Saturday Night Radio Drama - Philip Doherty - A Golden Triangle

A Golden Triangle 

The accidental intersection of three unlikely folk living in present-day Dublin - a curmudgeonly widower, a ladette in a wheel-chair, and a jobless Pole mauled by the Celtic Tiger in its death-throes - constitutes a curious trinity in a touching thumbnail sketch of disheartenment, desire, and eventual deliverance. 

Author Philip Doherty earns his second such award [ First Place in the the P. J. O'Connor Prize] with the interrupted monologues that make up A GOLDEN TRIANGLE; and a parallel double deployment in production features a distinguished father-and-daughter team, Brendan and Neilí Conroy, along with actor Gerry McCann, in the casting of the trio. Mattie was played by Brendan Conroy, Jill was Neilí Conroy, Edek was played by Gerry McCann

It's another Irish national radio production, which means you have to download it to listen to it. 

__________________

I listened to an interview with the late Edward Albee last week in which he said that he thought most plays were too long.  Listening to this, I wondered if that's one of the reasons I like radio plays so much, they tend to be an hour or less.  Another reason is that you get to hear a lot of plays by writers you'd never, ever see in a stage production or acted out in a film.  It's so much cheaper to do a play this way, especially a non-conventional kind of play.   I don't miss the visuals.  

Charlie Pierce Is Capable of Greatness

His piece from yesterday about Trump's smoke screen* attack on a Syrian airbase Friday, Washington Is Void of Any Sense of Restraint, and the politics of authorizing war is certainly one of the five most important things I've read this year, perhaps this decade. 

If you don't have the time to wade through my piece below, Charles Pierce's piece is more important and much shorter. 

* Is it true that they warned the Assad regime so they could remove anything they didn't want to get blown to smithereens?   I can point out that in 2013, Trump and other Republican-fascist-racists were accusing Barack Obama of going to have been guilty of doing exactly what it is so obvious that Trump did.  I still wonder if it might not have been set up by Putin, getting one of his lesser assets, Assad, to provide his major asset, Trump, with a way to deflect attention from the treason of Trump and his regime with the Russian oligarchs.  

"The feeling of security given by the reductionist approach is in fact illusory"

"Such a situation would put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form."  Eugene Wigner

The atheist religion needs to believe in something that no sensible person,  including many atheists, would ever believe, that just because someone, somewhere can think of an equation for something that that means that that equation is about something real in reality.  Which, as superstition, ranks right up there with the Republican-fascist conspiracy theories about what happens in the basement of a pizza joint that doesn't have a basement.  Yes, someone didn't like what I wrote about that last week.

I think it's possible that what physicists actually found when they couldn't make their equations come up with an absolute measure of the position of an electron in quantum physics was probably a hard fact about using mathematics as a powerful but, ultimately and inevitably a limited tool for addressing physical reality.  When you press the tool to that limit, perhaps you will find that it doesn't reveal the hard, solid, dependable view of the universe that constitutes a classical concept of objective reality that is external from the observer.   Which isn't some huge shock, it's been known to be true of the act of measurement ever since people started using standard measuring conventions, most obvious when trying to apply those standard measuring conventions against some physical object or, say, a plot of land or, especially, something which changes in dimension.

There has always been a built in margin of error in any act of measurement, sometimes you can't even really measure or even really estimate what that margin of error is.  That those exist in more sophisticated acts of measurement involving more than one possible vector in which those discrepancies between the act of measurement to cloud the issues isn't really shocking.  That it shocked the physicists who had gotten into the habit of believing that the impressive physics that Newton and his successors came up with showed us a solid, reliable, and, most cherished of all by them, an OBJECTIVE view of reality only shows that what they were using physics for up till that point could work within the range of uncertainty that it always had included.   That range of uncertainty was always acceptable in terms of the human use of knowledge.  It was always there, the idea that what classical physics gave was an objective view of reality was, itself, an accepted fudging of realty.

An aspect of how that faith in the objective reality of what physics showed us was through the physicists' often very useful practice of reducing the complexity of what they studied and observed, either through choosing a very simple object and a few aspects of its movement to study or though ignoring the range of possible influences on it movement.  As the means of measuring the objects they were studying and aspects of the objects became sufficiently precise and sophisticated in the later 19th century, problems with the imprecision of measurement became more relevant and important.  And, as it forced them to address the fact that the previous standards didn't actually give the absolute, total, and entirely dependably objective view of reality, it impinged on their most cherished beliefs gained by the really impressive usefulness of those practices up till that point.  I can imagine for people who were raised with, trained with and had a professional and, most of all a huge emotional stake in that faith in the potency of physics, facing those discrepancies was extremely painful.  Some, like Plank and Einstein, started doing physics which took the newly faced imprecision of measurement into account and did physics a new way.  But the need to maintain the, yes, if you want to put it that way, "religious" faith that what they were doing provided the kind of objective view of reality that was the cherished belief of physicists and their fans in the lay population persists.

I think the multi-verse phenomenon among physicists, perhaps the string theoriests, the M theorists, etc. are all trying to push against the limits of physics and coming up with all manner of bizarre ways to do that.  It reminds me of the epicycles and other things that late classical and medieval astronomy came up with to maintain the earth-centered cosmological system they liked so much only on both speed and acid.  I think the social sciences, trying to measure things, especially social phenomena that couldn't be reduced or really located and which were not static reality, has come up with many even more decadent claims presented as if they had any reliability at all when they don't.  Even trying to come up with a mathematical view of one human being, even just their physical body, runs up against limits almost at the beginning.

And if you think that's far fetched, while writing that I remembered that it was something which Eugene Wigner implied in his famous paper, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences

Let us consider a few examples of "false" theories which give, in view of their falseness, alarmingly accurate descriptions of groups of phenomena. With some goodwill, one can dismiss some of the evidence which these examples provide. The success of Bohr's early and pioneering ideas on the atom was always a rather narrow one and the same applies to Ptolemy's epicycles.

Only, if you're going to consider a few examples of false theories which give a few of "alarmingly accurate descriptions of groups of phenomena" you certainly should consider the many examples of people with the habit of believing in the ultimate potency of mathematical descriptions, especially in phenomena that are far more complex than what Bohr or Ptolemey's studies dealt with.  When what is allegedly being measured and, so described is far more complex, the chances that what is produced will turn out to be alarmingly inaccurate though the faith in science will lead people to believe it to be reality until reality bites back.  In the biological sciences of the late 19th century until even today, that faith has gotten millions of people killed, oppressed, discriminated against.  The next time you hear some behavioral scientist talk about the "difference" between "female and male brains" gender groups, races, ethnic groups, etc. when you read a sociological survey or anything that relies on reported responses of subjects, such as an opinion survey, you're just hearing that faith being pushed entirely past where it is warranted at all.   The "success" of some of it, such as the recently tested faith in the efficacy of polling in predicting presidential elections was most likely always an illusion based in that old and baseless faith in the ability of numbers to give you an objective view of reality.

Then there is this, from the end of Wigner's paper.

If viewed from our real vantage point, the situation presented by the free-electron theory is irritating but is not likely to forebode any inconsistencies which are unsurmountable for us. The free-electron theory raises doubts as to how much we should trust numerical agreement between theory and experiment as evidence for the correctness of the theory. We are used to such doubts.

A much more difficult and confusing situation would arise if we could, some day, establish a theory of the phenomena of consciousness, or of biology, which would be as coherent and convincing as our present theories of the inanimate world. Mendel's laws of inheritance and the subsequent work on genes may well form the beginning of such a theory as far as biology is concerned. Furthermore,, it is quite possible that an abstract argument can be found which shows that there is a conflict between such a theory and the accepted principles of physics. The argument could be of such abstract nature that it might not be possible to resolve the conflict, in favor of one or of the other theory, by an experiment. Such a situation would put a heavy strain on our faith in our theories and on our belief in the reality of the concepts which we form. It would give us a deep sense of frustration in our search for what I called "the ultimate truth." The reason that such a situation is conceivable is that, fundamentally, we do not know why our theories work so well. Hence, their accuracy may not prove their truth and consistency. Indeed, it is this writer's belief that something rather akin to the situation which was described above exists if the present laws of heredity and of physics are confronted.

As a physicist and mathematician, Wigner may have had a very naive view of the complexity you fast run into when you're studying living beings, even in some of their simpler aspects.  For those of you who may not have read the post here from a few weeks back, I'll point out what the eminent biologist Lynn Margulis said about an exchange she had with the eminent geneticist Richard Lewontin about mathematical modeling in genetics which runs up against the discrepancies and the limits of that faith in the efficacy of mathematics a lot faster and more consequentially than happens in studying electrons.

When evolutionary biologists use computer modeling to find out how many mutations you need to get from one species to another, it’s not mathematics—it’s numerology. They are limiting the field of study to something that’s manageable and ignoring what’s most important. They tend to know nothing about atmospheric chemistry and the influence it has on the organisms or the influence that the organisms have on the chemistry. They know nothing about biological systems like physiology, ecology, and biochemistry. Darwin was saying that changes accumulate through time, but population geneticists are describing mixtures that are temporary. Whatever is brought together by sex is broken up in the next generation by the same process. Evolutionary biology has been taken over by population geneticists. They are reductionists ad absurdum.  Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.

And I'll point out, they're dealing with something far simpler than the massively more complex whole organisms and stupendously more complex species and ecological systems in which those genes exist.   The reason to believe that reductionist practices and mathematical modeling will work in studying and understanding, even in a partial or general way, those far surpasses unreasonable belief. As I recall Margulis called it "religious faith" somewhere, I think that much religious faith is far more modest and far more reasonable.  A more apt, accurate and honest comparison wouldn't be to religion, it would be to pseudo-scientific ideologies which sprang up in the 19th and 20th centuries among those atheists who had that faith in the ultimate power of mathematics and science which has led their fellow atheists (and others) in science astray, as well.

I think the creation of jillions and jillions of universes by physicists frustrated with the fact that they can't have an objective view of reality is sort of like the ultimate expression of what led Ptolemey to come up with his means of making things work when they didn't.  Only he was addressing things that could be seen to be there and so he couldn't come up with magic to make it work.  Modern physics reached a point after World War Two when it chose to allow that.  I think if Bertrand Russell in the late 1920s hadn't used his hatred of religion to make an analogy to the decadence he feared modern physics would lead to, he might have been more accurate about the nature of that decadence. And it's a quite materialistic and quite atheistic decadence, based on faith in a far different, far more human and totally material set of desiderata.

* I'll quote the mathematician René Thom, again

The excellent beginning made by quantum mechanics with the hydrogen atom peters out slowly in the sands of approximations in as much as we move toward more complex situations…. This decline in the efficiency of mathematical algorithms accelerates when we go into chemistry.   The interactions between two molecules of any degree of complexity evades precise mathematical description … In biology, if we make exceptions of the theory of population and of formal genetics, the use of mathematics is confined to modeling a few local situations (transmission of nerve impulses, blood flow in the arteries, etc.)  of slight theoretical interest and limited practical value… The relatively rapid degeneration of the possible use of mathematics when one moves from physics to biology is certainly known among specialists, but there is a reluctance to reveal it to the public at large … The feeling of security given by the reductionist approach is in fact illusory.

And refusing to face that has brought science into complete decadence.

Hate Update:  I think the stuff Comte and Marx came up with was pretty bad and the political-social-legal application of natural selection was far worse.  The ultimate decadence among atheist-materialists today, the demotion of the mind to being a product of chance, random events, randomly present chemicals and physical phenomena in our skulls, the demotion of our minds into the total impeaching of the significance of our thoughts - though, they insist, out of any rational coherence,  not their own thoughts - is just more of the same misplaced faith that is the theme of this post.   Science works best when it is honestly applied to things it can honestly be applied to and the claims made for the results are honest about the range in which those are reliable and the limit within which it is reliable.  Very little science is presented with that honesty.  A hell of a lot of what is included within "science" today is an atheist equivalent of the "astrology and necromancy" that Bertrand Russell talked about in the wake of the robust belief in the Roman Catholic church.

When the robustness of the Catholic faith decayed at the time of the Renaissance, it tended to be replaced by astrology and necromancy, and in like manner we must expect the decay of the scientific faith to lead to a recrudescence of pre-scientific superstitions.

Only the very faith that Russell had in the total efficacy of science and mathematics had already produced far more dangerous and far more potent superstitions which were already piling up corpses.  That pile had started in the Reign of Terror carried out as part of the very "enlightenment" Russell feared was passing away.  He had seen more of it in his disillusioning visit to the Soviet Union nine years before he wrote that article, though his faith in science and his a-historical upper class Brit hatred of religion led him to entirely mischaracterize the incipient horrors he already saw forming under Lenin in his book The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism.  But that would take an even longer post to go through.  Whatever you can say about the horrific results of Marxism, it wasn't religious superstition that it was based in, it was ultimately based in the very faith in the efficacy and monist potency of materialism and science Russell held that produced it.   And the same can be said about Nazism which was based, entirely, on a belief in natural selection and the eugenics which blamed civilization and the morality of the Golden Rule as impeding its violent, brutal culling out of the "weaker members" of the human species.

Hate Update 2:  Bertrand Russell's chapter treating The Materialistic Theory of History is absolutely full of double-talk, ahistorical garbage, bigotry, etc.  He literally contradicts himself throughout it.  His motive wasn't honesty about the developing horror of Soviet Marxim, it was to attribute everything about it to things he didn't like.  You can still read similar stuff with similar motives on the atheist, alleged left, today.

GYÖRGY LIGETI - Sonata for Cello solo

Mathias Johansen - Cello

The Same With The Score

Arranged for Guitar by Kostas Tosidis

Kostas Tosidis, guitar

The Sonata has an interesting story, the first movement composed as an imaginary dialogue between a man and a woman - written for a cellist Ligeti was in love with but who he never told he was in love with.  Later in 1953. another cellist asked him to write a piece so he added the second movement the Cappricio to it.  However, when they applied to the Hungarian Composers Union (or more honestly Soviet occupation composers censors) they banned its public performance and publication, allowing only a recording for radio which was never played.  The piece was put aside and forgotten when Ligeti walked out of the Soviet bloc and began what he considered his mature compositional period free of censorship.  The piece was revived and received its first concert performance in 1983 and was published in 1990.

I assume Kostas Tosidis had either Ligeti's permission to make the transcription or that of his estate. I think it's pretty successful.

Duncan's dopes never come here to read what was really said. They don't even read what he says on his own blog. Which is why he stopped saying things there.  

Eschaton is a thing of the past.  Which would be ironic if the inmates knew what the word means.

Having Putin's Puppet in the Presidency Makes Things A Lot Crazier Than They Would Be If A Traitor Wasn't President

It is one of the insane things about having the Republican-fascists in power under the patronage of Vladimir Putin that who knows what's possible.  The ever increasing knowledge of how far he went to put Donald Trump in office means that he obviously sees him as an asset.  With the unprecedented and open corruption of Trump and his ties to the Russian mafia that runs the country it is clear that he is a partner with Putin.  

That makes what's been going on in Syria especially strange because Putin is also the biggest backer of the Syrian regime and an active participant in the war of Bashar al-Assad.  Then there was the recent attack in the St. Petersburg subway which, at least several days ago was believed to have been retaliation for what the Putin regime is doing in Syria.  

I would find it hard to believe that al-Assad would commit the atrocity of the gas attack this week without at least consultation with the Putin government.  It's even possible that he would want to get the OK from Putin to do it - if, in fact, it was his regime that did it and not the terrorist groups who are known to have chemical weapons in Syria.  

What is especially insane is that any scenario you can think up is possibly true.  I was wondering earlier this morning if Putin decided that a gas attack, allowing Donald Trump to launch a military attack might reduce the pressure on what must be his major asset outside of Russia, the Trump regime.  Americans are as stupid about rallying around any Republican military action as Russians have been for Putin.  He's used those kinds of things, including terror incidents some believe his own government staged, to consolidate power.  Maybe he's decided that Trump can get him more of what he wants than Assad, though he might be figuring on keeping both. 

Does that make more sense than that Assad would do something he would have to know risked major involvement with the biggest military in the world?   Something that would prove that he and possibly he and the Putin regime lied about him destroying his chemical weapons stockpile?

Or maybe Putin had no involvement in any of it.  Who knows? I doubt anyone in the American media does.  One thing I do know is that a lot of the craziness comes from us having a person running the government who is an asset of Vladimir Putin, who also has assets leading the State Department and who are in other places in the Trump regime.  If they weren't there, some of the issues making this so crazy wouldn't be there.  If Trump and his cronies weren't in place, so many of them with ties to the Russian kleptocrats - including his son-in-law, the de facto Secretary of State, his daughter and his sons.   

Update:  Says the guy who was stunned to find out in recent weeks that 90 year olds dying is, you know, a thing.   I wonder what he said when Irwin Corey died at 102.  I can imagine that came as a huge unfair shock to him as well with a good dose of histrionic complaint.

By the way, these are the same people who accuse religious people of fearing death - that is when they aren't saying that religion is a death cult.   Heads I win, tails you lose is the standard operating procedure for these dolts.  Never let them get away with it.

Kenneth Gaburo - Maledetto

"Lingua II: Maledetto" by Kenneth Gaburo performed by Stephen Miles, R. L. Silver, Kartina Amin, Lisa Pokorski, Jason Rosenberg, Steven Jones, and Nadia Stegman at New Music New College's Speech Acts concert, November 18, 2000 in the Mildred Sainer Pavilion at New College of Florida.

I'd only ever heard this on the old CRI LP recording of a performance from the 1970s.  I hope it's been performed since then.   It's been way too long since I went to an avant garde music concert. Though Gaburo wasn't exactly that since I don't think he sparked a movement.  He was a really interesting composer-theater creator.

I was looking for something to curse the Republican-fascists with, this isn't exactly what I had in mind but it will do for now.

The Shade of Roger Taney is Smiling From Hell

I remember when I first went online and I started condemning the Supreme Court as a corrupt instrument which has, with the fewest of exceptions, been a secure means of preventing equality and justice, a lot of liberals got really upset, nervous, skittish.   The older ones invoked the Republican-fascist campaign calling for the impeachment of Earl Warren, bill boards and all.  The friggin' Supreme Court had a little burp of liberalism for a few years in the later 1950s and 60s and people wanted to pretend that was the status quo of the most undemocratic branch of the government.

Well, along with the nuke the Republican-fascists set off today, including the skank from my home state, Susan Collins, I say the days of treating that thoroughly politicized body with kid gloves is well over and good.

Neil Gorsuch has to be exposed every time he does the slightest thing that can be turned against the Republican-fascists who put him on the court, he will give us lots and lots to use.  He will regularly vote to screw the majority of people on behalf of the oligarchs who begot and nurtured the fascist, the Federalist fascists, the American Enterprise Institute, etc.  And the oligarchs.

Democrats should feature his every outrage in a constant stream of political messaging that will turn him into the most hated Supreme since the putrid Roger B. Taney of Dred Scott infamy.  He will probably do everything he can to bring us back to that period.  

There should also be a move to limit the term of Supreme Court members to ten years.  For any great justice who you would like to keep on for life there have been many times more who should never have been there to start with.  The Founders were total novice and amateurs who could never have imagined a ruling elite with no sense of honor, such as the one we have in power now. They couldn't have imagined the kind of scum such as Gorsuch, Thomas, Scalia and Alito could be put onto the court, and if they could, they were not only naive, they were jerks.

I Approve This Message from Samantha Bee - We Told You So: Russian Hacking

It's a real sign that American democracy is in a fatal tail spin when the "free press" only tells you the truth in the context of a comedy show.   I really friggin' hate the free speech - free press industry that let the media lie us into fascism.  Oh, yeah, and we had to have a Canadian tell us.  Damn, I wish I'd moved there when my Latin teacher tried to talk me into it.

I Think Jay Semko's Mouse In A Hole Is Great Musical Theater In Six Minutes

Let me guess, you don't like it because he's not from New York or LA and has worked mostly in Western Canada.  I don't care.  Your comment dismissing his song reminds me of the story that his friends told about Charlie Parker who would feed coins into jukeboxes listening to Hank Williams songs.  When his friends complained asking him, the ultimate - no far more than ultimate hipster how he could listen to that corny country stuff he told them to listen to the stories.

Yeah, I do think Jay Semko's song is better than that rehash of Civil War sentimentality - which I finally listened to and, while it isn't exactly tripe, I've heard it all before, many times.  It suffers from being safely in the sentimentalized past not the present with all the dangerous issues involved.  I think, by the way, that Semko's fellow Canadian Robbie Robertson's act of imagination as heard on The Brown Album is ever so much more impressive.

For anyone who missed it below here's a link.

Update:  Dopey is railing at me that I only listened to the words and ignored music in the.... um,  "masterpiece, he railed at me about for most of the past week.  He's wrong.  If I had to judge it on the music I'd note that it's the same stuff I heard in the 1960s rehashed for the past half century thousands of times instead of the mere dozens of times I've heard the same ....un.... literary content.  Banal junk.

Update 2:  Here's Semko singing it with just his guitar at a house concert in Victoria BC.  Notice all of those different voices you thought were different voices were, actually, his.   Yes, it is great musical theater.

Update 3:  Uh, Stupy, I hate to disappoint you but you're not the only idiot who tries to spam up my blog comments.  Maybe you can go back to Baby Blue and hunt down your rival.  I think I'll keep up the ban on posting your comments as well as your buddies' unless I can use their content.  I might get to the point where I don't bother at all with them.  What a loss of attention that will be to you.

The Clearest Thing In The Republican Attempt To Cover Up For Trump Is Republican Racism

The list of Republicans piling on the smoke to shield Trump from his lie that President Obama spied on him and his traitorous thugs in Trump Tower all comes together in their decision to blame everything on Susan Rice.  Trump, his thugs, Lindsay Graham, Deven Nunes, Fox, the Breitbarts and even such crap as work for the corporate media like Bloomberg chose her for the same reasons they went after her over nothing in regard to the Benghazi pseudo-scandal during the Obama administration.

The reasons they are trying to create another in their decades of political pseudo-scandals is that she is a, Black, b. a Woman, c. a Democrat.  

Republicans made a decision after the passage of the monumental Civil Rights legislation that they would take in those racists and segregationists who would never accept the equality of Black poeple, and others covered by those acts and that tactic, the "Southern Strategy" of the criminal Richard Nixon has served to empower Republicans and to move them from main-stream, still quasi-democratic corporate servants ever farther into the Republican Party turning from corporatism to fascism.  From the party of inequality to fascism.  From the party of Eisenhower to the party of Nixon - Trump.  All Republicans in 2017 are the servants of racism, of fascism, today.  They went from trying to harness racism and racists as a tool to those racists dominating and entirely running the party and, with them in power, the United States.  

Susan Rice did nothing illegal, improper or unethical.  After they've dragged her through dozens of more hearings in addition to all of those the Republican-fascists subjected her and other members of the Obama administration to, they will come up with nothing.  I am confident of that because they came up with nothing on anything else.  If there has been something dependable in the Obama administration, it is that the people who were in it don't commit crimes because they intentionally choose to not break the law.  You can say the exact opposite about Republicans.    And you can be certain that just as the criminal Bill O'Reilly went after Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the reason they've gone after Susan Rice it is to rally their racist, fascist base.  

Update:  Just looked, you can add the genteel, Ivy Leaguer, Federalist fascists to that list, the ones who sponored Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court.  They're supporting the Trump traitors cover up on their website, too. 

Even More Hate Mail - "The Greatest Minds In Science ....." (blah, blah, blah)

I don't know.  If we're supposed to believe that this multi-universe option to solve the atheist-materialist conundrum caused by modern physics is legitimate, on the basis of the equations they come up with to determine all possible positions of electrons, what would the equations dealing with all possible aspects of my typing out that "M" at the beginning of that sentence in my question below be like?   I would suspect that, while it would be impossible to calculate something like that, it would have to come up with far more possible values for all of the myriads of variables in that one physical act (never mind intentional choice) than those dealing with an electron.  All of them requiring a universe in which all of those possible variations in the variables would be expressed in a concrete material form.   And you think the Genesis story* - even taken as a figurative, instructive description, not as young earth creationist "science" - is absurd.

At least I'd like a really good explanation that all of the many physicists who insist on that multi-universe agree on as to why my question on that matter isn't relevant.  

Or, maybe, to get around the problem of my experienced choice in typing that "M" being determinative, they'll claim that I didn't really choose that but that it merely exists in their stupendously infinite and concrete mega-supreme multi-universe system which, by the way, we don't even know exists except within their imaginations - none of them really being able to fathom what they've imagined, I'd guess no two physicists imagining exactly the same ensemble.  In which case where did all of those infinite universes come from and why they exist as they do?  And, yes, there is the problem that if the equations that our multi-universe creating physicists dream up are so efficacious as to either create or expose other universes, there would certainly have to be other universes in which other physicists have come up with the disconfirmation of their conjectures. 

I think the most parsimonious explanation is that those other universes exist as nothing but wishful thinking by atheists who have proved how decadent they are willing to make science in order to impose their atheism on science.  That has happened in cosmology, in neuro-science, in biology, and certainly in the social sciences over and over and over again since at least the advent of modern science.  There is no magisterial wall between atheist ideology and science as there is, in fact, one that keeps religion out.  Neither religion founded in the supernatural nor atheism based on vulgar materialism really have any place in science, though I'm afraid a lot of people who get paid to write papers and publish them would be hard put to come up with something to get into the journals and to show their departments to try to get tenure if such a wall against atheist religious preference was enforced.  They would be hard put to come up with something to do that with if atheist-materialist faith were kept out of science.   I think the current faculties of the social sciences, neuro-sciences and cosmology would largely have to be put out on the dole if that were done.

Hey, maybe firing them all would tip the political balance in favor of liberalism, assuming they haven't talked themselves out of ideas like equality, equal justice, and our equal moral obligation to give them to everyone wasn't obliterated in their materialist wishful thinking due to their atheist faith in natural selection.  I think Horowitz and Putin are good examples of what so often comes out at the end of atheist materialism.  Vulgar materialism and the monumental greed and depravity that constitute its morals and sacraments. 

*  I'm really tired of rehashing the first few chapters of Genesis along with the story of the flood.  I think the story of Joseph at the end of the book is far more worth going over.  Especially considering the points Brueggemann makes about him acting as an agent of Pharaoh instead of according to the Jewish tradition is both a lot more important for us today and far more interesting.  Especially as Brueggemann point out, you've seen one Pharaoh you've seen them all and a lot of them are around today. 

Materialism Is Entirely A Product of The Primitive Emotional Preferences Of Those Engaged In It - Hate Mail

I really wish that instead of railing at me and other commentators you would go read Adam Frank's excellent article.  Read the very clear, very concise description of the alternatives of taking either the position that the wave function, itself, is a picture of reality or the one we happen to measure being what it would seem to be, the measure's perspective on reality and not an objective reality itself.  The first one, the stubborn insistence that what is obviously not a concrete view of reality comes with a huge price, as Frank says, it insists on the really crazy results of the ever expanding multi-universes that turns the "turtles all the way down" line atheists love to use against religious folks on its head and turns equations into creator gods on the say so of contemporary physicists.  I have always wondered how the tiny little actions we take generating new universes would square with the materialists' ideas of force and power needed to do things could be fit together but if there's something like that within the theories, I've never come across it.  It would seem to be that we, like the young witches in Harry Potter, are unconsciously doing far more impressive magic.  All the time, Every one of my keystroke while I write this have, I suppose, created universes in which someone doing exactly what I did typed every single other available wrong letter or character or left out every one of them, or something like that.  Try describing every alternative to even one tiny act you take and imagine what alternative universes would be generated to constitute every possible variation on it.

The multiverse theory that is so influential in pop culture and in university departments would seem to turn us all into unconscious creator gods far more potent in their creation than God in Genesis.  Only, the materialists can comfort themselves that we're not creating by intention but through the power of their equations.  I wonder if there are universes in those all other possible universes where physicists come up with equally potent equations that cancel out the power of our physicists, disproving the multi-universe conjecture.  If our equations can have such power, why not theirs?*

Of course the other view, that the the many (infinite?) possibilities of the wave function collapsing into some kind of imposed reality when someone makes a measurement also has consequences of the people measuring influencing the actual physical reality.  Or at least what we choose that to be.

From what I understand you can either choose to have our and everyone elses' every act generating entire new universes continually or you can choose to say that whatever reality we can have of the physical universe being, in a real way, the result of our our minds, our decisions, and choices but NOT the classical idea of it being an "objective" "real" view of a hard material reality.   I think the decision of which one is chosen is, as Frank says, entirely dependent on which one you like and really not on anything else.  I've read physicists, mathematicians, and others involved in these issues note that which one is chosen probably has as much to do with the geographical location of where you went to grad school and which view dominated which department granted you your degree and which also gave you a professional and, likely, financial stake in your chosen denomination of physics.  Which is just another undermining of the classical-materialist belief in a solid, scientifically certain, material reality which comes with this.

For the attempt to turn the mind into another material object, governed by whatever forces under whatever laws whichever ideological scientist might prefer the problem is far more basic.  And here I think Frank put it very well.

Putting the perceiving subject back into physics would seem to undermine the whole materialist perspective. A theory of mind that depends on matter that depends on mind could not yield the solid ground so many materialists yearn for.

And, for the atheists in the audience, don't pretend that both of the choices available to materialists, either the elevation of the wave function into an ever expanding, multi-universe reality or the one that admits that, for human purposes, our own choices govern what we will ever have as reality, whatever we can coherently or incoherently talk about matter being, BOTH OF THOSE ALTERNATIVES ARE dependent on our minds, our choices.  There is no old fashioned, comforting, classical view of a solid, dependable universe available to you if you, as you also will, insist that the reality of the material universe is uniform at every scale of its existence.

The price for pretending otherwise is that ultimate decadence of pretending that our minds are an illusion which not only collapses the variables in an equation those meaningless minds come up with, it collapses the possibility that any of it has significance and produces any knowledge of any truth or reality.   The mind only become a "hard problem" when atheists want to force our minds out of what they are and into a narrow, classical physical world that died in the early 20th century.  It is in every way irrational, every way anachronistic, in every way as much a product of the emotional preferences of the materialists who are engaged in that because they just can't stand anything that implies that our intuitions derived from the reality of our minds not being like physical things implies that there is a God.

God ain't going away, dear, there is not a coffin big enough and no lid strong enough.  People will not ignore the problems with materialism as long as they think and the materialist hegemony that clogs universities and the media isn't going to stop that.  It can't even stop people believing in the stuff CSICOP railed against,  there are probably more people who believe in those things than there were in the mid 1970s.   It's materialism, in the high-brow form, that's in trouble, though, as we can see from the product of indoctrination into hard-core materialism in the old Soviet Union and China, the vulgar form of it and the fascism that comes with that are flourishing.   Materialism always seems to collapse into that.  Look at David Horowitz.  That high-brow materialist-atheist view of life is merely a matter of snobbery by people with degrees or those who would like to be taken as such without the work.  It is a product of social and class coercion and vulgar economic-social aspiration as much as anything else that people figure will get them ahead.

*  Maybe a finger typed out every other possible "M" at the beginning of this sentence in a slightly different place on the key, and in some of them they forgot to capitalize it, or maybe they don't capitalize at the beginning of sentences in some of those universes.  Maybe they choose different type faces.... It almost immediately becomes absurd.

Hate Update:   What's an ignorant, middle-brow, blog babbler like you to do?

 The Humanities Major Atheist Solution

Though never a whiz with the math,
And so on to science, no path,
I'll fake it with attitude,
Materialist platitude, 
And pseudo-historical wrath. 

Jay Semko - Mouse in a Hole - Answer To An Angry Rant

I am really, really not big on rock.  Once in a while I hear something I think is worth while.  As far as I can remember this is the last thing like that I heard, it was posted eleven years back so it's since then I've heard it.

Makes me wonder how many mass gun murders there have been in North America since it was written.

Simps and Trump are alike re truth telling, 
As well in their ranting and yelling,
They both come from Queens,
And they both act like tweens 
And oddly alike re repelling.  

Update:  Like there's a difference.  You all come from the same place and it's anatomical, not geographical. 

And speaking of meat-heads.  He's still going on and on about my lying about not knowing about a band I never heard of or heard, going on three days .... or is it four?  

I don't know, is he still doing so on his vacation to Stockholm?  As I said, if I'd spent all that money to go on a vacation I can tell you, answering the numb nuts at Eschaton wouldn't be how I'd be spending my time.  I'm guessing his girl friend was off enjoying herself while she left him to drool into his phone.  I hope so, it must be bad enough to be traveling with him. 

An ancient rock critic in Sweden,
Just couldn't stop blogging or tweetin'
His raging, OCD 
Attention grabs, needy
Would come even while parked in Eden. 

(I'll confess, this one took seven minutes, not the under five I limit myself to when limericking.)

Update:  "in bed while using hand held devices".

Oh, please, I don't ever want to think of you in bed using a "hand held device".

Materialists Are The Atheist Equivalent of Young Earth Creationists

Reader, rustypickup sent me a link to an interesting article by the University of Rochester astronomer, Adam Frank about the persistent problems for the materialist model of reality in face of the persisting problems of modern physics.   Much of what he said will be familiar to people who've read my blog posts on the relevant issues, as good a way of any to show what there problems which Frank says physicists don't like to talk about, especially with outsiders, is to give a few quotes.

When I was a young physics student I once asked a professor: ‘What’s an electron?’ His answer stunned me. ‘An electron,’ he said, ‘is that to which we attribute the properties of the electron.’ That vague, circular response was a long way from the dream that drove me into physics, a dream of theories that perfectly described reality. Like almost every student over the past 100 years, I was shocked by quantum mechanics, the physics of the micro-world. In place of a clear vision of little bits of matter that explain all the big things around us, quantum physics gives us a powerful yet seemly paradoxical calculus. With its emphasis on probability waves, essential uncertainties and experimenters disturbing the reality they seek to measure, quantum mechanics made imagining the stuff of the world as classical bits of matter (or miniature billiard balls) all but impossible.

Like most physicists, I learned how to ignore the weirdness of quantum physics. ‘Shut up and calculate!’ (the dictum of the American physicist David Mermin) works fine if you are trying to get 100 per cent on your Advanced Quantum Theory homework or building a laser. But behind quantum mechanics’ unequaled calculational precision lie profound, stubbornly persistent questions about what those quantum rules imply about the nature of reality – including our place in it.

Those questions are well-known in the physics community, but perhaps our habit of shutting up has been a little too successful. A century of agnosticism about the true nature of matter hasn’t found its way deeply enough into other fields, where materialism still appears to be the most sensible way of dealing with the world and, most of all, with the mind. Some neuroscientists think that they’re being precise and grounded by holding tightly to materialist credentials. Molecular biologists, geneticists, and many other types of researchers – as well as the nonscientist public – have been similarly drawn to materialism’s seeming finality. But this conviction is out of step with what we physicists know about the material world – or rather, what we don’t know.

Sorry, that's one of the problems with doing these topics.  The ideas involved don't lend themselves to being disposed of in a few aphoristic statements designed for easy consumption by even college-educated TV trained consumer of them.   And as Adam Frank notes, it's apparent that some of the biggest names in science, even the physicists whose own field can't escape the vicissitudes of these hard and inconvenient truths don't seem to be willing to really acknowledge that they are there, they are real and the insurmountable hurdle  they present for their materialist-religious ideology are there.  And for materialism, since its replacement for God is the physical universe and the laws constructed by science about those, those insurmountable problems are fatal to materialism in a way that they are not for non-materialist religion.

Take the very first problem in that, that the real and effective modern understanding of electrons doesn't actually define WHAT they are, they present them in terms of the properties that physicists have assigned to them.  When they are talking about electrons, they aren't talking about a thing they're talking about what they believe an electron does.  And that problem is only more exacerbated by the fact that modern physics doesn't talk about an actual thing doing things, it can't do anything but present those "things" as a series of probabilities, none of which can be definitely assigned to the "thing" they're talking about.

For physicists, the ambiguity over matter boils down to what we call the measurement problem, and its relationship to an entity known as the wave function. Back in the good old days of Newtonian physics, the behaviour of particles was determined by a straightforward mathematical law that reads F = ma. You applied a force F to a particle of mass m, and the particle moved with acceleration a. It was easy to picture this in your head. Particle? Check. Force? Check. Acceleration? Yup. Off you go.

The equation F = ma gave you two things that matter most to the Newtonian picture of the world: a particle’s location and its velocity. This is what physicists call a particle’s state. Newton’s laws gave you the particle’s state for any time and to any precision you need. If the state of every particle is described by such a simple equation, and if large systems are just big combinations of particles, then the whole world should behave in a fully predictable way. Many materialists still carry the baggage of that old classical picture. It’s why physics is still widely regarded as the ultimate source of answers to questions about the world, both outside and inside our heads.

In Isaac Newton’s physics, position and velocity were indeed clearly defined and clearly imagined properties of a particle. Measurements of the particle’s state changed nothing in principle. The equation F = ma was true whether you were looking at the particle or not. All of that fell apart as scientists began probing at the scale of atoms early last century. In a burst of creativity, physicists devised a new set of rules known as quantum mechanics. A critical piece of the new physics was embodied in Schrödinger’s equation. Like Newton’s F = ma, the Schrödinger equation represents mathematical machinery for doing physics; it describes how the state of a particle is changing. But to account for all the new phenomena physicists were finding (ones Newton knew nothing about), the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger had to formulate a very different kind of equation.

When calculations are done with the Schrödinger equation, what’s left is not the Newtonian state of exact position and velocity. Instead, you get what is called the wave function (physicists refer to it as psi after the Greek symbol Ψ used to denote it). Unlike the Newtonian state, which can be clearly imagined in a commonsense way, the wave function is an epistemological and ontological mess. The wave function does not give you a specific measurement of location and velocity for a particle; it gives you only probabilities at the root level of reality. Psi appears to tell you that, at any moment, the particle has many positions and many velocities. In effect, the bits of matter from Newtonian physics are smeared out into sets of potentials or possibilities.

All of this led some of the most philosophically sophisticated physicists such as Eddington to state and even some of the most dedicated atheist-materialist philosophers such as Bertrand Russell to admit that modern physics had pretty much destroyed the old materialism which was fast becoming the standard religion of atheist-scientists.  It is the old-time religion that still holds sway among even physicists whose own field undermined the possibility of them believing in it professionally.

Materialist - ideologues among modern physicists would seem, to me, to be the equivalent of biologists or geologists who held with young-earth creationism.  

Frank goes into some of the truly bizarre stuff like even the most extreme versions of multi-verse theory which is found to be more acceptable to these materialists than just stating the obvious, that materialism is an inadequate model of the physical universe at even the level they can study with any kind of confidence.  Never mind the insistence that the efficacy of their religious cosmology can be extended from quantum physics concerning electrons into complex chemistry, biology and even reliably reducing the minds that can't really grasp what electrons are or where they are with absolute certainty into computers made of meat.

I have noted how, on reading Eddington's lectures that Bertrand Russell predicted that science was entering into a decadent phase.  That was nearly ninety years ago.  What has obviously reached a stage of decay is the fields of cosmology, some branches of physics, the elusive and absurd and blatantly announced attempts of scientists to define consciousness, mental activity, etc. into nothing but chemistry and physics, something that some of the big names in popular science such as Michio Kaku claim is inevitable - Frank has critiqued him on that count, as well.

Everywhere I've looked, when a scientist starts out with the clear intention, generally overtly stated, to support the materialist model of reality, the results have been utterly decadent, utterly dishonest and the science it produces has often crashed catestrophically.   In a lot of my blog writing I have dealt with the most deadly of those, eugenics, which the Darwin inner circle in Britain and Germany believed in as a part of the "material monist" view of life which they believed natural selection confirmed.  I have noted a number of times that in his book, The History of Creation, which had Darwin's full support, Haeckel credited him and that theory with the "final triumph" of "material monism" to Darwin.  The current crop of materialists in cosmology, in neuro-science and other fields which are trying to nail the final nails in the coffin of what they take as the main rival of their religious faith, a belief in God, are engaged in the same entirely extra-scientific effort.

Rustypickup sent me the link to the piece in my piece noting Stephen Jay Gould's willingness to forego his entire, decades long criticism of the Just-so story telling of sociobiology and evo-psy in the one instance where they disposed of the "vexing problem" of "altruism" on behalf of natural selection.  I can't claim that my longstanding affection for Gould didn't take a big hit with that article and, especially, that particular lapse in his scientific integrity.  And for the same reason, ultimately, that led the original generation of Darwinists to refuse to note the problems with their universal ambitions for the theory of natural selection.  That someone as humane as Gould was willing to do that in the 1970s, two years after he noted that sociobiology risked a revival of eugenics and all of the possibilities we in the post-war period know with such horrible certainty shows how dangerous materialism really is.

It's mighty tempting to go into all of the problems of materialism that Adam Frank sets down in his article but I'll give you his conclusion, which I can agree with, sort of:

Rather than sweeping away the mystery of mind by attributing it to the mechanisms of matter, we can begin to move forward by acknowledging where the multiple interpretations of quantum mechanics leave us. It’s been more than 20 years since the Australian philosopher David Chalmers introduced the idea of a ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Following work by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, Chalmers pointed to the vividness – the intrinsic presence – of the perceiving subject’s experience as a problem no explanatory account of consciousness seems capable of embracing. Chalmers’s position struck a nerve with many philosophers, articulating the sense that there was fundamentally something more occurring in consciousness than just computing with meat. But what is that ‘more’?

Some consciousness researchers see the hard problem as real but inherently unsolvable; others posit a range of options for its account. Those solutions include possibilities that overly project mind into matter. Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of. Regardless of the direction ‘more’ might take, the unresolved democracy of quantum interpretations means that our current understanding of matter alone is unlikely to explain the nature of mind. It seems just as likely that the opposite will be the case.

While the materialists might continue to wish for the high ground of sobriety and hard-headedness, they should remember the American poet Richard Wilbur’s warning:

Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones: 
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

Oh, well, I can't keep myself from noting that if the mind is not material then there is no way to apply any of the methods of physics or even biology to it because those can only have any reliability at all in so far as they reveal properties of matter.  If the mind is not material, it will certainly have qualities which the methods of science can't approach.  To anyone who objects to that idea, modern physics has certainly shown to a high degree of reliability that the methods of science can't even reach all of the qualities of the physical universe.  As I will brag, once again,  I once got the arch-materialist, arrogant physicist Sean Carroll to admit that there was not a single object in the entire physical universe that physics had defined comprehensively and exhaustively.  Something about even the most studied object in the universe, "simple" and observable as that might be, has eluded the most exigent methods of science.

Maxine Waters‏Verified account @MaxineWaters

Susan Rice didn't ask the FBI for immunity from prosecution. Mike Flynn did. Obama's campaign was not under FBI investigation. Trump's is.

Republicans Are The Party of White Supremacy That Is Why They Are Going After Susan Rice Again

Rule of Republican-fascism: when you can do it, use a Black Woman as a focus in your political witch hunts do it and if it is a Black Woman you've used that way before, so much the better.  The racist, neo-confederate, white-supremacy party is going after Susan Rice again AND THEY'RE GOING AFTER HER, THE FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR TO THE PRESIDENT FOR DOING HER JOB. '

The mentally defective Pauls, Rand and Big Daddy Ron in his podcast to his pod-people are hardly alone in this Republican effort.  It began in the Trump Whitehouse with, we know,  National Security-political operatives Ezra Cohen-Watnick and  Michael Ellis doing what Susan Rice is being accused of by Republicans, leaking classified information to Devin Nunes in what was an obvious attempt to throw up smoke screen around Trump regime treason with Russia.  The whole thing is, obviously, planned and coordinated to use Susan Rice to rally the racists who are the main support of the Republican-fascist party.

They went after Rice before as part of their phony-scandal over the Benghazi attack, they will, no doubt, drag her through the mud before she is ultimately exonerated but exonerated only by the very few who were paying real attention to it and the few of those who are still paying attention.

The Republican Party made the decision to appeal directly to segregationists and racists in the 1960s it is now in the total control of racists and overt white supremacists.  Male and female, Republicans in the Congress eagerly went after Black Women with glee during Republican campaign of racism against the first Black president in our history.  FOX, Breitbart, the toilet papers, etc. were all part of it.  I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't taking lessons in it from Donald Trump's patron Vladimir Putin who is funding and promoting neo-Nazis and neo-fascists in Europe and here.

This is serious, this is proto-Nazi behavior, this is unacceptable.  This has to be thrown in the face of the few phony-moderates and used to bring them down and get their party out of power.

Do Authorities Now Have What They Need on Trump?

Charles Ives - Religion

I have gotten a lot of flack for the 20th-21st century music I post, Dusan Bogdanovic was slammed for being too ethnic (meaning that as a composer who grew up in the Balkans they figured he shouldn't make reference to Balkan music) or my dear old, lamented and beloved friend Arthur Berger was denounced as an"academic serialist" by someone who neither knew what the term allegedly meant and who was unfamiliar with Arthur's music - most of which was quite tonal - anyway.

But one composer, the most radical of them all, perhaps, Charles Ives was someone I could post, anything from his most sentimental parlor song to his most extremely proto-serial work without getting any flack because sometime in the 1970s or so Charles Ives was declared kewl - something he also never was.  I would bet he'd have seriously objected to the idea.

Anyway, looking up one of his most perfect pieces in any form, "The Housatonic At Stockbridge," I noticed that the next song in Ives' self-published book 114 Songs has a text which could not have possibly been more apropos to several of my recent posts on atheism,

The song is "Religion" (page 37 of the Pdf below).   The text of the song, from James T. Bixby's essay "Modern Dogmatism"  reads

“There is no unbelief;

And day by day, and night by night, unconsciously

The heart lives by that faith the lips deny,—

God knows the why.”

is just a far earlier statement of my observation that none of the atheist-materialists who never, not for a second live their lives as if they really believed their claims that people are objects, "lumbering robots" "computers made of meat" whose consciousness is a delusion based in the mere working out of random chemical-physical combinations and fluctuations in our skulls, free-will, free-choice (all compositional choices included, not to mention their own their academic blather) and the rights and privileges enjoyed by human beings, etc.  None of them really live that way.  Apparently Mr. Bixby said the same thing in a different way in 1891 and the great Charles Ives chose to set those words 29 years later because he thought they were right.

Here is the song sung.

David Pittsinger, voice
Douglas Dickson, piano

Here's a wider context for the text set by Ives

And further, let me say, I would dislike very much to have you contented with doubt. Doubt makes a very good spade to turn up the ground, but a very poor kind of spiritual food for a daily diet. It is a useful, often an indispensable half-way shelter in the journey of life; but a very cold home in which to settle down as the end of that journey.

In all our deepest hours, when our heart is truly touched, or our mind satisfied, we believe. It is each soul’s positive faith, however unconventional or perhaps unconscious that faith may be, that sustains its hope, that incites its effort, that supports it through the trials of life. Any doubt, even, that is earnest and to be respected, is really an act of faith, faith in a higher law than that of human creeds; in a more direct revelation, within ourselves, in our own sense of justice and consistency, than in any manuscript or print.

The very atheist, who in the name of truth repudiates the word God, is really manifesting (in his own different way) the belief which he cannot escape, in the divine righteousness and its lawful claim on every human soul.

She is right who sings:—

“There is no unbelief;

And day by day, and night by night, unconsciously

The heart lives by that faith the lips deny,—

God knows the why.”

I wish everything could get looked up that fast.  It would have taken me at least an hour to look this stuff up, assuming the university library where I would have to go look for it had it.  I wish it were possible to look up everything online.

Charles Ives - The Housatonic at Stockbridge

Jan DeGaetani, voice
Gilbert Kalish, piano

Score (Page 32 of the Pdf)

“I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am"

That would be [Male -1] the attention-starved, as-seen-on TV goof, Carter Page, the callow numbskull with a PhD that so impressed Donald Trump that he named him as a campaign consultant, only to have other members of the Trump campaign deny he had any role in the campaign.  Or something like that.  Like everything to do with Page, it leaves you shaking your head as to how someone who is so obviously limited and so obviously immature could have graduated from the Naval Academy and to have obtained graduate degrees.  I looked at the Wikipedia page of The School of Oriental and African Studies which gave him that PhD.  He doesn't seem to appear in the long list of grad that the school's PR people who obviously wrote the Wiki wanted to brag on.  At least as of this morning.

I think that the Russian spy got it right,  Carter Page is an idiot.   He's such an attention starved idiot that he confirmed that he was the dolt who got unwittingly recruited to be a Russian spy asset by Russian spies who played him on his conceit, his idiocy and his total cluelessness.  It's nice to know that you can agree with Russian spies on one thing, at least.

------------------------------------

Considering the news of the morning carries the bad news that Mike Pence is meeting with Republican-fascists in the Congress to try to revive their Kill the Poor replacement for Obamacare, I don't know whether or not the damage that the overt gangsters of the Trump regime will do enough damage to hope that the Pence presidency will replace it.  Pence is quite capable of doing a hell of a lot of damage and you can be certain that the media will present him as a savior and enable him and the thugs in the Congress in doing what Trump and his thugs can't do.

I say we should make Pence and Ryan and, really, all of the Republicans in the line of succession for the presidency as controversial as possible, they have lots of really awful stuff in their public life to do that with.  I'm not sure Trump-Kushner will be around long enough to depend on them bringing down Republican-fascism.

Another thing that's obviously needed, the pardoning powers of the president need to be reigned in.  I doubt the Trump regime would be anywhere near as bold if it were impossible for Trump or Pence to pardon them as their crimes in office and elsewhere are exposed.  I am certain that if Trump doesn't issue the kinds of pardons that previous Republicans have, to end investigations and to protect their own criminality, Pence will.  And if not Pence then Ryan or whoever succeeds them.   There are some crimes that should not be shielded from prosecution, those which happen at the highest levels of power. Especially by members of the same criminal administrations and their equally corrupt political party.

Hyacinth Bucket and Zaphod Beeblebronx

It's a real but minor source of amusement to me to see Freki trying to pull the class-based Brit tactic of brazening it out by putting on a superior attitude and a pose of looking down her nose.  Like that's ever worked on the Irish.  I think that's one of the things she really hates about me, that when I knew she didn't know what she was talking about or lying that she couldn't cow me with that stuff.  

It's really a lot like what Simps does, only he does it from the alleged superiority that having been born in Queens and spending his time in the most over-rated city on the continent so many of NYC's residents believe they have.  Especially when they're convinced they're the definition of teh kewl.  Like that's ever worked with people who aren't that impressed with that, either.  

I don't know which of the two is the stupider but they're only risking making me waste time because it's funny watching them make fools of themselves.  Two different styles of snobbery, one effect. 

Trump is Panicking About Russia

Bernie Sanders Cut It Out, 2016 Is Over Put On Your Big Boy Pants

Charlie Pierce has one of the too few adult pieces I've seen on how, despite the continued idiocy of the Susan Sarandon play group on the play left, adults who want to oppose Republican-fascism have better things to do than to re-litigate the last election.  Bernie Sanders, with whom I was more than willing to let bygones be bygones with isn't helping much but we really don't have time to waste on that.  

For now, it's a matter of getting Democrats elected on the federal and state level and those campaigns aren't a re-run of the 2017 primaries or general election.  Purity tests and futile primary challenges dreamed of in liberal enclaves in other states by people without a clue are not going to be useful. 

Speaking of primaries, this is the time to get rid of the stinking, anti-democratic caucuses in favor of primaries and to take the primaries out of the hands of Republican legislatures and put them in the hands of the Democratic Party. 

I proposed that all of them, everywhere, be made Washington State style mail-in ballots as a means of bypassing the states, the crooked voting machines, the stinking anti-democratic caucuses and to get high volume turnouts everywhere so there will be less of a chance that no one knows who the majority of Democrats support and none of the crap that happened at caucuses, especially states with really cockamamie systems like the one in Nevada.  The Democratic Party owns its nomination, not the state governments, too many of which are in control of ratfucking Republican-fascists, and not the federal government.  Even if it cost a lot to run, it would be worth owning our own nomination race.  It would also get the choice out of the hands of Iowa and New Hampshire.  

It's way past time that those two lily-white states gave up that influence in a party that depends, absolutely, on a far more diverse electorate.  

You Can Tell When An Eschatot Is Lying Because Their Fingers Are Moving - Hate Mail

I don't recall even knowing who Gerry Devine and the Hi-Beams are, not to mention knowing any of their music.  I don't think I ever heard of that song, I've got a pretty good memory for even third-rate music so I think I'd remember pretty much everything dopey brings up.  

It says online  He first achieved notice with a 1989 New York Music Award for Best New Songwriter.   By 1989 it had been well over a decade since I had managed to pretty much avoid hearing pop music of any kind, not to mention being familiar enough with any one person or band to know much about them.  Give or take one of the really big ones like Prince or one whose politics brought them to my notice, like Lady Ga Ga. Disco was the last straw for me.  I stopped going to bars over disco.  That and realizing I didn't really enjoy them.  

So, yeah, like everything else he says, he's lying. 

I see that meathead is supposedly posting comments from Sweden?  Jeesh, going to Sweden and spending your days posting comments to Baby Blue?  It's the intellectual equivalent of going to Florence or Paris and looking for a McDonald's. 

Update:  The Old Ugly American took time out of his Swedish vacation to come here to rage in his senectitude about this.   I wonder how many dollars of his vacation time it's taking for him to do that.  What an idiot. 

Update 2:  The wack-job is still ranting at me from Stockholm for going on three hours. Geesh, he should have stayed home, he could have done that from the comfort of his own play pen for free.   I never friggin' heard of (wait, I've got to scroll up, I can't remember the band name) Gerry Devine and his White Sox or whatever they're called.  I never said anything about their song because I never heard of them before.   I don't know, is Gerry Devine like Divine's little brother or something?  All I can think of is a 300lb female impersonator.  Which is unfortunate because now I've got the theme song for Female Trouble going through my mind.  The curse of a good musical memory.  Sometimes. 

Update 3:  He's still railing at me from Sweden, I'd love to know the per minute cost in vacation dollars he's spending on insisting that I'm lying about not knowing about some pop-group I've never heard of before.  

Dopey, when you get home BG should get you to a geriatric psychiatrist to get you checked out for dementia.  Or maybe you need your meds adjusted.  

Update 4:  So far I'm counting six ranting e-mails from c. 60 degrees North and across the ocean and a couple of seas going on and on about an obscure pop-music act which I've never heard of before.   I think I'll have them bronzed.   Baby boots to geezer pouts.  

The last one contains his ultimate insult, that I'm "a hick".  Well, this hick knows one thing, if I were in Stockholm I wouldn't be spending time in front of a screen screeching at Baby Blue and here blowing smoke.   Though I'd rather be out in the country than in a city.   

That year, two elders of the people were appointed judges, of whom the Lord said, "Wickedness has come out of Babylon"

I hadn't realized it before just now, but there is something really fitting that the day the Senate Judiciary Committee moves the nomination of the truly wicked Neil Gorsuch on to, no doubt, confirmation by the American Babylon that the Republican-fascists are, the day's lectionary readings include the story of Susanna and the two evil judges who falsely accuse her when she won't let them have sex with her.   

Evil judges, we've got by the scores and hundreds, a Daniel come to judgement to expose them and defeat them we don't have.