Ben Weber - Dolmen, An Elegy

 

Direct link to the video

Louisville Orchestra

Robert Whitney, conductor 

The October light here reminded me of this piece.  I've never heard a piece of Ben Weber's music that I didn't like. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - David Zane Mairowitz - Williwaw

 Williwaw

The story of naturalist Georg Steller, who sailed on Bering's disastrous 1741 expedition from Siberia to Alaska. Bering and many of the sailors died from scurvy after their ship was marooned for nine months. Steller discovered a number of new animal species, but was unable to take any of his specimens back to Russia.

Director:.........Jeremy Mortimer

Steller:........Adam Godley
Vitus Bering:..........Ewan Hooper
Lt Waxell:.........Bruce Purchase
Master Khitrov:........Gerard McDermott
Brigitte:.........Laura Martin-Simpson

Afternoon Play: Williwaw
Fri 2nd May 2003, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM

Georg Wilhelm Steller (10 March 1709 – 14 November 1746) was a German botanist, zoologist, physician and explorer, who worked in Russia and is considered a pioneer of Alaskan natural history.

Georg Steller described a number of animals and plants, some of which bear his name, either in the common name or scientific.

Williwaw is - a sudden violent gust of cold land air common along mountainous coasts of high latitudes. 

I really like the radio plays by David Zane Mairowitz though I haven't heard nearly enough of them.  Unfortunately the link to RTE's production of his excellent James's Story that I posted before is now dead.  I hope I can find another link to it someday.   Here's one I haven't posted before. 

I'm 100% Against That Kind Of Union

DECERTIFY THE CHICAGO POLICE UNION, fire officers who refuse the order to reveal their vaccination status.  It would probably do more to de-Nazify the police there than anything else you could do.  Investigate the leaders of the union for collusion with other dangers to the public health and safety.  Prosecute them when they break the law.

Police unions that tell their members to do such irresponsible and stupid things like not to be vaccinated against the current leading cause of death on the job among their members  should be dissolved.   Police unions are  too often Republican-fascist front groups that are a threat to public safety, protecting criminals among their membership and driving down the good of the work that they are hired to do.

Failure To Hold Trump's Mobsters To Justice Should Lead To Merrick Garland's Firing

On the appeals court, Garland has been a moderate liberal, with a definite pro-prosecution bent in criminal cases. Indeed, his views in the area of criminal law are considerably more conservative than those of the man he would replace, Justice Antonin Scalia.

Nina Totenberg and Carrie Johnson

THE RECENT REPORTING that Attorney General Merrick Garland is fretting that sending to jail the violent, white-supremacist, opponents of American democracy who attacked the Capitol, injuring more than a hundred police officers killing at least one as they were struggling heroically to protect the Congress and others, trying to stop the antiquated Rube Goldberg machinery of putting the winner of the presidential election into office, etc.  the ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES! sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution and to administer law is afraid that WHITE THUGS AND GANGSTERS will be more radicalized than they demonstrated they already are BY ATTACKING THE CENTER OF GOVERNMENT TO PREVENT IT FROM COMPLETEING ONE OF ITS CENTRAL ACTS IN ELECTED DEMOCRACY  if he does his job proves he was always the wrong person for the job he holds and the job as a member of the Supreme Court he was nominated to but failed to get on due to the Republican-fascists holding the the goddamned Senate.  

In light of that quote at the top of this post, I would love to know more as to how his past cases as a prosecutor and judge, especially the Oklahoma Bombing case fit in with his reported reluctance to go after the people who attacked the Capitol.  Did he lose his nerve somewhere along the way?  Did his subordinates have to deal with his reluctance to prosecute before?

If he fails to act against Steve Bannon as soon as the House sends a criminal referral to the Department of Justice President Biden should ask him for his resignation because he has already proven he is not up to the job of holding white racists and fascists to the same and currently unequal justice that People of Color and others are held to routinely and because he has proven he is not up to the job of defending the Constitution or administering the rule of law. 

I had my doubts about the wisdom of Barack Obama in his acquiescent observance to the courtly habits of the legal establishment he, no doubt, learned at Harvard Law and elsewhere.   The same place Garland learned about what nice lawyers do and, perhaps, who to go easy on as you don't on others.  That was only one of many disappointments I had with Obama.  There was little to nothing in his career in public office that led me to believe he had a devotion to true economic and social equality and equal justice under law. He was a prep-Ivy kind of guy, to the core.

It is about a year since I learned the hard lessons of listening to the hearings of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees into the Trump crimes of trying to shake down the Ukranian government to get them to lie about Joe Biden so as to influence the election.   How it was the diplomats - who I can assure you I was not inclined to hold in high regard - and the military officers who were the ones to stand up and risk their careers and lives and how it was the legal class, the lawyers who consistently covered their asses and the truth of what really happened, feigning a pose of "fairness" "evenhandedness" "carefulness" to give the benefit of any ridiculously extended doubt in in all of the ways that self-protecting courtiers might be imagined to do.   I can add, as longtime readers of what I wrote would know, that watching the behavior of that granitic empty suit's, Robert Mueller's, behavior in regard to his buddy,  William Barr, had prepared me for that last disillusionment with the culture of the legal system.

It is one of the biggest problems I have with the administration of law in the United States that it is a grotesquely unequal from the fact that the rich can hire lawyers aplenty and use the clunky mechanisms of the courts and process to get away with anything they can, more than not.  The poor, the destitute, the merely not rich cannot do that.  Added on top of the fact that in the United States People of Color,  members of unfavored groups,  those who are not violent, insurrectionist facists on behalf of a would-be dictator, can expect a Merrick Garland to be a precisian enforcer of law and even an administer of injustice that should remove anyone unwilling to go after the January 6 mob from any position in the so-called Department of Justice. 

Democratic Presidents have an unfortunate history in their selections of Attorneys General, Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, . . . have all had rather bad ones who frequently demonstrated their devotion to the settled and unequal order or who were just not up to the job.  There must be better candidates than get nominated and confirmed,  I'd look outside of the graduates of Harvard and the other factories of the enablers of privilege, though that's no guarantee either.

Dusan Bogdanovic - Hong Kong Ricercars

 

Direct Link To The Video

Yurika Takayama, Piano, Natalia Natalia Lipnitskaya, Guitar.   Commissioned by Alvaro Pierri and The Hong Kong Piano International Competition. Audio: Samuel Albert; Video : Yan Sterckx Recorded in 2021, Studio de Haute école de musique of Geneva. 

Orrin Evans Quartet @ The Jazz Standard - Slife

 

 Direct link to the video

 

Orrin Evans Quartet -  

Kurt Rosenwinkle on guitar, 

Orrin Evans on piano, 

Luques Curtis bass, 

Mark Whitfield, Jr. on drums.

I Don't Think What She Was Doing Was In Any Way Different From A Gunman Shooting At Other People

IF SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE from Covid-19 I would rather have it be someone like anti-vaxx-anti-mask Trumpoid psychopathVeronica Wolski dying than some innocent child or adult who was not spreading lies, encouraging other people to risk themselves for their own selfish satisfaction.  

I can't say I'm glad she's dead but I can say I'm glad she can't get other people killed, she was a clear and present danger to anyone who believed her. 

And that goes for all of them. 

No, That Holding Of Conventional College-Credentialed Wisdom Is A Blatant Lie - "Social Darwinism" IS Darwinism And It Has Been From The Beginning Of It - Hate Mail

HAVING GOTTEN FAR INTO THE HISTORY OF DARWINISM through its primary documentation, from its inception to its use today as a result of my online brawls, several things that are the common received wisdom of the college-credentialed class are blatant post-WWII, post the revelation of what eugenics led to under the Nazis fabrications that literally no one I have found in more than a decade of searching from before WWII ever claimed, that Darwin and Darwinism, natural selection had nothing to do with eugenics,

-  "active eugenics", involuntary and coerced sterilization of people to murder

- or the "passive" form of letting the poor, the ill, the weak, the merely "unfavored" by those with power and money (assumed to be the product of and acting out some atavistic force of "nature") die for want of the resources to live a decent life for themselves AND THEIR CHILDREN.  Darwin especially hated the thought that such children would live to adulthood.

That was such an obvious lie that the definitive proof against that ubiquitous lie among the educated post-WWII population was to be found in the words of the inventors of eugenics, Francis Galton, W.R. Gregg, Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Schallmeyer who all founded their assertions of some pretty extreme eugenics on Darwin's theory of natural selection, (Haeckel early calling for the active murder of those he classified as "lesser" beings) and on Charles Darwin's endorsement of the very texts and allegations made by all of the above except Schallmeyer who came up in the generation after Darwin died.  Darwin explicitly endorsed the claim that the deaths of those he deemed "less favored" people and entire races would lead to the "improvement" of the human species in the survivors who, he hinted, were to do the killing if "passive eugenics" didn't get the job done. 

He, himself, removed any doubt, proved the lie that the putative inventor of "Social Darwinism" the putrid Brit philosopher Herbert Spencer was the foul polluter of Darwinism in the 5th edition Charlies Darwin made of his magnum opus, On The Origin of Species By explicitly saying that when he used the term "Natural Selection" he meant exactly the same thing that Herbert Spencer meant when he said "Survival of the Fittest."   He said at that time he was urged to make that clear by his co-inventor of natural selection, who would eventually turn anti-eugenics, A. R. Wallace.   I have given that proof here a number of times, linking to the pro-Darwin website that posts the image of the pages of the 5th edition that proves he said that along with a somewhat more easily resolved text transcription of it.  There is no honest argument to be made that "Social Darwinism" is not exactly what Darwin meant when he said "Natural Selection" because Darwin removed any doubt whatsoever on that point, himself.

His most notable followers among scientists in his and the next several generations, not a few of them his direct descendants, were pretty much all eugenicists, some of them actually collaborating with Nazi eugenicists, some such as the English elite style "socialist" Karl Pearson handing Nazi eugenicists arguments that Polish  and Russian Jews who lived in Western Europe were a danger to the nations and societies they were in in the decade before the Nazis started murdering exactly those same people, his scientific assertions entirely founded on Darwinism, natural selection.   I have documented that here, exhaustively.  In doing that I have found that even many of the creationist critics of Darwin have, if anything, underestimated the connection between English language Darwinism and Nazi eugenics and genocide. 

And that characteristic of Darwinism was noted from the start of it by at least one person, someone who knew Darwin and his wife quite well, the sadly little remembered early feminist, Lesbian radical Frances Cobbe who correctly and accurately predicted that natural selection would lead to moral catastrophe and atrocity, a history which was fully realized in not only the Nazi eugenics but in the preceding American eugenics and the same in places such as Canada, someone who Darwin brushed off with sexist condescension in his scientific publications, even as he endorsed the depravity of exactly that kind of moral depravity in Ernst Haeckel and the assertions of Francis Galton and W. R. Greg as scientific truth.  

I know that this will not be the last time I find it necessary to repeat this because we live in an age of lies, conventional lies and the absence of any truly believed in consequential sin of lying.   Quite often the political and ideological character that a person takes is not based so much in their deviation from or devotion to the truth but to which conventional lies are preferred by the person who holds and asserts them.  I have come to the conclusion that that is directly related to the secularism that has pushed such notions as morality out of lives of so many people in the way that, formerly, vulgar materialism pushed out notions of doing for the least among us being what we did for God from consideration when it came to slaves or those who could be killed and robbed of their lands and resources.   The problem with Christians has always been, not that they believed too much in the Gospel of Jesus, the Epistles of Paul and James but that they didn't believe enough in them and acted accordingly.  

This is an answer to the typical whining that happens when I diss Darwin.  Part of a never-ending series.

Old Eyes

BOWING TO THE INEVITABLE HAVING LONG SINCE ARRIVED, I have started using an old, larger, flat-screen TV as a computer monitor because too many words were getting cut in my editing on the small screen without me seeing it.   If it leads to better editing, catching needed changes in subject predicate agreement, when I need to change prepositions, when a vitally needed verb in a sentence is accidentally cut. . .   

I was going to say "we'll see" but I suppose that depends on me seeing, I am sure you have.  Some days I think I might go to a dark screen format but I was warned against radical changes in design once.  Changing to using a text editor with dark mode instead of the word processor helped a lot, when I remembered to use it. 

Hate having to have the thing cluttering up the place but it sure makes reading books on the screen easier.  I'm so excited about that I feel like doing a series.  Once the garden is done for the year.

Orrin Evans Trio - Autumn Leaves

 

Orrin Evans, piano

Vincent Archer, bass

Obed Calvaire, drums 

I love how you have to really listen for the standard in the improvisation when Orrin Evans is playing it.   Good for the attention.

Shatners In Space - Someone Asks What I Think Of It

GET BACK TO ME when he's in a sequel to Incubus.   I saw the Murdoch Mystery he played Mark Twain in,  it was ridiculous.  Other than that I don't think I've paid much attention to what he's doing.

I always said his pronunciation wasn't that bad, I got the feeling he understood what he was saying.  

Somewhat Dangerous Children Of The Privileged Class - A Quick Look Behind The Temple Of Satan

HAVING HAD A SLEEPLESS NIGHT last night, I looked farther into The Satanic Temple and was not that surprised to find out that one of the influences on its founders was one of the more putrid books of the last years of the 19th century, Might Makes Right, a Darwinian-white supremacist, proto-Nazi, male-supremacist tract written in opposition to morality and the good will that is essential to egalitarian democracy.  His general thinking is a mish mosh of junk, the kind of typical watered down junk that instructed pop and not a little of the allegedly higher brow atheism of the entire 20th century and into this one.   I wasn't that surprised because I had read that the atheist Satanists were really big on assertions of "individualism" a word I have come to distrust because it so often hides selfish, egocentric, conformists.  Most of the "individualism" I've seen can be boiled down to those and, oddly, a rather limited range of consumerist and hedonistic short-term goals.   Sort of like the stunts mounted by The Satanic Temple. 

The American left, any left, really, that takes this kind of pop-Darwinist-Nietzschean-materialist-amoralist-bullshit, the rebellion of the eternal toddlers against not getting their own way or even consistently knowing what that is seriously, on the basis of some notion of "fairness" to them in their amoral stupidity, is stupid.  Their rebellion is bound to be counter-productive as their philosophical basis is bull shit, their discipline non-existent, their goals, inevitably being the opposite of equality, economic and social justice.  If you want to see that, here's from the interview linked to above, by the republisher of Might Makes Right and the guy who is most often presented as the major figure in the Satanic Temple, Lucien Greaves (one of a number of aliases he uses).

And, yes, we are adding to LaVey. LaVey is an excellent jumping-off point, but his work was a product of its time, and it’s appropriate to recontexualize it to today’s reality. LaVey was active during a time in which, for decades, the United States was on a dysfunctional spiral of increasing violence. As a result, LaVey’s rhetoric tended toward Social Darwinistic Police State politics. Since 1995, violence in the United States—and, in fact, the world over—has been in decline, and we’re now in a position to evaluate what’s working for us, and where we went wrong previously. Certainly, a strong and effective police presence is a contributing factor, but we also find that autocratic governments breed social violence. We also find that Social Darwinism, interpreted in brutal, strictly self-interested terms, is counter-productive, and based on a simplistic misinterpretation of evolutionary theory. We do better when we work in groups, where altruism and compassion are rewarded. We are social animals. That said, however, I believe in a system that runs meritocratically. Also, revenge is a natural impulse, without which justice would never be served. We should do our best to mitigate the pain of those who are suffering, whoever they are—but also be diligent to punish the misdeeds of those who behave unjustly to those around them.

NOTE that great big "however" ALWAYS LOOK FOR THE "HOWEVER" EVEN WHEN IT ISN'T THERE because with these guys mouthing the requisite mitigations of their essential sameness with the kind of gangsterism that really runs politics and almost all establishments.   I would look at Greaves and the republisher-interevewer Shane Bugbee to wonder what in their CVs would lead anyone to assign them to the kind of "merit" that he's calling for.  I looked and they both seemed like rather stupid slackers to me.  

You always get that with what is essentially a recapitulation of  Darwin, Nietzsche, a few other enemies of equality and morality from the enlightenment that so quickly decayed into romantic era decadence.   Not without a lot of attention getting let's pretend.  I doubt it's got much durability to it, with the number of broken links I ran into, it doesn't look like they can even keep their URLs current. 

The title.  I think the biggest danger they pose is to the real, religious left that is either a contradiction of the "meritocratic" elitism, the Darwinist inequality and, ultimately, the materialistic amorality of such brats or it is nothing.   That left too often gets wrapped in in some meat-headed attempt to be fair to them and provide them with some kind of misguided fairness.  The idea that all ideas merit us wasting our credibility, our very limited resources, our very limited time, etc. on their stunts has cost us an enormous price and, worse, those whose equality, economic and social justice depend on us not getting side tracked by a cheap carny side-show riffing off of junk such as this is and always has been.

In Time For Halloween Satanists Get Had By Small Town Coucil Whine That Their Priciples Cost Them A Bundle On Their Ugly Stunt Prop

WHILE I WOULD TEND to be on the side of a group that opposes any governmental entity getting involved in what might imply the establishment of any religion - religion would eventually come out the worse for it - I had to chuckle when I read about this on Hemant's "friendly"hate blog, of all places, when I found out the quite small town of Belle Plaine (population 7,090) got the better of the publicity-seeking atheists of The Satanic Temple by giving them what they claimed to have wanted.  Here's a non-whiny description of what happened:

The battle began about four years ago after a monument was installed at Veterans Memorial Park depicting a soldier's silhouette kneeling by a fallen comrade's cross-shaped grave marker. The monument garnered complaints for its religious overtones.

The city then took the memorial down, but new protests prompted Belle Plaine  to create a free-speech area in the park and put it back up. The Satanic Temple commissioned a monument of a black cube with pentagram inscriptions and an upturned helmet on the top to be displayed as a counterpoint.

It was to be the first Satanic Temple monument on public property in the country, but Belle Plaine leaders canceled the free-speech zone — a "limited public forum" — after repeated protests by religious groups and free speech advocates and revoked the temple's permit. The statue of the soldier, who some called "Joe," came down.

The Satanic Temple sued the city in 2019, asserting that its rights were violated by the city revocation of the permit. Temple officials said they had paid to have the monument built and that its value was about $35,000.

The temple, which has chapters around the world and one in Minnesota, says its members don't actually worship Satan but advocate for a distinct separation of church and state.

In August 2020, a federal court dismissed nine of the 10 counts in the Satanic Temple's suit, including several alleging free speech and free exercise of religion violations. The lawsuit's remaining count alleged that the city broke a promise when it revoked the permit.

The "promissory estoppel" claim required the temple to prove that the city made a "clear and definite promise" to the Satanic Temple, that the city intended the temple to rely on the promise, that the temple did so with negative results and that the promise must be kept to "prevent an injustice."

The judge found that Belle Plaine made a promise but said the temple didn't rely on it because the group had contacted an artist to make the monument before receiving a permit.

Belle Plaine fulfilled its promise, the judge said, since the city never promised to reimburse the temple and the temple received ample donations to fund the monument. The temple didn't make a "compelling case" that its reputation was hurt or that the monument isn't fulfilling its purpose because it's not displayed in Belle Plaine, the judgment said.

Since the temple wasn't financially hurt and there was no loss of reputation, enforcing the promise isn't necessary, according to the order.

The judge also agreed with the city's request to penalize the temple for filing a second lawsuit that echoed claims that already had been dismissed in the first case.

The judge ruled that the temple should pay the city's legal fees for the second suit, which was dismissed, as a penalty. The legal fees still are being determined.

And now the atheist-Satanists (apparently these particular ones are from Massachusetts, not even in the same state as Belle Plaine) are whining that it cost them money to mount their publicity stunt and that they're not getting their way.  Which is funny because they got their way, or what they claimed was their way.  It's kind of funny, considering that they are also whining that the judge noted they are an anti-religious outfit, which they are, while whining that they're a religious outfit.  

That was especially gratifying to me because if there's one thing atheists hate in my experience it is when someone points out that atheism is a religious ideology.  They really whine when someone points out that they're always creating gods in the way I pointed out just the other day, material gods not unlike the old European pagan gods, demiurges, etc. only they deny that's what they're doing as they shove those gods into gaps into the current holdings of science, not infrequently to prevent things like the improbability of our intelligent-life-containing universe leading people to believing in God as a rational conclusion.  Of course the issue at the heart of the Satanic Temple's whining is that most popular of all atheist gods (and not with a few others) Mammon, money, the almighty Doll-ah! 

I'll leave it to you to go follow the atheist whining on this. One of the funniest things is the way they're whining about the judge who issued the decision, Wilhelmina Wright, an Obama appointee who was supported in her appointment by both Senator Amy Klobuchar and the great Senator Al Franken. The idiot geniuses of Hemant's blog community seem to believe she's a right-wing Republican.

I'll give you this much of Hemant's whiny post on it:

Rather than have a Satanic monument go up, they promised to remove the Christian monument.

That was all well and good in regards to the First Amendment.  But that didn't mean all the problems were resolved because The Satanic Temple now has this giant black expensive steel monument sitting in a facility.  They commissioned it with the intention of putting it up in the park, but that was no longer going to happen because city officials shut down the public forum.

So what were they supposed to do with it?

Hey, maybe they can get the Center For Inquiry to display it on one of their properties, or the Freedom From Religion Foundation heads would put it on their lawn or something (assuming they've got one).  Maybe one of the richer atheists would like it in their collection.  If the idiots paid $35,000 on the prop for their publicity stunt - reportedly funded through donations - it must be worth that much to one of their faithless faithful.  

I guess it didn't occur to the big-brains (atheists are always telling us how much smarter they are) at the atheist outfit that if it were put on public property in the park that a religious group could have sued for it violating the separation of church and state and the idiots would still have the thing on their hands with removal costs thrown in, besides.   They should have gone through court before paying for the hideous prop.  I'd have hired a better artist, that thing is plug ugly.

Update:  The Satanic Temple's use of a town that size to mount one of its publicity legal cases is not an insignificant thing for a town council to have to deal with.  Especially when they're an out-of-state, tax-exempt outfit and the town would have to pay legal costs out of local taxes.   I would bet that they'd rather have been shut of the entire thing but they also have to contend with what locals want, even if what they want is bound to lead to this kind of headache.  

This isn't an important issue for the real left, fighting over stupid stuff like this while Republican-fascists are using the idiocy over things like this to destroy democracy and prevent equality is more important than placating whiny atheists and others.  The left should get shut of them and their counter-productive obsession.

Maybe I'll Limit Negative Musical Comments To One A Month After This, There's so much good music that never gets exposure

REALLY IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO?  Having so recently gotten into a silly brawl over pop music, I really don't want to get into why I loathed Jesus Christ Superstar on first being involuntarily exposed to it and have hated every note its creator put to paper ever since.  If I could remove any memory of it from my mind I would in a second, retaining only the memory of having hated it to steer me away from it in the future. 

It has had no influence on my religious thinking, whatsoever and none on my musical development, either. 

Rachel Maddow, Charles Pierce And The Rest Won't Tell You But I Will - The Forbideen Logical Conclusion - Hate Mail

CONSIDER HOW MANY TIMES in the past four years of this crisis in American democracy you have heard the mention of the weaponization of lies.  

I would bet that you, as I have heard people from MSNBC, other cable and broadcast venues talk about how the tsunami of lies spread by Republican-fascists, Trumpists, the fascist entities surrounding Steve Bannon and flowing from the various AT&T and other corporate enabled and encouraged lie machines constantly.  Talking about how the "post-truth" world that they, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tic-Toc etc. has not only endangered American democracy at its roots but has led to the anti-vaxx, anti-mask Covid denial that is literally killing hundreds of thousands of us and which has spread from the United States elsewhere in the world, Canada, Britain, etc. to kill there, too.  And how much of American fascist lies are hooked in with other gangster efforts in Hungary, in Brazil, and most of all in Putin's crime mob dictated Russia.  

And now ask yourself how many times and where you have heard that related to the Supreme Court rulings that have freed the media from consequences for carrying even the most extravagant of lies told by  Trump and his fascists lied about to gain power, who the Republican-fascists lie about and to gull the vulnerable into going along with them against their political opponents who, by and large, do not control the media and never have despite the lie that the American media is a liberal entity.   

That is the logical connection which is never made, not allowed to be mentioned, for all of the alleged and supposed freedom of the press, freedom of speech, that glaring and obvious logical connect between the regime of lies which has brought us from the high-point of American democracy to where we are wondering if the next election ratfucked more effectively by Republican-fascists in 2021 than Nixon and his thug, G. Gordon Liddy ever dreamed they could do in their wildest imaginings will be the final nail in the coffin of American Democracy and with it, possibly Democracy anywhere it had any hope of existing.

OUR TICKET TO FASCISM WAS BOUGHT WITH THE FREEDOM GRANTED TO THE MEDIA TO LIE BY A PSEUDO-LIBERAL COURT IN THE MID-1960S THROUGH THEIR ABSURD READING OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT.   That was further aided with Republican-fascists on the court reading the Second Amendment so as to arm their fascist legions.   In the chronology of the march towards fascism it was the Warren Court that stupidly led us to the second, without their rulings allowing the media to lie with impunity we would likely never have gotten courts that would allow the arming of fascists and the criminally insane using the stupidly written Second Amendment, a provision that was put there to make state slave patrols safe from federal oversight. 

Those lies that they admit are leading us here with come right through the American media, the old fashioned kind and the new social-disease media online.   We take the chance of regulating it to force the lies out of it or we lose democracy and, with that, any pretense of freedom of the press or freedom of speech, especially that which will have the alleged benefits that were supposed to come with the privileges given to the corporate media in the First Amendment of good government of, by and for THE PEOPLE.   Lies can corrupt that at its most basic level by corrupting The People on who it all depends.  Or at least enough of them to destroy it. 

Just A Little Musical Detour

 Direct link to the youtube

THIS SHOWED UP in the sidebar when I was looking at a Youtube, I listened to it and it was the best and most honest critique of the claims of using "just intonation" in music that I've ever seen.   Tuning and temperament was a huge issue in my brief period of thinking I wanted to go into musicology, being interested in the late medieval, early renaissance music at that  time.  While I knew enough math to understand that my ears weren't deceiving me and that the claims made about the use of so-called pure intervals was impossible to apply to the music in discussion, it was the sheer nastiness of the various factions and the neurotic claims of reproducing anything like "the authentic performance practice" for most of that music that drove me to concentrate on music from the 20th century.  I have never regretted that decision.

A lot of nonsense still gets said about "pure intervals" - Lou Harrison's writings on the topic are a real mixed bag, not to mention others who are even more out of line with reality.  Some of the composers who make "pure intervals" and the various micro-tuning intervals you have to deal with when you start down that never-ending road have produced interesting music, I'm certainly not opposed to that at all - though lots of it is pretty boring.  But the imposition of that on music of the past as a means of bullying people is ahistorical.  The point in the video that says that there is no historical evidence that they tried much to impose just intonation on musical performance, there is no vocabulary for it or notation for it in the voluminous literature is probably the best one I've ever read or heard in the discussion.

I'm in the process of collaborating with one of my oldest musical friends on some didactic materials, I was hesitating over a point of which tuning to use - he wanted to just go with equal temper and be done with the question, I was worried about that leading to criticism.   I will call him today and tell him that he was right, the critics be damned.   I think that's one of the things that was most damaging to me in my university years, listening to the critics, damn them and their ridiculous pretenses all. 

Extra-Stupid - Stupy Trolls Me With A Comment About Brian Wilson's "Genius"

I WILL ADMIT that it is something that gave me a bit of fun on days I wasn't busy enough to make fun of Steve Simels' repetition of the common received "wisdom" of pop music scribbling.  One of those surrounds the ridiculous inflation of the Beach Boy's Brian Wilson into a "genius" who Stupy, along with other cretinous "critics" of bubble-gum music have compared favorably with George Gershwin and, yeah, right, Mozart.

I would imagine some Daughter of the Confederacy falling on the fainting couch when someone desecrates the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest or Henry Clay is no more melodramatic than Simps going into a lather when I mock the pretentious claims made about commercial pop music icons. 

This time, waiting for the morning dew to dry up so I can go do my garden chores I decided to look to see if I could find who first designated Brian Wilson as a "genius" for Simps and the simple minded scribblers of rock "criticism,"  a line for them to  dutifully repeat for the next six decades, what that profession is made of.   I found out it was none other than Brian Wilson and his publicist at the time, Dereck Taylor who declared his "genius" to the world.  It seems to have stemmed from Wilson whining about the wholesome American boy image that had made him rich but was confining and perhaps something he'd outgrown,  that he didn't get nearly the respect that his "genius" earned him and, it being the most commercial and least genius ridden genera of music there is per billion dollars in revenue in the history of human music making, yeah, it got him what he believed he wanted.  

Temporarily believed he wanted.   He soon found being declared a "genius" to pad his ego was far more of a burden to him, one that led to everything from his backing away from the Beach Boys to inhibiting him from song writing, to turning to drugs to try to inspire his "creativity" to whatever else ailed the guy.   That, in the world of pop music is so monumental an issue that it generated a ridiculously long wikipedia page on the topic "Brian Wilson is a genius."  Something which, until I read Simp's taunt, I'd likely never have seen to mock his assertion with. 

I don't really care if Brian Wilson writes songs or music or performs it or if his fan boys and gals, most of them in the cootster cohort, lap it up.  His music doesn't offend me as long as I don't have to hear it.  I doubt he'd like much of the music I like.  People have a right to their own taste.  I don't care if they call him a "genius" though apparently that was something that brought the guy lots of grief.   The lesson is beware of getting what you can buy yourself into getting because you might find it comes with a bigger price than you find you're willing to pay or can handle.  

Mozart.  Really.  Mozart. 

UPDATE:  I decided to post this performance by Wim Winters of one of Mozart's most over-played and abused sonatas, the K332 F Major.  I might comment about it if I get flack.

 Direct link to the youtube

 

Update 2:  Leonard Bernstein was quite able to say some pretty silly things about music.  Especially when it was his attempt to be kewel with the kiddies.  I won't go into some of the truly stupid things he said in his disastrous Norton Lectures which did so much to alter my view of him, though he was never anything like my favorite conductor or composer.  

Hey, Simps, go read the wikipedia article and weep.  Brian Wilson was the one who ended up resenting the folly of getting himself declared a genius and who suffered due to the consequences of his own publicity campaign.  I am sorry he had to suffer but the way he got into it wasn't any evidence of genius, it was what you do, PR and salesmanship.

The Arrogance Of An All Male Authority And The Refusal Of It To Face A Reality They Will Never Have To Experience First Hand

I READ IN the National Catholic Reporter that: 

Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco is asking "all Catholics and others of goodwill" to join a prayer and fasting campaign for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic Democrat who supports legal abortion.

She represents California's 12th Congressional District, which is entirely within San Francisco.

What has prompted the prayer and fasting campaign is her leadership on the Women's Health Protection Act, or H.R. 3755, passed by the House in a 218-211 vote Sept. 24.

It codifies the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide. The measure establishes the legal right to abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy in all 50 states under federal law.

"A conversion of heart of the majority of our congressional representatives is needed on this issue, beginning with the leader of the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi," Archbishop Cordileone said in a statement Sept. 29.

Let me ask in turn that people pray for the conversion of Archbishop Cordileone and the rest of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops, that they have a conversion to the reality that making abortion illegal in all of the 50 states and territories of the United States will not stop abortion, it will only set us back to the pre-Roe days when abortions happened, very often, only they were done in illicit conditions for most WOMEN, with many being injured, some permanently injured, some dying some being subjected to terrible abuses and blackmailing during one of the most vulnerable periods of their lives.  And the illegalization of abortion not only had that effect, it also led to far more frequent incidents of infanticide, of the murder of unwanted babies who had been born.   To pretend that that experience of the illegalization of abortion is not what we have every reason to expect if it is again made illegal is willful, sinful and evil complicity in what will happen if they get their way.  That was considered acceptable in most states up till Roe was decided, the status quo of that era, allowing that to continue was an act of collaborative evil.

Pray that the USCCB and the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy face the hard truth that the one and only way to prevent abortions happening isn't to make it illegal it is to promote the use of birth control so that unwanted pregancies do not happen nearly so often as they do in our country, in no small part due to the Catholic hierarchy, other religious alleged authorities having suppressed the promotion of contraception, the respect of Women, the encouragement of Women to have full control of their bodies and their lives with the understanding that since pregnancy occurs only within their bodies that it is their right to be the one to make the decision to become pregnant in the first place and that they must exercise the responsibility to control that right. 

I would suspect that Nancy Pelosi, having been a mother, HAVING BEEN PREGNANT, something that no one in the Catholic hierarchy has ever been in the entire history of the Roman Catholic Church, knows more about that than all of the USCBB combined in its entire history.   I would ask her to include the Bishops, the Pope, and others in control of the Catholic Church in a prayer for their conversion from the arrogance of dictators to having the humility to allowing Women to own their own bodies without the coercive interference of the state or a church run exclusively by men.

The Hidden And Perpetual Lynching Campaign Against Women, Especially Women of Color

ABOUT A DECADE AGO while doing research for a blog post, I was horrified to read that at that time the FBI estimated about four women a day, every day, year after year have been murdered because of their gender.   It's a statistic that made a big impression on me because I had also researched the history of what is officially called lynching in this country and know that it was a far rarer thing than that - though it's absolutely certain that there were more racially motivated murders of Black People, Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other disfavored ethnic groups than would be counted as lynching.   That is, unfortunately, only one form of terror murder practiced routinely around the world though one of the most horrific.

I believed then and now that the reason that we don't see the campaign of murder, terror and violence against Women for what it is is that it's so common, the consequences of it in Women's lives are so habitual and accustomed that it's unremarkable.  Which is one of the reasons that it continues without any serious and effective means of fighting against it being found.  

I read in yesterday's Guardian that that figure of four women a day must be far too low because the FBI now says that at least four Black Women are murdered a day in the United States:

A least four Black women and girls were murdered per day in the United States in 2020, according to statistics released by the FBI last week, a sharp increase compared with the year before.

The FBI recorded at least 405 additional murders of Black women and girls last year as homicide surged across the country, and experts caution that even that stark number probably represents an undercount.

To families of victims and local activists, the release of the data is just the latest reminder that violence against Black women and girls often goes ignored, and should be made a more urgent public priority.

“What’s sad is that a lot of cases aren’t taken too seriously. It’s just another Black girl,” said Jennifer Redmond, whose 19-year-old daughter Sarayah Jade was killed last September.

The whole article is essential reading because it lays out the depth of not only the campaign of murder against Women of Color but also how routinely it is taken by the society in general.  The criticism of the 24-7 cabloid news coverage of the disappearance of single, often affluent, White Women puts the blame in the wrong place, on the Woman who may have fallen victim to violence and murder, though they are as capable of mounting the same kind of cabloid fever obsession over runaway brides.   That is all down to the racism of those who run and manage those commercial infotainment-sometimes news outlets and their expectations of the racism of their viewers.   If they expected that their viewers would care about the murders of Women of Color they would cover them hoping to get viewers.  Or, maybe not.  It really does matter when the people running a place are all White, all affluent, all part of the network of White, Straight, usually but not always male privilege, especially those who are products of the prep-elite private college system.  Socially, politically and in most cases, legally the opposite of the destitute, the poor, the not-white, not connected to privilege.  

But also this proves a need for People of Color, Women of Color and Women to be far more present in law enforcement, prosecutors offices, the judiciary and the higher courts as well.   Justice will be elusive and with it any inhibition that a risk to a criminal that might have in it.

There is every reason to believe there is a connection between violence against Women and the culture of entertainment which has and still does encourage that view of women, teaching men that they are entitled to commit violence against Women, to kill them, especially Women of Color to treat them as objects.   That is far, far best demonstrated in one of the forms of media that is most influential on the actual behavior of those who consume it, pornography.   The long told lie of the ACLU and other hucksters in the "civil liberties" industry is that "there's no proof" porn incites the behavior that it depicts and presents for the masturbatory inspiration that porn is.  Anyone with the rudiments of thought would see that as the fraud it is because all media that is consumed in that way has the same effect that advertisement has on people.  A commercial for a luxury food or drink product has the same effect on the behavior of the people who are susceptible to its intended message, it alters their behavior.  The very same lawyers and their organizations have made a big deal of getting pill pushers, tobacco, the liquor industry a "right" to advertise on TV.  If they believed that their client's much shorter, less participatory media messages had no effect on behavior they were guilty of taking their client's money fraudulently.  Only they never really believed that for a second as they lied about the far more engaging media that porn is.

That the "civil liberties" industry has profited from the patronage of the media, including pornographers is not unrelated to their lie that the stuff they enable is harmless, though there are signs that SOME younger people who would be peddled as the likely victims of porn and racist violence are making the link between the old ACLU bullshit and the waves of violence and terror against them and they're not having it.  I absolutely encourage them to understand that their lives, their bodies, their minds are the target of this flood of such "freedom" as the highly paid lawyers and the largely white male judges and "justices" have given to the media to target them are their enemies and that the law as written by 18th century rich, white, largely straight male racists should not burden them forever.  

People of Color, Women of Color, Women in general, LGBTQ, people, poor people, religious minorities all have a stake in the suppression of the media that puts a target on our backs because that has been a huge part of what stopped the progress of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Rights Movement.   I have no doubt that given the Republican-fascist domination on the Courts and in rigged, gerrymandered, manipulated district governmental bodies, that what progress has been made by LGBTQ people - who have benefited from the fact that there are lots of gay men and some lesbians embedded in the structures of privilege, in the Senate, on the Court - will be turned back, as well.   The violence against Trans women of color is an epidemic in itself.  We have every reason to all hold together against the origin of the epidemic of violence against Women because the very same forces that ignited that can ignite it against all of us in due time.

Everything I Needed To Know I Still Haven't Figured Out Well Into My Seventh Decade

IN TRYING TO DECIDE whether or not to answer one of the large majority of comments in my moderation file that doesn't get posted, I went back to a post I did earlier this year where I linked to a speech given by Adam Morris, the main character in the old BBC 6 part series, The Glittering Prizes.  In it the author used what is purported to be a quote by old Bertrand Russell saying that if it would assure eternal bliss for the survivors it would be morally justified to kill all of the Jews, the character referencing it in haranguing a tiny audience of elderly Jewish people for their hatred of Arabs.  Along the way, it being an upper-class, college-credentialed Brit milieu in which the thing was written and produced, of course they had to slam religion in general, the Jewish conception of God as elucidated in the Jewish (and by implication, Christian) scriptures as the most blood thirsty and evil entity in all of human history.  

In listening to it yesterday it struck me that what was on display was the typically superficial and uninformed, unthinking reading of the Scriptures that is typical of modernism, in which everything is supposed to be taken as if it were a modern political tract or modern history of something instead of something that is to be read with the highest degree of criticism, discovery of flaws and contradictions, trying to figure out what you are to think of the troublesome texts and to come to something far beyond a common-sense, "literal meaning" of what you've just read.  I'm sure it would offend those who have what they consider to be a sophisticate's dismissive view of the Scripture and the religion that is an attempt to apply scripture that I think theirs is, actually, an incredibly unsophisticated, simplistic and uniformed view of the whole thing.  Not to mention the view required of conformists to a particularly elitist and snobbish clique.  There's not much about it that is smart, it takes some of the most basic questions that a child would have about the Scriptures, gives a pat answer to them and stops at that.  There's a reason so many atheists will proudly say they had it all figured out when they were nine, or 12 or even 23.  Heaven help me if I'd stopped at my understanding of the world when I was 46.

I would say that even for modern political tracts modern history or even scientific paper,  reading it as if the meaning of what you're reading gives you anything like a complete or objective view of reality - the standards with which such things are supposed to be produced, is a delusional practice.   Nothing that anything any of us writes is free of the fact that they are written out of our previous thinking, the limits of our knowledge, our own life experience and the unconsidered expectations we have - and that's not when they are consciously written to support some theme or agenda.   Any responsible reader reads EVERYTHING asking what those are, including not only modern novels such as the one The Glittering Prizes was based on but modern history, science, political and legal document which is by habit and custom to be taken as an attempt at objective reality. 

That great philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel famously said, 

As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash

an interpretation.  I take that to be an assertion that the Bible is what it certainly is, a collection of humanly produced documents, as such it contains all of the certain biases, inadequacies, flaws and mistakes that any human being will produce and that, at most, it can only be an approximation of the complete truth.  In some places it might be very close, in others anything from a distorted reflection to an echo or a shadow or a false conception imposed on and amidst the what comes closer to the truth.  I will say that even the Bible itself doesn't claim it is the exclusive such document which attempts to come to a view of reality.   God, in the Hebrew Bible says that he has made covenants with other peoples and even the animals, who would have to have had their own view of reality.   Even that formerly notably arrogant and exclusive entity, the Roman Catholic Church has come round in the Second Vatican Council to admitting that other religions, even those which are not officially in line with the Jewish-Christian monotheistic tradition have truth in them.  

It may have troubled me once that there were four gospels (or more) that purported to be accounts of Jesus, what he did and what he said and, more important, what it meant but I think that multiplicity with its several major and many minor discrepancies produces a more useful and valid conception of what we can never really produce, an absolute and accurate and full picture of what gave rise to Christianity, the person who Jesus was, his nature, the relationship of the Redeemer to the Creator and the Sanctifier (to use a feminist expression of the human conception of God as a trinity of persons, one of many such possible and valid conceptions of it).  

None of us is capable of encompassing the entirety of much of anything except our own experience and our experience cannot be all encompassing.  In asking whether or not some computer algorithm that can predict the most efficient form of protein folding but which no human being could contain in their own memory and put to use really is "understanding" I was riffing off of something I wrote a long time ago about the eight dimensional figure that a large team of mathematicians using many computers linked together came up with.  I remember when I read that if printed out on paper the mathematical description would cover Manhattan was when I realized that the idea that any human mind could encompass such a thing was absurd and so wondered at anyone believing that they had understanding of it - not to mention how anyone could check it reliably in the way of old fashioned mathematical proof.  If that's true for one eight-dimensional figure, which may not exist anywhere in reality, it is literally infinitely true for God. 

And that is the problem with the utilitarian concept that we could ever calculate "the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people" in determining what we are to do as an ersatz, scientific, mathematical replacement for revealed morality.  There is no human capacity for determining what that is in any one generation, there is no way to know if, once, as Russell asserted all the Jews were exterminated if the remnant, or a very large number of them, may sense the horror of what they did and that it would forever haunt them, as it should.   And what kind of people would they be if they forgot what they did in all of its evil and all of its depravity as a means of producing the happiness of the surviving population, something which Hitler promised the Aryans they'd get by the various extermination programs he undertook, from the disabled to the Jews, the Slaves, the Roma, etc.   It is something that Darwin explicitly said would be gotten for the survivors if through passive negligence the poor died off in large numbers - he got that idea from the depraved parson Thomas Malthus - and through active means, his enthusiasm for British imperialism wiping out native Peoples, to be replaced by Brits as he believed happened in North America, Australia, Tasmania and elsewhere. 

So, no, it doesn't much trouble me that there is no one picture of Jesus in the Bible and that the figure of Moses is unproven in archeology or in the records kept by other civilizations in the Mediterranean East. I am, perhaps, a bit out of keeping with the up and came, already old-fashioned modernist view of such things that "Moses was a myth." because I doubt anyone would come up with such a radical view of reality, unprecedented in so many aspects, except for a single prophet speaking out of their experience of revelation.  Whether or not the entire setting that The Law and its being given is accurate, that central conception of Justice and of the God who insists on that Justice in response to human experience and depravity is why I believe there was such a person through whom that Law was given, though I don't believe that there necessarily was as large a population of runaway slaves or that their eventual domination of a part of Palestine happened through the bloody conquest described after Exodus in the canon.  

Nor do I think that utilitarianism or Darwinism are anything like a replacement for it, they are the negation of morality, not a more scientific and mathematically secure articulation of it. 

Maybe I'll try to concentrate on Heschel this next year.  I wish I'd gotten started on this when I was a teenager but, no, I had to get distracted by modernist bull shit, stupidly believing it was a more reliable guide.  It isn't, no more than a literalist, fundamentalist or  Magisterial view of the Scripture would be.  One of Heschel's conclusions that I value the most is that God would appear to favor a pluralistic understanding of religion.