The Garden (original song) recorded with Audigo

Talking to My Bot

I been talking to my best friend Bard about the we're the good guys quote from Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road". 

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 Townes Van Zandt - Pancho & Lefty (Live in Austin, 1975) [RESTORED FOOTAGE]

The Easybeats - Friday On My Mind (French TV, 1967) 1080p HD

Animals Medley: We Gotta Get Out of This Place / Don't Bring Me Down/ It...

Nicki Minaj & Ice Spice – Barbie World (with Aqua) [Official Music Video]

It seems cool to me that the Barbie Movie is such an opportunity for learning either by the cool (like this video) or the uncool but hilarious mojo dojo casa house. 

Irish Catholics in Ireland - A Shameful History

Since this is St. Patrick's Day and people are thinking about Ireland maybe it's a good day to think a little about Irish history.

The segments below are from the book "The Age of Voltaire" by Will and Ariel Durant 

Chapter III section VI Ireland 1714-1756

"Rarely in history has a nation been so oppressed as the Irish. Through repeated victories by English armies over native revolts, a code of laws had been set up that chained the Irish in body and soul. Their soil had been confiscated until only a handful of Catholic landowners remained, and nearly all of it was held by Protestants who treated their agricultural laborers as slaves. "The poor people of Ireland," said Chesterfield, "are used worse than Negroes by their lords and masters." It was "not unusual in Ireland," said Lecky, "for great landed proprietors to have regular prisons in their houses for the summary punishment of the lower orders." ...The tenants - racked by rents paid to the landlord, by tithes paid to the Established Church which they hated, and by dues paid to their own priests - lived in mud hovels with leaky roofs, went half naked, and were often on the edge of starvation; Swift thought "the Irish tenants live worse than English beggars." Those landlords who remained in Ireland, and the deputies of the absentees, drugged themselves against the barbarism and hostility of their surroundings with carousals of food and drink, extravagant hospitality, quarreling and dueling, and gambling for high stakes"......

"The structure of Irish politics made impossible any resistance to English domination except by mob action or individual  violence. Since no one could hold office except by adherence to the Church of England, the Irish Parliament, after 1692, was composed entirely of Protestants, and was now wholly subservient to England. In 1719 the English Parliament reaffirmed its paramount right to legislate for Ireland. Laws that in England protected parliamentary or individual liberty, like the Habeus Corpus Act and the Bill of Rights, were not extended to Ireland; the relative freedom of the press enjoyed in England had no existence in Ireland. The two parliaments resembled each other only in the corruption of their electors and their members. They differed again in the dominant influence of Anglican Bishops in the Irish House of Lords."

"The established Church in Ireland included about a seventh of the population among it's adherents, but it was supported by tithes taken from the peasantry, nearly all of whom were Catholics. A small proportion of the people followed the Presbyterian or other Dissenting creeds, and received a measure of toleration, short of eligibility to office. Catholics were excluded not only from office but from all learned professions except medicine, and from nearly every avenue to higher education wealth of influence. They were forbidden to purchase land, or to invest in mortgages on land, or to hold any long or valuable lease. They could not serve as jurors, except where Protestants were not available. They could not teach in schools; they could not vote for municipal or national offices; they could not validly marry a Protestant."...

"The disorder of religious life shared with the poverty of the people and the hopelessness of social advancement in demoralizing Irish life. The ablest and bravest Catholics - who would have raised the level of Irish capacity, morality and intelligence  - emigrated to France or Spain  or America. Many Irishman sank into beggary or crime to escape from starvation. Robber gangs hid in the countryside, smugglers and wreckers lurked near the shores, and some property owners kept as many as eighty bravos to do their bidding regardless of the law. Thousands of cattle and sheep were slaughtered by roving bands, apparently as Catholic revenge upon Protestant landlords. It was difficult for a people to respect the laws passed by an Irish Parliament that often spoke of the Catholics - three quarters of the population - as "the common enemy.""

"There were some brighter elements in Irish life. The cheerful, easygoing, laughter-loving temper of the people survived through all their hardships, and their superstitions and legends surrounded their lives with magic and poetry without leading them to such violence as marked the witchcraft persecution in Scotland and Germany.....There were many instances of individual Protestants helping indigent Catholics, and of magistrates applying leniently the Draconian regulations of the penal code."

By and large the Irish scene was one of the most shameful in history. A degrading poverty, a chaotic lawlessness, a nomadic pauperism, 34,000 beggars, countless thieves, an upper class living in drunken extravagance amid a starving peasantry, every crop  failure bringing widespread  starvation - "the old and sick," said Swift, "dying and rotting by cold and famine and filth and vermin" - this terrible picture must find a place in our conception of man."

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I've been thinking about the history of people who are able to overcome adversity in the form of poverty and oppression and exploitation by those with money and power. I recently finished  the book "Unfree Labor - American Slavery and Russian Serfdom" by Peter Kolchin. It's an interesting book showing some of the similarities and differences between American slavery and Russian serfdom. A key takeaway may be that the percentage of unfree labor aka slaves/serfs in the general population was much higher in Russia than in the U.S. Of course this means today that more Russians are descendants of slaves/serfs than Americans. Slavery in the U.S. and serfdom in Russia were both ended in the mid 1800's. In Russia in 1861 voluntarily by the aristocracy and in the U.S. in 1865 via the Civil War. 

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The Chesterfield mentioned above is Lord Chesterfield aka Philip Dormer Stanhope 4th Earl of Chesterfield. He was, among other things, the lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1745. Will and Ariel Durant write, "His one year in Ireland was the most successful of his career. He established schools and industries, cleansed the government of corruption and jobbery, administered affairs with competence and impartiality. He ended the persecution of Catholics, promoted several of them to office, and so earned the respect of the Catholic population that when the Young Pretender invaded England from Scotland, and England expected a simultaneous revolution in Ireland, the Irish refused to rise against  Chesterfield." 

What I find fascinating about Lord Chesterfield is the book of letters published after his death to his illegitimate son Philip Stanhope. Wikipedia describes this book as -

Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774), comprises a thirty-year correspondence in more than 400 letters. Begun in 1737 and continued until the death of his son in 1768, Chesterfield wrote mostly instructive communications about geography, history, and classical literature. with later letters focusing on politics and diplomacy, and the letters themselves were written in French, English and Latin to refine his son's grasp of the languages.

As a handbook for worldly success in the 18th century, the Letters to His Son give perceptive and nuanced advice for how a gentleman should interpret the social codes that are manners:

... However frivolous a company may be, still, while you are among them, do not show them, by your inattention, that you think them so; but rather take their tone, and conform in some degree to their weakness, instead of manifesting your contempt for them. There is nothing that people bear more impatiently, or forgive less, than contempt; and an injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult. If, therefore, you would rather please than offend, rather be well than ill spoken of, rather be loved than hated; remember to have that constant attention about you which flatters every man's little vanity; and the want of which, by mortifying his pride, never fails to excite his resentment, or at least his ill will....

Samuel Johnson said of the letters that "they teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing-master" as means for getting on in the world as a gentleman. 

I found the book interesting, but slow reading, with what seems like some timeless advice for how to get along and get ahead (if that's your thing) in the world. It's an incredibly sad book in a way - Lord Chesterfield means well and wants his son to thrive in the 18th century world of politics, salons and society (as did Lord Chesterfield). The son gets a seat in the English parliament thanks to Dad but gives only one speech which he doesn't finish because he gets so tongue-tied. Philip marries without his father's knowledge and dies at 36. After Philip's death, Lord Chesterfield learned of the existence of Philip's wife and children. He received them kindly and took upon himself the cost of education and maintenance of his grandsons and became very attached to them. 

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Finally...you might ask yourself why Will and Ariel Durant titled this 900 page book "The Age of Voltaire", or if you are like me you might ask yourself - "who is Voltaire?" One way to get to know him a little is read his book Candide, although it would be useful to read a bit about the political, religious, and philosophical climate of his time to understand what that book is about - a fairly devastating attack on the ideas of philosophers like Leibniz, and theologians of the Calvinist stripe, who propose that all things are predetermined by God i.e. free will does not exist and even terrible disasters that kill innocent people (like the Lisbon earthquake in Voltaire's case) are the best thing that could happen in this - the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire had seen to much of humanity's inhumanity to think one could find the best of all worlds in the world at large....so not  totally unlike Chance the Gardner (if we take away Chance's constant TV watching) he  recommended we tend our own gardens.

You could also listen to this 40 minute BBC Radio 4 podcast about Voltaire's Candide to see if any of this interests you.

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Marxist Philosophy - Bryan Magee & Charles Taylor (1978)

Marxist philosophy appears to me somewhat like a cartoon we had at work of a person writing a giant complicated equation on a chalkboard and the equation has a term "and then a miracle occurs". One miracle Karl Marx believed in was that post-revolution society would be conflict-free. This results in Marxist regimes having no way to accommodate pluralistic values, but rather they must punish/remove/silence those not adhering to the party line. 

“The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.” - Karl Marx

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." - Hamlet Act 1 

 

Empty Signifiers - Autogenerated by GPT-4

Words like woke, conservative, and liberal are often used in political discourse to label people, groups, or ideas. But what do these words actually mean? And why are they so vague and controversial?

One way to approach this question is to use the concept of **empty signifiers**. An empty signifier is a word or phrase that has no clear or fixed meaning but can be filled with different meanings by different people. For example, the word "democracy" can mean different things to different people: some may think of free elections, others may think of human rights, and others may think of social justice. The word "democracy" does not have a single or objective definition, but rather depends on how people interpret it in different contexts.

Similarly, words like woke, conservative, and liberal can be seen as empty signifiers that have no precise or universal meaning. These words can mean different things to different people: some may associate them with certain values, beliefs, policies, or identities; others may use them as insults or compliments; and others may reject them altogether. These words do not have a clear or consistent signified (the thing that they refer to), but rather depend on how people use them as signifiers (the symbols that represent something).

One reason why these words are empty signifiers is because they are often used in **hegemonic** ways. This means that they are used to represent a diverse and complex set of demands or interests as if they were unified and coherent. For example, the word "woke" can be used to represent a variety of social justice movements or causes as if they were all part of one single agenda. The word "conservative" can be used to represent a range of political views or ideologies as if they were all based on one common principle. The word "liberal" can be used to represent a spectrum of economic or cultural positions as if they were all derived from one core value.

By using these words as hegemonic empty signifiers, people can try to create a sense of identity or solidarity among themselves and their allies. They can also try to exclude or oppose those who do not share their interpretation of these words. However, this also creates problems and contradictions.

Words like woke, conservative, and liberal are not clear-cut categories or labels but rather fluid and contested signs that can change over time and across contexts.

These words are not neutral or objective but rather loaded and subjective symbols that can evoke emotions and reactions.

Therefore, it is important to be aware of how these words are used and what they imply. It is also important to be critical of how these words are abused or manipulated. By doing so, we can avoid falling into simplistic or polarized views of ourselves and others.

We can also engage in more nuanced and constructive dialogues about the issues that matter to us.

<end of auto-generated text>

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“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

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Eating Our Way to Extinction | Full Film | 4K

The Front Desk: Vow of Silence ft. Fred Armisen

 

 

The comedian and YouTube political commentator RM Brown was using samples of this video to illustrate how ridiculous partisan political name-calling can be. RM Brown has some funny (in my opinion) and smart takes on a variety of political and social issues. He is good at pointing out the absurdity of the messages promoted by various right-wing paid propagandists who are popular with frightened old people and confused young men.

Reading From Will and Ariel Durant's "The Story of Civilization" Book VII Chapter XIX

I found the discussion of Gustavus Adolphus and his daughter Christina to be fascinating and thought I'd share some of it.

The Durant's describe Gustavus Adolphus -

"The most romantic figure in Swedish history was now sixteen. His mother was a German, daughter of Duke Adolphus of Holstein-Gottorp. Father and mother gave him a rigorous education in the Swedish and German languages and the Protestent doctrine. By the age of twelve he had learned Latin, Italian, and Dutch; later he picked up English, Spanish, even some Polish and Russian, to which was added a strong dose of the classics as comported with training in sports, public affairs, and the arts of war. At the age of nine he began to attend sessions of the Riksdag; at thirteen he received ambassadors; at fifteen he ruled a province, at sixteen he fought in battle. He was tall, handsome, courteous, generous, merciful, intelligent, brave; what more could history ask of a man?"

and write of his daughter Queen Christina -

"In 1644 Christina, now eighteen, assumed control. She felt herself fit to rule this vibrant nation, grown to a million and a half souls; and indeed she had all the abilities of a precocious male. "I came into this world", she said, "all armed with hair; my voice strong and harsh. This made the women think I was a boy, and they gave vent to their joy in exclamations which at first deceived the KIng." Gustavus took the discovery of her sex like a gentleman and came to love her so dearly that he seemed quite content to have her as heir to his power, but her mother, Maria Eleanora of Brandenburg, would never forgive her for being a girl. Perhaps this maternal rejection shared in making Christian as much of a man as her physique would allow. She conscientiously neglected her person, scorned ornament, swore manfully, liked to wear male dress, took to masculine sports, rode astride at top speed, hunted wildly, and bagged her game at the first shot, but: "I never killed an animal without feeling pity for it."

...

"She wished to rival not only the youths in sports and courtiers in politics, but also the scholars in learning, and these not merely in languages and literature but in science and philosophy as well. By the age of fourteen she knew German, French, Italian and Spanish; by eighteen she knew Latin; later she studied Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. She read and loved the French and Italian poets and envied the bright vivacity of French civilization. She corresponded eagerly with scholars, scientists, and philosophers in several lands. She brought together a splendid library, including rare ancient manuscripts which students came from many countries to consult.

...

"Pascal sent her his calculating machine, with a remarkably beautiful letter complementing her on being a queen in the realm of mind as well as government." 

...

"Her penultimate passion was for philosophy. She corresponded with Gassendi, who, like a hundred others, congratulated her on realizing Plato's dream of philosopher-kings. Rene Descartes, the outstanding philosopher of the age, came, saw, and marveled to hear her deduce his pet ideas from Plato. When he tried to convince her that all animals were mechanisms, she remarked that she had never seen her watch give birth to baby watches."

...

"Her fragmentary memoirs are vital and fascinating. The maxims which she left in manuscripts have nothing hackneyed about them. E.g.:

• One is, in proportion as one can love.
• Fools are to more feared than knaves.
• To undeceive men is to offend them.
• Extraordinary merit is a crime never forgiven.
• There is a star which unites souls of the first order, though ages and distances divide them.
• More courage is required for marriage, than for war.
• One rises above all, when one no longer esteems or fears anything.
• He who loses his temper with the world has learned all he knows to no purpose.
• Philosophy neither changes men nor corrects men. 

I included an audio file below so you can hear my beautiful voice instead of me clicking on this keyboard in silence. I probably should have taken the wad of tobacco out of my mouth and not tried to balance the book, a laptop and a small dog on my lap but hopefully it's semi-intelligible and may prove to be a sleep aid.

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Reading from book VII in the eleven-book series "The Story of Civilization". Book VII is titled "The Age of Reason Begins". It was published by Simon and Schuster in 1961.

This reading is a section from Chapter XIX "The Rise of The North: 1559-1648" discussing Sweden's King Gustavus Adolphus and his daughter - Sweden's Queen Christina. Begins". It was published by Simon and Schuster in 1961

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Speaking of Sweden, perhaps a Swede rocking out on a Hammond B3 organ with a Leslie speaker would be of interest? or the song Dancing Queen by the Swedish group ABBA? Before I go too far down a random "things Swedish" path I think I better wrap this and go enjoy some warm medicinal smoke to help myself focus....and laugh. Hope this day was good for you💖

Back In The Day

I'm almost through Volume VII of "The Story of Civilization" series by Will and Ariel Durant. Volume VII is titled "The Age of Reason Begins". At 647 pages it is one of the shorter volumes of the set so it's not suitable for reading on a smart phone or by those with more important things to do. It can be time consuming to read but if you are interested in time travel, reading history is a practical means that doesn't require a flux capacitor.

When I first started reading about this series of books I thought it was a joke that anyone could claim to write "the story of civilization." Luckily Will Durant has a sense of humor and created what seems to be a fair minded, necessarily partial treatment of history with all the limitations that any history writing has especially one of this scope that reaches back over 2500 years. If nothing else reading this type of history will give you some sense of perspective when considering our present time. It will also disabuse you of any notions of "exceptionalism" when it comes to nations, states, races, creeds, genders or colors. Exceptional individuals - yes; exceptional abstractions - not so much.

Fun fact - Will and Ariel Durant were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the Republican President Gerald Ford in 1977. It seems somehow instructive that the Republican President Donald Trump awarded this medal to the radio personality Rush Limbaugh in his 2020 State of the Union address.

So what's the point? 

You'll certainly learn by reading Will and Ariel's books that civilizations evolve and devolve. The moral arc of the universe may be long and bend towards justice as Martin Luther King taught but the actual state of society has varied wildly over the last couple of thousand years alternating between times of feast and  famine, war and peace, enlightenment and darkness.

I wanted to include a bit of Volume VII to give you a taste of the style of the Durant's writing, which of course changed some over the 37 years they spent on their project but remained always informative, surprising (to me at least) and somewhat wry. This is from the chapter "Imperial Armageddon" in a section titled "Morals and Manners" describing the German empire in the mid 1500's. It may cause you to wonder if there is anything truly new under the sun or if humans are actually acting out some variation of an absurd, sometimes beautiful sometimes cruel and ugly, drama with only the names and dates varying over the millennia. Hopefully it will also make you laugh a little at us apes wearing pants and pantsuits. 

From Will and Ariel -

If we believe the moralists of this half century before the war, the moral picture was as dark as the economic. Teachers complained that the youngsters sent to them were not Christians but barbarians. "The people bring up their children so badly," wrote Matthias Brendenbach in 1557, "that it becomes obvious to the poor schoolmasters...that they have got to reckon...with wild animals." "All discipline appears at an end," said another in 1561;"the students are refractory and insolent in the extreme." In most university towns the citizens hesitated to go out at night for fear of the students, who on some occasions attacked them with open knives. "A chief cause of the general depravity of the students," said Nathan Chytransin in 1578, "is undoubtedly the decline in home training...Now that we have slipped the yoke of ancient laws and statutes from off our necks...it is no wonder that we find, among the larger part of our young people, such unbridled licentiousness, such boorish ignorance, such ungovernable insolence, such terrible godlessness." Others thought that "not the least among the causes why the young lapse into immorality and lasciviousness are the comedies, spectacles, and plays."

As for adults, the preachers described them as quarrelsome hypocrites, gluttons, drunkards and adulterers. Pastor Johann Kuno complained in 1579, "Vice of all sorts is now so common that it is committed without shame, nay, people even boast of it in sodomitish fashion; the coarsest, the most indecent sins have become viirtues...Who regards common whoredom any longer as a sin?" Pastor Bartholomaus Ringwalt thought in 1585 that these were "the last and worst times which have come upon the world." Profanity was almost universal among the men, regardless  of the creed. Calumny had a festival. "My superintendent," wrote the Count of Oldenburg in 1594, "has complained to me of the manner in which Dr. Pezel, at Bremen, has abused and slandered him in one of his books, making out that he spent his days in gluttony, drunkenness and debauchery, that he...was a sheep-devouring wolf, a serpent, a he-goat, an abortion...and that he must be gotten rid of by hanging, drowning, or imprisonment, by the wheel or by the sword." The court preacher of the Elector of Saxony found that, "almost throughout the length and breadth of Germany it has been falsely reported that I earn large gilded goblets in drinking matches, that...I so fill myself with wine that...I have to be propped up and laid on a wagon and carted off like a drunken calf or sow."

Eating and drinking were major industries. Half the day of a well-to-do German was consumed in passing edibles from one end of the anatomy to the other. Burghers were proud of their appetites, which like the dress of their women, served as heralds of prosperity. A circus performer earned national fame by eating at one meal a pound of cheese, thirty eggs, a large loaf of bread--after which stint he fell dead. Dinners lasting seven hours, with fourteen toasts, were not unusual. Weddings were in many cases riots of gourmandizing and intoxication. A jovial prince signed his letters "Valete et inebriamini" (Be well and get drunk). Elector  Christian II of Saxony drank himself to death at the age of twenty-seven. A temperance society struggled against the evil, but its first president died of drink. It was asserted that gluttony was shortening the tenure of life. Said Erasmus Winter in 1599: "Owing to immoderate eating and drinking there are now few old people, and we seldom see a man of thirty or forty who is not affected by some sort of disease, either stone, gout, cough, consumption, or what not."

We must not take these contemporary complaints too seriously. Probably the majority of the people were hard-working, long-suffering, and literally God-fearing folk; but in history, as in journalism, virtue makes no news--which proves it usual.

I hope you can find time to read something that makes you realize how complex and in some sense unknowable this world and the people in it are, while also seeing the common virtue of human individuals throughout time. If nothing else it's like a billion piece puzzle you can enjoy spending your life trying to piece together and in the end knowing the effort was the point. In other words - there are plenty of dittoheaads what the world always needs more of are independent, thinking, evolving humans.

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Poet Amanda Gorman reads 'The Hill We Climb'

The essay in the NYT by Timothy Egan titled "A President Can Govern in Poetry" reminded me of Amanda Gorman's wonderful reading of her poem "The Hill We Climb". 

As powerful as her live reading was, Amanda Gorman's soon to be released book seems like a nice keepsake for those who believe in the power of words to foster hope and healing.

Livin Large

Walt Whitman wrote in his poem Song of Myself, 

"Do I contradict myself? 

Very well then I contradict myself, 

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Whitman's contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson was perhaps touching on this idea when he wrote,

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds..." 

and perhaps also when he wrote, 

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them." 

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Consider how you might define your self and find meaning in your one precious life. Don't sell your self short, don't be afraid to be ignorant, or to put it another way - don't let your hard-headedness or hard-heartedness prevent you from learning; or finding compassion for fellow beings.

You could define your self as something small and constraining such as a member of a political party, state, or nation. 

or

You could think of your self as a precious unique individual with expansive possibilities - a human living in a civilization that is the product of thousands of years of human history, millions of years of geological history, on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy, in a universe that is infinite.

Many many possibilities - it's up to you to make the world you live in. In that vein consider another quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson -

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”

As is so evident in contemporary American society what we read, listen to and watch has extraordinary impacts on who we are (or at least who we think we are). 

The right-wing media ecosystem has for decades encouraged millions of Americans to be fearful, angry, hateful, and aggrieved at one another; as well as promoting distrust of science, expertise and traditional journalism i.e. fact-based and error-correcting. 

This blame displacement exercise has led to the richest country on earth lagging other economically developed nations in key aspects of how our society cares for it's citizens - health care, education, wages, family leave etc. while a large portion of it's citizens have been propagandized into blaming each other, rather than holding those with power (wealth), who control the economic and political structures, accountable.

That's bad...but here's the silver lining.

Humans who are ensnared in the right-wing media ecosystem aren't necessarily racist, or stupid, or mean...they are just people. Forgive them for they know not what they do...if you want to be angry you could be angry with those with power (wealth) who created and control these vast right-wing propaganda machines in order to use people as a means to their own selfish ends. 

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Life is Like a Tackle Box

How Fox News and Right-Wing Media Brainwashed This Dad

BREAKING NEWS! Trump Challenges Biden to Pissing Contest!!

Sources are reporting that Donald Trump has challenged fellow septuagenarian Joe Biden to a pissing contest. Trump who claims to have the peeing range of an 8 year old is reported to have requested the pissing contest as an alternative to this years presidential debates. Sources report Trump saying, "I talked about dongs in the Republican debates of 2016, lets ratchet things up a notch this time by whipping them out on live television."

That's not breaking news you say?

It's as factual as much of what you'll find if you happen to be a denizen of the right-wing media ecosystem or if you listen to Donald Trump talk for a few minutes.

If you have some attention to spare please watch the video below. 

You won't be able to save the victims enthralled by the right-wing media ecosystem but at least you'll have a better idea of how and why the United States got to where we are currently. Hopefully you can come up with some ideas for how you as an individual might save our democratic liberal society from a group of people that are being manipulated to the point where they inhabit a world that you, and and anyone else who inhabits the world of reality, would find very unfamiliar. 

Anyone who wants to get a better view of how the United States slipped into our current dystopian state and what we might do to start correcting our path should be interested in this video and, if you have time, read the associated book Network Propaganda - Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. 

If you are short on cash you don't have to buy the book since the authors have made a PDF copy available by clicking on the "open access" link at the top right corner of the book's page at Oxford University Press. 

The book isn't typical media criticism but rather data analysis of millions of stories, tweets and Facebook shares using MIT's Media Cloud Software. If you are curious you can sign up for an account and start doing your own research.

Sadly the book confirms that it would be as foolish to believe in the upcoming Biden/Trump pissing in the wind contest as it is to believe that "facts" and "journalism" and "reality" are going to sway people looking solely for information that is entertaining, self-affirming and non-threatening to their preconceived (and constantly reaffirmed) fantasies.

On the plus side you can stop beating your head against the wall wondering how so many people can be so ignorant. They aren't to blame, they have been trained very well over many years by the finest propaganda money can buy.

You can also stop fretting over all the negative but truthful coverage of the GOP and Trump in mainstream journalism and why that awfulness doesn't sink in with the current supporters of the GOP and Trump - because they aren't reading, watching or listening to any of that stuff. 

If you have a good mental core and can view emotional things dispassionately it might be better to listen to right wing hate radio, read Breitbart, RT, Daily Caller, Daily Pundit or the Washington Examiner and watch Fox and Friends in the morning and Hannity, Ingraham and Carlson at night - like the President and most other GOP politicians and their supporters do - to get a better idea of what that frightening world is like. 

Trump took over a media machine that the Republican party spent decades constructing and now this out of control giant robotic beast is roaming the country wreaking havoc on us puny humans. 

Refuse to be assimilated. 

It seems unlikely but if you think an intervention - with some victim of the right-wing media ecosystem, who you know well and can talk with, would help - by all means try to help them. 

It's more likely that these beliefs are so ingrained and deeply personal that unless a person looks for reality of their own accord...no one else is going to convince them, or debate them, or shame them, into changing these deeply held personal beliefs. 

If over 100,000 excess deaths due to the Covid-19 pandemic don't convince Fox News watching and Facebook sharing, Uncle John or Aunt Sally that the GOP and our president are unfit - your debating, Facebooking, and twittering skills aren't going to help. I came up with 100,000 as a conservative figure. The US has about 4% of the world's population and 20% of the world's Covid-19 deaths. In other words we have five times as many fatalities as would be expected...which means with our current 200,000 plus deaths that Trump and his GOP enablers are responsible for 160,000 excess deaths in our country.

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It's not all that surprising that this video was posted in March and only had 27 views when I  watched it this September since it isn't being promoted by "influencers."

It's not that hard to push content to the top of the Google search. I used to do that with this blog years ago when I still accepted advertisers.

Finally I'll leave you with this quote from the book that sums things up pretty well from my perspective -

"We think that fundamentally, anyone who insists on claiming that we cannot draw conclusions about which side is biased, and which side gravitates more closely to the truth, must explain how the media sources most trusted by consistently conservative survey respondents—Fox News, Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck—are the equivalent of the sites that occupy the same positions among consistently liberal respondents: NPR, PBS, the BBC, and the New York Times."

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Handmaiden Nominated for Supreme Court

Amy Coney Barrett, nominated to replace Justice Ruth Ginsberg, is a member of the group People of Praise. This ecumenical, but mostly Catholic, group subscribes to non-Catholic theology in their belief that husbands are the "head" of the family and wives "handmaidens". 

I'm being a bit unfair with the "handmaiden" label. In 2017 when Ms. Barrett was nominated for her first judgeship on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals the leader of the group People of Praise, Mr. Lent, said the group’s system of heads and handmaids promotes “brotherhood,” not male dominance. He said the group recently dropped the term “handmaid” in favor of “woman leader.” 

Catholic doctrine does not teach "male headship", which is a belief held by some evangelical sects.

"Male headship" contradicts Catholic doctrine which states that in the mutual relationship of man and woman in marriage -

The woman cannot become the "object" of "domination" and male "possession".

The group People of Praise also believe in prophecy, speaking in tongues, divine healing and most troubling - discriminating against some of God's children, namely LGBTQ people.

This snippet from a South Bend Tribune article is illustrative of the groups treatment of LGBTQ people, specifically a young woman named Flannery who joined the group at 18 -

When she returned to South Bend after graduating, she was allowed to transfer to the South Bend branch. At that time, Flannery was realizing that she was lesbian or at least bisexual. During a women’s group meeting, she talked about her “big life change” and how she had met a woman she was interested in, and she was struggling with the fact that she no longer identified as straight, she said.

“I did not ask them to approve of what I did or to pat me on the back and say ‘good job,’” she said. “I just needed to tell somebody so I could talk about it.” 

Flannery said she was shocked to learn that the women then reported what she said to her leader, who, a few days later, called her to a meeting at her house and said the women “were very uncomfortable that you were talking about that.” 

“She said, ‘Either you never mention this again, or you leave.’ I said, ‘I’ll leave, I don’t want to live like that.’” 

Not commenting specifically on Flannery’s case, Lent said the group would end the membership of a person who admits to homosexual activity, or any other “ongoing, deliberate, unrepentant wrongdoing.” He said the group believes that only married people should have sex, and only men and women should marry. Homosexual attraction is not sinful, but acting on it is, Lent said. 

Aside from the group’s views on homosexuality, Flannery said she “absolutely” would have been concerned if Barrett had received the Supreme Court nomination.

I don't know anything about Amy Coney Barrett - she sounds like a good person from what I've read. Looking at a group like People of Praise as an outsider doesn't tell me what it's like to be in the group interacting with it's members. It has some aspects that sound appealing to me but there are other aspects that sound quite disturbing. I don't  have any issue with people joining non-traditional religious groups it's just that I'm not sure if being a member of a group like People of Praise should not be disqualifying for anyone wanting to be a judge in secular society or at least that a member of that group should be questioned and explain how her membership does not skew her ability to be an impartial judge.

One of The Golden Texts of Philosophy

The quoted text below is from volume I pages 667-669 of Will and Ariel Durant's series of books "The Story of Civilization" -

"The Confucian program is expressed pithily and profoundly in the famous paragraphs of The Great Learning: 

The ancients who wished to illustrate the highest virtue throughout the empire first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their own selves. Wishing to cultivate their own selves, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their own selves were cultivated. Their own selves being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. The states being rightly governed, the whole empire was made tranquil and happy."

Will Durant goes on to write -

"This is the keynote and substance of the Confucian philosophy; one might  forget all other words of the Master and his disciples, and yet carry away with these "the essence of the matter," and a complete guide to life. The world is at war, says Confucius, because its constituent states are improperly governed; these are improperly governed because no amount of legislation can take the place of the natural social order provided by the family; the family is in disorder, and fails to provide this natural social order, because men forget that they cannot regulate their families if they do not regulate themselves; they fail to regulate themselves because they have not rectified their hearts - i.e., they have not cleansed their own souls of disorderly desires; their hearts are not rectified because their thinking is insincere, doing scant justice to reality and concealing rather than revealing their own natures; their thinking is insincere because they let their wishes discolor the facts and determine their conclusions, instead of seeking to extend their knowledge to the utmost by impartially investigating the nature of things. Let men seek impartial knowledge, and their thinking will become sincere; let their thoughts be sincere and their hearts will be cleansed of disorderly desires; let their hearts be so cleansed, and their own selves will be regulated - not by virtuous sermonizing or passionate punishments, but by the silent power of example itself; let the family be so regulated with knowledge, sincerity and example, and it will give forth such spontaneous social order that successful government will once more be a feasible thing; let the state maintain internal justice and tranquility, and the world will be peaceful and happy.

It is a counsel of perfection, and forgets that man is a beast of prey; but like Christianity it offers us a goal to strike at, and a ladder to climb. It is one of the golden texts of philosophy."

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Buy The Ticket Take the Ride

B and I went to see Hunter S. Thompson "speak" at the old Gallatin Gateway Inn four decades ago or so. He was with Jerry Jeff Walker and his band. Lots of drinking and laughing. We had a blast as usual. Buy The Ticket Take the Ride is a documentary about Hunter S. Thompson that is available on YouTube.

"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ''Wow! What a Ride!''

Hunter S. Thompson