Saturday Night Radio Drama 2 - Philip Davidson - Lollie's Earth Rod

Lollie's Earth Rod

Lollie's Earth Rod  a comedy of errors and terrors by Philip Davison. Like it or not, Enda has to euthanize the infirm family dog, but his senile mother's calling for her pet pooch from her bedroom in the retirement home. Ciarán Hinds is the pained yet po-faced first-born son in Lollie's Earth Rod.  

Written by  Philip Davison. 
Enda, the family ombudsman, was played by Ciarán Hinds

Producer Aidan Mathews

No real dogs were euthanized in the production of this play.  Still more, later. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama 1 - Tracey Martin - Long Story Short

Long Short Story

Karen is one of the lucky ones. Nobody she knows personally has fallen sick from Covid 19. 

While the world outside screeches to a halt Karen turns her focus to what's happening on the other side of the garden fence. 

Like the rest of us, Karen and her husband Gary have found themselves cooped up together like never before. Spending so much time with a partner can either make or break a couple. And while Karen fixates on the noises coming from the neighbours' bedroom Gary is spending his time redecorating the house in a bid to woo his own wife back into theirs. 

Writer Tracy Martin explains that she wanted to write a comedic piece about the times we're living through as after months of stressing about our health and the health of our loved ones, as well as our economic futures, that we could all do with a little light relief. "Our stress levels piqued as we sat and listened to Leo talk about quarantine. Stay indoors. Close the circle. Flatten the curve."

Couples who would normally only meet on the couch, found themselves stride walking together and pouring over lists for the 'big shop’ like it was a military operation, relishing the opportunity to expand their cooking repertoire. 

The highs of the healthy life style were soon met with the lows of the constant house and love silently turned sour as partners wondered if their loved ones were EVER going to stack the dishwasher correctly." "Couples with children stared at the small dictators they had created and wondered how teachers avoided using corporal punishment." "Single people initially feared that they had made the wrong lifestyle choices. 

This fear was quickly quelled as they relished times sliding around in their socks and pants, tossing dirty spoons over their shoulders as they used their fingers to wipe out the sixth chocolate mousse pot."

Written by Tracy Martin Produced by Kevin Reynolds 

It's, as indicated, short.   More later.

Starting Out Always Too Late, Never Too Soon

In 1978, forty-two years ago,  in the preface to what was to become his most influential book to date (I believe he's still publishing new ones) the renowned theologian and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann said:

The following discussion is an attempt to understand what the prophets were up to,if we can be freed from our usual stereotypes of fortunetellers or social protesters. Here it is argued that they were concerned with the most elemental changes in human society and that they understood a great deal great deal about how change is effected.

There is no coincidence in the enormous number of times that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. made reference to the Hebrew Prophets during the struggle of the Civil Rights movement he was such a large figure in.   And he was not alone in that.  I think it is one of the reasons that the Black Churches played the central role, with other churches playing supporting ones,  so many of the most effective figures in the human rights movements have made reference to the Biblical Prophets, they not only exposed the exact same kinds of wrongs we face today, they proposed means of ending those wrongs and they proposed what the results of a successful change in the right direction would look like.  And, perhaps most important of all, that that dynamic would always be in operation,  there would be no successful change in human life that would not be susceptible to reversion.And that, as well, there was no wrong so bad that God would abandon us totally beyond the possibility of redemption.   Secular revolutionary change has been, by and large if not completely less successful and far more immediately prone to reproduce the evils it alleged to overcome.  

Deepest of all change is change within a person.  That change, if it is deep enough, it will make a more reliably durable change than passing a law that can be ignored, interpreted out of any meaning or overturned.   As we are finding and will increasingly find is the case in the United States.  

The prophets understood the possibility of change as linked to the emotional extremities of life.  They understood the strange incongruence between public conviction and personal yearning.  Most of all, they understood the distinctive power of language, the capacity to speak in ways that evoke newness "fresh from the word."  It is argued here that a prophetic understanding of reality is based in the notion that all social reality does spring fresh from the word.  It is the aim of every totalitarian effort to stop the language of newness,  and we are now learning that where such language stops we find humanness diminished.  

These are the reasons I think it's helpful to go through Breuggemann's book The Prophetic Imagination as we are going ever deeper into the same kinds of disaster that the Jewish Prophets addressed, over and over again.  

I have absolute confidence that the reason we are in such trouble is related to not only the secular rejection of that tradition but also the effective abandonment of it within the Churches, the Fundamentalists, the Roman Catholics, the other churches which have aligned themselves with what Breuggemann has called the "totalizing power" I believe borrowing it from a secular writer to whom he gave the credit for it (I don't have time to go through the many lectures posted online to find the one I'm remembering), the focus of Breuggemann's critique and theological discourse, the similarities of the Pharaohic system, the corruptions of the Jerusalem establishment and of modernist capitalism and consumerism.

You don't have to go far into the book to see that the author was speaking prophetically himself.  He began during Lent 1978 by saying 42 years ago:

The Time may be ripe in the church for serious consideration of prophesy as a crucial element in ministry.  To be sure, the student indignation of the sixties is all but gone, but there is at the same time a sobering and a return to the most basic issues of biblical faith. 

And there, indeed was, though not in the as seen on TV and heard on rent-time radio, not so much later that year in the Vatican as John Paul II and Cardinal Ratizinger would take control of it, not so much in it.  But at that point as the popular culture was decidedly not sobering as it seldom does many Protestants, many Catholics, many Jews were definitely taking that sober return that he talked about.   

The mostly and increasingly secular, in most cases I knew of irreligious, iconoclastic "student indignation" had, indeed, petered out.   In the United States it took one of its biggest hits when Richard Nixon craftily and cagily, understanding the basic mind set of so many of those indignant students ended the draft and the possibility that they might find, on graduation, their asses on the line in the war in Southeast Asia.  Secular substitutes for that kind of prophetic action are seldom based in much that is durable other than, perhaps, those that coalesce around a cult figure which the majority either never hear of or find as absurd as they are.  So many of those within that "student indignation" went on to join the totalizing power, Larry Kudlow was a member of the SDS and later of Americans for Democratic Action (surprised to find out that Michael Medved was in that as well).  I could draw you a very long list  of those indignant students who took that same road into the worst of the American fascist movement as, indeed, so many of an earlier generation of them had been Trotskyites in their youth, before they started having the chance to make a lot of money.  There may well be religious apostates into it, the Catholic tradition has certainly stunk with many of them, as can be seen in the Trump regime and the Supreme Court as well as the incumbant members of the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.  

But what Breuggemann sensed within the churches then was real, it was actively prophetic, the Latino and Black Liberation theology movements, related and supporting movements within the Catholic and Protestant churches and within Judaism and other religious groups was real and have been sustained efforts under some of the most seriously discouraging conditions there are.  

Far from the smallest point of interest in the preface to the book is its last paragraphs.  

This book is offered in thanksgiving for a growing number of my sisters who at long last are finding acceptance in ordained ministry.  For me, of course, that distinguished group of colleagues is headed by my wife,  Mary, who pastors in prophetic ways.  It includes a growing number of women who have been my student colleagues at Eden Seminary.

I am growingly aware that this book is different because of the emerging feminine consciousness as it impacts our best theological thinking.  That impacting is concerned not with abrasive crusading but with a different nuancing of all our perceptions.  I do not think that women ministers and theologians are the first to have discovered the realities of grief and amazement in our lives, but they have helped us see them as important dimensions in prophetic reality.  In many ways these sisters have permitted me to see what I otherwise might have missed.  For that I am grateful - and amazed. 

I will mention that that new stream of prophetic witness has been disruptive even of the prophetic voice within that same period.   The great Black Liberation theologian James Cone's great influence has not been immune from the criticism or, I'd think more productive disagreement with that of the great Womanist theologian Dolores Williams.   Prophetic witness will always have that feature, it is clearly part of  "the strange incongruence between public conviction and personal yearning" or between the differences in the human experiences and the informed, passionately moral conclusions based on that experience.  But more important than those differences are the common purpose and understanding of them.  I am in my early reading of Womanist theology and I haven't read nearly enough Black Liberation and other Liberation Theology.   I wasted most of those 42 years when I should have been reading them, as I would bet you Breuggemann and many other white males were reading them.   I have to say that of the areas of intellectual life I've seen, theologians are among the best and most widely read of the lot of them.  It is one of the most intellectually engaged of all the disciplines and one of the most serious about life outside of its specialty.  

A geezer my age should not try to do anything after not sleeping all night.   We're not teenagers going to school the day after staying up all night reading.   But that was yesterday, today's a new day. 

Really bad night leading to a slow start,  I hope to post something substantial later.   

Speaking of Essential Constitutional Amendments

I pray that if she's still with us that Ruth Bader Ginsburg retires immediately on Joe Biden becoming president.  And given how superstitious I am about jinxing things with optimism, it takes the highest degree of grim pessimism to say it. 

If she makes it to January 21 and has not submitted her resignation by January 22, I move that RBG be forced to go into retirement.  I can't take this anxiety for another year. I love her, I adore and respect her but I can't take this much longer.  No doubt she's as sharp as someone half her age, she's wise with her years, the welfare of the country can't hang on an 87 year old with a history of health problems holding on for seven more months. 

High on that list of things that must be changed in the blasted Constitution is putting a 10 year term limit on Supreme Court seats.  It is absurd to have it as it is now.  A fixed term matched with a lifetime recusal from having anything to do with any matters which they had before them in their time on the court.   AND STRICT DEFINITIONS OF WHAT CONSTITUTES A CONFLICT OF INTEREST.  

And that only begins what needs to be changed about the Supreme Court. 

Max Roach - We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (1960)

Abbey Lincoln, voice

Coleman Hawkins, sax

Booker Little, trumpet

Julian Prieste, trombone

James Schenck, bass

Max Roach, drums- composer

I envy young people who are hearing this the first time, I wish I could feel that feeling again.  Though I also like what repeated hearings bring.  This kind of art stands up to a lot more repetition though I don't dare listen to it too often.  I never want it to get old for anyone. 

High On The List Of Constitutional Amendments That Will Have To Be Put Into Place If We Are Not To Be Ruled By Gangsters

Does anyone think it is at all unreasonable to suspect Donald Trump is and will be in the business of selling pardons, commutations, etc. as he has been in the business of selling other powers so disastrously given to him by the Electoral College, James Comey's intervention in the 2016 election and the quarter-century lie campaign against Hillary Clinton in the corporate and play-lefty media? 

Thinking about that, can anyone in the world who saw his odd and inexplicable pardon of convicted  Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, convicted of using his position to try to sell a Senate seat possibly imagine that the life-long grifter, sleaze, con-artist and crook, Trump, with the crimes of Blagojevich laid out before him,  didn't think of the possibility of selling presidential actions, including the one he was in the process of executing?   

I suspect that there are a long list of those who Trump is hoping to say " I'd like you to do us a favor, though" to when the topic of pardons, commutations, clemency come up and in a lot of those,  Mnuchin, Chao, Ross, Bernhardt, etc. I can well imagine there will be a "gentleman's agreement" or an outright bribe paid or some "favor" given or implied or asked for in return as each pardon is sought and granted.  

The pardon power of the president is a hold-over from a time when there was marginally more stock put in honor or really,  the mere appearance or conventional pretense of it than there is today.   With Trump, as in the previous five Republican presidencies and, certainly after the Gingrich speakership in the Congress and that of Trent Lott in the Senate, that is gone, never to be recovered without a massive and not to be expected reform of the American character.  I doubt it will come back without a reform of Hollywood and anyone holding out for that would more rationally expect Donald Trump to fall off his golf cart and rise up a converted follower of the Gospel.   

The pardon power has to be removed from the president and others in regard to wrong doing that A. concerns members of his own administration, campaign, donors, etc.  B. from members of his extended family.  C. others as those appear,  that removal of powers has to be removed from Constitutional granite and made contingent on the refusal of Congress to block them whenever there is a possiblity of self-interest in granting the pardon.  To make pardons, in all cases exempt from review and reversal is insane.   I have to wonder how many of those Founders who approved it in that form anticipated, perhaps, needing one in their future activities, for themselves. 

Anti-nepotism laws have to be strenghtened and put into effect otherwise a Trump can put his criminal brats and their criminal, ganged up spouses into office from which they can commit crimes against the public interest, depending on daddy to give them a pardon at the end of the day.   Ivanka and Jared and Don (Diaper Don) jr. and the rest of Trump's extended crime family should be the final straw in that matter.   It was one of the worst things that the Kennedy family did when John Kennedy made his brother Attorney General.   Whether or not Robert Kennedy did a good job, there were certainly others who would have done as good and probably many who would have done much better.   It opened a door that should never have been opened for future presidents to do what Trump has done to such evil effect.  

I won't get into the prospect of Trump pardoning his criminal gangster Attorney General,  Barr.   No, actually, I will get into it.  I fully believe he is covering up for the crimes of his own family and likely himself - I fully believe that Jeffrey Epstein was procuring underage girls for Barr's father and likely others as he got his start in crime.  I believe covering that up is why Epstein ended up dead in prison and his pimpess is reasonably believed to be in danger of hers.  I hope the gal, witnessing her own father's crimes and "death" is smart enough to have some evidence stashed with the grantee that upon her death or disappearance it will be sent to Rachel Maddow or other members of the press.   It's what I'd do if I'd led her life of crime.   She shouldn't rely on a presidential pardon keeping her alive.  I hope she's not that stupid that she is relying on that to keep her from committing "suicide". 

I'm the target of another spam bot so I'm closing down all comments on this blog to see if it will go away.   That's how it will be for the time being.

This one is pornographic, alas, not as unintendedly hilarious as the last such one which made such absurdly improbable promises. 

I'm Not Making This Up, You Know - "there is no reality independent of the choice of measurement"

In 1967, Simon Kochen and Ernst Specker proved mathematically that even for a single quantum object, where entanglement is not possible, the values that you obtain when you measure its properties depend on the context. So the value of property A, say, depends on whether you chose to measure it with property B, or with property C. In other words, there is no reality independent of the choice of measurement.

Quantum magic trick shows reality is what you make it:  New Scientist June 22, 2011

"the resulting statistics could only be explained if the combination of properties that was tested was affecting the value of the property being measured"

The article is about experiential confirmation of that statement. 

They found that the resulting statistics could only be explained if the combination of properties that was tested was affecting the value of the property being measured. “There is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure about a system has [an independent] reality,” Zeilinger concludes.

Well, if what you get as a result is dependent on what you do include in consideration, there is no sense in assuming what you do not measure does not have an independent reality.   It seems to me they want to have it both ways.   If that were not a possibility, you wonder exactly what the significance of their experiment is supposed to be.  I would wonder if it would not be rather pointless.  Still:

Steinberg is impressed: “This is a beautiful experiment.” If previous experiments testing entanglement shut the door on hidden variables theories, the latest work seals it tight. “It appears that you can’t even conceive of a theory where specific observables would have definite values that are independent of the other things you measure,” adds Steinberg.

Kochen, now at Princeton University in New Jersey, is also happy. “Almost a half century after Specker and I proved our theorem, which was based on a [thought] experiment, real experiments now confirm our result,” he says.

Niels Bohr, a giant of quantum physics, was a great proponent of the idea that the nature of quantum reality depends on what we choose to measure, a notion that came to be called the Copenhagen interpretation. “This experiment lends more support to the Copenhagen interpretation,” says Zeilinger.

If the scientists are telling us that, it stand to reason that if you are going to define "reality" as what your experiment shows you and that choice is a direct product of the choices you make in HOW you look at things, then it's clear that that "reality" can tell you nothing about those things you chose to leave out of your consideration or what your "reality" would be if you included other things.   Note, some of those other things may not be testable with the methods of science, in which case science couldn't tell you about them.   That should not have seemed like an outlandish observation, it's been suspected for quite a while now. Why ideologues within science and the amateur sci-rangers think they can pretend the results they get based on the choices of what to include and to exclude can give you a comprehensive view of reality is worth asking, though it's a psychological, not a scientific matter.   The science has been rather clear on that for a while now,the emotional preferences of atheist-materialist scientists haven't caught up and I expect they won't.

The Laws Delay As A Tactic Engaged In By Those With The Insolence Of Office, And Their Spurns

It was certainly one of the most astute of lists that usually pass by notice and consideration in the costuming and posturing and staging probably 95 times out of 100 that it's heard. The listing of the "whips and scorns" we experience in life.

. . . of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes

Other than the pangs of despiz'd love, it sounds like the typical results of what you get from the American "justice" system.   And I'd bet there's plenty of "despiz'd love" involved, look at how the Supreme Court is helping by "the law's delay" Trump get away with what it convicted Michael Cohen of.   Stormy sure as hell doesn't seem to have enjoyed it.  

Is there any office more insolent than that of Supreme Court Justice?  I mean, how many of them were famous for their modesty - other than that most of them were very modest of wisdom, intelligence or moral fiber.  I doubt you're going to find more "proud man's contumely" than on the Republican side of the Roberts Court, most of them drip with it and it's typical of that rank of their profession, both on the judicial and the academic scholastic side of it. 

The author of those lines is often noted to have had an incredibly deep understanding of the law and legal proceedings, he certainly predicted the character of the American law, even as it pretends to do better than that. 

Would You Look For A Good Cup Of Coffee Using A Geiger Counter?

Is it a whole week since I recommended the Youtube channel of the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder?   I don't understand why you object to my point that when you make the rules of how you are to look for something, excluding types of explanations of things, that when you come to your conclusions, you can't rationally claim that the results you got with your exclusionary methods are useful to reason back as to make statements from your conclusion about the thing you excluded.   

If you exclude considerations of God in your method, a. what you find will only tell you about things you could find without considering God, b. those things you do find cannot, then, lead you to any rationally coherent statement about God. C. The findings of physics, made under those rules, should not find anything about God anymore than they should which political candidate to vote for.  They might inform your thinking about those things but they cannot, unaided by a far wider consideration of experience, get you to an answer of questions outside of their formal discourse.   I think I was fairly clear in stating that last Monday.

Another is contained in her repetition of the contention that belief in God is not warranted because God is "not necessary" for the findings of physics.   There are any number of problems with that claim, not least of which is that science, including physics, is a human construct which formally excludes consideration of the question of God just as it excludes consideration of questions of morality.  When you start out that way, by excluding things, it is no great surprise when your chosen method cannot support the contention that those things are real or true - even as you formally proclaim that reality or truth are not the things you are trying to establish.   She does both in the course of her videos, makes those true statements about the formal intentions of science but she, then, also tries to use them to debunk the existence of God. 

And I do think it was an apt point to make after pointing out that the ideology of so many scientist-atheist-materialists, scientism, that science is the exclusive method of finding the truth, expressed by that major figure in all three,  the logician Bertrand Russell,  in the logically incoherent claim "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know."  Well, science cannot tell you that so it is a matter of his faith, not science.  You wonder why he either didn't get that glaringly obvious problem with his statement or why, getting it, he said it anyway.  

It is exactly like the dangerous stupidity in the biological and life sciences of claiming to look for the existence of moral absolutes with the agreed-to, socially constructed methods of science when those methods, by agreement, exclude questions of morality.   It doesn't mean that those don't exist, it means your methodology, excluding those from the start, failing to find them, cannot then claim that they aren't there though that claim will get the support of those who didn't want to find them, anyway.  Any "morality" you find or discover or discuss under the reigning orthodox framing of biology will carry the distinct and controlling character of the doctrine of natural selection, lots of people will end up getting killed or dying of neglect. 

If you don't think that's a dangerous practice, you should read the behavioral science of the Nazis, of the Darwinists and of their modern manifestation in contemporary, university based and book tour supported "ethics" which seems to me to be little more than engaged in making lists of who it is "ethical" to kill or to let die or to languish in misery out of questions of economic utility to those who have control of wealth.  Economists who play biologists are some of the worst, as can be seen in the influence of Richard A. Epstein, the Hoover Institute - New York University Law School on the Trump non-policy of dealing with our present pandemic.  His reasoning in supporting his credibility in something which he clearly has no credibility in (as can be seen from the actual results as compared to his projections) plays on just that question of what you get depending on what your beginning rules of research include. 

No, look, I’m not an empiricist, but, again, let me just be clear to you, because you’re much too skeptical. The evolutionary component has not been taken into account in these models, and so before one is so dismissive, what you really need to do is to get somebody who’s an expert on this stuff to look at the evolutionary theory and explain why a principle of natural selection doesn’t apply here.

What I’m doing here is nothing exotic. I’m taking standard Darwinian economics—standard economic-evolutionary theory out of Darwin—and applying it to this particular case. And, if that’s wrong, somebody should tell me. But what happens is I just get these letters from people saying, “You’re not an expert. The H1 virus differs from this one in the following way.” What I don’t get from anybody is a systematic refutation which looks at the points parameter by parameter.

In this case he was whining because the results he liked aren't the results you get if you start out with the ground rules experts in epidemiology have experience of knowing work to make predictions that work based on experience.  That anyone would believe someone with Epstein's CV would have more credibility than Dr. Fauci is certainly not a matter of rational consideration. 

I would think it's worth thinking about the extent to which morality is a tacitly acknowledged framing under which epidemiologists are motivated to do their work as opposed to libertarian law professors playing biologist.   I have, repeatedly, discussed the wider framing of Darwinism as based in the class interests of Darwin and the adopters of his theory of natural selection which is his own adaptation of the pathologically amoral class-based economics theory of the notorious Thomas Malthus, who certainly excluded the Gospel of Jesus from economics which are a total and complete inversion of it.  He did that though his "living" was as the parson of an Anglican church, which at that period was about as much a guarantee of taking the teachings of Jesus as true as a hack libertarian law prof who is part of the Hoover gang taking them seriously true in 2020. 

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As I said,  I admire much of Sabine Hossenfelder's skepticism of the scene in physics and cosmology of the past 40 years even as she is a figure within that scene.   I think the questions she and others like her, such as Peter Woit, are important.  But I think they generally miss the point I'm trying to make here.  You cannot use science to engage with questions concerning the truth or falseness of the reality of God, or the truth of God's existence because the rules of science exclude those.   

More seriously, for science, the study of physical reality, to ignore the problem that your ground rules will exclude not only possible realities that cannot be found through them but in even addressing matters you have excluded from your study before you even start, is a serious oversight of scientists.  And those exclusions are as often a matter of cultural hegemony as anything else.  If you start out with rejecting the possibility that the universe is not eternal but had an absolute beginning, you get things like the editor of Nature magazine railing against the possibility of the Big Bang as late as the 1990s on purely ideological grounds.  You get the refusal to look at the rigorous research into parapsychology - the most rigorously controlled, criticized, corrected, (yet getting persisting positive results) research into human minds currently available EVEN AS SCIENCE ACCEPTED EVEN THE HUGE PERCENTAGE OF QUESTIONABLE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLAP TRAP INCLUDING THAT ENORMOUS MAJORITY OF IT WHICH COULD NOT BE REPLICATED - on the a priori ideology of materialists that it can't be true.  Yet those incredibly highly controlled, critisized, analyzed AND REPLICATED experiments continue to yield not only strong statistical evidence of the phenomena studied, but very strong statistical evidence of it. 

If life came about and evolved by the intent of God, if, in fact, the "fine tuning" of our one and only universe is a result of the same intent, then science as conducted under its classical and present rules could not possibly find those realities because their rules would exclude what you would need to know to find that.  That is even if the goal of science, informing human minds of such things, can find those truths.  It's not outside of the realm of possibility that that is among the "laws" that Eddington said may be outside of the capacity of human beings to understand using the means of understanding available to us.  I'm tempted to give the many instances in which the Jewish scriptures inform us that we should expect such inability when it comes to the ultimate question of God. 

Science is not capable of telling us why the universe is the way it is, it can tell you things that come after that, why, within the way things are things happen, it cannot go back before that starts and tell you why things are the way they are.  It can't even tell you if there is a why involved.  And there is much about the physical universe of our experience that it is probably if not certainly incapable of telling us.  It cannot tell us if all of that experience is bounded within those things explainable by physics, though that everything could be reduced to the rules of physics is certainly one of the undemonstrated controlling faiths of the ideology of materialism.  I would suspect that was the article of faith that led Russell to make his logically, self-internally irrational claim about the power of science to reveal the entirety of reality to human beings. 

Even if they could tell you how the first organism, in the realm of improbabilities far higher than the improbabilities of cosmology, formed by random-chance, it couldn't tell you why things were as they were to allow the conditions under which random-chance could have allowed for that possibility or why, given that incredible probability our planet has life instead of no life, which would have been the probable outcome in every alternative scenario that science can possibly address. Yet atheist-materialists and, especially, those devoted to scientism constantly address the question of the "necessity of God" for the results found with a methodology that excludes God.  You wonder if a scientific method that included God would be useful for excluding God. Though it wouldn't be the same thing.   I wonder how well it would work for the human purposes science was invented to serve. 

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I was curious about my title, googling "geiger counter good cup of coffee" and found that scientists are about as concerned with coffee drinking as I am in the morning when I write most of my posts. Many of them said coffee was missing from the hit.   

Other than that there was a site that claimed you could turn a Mr. Coffee into a geiger counter.  Which seems just wrong to me, using a coffee maker for some other purpose.  Just wrong.