Trump Wanted Jeffrey Rosen To Be His FOX, His NY Post, His Paid-For NYT Ad

LISTENING TO CHRIS HAYES talking about how the Repulbican-fascist party is doing what Trump told his acting AG to do, just put something "out there" and he and the Republicans in the Congress would overturn the election with it has become a serious problem, it was nice to hear a journalist talking about it but he needs to go farther back. 

That isn't something Trump invented, the media invented it when they were given the permission to carry lies by the Supreme Court.  For decades I heard the "it's being said" transmission of lies on NPR, on PBS, on network news, in "opinion journalism" as all of them, freed from anything like a commitment to carry the truth adopted the standards of the tabloids.   If they want to know where the idiot savant Trump (his one talent being conning the susceptible) and Republican-fascists learned it, they learned it from media, from journalists, from news program speaking heads, from cabloid 24-7 air fillers.  And it all started with the permission given to them by the Warren and later courts based on "the First Amendment."  

Trump was merely asking the acting AG, Jeffrey Rosen to do what Bush II, Bush I, Reagan. . . going back to Richard Nixon regularly had the press doing, putting lies and innuendo out there for the benefit of Republicans, going back to the period when they weren't all fascists.  The habit of having the media do that, especially broadcast media, has been setting us up since at least 1964 on the allegedly respectable media the way the tabloids have always done it for them.  He was asking him to be his FOX or NY Post or his paid-for NYT ad* calling for the execution of innocent black kids.  It should never be forgotten that the NYT published that ad as it did the one that led to it getting the original permission to publish lies with impunity from the Warren Court, a permission to lie that is universally celebrated by journalists, I've yet to hear a major one say that that decision has been a disaster for democracy.

There are a number of needed revisions to the Bill of Rights and other amendments, protecting individuals and the media when they tell the truth AND NOT WHEN THEY LIE is among the most serious of those.  That's right up there with making it plain that there is no personal or private right to amass military sized arsenals and ownership of what are effectively military assault weapons.  

It must be possible for individuals to punish the media for lying about them and for democracy to protect itself from media lies that intentionally and unintentionally undermine and attack democracy.  Our media are the main transmitters of the poison that Trump used as it was when it was Gingrich doing the same thing.  

* It wasn't only the old gray slag that took his money and published his racist screed, he put it in a number of papers.  Not to be fair because there is no such thing as being fair to the publishers of murderous, racist, lying slander but to tell the truth of it. 

Andrew Cuomo Would Resign Now If The Good Of The State And Country Meant Something To Him His Brother Not So Fast

THE 1970S ERA TALK-SHOW SHRINK encouragement for casual touching, feeling, kissing and the creation of the idiocy that having a sense of personal, bodily privacy was mentally unhygenic provides Andrew Cuomo with his indefensible defense  against his pattern of sexual harassment.  It should end.  The extent to which Covid-19 has led to a decrease in that kind of promiscuous touching, I hope it doesn't come back in if the virus is ever suppressed.  People should keep their mouths and hands off or other people unless they are in an ongoing intimate, mutually consenting and egalitarian relationship.  I can't think of anything that would be more hygenic than people again having a sense of personal dignity that is violated by that crap.

Cuomo should resign from the governorship and from politics.  His career was built on the reputation of his father,  Mario Cuomo and Mario Cuomo's influence in Democratic politics while he was alive.  The son burned through the good-will his father may have built up pretty fast through his arrogance and ruthlessness and Trumpian meanness.  From what I've read and seen of him, his attractions to the voters of New York mystify me almost as much as the patience with his father's perennial, non-committal teasing to run for president.   Though his son is not alone in having ridden into high office on the power of his family name and no other qualification.  There are relatives of politicians who prove to be good politicians but you can't count on that being a guarantee, we should all grow up and treat would-be dynasty builders with skepticism.  

Andrew Cuomo should resign and face the civil suits and, maybe, criminal trials that await him over that and his handling of Covid, his staying in office will cement his legacy as a selfish jerk.   

I am proud of Democratic politicians in New York and elsewhere, especially Joe Biden over their calls for him to resign.   It's rare for a president to call for the resignation of a politician who has been an ally and, maybe, kind of a friend, especially the governor of his own party in a major state whose electoral votes put him in office.  I can't recall a Republican president doing something like that though I'd like to have my memory refreshed if such happened within living memory.   

Cuomo's brother, having had a role in giving his brother political advice in this matter should not continue as a "journalist" at CNN.   But if what he did, involving himself as a political advisor while allegedly practicing journalism requires a resignation there'll be scores and hundreds of vacant jobs, I'd guess most of them such "journalist" collaborators with Republican-fascists, Rupert Murdoch's empire of right-wing "journalism" would be pretty much emptied.  The politician, being a public servant,  should resign as a matter of course, Chris Cuomo should do so only if the other political hack "journalists" are forced to do the same.  The media is a whore house where Republicans get to be totally corrupt so why shouldn't others? 

Lead Sheet Us Into Temptation

I HAVE PRINTED OUT the musically incompetent hate mail to pin it on my bulletin board so I can smile in satisfaction when seeing it again.   Imagine, not being able to count a measure in 2/2 filled with eight eighth notes.  I don't know which that should get them, a failing grade in first semester solfege and dictation or in sub-primary number work.   Maybe no one cared enough to point out he's got two hands to count on after he runs out of fingers on one of them.

UPDATE:  Warning, the following will be tedious for non-musicians.

I looked at the lead sheet as published by Virtual Sheet Music, online.  It's how I knew it was notated in 2/2, from there the rest of it was just a matter of listening and counting.  The eight "o"s that are sung in a chorus on the recorded version of it aren't notated, there's just a tied-over half note on the word "Nor-man" followed by a half rest.  In Sue Thompson's singing of it all eight "o"s are part of a simply banal melodic pattern of eighth notes filling that measure as recorded. 

Jeesh!  I'm going to print out the continuing whining that only further proves his musical incompetence in even the most simple-minded pop music.  Apparently he doesn't understand what lyrics are and that in songs lyrics, apart from the relatively rare spoken ones, are generally sung on pitches, within rhythm. 

I said "Blackbird" was OK, there's no pleasing you jerks.  It's  OK for what it is, it's not an undying masterpiece, at least not unless it gets revived through improvisation by really good improvisers.  I wouldn't listen to most jazz standards if they weren't treated that way, the notated and original form of them, especially the ones written for shows, don't stand up to repeated hearing.  They weren't built for that like Beethoven Bach or Schoenberg is.

I Was Only In It For The Funny

YOU KNOW IF I had dissed the early 1960s pop song "Norman" (o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o) I'd have gotten hate mail claiming that Sue Thompson was a genius for the ages and that "Sad Movies Always Make Me Cry" proved it.

Now stop asking me why I loved to trigger that kind of idiot by making fun of the mop heads or I'll give you another deadly earworm,

Update:  I actually did find the occasional song by Paul McCartney to be OK, Blackbird, for example and I was rather fond of George Harrison.  As an ensemble and the for the most part, them apart from it, not so much.  

John perhaps least of all, most overrated of them, biggest jerk. I was just baiting the idiot troll for a lot of it, though "Imagine" is the stupidest "anthem" in the history of cheap, shoddy pop "anthems."  Stupid, hypocritical words, stupider "melody" entirely banal harmony and rhythm.  As someone said about the movie Moment By Moment, Quaalude time in la la land.   And still those who intone it can't "sing" it in tune or time.  It's the anthem of the tone deaf and affluent contentedness. 

That's my final word on the topic.

The Blame You Seek To Assign May Turn Out To Be Your Own

THE COMMUNIST CHINESE GOVERNMENT only has itself to blame for the widespread skepticism about the origin of the Covid-19 virus, the Repulbican-fascist fed theory that it didn't arise spontaneously in the cruel wet-markets with a covid virus from bats going through pangolins kept to be slaughtered to feed the appetites of the wealthy who wanted to eat such poor creatures, and that isn't just something that is done in China but around the world.  

It is a fact that some of the deadliest pandemics in human history have an origin in animals kept or hunted for meat, though keeping them in close confinement, tended by people who then become a part of the development and chain of transmission for novel viruses, I'd guess, is most responsible.  I make no apologies for pointing that out and will continue every time this is the topic for discussion.

Somehow, I can't see meat producing Republican-fascists being at all eager to regulate that industry here, which is, as it is anywhere, a ticking time bomb which is all but totally guaranteed to produce other pandemic diseases.  I wonder if maybe there is a political-economic motive in the Republican-fascist desire to steer attention from the meat industry as the source of this, one, viral pandemic.  I certainly don't trust them anymore than I trust the Communist Chinese government to be honest and above board.

But, as I started, the Chinese government with its paranoid habits of secrecy and non-disclosure has certainly given the Republican-fascists a lot of what they've used to blame them for human creation of the virus.  If they had been totally open to world-wide investigation from the start,  innocence of that accusation, if innocence it is, could have been discovered.

But if that theory is right then it's an indictment of the scientists and administrators who carry out that kind of research so irresponsibly.  I was talking to a biology teacher a while back and he told me about a Soviet-era lab deep inside the Soviet Union where a scientist loved to create novel viruses of enormously deadly potential just out of what he called "intellectual curiosity."  He being kept by the Communist government and allowed to pursue his hobby with an eye towards possible military application in the same way the North Korean government pursued nuclear weapons.  And I'm sure that depraved hobbyist of "pure research"  would have his counterparts in many countries, including the United States.  

I remember getting into several blog brawls on science themed blogs about the stupidity of locating high security bio-hazard labs in population centers, especially one that was to be placed in South Boston so as to be convenient to so many of the area's universities.   I remember asking one obviously insider commentator if grad students would be working there, she said yes.  Grad students would be exactly where I'd expect accidental infection and transmission to the outside world to happen, yet they are not the only possible source for that.  Grad students, no matter how smart they may be, are mostly immature kids who have spent too much time in school and not enough in reality to be trusted with such grave responsibility.  Neither are many seasoned scientists.

Perhaps the Republican-fascists in the Congress should be careful about getting what they wished for.  If a government lab in Communist China, one of the most tightly controlling governments in the world, could have an accident unleashing this pandemic from the controlled conditions in a high-security laboratory then it's a gurantee that it can happen here or anywhere where such labs, government run OR IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR operate.  

You can take your pick, either the meat industry or the scientists who do this kind of research and those who fund and motivate their work are to blame for this.  And neither of those are exclusively Chinese or "other" in origin but are the same world-round.  I remember when the putrid Sam Harris proposed his little thought experiment of preemptive bombing of "Muslim countries" to prevent them using, in their putrid phrase the "Isl*mic bomb" on us, "killing tens of millions in a day" I proposed, instead, demanding that all of the scientists with the knowledge of producing atomic and nuclear weapons be killed, instead, since they were the source of the danger.  The very same people who, as an intellectual exercise (yeah, right) proposed killing tens of millions of totally innnocent people reacted in horror at the prospect of killing the people who were guilty of producing those weapons that were the origin of their depraved proposal.   

While I'm not necessarily advocating first killing all the scientists, if they're going to insist on producing such horrors, they are a danger to all of us.  The same with the meat industry.  If the swine farmers and poultry farmers and cattle men are going to produce other pandemic diseases, they're as responsible as the scientists who they want to blame this pandemic on - somehow, I suppose, absolving Trump and the likes of the governors of Texas, Florida and South Dakota from their role in its massive spread.

The Tough Guy Prosecutor Of Mobsters (it was really his staff) And Media Championed Mayor Of A Crack Down On Lawlessness (read On People of Color) As Crybaby Brat

I DON'T THINK IT'S THE FACT THAT I come from a very large family, originally having nine siblings, but while listening to Rudy Giuliani's self-pitying interview in which he threatens those who are going to prosecute him with retribution "in heaven" a phase I heard someone outside of my family use came to me, "he's acting like an only child."   So I looked it up like I look up to see if someone I suspect is a prep-Ivy-Ivy equivalent product and, sure enough, Rudy was an only child, obviously the spoiled kind of only brat.  I know that there are only children who are and grow up to be wonderfully unself-centered people but there's also the "only child" type, not all of them only children.  Look at Donald Trump. 

Giuliani is, by the way, a Catholic school (Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School) -private college (Manhattan College)-private law school (New York University School Of Law) product.  I think they should be acknowledged as having credentialed the garbage they enable.

My parents, neither of them only children, never said that kind of thing about only children, they were the kind of people who were opposed to stereotyping on moral grounds, I suppose stereotyping being a guarantee of bearing false witness against the many who wouldn't fit the stereotype of their assigned group.  Fairness is a huge component of morality, something that doesn't seem to much figure to Rudy and his ilk.  Come to think of it, I never remember my older siblings or younger ones say something like that, either. 

Still, it's kind of funny that hearing his 77 year old whiny ass crybaby treat that God's going to avenge him against those who are doing what Rudy did as a prosecutor, which made that phrase come to me and it turns out to be accurate.   If Rudy wants to whine about that he only has himself to blame for that too.   Though I'll bet he'd blame his mother.

Who Needs Horror Stories When There's The News - Lambda Variant of COVID-19 Might Be Resistant to Vaccines

AS THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS are endangering us all by volunteering to be incubators of new and, in some cases, worse variants of Covid-19, the Lambda variant first recorded in Peru may be able to overcome vaccine antibodies. 

Investigators in Chile conclude that the lambda COVID-19 variant is not only more infectious than standard SARS-CoV-2, but could also possibly shrug off vaccines. The first case in the United States has been spotted at Houston Methodist Hospital.

A COVID-19 variant that proves to be resistant to vaccines keeps medical experts, public health officials, and health care professionals—including infection preventionists—on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic up at nights. There’s no reason to sound the alarm yet, but there may—just may—perhaps be reason to think that there’s a chance that the alarm may have to be sounded at some point about the lambda COVID-19 mutation, or C.37.

A preprint study by investigators in Chile suggests that the mutation, which first surfaced in Peru about a year ago and is highly infectious, may also be able to evade vaccine antibodies.

“Our results indicate that mutations present in the spike protein of the lambda variant of interest confer increased infectivity and immune escape from neutralizing antibodies elicited by CoronaVac,” the study states. CoronaVac is a vaccine manufactured by a Chinese company and that’s used in Peru. The study continues: “These data reinforce the idea that massive vaccination campaigns in countries with high SARS-CoV-2 circulation must be accompanied by strict genomic surveillance allowing the identification of new isolates carrying spike mutations and immunology studies aimed to determine the impact of these mutations in immune escape and vaccines breakthrough.”

Peru has the highest COVID-19 death rate of any country in the world, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center: about 600 for every 100,000 people infected with COVID-19. That’s about twice the amount of Hungary, the country with the next highest COVID-19 death rate. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that the lambda variant has been the COVID carrier in about 81% of infections in Peru since April. The WHO declared the lambda variant a variant of interest last month. The lambda variant has spread to about 30 other countries in the world, including the United Kingdom.

I have little hope that people will adapt to reality as fast as the virus is, apparently the virus is smarter than some of us, including, I will bet, the Supreme Court.  If we don't give up the spoiled toddler libertarianism that currently rules us, we're in for an even worse hell ride than we've been on. 

You Don't Have To Be A Fundy To Find What's To Love In Leviticus, In Fact A Lot Of Them Can't Find It

POINTING OUT THE RADICAL SOCIAL JUSTICE of the Book of Leviticus yesterday seems to have anticipated an article about The Leviticus Fund posted at the Global Sister's Report this morning.  It's an example of how the economic justice of the Mosaic Books is alive and informing means of making that real in life, today.

"It's faith capital," said Greg Maher, executive director of the fund, which is based in Tarrytown, New York, and takes its name from the call for economic justice in the Book of Leviticus.

It also shows the strength of pulling together resources, Jeffries said. "We can do much more together than we can do alone."

'We can do much more together than we can do alone.'

—Mercy Sr. Rosemary Jeffries

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As one of the nation's first community development financial institutions, or CDFIs (see sidebar), the fund has financed projects including housing, community health work, education and, more recently, access to food in communities with food deserts.

Leviticus' investment model is similar to purchasing certificates of deposit at a fixed interest rate for a specified amount of time. The investment, in turn, allows Leviticus to lend money to groups like The Bridge.

But now, Leviticus is further strengthening its work through a recently announced Legacy Fund — a pool of capital based on donations, not investments. Pooling their support into donations are seven original fund investors. Six are sister congregations: the Dominican Sisters of Sparkill, New York; Franciscan Sisters of Peace; Good Shepherd Sisters; Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary; Sisters of St. Dominic of Blauvelt, New York; Ursuline Sisters of the Roman Union.

Money from the Legacy Fund, permanently restricted for lending, will be lent and repaid to support future projects, said Colleen Ryan, Leviticus' resource development officer.

It's a far cry from using the holiness code for priests with its severe penalties for this or that sexual act or wearing polyester cotton mix that are the sum total of so many peoples' view of Leviticus.  The non-reading, non-thinking, "proof-texting" use of it.  

Busy day.  I may get around to writing something later but I wanted to share this with you.

Hate Mail

ALONG WITH THE RIDICULOUS REQUIREMENTS of total accuracy for the Bible, the demand that it be literally true and accurate in the sense of modern history and science, neither of which existed for the centuries during which it was composed, edited and compiled, there is an absurd insistence that religion has a totalitarian hold on the minds of its adherents which it most certainly never has had except in the fewest of cases.

I have pointed out how in my personal experience of anti-LGBTQ violence,  intimidation, invective and discrimination, all of which I've experienced, the very language of those who committed those showed that they certainly didn't take the "second commandment" to heart.   I can't remember every instance of that but I'm sure the two instances of actual violence I experienced included "God" and "Jesus Christ" featured  in one or the other.   Clearly the Golden Rule was no where in evidence nor other teachings of Jesus.  

The same is seldom true of men who attack women, those attacks generally violating even more of the commandments and moral teachings of the Bible, it is impossible to believe that religion is a major motivation in that - as if men who are totally irreligious have a lower incidence of misogynistic attacks against women and sexual assaults up to and including the perpetual lynching campaign against women which is so common that it is not even imagined in such terms even as it fulfills the requirement for being the worst campaign of sustained, intimidating violence in history, in all places and against all women, Women of Color, White Women, Poor Women, Destitute Women, relatively privileged Women. 

The idea that religion is to blame for all of that is unrealistic.  It is notable that even the strongest prohibitions of Western religion, all of those having to do with sex outside of marriage, are not nearly universally effective in controlling the behavior of even the most officially fanatical of those who profess to believe Jesus was literally God and spoke with the authority of God.  If they did then, universally they would hold that remarriage after divorce was literally adultery - though I have seldom encountered a sexual dictator who was against anything they wanted to do, themselves.  It's far easier to be a precisian adherent of the scripture when it's someone else's behavior you propose to monitor. 

I have certainly not noticed any great influence of religion on most people except as setting an outer limit of what they will do to satisfy their desires and likes.  The Republican-fascists who profess to be such big fat supporters of religion are among the biggest fattest haters of religion, especially such Christians as propose the radical egalitarian justice that is the center of Christianity as it is of its parent, Judaism and its cousin, Islam.  

Like the things we are supposed to learn in school, the actual power of religion on peoples' lives is too weak to account for the evils that they do, give or take an extreme example of heretical fanatical sects.  The greatest influence on peoples behavior is their economic self-interest, the second greatest certainly the entertainment media they consume, TV and other commercials, peoples family and class interests.   Religion, which a minority of Americans "observe" even an hour a week in church could not possibly compete with those, mandatory education can't compete with it and they have students for many more hours a year than the churches do. 

Why do they blame religion for things that are obviously not taught in the Scriptures, indeed many of those things they are blamed for things not contained in the Scriptures or the official teachings of the Churches?  I'd guess because it's about the easiest of targets in post-WWII America, the absurd feeling of transgression for dissing religion as so many idiots online feel is totally anachronistic.  I think it was the sarcastic atheist Alexander Cockburn who pointed out that it was more of an act of bravery to profess a belief in Christianity than to diss  it.  Especially in the scribbling, babbling classes.  I don't know about bravery but you'll get attacked for being religious more certainly than for being an atheist a-hole.  

It's also cowardly like the attacks of the middle-class and even working poor on the destitute instead of the real enemy of those People, the ruling class.   It's a rather stupid waste of effort for the left except in so far as the supposed figure of religion is also an active supporter of Republican-fascism or other powerful gangsters.  It's more one of those lifestyle issues that the play left really cares more about than establishing equality and economic justice and a democratic commonwealth.  It's as déclassé as eating unfashionable food or wearing unfashionable clothes or speaking Esperanto.  It's a lifestyle thing for the play left, the secular left and the libertarian-liberals.  

P.S. It occurs to me while going through this for editing, the first thing I ever wrote on my first blog was against the media requirement never placed on conservatives or moderates or centrists,  that liberals (real ones, especially) MUST get everything 100% right all the time or they are as useless as it was asserted to me that the Bible must be.  I think in so far as real liberalism is all about equality, economic and social justice and democracy under that overarching moral framing that the two demands are not unrelated.  I remember, it was being fed up with hearing Scott Simon do that on NPR that morning that led me to do what I'd been toying with for a while and start posting things on the blog I'd put up but was too inhibited to.  I got over that pretty fast.

The Complete Radicalism Of The Jewish Monotheistic Tradition Isn't Ideological It Is In The Stuff Of Life, Itself

THE IDEOLOGIES OF THE VARIOUS components of the current resurgence of neo-fascism-neo-Nazism aren't the center of that thing, it is the billionaires and millionaires, in the United States, Britain, Russia and elsewhere who are financing it and their psychotic mania for concentrating wealth and, so, power for themselves which are behind it.   The racism, the bigotry, the misogyny, the LGBTQ hatred, etc. are the levers they use to mobilize other species of psychotics (and lots of the billionaires and millionaires share their psychoses) to serve their real ends, to destroy egalitarian democracy and the commonwealth that is one of the oldest and deepest strains of the Jewish monotheistic tradition. 

That is how the former KGB communist Putin and his lackeys, most of whom were part of the Soviet elite or their brats, are so easily amassing some of the greatest fortunes through theft  and are in thick with their fellow thieves, the billionaires and millionaires of the capitalist West.  They were never really different except that they had to pretend to having some kind of intention of egalitarianism even as the Communists inevitably rose up an elite of their own as The People were given a few crumbs to starve on as they were terrorized into slavery.  That is hardly an advance on the goals of western capitalists, especially as they gave up the pretense of any kind of devotion to Christian egalitarianism and, eventually, even pretending they believed it.  The slave-power here never intended to follow it, even as they professed it.

Yesterday's Catholic liturgy held one of the central pillars of that egalitarianism which is, in my experience, found nowhere except in religion, from the much misunderstood, misused book of Leviticus:

Then, on the tenth day of the seventh month, let the trumpet resound;
on this, the Day of Atonement, the trumpet blast shall re-echo
throughout your land.
This fiftieth year you shall make sacred
by proclaiming liberty in the land for all its inhabitants.
It shall be a jubilee for you,
when every one of you shall return to his own property,
every one to his own family estate.
In this fiftieth year, your year of jubilee,
you shall not sow, nor shall you reap the aftergrowth
or pick the grapes from the untrimmed vines.
Since this is the jubilee, which shall be sacred for you,
you may not eat of its produce,
except as taken directly from the field.

“In this year of jubilee, then,
every one of you shall return to his own property.
Therefore, when you sell any land to your neighbor
or buy any from him, do not deal unfairly.
On the basis of the number of years since the last jubilee
shall you purchase the land from your neighbor;
and so also, on the basis of the number of years for crops,
shall he sell it to you.
When the years are many, the price shall be so much the more;
when the years are few, the price shall be so much the less.
For it is really the number of crops that he sells you.
Do not deal unfairly, then; but stand in fear of your God.
I, the LORD, am your God.”

It's no wonder that the Black People enslaved in the United States talked about "the year of Jubilee" so often, the time of "liberty for all the inhabitants of the land,"  a time of restoration of rights, a time when all sold property would be returned to the families which had sold it - clearly this law intends that to be understood, always as leasing not what the Anglo-American legal system with its endless amassing and concentration of wealth and, so, inequality defines it to be. 

I will point out that elsewhere in The Law it defines the food left in the field, the source of wealth, as being the rightful property of the destitute, the orphan, the widow and the alien dwelling there.  As a recent convert from vegetarianism to veganism, if you may not eat of its produce,except as taken directly from the field, that could mean that the text implies that they weren't supposed to eat animal products, though I'm sure that would be seen as too radical by a lot of people.  Though it defines the sacred year of Jubilee through what it said. 

The Law of Moses is nothing less than a legal system to ensure a far more radical equality as being the will of God, meaning to establish that equality more strongly than any secular, materialistic legal system ever has.   It does not outlaw the ownership of property but defines it in such a way as a right of all that any financial scheme cannot override, I would go so far as to say that under that Law the concept of ownership of shares in a corporation past the point of a just return on an investment is unjust and illegal.   Capitalism is absolutely a contradiction of that law, though any socialism which would abolish ownership in favor of the state owning everything is, as well, wrong.  Again, in the former Soviet Union, we can see how state ownership easily became private plunder by those conveniently former "communists" as they gave up a pretense of their formerly professed faith.  There have been socialists who advocated something like that though they were swamped by the Marxist-materialist and anti-democratic ideology which, in real life, is just a different flavor of violent, oppressive gangsterism.  

One of the greatest things that was done in Vatican II, building on, of all Popes, Pius XII's reform of having the scripture readings in the vernacular (as the priest quiet mumbled them in Latin), greatly expanded the readings from the Hebrew scriptures, perhaps the reason that around the world Catholics got to hear that mightily subversive text announced as the Word of God.  I doubt that many of the trad-catholics would really have liked people to take it to heart as such.   I doubt that any defined group of scientistic materialists heard any such radicalism expounded as that any time in the past year.   I'm sure the many libertarians in organized atheism would despise that notion as would any strict Darwinsts who are, after all, the descendants of Thomas Malthus, the depraved Anglican pastor who wanted a large part of his "flock" to be thrown out and starved to death. 

The modern Biblical scholars who attribute the texts we have of the First Testament to the Jerusalem elite make you wonder at how much they would have liked what they, nevertheless, felt was the Word of God strongly enough to preserve it, if in their falling away from egalitarianism to the injustice of the Solomon and post Solomon period, they felt compelled to retain the Sinai tradition even when it condemned their privilege, for which you can read "injustice" injustice being a component of all privilege.   I don't know the answer to that but it's one of the things I thought about when I heard it read while listening to the mass.   I find that hearing the Scripture often leaves me just a little more radical than I had been before I heard it.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Dick Riley - Middleman Out

Middleman Out 

 

Being busy with moving I have decided to take time off from looking for new radio plays this month, though if I come across any, I will post them.  So I'm going to post some of my favorites from those I've already posted.  I had intended to start with Gordon Pengilly's Seeing In The Dark, one of the best radio plays I've ever heard, but it has been removed from Archive.org where I found it.  But this one is still up and I liked it almost as much.

Elite Catholic Education Not In The News But Should Be Exposed

THE PSYCHO-FASCIST COVID-19 CONSPIRACY LIE SPREADING lie network Newsmax, was founded by Christopher Ruddy who is a product of, yes, you guessed it, another Catholic boy's prep school, Chaminade High School in Mineola, NY. and the Catholic St. Johns University, though in this case the religious orders to blame for credentialing him are the Marinists and Vincentians, not the usual Jesuits.   You have to wonder if they believe he is an upright example of the kind of Christian morality they claim to exist to propagate.   I include that in founding that abomination that should be totally suppressed, he tapped into the fascist-billionaire loot of Richard Mellon Scaife, a prep-Ivy product who you can't blame on the teaching orders.

The elite Catholic prep schools, colleges and universities have, I think, earned a reputation of producing the current wave of fascist oligarchs and their servants.  I would hold they should be investigated on that as much as the Catholic hierarchy should for the sex abuse scandals.  I'm thoroughly disgusted that they continue in this even with the enormous role of dishonor they had a role in credentialing.   And in the meantime the Catholic schools which used to help educate working-class and poor children is dying.  The elite schools should be closed, their properties sold or rented and the proceeds sent to support that part of Catholic education.  

And, you guessed it,  Christopher Ruddy is thick in the neo-fascist Latin Mass cult, as well (I won't link to him).  Thank God Pope Francis is trying to end that, though I think it's way too late. 

Update:

Apparently though he is a product of the Deerfield Academy,  Yale (which kicked him out for drinking) and then Trump's minor-Ivy alma mater, The University of Pennsylvania, Richard Mellon Scaife (who was not Catholic) IS TO BE BLAMED on the Catholic school system which he never attended.   At least that's what I find in my to be trashed file just under the deadline.  

I don't think Scaife was a believer in the Jewish God Christianity and especially the post-Vatican II Catholic Church, believes in.  He was a thoroughly devoted and complete servant of Mammon, seeing religion as nothing more than a tool to impose billionaire oligarchy on humanity.    That the Catholic-Mammonists like Ruddy are the servants of the servants of Mammon is only one way to encapsule what I said in this post. "Catholic Mammonist" is a good name for the real religious belief of the Latin mass advocates, "traditional Catholics" and other neo-integralists.  They don't care if they don't understand the words because those words aren't about what they really worship.

The idiot either means that or he believes I was, in a post that thoroughly trashed elite Catholic preps and universities for turning out a distressingly large percentage of the current crop of neo-fascists REALLY means I was absolving the elite Catholic schools for exactly that, the idiot doesn't seem to get the distinction, which would have surprised me before I went online and found the Eschaton and other play-lefty commenting communities.

Illiteracy, no bar to having college credentials and a white-collar career, apparently.

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The Violation Of Non-Transgressible Limits And Its Consequences

SOMEONE ASKED ME YESTERDAY if I knew how long the Black Death lasted, I knew it had lasted a number of years but I had to look it up, figures vary slightly but from 1347 to 1352, a year or two on either or both ends probably a safer guess. We've been in this pandemic for a year and a half.  While the two illnesses are quite different, the plague being a bacterial disease spread by fleas and Covid-19 being an air-borne virus, I'm not sure which would be the more dangerous.  If Covid-19 lasted five or seven years and if it generates variants that are more transmissible and deadly, with world travel and the larger population of human beings, I doubt anyone can guess what's in store with any accuracy.   I think one thing is certain, it is likely that this is far from over and will be far worse than it is now, and it is too bad now to tolerate the anti-vaxx-anti-mask antics of Republican-fascists here or the Conservative-fascists in Britan or their like in Canada or anywhere else in the world to be allowed to make it even worse than it could be.

By the way, one of the things I looked at and am still going over is this fascinating article from The Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health, the official journal of the Australasian Military Medicine Association.

Walter Brueggemann's idea that what the Prophets in the Bible warn against is the human population, individually and as a nation, going past "non-transgressible limits" past which the rules of the universe, the Creation of God, will permit tolerable human life within.   I don't know enough about the actual life of 14th century Eurasians and Africans - the populations who suffered the Black Death - to know what limits may have been violated leading to that plague were.  But it's clear that the violation of the truth in the permission and protection of mass media spread lies is playing a huge role in this pandemic as it has in other, modern, fairly well documented pandemics.   As very well may be the cruelty to animals that the meat industry has as an intrinsic feature of its origin. 

If you thought I was being hyperbolic in either of those things I said yesterday, I wasn't.   We know where the annual flu pandemics come from, we know where the worst one in relatively recent times came from, we know the role that lies, politically and economically motivated lies had in worsening those.  

If, as the best guess of researchers seems to be as of now, Covid-19 arose in the notoriously cruel wet markets where exotic and rare animals were kept for slaughter to thrill the appitites of affluent people, that meat market was as relevant to this pandemic as swine farming was for the Influenza of a century ago.   That pandemic had its own political uses, its own anti-masking cult of death, one which was, in part, responsible for the far worse second wave of it. So lies, as well, have had a major and historical part in previous pandemics.

Yet our legal system sees no need to do something about lies even as those get hundreds of thousands, going into a million, of us killed.  Lies amplified immediately on FOX and other fascist media and on the fascist channels on online media, so much worse than the newspaper syndicate-word of mouth transmission of the anti-mask mania of a century back.  I don't know if the early movie industry played a role in it (send me links, PLEASE!) or telegraph but other electric media wouldn't have since those didn't exist yet.  

Our notions of freedom of the press and freedom of speech, absent a requirement that those do not tell lies that will get hundreds of thousands, millions killed is an idiotic "enlightenment" stupidity that our decidedly "enlightenment" benighted age refuses to learn from.  

That is with even the large majority of the population, today, being literate, being hooked into "information" networks and even having the benefits of the best science in the history of our species.   The refusal to acknowledge that we have transgressed the limits of the tolerability of lies even as we are seeing the results in preventable deaths, in terrible pain and hardship shows that there is nothing more benighted than the idea that you can escape the reality of moral obligation and not suffer the consequences.

I have recently pointed out that what the Prophets perceived as the consequences of sin could, in many cases, be seen as them perceiving the transgression of the Law of God, as expressed through the way the universe is set up.  If that is true it is among the most impressive feats of insight in the history of our species among those iron-age (not "bronze age") peoples.  For someone who believes that God created the world it is to be expected that the so-called "laws of nature" would be in line with the Law of God.  I don't think that the idea that such transgressions of moral law will have real consequences in physically lived life is anywhere near as silly or farfetched or superstitious as the idea that a human society, a nation, its legal system can get away with lying at all levels at any magnitude and not have catastrophic results.  Nor that a limitless level of cruelty and killing of animals is something human beings can manage and not suffer consequences forever.   I look at the history of the well-documented pandemics of the modern period and the idea that those are knowably an aspect of them is rather blindingly obvious, no matter how difficult that may be to articulate in a pseudo-scientific form.  Science, clearly, could not encompass that insight because it, by choice and design, cannot contain the moral concepts necessary to hold it.   

I have to say, one thing I've learned in this is what a bunch of fucking crybabies a large number of Americans are.  Whining and bawling like babies ABOUT WEARING A FRIGGIN' MASK!   Jeesh, imagine if they had to really face a hardship.  The American cult of "freedom" without responsibility has turned us into a nation of whiny brats.  Such is the legacy of the cult of Madisonian "rights" and movie epics about the "wild west" and other such "outlaws" who work in makeup and costumes.

 

Question Answered - Someone Wants To Know Why I Derided "romantic era anthropology"

THAT POST I DID about the mathematical demonstration (maybe it might rise to the level of proof) that almost all people with European heritage have the 8th century emperor (gangster king) Charlemagne as an ancestor is something I've looked into more and I'm convinced it is almost a certainty based on the number of direct ancestors we would have at that distance in time back and the absolute number of Europeans alive at the time.  We know that he left many, many children, legitimate and otherwise who, as well had children who had children.  

Based on that I had to conclude that the entire concept of ethnicity as a biological classification was bogus.  There were certainly many more people who had children in any stated ethnic category known to have been around at the time than any one person and, so, if Charlemagne is in our family line, so must at least some of the members of virtually every other ethnic group alive at the time.  I took that to mean that every single Nazi had Jews in their family line, every European Jew certainly had what would now be called "antisemites" in their lineage, even every Brit would have Irish in their background and every Irish person should suspect that even they are a little bit English.  Assuming that, whatever race they may be assigned, the Brits, Irish, Jews and Nazis all had at least partial European heritage dating back that far.   Hard as all of those may be to take for the bigots among those various groups, they aren't the pure stock they love to imagine themselves as being.  We are all mutts.  That probably saved most of us some serious genetic trouble along the way.

I felt enormously freed from the burden of considering ethnicity as being anything but an imaginary categorization founded on ignorance of mathematics and probability, the fever dream of nationalists, ethnic chauvinists and the like turned into a parody of science, only fully believed in by scientists who are the only people who get to determine what science is at any given time.   Though I was brought up to believe that everyone is equal so maybe someone brought up on ethnic chauvinism might not feel unburdened.  For which I thank my liberal Irish Catholic parents.

Going back farther, of course, we all came from Africa and, no doubt, one original small group of pre-human ancestors.  That only makes the idea of ethnicity even stupider.  

Someday I might go into how Anthropology as a field had a chance to get past some of its worst aspects in and around the once dominant figure of Franz Boas and how the Darwinists derided him and swamped his more idealistic school of it after his death.  Not that there weren't major problems with Boas for all of his numerous virtues - anthropology will never be science, it is, at best, a collection of competing and sometimes combating lores, generally told by frequently condescending outsiders with a hatchet to grind.  You cannot study something like human cultures using science, though you can use some of those careful methods of study of which the so-called "scientific method" is supposed to be a specialized example.  No one can look from the outside or the inside of a community and come to that level of understanding about it, divorced from pre-existing attitudes and judgements and ulterior motives to get real data and measurements.  The idea that that could be done was ridiculous faith based in materialism.  One of the stupider ones.

Ethnicity is an imaginary entity, I think if human beings have a future it will have to be scrapped.  It gets too many people killed and oppressed.

Announcements And Denouncements

 MY OLD PRACTICE of making resolutions on the first of any month - you make enough resolutions one's bound to stick sometime - may be revived on August first. You will only be able to tell by the absence of mentioning the person most obsessed with me in the world, Simps.  If he never appears in mention here, you'll know I've successfully resolved to get shut of him, useful as he's been as a model of what's wrong with the American left. 

But I've got just under two days to go as he rages again that if The Bible is not literally true and fully the "word of God" then it has the same status as a Marvel comic book.   Which is obviously not true.  I would not be skeptical that he might have made it through a Marvel Comic I'm sure he's never read a page of The Bible. 

I could just repeat my point about the fact that the Abolitionist movement, the Civil Rights movement, much of the successful attempt to reform life in many places and over time found their moral framing and articulation from The Bible.  Marvel Comics, I'd love someone to try to argue it's produced much of anything except dumb movies that are an evidence that movies prevent people who go through puberty from growing up.  That's the basis of contemporary atheism. 

Note:  There may be a disruption in my writing this month as I am moving in with a relative to take care of them.  Moving even with as little as I've got to move sucks. . . . up a lot of time. 

We Change Or We Die And If We Don't Change We May Be Too Stupid To Live Indications From The United States Point In That Direction

WHILE VIROLOGY AND EPIDEMIOLOGY have made huge advances even during some of our lifetimes, producing far better, far safer vaccines much faster, none of that is anything like science understanding all issues necessary to determine and produce essential vaccines, treatments, public recommendations and policies and laws. It is stupid to think that's anything like a guarantee.

The movie view of science being omnipotent and omniscient (no wonder so many movie and TV addicts figure on it as a substitute for God)  the fact is it isn't anywhere near that, no, not even if we might need it to be or no matter how we cling onto that idea.  If you hold that idea science is bound to lead to disappointment and scientists and science fan-boys who present it as such are setting up the public to be serially disappointed and, so, to become as cynical, jaded and unrealistically dishonest about science as the self-believing smart set are about God.   And to have that cynical and jaded view of science manipulated by con men, gangsters and media liars - many of whom couldn't care less about the truth but game the situation to benefit their careers.  You wanna bet that those moral cesspools Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson believe any of what they say and were not among the first to get the vaccine for themselves as it became available?   We know for a fact their boss, Rupert Murdoch did, arriving to get his fetid old carcass vaccinated with a retinue in a fleet of Land Rovers early on.

There was never any guarantee that the best that science could do in trying to contain and prevent the Corvid-19 pandemic would work 100% or 68% or even come up with a permanent fix for what is almost certainly a casually human-caused viral pandemic that we now know might alter human life and society for good.  It may well be outside of the power of science to do what is needed in time, especially as the virus itself changes and forces human life and society into new and far less enjoyable patterns.  If this one Delta strain of the virus can do that, there is no reason to believe that another one won't be worse, perhaps overcoming the vaccines so far developed even more so than this one has proven capable of doing.  Especially in the petri dish that the unvaccinated here and elsewhere have been. 

Among the many things this pandemic is forcing us to face is that media such as FOX, such as the myriad of billionaire gangster lie pushers cannot be allowed to lie with the abandon our inadequate and dangerous current interpretation of "free press" doctrine permits.   This resurgence is, for now, rightly called a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" but it is far more a pandemic of those who bought Republican-fascist lies as peddled by Murdoch and multi-billionaire financed media on behalf of that gangster class, here, in Britain, in Russia, etc.   Their lies have the potential to get millions if not billions killed and that is simply not going to be sustainable as such viruses take hold of the enormous human population few of whom are entirely isolated from contact with such viruses.  

And that's just the start of it.  Large indoor gatherings could well be a thing of the past if the worst that is imaginable about this pandemic is even partly true.  Unmasked public appearance could be a thing of the past if that's the case, the normal pre-Covid-19 world could be something that is unsustainable in large part now.  Office buildings, in-person schooling, religious services,  live concerts, etc. there is no guarantee that those can be a permanent part of human society and life. 

If, as all indications seem to indicate, this is yet another human pandemic of horrific potential that came from the meat industry, that's something that may be unsustainable in today's world.   The mass holding of animals to be slaughtered for human consumption, especially in the cruel ways that is done in such markets as the one this is suspected of having given rise to, may prove to be fatal to the human population.   I have mentioned here before listening to Matthew Meselson, the eminent micro-biologist, specialist in such matters as chemical and biological weapons, etc. on the CBC program As It Happens and him shocking the interviewer when he said that it was not impossible for such a disease as the "bird flu" or other such livestock-human originating viruses to come up with one that could wipe out the human population.  If a virus with that potential arose it would require the most sweeping of changes to prevent our extinction and, as such viruses are given the chance to rise ever more from human practices and human population growth, I'd guess that potential is ever more likely to happen.  And there have been pandemics which have a fraction of that potential which have forced huge changes in human life and habits.  The Black Death which wiped out about a third of the human species forced huge changes including, so I recently read, the invention of quarantine.   

And I don't see much in the way of conversion to veganism over this. 

This ain't nearly over, there's no guarantee that even the best that the best we've got will be able to save us, not even with their best and most heroic efforts - and those are certainly failing due to our idiotic refusal to admit that the mass media cannot be permitted to lie with impunity on behalf of gangsters and fascists - yet we call that "freedom" and "democracy".   If we are too stupid as a species to see the problem with that must be fixed and right now, maybe we're too stupid as a species to have even the best of us save us from ourselves and our lazy, stupid, selfish weakness.

They would never have done it if she had been white and everyone knows that.

WONDERFUL, BEYOND WORLD CLASS CLASSY SIMONE BILES who is taking heat even as she did the most unselfish thing I've seen an Olympic athlete do in my recollection, passing up a chance for personal glory to help her team mates, is taking heat from the white-racist-American-fascist gangster media.  If we know one thing other than that she may be the greatest gymnast in history - her list of firsts assures that - she will now have the status in history as the Jesse Owens of this century, the American right playing the Adolf Hitler role in the story.  And unlike them, she's young enough and mature enough and fine enough that she may well go onto higher heights in the field she occupies now or some other one she may yet enter.  

American Republican-fascism, our billionaire gangster media are  the basest of villains, that's their role now and for the future.   Someone should knock a few of them to their knees for how they've tried to destroy her.  They would never have done it if she had been white and everyone knows that.  The goddamned Federalist Magazine can go to hell.  

John Roberts' claim that racism is over should be something he wears in ridicule for the rest of history, too.  He's one of theirs, so are the rest of the Republican-fascists on the Court. 

By Their Fruits You Will Know Them But In Some Cases Only If You've Read Them To Know The Difference In The First Place

SIMPS WHO IS AGAIN IN TIME OUT maybe permanently, this time, equates the Bible with classical Greek and Norse mythology, dismissing the very thing which allowed the  Jewish People to continue in diaspora as a coherent group as mere "folk lore".   Which, considering his first resort in disagreement is to attribute "antisemitism" to everyone he doesn't like and the many perhaps most he finds he can't argue with because he's spent his lifetime with his ears and eyes stuck to pop culture and commercial entertainment, is stupid.

The Jewish tradition, especially as interpreted in the Christian tradition in the past century produced the great Civil Rights movement - all you have to do is listen to the speeches, listen to the songs of that movement to hear that,  Though you'd have to have read enough of it, especially the Mosaic books to get that.  

The Norse tradition, especially as interpreted  by Wagner and  would-be scientific romantic era anthropology and linguistics, the romantic era would-be scientific study of folk lore, produced Nazism.  

By their fruits you will know them, someone said.   And science often determines the nature of things unseen from the visible effects of them which are observable.   Seems to demonstrate a significant effect that can be judged for the truth and so goodness of it, one leading to freedom, the other to genocidal oppression.

UPDATE:  I'll bet Darwin's defender believes he's got me this time.  He's the Elmer Fudd of polemic discourse.

It is as indisputable that the genocidal policy of the Nazis is a direct result of Darwinism as other aspects are a result of the influence of Norse mythology under the phony presentation of that by Wagner as well as romantic era German anthropology and folklore. Darwin's theory of natural selection was easily mixed with that poison, I've proved that over and over again here (search for "natural selection" in the search window to the left).  I've demonstrated that in the primary documentary record left by the Darwinists and the Nazis and, by the way, the current neo-Nazi movement.  

I have never denied one more thing though I've never gone into it far, that the very same romantic era anthropology, linguistics and folklore produced Darwinism - if you doubt that look with a critical eye at the things cited by Darwin to support his claims and also those of his major German supporter and promoter, Ernst Haeckel.  I know that somewhere I pointed out that much of their "scientific evidence" was nothing more than folk lore.  In the beginning it was that level of gossipy junk being used to support the Brit ruling class anthropology and economic folk lore of Thomas Malthus, irrationally applying his claims to the entirety of nature and, along the way, of arguing against everything that is moral and decent in human culture.   Again, look at my citation of the primary documentary record as left by Darwin, Haeckel, etc. and the Nazis and Anglo-American neo-Nazism right now. 

UPDATE 2: It occurs to me, reading this to correct it, that any scientific assertion of human inequality will inevitably be used to support the rule of gangsters and that as long as science is in the hands of an aristocracy of some kind, it will be looking to support that inequality.  If something as inherently egalitarian as the Jewish moral tradition - the Christian moral tradition being a part of that tradition - can be corrupted by aristocratic, gangster gaming, the by-choice amorality of science will render it even more vulnerable to that use by an elite that can sway it that way.  I'm pretty confident I'd find the evidence of that but it's just a theory that I just came up with.  But I'd never claim it to be true without finding the supporting evidence after subjecting it to testing by contradictory evidence.  I do respect the method of careful, responsible scholarship, of which the scientific method is supposed to be a subscriber.  But we're all only human in the end.

Truth And Technical Accuracy Aren't Enough When Dealing With The Public Which Will Be Swayed By Murdoch Media

LISTENING TO THE RATIONAL discourse of Dr. Fauci on the confusion about the change back to recommending masking he makes complete sense on the basis of science and the experience of epidemiologists but it never took into account that a very large percentage of people aren't going to understand any of that.  What they hear is that the most respected and most respectable authority in the United States on this is "flip-flopping" and they are not going to understand the reality that this was already built into what the CDC was doing when it recommended relaxed requirements for those who are fully vaccinated.

This reminds me of the previous epidemic of HIV-AIDS surrounding safe sex and, especially, after the first effective treatments for the effects of having the virus came in and the need for practicing safer sex was announced to be over by scum like Andrew Sullivan.   Conservatives are always one of the soft spots in public health and in many other things which require maturity and self-restraint and unselfish behavior.  Though there are many in the center and on the "left" who can match them in that.  Those in the media are the most dangerous of that soft spot in this pandemic.  

I hope that the CDC and the Biden administration understand that you can't go back and forth on something like this because no matter how well you explain it, you're going to lose those who won't understand or don't want to take the bother to understand or who may understand but want to game things for their own, selfish purposes.   The explanation that Dr Fauci and his colleagues give need to do more than be technically correct and scientifically and logically sound, they have to take into full account all of those things from inability to understand to full understanding by those who want to game things for the most vile of purposes, like all of the Murdoch minions who have been vaccinated but encourage other people to be paranoid about the vaccine and stupidly macho in their refusal to take public health advice and even requirements seriously.  And at this point it's pretty much everyone who works in that building protected by the FOX-Murdoch vaccine passport.  

 

Note:  I knew watching the footage of the attempted putsch of January 6 and listening to the testimony would really get to me and it did.  I'm not ready to write about it, anything I added would be totally inadequate compared to the testimony of the four police officers who started the hearing and the video evidence that was presented.  I'm overwhelmed by that.