I'd Really Rather Go Over Somethign That Pushes The Envelope Than Go Over Things I Answered Decades Ago

I'M SURE DENIS NOBLE would probably not agree with the use to which I will put something he said in an extremely interesting interview he gave to Curt Jaimungal, a scientific podcaster earlier this year but I can't see how my use of it outside of science is wrong.  Science isn't a self-contained activity anymore than history or any other intellectual activity is.  I think it's entirely legitimate for us to listen to what scientists say and draw inferences from it that about things which could not be properly a part of science.  I don't think there's anything illegitimate in what I'm about to do.  I'm as sure of that as I know that I disagree with Denis Noble about natural selection. 

At almost the one hour mark in the video after the host asked about the relationship of holism and the molecular reductionism of neo-Darwinism (Denis Noble is, as I stated the other day, a Darwinist though he has declared the neo-Darwinist synthesis of the mid-20th century to be dead) he made some very interesting points which are relevant to one of the issues in science I've gone over a number of times, the extraordinarily improbable chance of a cell's containing membrane to have come about and come to contain the necessary molecules for life to happen, just happening by random chance in nature.

My somewhat informal transcription of the video leaves out something said by the man conducting the interview which I've noted below.  I won't break into it.  At about 59:25, Denis Noble says

D.N. Let me also say something about holeism.   I know the neo-Darwinists in particular will dismiss me as completely off my head, when I talk about holism. they will think it's all terribly vague.  Actually it's a mathematical necessity.  And this may surprise people, about, let me see, it's 2016, so it's about eight years ago I published a book called "Dance To The Tune Of Life" . . . But I published a book subtitled "Biological Relativity."  . . . Biological relativity is the idea that there is no privileged level of causation within a biological system.  

Now, that is a mathematical necessity for the following reasons.  And I can illustrate it best by how I modeled the heartbeat, oh, over sixty years ago when I was a research student.  I was looking at ion channels in the heart cells,. characterizing those so we could fit equations to characterize their physical properties.  And then you could work out how that influences the overall electrical potential in the heart cell because the heart rhythm is an electrical process.  The voltage on the cell literally goes up and down like that [he makes a hand gesture going up and down].  Now, what I showed there was that you could not explain the rhythm from the molecular elements alone.  If you take those proteins and you put them in a solution with no membrane around them,. in other words, not in a cell, they will not oscillate.  There is no rhythm.  If, therefore, you remove the cell membrane and its electrical potential it doesn't work.  Incidentally, that's also true of mitochondria, our energy factories in our bodies.  If you remove the electrical potential across the membranes the system no longer works. So that's not, itself, a new discovery.  

Now, then, what I came up with is a very simple point, you can fit differential equations, sorry to be technical for a moment.

At this point the host interrupted to tell Denis Noble that he and his typical podcast audience were able to handle the technical content he was about to give. To which Noble said he was delighted.

The point is very simple.  However many details you put into the equations, or the differential equations and the functions used in those equations, you need the boundary conditions.  Otherwise there's no solution to those equations.  Every mathematician knows that.  Where do those boundary conditions come from?   

Well, in a sense the word gives it away, doesn't it.  In the case of a cell it's what the membranes constrain the molecules to do.  Those are the boundary conditions.  

So, a holistic view is simply the enumeration of the boundary conditions in a differential equation model.  So, that's why I call it a mathematical necessity.  And I think that your listeners who would understand the mathematics here, will readily understand when I say that there's no solution to a set of differential equations without the boundary conditions being put in.  Those are the influence from the higher levels of organization.  Because it is those higher levels of organization that constrain what the molecules themselves are doing.

Think of how life must have emerged long ago, in, we don't know exactly where - perhaps in the minute fissures and cracks in thermal vents - who knows?   But until the living system, the networks of interactions which were forming autocatalytic sets, meaning chemical reactions that could continue indefinitely,  until they were enclosed within membranes they would have just dispersed.  So, somehow or another, that constraint, the forming of a membrane around a catalytic set would have been a key element in any form of evolution of what we call life.  So, right from the very beginning the boundary conditions by the structure in which the molecules are to be found are a critical element in determining how they behave.  And so there's nothing terribly surprising in that. The principle of biological relativity is simply that you will always need the boundary conditions as well as the differential equations.  
 

C.J. So, that's extremely interesting, are you making an analogy between the evolution laws and reductionism and the boundary conditions and holism?

D.N. I am saying the boundary conditions are what give the system its whole, yes, that's right.  If what you are referring to as the whole is the structure of the system, then it is that structure that creates the boundary condition.  Cells are packed with structures that do that.  The molecules are not free to move easily from one compartment to another. They're restricted to various compartments.  That is, itself a structural imposition of constraint on the molecules involved.  All I'm saying is all molecules in living systems are constrained in the same kind of ways.  So, yes, if you want to say that holism is the existence of boundary conditions from structure, then I think that's absolutely right.  But, then, you've got to look at the whole to see the structure.

None of it works without a containing membrane and the containing membrane of any living, reproducing organism is extremely complex, it may well have been the most complex structure BEFORE THERE WAS ANY LIVING ORGANISM CONTAINED BY IT.  It, itself would have to have been a part of the whole structure or there would never have been any life.

It was way back in the days that I was enjoying getting into brawls with materialists on the Scienceblogs that I first brought up the problem of the containing membrane that would have had to contain the theoretical first organism of life on Earth which I am fully prepared to believe in though I hold there will never be a way for us to know about live that far back or to have any real idea of what it was like.  I described the necessity of the membrane of the first organism in terms less explicit and detailed than what Denis Noble says though he leaves out the extraordinarily hard to comprehend matter of that first organism dividing successfully, rupturing its membrane and resealing itself, enclosing the internal molecular structures that would result in two living organisms instead of one and a host of other incredibly complex actions. the extreme improbability of which lead me to believe that that could only happen as a result of intelligent intent not found within the organism, itself.  I know that Denis Noble and his colleagues doing some of the most important and fascinating research into these areas of cellular physiology reasonably and probably correctly attribute far mor in the way of intelligent action to individual cells as they can observe them, both as individual organisms and, far more elaborately, as parts of multi-cellular organisms but surely, as Denis Noble says and implies throughout this interview and his talks, that individual molecules not contained within cell membranes and within living organisms exhibit no such intelligence, it could not have been there before there was a living cell to organize that molecular behavior.  

I do think there is an artificial boundary at the same place in physical reality which prevents science from taking that step to considering the possibility of the Creator of life being part of that but I don't think there is anything wrong, at all, with someone taking that step outside of science.  It makes entirely more sense to me than the materialist-atheist-scientistic claims that a mechanistic view of the start of life is a fact and that that removes the necessity of God from any respectable discussion.  They can't even sustain their model within science, as Denis Noble points out at the beginning of the interview, the four basic assumptions of the latest attempt to come up with a reductionist description of evolution have all fallen to recent scientific research.  I don't think trying to make a holistic model of that will be either successful or widely convincing.  They'll have to overcome the materialist-atheist reductionist fever dream that they've put the last nail in the coffin of God.  I do agree with him that Cartesian dualism got it wrong just as those who figure the Creator of the universe, somehow, had nothing to do with the physical creation God created.  The Cartesian-scientific concept of that in terms of humanly created machines was incredibly naive no matter what it motivated in the further effort to come up with such means of controlling stuff and forces.  People are so ready to forget that their metaphors are just metaphors and not real think the mistaken philosophical imaginings of those who favored that ideology has had little to nothing to do with the actual success of science and technology, getting things we wanted and which would achieve our intentions has more to do with that, which accounts for why it is also destroying us and life on Earth.  

Update:  Simps, you really want to accuse me of "candor" in responding to you?   

1 : unreserved, honest, or sincere expression : forthrightness
the candor with which he acknowledged a weakness in his own case—
Aldous Huxley
2 : freedom from prejudice or malice : fairness
… a heavy accusation … from a gentleman of your talents, liberality, and candor.—
Noah Webster

Merriam Webster Online

Not only do you not know how to read, you don't know what words mean.

Dave Holland Quintet - How's Never

 

Dave Holland - bass
Robin Eubanks - trombone
Chris Potter - saxophone
Steve Nelson - vibraphone
Nate Smith - drums
 

It's All A Matter Of What You Choose To Believe No Matter How Much You Pretend It Isn't

Note:  I wrote this piece a couple of days ago but haven't been able to post it until today.

IT'S A BIT of a coincidence that I'm answering a bit of old snark concerning something I wrote a while back, today because it's the same day that I have decided that one of those online atheists I recently respected has feet of clay.  Sabine Hossenfelder's Youtube posted yesterday pushed her climate-change denial, which she addressed in terms of her loss of respect for scientists and, I guess, science.  THAT was the issue that led me to conclude she, herself, is what she criticizes, a scientist who abandons scientific methodology and practice.  Though it was her typical materialist-atheist-scientistically ignorant citation of the scientific research into parapsychology that I addressed in my comment at Youtube.  

It is clear from Hossenfelder's summary dismissal of decades of some of the most methodologically sound and rigorous of published, reviewed and re-reviewed research into forbidden topics that she has never read the literature of that branch of science but has relied on the entirely ideological misrepresentations of it.  That is typical of what she criticizes among scientists who violate the very basis of science for non-scientific, ideological reasons.  It is clear from, especially the lowest of so-called scientists who dismiss that science, in psychology, as well as those in the would-be queen of the sciences, physics, that those who summarily dismiss the published research have never read or seriously considered the long history of rigorous experimental success in demonstrating a list of parapsychological phenomena including those Hossenfelder listed in her summary dismissal of that science.  My thinking is if she can do that so readily, why should I believe her summary dismissal of the more than half a century of scientists publishing predictions of climate change which all of us experience nearly every day.  I was talking to my brother just last month and he was telling me of sitting as a student in the library at the University of Maine at Orono reading a paper that predicted that within a half a century Maine's climate would be approaching that of Virginia's if measures to curb carbon pollution in the atmosphere weren't taken.  Well, that prediction is obviously true in our record-breaking heat of this summer, the year after year of entirely unprecedented weather in Northern New England and the effects it's having on our climate and our gardening.  

But that isn't what I was going to write about until I listened to Hossenfelder's anti-climate-change diatribe, that was another bit of snark regarding the Resurrection of Jesus which I mentioned in a post I did a while back.  First, I capitalize Resurrection because it is a singular event in the history of humanity and life on Earth of the highest religious significance, if you don't like that I can't help you being unhappy about it but I'm not going back on that.  Live with it.

In his book, Living Jesus, in the first chapter in which Luke Timothy Johnson deals with both the question of in what sense Jesus is LIVING and in what sense JESUS is living, after the Resurrection, he says this:

Luke's empty tomb account (24:1-8) is a remarkably complex composition, especially when compared to its parallels in Mark and Matthew.  In Luke, we find no statement concerning a future appearance.  Instead, the women visiting the tomb are told that they are mistaken in their quest.  "Why do you seek the Living One among the dead?" (24:5).  It is clear from this response that Jesus' body is no longer where it had been, but this absence is explained on the basis of his being "the Living One," who cannot be constrained even by death.  The women, however, are given no immediate vision of Jesus as alive.  They are told to "remember" the words he had spoken in his past life concerning his death and resurrection (24:6).  His "absence" then, is pregnant.  The tomb is not entirely empty, Jesus' past life is over, yet it persists in the memory of those who will shortly come to understand that he truly is "the Living One,"  and their every memory of his past will be shaped by that growing realization of who he truly was all along.  

The appearances in Luke 24:15-49 are obviously a node not of Jesus' absence but of his presence to his followers.  He moves about him as he had before - yet, as we have seen, not really as before.  Jesus is not present in the way he had been when he walked and talked with them in Galilee.  His presence to them now is both more powerful and more allusive, more dramatic and more mediated.  Though he is "really" present in his body, that body has a transfigured quality that enables him to be present in different places to different people (24:31-54.)  

I'll back up to say that in the early days of my writing online, when I was reacting to the politically stupid and counter-productive new-atheist fad of the 00's that I was honest in saying I didn't understand what the Resurrection was supposed to be but I thought that those who reported their experience likely had experienced something they took to mean that Jesus had risen from death.  Thinking of something like that as a problem to be understood instead of a mystery to be thought over is a bad habit of thought.  Much of life is such an insoluble mystery but that doesn't make it any less real. Back then I was still under the influence of the historical-critical writer John Dominic Crossan's and others' books which had been the beginning of my late-in-life conversion to the Christianity.   I'd only been culturally part of before my long period of agnosticism.  The habit of agnosticism is a frequently cowardly decision to remain forever in a suspended state of non-decision instead of choosing to believe or disbelieve.  I'll hand it to the new atheists, their dishonesty led to my decision to stop being a coward in these matters.

I will repeat something that set off the snarky comment, that it was the atheist and eminent early computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum who gave me the key to understanding so much about science and human thinking, that everything we take to be known is, in truth, a product of what we choose to believe, that there is no such a thing as knowledge that is not, early or late in its adoption, a product of our choice to actively believe what we are presented with.  It was that honest atheist who taught me to be unafraid of believing as opposed to what could safely be claimed to be known in the milieu of late 20th and early 21st century college-credentialed people.  Along with such honest atheists as Richard Lewontin, I'm entirely unafraid to be influenced by some of what such atheists say, when it makes abundant sense.  

But I can say that it wasn't until I read Luke Timothy Johnson that I really could believe in the Resurrection in the various ways in which it's described in the different Gospels and Epistles and in secondary literature up to and including those who write about it today - in all their seeming contradictions and disagreements.  

Reading and relying on the historical-critical practitioners who, as Johnson has pointed out, come up with their own scientific-historically produced "historical Jesuses" which are mutually inconsistent and contradictory, it would seem that that mock-scientific methodology produces less instead of more clarity.  In practical terms, none of their "Jesuses" is compelling or helpful, many of them are far less plausible than the far more coherent Jesus of the New Testament.   That is a consequence of pretending that historical methodology can produce the kind of consensus that only the most agreed to levels of science can sometimes achieve.  That's true of the highly verifiable field of chemistry, certainly and, to a lesser extent the ever more distant from physical proof branch, physics, but most true of all in mathematics which doesn't deal with physical objects, at all but can produce the most unassailable levels of proof in science.  I think that relationship of the highest level of proof and the fact that mathematical "objects" are not physical is of great significance and a strong refutation of materialism as a respectable ideology.

I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus now but not in any neat packaged description of it, not as merely the resuscitation of his body because that's not what any of the writers in the New Testament said it was.  Jesus had a body after he came to Glory (I think, Johnson is correct, John's Gospel might have used the best descriptive word for it) which was related to his body during his historical lifetime but it was not the same as it had been before.  The widely reported emptiness of his tomb, and we have testimony of that in both later to be considered "Christian" sources and extremely hostile sources rejecting the Resurrection, the Jerusalem establishment, that the tomb was found to be empty, may lead us to believe that the Resurrection body of Jesus included his physical body but I don't think that's something we can generally know.  The Gospels, themselves, say that his presence is through the Spirit and that his physical body needed to be absent before People could experience that.  It would be a phenomenon of which we have no precedent to lead to understanding it.  I choose to believe the evidence of those who experienced the Living Jesus after his death, those who knew him in life and those like Paul who certainly had a profound experience of Jesus as one of his most extreme enemies.  

There are two major and several minor things which led, ultimately, to me rejecting Crossan's presentation of this.  Him violating his own stated standards of judgement in terms of the dating of the sources and the need for agreement among independent sources to sustain any particular article of faith was first and foremost in rejecting his assertions about the corpse and Resurrection of Jesus.

His claim that the body of Jesus wasn't buried in a tomb but was thrown into a common grave to be dug up by wild dogs and eaten is his own invention from the late 20th century, nearly two-thousand years after any possible evidence about that could have been established is one of his chief violations of his stated standards.  His claims are opposed to the burial of Jesus in a tomb, which is multiply and independently attested in both Christian and anti-Christian sources close in time to the death of Jesus.  I'll say that again because it is typical of the revisionism that comes from the historical-critical practitioners.  It is based on exactly no contemporary evidence, whatsoever, it is contradicted by multiple, independent sources in the Scripture as well as that of those hostile to the claims of the Resurrection - as is documented in Matthew's Gospel.*  And that's only one example of where Crossan violates his own stated criteria.

His claim that the Resurrection was a metaphor for the memory of Jesus living on in those who knew him is, as well, attested in absolutely no place in the oldest of Christian literature.  The only claims made about that is that Jesus was and is actually living, in an actual bodily existence but much more than merely that, in every single case.  The widely spread claims about any "Jesus" centered community which held that Jesus was still dead and it was just the experience of his memory that "kept him alive" is evidenced in absolutely nothing but the many centuries after inventions of would-be historical-critical scholars who would seem to never apply historical-critical methods to their own claims and procedures.   

You, of course, don't have to believe those with the closest proximity to Jesus in time and place, either eye-witnesses to the Living Jesus or with first hand knowledge of those who said they did have such direct experience of it, but those are the most credible sources of evidence on which to build any such claims.  I find the various criteria of how we, today experience the Living Jesus which Johnson gives to be quite convincing, along with his descriptions of ways in which the Living Jesus surpasses the abilities of the historical Jesus (before his death) and the reasons that Jesus had to die to lead to his continued presence in history as the Living Jesus.  I find those convincing in ways that I don't find any of the historical-critical "Jesuses" to be convincing or at all helpful or because of that lack in the context in our lives, important.  I don't find Crossan's Jesus to even be very compelling.  I'm currently reading the letters and other writing of the martyred Sr. Ita Ford just now and I can't imagine her being motivated to do what she did for the least among the least in our hemisphere on the basis of Crossan's reconstructed, denatured "Jesus."  

My point is that whether it is the rigorous scientific demonstration of parapsycholgical phenomena or the obvious fact of climate-change or the truth of the Resurrection of Jesus, it comes down to what you choose to believe in the end.  That is true even when, in the case of the controlled, reviewed, published experimental research in the case of parapsychological phenomena, OR IN CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE, it is one of the champions of science denying both the extraordinary level of scientific practice followed AND THE TESTIMONY OF OUR OWN EXPERIENCED OBSERVATION.  

I think it's a lot more immediately dangerous for someone with Youtube and other influence to disbelieve the clear and present evidence of climate change than to either believe or disbelieve in the Resurrection of Jesus, at least for all practical political matters.  Though I think for egalitarian democracy, a disbelief in Jesus is as dangerous.

The motives for the determined refusal to look honestly at the more than a century of rigorous scientific research into parapsychology are clearly not scientific or in any way honest.  

Both issues are, actually relevant to the refusal to consider the possibility that the New Testament is reporting the truth of the Resurrection and continued life of the Glorified Jesus out of ideological motives.  In both cases it is a product of materialist-atheist-scientism, only such a refusal to look at the scientific evidence supporting the reality of psychic phenomena is as far from the honest practices of science as could be.  Such denial of strong scientific evidence should, rightly, be condemned.  As should the mixing of ideology with science.  Only when it's the ideology of materialist-atheist-scientism, there is no level of that being inserted into the very literature of science which is deemed impermissible in the mainstream of science.  I also recently listened to a Youtube of one of the most thoroughly ideological of scientists, the new-atheist crank and geneticist Jerry Coyne condemning that practice of mixing ideology with science when there is no one who does that more than he, himself does, not to be noticed doing it because his own ideology has been allowed to dominate the practice and publication of science.  

A consideration of the Resurrection of Jesus may well be held to be something that science is entirely incompetent to judge, since there is no way to scientifically verify or refute the proposition that Jesus is resurrected and lives in a state of Glory/  There is no way to make such a thing fit into the subject matter of science.  But there is an enormous literature of scientific experiment carried out over decades in several of the forbidden topics such as parapsychology.  Experimenters, taking the criticisms made of past experiments into account in further experiments, still showing very statistically significant results and with extensive replications verifying those results in many instances resulting in meta-analyses  showing spectacularly high rates of probability as against chance, in some experimental programs, surpassing some of the most celebrated verifications of modern physics.  I was hardly convinced of that before I went to the bother of looking into it, just as I believed other conventions of the modern common-received "knowledge" of the kind Hossenfelder promotes until I really looked at the claims made within the published literature of the field.  There was a time I bought the theory of natural selection as handed to me in science classes before I ever went to the bother of actually reading Darwin and the subsequent literature of the theory.  Now I can see there is absolutely no observational evidence that there is any such thing nor any that verifies it is the primary or exclusive force in driving evolution.  And the more I looked hard at what was claimed, the more obvious it became to me that it is nothing more than an ideologically supported convention required of those who are held to be respectable in science and outside of it.  The atheist Denis Noble has recently noted how he was encouraged to lie about what he and his fellow scientists are discovering which contradicts the neo-Darwinian synthesis which has dominated biology for the past seventy years, not on the basis of their findings and the consequences of those being false BUT BECAUSE HIS OPPONENTS DON'T LIKE WHATEVER THEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS CAN BE DRAWN FROM THEM.   Implications that any honest practice of science should not be in the business of considering in the articulation of science.  I think, far from Hossenfelder's claims in her recent Youtubes denying climate change science, it is her own ideology which is the driving force in so much of science and, especially, in that "public understanding of science" which Richard Dawkins, another of the foremost ideologues in neo-Darwinism and neo-eugenics and taboo science-denial, was given an Oxford seat in.  I think a lot of the millionaire-billionaire tech-bro sci-ranger activity of that kind is, actually, the promotion of such ideology which masquerades as science.  

I'd rather be honest than be considered respectable in that milieu.  I'd rather admit what I believe and the bases on which I believe what I do believe.  In the matter of climate change, I read the predictions and I saw those come true in the past fifty years.  In the matter of parapsychology, I read the literature and the mathematical analysis of that and if I want to hold that statistical evidence is a good way to find out the truth of things discernible in no other way, I must accept those.  Along with that I read the "skeptics" and found in every case I looked into, they were liars and hypocrites.  I came to the same conclusion about many of what I formerly took to be bright lights of that ideology the more I looked at what they claimed.   

My belief in the Living Jesus is based on a far different level of belief, though, if that is true then the Resurrection of Jesus is a plausible aspect of that, one which is attested in the best evidence of that available in literature.  I don't care if the likes of Hossenfelder or, on the low end of that, the guy who plays a genius on Brit TV and Youtube, Stephen Fry don't find that respectable.  I can live without their respect and I don't especially want it any more than I would that of James Randi or Jerry Coyne.  Nor do I care about the opinions of the dopes who troll me here except in so far as I can play off of them to write a post that I want to write and have a little fun at their expense.  Everyone has an opinion and, well you know what they say, generally, about those.

* I am not absolutely convinced but I think it's very probable that a good part of Matthew's Gospel, the "sayings" especially, may well be the product of the Matthew named as one of Jesus's Apostle as a number of classical commentators said.  Several of those living within a century of the assumed writing of that Gospel.  Several said that Matthew, aka Levi in Mark and Luke, the tax collector, wrote out the sayings of Jesus in "a dialect of Hebrew" probably in the Aramaic which was certainly Jesus's native language and that the Gospel of Matthew we have is a "translation" of those, almost certainly with expansions and commentary.  That it would be a confessed and despised tax collector among the followers of Jesus who wrote those down is credible in that a tax collector almost certainly was literate and likely was in the habit of writing in the course of their employment.  The modern fashion of claiming that Jesus, Paul, etc. were illiterate - something which the best nearly contemporary evidence of contradicts - is probably least credible in the figure of Levi-Matthew.  And it would be the most natural thing to imagine that a literate follower of Jesus would have written down what they remembered of what he said.  Though the testimony of Papias and Irenaeas that he wrote that in what they certainly meant as contemporary Aramaic and that "others translated as best they could" into Greek, then what has survived has only been the product of one or more of those translators who would make any stylistic discernment of different layers unlikely to impossible.  If Jesus and, or Paul were illiterate their intelligence could only be far higher than it might have been if they had recourse to reading and, especially, writing.  The Epistles considered by scholars to be "authentic" include works of the highest level of genius, Corinthians and, especially Romans, if composed in the mind alone and dictated to a secretary would mark those as among the most brilliant of documents.  I could imagine Paul producing a good draft and having someone with better handwriting making a clear copy for sending but I think Paul probably wrote the original down.   I'll insert something Michael Eric Dyson said nine years ago in regard to the decline of Cornel West:

The ecstasies of the spoken word, when scholarship is at stake, leave the deep reader and the long listener hungry for more. Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink. Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas than does speaking. It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks. Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine if better and deeper things can be said.

That would seem, to me, to be especially true of the most extensive of Paul's letters.  As to the startling content of the sayings of Jesus, I doubt those could have come from any but the most astute of minds, their seeming everydayness is a product of the culture that Jesus initiated in which much of the world has lived for the past two-thousand years.  

I can point out that all of those sources making claims about things such as the connection of Matthew to that Gospel and of an original by him in a "dialect of Hebrew" have a far closer proximity to the original than any modern scholar does,  It's probable that actual copies of the original document were available to those making that claim but which have not survived.  

Again, I think it's quite possible that a very early Greek  translator of such a list of sayings may well have fleshed it out with an editing and commentary of Mark's Gospel just as the author of Luke's Gospel may well have included both in the multiple sources overtly consulted by the author "Luke" to produce his works.  I would say the best evidence we have of that identifies both of the authors by name.  I don't know how you can find out more about that given the sources we have to claim to know such things about it but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that those like Papias and Ireanaeus had access to more knowledge of the facts of the matter than have survived in what records we have available.  If that is true the author of Matthew on many points may be, in fact, an eye-witness to Jesus as he was before and, by the testimony we have available to us, after his death.  I don't hold with the fashion of holding up any such evidence to an impossible level of verification which is practiced for no other topic in the study of literature and the relationship with reality in that time frame.   I doubt there is another area of study in which such an impossibly high level of study is applied to, especially one which is so rich in independent sourcing as the study of the New Testament and early Christianity.   While, especially Papias is known only through quotations from his work, he being such an early source and some of the later supposed quotations are questionable, that is the earliest evidence we have on some of those questions, certainly closer to the actual compositions of the Gospels than the often ideologically motivated claims of modern scholars, especially those since the 18th century. 

You're Forcing Me To Defend Robert Barron, You Bastard

Was Hoping I Was Done With This Stuff

I HAVE SAID that I like Keith Olbermann and respect him.  That is to say, on balance I like what of Keith Olbermann that I know.  I've never met him, I've never seen him in life, I've never talked to anyone who knows him, friend or foe.  What I know of him is what I used to see when his Countdown show was on MSNBC (which I rarely saw because it came after I stopped watching cable TV) and what I've heard of him online, first in the series of polemical attacks he made on the Trump regime many of which I posted here and in his revived Countdown which he produces himself, generally the first thing that comes up when I go on Youtube because I listen to it virtually every day it's put out.  One thing that could be said about my idea of Keith Olbermann is that my view of him isn't disinterested because it's based entirely on what he says and what he says about himself and his life (we both like dogs, a lot, for example) and what we agree on, most everything to do with politics.  And what we don't agree on I can take, his anti-religiosity and anti-Christianity most seriously, his love of Thurber, which I don't get at all and his focus on sports.  Though I've said he is about the only person who is a good enough writer and interesting enough so that he is the only commentator on sports who can get me to listen to an entire piece about it.  Of people I like in that kind of way, I like him very much.  

If someone wanted to mock my liking and respect for Keith Olbermann, they could truthfully point out that I don't really know anything "objective" about him, since just about everything I know about him comes from him. I suppose I could go look for what other people say about him, including those who have known him.  But I've never done that and don't really have much of an interest in doing that, I like his commentary enough and find he is honest enough about what I share a knowledge of with him that I don't want his personality, likeable enough but with definite prickles, to get in the way of enjoying listening to him.  I'm sure his enemies, many of whom he has known and worked with would say things about him that could impact that.  I've also admitted that finding out too much about some composers, musicians, writers, etc. have made it impossible for me to enjoy their work.  Considering how much of his podcast is devoted to telling tales of others in media who he has worked with, his criticism of them (many of whom I dislike or, like Rick Kaplan and Laura Ingraham, I detest) and his positive reporting of a few of them, that would probably be something that would be a fair point in evaluating my opinion of him.  I can say that some of those he slams or criticizes I like, too.  I don't feel obliged to dislike someone just because he had a run-in or two with them.

If someone wanted to go all late night college sophomore on me, they could point out that I have a pretty flimsy basis on which to base my opinion of Keith Olbermann on.  I've never seen him, I've never seen him within the milieu in which he lives, I've never verified much of anything he's said about himself and his life.  For all I "know" if by that you mean know in some pretended objective and disinterested way, the man I know as Keith Olbermann is an actor playing a part on TV as I suspect many of those in the media do.  Some of whom he and I share a disliking for.  For all I know all of them are playing who they are as "TV journalists"*.  For all I know Keith Olbermann is a TV character who transitioned into Youtube and other online formats and is as real as any other TV character.  If it wasn't for the fact that he can write well and uses the language very well and doesn't have tell-tale beats taken in his delivery, his most recent Youtubes could be AI generated.  

All of this is because someone mocked me over Olbermann's repeated ridicule of Christianity in his "Worst Persons In The World" segment yesterday.  He gave out his typical barroom atheist mythicist rant about the real existence of Jesus and the events in the Gospels during it.  I'll start with what set that off this time.

Olbermann belatedly slammed the critics of the Olympics opening show's clear mockery, not of "The Last Supper" but of Leonardo Da Vinci's famous and decayed fresco of it, with drag queens as Jesus and the Apostles and pagan content.  Making believe that what the director of the thing, Thomas Jolly obviously did, making a vulgar mockery of one of the central events in all four Gospels, wasn't what he clearly did is beneath Olbermann's level of honest reporting.  It was blatantly an obviously offensive presentation mocking that.  There is no other reasonable interpretation of it.  Jolly's defense of it in terms of a right to disbelief confirmed that was his clear intent, despite his ass covering denials.  That ass covering makes any assertion of its courageousness an empty gesture.

It was a spectacle intending to offend Christians in the most obvious of ways.  It couldn't be more obvious that that's what he and his colleagues did.  And it is as clear THAT HE DID IT WITH THE INTENTION OF OFFENDING MANY PEOPLE AND GETTING A REACTION FROM THEM.  He was probably counting on the Archibishop of Paris, among others, to express that offense.  THAT SUCH PEOPLE GAVE THE REACTION THAT WAS CLEARLY DESIRED IS HARDLY THEIR FAULT.  Nor was it unexpected.   No more than that the fashionable despisers of Christianity expressing their delight at the offensiveness to it intended to offend.  If those who were offended had done what would probably have been the wisest thing to do, brush it off as another pedestrian Parisian spectacle as meaningless as any such production number, none of the pretended counter-offense of the anti-Christians could have happened.  If they'd ignored it altogether Jolly and his colleagues would certainly have been upset instead of gratified by it.  If there is one thing that they didn't want, it was to have the let-down of their offensive tableau NOT GETTING THE REACTIONS IT DID.  Such show-biz types mount spectacles to get attention and if it hadn't they'd have been the most hurt of all.   There's nothing much more to it other than getting paid to do it.

That part of the effect desired by those producing such intentional offense, the part that Olbermann and his like played in reacting to the original offense taken, their pseudo-moralistic defense of the um. . . "art"  on the basis of "liberty," "freedom of expression," "free speech" and "artistic freedom" was the most over-blown part of it.  Well, who stopped them from doing any of it?  

What is the most developed view of this situation is the intense irony that those who slam the objectors to the spectacle on the bases of various "freedoms" is that they are objecting to the liberty, the freedom of expression, the free speech of those expressing their hurt and outrage.  OF ALL OF THOSE EXPRESSING OUTRAGE, THE ONES INTENTIONALLY OFFENDED ARE THE ONES WHO DIDN'T DO A THING TO CAUSE THIS TO HAPPEN.  Even if I disagree with them on extremely important things, even my own rights as an LGBTQ+ man and even as I dislike many of those who have expressed their outrage, their outrage was in response to something they didn't originate.  The hypocrisy of Jolly and his colleagues in pretending they didn't intend to do what they so obviously intended to do is exactly that, hypocrisy.  As is the hypocrisy of those who had Olbermann's reaction to that expression of being involuntarily offended, is that they're objecting to the free expression of that offense.  The whole thing, from start to finish reeks of hypocrisy on the part of those who provoked the offense and those who object to the expression of that offense.  Much as I dislike many of those who have expressed that offense - I pretty much detest the two American bishops named in that piece I wrote about it last week - them taking offense at what they found offensive is the most honest thing about it.

Considering what I said about the dynamics of Olbermann's beloved sports as an entertainment planned to make at least half of those doing it and at least half of those watching it unhappy - for him to slam those who were involuntarily made unhappy by an . . . um. . . "artistic" spectacle they had no foreknowledge would be presented to them expressing their unhappiness is especially odd.  Especially as it was done as a prelude to exactly that kind of sports spectacle in which those made happy or unhappy were expected to express their feelings, how can those expressing their offense at the opening show be offensive?   I wonder if Olbermann has ever expressed his dislike of a half-time show at a football game.  Many do to not much criticism.  What if it had been on the basis of right wing politics, insincere and hypocritical nationalism?  The kind of stuff put on by Olympics mounted within some of the worst dictatorships?   Would it be Ok to slam those or express offense on those bases or is that a wrong on the same basis as the outrage of the Archbishop of Paris is held to be a wrong? 

I have to say, I wasn't terribly offended by the spectacle, which, watching it after it happened, was among the most tediously predictable drag act I've ever seen.  I'm not a huge fan of the . . . um . . . art of drag but it's best when it's surprising and creative.   Which the Paris spectacle was not.  I generally find that modern French culture is a matter of presenting the most predictable and practiced and sterotypical content - people go there to study styles of clowning, for fucksake.  They pretended that Jerry Lewis was a comic genius because some idiot ersatz savant claimed him to be one.  It is entirely in service to whatever is in fashion at any given time.  That's typical of such show biz, everything from nightclub acts to stage presentations, TV shows and movies, no matter where those are produced.  It's typical of the kind of lit that gets on best sellers lists and mentioned on TV and radio shows.  It's very rare that any of it rises above or departs entirely from the recitation of conventional images, in this case the typical conventions of anti-Christian puerility.  I'll add that J. D. Vance's "hillbilly" shit was just a different topic and style of the same thing, otherwise it would never have been made into a movie.

Keith Olbermann taking the opportunity to throw more offense at Christians who were so offended  by claiming that the existence of Jesus and The Last Supper are not knowably historical is, of course, the focus of the first part of this post.  Any claim made about Jesus is demanded to present a level of "proof" that little else is demanded to.  Especially considering when he lived.  Jesus is probably the best documented peasant from antiquity and better documented than any number of well known figures in the ancient and classical world.  There are more independent sources of information about him than for Socrates for whom there are exactly three hardly disinterested sources, Sparticus who is known only through aristocratic Romans writing about him more than a century after his life.   I doubt there is any such a thing as a disinterested classical writer about any person or event.   All of them wrote out of an apriori point of view. 

Since I'm reading him right now, Luke Timothy Johnson has said that the existence of Jesus as a Jewish peasant from the first century, his death on the cross and the movement that arose immediately after his reported resurrection are facts of the highest historical probability.  LTK is someone who has devoted his academic career to the topic, he has the credentials to be taken credibly on the topic.  He lists other things about Jesus that are not as certain but are very well or less well evidenced.  Even atheists who specialize in the relevant fields such as Bart Ehrman hold that view of the historicity of Jesus, a couple of those with such credentials on the fringiest of fringes denying that high probability.  The same cannot be said about many people and events of the ancient and classical eras, though I've never heard anyone doubt that even the most developed stories about them are factual.  

Given the milieu in which Olbermann works and in which both of us live in 2024, how many English speaking People these days believe they know all about figures such as Sparticus, such as Caligula and Claudius when all they know they got second hand through a TV series made from the NOVELS by Robert Graves, or how many believe they know about Thomas More based on the movie The Man For All Seasons, what they know of the Scopes Trial on the grotesquely anti-historical Inherit The Wind?  Basing a knowledge of Jesus on the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles is practicing a heightened level of historical review from what I'd guess is typical in Olbermann's and my milieu.  I have, on occasion, heard Olbermann make the typical historical and other factual gaffs and errors common to our generation of college-credentialed people, maybe some of them gained currency through such show biz.  Maybe I'll start keeping a tab when I hear those, from now on.  I would welcome anyone finding any in what I write to point those out, after documenting that they are actually gaffs.  

I still like Olbermann and will listen to him on politics,** on the media, even on sports (though I cannot listen to Thurber even when he reads it) but on the topic of Christianity, I'll listen to those who have some basis higher than the village barroom atheist school of oratory, such as apparently ill-served Clarence Darrow when he unwisely debated G. K. Chesterton on the topic.  As I've noted here, even such a Christianity unfriendly organ as The Nation said that Chesterton knew what he was talking about and Darrow just repeated that kind of stuff as a boy would try to offend his pious aunt with.  I do thank Olbermann and whoever it was who mocked me over his commentary for making me think out the real nature of the Olympics opening brew-ha-ha even though it made me speak up for the likes of Bishop Barron and the Archbishop of Paris.  Most of those named among the complainers I don't like much at all, I'd rather not have to speak up for them.  Of all of those expressing disapproval in this matter, they were the ones least hypocritical about it.  I might like Olbermann better than them, but in this, they were more in the right than he is.  I just wish they'd ignored the stupid thing and it deflated like I hope Trump is.  

* Olbermann's observation on "TV journalism" that it's not journalism because it's all TV is one of the most valuable and succinct summations of what's wrong with it.  TV is all about getting ratings, reporting of facts coming well down in the list of its priorities.  My thought on that was that the more production involved in "journalism" the farther away from the reporting of facts.  So I've long distrusted TV "journalism" and "journalists" especially as the 24-7 format invented by Ted Turner took over and they flooded TV "journalism" with "opinion journalism" over the far more expensive and slow and risky reporting of verified fact.  And with the idiotic permission of the Supreme Court and the gutting of broadcast standards, the reporting of conjecture, polling and predictions.   

** Another thing, I suspect it's his unstated scientism that leads Olbermann to spend so much time on polling, which, if there's something obvious about it, it's highly unreliable pseudo-science of a particularly dishonest kind.  I think most of it is planned to get the results those commissioning the polls want.   I wish he'd spend less time on the polls which I find myself scrolling past.  I try to let the Youtube play through because I assume it's to his financial advantage but I'm pretty much past the point of tolerance over polls.

Crowd Size

It's so funny that Trump is so upset that hers is so much bigger than his.

I'll Admire The Losers And Those Who Serve The Losers Among Us, Instead

THE RESURFACED FOOTAGE of the massive asshole, male-supremacist creepy weirdo, billionaire's bitch, J. D. Vance once slamming Simone Biles over her generous decision to pull out of a previous Olympic competition to give her team mates a chance to win, got the response among non-Republican-fascists that it should have.  Vance is an asshole. Simone Biles was the expert in that situation, probably one of the few in the world best qualified to make that judgement, CERTAINLY THE MOST QUALIFIED in the world to make it on her own behalf.  His abuse of a young woman over that was a disgusting and self-serving use of her for his own ends, gaining status in a sick and disgusting culture to gain position in the Republican-fascist media and party.  What else does his mentor, bad-sport, foreign billionaire's bitch Donald Trump's entire shtick consist of?  

But what Vance did to her happens all the time to no objection or notice being taken, it isn't atypical of how even the youngest athletes are treated, those who lose or choke up as she may have if she didn't wisely withdraw from tasks she wasn't prepared to do at that time.  That is an inherent aspect of sports.  The difference is that Vance slammed a superbly talented, hard-working athlete, using her and, no doubt, her identity as a young Black Woman to his ends.  But that's the only the major difference.  If he had said similar things about a young athlete who failed to win, even one who came close to winning, no one would have objected to it.  Especially if he were a coach abusing and reviling an athlete or an entire team.  Such an abusive coach would probably gain a similar kind of status as Vance hoped to gain by doing that.  Even the best athletes are subjected to that kind of abuse as coaching and encouragement.   

In my recent dissing of the sacred Olympics I knew the response it might get because the absurd idolatry of the thing is so predictable.  I mentioned the absurd and phony aroma of sanctity heaped on what is actually a sordid international gangster money shake-down, full of millionaire and billionaire beneficiaries, some of them actual royalty, royals being the quintessential. longest standing gangster class.  A gangster syndicate which colludes with the local version of the same thing, whether in dictatorship or alleged liberal democracy.  That's a permanent part of what the Olympics is and saying that got the typical high school mean-boy, mean-girl style responses that I knew it would.  

I heard the sane slogans and accusations when I said something like that to the vice principal when I got caught not attending a mandatory pep-rally my Freshman year of high school.  He said pretty much the same thing as I got last week.  It's so funny reading the superannuated kewel-kids in their sixties and seventies saying what the entirely uncool vice-principal said to me all those decades ago.  I got better at hiding from pep-rallies, not going to them.  The hell with football and jock kulcha.

The international committee behind the Olympics is an extremely profitable scheme comprising the money-making parts of the corrupt deal which feeds on, first and foremost, the generally very young athletes who are required to be amateurs (with some notable exceptions made, allowing even the best paid professional athletes into amateur competition) some of whom are talked into some pretty extreme hardships and sacrifices and personal and family expenses just for the supposed honor of being allowed to compete in the final show.  Especially in obscure sports.  The Olympics is no different.  And that's done knowing only a few of the most talented and lucky will have any real chance of winning any of the events, even some of the best athletes have lost on the particular day of any of the contests involved.  Most of them will be very disappointed and those who encouraged that planned it that way from the start.  In some of the worst cases, such as in the dictatorships, children showing talent are pulled out of a normal childhood and away from their families into a farming system that includes enormous abuse and drugging, chewing them up and spitting out most of them so that the elite can compete for the glory of the dictatorship.  How that differs from John D. Rockefeller's infamous Social Darwinist American Beauty Rose sermon, I'd like some alleged lefty Olympics cultist to explain to me.  And the officials in charge of the filthy thing know all about that.  Maybe I should study the relationship of athletics to eugenics because given the time frame of the Olympics and the rise of eugenics, I'm absolutely certain there are many connections between the two.

Those who get eliminated early, those who lose at the games will be losers, feeling badly, maybe permanently impacted because of something which doesn't matter, one bit.  The time framing of Olympics will ensure that even some of the best athletes of their time will be losers.  I don't know what long term studies have ever been done on a world-wide basis to measure what the losers and their families get out of it, what the athletes who didn't get far at the Olympics got for all of that use by everyone from local coaches and national affiliates of the Olympic syndicates,  I doubt many if any disinterested studies of athletes and athletics are done.   I suspect that for a lot of even temporarily winning athletes they must often regret having given up so much, their families having invested so much into what was, in the end, not very much.  I remember reading one study of kids who spent enormous amounts of time playing pick-up basketball who seemed to fully believe someone was going to pluck them out of their working class or poverty into the wealth and fame of the NBA.  Some of such deluded dreamers didn't even play on a high school team.  The author of one of the articles about the study pointed out how few players made it to the professional level in terms of how much greater their chances of becoming surgeons and members of other elite professions would have been if they'd spent that time studying.  If they'd put it in terms of how many of them could have studied and apprenticed to become members of non-elite professions or trades, making a good living instead of becoming never rich and famous the numbers against them following an absurd fantasy would have been entirely against encouraging them in sports.  

The alleged advantage to their life-long health from participating in sports is also absurd,  I'll back up here to note that the greatest motive in the founding of the modern Olympics wasn't tied to the alleged life-long health benefit to athletes, it was to encourage the young to make themselves better cannon fodder for the competing military powers of Europe after the Franco-Prussian war.  That is why the Olympics is so tied into the most putrid of nationalist cultism.  Those members of the economic elites who planned the Olympics didn't want the athletes to be healthy for a long and good life, they wanted more effective soldiers to fight for their wars of conquest and financial gain.  Getting shot at, likely maimed or killed whether for king and country or republic.

But so many sports, especially at the elite, professional levels are far more contributive to injuries and health problems and poor health habits than being able to lead a relatively healthy and happy life.  Many of those bad effects being problems of emotions and character. I will note in passing the long standing relationship of athletics and alcohol use.  My guess would be that abstinence has been rare and rarely encouraged in the culture of athletics.  

I will point out that much of the same can be said about elite, modern classical musicianship especially in my field of playing piano with all of the famed players who, once prodigies, played themselves into disability in service to some pretty bad music making concentrating on thrills and speed instead of musical content.   I've criticized that from pretty much the earliest comments and blog posts I've written, details will be given on further whining by the pudgy, couch-potato chorus who objected to my criticism of the holy Olympics.  

The direct musical analog to the Olympics, the performance competition racket is something I've never supported even when encouraged to do so within the department in college,  It's part of what's wrongest with professional musicianship and produces some pretty awful music making.  I absolutely and always have loathed the competition racket and the resultant kind of music making.  Bela Bartok said that competitions were for race horses, not artists.  When entrepreneurs wanted to tour the young Rudoph Serkin around the world his father rejected that saying they wanted an artist, not a prodigy.   Outside of opera and rock, music doesn't tend to lead to violence among the audience.  I'd argue strongly against depending on music as a "character" builder but the idea that sports builds good character is so easily contradicted by the many examples when it built bad character and outright criminality that that delusion is one of the major uninvestigated widespread delusions of our time.**  That is because you aren't allowed to tell the truth about that anymore than you are the sacred Olympics.  Some sports produce violent criminals so regularly that the culture that surrounds them and the violence intrinsic to the "game" has to contribute to that.  In many cases even the more likable non-criminals involved will cover up for their criminal teammates and even those on rival teams, mimicking the worst practices among many professions and associations.  

I don't have much of an opinion about non-professional sports engaged in for harmless pleasure, the ones that don't involve injuring the players or lead to regular riots and vandalism or rape.   With pro sports and many college sports fans seem to riot if their team loses or wins.* I am entirely against any that do that, especially to young people too young, foolish and manipulable to protect themselves against adults who feed off of them like vampires.  Womens' softball and, maybe, non-professional men's baseball played for fun strike me as being relatively OK, I'm sure there are other examples in other sports, I just don't know about those.  

I mentioned the effort of local residents in and around Boston to halt the effort of local businessmen and politicians to bring the summer Olympics to Boston a while back. Doing so democratically, not through PR.  The lies told by the promoters about the benefits that the residents of Boston and the surrounding area and the state and even region were pretty blatantly lies.  It is the rarest and only best planned and managed of Olympics that don't end up being a huge cost in taxes and other losses to the "host city, state and country."  And a lot of that is as much a matter of chance and luck as it is by planning and minimizing the cost of the corruptions baked into the deals that bring the Olympics to a particular place.  Reading the demands and guarantees that those costs will fall on the "host" and not on the ultimate beneficiaries of the Olympics, the members and employees of the international and national syndicate controlling them, you'd have to be the ultimate idiot or entirely ignorant of basic arithmetic to not see that it's an old-fashioned shake-down.  Or in on the con job.  Certainly the millionaires, billionaires and politicians who enter into the deal with them aren't the ones who plan on taking the hit to pay for what often turn out to be superfluous sports facilities, often designed by big-name architects who get lots of money as well as added PR for building those often unused white elephants.  Not to mention the accompanying infrastructure that so often doesn't fit into the actual needs of living around them.  Taxpayers are the ones who end up paying for them, probably for their eventual demolition when the same millionaires and billionaires or others of their type set their eyes on the often prime real estate those things sit on.  The poor, the destitute, the homeless who are pushed aside for them and disappeared don't matter at all to much of anyone.   

And there are the contractual obligations of the "host" cities and regions to provide the members of the Olympics syndicate with demanded perks and privileges.  One of the ones I remember was that lanes on highways in and around Boston would be designated for the use of Olympics officials only.  For anyone familiar with the traffic in and around Boston, the consequences of that would almost certainly have been grid-lock for as long as the princes and princesses and other gangsters of the Olympics got that privilege.  And that was only one example of the kind of demands that the Olympics places on whatever host it decides to parasitize.  Again, the same can be said of many professional sporting syndicates, football, baseball, perhaps somewhat less so for indoor sports like basketball and hockey, though those, at least, stick around and sometimes do actually contribute something long term to the place where they play.  I always like to see residents of cities who resist the shake-downs of the millionaire-billionaire owners of teams who demand they build them new stadiums for them to keep the team in their cities.  I think that's a sign of the mental health of the majority, maturity and an ability to understand basic mathematics, something which so many of those who objected to what I said in passing don't possess despite being credentialed by colleges and universities.  I think if a majority of residents in a democracy were presented with the facts of what the Olympics is going to mean to them, no democracy would ever agree to serve as the victims of the scheme.  That Paris, which likes to believe itself the cultural origin of enlightenment culture and governance, agreed to host the thing is a sign of how readily they are suckered by public relations and ephmeral fads and fashions.  Paris like most such over-praised loci is too full of itself.

During the last hostings of the Olympics by one of the major dictatorships, I forget wither it was Putin's Russia or Communist China, I heard talk again of the Olympics having permanent homes for the summer and winter games in relatively stable democratic countries.  One suggested Athens for the summer Olympics, I don't know what snowy location they'd think was reliable enough into the future to have snow games based there.  The suggestion touched on many of the corruptions inherent in the Olympics as being lessened or removed by that and they'd be spared the scandal of making cosy with the likes of Putin and, in the past Hitler and myriads of other vicious dictators and their corrupt regimes.  Though I strongly suspect many of the permanent members of the Olympics committees thrive on the opportunities for corruption baked into the thing and they'd never give up their good thing unless forced to by democratic governments.  Security around the Olympics being more possible in permanent locations might be another selling point.  

That might fix some of what's wrong with them but there's a lot more than that which is bad,  A lot of that is related to the exploitation and abuse of young athletes which is intrinsic to the Olympics.   That is endemic to sports which is, as I said, an irrational form of entertainment in which it is planned that at least half of the participants and fans are made unhappy though them.  I don't think that kind of unhappiness carries the alleged emotional or moral benefits it allegedly does carry.  If it did then the world's population would be a lot more emotionally stable and a lot more moral than it is, especially those who follow sports.  Some of the response to what I wrote, mentioning the practice of giving out medals to those who lost games or competitions, seem to take offense at not sticking it to "losers" in every way.   I've never endorsed giving "losers" ribbons or medals or awards of participation or whatever someone dreamed up in the last few decades, I've endorsed not caring about the whole thing.  Indifference to sports hasn't hurt anyone I know of who is indifferent to them.  And I can tell you, if you played music in high school instead of football, you're a less likely to have gotten fat and had health problems from it.  I don't know if any studies have been done about that, it's just based on being able to observe lots of people I went to school with throughout their adulthood.  Some of the jocks turned out OK but lots of them didn't.  The "character: that sports built wasn't reliably the best, the effect of sports on that is probably everything from nothing to making would-be jerks bigger jerks.

For myself, the coercion to pretend to like sports, to care about sports and to lie about what I can see right in front of me about sports is something I do resent, when I am forced to pay any attention at all to them.  I don't care about the games, I don't care about who wins and who loses, I won't lie about that or the corruption and immorality that is intrinsic to or which attaches itself to sports.  I don't particularly care if you don't like that, you can go soak your head if you don't but I never agreed to the fake morality that presents sports as an unmitigated good.  The only good that might be gotten out of sports, in terms of physical fitness and health are better gotten through rational, safe exercise and an active life.  

I'll save my admiration such as that given to athletes for people who serve the least among us, the "losers" among us, making themselves the servants of losers.  I'll save my admiration for those who give their time and work and resources to the public good, who never once provide the thrills and adrenaline high that sports encourages people to be addicted to.  I'll save my admiration for those who don't conform to corporate, market economics and who make deals with dictators and billionaires and other thugs.  And those who tell the truth instead of theatrical lies marketing those deals.  I'll save my admiration and praise for those who serve the least among us, the losers.  

* In researching what I write here, I  was interested but not surprised, to find out several years ago that the very first inter-collegiate American football game resulted in a riot, necessitating in the visiting team fleeing the town where it was held.  It hasn't gone uphill in terms of morals or ethics, since then.  Sports with violence built into them can't rationally be expected to produce anything else than the encouragement of violence.  As an invention of our economic elite who comprised those who attended universities back then, that's not surprising.  It is an expression of the cruel viciousness of the rich.   That they are asserted to produce good character so widely is one of the most widely believed lies there is.   I found out about that while I was researching the history of American football players who died while playing the "game."    That such a thing is so intimately tied into American colleges and universities, especially those with an alleged Christian character is proof of the depravity of modern life.  That it is presented with such phony, hokey, sentimental and dishonest sanctity when it is a filthy, cruel and violent game resulting in conceit and a sense of entitlement among those involved in it is an indictment of the culture that hosts that delusion.  I don't hold any sentimental regard for baseball but at least the game itself isn't the practice of thugishness.  Hockey, stripped of the violence attached to it, might not be anywhere near as bad as it is but American football is inherently dirty.  

** That American football has produced and not rejected so many rapists and other violent criminals, often being let off the hook by the police, and if not them then by prosecutors and judges is a hard fact.  There have been professional players who were known rapists.  And even the most credible accusations have not often led to such criminals being thrown off of college teams.  Though a few do get thrown off, now.  Often the response has been to quash any investigation into the crime or to discourage victims from making talking about attacks on them.  I've recently written about one of the most infamous and largely forgotten cases of that showing the corruption inbuilt into that sport and the culture that rose up naturally around what is inherently a violent sport.  The revelations of only a few cases of the sexual abuse of boys and young men in sports is, of course, worth following up on because I think there's a lot more of that than is ever reported.  But it's certainly a small percentage of the abuse of girls and Women that is intrinsic to the culture of athletics and has been from the start.  That it is the sexual abuse of males that really causes outrage is an indication of the sexism of the culture and in no way should lead to the minimization of the wrong done to the victims.  Male athletics inevitably seems to an assumption of sexual entitlement by athletes and that inevitably results in sexual violence.  That coaches and others would assume the same about males being used sexually isn't at all surprising when you think about it.  You'll have to prove to me that athletics is capable of changing that.  I will point out that I've had to face the same thing about the world of music, being disheartened when I found out what was apparently an open secret that the late James Levine was a serial sexual abuser and had been for decades before he was finally exposed during #MeToo.  I can't listen to his recordings anymore.  He disgusts me.  

God Bless Jimmy Carter

 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Keri Collins - Severn

 Severn 

Edward is a lave net fisherman who spends his days wading and sifting in the tricky tidal waters of the River Severn. When something unexpected turns up in his net, an old mystery rushes back into his life like a spring tide.  Starring Jason Hughes and Remy Beasley.

Writer - Keri Collins

CAST
Edward - Jason Hughes
Ellie - Remy Beasley
Lizzie - Katharine Rogers
Boatyard Jack - Joe Sims
John - Christian Patterson
Maria - Lucy Rivers
Mick - Stuart McLoughlin
Holly - Amelie Anthony

Production Coordinator - Eleri McAuliffe
Sound Design - Nigel Lewis
Field Recordings - Jonathan Thomas
Director - John Norton
A BBC Audio Wales Production

With thanks to : Black Rock Lave Net Heritage Fishery

I didn't have time to look for a new play this week so I'm hearing this for the first time, too.  Hope it's good. 

That Dumb Dolly At Duncans'

 opinion doesn't interest me.   

She thinks improvisation means doodling round on pentatonic scales against a rock style, bargain basement back beat.   I mean, who can't do that? 

 

Whining About Me Dissing "Civil Libertarians"

SCUM BUCKET LAWYER-SCUMBAG  torture advocate, Trump bitch, celebrity ambulance chaser, Harvard Law and camera hogging whore Alan Dershowitz, successfully  marketed himself as a "civil libertarian."    

A "civil libertarian" is someone who cares more about the guy who wants to lynch you than he cares about your right to live a decent, peaceful life and gets on TV to push that while shaking down the potential victims for donations to the "cause."    I prefer the ones who announce they're Nazi enabling assholes instead of proving they're assholes while pretending to have principles.   I loathe them. 

If You Want To See Extreme Blasphemy

look at this post from RMJ.   

THIS CRAP I do find offensive.   

Looking at those images deifying Trump, I do remember having written about the remarkable lack of complaint about a photo-job era "last supper" that put the then winning Red Sox in place of Jesus and the Apostles.  But I can't find it. 

Just As I Try To Boycott New Years Eve

I seldom pay any attention to the Olympics.   Finding athletics competitions to be boring and incomprehensible (I have never understood why I'm supposed to care who wins and who loses a game) and repelled by the phony, hypocritical moral esteem they are held in, it's best to just ignore it.  

I don't have anything in particular against the athletes, themselves but the International Olympics Committee are a pack of crooks, thugs and gangsters, often corrupting local, state and national governments in their shake downs of choosing which city will be the victim of Olympics in the future.  I was never prouder of my region than when the People of Boston sandbagged the city and state government's attempts to force the Olympics on them.  They did it the right way, by researching what a bad deal it was for residents and tax payers and the fact that in just about every case, what is promised as a huge economic boost for the place that holds the thing turns into a huge, expensive and not infrequently human rights violation of the "host city."   When it's the Olympics, the "host" is the kind of host that it is when an organism contracts a dangerous, debilitating disease or parasite.  

So I ignored the Paris Olympics opening which I hadn't seen described in all its grotesque over-the-topness until reading this article criticizing Catholic bishops for getting their knickers in a twist over the vulgarity and would-be blasphemy of the thing.   Since one of the bishops getting slammed is one I particularly dislike,  the right-wing, male-supremacist media hog Robert Barron,  I'll get that out of the way, first:

This last point is important because Bishop Andrew Cozzens of Crookston, Minnesota, and Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, both rushed to denounce the sketch. Cozzens took to Instagram to issue a statement that read, in part, "Jesus experienced his Passion anew Friday night in Paris when his Last Supper was publicly defamed. As his living body, we are invited to enter into this moment of passion with him, this moment of public shame, mockery, and persecution." This is overwrought. Persecution is made of sterner stuff. Besides, I thought the persecuted were blest (cf. Matthew. 5:10)?

Not to be outdone, Barron said in a video posted on X, "France felt evidently, as it's trying to put its best cultural foot forward, that the right thing to do is to mock this very central moment in Christianity." It seems Mssr. Jolly mocked Christianity, not "France," but never mind. Barron went on to ask: "would they ever have dreamed of mocking in this gross public way a scene from the Quran? We all know the answer." Excuse me, mon excellence, but have you forgotten the massacre of journalists at Charlie Hebdo? And is Barron suggesting we Christians should be more like radical Islamists in defending the faith?

The problem with these two statements is not just that they are a bit shrill and hysterical. It is that they do not mention if they consulted with the French bishops, who issued a statement of their own. The French bishops were more measured and less histrionic than their American confreres. My question to Bishops Barron and Cozzens is this: On what authority do you feel it necessary to weigh in on an event that happens outside your diocese without consulting the local ordinaries? They could have done what Archbishop John Wester did, issue a statement expressing solidarity with the French bishops and reposting their statement. Neither man is a leader of the U.S. bishops' conference. Did the Holy See ask them for their thoughts? The word "Catholic" is a word with a meaning. There is an archbishop of Paris and his name is Ulrich, not Barron or Cozzens.

Barron seems to enjoy commenting on every issue under the sun. If there were a Dicastery for Hot Takes, he could be the prefect. The problem is deeper than the vanity of one bishop. Both U.S. prelates fail to recognize the self-defeating quality of taking the bait every time the culture wars burst into flame. It always cedes the choice of battlefield to one's opponents. It always puts one in a defensive crouch. It always risks exacerbating tensions that might be resolved or at least ameliorated with a different approach. I am not afraid of being a bit stiff-necked when it is necessary. When it becomes routine, it becomes unconvincing.

The two bishops also make the mistake of assigning motives that may or may not be present. Barron talks about France's "post-modern society" which may or may not have been part of the choreographer's motives. He might have just been looking to cause a stir, to generate clicks. Perhaps Barron has lost the capacity for recognizing the way commercial interests tend to distort one's message and blur one's intentions.

I have to admit, I enjoyed reading that passage more than I'd enjoy watching any Olympics event.  I also read it while admitting that what I did see of the opening ceremonies was vulgar, over-the-top, stupid and offensive, not to mention exactly in line with typical French republican anti-clerical, anti-religion.   And, if Michael Sean Winters is quoting Thomas Jolly,  the head of planning for that anti-Christian content as the bishops assert it was planned for exactly those reasons.  The whole thing was planned to get as much attention as possible for whatever reason.

The Paris Olympic organizing committee promised us the opening ceremonies of the 2024 Games would be like no other. They succeeded beyond our wildest nightmares. 

The whole thing was overdone. As the Times' television critic Mike Hale noted, it felt like "just another bloated made-for-TV spectacle."

The most conspicuous difference from past opening ceremonies was that the parade of athletes took place in boats sailing down the Seine from the Pont d'Austerlitz to the temporary stadium erected at the Trocadero. Usually, the athletes enter the stadium marching behind their flag bearer. Videos of early Olympics show the parade of nations had a military feel to it which gave way to a more informal marching in more recent years. Bringing the athletes down the river on boats had the benefit of showcasing many Parisian landmarks, but at the expense of keeping the focus on the athletes.

Because traveling the length of the river took longer than marching around a single track, the parade was filled with cultural segments of uneven quality. The images of a decapitated Marie Antoinette staring out from the windows of the Conciergerie were disturbing. "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" is the French national motto but perhaps we should add "brutalité" to the list.

I will interject that that last sentence is excellent and accurate.

The scene of a "ménage à trois" starting in a library might see an uptick in library visits, but I could have done without it.

The most controversial scene featured a group of drag queens involved in some kind of pagan feast that mimicked Leonardo da Vinci's fresco "The Last Supper." The organizers and the man who choreographed the ceremonies, Thomas Jolly, denied there was any attempt to mock anyone, which is difficult to believe when he also said, "I didn't have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey." Amidst the confusion of his comments, his agenda is hiding in plain sight. What is more, the organizers later admitted the da Vinci painting was an inspiration for the skit.

Looking at better images of it than the ones I first saw, that couldn't possibly be more obvious, denials made on behalf of the planners were obviously lying.   Do I find it offensive, somewhat but not enough to get really worked up over it.  I'd guess I'd find something pretty offensive about any Olympics opening spectacle, any of the many held in brutal, oppressive dictatorships, for a start.  In that case, the most tastefully done one would only be more morally offensive because of that. 

The first thing that should be said to Mssr. Jolly is that if you have to explain the symbolism of your art, your art isn't very good. The second thing is that the episode shows, again, the limits of laïcité, the aggressive separation of church and society legally enacted in the late 19th and early 20th century. The third thing to be said is that it is for the Christians of France to register their displeasure.

Since reading that I've looked into the issue more than I ever would have and it's pretty clear that what Jolly was looking for is pretty much what he got, a huge amount of publicity based in offending a lot of People, especially those in high places where they can do little to nothing about their offense.   Going after Christianity in France is pretty safe,  it is most places because religion is one of the most dis-empowered entities there is.   If he'd gone after the super-rich, after major media figures, politicians, in descending level of danger to the one doing it, that might have been brave and worthy of going to the bother of defending it.   As it is, you hire someone who has announced he's going to stage a spectacle aiming at creating a stir, you're likely to get a stir. 

Is this important?  I hope not.  There are more important things for Christianity to be doing than to get worked up over this.  I don't know what the planning for the Paris Olympics have done to harm the poor, the destitute, the homeless but that's often a part of the racket wherever that international organized crime racket puts down for a few years.  That would be worth getting in a lather about, though I'd like to see where the bishops in question ever spent any time on that.   Or, for that matter, any media giving such a religion-based advocacy for the least among us the attention they've given this story.   I know that Winters has as has the National Catholic Reporter so I'm not including them in that last remark.  

As to the harm to Christianity that will come from the grotesque spectacle, if that's all it takes then Christianity has sustained far more damage, already.   If the Churches had been doing what they should have been doing all along, doing for the least among us what they would do for The Lord,  all the idiot theater producers and directors in France and Hollywood couldn't harm it. 

An Amazing Interview With Steve Reich At 87

 

 

I'm tempted to rub this in the face of those who bought the media created idea that Joe Biden was too old to do the job he's been doing so brilliantly (his NATO press conference, for example).    But it's wonderful to hear him talking so brilliantly about his music, music and so much else. 

On the other hand, Trump never had this kind of competence on the best day of his life.   Neither do most people half that age. 

It Wasn't All Barbershop Quartets - What I Did Last Weekend

IN "GIFT AND TASK," the book in which Walter Brueggemann gives the lectionary readings, commentary and a prayer for every day of the Episcopal liturgical year in 2017,  on Proper 10 he asks the question of what it says about the church that it's so domesticated that it isn't causing the powerful, the rich and the culture in general to feel uneasy with it.   I would say that that's too true of "the church" while being untrue in a number of particular instances.   A number of those working inside the structures of mainline Protestantism and Catholicism regularly make those comfortable in and with the powers that be everything from uncomfortable to angry to furious.   In Catholicism Pope Francis has certainly gotten the opposition to the rich and powerful through his environmental theology, his theology of economic and social justice, his theology of mercy to those who the Catholic Church has traditionally excluded, LGBTQ+ (despite his unfortunate use of an anti-gay slur a while back), his proposal to include divorced and remarried Catholics, his outreach to non-European People and cultures, etc.  And there are those in the Catholic Church who make him uneasy with their insistence on equality for Women in the priesthood and diaconate within the Catholic Church. 

Whenever someone in the Church takes the teachings of the Gospels and Epistles, the Prophets and the Sinai tradition seriously, the results won't rest easily with the rich and powerful or in those who want the Church to be comfortable instead of prophetic.  

If there's one thing that anyone trying hard to follow the teaching of Jesus as laid out in the New Testament, in the Epistles as well as the Gospels, they wouldn't be making anyone with lots of money or political power happy, whether they were outside of or inside of the various Churches.   As I've quoted him before,  the atheist, secularist radical Noam Chomsky has said that the Gospel is radical, I say far more radical than any secular attempt to imitate it.   I can't remember which younger commentator I heard online who noted that atheists who promote anything left of predatory capitalism by way of equality or morality got their morality directly from the Jewish-Christian tradition, though we're finding out today that some of that came through Islam as well.   You have to go to those who were influenced by other religious traditions,  Native American, Asian, etc. to find those who got some of that from elsewhere but none of it comes through secularism which doesn't contain what you need to make those.  If anything the history of America demonstrates that secularism is far more likely to dissolve that morality from life than to support it.   Economic liberalism, in the sense of allowing the already rich to get richer at the expense of the non-rich and to enjoy their wealth without government getting involved is a product of "enlightenment" secularism.  It is the fatal genetic disease embedded in liberal democracy and in many less than democratic forms of republican government.   

I wrote a long, long piece this weekend in response to someone who complained about something I recently wrote, basing it on a piece that Rick Perlstein wrote for the nation nine years ago,  When Leftists Become Conservatives.   My conclusion is that in every case he mentions that I'm familiar with,  the "leftism" of the lefties in question, which turned out to be less than a durable lifetime commitment,   was problematic due to its secularism, materialism and anti-religious content.   I think it's due to that amorality that led so many of them to go from that atheist-materialist-scientistic "left" to the vulgar materialist right.  The likes of Max Eastman,  Ronald Radosh and David Horowitz figured in my arguments.   I'm never surprised, anymore, when I hear about such lefties turning to Republican-fascism, whether in the racist National Review of the Buckley era or of the Bush II regime or the Hudson Institute and The New Criterion.   I distrust such would be intellectual enterprises about as much as I distrust capitalism and Marxism and Catholic integralism and its millionaire owned Vatican in Napa.  

I don't know if I want to go at length into slamming that ersatz left again, though I was all ready to do that in light of what the Greens and the massive asshole RFK jr. are still up to.   If I do it will be from a Christian point of view instead of some impotent stand of secularism.   I don't find that at all effective and it's an inadequate basis for attacking the enemies of equality and democracy, economic justice and the environmental basis of life.