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[ by Charles Cameron — Hillary Clinton hoist as the contrapuntal mind springs into action ]
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Hilary Clinton recently tweeted:

The top 25 hedge fund managers make more than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined. That’s not acceptable.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 26, 2016

That was March 26th this year.

I have a certain fondness for the Medici, who sponsored the Platonic Academy under Marsilio Ficino, and more or less gave us the Florentine Renaissance, and for Paul and Mary Conover Mellon, who sponsored the magnificant Bollingen Series of books, starting with Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial, Joseph Campbell‘s collaboration with Jeff King and Maud Oakes..

But then I’m also highly appreciative of St Francis, the poverello of Assisi.. go figure.

Thing is, Bernie Sanders had tweeted pretty much the same thing just a week earlier:

It's unacceptable that, last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers earned more income than 425,000 public school teachers.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 19, 2016

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But hey, wait a minute, Hilary had also tweeted in June of 2015:

What's wrong with this picture? pic.twitter.com/GnytNmNS7A

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 13, 2015

— so now who has the “first mover” advantage? — plus she had graphics!

— and hold on, even that tweet drew an almost immediate tweet-back in refutation:

The fact that many of your major donors, and your son-in-law, are hedge fund managers? https://t.co/TA6ThYyTLc

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 13, 2015

— from the redoubtable Marc Andreessen, no less.

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Nor are those the only ways those tweets of hers can bounce back on the Clinton campaign. Here’s another:

The top 25 hedge fund managers make more than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined. That’s not acceptable.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 26, 2016

.@GoldmanSachs paid you more for a 20 minute speech than a Kindergarten teacher makes in 10 years. #ImNotWithHer https://t.co/GKIumiC1d1

— Xavier Pérez (@DOUBTMYPROGRESS) March 29, 2016

I suspect, btw, Xavier Perez swiped that from Kevin Tulppo on Facebook a couple of days before..

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I’m not really much of a political animal — feeling powerfully drawn to Justin Erik Halldór Smith‘s remark today —

some questions have complicated histories and there might be no right side to take

— but in this entire by turns provocative, hilarious, sad, infuriating, and by now deeply fatiguing campaign season thus far, there has only been one image giving me a sense of quiet delight in one of the candidates..

On the left, Bernie Sanders as a far younger man — I can vaguely recall being a far younger man myself — and on the right, the book he was about to read, or had just been reading..

Rimbaud, poetry. Ah, youth.

[ by Charles Cameron — philosophy during a bank heist — and its implications in terms of military doctrine ]
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Two screenshots in sequence from the Denzel Washington movie, Inside Man, bring me back to the philosophical fissures and fusions between mind and brain, subjective and objective, quantitative and qualitative, man half-angel and half-beast — in a law enforcement context.

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When one side has reached the limits of its material strength, it can always add to its military efforts by mobilizing all possible moral strength.

I often need to talk about this. As material, for Clausewitz, is the counterpart to moral, what for TRADOC is the counterpart to Human Terrain?

[ by Charles Cameron — Aung San Suu Kyi and U Thein Sein dance a quick pas de deux, but what comes next? ]
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Aung San Suu Kyi to Burma army: Deny me presidency and I'll become effective prime minister. https://t.co/hHHrj9EXkB pic.twitter.com/fW3WE76Nsr

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) April 6, 2016

and:

Thein Sein, the ex-president of Myanmar, became a Buddhist monk on Monday. https://t.co/331XDSPZrR pic.twitter.com/qqxMaR2e90

— Lion's Roar (@LionsRoar) April 5, 2016

Bear in mind, though:

U Thein Sein becoming a monk shouldn't be a surprise. Lots of men join a monastery for a time over the holidays; maybe I'll do it next year

— Thant Myint-U (@thantmyintu) April 4, 2016

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It will be instructive to see whether Aung San Suu Kyi, now that the elexctions are over and her power secxured, will at last begin to show signs of Buddhist abhorrance at the way her fellow Buddhists in Myanmar are treating the Rohingya minority. Here’s the gist of Peter Popham‘s recent exploration of that question:

Plenty of Burmese Buddhists are extremely prejudiced against Muslims. But is Aung San Suu Kyi? [ .. ]

It is true that she has never made a clear statement in support of the Rohingya, the persecuted Muslims of western Burma, tens of thousands of whom are stateless, homeless and without rights thanks to official Burmese government policy. She has lamented the violence in Arakan state but has refused to endorse the judgements of organisations such as Human Rights Watch, which have blamed Arakan’s Buddhists for the persecution of the Muslims. [ .. ]

Suu Kyi has been struggling to attain power in Burma for the past 28 years. She is vastly popular with her fellow countrymen, more than 90 per cent of whom are Buddhists, like her. But her enemies in the military regime have never stopped trying to blacken her name. Their favourite method was to say that she wasn’t properly Burmese because she had been married to an Englishman, had lived in the West for many years and produced two foreign sons. And by depicting her as foreign, they tried to lump her together with the Muslim minority who are also regarded by many Burmese Buddhists as aliens with no right to remain in the country.

My hunch is that Suu Kyi feared that if she spoke up for the Rohingya, it would make it easy for her enemies to repeat this argument – and if the Burmese masses fell for it, that could erode her standing and her chances of coming to power. So she has been sitting uncomfortably on the fence for the past five years. [ .. ]

Now she is coming to power with a solid parliamentary majority, perhaps she can relax and tell us what she really thinks.

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[ by Charles Cameron — closing out a thread that began with anoither recent post of mine ]
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Organ, Berlin Cathedral

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The immediate occasion for this [second] post is my reading about the book Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Geoffrey Hill, by Eleanor J. McNees. Her subtitle names four poets I greatly admire, and whose company I would aspire to keep:

Though widely separated chronologically, all four poets use the Anglican and Roman Catholic doctrine of eucharistic Real Presence (the literal embodiment of Christ in the sacrament of Holy Communion) as model for their own poetry. Each poet seeks to charge his words with a dual physical/spiritual meaning that abolishes the gap between word and referent and so creates an immediate presence that parallels Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist.

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That pasage, in turn, reminds me of some words John Eliot Gardiner spoke on the topic of Bach and grace,
on the DVD of a rehearsal of Bach’s cantata Christen, ätzet diesen Tag (BWV 63) right after Sara Mingardo sings O Selger Tag. Gardiner first quotes Bach, then translates him:

Nota bene: Bei einer andächtigen Musik ist allezeit Gott mit seiner Gnaden Gegenwart.” Now I find that very, very significant. That he’s saying wherever there is devotional music, God with his grace is present.

How close is that to the poets McNees talks about, creating with their poems “an immediate presence that parallels Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist”?

And then he comments —

Which, from a strict theological point of view is probably heresy, heretical, because it’s saying that music has an equivalent potency to the word of God.

I’m not so sure about the heresy, but this is the point at which I turn to Lexington Green‘s comment on a recent post of mine, in which he quoted the Cathecism of the Catholic Church:

1374 The mode of Christ’s presence under the Eucharistic species is unique. It raises the Eucharist above all the sacraments as “the perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend.” In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist “the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained.” “This presence is called ‘real’ – by which is not intended to exclude the other types of presence as if they could not be ‘real’ too, but because it is presence in the fullest sense: that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God and man, makes himself wholly and entirely present.”

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Whether in the performance and hearing of Bach, Christ can be said to be “wholly and entirely” or “devotionally and musicially” present is a delicate question, one part ontological and absolute, I’d suppose, and one part epistemological and subjective.. but I find myself in warm agreement with Gardiner’s elaboration of his theme..

And I think that in essence is why Bach is so attractive to us today because he is saying that the very act of music-making and of coming together is, in a sense, an act which invokes the latency, the potency, the potentiality of God’s grace, however you like to define God’s grace; but of a benediction that comes even in a dreadful, overheated studio like Abbey Road where far too many microphones and there’s much too much stuff here in the studio itself, that if one, as a musician, puts oneself in the right frame of mind, then God’s grace can actually come and direct and influence the way we perform his music.

I really must read me some Hans Urs von Balthasar.

[by Mark Safranski / “zen“]

A while back I had a longish post that argued that the mass executions practiced by ISIS drew from the long pagan tradition of ritualistic human sacrifice. Today in the news, some social scientists see evidence of human sacrifice as the catalyst for establishing and maintaining stratified, hierarchical and (usually) oppressive societies:

Human sacrifice may seem brutal and bloody by modern social standards, but it was a common in ancient societies.

Now, researchers believe the ritualised killing of individuals to placate a god played a role in building and sustaining stable communities with social hierarchies.In particular, a study of 93 cultures across Asia, Oceana and Africa, has found the practices helped establish authority and set up class-based systems.

Human sacrifice was once widespread throughout these Austronesian cultures, which used it as the ultimate punishment, for funerals and to consecrate new boats.Sacrificial victims were typically of low social status, such as slaves, while instigators were of high social status, such as priests and chiefs, installing a sense of fear in the lower classes.

….Analysis revealed evidence of human sacrifice in 43 per cent of cultures sampled.

Ritualistic killing of humans was practiced in 25 per cent of egalitarian societies studied, 37 per cent of moderately stratified societies and 67 per cent of highly stratified societies.The researchers constructed models to test the co-evolution of human sacrifice and social hierarchy and found that human sacrifice stabilises social hierarchy once the system has arisen. They said it also promotes a shift to strictly inherited class systems, so that people of a high social class will continue to stay important over time, because of ritualistic killing.

‘In Austronesian cultures human sacrifice was used to punish taboo violations, demoralise underclasses, mark class boundaries, and instill fear of social elites  – proving a wide range of potential mechanisms for maintaining and building social control,’ they wrote. ‘While there are many factors that help build and sustain social stratification, human sacrifice may be a particularly effective means of maintaining and building social control because it minimises the potential of retaliation by eliminating the victim, and shifts the agent believed to be ultimately responsible to the realm of the supernatural.’

Supernatural forces….like for example, because Allah wills it.

This Austronesian study conclusions sounds remarkably similar to the role of (allegedly) Sharia sanctioned horrific punishments meted out by ISIS and fetishistically recorded and widely disseminated in video propaganda. A religiously ritualistic rein of terror as a mechanism to reengineer Sunni Arab society in areas under the group’s control and cement the state-building efforts of ISIS.

For details of ISIS use of extremely ghoulish violence for propaganda and state-building, I heartily recommend ISIS: the State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger.