I posted this several years ago when I was discovering that Peter Whalley was a pretty good writer. I could have posted a number of his plays as worth another listen. You should listen right away because these keep getting taken down at Youtube and a number of the ones I've posted in the past from other places have, apparently, gotten attention from the anti-pirate police.
Saturday, August 14, 2021
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Peter Whalley - The Test
Venerabile antico Del buon Caronte idolatrato amico
YEAH, YOU CAN TELL HOW SIMPS really bemoans the passing of and honors the life of Nanci Griffith by how he uses her death to score points against someone who wouldn't have had any comment on her passing. Me. Or, that is, to get attention for himself at Eschaton. Apparently she wanted the first week after her passing to be a private time, no doubt for family and the people who really knew her so no public announcement about it and certainly she didn't want cheap sidewalk hucksters like him who want to make use of her.
Hey, people keep telling me what he's saying. Apparently someone over there likes it when I dope slap him. Maybe I'll abstain during Advent.
I remember when the groovy and rapidly ever superannuating atheists of Eschaton used to slam religious believers because they claimed we were afraid of death, funny, other than the untimely deaths of the young, those who died unnatural deaths, deaths caused by injustice, they're the ones constantly freaked out about it. Hey, Simps, don't worry if you don't get used to it, it's probably not going to be that long. What's that line from The Coronation of Poppea, something like "you are Charon's best friend."
There, it's all about you again. You should be thrilled.
Update: Simps is claiming that I, someone who listened pretty much every week to A Prairie Home Companion from the time it first went national till Garrison Keillor's retirement* never heard of Nanci Griffith. Stupy thinks that the world starts in Queens and ends in the suburbs of NYC so the idiot has no idea that there are radios all over the place now a days. He may be the most parochial and narrow person I've encountered online, though there are a number of almost as limited people at his home blog, Eschaton. How he imagines that Nanci Griffith fit into the confines of his little world probably doesn't enter into it, lack of integrity in world view doesn't much figure to the severely limited.
* The hiatus when they tapped poor Noah Adams to do a replacement show and the period of Radio Company Of The Air, taken into account. I was glad when Keillor returned to St. Paul, it's always so much more interesting to hear things from places that aren't New York, white DC and Hollywood than from those over exposed cultural and untillectual cul de sacs.
Friday, August 13, 2021
It's Been Years Since I Posted A Comment I Made Elsewhere But I Think I Said Exactly What I Meant In This One
I was fuming listening to the crisis in pediatric hospitalization in Mississippi, remembering Tucker Carlson advocating calling the police on parents who had children wearing masks. I think it is necessary to keep the media from getting people killed the way he and FOX and others in the media are doing. If the First Amendment can't keep the media from getting large numbers of children killed it can fuck off as far as I'm concerned.
And I'll add here, so can Jemmy Madison.
Satan Get Behind Me - Poly Stunts A Slacker
HOW DO YOU EXPECT me to keep to my August resolution when you wave that cat nip in front of me?
As he couldn't navigate a measure in 2/2 time with nothing but eight eighth notes in it, it's clear he couldn't even navigate one of the most common time signatures IN FRIGGIN' POP MUSIC! I know nothing about the rock drummer you mention or care to but there are few, very few rock drummers who rise to the level of even college level jazz drummers these days. For anyone who cares, Peter Magadini's book of polyrhythm exercises is very useful and excellent. I would recommend going through them using a metronome BEGINNING SLOWLY. I wish I could get back to teaching. Maybe I should rent a bigger place so I could teach socially distanced.
Reminds me, I haven't listened to this in a long time:
Dusan Bogdanvic - Polymetric Studies
Update: Linked to the wrong youtube. Here's the one I intended to link to, with the score.
Kill The Caucuses They Are An Attack On Democracy
Anybody who would struggle to get to a specific place at an inflexible time, I want them to have options. I understand why people like it, it's folksy and the idea of it is charming, to come together as a community, and we discuss who we want our next president to be. But what it ends up being is an exercise in privilege by hobbyists.
Emmanuel Smith: Disabilities advocate on why caucuses should be abolished
I had planned on writing about something else today but in reading around about the current status of the few state nominating caucuses that remain, I came across claims officially made in a couple of caucus states that reflect the unfounded and smug snobbery of Richard Bender, the big brain behind the Iowa caucus and its outsized role in American politics for the past half century, from the same post I took that quote from when presented with what Emmanuel Smith said:
Well, I think they're an exercise by people who really care about who is going to be president of the United States.
Richard Bender
Really? They "really care about who is going to be president of the United States?"
Well, how good are they at that with all of their care for it? Here is the history of the discernment of those elite Iowa voters in the period under discussion as given, again, sorry, at Wikipedia:
1972 (January 24): "Uncommitted" (36%), Edmund Muskie (36%), George McGovern (23%), Hubert Humphrey (2%), Eugene McCarthy (1%), Shirley Chisholm (1%), and Henry M. Jackson (1%)
1976 (January 19): "Uncommitted" (37%), Jimmy Carter (28%), Birch Bayh (13%), Fred R. Harris (10%), Morris Udall (6%), Sargent Shriver (3%), and Henry M. Jackson (1%)
1980 (January 21): Jimmy Carter (59%) and Ted Kennedy (31%)
1984 (February 20): Walter Mondale (49%), Gary Hart (17%), George McGovern (10%), Alan Cranston (7%), John Glenn (4%), Reubin Askew (3%), and Jesse Jackson (2%)
1988 (February 8): Dick Gephardt (31%), Paul Simon (27%), Michael Dukakis (22%), Jesse Jackson (9%), and Bruce Babbitt (6%)
1992 (February 10): Tom Harkin (76%), "Uncommitted" (12%), Paul Tsongas (4%), Bill Clinton (3%), Bob Kerrey (2%), and Jerry Brown (2%)
1996 (February 12): Bill Clinton (98%), "Uncommitted" (1%), and Ralph Nader (1%)
2000 (January 24): Al Gore (63%) and Bill Bradley (37%)
2004 (January 19): John Kerry (38%), John Edwards (32%), Howard Dean (18%), Dick Gephardt (11%), and Dennis Kucinich (1%)
2008 (January 3): Barack Obama (38%), John Edwards (30%), Hillary Clinton (29%), Bill Richardson (2%), and Joe Biden (1%)[44]
2012 (January 3): Barack Obama (98%), and "Uncommitted" (2%)[31]
2016 (February 1): Hillary Clinton (50%), Bernie Sanders (49%), and Martin O'Malley (1%) [45][46]
2020 (February 3):[47][48]
State Delegate Equivalents: Pete Buttigieg (26%), Bernie Sanders (26%), Elizabeth Warren (18%), Joe Biden (16%), Amy Klobuchar (12%), and others (2%)
Delegates: Pete Buttigieg (14), Bernie Sanders (12), Elizabeth Warren (8), Joe Biden (6), Amy Klobuchar (1), and others (0)
First Round Popular Vote: Bernie Sanders (25%), Pete Buttigieg (21%), Elizabeth Warren (18%), Joe Biden (15%), Amy Klobuchar (13%), Andrew Yang (5%), Tom Steyer (2%), and others (1%)
Second Round Popular Vote: Bernie Sanders (27%), Pete Buttigieg (25%), Elizabeth Warren (20%), Joe Biden (14%), Amy Klobuchar (12%), Andrew Yang (1%), uncommitted (1%), and others (0%)
It would seem that that elite group of dedicated hobbyists is far better at discerning WHO WILL NOT BE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES than it is at pushing someone on to the other abomination, only somewhat less so because it's a far more democratic primary than an anti-democratic caucus, also small, largely rural, largely white, New Hampshire. Iowans who show up to caucus would appear to suck at discerning who can win the election.
The DNC should, as soon as the results of the mid-term are in, declare that no longer will delegates chosen in a caucus be allowed to vote for the nominee during the convention, it should abolish caucuses since the several states that have had such disasters with caucuses such as Iowa and Nevada (last I checked) don't seem to be willing to give them up yet.
After the mid-term election there will be no excuse that getting rid of them might hurt Democrats chances of winning lesser offices in Iowa (yeah, right) and there will be just enough time to organize the possibility of exactly that kind of Democratically run by-mail primary of ONLY REGISTERED DEMOCRATS in those states which refuse to give up the anti-democratic atrocity. It was done all over the country in response to Covid in less time. And I would suggest that the rule is that only those who registered as Democrats at least six months in advance or less if they turned 18 in that time are eligible to vote in that primary. That would keep such as the Green Party ratfuckers from conning their way into the process as I saw done when they swamped the Caucus here in 2016. If any of them voted for Hillary Clinton over Trump I'd be surprised. They were mostly good for whining about "the fix being in" even though the rules were read out to the entire group by the convener (one of the most honest people I know), posted for anyone to read and rigorously followed.
Kill the caucuses, they are an attack on democracy. Do it as soon as possible.
Thursday, August 12, 2021
THERE WILL BE a break in writing here at some point this month, I'm not sure when or how long it's going to be. I'm moving and it's not going smoothly.
I'm just trolling the troll some of the time, I've been experimenting with assistive technology because my vision problem is getting worse, that accounts for more of it. I'm trying to avoid eye surgery as long as possible because I can't afford it. I'll probably hold out until I can't read anymore. Or die, that might come first. Covid has really taken the bottom out of my life.
In Memory of Richard Lewontin - Who I'd Guess Was Surprised To Find Himself In Heaven
IT'S ONE OF THOSE TEMPTATIONS I hope to resist to always answer Darwin's defenders, it's too easy once you've done the basic research of READING WHAT DARWIN ACTUALLY SAID IN DETAIL and what his contemporary and succeeding generations of disciples said. THEY are the ones who give the evidence of having supported depravity, they are the ones who, no matter how much they might deny it or even make the attempt cannot filter out the eugenic aspects of the intellectual history of Darwinism from their current thinking.
They are the ones who introduce story-telling as a replacement for actual observation and measurement as the essential antecedent actions leading to rigorous analysis - they have no choice as their claims are that they have found one of if not THE thing that explains the evolution of species and the enormous diversity of life on Earth when they cannot ever make those observations and measurements of populations and reproductive success in the forever lost past. When you are making believe you can do science around what cannot be observed or measured, you've got nothing left but to make stuff up and peddle it on its seeming plausibility, in which case those aspects of habit and culture which make it plausible enters directly into the conditions of its success. Natural selection was especially plausible among the English speaking upper class which Darwin belonged to BECAUSE IT IS BASED IN THOMAS MALTHUS' BRITISH CLASS-BASED ECONOMIC THEORY. That Darwin had to invert the theory to apply to all of nature what Malthus said was a crisis of allowing the poor to survive and have children due to human civilization and, though he didn't put it that way, the kind of morality that Christianity is rightly based in leads to an internal contradiction and discrepancy that, both favoring the rich and powerful and those who aspire to be such, hasn't bothered them much.
I will point out that in my criticism of Michael Behe's own breaking of the rules for doing science, that he would have to get them to change the rule against considering the plausibility of intelligent design as within the bounds of science first, I admitted that he's asking for what has been granted to the Darwinists from the start, peddling science on the basis of seeming plausibility instead of physical evidence. If Darwinists from Darwin to Dawkins and beyond can peddle their claims based on their plausibility (some of those entirely implausible if you look at them with even moderate rigor) then I don't think Behe is asking for anything his opponents don't take as their own privilege.
Me? I'd rather all of them would admit that they're just making up stories, peddling fiction as scientific fact. There will never be a scientific explanation of the evolution of the diversity of life, there will never be any scientific support for eugenics that isn't based on that peddling of stories made up and sold to the willing believers of them. I think Michael Behe would be far more honest and on far firmer ground if he made his arguments and claims as being outside of the rules of physical science, attacking Darwinism because it, in fact, is based in exactly what he is doing making claims that can only have more or less plausibility. And, I will say as one, I hope, more rigorously predisposed to skepticism about it than some others, SOME of his arguments seem to me more plausible than his critics.
----------------
Going down my own memory lane, I found that one of my favorite magazines of the 1970s, Science For The People, started by and run by a number of those who were part of the enormously important and largely forgotten Sociobiology Study Group, has revived and has an archive of a lot of their publications from back then.
In it I found out looking at it, just now, that one of the people who had the most influence on me in thinking about those areas of biology Richard Lewontin died on July 4th at the ripe old age of 92, something of an irony considering his political radicalism and his critique of, not only American but all other injustices, racism, imperialism and economic injustice. I get behind on my reading during the gardening season. But I'm sure he'd want me to continue as I think he would have instead of dwelling on him.
Back when I read the magazine in the 1970s, I read this article, Racism at Harvard, which discussed the quest of Dr. Bernard D. Davis, one of those spearheading the scientific racist campaign of the time by lying about admissions to his college, the Harvard Medical School. I read it in light of my research into the history of Darwinian eugenics - ALL of the arguments of the scientific racists are based on natural selection - and could only shake my head at how Davis, who was Jewish, was making the same kinds of arguments in 1976 that Nazi doctors and scientists were making against the intellectual abilities of Eastern European Jews that they were provided by the British genticist champion of Darwinian eugenics, Karl Pearson and his colleague Margaret Moul in 1925. Davis' parents were Jews from Lithuania, he was born in 1916, if he had lived in Britain instead of Massachusetts, HE may have been one of those "measured" by Pearson and Moul's team to argue about the danger of having Eastern European Jews allowed into Britain. If their measurements found him to be intellectually sub-normal, it wouldn't surprise me one bit, such research tends to find what the researchers want it to find as so much less than rigorous observation does. So you can imagine what happens in making up sciency narratives when observation is impossible
The obvious racism of Davis and those he supported, the co-author of The Bell Curve, Harvard psychologist Richard Herrenstein but also Arthur Jensen (who Francis Crick campaigned among their fellow scientists to support in his eugenics) and the physicist William Schockley*. I will note in the response of the Harvard Medical School faculty, for a Harvard based scientist, Davis was remarkably lax with his own fact checking as he made a number of false claims against the admission of Black students to Harvard Medical School.
I wanted very much to research that and write it up because it's my observation in reading a large number of scientific racists, Darwinists all, that those who are Jewish, Irish, etc. very likely are members of so-called ethnic or racial groups who other Darwinist eugenicists claimed were genetically disposed to intellectual inferiority and, so, should not be granted equality, their own families and nationalities and so-called ethnicities so judged by some other, equally or even better credentialed racist.
There are many such posts I wish I had the time to research and post because the history of Darwinism and its immediate parentage in scientific racism and its entirely legitimate offspring, eugenics are full to the top with such ironies and hypocrisies. And it would be fairly easy for me to predict what I could find there because, as I've studied this a long time now, the trails laid in the primary documentation by those peddling their plausible ideas are almost certain to be there.
In the years since I started researching Darwin's connections to eugenics, English language and other, including Nazi eugenics, I have followed a couple of other dissident academic brawls unrelated to biology and I have noted that in both of those the unorthodox view points seem to be available in the paper trail left in primary documentation in pretty much the same way. I'd say if you find after a number of years of studying something that it's easier and easier to find the primary documentary evidence that's a good sign that you're on the right path no matter how strong the orthodox viewpoint is. Sometimes it's matched by a total absence of actual, primary documentation that supports the orthodox POV. But this is enough writing for one morning.
* I remember a relatively young Richard Lewontin was on a talk show arguing against the scientific-racist-eugenicist William Shockley when Shockley was in the news promoting his Nobel laureate stud farm project, in which the physicist whose claim to fame wasn't genetics but as a co-inventor of the transistor, wanted to raise a generation of geniuses like Hitler wanted blondes with blue eyes. At one point the geneticist Lewontin noted that at the typical age of a Nobel laureate, very old, their sperm was far more likely to contain DNA that was damaged than the sperm of a much younger man and that instead of using them for breeding Shockley's race of super geniuses, their sperm should be "obliterated" by the same line of reasoning. I don't recall Shockley having a scientifically based response.
The Survival Of Natual Selection As The Required Ideology of Biology Is A Clear Danger To Life - Hate Mail
WHENEVER YOU HEAR SOMEONE SAY "HERD IMMUNITY" within public policy or even as a mere casual expectation that will come from public policy, they are talking about the presumed consequence of eugenics, presuming that if enough people get a disease, the weakest will die of it and the survivors will have a significant or complete immunity to the disease or at least enough immunity to mitigate the severity of it. The anti-vaccination, anti-masking Trumpian, Republican-fascist response to Covid-19 is, from start to finish, an unacknowledged citation of the same aspect of Darwinism that Nazism is based in, as, indeed, the thing that influenced it so much, the American, Canadian and other active eugenics programs that pre-date Nazism as a thing.
I have explained that before and at length. You can find the kernel of it in English in Darwin's The Descent of Man in one of his more infamous claims:
Look at this famous and famously infamous passage from The Descent of Man
There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
That is "herd immunity" from start to finish, "herd immunity" is not only a thoroughly Darwinist concept, the entire thing including comparing human beings and human society to animals kept in a commercial breeding operation, where they would be disposed of as economically desired and with an eye to improving the economic "fitness" of the animals in a herd (which is in no way comparable to their survivability and reproductive success in the wild) his complaint that one of the most successful public health measures in history, smallpox vaccination, had a dysgenic effect on the human species is essentially the one the Great Barrington Declaration signers attribute to containing the disease (Covid-19).
In my response to a comment on that piece I said:
One of the earliest names to surface in the "herd immunity" nonsense that Trump and his gangsters were said to be relying on was Richard Epstein who explicitly said he was practicing Darwinian economics,"I’m taking standard Darwinian economics—standard economic-evolutionary theory out of Darwin—and applying it to this particular case." I haven't found if the quack Dr. Atlas has identified his contentions with Darwin but I'd be surprised if he has any other source for it than the theory of natural selection in one of the more naive understandings of genetics, probably of an adaptationist bent. Perhaps one that no real geneticist or evolutionary biologist or epidemiologist would recognize as valid.
All through the literature of Darwinism, from Darwin and Haeckel and Huxley through Galton and Pearson, etc. right down to this week and this day they are all really enthusiastic about people dying so the human species can get better and better. One of the hilarious things I've read recently made the old claim that Darwinism doesn't believe evolution is progressive when Darwin never much stopped asserting it was when it came to the human species and that civilization, decency, a decent living to the poor, to Black People, Fuegians, Tasmanians, etc. was a clear and present danger to the human species. It's really an inversion of Mosaic and Christian morality, it's not in any way compatible with The Law or the Gospel. And they realized that almost as soon as they said it, I wouldn't be surprised if one of the reasons they invented natural selection was to have that effect. It's no wonder that Trump unwittingly adopts it, it's a boon to rich boys invented by a rich boy.
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"Herd immunity" is a belief which is extremely naive as can be seen in any number of very difficult to prevent viral illnesses, coming up with even effective immunization that can keep up with a rapidly mutating virus so as to mitigate its worst aspects is something even the most excellent of modern virology, epidemiology, etc. intervening at its most effective can barely keep up with. Even the most effective vaccines they have NOW and which should be taken now could possibly be overtaken by a virus run wild in the population. Without that intervention and preventative measures, you're only helping the virus to overcome any attempt to keep it contained and depriving it of opportunities to mutate more and more deadly strains. When Darwin came up with his cruel, immoral and Victorian aristocratic claims in science, he had nothing much to go on, he didn't know viruses existed and science certainly had no very good idea of what they were talking about. Today we retain the assumption that gave him his reasons for opposing universal vaccination while science certainly knows better. And this is only one of the things I talked about regarding the consequences of discontinued science retaining its power even after it had been discredited.
There is one thing that I think even one of the most important people around these days, the great Dr. Fauci doesn't understand as he tries to explain things to people in the government, in the media and the public is the extent of the public's naivete about what he's saying. A lot of the things he says that are conditioned and come with an expectation of the limits of science being understood are heard as absolute assurances of far greater knowledge on behalf of the scientists and doctors in his field and the permanence of even their best performances. That romantic, unrealistically heroic view of science, as promoted in numerous movies, TV shows, pulp-grade novels is something that even the truly heroic scientists and nurses, doctors, EMTs, etc cannot guarantee. Why should they be expected to when no one else does, either?
The down sides of Darwinism are many and started being manifested almost immediately after he published his version of natural selection, while not all of the worst response to this pandemic can counted against him, some of the worst of it can be.
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
A Moral Hypothetical
YOU ARE A NURSE AT THE END OF YOUR ROPE due to this 4th surge of Covid-19. You have more patients than ventilators for them. One of the patients came in with a MAGA hat, unvaccinated, unmasker. Do you keep them on the list of those under consideration to be put on one?
I doubt I would.
We should encourage the backlash of the vaccinated, the responsible, the people who believe the truth is better than lies you willingly believe. Or I could have just said against the racist-Republican-fascists, it's pretty much the same set.
To Behe or Not To Behe , That Is The Accusation - Aged Hatemail As Opposed To Hatemail From The Aged
I DON'T BELIEVE I HAVE much read Michael Behe though I have listened to some interviews with him. He makes some good points on a lot of things within his range of expertise. I try to listen to everything and have no index of forbidden ideas, I leave that to the atheist-materialist types.
The most serious thing we disagree on is his contention that there is a theoretical basis for someone believing that "Darwinism," by which I think he means natural selection (as I almost always do when using the word) and Christianity are compatible, which is untrue.
While to get to where Behe does in that claim you have to abandon the aspect of Darwinism that allegedly denies there is teleology in evolution (something which, I will note, though Darwin and his followers repeatedly say that they are constantly making teleological claims within natural selection). I think just as Behe has to ignore that to square Darwinism and Christianity, to make natural selection square with the Gospel of Jesus, the writings of Paul, especially James, etc. you have to ignore that the center of The Law and the Prophets is "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
While my basis for complete disbelief in natural selection as a thing having some "objective" reality, not to mention as THE engine of the evolution of species, is based in problems with it. First and foremost the impossibility of doing science around that because you would have to have an enormous program of observing, measuring and analyzing the forever lost past so it is having caused the evolution of one or all species can not be a scientific claim. It is an ideological assertion or a just-so story.
The second is, as a number of full blown true believers in natural selection will admit, is the impossibility of testing claims about it based in narrative stories of that same forever lost past.
My misgivings about natural selection most certainly include the depravity of natural selection as a theory, depravity that was a chosen inheritance from its predecessor, Brit-class-based Malthusian economics, but, from the view of credible science, it doesn't follow the rules. While Behe criticizes what he has proposed as attempts to find replacements or supplements to natural selection, "niche theory" the one I'm most familiar of those he named as not having even the theoretical completeness of explanation that natural selection does, he ignores that if your framing is scientific method natural selection replaces that with stories that convince on the basis of seeming plausibility, not on rigorous analysis of actual observation and measurement. That it is not only hard but impossible to do the required observation, measurement, etc. that does nothing to change the fact that if you can't do it, you haven't really done science.
Though from a realistic point of view, what science is at any given point isn't based on precisely following scientific method, it is based on what scientists call science at any given time, something which they will attempt to cancel but by then, as can be seen in the endurance of Darwinian eugenics that is getting people killed in the current pandemic, they really can't cleanse the minds of humanity from what was once asserted to be "scientific fact" in fact, you can't really get scientists to cut discontinued science out of their discourse. Darwin and the Darwinists never got rid of teleology, after all. And I've pointed out the materialists have had to create creator gods out of probability, random selection, a ridiculous unnamed power of creating jillions of universes out of nothing but ideological desperation.
He does say some things I've also said - we're hardly the only ones to point that out - he does admit that the attempt to theorize the structure and life of the "first organism" is impossible, as I repeatedly and with great detail have pointed out, rightly slamming some of the same "abiogenesists" that I have. He also admits that that theorized "first organism" under common descent theory (which I accept as a plausible position while admitting it isn't a scientifically supportable claim) may not be any more real than I claim natural selection may not be. He has pointed out that Francis Crick's "panspermia" stuff is ludicrious, though in what I recall he didn't point out that leaves such panspermia fans with the same problems they had before, just located in a time long ago, on a planet far away. Mixing Star Wars with the problems of atheist biologists doesn't seem to be a good thought model for getting out of the soup.
More generally, I've pointed out that the rules under which science is allegedly done, by common agreement, excludes a number of things which are far more rigorously observed than the entire range of interested speculation and assertion (which always benefits the biologist or other claimants and hardly ever harms their interests) one is one which I think is causing a lot of trouble in the wrangling over Covid, the question of morality. When scientists are dealing and making and manipulating things which can lead to the life or death of everything from individuals, to communities, to societies to the human species, to life on Earth, allowing them to merrily go on their way unanswerable for the consequences of their work is going to prove to be either insupportable going on or fatal. I think a revision of the "method of science" is going to be forced by the consequences of what they do, by their incredibly lax attitude toward telling the truth (See Retraction Watch For Examples) and their near total sense of immunity from considering the consequences of what they do - either that or the permission they will claim for their colleagues to do the most appalling things on behalf of the piously asserted "quest for truth." If they were questing for the truth they wouldn't excuse the lies so many of their colleagues publish in reviewed journals, with their valued and respected colleagues passing on those as they review them.
I think one of the things that would have to change to make his intelligent design into science would be that ban on the consideration of teleology, I'm skeptical that you can use scientific method to find it as I'm certain there is no way to eliminate intelligent design from anything scientists do so there is no way to use science to demonstrate intelligence was not required to come up with anything it studies. But I'm only interested in that to attack that atheist-materialist-scientistic orthodoxy because of its political, social and moral effects.
I do recall hearing him point out that while the AMS ideology has to crumble if there is even one miracle anywhere that Christianity is entirely compatible with the idea that, as science claims, there are physical laws that are real and really do operate in the typical workings of the physical universe. That is obviously true, the rigid monism of athest-materialist-scientism lives or dies on whether or not there are "miracles" and if someone kills it off with one, good. It leads to depravity.
Michael Behe is not a fundamentalist nut job, he is a dissident biologist who has transgressed the atheist-materialist-scientistic bounds that are enforced in, especially, English language college-credentialed culture. If his science goes anywhere, I don't know and I'm not especially interested, I'm a political blogger, the consequences of what they do and claim and assert and get made into public policy and law rot out the morality of our society is what interests me.
I'll listen to him though he's not one of my major sources for information on this topic.
I typed this really fast because this week has been hellishly busy for me. I will probably follow up.
Twelve Fun Minutes With The Wonderful Jan Freeman The Writer of My Favorite Newspaper Language Column
JAN FREEMAN SHOULD BE better known than she is, she wrote a great column on language for the Boston Globe, she is far more careful in her scholarship and claims and so her erudition is really erudite as compared to the more widely known language nags, scolds and dolts.
Here's a short interview with her about her annotation of the late 19th, early 20th century cynic and general asshole, Ambrose Bierce.
Jan Freeman On A Way With Words
She issued an annotated, revised publication of Ambrose Bierce's prescriptive language-style book "Write it Right" from shortly before that ass Strunk did his. Bierce at least had a career as a writer that people read and respected (When Dean Howells said that Bierce was one of the three truly great American writers, Bierce said that the other two were, no doubt, Dean Howells and Dean Howells). Freeman points out there was a fashion for writing that kind of language nagging and snobbery around then, her comments on it and that kind of thing in general are very sensible in ways that are rarely heard in the media,. I would guess that that is because like Geoffrey Pullum, her fellow critic of Strunk-White, and almost none of the suckers in the media, on faculties, in the college-credentialed who buy that tripe, she knows something about grammar and language so she knows when it's peddling horse feathers.
I'd Really Rather Talk About Abrose Bierce But Maybe Later
YOU'RE WRONG, it's actually spelled بن لادن
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
These Days You've Got To Take The Reasons To Smile That You Get
Brian Klaas
@brianklaas
People who claim to have “done the research” and found out the truth about vaccines tried to storm the BBC today but instead managed to try to break into a building that hasn’t been the BBC building since 2013. Perhaps that should tell you about the quality of their research.
Jim Waterson
@jimwaterson
Anti-Vaxx protestors storming the old BBC Television Centre to hold the BBC responsible for... vaccine passports?
Either way the studios they attacked are... mainly leased by ITV to make Good Morning Britain, Lorraine, and Loose Women, so that showed them.
Who Was Jeffrey Clark Getting Help From Outside The Trump Regime As He Was Trying To Kill Democracy?
LISTENING TO SENATOR WHITEHOUSE from Joy Reid's show last night, my question is who OUTSIDE of the Trump regime was Jeffrey Clark in communication as he was conspiring with Trump regime figures to try to destroy American democracy. I would like to know who inside the Federalist Society and elsewhere may have been advising him in how to blackmail and enable state officials to reinstall Trump, what things they did that might have worked, no matter what the actual vote was. I'd be curious to know who some of the Supreme Court members were in communication with as that was going on. Alito, especially.
This is dead serious. And it should never be forgotten that just as the Bush v Gore five did, what the Trump criminals were doing was rigging the anti-democratic Electoral College to make sure that the choice of the majority of the voters would not be president of the United States. As long as the Electoral College is retained, it will be not only as dangerous as it has been throughout our history, it is guaranteed to be more dangerous as the enemies of democracy, the Republican-fascists now, others in the future, game it and rig it to destroy democracy. I am confident that if we don't get rid of it it will lead either to the break up of the country as states with a majority of those who favor democracy are fed up with the states which have a majority who despise democracy insist on retaining the atrocious thing. It is doubtful that short the democratic states coming up with a sufficiently strong means of forcing its abolition that it will lead to either fascism or the break up of the country.
It is clear that anyone who argues in favor of retaining that dangerous booby trap in the Constitution is an enemy of democracy. And they are all over the place, in the law, in government and, especially, in the media-promoted propagandists of the pundit class.
The Federalist Society Is A Dangerous And Powerful Seditionist Group Of Aristocrats It Should Be Exposed To Sunlight And So Killed
In January 2019, The Washington Post Magazine wrote that the Federalist Society had reached an "unprecedented peak of power and influence." Of the current nine members of the Supreme Court of the United States, six (Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett) are current or former members of the organization. Politico Magazine wrote that the Federalist Society "has become one of the most influential legal organizations in history—not only shaping law stumembdents' thinking but changing American society itself by deliberately, diligently shifting the country's judiciary to the right."
The number of members of the attempted putsch against American democracy who are also members of the Federalist Society should be discovered or estimated because we already know there were a number of those who were insiders to the criminal conspiracy who were members of it. The number of those who are in the Congress who are either members or fellow travelers with them is certainly large, almost certainly all of them members of the Republican-fascist caucus.
When they went after the commies in the late 40s and early 50s, they had to invent a large conspiracy within the federal government but we know, for a fact, that the seditionists who are not just a figment of the self-promotion of Senator Joe McCarthy and who nearly succeeded in preventing the winner of the 2020 election taking office - as the Supreme Court did in 2000 (Note that Antonin Scalia, one of the Bush v Gore thugs was the original faculty advisor to the fascist group).
Also unlike the red scare which was largely based on lies, the faculty and other highly placed and influential members of the group so thickly involved with the putsch against American democracy are numerous and openly declared members of it, the list of "Notable Members" at the link to Wikipedia is disturbingly long with many well known and powerful people on it. It notes that the actual membership of the Chief "justice" of the Supreme Court, John Roberts is "disputed" though the footnote notes he rather daintily "doesn't remember" being a member of it though " the Federalist Society Lawyers Division Leadership Directory, 1997–1998, which listed Roberts as a member of the Washington chapter steering committee." It would seem that Roberts is trying to hide his participation in that sedition friendly group, perhaps he knows more about their intentions than is generally known and he wanted his deniability established.
I have to say, it's rather remarkable, how many Republican-fascists have such leaky memories. You have to wonder how they ever got to be so high and powerful, so many of them in jobs that require having a good memory. I expect that if the members of the Federalist Society are brought up to answer questions there will be an astonishing frequency of such bad memories among them. William Barr certainly has used that dodge while under the equivalent of an oath to tell the truth in the past.
I should explain my use of Wikipedia, a source I almost never cite. I assume that the article there is probably one that is under the active "editorship" of the Federalist Society so I would guess it is probably less shockingly revealing than other sources could be. I doubt what it says there is not about the least damaging account of it that could be given. I'm sure I'll be looking at what its critics have said about it a lot more. I hope that it becomes the focus of exactly what the red scare era investigations into the hardly dangerous commies was, honest, fair, probing and consequentially democracy protecting and enhancing.
Monday, August 9, 2021
What Are You Supposed To Call A Defined Group That Kills Hundreds Of Thousands Of Americans, Going On A Million?
DICK FARREL TRUMP-FASCIST anti-Covid-vaxxer, liar, right wing fascist who died of what he wanted other people die from is not going to get any of my sympathy, nor will his loved ones who didn't argue against him and condemn him, nor will his fan base who I am not impressed with as they promote "freedom" to be infected, act as incubators of new and more dangerous variants and who are now crediting the dead ghoul with talking them into being vaccinated, now. When I hear the next story of a child or teenager who dies of Covid-19 now, I am going to wish that there is a long, long term in purgatorial flames where such media liars and politicians and their financial backers roil and gnash their teeth.
The Republican-fascist party, from Florida to New Hampshire to the Rock-head mountain states to the South west is responsible for the greatest preventable death toll of Americans in our history. One or more 9-11s every week, more to come and yet they are not presented as worse than the Bin Ladin terrorists who killed a fraction of the body-count of the Republican Party right now.
The media is in on it with them because they are carrying their water and their messaging. The "free press" freed by the Supreme Court and the dolts in the First Congress to lie with impunity about this is in the same category as Bin Ladin's pack, too. And the lawyer-liars who brought that about.
I've lost patience with being moderate and understanding about this, being fair to them because fairness to them gets innocent people killed in large numbers.
Bernie Sanders Should Learn That A Majority Of Voters Might Know What He Doesn't - It's Well Past Time Democrats Took Control And Ended The Anti-democratic Caucuses
THAT BERNIE SANDERS is in the Senate generally pleases me, it used to really please me before he started running for president and screwing with Democratic politics. I like that he caucuses with the Democrats and I'm even glad that in consideration of that that he has been made the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee.
I am not exactly happy with him otherwise. I'm not happy that he is endorsing people who lose primaries within the Democratic Party and when Democratic voters in their districts choose another Democrat, Bernie Sanders divisively figures he, not a Democrat except when he's wanted to run for the Democratic presidential nomination, figures he can second-guess their choice.
I've heard a lot from the punditry as to why Nina Turner lost her race in Ohio. Well, maybe it had something to do with drug companies, Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry spending millions trying to defeat her. Is that the kind of Democratic Party we want? I don't think so.
That Nina Turner has trashed the Democrat who became president with the largest number of votes ever cast for a president as "like eating a shit sandwich" THAT JOE BIDEN IS LIKE EATING SHIT might, just might account for her loss to an experienced and mature Democrat, chosen by Democratic voters to represent them over Sanders' former campaign worker who, by the way, endorsed Jill Stein over Hillary Clinton in her race against Donald Trump. There is no reason for a Democrat to like her. That she had a rapper named Killer Mike who while campaigning for her slammed the eminent and accomplished Congressman James Clyburn, a member of the Democratic House Leadership as "incredibly stupid" for supporting Biden, lest anyone forget, THE CANDIDATE WHO WON THE ELECTION WITH MORE VOTES THAN ANYONE IN HISTORY is the kind of thing that would make anyone believe THAT is the reason she lost a Democratic nomination.
And as for Bernie Sanders' automatic response that the reason she lost to a genuine Democrat is big money interests, his candidate far out raised her opponent, so money doesn't seem to have been the decisive issue in her loss.
Perhaps Bernie Sanders should consider that her treachery towards Democrats who have won and led responsibly, even heroically and her idiotic "I'm the most lefty in the room" style may have been the reason that she lost a DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION just as he, twice, A DEMOCRAT ONLY WHEN IT'S CONVENIENT FOR HIM, lost A DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION. I don't know "Killer Mike" from Mike The Headless Chicken but if she's stupid enough to have such a jackass campaign for her, she would probably have lost the general election and been about as reliable a Democrat as another Jill Stein endorser, Krysten Sinema if she managed to win it.
I learned my lesson in this past election as a die-hard but not dead-headed supporter of Elizabeth Warren - someone who the play-lefties such as Sam Seder slammed on behalf of Bernie Sanders. In my ranked choice ballot, I put Elizabeth Warren first, Kamala Harris second and Joe Biden third. I had no confidence that Joe Biden could win or that he'd be an effective president if he managed to win but he proved me wrong. In his campaign having been revived by Black Voters in South Carolina on the advice of James Clyburn and watching him win the nomination hands down and go on to beat Trump I realized that the Black Voters of South Carolina, reportedly especially the Women among them were far wiser than I am, knowing the electability is the first and most important quality for a nominee to have and knowing who is electable is the most important component of wisdom in a voter during a primary.
As I saw in the tweets about Sanders' claim pointed out, Bernie Sanders doesn't seem to have that knack for picking winners or winning outside of Vermont. He may know his voters in Vermont, he doesn't seem to have much of an understanding of voters anywhere else. The play left doesn't even have as good a record as Sanders does.
Bernie Sanders should concentrate on his committee work and leave choosing Democratic nominees to real Democrats.
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Just to say, I read that Marjorie Taylor Green is planning on going to the Iowa State Fair, probably just to make money off of suckers but maybe to indicate she's thinking of running for president in 2024 (probably, again, to make money, not to really run).
Democrats should, right now, ban the use of caucuses in Democratic presidential nominations, declaring that any results from any state using caucuses will be invalid at the convention. Democrats should take over the nomination process and have a national, by-mail, tamper proof primary vote for the presidential nominee by DEMOCRATS ONLY, Iowa and New Hampshire not allowed to have the traditional, rural, small-state, lily white influence on the nomination they have enjoyed for the entire period of Republican-fascist ascendancy. State legislatures should not be able to screw with the Democratic Party nomination in the way they do when states set the calendar and the form of the nominations in their states.
This should have been done by now. Joe Biden owes neither Iowa nor New Hampshire his nomination, they should be demoted for the reasons above, the last few caucuses - which Bernie Sanders used so divisively in 2016 and which his supporters hoped to use that way last time - should be finally and totally abolished. Sanders should consider his dependence on that anti-democratic atrocity and learn the lesson of what that really meant in terms of actual voter support.
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