Orrin Evans, piano
Eric Reves, bass
Karriem Riggins, drums
Saturday, September 18, 2021
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Bangers And Mash
Comedy series by Katie Hims, in which former nun Martina takes a job with a chaotic catering company.
Starring: Mark Straker, Gerard McDermott and Catherine Harvey
This is a comedy series by one of my favorite younger radio drama writers. It's more down to Earth than Spaxter, posted last week. I've been listening to it while making applesauce and canning it. It's good to remember that Brit cuisine is pretty awful.
I'd never get nearly as much done if I had to look at a screen while I'm working.
Brueggemann On Exodus - Deeper Than Words To What They Are Talking About
Grace peace and mercy,in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
The Exodus story is our indispensable story. It is indispensable for Jews and for Christians. It keeps showing up in the Old Testament, it keeps showing up in the New Testament. It keeps showing up in the daily newspaper wherever there are questions of justice. So when you read the newspaper, look for Pharaoh, Pharaoh will be there.
We know a lot about Pharaoh, we know from the book of Genesis that he had dreams of scarcity he was afraid of running out. So he was a very anxious man and what he set out to do because he thought he'd run out that he would accumulate, that he would accumulate money and land and food, grain, people to work until he had a monopoly of everything in Egypt.
And then the book of Exodus begins as in our reading by saying when you have the monopoly you think you don't have enough yet, you will, we will always end up in violence.
And so he treated the slaves harshly because he thought it was legitimate to oppress them in order to enhance his monopoly.
But the book of Exodus is not written by Pharaoh, it is written from underneath. It is written by this company of people who were in debt, who were in despair and who were in bondage and who became a cheap labor supply for Pharaoh. They tell the underside of the story of world history.
And when the story begins, Pharaoh, who is scared of his slaves, the way all slave masters are scared of their slaves, was so afraid that he made a decree that all of the baby boys born to slaves should be killed because he did not want to have too much dangerous manpower around.
Then something happens in the story that we read today, there are these two Hebrew midwives. They are uncredentialed, the amazing thing is that we know their names, their names are Shifra and Puah. [To the congregation] Say, Shifra [Shifra] and Puah [Puah] and don't you forget that! And what Shifra and Puah did was to defy Pharaoh, they did not kill the baby boys but birthed them, and birthed them and birthed them. And we are told that because they feared God. They did not fear Pharaoh. If you look at what they did they engaged in civil disobedience. They engaged in political resistance.
There are people, I've heard there are people who are afraid that the Church is becoming too political. Well, it's political from the ground up. It's not liberal politics, it's not conservative politics, it is Exodus politics.
And Exodus politics are at work wherever there is a predatory economy where the big ones eat the little ones and people in power take advantage of powerless people. But they did not fear Pharaoh and so they engaged in dangerous action. They are called in for interrogation. And Pharaoh asked them, "Why did you do that? Why did you not do what I told you to do and kill all those baby boys?"
Well they're very clever women so they did not tell Pharaoh that they feared God because that would have been inflammatory. Instead what they told Pharaoh - you can look it up in the text - "Well, it just happened, the Hebrew baby boys just kept popping out and we couldn't stop them because The Force is with us." The Force is not with Pharaoh, The Force is not with those who are at the top of the heap who have a monopoly of money and power and land and food but the Biblical story all the way to Jesus of Nazareth is that The Force wells up from below and works justice and mercy and compassion and freedom for those who live in despair.
It's amazing that we do not know Pharaoh's name. I suppose that's because if you've seen one Pharaoh, you've seen all Pharaohs. But we know the names of the two midwives. Their names are Shifra and Puah. And the Bible believes that the course of human history is the contest between Pharaoh and Shifra and Puah. Or it is the contest between Cesar and and Jesus of Nazareth. Or it is the contest between all the powers of injustice and the strange work of justice that is done by people who commit civil disobedience and refuse to obey Pharaoh.
Today, when the true believers of Donald Trump, the entirely typical Pharaoh of the present are allegedly going to gather to promote their big lie and try to sway juries and judges into letting their ilk off of their attack on democracy and decency, it's good to point out that that is an entirely different thing than the risky civil disobedience against Pharaoh or Cesar or Trump though the words used mislead the dishonest and gullible into believing it is the same thing. Instead of those in the American underclass who performed the insurrection on January sixth, it was largely an affluent crowd who could afford to travel, to rent rooms in one of the most expensive places to do that and to fly back home who manned the insurrection that the President called to maintain him in power, with the help of Congressmen and Senators and thugs in his Department of "Justice" (irony surrounds that word like flies around a three day old corpse) and others with power. Some of the insurrectionists who attacked Capitol police and DC Metro police were police and firefighters in their own towns, some of them were members of the military. These were not your Hebrew slaves, they were not members of our underclass so a legitimate springing up of "The Force" could not have come from them. Not that many in the elite commentariate could have noticed that because, you see, the words used for both would be the same so the fact that the one was not like the others would have escaped them like someone who watched cartoons instead of Sesame Street.
I decided to transcribe the sermon of Walter Brueggeman that I recommended the other day, sometimes it's helpful to have the text though when it's so well delivered that gives you something letters on a screen can't. This is to about the half-way mark. I will try to have the rest of it soon if I don't get a cease and desist order, first.
"no sense of humor" - Stupid Mail
I GENERALLY LIKE LEWIS BLACK, though when he's not infrequently wrong he's wrong in the general way that I spend a lot of my time here railing against. I have found from listening to his Youtube channel "Rantcast" a few times that sometimes he's a lot funnier than other times. If it's worth listening to, I couldn't predict any particular day.
I, of course, think his free-speech absolutism BS is as dated and dangerous and quaint as his recent use of that most quaint of all 1950s era naughtiness, nudism, to repeat an argument to throw at the anti-mask nut cases. That antic he staged using teenage topless girls on a bus in NYC to exert his "freedom of speech" was pretty disgusting. Not to mention typical of a male in that milieu before second wave feminism. Why he didn't flash his own junk like a decent degenerate and get into even more PR generating trouble is what I'd ask him. Could it be that even for a bold, brave free-speech absolutists there are limits to what they'll do for their "free speech?" Like using their own body to make that statement? Since he claimed that it was advertising (I guess for his own career) he wouldn't have used his own junk for that but had no problem using teenage girls' bodies to do it along with those fucking assholes at the Opie and Anthony show.
Of course the reason for that is that the white-males of free-speechy "comedy" never put their own sweet fat on the line, they use other people for that.
I hate show-biz for the most part. I once told a brother in law who encouraged me to go back to watching TV because of "the good things it has on" that if someone poured a bag of quarters into a cesspool I wouldn't go diving in it to find them. "Comedy" is like that, too, but it's generally a few dimes with a couple of dollar coins thrown in. Lewis Black generates a few dimes and maybe, once in a while,a dollar, but I don't go looking for the chance to find them on a regular basis. I like funny stuff but comedy, like "pop music" is shockingly deficient of what it's supposed to be made of, these days.
Last Update:
Oh,
really? I thought he was a Scot. Like Duncan. What's the difference
between a Scot and a Sot? The Scot maintains the blog the sot lies on.
When Simps plays that card what he really means is "I got nuttin'."
Hey,
he ain't no Groucho or Jack Benny. He ain't no Fran Liebowitz who is
funnier in just about any interview I've heard her give than everything
I've heard Lewis Black produce. Lewis Black can be funny, just not as
often as you'd think a career as a comedian would require. He doesn't do
what he does as well as Zero Mostel did. Or the late, great Maury
Chaykin in that last show he did.
Opie and Anthony aren't
Jewish, how do you explain what I said about them? I didn't call Lewis
Black a fucking asshole, though I will stipulate that you are one.
As soon as I post this I am going to copy it to the right thread, to make up for your senility.
Friday, September 17, 2021
Maybe What You're Complaing About In My Criticism Of Buddhists Saying That Justice Is An Illusion Is A Feeling You're Suffering An Injustice - Buddhist Hate Mail
IF BUDDHISTS want to argue that the Jewish conception of justice is an illusion - and if there are any who want to argue that justice is real I would love it if you'd speak up LOUDLY to that effect - then the use of Buddhism by some of the most shamelessly malignant human beings among us today (Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey) makes their shameless evil far more understandable.
I was quite honest in my criticism of Buddhists and Buddhism's alleged non-theism as well as my criticism of Christians and Jews and their alleged belief in God. I don't see how you can accept the criticism of those who act as if they believed justice is an illusion when they're Christians and Jews who merely claim to believe in the source that teaches it is among the most real of realities but fall short and reject that criticism of people who claim it's an illusion and, in so many instances, act as if they really believe that.
I remember reading somewhere, back in the 60s or 70s a teacher of meditation warning that without a basic holding to morality that meditation would just make evil people more efficient in their evil doing. If you remove God from it, a comprehensible source of morals as real, you're begging for trouble. One of the worst things about the Catholic and Orthodox traditions was the extent to which nominal believers just left all of that stuff to the pros, the monks, the clergy, the religous in their communities. It was bad for The People, it was bad for the pros. I think Buddhism, especially in its cheapened, capitalist-inflected, show-biz-public relations oriented. faddish American form is at least as bad as the worst of those.
As The Great Gray Drab Wrings Her Hands Over Her Privilege To Lie With Impunity The Freedom To Lie Is Killing Us Better Than Our Foreign Enemies
HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE YOU WILLING TO GET KILLED FOR THE "FIRST AMENDMENT?" I don't mean on the battlefield allegedly in defense of "The Constitution," I mean on the killing fields, the overrun hospitals, waiting in hallways, waiting rooms, parking lots, unable to get an ambulance for a non-Covid emergency, unable to get life saving surgery and treatment because the hospitals are filled up, infected by those who believe what they read on Facebook and hear on FOX of from some sub-FOX radio hate-jock or some asshole of a spoiled brat rapper who was pissed off that she couldn't go to the big party because she wouldn't be vaccinated so she lied up a story about her cousin's friends balls blowing up? And that's only where some of the deaths have already and likely will come from.
At least in the absolutist formulation of it followed by courts since the Warren Court and with the holes blasted through the truth by them in the early 1960s, the truth and even the protection of American democracy from gangsters foreign, as well as domestic by the Rehnquist and Roberts courts. That got so bad that eventually some of those in the leadership of the ACLU in earlier years warned that things were getting dangerous a while ago, there is disagreement within it as lawyers protecting equal rights for those in danger from fascism disagree that a pseudo-liberal organization should be enabling fascists and Nazis and corporations that kill people. It's so bad that it recently had the great gray drab Susan Collins "concerned" that the group that got it the "right" to lie with impunity might not be so rock-headed solid on that absolutism in the face of what happens when the truth is destroyed and tens and scores of millions buy into the media lies with violent enthusiasm. That's the New York Times that used its "right" to lie about Hillary Clinton and so did more than its share in producing the Trump regime. The gray whore is worried that some of the ACLU's new staff, bought with all of the money people freaked out over Trump stupidly sent that organization are less enthusiastic about her and Lenny Bruce's right to blather than they are the real rights of real people being destroyed by the NYT helping to put Republican-fascists in power.
In case you might not think so, that first question was entirely serious. How many people are you willing to see die for that daffy, media-welcomed "right to lie," what "The First Amendment" means in an dangerously frequent use of that phrase today, as they take horse wormer for Covid, as they swamp schoolboard meetings across the country to get school children killed for their "freedom." As the same side lied about school children in the earliest years being murdered for "the Second Amendment" it's no great shock that they're willing to get even more killed for "the first amendment." Nor is it a shock that the media is so blase about that because they really aren't that removed from the post-Trumpian Republican-fascists.We passed the statistical milestone of one in five-hundred Americans having died from Covid-19, a very large part of that people being killed because of the "freedom of the press" to lie them into not only stupidity for themselves and their unfortunate families and co-workers but into a public health emergency for literally everyone. We are supposed to allow this to stay the same, that Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and the others in the Vaccine Passport protected FOX offices in New York can lie school children into their grave, their teachers, their school staffs, etc. And, before you know, those who use their Second Amendment "rights" to gun down school board members, administrators, etc. on the basis of what they hear in the media.
And that doesn't get us to the Facebook scum, Zuckerberg, et al. The Tic-Tok, Instagram, etc. front in this war of The First Amendment vs. The American People. And others. The American fascist war against Americans has been exported to Canada, Britain, elsewhere. I'm old enough so I remember when we used to ship vaccines and medical care abroad, now we far more efficiently send anti-vaxx and anti-medical care propaganda.
If we don't radically change the "first amendment" orthodoxy to protect ourselves from the FOX-Facebook-etc. fascists so as to shut them down we will soon find ourselves not only dying in even larger numbers, we will see the fascists use the power that they have gained by "freedom of the press" to make telling the truth not only illegal but dangerous. They're already making telling the truth and acting on it dangerous for school boards and schools even as they make telling lies dangerous for them, as well. That is what the theory of free speech-press that refuses on the basis of enlightenment withholding of moral judgement to distinguish between the right to tell the truth and the privilege that they and the courts have given to liars to lie us into perdition.
I'll tell you right now that I don't think any discussion of the
media and "The First Amendment" that leaves out the financial motives of
the commercial media and its employees in their absolutist support for
the current theory of "free speech-press" is going to be honest. I
distrust any media figure who takes that position because from the worst
to the best of them, allowing the media to lie with impunity is
profitable to them and those who hire them and maintain their careers. I
don't trust the media to tell the truth about that.
Thursday, September 16, 2021
After I Asked Nicki Who? - I Am Asked What I Think About Nicki Minaj's Antics
There's stupid, and then there's internet stupid. It's a like a whole other country; of stupid.
RMJ (in a comment he once made here)
Internet stupid is a subset of pop kulcha stupid.
I had never heard of Nicki Minaj before but looking her up and previous hypocrisies (going from making an appearance over Pride Month to getting paid 7 figures for singing at a Saudi pop concert, a country where they regularly behead LGBTQ people*), previous stupid statements, etc. what the jerk said to her 22 million followers about someone's balls swelling up because they got the Covid vaccine was something that should be criminal.
Pop kulcha has got to be put back in the category of stupid frivolity because when it's taken seriously it is too dangerous. I know WHY it's taken seriously, because there's so much money in it, but that does nothing to mitigate that it is dangerous for not only egalitarian democracy but, also, the public safety and health. The internet, social-disease media has brought this potential of it to the point of crisis. False witness, lying, the spreading of falsehood and the peddling of scummy crap like Reagan and Trump and Larry Elders is endemic to it.
Academics who specialize in pop culture on any basis except its danger to egalitarian democracy and a safe, decent life are a disgrace to scholarship and should be seen for the fame and money grubbing whores they are. Journalists, too, though they have no shame as a profession.
* I read she dragged Joy Reid over "homophobia" the other day. I'll bet she didn't drag the Crown Prince of The House of Saud who arranged for her to sing and get paid that over his murdering LGBTQ people, peaceful protestors, journalists, etc.
Update: Of course I listened. To two "songs," more than enough to know her junk isn't for me. By the time I was aware of rap "music" I figured, hey, we've got comedy that isn't funny, why not songs that aren't music? Then I heard more and I thought, "I hear America whining."
TV Is Not An Intellectual Entity - Other Than The Stupidest Of Them, They Come Here, Get Their Ass Whipped And Go Back To Duncan's Place Never To Return
IT IS JUST A SMALL PART of the idiocy of the atheist "left" that a lefty blog rat can go for going on a couple of decades with a pseudonym based on not one, but two of the more flagrant antisemites in the history of European culture and not a single one of the other members of that "left" would have that bother them in the least. If you want to see what happened when I called them on that, look up "Tacitius" and "Voltaire" on my blog archive in the box to the left of this.
Not that I think such asses know beans about either Tacitus or Voltaire except what they might have gotten from pop kulcha of the untillectual kind. I mean, they didn't know their vicious antisemitic content which is not inconsiderable. Nor did they know that that "enlightenment" hero of the atheist left, Voltaire was also a vicious racist, as well.
That's the "left" that the real left, the one that can win elections, control of the congress and the presidency, change laws for the better and, so make life better has got to get shut of and leave behind with all of its election losing baggage.
If you do the exercise of looking those up, note the time I kicked TV's ass over the matter of atheist mass murderers. I came up with a number of them in refutation of his challenge. I'd imagine his ass is still sore over that. So it doesn't surprise me that he would want to agree with Simps. I don't remember if he is one of the Eschatots who claims a career in the sciences. Maybe he doesn't understand set theory, either.
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
Stupid Mail - Why Should I Care What A Stupid Man Thinks He Thinks About What I Didn't Say?
HE'S TOO STUPID TO UNDERSTAND that the whole point of that little post answering someone who challenged what I said the other day is that there is nothing like complete understanding of the simplest mathematical objects, 1 certainly being quite simple and rather an important number. The whole point of it was that if the presumption that there was anything like complete understanding of anything in mathematics and, so, the physical sciences is absurd. Physics being entirely dependent on mathematics. It was an extension of the thing I got the massively arrogant and ideological cosmologist Sean Carroll to admit, that physics has nothing like a complete and comprehensive knowledge of a single electron in the universe which made his claim that a Theory of Everything was almost in hand entirely absurd.
Simps is on safe ground distorting what I said at the Eschaton "brain trust" (which they have been known to call their daycare for superannuated lefties) because none of them ever come here to see if he's lying or not. They don't care. One of the reasons I don't care what they think they think.
My point is that no mathematician would make such claims about the objects they deal with, never mind the entirety of mathematics while those professionals in the more attenuated and speculative and contingent fields of physics and cosmology have been getting away with such claims for most of the last century and longer.
Chore Day May Post A Longer Piece Tonight
I HAVE A MOUNTAIN of apples to turn to apple sauce to can and other harvest chores. Thank heavens. I had thought it was going to be a total disaster what with the spring drought and then the summer floods. My onion crop is a total loss, as is my garlic, but other things have made up for that.
In lieu of going on about the depressing political situation and the catastrophic environmental and public health situation, I'll leave you with a sermon by Walter Brueggemann on the central Exodus story and how it is the essential thing in our lives. Listening to his statement about the essential politics of the Christian church not being conservative or liberal but Exodus politics seems to me to provide a far more useful label for traditional American liberalism based on egalitarian commonwealth than the words "liberal" or "leftist" or "progressive."
I'd have to figure out the form of the word. "Exodus democrat," "Exodus egalitarian," "Mosaic liberal," . . . But anything that would separate the egalitarian democratic, economic justice ideology from the disastrous 18th century, inegalitarian, anti-democratic, economic injustice "liberalism," Neo-liberalism, would be good.
Americans of the real, can-gain-office-and-change-laws left need to get shut of all of that nonsense or it will never work. Basing it in the Scripture Tradition and following it as possible and even as seems risky will do us better than the alternatives. I think the Biden presidency might offer something of a real-life test of that idea.
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
An Answer - It Would Be Too Stupid
I WOULD LOVE TO SEE what would happen to any university based mathematician who claimed that every property of the natural numbers is known in every aspect and that there are no further properties of them to be discovered. I would imagine no one would make such a claim but I'd like to see the response to such a claim. And what is true for that set of numbers, in general, would be true for every element in that set, I would guess, including the number 1. I don't know how you could rank such aspects of mathematics in terms of significance. That's, surely, an extra-mathematical ranking.
If I were a mathematician I'd love to run that experiment though I doubt such a paper would ever get into a professional journal. It would be too stupid. Maybe your friend would like to try that, though I think it's probably more likely you misunderstood her.
Physics, today? Such claims are a dime a dozen and worth far less than that.
Hate Mail - The Only Secure Basis Of Effective Belief In Morality May Be No Absolute Guarantee But Its Opposite Is Guaranteed To Be Totally Ineffective
SOMEWHERE IN WHAT HE SAID about the Global Ethic effort that the late and beloved Hans Kung was engaged in, in the promotion of "The Golden Rule" he said that there had been a natural desire to include a mention of God as the source of that universal rule for human conduct but that if they did that they would be excluding the Buddhists. In my years of perhaps too informal study of Buddhism, I had noticed that though the claim of Theravada Buddhists* was that they didn't deal with the concept of a Creator God, for everything they said about The Dharma, it certainly looked like they did rather consistently have a Creator God, either in The Dharma or whatever it was that they thought made The Dharma real or function with something like what materialist physics likes to posit as a law of everything (not that they're close to having one of those articulated nor that there is any reasonable reason to believe they ever will have one of those). I think that Buddhism really does have a Creator God, a belief in a self, a belief in an enduring soul and the imposition of consequences for behavior (karma), they just don't like to talk about them in the same terms that most other people do.
If they are right not to as opposed to those of us, the majority of humanity who do talk about them in terms of a humanly comprehensible Person, I don't think there is any strong evidence. I do know that there are consequences in terms of their own thinking and belief. For me, as I've mentioned, the breaking point came over the Jewish conception of justice, which I regretted seemed to be missing from just about all of Buddhist thinking (though I wouldn't think as much action) and that that was a serious problem for it as an adequate system. The Buddhists I discussed that with tried to assure me that justice was merely an illusion, they didn't succeed in that. I assured them that if they were the victims of injustice they would certainly notice the absence of justice no matter how much their faith maintained it was a mere illusion.
The desire of Hans Kung and his colleagues to want to be inclusive of such a large number of people and an old, venerable and far from invaluable religious tradition seems honorable but I don't agree with them on that if their goals were to change human behavior to save ourselves and our biosphere for ourselves and the posterity of life on Earth.
I value being all inclusive of those who feel and believe other than I do but not enough to pretend that there won't be serious consequences for not pointing that out. If Buddhists are offended, well, no one seems to seriously mind it when serious Christians are so offended, or Jews. But I won't get back into what the late Bishop John Shelby Spong did in that regard just now.
I look on it from that and see no reason to believe that absent a widespread belief in consequences for not, in our behavior, following The Golden Rule and other hardly novel articulations of moral law, as opposed to the mere profession of an abstract belief in them, we may as well not bother trying to save ourselves.
I see nothing in human history or behavior to think that without a belief that God, beyond any human self-deceptive finagling, making those moral laws real in our lives and that there are real and guaranteed, immediate or eventual consequences for violating them, that asserting those morals or, if you will, "ethics" will make the slightest difference in real life.
It is hard enough to get people who claim to believe not only in the Jewish principle of justice but also in its extension in Christianity to universal love to even start to act like they didn't believe in their opposites - the history of Christianity is as much a sorry documentation of our falling short of that as the kings of Israel and Judah and The People falling short of the Mosaic Law/ If anything there is every reason to hope for a far stronger belief that The Golden Rule, the warning of the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, the commandment to love not only our neighbor but also our enemies and those who persecute us, etc. and the guarantee of consequences if we don't follow those than to water them down to doing that only if we feel like it. If there is anything obvious in the conduct of human life is that very, very few of us will "feel like it" and even some of those not enough to do it consistently and universally. Some of those who could be most charming and even hospitable to a select few have no problem being cruel, merciless and murderous to other people at the very same time. The gentility of the gentry was a point of pride with them, "Southern hospitality," the courtesy of the affluent to people of their own class even as they meted out the most evil of exploitative violence on many others. The reported strong friendship between Ruth Bader Ginsburg with one of her cruelest colleagues, Antonin Scalia, the reverence shown for the Supreme Court as it does some of the most evil things in American government, all of those are fuel for my skepticism that anything except a real and effective belief that those anti-Darwinian laws of morality are real because God makes them real and consequential will make them a reality in human conduct and action.
Anyone who believes any secular system can do that believes on the basis of having no evidence that that has ever or will ever get it done. It's hard enough to believe in that possibility when you do believe that God makes them real, without that, anyone who believes materialist-atheist-scientistic-secularism can could believe anything.
The biggest problem with Christians is that they don't act out what they claim to believe nearly often enough. Their belief in what they profess and its consequences is not strong enough to overcome their natural selfishness and greed. If there is something that nature gives us, it is the very thing that is leading us to perdition.
If they did act out of The Golden Rule, the other Commandments set out by Jesus, theirs would be the most well thought of thing, religion, ideology, in human life. That it is not so considered is one of those durable and guaranteed consequences of not doing what they preach. There are a few Christians who did better at that, when they are known for that, they are well thought of. Though most would rather accumulate junk and money and power just like everyone else.
* I think the gods of Mahayana Buddhism are mis-called, being more like lesser supernatural creatures in other mythologies, personifications of human traits and things observed. Which is one way to think of them.
I would like to go into how none of us can possibly have anything like a full conception of God and even an imaginary collective conception of all of human beings together (which is merely imaginary) couldn't come up with one.
The atheists in the audience shouldn't feel smug about that, current science, physics, cosmology is full to the top of such things, mathematics is constructed of such stuff. There is not a single mathematical object which is fully known in full, not even the number 1, not to mention 2.
Sunday, September 12, 2021
Headline At Media Matters Says
Sean Hannity warns “you will be canceled” and the government will target “your loved ones” if you don’t get vaccinated
Hannity, a. has been vaccinated, b. would lie about that, c. figures it's OK if you target your loved ones with Covid-19 and kill them.
FEED THE BACKLASH AGAINST THE ANTI-VAXX-ANTI-MASK TERRORISTS WHO ARE KILLING HUNDREDS OF TIMES MORE THAN AL QAEDA DID ON 9-11. WE SHOULD DECLARE WAR ON THEM AND DRIVE THEM OUT OF THE COUNTRY THAT HARBORS THEM, AMERICA.
When The Supreme Court Gives Rights To Lie To Liars They Destroy The Truth
Don’t tell me if you said that you remember September 11, 2001, I remember September 11, 2001. Yes, yes, you helped to get benefits for the people who were injured that day. But I heard her say that she was there that day. I was there that day, I don’t remember seeing Hillary Clinton there. That was like when she said she had to run through gunfire. That turned out to be, what do we call it? A lie.
Rudy Giuliani Last Week
Rudy Giuliani on The Site of The Twin Towers September 12, 2001 notice who is to his left with a mask on, unlike Rudy and the other guy, she knew how to wear one even then.
A Specimen In Defense Of My Criticism Of Psychology Last Week - Hate Mail In Answer To Hate Mail
BACK WHEN I SPENT a lot of my time arguing with people who cited the made-to-get-publicity "studies" published by the Pew center on how religion was falling to atheism, I wrote the piece reposted below. It gives the definitive answer as to what is wrong with the social sciences as science, especially those that rely on the unverifiable testimony of a, generally, ridiculously inadequate number of people, not randomly chosen (sociology and its allies cannot get a true random sample to represent large populations) and of unverifiable reliability in their responses. That situation has not changed, it alone is enough to prove that the science of sociology is a flagrant violation of the stated, agreed-to methods of science in a way that should disqualify it from being called science but as scientists are the ones who get to decide what is included, it being allowed to get away with being called science further proves the inconsistency of the world body of scientists on their agreed to requirements.
I will have some further comments after the repost.
Saturday, January 28, 2017
Why Some, Not All, Atheists Go Nine Bubbles Out Of Level And Give Crap Advice 'yeah, It's Hate Mail
There really isn't any way to know how many members there are of a
group which doesn't keep track of its membership, not to mention groups
that are not groups but are defined as such by sociologists. A figure
I've seen used for atheists is that there are about 9,886,000 atheists
in the United States - though the percentage figures you always see are
hardly reliable. In fact if you really care about accuracy, they aren't
reliable at all. According to one of the groups whose statistics are
often cited, Pew, there are some interesting "facts" about atheists, one of which is
8% of those who call themselves atheists also say they believe in
God or a universal spirit. Indeed, 2% say they are “absolutely certain”
about the existence of God or a universal spirit. Alternatively, there
are many people who fit the dictionary definition of “atheist” but do
not call themselves atheists. About three times as many Americans say
they do not believe in God or a universal spirit (9%) as say they are
atheists (3%).
I have seen other numbers from other organizations that lead me
to believe that the number of atheists is, to a large extent, a matter
of manipulation of survey questions. Looking at the methodology of some
of them would lead me to suspect that the actual number might be less
than one percent, some others, as high as six percent, though I think
both are as much a product of the manipulation of questioning, seeking a
result by those conducting the alleged research.
But, also, like all surveys of this type, any particular datum
you include in your data, is only as good as the understanding, the
competence, the honesty and the earnestness of the person who was asked
to provide it. There is no way to test the responses for their truth,
accuracy or understanding of the question, that is left to being a
matter of faith and what the analysis throws out in a way to rig the
results. All survey results will include data which will range from
totally unreliable to somewhat more reliable, perhaps.
And don't leave out that practice of just throwing out data you
don't like. What do you do about someone who claims to be an atheist
but who is "absolutely certain" about the existence of God or a
universal spirit" or about someone who doesn't believe in God but who
will not call themself an atheist? And if you just throw those
responses out you aren't clarifying anything about the actual composite
religious nature of the American People*. Claiming that someone who,
when given the chance, refuses to self-identify as an atheist is an
atheist would only add another layer to the dishonesty of the entire
enterprise of gathering such data, substituting the opinion of the
surveyors for that of the people whose honest reports they are allegedly
relying on.
I have written about the phony, ideologically created group
"Nones" as a means of confusing people into thinking there are more
atheists in the United States than there are, but it - against all logic
and all practice of accurate definition - tosses together any number of
dissimilar people, believers, non-believers, people who pretend to not
have made up their minds, etc. Believers, in the breakdowns of the
"Nones" tend to be far more in number than the non-believers or the
"agnostics" who call themselves that. Though I wouldn't trust the
surveyors who resort to that atheist propaganda dodge to have nearly
uniform means of generating their data or defining it or shoving them
into that category.
Religious groups which do keep track of membership at least can
tell you if someone has been a member of their church so at least those
numbers are probably somewhat more reliable. Some keep better records
than others.
In order to avoid having to continually use qualifiers because I
really don't believe their survey results, I'm going to state that I'll
pretend for what follows that those are reliable. Though I want to make
it clear that I don't buy them for a second.
Anyway, the fact is that 85% of the presumed 3.1% of American
Voters identified as atheists who are reported as voting for Hillary
Clinton, make up a far smaller number of people than the combined
members of religious denominations who voted for Hillary Clinton both in
total numbers, going from the religious denominations who gave her the
least percentage of their reported votes (just under one fifth of
Mormons) to the most (African Methodist Episcopalians, 92%) that number
of voters is certainly not a group which Democrats can afford to ignore,
not even to please such atheists as Duncan Black and Kevin Drum.
Advocating the position they did is absolutely sheer stupidity. Given
that the number of religious voters is about the largest sub-set of all
voters, it would make more sense in sheer term of trying to win an
election to leave one of the genders out of the discussion. It
certainly would make more sense to leave out those atheists and
agnostics who advocate such stupidity. And I do know for a fact that
they don't speak for all atheists. I doubt Barney Frank would say such a
stupid thing about politics and I know my former state legislator who
knew how to count votes wouldn't. If you think I've been hard on them,
he'd be likely to dope slap them. He's had to try to win election
instead of just tapping a keyboard about politics.
* Such composite entities don't really exist, they are a mythical creation of such pseudo-science as sociology is made of.
Update 2021: Reading through this, it occurs to me that the phenomeon of atheists who are "certain" that there is a god or universal spirit and non-atheists who are atheists by the dictionary definition of the word might prove that the insistence on creating such defined categories is, itself, the opposite of a scientific or mathematical exercise. People simply will not accept the category that even such scientists,** put them in to get the results they want for publication. The problem of that for all and any such science that relies on people reporting such stuff as unverifiable "facts" about themselves, their experience, their opinion and for putting such people in defined categories for publication is extremely serious and quite obvious. But there is no evidence I've seen that it is a problem for the allegedly scientific nature of what they do that has ever been honesty dealt with by such sciences as should be laughed out of honest consideration.
I have recently noted the dangers of judges and courts relying on such stuff, which can be as easily ideologically rigged for the fascist right as for the allegedly liberal alleged left. I don't think the dangers of the left depending on them are negligible either. Dishonest and mistaken science tends to carry its own dangers when decisions and policies and legal decisions are based on them. Look at Buck v Bell written by the insanely inapt hero of later "liberals" if you want a classic example.
** I would have formerly put the word "scientist" in quotes there because they don't follow the rules of science, however I have decided that is dishonest because scientists, the faculties of university and college science departments, the publishers of scientific journals are the ones who define who is a scientist, whether they adhere to the rules rigorously and scrupulously or if they violate them rigorously and unscrupulously. Scientists should clean up their acts but it will involve them telling the truth about psychology, evolutionary psychology and Sociobiology, sociology, anthropology, perhaps worst of all, ethology and other fields of publication and entrenched positions in universities and the public understanding of science which would be a huge shit show. It would also demonstrate that, especially since the rise of Darwinism, that science has pretty much been in violation of its own stated rules in many fields. Not all of them on the same basis of the fields named above and generally for ideological reasons, cosmology and contemporary physics is a whole other shit show for reasons of ideology.
Update To The Whole: If you want a good example of what a shit show ideology has driven contemporary physics into, and its only one possible such example, here's this recent post from Peter Woit's blog. Especially note his responses in the comments. I wouldn't accuse Woit of being non-ideological but he at least seems to take the requirements for honesty and following the agreed to rules more seriously than a lot of his colleagues do.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Shorter Schmucko:
ReplyDeleteLewis Black is Jewish.