I would have thought it was obvious why I posted the account of the Polish Catholic farm couple and their children who were sacrificed in their attempt to save Jews from the Nazis without posting an explanation. The accusation was made attributing the Holocaust to Christianity. Well, while everything about Christianity is in opposition to what the Nazis did it is entirely consistent with what the Polish Christians who risked and in many cases lost their lives and even the lives of their children in an attempt to shield Jews from the Nazis who were killing them. Since the accusation is made by an atheist who constantly makes such accusations, attributing actions which are identified as evil and not to be done in the Christian scriptures, which, by the way INCLUDED THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES, it is entirely fair and proper to note that there is nothing in atheism, materialism, or even science that identifies those actions as evil and not to be done.
Any people who profess Christianity who did what is forbidden by the books which their religion identifies as inspired if not actually the word of God were certainly not acting from their professed religion, a far more rational accusation was that they were adopting the amorality of atheism as the framing of their actions. But the accusation which was made isn't made from an honest or rational framing, it is made to denigrate Christianity, not to understand the Holocaust and its motives.
I have noticed, perhaps in response to that accusation, one popularized by the atheist, materialist and scientist Steven "bad religion" Weinberg and his associates in evangelical atheism, there has been an effort to reexamine more closely the motives of the Nazis, which were varied but which, at the top, were quite explicitly anti-Christian. If the Nazis hadn't lost the war and been brought down it's pretty clear that their plan, which had already evolved from the period when they gained power in 1933, ever more violently, had a tactical plan. They didn't start murdering people immediately, they began with the destruction of those deemed biologically inferior due to disability, violating their rights, forced sterilization. Their plans were to go for the easiest targets first and to progressively attack those who were more able to fight back and to do things gradually, including attacking Jews and even the very influential Protestant and Christian churches. One of their strongest means of doing that was also a gradually building and progressive program of terror, attacks on property, on people which included, quite early, murder to stifle any resistance. Catholic leaders were targeted in the early Night of the Long Knives along with possible competition even within the Nazi party. The coming weeks, months and years brought progressively harsher laws first restricting religious activities by the Catholic and real Protestant churches, first to weaken their influence through political, social and youth groups - previously some of the strongest in Europe. Some have likened the Nazi actions as a form of ghettoization, shutting up the Church and restricting its activities to remove it from the wider society where it couldn't resist the Nazis progressively stronger grip on power and its beginning of putting its programs of war and murder into effect. As soon as they felt confident enough to do that the Nazis began the wholesale and open murder of people, beginning with those deemed biologically unfit about the same time they began their military conquests. I don't think the timing of those two events was coincidental.
The gradual approach the Nazis took was necessary, in no small part, because the Christian churches could be counted on to endanger their power in the early months and years if they acted immediately to kill people. The encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, read in all Catholic churches in 1937, as the dangers of doing so were rising, contains an explanation of how the Vatican was taken in by the Nazis four years earlier and notes the progressive nature of the Nazis scheme.
When, in 1933, We consented, Venerable Brethren, to open negotiations for a concordat, which the Reich Government proposed on the basis of a scheme of several years' standing; and when, to your unanimous satisfaction, We concluded the negotiations by a solemn treaty, We were prompted by the desire, as it behooved Us, to secure for Germany the freedom of the Church's beneficent mission and the salvation of the souls in her care, as well as by the sincere wish to render the German people a service essential for its peaceful development and prosperity. Hence, despite many and grave misgivings, We then decided not to withhold Our consent for We wished to spare the Faithful of Germany, as far as it was humanly possible, the trials and difficulties they would have had to face, given the circumstances, had the negotiations fallen through. It was by acts that We wished to make it plain, Christ's interests being Our sole object, that the pacific and maternal hand of the Church would be extended to anyone who did not actually refuse it.
If, then, the tree of peace, which we planted on German soil with the purest intention, has not brought forth the fruit, which in the interest of your people, We had fondly hoped, no one in the world who has eyes to see and ears to hear will be able to lay the blame on the Church and on her Head. The experiences of these last years have fixed responsibilities and laid bare intrigues, which from the outset only aimed at a war of extermination. In the furrows, where We tried to sow the seed of a sincere peace, other men - the "enemy" of Holy Scripture - oversowed the cockle of distrust, unrest, hatred, defamation, of a determined hostility overt or veiled, fed from many sources and wielding many tools, against Christ and His Church. They, and they alone with their accomplices, silent or vociferous, are today responsible, should the storm of religious war, instead of the rainbow of peace, blacken the German skies.
The signs that the Vatican had been duped began to be manifest almost immediately because within weeks of signing the Concordat the Nazis started to destroy Catholic youth organizations by outlawing membership in them. Propagandizing children was one of the cornerstones of the Nazis plan, one of the quickest means they saw of consolidating power by turning even the children of parents who hated the Nazis into fanatics.
The charge that the Nazis are a product of Christianity is a big lie that has been widely sold in the English speaking world by atheists, I think to some extent it was a harder sell in places where people could read the original source materials in full as opposed to the selectively translated and clipped versions of those that were contained in the things I remember reading about the Nazis in relation to Christianity in the 60s. Now, as more things have been translated more fully into English and those are increasingly available in easily found form, online, that lie will become harder to tell. In my experience of research over the past decade, it is not unlike the results of having the complete writings and progressively more of the letters of Charles Darwin, his children, his closest inner circle of colleagues available. The lie of the eugenics-free Charles Darwin whose natural selection had nothing to do with Nazi eugenics was sold by the same English language academic figures during the same period.
The sins of the Christian churches and many Christians who participated in Nazism, in fascism, in other atrocities must be faced up to and learned from. The generation who did those things in the 1930s and 40s is almost completely gone, so for us it is a matter of learning from their history and resolving never to allow that to happen again. That is a religious obligation, it is a moral obligation to do so. There is nothing within atheism, materialism or science which requires that kind of reflection, there is within Christianity. Which framing could rationally be believed to be a better means of preventing that happening again, in the future?
Update: Ah, well, you see, in 1933, when the Vatican entered into the Concordat it was dealing with the newly and LEGALLY elected government of Germany, which, by the way, had been opposed by the Catholic political parties in the election. That it was a government that came to power with a minority vote is a warning to us all, a warning that, today, going on a century later, has not caused us to see the evil of any government being elected with less than 50% of the voters supporting it and to change laws to prevent the same happening here, is an important issue but not part of my answer.
As far as the Vatican could have known, they faced a legally elected government whose policies were inimical to Christian morality at the very least and a direct danger quite certainly. The Nazis had said a lot about their intentions in 1933, they had lied about a lot of it and had certainly hidden most of the worst of it. If they had not they likely would have lost the election and never come to power.
As was said by Pius XI in the encyclical quoted above (an encyclical published in German instead of the usual Latin so as to be entirely understood by the German Catholics to whom it was read) they relied on the information available to them in 1933 and were quickly shown that those hopes were badly wrong.
You can contrast something which had the great support of many of the cultural heroes of the atheist left in the post-war period, the Stalin-Hitler pact - often euphamsized as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact so as to shield Stalin from direct involvement - which was agreed to in August 1939 when there was absolutely no mistaking the intentions of the Nazis. Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia in March, Kristallnacht had happened nine months before. Two months later the Nazis began their mass murder program through Gnadentod "mercy death" of the disabled, their trial run for the mass murder programs, Hitler backdating his order legalizing it to September 1. There was nothing in the six years separating the Nazis first months in power to the time when Stalin signed his own concordat with Hitler that would have allowed the Communists who supported Stalin to disclaim knowledge of who their hero was doing business with. Yet, as has been pretty well covered up, many Communists, many of them cultural heroes to the "new left" of my generation, did a U-turn and suddenly went from being anti-Hitler to being anti-war. Dalton Trumbo's book Johnny Got His Gun was serialized in the Daily Worker in 1940, something which got the bourgeois-communist, Trumbo fan letters from American Hitler lovers.
If you want to make hay over a group which made love to the Nazis well after it was apparent what they were up to, more than two years after the Vatican repented of their far earlier and foolishly optimistic attempts to avoid what was inevitable with the Nazis, you can look to that group of atheists who suddenly, under orders from Stalin, went all peace and love with the Nazis as they were engaged in military conquest and mass murder.
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Monday, October 12, 2015
Mauro Giuliani - Two Rondos
Erik Stenstadvold, 19th century guitar
Brenda Blewett, fortepiano
I remembered these pieces that show the sound a fortepiano like Schubert knew and a guitar of the same period had timbres which were much closer than modern pianos and modern guitars.
These are fine pieces, especially the second one.
OK, Atheists, Show The World Your Effective, Durable Articulation of Equal Rights And The Moral Necessity of Respecting Them
Having repeatedly pointed out the historical fact that 100% of the political regimes where atheists held political control have been, in fact, dictatorships characterized by massive bloodshed, slavery and many other forms of oppression, I am told that atheists have means of articulating equality and rights that are superior to the assertion that rights are an equally bestowed endowment from God.
I would like to see what those are. Jesus said that you don't light a lamp and put it under a basket but it would seem that's where the atheist exposition of rights is. I say, take it out so we can get a look at it.
Though, I should qualify my challenge for them to produce their assertion of the reality of equal rights, that assertion has to be effective in producing the freedom to exercise those rights in real life, which, of course, necessarily leads to the identification of moral requirements that people respect those rights on a universal basis. Atheists aren't notably big on identifying firm moral requirements, they're more likely to be coming up with reasons to not believe those are more than mere convention, just another way of coming up with reasons they or others don't have to practice moral restraints and obligations.
I have also gone through that, over and over again and the explanation of their substitute for equal rights and moral obligations have never stood up to the first level of testing.
Readers of my blog will know that since last April I've been challenging atheists, materialists, to come up with some coherent explanation of how, under their "brain-only" model of the human mind, in which all of our ideas and thoughts are ephiphenomena of physical structures within the brain, a brain would know how to make the right structure to be any given idea before that materialist idea-structure was present in the brain to inform the brain of what it needed to make. The attempt by two rather superficial materialists to magically invoke "DNA" and some vague assertion of natural selection didn't even begin to produce an answer to those challenges though it did show that, in the minds of materialists, those words serve a function, at times, as superstitious as anything they might mock. Far more superstitious than many of them.
I know from experience that the same vague, illogical and irrational invocation of natural selection and genes, is often as far as the atheists can get in explaining why someone shouldn't violate someones' rights, up to and including their right to remain alive, to which another atheist would say, "Who's going to make me?" The fact is that no materialist who goes on about rights of any kind has ever come up with a reason another materialist shouldn't violate them if they figured they could get away with it.
Invoking natural selection, a model of evolution that works by the stronger killing off the weaker if the weaker don't just die in an accommodating manner as the origin of morality only shows just how stupid trying to make science do what it can't can get. The ridiculous "mutual aid" model that was pasted onto Darwinism is a far better model of the inadequacy of the patch job than it is of any proven effectiveness in producing "mutual aid". The absolute nihilism of natural selection was and is the most enduring feature of it as applied to the human population, which has no special status under it, something which has been asserted from Darwin on, it was, explicitly noted as one of its main attractions by people like Huxley, Galton, Haeckel, and the overwhelming consensus of those who advocated natural selection.
Materialists, figuring they've got what they believe to be the oracular power of science on their side, maintain one of the most intellectually bankrupt ideologies human beings have ever held in large numbers. And while there are a myriad of sci-guys and sci-rangers who have a naive faith in that power without having bothered to learn much of anything about science on more than a popular level, even the high priesthood of scientistic materialism is notably unable to make any kind of progress in producing either a viable explanation of how their materialist mind can get started or an effective and durable assertion of the reality of rights and the moral obligations that make those a reality in human societies.
It is in human societies in the past century that the idea that materialism, atheism could produce better government had its real life try out and the results are brutal, oppressive, unequal and unjust governments with a probability of those results in 100% of the experiments run. The concurrent experiments run under capitalist materialism prove that, though the results are not 100% like those under Marxist materialism, the less they take the metaphysical reality of rights and moral obligations as their governing principle the more like them they will be.
As for the atheists who have spoken out for human rights, some far more persuasively than others, I would like to know how they can convince someone of why they should not violate someones' rights if they want to and they believe they can get away with it. The lessons of human history has shown that if you don't have some really effective argument as to why they shouldn't, those with the power to violate rights will always do that under those conditions. Unlike materialism, the problem with Christianity isn't the morals asserted, it wasn't what Jesus said to do, it is the inability to get those who professed Christianity to DO IT CONSISTENTLY. Atheism certainly doesn't improve the chances of that happening by removing the God who commands equal justice and moral behavior.
There is nothing in atheism that contains a reason for not doing what you want to when you figure you can get away with doing it or to put the burden of bad results it on other people. I'd like to know how Katha Pollitt would tell Thunderf00t why he should respect womens' rights when he doesn't want to and doesn't have to. His career as a scientist and an atheist activist doesn't seem to have done that.
Update: "Christians weren't responsible for the Holocaust -- it was materialists pushing gun control."
There is no way to reconcile the Holocaust with the teachings of Jesus or his closest followers, everything about the teachings of Jesus and his followers would identify it as an absolute evil. There is no way to explain why it was wrong with atheism. None of the people involved in the Holocaust were acting according to the teachings of Christianity, most of the non-Jews who resisted the Nazis were Christians, as pointed out, increasingly as people go over the record of what the Nazis involved in the Holocaust said, they were hardly acting out of religious motives. Christians who opposed the Nazis were also targeted for death, those who aided Jews in escaping from the Nazis were marked for death, them as well as their families. Many if not most of those who risked that were Christians or likely were. Tens of thousands of Pols, for example, were killed by the Nazis for hiding Jews. For example:
Markowa, Lancut county, voivodship of Rzeszow. March 24, 1943. A Catholic farmer, Jozef Ulma, kept Jewish refugees in his household. Surprised by three carloads of German military police and cornered in the attic, all the Jews were shot to death. Then, in reprisal, Ulma's six children: Antoni Ulma, Barbara Ulma, Franciszek Ulma, Marian Ulma, Stanislaw Ulma and Wladyslaw Ulma, aged from 1 to 8, were put to death. Their father and pregnant wife, Mrs. Ulma, had to watch their children being killed one by one. Both parents were murdered last. All the Christians and Jews were buried in one common grave dug in the backyard. The youngest, a one-year old baby was smashed against a tree.
I would like you to come up with a list of those who proposed gun control measures in various congresses and legislative sessions to prove that "it was materialists pushing gun control". For one thing it would be rather hard to find enough materialists who hold public office to have done that. If you could it would deprive atheists of one of their favorite whines, that no one will vote for atheists.
I would like to see what those are. Jesus said that you don't light a lamp and put it under a basket but it would seem that's where the atheist exposition of rights is. I say, take it out so we can get a look at it.
Though, I should qualify my challenge for them to produce their assertion of the reality of equal rights, that assertion has to be effective in producing the freedom to exercise those rights in real life, which, of course, necessarily leads to the identification of moral requirements that people respect those rights on a universal basis. Atheists aren't notably big on identifying firm moral requirements, they're more likely to be coming up with reasons to not believe those are more than mere convention, just another way of coming up with reasons they or others don't have to practice moral restraints and obligations.
I have also gone through that, over and over again and the explanation of their substitute for equal rights and moral obligations have never stood up to the first level of testing.
Readers of my blog will know that since last April I've been challenging atheists, materialists, to come up with some coherent explanation of how, under their "brain-only" model of the human mind, in which all of our ideas and thoughts are ephiphenomena of physical structures within the brain, a brain would know how to make the right structure to be any given idea before that materialist idea-structure was present in the brain to inform the brain of what it needed to make. The attempt by two rather superficial materialists to magically invoke "DNA" and some vague assertion of natural selection didn't even begin to produce an answer to those challenges though it did show that, in the minds of materialists, those words serve a function, at times, as superstitious as anything they might mock. Far more superstitious than many of them.
I know from experience that the same vague, illogical and irrational invocation of natural selection and genes, is often as far as the atheists can get in explaining why someone shouldn't violate someones' rights, up to and including their right to remain alive, to which another atheist would say, "Who's going to make me?" The fact is that no materialist who goes on about rights of any kind has ever come up with a reason another materialist shouldn't violate them if they figured they could get away with it.
Invoking natural selection, a model of evolution that works by the stronger killing off the weaker if the weaker don't just die in an accommodating manner as the origin of morality only shows just how stupid trying to make science do what it can't can get. The ridiculous "mutual aid" model that was pasted onto Darwinism is a far better model of the inadequacy of the patch job than it is of any proven effectiveness in producing "mutual aid". The absolute nihilism of natural selection was and is the most enduring feature of it as applied to the human population, which has no special status under it, something which has been asserted from Darwin on, it was, explicitly noted as one of its main attractions by people like Huxley, Galton, Haeckel, and the overwhelming consensus of those who advocated natural selection.
Materialists, figuring they've got what they believe to be the oracular power of science on their side, maintain one of the most intellectually bankrupt ideologies human beings have ever held in large numbers. And while there are a myriad of sci-guys and sci-rangers who have a naive faith in that power without having bothered to learn much of anything about science on more than a popular level, even the high priesthood of scientistic materialism is notably unable to make any kind of progress in producing either a viable explanation of how their materialist mind can get started or an effective and durable assertion of the reality of rights and the moral obligations that make those a reality in human societies.
It is in human societies in the past century that the idea that materialism, atheism could produce better government had its real life try out and the results are brutal, oppressive, unequal and unjust governments with a probability of those results in 100% of the experiments run. The concurrent experiments run under capitalist materialism prove that, though the results are not 100% like those under Marxist materialism, the less they take the metaphysical reality of rights and moral obligations as their governing principle the more like them they will be.
As for the atheists who have spoken out for human rights, some far more persuasively than others, I would like to know how they can convince someone of why they should not violate someones' rights if they want to and they believe they can get away with it. The lessons of human history has shown that if you don't have some really effective argument as to why they shouldn't, those with the power to violate rights will always do that under those conditions. Unlike materialism, the problem with Christianity isn't the morals asserted, it wasn't what Jesus said to do, it is the inability to get those who professed Christianity to DO IT CONSISTENTLY. Atheism certainly doesn't improve the chances of that happening by removing the God who commands equal justice and moral behavior.
There is nothing in atheism that contains a reason for not doing what you want to when you figure you can get away with doing it or to put the burden of bad results it on other people. I'd like to know how Katha Pollitt would tell Thunderf00t why he should respect womens' rights when he doesn't want to and doesn't have to. His career as a scientist and an atheist activist doesn't seem to have done that.
Update: "Christians weren't responsible for the Holocaust -- it was materialists pushing gun control."
There is no way to reconcile the Holocaust with the teachings of Jesus or his closest followers, everything about the teachings of Jesus and his followers would identify it as an absolute evil. There is no way to explain why it was wrong with atheism. None of the people involved in the Holocaust were acting according to the teachings of Christianity, most of the non-Jews who resisted the Nazis were Christians, as pointed out, increasingly as people go over the record of what the Nazis involved in the Holocaust said, they were hardly acting out of religious motives. Christians who opposed the Nazis were also targeted for death, those who aided Jews in escaping from the Nazis were marked for death, them as well as their families. Many if not most of those who risked that were Christians or likely were. Tens of thousands of Pols, for example, were killed by the Nazis for hiding Jews. For example:
Markowa, Lancut county, voivodship of Rzeszow. March 24, 1943. A Catholic farmer, Jozef Ulma, kept Jewish refugees in his household. Surprised by three carloads of German military police and cornered in the attic, all the Jews were shot to death. Then, in reprisal, Ulma's six children: Antoni Ulma, Barbara Ulma, Franciszek Ulma, Marian Ulma, Stanislaw Ulma and Wladyslaw Ulma, aged from 1 to 8, were put to death. Their father and pregnant wife, Mrs. Ulma, had to watch their children being killed one by one. Both parents were murdered last. All the Christians and Jews were buried in one common grave dug in the backyard. The youngest, a one-year old baby was smashed against a tree.
I would like you to come up with a list of those who proposed gun control measures in various congresses and legislative sessions to prove that "it was materialists pushing gun control". For one thing it would be rather hard to find enough materialists who hold public office to have done that. If you could it would deprive atheists of one of their favorite whines, that no one will vote for atheists.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Another Reason Why Change Stalled: A Rule To Live By
Those people who would make an argument about genocide in all too real life out of The Big Lebowski forever mark themselves as too stupid to bother with. But such passes as smart thinking these days. It isn't.
Another rule is that anyone who think's that kind of stuff is smart is too stupid to change anything except the channel.
Another rule is that anyone who think's that kind of stuff is smart is too stupid to change anything except the channel.
Katha Pollitt's Facile Put Down of Laudato Si
Someone threw Katha at me again. That would be Katha Pollitt, specifically her column against Pope Francis for not overturning previous Catholic teaching on birth control and abortion and, apparently, in her view, cancelling out all of what he said that has made him the most radical voice among world leaders on ending the war against the environment. I happen to agree with Pollitt about the right of women to control their own bodies, though I think our ideas about that are somewhat different. I also agree that people controlling the size of the human population is an essential aspect of the continuation of the human population, biological diversity and life on Earth, human beings being the most destructive species in the history of life on Earth. But the mere assertion that is going to be done through making birth control available is just plain wrong. She makes a lot of hay out of the reproductive rate in the Philippines, a Catholic majority country,
True, Pope Francis did say that Catholics needn’t breed “like rabbits,” but he waved away the need for “artificial” birth control. If only those rabbits would use natural family planning! Interestingly, he made that comment as he was leaving the Philippines, a largely Catholic country where the powerful church hierarchy has fought tooth and nail against realistic sex education and government funding of contraception. Not coincidentally, the Philippines has the highest fertility rate among the 10 countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
While I certainly agree with her that women and men in the Philippines should have full access to and information about modern contraception and a right to control their bodies, her use of that issue in the article is nonsense. In the Union of Concerned Scientists' listing of Each Country's Share of CO2 Emissions virtually every large country in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is in the top 20, the Philippines doesn't even show up in it. China and India, both with extensive programs and even mandates in controlling fertility (China) are in the top 5, China topping even the United States for number one. Japan is number 5 and South Korea number 8. Other than the oil producing nations of Iran (number 7) and Saudi Arabia (10) all of the top ten are modern industrial states which, I believe, have rather advanced programs of dispensing birth control information and, in some cases, even methods and, also, have no ban on abortion.
Even when you do get to Catholic majority countries on the list, Brazil (12), Mexico (13) both have free availability to contraception, Mexico is listed by the UN as having liberal availability of legal abortion and Brazil of having legal though somewhat more restrictive availability of abortion.
Britain, often touted as a secular paradise with liberal availability and government provided birth control and abortion services comes in at 11, before either of those Catholic majority countries. If you look at the list from the Union of Concerned Scientists, being a Catholic majority country would not seem to be a strong factor in making you a major contributor to global warming. If you want to force some kind of illogical algorithm on that count, someone could make an equally problematic case that secularism could be made into a stronger correlation than Catholicism.
One of the points she made was as trivial as it was easily testable with a word search. She said,
It’s remarkable that the pope didn’t address a single sentence of his encyclical to these issues, especially since it otherwise deals so intelligently with the interconnection of so many disparate phenomena. Francis has often said that men and women have different gifts and “complementary” roles. He has spoken sweetly of motherhood and femininity and derided the movement for women’s equality as “female machismo.” Yet in Laudato Si’, the word “women” appears only in the phrase “men and women”—that is, people. Don’t women have anything special to contribute to solving climate change beyond serving their too-numerous children less fast food?
Apparently it didn't occur to Pollitt but she could have searched the document to find that the word "men" other than in about one quote always appears in the phrase "men and women". The document is rather remarkable in its adherence to the policy of language inclusiveness. I can imagine if Francis had singled out women for special contributions to the solution of climate change, Pollitt would be complaining that he was placing extra burdens on women when it was men who caused the problem.
I was interested to note that even back in 1963 Pope John XXIII used inclusive language in Pacem in Terris, as quoted by Pope Francis,
More than fifty years ago, with the world teetering on the brink of nuclear crisis, Pope Saint John XXIII wrote an Encyclical which not only rejected war but offered a proposal for peace. He addressed his message Pacem in Terris to the entire “Catholic world” and indeed “to all men and women of good will”. Now, faced as we are with global environmental deterioration, I wish to address every person living on this planet.
There are legitimate critiques to be made of Catholic policy on birth control and abortion but Pollitt's isn't it. I don't think her motives in doing so are unrelated to her fallback career in antagonism to religion, a fall back which so many people of the scribbling class have taken to that it would seem to be a movement now that the paid magazine writing market isn't what it used to be.
The milieu in which Pollitt grew up and has lived and worked in for her entire life, in the affluent, industry, automobile, oil, gas and coal supported American middle class, all dependent on the science and technology that her anti-religious ideology worship are far more indictable than policies of the Catholic Church in bringing about global warming. Using the issue in the way she does in her column is all about promotion of ideology, not looking for ways to really change things. It lets the worst offenders off the hook.
Pope Francis isn't going to change the Church position on abortion and is unlikely to basically change its policy on birth control, though, as can be seen in, for example, Mexico, that isn't any guarantee that those policies will be followed by Catholics or even the governments of Catholic majority countries. Even in the years when abortion was illegal in the United States it wasn't uncommon for women to go to Mexico to have abortions. But the assertion that abortion is a solution or even a major contributor to ending climate change is belied by that list from the Union of Concerned Scientists given above.
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I don't agree with the reasoning behind the Catholic position against artificial birth control but, given the current state of women in the United States where birth control has hardly led to an iron clad guarantee of equality or dignity or even an elevation of women above the status of object for the use of men - and that's the current sex-pos pseudo-liberal position on it, women as commercial comodities - the old assumptions we had back in the 1960s and 70s about how the pill was some great equalizer were naive in the extreme. Even many feminists who seemed to know better back then have thrown their support to the sex industry, than which there is no more oppressive manifestation of sexism in the period when temple prostitution under Paganism was ended.
The only thing that guarantees equality is the moral requirement to treat people as they would like to be treated, with full equality and dignity, realized by individual people first in their own lives and, then and only through them, government polices leads to real equality. In most cases I can see in the real lives of real women, birth control alone, not even abortion, alone, produces equality and dignity. That requires something that Pollitt's atheist ideology can't provide but which is asserted in Laudato si, Pacem in Terris and, let me point out, most controversially of all, Humane Vitae, the sacred status of women and men as more than mere material objects but as the possessors of divinely endowed rights, including the right to personal determination and the right to dignified treatement. While I disagree with the conclusion that Paul VI reached about birth control and I disagree with the idea that there is a legitimate interest in the state controlling a woman's use of her own body, I can't see any progress being made without the definition of women as having divinely endowed rights being the basis of any assertions of those rights. The acquiescence of so many feminists to the agenda of the sex industry in the past two decades, their support of the worst aspects of it forces the question as to whether birth control, even abortion rights, without the more basic belief in the sanctity of life, something which is not durable or effective without a belief in God. Secularism will never, ever be enough to ensure that.
Update; OK, if you won't look at the link to the UCC, here's their pie-graph
True, Pope Francis did say that Catholics needn’t breed “like rabbits,” but he waved away the need for “artificial” birth control. If only those rabbits would use natural family planning! Interestingly, he made that comment as he was leaving the Philippines, a largely Catholic country where the powerful church hierarchy has fought tooth and nail against realistic sex education and government funding of contraception. Not coincidentally, the Philippines has the highest fertility rate among the 10 countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
While I certainly agree with her that women and men in the Philippines should have full access to and information about modern contraception and a right to control their bodies, her use of that issue in the article is nonsense. In the Union of Concerned Scientists' listing of Each Country's Share of CO2 Emissions virtually every large country in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is in the top 20, the Philippines doesn't even show up in it. China and India, both with extensive programs and even mandates in controlling fertility (China) are in the top 5, China topping even the United States for number one. Japan is number 5 and South Korea number 8. Other than the oil producing nations of Iran (number 7) and Saudi Arabia (10) all of the top ten are modern industrial states which, I believe, have rather advanced programs of dispensing birth control information and, in some cases, even methods and, also, have no ban on abortion.
Even when you do get to Catholic majority countries on the list, Brazil (12), Mexico (13) both have free availability to contraception, Mexico is listed by the UN as having liberal availability of legal abortion and Brazil of having legal though somewhat more restrictive availability of abortion.
Britain, often touted as a secular paradise with liberal availability and government provided birth control and abortion services comes in at 11, before either of those Catholic majority countries. If you look at the list from the Union of Concerned Scientists, being a Catholic majority country would not seem to be a strong factor in making you a major contributor to global warming. If you want to force some kind of illogical algorithm on that count, someone could make an equally problematic case that secularism could be made into a stronger correlation than Catholicism.
One of the points she made was as trivial as it was easily testable with a word search. She said,
It’s remarkable that the pope didn’t address a single sentence of his encyclical to these issues, especially since it otherwise deals so intelligently with the interconnection of so many disparate phenomena. Francis has often said that men and women have different gifts and “complementary” roles. He has spoken sweetly of motherhood and femininity and derided the movement for women’s equality as “female machismo.” Yet in Laudato Si’, the word “women” appears only in the phrase “men and women”—that is, people. Don’t women have anything special to contribute to solving climate change beyond serving their too-numerous children less fast food?
Apparently it didn't occur to Pollitt but she could have searched the document to find that the word "men" other than in about one quote always appears in the phrase "men and women". The document is rather remarkable in its adherence to the policy of language inclusiveness. I can imagine if Francis had singled out women for special contributions to the solution of climate change, Pollitt would be complaining that he was placing extra burdens on women when it was men who caused the problem.
I was interested to note that even back in 1963 Pope John XXIII used inclusive language in Pacem in Terris, as quoted by Pope Francis,
More than fifty years ago, with the world teetering on the brink of nuclear crisis, Pope Saint John XXIII wrote an Encyclical which not only rejected war but offered a proposal for peace. He addressed his message Pacem in Terris to the entire “Catholic world” and indeed “to all men and women of good will”. Now, faced as we are with global environmental deterioration, I wish to address every person living on this planet.
There are legitimate critiques to be made of Catholic policy on birth control and abortion but Pollitt's isn't it. I don't think her motives in doing so are unrelated to her fallback career in antagonism to religion, a fall back which so many people of the scribbling class have taken to that it would seem to be a movement now that the paid magazine writing market isn't what it used to be.
The milieu in which Pollitt grew up and has lived and worked in for her entire life, in the affluent, industry, automobile, oil, gas and coal supported American middle class, all dependent on the science and technology that her anti-religious ideology worship are far more indictable than policies of the Catholic Church in bringing about global warming. Using the issue in the way she does in her column is all about promotion of ideology, not looking for ways to really change things. It lets the worst offenders off the hook.
Pope Francis isn't going to change the Church position on abortion and is unlikely to basically change its policy on birth control, though, as can be seen in, for example, Mexico, that isn't any guarantee that those policies will be followed by Catholics or even the governments of Catholic majority countries. Even in the years when abortion was illegal in the United States it wasn't uncommon for women to go to Mexico to have abortions. But the assertion that abortion is a solution or even a major contributor to ending climate change is belied by that list from the Union of Concerned Scientists given above.
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I don't agree with the reasoning behind the Catholic position against artificial birth control but, given the current state of women in the United States where birth control has hardly led to an iron clad guarantee of equality or dignity or even an elevation of women above the status of object for the use of men - and that's the current sex-pos pseudo-liberal position on it, women as commercial comodities - the old assumptions we had back in the 1960s and 70s about how the pill was some great equalizer were naive in the extreme. Even many feminists who seemed to know better back then have thrown their support to the sex industry, than which there is no more oppressive manifestation of sexism in the period when temple prostitution under Paganism was ended.
The only thing that guarantees equality is the moral requirement to treat people as they would like to be treated, with full equality and dignity, realized by individual people first in their own lives and, then and only through them, government polices leads to real equality. In most cases I can see in the real lives of real women, birth control alone, not even abortion, alone, produces equality and dignity. That requires something that Pollitt's atheist ideology can't provide but which is asserted in Laudato si, Pacem in Terris and, let me point out, most controversially of all, Humane Vitae, the sacred status of women and men as more than mere material objects but as the possessors of divinely endowed rights, including the right to personal determination and the right to dignified treatement. While I disagree with the conclusion that Paul VI reached about birth control and I disagree with the idea that there is a legitimate interest in the state controlling a woman's use of her own body, I can't see any progress being made without the definition of women as having divinely endowed rights being the basis of any assertions of those rights. The acquiescence of so many feminists to the agenda of the sex industry in the past two decades, their support of the worst aspects of it forces the question as to whether birth control, even abortion rights, without the more basic belief in the sanctity of life, something which is not durable or effective without a belief in God. Secularism will never, ever be enough to ensure that.
Update; OK, if you won't look at the link to the UCC, here's their pie-graph
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Whiny Ass Cry-Adults
Yesterday I called Bill O'Reilly a "Whiny cry-baby" and someone pointed out that it was an insult to cry-babies. Considering the article at Salon in which Alanna Weissman, recent graduate of the Columbia GRADUATE(!) School of Journalism put her enormous Ivy-league grad-school level erudition together to tell the world she hated babies and that they had no right to hate her because she hated babies, I wonder why whiny ass cry-adults couldn't be a thing. I doubt that such a thing would have ever crossed my mind before going online and reading the unedited thinking of large numbers of WACAs expressing their inner spoiled-brats. They seem to be everywhere. I used to remember when we made fun of those PBS shows where people were taught to get in touch with their "inner child," little did we know that so many were totally in touch with them.
I suppose I could mention that she's also an only-child, no doubt the apple of her "older parents'" eyes. Only I've known only children who did grow up.
Imagine, she had to go to Columbia Grad School to learn to write something like that.
I suppose I could mention that she's also an only-child, no doubt the apple of her "older parents'" eyes. Only I've known only children who did grow up.
Imagine, she had to go to Columbia Grad School to learn to write something like that.
Mostly Mauro Giuliani - A Recital by Franco Fagioli and Pablo Gonzalez Jazey
I haven't listened to all of the songs in this playlist of a recital consisting mostly of songs of the guitar composer and virtuoso Mauro Giuliani with, so far, one by Domenico Cimarosa arranged by Giuliani. Pria Che Spunt'in Ciel from Il Matrionio Segreto, an opera I'm not at all familiar with. I will listen to all of them.
It was nice to stumble across something that sort of tied yesterday's post about Schubert sung to guitar with the previous posts about male sopranists, I hadn't looked for one. That an artist of Franco Fagioli's status went to the bother of presenting a whole recital of Giuliani songs supports the idea that he was a real composer, not just a specialist in studies for guitar. He was close to many of the leading composers of the first decades of the 19th century, including Beethoven.
You can find scores for all of the songs here, as well as just about all of his many compositions. You'll notice that a lot of his pieces are based on opera, many variations and his sets of "Rossinianae" which are some of his most often played pieces, so it's no surprise he wrote some pretty good songs.
Notice, too, that Fagioli still had hair back then and no beard.
It was nice to stumble across something that sort of tied yesterday's post about Schubert sung to guitar with the previous posts about male sopranists, I hadn't looked for one. That an artist of Franco Fagioli's status went to the bother of presenting a whole recital of Giuliani songs supports the idea that he was a real composer, not just a specialist in studies for guitar. He was close to many of the leading composers of the first decades of the 19th century, including Beethoven.
You can find scores for all of the songs here, as well as just about all of his many compositions. You'll notice that a lot of his pieces are based on opera, many variations and his sets of "Rossinianae" which are some of his most often played pieces, so it's no surprise he wrote some pretty good songs.
Notice, too, that Fagioli still had hair back then and no beard.
Hitler's Time Table Included Destroying Christianity As Certainly As It Did Judaism
On gaining power, Hitler, whilst most certainly not sharing Koch's belief, seems to have been concerned most of all about the potential power of the church in Germany – Catholic and Protestant – as an oppositional power-bloc to his ambitions rather than as a spiritual force. For some years Hitler encouraged the placement of clergy who were out and out Nazis in senior positions within the Protestant church in Germany. But by 1937 it was obvious to Hitler that the German Protestant church would never be as acquiescent as he desired, and his rhetoric – in private – grew more overtly anti-Christian. And whilst in public Hilter was still ambiguous about where he stood in his relationship t Christian God , a number of other leading Nazis were outspoken in their dislike of Christianity. Martin Bormann, who would become Hitler's secretary, Alfred Rosenberg, a leading party ideologue, and Heinrich Himmler, would all openly condemn Christianity. Members of Himmler's SS were not allowed to say they did not believe in God, but equally they were not encouraged to say they worshiped a Christian God. The preferred option was for them to proclaime that they were “gottgläubig” or “God believers” - without any need to specify the exact nature of the God they believed in.
As time when on, Hitler's true feelings about Crinstianity became ever more apparent within the Nazi elite. “The Führer is a man totally attuned to antiquity,” wrote Goebbels in his diary on 8 April 1941. “He hates Christianity because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.” That same year, chatting to five of his cronies – including Ribbentrop and Rosenberg – Hitler said, “The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that my life's final task will be to solve the religious problem.” Declaring that “Christianity is an invention of sick brains,' he said that “the concrete image of the Beyond that religion forces on me does not stand up to examination.” Instead Hitler said, he dreamt “ of a state of affairs in which every man would know that he lives and dies for the preservation of the species.”
However, since Hitler knew that if he openly expressed such anti-religious views his own popularity might suffer, what he did was to mingle two justifications of his authority – a religious one and a scientific one – together. On the one hand Hitler claimed legitimacy from “Providence,” which millions of German Christians could take to be their God, but on the other he also claimed that the fundamental laws of nature supported his beliefs – hence the dual views presented in Triumph of the Will of pseudo-religious iconography and the raw animal power of healthy young Nazis...
Hitler's Charisma: Leading Millions into the Abyss
Laurence Rees
What? You think he told the truth to the German people?
Nazism was, in Hitler's view, applied science, a matter of Survival of the Fittest, something which the most conventional of science had been asserting as having the reliability of science since the 1860s. If you want to get into that again, I've got lots of notes I never used in the previous two go-rounds and it could get really, really unpleasant.
As time when on, Hitler's true feelings about Crinstianity became ever more apparent within the Nazi elite. “The Führer is a man totally attuned to antiquity,” wrote Goebbels in his diary on 8 April 1941. “He hates Christianity because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.” That same year, chatting to five of his cronies – including Ribbentrop and Rosenberg – Hitler said, “The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that my life's final task will be to solve the religious problem.” Declaring that “Christianity is an invention of sick brains,' he said that “the concrete image of the Beyond that religion forces on me does not stand up to examination.” Instead Hitler said, he dreamt “ of a state of affairs in which every man would know that he lives and dies for the preservation of the species.”
However, since Hitler knew that if he openly expressed such anti-religious views his own popularity might suffer, what he did was to mingle two justifications of his authority – a religious one and a scientific one – together. On the one hand Hitler claimed legitimacy from “Providence,” which millions of German Christians could take to be their God, but on the other he also claimed that the fundamental laws of nature supported his beliefs – hence the dual views presented in Triumph of the Will of pseudo-religious iconography and the raw animal power of healthy young Nazis...
Hitler's Charisma: Leading Millions into the Abyss
Laurence Rees
What? You think he told the truth to the German people?
Nazism was, in Hitler's view, applied science, a matter of Survival of the Fittest, something which the most conventional of science had been asserting as having the reliability of science since the 1860s. If you want to get into that again, I've got lots of notes I never used in the previous two go-rounds and it could get really, really unpleasant.
Friday, October 9, 2015
Schubert's Guitar
When I was looking for a recording of Schubert's song Nacht und Träume the other night I came across a version of it with the accompaniment played on guitar instead of piano.
As a piano player I've got to admit it sounds as good as the song when accompanied by a modern piano, an instrumental sound that wouldn't have been as familiar to Schubert as a modern guitar. On this song the really difficult task of playing quietly comes a lot easier to a guitarist. Though a modern instrument sounds different enough from the guitar of Schubert's time as to make a different effect the difference isn't as drastic as between a piano of Schubert's time and a modern piano.
From back in my college days I knew some of Schubert's pieces for male chorus had provided an alternate guitar accompaniment for some of them so I wondered if maybe he'd done the same for some of his solo songs. Apparently a number of his songs were published with guitar accompaniment during Schubert's lifetime, some with a guitar accompaniment published BEFORE a version with piano was. While there has been some assertion that Schubert didn't play guitar, the evidence is that he did, he is known to have owned one made by Johann Georg Staufer, one of the best guitar makers of the period. It is preserve in the Schubert Museum. The description of the difference between Staufer's guitars and others given here is especially interesting in regard to Schubert's music.
Stauffer guitars were exceptional, as are the modern reproductions. There is no bracing on the top; it is a simple design with only a harmonic bar, but it works well, and the back is sloped somewhat like a violin. The sound is very different from the Spanish school, as is the construction. Spanish guitars have a slow response (particularly in the trebles). This means that during a split second, the sound starts softly, then grows in strengh and fades away more slowly after the string has been plucked. This is what contributes to the singing, mellow quality of the Spanish intruments. The Stauffer on the other hand is much quicker. The sound is immediate when the string is plucked; it speaks quickly. Therefore the Stauffer does not have the same singing quality, but this is not what the Austrians wanted (think romantic piano music, e.g. Beethoven.) They wanted an instrument that could play dramatic music, with a lot of expression. The basses are solid and deep to provide a foundation to your music. The Stauffer projects exceptionally well and many surviving originals as well as replicas are easily as loud as a modern classical guitar.
You can find youtubes of people playing original Staufer guitars.
I doubt Schubert would have had a guitar if he didn't know how to play it. He lived a pretty modest, and somewhat homeless and all too short a life, depending on the kindness of friends. I doubt he'd have kept an instrument he couldn't play but which he could have sold for much needed money. I also know that he must have been familiar with the fret board layout of the guitar because it is the same as for the arpeggione, a bowed instrument invented by Staufer, is tuned like the guitar for which Schubert's one sonata is, beyond doubt, the most significant composition.
As to the use of a guitar instead of a piano, apparently that was a common practice in Vienna which Schubert certainly was aware of, I'm unaware of any instance in which he expressed an objection to it. Even if he didn't make those arrangements he knew others did. There is some indication that it was expected, especially at amateur performances in the home, that if a much more expensive piano were not available, an accompaniment on guitar might be made or even improvised. There is some indication that he might have done that, himself. It is also known that in the decades after his death, Franz von Schlechta, one of his sometimes collaborators and friends made a large number of such transcriptions for his own use. I don't think anyone today has the standing to second guess the judgement of someone who actually knew Schubert, especially if the results are a musical success. For all we know he based what he did on what he heard Schubert either doing or approving of.
Here is a really interesting arrangement of Der Lindenbuam which uses harmonics and other effects which I doubt Schubert could perform but which I can't imagine he'd object to if he heard it. Perhaps his friend, Mauro Giuliani could have done it.
I would certainly rather have people singing his songs with a guitar than first hearing them from one of the myriad recordings of his songs played on instruments, with no one singing a syllable. Schubert wrote songs to be sung to texts he wanted to be heard and thought about. That was one of the things that finally got me to stop listening to the morning music show on our local public radio station where they seemed to have a policy against ever playing a recording of a singer singing Schubert, instead playing recordings by celebrity violinists, flutists and cellists playing the lines no where near as interestingly as hearing a singer singing them. If there's a violation of musical intent, that's it.
Why It Is Impossible To Stop The Serial Mass Gun Murders In The United States Is Obvious
that is as true this morning with its merely most recent mass murder as it was with the one less than a week ago.
1. The Supreme Court allows the promotion of violence through its enablement of corporations and entire industries to meddle in politics, driving out the most responsible politicians who are replaced by the most irresponsible. Corporate person hood, the permission to lie, making it impossible to either punish or outlaw lying in politics and in broadcast or print media.
2. The Republican Supreme Court we've had for a long time now, has baldly enabled the gun industry which backs their party. It has a direct role in the promotion of serial mass murder in the United States. It is way past time to stop lying about that.
3. Our Constitution has not only failed to protect us from the combined forces that have conspired to produce these serial mass murders, it has defects that make it simple for thugs in robes and in legislatures and executive offices to do what has been done. Our Constitution which didn't prevent the Supreme Court from making corporations immortal, super-persons and, specifically, the horribly written Second Amendment and the idiotic permission to lie given by some of the most muddle-headed pseudo-liberal rulings of the past half century combined to produce the epidemic of mass murder by gun which is the real terror campaign against the American People.
4. The foolish founders believed that a sense of honor would be a sufficient replacement for a sense of morality and explicitly written legal documents, even as their own actions disproved that belief. Their attempts at poetry as legislation are in the most serious need of correction from the two centuries and more of living with their bad decisions and, in their foolishness, they made it almost impossible to do that under the rules they made. Our Constitution is most in need of being knocked off of the pedestal that the beneficiaries of the status quo which is killing us have glued it to.
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Palestrina - La Cruda Mia Nemica - Allesandro Moreschi and other soloists
You'll read a lot of nonsense about Allesandro Moreschi having been a great singer when, if he hadn't been the "last of the castrati" I doubt anyone would look on the recordings of his voice as much more than a miscellaneous curiosity. After having listened to all of the available recordings of his voice - or as close to those as you can get online, I think this is the he one that gives you the best idea of how really mediocre an artist he was. The tenor and bass on this recording and even the countertenor-alto are better singers, even with the pretty anachronistic romantic-operatic qualities of all of them inappropriately used for Palestrina's counterpoint. Moreschi obviously made up for a lack of training and taste with hamming it up. This has nothing in it that compares with the record of written music sung by and composed for the castrati of the earlier centuries. The male-sopranists of today are a closer approximation of those abilities, if not of the actual voice, and there is no way to know that for the best of them. I couldn't find a recording of that particular madrigal that I wanted to post, though there are better ones on Youtube.
Here is one of the very best of those who sing in the top register, Franco Fagioli (yes, the beard is real) singing one of the last roles written for the castrati, Arsace in Rossini's Aureliano in Palmira from 1813.
And Michael Maniaci, one of the very, very rare natural adult male sopranos, singing in full chest register the very last of the classical castrati roles, Armando in Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto, composed in 1824.
When the last of the operatic castrati for whom those two roles were written, Giovani Veluti sang it in London, he got bad reviews, it was the first time in more than two decades that a castrato had appeared in an opera there and musical tastes had changed, drastically. He continued performing on the continent with better reception and in concert for a number of years after that. He died about 1860. With him the golden age of the castrati ended, the recordings of Moreschi not even a shadow of that.
Update: There is a really odd BBC program about the castrati and a really stupid attempt to "recreate" the voice using computers that proves, if nothing else does, that when a techie puts his hand to something like making a computer sing like a person, the results will be stupid.
This Is Your Country Entertained To Death
This is going to be short, it's a horribly busy week here.
That woman who shot up the Home Depot parking lot in Auburn Hills, Michigan is a product of a number of things, all of them getting back to paranoid, idiotic ideas fed to the susceptible by TV, Movies and hate-talk radio.
She obviously saw herself as an adjunct law officer, packing a 9mm handgun, I assume enabled by the gun-industry sponsored carry laws that have sprung up like poisonous mushrooms all over America. Those sold through TV and hate-talk radio and, to an extent, the movies.
She obviously had some kind of fantasy heroic idea of what she was doing, again as sold through a long series of movies, TV shows and later hate-talk radio and, now, the internet.
That the police as of the last time I looked, hadn't yet charged the nutcase who is packing is probably also a product of the media, I'm sure they're wondering what kind of FOX style hero this dangerous person will be turned into, they being the villains in a story line pitched to other insane people with guns.
This is all the product of crappy hack writers who work in the media churning out crap with the most facile and unrealistic story lines, story lines which never have to face what real people face, the real results of things like psychotic would-be vigilantes who are packing heat. It is also the result of the "news" arm of that media who are as unrestrained by reality and responsibility as the "entertainment" arms of it. Once broadcast and other media were released from any kind of responsibility to the communities and the country in which they operate, they did what any intelligent person could have predicted they would, they drove the media and the country straight to the bottom where the easiest money could be found.
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Related to this, we now know that Laurel Harper, the mother of the latest serial mass murderer, was an open-carry, paranoid gun-nut who expressed all of her multiple symptoms on Face-book. I think when someone publicly announces themselves as an open-carry gun nut with symptoms of paranoid delusions their neighbors and other members of the community have a right to know it. I suspect the police can't and, perhaps, shouldn't monitor the online rantings of these crackpots who haven't, yet, killed anyone, that shouldn't stop private citizens from keeping a watch list based on the self-given, voluntary, information that these people self-publish. I wouldn't even be especially concerned if the police did keep a list of those people but since the government enables this class of violent psychopaths they permit to roam, armed, among us, we have a right to know who they are.
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And, finally, that terrible story about the bigot posting a selfie with a 3-year-old boy for the edification of himself and his racist, dirt-talking twittering, fellow bottom scum goes several steps lower than the Palin-Dawkins-Maher bullying of a 14-year-old boy. That's another class of people who should be considered to have opened themselves up for unwelcome publicity of the kind that, I read, got him fired.
The internet, the "information age" has turned out to work at least as well for the worst of human pathology as it has for anyone looking for reliable information and ways to improve life. Anyone who has seen American media in the post-Sullivan decision, post-Fairness Doctrine, post- community service era should have seen this happening. It's the same thing the vaunted free-press did with its freedoms, it's no wonder that the people whose minds are formed from the content they got there would do what they do.
That woman who shot up the Home Depot parking lot in Auburn Hills, Michigan is a product of a number of things, all of them getting back to paranoid, idiotic ideas fed to the susceptible by TV, Movies and hate-talk radio.
She obviously saw herself as an adjunct law officer, packing a 9mm handgun, I assume enabled by the gun-industry sponsored carry laws that have sprung up like poisonous mushrooms all over America. Those sold through TV and hate-talk radio and, to an extent, the movies.
She obviously had some kind of fantasy heroic idea of what she was doing, again as sold through a long series of movies, TV shows and later hate-talk radio and, now, the internet.
That the police as of the last time I looked, hadn't yet charged the nutcase who is packing is probably also a product of the media, I'm sure they're wondering what kind of FOX style hero this dangerous person will be turned into, they being the villains in a story line pitched to other insane people with guns.
This is all the product of crappy hack writers who work in the media churning out crap with the most facile and unrealistic story lines, story lines which never have to face what real people face, the real results of things like psychotic would-be vigilantes who are packing heat. It is also the result of the "news" arm of that media who are as unrestrained by reality and responsibility as the "entertainment" arms of it. Once broadcast and other media were released from any kind of responsibility to the communities and the country in which they operate, they did what any intelligent person could have predicted they would, they drove the media and the country straight to the bottom where the easiest money could be found.
--------
Related to this, we now know that Laurel Harper, the mother of the latest serial mass murderer, was an open-carry, paranoid gun-nut who expressed all of her multiple symptoms on Face-book. I think when someone publicly announces themselves as an open-carry gun nut with symptoms of paranoid delusions their neighbors and other members of the community have a right to know it. I suspect the police can't and, perhaps, shouldn't monitor the online rantings of these crackpots who haven't, yet, killed anyone, that shouldn't stop private citizens from keeping a watch list based on the self-given, voluntary, information that these people self-publish. I wouldn't even be especially concerned if the police did keep a list of those people but since the government enables this class of violent psychopaths they permit to roam, armed, among us, we have a right to know who they are.
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And, finally, that terrible story about the bigot posting a selfie with a 3-year-old boy for the edification of himself and his racist, dirt-talking twittering, fellow bottom scum goes several steps lower than the Palin-Dawkins-Maher bullying of a 14-year-old boy. That's another class of people who should be considered to have opened themselves up for unwelcome publicity of the kind that, I read, got him fired.
The internet, the "information age" has turned out to work at least as well for the worst of human pathology as it has for anyone looking for reliable information and ways to improve life. Anyone who has seen American media in the post-Sullivan decision, post-Fairness Doctrine, post- community service era should have seen this happening. It's the same thing the vaunted free-press did with its freedoms, it's no wonder that the people whose minds are formed from the content they got there would do what they do.
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Heinrich Schütz - O Lieber Herre Gott, Wecke Uns Auf, SWV 381
Dresdner Kreuzchor
Rudolph Mauersberger, director
Score
My favorite recording of this and other six-part motets by Schütz was recorded by Emanuel Music conducted by the great Craig Smith. I don't know if it's still available. It started going through my head yesterday and I wanted to post it.
The First Person Who Says "Nones" Loses
It just happens that I came across several posts and articles about "Nones" yesterday, the category in surveys which means those who are unaffiliated or don't self-identify as any of the religious categories provided by those designing the surveys, quite a grab-bag of religious believers who are unaffiliated, people who merely don't believe in "any particular thing" but who fail to identify as agnostics or atheists, a small percent who do self-identify as agnostics and an even smaller percentage who self-identify as atheists. Anyone who has read much of my blog may know that the category was invented by an active promoter of atheism, Barry Kosmin, for what I hold are the most obvious of ideological reasons. I'll repost my argument below. It is clearly not a scientific description of any real, coherent group, it is an artificially created set, not even a real representation of the people in the set as what defines their inclusion in that set is not any set thing, in itself. The non-affiliation of a religious person, such as myself, who has chosen not to choose any of a number of very worthwhile religious affiliations is clearly not the same as that of an atheist who hates all of religion, yet, if I would be one of the about 8% of those who will even take a poll on this topic, Pew or Gallup or some other polling outfit would put me in the same category as them on the topic of religion. Even the sub-categories are ill defined as I was surprised to find last night when I took another look at it, for example, 14% of those who call themselves atheists also say they believe in God or a universal spirit. If it were me and I got those results it would lead me to the logical conclusion that self-reporting, self-identification was, in itself, unreliable and could not generate anything legitimately considered data for any scientific purpose. But, then, I don't make my living by pretending that surveys and polling are science.
At any rate, the category "Nones", clearly and successfully introduced for purposes of the promotion of atheism at the expense of religion, was always a phony PR effort, not science. Anyone in sociology who uses the term is clearly in on the fraud as it is a blatantly illegitimate categorization of disparate people lumping them together for dishonest purposes. Here's why.
I Accuse Kosmin of Ideological Distortion In Creating the "Nones"
You will certainly in the next few days or weeks hear some reference to the "Nones," that category in the Pew surveys that is often claimed by atheists as proof-positive that they're going to win, man because the "nones" are the fastest growing group of people in the United States and.... something. You know, the group which includes pretty much anyone who doesn't claim membership in a particular denomination of religion. I have pointed out, many times, that, by the definitions provided by the Pew and other polling organizations, I'm considered a "none".
At any rate, the category "Nones", clearly and successfully introduced for purposes of the promotion of atheism at the expense of religion, was always a phony PR effort, not science. Anyone in sociology who uses the term is clearly in on the fraud as it is a blatantly illegitimate categorization of disparate people lumping them together for dishonest purposes. Here's why.
I Accuse Kosmin of Ideological Distortion In Creating the "Nones"
You will certainly in the next few days or weeks hear some reference to the "Nones," that category in the Pew surveys that is often claimed by atheists as proof-positive that they're going to win, man because the "nones" are the fastest growing group of people in the United States and.... something. You know, the group which includes pretty much anyone who doesn't claim membership in a particular denomination of religion. I have pointed out, many times, that, by the definitions provided by the Pew and other polling organizations, I'm considered a "none".
Well, I hadn't given a lot of thought as to who came up with the category until I came across this piece which names the man who invented the term, Barry A. Kosmin. The piece describes him as:
... the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and a professor at Trinity College, Kosmin had been helping to conduct the American Religion Identification Survey for nearly three decades.
I was familiar with Kosmin for a different reason which I'll get to in a minute.
His reasoning in coming up with the term is given as:
Once they’d evaluated data from the 1990s, Kosmin and
his team were determined to name a new category.
“Nonreligious” was a possibility. So was “non-faith” and “non-affiliated.”
But Kosmin rejected all of these. The “non” part bothered him. “Non-affiliated” would be like calling people “non-white,” he said. “We didn’t want to suggest that ‘affiliated’ was the norm, and every one else was an ‘other.’”
“Nomenclature,” he added, ” is quite important in these things.”
So Kosmin began calling this group the “nones,” a shortened version for “none of the above” — which is what people often said when asked to name their religion. He never thought the term would stick.
“It began as a joke,” he said, “but now, like many of these things, it has taken on its own life.”
Indeed. Today, “nones” are everywhere. Both in a literal sense and a literary one.
I will point out that, having looked up the dictionary meaning of the word "norm", in the context of what Kosmin is engaged in doing, purportedly coming up with sociological and statistical information, based on the results of his own data, being religiously affiliated is the norm in the United States and, indeed, in most countries. He might not like that but it is a fact, though like so many on his ideological side, the actual meaning of words don't matter nearly as much as their ideological preferences.
If he had gone with the other alternatives he mentions and put only those who had no religious belief in that category, the percentage given as "Nones" would be less than half of what it generally is claimed to be and less newsy. More of those included as "Nones" express some kind of religious belief than the percentage who are atheists, if not both atheists and agnostic combined, in most of the times I've seen a percentage break down given.
If he had gone with the other alternatives he mentions and put only those who had no religious belief in that category, the percentage given as "Nones" would be less than half of what it generally is claimed to be and less newsy. More of those included as "Nones" express some kind of religious belief than the percentage who are atheists, if not both atheists and agnostic combined, in most of the times I've seen a percentage break down given.
Which gets me to how I knew of Kosmin, he's a member of the board of directors of the Center for Inquiry, one of the alphabet soup named groups begun by Paul Kurtz to promote atheism, primarily by attacking religion. So the conflict of interest you may have suspected in his creation of that category so useful in atheist propaganda, is documented.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Hate Mail On Male Sopranos
You can count on one thing if you raise the topic of men who sing in the alto and mezzo-soprano range, snarky comments mocking the practice. But the very same people who give full vent to their inner-12-year-old-boy on the topic are the very same people who grooved to some Frankie Valli, Roy Orbison, Neil Young, or some other rock singer who sang in the same range, only, perhaps Orbison excluded, no where near as competently, vocally, certainly not as interestingly, musically. The difference is that you have to pay attention to someone singing Handel (I mean the pieces you haven't heard a zillion times and stop hearing due to over familiarity) or Marcello or Monteverdi, or the other composers who I've been posting. The need to pay attention is the real issue dividing pop music and classical music of any complexity, they don't want to pay attention at that mental age anymore than they wanted to do their homework in any subject they didn't like or find easy.
Benedetto Marcello - Chiaro e Limpido Fonte
Philippe Jaroussky & Max Emanuel Cencic, voices
Les Arts Flourissantes, William Christie, director
That this began with me finding Philippe Jaroussky singing music outside of his specialty, something any musician with the technique and curiosity to do it does, including those who do rock music, should tell you something about the difference between an intelligent, curious musician and an mindless pop guzzler. And, it being a bit on the forbidden side, raising it was irresistible to a thought criminal like me. I knew the reaction it would get with the usual flyspecks as I decided to go there. They never, ever, say anything new or slightly interesting.
By the way, the biggest motive in the horrible industry in castrating boys wasn't the church, it was the very secular opera industry, the musical comedy - Hollywood type spectacle media of the 17th and 18th centuries. The opera was generally more in danger of being shunned and banned by religious authorities than supported by it, at least before the 19th century. The church use of castratos, mostly in Rome and other Italian cities, grew out of the secular creation of castrati. It was, of course, a bad idea, it was grotesquely immoral - many young boys died of the operation and very few, perhaps one percent of those who were castrated, went on to have significant careers as opera stars.
Less significantly, it led to some really awful church and religious music, as heard in the few recordings that Allesandro Moreschi* left. That is especially true in 19th century Italy where the remnants of the practice persisted into the 20th century. Religion and theater music is most often a recipe for bad music and bad religion, the theater will tend to win out over religion in that contest. It takes a real musical genius to make that reconciliation and they aren't in any more abundance than vocal genius among castrated boys.
Instead of using the issue in some brainless and historically uninformed Christian bashing it would be useful to point out that the international sex industry that all right-thinking sex-positive folk are supposed to support carries out a trade in boys who are abducted, castrated and prostituted, quite often to western men in sex tourism. And, I'll point out that bashing Jews for it is especially stupid because, almost uniquely among people in the ancient Mediterranean basin, Jews forbade the practice for humans and even for animals. Most of the enormous numbers of males who were castrated were slaves kept to labor of for sex with men, not to sing. But concentrating on the real and present evil of the prostitution and porn industries isn't kewl, the uselessness of snarking over things done three or four centuries ago is a lot less work.
* I made an error in my post the other day, Moreschi wasn't an old man when he made those recordings, he was in his 40s, which should be a competent singer's prime. I'm prepared to believe he never sang any better than that. One of the contemporary descriptions of his singing when he was in his 20s mentioned there being " a tear in every note", which describes his recorded sound. I also read there is some indication that he was castrated as a result of medical practice, to treat a particular type of hernia for which, I also read, castration was the only scientifically recognized treatment. All I can say is that if it were me, I'd have tried to do more with my voice than produce those tacky, melo-dramatic effects. He clearly had a voice, he clearly lacked the training to do more with it. Too bad he didn't study with Pauline Viardot who could have steered him in a better direction.
Benedetto Marcello - Chiaro e Limpido Fonte
Philippe Jaroussky & Max Emanuel Cencic, voices
Les Arts Flourissantes, William Christie, director
That this began with me finding Philippe Jaroussky singing music outside of his specialty, something any musician with the technique and curiosity to do it does, including those who do rock music, should tell you something about the difference between an intelligent, curious musician and an mindless pop guzzler. And, it being a bit on the forbidden side, raising it was irresistible to a thought criminal like me. I knew the reaction it would get with the usual flyspecks as I decided to go there. They never, ever, say anything new or slightly interesting.
By the way, the biggest motive in the horrible industry in castrating boys wasn't the church, it was the very secular opera industry, the musical comedy - Hollywood type spectacle media of the 17th and 18th centuries. The opera was generally more in danger of being shunned and banned by religious authorities than supported by it, at least before the 19th century. The church use of castratos, mostly in Rome and other Italian cities, grew out of the secular creation of castrati. It was, of course, a bad idea, it was grotesquely immoral - many young boys died of the operation and very few, perhaps one percent of those who were castrated, went on to have significant careers as opera stars.
Less significantly, it led to some really awful church and religious music, as heard in the few recordings that Allesandro Moreschi* left. That is especially true in 19th century Italy where the remnants of the practice persisted into the 20th century. Religion and theater music is most often a recipe for bad music and bad religion, the theater will tend to win out over religion in that contest. It takes a real musical genius to make that reconciliation and they aren't in any more abundance than vocal genius among castrated boys.
Instead of using the issue in some brainless and historically uninformed Christian bashing it would be useful to point out that the international sex industry that all right-thinking sex-positive folk are supposed to support carries out a trade in boys who are abducted, castrated and prostituted, quite often to western men in sex tourism. And, I'll point out that bashing Jews for it is especially stupid because, almost uniquely among people in the ancient Mediterranean basin, Jews forbade the practice for humans and even for animals. Most of the enormous numbers of males who were castrated were slaves kept to labor of for sex with men, not to sing. But concentrating on the real and present evil of the prostitution and porn industries isn't kewl, the uselessness of snarking over things done three or four centuries ago is a lot less work.
* I made an error in my post the other day, Moreschi wasn't an old man when he made those recordings, he was in his 40s, which should be a competent singer's prime. I'm prepared to believe he never sang any better than that. One of the contemporary descriptions of his singing when he was in his 20s mentioned there being " a tear in every note", which describes his recorded sound. I also read there is some indication that he was castrated as a result of medical practice, to treat a particular type of hernia for which, I also read, castration was the only scientifically recognized treatment. All I can say is that if it were me, I'd have tried to do more with my voice than produce those tacky, melo-dramatic effects. He clearly had a voice, he clearly lacked the training to do more with it. Too bad he didn't study with Pauline Viardot who could have steered him in a better direction.
Monday, October 5, 2015
Handel - Come Nube Che Fugge Dal Vento - Philippe Jaroussky
Jaroussky as that ultimate bad-boy Nero in Handel's opera Agrippina. This sounds a lot more convincing as an approximation of the discription of the baroque castrati's singing than the old counter-tenors of fifty years ago. If you think the costume and wig are a bit over the top, it is opera.
If you want a sort of battle of the male sopranos, here's another of today's biggest stars, Max Emanuel Cencic.
And here's Jennifer Rivera singing it as a pants role
Update: OK, here is the late Alfred Deller singing Handel in 1953. He was a great singer and artist, you have to grant him that, but he was no coloratura singer, a good part of that could have been the lack of training - he was pretty much a pioneer in counter-tenor singing. It's impressive, considering his training in the English choral tradition, that he managed to learn how to pronounce words clearly, especially at that pitch range.
Update 2: The stupidity of the Brain Trust on this topic is predictable. The value of the life of no-mind. But they'll tell you how smart they are. Since there is no evidence to that effect.
Neo-Integralist Catholics and Neo-Atheists Have A Common Cause of Discrediting Pope Francis
The continuing online obsession with the brief meeting that Kim Davis had with Pope Francis proves that it is extremely important for two groups of people generally taken to be enemies of each other have something important in common. Those groups in this case are the right wing of the Catholic hierarchy and the Catholic and Pope hating neo-atheists. The right-wing of the Catholic hierarchy and the atheists have something in common, a mutual desire to discredit a very popular and liberal pope, to take him down as a popular, world figure, to discredit his focus on economic justice and environmental protection, justice for the stranger among us....
That both groups would like him to concentrate exclusively on the topics of abortion, sexual practice and other legalistic topics that made Benedict XVI unpopular is obvious. It's even true that the two groups have a similar interest in the results of that concentration. Pope Benedict was openly prepared for the Catholic church to lose members. He was a reactionary who clearly didn't like the changes that came with the Second Vatican Council and who pined for a romantic, never extant "pure" church which would be small in numbers and controlled by his own, romantic and fictitious orthodox definition of real Catholicism. He'd been writing things to that effect since the late 1960s. Since his vision of Catholicism was what he was known for, his elevation by John Paul II, who more or less named him as his chosen successor, it was also what Benedict's predecessor favored. That those two had a similar goal as the neo-atheists makes their similar dislike of Pope Francis somewhat less surprising, perhaps. That both groups see other goals as more important than the Catholic church following the instructions left by Jesus and his apostles, in short, to remember the poor, the oppressed, the stranger among us, and the protection of the environment makes their common cause less surprising than it might otherwise be.
I hope that this incident shows Pope Francis the need to move quickly to replace many of the bishops and cardinals appointed in the past two decades. One of the worst aspects of the last two papacies was the elevation of hacks who were incompetent pastors but who could be counted on to toe the line as set by the insiders of the Vatican. This incident was a reminder if not an introduction into the internal politics at the upper reaches of the hierarchy which became a massive series of scandals under those two would-be purifying popes. The lesson for Catholic conservatives should be that they should have removed the beam in their own eyes before they called out others for the spec in theirs. Though, like the neo-atheists, they are rigidly resistant to that because their position isn't really concerned with things like justice and the necessities of life, certainly not with the rights and real lives of real people, it is with getting their own way.
The lesson for the rest of us is that those two groups are not to be trusted, neither of them are basically concerned with real life or even their claimed values.
That both groups would like him to concentrate exclusively on the topics of abortion, sexual practice and other legalistic topics that made Benedict XVI unpopular is obvious. It's even true that the two groups have a similar interest in the results of that concentration. Pope Benedict was openly prepared for the Catholic church to lose members. He was a reactionary who clearly didn't like the changes that came with the Second Vatican Council and who pined for a romantic, never extant "pure" church which would be small in numbers and controlled by his own, romantic and fictitious orthodox definition of real Catholicism. He'd been writing things to that effect since the late 1960s. Since his vision of Catholicism was what he was known for, his elevation by John Paul II, who more or less named him as his chosen successor, it was also what Benedict's predecessor favored. That those two had a similar goal as the neo-atheists makes their similar dislike of Pope Francis somewhat less surprising, perhaps. That both groups see other goals as more important than the Catholic church following the instructions left by Jesus and his apostles, in short, to remember the poor, the oppressed, the stranger among us, and the protection of the environment makes their common cause less surprising than it might otherwise be.
I hope that this incident shows Pope Francis the need to move quickly to replace many of the bishops and cardinals appointed in the past two decades. One of the worst aspects of the last two papacies was the elevation of hacks who were incompetent pastors but who could be counted on to toe the line as set by the insiders of the Vatican. This incident was a reminder if not an introduction into the internal politics at the upper reaches of the hierarchy which became a massive series of scandals under those two would-be purifying popes. The lesson for Catholic conservatives should be that they should have removed the beam in their own eyes before they called out others for the spec in theirs. Though, like the neo-atheists, they are rigidly resistant to that because their position isn't really concerned with things like justice and the necessities of life, certainly not with the rights and real lives of real people, it is with getting their own way.
The lesson for the rest of us is that those two groups are not to be trusted, neither of them are basically concerned with real life or even their claimed values.
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Pauline Viardot - Havanaise
Pianist, name not listed
Phillippe Jaroussky, male soprano
Jérôme Ducros, piano
The past few decades have certainly seen a huge development in the recovery of the art of adult men singing in the alto and mezzo soprano range. Phillippe Jaroussky has brought that far, far farther than old Alfred Deller ever did. It's interesting to hear him in 19th century, romantic style music instead of the baroque arias and operas he usually sings. I would guess he's a lot closer to how the legendary baroque castrati sounded than even the available recordings of the last of those surgically created male sopranos singing in a rather horrid, over the top way well into his old age.
But I was going to concentrate on Pauline Viardot instead of male sopranos. A number of Viardot's songs are a reminder that she was Spanish and was able to give first hand advice to other composers about "Spanish music" of the type that would be more often composed well after she wrote this song, probably in the late 1870s.
She wrote a lot more music than what I read led to believe last week.
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