEMSELVES.  Clarence Thomas and his insurrectionist wife should be the last veil covering that raw and putrid power play that lies behind the pose of judicial decorum.

The Supreme Court should be stripped of its robes, its mystique and its legend because that is part and parcel of its evil doing.   It should be legally required to conduct all of its business in public and not behind any kind of a veil of secrecy.   Its legend is as phony as that of the ol' way-est and the Lost Cause and all of the other regional BS that are tools against the common good.

All Of The Poisons Embedded In The Constitution And Others Placed Their By Supreme Courts Are Reaching Fatal Level

Finally, it is the act itself that matters.  When instrumental reason is is the sole guide to action, the acts it justifies are robbed of their inherent meanings and thus exist in an ethical vacuum. Joseph Weisenbaum

THE EVILS EMBEDDED in the United States Constitution by founder-slavers and founder-financiers at its framing and adoption have never not been something that impinges on the life experience of those who those evils were intended to enslave and oppress, Black People and other People of Color and those whose subjugation was so routine at the time of its adoption that they didn't bother to encode them, Women.   LGBTQ People weren't even thought of, though certainly oppressed by law and custom.

Yesterday I posted about the most notable and scandalous lapses among Christians, "most Christian princes" etc. in ignoring and blatantly violating the teachings of Jesus while professing to believe that he was divine.  Something similar is typical of those who uphold the Constitutional order, especially those whose entire profession, under the obviously badly framed federal government, is allegedly dedicated to it.  Of course I'm talking about the Supreme Court and the judicial system and legal profession which is so largely determined by the Supreme Court.  If there is anything like royalty in the United States, it isn't the executive which embodies it, it is the Supreme Court as it has taken the dangerously vague and expansive powers granted to it by the written Constitution and as it has usurped powers to itself never put into it, by its say so and maintained because the other branches had no power to prune that parasitic growth back.  They could, of course, do that but Democrats, who have a misplaced respect for even that "law," won't do it and Republican-fascists would do it to regularize the kind of Republican-fascist criminality that was pioneered by the Nixon, Reagan and Bush I and II administrations and regime and which went whole hog in the Trump regime.*

Though I doubt he knows I or this platform exists, I felt confirmed in my view of the Constitution and the Supreme Court when I heard the truly honorable Congressman and Constitutional Scholar Jamie Raskin on Rachel Maddow's show characterize the Supreme Court and its sordid history, its role in American history as the foremost tool of wealth and oligarchy and the character of its members as social, economic and legal anti-democratic reactionaries.  

He even noted that that was its history despite the entirely atypical Warren Court.  Over the past several decades, when I pointed out that terrible truth about the Supreme Court. the secularly sainted Warren Court was the chicken-wire and terry-cloth surrogate mommy figure clung to by the college-credentialed liberals who were the audience for what I said.  The number of times I had to point out to them that Earl Warren and his associates were long gone and that even other such idols of the liberal American civic religion, such as Holmes were false demigods would number in the hundreds if not thousands.  

They especially didn't like it when I pointed out that if the Warren Court's civil-libertarian rulings were supposed to enhance equality and egalitarian democracy, subsequent American history proved they have had the opposite effect.  

The highest point of official, federally enacted egalitarian democracy in American history, the early years of the Johnson Administration, sank in their "freedom of the press" attacks on Democrats, Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon won the office he lost before those rulings were made freeing the press to lie with impunity.  The march to today's dangerous situation that risks actual fascism, embodied in Trump but also any time the Republican-fascists gain control of the elected branches - it now has the Court - began with the criminal, Nixon.  It has steadily gotten more dangerous since then.  The Warren Court gave them the key to that in a number of its allegedly liberal rulings.

The dangers of trying to reform the American government through a new Constitution which could beneficially look at the two hundred fifty years in which the novel attempt of the "founders" has repeatedly been proven to not only be inadequate for its intended purpose, and how to correct them but at times disastrously dangerous, are more than matched by the dangers of keeping it as it is.

It was designed to be a vehicle of slavery and subjugation (see first paragraph above) and all sorts of corruption and theft and graft and LIES have not only never been corrected, they have expanded and flourished UNDER THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER WITH "THE BILL OF RIGHTS" FOR TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES.  The one great alleged success in its reform took one of the most horrific Civil Wars in modern history.  That, in itself, even if it had worked to really correct it, proves that the Constitution and, especially, the government by judiciary under it, is not a success.   And de jure slavery was succeeded by American apartheid and de facto slavery even with the Civil War Amendments in place, the Supreme Court weaponized those at cross purpose to their adoption and the legislative record of that.

A presidential system is far more dangerous than a prime ministerial system in a republic, though as Boris Johnson's Britain proves, even a prime ministerial form under the reign of Murdocian style lying press,  is not as safe as it should be. Though a lot of that is because the British system has anti-democratic features embedded in it of unequal representation as much as the American one does.  

As Trump and other lesser criminal presidents have proven, the founders imaginary protection against even the most dictatorial of those who manage to get in under our corrupt system of electing a president (the stinking putrid Electoral College), impeachment, is a fairy tale which is not even used to remove corrupt Supreme Court members.  The two which the Democrats got against Trump hardly slowed him down as the Republican-fascist party, AND IT IS NOW UNDENIABLY A FASCIST PARTY, supported him and still, now, out of power and under inadequate investigation for the most serious of crimes, has him as the head of his party.  Of course the anti-democratically constituted Senate will always be the place where impeachment actions against even the most criminal and dangerous of Republican-fascist presidents and unethical Supreme Court Republican-fascist "justices" die.  

And if he does not become their nominee in 2024, some other Trumpian figure, the extremely stupid and morally degenerate governor of Florida, or any one of various others, can be counted on to continue much in the same way as Trump did.

This is the time when all of the evil embedded in the Constitution, weaponized by lawyers, scholars and scribblers in the hire of fascist billionaires FOREIGN AS WELL AS DOMESTIC, thanks to the Supreme Court and the idiots of the American Civil Liberties industry, have come up with the algorithms of instrumental reasoning which, to any supposed democratic American Republic are like prions in the brains of brain eaters.  That's what that "judicial philosophy" so discussed in the recent Supreme Court nomination hearings were. That is what was bound to happen in American government, under the written Constitution from the late 18th century under the operation of Supreme Courts and their sometimes-thing of precedent.  Such Constitutional scholars as Jamie Raskin will point out that no other country allows its Supreme Court to do what ours gave itself the power to do, that evil is one that cannot be blamed on the amateur status of the "founders" it was the creation of the Taney Court when it nullified the Missouri Compromise in the Dred Scott decision to try to cement legal slavery into American law forever and to extend it to the entire country.  

The Roberts Court - which is probably more the Alito Court, in fact - is about to do to Women what the Taney Court did to Black People.  And the same Court has already made some of the most blatant and effective attacks on democracy and the right of The People to vote in the history of the Country, it is hell bent on stripping many people, Black People, other People of Color, Women, LGBTQ, ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO ARE NOT RICH of their rights, theirs is more than the mirror image of the Warren Court because their program has the backing of the biggest money in our history and the most blatantly fascist party in our history.  The Republican-fascist Party is the wet dream of the KKK that marched in Washington a century ago, it is the disideratum of the framers of the Confederacy and unlike that time, those with the power and money backing to do it are not confined to a specific region of the country which a concentrated military effort can, at terrible cost, defeat.  

The Warren Court and its short-sighted to idiotic "free speech-press" rulings did, in fact, give the billionaires and multi-millionaire fascists their foremost tool, the ability to lie with impunity, and with the full support and promotion of the media.  Lies have always been a foundtaion of all evil, especially when that evil is a result of malignant governments and courts. If you can lie people into opposing their own interests as well as equality and justice, as a fascist oligarch, you've got it made and the Warren Court and the ACLU gave them that using the inadequate and sacrilized language of the First Amendment.  In an electoral government it is necessary to lie effectively to enough people to put the henchmen of the rich and oligarchic in power and under our appalling anti-democratic Constitution with the anti-democratic Senate and the repeatedly demonstrated evil of the Electoral College, you don't have to get nearly a majority of The People to be suckered.  

Maybe most of all we have to declare, finally, that the 18th century is over, the "enlightenment" was not enlightened, the "founders" were not geniuses or especially virtuous, some of them are were as vile as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and the rest of the billionaire hoarders of the common wealth.  The "genius" of the "founders" amateur status - uniformed by the two and a half centuries of information gathering and viewing their creation in action since then - is nothing we should tolerate anymore.  We will either get rid of the anti-democratic mechanisms in government they created for evil purposes and those which don't work the way they're supposed to and once and for all remove the self-created powers of government by judiciary which the Supreme Court has steadily used to make those and other evils worse AND DO IT IN THE CONSTITUTION or we are doomed.  The slave power and its modern translation into American apartheid has had two and a half centuries for its henchmen, the lawyers and scholars and media scribblers, to make what they do more effective.  We change that and once and for all remove those or we are doomed.
 

 LET ME GO ON RECORD as not giving the slightest frick about some clerk leaking the draft opinion, the stately cotillion that masks the raw power play of the judicial power and its anti-democratic, oligarchic corruption has been a protection for what has always been the most dangerous and most corrupt branch of the federal government.

Anyone who wrings their clean, manicured little hands over that is as much a part of the problem as Alito and Kavanaugh. 

Hate Mail - About "The Historical Jesus" And "Imaginary Friends"

ONE OF THE biggest follies and one of the greatest dishonesties of so-called enlightenment modernism is the denigration of the imagination, "that's only imaginary," "you're imagining that," "it's all in his, her, their,your imagination," is a general dismissal of whatever someone wants to dismiss.  The dismissed, alleged to be "merely imaginary" entity can be understood to be contrasted with whatever the dismisser asserts is a solid and solidly real entity which they hold in their own (no doubt believed to be) superior mind which isn't dependent on the merely imaginary.

That is such an obvious lie that to point out that it is a lie will shock the self-imagined rationalist but it wouldn't be a surprise to some of the greatest heroes of modern, "rationalist," college-credentialed, "reality based" people.  Einstein in his evaluation of his friend and colleague Eddington praised his work based on the fecundity of his imagination even as he criticized some of his conclusions on his alleged failure in critical thinking.  I assumed he meant in Eddington's late attempt to come up with a "Fundamental Theory" of physical science, something which Einstein, himself, failed to do in his late work and which I doubt anyone will ever achieve because I don't think our imaginations can comprehend enough of even the physical world to allow someone to achieve such a thing.  The much vaunted "theory of everything" that modern physicists and cosmologists, especially the atheist fundamentalists among those, is likely never to be more than the figment of some very specialized and cultivated imaginations with an unadmitted ideological goal which has nothing to do with physical science and everything to do with atheist-materialist fundamentalism.  

That's not to say that what's imagined can't be a mistakenly held belief or view of things, which may be entirely innocuous but which may, also, be extremely dangerous or evil.  Our imaginations are capacious enough for them to contain all of those things.  Imagination is no more good or bad than life is, even "real life."  Every weapon of mass or individual destruction wielded or threatened by a tyrant was the imagination of some scientist or other weaponeer harnessing their imagined view of material science.

History. dealing with a far, far broader range of realities than the physical sciences, is, generally, more honest about that, or at least it should be.  Any work of history, dealing with a far broader and far more difficult to encompass reality than particle physicists have as their professional concentration, is merely fragmentary.  There is no such thing as a comprehensive historical point of view, even those which encompass a very large body of evidence, documentary and physical, will be nothing like a comprehensive view of even any given day, never mind a year or decade or era. Despite the fact that before my involuntary recess I'd praised the ability of history to come up with some SOME facts of far more certain reliability and finality than even physics can in some cases, history as a study is never a completely comprehended view of its subject matter.  And all of it, even that which rigorously deals with documentation and physical evidence, is permeated with and resides in and depends on human imagination.  

There is no part of anything which we do which is not entirely dependent on the imagination of things and events, living organisms and human beings . . . Even our most basic sensory apprehension of our surroundings is dependent  on and founded in images and scenarios in our imaginations, even the tiniest part of the outside universe is not recreated in our minds, what we have in there is not what is really out there, though it might be a good and reliable model of it and, in many cases, an honest one.  Our imaginations might lead us to some success in navigating and living in the external universe but we are all as likely to imagine ourselves into trouble, for ourselves and other living beings, there are no People more apt to do that than those within the culture of modern "enlightenment" college-credentialed snobs, especially the affluent among them.

I re-read, yet again, The Real Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson and was struck by both his deep appreciation for the benefits of historical method and the problems of it, especially the problems of academics who make assumptions about their historicism that are as careless as those of the most arrogant and clueless of physicist-cosmologists about the limits of their subject.  The beginning of the honest practice of any historical method is to admit that it is inherently problematic and what it produces is not going to be the reproduction of reality.  The best historian, the best biographer - when they have what can honestly be considered enough of the right kind of evidence to produce biography - does not reproduce an "historical" anyone.   And there is not that kind of evidence much before the modern era to produce that kind of biographic treatment.  Any claim that you can produce an, or, even more cluelessly, THE "historical Jesus," is a self-impeaching flight of dishonest imagination.

 I am very tempted to go over that entire chapter of the book that deals most directly with that because the bad habits of thought he discusses in it are ubiquitous and there is definite bleed over into the general culture.  He asks a very provocative question as to why "the Church" should consider the "historical Jesus" which is a product of the imaginations of some, very often quite ideologically motivated, academics more than the "Jesus of faith" which is who you find in the Scriptures.  

Why should a modernist, reductionist "Jesus" of what was, honestly, a rather dodgy academic publicity stunt of announced ideological motivation, be considered to be superior to the Jesus of the Gospels?  Johnson does something I've never really seen much as a self-criticism within that kind of effort, he pointedly criticizes the criteria used to come up with some of the most ubiquitous of claims of the historical-critical method such as those used to illegitimate some of the Pauline Letters, other Letters in the New Testament, the Book of Acts and which are used to slice, dice and trim the Gospels, canonical and apocryphal, into an ideologically acceptable form - which often renders them quite useless for any good purpose.  I will admit that I, very far from a rigorous New Testament scholar have just accepted that current most common view of it without questioning.  And I won't go into the non-scholarly side-show of those like the late John Spong except to point out that I never did take him seriously on such topics.  

I really have to wonder at the motivations of why they want us to imagine Jesus in the many, conflicting, incompatible ways they want him to be thought of when it's clear that such Jesuses don't really come out in a place much better than that of the fundamentalist-televangelists who they announced themselves in opposition to.

Even a quarter of a century ago, after about what I noticed as a quarter of a century effort by the American media of presenting right-wing ideological "christianity" as Christianity, Luke Timothy Johnson was able to ask why the churches closest to the John Spong, Karen King, John Dominic Crossan, etc. imagination of Jesus were ever fading as the fundamentalists were gaining.  I think it's because that kind of Jesus imagining effort comes out with a Jesus that doesn't work for what they claim they want him to do.  

The Jesus of the Gospels asks us to do some of the hardest things imaginable, to sell all we have and give the money to the poor, to give all of our money to those who won't pay us back (absolutely fatal to capitalism and the investment portfolios of Christians, right to left), to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, to be without a beam in our eye before we criticize a speck in someone else's, to be without sin before we cast the first stone (absolutely fatal to those who favor capital punishment), to do to others what we'd have them do to us (this risks me getting on football at allegedly Christian institutions of learning), etc.

If that Jesus, the Jesus that the conservative Churches, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Orthodox (risking getting into the Patriarch of Moscow), the Jesus of the Catholic medieval monarchs and the Protestant Most Christian Princes, the Jesus of the old mainline denominations back when they tried clergy for heresy, etc. was unsuccessful in leading those who professed that belief into actually doing what Jesus would have done - AND NONE OF US EVER HAS DONE THAT - then the diluted, diminished, pruned and rationalized Jesus of the historical-critical movement, the Jesus made acceptable to "enlightenment rationalism" and scientism and materialism is going to be ever less of a force for doing that in the general population.  If such a denatured Jesus might work among those for whom the cultural vestiges of the "real Jesus" of faith are mixed with a general culture of liberalish niceness, that's certainly something that diminishes over time.  I can't recall which comedian it was I recently heard pointing out that the professed morality among the mocking dismissers of Jesus were actually derived from the Gospel but that's certainly true.  I think it's as certainly true that within my lifetime the vestiges of that cultural heritage have been petering out like Nietzsche's imagination of the Shadow of the Buddha.  Look at the "Buddhists" among the libertarian amoralist cyber-tycoon class for a parallel to that.  And the ones that don't even make that much of an effort at putting up a false front over their Nietzchean march of acquisition and amoral decadence.  I'll bet they all pretty much bought into the new atheist fad of the '00s. Jeffrey Epstein and his pimpess were really big in that as they were in their other activities.

Announcing The Grand ReOpening - Sort of

THEY THOUGHT THEY FOUND SOMETHING, which meant more time out, but it wasn't there.   They think I'm going to live.  I was going to say "sorry" but that would be a lie.  Especially with the hate mail that got left here over the past two weeks. 

I'm working on something to post tomorrow or Wednesday.  I hope to get back to the daily schedule at that time.   I'm out of touch haven't read any news - wasn't online where I was.  I couldn't stand to have their TV on and American radio news mostly stinks.   I loathe NPR as much as I had come to loathe it.  

Though I listened to Toby Laboutillier's "Down Memory Lane" something I used to do weekly but haven't for a while.  He has a somewhat different format now and I made the mistake of leaving it on for the second hour when they start with the top hits for the week in 1962,  I had The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance going through my head for days.   The only person in that movie I had any respect for as an actor was the villain, Lee Marvin who I thought was one of the best Hollywood actors of that generation.  I hated both Jimmy and the Duke and not just because they were Republicans.   

One of my sisters loved them some Gene Pitney and so I got that song indelibly burned into my memory.  I hate that era of pop music even though I do think some of the song writing was better than what came later.  Pop culture is retrogressive, the idea that it's progressive is one of the biggest loads of B.S. there is.

I'm Almost Back

NOT A VERY EXCITING week, no thrills or danger (except of insolvency)  just tests and nothing conclusive.   Not As Seen on TV.

The Unmovable Moral Bedrock That Other Moral Positions Rest On And The Difference

I'D INTENDED to get right back to Louis Boudin's Government by Judiciary this morning but that will have to wait, perhaps as long as a week, I may be out for several days, maybe longer, a health issue has sprung up and it may either be relatively minor or major, we'll see.

I would highly recommend that if you have access to the two volumes of his study, it is more relevant today with the out of control, Republican-fascists on the Roberts Court about to send us back to the very period which Boudin knew if not something far worse and, as it is clear, the Constitution not only doesn't have any controls on the out of control, unelected, lifetime appointed tyrants in black robes, there is no legal mechanism for even forcing them to not be openly dishonest crooks and nest featherers.   We do something to change that on the most basic levels or things are going to go entirely to hell.

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It was the farthest thing from my mind to write something so internal to the Catholic Church this morning but this passage from the National Catholic Reporter by the very erudite Michael Winters touches on something I've been thinking a lot about lately, the modernist trap of moral relativism that might be more dangerous than the other traps of convention and orthodoxy that it was invented to counter.  The issue, a letter written by some of the worst Catholic hierarchs complaining about the German Conference of Bishops, most of those named by Winters are men I have little to no respect for and several who I rather despise but he concentrated on one of the signatories to the thing that he has some respect for but who I know nothing at all about:

At the meetings of German Catholics earlier this year, the synodal body publicly voted for a document calling for women deacons and for involving laypeople in the selection of bishops, as well as calling for a relaxation of the rule of celibacy for the clergy and for some kind of blessing of same-sex unions. Previously, the bishops of Scandinavia voiced concerns about "the direction, the methodology and the substance" of the German consultations as did the president of the Polish bishops' conference.

Last year, when some of the preparatory documents for the German meetings were released, Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila issued a 15-page criticism. He was one of the signatories of the current letter as well. And most of the other signatories are not surprising: Cardinal Raymond Burke; Cardinal Francis Arinze; Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco; two retired archbishops, Charles Chaput and Joseph Kurtz; and various other prelates. Several of the names coincided with the lists of bishops who voiced support for disgraced former nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò when he called on Pope Francis to resign. That was a much graver issue than this letter to the German bishops.

One name on the list of signatories jumped out at me: Bishop Michael Warfel of Great Falls-Billings, Montana, who was at the meeting of bishops and theologians in Chicago last month, and whom I always think of as a pastor first and foremost, without any special ideological baggage.

I wrote to Warfel and asked why he signed it. "As I've read about the Synodal Path and the Fundamental document produced from it, concerns surfaced," he replied in an email. "From what I have read, there is an indication of a desire to change Church discipline and doctrine. While there are ample disciplines that may be adjusted, e.g., mandatory celibacy, doctrine is a different matter, especially when the delegates of the Synodal Path indicate irreformable doctrine."

Warfel said he was worried about the German process sowing confusion. "There is one statement in particular that caught my attention and caused a bit of heartache: '…there is no one truth of the religious, moral and political world…' This comes from the Fundamental Text document. To me, it sounds a lot like, 'Well, that may be your truth, but it is not my truth.' This can easily lead into relativism."

As I said above, I have come to view moral relativism as an extremely dangerous thing, one of the things that is driving us into a plutonium dark age in which even the truth is held to be both meaningless and not worthy of any protection against the most degenerate and dangerous of lies - which might get me back to the Supreme Court and its decisions but I'll forego that for now - but, really?

The list given by Winters of signatories to the attack by North American, Australian and other bishops on those in Germany is telling; Cardinal Raymond Burke; Cardinal Francis Arinze; Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, Charles Chaput and Joseph Kurtz, who Winters notes were "vocal in their support of disgraced former nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò when he called on Pope Francis to resign." 

A number of those men openly supported Republican-fascism and Donald Trump, the flower of modern moral relativism - a better name for which would be the denial of the existence or importance of morality, even as they wanted to use a pantomime of morality as a political, social and economic tool against other People.   There has been no act of moral relativism of more serious consequence than such putative religious figures supporting the amoral degeneracy of Trumpism.   And there is no Archbishop living today who is more of an embodiment of relativistic moral degeneracy of that kind than Carlo Maria Viganò,  his ersatz moralistic and superstitious politicization of Putin's invasion of Ukraine in his war against Western politicians, especially the second and, I assert, most Catholic president in American history, President Biden, have been so extreme that even many on the Catholic far-right have broken with him.  

The U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops has more than enough to reform about its own moral relativism, in full operation right now and for all of its history.   They could start with practicing truth and real honesty.   I suspect that, Winters' respect for him aside, Bishop Michael Warfel of Great Falls-Billings, Montana is barking up the wrong tree in going after the German bishops.  It doesn't say just which issues the German bishops have spoken on that got his back up but I suspect it is the typical ones for U. S. bishops, communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, the ordination of Women, LGBTQ rights - especially LGBTQ rights and marriage equality - which he sees as unacceptable moral relativistic change.  Until JPII made his dodgy declaration that the issue of Women's ordination was a closed one, I suspect he may have not included that one on such a list - the issue of such declaration by even a pope who got himself canonized but not in the formula of so-called infallible teaching reminds me of nothing so much as the hijinks of the U. S. Supreme Court.  Usurped powers are seldom usurped for doing the good.

I think it's notable that there is a moral issue, a moral absolute that is behind those contentious items in the conservative bishops' agenda that is as basic to the entire monotheistic tradition that Catholicism is a part of and that is equal justice under God, not under artificial, humanly created "law".  The rights of Women, of LGBTQ People to live their lives, exercising their own ownership of their bodies, their own right to act in full moral and political equality and under the same commandments of justice and love and to follow any calling they perceive to ordination or marriage as anyone else is an unmovable rock.   

I can't speak for Women but I can speak out of the experience of being a gay man.  It is as possible for consenting, adult, gay men to use sex and sexuality as morally or as immorally as anyone else.  I have, repeatedly argued against the irresponsible practice of many gay men in promiscuity, sexual acts which have a high risk of spreading disease and causing harm, of using sex to encourage and practice inequality, sexual practices based on abuse and pain, promoting feelings of superiority and inferiority, sex which was not an aspect of faithful, committed love and the practice of treating other people with love, both in a committed relationship and as a part of the wider society.   I have condemned writers who discourage that as they promote the immoral and, perhaps worse, amoral use of sex in selfish and transactional terms, denying the ability of, gay men, especially, to form honestly faithful and committed marriages.  

Children cannot give real consent to sex.  Their sexual abusers have no legitimate right to the support of anyone, LGBTQ or straight.

Certainly the priest-sexual abuse scandals prove that the Catholic Church hierarchy, in reality, with the full knowledge of those up to and including Popes, has contained the reality of widespread sexual immorality among the all-male priesthood.   We now know that there was widespread criminality as well as merely knowing retention of criminal child rapists within the active priesthood, assigned by bishops and Archbishops to rape again in new assignments sometimes without even other priests being informed, certainly none of the parishioners were.  We can be quite certain of that, it is impossible to imagine, even in the pre-Vatican II period that the laity would have put up with a known child rapist acting as a priest, probably not even in a parish far distant from them.   

NO MATTER HOW MUCH THEY DENY IT, THAT IS SOMETHING WHICH CANNOT BE SEPARATED FROM THE VICISSITUDES OF A "CELIBATE" ALL-MALE PRIESTHOOD and the shrinking numbers of those willing to take up that profession.   Those Catholics who have pointed to other denominations with married clergy who have also sinned as a defense of the unmarried, all-male priesthood can't change the fact that every aspect of the Roman Catholic priest-sexual abuse scandals is intimately related to the rule of all-male "celibacy" for its clergy.   And, I would say, it's what you can expect of ANY institution when it's dominated by an all-male, exclusive power holders with an interest in keeping things as they are.

And we know from the released, often pried loose, documents concerning the scandal that that situation was no secret among the hierarchy.  In the article linked to it says:

Asked if sending such a public rebuke really fit the definition of synodality, Warfel replied, "I actually view the open letter more as frank dialogue. Pope Francis has emphasized the need of dialogue." He added, "I think a confidential or private letter would not garner much attention from the German bishops. I also do not believe a confidential of private letter would remain so for very long. As [former Vatican nuncio] Archbishop [Pietro] Sambi said to me long ago, before I was appointed to Great Falls-Billings and had heard about the appointment before he called me, 'It's hard to keep a secret in the Church.' "

They were certainly able to keep some secrets from the wider public, if they were secrets they really didn't want to get out.  They also know how to leak as well as any other holders of power do. 

That is something which all of these orthodoxy-supporting hierarchs, those who have acted with moral responsibility as well as those who should have been indicted and convicted of aiding and abetting child rape choose to be a part of, even now.   There is no group in the Catholic Church which has earned the distrust of the public more than those who hold the most power in it.  The all-church Syodality effort by Pope Francis is, I am certain, his attempt to broaden the power base, opening it up to the laity, Women too.  Which is one of the real reasons that a lot of the bishops have opposed, thwarted and monkey wrenched it.  The letter which is discussed in the article looks like part of that reactionary effort, to me.

It would seem that the German Bishops are among those who have heard and taken the wider voice of The People of the Church into consideration, which accounts for why their agenda might seem terrifying to the conservatives among the Bishops.  

The U. S. Bishops, like the members of the U.S. Senate and the Supreme Court can choose to ignore even the most vital issues for people they lord it over but who they aren't directly concerned with.  American "democracy" full of anti-democratic features is truly bizarre and increasingly unworkable.  In the Senate, that makes them value the anti-democratic atrocity of Senate Rules more than they do democracy, what leads the Supreme Court to its even less democratic and anti-democratic holdings and why so many of the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are so entirely out of touch with the lives of Catholics, especially when those Catholics want the bedrock of justice within the very real reality of their own lives.   An Archbishop, even one who might have the respect of Michael Sean Winters might understand the problem of seeming moral relativism but he misses that what seems relativistic to him is actually resting on that bedrock of justice and respect for individuals and their real lives, something that even those who wrote the scriptures might not have understood in their world in their times and customs but which the ongoing Creation has revealed to us, today.   Maybe you have to be a LGBTQ member to sense the moral bedrock that should govern your actions while someone outside of it only sees what shocks and scares them.  Enough gay men seem to be unseeing about that, but you can say that about any group.  Straight men aren't universally aware of it either.