Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims and Paul Elliott - Scenes From A Zombie Apocalypse

Scenes From A Zombie Apocalypse  

 

When the world goes off track, sometimes children understand it best. A persuasive modern horror story.

Cast

Bo ..... Orla Pearce

Ellie ..... Eliza Pearce

Bernadette Strange ..... Laura Elphinstone

David Chase ..... David Sturzaker

PC Blake ..... Nicholas Murchie

PC Ackie ..... Marilyn Nnadebe

Fiona ..... Jessica Turner

 

Never expected to post a zombie show but I never expected to find one with the excellent katie Hims as a writer, either. I'm not that big on horror, either. Figure if I want that all I have to do is look at the news.

Dave Holland Quintet - Last Minute Man

 

Dave Holland - bass

Robin Eubanks - trombone 

Chris Potter - saxophones 

Steve Nelson - vibraphone 

Nate Smith - drums

Sins Of My Old Age

Part of my problem is that I've been looking for a more strenuous version of cardio exercises than the walking in place I've done all winter.  I've lost quite a bit of weight during the quarantine and I wasn't too robust before then.  Wanting something to build myself up I got inspired to try the old fashioned Burpee exercise stand with feet shoulder length apart - squat with hands on the floor- kick the legs back to a plank - kick back to a squat, stand (or hop).   Let's just say I could do them but I forgot for a day I'm not fifty anymore.  I'd hoped to reach a milestone before my next birthday and figure if I tried to keep with my goal I might get a tombstone instead.   I'm still going to do them, just not like I was stupid enough to try yesterday.   

 

Maybe I should have gone with rope jumping instead. 

I'm never going to be an Iron Wolf (as seen on YouTube), not in this incarnation.  I hope if I have to do that I'm not foolish enough to cover myself with tatts.  He'd be a good looking kid if he didn't have those. 

To Say It Is Less Than To Live It, To Live It Is Not The Final End Either

THIS HAS TO BE one of the weirdest Lents I've ever had, I don't remember ever feeling so listless before.  Can't seem to put my mind to one thing.    Well, when all else fails, go with today's texts. But first, here's a little starter.

MS. TIPPETT:

So we’ve named this modern problem with creeds and some of the problems with the way we’ve addressed that. But there is this tension between the creeds. And as you point out, I mean, even the oldest creeds we have did not come out of the mouth of Jesus Christ, right?

DR. PELIKAN:

The only creed that came out of His mouth was the creed of Judaism.

MS. TIPPETT:

Right. OK.

DR. PELIKAN:

The Shema.

The Gospel for today in the Catholic lectionry is Matthew 12:28-34 a story of a Jewish intellectual, and legal expert, a Scribe, asking Jesus which of the many commandments is the greatest, Jesus answers him with the closest thing to a creed in his religion, the requirement to love the One God with all of our hearts, souls, mind and strength. He adds that the second one is to love others as we love ourselves.

I'm kind of listless, as I said, and tired so I'm going to just rely on today's National Catholic Reporter commentary on this Gospel called Jewish Jesus:

The prayer, found in Deuteronomy 6 and Numbers 15, is part of Moses’ instruction to the people as they are about to enter the Promised Land. It is the foundation, centering text and organizing principle of the Covenant that places God first in their lives. It contains the whole Law. It is the basis for “right relationship” and the moral code that governs the people’s lives with God and one another. A Jew who obeyed this first commandment need not worry about offending God or straying from the intimate web of beliefs and practices that defined and protected Jewish identity.

The scene concludes as Jesus tells the exhilarated scribe that he is “not far from the Kingdom of God.” To suggest that he was incomplete may seem an affront, but Jesus is telling him that he is still on the threshold of an even deeper relationship with God. To know and recite the Sh’ma was less than to live it, and living it was only the penultimate step to surrendering oneself to the intimacy Jesus was offering by virtue of his Incarnation, the gift of divine mutuality, true friendship between a human being and the divine Being that is God.

The stunning implications of what is being offered by Jesus and through Jesus may be the reason the text ends with the curious statement that “no one dared ask him any more questions.” The scribe has experienced human solidarity with Jesus but also knows he has just experienced a theophany. 

 

The point made by Pat Morrin goes farther than the text of Jesus's version of the Shema (however of the many ways that gets transliterted) as I've used it for prayer-meditation to living it and even that isn't to reach the end in "surrendering oneself to the intimacy Jesus was offering." It's interesting that in the interview at the first link that the scholar of creeds, Jaroslav Pelikan seems to unite the Jewish and Islamic practice and understanding as opposed to the Christian understandings with our may, at times contradictory creeds that people have felt strongly enough over that Christian unity has been fractured through one or two words. I think that to surrender to what Morrin talks about has to get beyond the discourse of rational cogitation and authoritative declaration. But that's for another time. It's no wonder that no one dared discuss it more with Jesus at that time.  

Shouldn't He Be Saying Offensive Things About Women Over There Instead

HA, considering I've mentioned Dr. Seuss about twice in blog posts on this blog, since 2012,  one of which was to mock Ted Cruz reading the beginning of Green Eggs And Ham to say he didn't like a Democratic policy - mocking him for not reading to the end of the book where the guy finds out he actually likes what it took the entire book to get him to try.  Considering that asses home blog is obsessed with the Republican distraction pop-kulcha BS to the extent that's what he and they discuss endlessly and futilely it's kind of rich for him to accuse me of being obsessed with it.  Endlessly discussing pop-kulcha crap of their own obsession, otherwise.    Checking, the other mention here of Dr. S. was making fun of Trump's proposed statue park of "heroes" in which I figured that dear old commie (and not even much of one, I think that poster I saw was a paid job) wrote the only book Trump ever finished in his life. 

Until I finally looked her up I didn't know what the kid named Brittny Spears did, having merely a vague awareness that she probably was a movie-TV "actor" or celebrity or pop-singer, I was merely aware of the name.   I still couldn't tell you I was hearing her if I heard her or seeing her if I saw her picture.  Nor do I care. 

Eschaton is a home for liars, snobs,  immature and  lazy people who obsess on trivia,  a catch drain for white-collar time-wasters of a generally lower mid-brow mind-set.  Apparently all you have to do is point out that Woody has a history of screwing around with women young enough to be his daughter and younger, making movies about it and then trying to get the kid he hired to be in the movies with to go on trips with him without supervision.  That in the discussion she, as a teenager, was the one adult in the room (her parents were as adolescent as Woody, apparently) was quite a revelation of the grotesque immaturity of that milieu to me.  There, that should give him something to piss off the gals over there over. 

In all the fuss over the neutering of potatoes, plastic ones, at that, you wonder why the Republican-fascists and FOX have ignored the unremarked on unisex of Cootie Bugs.  How come they're worked up over plastic potatoes that don't have gender when they ignore the genderfluidity and ambiguity of the plastic bugs. 

MR. BIDEN (Bring My Vaccine) - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody

 

Wednesday After The Third Sunday In Lent - Trying To Figure Out How Little You've Got To Do And Finding Out Doing That Is Far More Demanding

TODAY'S Catholic lectionary has this for today's Gospel:

Jesus said to his disciples:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.

I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.

Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,

not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter

will pass from the law,

until all things have taken place.

Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments

and teaches others to do so

will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven.

But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments

will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.”

Matthew 5:17-19

The first thing to notice is that, by this, Jesus accepts and insists on the truth of the Jewish religion and to insist that it is eternal and an eternal requirement on those who would follow him.  Would that the entire history of Christianity had followed that part of his teaching, the world would be a different and better place if it had.

 

The first temptation for me is to first wonder exactly what Jesus meant by "The Law" and "The Prophets" as a way of narrowing what we had to avoid breaking, how much we could get away with. Not even the priests and rabbis of his time agreed on that, though I think it's obvious that Jesus was of the side that Hillel represented, if not explicitly then according to the substance of his teaching.   My temptation boils down to wondering what we have to obey and, hardest of all, advocate for other people. I think the rest of the Gospels and the earliest writings of those who had a direct experience of Jesus or who knew those who had had that experience can give us some real hints as to what that meant. 

 

As Christianity has been obsessed primarily with matters of sex, and only secondarily with other things, it's necessary to point out that Jesus didn't seem to be as obsessed with what Walter Brueggemann sometimes refers to as "pelvic theology" (I can't remember who it was he quoted when using that phrase) as just about the entire two-thousand years of Christianity was. 

 

He did seem to have the deepest compassion for those who were abandoned by a marriage being broken up which he related to the ban on adultery quite strongly. I suspect that just as in him using the phrase "Our Father" in the Our Father, that what to us might seem a far simpler and more restricted category of life and experience and fascination (who's having sex with who) was, in the context of the classical Mediterranean cultures, a far more extensive treatment of  life support in its broadest terms. 

I've mentioned before how John Dominic Crossan noted how surprised he was when he realized how much of the New Testament was taken up with talking about food, what Jesus ate, what his disciples ate, the context of them eating what they did, with whom they ate, etc. One of the main fractures in earliest Christianity was about the issue of Peter and Paul and whether or not they ate with the uncircumcised, the gentiles.  And it's not just in the New Testament, the entire history of the Children of Israel starts with Abraham providing hospitality of The Lord (who, interestingly enough, seems to come in three persons, something I don't think I've ever read anyone comment on) telling Sarah to make some bread for them.   

 

In current affluence, which may be a lot more temporary than the experience of just about anyone reading this would lead them to expect, we don't really understand how much The Law and The Prophets is motivated by the desire to have poor people, those who are excluded, those who have not an have what they have taken from them have food and those other necessities of life provided to them on the basis of giving them a decent life, a life that is sufficient for them to experience the love of God. You can compare the appalling idea of providing the most meager sustenance for the "deserving poor" in the obsessions of the British Fabians and how that alternate, rationalistic, would be scientific ersatz replacement for revealed religion on which the Poor Laws were reformed and then transformed into the British Welfare state, one of those things which, along with the French Revolution, English language lefties and liberals are supposed to genuflect to and admire. That materialistic and phony replacement ALWAYS devolves into and hinges on the utility of those so sustained for the state or, under the disgusting British class system, the rich, something which American Republican-fascists want to be the law here as their slave-holder and Jim Crow predecessors, those who ran paid American industry under wage slavery had it for most of our history under the United States Constitution.

As noted last week, Paul's obsession with matters sexual, when read in the wider context of the letters he said those things in, his entire writings accepted as authentic, the wider context that includes the rest of the New Testament, The Law and the Prophets does not mean the same thing, that the extent to which Paul condemns or cautions against sins of sex he puts those in a wider context that includes the luxury of the affluent and those who aspire to be affluent - things which at no time I'm aware of were viewed or treated in the same way though Paul certainly mentioned sins of sexuality in no harsher terms. Paul, in his presumed chaste celibacy - Elizabeth Johnson and Susannah Heschel both noted that it's hard to imagine anyone being able to live with him and his perfectionism - could not imagine the possibility of LGBTQ relationships of committed faithfulness that included sex which was not exploitative, was responsible and mutually respectful, that did not include all of the destructive inequalities and exploitation and legal supremacy that characterized and still does characterize even faithful straight marriages. I will point out that even many LGBTQ people have a hard time imagining them, some of the loudest voices that demanded "marriage equality" denied that gay men were biologically capable of forming such faithful marriages. So why should a presumably straight Paul have been expected to be able to imagine them two thousand years ago? 

 

The matter of creating mutually supportive, mutually enriching relationships in life is the center of The Law, The Prophets, The Gospel, etc.  Jesus, joining with the tradition of Hillel, said it in the Golden Rule which he clearly identified as the summation of "The Law and The Prophets".   And it is still, in its full meaning, extended as to cover those who the sun comes up on and the rain falls for, is, in every way, a larger obligation than even the most legalistic of would be champions of "the law" would ever hold themselves to.  It would certainly not make them money from the "faithful" or keep them on good terms with billionaire and millionaire patrons.   Though it certainly would be as unpopular with even  many of those LGBTQ people who might identify as of the monotheistic tradition who want marriage with outside benefits.

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

Totally outside of this, I think we need the ability of two adults to form civil unions with the legal benefits extended to married couples, I recall back in the 00's during the brawl over marriage equality I said I wished the state would totally butt out of questions of marriage, instituting something like civil unions on top of marriage which would, then, be a private matter.   

The limitation of such recognized, protected, privileged unions among consenting adults to those who have sex with each other leaves out many people who need the protection given to people who have sex with each other (even when they have sex with other people, as well).  I remembered reading that in France which recognized such civil unions, the largest numbers of those were between mothers and unmarried daughters who lived together in mutually supportive households.  

That's something I really wish would move on the state and national level.  Worrying about my old LGBTQ and other musician friends who are in a leaking, sinking boat that I could soon be in myself has made this newly relevant to me.

A Very Fine Article Especially If You Take Some Precautions

TODAY SEEMS to be Michael Sean Winters day here because it's through another of his articles that I got to the fine and provocative article of Michael Luo at the New Yorker The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind, which gives a far deeper insight into the anti-intellectualism and depravity of a large majority of "white evangelicals" in the United States in history.  I would recommend reading it more than a couple of times and following up on his citations, the extent that that is possible for you.  I'll need to get to a good library, eventually.

I would caution on a few points in that I think the anti-intellectualism of the "white evangelicals" is far from a universal trait among them, it being no more a given than the general stereotype of them as being Republican-fascists of the worst kind.  There are many evangelicals who are honest intellectuals, many who are honest readers and adherents of reality and many who would be classified as moderate to liberal and, in a few cases I'm aware of, radical in terms of contemporary American politics.

I would also caution against taking the genuinely identified "evangelical anti-intellectualism" as being an anomaly peculiar to them or to any backward or dangerous religious movement.  The entirely secular realm of American life is at times and to some measure as prone to anti-intellectualism as it is to political retrogression, racism, bigotry, sexism, anti-LGBTQ activity.  THAT A LOT OF THAT ON BEHALF OF SECULAR REPUBLICANS IS AN ATTEMPT FOR THEM TO HARNESS THE POWER OF EVANGELICAL RACISTS, HATERS OF LGBTQ, SEXISTS, ETC IS CERTAINLY NOT SOMETHING THAT SHOULD BE REGARDED AS A VIRTUE ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT THEY DON'T FEEL THAT HATRED, THEMSELVES.   If anything their cynical manipulation of a force of hateful ignorance makes them the greater sinners.   Lindsay Graham should be the poster child of that as should many gay and lesbian Republicans, libertarians, etc.  who are in no way Christian and certainly don't count themselves as "evangelicals". 

At the end of 2016 got into a number of online brawls over the PEW style broad-brush painting of the members of religious denominations and those "groups" such as "white evangelicals" that such outfits invent, one thinks not infrequently to serve an unstated agenda.   I pointed out that even among the groups most blamed for putting Trump in office that there were often between a fifth and quarter in the PEW numbers who voted for Hillary Clinton and in the ones with the highest percentage who voted for Clinton, there were not insignificant numbers who voted for Trump, including that phony category invented by an ideological anti-religious hack, "nones" which PEW adopted, among the atheists and agnostics among them.   I noted that there was a more or less organized "Evangelicals For Clinton" not that they ever got much news time or online discussion.  

As an LGBTQ guy with a long, long time to see things and the problems with stereotyping,  I reject the kind of blanket categorization and definition that the pseudo-sciences of sociology, polling, surveys and anthropology have made the bigotry acceptable among the educated population.   In that the "white evangelicals" form of thinking isn't all that much different from the typical thinking of secular Americans, it's just they apply it in a different way to other "others". 

"Pro-Life" Bishops For Getting Hundreds Of Thousands Dead

THE TOO-LONG papacy of John Paul II continues to blight the Catholic Church and through it and the billionaire-millionaire enemies of democracy and reality, the United States and countries around the world.

One of the latest of those is the campaign of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops to thwart the Covid vaccination efforts of the Biden administration through two of JPII's appointees, who are in direct opposition to what good Pope Francis and more rational members of the hierarchy have said about the available Covid-19 vaccines. I will mention, in case anyone is in doubt, the neo-Integralist billionaire-millionaire conference of Bishops really hates Pope Francis and seldom loses a chance to attack him, in fact though maintaining a transparent and dishonest smokescreen of support.

The fine journalist Michael Sean Winters tells it far more moderately than I'm going to:

Last week, the Gospel reading for Tuesday of the second week of Lent began:

Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples, saying,

"The scribes and the Pharisees

have taken their seat on the chair of Moses.

Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you,

but do not follow their example.

For they preach but they do not practice.

They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry

and lay them on people's shoulders,

but they will not lift a finger to move them.

-Matthew 23:1-4

Apparently, some of our bishops lost their lectionary that day and did not get to read that Gospel or, if they read it, could not comprehend how it applied to themselves. Because that same day, Archbishop Joseph Naumann, chair of the Pro-Life Activities Committee at the U.S. bishops' conference, and Bishop Kevin Rhoades, chair of the Doctrine Committee, issued a joint statement stating, "Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines raised concerns because an abortion-derived cell line was used for testing them, but not in their production. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, however, was developed, tested and is produced with abortion-derived cell lines raising additional moral concerns." After quoting the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's explicit judgment that it is "morally acceptable to receive Covid-19 vaccines that have used cell lines from aborted fetuses" they applied their moral analysis to a situation that does not exist and in a manner so skewed it is difficult to comprehend:

However, if one can choose among equally safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines, the vaccine with the least connection to abortion-derived cell lines should be chosen. Therefore, if one has the ability to choose a vaccine, Pfizer or Moderna's vaccines should be chosen over Johnson & Johnson's.

Call me silly, but you would think the chair of a pro-life committee would be a little bit more fulsome about encouraging people to get vaccinated from a virus that has killed more than half a million of his fellow Americans and a like number of people in other countries. The best these two committee chairs could manage was to say that "given the world-wide suffering that this pandemic is causing, we affirm again that being vaccinated can be an act of charity that serves the common good." Can be?

The bishops' conference statement followed statements from the New Orleans Archdiocese and a few other dioceses, including one from Bismarck, North Dakota, that said the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was "morally compromised" and that Catholics should not receive nor dispense it. The conference and these individual bishops were raising a scruple in people's minds where none existed. They were tying up a heavy burden and laying it on the people's shoulders. It was a moral version of the Benedict Option, and it was crazy.

Crazy, but not too difficult to understand. If you think abortion is really the only moral issue that matters in public life, you might not notice that a statement about taking a vaccine to help guard against a deadly pandemic is a little light on encouraging people to get vaccinated. If you turn to LifeSiteNews for some sense of what concerns the faithful, you would think this issue of the vaccines being morally compromised was a burning one. If you think abortion is the only important moral issue, you split hairs that need not be split and do not think twice about sowing confusion where it is helpful to eradicate confusion.

Bishop Rhoades followed up his joint statement with Naumann with a video in which he stated, "The Vatican has made it clear that all the COVID vaccines, recognized as clinically safe and effective, can be used in good conscience. There is no moral need to turn down a vaccine." That was all that had to be said. I wanted to shout "Punto!" or "Be done with it!"

You could not help thinking that the bishop's video looked like a hostage video: Rhoades was sitting in a dark room, appeared like he was under duress, and he was reading from a script. And I could not help but wonder why Archbishop Naumann has not made a similar video statement.

Over at EWTN, Raymond Arroyo gave one of his most despicable performances to date. He interviewed Fr. Tad Pacholczyk from the National Catholic Bioethics Center and they both seemed relatively uninterested in the principal moral question — what does the vaccine accomplish? — because they really just wanted to focus on the link to abortion.

Oddly, I don't remember any of these assholes saying things like this when it was the Trump regime who were trying to take credit for the vaccines, I have every faith that if he were president they wouldn't have discovered these moral qualms concerning them. 

With this the Raymond Burke wing of the USCCB hasn't just jumped the shark, they've jumped the entire class of chondrichthyes  

 

This is such a morally irresponsible atrocity that whatever credibility they may have not already lost through the decades of scandal in the wake of the scandal ridden JPII papacy should be declared forever lost to them.

It's time for Catholics to stop giving their support to Bishops and Archbishops and their diocese until these evil old men are replaced with people who aren't liars, hypocrites, bearers of false witness and the servants of neo-fascist billionaires and millionaires of the type that JPII installed. He may have had some control over their worst inclinations since he installed them to be yes-men to him and his chosen successor, the almost as disastrous Benedict XVI. With them feeling free to do whatever they want, taking advantage of the Vatican II collegiality that Pope Francis has tried to revive to attack the Pope who set them free of the Wojtyla style dictatorship of the end of the 20th century, the American bishops installed during those decades are with few exceptions worse than ever. The antics of Raymond Burke and so many other sitting bishops and cardinals may be something that Pope Francis is willing to tolerate but We The People are under no obligation to give them money and support or to withhold our criticism and condemnation. With this attack on something that might, if it is done widely, effectively save hundreds of thousands of lives, maybe millions, not inconceivably most of the human species, the US Catholic Conference of Bishops has abdicated their moral authority definitively and completely and, in so far as the current majority of it is concerned, permanently. 

 

It's time for Catholics to impress on the media that those scum-buckets in miters don't speak with any moral authority we accept. 

Why Don't You Go Back And Read A Little, Bunky

MY DEAR OLD Latin teacher , who in his retirement tutored me, was a Bertrand Russell style atheist, a 19th century materialist, who, much as I loved him, could be a real pill when he was in the mood to get combative about ideology.   He liked to argue with me because I was about as scrappy as he was and he knew I read a bit.   At the time I was an agnostic on principle who was as skeptical of atheism as I was religious belief.  That was due mostly to my own rather 19th century misunderstanding of the nature of belief, believing stupidly that it either just happened or it didn't and until it did, all on its own, without any component of human volition happening in a human mind that had no qualms about volition in any other aspect of life, you had an obligation to remain mired in the lazy non-choice of agnosticism.  But this isn't about that.

I remember one day while we were going through my translations (his teaching method was pretty 19th century, as well) he said that the passage from a Roman writer, can't remember who, went back to Herodotus on the Peloponnesian War.  Which led to one of his long digressions, he loved to show off his erudition to me, too. Which I took as a compliment.   

He said he had been teaching about that ancient war for decades when one day in class, after WWII (he'd been in Intelligence, which is a story too) he suddenly realized due to his wartime experience that the thousands and thousands of deaths that he had taught to prep-school boys for years as a number were actual lives of actual people who actually died individual, terrible deaths and that the second he faced that he was never able to teach it as a mere estimate from the ancient historians again.  

I don't know how he would have answered me if I brought up later death counts of later political, economic or ideological struggles and wars as a similar number hiding the hard, hot, horrible fact of brutal and intentional death which he, not having thought of them in similar terms would still just figure was a number.   

I remember discussing the Paris Commune with him - the assassination of the Archbishop and others taken hostage by the Communards of the sacred Commune probably figuring into one of our brawls - I don't recall discussing the Reign of Terror which is indistinguishable from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic military regime, terror and world war which it was all a part of.  Which, by the way, led to one after another unstable, chaotic, violent, frequently oppressive French government, which led to the Commune which, itself, hardly promised to bring about a stable egalitarian democratic government. Such is the general run of progress brought in by the stupidest of all means of reform, revolutions.

There are real scholars of 18th century France who are of the opinion that a good measure of the murder and terror of the French Revolution and its aftermath is attributable to the words and the attitude expressed in those words of the French intellectuals,  Denis Diderot one of those most directly responsible for the devaluation of lives considered as abstract objects in his materialism.   No doubt the idiots who mouth that spurious quote about priest's entrails would approve of the murders of the clergy and women religious and the laymen and women and children who were murdered in the name of Liberté, égalité, fraternité, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the rest of the enlightenment bullshit that that emblematic revolution we are still supposed to revere turned into a lie practically from the second the rationalists took power in France, started killing people en masse and almost as soon turned on each other in power struggles in which those liberty lovin' frat bros started lordin' it over their brothers and then started killing them as fast as they would any priest or nun or hapless peasant, one of the many who got caught up in that rationalist engine of murder. 

 

The common attitude towards the French Revolution on the play-left is as stupid and uninformed as the attitude toward the American Civil War  is on the Republican-fascist-Hollywood-Cable TV movie informed real and deadly American right. Both flow from the same habit of thought that was prevalent among the French intellectuals of the 18th century, of abstraction, of turning human beings into ideas or even further reducing them into the raw material of scientific inquiry, numbers. That is why the ideologically scientific regimes of the 20th century, some of them holding up the French Revolution as a prelude to their own glorious revolutions have run up murder rates that make the ancient ones, even in their typical absurd exaggeration seem like mere statistics. That is a habit of thought that is ubiquitous among fascists who hold that the large majority of the human population is insignificant and expendable but it is certainly not unknown among those on the alleged left whose devotion to "the masses" is one of their most obvious hypocrisies. The Marxists who have competed with the Nazis in running up murder counts may be, as well, attributed to the 18th century French thinkers because Marx said that Diderot was, in his estimate, the greatest writer of prose.

Why Would It Bother Me That Some Boob Said That To Other Boobs On That Home Of Boobies?

I AM fully prepared to believe that those boobs never read a word by Denis Diderot except that often repeated line about strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest, and having read that spurious quotation they haven't even read those words by him.  Did they attribute it to him or were they even ignorant of the alleged source of it?

Of course that sentiment proves one thing, lazy-assed, post-literate, college-credentialed atheists who mostly know TV and pop culture and not much else tend to be as stupid as they are thrilled by violence.  And thoroughly predictable. 

You Have To Wonder Why No One Points Out That They Can't Do What They'd Have To Do To Know This

SINCE the post I did a few weeks back, in which I said that,among other behavioral sciences anthropology was a pseudo-science most honestly considered to be in the same category of human story telling as other more honestly presented forms of lore, and I included that most epic of pseudo-scientific programs of creating Just-so stories and calling it science, natural selection, I read this bit of such lore from today's Guardian with a gelid eye. 

 

Perhaps I should stipulate that I'm talking mostly about "science" as that is taken among the general public, the scribbling profession of journalism but not infrequently among professional scientists and so-called scientists, too. 

Human evolution and exploration of the world were shaped by a hunger for tasty food – “a quest for deliciousness” – according to two leading academics.

Ancient humans who had the ability to smell and desire more complex aromas, and enjoy food and drink with a sour taste, gained evolutionary advantages over their less-discerning rivals, argue the authors of a new book about the part played by flavour in our development.

Some of the most significant inventions early humans made, such as stone tools and the controlled use of fire, were also partly driven by their pursuit of flavour and a preference for food they considered delicious, according to the new hypothesis.

“This key moment when we decide whether or not to use fire has, at its core, just the tastiness of food and the pleasure it provides. That is the moment in which our ancestors confront a choice between cooking things and not cooking things,” said Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University. “And they chose flavour.”

Cooked food tasted more delicious than uncooked food – and that’s why we opted to continue cooking it, he says: not just because, as academics have argued, cooked roots and meat were easier and safer to digest, and rewarded us with more calories.

Some scientists think the controlled use of fire, which was probably adopted a million years ago, was central to human evolution and helped us to evolve bigger brains.

“Having a big brain becomes less costly when you free up more calories from your food by cooking it,” said Dunn, who co-wrote Delicious: The Evolution of Flavour and How it Made Us Human with Monica Sanchez, a medical anthropologist.

However, accessing more calories was not the primary reason our ancestors decided to cook food. “Scientists often focus on what the eventual benefit is, rather than the immediate mechanism that allowed our ancestors to make the choice. We made the choice because of deliciousness. And then the eventual benefit was more calories and fewer pathogens.”

Human ancestors who preferred the taste of cooked meat over raw meat began to enjoy an evolutionary advantage over others. “In general, flavour rewards us for eating the things we’ve needed to eat in the past,” said Dunn.

Lost in that web of story telling is the fact that not a single bit of it is based on actual observation of anything like a representative sample of the human and immediately pre-human populations to see if any of these speculations are proven to anything approaching the standards that science is constantly asserted to require. 

 

The surviving record of fossils and artifacts is certainly not large enough to represent a sample of our ancestors of the period in question and I would bet that the professional interpretation of them, the resolution of them as a "snapshot" of even the moments in prehistory that they potentially could be asserted to be, is at least to some measure not uncontroversial or stable enough to have any guarantee of not being overturned.

The mere plausibility of a story is not sufficient to base science in, there have been lots of plausible sounding stories, especially those invented in the supposed scientific study of evolution and the human species, which are sooner or later rejected as everything from wishful thinking to racist bias to outright fabrication and fraud.

I'd ask you to consider how often these kinds of claims are full of hedging and conditional constructions, some of them probably fair such as "Some scientists think" which only points out that others don't think or may not think, which doesn't strengthen the claim that what they're engaged in has the supposed solidity of the best science.

Others point to how speculative this whole thing is, "which was probably adopted a million years ago," "are likely to have developed an evolutionary advantage." The only way to know if a proposed scenario did confer an "evolutionary advantage" would require an extremely complex and accurate survey of the species in question DURING THE CRUCIAL PERIOD IN WHICH THAT ADVANTAGE IS SUPPOSED TO CHANGE THE BEHAVIOR OF THE MAJORITY OF THE POPULATION, one which proves that those individuals who adopted the change of behavior, in fact, left more surviving offspring for a number of generations than those who didn't and, probably hardest to prove of all, that there is a heritable biological substrate that leads to the behavior in question. If there is no heritable biological substrate to the behavior, "natural selection" as defined couldn't enter into the question. Which doesn't bother me much if it's faced honestly because I think natural selection is the mother of all Just-so stories that should have been scrapped in the 1890s.

Of course, absolutely none of that is possible in the lost human and direct pre-human past because behaviors of that kind are extremely difficult to research and verify among living human populations now, one of the reasons that ALL OF THE SO-CALLED BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES demand that they be exempted from even the first requirement to do that, have a randomly selected sample of the human population of sufficient size to represent the human population. I would love to know which of the myriad of studies asserting the demonstration of an "evolutionary advantage" to some contemporary, observable (though not necessarily uncontroversially defined and described and observed) human behavior which has an accurate count of offspring directly attributable to the alleged behavior which demonstrates such an "evolutionary advantage."

I don't have any idea whether or not Robb Dunn and Monica Sanchez have come up with an accurate description of a component of evolutionary change in the human population, all I know is that what they've produced is not science in any way comparable to the reliable, demonstrated and durable  discoveries of physics, chemistry, some of the more modest claims of physiology and other aspects of biological science or other areas of science which can make direct observation and conduct honest measurement and analysis of what they study. I  think everything about how evolution happened is a mix of everything from the actual differences in reproduction due to genetic and other biologically heritable conditions to sheer dumb luck and its opposite to non-biologically determined preferences and happenstance. I doubt all of evolution could possibly be due to adaptations, I tend to doubt most of it has been or that in different species and population there has even been a constant character to what made things as they are now. If they had presented what they're doing as lore and not as evolutionary science I'd have no problem with what they're doing, though I'll bet they'd find their funders wouldn't like that type of honesty. I'd wish that The Guardian and other media would note the real nature of it, though science reporting is almost never done with that level of honest disclosure. 

 

I might disclose that, seeing his picture, I believe I've met Robb Dunn, though the person who would have introduced us is no longer living so I can't ask her. I have nothing in particular against him or his colleague, I just wish they'd be honest about what they're doing.  Though I doubt they will because they want their funding to continue.