Abby Lincoln - Roy Hargrove - Christmas Cheer

 

Adeste Fideles - Bob Dylan

 

I love Bob Dylan's old, raspy but remarkably in tune singing of this in Latin then English.   I think he pronounced the Latin better than some of the priests I recall from way, way back did.   He certainly sang it better in tune than a lot of them could.  Better than some of the younger members of the chorus did.  

Deep Incarnation - Elizabeth A. Johnson

Deep Incarnation

Odd as it may seem to others, Christians hold to the radical notion that the one transcendent God who creates and empowers the world freely chooses to save the world not as a kindly onlooker from afar, but by joining the world in the flesh.  The prologue of John's Gospel states this succinctly, speaking of the advent of Jesus as the coming of God's personal self-expressing Word, full of loving-kindness and faithfulness:  "The word was made flesh and dwelt among us" (Jn 1:14).  Note that the Gospel does not say that the World became a human being (Greek antropos),  or a man (Greek aner), but flesh (Greek sarx), a broader reality.  Sarx or flesh in the New Testament connotes the finite quality of the material world which is fragile vulnerable, prone to trouble and sin, perishable, the very opposite of divine majesty. Taking the powerful biblical theme of God's dwelling among the people of Israel a step further.  John's Gospel affirms that in a new and saving event the Word of God became flesh, entered personally into the sphere of the material to shed light on all from within. 

In truth, the configuration of sarx that the Word became was precisely human.  However, the story of life in our planet of repositioning our species, connecting Homo sapiens historically and biologically to the whole tree of life.  Rather than standing alone as a species, we are intrinsically related to other species in the evolutionary network of life on our planet.  Consider this example, taken from Darwin's observations:

What can be more curious than that the hand of man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle off the porpoise, the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions? 

On the ordinary view of the direct creation of each being, he writes that we can only say that it has pleased the Creator to construct each animal in this way.   But if we suppose an ancient progenitor had its limbs arranged this way, he continues, that all descendants inherit the pattern.  The bones might be enveloped in a thick membrane to form a paddle to swim, or a thin membrane to form a wing, or that may be lengthened or shortened for some profitable purpose;  but there will be no tendency to alter the framework.  Indeed, the same names can be given to the bones in widely different animals.  What a grand natural system, formed by descent with slow and slight successive modifications!

The Word did indeed become human flesh;  but we now know that human connection to nature is so genuine that we cannot properly define our identity without including the great natural world of which we are a part.  Danish theologian Niels Gregersen has coined the phrase "deep incarnation," which is starting to be used in theology to signify the radical divine reach through human flesh all the way down into the very tissue of biological existence itself with its growth and decay.

Born of a woman and the Hebrew gene pool, the Word of God became a creature of Earth.  Like all creatures Jesus as an earthling whose blood held iron made in exploding stars and whose genetic code made him kin to the whole community of life that descended from common ancestors in the ancient seas.  "Deep incarnation" understands John 1:14 to be saying that the other human beings; it also reaches beyond them to join him to the whole biological world of living creatures and the cosmic dust of which they are composed.  As Pope John Paul II realized the incarnation accomplishes "the taking up in unity with God not only of human nature, but in this human nature of everything that is 'flesh': the whole of humanity, the entire visible and material world.  The Incarnation, then, has a cosmic significance . . . 

Instead of writing that long post I mentioned earlier,  I remembered this passage from Elizabeth A. Johnson's Abounding Kindness: Writings From The People of God so I typed it out.  Finally found my book holder which I misplaced a few weeks back so I can type out things like this, again.   

Odetta - Virgin Baby Had One Son

 

Odetta - voice, guitar

Bill Lee - bass

It's never been Christmas to me since about 1961 until I hear this.  Amazing to me it was that long ago.    

Patrick Cornelius - Christmas Gift

 

Patrick Cornelius - alto saxophone

Gerald Clayton - piano

Peter Slavov - bass

Kendrick Scott - drums

Daquin Noël X Organ in Saint Maximin - Quand Dieu Naquit à Noël

 

Pierre Bardon, titulaire émérite, organist 

My favorite Noel,  no one does it quite like the French do. 

Noël XI (Une Jeune Pucelle) - Louis-Claude Daquin. Performed by Edwin Lawrence on the Organ

 

The Huron Carol

This version performed by Heather Dale, and sung in Wendat (Huron), French and English.

The "Huron Carol" (or "'Twas in the Moon of Wintertime") is a Christmas hymn, written in 1643 by Jean de Brébeuf, a Christian missionary at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons in Canada. Brébeuf wrote the lyrics in the native language of the Huron/Wendat people; the song's original Huron title is "Jesous Ahatonhia" ("Jesus, he is born"). The song's melody is a traditional French folk song, "Une Jeune Pucelle" ("A Young Maid"). The well known English lyrics were written in 1926 by Jesse Edgar Middleton.

Have A Faithfilled Christmas

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, the French-Canadian Nuns who taught us catechism came over from the town where their convent was to watch us brats at the early morning mass on Christmas.  Then we'd have to all troop downstairs to the church hall, a dark and dismal basement room where the priest would come in and we'd be told, beforehand to sing one of the universally known Christmas songs to him and he'd be given a token present, supposedly from all us brats - though we didn't know anything about it though I think I remember having given a dime or so towards it.  If one of my older siblings had a reliable memory for that kind of thing, I'd ask what they remember.  But, there you go.   

In my family it might have meant putting off the hour when we got to open our presents, though we knew our older sisters would insist on singing for the late morning mass and we couldn't open ours until they came back, near or even early after noon time.   I remember feeling some contempt for the kids whose family tradition permitted opening presents before mass or even on Christmas eve.  "Babies" I thought, relishing the kind of feeling of moral superiority which is likely alloyed with a touch of envy.  Probably something like what Republican-fascists think whenever they hear of some poor or destitute person receiving meager aid.  But I outgrew that fairly young. 

I remember one year the Nuns told us to sing "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" but they'd decided that a "Merry Christmas" was insufficiently religious and they told us to, instead, sing "A Joyous Christmas."  As French was most of their mother tongues, and most of them came from very pious Catholic families, I figured it gave a little window into the difference between their and Anglo culture.   I didn't know that French Canadians saved up the merriment for Le Jour de L'An, on January 1st, Christmas day being a Holy Day.   

Some of that experience stuck with me because now,  the world of difference all those decades aside,  I still feel reluctant to say "Merry Christmas" because it seems too frivolous for what is a religious, a Christian holiday.   Too English to my ears, to tell you the truth.   I won't go into the diatribe against FOX Lies and Trump at this point but I'm sure you can guess what I mean and  what I'd have to say about that.  

My family, by almost unanimous consent, has done away with Christmas presents for adults - enjoying the entire Christmas season, including Advent, all the more for that.   We still decorate a bit, still make Christmas cookies, and some year I'll make my famous fruit cake again - Haven't made it since our father died thirty-one years ago, I'd probably die of shock at the price of the dried fruits, now.   And we'll have our traditional for the day and have our family party  on the January 1st.  I'm spending the day alone with my old cat and reading the appropriate Gospel readings and which-ever psalms and Epistle readings are for the day and that's as much merriment as I care to have.   I'm even foregoing writing a huge post on the Incarnation and the universal and cosmic theological assertions on that from such deep theologians as Gregory of Nyssa.  

So, have a faith filled, or even a joyous or, if you feel up to it, a merry Christmas.  I'm having one.

Double Speak, Double Think, Forked Tongues and The Such - A Christmas Post

ENGLISH IS A STRANGE language, the way that some words can mean both a thing and its opposite, "inflammable" being a famous example that can mean both something that burns easily or something that doesn't burn at all.   Then there are words that mean one thing then are intentionally distorted to mean something very different for intentional ends.   "Antisemitism" is one of those words I've been examining here since the IHRA intentionally turned that word into a smoke screen to privilege the bad behavior of the Israeli government, so it can do what the most infamous of antisemites in history did to another branch of "semites."   I wonder the part that the denotation slippage of our slippery, sloppy language plays in enabling that kind of thing.   Though, of course, English is hardly the only language that is so strange but as the United States is the primary patron of the Israeli government and has long been since they figured out (some say through the Six Day War in 1967) that Israel could be the American base to exercise out sized power in the middle-east, the facility with which English can be lied so consequentially with is an important consideration.   

But this is about how not only words but entire ideas can be twisted and distorted in response to some snark that came my way about how I've gone from the old, conventional, "enlightenment" practice when it comes to matters in the first century (or earlier) when the topic is religion of doubting everything while still using the exact same testimony about events in the ancient past recorded then when it is, literally, the only thing we have to go on to even know what may have happened, to someone who is willing to believe that they might just be leaving us an accurate description of reality.   What got me thinking about the slips and slops of language and, so, the thinking behind words is how the very same 17th - 21st century academics who heap up doubts about the reports of  the experience of the world of the first and other centuries while claiming to be able to present a description of that world as part of their academic scribbleage, what they get paid to do assume that those very words are unreliable.   I've criticized the "historical Jesus"  industry that does just that to get many an academic on the make for the relatively big bucks that such academics can get from getting on TV "documentaries" about "the historical Jesus" or by writing best sellers on the topic.   

It was while I was reading one of the best of those,  John Dominic Crossan,  specifically his claim that the body of Jesus wasn't given a decent burial by Joseph of Arimathea but was thrown into a shallow, common grave, likely dug up and eaten by stray dogs, that I realized that he, 20 centuries after Jesus was making up a story of the kind that he said the first century authors of the Gospels, some of whom may have seen Jesus and who very likely knew people who did see and hear Jesus, likely some of those witnesses to his Crucifixion and possibly eye-witnesses to the event did in reporting on his burial.   

I had already caught on to the game of such modern academics of claiming that the years and decades between the presumed date of Jesus's death and the writings of the Gospels as a means of debunking their accuracy or even veracity realizing that one is not to notice that such academics expect you to ignore the nearly two millennia of years, decades and centuries between the death of Jesus and their story telling, not to mention their own entire remove from any eyewitnesses, also their own motives in telling the stories they make up as alternatives.   And, as already said, topped off by them having to rely, entirely, on the canonical Gospels and those not in the canon, which are often suspected of even greater remove from the life and times of Jesus than the supposedly debunked canonical Gospels.   Almost all of the apocryphal gospels I've read contain even  more fantastic stories about Jesus than the canonical ones, but many such modern scholars claim them as more reliable than the officially accepted ones. 

And that's Crossan who has some record of producing credible reviewed academic writing, many of the most influential voices in the land of TV and internet documentaries have little to none of that.   Some of them make claims such as the absurd one that "organized Christianity" that came up with the various Scriptural canons "suppressed" the alternative Gospels.  That's certainly not the case of the Eastern, the Orthodox and the Catholic churches, which clearly took claims about Mary found in the apocryphal gospels to incorporate those in its holdings about Mary, her parents not mentioned or named in the Gospels, and, at least in the case of the Catholic churches, making that the basis of papal "infallible" doctrine and dogma.   The Protestant tradition is, actually, the source of most of the suppression of the apocrypha, though they have certainly also been the source of much of the scholarship around such writings, too.   Yet I'd expect that at least 98 out of 100 college-credentialed People who believe they  know anything about this  would repeat the lie that Christianity tried to destroy those poor-put-upon "alternative gospels,"  those meanies!  Elane Pagels has made a career out of peddling that line.   

I don't have any problem with honest disbelief in what the canonical Gospels say,  so long as one standard and not two or more are applied to the literature and history done in that period.   I have a big problem with double standards, whether in the treatment of academic topics or the behavior of governments and the societies that produce those governments.   I have a really big problem with dishonesty and sloppy, slippery representations of reality.    I'll bet that something approaching 90 percent if not ninety-eight of college-credentialed Americans who absorbed that forged "gospel" that "proved Jesus was married" still believe that years after it was exposed as a forgery made by a known and named forger and peddled to a member of the "Jesus Seminar" working at that most august and reputable of American universities, Harvard.   That scholar, Karen King, finally had to admit it was a fraud that she bought whole hog when it was fairly easy work by real experts to identify not only that it was a clear forgery but were rapidly able to figure out who had made the forgery.   About few topics is a lie as quick to fly around the world and lodge in the common received so-called wisdom of the college-credentialed as about Christianity.   To be fair and even-handed, the same is at times as true among those who aren't hostile to Christianity,  though they tend to be contained within some specific, often very conservative sections of Christianity and those who are pretty naive about history and its allied fields of research. 

I think that the two accounts, in Matthew and Luke, are more reliable than any of the later alternative sources about the Incarnation of Jesus, his birth and early life.   I think if the early followers of Jesus were making it up they would have come up with something far, far less likely to promote ridicule and snark and skepticism with motives other than finding the truth.   The Virgin Birth and the accounts of the infancy of Jesus in those two Gospels would have to be designed to invite that if they were invented either by the evangelists who wrote the Gospels or their sources.    Or, like Mark and John and Paul, they could have just not addressed the conception, birth and early life of Jesus.    I've been over the asserted discrepancy between the Septuagint and the Masoretic passage from Isaiah about a virgin giving birth not being a "Christian distortion" of the text but, rather,  the understanding of what was supposed to constitute a sign by God by those who translated the text into Greek.  I would suspect that many who read it in Hebrew would have understood it to mean a virgin as, clearly the translators did.   It makes a lot more sense if you figure a sign to be even noticed as a sign would be something out of the ordinary and a young woman giving birth in a society in which very early marriage (by modern standards) was the norm.   Who would even notice something everyday as a sign of anything?   I think it was the interpretation of Isaiah in reaction to Christian claims that distorts the text, both Hebrew and the character of the Greek translation made before the birth of Jesus. 

We are as reliant on what the ancient writers said whenever we want to think or talk about the People, times and places back then, archeology and speculation based on physical evidence can only take you so far, when remains of specific, nameable People or animals isn't available, it it almost never is outside of Egyptian royalty, that written record is all we have to go on, it's even necessary in the case of those mummified remains of the royals who we need a text to identify.   In the case of Jesus constructing him, his mother, etc. on the basis of "typical" Jewish peasants,  is as much historical fiction as many sand and sandal movies or 18th century bodice rippers.  If there is one thing we know about Jesus, he was unique among first century Jewish or other peasants, he is the motivating personality and central figure in a religious and moral movement that has lasted two-thousand years.   There is every reason to believe there was little that was typical about him and, likely, his parents.   You can't reconstruct anyone person out of generalizations from archaeology and things like speculative demographics from the lost past,  individuals are too individual for that.   You certainly can't settle the truth of a claimed to be unique miracle such as the Virgin Birth of Jesus with science, though one of the most famous of scientists falsely claimed you could.  You couldn't do that without a number of securely identifiable remains which yielded reliable DNA samples and those are not and never will be had.  And you'd have to rely on textual evidence to identify them, to bring that old post in line with the topic of this post.   I will point out that since 2006 I have chosen to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus based on the evidence available and the consequences of believing in it.  As I said the other day,  I think it's a hugely and universally beneficial belief. 

Candlemas

With certitude 

Simeon opened

ancient arms

to infant light.

Decades

before the cross, the tomb

and the new life

he knew

new life. 

With depth

of faith he drew on

turning illuminated

towards deep night. 

Denise Levertov: Breathing The Water

Israelism: The awakening of young American Jews

 

When two young American Jews raised to support Israel unconditionally witness the way Israel treats Palestinians, it changes their lives. They join a movement of young American Jews campaigning to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel and reveal a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity. Israelism sparked huge debate on American campuses even before the events of October 7, 2023.

It follows Simone Zimmerman, who visited Israel as a teenager, and Eitan who joined the Israeli army after graduating from high school as they discover the reality for Palestinians and radically revise their views. It includes interviews with academics and political activists, including Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Lara Friedman and a former director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abe Foxman.

Contributors suggest the narrative that young American Jews are fed almost entirely erases the existence of the Palestinians through education and advocacy, sometimes involving groups that organise free trips to Israel partially funded by the Israeli government.

This film describes how influential this narrative is in shaping attitudes to Israel, not just in the United States but across the world.

This is an excellent documentary, documenting the influence that zionism has had in deforming the perception of reality.   It is very much the same phenomenon at work in the really dishonest and clearly ideological IHRA "definition" of antisemitism which, adopted officially and legally by a large number of countries under the influence of Israeli and zionist lobbying, has distorted the law to protect, not Jews, but one country out of the entire world of countries, Israel.   Other than dictatorships and monarchies that protect their own governments and the governments of their close allies to protect them from not just criticism but the very facts and truth of what they do, there is no other instance I know of where countries deputed to be democracies have done that - the United States is certain to adopt the IHRA's iron smoke screen for Israel, probably as soon as next year.  The fact is that that smoke screen is already up on a defacto basis.  In addition to the phrase "apartheid democracy" we need to start talking about moral blackmail in which the moral aspiration to something worthwhile, the suppression of hatred of Jews, is used to extort unquestioning support for just another and not a particularly moral state, Israel.   The documentary points out that the American right, which includes probably the greatest number of zionists - THE LARGE MAJORITY OF THEM JEW-HATING "CHRISTIANS" - making common cause with fascists and neo-Nazis to distort American politics on behalf of that other country.  

The kind of revelation among former zionists - I guess I'd be considered one before the late 1980s - once they learn the truth about Israel present and past and zionism before Israel, is one of the few optimistic signs of the times.  

Despite the lie that Israel is singled out for criticism over its laws and policies, treated unfairly on that basis, the opposite is true in the United States and by Western countries, in general.  That is done on the basis of moral blackmail when it's not done on the basis of enticing the highly corruptible, generally in right-wing parties.   I want Israel to be treated as any other country with its apartheid legal basis, its Lebensraum policy of stealing land and property owned by Palestinians, its genocidal policy and war on Gaza and its outsized influence in getting the United States into some of the worst choices ever made by our government, like any other country would be.   I want Israel to be considered just another country, as liable to do evil as any other because it is certainly not "the most moral" country with "the most moral army" in the world.  That is a really, really big lie.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Various - 8 Hours Of Christmas Radio Dramas

 

I was looking for a new Christmas themed radio drama to post, figuring I can post the very good Morpeth Carol only so many years before it started getting the old Christmas Carol status here.   Then I realized that there were plenty of "golden age" dramas that had Christmas programs that were new to here and I immediately found this.  I haven't listened to much of it, yet,  I hope you find something to like.  I wouldn't try listening to all eight hours at once.  If you go to it at the Youtube site, there's a linked playlist so you can try them one at a time.

Member of Musk's Favorite Neo-Nazi Party In Germany Murders Many Terrorizes Many More In An Attack On A Christmas Market

 The guy is an atheist, ex-Muslim shrink,  long time and confirmed fanatical supporter of neo-Nazism and fascism and hatred of Muslims supporter of genocide against Palestinians, etc. and, of course, the European neo-Nazis and fascists are claiming his ethnicity to promote exactly what their terrorist supports.   And J.D. Vance is getting in on the neo-Nazi action. 

Owen Jones' current history context is especially important to hear. 

The Connection Between

the rather pedestrian event,  the winter solstice and the birth of Jesus, the incarnation is something RMJ posted about today.   The readings in his post reminded me of one of the most moving things in the Catholic liturgical year, the Easter Proclamation centering on the Easter candle,  the ending of which is . . . 

May this flame be found still burning
by the Morning Star:
the one Morning Star who never sets,
Christ your Son,
who, coming back from death's domain,
has shed his peaceful light on humanity,
and lives and reigns for ever and ever.

I'm  all in on that but think it's too narrow,  favoring more of a cosmic interpretation of the incarnation and embodiment of God in material substance, an idea that is more compatible with Franciscan Christology and theology than it is most conventional Catholicism or even most of mainline Christianity.

The combination of the two events, the Incarnation and the Resurrection are not separable, both being aspects of the very real, living Jesus, both before his death and after the Resurrection.    As that quote from Hans Kung posted here a while back notes, the infant so tender and mild in that Silent Night idea of things already bore the imprint of the cross.  And on the other side of his bodily death was life of a kind that is quite unlike the material life, though, if Paul is to be believed, is physical in a way that modern thinking can't really deal with.  Here from 1 Corinthians 15:

35 But someone will say, “How are the dead raised? What kind of body will they have when they come back?” 36 Look, fool! When you put a seed into the ground, it doesn’t come back to life unless it dies. 37 What you put in the ground doesn’t have the shape that it will have, but it’s a bare grain of wheat or some other seed. 38 God gives it the sort of shape that he chooses, and he gives each of the seeds its own shape. 39 All flesh isn’t alike. Humans have one kind of flesh, animals have another kind of flesh, birds have another kind of flesh, and fish have another kind. 40 There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. The heavenly bodies have one kind of glory, and the earthly bodies have another kind of glory. 41 The sun has one kind of glory, the moon has another kind of glory, and the stars have another kind of glory (but one star is different from another star in its glory). 42 It’s the same with the resurrection of the dead: a rotting body is put into the ground, but what is raised won’t ever decay. 43 It’s degraded when it’s put into the ground, but it’s raised in glory. It’s weak when it’s put into the ground, but it’s raised in power. 44 It’s a physical body when it’s put into the ground, but it’s raised as a spiritual body.

If there’s a physical body, there’s also a spiritual body. 45 So it is also written, The first human, Adam, became a living person, and the last Adam became a spirit that gives life. 46 But the physical body comes first, not the spiritual one—the spiritual body comes afterward. 47 The first human was from the earth made from dust; the second human is from heaven. 48 The nature of the person made of dust is shared by people who are made of dust, and the nature of the heavenly person is shared by heavenly people. 49 We will look like[f] the heavenly person in the same way as we have looked like the person made from dust.

50 This is what I’m saying, brothers and sisters: Flesh and blood can’t inherit God’s kingdom. Something that rots can’t inherit something that doesn’t decay. 51 Listen, I’m telling you a secret: All of us won’t die, but we will all be changed— 52 in an instant, in the blink of an eye, at the final trumpet. The trumpet will blast, and the dead will be raised with bodies that won’t decay, and we will be changed. 53 It’s necessary for this rotting body to be clothed with what can’t decay, and for the body that is dying to be clothed in what can’t die. 54 And when the rotting body has been clothed in what can’t decay, and the dying body has been clothed in what can’t die, then this statement in scripture will happen:

Death has been swallowed up by a victory.[g]
55
        Where is your victory, Death?
        Where is your sting, Death?[h]

(56 Death’s sting is sin, and the power of sin is the Law.) 57 Thanks be to God, who gives us this victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! 58 As a result of all this, my loved brothers and sisters, you must stand firm, unshakable, excelling in the work of the Lord as always, because you know that your labor isn’t going to be for nothing in the Lord.

The great commentator on this, the classicist and writer on religion David Bentley Hart has pointed out in reaction to people misrepresenting his view, claiming that he denied the physicality of the resurrection points out that he has said nothing except what Paul said in this passage, pointing out that the common conception of the "physical" and its relation to spirit was quite different than that held under our common modern, scientific definition of what physical reality consists of, noting that angels were held to have a physical body while being spiritual beings, the only non-physical entity or consciousness being God who is the only uncreated being  He talks of the implications of verses 35 through 44 in which stars, the moon, the sun, are talked about in the same way that living beings are talked about as a prelude to including human beings in that same universe of glorious (implying spiritual) embodied entities.  

In his reaction to the atheist-materialist fad of pansychism, claiming that consciousness is an inherent attribute of naturally organized physical entities, atoms, molecules, subatomic molecules, that "conciousness" getting more like what we experience of consciousness as the entities increase in their complexity and organizatoin, Rupert Sheldrake asked the entirely reasonable question, well, then, is the Sun conscious?   It is certainly an extremely complex, very active physical structure, self-organized, as it were.  If you're going to take that resort to the "hard problem" of trying to deal with clearly incarnate consciousness and its relationship to problem of understanding it in materialist terms,  I don't see how you can say that's an unreasonable question and, in fact, that its affirmative answer would be any more outlandish than the idea that atoms and molecules, possibly subatomic particles, maybe even energy has consciousness - though I think it's absurd to think that talking about what the panpsychists conjecture and the normal, universal conception of what consciousness is based on human experience of our own consciousness and our observation of animals and other behaving organisms as the same thing makes the first particle of sense.  

And if those particles that we're told are, at a fundamental level, much like light and energy, conscious, why not the light?  

These are just a few things that come to mind on a winter solstice morning as I try to deal with an ongoing family problem.  I might get more posted today,  I hope so.  Thank you

Here is RMJ's second post of the day on that appropriate O Antiphon, O Radiant Dawn.

Military And Governmental Superstition About AI Is Killing Innocent People Right Now

OVER THE PAST year I've noticed an increasing number of those making pseudo-historical videos are obviously depending on AI to produce content.   My response to those is to click on those that look like they might be that kind of crap less and less but I still do on occasion.  One I clicked on a couple of days back was supposedly about Empress Elizabeth of Russia but which had many images entirely irrelevant to her and 18th century Russia, some of them images of Elizabeth I of England and clearly having something to do with England in her time.  Other  videos are even worse, mangling the chat-bot voice-over mixing all kinds of stuff together, using clearly inappropriate words as AI is quite likely to do and other stuff.  Maybe they've turned the production of this crap entirely over to AI, not even bothering to watch them before they're posted to get that monitization money from Youtube.   

I've noticed the same is sometimes true of those really annoying and unasked for AI "summaries" that now appear at the top of Google searches.   I hope Google soon either drops those or they give an opt-out feature.  Though I think it's very likely to twist the already twisted minds of a dangerously large number of the mid-brow who make up most of our so-called educated population.   The "information age" has produced an even lower percentage of informed People. 

But that's only relatively annoying and mostly innocuous. My doubts about so-called artificial intelligence increased about fifteen years ago when I first read about officials in the Pentagon anticipating using it for things like choosing targets to bomb and places to attack.   Well, that's part of what the Israeli government and its military are doing in Gaza, right now, wiping out entire neighborhoods because their computer conjectures that a Hamas militant might be in the general vicinity.  Which should be a war crime and, if it is, no one's doing much of anything to stop it.  

Human Rights Watch assessed four tools that the Israeli military has used in its ongoing offensive in Gaza related to military planning and targeting. One is based on mobile phone tracking to monitor the evacuation of Palestinians from parts of northern Gaza. Another, which the military calls “The Gospel,” generates lists of buildings or other structural targets to be attacked. Another, which the military calls “Lavender” assigns ratings to people in Gaza related to their suspected affiliation with Palestinian armed groups for purposes of labeling them as military targets. “Where’s Daddy?” purports to determine when a target is in a particular location so they can be attacked there.

Am I the only one who thinks the Israeli establishment is unusually cynical and callous as demonstrated in the names they give their engines of murder? 

Israel has a huge business in exporting its spying and repression technology to some of the worst regimes in the world,  that's something that its been doing since well back into the apartheid era of South Africa, the dictatorships in Latin America and Asia so I have no doubt that they would be even more willing to sell it to the American government, in fact they have been making a lot of money out of teaching military and control tactics to local American police agencies - remember that as you watch the Trump II era military-police tactics used against demonstrators and, who knows, even those who don't demonstrate against Trumpian fascism.   I doubt them using "artificial intelligence" would make them any less apt to kill and maim and terrorize people who are guilty of nothing more than demanding equality and democracy.  

The more general point is that if the Israeli regime is doing this you can imagine that other regimes in other countries are doing it - there are none so superstitious about the value of "AI" as those who don't have a clue about it but are sold it as being of benefit to them.  This is the new superstition, superstition with science and technology which is certainly going to be more dangerous because it magnifies and multiplies the power of those who choose to use it without much human intelligence or a shred of moral restraint.   Secularism is every bit as capable of producing superstition as the worst of any other aspect of human culture and ideology.   And, I'd argue, it's far worse because like science, secularism is divorced form any consideration of morality by common agreement. 

Mikołaj Zieleński - Magnificat

 

Warsaw Philharmonic Choir

Henryk WOJNAROWSKI, director

While Thinking About The Principles Of Kwanzaa

After Listening To Callie Crossley Last Night

AS THE BILLIONAIRE OWNERS of the "free press" join the other grifting billionaires in kissing Trump's ass AND PAYING HIM OPEN, OVERT BRIBES,  remember all those self-serving lines about the "free press" as the guarantors of American democracy which were generally lies in the past and are entirely lies now. 

I think we're finding out democracy is not the product of some kind of natural, inevitable evolution, it's not a product of alleged education and literacy.  It's not the product of ever expanding and increasing libertarian freedoms as those were dreamed of in 1960s era secularism and illusion.  Democracy is not about getting your own way, which is what most Americans seem to believe constitutes "freedom."   It certainly cannot survive in a country where the Supreme Court has declared money to equal "free speech" thus, with one ruling giving billionaires billions of times more "free speech" and so "freedom" than those who have little or nothing. 

It is now clear that democracy cannot exist with a billionaire-multi-millionaire class because it is inevitable that they will use such freedoms to corrupt a margin of Americans into either voting for fascism and peddling lies to enough of them to ensure that self-government is a pious fiction at best while being a total and obvious lie in reality.   Our choice is to either be rid of income inequality or be rid of equality and democracy,  that is the big, glaring, reality as can be read in those signs of the times I mentioned yesterday.

It may be incomprehensible to many why I rail a lot against the "civil liberties" industry, the big name civil liberties, especially "free speech" "free-press" presstitutes,  old line ACLUers, and the "liberal" "justices" and judges who have given the billionaires and their media a privilege to lie with impunity because it was their, not infrequently personally profitable service to the big media, the lying media, the Republican-fascist, billionaire and multi-millionaire owned media because they have  played as big a part as the billionaires and millionaires in corrupting enough People to produce the ever increasing disasters that have led us to Trump II - American Democracy Implodes Like His Atlantic City Casinos.   

The old secular liberalism and leftism betrayed the real American left which has always, for our entire history, been all about equality,  legal, social equality and economic justice.   It has been about telling the truth which is the enemy of the kind of privilege that is baked into the Constitution and which the courts, from the time of the Marshall Court on have expanded, though on occasion they would, in effect, permit such rights equally to the poor and destitute as they would to billionaires and millionaires, guess whose "equal rights" of that sort would prove to be the real ones.  

Reading Jeremiah and the other Prophets of the Jewish Scriptures,  their warnings of consequences for Judah and Israel that came with the abandonment of the radical egalitarianism of the Mosaic tradition,  I don't think we have any reason to believe that America is going to escape similar consequences.  I think we have every reason to expect such as will come will be far worse than the pillaging of the capital city and the exile of a few thousand aristocrats and royals - what the actual biblical Exile consisted of.  If, as happened then, America's presumed special status is going to be stripped away has yet to be seen.   

I think with, first, the imposition by the Supreme Court of Bush II with the disasters it instituted, especially in its invasion of Iraq with consequences still playing out right now, then the voters putting Bush II in power, even as the catastrophic policies foreign and domestic were known to be a disaster - then a mere eight years later Americans and our corrupt Electoral College giving us Trump I with its massive corruption and criminal insanity - costing hundreds of thousands of American's lives - to have Trump II a mere four years after that - after the most remarkable domestic policy success of the Biden years were rejected by the voters at the urging of the "free press" ,. . . with the world seeing how truly corrupt our media, our politics, our "democracy" has become, how easily gulled and led a majority of the electorate is,  they have certainly learned that America's best days are well and truly behind us and they will need to make other plans in the future.   

Our mass media, which now includes the Zuckerberg Face Book - he being one of the billionaires to kiss the ass of Trump - Twit's Musk who is about to strip the American treasury on the inside -  ABC - which caved to the tune of fifteen-million FOR TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT TRUMP  and the freedoms to operate as they have been handed by the "civil liberties" industry and "liberal" and fascist Supreme Courts - proves that the First Amendment is so stupidly drafted so as to have always been a danger to equal justice, equal rights, equality and, so, democracy.   The United States has no hope of reaching anything like a stable, never mind progressing egalitarian democracy so long as those words remain unchanged, making it clear that there is no right to lie,  that the media is a corporate entity and, so, has no rights and that any privileges to operate require mandatory obligations to tell the truth and nothing but the truth,  America as America was alleged to be is over. 

America won't recover until a large margin of voters grow up and accept that a decent government and a decent society carries not only the necessity of knowing the truth that might, might make us free BUT ALSO THE MORAL OBLIGATIONS THAT COME WITH REAL COSTS IN THE IDIOTIC NOTIONS OF LIBERTARIAN "FREEDOM" THAT WE HAVE BEEN SOLD.   And I don't think that will come unless they realize that secularism cannot sustain that because secularism will always erode morals, even from those who may retain vestiges of such notions through socially inherited feelings about that.   Even a rational calculus that shows such decency requires morality to come about to start with and, even more so, to sustain it isn't enough.  You as well  as an effective majority have to really, truly believe you are consequentially obliged to practice that morality for it to really, truly, become reliable. 

I listen to those Black People who sincerely and joyously practice Kwanzaa  and the principles of it and sincerely envy them such an inspired season.  I don't think it would be good for white guys, such as I am, to break in on it because that would dilute it as much as if Christians started in on the Jewish holy days or appropriating other cultures' sacred times.  I mentioned here years ago, while reminiscing about my decades as a gay man, that I read a 1970s gay activist, a Quaker, saying that the "gay liberation" movement needed a Martin Luther King jr. and that it wasn't going to have one.   I don't remember his name, I doubt he is still alive, though he might be, but he was absolutely right.  I think the LGBTQ+ community - by which I mean those of us who are mutually committed to universal equality, not to the kind of rich gay and lesbian millionaires and billionaires and Trump ass kissers - would benefit from a similar list of principles and a similar period of organized promotion of them every years - "pride month" doesn't do it.   But, I doubt we're going to have that.  We could adopt that list of principles without coopting or risking appearing to appropriate Kawnzaa, it would be a pretty good list to go with. 

Ex-Republican-(allegedly non-fascist) Maryland Governor Larry Hogan

apparently mistook the constellation Orion for mysterious drones hovering over the east coast.  He took videos and posted them in a Twit.  I  looked and it was so frickin' obvious that I couldn't believe that so many allegedly responsible adults are too ignorant and stupid that they mistook some of the most obvious stars in one of the most obvious constellations in the night sky.  Apparently that's what most of the videos of the "drones" that the Republican-fascists on FOX Lies are rattling on about are. 

It reminds me of when I was obliged to visit an old-family, old fart who I really didn't like when he was hospitalized at the age of 84 - he was allegedly leaving some money to a non-profit I was on the board of - and he said he'd never really looked at clouds before.   The guy was a classics professor who, no doubt, had read all kinds of descriptions of the sky in classical and other lit but apparently he'd never bothered to look up at the sky above him even in his childhood.   He was a Republican, too.  I had to bite my tongue when he started talking about the politics - a real racist.  Maybe Republicans are just like that.  Neither seeing the sky nor the signs of the times.  

His supposed legacy to the non-profit never materialized, either.  It did cause us a lot of headaches as people wondered why the windfall he'd talked about didn't materialize.   He'd taught Bush I at some point in his life.  I really had to bite my tongue when he started going on about what a good family the Bushes were.   Criminals. 

The Israeli Genocide of Gazan Civilians Documented

 

You can read the report from Airwars on which Owen Jones based his commentary on here.   Keeping in mind that it only reports on a short period of time during the Israeli attack begun as a response to the October 7th massacre, the first 25 days of it.

Especially damning is this passage comparing the number of civilians killed in Gaza to that of the previous highest number they reported on when the US led coalition attack on Raqqa over a four month period and the battle of Mosul which had been the highest month long period they reported on. 

In 25 days of October 2023, civilian harm in Gaza occurred on a scale unmatched by any conflict previously documented by Airwars. This section will outline a number of key metrics by which such rates are measured.

When discussing rates of civilian harm, the most commonly used metric in public debate is the number of civilians killed in a particular period. Airwars found that at least 5,139 civilians were killed in Gaza between October 7th through the 31st. This number is only a minimum, with the maximum number of civilians killed reaching 6,668. It is also a known undercount as Airwars' work is ongoing, with additional civilian deaths from the period still under analysis.

This conservative figure (5,139 civilians killed) is already nearly four times the number of civilians killed in the most lethal month previously documented by Airwars: March 2017, where at least 1,470 civilians were killed by the US coalition in Iraq.

In the Battle of Raqqa, where the US-led Coalition fired 30,000 artillery rounds into the city over four months, Airwars documented 2,556 civilians killed by US coalition forces. 956 of these civilians were killed in strikes where attribution was recorded as contested, i.e. where harm may have resulted from other actors. Even taking this higher number of civilian deaths into account, it is still only half the number of civilians killed in 25 days in Gaza.

In his commentary Owen Jones points out that the accusation made by the Israeli government and its apologists that Hamas was using civilians and civilian infrastructure as "human shields" that Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth and that when Iran targeted the headquarters of the Israeli intelligence service and and military, located among civilians and civilian infrastructure, that no one talks about the Israeli government and military using Israeli civilians as "human shields."  He also notes that the Israeli military using Palestinian civilians, even children, as human shields during their attacks has been documented.   

Israel is exposed for what it is, certainly a genocidal apartheid state, what I think should be considered an apartheid democracy.   I have heard its democratic status given as a reason that the west must support it, no matter what, apparently, forgetting that just because they vote in the government that that exempts them from being held responsible for the crimes that government commits.  That is one of the worst examples of what giving a mere word that kind of absolute and unthinking moral authority because the Apartheid South African government was just such a democracy as were the American states which practiced and still do practice Jim Crow to maintain white supremacy.  Israel, both by Constitution, by law and by Supreme Court declarations is more overtly apartheid than even the American Jim Crow states were during the lynch-law period.   The "settlers" carrying out Israeli murders and terrorism and intimidation just as much as any Hollywood depicted lynch mob ever did largely with the state government's support and encouragement.  

With Gaza a lot of People are waking up to realize what I did during Israel's genocidal attacks on Lebanon decades before, it is an outlaw state cultivating and demanding the conditions for its support in the United States, Britain and other countries without which it could not maintain its apartheid system of rule and Lebensraum policy of expansion.   A large number of those whose eyes are opened about that are Jews, young and old and, as Mehdi Hassan has pointed out, like it or not that is an important thing.   

Zionism has been a disaster as many Jews predicted it would be in the early decades of the ideology.  They were right.  America has to stop its facilitating of the crimes of the Israeli government, military and the majority of Israeli voters who keep apartheid in power and its imperial expansion going.   It's not going to get better, it's going to be an even bigger blood bath than it is now.  

Without equality being the foundation of it, democracy is as capable as any other government of being evil, that's true of the United States under apartheid democracy as it is in Israel.   Calling unequal governance what it is is important, calling Israel an "ethno-state" isn't specific enough because the responsibility of the voters there, as in the United States which just voted in a white-supremacist government by democratic means, must be included in the label.   Holding a vote isn't nearly enough, without equality a majority can be as evil as a single despot.  In the case of Israel, they've kept Netanyahu in power longer than they have anyone else, knowing full well what an evil and corrupt person he is.  The majority of Israelis hold responsibility for what their elected government does as the majority of voters and those too irresponsible to vote against Trump do for what he's about to do, including giving the genocide campaigns of the Israeli government a free hand to kill and steal even more.

Dedication Of The Notre Dame Organ

 

0:22 First invocation (Latry), crescendo from flues to chorus reeds

2:27 Second invocation (Latry), from death to resurrection

4:11 Third invocation (Dubois), featuring chorus reeds and sweeping descending runs with mutations sur Veni Sancte Spiritus

6:19 Fourth invocation (Dubois), tierce en taille sur Ave Maris Stella 

8:29 Fifth invocation (Fajoles), plein jeu

10:35 Sixth invocation (Fajoles), featuring voix céleste and septième

12:39 Seventh invocation (Escaich), stepwise solo melody

14:33 Eighth invocation (Escaich), toccata in modern Cochereauian style

I've read a lot of those who listened to it live and in the media were shocked and even angry at the incredibly fine display of French style organ improvisation,  some complained that it was "inappropriate" because it wasn't simple and melodic - I suppose they'd have preferred cocktail lounge Hammond style stuff.   The expressions on the face of the Archbishop showed just how appropriate it was to the place and occasion.   It was a full display of great musicianship in the French style, as it should have been.   Wish I could have been there, even the glimpses of Trump and Musk didn't do much to spoil listening to it.   I wonder if fat ass was listening to a recording of himself in the ear plug he had plugged into.   It is such a national disgrace to have him representing the United States.