Bridle thy tongue and deceive not your heart

From yesterday's reading, James 1:19-27.

You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.

But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.

If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

A lesson for the social media age: Bridle thy tongue.

As was the second reading, adjuring us not to set store on the appearances of piousness but to practice piety. I.e. not spinning, moral posturing, preening, or virtue signaling allowed.

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23.

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live[d] according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”

”For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

I can not understand the guy

Yes, pretty much my sentiments. From Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson by Bird Dog.

As I toil towards my goal of unloading 2000 books from the Maggie's HQ, it's tough not to flip through each one in case you might change your mind. My books are part of me, it seems. That is stupid.

Take Emerson. I open a random page. No, dammit. I can not understand the guy and I never could figger out what he was getting at. Not blaming him because as far as I can tell he is a deep thinker and his essays remain widely appreciated. "It's me, not you."

Some writers/thinkers build furnaces of thought. Some start small useful fires. Emerson is more about sparks. Nothing substantial enough to warm yourself but small expressions which catch your attention. At least in my experience.

Barcelona

Barcelona
by Robert W. Service

The night before I left Milan
A mob jammed the Cathedral Square,
And high the tide of passion ran
As politics befouled the air.
A seething hell of human strife,
I shrank back from its evil core,
Seeing in this convulsive life
The living seeds of war.

To Barcelona then I came,
And oh the heavenly release!
From conflict and consuming flame
I knew the preciousness of peace.
Such veneration for the law!
How decorous was every one!
And then (significant) I saw
Each copper packed a tommy gun.

Well, maybe it is best that way.
Peace can mean more than liberty:
These people, state-directed, may
Be happier than those more free.
When politics wield evil grip,
And warring factions rise and fall,
Benevolent dictatorship
May be the answer, after all.

Robert Service lived in France from before the Great War and had homes in Paris and the country. He would, as a poet and newspaperman, have been sharply aware of the Spanish Civil War next door. "Benevolent dictatorship" is a frightful conclusion but has a context of those titanic years.

The Abbey in the Oakwood

The Abbey in the Oakwood, 1809/10 by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

Click to enlarge.

I first came across this in Fantastic Art, edited by David Larkin circa 1980. There was a used bookstore on M Street, probably between 33rd and 34th Streets where I acquired a number of large format art books for a dollar a piece. One of the early locations that contributed so many choices to my early collection of books, now in the thousands. These cheap but beautiful art books provided a foundation of art knowledge never acquired in the classroom.

A carefully presented argument, not a carefully explored argument.

An excellent interview this morning on NPR, What Changed After D.C. Ended Cash Bail, Melissa Block speaks with D.C. Judge Truman Morrison.

The only drawback is that it did not present the counter-argument. Bail has always struck me as a tainting influence in the criminal justice system. I recognize that the intent is to ensure that the accused return to court for their next court-hearing, an indisputably proper goal. Whether setting bail is the right means for achieving that goal is a fair question. Does it work?

Which is important because the negative aspects of bail are pretty significant. Philosophically it feels like it is too close to the equivalent of saying that you are guilty until proven innocent and you need to pay for that privilege of freedom. By introducing lucre into the judicial system, it opens up all sorts of opportunities for unintended incentives at the least, and outright corruption at the worst.

It also feels like a crushing tax on the poor. If you are middle class and accused of a crime and offered $10,000 bail, it is pretty reasonable to assume that the traditional 10% front money of $1,000 won't break your personal finances. For a person with no assets and no money in the bank, it means you stay in jail, lose your job, lose custody of your children, possibly lose your apartment and all sorts of other possible ramifications. All before you have been proven guilty, if indeed you are even guilty.

There all sorts of things to not like about the current bail system, but it obviously exists for a purpose. It may have outgrown that purpose. Modern circumstances may have rendered it ineffective. But we don't know what the case is for supporting bail because NPR provides only one side of the argument. In that regard, the interview was terrible. It ignores the principle of charity which requires "interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation." NPR gives us one argument and not the other.

But Judge Morrison is a very persuasive advocate for a no (or more properly, rare) bail system.

For me, one of the most troubling elements of the release system (don't hold people because they can't pay bail) is the chance that the accused returns to his/her community and continues to disrupt the lives of those around them, even to the extent of harm and death. How does the state answer a citizen when it unleashes an accused criminal who murders a loved one?

On the other hand, obviously, it is also entirely wrong that all accused should be held without bail before trial.

Some of the points I found interesting from Judge Morrison. A loose transcription:

In 2017 they released 94% of all those detained without bail. (Would like to understand what the denominator is here. My weasel word antennae are quivering. All those detained or all those arrested and charged with a crime?)

88% made every single court appearance.

86% were never arrested for any criminal offense of any kind.

Of that very small percentage who were arrested and then released, less than 2% were rearrested for a crime of violence.

These are impressive numbers but I have the sense that there is a sleight of hand going on based on the distinction between those detained and those arrested. My guess is that Judge Morrison is initially using detention as the denominator, when what we are really interested is those for whom there is a reasonable probability that they committed a crime.

It sounds like 86% of those detained were never charged. And of those 14% charged, only 2% were rearrested for violence (presumably during the duration of their pre-trial release.) I can't say for sure, but it feels like there is a deception going on here. That's why it is so important to present both sides of the argument. I agree with Judge Morrison's goals but he isn't giving much information for supporting the means of achieving those goals.

On the fundamental issue of non-financial release justification.

We are never going to be able to perfectly predict human behavior.

Many people who were released would have bought their way out of jail and committed the same crime anyway.

He paraphrases Justice Jackson in Stack vs. Boyle: There is always an element of risk in making a release decision before trial. That is the price of our ordered system of liberty and justice. The only way to get a complete assurance of safety is to of course incarcerate everyone which is of course not the American Way.

True enough but it doesn't answer the victim citizen's charge against the state when the unspeakable happens - You had him in custody and you released him to injure/kill my nearest and dearest.

I think the argument has to be tied to a principle which most everyone accepts. It is better that ten guilty go free than for one innocent to be mistakenly imprisoned. If we accept that, then perhaps it is easier to accept the corollary - It is better that ten likely guilty people are temporarily released than for one likely innocent person have their lives destroyed by bail requirements.

The former is already an operative principle which has a cost. With all our safeguards to protect the innocent in our judicial system, there are plenty of guilty parties who return to civil society; some to reform themselves, some to continue preying on innocent citizens. We know that deal, and while we may not like its implications, it is a cost we are willing to collectively bear.

So why not the corollary principle? Why not release everyone who is charged without bail, excepting those for whom there is a compelling case? I suspect that there are at least two complicating issues.

1) Volume - The number detained dwarfs the number charged and the number convicted is some fraction of those charged. Release of those detained but not charged likely has an order of magnitude impact greater than volume impact.

2) Class - I am assuming that a large majority of property and violent crimes are committed by those in the bottom two quintiles of the population. Crime offenders in these quintiles are a small percentage of the population but they are the majority of the population of all offenders. The large majority of law-abiding citizens in the bottom two quintiles are likely not enthusiastic about a system that might disproportionately disadvantage them. To make an extreme example, if all murderers are from the bottom 40% of the population and they are returned to their communities where 2% of them reoffend, then the murder rate for the bottom 40% by those who have been released is 5% not 2%. If policy is set by people at the top who are unlikely to bear the impact of that policy which is on those at the bottom, then there will be plenty more voters at the bottom providing a quiet opposition.

So recapturing this interview, perhaps I am less enthused of the interview than I was while driving around, focusing on the traffic and not parsing the argument. NPR presented one side of the argument and did not address both sides. Never a good approach. While Judge Morrison was an presenter for his side of the argument, when you consider the careful definitional distinctions which seem implied, there is probably more to this than presented.

Oh, well. It seemed like a good interview.

Singing Homer

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek by Josh Jones.

In fact, “before writing was generally known among the Greeks,” the University of Cincinnati notes, “poets recited and sang stories for audiences at the courts of city leaders and at festivals. A poet could actually improvise a tale in the six-beat rhythm of Greek verse if he knew the plot of his story.” We do not know whether Homer was one enterprising scribe or “a group of poets whose works on the theme of Troy were collected” under one name. But in either case, that poet or poets heard the tales of Hector and Achilles, Odysseus and Penelope, and all those meddling gods sung before they wrote them down. Now, thanks to Georg Danek of the University of Vienna and Stefan Hagel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, we have some idea of what those songs may have sounded like.

“In the course of the last years,” write Danek and Hagel, “we have developed a technique of singing the Homeric epics, which is appropriate for the primarily oral tradition from which these poems emerge.” The two scholars caution that their theoretical recreations are “not to be understood as the exact reconstruction of a given melody, but as an approach to the technique the Homeric singers used to accommodate melodic principles to the demands of the individual verse.” Accompanied by a four-stringed lyre-like instrument called a phorminx, “the Homeric bard” would improvise the “melody at the same time as he improvised his text, which was unique in every performance.” In the audio above, you can hear Danek and Hagel’s melodic recreation of lines 267-366 of book 8 of the Odyssey, in which Demodocus sings about the love of Ares and Aphrodite.

Fascinating.


Double click to enlarge.

'Tis bitter truth, but there you are

My Cross
by Robert W. Service

I wrote a poem to the moon
But no one noticed it;
Although I hoped that late or soon
Someone would praise a bit
Its purity and grace forlone,
Its beauty tulip-cool...
But as my poem died still-born,
I felt a fool.

I wrote a verse of vulgar trend
Spiced with an oath or two;
I tacked a snapper at the end
And called it Dan McGrew.
I spouted it to bar-room boys,
Full fifty years away;
Yet still with rude and ribald noise
It lives today.

'Tis bitter truth, but there you are-
That's how a name is made;
Write of a rose, a lark, a star,
You'll never make the grade.
But write of gutter and of grime,
Of pimp and prostitute,
The multitude will read your rhyme,
And pay to boot.

So what's the use to burn and bleed
And strive for beauty's sake?
No one your poetry will read,
Your heart will only break.
But set your song in vulgar pitch,
If rhyme you will not rue,
And make your heroine a bitch...
Like Lady Lou.

The Landing in Summer

The Landing in Summer, 1930 by Mary Dawson Elwell

Click to enlarge.

My greetings to all of you, Yeasts, Bacteria, Viruses, Aerobics and Anaerobics

The Microbiome and Risk for Obesity and Diabetes by Anthony Komaroff and Your Microbe Aura Could Be as Distinctive as Your Fingerprint by Cari Romm together make the point that we each of us are a unique ecosystem of life.

Which brings to mind Auden's response after having read an article on skin microbes in 1969 in Scientific American. He wrote:

A New Year Greeting
by W.H. Auden

On this day tradition allots
to taking stock of our lives,
my greetings to all of you, Yeasts,
Bacteria, Viruses,
Aerobics and Anaerobics:
A Very Happy New Year
to all for whom my ectoderm
is as Middle-Earth to me.

For creatures your size I offer
a free choice of habitat,
so settle yourselves in the zone
that suits you best, in the pools
of my pores or the tropical
forests of arm-pit and crotch,
in the deserts of my fore-arms,
or the cool woods of my scalp.

Build colonies: I will supply
adequate warmth and moisture,
the sebum and lipids you need,
on condition you never
do me annoy with your presence,
but behave as good guests should,
not rioting into acne
or athlete's-foot or a boil.

Does my inner weather affect
the surfaces where you live?
Do unpredictable changes
record my rocketing plunge
from fairs when the mind is in tift
and relevant thoughts occur
to fouls when nothing will happen
and no one calls and it rains.

I should like to think that I make
a not impossible world,
but an Eden it cannot be:
my games, my purposive acts,
may turn to catastrophes there.
If you were religious folk,
how would your dramas justify
unmerited suffering?

By what myths would your priests account
for the hurricanes that come
twice every twenty-four hours,
each time I dress or undress,
when, clinging to keratin rafts,
whole cities are swept away
to perish in space, or the Flood
that scalds to death when I bathe?

Then, sooner or later, will dawn
a Day of Apocalypse,
when my mantle suddenly turns
too cold, too rancid, for you,
appetising to predators
of a fiercer sort, and I
am stripped of excuse and nimbus,
a Past, subject to Judgement.

Anti-Americanism, bought and paid for

Neil Armstrong Landed on the Moon and Planted an [REDACTED] Flag by Jim Treacher.

Over the past couple of decades, Hollywood has derived an increasing portion of its revenue stream from international movie ticket sales. I have read commentary about how this affects which films get made and how they are made. Fundamentally, international sales creates an incentive for simpler dialogue (eases translations, dubbing, and subtitles), more action, more special effects, less nuance/sophistication and more generic context.

It is assumed in Hollywood that stories which require a knowledge of American history and culture and which celebrate America will simply earn less money in international sales. An assumption that likely is true though I have never seen an actual empirical analysis confirming the assumption.

Treacher's article is primarily a lambasting of Hollywood in its capacity as a traditional bête noire of the right. A role which they usually warrant. But in his taking down of Hollywood's moral preening and posturing, he indirectly makes a point related to those above.

Apparently a movie has been made based on the life of Neil Armstrong whose great achievement was as the first man on the moon, an indisputably magnificent technological triumph of both humanity and the American nation. However, the movie omits one of the central scenes of that achievement - the planting of the American flag on the moon's surface.

Treacher lashes Hollywood for their anti-Americanism and soulless cosmopolitanism; their hatred of all things America.

Ever notice how much Hollywood* hates America?

Well, maybe that's overstating the case. "Hate" might be too strong a word for the emotion our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in Tinseltown feel about the rest of us. It's more of a vague disgust and an unearned sense of superiority, wrapped up in sheepish apologies for daring to live in the greatest country in the history of the world. That's the message they keep sending out to the rest of the planet: "Sorry for being so awesome, everybody. We might be in America, but we're not of America. We're not like the rest of these ignorant rubes. You guys have some really good countries too!" Hell, why do you think Hollywood loves Obama so much? Every time he apologized to another country, they threw another lavish fundraiser for him.

[snip]

That's why Joe Johnston, director of Captain America: The First Avenger, once told the LA Times about the titular superhero: "He's a guy that wants to serve his country, but he's not a flag-waver." That's right, the fellow who wears the American flag on his uniform and shield, the dude whose name is Captain America, isn't a "flag-waver." He's basically just Captain Person, really. Why get all jingoistic about it?

But erasing American greatness from our fictional characters wasn't enough. Now Hollywood is doing the same thing to a real-life American hero.

But in the midst of the lambasting, as almost an incidental swipe, he makes two distinct points which are undeveloped in his lampooning of the Hollywood absurdities:

The moon landing was a uniquely American achievement, as indicated by the fact that no other country on Earth has ever achieved it. Armstrong didn't plant an Earth flag. He planted an American flag. It's still there. That's what happened. How do you make a movie about the greatest thing he ever did, arguably the greatest thing anybody has ever done, and leave that part out?

Why, because it might turn off audiences in Beijing?

First Point - Yes, most the vaporous cognitive lightweights of Hollywood probably do have much of the hatred of America and the average American as Treacher imputes. But I am guessing that the fact that it might turn off audiences in Beijing is probably the primary motivator rather than hatred of America. China represents 22% of global movie ticket sales, the second largest movie market in the world after the US (sources here and here) and half their movie sales are for movies from overseas, primarily America.

I understand why an American Hollywood producer might be concerned about how an American film about Armstrong might be received by 22% of your audience. The CCP has been stoking nationalism over the past decade as the economy in China has begun to slow and America is on the receiving end of much officially sanctioned negative publicity. We are the status quo against which they are testing themselves. It is easy to see why a producer celebrating the achievements of Armstrong might wish to downplay the flying of the American flag on the moon.

Easy to see that there were venal inducements to omit the flag but that still does not make it right.

It is these persistent, small, cowardly concessions, these frequent elisions, omissions and downright untruths which bring Hollywood and the MSM into such disrepute. They are misleading and lying in order to gain more money. That is what it boils down to. It would be nice if no one noticed but people do. They notice and then they stop watching movies which insult their country and themselves. And Hollywood moans about the lack of sophistication of American audiences and their own declining revenues while never examining their own Faustian deals which are at the heart of their dilemma.

Which goes to the Second Point. Hollywood and the MSM media misrepresent the truth for their own profit and then expect everyone to accord them respect. They are misleading and lying. They might be doing it because it is financially rewarding (in the short term) but it is morally corrosive and epistemically destructive.

The MSM shrieking about the president's repeated lambasting of them for Fake News is almost certainly in part simply because they are being called out for a lucrative and satisfying practice which is both morally reprehensible and reflects a low level of product quality. The producers know it, the audience knows it and now people are talking about it. Treacher has tweeted about this:

Click to enlarge.

As has David Burge:

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As an aside, sheer incompetence also enters into the fake news discussion. Three days ago, Slate chose to illustrate an article, Two Years Into His Presidency and Donald Trump Still Doesn’t Use Computers by Heather Schwedel with this picture.

Click to enlarge. What is that thing in the upper right?

Aside from the fact that executives are not journalists and rarely spend extensive time on computers (at least in my experience), there is the own-goal of the mismatch between Slate's headline claim and their own picture. Who are you going to believe? MSM or your own lying eyes?

Back to Treacher's screed. For all that he is exercised by Hollywood and the MSM's behavior and anti-Americanism, he raises a point which points in a different direction. Perhaps the apparent anti-Americanism and misdirection, rationalized on other grounds, is simply a product of venality, laziness, and carelessness. Given the choice, they will hide the American flag for some hundreds of millions of dollars of Chinese revenue. Given the choice, they will sacrifice local market quality for lowest common denominator global revenue.

I am not certain that it is generous to attribute to venality and laziness behavior which Treacher is attributing to anti-Americanism, and I don't reject the hypothesis that both might be motivators at the same time. However, my suspicion is that the greater portion of apparent anti-Americanism is a product of venality and laziness than the actual real deal.

A suspicion bolstered by the fact that while all the leading lights of Hollywood keep promising to leave America if they don't get their way, they never actually do. If you want to know what people believe, look at their actions not their words. Those with great fortunes which allow them to live anywhere in the world, choose to live in America. They don't believe their own lies.