The creationist-cosmologists (they being the creator(s) of infinities of universes) require infinities in which to work their probabilistic arguments against the possibility of God creating the universe and life and everything, including every single thing that scientists can fit into a model of physical causation (though nothing they can do in that line of endeavor can explain the ultimate cause or any possible purpose in it).
When you're talking about even the universe of our experience, the only thing that can be treated scientifically, however, you aren't talking about theoretical probabilities working on things in an infinitely large, infinitely long time to be sorted out by random chance. THAT IS ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT LIFE IN WHICH IT HAS TO WORK TO PRODUCE LIVING ORGANISMS WHICH, AS LIVING ORGANISMS, WE MIGHT BE FORGIVEN FOR BEING RATHER INTERESTED IN. Oddly enough, the biologists who should understand those limits don't often seem to notice them, knowing that they are required to carry the banner of infinite probability into their field of very limited, time lapsing phenomena. I've gone over the absurd notion that DNA produces chains of amino acids which, then, fold themselves in just the right way to produce the needed biological action within cells when if it did that by some trial and error scheme under random chance, it would take the life of the universe and then some for all of the probabilities possible to be sorted out every time that happens. Clearly, something within the cellular chemistry "knows" how to do that to have the "desired" effect, something which, itself, is not coded in DNA which clearly doesn't seem to "know" how to do that, whatever that is, I doubt scientists have ever even considered.
To say "probability" or "random chance" when those wouldn't work in the limited number of organisms in the limited number of billions of years, of years, of months, of days, of seconds in which those things happen (all of them taking time to happen) is to say nothing. The illusion of probability being responsible for the phenomenon of life as it evolved on Earth, as it is sustained within any given organism is persuasive but only if you ignore the actual problems involved with that and only if your motive in doing that is ideological and not scientific. I have learned a lot from watching the ranting and raving of Jerry Coyne against his colleagues such as James Shapiro who is one of the rare scientists who admit that that old scheme of random chance and probability doesn't work in addressing the reality of life as it presents itself. Whether or not there is divine intention driving evolution (not to mention the plain day-to-day working of any given, surviving organism) it's clear that the old atheist stand by of attributing everything to probability whenever explanation fails is inadequate. Divine intention is something that science is not competent to take up as a question for the same reasons given by Hans Kung in that passage I typed out this morning. Atheists who try to fight about the existence of God using science ideologically make exactly the same errors of judgement that those using science to "prove" God only they pretend to know better than to do that.
Note: Coyne rants and raves about just about everything, sooner or later. He's a high functioning nutcase.
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Rod Serling (presents) - Zero Hour - Two Stories (with period commercials!)
LOST IN TIME
FACE OF THE FOE
Murders, scary stuff, disturbing stuff, typical light summer fare when it's too hot to live. I'm going to go lie in a cold wire chair in front of a fan till September. At least that's my plan this afternoon.
Rod Serling wrote affectionately of his early work in the waning years of American radio drama, he loved the freedom the inexpensive format and indifference of executives allowed him. He revived it in the early 70s, after his TV show was cancelled.
"Secularism" Meh!
I'd much, much rather be dealing with the thinking of Brueggemann, Kung, Elizabeth A. Johnson, Susannah Heschel and Marilynne Robinson than the idiocy of the atheists but the atheists are the ones damaging the American left. I think that's been done largely by duping liberals into believing that secularism, an administrative necessity in an egalitarian democracy is some kind of moral requirement for the left, itself. We don't owe the sacrifice of the most powerful engine of liberal change in the history of the United States, the morality of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition, to the atheists. It was when that was done, beginning in the mid-1960s that the left started its nose dive into Nixonian, Reganite, Bushist and now Trumpian fascism. This is a political blog, after all, dedicated to the left winning by being true to its foundations and the foundation of those foundations. Atheists don't have a right to run the left into the ground to suit their very limited ends. And we've been stupid enough to let them do it. Well, no more. Not as Trump is in office and the Republicans have staffed the courts with fascists, white supremacists and traitors.
The Decay Of "Skepticism" The Decadence Of Atheist Materialism The Durability Of Theological Skepticism
I listened to several of Rebecca Watson's Youtubes and have to say that she's an idiot. She has an even more superficial knowledge or view of science than your typical NPR style of science reporter, I'm not even sure I'd put her at the level of your typical major network news reader feed writer on that count. I don't know if she still is on that podcast-radio program thing that Steven Novella (also a vehicle for him to hire his idiot family members) but any claim to scientific expertise he squeezes out of him having a career as a medical practitioner should be obliterated by her presence on it. If she's bad her audience, or at least the ones who comment in the comment sections are even stupider.
I don't, as a matter of fact, hold that questions of religion are treatable with the methods of science AS I MUST HAVE STATED A THOUSAND TIMES ONLINE, MANY OF THEM IN THESE PIECES I POST. As I mentioned, that's something that, if anything, the theologians I read have a deeper understanding of than any ideological atheist I've encountered does. That is due to something which I have to say I've been rather surprised to find while reading theologians such as Hans Kung, among the most exigent skeptical methodology I've encountered is practiced by such theologians, even as it is most definitely not even approached by the pro and semi-pro professional "skeptics" such as Watson, Novella and the others in the atheism industry. Here's an example of how Kung's skeptical method is applied to the question of the historical or scientific investigation of the Resurrection of Jesus.
Raising up as a historical event? Since according to New Testament faith the raising is an act of God within God's dimensions, it can not be a historical event in the strict sense: it is not an event which can be verified by historical science with the aid of historical methods. For the raising of Jesus is not a miracle violating the laws of nature, verifiable within the present world, not a supernatural intervention which can be located and dated to space and time. There was nothing to photograph or to record. What can be historically verified are the death of Jesus and after this the Easter faith and the Easter message of the disciples. But neither the raising itself nor the person raised can be apprehended, objectified, by historical methods. In this respect the question would demand too much of historical science - which, like the sciences of chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology or theology, never sees more than one aspect of the complex reality - since, on the basis of its own premises, it deliberately excludes the very reality which alone comes into question for a resurrection as also for creation and consummation: the reality of God.
Note what I presented in blue and underlined in that passage from On Being A Christian.
I give that passage, not as an argument for the truth of the Resurrection of Jesus, which Hans Kung's skeptical method contained in it would make a very difficult thing to use it for but as an example of how rigorous his methodology is.* He doesn't make the typical scientistic-materialist-atheist mistake of expecting a comprehensive view of reality from either rigorous science or rigorous history, he disqualifes them from being able to do that by admitting the severe limits that the best methodologies of both of those academic field INCLUDING HIS OWN FIELD OF THEOLOGY for being able to do that. I have seldom heard a scientists and never one who was involved in the "skepticism" racket admit that their own field is, by its very methodology, its very means of coming to reliable information about a very limited number of very specific things within observable physical phenomena which are susceptible to the honestly applied methods of science.
That said, I have to say that every time in the past two decades, when I've rigorously considered the atheist substitute for the Creator, God, the reliance on probability, or, rather, the mere rote recitation of the word without even a very deep consideration of whether or not it could get the job done as needed, the less probable its adequacy seems to me. That reliance on "random chance", especially as the early Darwinists presented it to the convincement of the very superficial and those who wanted to be relieved from having to restrain themselves due to moral considerations, is especially superficial because as the physical basis of life is discovered to be ever more complex, at every level looked at, from the alleged workings of "natural selection" down to the ever increasing complexity of molecular biology, the inadequacy of probabilistic random chance producing the complexity of life seems ever more improbable.
There is a habit of superficial thought that thinks of "probability" of "random chance" in purely abstract terms and then believing that when you apply those to specific, real world conditions with their very real limits of time in which the results came about and the numbers of organisms within which those results were achieved, in many cases the working through of the mathematically possible variations would seem to far, far, very, very far outstrip the actual time frame and populations in which those would have to work out with exquisite precision to have produced the results that we experience in the phenomenon of embodied life in the one and only case we know it worked, our life on Earth in the one and only universe we have any evidence exists outside of human imagination motivated to pretend others exist. I suspect that those vanishingly minute improbabilities which are generally considered so troubling to atheist ideologues who dominate the scientific profession of cosmology are huge compared to the improbabilities which would be encountered if the full range of biological complexity which did, actually, produce life on our one planet in our one universe was capable of being addressed in the same way. I think that if life arose in different forms, the complexities of that kind which produced those successful lives would increase by factors as large, perhaps larger ones that would have to be addressed in figuring the improbability of it happening here in the one reality which we can intelligently address.
And note, Kung would certainly see more fundamental problems than almost any scientist I've encountered with all of this as apprehending "the truth" of such things. One of the rare scientists I've read who seems to have had a good understanding of it was one of the greatest mathematical physicists of the 20th century, the Quaker, Eddington.
Every time I look at the "skepticism" industry, that subsidiary of the wider atheism industry, the more I'm convinced it is, actually, a product of superficiality and appeals to stupidity and laziness. That's why it has devolved from even the Martin Gardiner level of superficiality, down through the CSICOP-CFI style, down to the Steven Novellas and Rebecca Watsons. It is just so stupid at that, the TV mega-church preacher level of it.
* Also as a refutation to the idiotic claim that I practice "God in the gaps" thinking. God isn't found in gaps, God is imminent in creation, including those few parts of it science has addressed, everything science discovers. The only "god" you're going to find in gaps of science is not God but some inadequate cousin to the material gods of Greco-Roman paganism.
I don't, as a matter of fact, hold that questions of religion are treatable with the methods of science AS I MUST HAVE STATED A THOUSAND TIMES ONLINE, MANY OF THEM IN THESE PIECES I POST. As I mentioned, that's something that, if anything, the theologians I read have a deeper understanding of than any ideological atheist I've encountered does. That is due to something which I have to say I've been rather surprised to find while reading theologians such as Hans Kung, among the most exigent skeptical methodology I've encountered is practiced by such theologians, even as it is most definitely not even approached by the pro and semi-pro professional "skeptics" such as Watson, Novella and the others in the atheism industry. Here's an example of how Kung's skeptical method is applied to the question of the historical or scientific investigation of the Resurrection of Jesus.
Raising up as a historical event? Since according to New Testament faith the raising is an act of God within God's dimensions, it can not be a historical event in the strict sense: it is not an event which can be verified by historical science with the aid of historical methods. For the raising of Jesus is not a miracle violating the laws of nature, verifiable within the present world, not a supernatural intervention which can be located and dated to space and time. There was nothing to photograph or to record. What can be historically verified are the death of Jesus and after this the Easter faith and the Easter message of the disciples. But neither the raising itself nor the person raised can be apprehended, objectified, by historical methods. In this respect the question would demand too much of historical science - which, like the sciences of chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology or theology, never sees more than one aspect of the complex reality - since, on the basis of its own premises, it deliberately excludes the very reality which alone comes into question for a resurrection as also for creation and consummation: the reality of God.
Note what I presented in blue and underlined in that passage from On Being A Christian.
I give that passage, not as an argument for the truth of the Resurrection of Jesus, which Hans Kung's skeptical method contained in it would make a very difficult thing to use it for but as an example of how rigorous his methodology is.* He doesn't make the typical scientistic-materialist-atheist mistake of expecting a comprehensive view of reality from either rigorous science or rigorous history, he disqualifes them from being able to do that by admitting the severe limits that the best methodologies of both of those academic field INCLUDING HIS OWN FIELD OF THEOLOGY for being able to do that. I have seldom heard a scientists and never one who was involved in the "skepticism" racket admit that their own field is, by its very methodology, its very means of coming to reliable information about a very limited number of very specific things within observable physical phenomena which are susceptible to the honestly applied methods of science.
That said, I have to say that every time in the past two decades, when I've rigorously considered the atheist substitute for the Creator, God, the reliance on probability, or, rather, the mere rote recitation of the word without even a very deep consideration of whether or not it could get the job done as needed, the less probable its adequacy seems to me. That reliance on "random chance", especially as the early Darwinists presented it to the convincement of the very superficial and those who wanted to be relieved from having to restrain themselves due to moral considerations, is especially superficial because as the physical basis of life is discovered to be ever more complex, at every level looked at, from the alleged workings of "natural selection" down to the ever increasing complexity of molecular biology, the inadequacy of probabilistic random chance producing the complexity of life seems ever more improbable.
There is a habit of superficial thought that thinks of "probability" of "random chance" in purely abstract terms and then believing that when you apply those to specific, real world conditions with their very real limits of time in which the results came about and the numbers of organisms within which those results were achieved, in many cases the working through of the mathematically possible variations would seem to far, far, very, very far outstrip the actual time frame and populations in which those would have to work out with exquisite precision to have produced the results that we experience in the phenomenon of embodied life in the one and only case we know it worked, our life on Earth in the one and only universe we have any evidence exists outside of human imagination motivated to pretend others exist. I suspect that those vanishingly minute improbabilities which are generally considered so troubling to atheist ideologues who dominate the scientific profession of cosmology are huge compared to the improbabilities which would be encountered if the full range of biological complexity which did, actually, produce life on our one planet in our one universe was capable of being addressed in the same way. I think that if life arose in different forms, the complexities of that kind which produced those successful lives would increase by factors as large, perhaps larger ones that would have to be addressed in figuring the improbability of it happening here in the one reality which we can intelligently address.
And note, Kung would certainly see more fundamental problems than almost any scientist I've encountered with all of this as apprehending "the truth" of such things. One of the rare scientists I've read who seems to have had a good understanding of it was one of the greatest mathematical physicists of the 20th century, the Quaker, Eddington.
Every time I look at the "skepticism" industry, that subsidiary of the wider atheism industry, the more I'm convinced it is, actually, a product of superficiality and appeals to stupidity and laziness. That's why it has devolved from even the Martin Gardiner level of superficiality, down through the CSICOP-CFI style, down to the Steven Novellas and Rebecca Watsons. It is just so stupid at that, the TV mega-church preacher level of it.
* Also as a refutation to the idiotic claim that I practice "God in the gaps" thinking. God isn't found in gaps, God is imminent in creation, including those few parts of it science has addressed, everything science discovers. The only "god" you're going to find in gaps of science is not God but some inadequate cousin to the material gods of Greco-Roman paganism.
Friday, July 19, 2019
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Scientistic-Atheist-Materialists Who Want To Assert Equality Are Up The Creek Of Amorality Without A Paddle
Looking for appropriate video for my post last night, I came across a Youtube by the semi-pro atheist-"skeptic" Rebecca Watson talking about her disappointment with some of the science guys who have had an association with the child rapist and elite sex trafficker to the super-rich and powerful, Jeffrey Epstein. Specifically, she called out Lawrence Krauss who has so disgraced himself, especially in the period when he took the golden parachute from being an actual scientist to being a professional atheist. I didn't get very far into Watson's not entirely unreasonable flaming of her fellow atheist-"skeptics" and others for being total and complete pigs, that is one thing on which I and Watson agree pretty much before she said something that was absurd in a revelatory way. What she said was, contained in the first sentence of my comment.
"Krauss is a scientist so he knows what's right"? Geeesh, what a stupid thing to say. Science totally discounts morality in doing science, scientists are probably less likely to think in moral terms than those in other professions. Lots of them can and do think morally but it's not due to their science.
OK, it's been too hot to do much of the weeding I was hoping to get ahead of this week and too hot for any deep reading or thinking so I was bored and looking for a fight.* It also pisses me off that people who can say such stupidly romantic things about science in such abysmal ignorance get enough attention so they can make a sort-of career out of spouting it. And this morning I find one of her fans did answer it in a pretty stupid way.
"scientists are probably less likely to think in moral terms than those in other professions." Geeesh, what a stupid thing to say. And she said "he knows what's right" in terms of logic, not in terms of morality. Try to keep on top of it.
Pretty typical of ideological atheists, to which I answered.
Science has always, by formal agreement among scientists NOT INCLUDED QUESTIONS OF MORALITY IN THEIR SCIENTIFIC WORK. Anyone who doesn't know that holds some idiotic romantic view of what scientists do without knowing anything about what they actually do do. This has led, especially within those fields most dubiously included in what gets called science, which rub up against questions of morality, for the scientists involved to come up with some kind of clearly immoral declarations such as the one the Rutgers biologist Robert Trivers made about the crimes of Epstein, “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous". If you aren't familiar with the so-called social scientists and even some in the legitimate field of evolutionary biology to declare that rape is "natural" (and so according to their thinking "good) and not such a big deal, you don't know what you're talking about and neither does Rebecca Watson, apparently. It led Richard Dawkins to declare that some level of pedophile abuse was no big deal. Logic can't get you to questions of right and wrong, something that has been known through rigorous logical application for just about as long as logical analysis started to be studied in rigorous terms. I am never shocked, anymore, to find out that ideological atheists are so plug ignorant of the culture of mathematics, logic and science.
I am sure just about any reputable theologian would have a rather good understanding of that but I'm increasingly unsurprised to find that many scientists and, ever much more so, their pop culture fan gals and guys are even more ignorant of that plain and simple fact, that you can't turn logic to the purpose of deciding questions of moral judgement. The most excellent practitioner of logic, of mathematics, of science who chooses to be immoral or, as I believe is far more common and so a serious problem, amoral are only more dangerous for their mastery of those areas of human culture which, by agreement, are shielded from questions of moral consideration.
But this leads me to consider the problem for the atheists and "skeptics" of the kind I've touched on before when I mocked the scientistic-atheist-materialists who, for themselves, claim the mantle of "Free Thought" when it is their very ideological side which has made the most sustained attack on the possibility of free thought, free will, - of anything free of deterministic, material causation - being possible.
It's clear that Rebecca Watson, as a woman who likes the idea of equality but whose career is founded in exactly that scientistic-materialistic-atheism is rather up the creek of amorality without a paddle. For anyone who had a realistic or even a mildly superficial knowledge of the history of the literature of science, as it deals with matters of sexual, gender, racial, ethnic, class equality would see that scientists - who are still among the most male, most white, most economically advantaged - have not been slow to assert that all of those issues and identities are unequal by hard fact of science, ignoring the scientific weakness or irrationality of their claimed "data" supporting their contentions, using every trick in their bag of those to dupe the public into believing, fully, in their sexist, racist, class-advantaged claims.
While there are many scientists who do not do that, the formal literature of biology, of the so-called behavioral sciences are full to the top of the assertion that biologically determined inequality is a hard fact of life. As I have made an in depth study of the literature of modern biology as concerns exactly those claims of inequality, that assertion has been a majority point of view since the imposition of natural selection and genetic determinism on the study of evolution and its asserted implications for human life and societies today. And a lot of scientists, even those whose own field of expertise renders their understanding of biology and behavior about as callow and superficial as the typical listener to of TV on those topics, fully buy onto that program of sexist, racist, class-divisive assertion in science BECAUSE THEY LIKE THAT THOSE THINGS ADVANTAGE THEM AND THEIR IMMEDIATE FAMILY AND COLLEAGUES.
Probably, by the way, even more dangerous is the popular level science reporting such as you can read in the so-called legitimate press or hear on NPR in the deepest level of superficiality that such "public understanding of science" is likely to be imbibed by most voters.
I can't claim that I have any respect for the people who obtain college credentials, who work in fields in which they write things for other people to read, who bloviate on such things online on on TV or radio talk shows while being in such total ignorance of these issues. I think if the "Skepchicks" (Watson's name for herself, so don't call me out on it) and the PZ Myers who might find that they either want to assert equality for themselves or through some vestigial remains of having grown up in the better part of Jewish monotheistic culture, feeling it's right, are deluding themselves if they think science and logic are going to replace the moral absolute that comes with the assertion that people have God given rights on an equal basis, they are not only wrong, they are willfully stupid.
* Too hot to sleep, too, which is why I've been up at three this morning and writing this.
"Krauss is a scientist so he knows what's right"? Geeesh, what a stupid thing to say. Science totally discounts morality in doing science, scientists are probably less likely to think in moral terms than those in other professions. Lots of them can and do think morally but it's not due to their science.
OK, it's been too hot to do much of the weeding I was hoping to get ahead of this week and too hot for any deep reading or thinking so I was bored and looking for a fight.* It also pisses me off that people who can say such stupidly romantic things about science in such abysmal ignorance get enough attention so they can make a sort-of career out of spouting it. And this morning I find one of her fans did answer it in a pretty stupid way.
Robert Dillahubris
2 hours ago
Pretty typical of ideological atheists, to which I answered.
Science has always, by formal agreement among scientists NOT INCLUDED QUESTIONS OF MORALITY IN THEIR SCIENTIFIC WORK. Anyone who doesn't know that holds some idiotic romantic view of what scientists do without knowing anything about what they actually do do. This has led, especially within those fields most dubiously included in what gets called science, which rub up against questions of morality, for the scientists involved to come up with some kind of clearly immoral declarations such as the one the Rutgers biologist Robert Trivers made about the crimes of Epstein, “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous". If you aren't familiar with the so-called social scientists and even some in the legitimate field of evolutionary biology to declare that rape is "natural" (and so according to their thinking "good) and not such a big deal, you don't know what you're talking about and neither does Rebecca Watson, apparently. It led Richard Dawkins to declare that some level of pedophile abuse was no big deal. Logic can't get you to questions of right and wrong, something that has been known through rigorous logical application for just about as long as logical analysis started to be studied in rigorous terms. I am never shocked, anymore, to find out that ideological atheists are so plug ignorant of the culture of mathematics, logic and science.
I am sure just about any reputable theologian would have a rather good understanding of that but I'm increasingly unsurprised to find that many scientists and, ever much more so, their pop culture fan gals and guys are even more ignorant of that plain and simple fact, that you can't turn logic to the purpose of deciding questions of moral judgement. The most excellent practitioner of logic, of mathematics, of science who chooses to be immoral or, as I believe is far more common and so a serious problem, amoral are only more dangerous for their mastery of those areas of human culture which, by agreement, are shielded from questions of moral consideration.
But this leads me to consider the problem for the atheists and "skeptics" of the kind I've touched on before when I mocked the scientistic-atheist-materialists who, for themselves, claim the mantle of "Free Thought" when it is their very ideological side which has made the most sustained attack on the possibility of free thought, free will, - of anything free of deterministic, material causation - being possible.
It's clear that Rebecca Watson, as a woman who likes the idea of equality but whose career is founded in exactly that scientistic-materialistic-atheism is rather up the creek of amorality without a paddle. For anyone who had a realistic or even a mildly superficial knowledge of the history of the literature of science, as it deals with matters of sexual, gender, racial, ethnic, class equality would see that scientists - who are still among the most male, most white, most economically advantaged - have not been slow to assert that all of those issues and identities are unequal by hard fact of science, ignoring the scientific weakness or irrationality of their claimed "data" supporting their contentions, using every trick in their bag of those to dupe the public into believing, fully, in their sexist, racist, class-advantaged claims.
While there are many scientists who do not do that, the formal literature of biology, of the so-called behavioral sciences are full to the top of the assertion that biologically determined inequality is a hard fact of life. As I have made an in depth study of the literature of modern biology as concerns exactly those claims of inequality, that assertion has been a majority point of view since the imposition of natural selection and genetic determinism on the study of evolution and its asserted implications for human life and societies today. And a lot of scientists, even those whose own field of expertise renders their understanding of biology and behavior about as callow and superficial as the typical listener to of TV on those topics, fully buy onto that program of sexist, racist, class-divisive assertion in science BECAUSE THEY LIKE THAT THOSE THINGS ADVANTAGE THEM AND THEIR IMMEDIATE FAMILY AND COLLEAGUES.
Probably, by the way, even more dangerous is the popular level science reporting such as you can read in the so-called legitimate press or hear on NPR in the deepest level of superficiality that such "public understanding of science" is likely to be imbibed by most voters.
I can't claim that I have any respect for the people who obtain college credentials, who work in fields in which they write things for other people to read, who bloviate on such things online on on TV or radio talk shows while being in such total ignorance of these issues. I think if the "Skepchicks" (Watson's name for herself, so don't call me out on it) and the PZ Myers who might find that they either want to assert equality for themselves or through some vestigial remains of having grown up in the better part of Jewish monotheistic culture, feeling it's right, are deluding themselves if they think science and logic are going to replace the moral absolute that comes with the assertion that people have God given rights on an equal basis, they are not only wrong, they are willfully stupid.
* Too hot to sleep, too, which is why I've been up at three this morning and writing this.
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Who Was That Bearded Man? A Possible Correction
Feeling uneasy with speculating that the photo of a guy who looks a hell of a lot like pictures of PZ Myers chatting over bottles of beverage with Jeffrey Epstein was The Sage of The UofMinn Morris,
vs 
Note that it would seem from the picture of Epstein that this was taken a few years back when, no doubt, like so many of us, Myers was less gray. Epstein looks noticeably older in recently taken photographs, the photo on the left, definitely PZ Myers, is taken from his "Free Thought" blog.
I went to find out if Myers had anything to say about it. I found that last November he denied ever having met Epstein.
I never met Jeffrey Epstein, fortunately. My sole link was through Lawrence Krauss, who memorably took me aside way back in 2010 to urge me to ignore the “rumors” going around about Epstein, who was a donor to his Origins program at ASU. He particularly warned me against that scurrilous gossiper, Rebecca Watson, who has since been revealed as a wise prophetess. I just figured this was what high-level people with the job of getting donations do to curry favor with donors, I didn’t actually know much about what Epstein had done. Of course, now I know (and I quickly learned then) that Epstein had pled guilty to soliciting sex from minors back in 2008, and it wasn’t so much “rumor” as “incontestable fact”, and that Watson wasn’t so much a prophetess as she was someone who had her eyes open. As she wrote in 2011:
For now I'll accept that at his word. I doubt Myers is stupid enough to deny something that can be documented, Which leads me to wonder who the guy I mistook for him was. Anyone know? I will also note that even if, in the past, Myers may have run close to the same circles as Epstein that since "elevatorgate" he has broken with a lot of the same old, white, academically elite and increasingly right-wing men of the "skepticism"-atheism industry. The little I pay attention to his blog, or Coyne's or any of them, these days, he's far from the worst offender on that count.
If you want more on Steven Pinker's ass-covering and his critics, there's an interesting piece up at Inside Higher Ed on the topic.
The part of it that I find most disturbing is how his bull-shit, pseudo-scientific credentials are being inserted into serious legal cases through Trump's TV lawyer implicated in the case, Alan Dershowitz, who I hope lives long enough to find himself disbarred for his misconduct if not indicted, though I'm neither holding my breath nor waiting up nights. It is disgusting that someone like Pinker, by virtue of practicing pseudo-science as promoted by such elite institutions as MIT and Harvard is presented as a serious expert on such things as the meaning of laws, something he is entirely unqualified to do. It is far more dangerous than his absurdly panglossian bull shit. Jerry Coyne. Lord help you if you're reduced to enlisting Jerry Coyne in your defense.
vs Note that it would seem from the picture of Epstein that this was taken a few years back when, no doubt, like so many of us, Myers was less gray. Epstein looks noticeably older in recently taken photographs, the photo on the left, definitely PZ Myers, is taken from his "Free Thought" blog.
I went to find out if Myers had anything to say about it. I found that last November he denied ever having met Epstein.
I never met Jeffrey Epstein, fortunately. My sole link was through Lawrence Krauss, who memorably took me aside way back in 2010 to urge me to ignore the “rumors” going around about Epstein, who was a donor to his Origins program at ASU. He particularly warned me against that scurrilous gossiper, Rebecca Watson, who has since been revealed as a wise prophetess. I just figured this was what high-level people with the job of getting donations do to curry favor with donors, I didn’t actually know much about what Epstein had done. Of course, now I know (and I quickly learned then) that Epstein had pled guilty to soliciting sex from minors back in 2008, and it wasn’t so much “rumor” as “incontestable fact”, and that Watson wasn’t so much a prophetess as she was someone who had her eyes open. As she wrote in 2011:
Jeffrey Epstein is the infamous media mogul who was jailed in 2008 for paying underage prostitutes who said they were recruited by his aides. Some girls were allegedly flown in from Eastern Europe, their visas arranged by his bookkeeper. Epstein only served 13 months in prison thanks to a sweetheart plea agreement which is now being contested by attorneys representing two of the girls, who were 13 and 14 when they were allegedly paid for sex. Both girls are part of a larger group of victims who have won monetary settlements from Epstein in civil cases.Krauss responded to that with several comments, still ardently defending Epstein, and this quote is particularly damning. . .
For now I'll accept that at his word. I doubt Myers is stupid enough to deny something that can be documented, Which leads me to wonder who the guy I mistook for him was. Anyone know? I will also note that even if, in the past, Myers may have run close to the same circles as Epstein that since "elevatorgate" he has broken with a lot of the same old, white, academically elite and increasingly right-wing men of the "skepticism"-atheism industry. The little I pay attention to his blog, or Coyne's or any of them, these days, he's far from the worst offender on that count.
If you want more on Steven Pinker's ass-covering and his critics, there's an interesting piece up at Inside Higher Ed on the topic.
The part of it that I find most disturbing is how his bull-shit, pseudo-scientific credentials are being inserted into serious legal cases through Trump's TV lawyer implicated in the case, Alan Dershowitz, who I hope lives long enough to find himself disbarred for his misconduct if not indicted, though I'm neither holding my breath nor waiting up nights. It is disgusting that someone like Pinker, by virtue of practicing pseudo-science as promoted by such elite institutions as MIT and Harvard is presented as a serious expert on such things as the meaning of laws, something he is entirely unqualified to do. It is far more dangerous than his absurdly panglossian bull shit. Jerry Coyne. Lord help you if you're reduced to enlisting Jerry Coyne in your defense.
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
"No True Atheist" The Thunderbird Of Pop Atheist Whines
Hey, I didn't make up that list of atheists associated with Jeffrey Epstein, he and they chose to associate themselves together, I'm just noting that Epstein seemed to enjoy their company and they his, not to mention that money and the flights on the infamous Epstein jet. I'm no more responsible for that than Trump and Clinton and Stephanopolis, Starr, Acosta, etc. etc. etc. for forming other such lists. Now one of the most interesting things is which of those associates are now lying about the nature and extent of their association, as mentioned at Slate, that's something a lot of them also have in common, lying.
I could also make a list of people who figure "no true atheist would do what these atheists are documented as doing." It's the same list who are the first to pull that bullshit "no true Scotsman" line that one of Epstein's good buddy atheists popularized among atheists.
And here's another:
At least two grant recipients in academia are standing by Epstein, saying he remains a friend: Krauss and Robert Trivers, a Rutgers University biologist. Trivers said Epstein is a person of integrity who should be given credit for serving time in prison and for settling civil lawsuits brought by women who said they were abused.
“Did he get an easy deal? Did he buy himself a light sentence? Well, yes, probably, compared to what you or I would get, but he did get locked up,” Trivers said. He said he got about $40,000 from Epstein to study the relationship between knee symmetry and sprinting ability.
Trivers also said he believes girls mature earlier than in the past. “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous,” he said.
Danilo Perez - Alfonsina y El Mar
Danilo Perez, piano
Soprano Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone
Joe Lovano Soprano Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone
Bass: Santi Debriano
Drums: Jack DeJohnette
Just Sayin' Lots Of Prominent Atheists Sure Liked To Hang With Epstein
Jeffrey Epstein, Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker
Reading this handy list (no doubt a short list) of famous associates of the child rapist who was almost certainly providing underage girls ordered to have sex with rich and famous men, Jeffrey Epstein, I couldn't help but notice that that list and some of the other names in other places (Stephen Hawking!, for the love of Mike) were prominent in the old fad of new atheism or had spoken out for atheism and against religious belief.
In addition to Stephen Hawking, Krauss and Pinker there is Alan Dershowitz*. There is another picture at a link to Gawker from the Slate piece, which I was sure was Epstein with another of the more prominent new atheists, though I might be wrong about that being PZ Myers.
If someone can identify that bearded man as someone other than PZ, I will note that in a clarifying post.
Which led me to check out PZ Myers who, apparently along with Jerry Coyne, posted Pinker's ass covering letter denying that he t was a buddy of Epstein. I include it only because it shows who other than Bill Clinton was flying around and paling around with Epstein.
But Epstein had insinuated himself with so many people I intersected with (Alan Dershowitz, Martin Nowak, John Brockman, Steve Kosslyn, Lawrence Krauss) and so many institutions he helped fund (Harvard’s Program in Evolutionary Dynamics, ASU’s Origins Project, even Harvard Hillel) that I often ended up at the same place with him. (Most of these gatherings were prior to the revelation of his sex crimes, such as the 2002 plane trip to TED with Dawkins, Dennett, the Brockmans, and others, but Krauss’s Origins Project Meeting came after he served his sentence.) Since I was often the most recognizable person in the room, someone would snap a picture; some of them resurfaced this past week, circulated by people who disagree with me on various topics and apparently believe that the photos are effective arguments.
Apparently Epstein liked to be with prominent atheists. Unfortunately, it would seem that Epstein's "science blog" has been taken down but I'm betting it would make interesting reading, though the Gawker piece casts doubt on him being the author of it.
* Here's the Dersh on the evil of religion, according to "The Friendly Atheist"
Organized religion is always having to say you’re sorry for misunderstanding God’s will in the past. That has been the history of organized religions.
We’re sorry for the Crusades.
We’re sorry for the Inquisition.
We’re sorry that we slaughtered babies and children in the name of Jesus. We’re sorry for the pogroms.
We were wrong then. God didn’t speak to us clearly then.
But he speaks to us clearly today!
Of course, a list of the sins of the atheists, in which each and every item on that list could be matched with a corresponding sin of atheists AND WHICH ATHEISM DOESN'T START OUT BY FORBIDDING but the Monotheistic and other religions do forbid could be complied. The Crusaders certainly violated the teachings of Jesus in the gospel in the epistles "those who live by the sword will die by the sword," the Inquisition (though you stood a lot better chance at getting off on accusations under the inquisition than you did any court in an official atheist country).
I wondering if Dershowitz could show us a list of babies and children "slaughtered in the name of Jesus" - if he could tell us exactly when that happened and who did it. Can anyone come up with actual incidents that match this because if he does I can certainly show him where Jesus said not to do things like that, as I can where he said that corrupting children - certainly including by raping them - was about as serious a sin as he ever identified. I will, for the moment, withhold any mention of another of the listed pals of Epstein, Woody Allen though I will point out that Richard Dawkins got in some hot water for pooh-poohing the seriousness of pedophile abuse a while back. Not to mention his problems when it comes to treating women with respect.
If you're waiting for Dershowitz to ever, ever say he's sorry for his association and enabling of Jeffrey Epstein, helping him get out of a very likely life sentence so he could rape who knows how many more young girls, trafficking them to rich men, don't hold your breath, you need to breathe. Being Dershowitz almost certainly means never having to say you're sorry before your next celebrity lawyering spot on TV.
Mercedes Sosa - Años
The nueva canción movement was, perhaps still is, one of the most significant artistic manifestations of the 20th century. It might be the most significant one in terms of area of the world covered and the number of people it influenced. And it is far, far more positive than modernism. For one, it was an artistic movement dedicated to democracy and against gangster governments. And its content, even when not overtly political is far deeper and more artistically profound than anything I'm aware of in popular music in English. Even if I might have some reservations about the Marxism of some of its significant figure, it was generally an interpretation of Marxism that was anti-imperialist and for equality, if disappointing in dealing with the political exigencies of the time, most of those forced on the people in Latin America by the United States.
Sueño con serpientes
Monday, July 15, 2019
Mercedes Sosa "Concierto Teatro Colón" (1986)
Almost ten years since she died, next October. That was a sad day. What a great artist.
Exodus 1: 8-14 22 The Way Out Of The Rule Of Gangsters - Got too hot too early today so this is an early post
I was uncharitable to those who have bought into the "Microsoft is evil, Apple is good" PR that is the basis of the cult of the Mac industry. I think they are largely the victims of the kind of anxious desire to be seen as virtuous, or good or, really, it gets down to being of more economic value and so if you present marketing in terms of good vs. evil as Apple certainly did, of being the heroine who will smash Big Brother when they were manufacturing their shiny, flashy, way overpriced products with quasi-slave labor under the giant figure of Mao or whichever successor gangster king was lording over China at the time.
Um, hum, I see.
One of my dear relatives, a sister-in-law, bought into that PR BS, a brilliant and good person who worked very hard in her professional life to make life better, the first in her family to go to university and get a PhD, who, I know, suffered the kind of anxiety I mention above, who wanted to do the right thing and, faced with the alternatives of the computer industry, unfortunately bought that false gospel.
Not that the PC industry is any more virtuous, it isn't. This isn't a matter where virtue comes into it, it's a matter of profit making business. There are no more virtuous choices I know of. I'm not even sure my recent experiments with Linux and the charitable Raspberry Pi foundation could be justified, entirely, in making that claim for it. Just as Google's motto "Don't be evil" hides the fact of things, so does any claim of virtue by any giant corporation does. The vileness of the big players in the modern economy are, virtually all of them, totally amoral. The "ethics" of business aren't to "don't be evil" they are to maximize profits for the owners. That's the reason that Youtube will not really suppress neo-Nazi content as its algorithms steer people towards them* - if they really do that I will revise but I'm not expecting to need to - and they're only one such "artificially intelligence" driven machine of commerce.
Marxism, the great false hope of so many, turns out to be, in reality, just a similar thing with other PR claims. After all, look where Macs and other computers and their components are made by quasi-slave labor. Look at the results of Marxism in every country which has adopted that as its explanation for how they've been governed. Look at how Russia couldn't manage to achieve democracy but quickly went from the corroded remnants of Marxism to overt gangster governance. Other than some Youtubes made by Marxists pining for the good old bad old days under the Communist Party, no one else even in Putin led Russia wants to go back, why bother, they've got the latest in a series of gangster thug dictators in a string that didn't stop with the last official Czar but has continued in an unbroken line of them.
-----------------------------------------------
Today's Catholic liturgy begins the readings from the central core of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Book of Exodus which starts like this (in my quick and rough dynamic translation):
A new king, who knew nothing of Jesus, came to power in the U.S.
He said to his subjects, "Look how numerous and powerful
the people of the children of Central America are growing, more so than we ourselves!
Come, let us deal shrewdly with them to stop their immigration;
otherwise, in time of election they too may join the Democrats
to fight against us, and so take the country from us."
(Here the translation is more difficult because it involves U.S. colonial policy, the history of setting up gangsters to rule over them to force their labor growing bananas and other things and manufacturing instead of building granary cities, though those here unofficially certainly did that. Migrant laborers picking our food is a more direct equivalent)
The Republicans, then, dreaded the children of Central America
and reduced them to cruel treatment,
making life bitter for them with cruel treatment —the whole cruel fate of slaves.
Trump then commanded all his subjects,
"Take the children of the Central Americans, rip them from their mother's arms, from their fathers, from their tias and put them in concentration camps and if they die in disease and misery and squalor, meh!."
Exodus 1: 8-14 22 TCV
Listening to that passage from the very start of Exodus, early this morning, awakened by the commentary and methods of Walter Brueggemann which makes the ancient texts ever new, ever illuminating, ever provocative, I understood that the story wasn't just about things that happened thousands of years back, it's happening today, here, now and we are the Egyptians and Trump is Pharaoh - the gangster king of what, for now, is still the most powerful country in the world (or at least what the original authors knew of the world) and that is what the secularists junk in their so-called "enlightenment". Trump's tweets about immigration, his campaign speeches to his racist base are exactly a translation of the claim of Pharaoh against the Children of Israel, the indifference of him and his base to the photo of a father and daughter drowned, to children tortured, sexually molested and left to die in Federal concentration camps is exactly equivalent to Pharaohs' order to drown the male babies of the Jews, in fact, it's crueler because it doesn't spare half of them as Pharaoh's order did.
Other translation are certainly possible, using other scenarios in which gangster governments oppress The People and dupe The People and divide and conquer The People and the conventional way of thinking doesn't free The People but only when they turn to God does that free them. I have lost my faith this past twenty years watching the American left repeat the same stupid mistakes over and over and over again and I've come to realize it does that because it is based in a secularist materialist program that is not only ineffective, it is corrosive of the very thing that is necessary to get out of that rut. Here is a way to get out of it.
* Even with the best of good will (which they have yet to demonstrate) any algorithm based system that they might come up with will quickly be overcome by the intent of the neo-Nazis, fascists, Putinists, Xi-ist, etc. gang who hire the best and brightest to ratfuck everything. It's an irony of the scientistic modern enlightenment which jettisons any idea of absolute morality that the "best and brightest" are often the ones who cast the most shadow over the world, doing their worst for money in support of gangster governance. What's even more ironic is that it's the "freedom" of speech, of press, etc. who have played us right into their hands and still do, the best and brightest of them as can be seen on Rachel or Lawrence or on so many a lefty Youtube channel. I'm trying to figure out the connections between RT and those lefty Youtube channels, especially those revolving around The Young Turks. I'm beginning to think that just as we demand the tax records of Trump, we should demand they be entirely transparent as to their finances, personal as well as business, as if there's a difference when it's a Youtube channel. That goes for the "Justice Democrats" who are tied in with them.
Um, hum, I see.
One of my dear relatives, a sister-in-law, bought into that PR BS, a brilliant and good person who worked very hard in her professional life to make life better, the first in her family to go to university and get a PhD, who, I know, suffered the kind of anxiety I mention above, who wanted to do the right thing and, faced with the alternatives of the computer industry, unfortunately bought that false gospel.
Not that the PC industry is any more virtuous, it isn't. This isn't a matter where virtue comes into it, it's a matter of profit making business. There are no more virtuous choices I know of. I'm not even sure my recent experiments with Linux and the charitable Raspberry Pi foundation could be justified, entirely, in making that claim for it. Just as Google's motto "Don't be evil" hides the fact of things, so does any claim of virtue by any giant corporation does. The vileness of the big players in the modern economy are, virtually all of them, totally amoral. The "ethics" of business aren't to "don't be evil" they are to maximize profits for the owners. That's the reason that Youtube will not really suppress neo-Nazi content as its algorithms steer people towards them* - if they really do that I will revise but I'm not expecting to need to - and they're only one such "artificially intelligence" driven machine of commerce.
Marxism, the great false hope of so many, turns out to be, in reality, just a similar thing with other PR claims. After all, look where Macs and other computers and their components are made by quasi-slave labor. Look at the results of Marxism in every country which has adopted that as its explanation for how they've been governed. Look at how Russia couldn't manage to achieve democracy but quickly went from the corroded remnants of Marxism to overt gangster governance. Other than some Youtubes made by Marxists pining for the good old bad old days under the Communist Party, no one else even in Putin led Russia wants to go back, why bother, they've got the latest in a series of gangster thug dictators in a string that didn't stop with the last official Czar but has continued in an unbroken line of them.
-----------------------------------------------
Today's Catholic liturgy begins the readings from the central core of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Book of Exodus which starts like this (in my quick and rough dynamic translation):
A new king, who knew nothing of Jesus, came to power in the U.S.
He said to his subjects, "Look how numerous and powerful
the people of the children of Central America are growing, more so than we ourselves!
Come, let us deal shrewdly with them to stop their immigration;
otherwise, in time of election they too may join the Democrats
to fight against us, and so take the country from us."
(Here the translation is more difficult because it involves U.S. colonial policy, the history of setting up gangsters to rule over them to force their labor growing bananas and other things and manufacturing instead of building granary cities, though those here unofficially certainly did that. Migrant laborers picking our food is a more direct equivalent)
The Republicans, then, dreaded the children of Central America
and reduced them to cruel treatment,
making life bitter for them with cruel treatment —the whole cruel fate of slaves.
Trump then commanded all his subjects,
"Take the children of the Central Americans, rip them from their mother's arms, from their fathers, from their tias and put them in concentration camps and if they die in disease and misery and squalor, meh!."
Exodus 1: 8-14 22 TCV
Listening to that passage from the very start of Exodus, early this morning, awakened by the commentary and methods of Walter Brueggemann which makes the ancient texts ever new, ever illuminating, ever provocative, I understood that the story wasn't just about things that happened thousands of years back, it's happening today, here, now and we are the Egyptians and Trump is Pharaoh - the gangster king of what, for now, is still the most powerful country in the world (or at least what the original authors knew of the world) and that is what the secularists junk in their so-called "enlightenment". Trump's tweets about immigration, his campaign speeches to his racist base are exactly a translation of the claim of Pharaoh against the Children of Israel, the indifference of him and his base to the photo of a father and daughter drowned, to children tortured, sexually molested and left to die in Federal concentration camps is exactly equivalent to Pharaohs' order to drown the male babies of the Jews, in fact, it's crueler because it doesn't spare half of them as Pharaoh's order did.
Other translation are certainly possible, using other scenarios in which gangster governments oppress The People and dupe The People and divide and conquer The People and the conventional way of thinking doesn't free The People but only when they turn to God does that free them. I have lost my faith this past twenty years watching the American left repeat the same stupid mistakes over and over and over again and I've come to realize it does that because it is based in a secularist materialist program that is not only ineffective, it is corrosive of the very thing that is necessary to get out of that rut. Here is a way to get out of it.
* Even with the best of good will (which they have yet to demonstrate) any algorithm based system that they might come up with will quickly be overcome by the intent of the neo-Nazis, fascists, Putinists, Xi-ist, etc. gang who hire the best and brightest to ratfuck everything. It's an irony of the scientistic modern enlightenment which jettisons any idea of absolute morality that the "best and brightest" are often the ones who cast the most shadow over the world, doing their worst for money in support of gangster governance. What's even more ironic is that it's the "freedom" of speech, of press, etc. who have played us right into their hands and still do, the best and brightest of them as can be seen on Rachel or Lawrence or on so many a lefty Youtube channel. I'm trying to figure out the connections between RT and those lefty Youtube channels, especially those revolving around The Young Turks. I'm beginning to think that just as we demand the tax records of Trump, we should demand they be entirely transparent as to their finances, personal as well as business, as if there's a difference when it's a Youtube channel. That goes for the "Justice Democrats" who are tied in with them.
Sunday, July 14, 2019
I'm not getting enough work done in my garden. Until the heat breaks I will not be posting before noon time Eastern Daylight Time in the United States. Boston time. I've got to get into the garden before it gets too hot to work. Responding to trolls is suspended until at least September, more likely October.
Update: I'd have said "Meddybemps time" but thought Boston was probably a better known municipality.
Update: I'd have said "Meddybemps time" but thought Boston was probably a better known municipality.
OK, In Short
A. It gets down to Duncan claiming that it's the fault of Jesus and the people who try to follow his teachings because Mike Pence who claims to follow his teachings but who, most obviously and flagrantly, does not is a lying, hypocritical asshole.
B. This is an example of the typical chop-logic of the college-credentialed and others in which a. Jesus is to blame for people who don't do the good things he told them to do but who b. IS to blame for those who do bad things he told them not to do. And, also c. he is also not to be credited for those who do do the good things he told them to do.
I am unaware of any other figure in human culture for who this is the case to this extent among allegedly educated people.
And people think Duncan's a great thinker - He's got a PhD from one of the Ivys, afterall. Which shows you the status of people who do this, which might be the majority of allegedly college educated Americans, at this point. Why, they're almost as numerous as people who claim to be Christians but who have no intention of following The Lord as they Praise The Lord and make money off of PTL. Almost as numerous but not as numerous. Which is why those people win elections, using the Duncan Blacks of the world to discredit Democrats and liberals.
Update: Hey, Duncan Black has been sponsoring lies and libel against me since at least 2012, he still does today. I blame him for what he keeps on his website, including what the commentators say. Not to mention when he posts something as stupid as the piece this answers. If he doesn't like when I push back against that, holding him responsible for what he publishes, to again quote the great Elizabeth Warren, "Good."
B. This is an example of the typical chop-logic of the college-credentialed and others in which a. Jesus is to blame for people who don't do the good things he told them to do but who b. IS to blame for those who do bad things he told them not to do. And, also c. he is also not to be credited for those who do do the good things he told them to do.
I am unaware of any other figure in human culture for who this is the case to this extent among allegedly educated people.
And people think Duncan's a great thinker - He's got a PhD from one of the Ivys, afterall. Which shows you the status of people who do this, which might be the majority of allegedly college educated Americans, at this point. Why, they're almost as numerous as people who claim to be Christians but who have no intention of following The Lord as they Praise The Lord and make money off of PTL. Almost as numerous but not as numerous. Which is why those people win elections, using the Duncan Blacks of the world to discredit Democrats and liberals.
Update: Hey, Duncan Black has been sponsoring lies and libel against me since at least 2012, he still does today. I blame him for what he keeps on his website, including what the commentators say. Not to mention when he posts something as stupid as the piece this answers. If he doesn't like when I push back against that, holding him responsible for what he publishes, to again quote the great Elizabeth Warren, "Good."
Unsolicited Mail
Apparently the Eschaton Brain Trust* doesn't think that Hillel was a religious figure. I'd go into details of Duncan and his rump community on the topic of Christianity but it's too stupid and it would require a link which I will not give him for previously stated reasons .
Please stop sending me this crap. I, as anyone else who doesn't frequent that site, don't care. I, for the life of me, can't understand why Hecate bothers with it, she actually does things in real life, the rest of them are a collection of slackers and aging cranks with a few certifiably ill People mixed in. CD, for one, should be in custodial care.
* They really do call themselves one.
Please stop sending me this crap. I, as anyone else who doesn't frequent that site, don't care. I, for the life of me, can't understand why Hecate bothers with it, she actually does things in real life, the rest of them are a collection of slackers and aging cranks with a few certifiably ill People mixed in. CD, for one, should be in custodial care.
* They really do call themselves one.
Tesla As Video Gamer God
One of the comments at that Tesla fantasy fan site I remember, slammed Einstein, not by any mathematical arguments or arguments based in physics but because "if it wasn't for Tesla we'd be reading Einstein's theory by candle light". Apparently the dim wit didn't realize that many cities had been wired for electricity by direct current before Tesla got them to switch to AC power. And, apparently, by extension, that argument would mean that all of physics done by candle and, more likely as the 19th century drew to a close and moved into the 20th century, by lamp light, had to give way under the mighty Tesla - or, rather, the pop-informed cartoon of him that is what most people mean when they talk about Tesla online.
I wonder if that would include the work of Maxwell and Faraday, without whom Tesla would still be playing with Leyden jars.
For the record, I doubt the dimwit who made that comment could manage the equations in the first chapter of most physics texts of any value.
I could write a piece tying this in with the quote from Hans Kung about the reality of things desired, or their unreality. But I'm procrastinating, there are weeds to be weeded.
Tesla was a great, if erratic, engineer who is a good example of how a genius in one field is a total boob if they bloviate and opinionate outside of their specialty. Some scientists, some very great, indeed, are wise enough to avoid doing that. Many aren't.
Update On More Recent Hate: The cult of Mac over PCs is emblematic of a. the cargo-cult that secular modernism is, b. the triumph of PR over knowledge and experience (those suckers going back to the "genius bar" over and over again to buy crap that is not only many times more expensive but less durable or repairable have to count as some of our most credulous dopes, today) and c. the desire of so many of them to have an all powerful, Mr. Wizard daddy figure in their lives. Steve Jobs was a con-man who was a piece of shit in real life and one of the all time crappy dads. Grow up.
I wonder if that would include the work of Maxwell and Faraday, without whom Tesla would still be playing with Leyden jars.
For the record, I doubt the dimwit who made that comment could manage the equations in the first chapter of most physics texts of any value.
I could write a piece tying this in with the quote from Hans Kung about the reality of things desired, or their unreality. But I'm procrastinating, there are weeds to be weeded.
Tesla was a great, if erratic, engineer who is a good example of how a genius in one field is a total boob if they bloviate and opinionate outside of their specialty. Some scientists, some very great, indeed, are wise enough to avoid doing that. Many aren't.
Update On More Recent Hate: The cult of Mac over PCs is emblematic of a. the cargo-cult that secular modernism is, b. the triumph of PR over knowledge and experience (those suckers going back to the "genius bar" over and over again to buy crap that is not only many times more expensive but less durable or repairable have to count as some of our most credulous dopes, today) and c. the desire of so many of them to have an all powerful, Mr. Wizard daddy figure in their lives. Steve Jobs was a con-man who was a piece of shit in real life and one of the all time crappy dads. Grow up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)