one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him - Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Stupidity 1

I HAVE NOT been following the Governors race in Virginia but from what I read this morning, the Republican-fascist could win because of the Republican-fascist-Murdoch media lies whipped up around a misrepresentation of "Critical Race Theory" getting suburban voters in a swivet over something that isn't happening and never was.  Of course, it being Republicans-fascists, the Murdoch media, white-voters, the underlying theme of that is lies fashioned, honed and told to take advantage of implied mild to flagrant racism among white people, among the foremost tools of America's indigenous fascists from the start, greed and envy being to other such tools.

The thing is that the issue of lies being enabled under the vague language of the First Amendment has very real, very dangerous and very harmful effects, effects big enough to negate the promise of freedom for Black People, in slavery,  in the post-Reconstruction period, the lie of "separate-but-equal" that led to post-slavery American apartheid segregation and,  now, the brief period of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights correction to that being overturned by Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court - placed there by presidents and Senators lied into office, the very same phenomenon that is said to be leading to the loss of a sizable lead for the Democrat to a Republican-fascist who is riding that lie to power. 

This issue is the central issue on which America's far from complete "experiment" with democratic self-government is kept from even progress toward that completion.  It is responsible for virtually all of the major evil done by the American government put in place by the votes of American People.  The corruption of The People today through mass media lies is the major tool to prevent progress by our indigenous fascists, originating in the slave-owning class, the financiers who worked hand in glove with them - and when not owning legally defined slaves used the forgotten wage slaves in, at times, in as brutal a manner.   The mass media, entertainment as well as "news" has been one of their major dispensers of lies, racism, envy and greed.  

We will have to change the words of the First Amendment to make the distinction between the real right to tell the truth and the stupidly created and false "right" to lie with impunity or American democracy will die and it's on its sick bed if not death bed right now.   

Something will also have to be done about the Second Amendment being used by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts to put modern mass killing machines in the hands of our indigenous fascists, the racists, the neo-Nazis, the Klansmen,  and those who, perhaps not fascists at heart but who can be duped into joining them by the lies told by the mass media permitted by "The First Amendment."   They have explicitly and knowingly armed the already deranged who have been shooting up schools, offices, outdoor audiences, churches, synagogues, etc. without the Courts or the Republican-controlled legislatures and executives doing a single thing to stop it.  The same people who wrote the idolized First Amendement wrote that one, the language of which is getting us killed in enormous numbers right now.  And the fascists are now openly threatening to use their arsenal to take power when the voters don't give it to them.

One of the things I have realized in the past four years, in the danger felt from the Trump regime was that a lot of White People got a little bit of a taste of the experience of Black People and other People of Color.  Or that white men got a bit of a taste of what it might be like to be a Woman, though lots of white women don't seem to understand the threat of violence standing over them, they've gotten so used to it.   White people are too much like that legendary frog in a pot being heated up in that regard, the frog thing is rather stupid thought experiment - the frog would get out or die after it stopped being used to the warming - any white voter who isn't a fascist but who would vote for a Republican-fascist on the basis of being scared by FOX on false witness over "critical race theory" is far more likely to vote us into death, lulled by the lying media that has lied us out of the high point of equality already. 

---------------

It seems a lot of people are turning to what  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the danger of stupidity.  I don't have the book with the translation of his letter that is being quoted but I have found a source of the text online which I think I'll go over this week.  It looks to me that it has a lot to consider, most of which is directly applicable to what's going on in the United States and many other Western countries as we lose even that level of democracy we once had.  The role of Rupert Murdoch's media empire in the United States, Britain and elsewhere among the English Speaking People in both making us stupid in the way that Bonhoeffer warned about and in morally corrupting us is among the most important dangers we face right now. 

Here is a passage I think is directly relevant to what I've said so I'll go over it first, here:

The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. 

That is exactly what the mass media does, a single source of lies  that can be broadcast to millions during the same hour, repeated, either verbally or, on a network, over and over again, which is the FOX 24-7 method of inserting lies about real terms they can, by repeated lies turn around into maliciously useful slogans such as "critical race theory" into the minds and irrational, uninformed fears of, if not a majority, enough voters to put fascists in office.  The next sentences seem prophetic of exactly our situation, today. 

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

The revelations of how Facebook designed its algorithms to feed stuff to those susceptible to taking it in is not that surprising, it has been the method of propaganda from well before computers were a reality.  It has been the science of lying so as to persuade and gull from the start.  It's not much different from the fable of the serpent lying Eve and Adam into eating the fruit, a reality that certainly predates the composition of Genesis.  Yet our founding document, our First Amendment in the so-called "Bill of Rights" neglects to make that distinction and it has certainly cost us, starting with the lies of racism and sexism and economic inequality.   And a lie being a lie, it doesn't have to conform to reality the way that the truth does, it doesn't have to cohere with anything, it can take advantage of us at our least realistic, our least coherent to get its effect.  Bonhoeffer's description of its character, its workings and its effects as he was waiting to be killed by the Nazis is a masterpiece of thought.  It's a shame that the deeper meaning of it is lost to the sloganistic effect of the First Amendment as it was badly written and as it has become something that is placed beyond criticism and so beyond repair. 

I, of course, believe that the reason it was so negligently written was because it would favor the liars who wanted to maintain and increase slavery, to lie to keep us in inequality and to prevent The People knowing the truth and, so, turning the United States into an economically egalitarian and just democracy in which the slave-owners and the rich would not be able to lord it over everyone else and to cheat and steal other peoples labor and the rights to the fruit of their labor.  I don't think Madison and the rest of them were unaware of what they were doing. I think those slave owners were cunning as the snake and we are all gulled and enslaved and killed by it, still.

 

Roger Sessions: Symphony No.3

 

Direct link to the video 

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra 

Igor Buketoff, director 

I almost forgot to post this symphony in the series.  Sorry for the lateness. 

let all corners of the earth be glad, knowing an end to gloom and darkness

Easter Proclamation

WITH FAILING eyesight of age and the financial inability to buy all of the recent books I'd like to read, I read a lot of free books on my computer from sources such as Archive.org and Project Gutenberg and much of the freely available, public domain publishing of primary documentary evidence, documents, letters, papers, etc. that I can get to without paying.  And being on computer, I can use dark screen mode and blow the letters up enough so I can read them.  I have come to love that.  No mildew from old paper to set my allergies off, too.

There, that's enough of that.

One of the books I'm in the process of reading is Universalism The Prevailing Doctrine of the Christian Church: During Its First Five Hundred Years by J. W. Hanson, a Universalist preacher and theologian of the 19th century.   I wish I had the time to fact check his assertions, though those that I'm somewhat familiar with he seems to be reliable.  

One of the most striking things about his account of earliest Christianity, before it became the state religion of the late Roman Empire and began to amass worldly power and wealth, he says it was a remarkably cheerful religion as opposed to the gloomy, fate-ridden, hopeless Roman and Greek pagan religions and other religions in the area.  I think he is a bit hard on Judaism and the Pharisees as well, as can be expected from a quasi-Protestant of the era, the Catholic Church in that regard, though the section of the book I'm interested in, before the Church came under the influence of the Roman imperial system, long, long before the split between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Churches, he points out that there is virtually no mention of eternal damnation, satanic influences, souls being sent to eternal hell fire and all of the rest of the phantasmagoria, house of horrors stuff that has been such a huge blight on Western Christianity and, with the corruption in the post-enlightenment pseudo-history of the romantic and post-romantic periods, continues in Hollywood style today.  

He remarks that in contrast to the gloomy, despairing, fatalistic Roman and Greek memorial texts, the readable messages in the Christian catacombs are full of hopeful expectation for the souls of the dead, that they have gone to be with God, with Christ and the martyrs and other saints in heaven.  A far cry from that putridly attractive 13th century chant heard in many a lurid movie and late 19th century program music , Dies Irae.  

He notes that until the Bible was translated into Latin, especially by Jerome, the original text in Greek didn't depict hell as eternal damnation of those who were forever cut off from God but as a period of purification during which souls not already sufficiently good would be coaxed into correction - though I'm sure my characterization of what he said is not how he'd put it.  He points out the difference between different words for an after death period of suffering or an eternal one, I'm not a Greek scholar nor a Hebrew one so I'm reliant on those who are.  I know that at least some other Greek scholars, then and now, make a similar point, David Bentley Hart being one of the most known modern Greek scholars who has written on it, too. 

I look at the long and gloomy period of  post-Constantine classical and medieval Western Christianity in which the sparks of light sometimes seem to be swamped in a sea of pathological dwelling on the dark, starting with Augustine's last work, and wonder if that isn't bound to come with an adoption of an all too worldly kingdom of the kind that Jesus emphatically said his kingdom was not.  Hanson also discusses the excuse for people who knew the Scriptures keeping the common lot in ignorance of the idea of universal salvation because they worried the plebs couldn't be trusted to mind themselves and toe the line if they weren't worried about eternal damnation.   The extent to which that and other sins feeding the other deadly sins, envy, covetousness, sexual neurosis and slander are tools of the rich and powerful to use against The People is pretty hard to deny, even today.  

I pointed out that Hanson is hard on the Catholics but he's pretty hard on a lot of Protestants too, he attributes to them more of that kind of depravity than even the late medieval Catholic Church taught.  Calvin is, of course, the one people blame the most and, fairly, he did seem to love the idea of a God evil enough to create people, even innocent babies, who God intended for eternal damnation, a God who is so evil it's no wonder so many who were brought up in that belief chose to stop believing in any God at all.  Even the bleakest Catholic idea on that holds that every soul has the possibility of salvation and that none of us can know if any one person is or (as some more charitable Catholics have asked, if even one person is) eternally damned.  

I would like to follow up on a lot of the things he says, for example, pointing to the non-Biblical but widespread idea that after he died on the cross Jesus descended into hell to preach to the souls there as evidence it was widely believed in the early Church that souls in hell were not there forever but only until they chose to be reunited to God.  I can believe in a God that punishes us for the evil we do in life after we die since so many get away with it in this life but even for the worst of us, the idea that such evil of limited duration would justify eternal and extreme torment is excessive.  It is certainly not understandable that God who is said to be all good and merciful and just could choose such a thing.  Those claims, made in human terms to human understanding have to stand in our comprehension for them to have any meaning at all.  I prefer the Jewish conception of God as being all good and holy to Calvin's God, or Augustine's who seems to me to describe the most evil creature ever conceived by human beings.   I don't believe in that God because we are told to forgive those who wrong us, the implication in the Lord's prayer being that our being forgiven is related to, God's forgiveness of us, divine forgiveness not necessarily contingent on it.  I relate it to the repeated exhortation to the Children of Israel in the commandments to practice charity, generosity and justice that they should remember they were slaves, strangers in Egypt.  And God freed them from that Earthly suffering after a period, notwithstanding their still being fallible people.  If we're supposed to remember that, maybe God remembers the obligation of the Creator to those who are created.   I couldn't love a person who begot children only to torture them for even a miserable lifetime,  I think to think God would do worse than what an evil person would do is blasphemous.  

So, today, Halloween, as you see the products of Jerome and Augustine not knowing their Greek well enough to set up Western culture for all of that gloom and darkness, ask yourself why those who reject the Gospel on that basis are so attracted to it and why those who claim to accept it seem to be, as well.   Easter is coming but All Saints Day is tomorrow.  All Souls Day after that.  Originally, as I understand it, the 1st was to commemorate children who had died and gone to heave, the 2nd, the adults.  But I haven't fact checked that, yet. 

 

Update:  You forget that I believe in eternal life.  God might create Poeple who suffer for a time in this world for eventual happiness whereas a parent who has children for the purpose of torturing them unto death doesn't have that power to bring them to eventual happiness.  I certainly don't understand why suffering exists but, then, neither do atheists.  I don't see any advantage of choosing to believe that all of that suffering is meaningless in the end, it's not as if atheists with power over other people are notably kinder than religious people are, especially those who accept the Jewish conception of God, Christians, Muslims, other monotheists who conceive of God in similar terms.  

I certainly don't believe that the line of belief that Christianity is a part of is exclusive.  We know of other Abrahamic monotheists, the Samaritans being the most well known through the Scriptures, the reported non-Jewish Abrahamic religionists described in the Islamic texts - though I don't know much about that.  I certainly think the conception of God in the American traditional religions shares in that as some of the other African and Asian traditions do.  The Hebrew Bible, after all, presents God as making covenants with other People, even enemies of the Children of Israel, two of the major figures of virtue in the Jewish Scriptures are Job and Ruth, neither of whom are Children of Israel, Jonah is sent by God to the enemy of Israel to preach so as to save the inhabitants of the enemy city of Nineveh.  When I say I'm a universalist, I really mean it.

Halloween Weekend Saturday Night Radio Drama - Gareth Shore - The Mourner

 

Direct link to the video.

Author: Gareth Shore 

Narration: Alicia Pavlis

The Editor: Peter Bishop 

The Thin Man: David Lewis Richardson 

Sound Design: Jeff Clement 

Original Music: Jeff Clement 

This kind of stuff in drama and fiction isn't my thing, there's the news for that.  I hope if you like it you like this.  

Here's One I've Posted On A Past Halloween, from the sadly long gone CBC Mystery Project.  James W. Nichol - Midnight Cab- The Mystery Of The Silver Rings

The Mystery Of The Silver Rings

 

I Doubt He Was Throwing Down The Gauntlet To Me But Here's My Quick Response

THIS WEEK HASN'T been a very good one for me listening to the news, I got overloaded on Reconciliation Bill click-bait freak-out on MSNBC so I have been limiting what I listen to online.  So I didn't catch Ari Melber's special report on that issue I've stressed since before I started writing online, the Sullivan Decision and its progeny and how the Supreme Court has empowered right-wing lies through that stupidly written decision.  Stupidly, I say, because 

a. It empowered the very side OPPOSED TO the MLK side Ari Melber speaks on behalf of, it empowered America's indigenous fascists, the white supremacists and the Republican Party which was in the process of taking them in as they left the Democratic Party for putting the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts into law.   Which happened the very same year the decision was issued.  That high point of the American civil rights struggle has been receding, washed away by media lies ever since then.

b. It made no distinction between the absolute right to tell the truth without punishment and the fact that not only is there no right to lie but that lies, often individually but always cumulatively produce bad results.  He's not alone in that, the badly written First Amendment also neglects that vital issue for government of, by and for, The People and our right to legitimate governance.

c. That We The People MUST HAVE THE TRUTH TO CAST EFFECTIVE VOTES AND PRODUCE LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT, and that that right is damaged by allowing the mass media to lie and to carry lies that will gull people from knowing the truth that, as it says in the Gospel, will make us free.

Ari Melber uses several outrageous cases, one in which a Republican-fascist , Putin friendly media outfit sued MSNBC, his network, alleging defamation against Rachel Maddow's show, but his choice to use that is inapt.  This account of the original ruling is how I remember reading it at the time:

One America took particular issue when Maddow, in her segment, also said “the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America really literally is paid Russian propaganda.”

Maddow made the statement after the Daily Beast ran a story by Kevin Poulsen reporting that one of One America’s on-air reporters, Kristian Brunovich Rouz, also was on the payroll for Sputnik, the Kremlin news outlet. One America then demanded a retraction.

In their lawsuit, One America said that “Rouz has never been a staff employee of Sputnik News. He worked as a freelancer for Sputnik News and his work there had no relation to his work for OAN. Rouz submitted articles to Sputnik on his own and would receive approximately $40 if the articles were accepted.”

In her ruling, Bashant wrote that even though Maddow used the word “literally,” she “had inserted her own colorful commentary into and throughout the segment, laughing, expressing her dismay (i.e., saying ‘I mean, what?’) and calling the segment a ‘sparkly story’ and one we must ‘take in stride.’ For her to exaggerate the facts and call OAN Russian propaganda was consistent with her tone up to that point, and the Court finds a reasonable viewer would not take the statement as factual given this context. The context of Maddow’s statement shows reasonable viewers would consider the contested statement to be her opinion.”

The lawsuit also claimed that Maddow’s remarks were retaliation against One America because its president, Charles Herring, had called out parent company Comcast, “for their anti-competitive censorship” in refusing to carry the conservative channel.

I don't see how that is relevant to the Sullivan Decision which I don't remember as having much of anything to do with "opinion."  The issue of whether or not the "reporter" in question was an agent of paid Russian propaganda doesn't seem to have entered into it.  Though I'm sure that the quibbling over whether or not getting paid the way the did would have made what Rachel Maddow said inaccurate of not, it certainly wasn't the kind of lie that is swamping American democracy as Melber's colleague at MSNBC, Chris Hayes documented in an excellent piece, getting scores if not hundreds of thousands of Americans killed by Covid, endangering elections officials - as Rachel Maddow covered on her show not long after Melber's piece aired.   If anything, Sullivan and its foul descendants have done more for the OAN side and the Republican-fascists than it has for the disciples of Martin Luther King jr. 

IF THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS THINK THEY WOULD COME OUT ON TOP IF LIES WERE PUNISHED, THEY ARE AS STUPID AS TRUMP IS.  If Trump could have been sued for all the lies he told about Black teenagers, other Black People, Women, Democratic politicians,  REPORTERS AND ANNOUNCERS, he would have been bankrupted many times more than he has been.

I wonder what would have kept an OAN from bringing a frivolous lawsuit of this kind AND AN MSNBC DEFENDING ITSELF AGAINST IT TO THAT THEORETICAL OAN'S COST before the Sullivan Decision was issued.  I'm no student of the history of lawsuits being thrown out in that manner but I'd really like to see if anyone has made such a study.

The other cases he used involved the use of British courts for gangsters from the Putin oligarchy trying to suppress books that can't be published in Britain without risking ruinous frivolous lawsuits - I'm no great fan of the Brit law on this so that's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about - is also inapt.  That British law is terrible in regard to the right to publish the truth has the same effect as the Sullivan Decision does in regard to the benefit of truth telling, it damages the power of the truth to bring the benefits of it being known.   

Using Martin Luther King jr. the way that he did in the piece was hardly honest as he was not a party to the lawsuit, though his close associate Ralph Abernathy was

The court went way, way out of its way to turn what should have been thrown out as a triviality to open the way for the massive lying by the media that now endangers American democracy.   Here, from the ruling are the facts and a little of the commentary on it:

5 Of the 10 paragraphs of text in the advertisement, the third and a portion of the sixth were the basis of respondent's claim of libel. They read as follows:

Third paragraph: 

6  'In Montgomery, Alabama, after students sang 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee' on the State Capitol steps, their leaders were expelled from school, and truckloads of police armed with shotguns and tear-gas ringed the Alabama State College Campus. When the entire student body protested to state authorities by refusing to re-register, their dining hall was padlocked in an attempt to starve them into submission.'
 

Sixth paragraph:
 

7  Again and again the Southern violators have answered Dr. King's peaceful protests with intimidation and violence. They have bombed his home almost killing his wife and child. They have assaulted his person. They have arrested him seven times—for 'speeding,' 'loitering' and similar 'offenses.' And now they have charged him with 'perjury'—a felony under which they could imprison him for ten years. * * *'

8 Although neither of these statements mentions respondent by name, he contended that the word 'police' in the third paragraph referred to him as the Montgomery Commissioner who supervised the Police Department, so that he was being accused of 'ringing' the campus with police. He further claimed that the paragraph would be read as imputing to the police, and hence to him, the padlocking of the dining hall in order to starve the students into submission.2 As to the sixth paragraph, he contended that since arrests are ordinarily made by the police, the statement 'They have arrested (Dr. King) seven times' would be read as referring to him; he further contended that the 'They' who did the arresting would be equated with the 'They' who committed the other described acts and with the 'Southern violators.' Thus, he argued, the paragraph would be read as accusing the Montgomery police, and hence him, of answering Dr. King's protests with 'intimidation and violence,' bombing his home, assaulting his person, and charging him with perjury. Respondent and six other Montgomery residents testified that they read some or all of the statements as referring to him in his capacity as Commissioner.
 

9 It is uncontroverted that some of the statements contained in the two paragraphs were not accurate descriptions of events which occurred in Montgomery. Although Negro students staged a demonstration on the State Capital steps, they sang the National Anthem and not 'My Country, 'Tis of Thee.' Although nine students were expelled by the State Board of Education, this was not for leading the demonstration at the Capitol, but for demanding service at a lunch counter in the Montgomery County Courthouse on another day. Not the entire student body, but most of it, had protested the expulsion, not by refusing to register, but by boycotting classes on a single day; virtually all the students did register for the ensuing semester. The campus dining hall was not padlocked on any occasion, and the only students who may have been barred from eating there were the few who had neither signed a preregistration application nor requested temporary meal tickets. Although the police were deployed near the campus in large numbers on three occasions, they did not at any time 'ring' the campus, and they were not called to the campus in connection with the demonstration on the State Capitol steps, as the third paragraph implied. Dr. King had not been arrested seven times, but only four; and although he claimed to have been assaulted some years earlier in connection with his arrest for loitering outside a courtroom, one of the officers who made the arrest denied that there was such an assault.

The complete triviality of the errors of fact, the fact that the guy wasn't accused of anything and the resultant tsunami of lies that it unleashed into American life, American politics, this might be one of the worst misjudgements by alleged liberals in the history of such misjudgements, so many of those made because the First Amendment doesn't distinguish the absolute right to tell the truth and the fact that there is no right to lie.   The Warren Court became addicted to issuing bombshell, block buster rulings, the few it did to good effect and the many it did with from anything to mixed results to the disaster that brought us to Trump and today's Republican-fascists should not allow their wisdom and foresight to be taken for granted. 

The outrageously irresponsible results are especially bad considering paragraph 11 of the ruling says the "damaged party" presented no evidence that he'd been damaged.

11  Respondent made no effort to prove that he suffered actual pecuniary loss as a result of the alleged libel. One of his witnesses, a former employer, testified that if he had believed the statements, he doubted whether he 'would want to be associated with anybody who would be a party to such things that are stated in that ad,' and that he would not re-employ respondent if he believed 'that he allowed the Police Department to do the things that the paper say he did.' But neither this witness nor any of the others testified that he had actually believed the statements in their supposed reference to respondent.

I am no lawyer but why this case wasn't thrown out on the basis the guy had no right to bring a lawsuit in the first place seems to me to have been a far safer alternative than giving the New York Times the "right" to publish lies with impunity.   Lies like the ones it printed against Hillary Clinton that certainly, magnified by the mass media 24-7-365 corporate media and the even worse social-diseased media online helped put Trump in office along with so many of the Republican-fascists who are nullifying the second Democratic presidency in a row. 

I don't know if, as was suggested to me, Ari Melber was responding to what I said here but, lawyer that he is, maybe he'd like to deal with such issues this brief response to his commentary raises.  I'd most like to know if he holds that there is a right to lie which is not at least vastly inferior to the right of We The People to know the truth and for the truth to not be swamped with lies so as to prevent us from being free.

The Would Be Grand Wizard Of The Invisible Empire Of Q-Anon

BENEDICT XVI appointed some of the worst bishops in modern history, he had a gift for choosing or allowing to be chosen some real loonies and liars, crooks and fascists.   Now one of his appointees, Joseph Strickland of  the diocese of Tyler Texas has endorsed the Q-Anon linked, actor in Mel Gibson's the passion as torture and snuff porn movie, the gospel as lurid Chick Publications spectacle (ironies are never far in that perverted hall of mirrors, the trad-catholic fascist-right) Jim Caviezel 

Bishop Joseph Strickland, who heads the Diocese of Tyler and is known for his controversial brand of conservatism, tweeted out a link to a website praising Caviezel’s speech on Monday (Oct. 25), with the prelate insisting “all need to listen” to its message. By then a clip of the speech had already been widely shared on social media in which the actor recites a line from Mel Gibson’s 1995 movie “Braveheart.”

“You can take our lives, but you can never take our freedom,” shouted Caviezel, who portrayed Jesus in Gibson’s 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ.”

I'll throw in here that "Braveheart" was so historically inaccurate that one historically informed critic said if they'd put a Plasticine dog in it and called it William Wallace And Gromit  it couldn't have been more inaccurate than it was.  Since such movie crap enters into the public imagination, triggering the susceptible in ways that come out in fascist, generally white supremacist violence, all such movie "poetic license" should be called what it is, dangerous lies.

Caviezel then added a faith-fueled addendum that appeared to be at least partly of his own design.

“Every man dies. Not every many truly lives,” he said. “We must fight for that authentic freedom and live, my friends. By God we must live. And with the Holy Spirit as your shield and Christ as your sword, may you join St. Michael and all the angels in defending God and sending Lucifer and his henchman straight right back to hell where they belong.”

The boy would seem to have a worse case of it than the movie Moses and Voice of God, Charlton Heston got from over-identifying himself with those roles.   I never could figure out which one Heston thought he was but apparently Caviezel thinks he's some kind of macho-white-supremacist-anti-vaxxer Jesus.  

The speech took place at the “For God & Country: Patriot Double Down” conference convened in Las Vegas over the weekend. According to the Las Vegas Sun, the gathering featured an array of controversial conservative speakers, including those who have spread misinformation about COVID-19 and conspiracy theories associated with the QAnon movement.

Strickland has a history of anti-vaxx,  Republican-fascist and similar activity, he joined in with the disgraced and dodgey bishop Carlo Maria Viganò (One of JPII's atrocious appointments) in his false witness against Pope Francis, lots of that stuff seems to me to be right in line with Jack Chick's loony anti-Catholic propaganda, only now on behalf of the soon to be schizmatic billionaire-fianced trad-Catholic fascists.   I doubt that he will do it and probably has better reasons for not doing so than I'm aware of but if I were Pope Francis, I'd ask him for his resignation or I'd reassign him somewhere they don't have TV, the guy needs to unplug from the fascist web for a year.   Short of that he needs to be condemned as a Q-Anon friendly liar and Republican-fascist goon.  There have been some really bad bishops in the past, an appalling number of them, but some of those in the US Catholic Conference of Bishops right now are among the worst in modern history.  

I don't for a single second believe that the trad-Catholics have the slightest interest in the Gospel of Jesus, they're a gang bent on using the resources of the Catholic Church, suckering a cult from among those who are lulled into stupidity from attending the Latin Mass and being wowed by what they imagine was the mass that St. Francis experienced (I had that thrown at me by one who, like almost all Catholics, has no knowledge of the history of the liturgy) or who want to play make believe with fake lives of the saints.   Lots of them just like the decor and the pretty colors.  But it all has a real political effect which is why this is important.  The billionaires wouldn't be funding the trad-Catholic cult if they didn't think there were bundles of cash in it for them, either to make or to retain.  I think a lot of the bishops are in it on a more penny-ante basis, lots of them get money from those gangsters and thugs.  The Catholic Church has always been vulnerable over its worldly holdings, and I don't mean just the buildings in the Vatican and their contents.   The scandals of the JPII and Benedict XVI years often centered around money when they didn't the consequences of an all-ummarried-male clergy.   One of the things they hate the most about Pope Francis is that he is, if too slowly for my liking, trying to clean up the corruption in that regard.   I'm convinced that's what motivates most of the hatred of him.  

On The Idea That Moses And The Law Are "Too Jewish" For The United States

Tell my brothers to be always watching unto prayer and when the good old ship of Zion comes along, to be ready to step on board.

Harriet Tubman Letter to her family 1854  

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live – a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

Martin Luther King jr. Last Sermon

Here is what is shown online as Benjamin Franklin's proposed design for the front of a Great Seal for the United States depicting Pharaoh's army being destroyed as Moses follows God's instruction for closing the path through the Red Sea

 

 

 Here is Thomas Jefferson's design showing the Children of Israel running away to freedom from their enslavement by Pharaoh.  

 

 

There is an enormous irony in the fact that the very thing that the slave-owner Jefferson wanted to use to symbolize the United States is a constantly referred to event in the abolition movement at its most basic level, the Spirituals of those enslaved escaping slavery against the very law of the United States embedded into the Constitution and which was not eradicated by the Civil War, the abrubtly cancelled Reconstruction, the great Civil Rights struggle of the post-WWII era, the culmination in that of the abruptly cancelled Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts and the presidency of Barack Obama as we are still suffering under the Pharaonic regime of anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian features embedded in the Constitution for the protection of the slave holders and their progeny.  

If I had time I would list only some of the citations of The Law of Moses in the historical foundations of the United States, of the Exodus story, both the good and the bad of it.   Moses and that first event of slaves being freed from slavery is as American as  Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King jr,  and even Franklin and Jefferson and they're just the start of it.  

After I wrote the first draft of this I checked out the news in several places, like I always do in the morning and I saw a piece by Thomas Reese at the National Catholic Reporter speculating on what the most Catholic President in our history, Joe Biden will talk about when he meets with Good Pope Francis tomorrow.   He made this observation:

The White House sees in the pope an ally on the world stage, although the pope is probably closer to Bernie Sanders than Biden on economic issues.

I would venture to say that Benedict XVI and even John Paul II, who I would never count as my favorite Popes, at least in their official writings are probably closer to Bernie than Biden because their theology is informed by the Mosaic Law as, in fact, the Gospels and Epistles are.  The Law is probably the most radical of all economic documents in human history, it makes Marxism pale in comparison in its radical egalitarianism, what Moses didn't explicitly equalize was equalized by both Jesus and Hillel in their abbreviation of The Law and the Prophets in their positive and "negative" expression of "The Golden Rule."   If those who claimed to follow those traditions obeyed that law there never would have been slavery among those who profess Christianity, there would never have been poverty or unequal treatment.   There is nothing more radical than that, every secular, ersatz substitute for that morality most assuredly included, including, unfortunately, most of what gets called "socialism." 

Moses is more American than apple pie.  "Mishpat" is a far better word for egalitarian representative government of, by and FOR The People than the entirely damaged word "democracy."  It has been used too often to mean unequal, non-representative gangster government.  Including some of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century.   "Democracy" is what the Republican-fascists are calling their ratfucking of electoral democracy even as I am typing this.  

Update:  Oh, and that 1 Samuel 8 passage I said was about the greatest warning against gangster government ever given.  It is so great that the big fat religion hater, Thomas Paine cited it positively, one of his primary historical testimonies in in his treatise against monarchy.

Betty Carter And Her Trio - Autumn Leaves

 

Direct link to the video

Cyrus A. Chestnut - piano 

Curtis Lundy - bass 

Clarence I. Penn - drums 

Betty Carter - singer

With such great jazz musicians as Betty Carter and those she worked with those standards were anything but standard. 

How About We Be Honest And Call Legitimate Governance "Mishpat"

Mishpat ehad yieyeh lakem kager kaezrah ki ani YHWH Elohim.  Leviticus 24:22

EGALITARIAN  representative government of, by and FOR The People is the only legitimate form of government.   There I said it, I hold that as an absolute truth and hold it as a more important and consequential truth.   If you can find a way in which it contains not only the self-contradicting but entirely self-consuming internal defect that I've identified in scientistic, atheist materialism, go for it.  

I would love to replace the common use of "democracy" for that legitimate egalitarian, representative government which is of, by and FOR The People, with the word "Mishpat" because that is what I firmly believe it is based in, both conceptually and historically.   Maybe I should start using it here.  I would tend to avoid anything with Greek or Latin forms though I supposed those would come up naturally as they are such a feature of the English language now.  

You can find the basis for egalitarian representative government in the Hebrew Scriptures, for example, as given above:

You shall have the same rule [mishpat] for the sojourner and for the native, for I am the Lord your God. RSV

as well as one of the most impressive warnings against choosing gangster governance in all of literature.*  It also contains numerous warnings of the human susceptibility of going that route even against the warning given by God, it happened over and over again and it lays out the consequences of that.  All of the historical books in which the Hebrew Scripture writers confess the sins of the Children of Israel are full of such warnings.   You can't find the basis of legitimate government in scientistic atheist materialism.  That seems to produce the opposite wherever it is adopted as the basis for governance, close to if not every time.  

*  Notice that in that passage God doesn't give them a king, Samuel does when the People demand it when the humanly instituted governance by judges fails due to the fallibility of Samuel's sons.  God allows them all to make mistakes, gives them the freedom to choose and do the wrong thing.  I think that's quite as significant as the warning of what their wrong choice would lead to. 

Note:  Forgive the transliteration of the Hebrew, the transliterations I found online didn't agree much but I wanted to make the point of how Mishpat is morally superior to the classical conception of "democracy." 

The Consequences For Truth Of Sabine Hossenfelder's Preferred Ideology Negates The Basis Of Her Argument - That's Quite A Definitively Refuting Consequence

What are the historical origins of the argumentum ad consequentiam, the argument from (or literally, to) consequences, sometimes featured as an informal fallacy in logic textbooks? As shown in this paper, knowledge of the argument can be traced back to Aristotle (who did not treat it as a fallacy, but as a reasonable argument). And this type of argument shows a spotty history of recognition in logic texts and manuals over the centuries. But how it got into the modern logic textbooks as a fallacy remains somewhat obscure. Its modern genesis is traced to the logic text of James McCosh (1879).

Douglas Walton:  Historical Origins of Argumentam ad Consequentiam

SUSPECTING THAT this dodge of accusing someone of committing this "logical fallacy" which I'd never had a pop-atheist throw at me before would become a more often resorted to dodge, I decided to see what I can see.  As the paper the above abstract introduces says, the "fallacy" is merely an "informal" one and one of fairly recent origin and, from what it looks to me, not particularly well thought out by those who use the term.  From what he shows it is sometimes confused with a somewhat related mode of thought that Aristotle gave a name that can easily be confused with it.  I'll leave it to anyone curious enough to go into that to read it for themselves,  the author of the paper is quite concise and clear in a way someone typing out a quick answer won't be.

The most important point is made after he discusses what Aristotle said, distinguishing what he presented as a (sometimes) useful mode of reasoning with what is presented as a "logical fallacy" by SOME modern logic textbooks and, outside of the academic realm by pop-atheist would-be logic ninjas from the philosophical school of Carl Sagan, James Randi and Michael Shermer.  He sums that up:

The long and the short of this digression is that the fallacy of the consequent is an interesting type of fallacy in its own right, and it is somewhat related to the kind of inference called argumentum ad consequentiam, but two the two things are quite different.  Argument from consequences is a very common, and generally quite reasonable form of argument to the effect that a projected course of action is a good (bad) course to take if the consequences of it are good (bad).  The fallacy of consequent is the error of turning a conditional around when such a turning around (converting) of the conditional is not warranted (generally because the inference from consequent to antecedent is weaker when turned around).  But the fallacy of consequent is certainly something to pursue, because of the neglect of any adequate and useful treatment of it in modern logic. 

Being a political blogger, a firm and complete believer in egalitarian democracy as the only possibility of establishing a legitimate government which is likely to produce the least moral atrocity, I will begin with a hard truth.

If people are incapable of free thought, free will then democracy is a sham and a delusion, no more legitimate than dictatorships, monarchies, oligarchies, plutocracies or inegalitarian governments including those make a show of "democracy"  in which one class of people get to lord it over other classes of people, ruling without the consent of the governed.*   Human history has shown that the consequences of that assumption are virtually everything bad ever in the recorded history of our species and its present.   

The contented, well-paid cattle in university faculties who are generally well subsidized by the state or by the patronage of the rich, whose families are safe, fed, housed, clothed, have access to health care, may not feel any immediate or credibly suspect they are in any danger of violent oppression - so long as they keep to the rules for maintaining their positions - are probably quite content to give up the belief in free will because those consequences are reserved for those lower on the economic scale.   They have far more of a stake in Christians acting like they're told to in the Gospel and Epistles which are rejected by those who love the idea that freedom is an illusion.

However, when the consequences of the fashionable and respectable materialist-atheist, scientism are pressed on its true believers, especially those consequences impinging on  the necessary demotion of the minds they use to follow their passion and professional bread and butter, they don't much care for it.   

The fact is, the real consequence of the demotion of all of the things they like from their other ideological preference is real, the consequence of not believing in the monistic character of materialism (the denial of "natural law" is imaginary. 

It's OK with them as long as they can apply such dogmas as the denial of free thought to religion, to politics, to consumer choices but when it is pointed out that literally everything they do, from the most speculative and often at odds with each other  denominations and sects of current theoretical physics down to the sciences of lesser prestige (though often of entirely more exigent necessity) and on down to the most basic of foundations on which all of that rests in mathematics and logic must be as devoid of transcendent significance as what they disdain, mock and dismiss as unimportant they either will not admit the point that their universalist-totalitarian monistic materialism cannot provide for their thoughts what it denies for the thoughts of those they don't like or they will refuse to follow their argument to its logical and inescapable end.  

Nietzsche did understand that consequence of total nihilism required by the ideology of materialism, a materialism, ironically, demanded by the scientism of "enlightenment" modernism.   And you didn't find it only in the expression of the line that came from Nietzsche.   It is the position that Nicolai Bukharin took when he told Michael Polanyi "Under [Leninist-Stalinist] socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to the problems of the current Five Year Plan."   Though the scandals of modern science as seen in Retraction Watch prove that capitalism and scientists serving in corporations are as able to corrupt science as Polanyi feared would happen under Stalinist communism.   Scientists are certainly prone to all manner of decadence as their refusal to rigorously follow the consequences of materialism right down to the bitter reduction of everything to no more significance than iron oxidizing, water evaporating or any other banal natural phenomeon, devoid of any transcendence as truth.  

That is quite a consequence and totally unnecessary if a materialist would give up the pretense that it is a totally potent explanation of things, the dogmatic holding that materialism is an adequate monistic explanation of everything.    The fact is that if you believe in the possibility of miracles you don't have to not believe in the validity of some of what scientific method, mathematics, logic demonstrate.  The number of scientists, mathematicians, logicians who believed in God and that God could do miracles is not insignificant, among them some of the most accomplished of all scientists.   I don't think Stephen Hawking is ever likely to replace Isaac Newton for top position as the greatest physicist on those ranked lists they love to make.  I don't think, Pascal's mathematics will ever be discredited, not for all of the snarking about his "Wager" which is discussed in the paper linked to above, though I doubt anyone has ever believed in God and acted accordingly based on it, excepting, perhaps Pascal.  There are a lot better reasons to decide to believe in God, better ones than to believe in any number of theories held by current science, certainly better than some of the competing theories of current theoretical physics which Sabine Hossenfelder ably critiques, though those who hold it are among those who determine what gets into science.  

* The touted Athenian "democracy" was such a gangster government in which only old-family white, Greek males governed, all foreigners (you couldn't become an Athenian citizen except through birth) women, slaves, etc. were denied a say in the government.   I would like to have a different word for the modern, egalitarian governance with all of the governed having a say in who governs on behalf of The People because it's a far different thing from that classical era gang rule system. I am convinced that modern democracy is far more a product of the Hebrew tradition than the classical Greek tradition, it is certainly not a product of the Roman Republic which the slave-owners and financiers who wrote the Constitution emulated.  That the Roman Republic degenerated into the Roman Imperial era and never recovered the Republic should have been a warning of what their emulation of it might spawn in the fullness of corruption they maintained.

Mary Lou Williams Trio - Baby Man

 

Direct link to the video

Mary Lou Williams, piano

Buster Williams, Bass

Mickey Roker, Drums

I know I posted this not that long ago but it's a cold, damp, broody night here and I needed to hear it again. 

Here's a different take I didn't post before:

 Direct link to the video

 

The Fact Is She Also Is Arguing From Consequence She's Just Not Admitting That She Is Doing So

In this video I explain why free will is incompatible with the currently known laws of nature and why the idea makes no sense anyway. However, you don't need free will to act responsibly and to live a happy life, and I will tell you why.

Sabine Hossenfelder:  You Don't Have Free Will, But Don't Worry

IN ARGUING AGAINST what Sabine Hossenfelder said about the impossibility of us having free will due to such a thing having to contradict "the laws of physics" I was accused of possibly violating the ban on "arguing from consequence," a novelty in my experience so I thought I should think it out.

I looked for a standard definition of this claimed "fallacy" and decided to settle on what an atheist-materialist Youtuber probably did, one of those would be smarty-pants atheist materialists who put up websites of such things.  Here's what the Wikipedia article on it starts with:

Appeal to consequences, also known as argumentum ad consequentiam (Latin for "argument to the consequence"), is an argument that concludes a hypothesis (typically a belief) to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences.  This is based on an appeal to emotion and is a type of informal fallacy, since the desirability of a premise's consequence does not make the premise true. Moreover, in categorizing consequences as either desirable or undesirable, such arguments inherently contain subjective points of view.

Here is what the next one Google threw at me says:

Description: Concluding that an idea or proposition is true or false because the consequences of it being true or false are desirable or undesirable.  The fallacy lies in the fact that the desirability is not related to the truth value of the idea or proposition.  This comes in two forms: the positive and negative.

Since Wikipedia is under the constant ratfucking, um,  "editing" of dedicated materialist-scientistic-atheist groups and the later one looks like it's put up by a member of the same ideological side, that's enough to start with.  Though I wouldn't regularly rely on that kind of stuff.

Since Hossenfelder's arguments against free will are that it violates physical law her argument was a far more direct example of  "arguing from consequence" because undelying it were several things she holds as desirable which she wants to protect with her arguments against free will:

a. the truth and totalistic efficacy of her conception of physical laws and their extension well past where physical law can be known to hold any validity, 
 

b. the exclusive and totalistic nature of material existence to not only explain everything but to comprise everything,
 

c. the non-existence of anything that renders either of those false or untrue or diminishes their exclusive status as true.  That is the essential and always unstated position of every scientistic-materialistic atheist I've ever encountered whenever they talk about such things.

Based on that I would say that if anyone was relying on argument from consequences, it was the atheists in the argument, including most of those in science who come up with assertions that they've demonstrated that.  I would say any time any of them, especially the ideologues who call themselves "skeptics" argue against something because "it violates the laws of science, physics, etc." they are making a hidden appeal to consequences, supported by an unadmitted and rather massive skeleton of such desired consequences.   Though those very desires are often stated within the very arguments they make.  

Their argument fails entirely if someone doesn't accept that their ideological totalitarian system comprises the entirety of reality or can credibly explain it.  And it doesn't make sense on its own terms.

In the case of asserting the materialistically deterministic and reductionistic character of our minds, what Hossenfelder takes up in her video-essay, the consequences for her preferred ideology are as real as it is for the things she doesn't like because they don't fit into her preferred ideological straight-jacket, more real, in fact because of the rigid and exclusionary monism of her preferred materialism.   Nothing she likes, science, physics, up to and including the mathematics and logic that those should be based in (though often, as even she points out, that is more honored than practiced) can possibly escape the acid of discrediting any more than those ideas and thoughts she not only rejects but disdains.   You should be careful when you throw such universal acid because it will eat through a lot more than you intend it to.  

I will not go into the very long passage I wrote about the stupendous improbability of any one individual organism or a small group of organisms having the correct antecedent physical materials in their brains so as to produce, out of all the random possibilities of what could be there and what those could result in being true in a significant way but I would guess if such a probability could be accurately worked out it would make the near impossibility of a universe producing intelligent minds pale in remote probability.    The typical atheist confronted with such an assertion would immediately make resort to those creator gods of atheism "natural selection" and "DNA" though I bet the probability of them explaining how Sabine Hossenfelder and her fellow ideologues managed to twig onto  the truth as those creator gods left so many of their equally and not infrequently far more reproductively successful human beings in the dark would not be significantly more probable.   Clearly many minds don't seem to contain the material antecedents of her kind of scientistic, materialistic atheism, that would seem to be a rather rare thing.  You might call it "improbable."   I think it might just add another layer of improbability onto what I already laid out.   If they did twig onto it in such numbers it must be through some miracle that their own ideology detests as repugnant. 

I have pointed out that her very attempt to change the minds of her audience proves that she, herself, rejects those consequences of her position that she doesn't like the logical consequences of it.  She has that in common with every single other atheist I've ever read on this except, possibly Nietzsche who was a pathological amoralist and loved to contemplate violence that he, himself, was too much of a coward to practice and the far more admirable Richard Lewontin who admitted the truth that his rejection of things outside of his materialistic-atheist ideology was merely a matter of preference and not hard reasoning.  

For me, not being a materialist monist, or a monist in matters of material or mental experience, I don't have any problem with the idea that science, mathematics, logic can find things generally and sometimes specifically true about physical reality nor that human beings can make judgements about their experience and observations (observations being a category of experiences) that can be true and honest and that those have actual significance on something other than chance and probability. 

That's one of the things I guess I should think on more.  Being a non-materialist has freed me from that kind of monist straight jacket.  Perhaps that's the reason that atheist-materialists are so dubious about the possibility of free will, their system doesn't allow them the freedom to accept it, it doesn't even allow them to really take a hard look at what their ideology confines them to thinking about.    Materialists reject freedom and aren't too good at getting the benefits of it.

Monday Night Standards - Ella Fitzgerald - Let's Begin

 

Direct link to the video

Jerome Kern, music - Otto Harbach, 

Ella Fitzgerald, voice 

Nelson Riddle, arranger conductor

Trombone solo by Dick Nash 

I've resisted posting standards because they get too much exposure as it is.  But I keep getting requests for them so I'll do it once a week.   Figured there wasn't a better place to start than with these.

She Didn't Say Yes 

  

Direct link to the video 

Credits as above 

An Answer To A Snarky Question

THE FIRST TIME I MANAGED NOT TO AVOID hearing the Rolling Stones song Brown Sugar, I immediately knew it was a. racist, b. white supremacist, c. sexist, d. pedophiliac and e. repulsive for all of those reasons.  And throw in advocacy of violence, nothing to do with slavery can escape the violence it took to keep people in slavery, up to and including murder.   

It would have been some time soon after it was released in the United States and played on the radio.  Now, fifty years later enough opposition to it has been brought that old, old Mick and his remaining old stones are perhaps permanently, perhaps temporarily dropping it from the set list of their geriatric tour where they will suck in money from ancient fans who have managed to not grow up in the mean time and to others.  Only a dozen years before he'll be boogying with an oxygen tank on stage, that Oxygen Tank Tour I predicted he'd do when he was 90.

I don't know when the first time I expressed hatred of that song online was but it's come up a number of times, that and the assholes who produced it.   I certainly expressed hatred of it from shortly after hearing it the first time because it was one of their most popular songs and I pretty much hated everything they did from the first time I heard them.  

Half a century ahead of the times, I guess.  I'm glad to see young people aren't taking that bullshit anymore in large enough numbers.

Roger Sessions - Symphony no. 2

 

Direct link to the video

San Francisco Symphony 

Herbert Blomstedt, conductor

This note from the program of a performance by the American Symphony Orchestra is informative.

Premiered on January 9, 1947 by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Monteaux
Performance Time: Approximately 26 minutes

Roger Huntington Sessions was born in Brooklyn and raised in Hadley, Massachusetts. His ancestors included Samuel Huntington, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the Rt. Rev. Dan Huntington, a noted Episcopalian Bishop of Central New York. Sessions noted, “I come from an old family and that is undoubtedly part of my life, because I realized that with that background I always had a basic sense of social security; I mean a security in American society.” This august pedigree extended to his education as well: Sessions studied at Harvard University, at Yale University under Horatio Parker, and privately with Ernest Bloch. Sessions was an immensely influential composition teacher, and he served on the faculties of Smith College; Princeton University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Julliard School, among others. During his lifetime, Sessions received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rome Prize in 1926, and two Pulitzer Prizes for Music. He was also elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

William W. Austin wrote in handsome tribute to Sessions: “In all his works the vast range of his craft and the intensity of his thought are evident. . . . For those capable of appreciating his technique, the music is deeply rewarding.” One of the most rewarding of Sessions’ scores is his Symphony No. 2 (1946), which was commissioned by Columbia University’s Ditson Fund. It is touchingly dedicated “To the Memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” An unusual aspect of the orchestration is the prominence of both piano and harp. Cast in four movements, the symphony includes a short, satirical scherzo as the second movement and a kaleidoscopic finale. Its heart, however, is found in its brooding slow movement. In his trenchant article on Sessions, Joseph Kerman singled out this movement for special commendation: “The sombre crisis before the ending (but not the ending itself) remains in mind as the focus of the whole symphony.”

The Terrible Accidental Shooting

THE NEWS OF THE ACCIDENTAL SHOOTING during the filming of what would have probably been an entirely forgettable western movie certainly proves that Hollywood will never, ever get things right unless they are forced to by law or by ruinous lawsuit (yeah, right, as if that would happen).   As details and rumors from the production come out it's clear that it was not an isolated incident as people warned that there had already been two or three accidental "discharges" I would imagine meaning guns were fired when they should have been.  Yet this still happened. 

It reminds me of that interview of the Canadian playwright Judith Thompson conducted by the Canadian actor R. H. Thompson I posted last summer in which he said that the only actor he knew of who refused to hold a gun in his career was Dustin Hoffmann.  It also made me think of the author Marilynne Robinson who remarked on the appalling amount of fiction that centers around the crime of murder - I wonder if there has ever been a "western" movie that has ever not had that as a central feature or a plot device.   Like Marlboro cigarettes, it certainly hovers in the background in that genre, the violence and gun fanaticism it fosters is a major blight on the United States and elsewhere.

I wonder what the motives of those in charge of the production, the producer, the director, maybe even the actors who had the decision to use actual discharges from a gun, a "prop gun" in the filming when others use computer effects to mimic them, if they wanted "authenticity" that would come from something containing an explosion of powder.   The idea that that, clearly dangerous thing could be one of the very few things that they needed to make "authentic" when everything about movies is as phony as a carny side-show is absurd.   I heard one person who works in that part of the industry who said that in order for the "mistake" to have been made, in which, movie-like, a bullet was put in the thing instead of a dangerous-enough-to-be-stupid-to-use blank, not one but at least three violations of the written rules on using a gun in a production would have had to be committed.   I hope whoever was responsible for breaking those rules is or are prosecuted for whatever New Mexico law would allow them to charge them with.

I would be curious to know if anyone was ever killed in the making of a radio drama.  Apart from one make-believe Ellery Queen who-done-it I seem to vaguely remember - and it was poison in that case - I don't remember ever hearing of one.  I despise Hollywood.  

Do The Kew-el Kids Still Say "Well, Duh!"

OF COURSE I used the term "real medium" to be provocative, you think I'd use it without knowing it would provoke the people who've been attacking me for going on two decades and who I delight in triggering?  

I don't know whether or not what real mediums do is real sometimes or many times.   When I say a "real medium" I mean someone who isn't as-seen-on-TV but who has paying customers.   As I said, people I know and trust, at least some  of them taking precautions to prevent the medium they consulted knowing their identity, said they told them things they couldn't have learned by googling them or asking someone. one impressed on me that they were the only possible source of what they were told and they'd never shared it with anyone else.   I wasn't there.  I have to do what anyone has to, respect their judgement of their own experience of something I didn't witness.     Something the "skeptics" never really do as they pretend to knowledge of something they can't have.  They don't respect anyone who isn't part of their ideological atheist religion. 

I will say that I take the traditional Jewish-Christian reservations about consulting them seriously because, like psychologists and psychiatrists and what they see on TV, the movies and Facebook, they can seriously screw people up. 

The claim that if you believe someone on something that seems incredible you have to believe everyone on even those things that seem impossible is an absurd exaggeration.  EVERYONE, including every friggin' big-name "skeptic" who ever lived believes in things that are incredible and they do what everyone else does, they pick and choose which things that are unevidenced and unverified they choose to believe.  If that atheist-materialist-true believer in scientism claim that to believe anything means you're compelled to believe everything were true that would apply to them as much as it would the most credulous dupe of any conman in the world because they do believe things that are unevidenced.

I cannot tell you how grateful I am to the atheist computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum who forced me to admit that everything, including those things held to be "known" and not "merely believed" are the product of choices to believe, even the most basic facts of math and our expectations of how physical objects will behave.  We choose to believe those reveal some hidden "law" or even truth about how everything is.  Being freed of the psychology manufactured separation of "belief" being a product of choice while "knowledge" is something we are compelled to accept involuntarily was a huge step in my understanding that there is really no bright line between the two.  The same mind does both and believes and asserts the conventional notion that there is a difference out of the most non-rigorous of investigation and conceit.    

Update:  I make no apology for dealing with the comments of those who love to hate on what I say on my terms and not theirs.  If they expressed their hate reasonably, with supporting evidence, honestly I might apologize for that and do it the conventional way, but they don't so I won't.

On Being Told Yet Again That I've Transgressed The Limits Of Respectability - Hate Mail

IN THE PROCESS OF INVESTIGATING a number of commonly and most ubiquitously held and rigidly required beliefs among the college-credentialed and even PhD'd population of the English Speaking Peoples, I've come to the conclusion that they are no less prone to every bad habit of thought they love to believe are the sole domain of their ideological opponents and those they disdain as ignorant and déclassée.   That's not to say that there aren't real differences in the morality of at least parts of their various programs or even real differences in the validity of what they hold, it's that none of us has possession of impeccable or admirable minds and lives and all of us are susceptible to bad habits and falling to temptation.

A lot of that is due to the choice to stick with a program of thought through thick and thin no matter how thin the arguments to retain the holdings essential to a blameless and acceptable life get.  It's my experience of arguing those out that even presenting the absolute and decisive evidence to destroy those mind-forged manacles that keep people from admitting the truth will not move someone off of their common received folly.   I have yet to have anyone admit it was true, those presented with the proof that Francis Galton said that it was his reading of his cousin's book On The Origin of Species which led directly to him inventing eugenics - the only reason I got started on my search and analysis of the primary documentary evidence that led to my complete apostasy on the matter of natural selection - and the confirmation in the very words of Charles Darwin that he was aware of Galton's and such others as Haeckel's use of his theory of natural selection AND THAT HE ENDORSED AND APPROVED OF EVEN THE MOST GENOCIDAL SCIENTIFIC CLAIMS THEY MADE FROM IT.   And that has consequences still, today, as Trump's rejection of virology and epidemology was supported with "Darwinian economics" and the eugenic claims of "herd immunity" not to mention the ongoing inspiration of neo-Nazi eugenics explicitly supporting genocidal eugenic claims such as William L. Pierce and his followers have made as they became ever closer to mainstream Republican politics and power here.

That case refuting the post-WWII lie that Darwin and natural selection had nothing to do with eugenics, "social Darwinism" made in Darwin's own words, EVEN HIS EXPLICIT EQUATION OF HERBERT SPENCER'S "SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST" IN THE LAST EDITIONS OF ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES is as conclusive a proof as things as complex as that question can get.   There is literally no honest case to be made to the contrary.  

Those rigid ideological requirements are so strong that recently when I made a comment on one of those dumb PBS Youtube video shorts that made a ridiculous speculation that the deadly poison of the infamous death cap mushroom evolved as protection from animals that would eat it.   

Since the story was, of course, all about human beings eating and being poisoned and killed by eating them the humanly told just-so story asserting that would require skepticism because human beings evolved so late in the development of that species, though other animals were certainly around - some of whom can and do eat the things without any toxic effect, at all.  I would guess that in the forever lost history of the evolution of modern death cap mushrooms that there have been enough squirrel like animals who have no problem eating them to make the evolution of such a defense mechanism unlikely.  

On top of that the fact of human predation that leads to the death of the stupidly confident would-be forager gourmets requires that they collect and eat the tiny part of the organism that grows into mushrooms, from the viewpoint of the organism eaten, it's too late to give the offender the death penalty.  In order to have a protective effect, the closer the death to the eating of it, the more plausible the just-so story - though even that would probably not "explain" as much as it would need to.  

I have not made a study of the totally conventional, accepted as valid science just so stories of that kind to test them for whether or not the explanatory myth has that rather large defect not so hidden within it or not but I would guess that such problems are routinely overlooked in coming up with a claim that things like mushroom toxins "evolved" (and by the way, do we have any idea as to their first appearance in the millions and millions of years in the evolutionary history?  I don't think so.) to ward off predators in line with the story told.

When I answered the person who pointed out that squirrels can eat the mushrooms, in response to my skepticism that there was any explanatory power to the claim of "natural selection,"  they were, nonetheless, upset that I said I was skeptical that natural selection was more than an ideological construct made by human scientists to fill in an enormous chasm in one of the most complex phenomena science has ever taken on and that it is far more a product of ideology than valid scientific methodology.   They said "natural selection is real" and "there is no question" as to its reality and explanatory powers.  Only that's not true, there are questions as to its reality and whether or not its "explanatory powers" are real or not.  I doubt there has ever been a really rigorous examination of those claimed "powers" because scientists hold onto Darwinism as a required and harshly enforced ideology, more rigidly I'd guess than the agreement with the 39 Articles of Anglicanism were for holding a professorship in many English institutions.   Believe me, questioning any of this is one of the greatest thought crimes among the English Speaking college-credentialed class that there is.  Its questioning only one of a number of highly questionable "unquestionable" items in the required dogma of respectable college-credentialed society.  

I don't find that even on an intellectual level that society is all that respectable, not when it can construct and maintain such blatant and morally consequential lies such as the one I started out with.   And its required ideology leads it directly into amorality such as I've pointed out in what you object to.   I can tell you that one of the milestones in my apostasy was realizing that promoting eugenics, promoting even genocide even infanticide is held to be less of an academic sin than neglecting to give a citation to a colleague or even one more remote or having spelling errors in your written text.  Though the connection required going to a bigger picture to finding a more general source of that depravity, founded in snobbery, class interest and an anxious desire to be respectable within that milieu no matter what depravity you had to find acceptable.   I find myself not caring much when such people withhold their respect from me because I don't want it anymore.