Saturday Night Radio Drama - Ray Bradbury - Zero Hour

 

Another re-performance by the Riverside Township Radio Players. 

 

How Republican-fascists Are Just Like Al Qaeda

 

Last Words On The First Recordings

THE EARLIEST PRE-ELECTRIC recordings by legendary artists are generally fascinating, especially if they were made well enough and are in good enough condition to give you some real ideas of how they sang or played, the idea that you could name one or, more as "the greatest" isn't artistic judgement, it's ad copy.  

Ephraim Zimbalist (the violinist, not his son the actor) and Fritz Kreislers' 1915 performance of the Bach Double Concerto is an interesting recording by two legendary violinists of that era, interesting for a lot of things but as historically informed Bach performance, not so much.   On the other hand there are recordings of legendary performer-composers such as Eugen Ysaye playing their music and others such as Joseph Joachim playing music composed for them by composers such as Brahms, pieces they played in front of and sometimes with the composers.  Some of the early singers were still impressive performers of pieces they sang for the composers in the period before recording.  Emma Eames, Adelina Patti, Pol Pancon, etc.  Alas, there were no students of Bach or Mozart or even Beethoven alive to make it to even the earliest recordings.  If the students of their students of their students are a dim reflection of the performance practice of them is highly doubtful.   We know that even Liszt, answering a critic, admitted that he played Beethoven, who he had heard and played for, in an audience pleasing way instead of as Beethoven would have.  

In regard to the comment, while there's no way to really know, Joachim's Bach recording of the g minor adagio from the Suite BWV 1001strikes me as closer to the performance practice as described by contemporary musicians of Bach's time.   I'd rather hear either Zimbalist (who really was, by evidence of the recordings, a great violinist) or others in repertoire more suited to their style of playing.   But when I go looking for the early stuff the most interesting to me is hearing composers playing their own music or those who composers chose to premier their music and who learned it under the composers' instruction playing it.  Fritz Kreisler also shines better in repertoire closer to his own time, including his own composition.   His use of vibrato and his choice of tempos in Brahms is especially fascinating.  

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Though I haven't really listened to a lot of them and haven't really studied them, I have come to have my opinion of SOME of the player piano rolls recorded by composers who were great performers changed for the better.  Those of Enrique Granados strike me as genuine artistic artifacts.  Here is one he made in 1908 of his own piece.

Quejas, ó la maja y el ruiseñor

I've always thought Granados was a far more significant composer than he is generally considered to be, though some of that may have been his untimely death when the Germans sank the Sussex at the height of his creative life.  The witness stories that he died trying to save his wife Amparo - neither of whom would have been on the boat if Woodrow Wilson hadn't requested he play a  recital for him - might make a tragic opera.

For comparison, here's an acoustic recording of him (not perhaps played back to its best possible effect) playing an improvisation on El Pelele in 1912.

One of the comments says that this recording has been re-done using the Zenph computer system in which acoustic recordings are processed by computer analysis to reproduce the notes, the pitch, the duration, the volume, the attack and their arrangement to be played back on a piano by the computer.  I haven't heard that, given how impressed I've been with the piano rolls maybe that would convince me too.  The one recording I've heard some of by that method was done in order to get a Stereo version of Glenn Gould's "First Goldberg,"  a project I can't say would interest me much to hear.  I am not a Glenn Gould fan, especially not his Bach or Mozart or Beethoven playing.  Especially not those composers.  Even given the recent research into tempo from that period which might, AND THAT'S A BIG MIGHT, justify some AND THAT'S A VERY DEFINITE SOME of the slow tempos Gould was infamous for there are other aspects of his playing that I can't tolerate, especially his playing music he disdained for commercial reasons and his self-indulgences, even extending to altering the composers' note choices.  

Anyway, I think I've gotten this topic out of my system for a while.  Kind of makes me miss being an active musician because of the pandemic.  At my age nostalgia is fatal to continuing the artistic effort as opposed to wallowing in my own past.  I think I'll go see what Stephen Drury and the Callihumpians are getting up to these days. 

UPDATE:  Well, there's a reason I call him "Stupy" a number of them, actually, one is that he was stupid enough to let me know how I could get under his thin skin when he picks a fight with me.  If he were smart he wouldn't pick fights with me and he especially wouldn't let me know how to annoy him when he tries to.   

As to his accusations of antisemitism, I figured that one out.  He's such a jerk that he's always annoying people and if he can pretend they don't like him because of his ethnicity he doesn't have to face the fact it's because he's an asshole.

Something Different

 

 

I've been neglecting the music side of things here over the past year.  I've been listening to the fine restorationist, conservator of early recordings Ward  Marston's Youtubes and have been absolutely fascinated.  This one gives you a good example of how much musical information there is in even the early low-tech recordings.   When he demonstrates the problems involved with finding the right needle and playback speed to get that information back it's pretty surprising how much of a difference that makes.   When he lets us hear what a repressing of the original master on vinyl instead of "shellac" is like was especially surprising.   A lot of what I thought of the early recordings was clearly wrong, some of that was due to bad or incompetent re-recording of those.   I'd already had my mind changed that by the Prima Voce recordings issued by Nimbus, some of which were a revelation.   I had a link, somewhere, once, that showed the enormous wooden horn they played discs back into a concert hall to make those recordings but I don't have time to look for it again. 

One of the things I've learned is that some of those I'd never heard of before were spectacularly good singers.  Probably the one who I was most astonished to hear was one I'd never heard of before, Celestina Boninsegna who was, apparently, famous for how well her voice recorded with the earliest non-electrical recording technology  Here she is singing Tacia la Notte Placida by Verdi in 1905. 

 

From what I read, she was well regarded but wasn't considered as good on stage as some of the other stars of her day.   She sounds pretty amazing to me. 

Got to go work in the greenhouse.  Used to be a piano teacher, now I'm a drudge. 

 

FROM NOW ON I won't be posting anonymous comments.  I have no idea if most of the people who try to post comments here are who they say they are but they should at least adopt a consistent online identity.   I have deleted the anonymous comment I posted two days ago with the request that the writer register.   Most of those who post hate mail here fail on the contents.  If they want to comment they should avoid slandering third parties, they should not lie and they should at least be a source of amusement to me if they choose to be stupid.

Make Harvard Law Wear Him Like The Cheap Suit He Is

ALAN DERSHOWITZ yesterday using his Harvard Law granted expertise on FOX to declare Trump's ridiculous "First Amendment lawsuit" grift was “the most important First Amendment case of the 21st Century,” should, among other things, lead to either the Harvard Law faculty expelling him and removing his credentials or it should result in them being declared the whore house that the likes of Dershowitz and the right-wing hacks who largely fill it has made it.  Harvard is a whore house, a knocking shop for credentialing the oligarchy and its henchmen, it's not the only one but it's the one responsible for producing Dershowitz in all his sleazy, Neo-fascist, torture advocating,  Epstein expressed, massaged repulsiveness.  It should wear him like the cheap suit he is.

The Higher Rearrangment Of Prejudices

ONE THING MY recent fall back into the bad habit of engaging with an idiot has taught me is that for many, perhaps especially those with mere college-credentialing, the idea of thinking, of reasoning, of being informed is merely a matter of reciting the common received "wisdom" of their own conventional ideological preference community, it has nothing to do with fact checking and testing for the rationality of conclusions.  In fact, if you do those two basic acts of responsible scholarship - something they should have started teaching them in about the fifth-grade - you will be regarded as a idiot if you point out the gap between evidence supported truth and what they like to hear repeated.  

I think there's a lot to be learned in why the major venues of the left, the old ones like The Nation and The Progressive, the newer ones like In These Times and the "new media" venues are stuck in the same ever replenished pile of bull shit that the Marxist-anarchist-"free thinking" (read "atheist") left has been in since Karl Marx was alive and distancing himself from the Marxists, not that they took the clue from him.   The anti-religious play-left has never produced shit even as they never produced anything else but that and defeat for the real left.   

There's definitely a means of diagnosing the reason for the failure of the left after 1968 in that.  And from what I see, the Marxists and anarchists are giving their own version of prion disease to the younger generation of lefties.  Don't look to people so gulled to make any headway in defeating the neo-Soviet push for world-wide fascism.   I notice that The Nation was again carrying Putin's water the other day as it once did earlier Russian dictators, though often once removed through the dear old, poor, victimized American commies.  Always beware of a trust-fund lefty bearing funding.   I can imagine some of its better writers are pretty disgusted with the owners.

It's been years since I saw an ink on paper copy, does that personal ad for proving Jesus was a fake still run there?  I wish I had piles of old copies to see if, as I recall, it pretty much appeared in every one of them.  It's like certainly did.  But those have all long since gone to recycling.

The Anti-Religious Left Fails By Its Own Scientific Metric And On Its Other Chosen Tests

IN THE HEADY DAYS when I as so many others were being introduced to the brave new world of online self-publishing, in those early days of 20 years ago, blogs, a lot of us saw the potential for correctives of the corporate media and, maybe, the salvation of democracy.  Alas, it quickly turned out that self-publishing was also available to the fascists and they had financial backing and were the ones that the media would pick up.   C-Span, through Brian Lamb's Washington Journal gave a big leg up to a lot of them, some of them among the worst, Matt Drudge, for example, and, since I still listened to it, NPR was always ready to do the same.   And as well, there where the online magazines which had backing, Politico and  The Hill were favorites for citation at "public radio" (for an example of how naive the left can be in its aspirations) and on "the left" there was always Salon being cited, if my memory of the recent, distant past holds up.

It took me about four years after 2002 to figure out that my early optimism was foolishly optimistic, one of the earliest and most promising of the "new media" venues,  Media Whores Online ceased posting and left it to a host of spin-off blogs, Eschaton and SullyWatch, what one always had to designate as "the good Roger Ailes" blog, . . . some of which kept it up longer than others, some of which quickly decayed into silliness and jr. high for seniors.   I'll give this to Sully Watch and "the good" Roger Ailes, they got out of it with a lot more dignity than others did.

But there were others who kept up a higher level of writing though too few of them got to do what Digby of Hullaballoo did, make the jump to magazine level and not all of them who did make that jump were the best.  My former colleague at Echidne of the Snakes, though a extremely good writer, especially for someone for whom English is a second language and a very fine researcher has not been picked up by anyone - the paid writing profession with the demise of print or, rather, paid advertising for journalism, isn't what it recently once was.  

One of the things I quickly learned from the "new media" and, especially, unmoderated, unedited comment threads is that a lot of "the left" is actually rather conservative, a lot of it frivolous and rather uncommitted to serious change, interested in upholding what is merely a different set of tribal myths and lies and pushing an ideological preference instead of making actual, real change in things. 

And a lot of it was an expression of conceit based on nothing much.  In the process of reading tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of comments on such comment threads, I've come to the conclusion that honesty required that I stop using the phrase "college educated" and admit that a lot of those in my cohort were merely credentialed by their universities and colleges.  If it was always so, I can't say because previous generations never left the evidence of that in an easily accessible form.  My joke which is only about a quarter joke that it's what happened when, during my generation, so many colleges and universities dropped requirements such as Frosh Rhetoric is not entirely unserious.  Though I think the demise of such requirements even earlier in education, as soon as the rage and fever of puberty wanes into what used to be an expectation that achieving actual adulthood was to be tried, is even more true.  Thinking and reasoning are too good to limit the attempt to achieve it to those who go to college.   I've known people who had to drop out of school when they were 16 or even younger who achieved it to a far higher degree than those with a graduate degree have.  I would trade you Abraham Lincoln or even Harry Truman for most of today's elite-Ivy-Ivy-Equivalent graduates in government.  It's possible to promote reasoning and thought in grade school and high school and in the real replacement of those as education, the media,  and it should be required, "free press" without the requirement to serve the interests of egalitarian democracy doesn't work.  

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That was a prelude to going over two articles from the last few days, one at one of the online magazines of more variable quality, from very good to very bad, Raw Story, the other from The Daily Beast which is generally somewhat better.  I got to that through RMJ posting the Raw Story twitter hook for its alleged summary of David Rothkopf's piece at The Daily Beast and read the two articles, seeing immediately that, typical of its anti-religion ideological preference, ignored most of what Rothkopf said in which lies told by religion was only one and hardly the most damning of the sources of lies.   Though I think both of them are seriously wrong headed,  Matthew Chapman's is the worse of the two.  That Chapman has written for the equally anti-religious Alternet is certainly relevant to seeing where he's coming from.  I'll leave it to you to read the pieces and see what I'm talking about for yourselves.  I've got another couple of points to make.

Along with what I wrote yesterday about how the "skeptical" community, the materialist-scientistic-atheist old farts of CSICOP and CSI and Michael Shermer's branch of that industry despise and disdain UFO and extra-terrestrial talk they don't like but are entirely comfortable with the as outrageous claims of their own, Carl Sagan, Francis Crick, etc. the political secular "left" is also seriously hypocritical about religion in politics. 

Right now, one of the major means of voter suppression being passed into now Supreme Court sanctioned law is the suppression of voting on Sunday, especially in the hours right after church services typically let out to thwart the very important "Souls To The Polls" practice of Black Churches, in which they bring large numbers of their congregants to vote directly from church services on Sunday.   The struggle to prevent Republican-fascists from suppressing the votes of Black Voters hinges on the votes of those who have just heard things that David Rothkopf would probably call "lies" that he blames for the rise of Trumpist fascism in the Republican-fascist party.   That is perhaps as true for other religious groups who are important to other Democratic hopes for defeating Republican-fascism, though I don't think many of them are as well organized or which could bring such large numbers to the polls.  A lot of those Black Churches would probably self-identify or be identified as "evangelical."  

I've pointed out many times that the Civil Rights Movement was successful when it was identified primarily with The Reverened Martin Luther King jr, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and that when secularists grabbed the mic and took over, that success halted.  The things that are under attack by the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court and, as they have reinstated Jim Crow, in Republican controlled states, were achieved when the movement was identified with and largely brought to effectiveness through the Black Churches, other churches playing an important but lesser role in it. And that is true of the even earlier Civil Rights struggle AND DESPITE WHAT THE SECULARISTS WILL CLAIM THE ABOLITION MOVEMENT.   It was one of the early things I did in response to something written by one of the best of the secular lefty blogs, researching the actual history of the abolitionist movement and finding out that it was, in fact, almost exclusively done by those who cited religion as their primary motive, most of all the Black opponents of their own enslavement, those who "stole" themselves to freedom, those who became free through legal means and those who joined them from the white population from the Germantown Quakers and John Woolman right through till the end of legalized slavery which was reimposed in much of the country through the secular "non-establishment" separation of church and state Constitution.   

Today, as I noted in response to the claim that religion is a major motivation of the Republican-fascists that when I've observed and experienced neo-facist violence adherence to the teachings of Jesus, Paul, James, The Prophets and The Law is not in evidence in their words and actions.  I would bet that in the fascist insurrection of January 6th, the fascists broke the commandment on taking The Lord's name in vain, the ban on bearing false witness (which was the catalyst that set it off) and many other assorted violations of the religion that only some of those fascists profess outnumbered citations of scripture.  If there was any "religion" in evidence it was that of the Qanon "Shaman" and whatever that was, it wasn't something mainstream Christianity, Judaism or Islam would necessarily endorse.  It was closer to the Nazi paganism of Himmler than the Christianity of The Reverend William Barber or the Islam of Keith Ellison.  

What's wrong with "white evangelicals" isn't that they're too religious, it's that they're not really religious.   If they have a religion it's a christianity falsified by the neo-slave power with a large does of Hollywood "bible" epics and other fascist produced garbage.   As RMJ also pointed out, through another Raw Story link, the degenerate Republican-fascist Lauren Boebert is invoking just such an abiblical, Hollywood John Wayne - Charlton Heston kind of "Jesus" in her recent ranting.  

If "religion" is to be faulted for this it is the refusal of those who may be more open to doing the far harder work of following Jesus than the easy as lying "praise the lord" fakery that is the sum and substance of the religion of most "white evangelicals" being too nice and polite to take them on in a religious brawl, a defense of the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets.   I point out MOST WHITE EVANGELICALS because the fact is that there were likely more White Evangelicals who supported Hillary Clinton and opposed Trump than there are atheists and agnostics combined, if the Pew research numbers that everyone cites are to be the basis of discussion.  If you add in all of the Christians and Jews and Muslims who voted for Clinton and the most observant Catholic president in our history, Joe Biden, as to compare that total to the one that Raw Story, Alternet, perhaps David Rothkopf see as the salvation of American democracy, you'll quickly see that they are all mathematically absurd in their contentions, the numbers don't only not support their contentions, they refute them rather definitely.   If Joe Biden and Hilllary Clinton had not had the "white religious vote" behind them, Trump would be in office because there simply are not enough non-religious voters (NOT ALL OF WHOM VOTED AGAINST TRUMP, BY THE WAY) to make up an electoral majority.  On the basis of something like the science that is worshiped by all of them, what David Rothkopf says is a search for "the truth".   Ironically, Rothkopf cites exactly the kind of social science I am skeptical of for its scientific insufficiency but which I cite in refutation of his contention in regard to religion because their own choice of metric refutes them.  

I am afraid—and those people thrive on lies, follow liars, reject the search for truth, fear science and history and math, don’t want to do the work required to figure out what is really happening around them—then we will have an irreparably fucked-up government.

Yes, we will, and I can report that if other people thrive on the lies they like, we'll have an irreparably fucked-up "left" such as the one we have had ever since The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. was martyred, though the Christian left has kept on a lot longer than the Yippies and the various Marxists, secularists and assorted anti-religious lefties of that era have.   

And, though this is already too long, I will point out that all of these "new media" venues have entirely let off the real motivation of the Republican-fascists, the mass media which all take up a lot more of the lives and times of the fascists and the college-credentialed play-lefties than any church ever has excepting, perhaps within a few cloistered religious communities.  The screen, computer, TV, movie, is the school of fascism, the First Amendment has never allowed those who run those a freer hand than it has had in the period in which Trumpian fascism rose TRUMP AS A FASCIST FORCE AS NEWT GINGRICH BEFORE HIM WAS A CREATION OF THE MEDIA.   The media is the church of fascism, Hollywood and Madison Ave (what used to be shorthand for the ad industry, for you younger people who might have gotten this far).   Yet these professional and semi-professional writers, their "new media" venues won't admit that is where all of this has really come from because it's a violation of their secular religious sensibilities, their tribal code and their financial self-interest.

According To A College-Credentialed Professional Journalist Who Trolls Me

I have no idea how much of what it says in that article is true, neither do I want to.  

+

As it is, as mentioned,  I have no way of knowing whose memory of what happened is more accurate or if none of them are.  That's for them, individually to figure out. 

=

"nixing the possibility that Don "American Pie" McLean might have been, as his daughter has charged, an abusive father."

Also that my complete agnosticism about life on other planets figured into it but this is enough to prove he's a. an idiot and b. a liar.   I don't think the idiot understands the concept of not jumping to conclusions, the college-credentialed blog-rat community doesn't seem to get withholding judgement on the basis of insufficient information and minding your own friggin' business.   Way too many people got college credentials who should have had to demonstrate a capacity to think they never developed.  

If they wanted to improve education in the United States they'd renew the requirement of all Freshmen passing a rigorous course in basic rhetoric including how to reason and make reasoned arguments.  Way too many people in my generation got away without one of those.  Including that idiot. 

Update:  OK, he's bored me again.  A lifetime in the mines of pop kulcha has given him a fatal case of sillycootsis.

My Excuse For The Interruptions - "It is an endless interpretive negotiation."

WHEN I GET THE TIME to type out parts of the lecture-sermon-Q&As of Walter Brueggemann's lessons on Jeremiah, into and out of the abyss, I'll go into those because there is more in them that would be better if you had the text to look at.  That's one of the problems of posting these things in videos instead of linking to or typing out a transcript, it's easier to listen to and I've got no illusions about it, people will be more likely to listen to a video than read my transcript of it.  But to really engage with what Brueggemann said the text is the most effective way to do it.  

The discussion in the third week between him and the Episcopal pastor who introduced the lectures on the tension between the Jeremiah (the Sinai theology) and Isaiah (the more establishment theology) and how we, depending on the occasion and what was said, choose between them is especially good.  Brueggemann's parallel between Jeremiah and The Reverend Jeremiah Wright's cherry picked, distorted and lied about "God damn America" prophesy is especially powerful.  He, as Jeremiah was saying what was not permitted to be said and, as Brueggemann notes, Obama on the spot "ran for cover."  I can certainly understand why he did that, democratic politics is often no more open to hard truth than the royal house in Jerusalem was - as he noted earlier in the lecture.   If Obama agreed with Wright - which I tend to doubt he would have wanted to - it's understandable that he would do that, it's not the role of a Sinai prophet to say what's popular but to tell the truth - as in the previous discussion of the trial of Jeremiah in which the earlier trial of Malachi is invoked. 

I will leave it to you to go on and hear what he said about how, in the great parable of Lazarus and the rich man, Jesus did what is so hard to do, reconcile those two lines of prophesy that are inherently in some tension with each other. 

In order to do that justice I will have to type out more of it than I have time to right now - unless I'm willing to do it badly which I'd rather not do.   I should have waited till November to do this series but that gets into the holiday season when I don't think this would play well.   People want Isiah around Christmas.   Isiah has good stuff in it, too.  For anyone who claims that this is the easy way out as compared to secularism, they don't know what they're talking about, its conflicts that have to be engaged are built into it and are inescapable.

A Passing Shower Allows Me To Go To The Hate Mail File

IT'S KIND OF FUNNY to be accused of being a believer in "UFOs" when I've never done anything except note the extreme improbability of them being from alien life  from  distant planets, at least based on current human concepts of physics and "the laws of nature."  If they know something we don't, well, that might narrow the odds.  Or they could just be smarter than us.  Or maybe its done through some kind of psychokinesis that, due to the orthodoxy of science and polite academia, is forbidden to serious consideration.  More about that in a minute.

I've repeatedly mocked the true faith of Carl Sagan that there must be billions and billions of planets with life on them, though the last article I saw on that that the other day was extremely pessimistic about that due to photosynthesis enabling light being a lot scarcer than previously noted.   Which may be the limit that they think it is or it might be totally wrong because other lines of life elsewhere use an entirely different chemistry which we cannot imagine producing life.  I've mocked Carl Sagan and his invention of what should be considered a pseudo-science because the scientific study of "exo-biology" in the absence of so much as a single sample of "other life" to study is entirely unable to fulfill the first and second requirements of the alleged requirements of science, observation and measurement.  They do without those replacing fantasy for them and, yet, they get loads of funding to do such science.*  

I have been, if anything, even more critical of the fantasies of the likes of Francis Crick who get by the extreme improbabilities calculated for the spontaneous assembly of the first organism in the theorized line of all known current life on Earth (a speculation I accept as a working basis for talking about this).  They get by it by claiming that "first life" got here as teensy organisms on meteorites or, as Crick proposed, by an intentional experiment by the intelligent design of extra-terrestrials, adding layer upon layer of improbability on top of those already known and adding the ones of how did his deus ex machina of alien scientists come about through natural selection on some other, unknown planet.   Atheists aren't nearly as smart as a group as we were all gulled into believing because so many of them have PhDs.   Neither are people holding PhDs in a lot of cases.  Not to mention that his proposal actually made him, a Darwinist of the most extreme materialistic type a hater of religion and all else not in line with his orthodoxy,  a proponent of intelligent design, but one who was not terribly intelligent, himself.

My first question about that was who lives that long to do an experiment that would take so long (though we might just be dirt left in a test tube and they got their results billions and billions of years ago and left us to ourselves) or, more saliently, what funding agency would give such a loony research program that kind of funding?  

This is a long way round to saying that though I've looked at the careful, controlled research into what is called "extrasensory perception" and noted that it is far, far better science than anything I'm aware of done and fully accepted by science as psychology, sociology or anthropology (or "exobiology" for that matter) and have used the refusal of the ideological atheism, scientism, materialism, "skepticism" to treat that research honestly and objectively, that has nothing whatever to do with UFOlogy, which I have never researched nor have I seen any actual scientific research into.   The only thing common to that topic of interest and the one I wrote about, extensively as a study of the anti-scientific dishonesty of ideological materialism has to do with the same materialists being so two-faced on the topic.  They like the talk about "alien life" that they like and the hate and deride the talk about it that they don't like.   It's most interesting as an extreme example of the hypocrisy of the culture of materialistic, scientistic, atheism within and without science and as is a required position within respectable academic culture these days.   

As for the released film footage, sure looks like there's something there to me, especially those recording the reaction of large groups of people with a lot to lose as they are seeing and recording what they're seeing.   I wouldn't expect the heir of Carl Sagan, the equally annoying Neil deGrasse Tyson to do anything but uphold the old CSICOP line on that as he goes on the talk shows.   He's got a professional interest in upholding that old line orthodoxy his teacher cashed in on before him.   I also don't expect any talk show host to ask him embarrassing questions about the hypocrisy of his ideology for not slamming exobiology or the likes of Francis Crick for resorting to claiming life had to have been put here by the intelligent design of aliens or otherwise got here by even more improbable means than the conventional faith that it just, somehow happened.  Even though in that case, how do they get away with pretending that the absence of subsequent spontaneous generation of life happening isn't a problem for the faith that random-chance did it all.

I will add that my skepticism about the controlled, scientific research into extrasensory perception isn't that they haven't fulfilled the highest requirements ever placed on any researchers into any area of human minds because they clearly have, it's because of possible problems with the use of statistical analysis in the behavioral and cognitive sciences, in general.   I've only read enough into that to have questions about it, though almost all conventionally accepted science of that sort fails rather disastrously on other methodological bases even without those.  As far as the conventional mathematical use of statistics by those in the study of "ESP" or "PSI" or whatever you want to call it, many eminent statisticians and mathematicians who have looked into that question going back to the time of Dr. Rhine have said that their use of probability and statistics is absolutely valid so I defer to the experts on that.  It's a question of IF the use of those methods in the study of human minds and behavior is valid and that's not a question I'm aware anyone has answered.  And if it has, then pretty much all of psychology and sociology will have to be scrapped, though they should be for those other lapses anyway.

*  As I've noted recently, I have stopped using the scare quotes around science of that sort because if scientists are going to admit such junk to the canon of science, they are going to have to live with the consequences of skepticism by some of us along with the unthinking acceptance by the idiots of the media and in the general public. 

Update:  I need to get back to the weeds, here's what a materialist-scientistic-atheist who is also an obnoxious ideologue but who was forced into honesty about that said:

I used to believe it was simply a figment of the National Enquirer's weekly imagination that the Science Establishment would cover up evidence for the occult. But that was in the era B.C. -- Before the Committee. I refer to the "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal" (CSICOP), of which I am a cofounder and on whose ruling Executive Council (generally called the Council) I served for some years.

I am still skeptical of the occult beliefs CSICOP was created to debunk. But I have changed my mind about the integrity of some of those who make a career of opposing occultism.

I now believe that if a flying saucer landed in the backyard of a leading anti-UFO spokesman, he might hide the incident from the public (for the public's own good, of course). He might swiftly convince himself that the landing was a hoax, a delusion or an "unfortunate" interpretation of mundane phenomena that could be explained away with "further research."

The irony of all this particularly distresses me since both in print and before a national television audience I have stated that the conspiratorial mentality of believers in occultism presents a real political danger in a voting democracy. Now I find that the very group I helped found has partially Justified this mentality.

If The NSA or FBI Revealed This No One Would Have Any Trouble Noticing Its Downside

WHEN YOU ASKED ME what I thought about the accusations made by his daughter and ex-wife against Don McLean, my first thought was "Who?"  

I'd stopped listening to pop music radio by the time he became famous, I heard "American Pie" though not often enough for much of it to seep into my memory.  I didn't find it interesting, a vague, longish list of pop culture references, so I didn't much pay attention to it.

I wonder why his daughter wants to launder the family linen in Rolling Stone, the impulse of famous people and somewhat famous people, those marginally famous and connected with their famous parents or others to display their family linen in the media is something I don't get at all.  If I ever had the misfortune of fame I'd hope that it included wealth enough to warn my entire family that anyone who displayed our family or myself through the media was guaranteed to be disinherited,   And the wisdom to not expose them to widespread notice  where people who knew them would hear what I said.   What I've done here doesn't  have that potential, though perhaps I should be more careful from now on. 

I have no idea how much of what it says in that article is true, neither do I want to.  If she figures she has some legal complaint to make about it she should be talking to the police or a lawyer.  Anything up to that is none of my or the public's business.  If she ever asked my advice I'd suggest that she might want to salvage something out of it so, unless there are actual legal issues which she has a moral duty to report to the proper authorities, she should keep it private.  It might be better for her to enjoy the dignity of privacy instead.   

As it is, as mentioned,  I have no way of knowing whose memory of what happened is more accurate or if none of them are.  That's for them, individually to figure out.    If she and her 75 year old father are never to have a rapprochement, it would be better if we never knew about it.  I'd never write about things in my family if I thought they would violate the privacy of its members, as it is, having no one care about you in the way celebrity brings is a wonderful thing, too.   If there is one thing I wish people could recover it is a sense of privacy and the pleasure of easy, courteous, friendly, egalitarian anonymity. 

Yes, I think I will be more careful, though since anyone in my family is obscure enough for that kind of exposure to not be a great danger, I hope I learn something from this.  

I wonder what her reaction would be, her level of outrage and those who read it would be if she found out the NSA or FBI were looking at the metadata of her online communication, collecting far, far less by way of personal information on her and her family than she gave to Rolling Stone to publish.  One thing she can be sure of now, everyone, including those who work at those agencies and others around the world know a lot more than caused the outrage over that a few years back.

July 4th After The Roberts Court Reinstated Jim Crow

MAKE ALL AMERICANS EQUAL FINALLY

Equality is the true basis of modern democracy, only on the basis of equality will a democracy not implode into an oligarchy as the first "democracy" never escaped being and which it imploded into and oligarchy was the motive of the aristocrats who rigged the American system of government for the slave owners and the finaciers and their modern descendants who are the de-facto ruling class of the United State even as we celebrate the The merely theoretical "freedom" and the "rights" that the First Congress had to adopt as a deal to adopt the Constitution by those rightly suspicious of the results of the Constitutional Convention.  

The realization that the language of "rights" and the notion of freedom was far, far from being a secure basis for democracy and that only full equality made that kind of talk and thinking safe  took me a while.   Considering I was not totally ignorant of American history, it should have taken me a lot less time.  One of the better early clues was seeing the crypto-fascist William F. Buckley's denigration of equality as an endangerment of HIS kind of freedom, the freedom of the rich to steal, cheat, lie and govern over the interests of those they wanted to fleece and cheat and, ultimately, use.  Oligarchs have always wanted their individual freedoms to do those things unimpeded by the government, they are the beneficiaries of those crimes that Balzac wisely noted were behind all great fortunes and if they ran things they could come to an agreement among themselves to do so without the government being any problem.  That is what you are going to see in the Roberts Court as they dare to impose that on the United States, this latest ruling to reinstate a modified Jim Crow proves that they aren't going to let reasoning or the truth interfere with their wordsmithing opinions that do exactly what they and their patrons want in that regard.

 

That I am white and male, though also gay and so a member of a partially oppressed group, certainly also figured in my tardiness to learn the lesson that equality was the actual and safe basis of democracy, a system of government put into power on the basis of a majority vote, I suspect that it was a lesson that Native Americans, Black Americans, Latino Americans, Asian and Pacific Americans would find far easier to understand.  It seems to be as hard for white women to comprehend and white women have had a far harder time of things than a white man who could, if he chose to, pass as a member of the favored class for all of American history, including now, straight, white males, a minority who still rule and are still the major force in the media, in the law, in government as they were when the Constitution was written and adopted and all through its period of amendment.  White privilege is as basic to understanding the history of the United States as European immigration and theft of North America.  In fact, they are the same thing.

So, this is my 4th of July message.  Equality should always be understood as being the only guarantee that an electoral democracy will really be free and a guarantor of rights, that is as plain as the legal methods that are being adopted and employed to prevent it in voting which are going on right now as they were in the period after the Civil War, after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War amendments were adopted and, especially, as the Electoral College and a corrupt deal made by Rutherford Hayes (who should be among the most despised of Presidents, known for nothing more as John Roberts' name should be infamous for this ruling as "Taney" is ) with the slave power to impose Jim Crow with the full support of the Supreme Courts, then, coming up with one after another legal argument with precedent in law to reimpose a de facto and partial slavery and to suppress other groups, making them less than fully human even as they wanted their own class of people to be.  Real history matters if you tell the full truth about it and the more privileged you are the less likely you will be to tell the full truth because there's no reason for anyone to allow privilege any privilege.

Saturday Night Radio Drama Plus - Malachy McKenna - The Quiet Land

 

The Quiet  Land

 

In the hidden Ireland off the new EU infrastructure of motorway and ring-road, two elderly farmers lean on a fence and talk in the low-key code of near neighbours; and the transcript of their talk, which is the text of this year’s outright winner in the annual PJ O’Connor competition, is a little masterpiece of hint and intimation, for these men are more vulnerable than venerable in a country where old age has no cachet.

The Quiet Land is also a master-class, served as it is by a brace of actors - Kevin Flood and Barry Cassin - who’ve accumulated between them a hundred and thirty years of rich theatrical experience. It’s authored by Malachy McKenna, a player-turned-playwright, who’s best known for his film Tillsonberg. The play is his first piece for radio.

Producer Aidan Mathews

There's a little bit of an introduction with Kevin Flood on the occasion of his 90th birthday that gives a little bit of an idea of what being a professional radio actor was like.  

I'll remind you that there are a lot of available plays at the podcast tab, some of them are better than others but most of those I've heard are worth the time.  How much of TV can you say that about? 

Update:  Meet The Author

Malachy McKenna in what I guess could be considered a five minute play:

Someone Objects To My Modest Proposal - Hate Mail

ANYONE WHO WOULD NOT WANT to see what a musical based on Titus Andronicus in which the Trump family and its lackeys were substituted for the characters in the play would be like has no soul and no sense of theater nor of fun.  I would certainly encourage Randy Rainbow to consider the project, though I would avoid any of the current Broadway composers for the music, their music sucks.   Just think of the staging possibilities, I've mentioned Melania's blood Christmas set.  And instead of baking them into a pie you could turn Donny jr. and Eric into cheese burgers and have Trump preside over the feast like this:

At this point I'd have a hard time calling a re-tread of something done to death as much as West Side Story has been a "revival."   It might be one in the same sense that you could call them pumping who knows what chemicals into the remains of Lenin one too. 

I Am Asked

. . .  what I think of Milo Yiannopolous announcing that he's an ex-gay "ex-sodomite" to which I say I haven't thought about that piece of white-supremacist detritus from England in years.   If he's gone straight all I can say is he's your problem now.  

I will take the opportunity to ask why he or Gavin McGinnis are allowed in the United States, they should be deported if they are still here and permanently barred from entry.   You can include Andrew Sullivan on that list, as far as I'm concerned, too.   Let the UK shatter, let an egalitarian, democratic Celtic confederation rise,  let England live with the garbage it has produced (McGinnis included, Canada should deport him for the same reason).   The Americas should be a fascism-free zone.  If we start the campaign now maybe in three generations we can have wiped it out.  Start by getting rid of whatever white supremacists have migrated here and are deportable.

Hate Mail

SOMEONE DEMANDS I tell them what I'd have them teach instead of Romeo and Juliet, to which I might suggest All's Well That Ends Well or The Dream or any number of other ones. I think I'd have paid better attention to Twelfth Night than I did the sappy love story in which a good majority of the participants would count as criminally insane today.  Fodder for an even dumber musical.   As I recall they taught us R&J in ninth grade, Freshman year in high school - I doubt even today they would dare to give an explanation of the meaning of lots of the words in it and the controversy those would bring.  It's kind of counter-productive when you are supposed to be teaching literature but don't dare define the words.  And I don't mean just the near ubiquitous error of thinking the question "wherefore" means the besought girl is wondering where he is - an error even Roger Ebert made, as I recall.  It's a good example of how the meaning of one of the most famous speeches in the English language is so easily overlooked by not understanding one word.

I'm not sure that teaching 16th century literature to brats in the throes of puberty is the most efficient use of their time. Not to mention verse drama, but, well, they should be encouraged to read it, eventually.

Actually, if it were me, I'd choose Robinson Jeffers' Medea which I think would probably have been more engaging.  The language of Jeffers is a lot clearer, requiring less of footnotes which a large percentage of the class won't look at and, so, think the silly bint is asking the absent Romeo where he is.   Jeffers' use of a chorus of three women is better than most translations of the original Greek drama gets it.   The messages of the evil that comes from breaking faith and how seeking revenge is bottomless in its toll are probably more useful than young love stupidly doing stuff and feeling sorry for itself and suicide given as a remedy.    I wouldn't teach The Crucible - I think they gave that to us in tenth grade - without pointing out that Arthur Miller totally lied about the actual event to make his play, the same with Inherit the Wind - which they gave us in eleventh grade.   If there's one thing I hate in literature, it's lying about actual events and people because even those with PhDs are too stupid to understand that movies aren't real - or plays.   The less close to pretending to deal with real history and real people the drama gets, the safer it is.

The Roberts Court Making Sure We Won't Even Be Able To Save Democracy Through The Ballot

WITH THE ROBERT'S COURT'S ATTACKS ON DEMOCRACY, on voting rights, on the rights of us all to honest government from the Ivy-League Bush II duo of John Roberts and Samuel Alito issued yesterday, the Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court has cemented in place voter suppression by white-supremacists, by Republican-fascists for who knows how long.  With that, clearly what they're doing to try to rat-fuck the 2022 election to hand the Senate back to Republican-fascist control and the House as well - what they're doing while biding their time to overturn Roe - which isn't in the cards until they have gotten back 100% Republican-fascist control because it will lead to a voter backlash that they want to suppress possibly endangering Republican-fascist control.   They're nothing if not long-term planners, just as those who put them on the court were.  Here's what I said about that in June, 2006

EVERYONE IN THE ROOM KNEW THEY WERE LYING

Molly Ivins' most enduring statement might turn out to be her observation that everyone in Washington DC ends up saying the same things. One of the same things today is that the Senate Judiciary hearings for Supreme Court Justices have become a Kabuki dance. What do you think the chances are that even three of the parrots of the DC press corps knows anything about the high art of Kabuki? Given that within the past year we have been witness to two of these shows and what those were like I'd like to suggest we pass up the obvious "theater of the absurd" designation and go straight to "charades".

But charades isn't the right word either. In charades while the player says nothing they make gestures that are designed to get the audience to say what the player is thinking. In these hearings there were a flood of words and few gestures, give or take a staged bout of tears, and the exercise was to make the audience NOT say what everyone in the room and beyond knew was the subject of the play.

Roberts and Alito lied every single time they verbally mimed the pose of not having made up their minds before hearing a case. These kobe cattle were bred and hand raised to provide the most predictable results. They were nominated into the entirely predictable and safe Republican hands to be put on the court to join Scalia and Thomas to gut the Bill of Rights and Civil Rights amendments and to continue the Republican handover of the country to the oligarchs and their corporate properties.

Everyone in the room knew they were lying. Such press as had any knowledge of the Court and things judicial knew they were lying though I'm prepared to concede that the cabloid clack might not have even known what the Court was. The large majority of us who listened to the entire farce knew they were lying. And now the lies will continue as they do exactly what everyone knew they would do. The very rare times that one of them has a bit of a woozy stomach and does something slightly unpredictable will be held onto like a life raft to prove the myth of judicial independence but that won't happen very often.

The lesson for the left is that Earl Warren is dead. He's been dead a good long while now. We can stop pretending that the Supreme Court is going to be anything but the hand maiden of the corporate oligarchy. If we are going to fight this its going to be through the ballot and if not there God save us.

Simple And Easy Are A Curse On Both Their Houses

If you aren’t struggling with the text, you aren’t engaging the text.

Hosea was a hard read then. No reason it shouldn’t be now, too.

RMJ

To which I say , Amen.   And to add that a large part of religion and anti-religion in the English speaking people, the French, almost as much, not as much with the German (I'm totally ignorant of  anti-religion in other languages) is exactly that kind of refusal to struggle with the text, to engage it seriously, dealing with the difficulties, the hard to believe, the impossible to believe, the clearly brilliantly insightful, what in it leads me to believe that large parts of it are, for want of a better concept of them "the Word of God" certainly more impressive and shockingly clear than anything I'd guess people would come up with on their own, unaided.   As I've pointed out any number of times, while science can come up with blindingly clear thinking about its legitimate subject matter, at times, the subject matter of real science is minutely focused and specific and limited, the subject matter of religion, of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition, is far more complex and far from the ability of science to use its method on it.  Complexity is baked into the scope of religion in a way that it is removed from science by design, by common agreement and, if they are exercised with honesty and wisdom, by the methods of science.  

There is no better way of discerning the catestrophic reality of human-caused global warming or the dire necessity of social distancing and masking in the current pandemic (which are still necessary if this thing isn't to kill even more than needs to) than science, there is nothing else that will come up with a prevention or, maybe, someday a cure.   But it can't tell you why it is immoral to not do everything possible to prevent its spread or to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere - one of the idiocies of making science the last authority in the law and politics is that it can't do that, the experts doing that have to rely on morality being commonly held by an effective majority of people.  And people are notoriously bad at discerning that moral truth and notoriously easy to gull into doing the opposite.   

And if you think I'm holding that out as a guarantee if you follow a religious path, well, think again because so many taken as religious figures in the United States, Canada, elsewhere, have been some of the most immoral in that regard, people like the incumbent head of the Archdiocese of New York, like various Orthodox Rabbis, slews of TV preachers prove that is no less a difficult claim to make - and a dishonest one - than claiming that being a professional scientist will guarantee of it. 

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

In one of my responses last night, i brought up the condemnation of the neo-integralist vulgarian, director Franco Zeffirelli's slam against Martin Scorsese for his direction of The Last Temptation of Christ "that Jewish cultural scum of Los Angeles which is always spoiling for a chance to attack the Christian world."  No doubt something the idiot who provoked me into mentioning it never heard of as he sentimentally recalled his introduction to Romeo and Juliet watching the 1968 extravaganza that Zeffirelli made of it.  Which especially romanticized the suicides in the typical cinematic manner.

What is especially funny to me about that is that the ultra-conservative Catholic Zeffirelli was in every way an example of de-Christianized Catholicism of a type that Vatican II tried to steer the church away from and, though I have no idea what his profession of religion might be, Scorsese in his hard complexity is, to my thinking, a far better example of Christian thinking than the easy show of easy piety that the other might make.  I also don't know what he does other than his directing and interviews, so I have no idea the extent to which he does it.

The book and film of The Last Temptation shows one thing about the point that RMJ so excellently made, that writing a novel or making a movie of the novel is probably not a very effective way to precisely get across what you are thinking unless your thoughts are slight, superficial and unimportant in a way that religion cannot get away with being without that religion being damaged by it.  To bring up the things that someone like the author and director do in the movies is a way to try to imagine what the Crucifixion of Jesus was like for how they imagine Jesus as being.  Which is, by the way, in none of our thinking of Jesus, guaranteed to be much like the truth of it - something that religious authorities and figures should realize applies to their imagined Jesuses as well.   I do, though, think that when you do think about it within the confines of a novel or a movie you're asking for that kind of trouble and, given the popularity of the movies and, to a far lesser extent novels, the potential for getting a strong reaction to your conception is far greater.    As somewhere in this series, I believe it is, Walter Brueggemann points out the people putting together the canon of the New Testament included four different, hardly uniform views of Jesus in the four Gospels - not to mention the differences in the other books so chosen and the differences in those have led to all kinds of difficulties.   Science has those too as the various schools of legitimate science and illegitimate sciences proves too.

I won't go on piling up examples of complexity and difficulties in various areas of thinking - it would be never ending.   But to reject something because it has those, as it generates heated and, in opposition to the teachings of Jesus, violent conflict, if applied evenly in all of life would lead you to be as insipid and stupid as the choice to be an insouciant. superficial person of fashion will lead you to being. No one's going to stop you from being a superficial fop, you'll no doubt be as happy as you choose to be stupid and to focus on the stupid.   But you should be glad that not everyone chooses that route.   I have not recently noted something that I early on noticed in engaging with other college-credentialed people of the English speaking world when first going online, how they figured that the often heard freshman style whine "But that's haaarrrrrrd!" sufficed as a means of rejecting something.  It should be the slogan of secular, popular culture and easy, facile piety, too.

He's Not The Stupidest Troll But He Might Be The Biggest A-Hole Online

WHETHER IT IS DYSLEXIA  or dementia or just parents who let the idiot brat watch too much TV and to not do his homework, I'm not the one who called the song the
"stupidest song ever" that was the request of the man who commissioned the song, Robert Altman an order which the song writer said he could fill:

While “Suicide Is Painless” has dark lyrics, its has a pretty melody. Oddly enough, composer Johnny Mandel told NPR the song was supposed to be stupid. Why? Director Robert Altman wanted it that way.

“‘It should be the stupidest song ever written,'” Mandel recalls Altman saying. “I said, ‘Well, I can do stupid.’ He says, ‘The song should be called ‘Suicide Is Painless.’”

Altman felt his version of the song was insufficient. Mandel recalled “[Altman] said, ‘Ah, but all is not lost. I’ve got a 15-year-old kid who’s a gibbering idiot. He’s got a guitar. He’ll run through this thing like a dose of salts.'” Ultimately, Altman’s teenage son, Mike Altman, earned $1 million from writing the song. Meanwhile, his father only made $700,000 for directing the film.

As for the accusation that I said the song made people commit suicide, that's just Simels' lying about something I didn't say anywhere in the piece I wrote about an hour after hearing the news this morning.  Just to show you the kind of shit I've been dealing with for the past twelve or so years coming out of the self-appointed merry prankster of Duncan Black's blog.  It's been pretty much constant for that time.