Garland Upholds The Traditions Of The DoJ And His Own Sense of Propriety Even At The Cost of Democracy

 I DOUBT that there was a single platitude in Merrick Garland's January 6, eve speech that I couldn't have predicted might come out of him without any new substance being added to surprise me.  I learned absolutely nothing from listening to it that I didn't know, including that I doubt he's going to really go after the insurrectionists in a timely fashion in a way that will protect democracy. 

The stupidity of his scrupulosity is that time is short and the Republican-fascists have the Supreme Court on their side, if not to install Trumpism - and if what they want, Republican-fascist rule comes in that sleazy package, yes with that - then Republican-fascist oligarchic rule.   The stately cotillion of the legal system and the courts is one of the things that Republican-fascists have weaponized knowing that such august figures a Garland will be willing and knowing patsies for it. 

I am beginning to look for common threads in American democracy and the touted Athenian democracy and its violent eclipse during the time of the Thirty Tyrants.  That rotted from the head, too. 

LISTENING TO THE HARVARD product, Peter Navarro detailing his attempt to ratfuck us into a fascist putsch I suddenly wished I could see a list of the Harvard men who his fellow Harvard product Merrick Garland  has put in prison.  I'm wondering if such a list can be complied, either because the information is not available or that there are none.

On The Day Before The Anniversary of the Republican-fascist Insurrection

ANYONE WHO BELIEVES they know how Covid-19 is going to mutate into "safer" or more globally deadly forms and with that the future of the pandemic and its effects for People, societies, countries and the entire human population is likely to be inaccurate, at best, deadly wrong at worst. 

If there is one thing we know the many trillions of viruses in the human and animal population are quite capable of generating new variants that spread with even more alarming frequency than the "original" did and since it is universal there is no knowing where those variants that are the most deadly will arise but we can be more certain that once they do there will be little that will stop their spread, short of some island nation totally and effectively closing their borders. 

Anyone who is expecting an end to the pandemic and the disaster it has been is likely going to have their hopes shattered.  I've heard it expressed as an article of faith that viruses always become more contagious and less deadly as time passes.  Covid viruses have existed for a long time, the one that caused this pandemic didn't come from nowhere.  It's better to face the facts, now, that is is going to be with us and dangerous, probably for as long as there are people and animals on the Earth.  

Barring some incredible advance in immunology and epidemiology that could eliminate the virus through some as yet unknown means, we're going to have to live with masks, physical distancing, and a whole range of very unpopular, very inconvenient physical means of slowing the spread of new variants.   

I think one thing this has shown in the United States and elsewhere is that the modern medical systems, their infrastructures, etc. are breaking and folding under the strain.  The numbers of those working in healthcare have been too few to handle this and the facilities in which they practice are too few, too ill-prepared for something like this and not even minimally structured to deal with a sudden flood of sick people.   The for-profit medical system in the United States is one thing I would hope to see go as this terrible pandemic continues.  If there is another thing we know, here, it will take a really catastrophic failure for the media-addled American public to even accept a terrible reality. 

In every way the problem of managing the pandemic has been increased to another breaking point by the lies of the right-wing, Republican-fascist and Republican-fascist tolerant American media.  Canada, Britain and elsewhere have also had that experience, in may ways the American death tole is a product of FOX and Rupert Murdoch and Republican-fascist attempts to harness denial and lies about this for political and economic advantage.   That is something that must change, they and the foremost social diseases of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. spreading the venereal disease of lies and stupidity have fueled the epidemic and driven up the death tole, the tole of those injured, permanently, in many cases, the catastrophe this has been for scientifically based health care and, so to We The People.

Yesterday I cited the preamble to the Declaration of Independence and its statement about "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another," they were really talking about the necessity of changing the political and legal basis for the continued well-being of a country.   The bulk of that document lists a long list of arguments variable merit, giving reasons to change the political system radically.  None of those reasons had the same level of danger to the entire country as this pandemic has given us a reason to radically change our political and legal system or for the country to break apart.   I certainly do not want to see the United States break apart, though I think it would probably be better for some regions if they could get shut of the defects in ours and the ghost of slavery that still manages the politics of many states.  Those states have, unsurprisingly, had some of the worst policy driven case loads and death-rates in the pandemic.  But it's worse than that, such states aren't confined to the old South, the worst states are presently those which are in the control of Republican-fascism, those states have had an outsized role in making things worse, states such as South Dakota and Florida.  

I don't see any reason to expect the United States to permanently remain united under this tyranny of lies and rumors and the era of bad-will that will come with any Republican reign for the rest of the existence of that party.   There is no living with it, there is no tolerating the Republican-fascist enabling and owned media.  The machinations of the Southern States at the original Constitutional Congress to protect slave owning through anti-democratic features embedded in the Constitution, the electoral college that gave us Trump, the anti-democratically constituted Senate, elections being run by often corrupt state government, etc. have become deadly for all of us even as they used to be deadly mostly for Black People, Native Americans and Latinos.

With another wave of this terrible thing, its political use by Republican-fascists and the media, from the sewer level of FOX to the supposedly better New York Times and NPR, they are all complicit.  If the law is not changed to prevent them lying us into permanent Republican rule, I don't think it's going to be possible to live in a united states of America except one as oppressive as any of the more enduring modern dictatorships.  

This is dead serious and those may well be the terms we deal with and very soon.  There's a new variant being announced, spreading from another country with disastrously low vaccination rates into Europe, who knows if it didn't originate in some affluent country and spread to the third world, though even knowing that as a fact would not stop the racists of he Americas and Europe from trying to use it for political advantage.

New Whine Same As The Old Whine - There Are Good Reasons For A Real Left To Keep Attacking Darwinism I Won't Be Giving It Up

AS HAS BEEN POINTED OUT HERE before, when the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence were trying to come up with a justification for breaking the standing law in effect in the American colonies they had to do so in terms of the rights of People, rights have to reside somewhere, as Barney Franck once pointed out, there is no such thing as a right that does not inhere to a living being who has that right.   They did so in the famous declaration that 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That came after they asserted that it was the right of human beings to overturn the government that was governing them, stating that as the beginning of the explanation of the origin of those rights:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

As dangerous as I hold that the cult of the Founders is, I will say that that is as succinct a definition of the reality of rights of human beings as you can find.  Knowing that the rich, white, aristocratic men on that committee were self-conscious members of the current trends in thinking, the so-called 18th century Enlightenment, they would have been loathe to make a resort to assert that rights came from God and not through some naturalistic explanation.  They knew, certainly, that though that would make some of them uneasy, Jefferson, the author of those words,  John Adams, too, certainly many of the chief of their fellow revolutionaries such as James Madison would have liked a naturalistic assertion but they were smart men who certainly knew that there was no secure naturalistic explanation that would not be subject to rejection by the typical ploys of skepticism and irreligion.  Irreligion was a deeply entrenched idol of thought in the intelligentsia of the late 18th century. 

Depending on that assertion that rights are an EQUAL gift to all People from God is the extremely important quality of those rights, that they cannot be removed by the act of human beings, they are "unalienable" and cannot be lost except through the act of the same God that bestowed them.   

It's not necessary to fully address the obvious hypocrisies of these aristocrats, the slave owners among them, those who accepted slavery as a fact to be exploited for the profit of non-slaveholding financiers (Hamilton sold the slave-compact of the Constitution on that basis) to note that that view of rights is in direct conflict with the kind of rights that Thomas Huxley addressed in the 1880 article I linked to yesterday, speaking of the view of such things that was compatible and consistent, not with a belief in God and egalitarian democracy but with naturalistic Darwinism, the belief in natural selection.

its [a biological grouping's and an idea's] right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals

The means of "resisting extinction by its rivals," is, of course, eventually done through the successful group, THE GROUP TO WHICH HE ASSIGNS ALL OF THE RIGHTS, exterminating the other group.  HE SAYS THAT THE RIGHTS BELONG EXCLUSIVELY TO THE ONES WHO SURVIVE. 

If you doubt that is what he held, due to his belief in natural selection as described by Charles Darwin, read his 1865 essay in which he looks forward to the extermination of the former slaves by the former slave holders and other white people in exactly the manner implied fifteen years later, as quoted above.  It wasn't the only time he or his closest colleagues, including his master, Charles Darwin, asserted that the extermination of entire groups of people, whether among other races or among the poor and infirm within the English and other "races" (as they often put it) would be a positive biological benefit to those who did the killing, the survivors in the "struggle for existence," to use Darwin's own term.  

I will note in passing that in the 1865 "Emancipation: Black and White Huxley was explicit in attacking the equality of all People: 

"The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion,"

But the idea of equality is no more illogical than the idea of rights, to start with.  If the rights of those who Thomas Huxley wanted to deprive of them were not logically protected, there is no more logical protection for those who he wanted to grant them to.  That's one of the things that those who want to deprive others of their rights never want to consider, the rights they claim and prize as their own are no more secure than the rights of others.  If someone wants to reject the logicality of their rights, they are as vulnerable to attack.  I don't think there is any right to claim that rights are unequally distributed nor do I think there is a right to lie and defame and attempt to alienate the rights of groups or individuals.  I think what I just said  renders that "right" an illogical illusion. 

As a political blogger, it is clear that the two concepts of rights, their origin, their equal or unequal distribution, their removal or inalienable nature are incompatible and, since Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, Galton, Karl Pearson, H. G. Wells, etc. right down to Richard Dawkins, Kevin MacDonald, Herrenstein and Murray, etc. today want to apply the theory of natural selection to the human population, human societies, determining the human legal system, social policy, educational policy, and the law, in general it is clear that Darwinism, from its inception and down till today is totally incompatible with the continuance of egalitarian democracy, racial harmony, care of the least among us, their elevation to the extent they can rise, and all other good that was aspired to, even by those most hypocritical slave-owning founders.

That is why questioning the theory of natural selection, making it answer for all of its defects, those known during the first twenty years after its publications - MANY OF WHICH HAVE BEEN VALID FOR THE ENTIRE TIME, SUCH AS THE ONE I CRITIQUED - and those which have arisen since then is a political issue.

There is absolutely no reason that any member of any group, any individual whose rights and very existence is called into question by the dogma of natural selection has to merely shrug their shoulders and say,  "Oh, well, science says so I have to just accept it."   I would suggest that people look at the long list of those Darwin held to be inferior in The Descent of Man, claiming that any inferiority held by our ancestors at that time would be held by their descendants, ask themselves if they really believe what he claimed.  And they can ask the same about the long line of Darwinists who loved to make lists of those they held to be inferior, in English as well as German and other languages.  I have gone into considerable detail about how the famous British Darwinist Karl Pearson and his colleague Margaret Moul wrote a paper detailing their claims about the biological defects of Polish and Russian Jews in 1925, a paper cited by Nazi scientists - at least one of whom is thanked by Pearson and Moul in their paper - as a reason for eliminating them from the Aryan population, something they put into stupendous effect only stopped by the combined forces of the Allies putting a stop to it, including the democracy such as the United States was then trying to become.

With the persistent power of the putrid political-Darwinist tome, The Bell Curve, this Darwinism is among the most dangerous engines of Republican-fascist political and judicial attack on democracy there is.  If natural selection was not the hegemonic requirement of the scientific establishment it would almost certainly not have the force it does.  

 

 

Be Careful, It Can Be Dangerous Out There

JUST FOUND OUT I WAS EXPOSED TO COVID yesterday, so every time I cough I wonder if it's the beginning of the end.   Of course more of us have been exposed more than we ever realized without anything happening and a lot of us have the infection without symptoms.  I'd been being really careful and it happened to me.  Now it's days of anxious waiting. 

I think omicron is going to be a lot more serious than they've thought up till now.  

Too Good To Be Forgotten - I Hope St. Desmond Tutu Continues To Mess With Us

THIS SHORT REMEMBRANCE of Archbishop Desmond Tutu ended with a story about his wonderful wife that I have to post here.

Tutu and his wife of 66 years renewed their marriage vows in 2015, on their 60th anniversary. His wife Nomalizo Leah survives him, as do his four children and seven grandchildren. Once when interviewing Leah in New York, I asked if I could take her photo.

"Just a minute," she responded, reaching into her briefcase. I expected her to get out a hair brush or lipstick. Instead, she removed a large license plate that read: "Don't mess with my Tutu."

The world did not — at least not for long.

I also read that the Archbishop was notably not a lover of would-be classy, elite food, preferring junk food and a sort of fried sandwich that would probably give me a heart condition.   Once when he was to be honored at an elite gathering, the host asked her what kind of food he preferred.  She said, "think of a five-year-old."  

How can anyone doubt he's a saint? 

The Idols Of The Tribe Of Darwinists - More Of A Whine Than Hate Mail

THAT QUOTE FROM THOMAS HUXLEY published two years before Darwin's death that I cited in the comments yesterday is a perfect illustration that Darwnism, the theory of natural selection carries more than just the germ of Nazi eugenics theory, it carries the fully formed monster.

"The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals."

That was something he said in an essay, The Coming of Age of "The Origin of Species" about fifteen years after, by the doctrine of natural selection, he gleefully anticipated the extermination of the recently emancipated slaves of the United States in a struggle for existence by their former enslavers on the basis that they were of no economic utility to the, he said, superior white people and so would have to go.  If you doubt the cheerfulness that he said it, you can read that essay for yourself, too. 

The question is settled; but even those who are most thoroughly convinced that the doom is just, must see good grounds for repudiating half the arguments which have been employed by the winning side; and for doubting whether its ultimate results will embody the hopes of the victors, though they may more than realise the fears of the vanquished. It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still  less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest.

But whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy.

The doctrine of equal natural rights may be an illogical delusion; emancipation may convert the slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperised man; mankind may even have to do without cotton-shirts; but all these evils must be faced if the moral law, that no human being can arbitrarily dominate over another without grievous damage to his own nature, be, as many think, as readily demonstrable by experiment as any physical truth. If this be true, no slavery can  be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

He certainly held that the anticipated extinction of the newly emancipated slaves at the hands of the former slave owners comprised exactly the same kind of  "right to exist" which, because he believed they would be rendered extinct, did not belong to Black People.  I think this must be about the most morally depraved view of slavery and abolition that I've ever seen or could imagine.  If you changed the nouns and adjectives, it would be as cold-blooded a statement of Nazi racism and economic utility as could have been published as science during the worst of the Nazi period.

If you doubt that Darwin, himself held such ideas and considered them to be a species of biological progress, you can read all through The Descent of Man, his second major book after "The Origin of Species" he not only repeatedly praising the even more depraved enthusiasm for declaring entire groups of human beings as inferior and bound to be exterminated from Ernst Haeckel and a more genteel line that essentially means the same thing from Francis Galton, W. R. Greg and, I believe on the basis of my research, inventing a statement from at least one other scientist to support the idea - or maybe he just got his notes mixed up.  Darwin, himself, said in his correspondence that he liked the idea that Brits would displace entire races of people all over the world and that the human species would be better off for the extinction of those he held were inferior and he was explicit that he held that his own "race" was if not THE superior "race" then among the top of them. 

Natural selection is the foundation of modern scientific racism, economic caste, white supremacy and the most putrid modern forms of that, Nazism and neo-Nazism.  

In that 1880 essay Thomas Huxley said a number of things that could be devloped on, in that particular quote used to support Richard Dawkin's stupid tautological invention of "memes,"  a fuller reading of the text and putting his invention into the context in which Huxley said that might have warned Dawkins off of doing it.

History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the "Origin of Species," with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them.

Against any such a consummation let us all devoutly pray; for the scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and rationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. Now the essence of the scientific spirit is criticism. It tells us that whenever a doctrine claims our assent we should reply, Take it if you can compel it. The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

It's too bad Huxley couldn't imagine the discrediting of a theory based on the defects of its  offspring. 

The latter day history of the theory of natural selection is full to the top of superstitions, most of modern pseudo-science, from Freud through the entire range of Nazi science to the theories of William L. Pierce of The Turner Diaries and, yes, those of such credentialed, peer reviewed published science as the Nazi curious if not friendly Kevin MacDonald was belatedly exposed for is based entirely on the theory of natural selection.  On the way there are many, many others that could be listed. [You can do a search of my archives, if I linked to all of the things I've posted on this most of the text of this would be red.]

I think the inherent weakness of the theory includes one about which Huxley made a snarky comment:

Adverse criticism made merry over such suggestions as these. Of course it was easy to get out of the difficulty by supposing extinction; but where was the slightest evidence that such intermediate forms between birds and reptiles as the hypothesis required ever existed? And then probably followed a tirade upon this terrible forsaking of the paths of "Baconian induction."

The greatest defect in the theory of natural selection, the theory of "The Origin of Species" is that there is absolutely no way to go back in time and do the kind of detailed observation of organisms, the identification and observation of "traits" and their relationship to the number and success of those organisms, the persistence and loss of those studied "traits" in the offspring and, in a theorized enormous length of time, new species arising out of that theoretical, never witnessed process.  The information needed to really come up with how, in one way or, as seems likely now, several or many ways that different species arise is forever lost in sufficient quantity to really make that study into a solid science and a reliable general theory.  That is the simple truth of it.

The, in many ways, wonderful biologist Stephen Jay Gould and his allies within biology rightly criticized Richard Dawkins and his allies for the creation of "Just-so stories" to replace real science based on the kind of thing Thomas Huxley ridiculed as a necessity of actually doing science.  But the problem for Darwinists such as Gould was is that the entire theory of natural selection is a long series of Just-so stories because it is impossible to make the necessary observations and mathematical analysis to make such claims have the same status as science that can do that. 

Huxley should have taken Bacon's method more seriously, as Bacon noted one of the reasons he invented it was to guard against exactly what Darwinism became, a conventionalized, required habit of thought, not outside of science but inside it.  From the Novum Organum by Francis Bacon:

XXXVIII. The idols and false notions which have already preoccupied the human understanding, and are deeply rooted in it, not only so beset men’s minds that they become difficult of access, but even when access is obtained will again meet and trouble us in the instauration of the sciences, unless mankind when forewarned guard themselves with all possible care against them.

XXXIX. Four species of idols beset the human mind, to which (for distinction’s sake) we have assigned names, calling the first Idols of the Tribe, the second Idols of the Den, the third Idols of the Market, the fourth Idols of the Theatre.

XL. The formation of notions and axioms on the foundation of true induction is the only fitting remedy by which we can ward off and expel these idols. It is, however, of great service to point them out; for the doctrine of idols bears the same relation to the interpretation of nature as that of the confutation of sophisms does to common logic.

I have noted that modern science has, through the introduction of ideology, such as the Malthusianism on which Darwin based his theory, through the attempt to support scientism, atheism and materialism, science became the stomping grounds of many an idol maker and worshiper.  It seems to me that science could do with more Baconian induction, not less of it.  It's no wonder that Huxley, arrogant at the successful sale of Darwinism in his day, figured they could bypass that process.  No doubt he liked it because of its support for his preferred ideologies.

John Harbison - The Flight Into Egypt

 

Direct link to the video  

Los Angeles Philharmonic · John Harbison, conductor

·Cantata Singers and Ensemble · David Hoose, conductor

Sanford Sylvan, evangelist

Roberta Anderson, angel 

The phrase about mystery and magic and the implication I took from of that about danger used in the post below led me to remember the wood-wind music Harbison wrote to indicate the Magi in this piece and that led me to remember what a fine piece of music it is.   His composers notes on it say:

I began The Flight on an impulse stemming from a conversation with Craig Smith and Rose Mary Harbison about Christmas texts. Craig Smith mentioned the Christmas season counseling experience of Reverend Al Kershaw at Emmanuel Church, Boston, a time when need, isolation, and anxiety increases. We agreed that the darker side of Christmas needs representation, especially in a time of increasing distance between the privileged and the less fortunate. I have worked twice before with unedited Bible texts, in a narrative manner favored by Schuetz and Stravinsky, and I’m sure I will again. Without these pieces I would feel that a significant part of what I want to do as a composer would not have a voice. In this piece the subject matter gave rise to musical techniques: a frequent reliance on points of imitation, and the derivation of most of the music from the short motives stated at the outset. These are metaphors for the pre-ordained, inevitable aspects of the story. The harmony is more freely ordered, in the interest of a more flexible and compassionate rendering of the details of the narrative. The most expressive element in the piece is the continuity, which fuses the narrative into one continuous impression, both abstract and highly colored

Update.  Oh, I forgot the words from the King James Version of Matthew's Gospel:

13 And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.

14 When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt:

15 And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.

16 Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.

17 Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying,

18 In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.

19 But when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeareth in a dream to Joseph in Egypt,

20 Saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are dead which sought the young child's life.

21 And he arose, and took the young child and his mother, and came into the land of Israel.

22 But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee:

23 And he came and dwelt in the city of Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.

The small wind of the chorus singing the words of the prophet is among the most effective endings of a piece of Choral music.  It reminds me of the endings of Sessions' setting of When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloomed. 

Give Me Some Mystery, Magic and Miracles Not Three Kings

THIS WEEK'S SUNDAY READINGS as commented on by Mary McGlone does a lot to reconcile me to the "three kings" story.

Who were those wanderers who, unimpressed by King Herod, did homage to a newborn babe and allowed an angel to change their travel plans? Our creche sets, carols and myths tell us they numbered three — an idea deduced from the gifts Matthew mentions — but there's no reason to think that there were not more of them: more people and more gifts. 

I remember smiling when I first heard that in some Orthodox traditions they put the number of them at 12, thinking of how many more kids could get a part in the Sunday School pageant.  Though more work for the ones coming up with the costumes. 

By tradition, they are called kings. If so, probably no more than ourselves who are baptized as priests, prophets and kings. (Not many areas of the world had three monarchs anxious to travel together to discover and revere yet another king.) Better we call them the Magi, a title that hints at mystery, magic and miracles. 

The point about the unlikelihood of three monarchs doing what's described is about as good a one as I've heard about the story.  The idea they were "kings" reeks of European feudal takes on these things, something that so much of Christianity should probably get shut of once and for all. 

While I still like the story about the Shepherds more, I really like that far more textually based interpretation because it makes them and what they were about potentially dangerous and disrupting, as well.   There's a definite darkness to the list of gifts, gold (love of which Paul correctly identifies with the origin of evil) with its association of worldly power, the kind of which Jesus said he didn't seek.  The incense carries the dangerous implications that Jesus was the incarnation of God - an outrageous claim which, certainly, had and has been made by some seriously rotten charlatans and con men.  Then there is the myrrh, usually associated with the embalming of a dead body and all that disquieting spookiness.  The story is rather unambiguous about them looking for a future king, but what they expected he would be king of as shown by what they brought him shows he wasn't going to be just any old king. 

There is as much reason to expect wise men to understand the implications of those things, their symbolism as much as we might.  As much as the author of Matthew's Gospel did when he decided to include that story in his account.  You have to wonder what the things the Gospel writers must have known about, heard about but decided not to include. 

Historians say it's unlikely that their story reflects any verifiable event. For us, more important than historical fact is the reason Matthew made this part of his Gospel. In that realm, he left us lots of hints. First of all, Matthew borrowed key details for his story from Isaiah's prophecies. Isaiah assures the people who have been in darkness that the light of God's glory will shine on them and that their faith will attract people from afar who will come bearing gifts. With that, we have the background for the star, the travelers, the camels and the gifts: all signs of the advent of God's salvation.

This year, as I've been using the Gospel of Luke to refresh my foreign language skills, I've mentioned that I've come to conclude that Luke included what he did because he thought it happened the way he recounts, not for some reason that would be discerned only through some rather harrowing literary criticism which had a high potential for coming to conclusions Luke didn't intend.  I think the same is true about the other Gospel writers.  If we know one thing about them, they, all of them, really believed in the status of Jesus they present him as having, they would have taken their responsibility to accurately and honestly present his story and words very seriously.   That's even true in John's Gospel, the outlier, the most mystical one, the least like the others.  I think the modern historians and those who practice historical-critical dissection of texts are probably mostly all wet about that.  I would like to know their evidence that those typically modern motives and practices outweighed the desire of those early members of the Jesus movement to tell it like they believed it was. 

But the use of Isaiah talked about is there.  I know it's a sore point that Christians use Hebrew Prophets as support for Christian theological claims but it should be remembered that Jesus wasn't a Christian figure during his lifetime, he was a Jew as were at least some of the Gospel writers, as was the person most often credited with turning the Jesus movement into Christianity, Paul.*  Were they not entitled to read the scriptures that way?  

That's a question that I don't think there's a knowable answer for.  

The meanings of prophesy can be expected to be  harder to discern than an attempted narrative account because the full meaning of all of it might not have even been known to the prophet.  At least when taken in line with the idea that any prophesy could be valid and that it has a relationship to the as yet unknown future. 

I'll leave you with this from her article:

What does this narrative mean for us today as we begin the year 2022? Perhaps in these uncertain times (will COVID-19 ever end?), the Magi, those people willing to walk together like participants in a synod, can be our guides. More than the time and money required for their journey, they possessed a key combination of self-confidence and desire for more meaning in life. These attitudes urged them to read the signs of the times and to venture into the unknown. They humbly believed there was more wisdom in the world than they had yet discovered. These travelers, unafraid to seek knowledge from afar, were moved — literally — by a holy disquiet, the restlessness St. Augustine says niggles at us until we rest in God. Thus, they set off in a caravan that became the first Christian pilgrimage.

Today, we see signs of a similar holy disquiet. As a result of COVID-19, people are reevaluating their lives. Researchers have reported that between January and October 2021, one in four people in the U.S. quit their jobs. Additionally, COVID-19 has made it impossible to ignore both the continuing political divisions among us and the wealth and wellness gaps that isolate us from one another, leaving multitudes of our brothers and sisters unconscionably vulnerable. At the same time, while some of our sick and their families suffered an isolation that magnified and even overshadowed the physical effects of illness, others discovered Zoom and other ways to be in direct, visual contact with their loved ones hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

In his book, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, Pope Francis shares ideas highly applicable to today's feast. He describes our time as a change of epoch, not simply a time of change. He says that this change, "accelerated by the coronavirus, is a propitious moment for reading the signs of the times." Avoiding the trap of easy answers, Francis says, "A gap has opened up between the realities and challenges we face and the recipes and solutions available to us. That gap becomes a space in which to reflect, question, and dialogue." 

I need to read more books this year. 

 

*  Having wondered how many of the early Popes probably considered themselves to be Jews, perhaps never having even known the word "Christian,"  I'd expect Peter, considered the first Pope and the fifth, one, St. Evaristus did,  I recently read about the text the Late Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger wrote for his tombstone:

I was born Jewish.
I received the name
Of my paternal grandfather, Aron.
Having become Christian
By faith and by Baptism,
I have remained Jewish
As did the Apostles.
I have as my patron saints
Aron the High Priest,
Saint John the Apostle,
Holy Mary full of grace.

I have read that he wasn't the only Catholic Cardinal of his time to consider himself both Catholic and Jewish, Jean-Baptiste Gourion, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, reportedly did as well.   They get to decide their identity as much as anyone else does. 

Answer To The Whining You Can Depend On Hearing When You Diss Communism - Hate Mail

IT WAS AND IS ONE OF THE STUPIDEST ideas ever articulated by, largely, college-credentialed people when largely secular alleged liberals, with full knowledge of the still then recently ended WWII genocides were a reality,  held that "We MUST allow Nazis in the post-war period, to be able to freely advocate their ideas."  I never think of that without hearing it said in a whiny, falsely pious obnoxious cadence.  Of course the reason we MUST do that is the wording of the First Amendment with its truncated, ill-considered, stupidly-general language adopted, not by gods among us, but by the members of the First Congress and the legislatures of the thirteen states, almost to a person, propertied, white men of affluence enough to allow them to play politics largely for their own advantage, with every defect and deficiency in consideration and motivation that you could expect to find among them.  Many of them slave owners and wage-slavers who had no intention of extending freedom of speech to those held in bondage to them, certainly not the Native inhabitants of lands they had their eyes on grabbing. 

The idea holds that no matter what harsh lessons history throws at us, we are never, ever to learn that there are ideologies, ideas, claims and lies that are dangerous enough to get millions of people murdered and that the proponents of such lies, having proven they actually can make it happen here, should eternally get a second, third, fourth, etc. chance to make it happen again because a bunch of white, rich men who really didn't have any experience of governance adopted that set of words which empowered lies and false witness with legal impunity and the impossibility of regulation and prohibition of them.  

That may be the stupidest idea that flows out of and through 18th century modernism and into today, an act of epic irresponsibility and nonfeasance dressed up like a sacred virtue when what is virtuous would be facing that Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, the ideologies of fascism, and its indigenous, traditional American form, white supremacy, subjugators of Women, bashers of LGBTQ people, should never, ever be able to rig things to give them any more chances of ever gaining power and putting themselves in a position to do it again, this time having learned how to do it more effectively.  It may be the stupidest, it is certainly among the stupidest, unthinking, ill considered idiocies ever to come out of the mouths of college-credentialed people as one of the perverted, inverted virtues of modernism.   That so many members of the groups who can be guaranteed to be the target of their empowerment hold with the idiotic idea that advocating violent, oppressive depravity must be placed on the same level as advocating egalitarian democracy, responsible freedom and behavior for the common good is only a further indictment of modernism and the education in its attitudes and habits of speech and thought.  

Women who believe those who would subjugate, control, harm and kill them have a "right" to do that because "The First Amendment" are their oppressors and killers' best friends.  Not a few of them in the pay of the porn industry.  Much of that clean-handed, absurdly elevated "First Amendment" advocacy is nothing but paid, intellectual shilling.

Black People, Latinos, members of other groups targeted by the racist media, and that extends from the pits of FOX level fascism to the editorial pages of the New York Times and The Washington Post as well as PBS and NPR,  members of targeted groups who hold that "we MUST allow them to have that chance" are their oppressors and killers' best friends.  

My fellow LGBTQ People who hold that their enemies have an absolute right to try what will probably be far easier than for the groups already mentioned, overturn, first marriage equality and, then, the rest of the progress made very fast in the past twenty five years will see that erased, are as foolish.  I have to confess that there is nothing I find more dispicable than an LGBTQ Republican-fascist or its close allies.

And, yes, I'll go there, Jews who advocate for the rights of Nazis and neo-Nazis to get another try are among the most morally depraved group who have ever lived.  I will include those who experienced Stalinism, Maoism, etc. but who hold that those mass murdering, genocidal ideologies are rightly advocated now, with full knowledge of what those led to are as depraved.  So are any of us who know that history and still hold that idea as a viable virtue.

There is no right to advocate the destruction of egalitarian democracy because that advocacy contains within it both the reason to suppress that advocacy and the moral foundation for that suppression.  As I've been demonstrating, the holding that that advocacy is to be permitted contains its own self-contradiction because those it advocates for would destroy the false-egalitarian notion being advocated by the would be "civil libertarians."

Since ideologies that contain the advocacy of not only inequality but, also, the suppression of groups of people, their oppression, their enslavement and exploitation, discrimination against them and up to and including their murder and obliteration imagine that as some kind of good, they have given those they target the right to turn that unequal treatment back on those who advocate it.  

That is a definitive difference between those who advocate egalitarianism WHICH MUST INCLUDE REAL AND SERIOUS LIMITS ON HOW OTHER PEOPLE CAN BE TREATED WHICH PRECLUDES THE DESIRES OF THOSE WHO WOULD HARM THEM and those who advocate inequality in which some, privileged people get to do that harm to other people.   The advocates of equality accept that those limits on behavior and advocacy of inequality which they would impose on others are, as well, imposed on them.   

That the advocates of equality may want to have their own worst impulses subject to legal restrictions is an entirely more admirable and safe desire than the desire of those who advocate inequality to be unrestrained in their inflicting harm on other people.  

The two things desired are not the same, one is entirely different in its effect than the other one.  No one in a position to judge the two could possibly mistake the effects of the one for the effects of the other, though our judicial system is full to the top of lawyers who were taught to lie about that, the "justices" of the Supreme Court, in the majority are some of the more powerful liars of that kind, the media are full to the top with them. 

Update:  The rise of neo-fascism, neo-Nazism, even in the lands where the most numbers of people were murdered under those ideologies EVEN, FOR PETE'S SAKE,  IN RUSSIA WHICH THE NAZIS MURDERED HUGE NUMBERS ON TOP OF THOSE MURDERED BY STALIN proves that the "more speech" means of resisting their success is about the stupidest slogan of lawyers and journalists and others who profited off of the money of pornographers and oligarch building billionaires ever peddled to a gullible public.  Put your "more speech" such as was practiced by Republican-fascists in DC last January 6 against that of the mealy-mouthed, media figure civil libertarian's "free speech" and see which one has real traction.  I am sure Merrick Garland must have at least nodded in acquiescent quiescence when a more bold legal colleague mouthed that false piety.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Lost Property

 

Lost Property  

 

BBC Radio 4's bittersweet trilogy set in 1941, 1979 and 2011. This history of relatives lost and found was originally broadcast on 3, 10 and 17 May 2011 in the 'Afternoon Play' slot. The first play, 'The Wrong Label', is set in London in 1941. Alice knows that to stop your children from being evacuated is tantamount to siding with Hitler. In 'The Year My Mother Went Missing', it's 1979 and not the first time that Ruthie's mother Queenie has gone missing - but usually she leaves a note. The final play, 'A Telegram from the Queen', is set in 2011 and, as Alice's 100th birthday present, Ruthie sets out to put her family back together again. The 'Lost Property' plays star Rosie Cavaliero as the narrator (and later as Ruthie), Shannon Flynn as the younger Ruthie, Alex Tregear, Jane Whittenshaw and Edna Doré as Alice and Gary Beadle as Ted.

I love Katie Hims' work.  

Throw Away Predictions Made Because I'm Too Tired To Really Write Something

YOU DON'T WANT TO HEAR any predictions for 2022 from me anymore than I wanted to read online this morning that apparently some of the internet crowd they should have gotten the net for years ago are troubled because of the "meme" that 2022 sounds like "2020 too."  Adding orthographic stupidity to the stupidity of believing that memes are real instead of imaginary.  I would like to start one that says that "memes" were a stupid invention by a rather incompetent Darwinist to try to plug up a huge hole in his unevidenced, outrageously unscientifically expansive claims for Darwinism of the worst kind.  And that anyone who believes "memes" are real is a chuckle-head. 

I don't have any good idea what the new year will bring except that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe and will do some terribly appalling things, though I'd be surprised if they are supportive of Trump because they want to get rid of him all the better to turn this country into a one-minority-party state through taking full advantage of every oversight and intentional thwarting of democracy contained in the Constitution.   

The Senate will almost certainly continue to obstruct the Democratic agenda on the basis of two non-Democrats who run as Democrats - that is if at least one of them doesn't cross the aisle as I expect him to.  Or, maybe, Manchin will listen to his constituents and figure his bread is buttered on that side, though I'm not waiting up nights. 

The elections are too far away to have any clue as to what those are going to produce, anyone who tells you they know has a very high likelihood of turning out to be all wet.  It's cold, foggy and misting here so I don't want to get all wet. 

Global warming will come on stronger with an enormous cost to the environment, plants, animals, environmental systems and human beings, the poorest among us paying the highest price.  The idiocy of modernism will not learn a damned thing from it. The Courts will learn even less.  

On the longer term future, I think that the only hope for humanity is if enough people become convinced that God by whatever name they call God wants us to act responsibly on the basis of equality and good will and that that will only come strong enough to work if it has that basis, we may see both an increase in that kind of religion with a decrease in the evil kind because the evil kind comes with those consequences.  I hope that the secular ideologies that pretend they can do the same things are discredited because they not only can't, they won't and their very bases lead to the opposite of what needs to be done.  They have no effective, consequential component in them to give even the innocuous and falsely anodyne among them an ability to do what needs to be done.   The other day an online Marxist whined to me that the problem with Communism is that it's never been tried, I said anyone who didn't notice the century-plus of communism in real life was too stupid to listen to - I believe it was either a college teacher or a grad student I was dope slapping.  Those people will be the very, very last to get wise in their credentialed wisdom.

A Holiday About Nothing

 NEW YEARS IS THE MOST blaah holiday other than Flag Day.  Good reason to go to bed at nine the 31st and to wake up late.  Other than changing the calendar and start practicing writing a new number never could see what people saw in it.  

At least I won't have to hear some adenoidal goof intone the most boring song in the English language, John Lennon's overblown atheist drone, Imagine.   It doesn't even have the life in it that the most pedestrian Psalm tone does.  Those mean something. 

They should have kept the old one, it was gooey and annoying but at least it wasn't pretentious and flaccid and vapid.  

Actually, they should have cancelled the whole thing.  It's the Seinfeld of holidays, a holiday about nothing. 

Hate Mail - The Moral Problems And Necessary Limits of Unlimited Pluralism Are There And We Supporters Of Pluralism Must Face That

SAID IT BEFORE and I'll say it now, the religious pluralism that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said he believed was preferred by God is something I believe is likely true.   It is one of those things that my more mature reading of the Jewish Scriptures sees right there unnoticed in plain sight, God is presented as having made covenants with other Peoples who weren't part of the Children of Israel, God is presented as caring about those People and their moral lives, the Children of Israel are commanded to treat foreigners among them as equals even as God commands the same Children of Israel to follow the their own religious and moral path which includes that pluralistic moral egalitarianism.  And what was taught in the First Testament is expanded by Jesus into the second testament such as in the parable of the Good Samaritan holding  and on to the ultimate of of loving even those who are our enemies and praying for them and not discriminating against them and violently repelling them. 

But in life, human life and culture and politics and secular law that radical ideal will have to have limits.  Ideologies that glorify in the opposite of those, in discrimination against, enslavement of and murder of other groups identified as "others" by a favored group will create intolerable conditions and human beings will not be able to live with that, ultimately.  

Hitler voiced his admiration of the Spartans who violently and murderously enslaved large numbers of Helots and imagined his Aryan Reich doing what they did on a far larger scale.  The American white supremacists would do the same here if they could get the power to do that and our Constitutional system is under active manipulation by the Republican Party to give them that upper hand.   When I say "American white supremacists" you can substitute the actual entity that is bringing that about, the billionaire and millionaire oligarchs and other gangsters who are behind the empowerment of the overt fascists, racism and other forms of identity hatred is merely one of their most important means of doing that, the corruptibility of lawyers, judges, "justices" and politicians almost as potent but working on fewer numbers. 

I think there has to be a distinction made in this, that those religions and ideologies that accept pluralism and egalitarian democracy can be accepted as working equals in the shared civic life of People of good will.   Along with that is the moral responsibility of both identifying and rejecting those religious denominations and ideologies that refuse and reject pluralism and egalitarian democracy. AND THOSE IMPOSSIBLE TO GET ALONG WITH IDEOLOGIES ARE DISTRIBUTED ACROSS THE BOARD.   The sects and denominations within Christianity that reject the equality of the sexes, races, other religious believers, and LGBTQ people are not worthy of inclusion within what is acceptable or, ultimately, tolerable in a society that seeks egalitarian democracy and the rule of good will.   

Even the groups and cults within different denominations include those who do accept that list of requirements for an equally distributed decent life and those who reject it.  Catholicism right now clearly has that self-chosen division into those who side with the line of Vatican II and the billionaire financed "traditional Catholics" who reject egalitarianism and pluralism and equal rights.  It is the difference between the Catholicism of Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the Catholicism of Amy Coney Barret and Brett Kavanaugh.  That it is dramatically obvious in their legal decisions on the Supreme Court that their religious orientation within Catholicism is very much in line with their legal decisions proves that this is, in fact, an extremely important matter in every practical way.   In one case, that of Justice Sotomayor, she favors egalitarian democracy and pluralism, in the case of the two "justices" they favor Republican-fascism, the rule of money owned by billionaire and millionaire gangsters, the ability of states to practice American style apartheid, the subjugation of women, in time they will roll back the protections of marriage equality and other hard fought reforms of the 20th and even 19th century and the destruction of the environment for profit.  They will, very soon, on a partisan basis, reject the ability of President Biden and Democratic governors to issue effective rules to prevent the spread of Covid-19.  

There is a difference between loving your enemies and praying for them and tolerating their empowerment to oppress, enslave, murder and set up a regime of Nazi or Soviet or American supported strong-man rule so as to bring about an era of grinding oppressive evil.  There is a difference between living with the differences that lead to different sects and denominations and even more basic religious differences on a basis of good will and mutual respect and living with sects, denominations and, perhaps, even larger divisions of religious identity which reject the bases of good will and mutual respect and living together in difference but in love and good will.  I don't think, as the stupid secular law would have it that we must make believe those differences are not obvious and must be allowed because judges and "justices" are either not trustworthy or honest enough to hold their jobs making such distinctions or because they want to pretend they are that stupid because they don't want the stupid and sleazy ones on a higher court to embarrass them by overruling their decisions.  And that is just how stupid our legal system is right now, pretending that con men and hucksters and liars those harnessing religiously gullible into political power and wealth are the same thing as the living saints among us.   I certainly wouldn't favor the violent oppression of the enemies of the common good but even more so I reject their empowerment on the basis of the inadequate language of the First Amendment - perhaps as dangerous as the inadequate language of the Second one.  

It is by their own choices that the enemies of good will, of equality, of a common, decent life for all remove themselves from the moral and rational tolerance for difference that should have an equal footing under law just as an alcoholic with a bad driving record removes themselves from those who should have a license to drive and the legal right to own a car.  

I will add as another practical example that under the Republican-fascist legal and political madness that we face right now, supported by ideologues and religious cultists, the sanity of depriving the dangerously mentally ill from having and carrying assault weapons is another kind of "equality" that is not only insanely irresponsible, no matter how the "justices" allowing it will come up with written "reasoning" to do the unreasonable, it's getting lots of us killed and that cannot go on forever, unstopped.  Moral pluralism cannot extend that far, not even when they call it religion advocated by millionaire hallelujah peddlers.

I Hope The High Class Child Trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell Saves Her Own Skin By Talking About The Rich, Powerful and Famous Men Who Also Raped Children

ANYONE WHO EXPECTS the convicted panderer and sex abuser, the rich, well-connected, deemed beautiful and attractive Ghislaine Maxwell will ever do anything out of a sense of shame and fear of ultimate consequences for her moral depravity is likely not correct.  Though I believe in the possibility of redemption, she'd be as hard a case for it taking hold as the scumbag rapist and child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and her own father, Robert Maxwell. 

I would like to know what she knew about the activities in the world of Epstein-Maxwell of a long list, Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz,  Bill Barr and is father, huge numbers of elite scientists and academics, people in the world of the sciences and the arts and finance.  I would love to know the relationship of Epstein and Maxwell to the new atheist fad of the 00's and on to today.   I wouldn't be surprised if their role in it was quite similar to the last Stalinist trust-fund atheist Corliss Lamont (the "last" might be slightly exaggerated, the "Stalinist" is spot on) with the immediate predecessors in organized anti-religion and atheism.   

I would, of course, like to see her spend the rest of a long life in prison for what she did as I wish he had, I really hope that what led to the death of Jeffrey Epstein - and I fully suspect he was murdered to keep him from fingering the rich, the powerful and the elite, being especially suspicious of the role Bill Barr played in his last hours - does not happen to her.   I would like her to truly, deeply, fully and effectively repent for her evil and try to do something to repair some of the damage to many girls and young women she gulled into the hands of Epstein and the men who raped and assaulted and tortured them, she is proven to have participated in that, as well.  I don't know if any other women were guilty as of now 

I would like that, I'm not waiting up nights.  I hope she has many nights awake with her consciousness of what brought her to where she is and I hope she comes to feel truly sorry for her sins.   If that happens, it's a good thing for her to go to prison because I doubt she would ever do it without prison.  It could be the best thing that has ever happened to her in her privileged, sordid, evil life.   Who knows, perhaps her telling what she knows about the dangerously rich and powerful and famous men will be part of that.  What I hope for her I also hope for them, their victims should be so lucky as to have a fittingly different and strong possibility for grace to be provided for them.   They deserve to have the metastasizing damage inflicted on them end and be repaired.

After That Depressing Post I Needed To Post Something More Hopeful

 

Direct link to video

I have to say watching them transplant the second female tree in what looked like deadly dry sand to me was kind of jarring but it's clear they know the territory better than I do.   I'd have to really change my thinking to do that kind of gardening. 

Of all the things I found out about in 2021, this was one of the ones that made me feel better about things. 

Chris Hayes' Realistic View Of Our Near Term Future Was One Of The Best I've Heard All During Covid But It Only Points To Understanding

 

Direct link to video 

My take on this is that all of the good that we can get from the freedom to determine our own lives and the course of our societies is defeated when that is turned to irresponsible, selfish, self-centered liberty to do whatever we want without responsibility.   I know using the word "liberty" so popular with, especially, conservatives but also with secular liberals in that contrast is bound to be everything from confusing to enraging but that's what it is.  Liberty removed from the morality of the Golden Rule which we cannot seem to extend to even our fellow humans, will always be a mortal danger to someone.  In this case, since a virus is involved, to everyone.

In the last part of Walter Brueggemann's lecture Slow Wisdom As A Subversion (or Sub-Version) of Reality he said that what is a proper lesson of kindergarten is also part of the relevant business of the university.   I think it can be condensed in the real, effective, responsible and consistent practice of moral responsibility and the fetish of liberty and individualism which is the underside of the credo of American civic faith is and always will be in opposition to that moral responsibility.  In normal times it is far less dramatically obvious to most people what the consequences of that selfish irresponsibility is because its consequences are not made real in a viral disease that can kill you or seriously disable you, very likely in some cases permanently.   

If, as I believe most likely, the disease originated in the brutally cruel wet market captivity and slaughter of wild animals so rich people could eat meat - AND LET'S NOT KID OURSELVES, IT COULD WELL HAVE ORIGINATED IN AN AMERICA, EUROPEAN OR THIRD-WORLD PIG MEAT OR CHICKEN OR DUCK OPERATION - its origin is from acts of callous human selfishness and feeding appetites. 

If, and though I don't believe it the idea is not entirely implausible, the virus was a result of human manipulation in a scientific lab, it was, again, created in an act of dubious responsibility, certainly one of wisdom generating something that scientists who never consider morality as a part of their purely scientific work certainly should have thought many times over whether or not they should do it.  I can't know if it was out of professional interest, the eternal quest among scientists to have something else to publish or, if it was to be concealed, to get them approval at work, or if it was merely the kind of scientific curiosity that I once heard an ex-Soviet scientist say led him to try to create the most deadly possible viruses he could construct with the tool of breeding he had at his dispose.  The ability of scientists to manipulate DNA at a level they can now makes the choice to permit science to be done merely out of a quest for knowledge and not with a strong hand of considering moral responsibility is probably one of the more dangerous things in human culture today.  I think it could turn out to be the thing that turns our ability to do science and the modernism that included the rise of modern science divorced from questions of morality into the definitive maladaptation as Darwinists conceive of them, leading to the extinction of our species as, in fact, science has given us the amorally used power to drive so many thousands of other species into extinction. 

It's been my experience of talking to some of them that many scientists don't even want us to consider the possibility that it originated in the work of scientists, as if they are not as prone to unintentionally carry a deadly virus out of the lab as a worker in raising animals in the meat industry could.   Even that level of moral awareness and reflection is anathema to them.  In the West, they don't even want the inconvenience of considering that their laxly supervised, dopey kid grad assistants are quite capable of getting infected and then going out into the wider world.  And I do think a lot of that is a matter of professional, faculty convenience. 

If what Chris Hayes said didn't scare you enough, I'll leave you with that thought, that the science that may save us from this one, and that's entirely dependent on medical, epidemiological and other branches of science being made effective by a morality that is absent from science, itself and that could be swamped by either the amorality of our feeding our appetites without regard for the suffering of our fellow creatures.  Or that scientists on the make are allowed to do some stupendously dangerous things that can escape the lab and spread like the Covid-19 virus has, even more dangerous things.   Though I think in this case it was viruses passing among different species, picking up mutations and passing into the human beings selling the miserable creatures to people to eat them.  The next one could, as ones in the past have, come from an American pig breeding operation or a chicken meat factory.   

It all started in allowing huge areas of human activity to sluff off moral considerations instead of practicing them.  As even the discussion of moral considerations became unfashionable and then distasteful in our pursuit of  liberty that has successfully been transformed from a value intrinsically wedded to responsibility into an idol of self-indulgence, there's nothing else to stop our self-extinction. 

You Save Humans And Animals Alike, O Lord - The Radical Salvation Possibilities Of The Belief That Jesus Was God Incarnated Which Is Unique To Christianity - A Christmas Post

WHILE NOT NOW INTENDING to transcribe her entire and great lecture about Deep Incarnation Theology, I am thinking of transcribing large sections of Sr. Elizabeth A. Johnson's lecture from last year "You save humans and animals alike, O Lord (Psalm 36:6) Reshaping Our Imagination of Salvation."   I am posting it here for anyone who wants to understand what I meant when I said Creation Theology was my preferred theological understanding.   I reject the traditional Catholic theology - though I think it's actually mostly a product of 17th century modernism - that radically limits the realm of salvation to a minority of the human population.  It is, I think, a product of the introduction of some of the more unfortunate Classical era pagan philosophy into the far broader implications of the greater Hebrew tradition, one which is far more in line with the ideology of the triad of control in Walter Brueggemann's lecture which I dealt with most of this month.  

I will admit that partly it is a response to the impending death of my sisters old and beloved dog, a dog I've known and had companionship with me for the past ten years - he was a tornado rescue dog who they estimated was three to four years old when she adopted him.  Partly it's a means of coping with the catastrophic consequences of the global environmental crimes of all People and all places putting the triad of control in power to govern us.  

The Deep Incarnation Theology like the Liberation Theology that I also like so much is the real alternative to that materialistic triad.  If it is folly then it is the kind of holy folly that Jesus exemplified and encouraged in his most radical of all programmatic triads, as Brueggemann talked about early in his lecture. 

If Sr. Johnson or whoever has the rights to her speech would not like me to transcribe it (I'm sure her text, if it is published, will be superior to my efforts) I would like them to tell me by posting a comment.  I will honor such a request.  If it's OK with her, I'd like to know that too.  Though I doubt she'll hear about this.  I'm always open to correction.  I love being corrected as opposed to the alternative of being mistaken.  

Here it is with the warning that the introduction goes on for about three and a quarter minutes.  

Direct link to video.

I Wish It Wasn't Thus But We MUST Learn The Lessons Of The Worse Than Futile Twenty-Years-War

I READ FORMER BRIT PRIME MINISTER Gordon Brown article in The Guardian decrying the humanitarian catastrophe that Afghanistan under Taliban and continuing war-lord rule is and have no idea of how he thinks "the West" could possibly do anything to improve things that twenty years of Western propped up governance of the country, costing trillions of dollars - much of it stolen - couldn't do.   

As I was reading it and its condemnation-exhortation of "the West" for not preventing what may be a catastrophe outside of our control AS, INDEED, MOST OF AFGHANISTAN WAS NOT IN "OUR" CONTROL FOR MOST OF THE PERIOD OF PROPPING UP THE ALLEGED CENTRAL GOVERNMENT,  I kept wondering, why is Gordon Brown not haranguing the Saudi and other oil rich oligarchies of the Middle-East to provide the 4.5 billion dollars he's calling on the West to pledge, not to mention the unmentioned prospect of re-involving westerners in a country so many of them and our Afghani allies had to be emergency rescued from and some of those eligible trapped by the deadline Trump set for American withdrawal.

I deplore the humanitarian catastrophe that Taliban rule and the consequences of that, largely foreign financed religio-gangster regime have brought  BUT IT IS CLEAR FROM THE TWO DECADE LONG EXPERIMENT OF TRYING TO REFORM AFGHANISTAN IN THE WAY BROWN WANTS, THE WAY HIS GOVERNMENT WANTED WHEN IT WAS PART OF THE COALITION FIGHTING TO SUPPORT A  GOVERNMENT LARGELY OF CROOKS AND LIARS THAT IT CAN'T BE DONE.  

We have no power to do what has to be done, if there was evidence that we would have even partial success instead of the kind of futile debacle that the Bush II, Obama, Trump Twenty-Year War that Biden finished was.  We have no power to change Afghanistan to rescue it from itself or what it is under the combined force of internal warlord gangsters, foreign financed religio-fascist-gansters, the power plays of surrounding countries and billionaire gangster money from the oil cleptocracies.  

We have got to get used to the fact that a terrible, violent, ruinously expensive twenty-year experiment has shown us the fate of those being destroyed by that reality IN THAT PLACE  is not in our hands.  We have no responsibility for what happens there, now, those who drove our efforts into disastrous ruin have that responsibility, they and their backers among the gangsters of the middle east and the Afghanistan region.  That they will almost certainly not take their responsibility seriously and will suffer no consequences is beyond our control.   I think, ironically, the one person in the West who will suffer the most from it is the one man who was brave enough who, when Trump along with his cronies in the region set an arbitrary end of America's presence in Afghanistan had the courage to face what that would bring, President Biden.   He will pay the price because the media-political-economic-academic establishment have seldom seen a futile and violent and dangerous incursion into an impossible war in an economically backward (non-)country that they didn't want the United States to commit to.

If Gordon Brown, ex-PM wants to make something of it, he should be lecturing those who have some real influence within Afghanistan.  Outside attempts from the West have never done much but make things worse at worst, merely revert to the status quo ante, at best. 

We should concentrate on getting any remaining American allies trapped in that hell hole out, we have a real moral commitment to those who trusted us from the time of Bush II, Obama and Trump.  The same ones who President Biden's political and media enemies are libeling and slandering so to hurt President Biden politically.  The others, we can cry for and plead for but we really can't help them.  If they want to blame someone they should blame the Saudis and others who created the Taliban and the Pakistani and Iranian power players and their own internal gangster-warlords and the culture that sustains that hell hole situation.  We have guilt there as a result of our war there but what's always been wrong with the place isn't something we are guilty of.

"Institutionalists" Should Have A Dictionary Definition "Those who will stand by spewing empty words as democracy is destroyed"

MERRICK GARLAND IS IN VIOLATION OF HIS OATH OF OFFICE, he is the kind of Department of Justice functionary which we learned about during the House Intelligence and Justice committee's hearings into Trump's illegal attempts to shake down the Ukrainian government to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden before the 2020 election.   I will never stop noting that in those hearings it was the lawyers, especially those associated with the Department of Justice who were empty suits with feet of clay even while it was clear that people in the Department of Defense and the State Department acted as brave patriots who are devoted to democracy and the rule of law in a way the large majority of lawyers proved they didn't.  When the diplomats and military officers called to testify were able to note how they stood up for democracy, the lawyers covered their own asses and used their devotion to their various institutions, the Department of Justice, so called, and the FBI. 

I don't know who in the Biden administration thought Merrick Garland would be a good Attorney General, they were tragically wrong.   If it was the same bunch who convinced Obama to nominate him to the Supreme Court, I'd like to know because they shouldn't have a hand in any kind of decision like that.  If it was Joe Biden's decision, alone, I pray that he does something about his big mistake before it's too late.  And I don't mean nominating him to the Supreme Court.

The graduates of the elite law schools, especially those Ivy League schools that have comprised a majority on the degraded and rotten Supreme Court have proven to be at best a very weak link in the security of democracy in the United States.  Democrats should have a stated and practiced policy of increasing the diversity in the higher courts to lessen the influence of, especially, Harvard Law, Yale, Princeton and the other schools which have given us so many of the worst Supreme Court "justices," Attorneys General and others who have done so much to use the law to destroy democracy and those who, allegedly devoted to democracy, such as Garland, will, nonetheless, let Republican-fascists burn it up so as not to disturb the cotillion-like propriety of their own, according to its rules, faultless professional life.   The nice order that Merrick Garland upholds in his nonfeasance is exactly what the economist Thorstein Veblen called "futile classicism" only he was talking about something that was innocuous, standard English spelling.   The futile classicism that Merrick Garland is upholding is giving the Peter Navarro-Steve Bannon fascists more than their January 6th putsch and criminal conspiracy among Republicans in Congress did. 

Please, President Biden, tell Merrick Garland to resign while it's still possible to replace him with someone who will do his goddamned job.