Saturday Night Radio Drama -Katie Holly - Sharon

Sharon 

After a decade of living it up and haven’ the craic, Sharon returns to her mother, her roots and her hometown. She works in a bar, hangs out with the local drama group and begins to feel cornered into following everyone else by getting married, buying a house and having a baby. Irene Kelleher, Marie O’Donovan and Mark Lawrence star in Sharon by Katie Holly. 


Sharon was written by Katie Holly 

Starring Irene Kelleher, Marie O’Donovan and Mark Lawrence

On sound was Damian Chennell Produced by Kevin Reynolds

They have the few actors voicing a lot of different characters, lots of them in the main character's head.  It's a bit confused but, then, that's the point of it. 

RTÉ, Irish national radio is beginning a season of plays by women authors to celebrate a century of women's suffrage.   Seems like a good thing to celebrate.  

During My Time Online I've Stopped Being Surprised When The Biggest Fattest Free Speech Blowhards Tell Me To Shut Up On This Issue

None of those who has spouted that most proven empty of empty slogans "more speech" at me ever answered my point that their advocacy for the misnamed "rights" of Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, male supremacists, Stalinists, Maoists, etc. to be free to promote their ideologies were actually telling the intended victims of all of those groups that those self-important, full of themselves "civil libertarians" were perfectly OK with giving those intending to oppress and kill them a sporting chance to succeed in winning power and putting their genocidal, oppressive intent into full practice.  

"More speech" turns "Never Again" into,  Oh, let's risk it happening again, it makes us feel all good and free speechy.   

Is it any wonder that that ideology comes almost entirely out of the white-collar babbling and scribbling professions who don't really work, who are well paid to do the bidding of the owners of the media and on college faculties and who seldom belong to a group who is really in present danger of being shot by white supremacists or bad cops.  Most of those I can think of, affluent or aspiring to be white males, though there are some women who have bought into that too.*  

That those ideologies have had power in the past proves it is possible for them to gain and exercise power.  For anyone who is stupid enough to say "it can't happen here in the good ol' US of A," they certainly must not belong to any of the racial or ethnic groups who were very successfully killed and oppressed and enslaved (both before and after the Civil War).  It most certainly has and does and no doubt will continue to happen here for them and their families.   

They are almost certainly white and rich and of a group who never had that very real history which never really ended.   Those who figure we (by which they really mean "I") are not really in danger of having the brief moment in American history in which the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Title 9 etc. were law, law that is being overturned by the fascism that has been resurgent here since shortly after the Supreme Court said that that mass media have a right to lie with impunity.   Nixon lost in 1960, he won the next election he ran in after the Sullivan Decision allowing the media to lie with impunity, it's been on a downward slope ever since.  The fascists have won with that "more speech" squeaking from the mouths of liberals even as the fascists also had their "more speech" something the "more speechers" seem to have overlooked.  And as the fascists' "more speech" was made all the more by the Buckley v. Valeo Decision which made money speech**  in addition to the other "free speech" rulings that allowed the fascists their chance to use the mass media to sway an effective margin of victory, made all the easier through the Electoral College and the Supreme Court run amok in clear partisan interference in elections - remember Bush v Gore?  Which led directly to the Republican-fascist dominance on the court continuing.  If you don't think the Roberts Court will try to reinstall Republicans you are an an idiot incapable of learning from the hardest of experience.  Much of our scribbling class are such idiots. 

You can take your "more speech" and go to hell as far as I'm concerned. You're as certain enablers of American fascism as the Green Party and the play-lefties and hate talk radio have been.  

*  Women even as they are the focus of the most sustained and ongoing lynching campaign in human culture - still averaging three to four a day in the last statistics I recall reading. 

**  First posted at olvlzl, Sunday, June 11, 2006

EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW: Lies over the door to the Supreme Court

Plessy v. Ferguson. What would your reaction to that phrase be if you didn't know the decision was a racist lie? If the pretext of the decision had been true, if it had maintained or established real equality would it be a stain across our history? It wouldn't come right after Dred Scott on the list of infamous Supreme Court injustices. Equality for black people in 1896 was a lie and the majority in Plessy knew it was a lie as they told it.

I second the nomination of Buckley v. Valeo to join that list of shame. That decision makes a pretext of upholding free speech rights while clearly endowing the rich with superior speech rights. It says that money equals speech.

If money equals speech then you can count it, you can figure out how much speech someone has. It only takes the simplest math. With p being a person and M being the money they have. P(M)= Speech owned by P. Or, more simply, 1xM=Speech. P is a person and always equals 1. M is a variable, it depends on the amount of money p owns. As M increases then the total speech owned by p increases. Buckley v. Valeo makes it possible for the first time in our history to calculate the amount of free speech someone has.

It might be lost on our brilliant Supreme Court and the scholars who support this monstrosity but if M=O the free speech owned by P is zero [Especially speech drowned out by the 24hr-7-365 corporate propaganda liars.] Maybe they are so busy rearranging legal Platonisms that they don't know what happens when you multiply one by zero. Or maybe they do understand and the outcome doesn't bother them. And that wouldn't surprise me anymore than that it is a Buckley who has his name attached to it.

The law being an ass, it is possible for someone to support this awful decision on theoretical principle while ignoring its horrible results. At least one of our greatest Justices, Marshall, did support it. I wonder if he would have if he knew what it would lead to. But that any of the self-proclaimed "originalists" could support it is stinking hypocrisy. The founders purportedly held that all people have equal speech rights under the law. Yet the plain result of Buckley v. Valeo not only distributes the right of free speech unequally, it also theoretically blots it out for the dispossessed. I say theoretically but can anyone looking at our politics since this decision honestly deny that this hasn't been the clear result?

I don't have much M but I'll be damned and in the fires of hell before I'm going to be silent about this.

Elizabeth Warren Makes Demanding Safe Elections Easy The Boys Whine On

Go to her website, find your state and go.  

Elizabeth Warren is already acting more presidential than most of her competitors were, not waiting, doing it now.  

I'll point out, contrary to what the asshole boys like Duncan Black and Sam Seder repeat like male Chatty Cathy dolls,  Nancy Pelosi already has been trying to do that through the very first bill she got passed in the House even as she knew, apparently as those blog bully boys still don't, that she can't make laws when the Republicans hold any power. 

Sam Seder has really got issues with strong women, which is why he seems to be pushing out Jamie for that idiot Nomiki Konst, these days.  I'm not the only one who's noticed.  I wonder if his past women problems aren't related to it.  He certainly hates Nancy Pelosi as he hated on Elizabeth Warren 

Ha-Ha, I Guess That Quote From Chuck Learned 'em Or, They Being Ineducable By Choice, At Least Shut Them Up

Apparently the tolls want to drop the matter of insect intelligence after yesterday morning's post.  Finding out that ol' Chuckie Darwin talked, not only about insect intelligence but he also cited the intelligence of the orders of insects I gave as examples, the Hymenoptera (as noted in the Japan Times, bees are even more impressive than previously known) and Coleoptera, the latter which I noted Boris Johnson is stupider than*.  Shut them up, it seems. 

Research, it pays off.  Post-literacy is voluntary stupidity of the Trumpian kind whether it's on the fascist right or when it's left (un)done on  the play-left but that's what culture has become in the post-WWII period.   I never really understood just how dangerous the dumbing down of Americans by TV was until I went online and started seeing the wreckage in their unedited thinking.  

One of the things I've realized is how much of the stuff I'd read, referencing authors, famous ones, generally, was a distortion of what they wrote until the internet made it possible to fact check in ways that would have involved a large library, a good card catalog and lots of stair climbing and looking through stacks and indexes (when that worked or those were provided).   That is the one thing I don't think I'd ever want to give up, the ability to fact check and check to see if authors really said what they're being claimed to have said.  The habits of that kind of dishonesty, twisting or distorting or lying about things is a lot more ingrained in secular, modern intellectual culture than I'd ever have guessed if that old inefficient means of fact checking hadn't given way to things like Archive.org, Project Gutenberg and machine search for strings of letters.    It's probably not going to ever overtake the bad things about it, lying is a lot easier than looking for the truth, but it makes finding the truth a lot easier than it used to be.  

And that platinum mine is left unused by the college-credentialed in enormous numbers.  Told you it was a big mistake to get rid of Frosh Rhetoric and Saturday classes. 

*  I have no doubt that Piers Morgan will revert to being officially stupider than a beetle soon.   Though I would never try to rank the intelligence of insects the way Darwin did.  It's obvious they have intelligence it's not an intelligence that human beings can really have much understanding of.  No doubt the enormous family of the beetles are smart enough to have persisted longer than the primates seem likely to.   Our terms are not their terms.  

Stupid Supremacy Touts "Natural Superiority"

Trump said it,  “The company, founded by a man named Henry Ford, Good bloodlines, good bloodlines. If you believe in that stuff, you got good blood.”

Well, I've been warning you of the constant danger of eugenics for the past fourteen years.   

The Times of Israel notes he did so at a Ford factory,  that would be in "Henry Ford" noted antisemite and someone who is in line with what Tacitus and Voltaire said about Jews' "bloodline".

You will note one of Trump's media learned weasel word habits, "If you believe in that stuff."   Well, we know his father believed in it,  he  was arrested at a KKK riot in New York City in the 1920s, that he and sonny boy were found to have practiced racial redlining in their properties, that his is the most overtly racist presidency since, probably since Andrew Jackson's.   I don't think even Wilson's was as bad.  Or Reagan's.  Racism is an expression of that belief, along with other forms of bigotry. 

I am dead serious that this is going to be a recurring curse certainly as long as people believe in natural selection and neo-Darwinism.   It was bad before that but people believed that with those inventions it was official "science".   It's an irony that those who despise the fact of evolution the most just  and officially hate Darwin just adore Darwinism as it props up racism.    Natural selection is a class-based, racist myth as certainly as those myths believed in by Tacitus, Voltaire,  and Trump. 

The great irony in this is that it is the stupidest, indisputably worst president in our lifetimes, someone who is getting enormous numbers of Americans killed through his criminal negligence who is stupidly and unknowingly pushing a form of folk natural selection theory.  

And I will note the Supreme Court and the Republicans in Congress are entirely OK with the stupidest, most criminally negligent president in the history of the country staying in office and stacking the judiciary with judges who will be OK with that.   The Roberts Court must be the last straw in Supreme Court partisan pampering of oligarchic criminals.  Which is entirely related to everything mentioned above in this post. 

How Satisfying Research Can Be When Their god, Ol' Chuck Backs Me Up

Continuing to be told that my statement that insects demonstrate intelligence is stupid, not wanting to waste any more time on answering that stupid statement by the stupid blog-rat at a would-be "brain trust", here is a fairly recent report on science in that area.   Note the unintended punchline at the end of it,  the ass is the one who hates my posts on Darwinism. 

Communication is the key to forming complex societies. It’s what allows the honeybee to perform such extraordinary behaviors. And, naturally, language is a key factor in human success. Intelligence is required for both these things, so does this mean honeybees, with a minuscule brain, are intelligent? It’s a tricky quality to define. One attempt, from the American Psychological Association Task Force on Intelligence, defines it as the ability “to adapt efficiently to the environment and to learn from experience.” Bees are able to do this.

There are six different kinds of dance, for example, and bees are able to learn and change their behavior accordingly. If bees encounter a dead bee at a flower, they change the pattern of dancing they perform back at the hive, suggesting they can perform a risk/benefit analysis.

Both bee and human language are a consequence of intelligence, and research such as Ai’s forces us to rethink what we mean by intelligence. “There might be a common brain mechanism between humans and honeybees,” he says.

What it certainly shows is that you don’t need a big brain to be smart. As with many things, Charles Darwin realized this, writing in 1871: “The brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of man.”

Update:  That quote is one I read when I read his book that I've cited most often and critically,  The Descent of Man, from where it's taken.  I will admit that I had forgotten it until I read the article from the Japan Times, but I recognized it when I read it.  Looking it up, Chuck, as always, was talking out of both sides of his mouth, he said, more fully:

As the various mental faculties gradually developed themselves the brain would almost certainly become larger. No one, I presume, doubts that the large proportion which the size of man's brain bears to his body, compared to the same proportion in the gorilla or orang, is closely connected with his higher mental powers. We meet with closely analogous facts with insects, for in ants the cerebral ganglia are of extraordinary dimensions, and in all the Hymenoptera these ganglia are many times larger than in the less intelligent orders, such as beetles. (78. Dujardin, 'Annales des Sciences Nat.' 3rd series, Zoolog., tom. xiv. 1850, p. 203. See also Mr. Lowne, 'Anatomy and Phys. of the Musca vomitoria,' 1870, p. 14. My son, Mr. F. Darwin, dissected for me the cerebral ganglia of the Formica rufa.) On the other hand, no one supposes that the intellect of any two animals or of any two men can be accurately gauged by the cubic contents of their skulls. It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin's head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man.

Right before he started in on a long paragraph of racist, 19th century style anthropology to rank humans as mentally superior and inferior based on race and some extremely convenient and rather obviously racist measurement.  Which ties him absolutely with German Darwinism which fed existing streams of romantic era racism which fed directly into the minds of those who produced Nazism. 

Those Two "R" Words

I doubt that Trump was really taking hydroxychloroquine, that was just another of his never-ending flow of off-the-cuff lies,  if he wants to prove he was, test him for it.   I wouldn't be surprised if his and the Kushner clan figure on making a killing on it.  A presidential ad.  

My guess is he heard some of the news reports on the side-effects and he didn't want anyone to think of him as "a retard" which is, no doubt, how he, um, "thinks", you know, like one of the bigger assholes on the 3rd grade playground.   He is the stupidest man to have ever been president, which is fine with the Supreme Court and the Republicans in the Congress.  

Oh, For . . . , Candide, Not Even The Book But The Friggin' Musical, Is The Weapon Used Against Me?

First, I took about twenty minutes to review the history of "Candide" and was surprised to find out that I got the chronology of its, um, creation wrong.  I'd always gotten the feeling that Bernstein had the idea and got Hellman to write the book.  Apparently it was Lillian Hellman's idea to adapt Voltaire's novel into a stage work with merely incidental music for which the old liar was fool enough to involve the young, energetic Leonard Bernstein, the current reigning NYC press scribbler crowned "genius" of music in it.  My guess is the old gorgon fast discovered that she couldn't control him - I'll give this to Lenny, he was the tool of no one else - and he made the music the most important element, which is probably the only reason any of it remains today.  As a number have pointed out, the music is Bernstein's typical clever pastiche, which works well enough on Broadway, second rate as it is as music.  

By all accounts, Hellman's book for the thing was largely the reason it was a disastrous, expensive flop, reportedly bringing her Broadway-Hollywood style Socialist Realist iron curtain down on a bit of 18th century French frippery.  Which is the reason that the successful productions of "Candide" have used a book that the far more theater savvy Harold Prince commissioned when Hellman refused to let them use hers for a revival.  Prince's necessity is probably what saved the show.  From what I read further revisions, some of them actually getting closer to Voltaire's original, have been made.  If that's a good thing, I don't really care enough to find out. 

I enjoyed watching the one with Kristin Chenoweth they had on TV quite a while back but only because I didn't have anything better to do. It had the great Patti LuPone in it, too.  The novel is overrated and the musical is a lot less than that.  It's got one number that carries the rest of the show,  and the overture, the part of it that gets the most play.  I'd rather watch anything by Sondheim any day.  

To mistake "Candide" the musical for Voltaire is typical of those who watched the movie and so figure they've read the book.  A common enough stupidity among jr. high students with an assigned book and, pathetically, among the college credentialed of post-WWII English speaking peoples.   

I strongly suspect that old liar and Stalinist,  Hellman may have read the novel as well as some of his other greatest hits - if Dorothy Parker considered her a woman of letters, she must have done at least that much.  I'm sure she was familiar with some of his famous quotes, including the asinine claim that he'd defend the right to speak of those who disagreed with him to the death.   I wonder how many of the people who proclaimed that while puffed up like a hot air balloon ever put themselves in danger of carrying through on it.    No doubt if Hellman ever used it she was trying to encourage other people to defend HER to the death.  She certainly made it obvious that any such claim by her was just another of her many lies in her lawsuit against Mary McCarthy when McCarthy told the truth about her being a  flagrant liar.   She had the same devotion to the truth as her hero of her adulthood,  Stalin did.  He killed lots of writers for telling the truth or even being suspected of maybe having an inclination to tell it.  Which didn't trouble her much.  Or those intellectuals and show folk who held her up as a figure for admiration. 

Our Constitution is a tool used by the Supreme Court to permit that crime spree to continue.

With its order blocking the release of the full Mueller Report to the Congress, the Roberts Supreme Court has taken its place in the criminal enablement of Donald Trump and his crime regime, the Supreme Court is in on turning the United States into a government of one man, one Republican man.

This is so outrageous that it alone must become the reason for making serious and basic changes in the structure of the government,  it has become too dangerous to stand, it is the reason that just returning things to how they were under normal times when overt fascists such as those who adopted the unitary executive and other fascist theories of the present Constitution are put on the court by a party that turned from normal conservatism to fascism in the past fifty years.  

The Supreme Court is using the courtly, lazy habits of the judicial and legal professions, putting of, putting off doing what it is obvious must be done to stop the Republican crime spree, that crime spree was a direct result of a line of Supreme Court rulings dating back to its alleged liberal period which empowered lies and criminals.  The rulings it may have thought it was making on behalf of freedom and the rights of those accused wrongly have been gamed by high price lawyers,  legal theorists whose inclinations are to aid the powerful and rich on behalf of people exactly like Donald Trump, the ignorant, lazy brats of corrupt moguls less dangerous than the ones who were clever and truly educated as they pursue the opportunity to sway and wield power as immorally as they want to.  

The lazy adoration of the United States Constitution is a dangerous cult that refuses to acknowledge the flaws put into it unintentionally, through the haste with which it was actually written and, perhaps even more dangerously, those put into it intentionally by Madison and the slave owners to protect the moral atrocity of slavery, the unrepresentative Senate, the Electoral College various other features, the atrocious anti-democratic features of it which were wrongly believed to have been defanged by the post-Civil War amendments.  

We are in the trouble we are largely through the Supreme Court's rulings, it must be reigned in and the ease with which Republican-fascism has stacked it with some of the worst members in its largely appalling history blocked and prevented.    That majority has to be disempowered by whatever means can be taken - increasing its numbers for one, adopting a term limit for another,  making it mandatory that BOTH the Senate and House must agree to the membership of it.  Of course those would never be done under any Republican-fascist administration in 2021,  it should be mandatory that those a president is going to nominate to it have been on record against the fascist theories of the unitary executive and the other means through which we have been brought to quasi-fascism, the arguments for that in the text of the Constitution changed to make it clear that presidents are not above the law.   

And it doesn't end there.   NO DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE LAWYER SHOULD EVER BE ALLOWED TO ADOPT SOMETHING LIKE THAT IDIOTIC RULE PUT THERE BY, IN EFFECT, A CLERK THAT SITTING PRESIDENTS CAN'T BE INDICTED.  The fixed term system of the United States makes the president too strong to allow for that.   The several times when a Vice President has had to become president through the death of a president has proven that a president is not irreplaceable to the extent that we must allow a criminal to stay in the office for that most convenient and dangerous of excuses, "national security".  

Desacralizing those items of the foolish Constitutional cultism we have adopted as a national religion is one of those things that must be done if we are not to become a fascist dictatorship.   Some may wonder why I have seldom lost an opportunity to castigate the idiotic and lying musical Hamilton, which props up that cult of the "Founders" and their putrid slavery-enabling, anti-democratic Constitution, a Constitution which would have long ago come to this if constant agitation against those things which our generations have been gulled into allowing had not happened.   The struggle against slavery and, after that, the unofficial slavery of American apartheid,  Supreme Court permitted Jim Crow may have actually shielded us from that as well.  But whatever protection we have had from those provisions of the document have been gamed successfully by lawyers and law scholars and Supreme Court members to have made it impossible to get rid of the worst president in our history, certainly the most overtly criminal one, ONE WHO NOT ONLY COMMITS CRIMES BUT DOES IT PUBLICLY AND WITH THE FULL APPROVAL OF THE REPUBLICAN SENATE.   And our Constitution is a tool used by the Supreme Court to permit that crime spree to continue.  It must be changed to both disempower the executive and the Supreme Court if that is what they are going to use their power to do, it must reduce the power of the Senate to allow a corrupt one to do what the Republicans have done.  

These Days Seth Meyers Is The News Source I Find Least Depressing

Of all the late night hosts, he has done the best with the at-home format.  

No One Is Stupider Than A Conceited Human Blog Rat With College-Credentials

You have to be as stupid as an atheist-materialist-sci-ranger-blog-rat to not recognize that animals who don't write short stories and novels demonstrate intelligence.  I don't think that's at all unrelated to the Renaissance and "Enlightenment" Eureopeans who assigned sub-human non-intelligence to entire racial groups covering entire continents on that claimed basis, such as David Hume's racist dismissal of the poetry of people of African ancestry, even though that racist fathead could read it.  And don't get me started on the racism of Voltaire.  The troll couldn't process the many quotes he challenged me to produce on that count, which I did, in both the original French and the English translation. 

That the "enlightenment" intellectuals wanted to murder those people and steal their land is entirely relevant to judging their intellectual claims.   

No, that kind of stupidity is endemic to atheist-materialists, of both the elite kind who have demonstrated some actual intellectual originality as well as for the ass-end variety of that which does no more than repeat slogans on an intellectual basis lower than African gray parrots have demonstrated.  You can get college credentials in the United States doing that, you can get a grad degree pleasing the common-received POV without more than that.   

With so many of them it's not actual thought in evidence, it is repetition of mere attitudes or fuzzily processed preferences.  Though I would acknowledge that is a sign of the possession of a capacity for intelligence, I'd see that as more of a misdirected potential than anything impressive in that area.  I've seen many animals display more creative intelligence than that.  Chickens, many species of birds, cats, dogs, foxes, possums, etc. I don't spend enough time observing individual insects to claim that I would recognize it in them, though if bees telling other bees where to find flowers isn't a demonstration of intelligence, the word has no meaning. 

More Morse Troll Teasing

I am so enjoying looking at super-cheap, home-made radios made of junk and very cheap components that I think I'll share that pleasure.   And it annoys the trolls, but that's just the icing on the cake. 

Dave Schmarder's  site has some wonderfully interesting looking radios, with schematics given,   though I wish he had done more testing and reporting on his experience with them.   I guess like George Dobbs admitted to, he has so much fun building them that he only has time to use them for a short period before he goes on to his next building project.  

I think someone should start a group dedicated to using radios containing toilet paper tubes for international communication.    The TPGRP Society.   I already have an idea for a Club Anthem, though I don't know how to convey that in Morse.  Maybe when I'm in my 80s I'll get around to that.

There are loads of small businesses selling plans, components and kits. Here is one that Mr. Schmarder endorses.  I don't know how well his kits work but like a number of those who put them out, how they look is part of the fun.  Who would have thought radio bugs had such a sense of design? 

Here is another whose radio and other kits looked really interesting to me. 

Here is a video about making the less than $10 "pixie" kits that have a terrible reputation but are apparently very popular around the world, tolerable.  

One thing I'm finding is that a lot of the recordings of Morse code are at a high pitch that at loud volumes is annoying.   I wouldn't be able to tolerate anything that didn't both lower the pitch and make it quieter than a lot of these videos seem to show is typical of kit made radios.  

Of course, I'm still at the phase where I'm learning Morse Code,  I've made a rule for myself that I buy nothing till I can get to a speed where I would consider imposing communication on someone else.  Then I suppose I'll try to be licensed, though from what I gather pirate stations abound.   I don't suppose I'll do that if the Republican-fascists win the election.  I'll bide my time. 

Update:  Do too.  Do too have an idea for an anthem for the TPGRP Society, if you don't think the phrase "roll on" isn't a part of that you have the intelligence of a materialist blog-rat and don't know me at all. 

You Have To Be As Stupid As A Materialist To Think Insects Don't Demonstrate Intelligence

When I was in 4th grade, during our science lesson our beloved teacher asked what you'd have thought would have been an obvious answer based on what she'd just said,  "What's the smallest thing?"  she called on a boy who I now realize she probably saw wasn't paying attention and he said,  "An ant?".   Which, as I recall, she rolled her eye at.   As he was the biggest kid in the class and one who was not exactly a bully but who could have a mean streak, no one laughed, as I recall.  

The naive answer directly taken from the textbook, for the information of the college-credentialed dope who has been trolling me, the official "right answer" back then was "an atom".  Though that's certainly not true and had long been known to not be true, it's what I'd bet just about any approved 4th grade science textbook would have said. 

I admit that I did hoot the other day when I read that conceited college grad geezer, a guy who has mocked and ridiculed what I have written about Darwinism with full documentation and citation in his words and the words of those who he cited with approval as understanding his theory and his own children who, unlike anyone in the post-WWII construction of the fake Darwin of common received "understanding" knew him, when that trool made it plain that he couldn't navigate the enormous gulf between viruses and insects.   One suspects he did so on the same basis as that poor, pathetically dull boy in my 4th grade class, "they're little".  

Having actually read some of the relevant recent biological evidence about intelligence in even bacteria (which, though written by a number of eminent biologists at major universities [ALWAYS look at the citations] - based in actual observation and not the typical reliance on theoretical assertions in the absence of observation - my persistent, arrogant as he is ignorant troll mocked on anything but a basis of understanding their papers)  to make that statement equating bacteria with viruses is absurd at this point, never mind the display of ignorance of equating the intelligence displayed by insects to viruses.  

I have never gotten around to doing enough reading into the theories that colonies of bacteria display intelligence analogous to the forms of intelligence that humans experience, though I would ask how, if you are going to make that claim you could claim that that group intelligence could exist without the individual members of the colony also possessing intelligence.*   I think to take the typical materialist-atheist out of saying "natural selection" or even "DNA" is to give a non-answer to that question.   Materialist-atheist ideology has been a means of putting that practice into science, directly into it through Darwinism and the neo-Darwinian synthesis.  And in that last sentence there is a problem for what I just said,  I know what that problem is but I doubt any of the materialist-atheist sci-rangers who would have read it would know what that is.  I think I'll see if any of them figure it out.  I can get over it, by the way.  Materialism can never get over the self-chosen problems inherent to it. 

*  I don't think human intelligence is a product of our brains and nervous system, I don't think our minds are made by our brains, which I've also gone into. 

The Sheer Lunacy Of The Play-Left

I have little to no doubt that The Law of Moses is the origin of the often most dependable form of traditional American style liberalism among Jews, those who kept with observance of that law and those who assimilated, though not universally among the latter or even the former.   Why wouldn't that phenomenon take among those who read the commentary in the Geneva Bible?  It pointed out what it really said in those passages of the Books of Moses,  outlining the most radical egalitarian and re distributive economics in the history of economics.  

The radical advice of Jesus, that if you want to be perfect you have to sell everything you own and give the money to the poor before adopting your own position in destitution adopts it pretty much in its most radical form.  That great figure in the later history of Christianity, St. Francis understood it in those terms,  correctly, as did others in as radical or a somewhat less radical form.   I've encountered people, even among those infamous "white evangelicals" who are led to economic radicalism through that same source.  

Bernie Sanders once pointed out that the Pope's economics was more radical than his were,  I don't remember but I seem to recall he wasn't talking about Good Pope Francis but Benedict XVI.  And it's true, even that conservative Pope advocated an economics that was way beyond any Marxist or even most of those who get called anarchists.   The great saint of our times,  Dorothy Day was considered that kind of an anarchist, which is certainly different from the secular, atheist, anti-religious formulations of anarchism.  She didn't write much theory about it, she did it.  Which is the most radical of radical actions of all, one that almost none of those who are famous for their radicalism ever much get around to doing as they babble and scribble and gull the suckers in college towns and beyond, who man podcasts that demand the impossible as they advocate the conditions that will make delivering what they demand impossible.

No.  ol' Moses had that figured out a long, long time ago,  so did Jesus.  

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ALL INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY  ALL CONCLUSIONS REACHED BY HUMAN BEINGS DEPEND ON THE CONTEXT IN WHICH THOSE ARE MADE.  It is one of the most telling features of the materialist-secular-atheist model of reality that no moral position can find any absolute footing in its own chosen framing.  I have read one after another after another attempt to do that, online one of the most pathetic was a well educated philosophy major who advocated his own branch of the phony substitute for morality  which he called "desire utilitarianism" in which to come to any assertion of morality required the most baroque and tortured and arbitrary verbal gymnastics which at any point were entirely vulnerable to that universal acid of materialist-secular-atheism,  the refusal to agree, based in their mutually agreed to framing. 

If you believe in God, the Jewish-Christian-Islamic understanding of God, when your authority for that understanding, such as the Books of Moses, the Gospel the Epistles assert something, that is the rock on which you can assert the rightness of that moral position.  Jesus said, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned, pointing to dire consequences if you didn't do that.  No doubt some, perhaps many, if they were so encouraged,  would do those things without the dire consequences out of their good will or a desire to feel good about themselves.   But it is a fact of history that those will not be the most numerous nor the ones who power in this world flows to.  I would guarantee you that in the absence of that framing of morality it is inevitable that power will flow that way, it is only in those rare instances when the moral character of people is fed and directed that that cataract of sewage  has been dammed.  

That it has not been a complete success doesn't do anything to lessen the urgency of that observation, if it's not successful when a majority profess to believe but then fail to practice it, it's lunacy to think that convincing people that the basis of that morality is nonexistent and they are free to do whatever they can get away with doing, it's going to lead to paradise.  

Hate Mail

The highest level of quality is equality.  

That's my position. 

If You're Going To Give Me Material I Am Going To Use It

I am still being trolled when I make comments under my own name, I will be making them under a different name soon.  Until then . . . 

You have to be abjectly ignorant of biology to equate the possibility of intelligence among insects with the possibility of that among viruses which, arguably, aren't even alive.   Lynn Margulis said they weren't and she was in a better position than I am to make that claim.  Insects certainly demonstrate intelligence, some of them are smarter than some people seem to be.  They're better at staying out of trouble than a lot of affluent Americans.  Tell me your average insect isn't smarter than Donald Trump jr or Sebastian Gorka. 

But I've been pointing out that the levels of such ignorance in the college-credentialed population are about the same as the population without such credentials.  It's pretty shocking how little the science boom in the United States in the wake of the shock Sputnik was to the military-industrial-corporate establishment has really taken.   Even among people who are credentialed in STEM subjects, outside of their specialty, they're probably even more ignorant and insusceptible to fact-checking than those who had a good basic foundation in the Humanities might have gotten.  

Update:  I could have mentioned Boris Johnson or Piers Morgan,  I am pretty sure that most of the beetles in the field here are smarter than either of them. 

Update 2:  Lying about what was said isn't a sign of intelligence, when it's done that way all it proves is my point about conceited people being lazy and stupid.  In other words your typical play-lefty blog rats.  Believing lies makes you stupid. 

Some Random Thoughts On The Handicap Of Snobbery And Related Matters

If I'd known the outrage that mentioning Morse code and communicating with dirt cheap low powered transmitters was going to cause among the people of fashion,  I'd have done it a decade ago. 

There is nothing more damaging to traditional American liberalism than the habit of snobbery that flourishes among the alleged left.  People of any level of intellectual ability and achievement, from lowest to highest can tell if someone is looking down on them, and what goes for class goes for region, accent, ethnicity, etc.  To a good extent that has been a result of what has been considered "the left" being perceived as being concentrated in college towns, among college grads, in places such as New York City and the greater Boston area - why that should be, I don't know because generally their politics are hardly far left.   

I think the association with Boston or Massachusetts,  New England, may come from that unremarked on fact of American history that Marilynne Robinson was the first to bring to my attention, that the Geneva Bible which did so much to form the culture of early New England contained some radical statements about the moral obligation to provide for the destitute and poor, that some of the earliest (and sometimes among the most severe) of Puritan preachers stressed the moral obligation found in The Law of Moses to furnish the least among us with not only bare bones sustenance but liberally so as to give them a decent life.  Of course that took only in part, stinginess among New England Yankees is a real phenomenon, as is generosity, but I don't think they're any more prone to it than anyone anywhere else.  

The early habit of legally requiring schooling be provided in towns over a certain size in New England was matched with some of the earliest institutions of higher learning*.   The influence of any liberalism gained from those things, especially as New Englanders moved into the Mid-West certainly has petered out.   The more I read of the New England "Founders" it seems to have mostly petered out by the second half of the 18th century.  

Rowing away from that stream of consciousness -  One of the things I said that got the most heat from the online play-lefties was when I objected to their snobbery about the food of the working and lower classes, Kraft Dinner was the focus of that, as I recall.   It is remarkable how much of the junk that gets heaped onto that college credentialed form of "leftism" and "liberalism" that is merely a convention of those who hanker after the respect of snobs.   As if someone is lesser because they don't have a sense of food snobbery and they eat cheap food that isn't pleasing to the snobs.  I will remind you, some of those same people are the same idiots who got sold that civit shit coffee I talked about, though that was a step too far for some of them.   But they will buy or adopt anything, even the most inexpensive food of the very poor from other lands and places, it getting in under the convention of adopting "exotica" or other things as written up in places like the New York Times feuilleton or some other such dubious engine of influence.  

The snobs have cost us everything, really.   I think they are one of the biggest reason that the same political side which has policies that would be the most helpful to the working poor, the poor, the destitute, even the lower rungs of white-collar working class people have found it so difficult to convince them of the benefits of those policies.   It is one of the reasons I think having a college-based left has been a disaster, as the Bernie Sanders campaigns have proved, it is also insane to put your hopes in the youngest, most callow of voters who can be so easily swayed and gulled on the basis of fashion.   I think only to a lesser extent is it dumb to put your hopes in campus radicals among the faculties of colleges and universities, so many of them are con men on the make, the Marxists to a person I would put in that category, as well as the anarchists. 

It is one of the unexpressed but frequently demonstrated habits of thought among the credentialed snobs that they don't believe the majority of people are capable of understanding as much as they can certainly understand (often better than those with credentials) or appreciate "the finer things in life"  

One of the earliest experiences I had with that online was one of them piously telling me that my taste in music, "classical" music was a damnable example of "elitism".   Which I'm sure I wouldn't be the only person who has lived a life in music would know was an idiotic statement.  I could cite a plumber I knew who probably knew as much about Bela Bartok's music as most music majors did, I could cite high school dropouts who knew more about opera than most instrumental majors with degrees in music did.   My general response to that is that I'm such an elitist that I won't be satisfied till everyone is elite.  Which includes, certainly, the ability which the greatest musicians, the greatest composers have had to appreciate the simplest of folk music and the most complex of it.  A lot of the folk tradition, some of the commercial popular music is music of the best kind.  Only I don't think the snobs of the left like to think that.   I don't want anyone to give up any music they like, I would like them to be able to enjoy all kinds of music they want to without having someone gull them into thinking they don't have any right to it because it's above them.  

The bad reputation that the left, that liberals got for being snobs is exaggerated in the movies, on TV, on radio, in the friggin' media, and it was done in no small part during my lifetime to hurt the electoral chances of the likes of the Kennedys on the national scene (remember what they did to John Kerry on that count.   If Elizabeth Warren had been the nominee, you can be certain that that would be invoked against her for her Harvard years, covering up her roots in Oklahoma and the fact that she is entirely a product of public education in places other than New England.  It has been a useful tool for Republican-fascists and the media that has supported them.  But in many cases they have had heaps of help from the "leftists" themselves.  In too many cases, it's a reputation that has been bought for us by the snobs among us, snobs who really aren't interested in the success of those policies I mentioned above, they are mostly interested in their own status and their own self-regard.  

That as much as anything has been a source of friction in my studying the reasons the left has failed.  And it is certainly related to the insistence that any positive mention of Christianity is a source of anger and annoyance and generally fussiness among the babies of the pseudo-left.  My post about "The Woman Taken In Adultery" which was an anti-capital punishment post got that anger. There was absolutely nothing in what I came out with that was anything but a support for what should be one of the most important positions of an American style liberal.  It pointed out that that argument against it was about the strongest that could be made, that God, in the person of Jesus, had said only those without fault are eligible to execute someone.  But that strongest of possible framing - there is no possible framing stronger than that God wills it - is unacceptable to such anti-religious snobs. 

It is part of that snobbery that the religion that a majority of Americans profess belief in never to be mentioned in the polite company of the college-credentialed "left" without disdaining it.  If it is mentioned it is to be considered a joke or an occasion to make some kind of crude and dismissive remark, it is certainly something that piques them if it doesn't really piss them off in any other context.   That such an attitude has been one of the most damaging things about the college-credentialed "left" one of the other things the Republican-fascists and its media have used to damage Democrats, has not made any difference to such "leftists".   It's clear that my conclusion is true, they hate God more than they believe in the positions they claim to support,  they won't even take strong arguments for those positions that may well sway some if not many to adopt them because those arguments are made in the framing of religion.  

* Researching this point, it was fun to find out that the legitimate claim of Harvard to being the first University in what would become the United States is easily outdone by a number of those in Latin America.  Some of them noted that while the Philippines were considered an American possession that The University of Santo Tomas had Harvard beat by a long shot.  But, then, Catholics did invent the University, as such.  Though by some definitions, the University of Cairo is older than that, even.  One online source claims that if you wanted to push the definition of public education, that the Incas had instituted mandatory education, though I have never read on that interesting claim so I don't know if it's true or not.  Harvard got lucky in money - much of it from moral atrocities such as the triangular trade -  and as a status symbol among the New England rich from whence its claim to quality is founded, not in maintaining any kind of moral authority or its ersatz substitute.  

I Do Have To Say They've Probably Got The Most Well Behaved And Some Of The Smarter Athletes

I love that John Oliver was once again cagey enough to snag a golden opportunity in getting the sole sponsorship of the marble racing league and I love the way they maximized that with donations for charities but after watching this way to satisfy a longing for distraction, I'm thinking learning Morse code is looking really good. 

I'm going to see if I can build a transceiver and get my license with having the inexpensive soldering iron I need be the most expensive thing I have to buy (it was when I read about them making new ones out of junked radios, telephones, etc. ). I'm wondering how cheaply I could do that, it will take months and lots of free time but since I've found out what I need to do to fully suppress the trolls here,  I may have literally minutes a day to devote to that.  

I'm also setting the rule that I have to do all of it while standing. If there's something I don't need at my age it's another excuse to sit down for long periods of time. 

Update:  Apparently it's a lot more popular than you might think, that book that originally cost less than a dollar, Making a Transistor Radio by George Dobbs, a pamphlet, really, (51 pages) I looked to see if I could buy a paper copy of it.  The cheapest price I found was fifty-four dollars, other copies available were in the hundreds of dollars.  That only happens when something is in demand.   I want the information, not the object.  

Update 2:  I'm not against marble racing,  it's more interesting and,assuming there's no underworld betting and the concomitant killings and beatings and gambling addiction involved, less morally tainted than NASCAR, it's certainly more of an intellectual challenge than watching American football, perhaps the most boring and stupid sport ever invented.  It's even less morally tainted than the one sport I can sort of actually tolerate watching, basketball.  My point is that by comparison, the challenge and content of talking in code with someone across the country or world by a radio that costs less than ten dollars is probably more stimulating and interesting.  If you like challenge and stimulation.  

In that listing of moral taint involved with sports, I should certainly include nationalism and the same phenomenon on regional and local levels.  Why I friggin' hate the Olympics, apart from the fact that the IOC are a bunch of organized criminals.  Let me know where a riot breaks out when the local champion marble team loses or wins, the way that those regularly happen in American football.  Riots have been a part of that since the first recorded game. 

How funny, a college grad, a professional "writer" and after all those years he still doesn't understand how quotes work.  

Naw, "college-credentialed" is going to be it until the colleges educate them.  I blame them dropping Frosh Rhetoric requirements and Saturday classes.  College should be open to everyone, it shouldn't be made EZ.   It should mean something other than the bills were paid including the library fines. 

Oh, Dear, I've Offended The Jefferson Cult, What Ever Will I Do Now?

When  the Jefferson cult annoys me the most, in thinking about the unfillable gap between his most famous claim in the Declaration of Independence, that "All men are created equal . . . " and his not only continuing holding of slaves but also his increasing enthusiasm and advocacy (to his friends of his class) for keeping Black People enslaved as a means of wealth creation for them every time a new Black Child was born into slavery, not to mention his own history of raping a slave child and maintaining her and his children by her in slavery during his lifetime,  I don't think he really meant it.  He was recruiting poor men to fight his war.  Like Thomas Paine, his fellow enthusiast for shedding blood for the "tree of liberty" he made damned sure it wasn't his that was going to do the watering of it. 

I don't think many, perhaps any of those rich, white men who signed the Declaration of Independence believed what it said about equality because their actions after independence was gotten prove they didn't believe it.  Slavery wasn't abolished, poor men without property were not universally given the vote, Women were certainly not made equal in terms of the law, the genocides and land theft from the original inhabitants of North America continued and increased, without whatever inhibition that Britain had been on that - one of the major bones of contention stated in the Declaration was that the Founders were not free to kill and steal land, though stated in more elegant double-speak.  

No, I think the loftiest language in the Declaration was there to sucker the poor into fighting the war on behalf of the wealthy founders, including some Black men - Britain's offer to give slaves who fought against the American independence effort freedom proved somewhat of a better promissory note than the one issued in the Declaration on that count.   The rebellions that led to the Constitutional Convention came about when poor white people who had been told they were getting a lot more found out the Founders, once with power, intended to welsh on those promises, too. 

I think Jefferson may have liked to strike the pose of an egalitarian lover of liberty - he was a man of late 18th century fashion - but his life puts the lie to his ever having really had that as a principle that he had any intention of living by.   He was certainly smart enough to have noted the damning gap between his words and his life, though he could count on his fellow aristocrats in delicately choosing not to mention that too often. They didn't mean it anymore than he did.   The slaves who demanded their freedom certainly did then and Black People and others still subjugated still now have noticed that gap, even in many cases, people of the humblest backgrounds without the advantages that Jefferson had in education.  

Naw,  Jefferson was a piece of crap, adding hypocrisy to the sin of slave holding and selling, of slave raping.   I don't trust him.  

Hints For Heretics

On my recent blogging anniversary - on which I noticed no one sent cards or presents - I was tempted to post a retread of one of the pieces I was proudest of, I Won't Be Fair To Fascists, I Won't Be Nice To Nazis, adding something like I Won't Be Kind To Commies (told you I'd changed during the past 14 years), but I may save that.  Instead I'll write about some of the things I've learned in those changes from my far less original conventional lefty phase which left me far more radical than I had been.  

This blog is called The Thought Criminal as a result of my time as the weekend blogger at Echidne of the Snakes, a fine blog by one of the best inexplicably neglected writers of the short hey-day of blogging.   Echidne certainly knew she was asking someone to weekend for her who had some unconventional views for a lefty, someone who in my first blog posts had announced my intention of being a critic of the left based in the mortal sin of repeated and long-standing political failure.  If our ideas are so friggin' great as compared to the opposition - and many of them are actually great in that comparison - WHY THE FECK ARE WE SUCH A FRIGGIN' FLOP AT THE POLLS?   DECADE AFTER DECADE, GENERATION AFTER GENERATION, NOW IN DANGER OF CONTINUING THAT INTO A CENTURY OF FLOPS.  MORE SO IF YOU ARE CHUMP ENOUGH TO INCLUDE THE MARXISTS AND THEIR ALLIES IN OUR FLOCK.  

I was constantly posting things, starting with my posting of the piece I mentioned above at a blog with a wider readership and I was constantly being told that I was thinking forbidden thoughts and saying forbidden things.  Constantly, long and loud.  I was forbidden to say that it was insane for any entity of the left to stand up for the rights of anyone who opposed equality, who opposed democracy who, if they gained power would deny every and all rights to us and, more importantly, whatever racial, ethnic, gender identity group they made the focus of their genocides and hate campaigns - NO GROUP MORE SO TARGETED THAN THOSE WHO WERE POOR AND POWERLESS.   I announced my first day that I absolutely despised that ACLU style idiocy in the form of the then living self-promoted hero of that most idiotic position ever pushed as phony leftism, the Village Voice-Progressive Magazine* celeb, Nat Hentoff.  

Added to that was, of course, my apostasy in the matter of Charles Darwin and, as I read him and the Darwinists from the beginning up till today, my conviction that natural selection is an intellectual construct based in the ideologies of those who cling to it and the convenience of those within the biological professions (as well as the pseudo-sciences) but which almost certainly does not exist except as a common received delusion.  

The worst responses I got were a post in which I wrote about a niece who died as a result of a severe mental illness and the absolute fact that she would have been alive then and probably far happier if she had been in custodial care.  The viciousness and insanity of the response for the right of those who are so mentally ill so as to be unable to exercise rational agency for themselves in which I was told my niece being dead was a good thing because "she died on her own terms" opened my eyes rather completely as to how depraved the talk of "rights" can be when it is divorced from reality.   I wish the comment threads on that post were still available because it was one of the worst I experienced and was chock full of examples of how cruelly insane a conventionalized point of view on that had become.   

I started this blog on Saturday, June 19th 2010 during one such contentious weekend a decade ago of being told I couldn't say and could't think what I'd said, of being told I was a thought criminal, I realized, even though that phrase wasn't used.  So I went with that.  

The lessons I've learned from the many brawls I've enjoyed and those I haven't, such as the one which told me that it was right that my beloved niece died a terrible and prolonged death, a niece who my family struggled to save - from the mental "health" industry and her alleged "civil rights"**  as much as from her mental illness, have led me to conclude that all of the things I saw were a problem for the political success of the left were not only still there, unreflected on, unexamined, not corrected but were getting worse.  I think the lefty media, the podcasts, the blogs (of ever lessening impact) the online magazines, the relics that still print on paper are by and large the engines of that continued fall into the pit.  Though, considering their pathetic self-imposed impotence, calling it an engine is an inapt metaphor, it's more like a rope line of chumps walking into the pit, one after another, few if any with the foresight to let go of the rope.    

The one piece of advice that I can give my fellow heretics is to have the citations and facts to back up what you say,  NOT THAT IT IS GOING TO GET YOUR OPPONENTS TO ADMIT THEIR ERRORS, they won't do that though it might jar a few minds loose of the stuck lids that ideology places on thought.  You will at least know that you have made your argument and it will inevitably give you clues as to where to look for more confirmation or for contraindications, evidence that you are wrong or not quite there yet.   It is one of the most interesting things I've found in this that the college-credentialed are as immune to the effect of evidence presented as those they love to disdain among the great unwashed (that's "the masses" in traditional lefty jargon).   I've come to see that having a degree is no guarantee that someone is going to be more susceptible to what, to use the current pretentious phrase, "the data," the evidence shows.  

I will repeat the heresy that led to this post, that the higher levels of theological writing are some of the least prone to that academic dishonesty that I've experienced.   Perhaps that's because a lot of theologians believe something that ever so many of my former fellow lefties demonstrably do not (and virtually no conservatives do) that it is a sin to tell a lie and to bear false witness.   I have been absolutely blown away with the gales of self-critical content of fair-minded but rigorous consideration of opposing viewpoints in the best theological writing I've read.  Which, I find, it's forbidden for a lefty to read with an open mind,  no, not even that, it's forbidden to read it at all. 

*  I have to say that I have come to have a disdain for the "leftists" of Madison Wisconsin that includes The Progressive Magazine and such family businesses as The Freedom From Religion Foundation.  I was encouraged by a social worker I ran into during my youth to apply to the University of Wisconsin which he called "The Berkeley of the mid-west".  Am I ever glad I didn't take that advice.  

** The idea that someone who cannot think clearly and who is constantly a danger to themselves as a result have a right to destroy themselves and others is one of the stupidest of the stupid ideas of the "civil rights" industry, as advocated in some of the most irresponsible crap to come out of 3rd rate novelists and the even lower level that Hollywood puts out.  

I remember in that brawl over that post that one of the people who commented said that they were a victim of mental illness and, in their lucid intervals, they  were grateful that people had stepped in and exercised custody over them so that they could live and, in their lucid periods, live a life of relative freedom.  It's one of the few such comments as most of them were made in the total confidence that such advocates of "rights" on behalf of other people can make without ever, once, considering the effects of their loftily proclaimed stands for liberty.   One of the more important things I realized is that "liberty" is generally a word to signal that you should watch, very carefully, what the person proclaiming it was really asking for.  Especially when it's a lawyer or a lefty scribbler who has no intention of having anything to do with the wreckage that their lofty principle results in.   Another thing I've noted is that we've gone from the problems of the 20th century mental hospital as a warehouse of the mentally ill to going back to the 18th century in which inevitably a lot of them end up in county jails and prisons.  That is the ones who don't end up dying on the streets, the victims of crime so much more often than they are the cause of it.  Of the overall crime of neglect.   

I can't claim that I don't despise that kind of "civil rights" advocacy. I absolutely despise the ACLU which takes away five times in "free speech, free press" advocacy what it otherwise gives.  

Update:  I wrote an earlier piece about the failure of the mental "health" industry and "rights" industry before I wrote the one mentioned above.  The link to the Boston Globe still works, which proves the experience of my family with that was not unique.   

Given Their Claimed Positions, Why Do They Hate The Possibility That This Great Story Might Be True?

It has long been the fashion of the historical-critical scholars of the text of the Bible to discount or reduce the status of the famous passage, "The Woman Taken In Adultery" found in John 8:1-11 since the earliest manuscript of John doesn't contain that story.  The line, taken up by many an atheist hater of Christianity for the polemical purposes, say that it was a later addition to the Gospel and Jesus never said that most wonderful sentence. 

I don't know, as does no one else, today, if the story was true in total or in part but if it was added by later Christians it's worth asking why they would have done that and why it was considered to be consistent with the character of Jesus as understood by early Christians.  They never wonder if the scribe who made that early manuscript might have left it out for some reason, maybe he hated women or didn't like the idea that the literal meaning of a part of The Mosaic Law being overturned in it. The fact is, we don't know if that happened, either. 

I don't know what early commentary there is on the story, which would be interesting to know, but it's clear that the earliest centuries of Christianity included that radical break with the interpretation of The Law which commanded that a woman taken in adultery be stoned to death.   It also demands that the man committing adultery be stoned too (Leviticus 20:10), I always wonder why they didn't haul him in front of Jesus but I would guess that's pretty much a self explanatory question.  

For anyone who might not be familiar with the story, here it is from the Good News Translation. 

Then everyone went home, but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.  Early the next morning he went back to the Temple. All the people gathered around him, and he sat down and began to teach them.  The teachers of the Law and the Pharisees brought in a woman who had been caught committing adultery, and they made her stand before them all.  “Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.  In our Law Moses commanded that such a woman must be stoned to death. Now, what do you say?”   They said this to trap Jesus, so that they could accuse him. But he bent over and wrote on the ground with his finger.   As they stood there asking him questions, he straightened up and said to them, “Whichever one of you has committed no sin may throw the first stone at her.”  Then he bent over again and wrote on the ground.  When they heard this, they all left, one by one, the older ones first. Jesus was left alone, with the woman still standing there.  He straightened up and said to her, “Where are they? Is there no one left to condemn you?”

 “No one, sir,” she answered.

“Well, then,” Jesus said, “I do not condemn you either. Go, but do not sin again.

It's clear that that story was either a fairly accurate report of an incident in the public life of Jesus or it is a moral fable that was consistent with the very early understanding of the character of Jesus and his teaching.   I would guess the people who heard that would often have been familiar with the statement of Paul that Jesus was like all of us except in sin, which would lead them to the same conclusion I remember reaching when I was a kid that Jesus was the only one who was qualified to throw the first stone at her and he refused to condemn her.  Which should be about as profound a statement about the forgiving of sins, leaving her with the most mildly given commandment to not sin again but which also disqualified the rest of humanity from imposing the death sentence commanded in The Law which Jesus said he came to uphold.   That is the reason I said what I did about that last week.  I don't think there is a clearer prohibition on any human being - all of us sinners - imposing the ultimate legal prescription for a crime.  That in such large numbers Americans who favor the death penalty claim to believe every word of the Bible is literally true - or some similar claim - would present them with a real quandary as to their favoring capital punishment.   That is a quandary which it is notable that had so little effect throughout "Christendom" which is certainly not the kingdom of Jesus - though I think it is arguable that in some ways Christianity was an improvement on the earlier kingdoms, empires, territories governed by various pre-Christian governance (human sacrifices were banned as were some other terrible practices, with variable effectiveness) it can hardly be considered to have approached the teachings of Jesus.  

No, I say we adopt the story as authentic and advocate that it is an absolute ban on any person who has sinned imposing the death penalty.  If The Law, contained in Scripture is made impossible to carry out under that amendment to it in this commandment of Jesus, it is even more clear that human law that provides for capital punishment is not only illegitimate, it is against the Law of God as taught by Jesus. 

I wonder why "leftists" who so widely take a stand against capital punishment wouldn't be entirely in favor of this story as about their strongest argument with those who claim to be Christians.  But I don't wonder very hard. 

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William F. Buckley once and insincerely said that he would rather be governed by the Gospel than any constitution ever devised -  given his stands on just about everything,  I doubt that, completely.  I can say that if any nominally Christian country or state or town had ever governed itself even imperfectly approaching full compliance with the teachings of Jesus, it would be considered a paradise on Earth and would almost certainly be attacked by other polities who would find the radical equality and economic leveling of it intolerable.   Jefferson couldn't tolerate Haiti's early aspirations to be a republic and began the long campaign to make sure nothing like good government ever happened there.  

But the question is why should anyone want to discredit the teachings of Jesus if they claim to be an American style liberal?   Even the American play-lefties advocate, in theory, a morality closer to that of Jesus than of Nietzsche or Darwin or Marx.  You wonder why they so consistently try to discredit what would have to be the strongest possible humanly understandable reason to make equality, justice, kindness real in human life, THE FIRMLY HELD BELIEF THAT THE ULTIMATE AUTHORITY OVER US WANTS US TO ACT THAT WAY.  

I think the reason they don't like it is because they don't really favor those things more than they hate belief in God, the possibility or the reality of God.  The fact is, most of them hate God more than they love equality and justice and democracy.  That has been one of the greatest self-imposed guarantees of defeat on the American left since at least the rise of Marxism within it and even earlier in the wrongly named, rationally absurd "free thought" of the kind for which Thomas Paine was a major figure.*  That Paine was a major and enthusiastic participant in the French Revolution - a disaster that led to the Reign of Terror and the military despotism of Napoleon before it led the the often violent and chaotic history of France up to recent decades - certainly is more telling about him than the slogans gleaned from his writing.  As can be seen in the life of Jefferson and the other Founders, words are cheap as compared to reality.  I don't believe any of them really believed in equality or democracy, I think they didn't really believe in those things they claimed to because they didn't believe they were founded in the most absolute of possible sources, in the mind of the Creator who Jefferson invoked when it suited his purpose in defending the break with England.  

*  I have been pointing out, more and more, that "free thought" is another of the things which such "free thinkers" will jettison in their adherence to materialistic-atheistic  of scientism because free thought is impossible within their framing of materialism, of physical causation being the entirety of reality.   I have never found such an advocate of such "freedom" under that framing who could come to any defense of or explanation for where freedom could come from within their ideological framing.   Far from supporting democracy, human dignity, human rights, their framing destroys any durable belief in those. 

I have come to be unsurprised how many American leftists have been enthusiasts for violence, bloodshed (vicariously in most cases, most of the biggest, fattest enthusiasts for violent "action" have been soft-handed cowards) and for dictators under whom they have chosen not to live.  The surprise would be for those who are against those, in that case having to borrow moral positions that their ideological framing is more capable of undermining than providing.