This group does live performances of old radio drama scripts, it looks like a lot of fun. I'm hoping we can all get back to live performance someday soon but not too soon for it to be safe. There are lots and lots of their performances on Youtube and you can read more about them at their theater company website. It would be great if more of these kind of companies would form, there are thousands and thousands of scripts, everything from garbage to masterpieces that aren't performed.
WATCHING THE DISGUSTING performance by Ohio's shame, Jim Jordan haranguing Dr. Fauci using the words "freedom" and "liberty" and "The Constitution" and "The First Amendment, people should come to see just how totally fucked up American notions of all of those are.
Disgraced wrestling coach, Jordan meant the "freedom" and "liberty" of irresponsible and stupidly gulled FOX viewers and other such adult brats to do things that will infect people with a serious illness which, even if you are not one of the ones it kills, could leave you with long lasting and serious physical and mental debility which may well be permanent - the freedom and liberty of those so infected by Jordan's freedom lovin' assholes totally destroyed so that they won't have to wear a mask or socially distance for a period of time while responsible medical and health experts try to halt the unhampered spread of the pandemic, the spread of which Republican-fascists like Jordan, like the Republican-fascists, those in the Congress, the Trump regime, the Supreme Court - and those in the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops (among other such befrocked fascists) have aided at every step of the way.
Those "freedoms" and "liberties" so championed by the likes of disgraced wrestling coach Jordan are clearly those, freedoms and liberties, which can, under our dangerously inadequate Constitution and its amendments, get hundreds of thousands of us killed and more maimed, perhaps for life, and still be peddled as an absolute good, especially in their absolutist articulation so popular with idiots left as well as right.
The freedoms and liberties the kinds that are most popular with such libertarians are the freedoms and liberties popular with the more bratty of toddlers, many two year olds but fewer three year olds, even fewer four, five and six year olds, as they grow in moral awareness and responsibility - as they start to grow up. Responsible parents try to teach their little terrors that it is wrong to exercise such freedoms and liberties because they harm others, other people, sentient creatures. Some, like Trump, never do develop, probably due to parental permissiveness or some rot in their mental development the origin of which will remain mysterious.
There are other freedoms and liberties that later come into play with puberty, often those sexual freedoms and liberties that the pedo-doctor and others in Ohio - who Jordan certainly knew about - took with the jocks who stayed in Jordan's wrestling program as they were being oogled and groped, those freedoms and liberties that Matt Gaetz is accused of taking with minors (apparently that was OK with the freedom lovin' libertarian Jordan because he is one of the few in Congress who came to Gaetz's defense).
That's the thing about "freedom" and "liberty" they are only as good as the bounds within which they are exercised and do not violate the equal rights of others, the moral restraints and bounds within which they are exercised. The absolutist notion of freedoms and liberties is stupid no matter how smart the person who asserted them are, and there are some people who have asserted them in that absolutism who should have known better. I suspect that a lot of that voluntary stupidity was on the basis of the vague and inadequately inspecific language of the First Amendment even as I know a lot of our danger is due to the similarly irresponsibly vague language of the Second Amendment. Both gets more scores and hundreds of thousands killed. Molly Ivins was one such free speech absolutist who I think was so gulled into stupidity by the language of the First Amendment and the misplaced reverence for Jefferson and, perhaps, the even more misplaced esteem for Madison. I totally disagree with her absolutism in matters of speech and press even as I esteemed her highly, otherwise.
It is one of the most telling of things about this right now is how it is fascists, Nazis, white supremacists, "Proud Boys," Republican-fascists, the fascists on the Supreme Court who are today's most frequent spouters of "freedom" "liberty" "First Amendment (and Second Amendment) etc. even as they seek to oppress and enslave and crush others with their freedoms and liberties. Orwell was prophetic.
The Trump regime, the continuing regime of "freedom," "liberty," "First Amendment," spouting fascists, Nazis, white supremacists, Republican-fascists have certainly put us all on notice that there is something fatally dangerous about the naive and promiscuous use of the terms Jim Jordan used Stalin style to browbeat Dr. Fauci the other day. Those notions are about what are actual goods when they exist within the bounds of morality, equality and decency turn into their opposites when divorced from morality and equality and decency. But just the missing qualifiers such as making them not include lies and hate speech make them anything but good as written. Just as the term "justice" turns to injustice so easily under the vague language of what the Constitution has been since the courts have been meting that "justice" out unequally and unevenly and in order to give privilege to those favored by the judges and "justices" at the expense of the rights of disfavored people. The Constitution of the "originalists" was by clear intent and not infrequently admission chuck full of such inequality, as was the law that it did little to level. Anyone who thinks "originalism" isn't a smokescreen to prevent equality and promote privilege is an idiot.
There is no getting away from the moral basis of all of this because it is the thing that determines the character of the law, of the Constitution, of justice, of freedom and even that most stupidly asserted of all of this, "liberty". A mass murderer, a child murderer is exercising their freedom, their liberty to do what they want to. That's why the pathological libertarian so popular with our pathological champions of "freedom" and "liberty", Ayn Rand in her journal drooled over a particularly sadistic child killer. Why Jim Jordan is trying to spread Covid-19 under the slogans of freedom and liberty and the First Amendment.
I think the slave owning Founders left out questions of morality from the Constitution because they wanted to protect their privilege, their freedom and liberty to enslave people, to keep others in wage and debt slavery, to rule the country as white propertied men of means. Even as they used words like "freedom and liberty" and asserted they were better, forming a new age based in science and the putrid class-based English common law. We keep up that idiotic 18th century conception of things at our peril because without the foundation of equal moral obligation freedom and liberty become tools of oppression, inequality and death.
IF YOU WANT to know how you can know if there is a God, or why else would you challenge me to "prove it", Jeremiah 22:15-16 says this to the king who was being challenged by the prophet:
Your father enjoyed a full life. He was always just and fair, and he prospered in everything he did.He gave the poor a fair trial, and all went well with him.
That is what it means to know the Lord.
I think that will get you a lot farther than trying to tease out subatomic particles the existence of which will never be knowable and the likely entirely imaginary most basic level of physical existence. I think people are rightly interested with and impressed by the method advocated by Jeremiah and rightly skeptical and uninterested in what you like better. I think if atheist-materialist-scientists were being shot by cops or cheated of a living wage or even the comforts such creatures generally wallow in, if you needed justice you'd find what Jeremiah said would speak a lot more impressively to you than what you get paid to do or to use your too ample leisure time for.
I should add that I rather like donkeys among the most agreeable of equine animals, and if I had one would mourn them dying than it says right after that. More than I will Trump. Read the link. I think our understanding of the world develops and the circle of our required concern grows throughout the Scripture tradition, it's well past time to include animals in it.
SOME PEOPLE SEEM to find my posts dealing with the limits of science to be aggravating and some seem to find them interesting, apparently the ones who come here looking to be aggravated by what they can expect to find here also find them interesting or at least entertaining. People like some excitement in their lives, they like being in some kind of lather over things, apparently.
I'll begin by saying that I value science and the scientific method for a lot of what it can legitimately tell us about the world and the recommendations it can make to us on how to do things better and more safely. I do that while knowing the limits of what it can do by the agreed to methods of science and knowing that those are frequently violated and the products of science either misstated or oversold. That is except when they're undersold, generally when the science is unwelcomed by the billionaire-millionaire-business class, the legal industry that serves their purposes and the general public who don't like to be inconvenienced even if it means it might save their lives or those of other people, the kind of people asshole Republican-fascists like Jim Jordan pander to and the right-wing media owned by the billionaire-millionares lie to.
No, with that level I got to the other day, I didn't by any means exhaust my problems with the ideology of materialism in regard to physics and cosmology and the sciences that may or may not mistakenly believe that everything they use scientific methods to study must revert back to the current findings of physicists and, Lord help us, theoretical physics and, so, cosmology claim about the material component of existence (though, as I pointed out, the topic of what exists isn't supposed to properly be the concern of physics, at least that's what physicists like Sabine Hossenfelder claim when they're not expounding on what doesn't exist on the basis of their expertise as physicists).
Take this little part of what I wrote so hastily the beginning of the week:
Where in their electrons are those characteristics and are they uniform? and if in even smaller units of the subatomic level of stuff, you could ask similar questions about all of those, the infinitely non-ending onion model of materialist faith. I wonder if they'll come to theorize objects so small that they couldn't possibly contain all of the information needed to account for what they are alleged to do, I think they already have. I remember one of the first things I thought of when I read about the conventionally included and totally absurd "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics where the energy that was constantly creating universes whenever we so much as press a computer key was supposed to come from.
The two things, whether or not there is an absolute smallest unit of matter in which must reside all of the characteristics, all of the qualities that determine the characteristics of all of the larger objects made of those smallest units is intimately related to the question of the ultimate beginning of the one and only universe we know exists (though whether or not physics and, so, cosmology will someday turn on a dime - it will take decades for them to do it - and declare that the Big Bang turns out to be wrong is something I wouldn't bet on).
I have a huge question about both the never ending onion conception of nature in which there is always a smaller and ever more inaccessible lower level of material existence and the eternal universe(es) model of atheist ideological necessity in which if those are true, how can there be said to be ANY basic character of physical existence, the ultimate thing of materialist monism on which that atheistic faith is based and which modern science posits as a necessity when science is altered into an all encompassing ideology instead of a set of conventional, man-made rules (so frequently violated even within science) that do work to give us some approximations of reliable information on which we can make useful and fatally dangerous things and which is as important when it can help us and is dangerous when it isn't used morally.
If there is an ever lower level to either material existence at the subatomic level or the an ever earlier time in the universe, both the existence of and the character of ultimate universal laws, generally miscalled "laws of science" are dubious if not impossible to rationally believe in. Or, rather, only possible to believe in on the basis of choosing to believe in them, not on the basis of a program of logic and mathematical style proof. You can forget about the scientific requirement of observation because even at the levels we're talking about now, the possibility that human beings will ever be able to observe even the next lower levels is likely a fantasy.
So, you see, I have thought about these things and the next questions that come up way past the level at which even the theoreticians seem to be imagining things. I think one thing we can know is that none of that is known and the idea that it will ever be known is absurd. Not by human beings, I doubt by any species we want to imagine anywhere in the universe, certainly not on the basis of the human invention of scientific methods which the theoretician-atheist-matieralist-ideologues don't seem to have any use for, now.
I would still like to know how even an absolute, tiniest unit of material existence could contain all of the "information" that would allow it to determine every characteristic of every larger entity made of such "objects" since the world on even a subatomic level is extremely varied. Such a theorized unit would still not explain that variation except, I'd guess, on the basis of it having component units, I doubt it could be conceived of in the "simplicity" that it would have to have on the one hand and produce the demonstrable variety in effect that we already know it would have to produce.
I could go on with the problems of materialist-monist ideology but I think that's far enough right now. There are real and important things to think about, better things for scientists to deal with (pandemics, global-warming, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick) and things that science can't really handle (police murder of Black People, anti-Asian hate, the mass media turning the American People (and people everywhere) into the raw material of oligarchic fascism) things for which physics is entirely inadequate and which require the morality which none of science, by conventional agreement, even begins to take into consideration. I find that a lot more interesting than these stupid games of materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology - entertaining as those can be.
I'm a person, a human being, I believe my purpose in this life should be more concerned with what can be done instead of things which are (perhaps wisely kept) out of the realm of human understanding, competence and efficacy.
Update: OK, one more thing. I would guess that the varied character of perceived physical reality would point to the entire conception of monism being wrong and that that variety of observed reality would make some pluralistic framing of reality match observation more simply. In which case the entire modernistic, scientistic, materialistically monist (atheistic) framing of reality is wrong.
ONLY SINCE YOU ASK and there is a point to be made, I got the Pfizer vaccine, I don't know if it's still considered the status vaccine I was told it was, especially after the Israeli study that claims it is "less effective" against the South African variant, which may or may not be true.
Trying to turn it into a thing is incredibly stupid. There's no way of knowing if I'm part of the small percentage for which the status shot won't be effective or if I, like the large majority of those who got the non-status vaccines, will be kept from either getting the virus or having the worst effects of it. There is no way of knowing that the person I know who got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine will have an entirely better outcome than I will or if the 86 year old guy who went before me will have a better outcome with the Pfizer vaccine than I will. Or if any of my other siblings who got the Moderna one will.
How stupid has TV and Hollywood and Madison Ave. made us that the habit of turning everything into a status symbol has become a thing in this? Is it a failure of the near universally taken biology courses most of us take? Is it a failure of math education under the hegemony of the STEM regime that degrades the humanities on behalf of big business and the testing industry?
I despair of this country, sometimes. And not just here. I read a piece from Canada about a woman upset about what brand of vaccine she was offered even in that country whose federal system has produced an even worse roll out of the vaccines than in the idiotic US system, even as its medical system is generally far superior, I believe the idiot turned down the vaccine she was offered the day of her appointment.
Maybe I shouldn't have told you which one I got except I can tell you, if it had been the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, even yesterday, I'd have taken it based on the known facts and the statistical improbability of the reported blood clot problem being unrelated or of very small unlikelihood of happening. I'd have taken whichever one the largely volunteer, excellently run vaccine site had to give me that day. I've got nothing but praise for that, though the system of getting an appointment has a lot of bugs to be worked out, but that's largely based on the availability of the vaccine. If snobbery and ignorance based status associated with one or another of the vaccines is added on top of that, Lord help us. What if there had been only one vaccine that had been developed?
UPDATE: I should add that even after the two-week period it's supposed to be as effective as it ever will is up, I'm still going to mask and practice social distancing. We're no where near this being over and I think we could all use a bit more caution in regard to making other people sick. If it gets rid of the awful invasion of privacy the touchy-feely, as seen on TV "experts" that advocated social kissing and hugging that came in during the 1970s, thank God that's over. I would like it if a nod of the head replaced hand shaking, too. Think of how Trump used hand shaking to bully people. Hands off will make us all safer.
AFTER I WROTE that piece the other day I watched more of Sabine Hossenfelder's videos and listened to the one titled, "How Can We Test A Theory of Everything?" and, even better, I found out that she has an excellent blog on which she gives the transcript of her videos (I'm a big fan of the use of scripts, very few of us can wing it). I'd rather have a written text than one delivered even as well and entertainingly and subtly humorously as she can deliver them. In the case of my questions about the relationship of larger entities and the constiuent atoms, subatomic particles, etc. had to the characteristics of the things that are made of them, she said:
The name is somewhat misleading. Such a theory of everything would of course not explain everything. That’s because for most purposes it would be entirely impractical to use it. It would be impractical for the same reason it’s impractical to use the standard model to explain chemical reactions, not to mention human behavior. The description of large objects in terms of their fundamental constituents does not actually give us much insight into what the large objects do. A theory of everything, therefore, may explain everything in principle, but still not do so in practice.
That shows two things, it shows exactly what I said, that the relationship of what are now taken as the basic particles that in the modern atheist-materialist reductionist ideology constitute the entire basis of existence* is unknown and likely cannot be known. It also shows that the ideological faith of such scientists, even one as honest as she is has a faith that that unknown and likely unknowable connection between the character of large objects and the character of the smallest units they are composed of is there when there is no reason to believe it is there. That was exactly what I was questioning and if I'd happened to have listened to her on the topic, I'd have been able to use this paragraph to support what I said.
I will point out that when I got Sean Carroll to admit to a simple fact that rather sank his claim that science was on the cusp of having a theory of everything I got him to admit that science didn't know everything about so much as a single electron in the entire universe so it was unlikely that it was going to have a theory of everything about everything about all of them. Though the questions I had on Monday are, as far as I'm concerned as prohibitive of them getting one as ignorance of electrons is. If those unknown, I'd guess unknowable relationships between the character of large objects and the atoms, subatomic particles etc. they are comprised of include characters of larger objects that don't come into being from any intrinsic characteristics of the smaller constituent objects and those characteristics, the larger objects are as much a part of everything as the things that modern physics has been obsessed with for the last century and a half.
* No matter how much S. H. correctly says that existence is a murky concept that really has no place in science (Eddington said it about a century ago) almost all scientists violate that truth constantly, none more so than who want to use it to support their ideological preferences and opinions.
UPDATE: Oh, I don't worship S.H. she has some of the typical and arrogant habits of materialist-atheist adherents to scientism, either admitted or denied. Her review of Sean Carroll's The Big Picture and participation in the comments is a glaring display of many of them. I have left a comment on her blog pointing out that she, effectively, does the old logical positivist trick of, by fiat, declaring that things she doesn't like and doesn't want to have to deal with are pointless or "meaningless" or uninformed (by which she often means that her preferred framing is somehow violated in what someone else says, out of her chosen bounds). She can be as bad as most of the atheist-scientist ideologues can be when it comes to arrogant dismissal, she's just more honest within her subject matter. I wouldn't trust her outside of it unless she demonstrated that she knew what she was talking about. But, then, you can say that about pretty much everyone in every specialty.
Got the second shot and, like they say, it was a little like being sick. Mostly tired, a little achy on the arm that I got the shot in but it wasn't bad. So I was being lazy but I'm hoping to be back tomorrow.
This latest police shooting has me so depressed I'm not sure that isn't part of it. There is something very wrong with the police as they are, it's going to have to be changed.
SABINE HOSSENFELDER is someone whose youtubes I know I've recommended people watch. I do, though usually on a binge basis like I take in the even more entertaining Periodic Table of Videos videos. Generally I can only do that when the gardening season isn't really going here, as it isn't yet, the reason I binged on her videos a while back. I believe I said her music videos are the best scientist ones I know of other than those by the insect guy John Acorn. His are more fun and less edgy, though if you want edgy, hers are that.
Her recent interesting video on whether or not complex numbers are real or not is the one that kicked off my thinking about whether or not pi is real or the product of human imagination again. Though that's something I believe I've written about one annoying "pi day" getting hate mail for thinking that thought, asking that question aloud. As it were. Higher-middle-brow geeks don't like it when you ask questions, they want such things presented as unquestionable dogma or doctrine but I'm not a geek so I don't care about their comfort. As to whether or not the recent, as of the time she commented on it unreviewed paper about quantum theory is true or if it really proves that imaginary numbers are real, I'd have to really think about that before I bought it and if I can't understand their claims, I'm not sure if I'm ready to buy that anymore than I bought some of the god of geeks, Hawkings' claims that may have evaporated like he imagined black holes do.
Her relatively recent videos include several that impinge directly on issues I've dealt with many times here, the character of psychology which I think is an obvious pseudo-science, based not only on its scandalous history, its dangerous practice - especially in its guise as psychiatry* - and its as scandalous though perhaps somewhat less evil, totally shoddy, totally inadequate, entirely dishonest methodology and publications practices. How she could have held the conversation she did over the replication crisis and its implications without pointing out that the entire field is pseudo-scientific and complete bullshit if taken as anything higher than folk lore or the fringier reaches of literary commentary is, perhaps, due to the polite reticence that I've noticed cultured Germans can have too much of.
I think, though, that her reticence may be due to the faith of the materialist-athetist-scientist in their materialist monism which holds, either explicitly or as a background faith, that all of existence has a uniform character which will follow general rules and have a general nature which is determinative of all phenomena at all levels. That is the background faith in which the early salesmanship of psychology getting away with passing itself off as a science is based. And I don't buy that. It is the same faith that Steven Weinberg based his flip remark about the uniformity of electrons and, indeed, his entire view of the universe and all of reality on. That uniform set of "scientific laws" or, if you will "law" that "theory of everything" which may be an ideological fiction isn't apparent to me.
Consider those electrons which are known solely by their effects in relation to other objects, subatomic and in the atoms and molecules of which they are constituent parts. Consider them in relation to the atoms and molecules which they are known through, having been theorized to explain the character of atoms and molecules to start with.
Take a water molecule, two hydrogen atoms bonded with an oxygen atom. What is the relationship of the characteristics of the hydrogen atoms or the oxygen atom to the characteristics of the water molecule? Do the characteristics of the water molecule reside in each of the individual constituent atoms? Does the fact that there are two hydrogen atoms mean that the pair of them have internal characteristics that contribute to the character of the water molecule, is their being bonded to the oxygen molecule relate to the typical hydrogen molecule that is ubiquitious in nature where hydrogen is not bonded with a different atom or atoms in a different molecule? Is that possible unknown characteristic of the individual atoms and, possibly a hydrogen molecule impinged on by the single oxygen atom or are those characters different. And that's not to mention what may or must be different in that regard to the oxygen molecule in a water molecule, what are the implications of water molecules formed by the explosion of the gases of the constituent elements, breaking apart molecules of hydrogen and oxygen in an explosion or other physical reaction. Do all hydrogen and all oxygen atoms have that potential or are there different, perhaps very rare, examples of atoms of those elements that cannot or would not act that way?
Or do the characteristics of the things those are made of come into existence only as those larger, composite entities come into being? In which case, how can you explain that through materialist ideology? Especially in its typical, reductionist species?
I don't know any of that, I doubt anyone does, I would be surprised if anyone ever thought about some of those questions. I could ask the same questions about where the potentials for all of this resides and if there are different characteristics that allow different atoms of the different elements that impinge on their ability to bond with other atoms reside within those atoms. In their electrons? Where in their electrons are those characteristics and are they uniform? and if in even smaller units of the subatomic level of stuff, you could ask similar questions about all of those, the infintely non-ending onion model of materialist faith. I wonder if they'll come to theorize objects so small that they couldn't possibly contain all of the information needed to account for what they are alleged to do, I think they already have. I remember one of the first things I thought of when I read about the conventionally included and totally absurd "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics where the energy that was constantly creating universes whenever we so much as press a computer key was supposed to come from. The only time I did that in the presence of a physicist, they thought it was rude but they didn't give me an answer. I wonder if it was because I'm not a member of that priesthood and so was not supposed to have that thought.
One of the problems in her recent Hawking video mentioned above was in the impossibility of human technology probing much farther into the realm of the subatomic and, so, according to modern cosmological faith, the entire universe. Hawking's seeming yearning for a Nobel medal evaporated in tiny, ephemeral black holes not showing up in the jumbo-sized collider he hoped would show those. And the string theory that Brian Greene's career was staked on probably won't even get that far.
Of course, the possibility that the monistic nature of reality and the quest for that theory of everything is an illusion of human imagination and the arrogance of modernists, to start with and, in human affairs, it may be not only an illusion but even if it's there, entirely irrelevant to our purposes and why we are alive in this universe.
I'm tempted to tie in one of the most recent life-boats launched by materialists who have a sense that the "hard problem" of consciousness may sink the entire ship "Materialism", panpsychism, the claim that our consciousness is a characteristic of all matter at all levels and that our consciousness is like a giant molecule that is an expression of a composite of the consciousness of our constituent parts. If they want to go there, in order to get rid of God, the real background motive of all materialists - perhaps as big a one as their arrogant love of believing that all of reality is the nail that the hammer they own can hit - then I'm sorry to tell them that the Scriptures have already got priority for something like that, as in when Jesus said if the people people laying down palm fronds and singing his praise wouldn't, the rocks and stones would sing out or when he told the arrogant religious elite that God could raise offspring for Abraham out of the rocks, too. Though I doubt they will ever be able to wrest consciousness in any meaningful term from them. I'd say you've got to have God to do that.
Cheer up, atheist guy, I've got to start planing onions this week, I won't have so much time to listen to stuff, though planting by hand gives me a lot of time to think about stuff.
* If you want a good and typical example of how dangerous permitting psychiatry to pass itself off as science is (if the opioid crisis wasn't enough to prove that), watch this scandal of science as it really can be.
