You know, the other day it occurred to me that Simps trolls me so he can get lines out of me to steal.
I don't go laying for him, I'd just as soon he never mentioned my name again so I'd never mention his or refer to him in any way. He's never said anything I'd want to steal. I never go bother the Eschatots with him or anything else, he apparently annoys them by trying to drag it over there. They don't like their playtime interrupted with even his distorted mention of what is written here.
It's surprising how popular it is when I decide to respond to his trolling. Those posts are almost as popular as some of my serious ones.
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Monday, December 12, 2016
The Trump Disaster Is A Test That Democracy Will Either Learn From Or It Will Die
We are about to be ruled by raving nutcases who have our national security in their hands as the president-elect refuses to be bothered with briefings on the topic.
The Trump transition, with its appointments and nominations of totally paranoid crackpots like Michael Flynn and totally unqualified people like the FOX commentator and blatant liar KT McFarland to back him up and a huge cast of other such horrors should be a golden opportunity for our great free press to shine but they are in on the con job and those who aren't are either hoping to get something out of it or they're cowards who won't point out that the ship of state is about to hit the rocks.
I can't think of anything that would more please the enemies of the Unites States, more please our rivals and more horrify our allies and friends than the insanity that the Trump transition is exposing.
That our Constitutional system can produce this - FOR THE LOSER OF THE POPULAR VOTE - and not leave us with any means of preventing it is an indictment of the final and fatal inadequacy of that worshiped document. That our "free press" not only created Donald Trump but enabled his installation by the corrupt electoral college system as he lost the election is the final indictment of it, as well. They have supported a series of the worst presidents in recent history and the corruption of the Supreme Court. The popular myth of liberals built up in the Warren Court years that the Supreme Court was going to save us from the worst inclinations among us is entirely delusional. It was as much a part of creating this horror as FOX or CNN or NBC.
I am not terribly hopeful that even the coming horrors will be enough to overcome the corruption of the American character over the past half-century, though that is the only hope. The temporary turn around in that after the Republican crash of 1928 was turned around by the regime of lying as TV took hold of our dominant force in formation of that character. I think this entire thing lays out one of the greatest challenges for egalitarian democracy. Democracy is only possible when its prerequisites are in place, it can exist only within a certain range of tolerance for deviation from good will and truthfulness, both of which we have allowed the media to destroy, entirely and cynically as its owners game things for their economic advantage.
Our media is one of the things that deserves to be junked and replaced by things that tell us the truth. I think the most likely candidate for that is a coalition of religious journalists who have a deep and abiding reluctance to lie or to cover up even the most horrifying truth. It would require institutional support of the kind that such churches might be able to provide, no shoe-string effort could hope to mount such an effort from scratch, depending on donations. I doubt anything else can save us. The secular press has failed to provide that, it is the greatest champion of its permission to lie which has brought us to where we are now.
The Trump transition, with its appointments and nominations of totally paranoid crackpots like Michael Flynn and totally unqualified people like the FOX commentator and blatant liar KT McFarland to back him up and a huge cast of other such horrors should be a golden opportunity for our great free press to shine but they are in on the con job and those who aren't are either hoping to get something out of it or they're cowards who won't point out that the ship of state is about to hit the rocks.
I can't think of anything that would more please the enemies of the Unites States, more please our rivals and more horrify our allies and friends than the insanity that the Trump transition is exposing.
That our Constitutional system can produce this - FOR THE LOSER OF THE POPULAR VOTE - and not leave us with any means of preventing it is an indictment of the final and fatal inadequacy of that worshiped document. That our "free press" not only created Donald Trump but enabled his installation by the corrupt electoral college system as he lost the election is the final indictment of it, as well. They have supported a series of the worst presidents in recent history and the corruption of the Supreme Court. The popular myth of liberals built up in the Warren Court years that the Supreme Court was going to save us from the worst inclinations among us is entirely delusional. It was as much a part of creating this horror as FOX or CNN or NBC.
I am not terribly hopeful that even the coming horrors will be enough to overcome the corruption of the American character over the past half-century, though that is the only hope. The temporary turn around in that after the Republican crash of 1928 was turned around by the regime of lying as TV took hold of our dominant force in formation of that character. I think this entire thing lays out one of the greatest challenges for egalitarian democracy. Democracy is only possible when its prerequisites are in place, it can exist only within a certain range of tolerance for deviation from good will and truthfulness, both of which we have allowed the media to destroy, entirely and cynically as its owners game things for their economic advantage.
Our media is one of the things that deserves to be junked and replaced by things that tell us the truth. I think the most likely candidate for that is a coalition of religious journalists who have a deep and abiding reluctance to lie or to cover up even the most horrifying truth. It would require institutional support of the kind that such churches might be able to provide, no shoe-string effort could hope to mount such an effort from scratch, depending on donations. I doubt anything else can save us. The secular press has failed to provide that, it is the greatest champion of its permission to lie which has brought us to where we are now.
Judge Teasdale As a Cynical Pop Music Critc
Horace Rumpole: May I read a short extract from a so-called historical novel entitled "Lord Stingo's Fancy".
Judge Teasdale: Ah yes, isn't that the one that ends happily?
Horace Rumpole: Happily *all* Miss Nettleship's novels end, my Lord - eventually.
[laughter from the jury]
You know, Simels, you going on and on about your Poldark fetish as if it's supposed to bother me only succeeds in making me feel smug. I'm not unhappy to learn that you and other Eschatots are thrilled by faux-18th century bodice rippers as made by the BBC. It's mildly amusing to find out that beneath that cynical, would-be sophisticate pose you're really the Judge Teasdale sort. Like you, he enjoys a "ripping yarn," only he's got the attention span to read them.
If I could find my copy of the Rumpole Omnibus that contains The Bubble Reputation I'd have more but I don't have time to search for it. I think of my time reading all of the Rumpole stories as a minor vice but at least those were funny. I'll always think of you with a judicial wig and a fussy little manner, seeking vicarious but entirely safe thrills, now.
Tell me, is Duncan a fan of that drivel, too?
Update: Oh, dear. Lord Simps is not amused.
Judge Teasdale: Ah yes, isn't that the one that ends happily?
Horace Rumpole: Happily *all* Miss Nettleship's novels end, my Lord - eventually.
[laughter from the jury]
You know, Simels, you going on and on about your Poldark fetish as if it's supposed to bother me only succeeds in making me feel smug. I'm not unhappy to learn that you and other Eschatots are thrilled by faux-18th century bodice rippers as made by the BBC. It's mildly amusing to find out that beneath that cynical, would-be sophisticate pose you're really the Judge Teasdale sort. Like you, he enjoys a "ripping yarn," only he's got the attention span to read them.
If I could find my copy of the Rumpole Omnibus that contains The Bubble Reputation I'd have more but I don't have time to search for it. I think of my time reading all of the Rumpole stories as a minor vice but at least those were funny. I'll always think of you with a judicial wig and a fussy little manner, seeking vicarious but entirely safe thrills, now.
Tell me, is Duncan a fan of that drivel, too?
Update: Oh, dear. Lord Simps is not amused.
Sunday, December 11, 2016
Olivier Messiaen - Twenty Shewings Of The Baby Jesus - Through Him All Is Made
Yvonne Loriod, piano
This is the longest piece in the set, I believe. Considering it is a vision of the relationship of Jesus to the creation of all things you'd expect it to have some sense of the comprehensive about it. Loriod, Messiaen's wife for many years can probably be regarded as the official interpreter of his piano music, her sister Jeanne Loriod, played many of the parts for Ondes Martenot which Olivier Messiaen wrote. I posted this because the set I've been playing, which has the sheet music, divides this movement into two videos, it should be heard as one.
I am not really happy with translating "Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus" as Twenty Visions on The Baby Jesus. The French word "regards" doesn't seem to me to translate well as "visions," The music gives me more of a sense of the same thing that Julian of Norwich called "shewings" in The Revelation of Divine Love but that word would be even more of a problem. It is a direct experience, not an intellectual rumination, though not divorced from thinking about it. The most famous passage of Julian's Shewings is definitely related to this piece:
Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with an eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall last for that God loveth it. And so All-thing has the Being by the love of God.
In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover, --- I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me.
The score I have only has Messiaen's original, French annotations for both the set of pieces and the individual pieces I wouldn't attempt to translate them. This site does have a translation of some of those for individual movements. It translates "regards" as "glances" or, perhaps best of all, "gazes" and gives some sense of Messiaen's intentions. A glance is certainly too short to give any sense of what the music is. "Gazes" is a pretty good translation but Messiaen was a mystic, a Catholic mystic, a French Catholic mystic so you get that kind of explanation. Considering it's music that's probably more helpful than a philosophical discourse would be.
Hate Mail - Political Philosophy
Egalitarian democracy is the only legitimate form of government.
Egalitarian democracy is a political means of securing as decent a life for everyone as it is possible to achieve.
It is a result of the moral practice of telling and knowing the truth in service to the duty to be good to each other.
Anything that prevents that, either the promotion of being cruel and exploitative of other people and living beings or lying about reality is destructive of a decent life for everyone and of the political means of achieving that.
Any political Constitutional article or provision or law or document or dogma that enables lying is anti-democratic, illegitimate and destructive of equality and a decent life. Any Supreme Court that by its interpretation enables lying is actively destroying democracy. Ours has done that for the past fifty years. After a half a century to see what the results of it is, any further enabling of lying should be considered to have that intention.
Being fashionable has nothing to do with any of it except in that both are inherently elitist and anti-egalitarian. See motto above.
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe - Christmas Party
Special Guest Stars: Marty Meriden, Linda Sorenson, Patricia Hamilton
Olivier Messiaen - Twenty Visions of the Baby Jesus - The Son's Vision Of The Son
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
The Individual Right To Not Be Lied About Transferred In A Privilege For The Ubiquitous Media To Lie With Impunity
The insight that I took from what Pope Francis said is an important point. When the United States Supreme Court under Earl Warren gave permission to the media to lie about people, he and his colleagues were, in fact, giving them a privilege to lie that came at the expense of the right of those they lied about to not be lied about. They were transforming what was a right under libel laws - to force those who lied about someone to correct the lie and to compensate the person they lied about - they turned that into a privilege for the corporate media. They were, actually, destroying a personal right in favor of a corporate privilege, in the actual case of Times vs. Sullivan. Though it more generally transferred the right to not be lied about into a privilege for individuals who lied, as well.
That right is the right to not have your personal life, your personal conduct, your public conduct, misrepresented so that people who don't know it will think badly of you. If you don't think that is a right I can guarantee you that it is something you would know was one if it happened to you and lies ruined your reputation.
Since Supreme Courts, both left and right, have been in the business of creating privileges and calling them "rights" based in manipulating the language of various amendments and clauses in the Constitution, you can pretty well guess their motives by what they did and who benefited from it. Though in the case of the Warren Court, by 1964 I think its members were so enamored with their practice of setting up landmark cases that that was also a motive for what they did. And it was certainly something that they knew would get them good press, it being the New York Times and, really, all of media and the scribbling class that they were privileging. Would those dolts have done it if they realized that it would largely enable the corporate right, racists, liars, those who would profit from lying? I don't know. There was a time when I would have suspected the "liberal" Warren Court might have been a bit sobered by the history of the next fifty years but, really, I'm not all that convinced of the actual liberalism of many of the justices we were sold by the media.
The glory decisions of the Warren court in racial equality that they make movies about are certainly being obliterated by the results of their decision in Times v. Sullivan.
After fifty years of the media hammering at liberals, they lost elections to the very people who the Sullivan decision ruled against. That result began almost as soon as the decision was handed down. Republican presidents appointed the enemies of racial equality to the Court. The first president elected after that ruling, the Republican Richard Nixon appointed the active, voter intimidating, racist, William Rehnquist who, with other Republicans subsequently appointed by other beneficiaries of lies told about liberal politicians. That line of direct and indirect beneficiaries of the privilege to lie about liberal politicians has signed the death warrant for the Voting Rights Act, major portions of the Civil Rights Act, they have been gradually chipping away at other major rulings of the Warren period and, in the Trump regime, will certainly accelerate their wholesale destruction of past liberal accomplishment in favor of oligarchic privilege. Anyone who thought, seriously, about what was at stake for the free press in that decision - the need to fact check before they published - would have realized how much was sacrificed so that a major newspaper could avoid a minimal cost of fact checking before they published. That, I was once taught, was a basic responsibility for a 6th grader writing a history paper. The Warren Court exempted the most august newspaper in the country from that responsibility. The most tragically short-sighted and foolishly ill-considered results of that are what we are living through, today. The media, left to right have certainly not shown themselves to be even responsible enough to honestly consider their role in it.
There was no move by the people who wrote the unfortunately truncated, minor 18th century poetry of our Constitution to abolish civil actions for libel, they obviously saw that there was a right to not be lied about. It is, in fact, a right that is far more explicit in the Bible than its negation is implicit in the First Amendment. "Thou shalt not bear false witness," joins other such commandments about respecting the rights of other people as those against depriving someone of their property or their marriage or even their due respect. When someone libels someone, they are, in fact, robbing them of the reality of their life, their conduct, their own restraint from doing wrong. That is especially true in the pile-on, amplified rumor mongering factories of 24-7 news and, even worse, social media.
The continuing education in what happens when a Supreme Court ruling transfers a personal right into a corporate privilege is about to take the most serious turn it has in fifty years. We are about to have a government by an overt fascist-strongman who is appointing an executive branch filled with pirates, gangsters, thugs and right-wing fascist nutcases. And there is little to no chance that the legislative branch is going to be a check on them, it being already filled with those by other court rulings gutting the Voting Rights Acts and permitting the Republican partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts. The Supreme Court has been the source of the most serious dangers to democracy in the history of the country, their often dodgy history, Dred Scott, Plessy, etc. has been topped by a series of decisions by courts right and left which could enslave us all. This is dead serious stuff, the old bromides and slogans that the left had substituted for hard thinking, the First Amendment as interpreted by lawyers in the pay of some media corporation and publicity addled justices won't work to protect us. If you think I'm exaggerating, check in after a few years of Trumpian fascism and see what you think then.
That right is the right to not have your personal life, your personal conduct, your public conduct, misrepresented so that people who don't know it will think badly of you. If you don't think that is a right I can guarantee you that it is something you would know was one if it happened to you and lies ruined your reputation.
Since Supreme Courts, both left and right, have been in the business of creating privileges and calling them "rights" based in manipulating the language of various amendments and clauses in the Constitution, you can pretty well guess their motives by what they did and who benefited from it. Though in the case of the Warren Court, by 1964 I think its members were so enamored with their practice of setting up landmark cases that that was also a motive for what they did. And it was certainly something that they knew would get them good press, it being the New York Times and, really, all of media and the scribbling class that they were privileging. Would those dolts have done it if they realized that it would largely enable the corporate right, racists, liars, those who would profit from lying? I don't know. There was a time when I would have suspected the "liberal" Warren Court might have been a bit sobered by the history of the next fifty years but, really, I'm not all that convinced of the actual liberalism of many of the justices we were sold by the media.
The glory decisions of the Warren court in racial equality that they make movies about are certainly being obliterated by the results of their decision in Times v. Sullivan.
After fifty years of the media hammering at liberals, they lost elections to the very people who the Sullivan decision ruled against. That result began almost as soon as the decision was handed down. Republican presidents appointed the enemies of racial equality to the Court. The first president elected after that ruling, the Republican Richard Nixon appointed the active, voter intimidating, racist, William Rehnquist who, with other Republicans subsequently appointed by other beneficiaries of lies told about liberal politicians. That line of direct and indirect beneficiaries of the privilege to lie about liberal politicians has signed the death warrant for the Voting Rights Act, major portions of the Civil Rights Act, they have been gradually chipping away at other major rulings of the Warren period and, in the Trump regime, will certainly accelerate their wholesale destruction of past liberal accomplishment in favor of oligarchic privilege. Anyone who thought, seriously, about what was at stake for the free press in that decision - the need to fact check before they published - would have realized how much was sacrificed so that a major newspaper could avoid a minimal cost of fact checking before they published. That, I was once taught, was a basic responsibility for a 6th grader writing a history paper. The Warren Court exempted the most august newspaper in the country from that responsibility. The most tragically short-sighted and foolishly ill-considered results of that are what we are living through, today. The media, left to right have certainly not shown themselves to be even responsible enough to honestly consider their role in it.
There was no move by the people who wrote the unfortunately truncated, minor 18th century poetry of our Constitution to abolish civil actions for libel, they obviously saw that there was a right to not be lied about. It is, in fact, a right that is far more explicit in the Bible than its negation is implicit in the First Amendment. "Thou shalt not bear false witness," joins other such commandments about respecting the rights of other people as those against depriving someone of their property or their marriage or even their due respect. When someone libels someone, they are, in fact, robbing them of the reality of their life, their conduct, their own restraint from doing wrong. That is especially true in the pile-on, amplified rumor mongering factories of 24-7 news and, even worse, social media.
The continuing education in what happens when a Supreme Court ruling transfers a personal right into a corporate privilege is about to take the most serious turn it has in fifty years. We are about to have a government by an overt fascist-strongman who is appointing an executive branch filled with pirates, gangsters, thugs and right-wing fascist nutcases. And there is little to no chance that the legislative branch is going to be a check on them, it being already filled with those by other court rulings gutting the Voting Rights Acts and permitting the Republican partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts. The Supreme Court has been the source of the most serious dangers to democracy in the history of the country, their often dodgy history, Dred Scott, Plessy, etc. has been topped by a series of decisions by courts right and left which could enslave us all. This is dead serious stuff, the old bromides and slogans that the left had substituted for hard thinking, the First Amendment as interpreted by lawyers in the pay of some media corporation and publicity addled justices won't work to protect us. If you think I'm exaggerating, check in after a few years of Trumpian fascism and see what you think then.
Friday, December 9, 2016
Allelujah - Pope Francis Says It
“They can be used as means of defamation. No one has a right to do this. It is a sin and it is hurtful.”
This is a passage that is buried in what Pope Francis said the other day about the destructive evil that lying by the media is. What most people in the media are focused on is his analogy to people who have an obsessive fascination with shit but they are missing his point, that lying in the media, media carrying lies has a real effect in the real world and that it is wrong AND NO ONE HAS A RIGHT TO DO IT.
That certainly means that the permission to lie that has been the law of the land in the United States for the past half century is not a right, it is a permission given by the Supreme Court justices who issued the rulings doing that. The focus has been on the real evil that comes from lies that gain currency in social media but just about all of the media, from the top down, engage in lying or in carrying lies in the United States. It was the New York Times that first got the permission to lie with impunity, not the National Enquirer.
There is no right to lie, to defame people, those lies enabled by the Supreme Court came at a cost to the real rights people have to not be lied about.
I'm going to repeat that. By permitting the media to lie with impunity, the Supreme Court gave a privilege to liars that came at the expense of those who are lied about who lost their right to not be lied about.
That might seem a slight thing to lawyers, few of whom had any practical experience in politics or who belonged to the class of people or in a line of work who can be easily destroyed by the media carrying lies about them but the consequences in our politics and in the corruption of society and life in the United States has been devastating.
The faster people have these realities pointed out to them, the faster they will get over the brainwashing by slogans engaged in by the lawyers and judges and media beneficiaries of the permission to lie. The truth should be what is privileged, not lies. But it was the idiocy of the Warren and subsequent courts that they turned that around and privileged lies and the lying liars who tell them. If the justices on the court couldn't understand that their reading of the absurdly and badly misphrased First Amendment would have a devastating impact as people were sold skillfully told lies that would effect their voting choices, that only proves that allowing judges to do that was unwise in the extreme. The media should have an absolute permission to tell the truth, they should never have been given a privilege to lie with impunity.
Pope Francis proves that the view of reality he practices is more realistic than that which the American legal establishment, the judiciary, the Supreme Court and the large majority of those in the media practice. I would say that it is directly related to those different frames of reality written about by Walter Brueggemann. The difference is between the covenental- historical model of monotheism as opposed to the modern-scientific-industrial model which is derived from 18th century materialism. It is certain that giving a permission to lie is entirely incompatible with the first and it is obvious that the second is the framing that led to the permission to lie which has had such a devastating effect on us. It is entirely absurd that we have, again, twice since the turn of the century, permitted a person of such appalling character to assume the presidency he won through lies though he actually lost the vote. Only our 18th century "enlightenment" Constitution prevents us from doing anything about it or anything to prevent it.
This is a passage that is buried in what Pope Francis said the other day about the destructive evil that lying by the media is. What most people in the media are focused on is his analogy to people who have an obsessive fascination with shit but they are missing his point, that lying in the media, media carrying lies has a real effect in the real world and that it is wrong AND NO ONE HAS A RIGHT TO DO IT.
That certainly means that the permission to lie that has been the law of the land in the United States for the past half century is not a right, it is a permission given by the Supreme Court justices who issued the rulings doing that. The focus has been on the real evil that comes from lies that gain currency in social media but just about all of the media, from the top down, engage in lying or in carrying lies in the United States. It was the New York Times that first got the permission to lie with impunity, not the National Enquirer.
There is no right to lie, to defame people, those lies enabled by the Supreme Court came at a cost to the real rights people have to not be lied about.
I'm going to repeat that. By permitting the media to lie with impunity, the Supreme Court gave a privilege to liars that came at the expense of those who are lied about who lost their right to not be lied about.
That might seem a slight thing to lawyers, few of whom had any practical experience in politics or who belonged to the class of people or in a line of work who can be easily destroyed by the media carrying lies about them but the consequences in our politics and in the corruption of society and life in the United States has been devastating.
The faster people have these realities pointed out to them, the faster they will get over the brainwashing by slogans engaged in by the lawyers and judges and media beneficiaries of the permission to lie. The truth should be what is privileged, not lies. But it was the idiocy of the Warren and subsequent courts that they turned that around and privileged lies and the lying liars who tell them. If the justices on the court couldn't understand that their reading of the absurdly and badly misphrased First Amendment would have a devastating impact as people were sold skillfully told lies that would effect their voting choices, that only proves that allowing judges to do that was unwise in the extreme. The media should have an absolute permission to tell the truth, they should never have been given a privilege to lie with impunity.
Pope Francis proves that the view of reality he practices is more realistic than that which the American legal establishment, the judiciary, the Supreme Court and the large majority of those in the media practice. I would say that it is directly related to those different frames of reality written about by Walter Brueggemann. The difference is between the covenental- historical model of monotheism as opposed to the modern-scientific-industrial model which is derived from 18th century materialism. It is certain that giving a permission to lie is entirely incompatible with the first and it is obvious that the second is the framing that led to the permission to lie which has had such a devastating effect on us. It is entirely absurd that we have, again, twice since the turn of the century, permitted a person of such appalling character to assume the presidency he won through lies though he actually lost the vote. Only our 18th century "enlightenment" Constitution prevents us from doing anything about it or anything to prevent it.
Psalm 130 - Out of The Depths I Cry To You O, Lord
1 Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
2 Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplications!
3 If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
Lord, who could stand?
4 But there is forgiveness with you,
so that you may be revered.
5 I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
6 my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.
7 O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is great power to redeem.
8 It is he who will redeem Israel
from all its iniquities.
Du fond de l'abîme je t'invoque - Lili Boulanger
Bernadette Greevy, contralto - Ian Partridge, tenor
BBC Chorus, BBC Symphony Orchestra
Nadia Boulanger, conductor
Du fond de l'abîme je t'invoque
Iahvé, Adonaï.
Ecoute ma prière!
Que tes oreilles soient attentives
aux accents de ma prière.
Du fond de l'abîme je cries vers toi,
Iahvé, Adonaï.
Ecoute ma voix!
Si tu prends garde aux péchés,
qui donc pourra tenir, Adonaï, Iahvé?
Mais la clémence est en toi
afin qu'on te révère.
Mon âme espère en Iahvé.
J'espère, je compte sur sa parole
plus que les guetteurs de la nuit
n'aspirent au matin.
Israël espère en Iahvé.
Car en Iahvé est la miséricorde
et l'abondance de la délivrance.
En Iahvé est la clémence.
C'est lui qui délivrera Israël
de toutes ces iniquités.
I tremble to think what's coming in this country and to the world when Donald Trump is inaugurated.
2 Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplications!
3 If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
Lord, who could stand?
4 But there is forgiveness with you,
so that you may be revered.
5 I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
6 my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.
7 O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is great power to redeem.
8 It is he who will redeem Israel
from all its iniquities.
Du fond de l'abîme je t'invoque - Lili Boulanger
Bernadette Greevy, contralto - Ian Partridge, tenor
BBC Chorus, BBC Symphony Orchestra
Nadia Boulanger, conductor
Du fond de l'abîme je t'invoque
Iahvé, Adonaï.
Ecoute ma prière!
Que tes oreilles soient attentives
aux accents de ma prière.
Du fond de l'abîme je cries vers toi,
Iahvé, Adonaï.
Ecoute ma voix!
Si tu prends garde aux péchés,
qui donc pourra tenir, Adonaï, Iahvé?
Mais la clémence est en toi
afin qu'on te révère.
Mon âme espère en Iahvé.
J'espère, je compte sur sa parole
plus que les guetteurs de la nuit
n'aspirent au matin.
Israël espère en Iahvé.
Car en Iahvé est la miséricorde
et l'abondance de la délivrance.
En Iahvé est la clémence.
C'est lui qui délivrera Israël
de toutes ces iniquités.
I tremble to think what's coming in this country and to the world when Donald Trump is inaugurated.
Family Crisis Emergency Reposting - Nazi Pagans And Deists
Note: I decided to leave in the updates in answer to the objections of the atheists because it is inevitable that even if they'd read them the first time, they'd still make the same ignorant assertions.
I can say that when I began going online in the late 1990s, I had a far higher opinion of atheists than I have in the wake of going on two decades of both reading their unedited thinking directly from them and, finally, subjecting a lot of their claims to truth-testing. I went from not being badly disposed toward them to thinking it is one of the most dishonest and superficial ideologies that depends on ignorance as much as Republican-fascist materialism does. Virtually every major holding of American and British atheists, and lots of those advanced by French and German atheists I've looked into has not held up on that kind of testing. None of that so much so as that around the phenomenon of fascism and, especially, Nazism.
Well, if there is one thing that I have a weakness for, it's following up leads when I get started on a topic. It's a lot more interesting than reading who-done-its or watching them on TV. Thus this unintended series which I'll put aside after this, barring someone in the opposition coming up with something other than their common received BS which is entirely unevidenced.
One of the things which I found puzzling in the online atheist blather of the past dozen years is the rare but oddly regular invocation of "deism" as a more rational alternative to "theism", putting both in quotes because, as used by the blatherers, neither word had a fixed meaning and was often used contrary to any dictionary denotation of the term.
My immediate response was to ask where these "deists" were, if they had any kind of organization, etc. I was assured they did and was given some URLs which looked about as substantial as the phony secular, Potemkin Village alternatives to Alcoholics Anonymous. A few atheists declared themselves, eventually, to be "deists", when I doubted that there were any actual "deists" if that meant they believed in a creator god who, on the midnight of their "sixth day" said, OK, I'm done, and left it to run itself down like a top set into motion.
The reason I bring that up is because, once in a while, in arguing about Christianity's culpability in Nazism some would bring up some Nazi or other declaring they were "God believing". Though that, also, was rare, most of the atheists in the arguments having never even done that level of superficial reading on the topic, merely nodding and spouting unevidenced bigotry on the issue.
I was interested to read this passage from The Third Reich in Power by Richard J. Evans
The [Nazi] Interior Ministry ruled that people leaving their Church could declare themselves to be “Deists” (gottgläubig), and the Party decreed that office-holders could not simultaneously hold any office in the Catholic or Protestant Church. In 1936, storm troopers were forbidden to wear uniforms at Church services, and early in 1939 the ban was extended to all Party members. By 1939, over 10 per cent of the population of Berlin, 7.5 per cent in Hamburg, and between 5 and 6 per cent in some other major cities were registered as Deists, a term which could encompass a variety of religious beliefs including paganism. The great majority of these were likely to hae been Party members; the proportion of Deists in the SS had reached over 25 per cent by 1938, for instance. This process was accelerated by an escalating series of measures pushed by the energetic and strongly anti-Christian head of Rudolph Hess's office, Martin Bormann, banning priests and pastors from playing a part in Party affairs or even, after May 1939, from belonging to it altogether. Still, there was a long way to go before the population as a whole took part in this movement. “We won't let ourselves be turned into heathens,” one woman in Hesse was heard to say by a Gestapo agent. The German Faith Movement, which propagated a new, racial religion based on a mishamash of Nordic and Indian rites, symbols and texts, never won more than 40,000 adherents, and other neopagan groups, like Ludendorff's esoteric Tannenberg League, were even smaller. Nevertheless, for all the general unpopularity of the movement it remained the case that the Nazi Party was on the way to severing all its ties with organized Christianity by the end of the 1930s.
While it is, indeed, terrible to think that any Christian pastor or priest would be involved with the Nazis, it is telling that the Nazis obviously didn't want them involved with their plans. They didn't feel they could trust them to be sufficiently evil or fanatical, even if they'd managed to dupe them into participating in the earlier stages of their regime. Remember, though there were lots of people who knew they were bad news in the early years of their LEGAL rule and their despotism which they instituted by due, if entirely insane, processes, who would certainly never have agreed to what they did from the late 1930s till the fall of Berlin. That there were people with even more reason to distrust the Nazis who were, as well, taken in by them, is proved by the fact that there were even some Zionists stupid or desperate enough to think they could do business with the Nazis in the early years of their regime, for example in the The Haavara Agreement. What people believed about the Nazis in their early years was seldom what came about in the last seven years of their regime, the Nazis, themselves, modified their policies as time went on, growing ever and unprecedentedly worse, as their ideological roots guaranteed. What we know in hindsight isn't what could have been known with foresight.
Reading more about the "Deism" of the Nazis as well as the paganism of some of their worst members makes me wonder why the present day Pagans and deists aren't held responsible for them when the Nazis were certainly more pagan friendly than they were Christian friendly. Hitler famously loved Wagner's insane operatic ring, one of the most absurdly scripted pieces of drama not denoted to be an example of surrealist, absurdist theater.
Reading on this also makes me understand why the past two popes and others who lived through the Nazi regime and invasion were skittish about the revival of "Paganism" which they'd seen revived under Nazism already. To someone in the United States, born after the war and in ignorance of Nazi paganism that might look like some kind of harmless nature-loving buyers of newly created history and yearning for a 19th century, story-book style pseudo-historical view of those religions. To someone who saw Nazi paganism, it would likely look a lot less harmless.
As I've noted several times, all of those pagan religions yearned after so romantically, sacrificed people to their gods. That is something they have in common with the Nazis. And I'm not going to not say it because they don't like it being said. Not to mention bringing it up to those online "deists" who declare their "faith" opportunistically.
Update: Ah, no. You've been watching too many Buggs Bunny cartoons. I am a classical musican and opera watcher who has always, always had a deep and abiding hatred of Wagner's music and a deep and intense disdain for his drama. I believe it was the great stage director, not the actor, Peter Sellers who attributed the decadence of opera to Wagner and Puccini who sent opera out of the realm of relevance to reality and into insane and gooey fantasy. I will say that Puccini's music is easier to take than Wagner's.
I have always held that Mahler wrote better Wagner than Wagner ever did and that Schoenberg wrote better Mahler than Mahler ever did.
Update: The fact is four dull cents still doesn't add up to a nickle. And that's about as much as they put into the discussion. Funny kind of brain trust that never reads what they believe they discuss. CD should stop making stuff up.
Update 3: Let's see, I've presented Richard Evans, William Shirer, Christopher Krebs, Laurence Rees. who cite primary documentary evidence to support the argument that the Nazis intended to destroy Christianity, replacing it with a Nazi religion because they figured the Volk needed something like that to replace Christianity. I also directly cited primary source material in making my case. The Brain trust, in answering what I presented presented nothing but their own assertions. And they figure they have the better argument. Just to show how this new-intellectualism works.
Sometimes I think that the problem with neo-atheists is that they don't have the first clue about how you make an argument in the world of adults.
I can say that when I began going online in the late 1990s, I had a far higher opinion of atheists than I have in the wake of going on two decades of both reading their unedited thinking directly from them and, finally, subjecting a lot of their claims to truth-testing. I went from not being badly disposed toward them to thinking it is one of the most dishonest and superficial ideologies that depends on ignorance as much as Republican-fascist materialism does. Virtually every major holding of American and British atheists, and lots of those advanced by French and German atheists I've looked into has not held up on that kind of testing. None of that so much so as that around the phenomenon of fascism and, especially, Nazism.
Well, if there is one thing that I have a weakness for, it's following up leads when I get started on a topic. It's a lot more interesting than reading who-done-its or watching them on TV. Thus this unintended series which I'll put aside after this, barring someone in the opposition coming up with something other than their common received BS which is entirely unevidenced.
One of the things which I found puzzling in the online atheist blather of the past dozen years is the rare but oddly regular invocation of "deism" as a more rational alternative to "theism", putting both in quotes because, as used by the blatherers, neither word had a fixed meaning and was often used contrary to any dictionary denotation of the term.
My immediate response was to ask where these "deists" were, if they had any kind of organization, etc. I was assured they did and was given some URLs which looked about as substantial as the phony secular, Potemkin Village alternatives to Alcoholics Anonymous. A few atheists declared themselves, eventually, to be "deists", when I doubted that there were any actual "deists" if that meant they believed in a creator god who, on the midnight of their "sixth day" said, OK, I'm done, and left it to run itself down like a top set into motion.
The reason I bring that up is because, once in a while, in arguing about Christianity's culpability in Nazism some would bring up some Nazi or other declaring they were "God believing". Though that, also, was rare, most of the atheists in the arguments having never even done that level of superficial reading on the topic, merely nodding and spouting unevidenced bigotry on the issue.
I was interested to read this passage from The Third Reich in Power by Richard J. Evans
The [Nazi] Interior Ministry ruled that people leaving their Church could declare themselves to be “Deists” (gottgläubig), and the Party decreed that office-holders could not simultaneously hold any office in the Catholic or Protestant Church. In 1936, storm troopers were forbidden to wear uniforms at Church services, and early in 1939 the ban was extended to all Party members. By 1939, over 10 per cent of the population of Berlin, 7.5 per cent in Hamburg, and between 5 and 6 per cent in some other major cities were registered as Deists, a term which could encompass a variety of religious beliefs including paganism. The great majority of these were likely to hae been Party members; the proportion of Deists in the SS had reached over 25 per cent by 1938, for instance. This process was accelerated by an escalating series of measures pushed by the energetic and strongly anti-Christian head of Rudolph Hess's office, Martin Bormann, banning priests and pastors from playing a part in Party affairs or even, after May 1939, from belonging to it altogether. Still, there was a long way to go before the population as a whole took part in this movement. “We won't let ourselves be turned into heathens,” one woman in Hesse was heard to say by a Gestapo agent. The German Faith Movement, which propagated a new, racial religion based on a mishamash of Nordic and Indian rites, symbols and texts, never won more than 40,000 adherents, and other neopagan groups, like Ludendorff's esoteric Tannenberg League, were even smaller. Nevertheless, for all the general unpopularity of the movement it remained the case that the Nazi Party was on the way to severing all its ties with organized Christianity by the end of the 1930s.
While it is, indeed, terrible to think that any Christian pastor or priest would be involved with the Nazis, it is telling that the Nazis obviously didn't want them involved with their plans. They didn't feel they could trust them to be sufficiently evil or fanatical, even if they'd managed to dupe them into participating in the earlier stages of their regime. Remember, though there were lots of people who knew they were bad news in the early years of their LEGAL rule and their despotism which they instituted by due, if entirely insane, processes, who would certainly never have agreed to what they did from the late 1930s till the fall of Berlin. That there were people with even more reason to distrust the Nazis who were, as well, taken in by them, is proved by the fact that there were even some Zionists stupid or desperate enough to think they could do business with the Nazis in the early years of their regime, for example in the The Haavara Agreement. What people believed about the Nazis in their early years was seldom what came about in the last seven years of their regime, the Nazis, themselves, modified their policies as time went on, growing ever and unprecedentedly worse, as their ideological roots guaranteed. What we know in hindsight isn't what could have been known with foresight.
Reading more about the "Deism" of the Nazis as well as the paganism of some of their worst members makes me wonder why the present day Pagans and deists aren't held responsible for them when the Nazis were certainly more pagan friendly than they were Christian friendly. Hitler famously loved Wagner's insane operatic ring, one of the most absurdly scripted pieces of drama not denoted to be an example of surrealist, absurdist theater.
Reading on this also makes me understand why the past two popes and others who lived through the Nazi regime and invasion were skittish about the revival of "Paganism" which they'd seen revived under Nazism already. To someone in the United States, born after the war and in ignorance of Nazi paganism that might look like some kind of harmless nature-loving buyers of newly created history and yearning for a 19th century, story-book style pseudo-historical view of those religions. To someone who saw Nazi paganism, it would likely look a lot less harmless.
As I've noted several times, all of those pagan religions yearned after so romantically, sacrificed people to their gods. That is something they have in common with the Nazis. And I'm not going to not say it because they don't like it being said. Not to mention bringing it up to those online "deists" who declare their "faith" opportunistically.
Update: Ah, no. You've been watching too many Buggs Bunny cartoons. I am a classical musican and opera watcher who has always, always had a deep and abiding hatred of Wagner's music and a deep and intense disdain for his drama. I believe it was the great stage director, not the actor, Peter Sellers who attributed the decadence of opera to Wagner and Puccini who sent opera out of the realm of relevance to reality and into insane and gooey fantasy. I will say that Puccini's music is easier to take than Wagner's.
I have always held that Mahler wrote better Wagner than Wagner ever did and that Schoenberg wrote better Mahler than Mahler ever did.
Update: The fact is four dull cents still doesn't add up to a nickle. And that's about as much as they put into the discussion. Funny kind of brain trust that never reads what they believe they discuss. CD should stop making stuff up.
Update 3: Let's see, I've presented Richard Evans, William Shirer, Christopher Krebs, Laurence Rees. who cite primary documentary evidence to support the argument that the Nazis intended to destroy Christianity, replacing it with a Nazi religion because they figured the Volk needed something like that to replace Christianity. I also directly cited primary source material in making my case. The Brain trust, in answering what I presented presented nothing but their own assertions. And they figure they have the better argument. Just to show how this new-intellectualism works.
Sometimes I think that the problem with neo-atheists is that they don't have the first clue about how you make an argument in the world of adults.
Olivier Messiaen - Twenty Visions Of The Baby Jesus - The Vision of the Virgin
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
Thursday, December 8, 2016
Hyman Bloom - Christmas Tree
Hyman Bloom was a mystic who found transcendence through color. Always an outsider, even when the, then trendy, abstract expressionists tried to adopt him as one of their own he said things like:
“I tried Abstract Expressionism and came as close to it as I wanted to, but I thought that it was mostly emotional cartharsis with no intellectual basis. It had no emotional control. All that thrashing around seemed infantile and beside the point.”
And, even more heretically:
“What I was trying to create was a complex picture in the classical sense; a work with depth and subject matter that was readable and over which I had exerted control. I thought of art as elevating, and I didn’t think Jackson Pollock even had a foot on the ladder.”
I can imagine that pissing off the mid-brow culture vultures. Then and now.
That comment about his pictures of decaying corpses and legs, I might go into that sometime. Maybe after the holidays are over.
Bela Bartok - The Miraculous Mandarin for Piano 4-Hands
Zoltan Kocsis - Adrienne Hauser, piano
Score
I've heard one live performance of this version and several recordings, this is the only one that begins to match the effect of the orchestration. I don't know who was playing which part, which hardly matters as their ensemble playing is some of the best 4-hand playing I've ever heard.
Mikołaj Zieleński - Magnificat
Warsaw Philharmonic Choir
Henryk WOJNAROWSKI, conductor
Mikolaj Zieleński's setting of the Magnificat for 12 parts in three choirs and his other composition were one of the best things I learned about when I did my month long posting of settings of that most radical of texts a couple of years ago (word search my blog for "Magnificat" if you want to find the others where the links still work). Zieleński was a composer I'd never come across before, I suspect that's because the musical establishment of my youth didn't particularly pay attention to Polish composers before Chopin. It makes me wonder what other great music doesn't get a hearing because of where the composer lived.
The Corruption Of Our Government Is A Result of Enabled Lies
Just a short post. If you're interested in just how corrupt the Trump regime is going to be, Kevin Drum is keeping a chart of his appointments in terms of their being a part of the swamp Trump claimed he was going to drain and if they are Rich, Crazy and, or Scary. Here's what he's got so far.
I said to someone earlier this morning that you had to go way back in the 19th century to find this level of blatant, corrupt, crony government in the United States but I'm not sure that this might outdo anything we've had in our history.
I think when the buzzards come home to roost and things fall apart that the sane but mildly corrupt margin of Republicans will be begging Democrats to join with them to get rid of Trump before he totally destroys their party. Though I'm not sure even that would do it. The corruption the Republicans and their media have built in this country over the past half-century is third only to the murderous theft of the continent and slavery in its moral depravity and I'm afraid it will take a shock which will have to drastically reform the Constitution before it is ended. And I'm talking about something as terrible as the Civil War.
The Republican-fascist regime we are about to undergo is a product of allowing the media to lie with impunity. Those legal theories that pushed their ability to lie like that are the polluted head waters of the sewer the country has become.
If you know the truth the truth will make you free but if you're so far gone you don't care if something is true or not, you are doomed. Our country has been corrupted to the point where the media, the politicians, even a large percentage of the voters don't care what's true and what isn't, anymore. It started with Justices on the Supreme Court deciding that wasn't something they should be bothered with and the elite, Ivy League class lawyers who pushed that line withe them.
Update: Eschaton, proof that you can assemble a group of college educated alleged liberals whose conceit vastly outpaces their desire to know what they're talking about. In some respects, it's getting to look more like an equivalent of a right-wing chat room every month.
Tell me, Simps, did Duncan ever actually, you know, endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump? Considering how much energy he spent in the early days of his public writing in defending Bill Clinton who was a far bigger jerk than she ever has been, you think he'd have been able to at least endorse her.
I said to someone earlier this morning that you had to go way back in the 19th century to find this level of blatant, corrupt, crony government in the United States but I'm not sure that this might outdo anything we've had in our history.
I think when the buzzards come home to roost and things fall apart that the sane but mildly corrupt margin of Republicans will be begging Democrats to join with them to get rid of Trump before he totally destroys their party. Though I'm not sure even that would do it. The corruption the Republicans and their media have built in this country over the past half-century is third only to the murderous theft of the continent and slavery in its moral depravity and I'm afraid it will take a shock which will have to drastically reform the Constitution before it is ended. And I'm talking about something as terrible as the Civil War.
The Republican-fascist regime we are about to undergo is a product of allowing the media to lie with impunity. Those legal theories that pushed their ability to lie like that are the polluted head waters of the sewer the country has become.
If you know the truth the truth will make you free but if you're so far gone you don't care if something is true or not, you are doomed. Our country has been corrupted to the point where the media, the politicians, even a large percentage of the voters don't care what's true and what isn't, anymore. It started with Justices on the Supreme Court deciding that wasn't something they should be bothered with and the elite, Ivy League class lawyers who pushed that line withe them.
Update: Eschaton, proof that you can assemble a group of college educated alleged liberals whose conceit vastly outpaces their desire to know what they're talking about. In some respects, it's getting to look more like an equivalent of a right-wing chat room every month.
Tell me, Simps, did Duncan ever actually, you know, endorse Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump? Considering how much energy he spent in the early days of his public writing in defending Bill Clinton who was a far bigger jerk than she ever has been, you think he'd have been able to at least endorse her.
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