Extra-Stupid - Stupy Trolls Me With A Comment About Brian Wilson's "Genius"

I WILL ADMIT that it is something that gave me a bit of fun on days I wasn't busy enough to make fun of Steve Simels' repetition of the common received "wisdom" of pop music scribbling.  One of those surrounds the ridiculous inflation of the Beach Boy's Brian Wilson into a "genius" who Stupy, along with other cretinous "critics" of bubble-gum music have compared favorably with George Gershwin and, yeah, right, Mozart.

I would imagine some Daughter of the Confederacy falling on the fainting couch when someone desecrates the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest or Henry Clay is no more melodramatic than Simps going into a lather when I mock the pretentious claims made about commercial pop music icons. 

This time, waiting for the morning dew to dry up so I can go do my garden chores I decided to look to see if I could find who first designated Brian Wilson as a "genius" for Simps and the simple minded scribblers of rock "criticism,"  a line for them to  dutifully repeat for the next six decades, what that profession is made of.   I found out it was none other than Brian Wilson and his publicist at the time, Dereck Taylor who declared his "genius" to the world.  It seems to have stemmed from Wilson whining about the wholesome American boy image that had made him rich but was confining and perhaps something he'd outgrown,  that he didn't get nearly the respect that his "genius" earned him and, it being the most commercial and least genius ridden genera of music there is per billion dollars in revenue in the history of human music making, yeah, it got him what he believed he wanted.  

Temporarily believed he wanted.   He soon found being declared a "genius" to pad his ego was far more of a burden to him, one that led to everything from his backing away from the Beach Boys to inhibiting him from song writing, to turning to drugs to try to inspire his "creativity" to whatever else ailed the guy.   That, in the world of pop music is so monumental an issue that it generated a ridiculously long wikipedia page on the topic "Brian Wilson is a genius."  Something which, until I read Simp's taunt, I'd likely never have seen to mock his assertion with. 

I don't really care if Brian Wilson writes songs or music or performs it or if his fan boys and gals, most of them in the cootster cohort, lap it up.  His music doesn't offend me as long as I don't have to hear it.  I doubt he'd like much of the music I like.  People have a right to their own taste.  I don't care if they call him a "genius" though apparently that was something that brought the guy lots of grief.   The lesson is beware of getting what you can buy yourself into getting because you might find it comes with a bigger price than you find you're willing to pay or can handle.  

Mozart.  Really.  Mozart. 

UPDATE:  I decided to post this performance by Wim Winters of one of Mozart's most over-played and abused sonatas, the K332 F Major.  I might comment about it if I get flack.

 Direct link to the youtube

 

Update 2:  Leonard Bernstein was quite able to say some pretty silly things about music.  Especially when it was his attempt to be kewel with the kiddies.  I won't go into some of the truly stupid things he said in his disastrous Norton Lectures which did so much to alter my view of him, though he was never anything like my favorite conductor or composer.  

Hey, Simps, go read the wikipedia article and weep.  Brian Wilson was the one who ended up resenting the folly of getting himself declared a genius and who suffered due to the consequences of his own publicity campaign.  I am sorry he had to suffer but the way he got into it wasn't any evidence of genius, it was what you do, PR and salesmanship.

The Arrogance Of An All Male Authority And The Refusal Of It To Face A Reality They Will Never Have To Experience First Hand

I READ IN the National Catholic Reporter that: 

Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco is asking "all Catholics and others of goodwill" to join a prayer and fasting campaign for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic Democrat who supports legal abortion.

She represents California's 12th Congressional District, which is entirely within San Francisco.

What has prompted the prayer and fasting campaign is her leadership on the Women's Health Protection Act, or H.R. 3755, passed by the House in a 218-211 vote Sept. 24.

It codifies the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide. The measure establishes the legal right to abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy in all 50 states under federal law.

"A conversion of heart of the majority of our congressional representatives is needed on this issue, beginning with the leader of the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi," Archbishop Cordileone said in a statement Sept. 29.

Let me ask in turn that people pray for the conversion of Archbishop Cordileone and the rest of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops, that they have a conversion to the reality that making abortion illegal in all of the 50 states and territories of the United States will not stop abortion, it will only set us back to the pre-Roe days when abortions happened, very often, only they were done in illicit conditions for most WOMEN, with many being injured, some permanently injured, some dying some being subjected to terrible abuses and blackmailing during one of the most vulnerable periods of their lives.  And the illegalization of abortion not only had that effect, it also led to far more frequent incidents of infanticide, of the murder of unwanted babies who had been born.   To pretend that that experience of the illegalization of abortion is not what we have every reason to expect if it is again made illegal is willful, sinful and evil complicity in what will happen if they get their way.  That was considered acceptable in most states up till Roe was decided, the status quo of that era, allowing that to continue was an act of collaborative evil.

Pray that the USCCB and the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy face the hard truth that the one and only way to prevent abortions happening isn't to make it illegal it is to promote the use of birth control so that unwanted pregancies do not happen nearly so often as they do in our country, in no small part due to the Catholic hierarchy, other religious alleged authorities having suppressed the promotion of contraception, the respect of Women, the encouragement of Women to have full control of their bodies and their lives with the understanding that since pregnancy occurs only within their bodies that it is their right to be the one to make the decision to become pregnant in the first place and that they must exercise the responsibility to control that right. 

I would suspect that Nancy Pelosi, having been a mother, HAVING BEEN PREGNANT, something that no one in the Catholic hierarchy has ever been in the entire history of the Roman Catholic Church, knows more about that than all of the USCBB combined in its entire history.   I would ask her to include the Bishops, the Pope, and others in control of the Catholic Church in a prayer for their conversion from the arrogance of dictators to having the humility to allowing Women to own their own bodies without the coercive interference of the state or a church run exclusively by men.

The Hidden And Perpetual Lynching Campaign Against Women, Especially Women of Color

ABOUT A DECADE AGO while doing research for a blog post, I was horrified to read that at that time the FBI estimated about four women a day, every day, year after year have been murdered because of their gender.   It's a statistic that made a big impression on me because I had also researched the history of what is officially called lynching in this country and know that it was a far rarer thing than that - though it's absolutely certain that there were more racially motivated murders of Black People, Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other disfavored ethnic groups than would be counted as lynching.   That is, unfortunately, only one form of terror murder practiced routinely around the world though one of the most horrific.

I believed then and now that the reason that we don't see the campaign of murder, terror and violence against Women for what it is is that it's so common, the consequences of it in Women's lives are so habitual and accustomed that it's unremarkable.  Which is one of the reasons that it continues without any serious and effective means of fighting against it being found.  

I read in yesterday's Guardian that that figure of four women a day must be far too low because the FBI now says that at least four Black Women are murdered a day in the United States:

A least four Black women and girls were murdered per day in the United States in 2020, according to statistics released by the FBI last week, a sharp increase compared with the year before.

The FBI recorded at least 405 additional murders of Black women and girls last year as homicide surged across the country, and experts caution that even that stark number probably represents an undercount.

To families of victims and local activists, the release of the data is just the latest reminder that violence against Black women and girls often goes ignored, and should be made a more urgent public priority.

“What’s sad is that a lot of cases aren’t taken too seriously. It’s just another Black girl,” said Jennifer Redmond, whose 19-year-old daughter Sarayah Jade was killed last September.

The whole article is essential reading because it lays out the depth of not only the campaign of murder against Women of Color but also how routinely it is taken by the society in general.  The criticism of the 24-7 cabloid news coverage of the disappearance of single, often affluent, White Women puts the blame in the wrong place, on the Woman who may have fallen victim to violence and murder, though they are as capable of mounting the same kind of cabloid fever obsession over runaway brides.   That is all down to the racism of those who run and manage those commercial infotainment-sometimes news outlets and their expectations of the racism of their viewers.   If they expected that their viewers would care about the murders of Women of Color they would cover them hoping to get viewers.  Or, maybe not.  It really does matter when the people running a place are all White, all affluent, all part of the network of White, Straight, usually but not always male privilege, especially those who are products of the prep-elite private college system.  Socially, politically and in most cases, legally the opposite of the destitute, the poor, the not-white, not connected to privilege.  

But also this proves a need for People of Color, Women of Color and Women to be far more present in law enforcement, prosecutors offices, the judiciary and the higher courts as well.   Justice will be elusive and with it any inhibition that a risk to a criminal that might have in it.

There is every reason to believe there is a connection between violence against Women and the culture of entertainment which has and still does encourage that view of women, teaching men that they are entitled to commit violence against Women, to kill them, especially Women of Color to treat them as objects.   That is far, far best demonstrated in one of the forms of media that is most influential on the actual behavior of those who consume it, pornography.   The long told lie of the ACLU and other hucksters in the "civil liberties" industry is that "there's no proof" porn incites the behavior that it depicts and presents for the masturbatory inspiration that porn is.  Anyone with the rudiments of thought would see that as the fraud it is because all media that is consumed in that way has the same effect that advertisement has on people.  A commercial for a luxury food or drink product has the same effect on the behavior of the people who are susceptible to its intended message, it alters their behavior.  The very same lawyers and their organizations have made a big deal of getting pill pushers, tobacco, the liquor industry a "right" to advertise on TV.  If they believed that their client's much shorter, less participatory media messages had no effect on behavior they were guilty of taking their client's money fraudulently.  Only they never really believed that for a second as they lied about the far more engaging media that porn is.

That the "civil liberties" industry has profited from the patronage of the media, including pornographers is not unrelated to their lie that the stuff they enable is harmless, though there are signs that SOME younger people who would be peddled as the likely victims of porn and racist violence are making the link between the old ACLU bullshit and the waves of violence and terror against them and they're not having it.  I absolutely encourage them to understand that their lives, their bodies, their minds are the target of this flood of such "freedom" as the highly paid lawyers and the largely white male judges and "justices" have given to the media to target them are their enemies and that the law as written by 18th century rich, white, largely straight male racists should not burden them forever.  

People of Color, Women of Color, Women in general, LGBTQ, people, poor people, religious minorities all have a stake in the suppression of the media that puts a target on our backs because that has been a huge part of what stopped the progress of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Rights Movement.   I have no doubt that given the Republican-fascist domination on the Courts and in rigged, gerrymandered, manipulated district governmental bodies, that what progress has been made by LGBTQ people - who have benefited from the fact that there are lots of gay men and some lesbians embedded in the structures of privilege, in the Senate, on the Court - will be turned back, as well.   The violence against Trans women of color is an epidemic in itself.  We have every reason to all hold together against the origin of the epidemic of violence against Women because the very same forces that ignited that can ignite it against all of us in due time.

Everything I Needed To Know I Still Haven't Figured Out Well Into My Seventh Decade

IN TRYING TO DECIDE whether or not to answer one of the large majority of comments in my moderation file that doesn't get posted, I went back to a post I did earlier this year where I linked to a speech given by Adam Morris, the main character in the old BBC 6 part series, The Glittering Prizes.  In it the author used what is purported to be a quote by old Bertrand Russell saying that if it would assure eternal bliss for the survivors it would be morally justified to kill all of the Jews, the character referencing it in haranguing a tiny audience of elderly Jewish people for their hatred of Arabs.  Along the way, it being an upper-class, college-credentialed Brit milieu in which the thing was written and produced, of course they had to slam religion in general, the Jewish conception of God as elucidated in the Jewish (and by implication, Christian) scriptures as the most blood thirsty and evil entity in all of human history.  

In listening to it yesterday it struck me that what was on display was the typically superficial and uninformed, unthinking reading of the Scriptures that is typical of modernism, in which everything is supposed to be taken as if it were a modern political tract or modern history of something instead of something that is to be read with the highest degree of criticism, discovery of flaws and contradictions, trying to figure out what you are to think of the troublesome texts and to come to something far beyond a common-sense, "literal meaning" of what you've just read.  I'm sure it would offend those who have what they consider to be a sophisticate's dismissive view of the Scripture and the religion that is an attempt to apply scripture that I think theirs is, actually, an incredibly unsophisticated, simplistic and uniformed view of the whole thing.  Not to mention the view required of conformists to a particularly elitist and snobbish clique.  There's not much about it that is smart, it takes some of the most basic questions that a child would have about the Scriptures, gives a pat answer to them and stops at that.  There's a reason so many atheists will proudly say they had it all figured out when they were nine, or 12 or even 23.  Heaven help me if I'd stopped at my understanding of the world when I was 46.

I would say that even for modern political tracts modern history or even scientific paper,  reading it as if the meaning of what you're reading gives you anything like a complete or objective view of reality - the standards with which such things are supposed to be produced, is a delusional practice.   Nothing that anything any of us writes is free of the fact that they are written out of our previous thinking, the limits of our knowledge, our own life experience and the unconsidered expectations we have - and that's not when they are consciously written to support some theme or agenda.   Any responsible reader reads EVERYTHING asking what those are, including not only modern novels such as the one The Glittering Prizes was based on but modern history, science, political and legal document which is by habit and custom to be taken as an attempt at objective reality. 

That great philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel famously said, 

As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash

an interpretation.  I take that to be an assertion that the Bible is what it certainly is, a collection of humanly produced documents, as such it contains all of the certain biases, inadequacies, flaws and mistakes that any human being will produce and that, at most, it can only be an approximation of the complete truth.  In some places it might be very close, in others anything from a distorted reflection to an echo or a shadow or a false conception imposed on and amidst the what comes closer to the truth.  I will say that even the Bible itself doesn't claim it is the exclusive such document which attempts to come to a view of reality.   God, in the Hebrew Bible says that he has made covenants with other peoples and even the animals, who would have to have had their own view of reality.   Even that formerly notably arrogant and exclusive entity, the Roman Catholic Church has come round in the Second Vatican Council to admitting that other religions, even those which are not officially in line with the Jewish-Christian monotheistic tradition have truth in them.  

It may have troubled me once that there were four gospels (or more) that purported to be accounts of Jesus, what he did and what he said and, more important, what it meant but I think that multiplicity with its several major and many minor discrepancies produces a more useful and valid conception of what we can never really produce, an absolute and accurate and full picture of what gave rise to Christianity, the person who Jesus was, his nature, the relationship of the Redeemer to the Creator and the Sanctifier (to use a feminist expression of the human conception of God as a trinity of persons, one of many such possible and valid conceptions of it).  

None of us is capable of encompassing the entirety of much of anything except our own experience and our experience cannot be all encompassing.  In asking whether or not some computer algorithm that can predict the most efficient form of protein folding but which no human being could contain in their own memory and put to use really is "understanding" I was riffing off of something I wrote a long time ago about the eight dimensional figure that a large team of mathematicians using many computers linked together came up with.  I remember when I read that if printed out on paper the mathematical description would cover Manhattan was when I realized that the idea that any human mind could encompass such a thing was absurd and so wondered at anyone believing that they had understanding of it - not to mention how anyone could check it reliably in the way of old fashioned mathematical proof.  If that's true for one eight-dimensional figure, which may not exist anywhere in reality, it is literally infinitely true for God. 

And that is the problem with the utilitarian concept that we could ever calculate "the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people" in determining what we are to do as an ersatz, scientific, mathematical replacement for revealed morality.  There is no human capacity for determining what that is in any one generation, there is no way to know if, once, as Russell asserted all the Jews were exterminated if the remnant, or a very large number of them, may sense the horror of what they did and that it would forever haunt them, as it should.   And what kind of people would they be if they forgot what they did in all of its evil and all of its depravity as a means of producing the happiness of the surviving population, something which Hitler promised the Aryans they'd get by the various extermination programs he undertook, from the disabled to the Jews, the Slaves, the Roma, etc.   It is something that Darwin explicitly said would be gotten for the survivors if through passive negligence the poor died off in large numbers - he got that idea from the depraved parson Thomas Malthus - and through active means, his enthusiasm for British imperialism wiping out native Peoples, to be replaced by Brits as he believed happened in North America, Australia, Tasmania and elsewhere. 

So, no, it doesn't much trouble me that there is no one picture of Jesus in the Bible and that the figure of Moses is unproven in archeology or in the records kept by other civilizations in the Mediterranean East. I am, perhaps, a bit out of keeping with the up and came, already old-fashioned modernist view of such things that "Moses was a myth." because I doubt anyone would come up with such a radical view of reality, unprecedented in so many aspects, except for a single prophet speaking out of their experience of revelation.  Whether or not the entire setting that The Law and its being given is accurate, that central conception of Justice and of the God who insists on that Justice in response to human experience and depravity is why I believe there was such a person through whom that Law was given, though I don't believe that there necessarily was as large a population of runaway slaves or that their eventual domination of a part of Palestine happened through the bloody conquest described after Exodus in the canon.  

Nor do I think that utilitarianism or Darwinism are anything like a replacement for it, they are the negation of morality, not a more scientific and mathematically secure articulation of it. 

Maybe I'll try to concentrate on Heschel this next year.  I wish I'd gotten started on this when I was a teenager but, no, I had to get distracted by modernist bull shit, stupidly believing it was a more reliable guide.  It isn't, no more than a literalist, fundamentalist or  Magisterial view of the Scripture would be.  One of Heschel's conclusions that I value the most is that God would appear to favor a pluralistic understanding of religion.  

Heinrich Schutz - O Lieber Herre Gott, SWV 381 - Chorus Of Emmanuel Music Craig Smith Director

 

 

Direct Link To The Youtube 

O lieber Herre Gott, wecke uns auf,
daß wir bereit sein,
wenn dein Sohn kömmt,
ihn mit Freuden zu empfahen
und dir mit reinem Herzen zu dienen,
durch denselbigen deinen lieben Sohn
Jesum Christum, unsern Herren,
Amen.

 O dear Lord God, wake us up,
so that we are ready,
when your Son comes,
to receive him with joy
and to serve you with a pure heart,
by the same, thy beloved Son
Jesus Christ, our Lord,
Amen. 

It's a long time since I posted choral music.  I was thinking of reposting Brahms' wonderful Im Herbst but decided to post this piece by Schutz instead.  I could do a whole year long series of pieces by Schutz and not run out of masterpieces, pity he's less known than he should be.  If I had it all to do over again, I think I'd have liked to be a choral conductor.  That is if I couldn't be a jazz musician.

Just A Little More Fun Before Going Back To Serious Things

IT WASN'T AS YOU SUGGEST "a medical professional" who made the accusatory "diagnosis" that I've "got aspergers" (sic) it was a jerk of an online commentator who, though alleging to have a career in science could not answer what I said on several points about science.  

I do have to wonder at the use of such "psychology" in argument, it implies, for a start, that the thinking of someone put in the category "Asperger's" is by that definition unreliable on its face and not in need of understanding or answering.  The couple of people I've known labeled as such don't seem to demonstrate any high degree of illogicality that I ever noticed.  They are awkward in crowds and if forced to speak much will say things they regret but, then, some people who are gregarious often say things that are hurtful to other people, they just don't seem to mind having done so.  Maybe the "syndrome" is an active conscience or awareness of the potential to hurt other people without meaning to.

That is one of the consequences of the pathologizing of human thought and the ability given to such pseudo-scientists as those who generally work in the area of human behavior to make up and pathologize , give them a name, come up with a "treatment" for them which they can then sell them pills for or charge them so much per "session" to gab about it.  That is until they sometime in the future decide their predecessors got it wrong and remove it from the newest, niftiest edition of the Diagonstic and Statistical Manual (the infamous DSM) no doubt with a few new ones for practitioners to rope in more suckers with.  

In the meantime people who are unhappy are more often than not left as unhappy as before their sometimes years long "treatment," sometimes with a drug addiction or two or some other problem which is a relic of such "treatment".  Those who were unpleasant are sometimes even more so afterwards.

In this case, however, it was someone using sci-babble to dismiss points in a debate that they couldn't answer and my refusal to drop the point when they didn't answer it or give a reason that it was irrelevant.  That's not a problem on my part, it's a problem of such people generally being crappy at logical argument and using words without considering what they really mean.  As I said, yesterday, most of the times you hear someone drop the terms "DNA" or "natural selection" or "random chance" or "probability"* they are used very sloppily, unjustifiably and even illogically, even by very sophisticated scientists.   They are in most of the cases I notice, doing exactly what the same people accuse other people of doing, creating, gods to fill in the gaps of knowledge so as to support their preferred ideological claims and to pretend that they know something they don't know.   

It was one of the worst consequences of the rise of psychology and psychiatry that so much of human life, so many human beings, their minds, were stigmatized and  that the lax and casual use of terms such as "Asperger's" have given too many people the idea that their minds and behavior are not really under their ownership or, to some extent, control.   It's hard to control yourself but you really are the only one who can do that.  Minus criminal or self-destructive behavior you are most likely left to do that.  Minus those, if you aren't hurting anyone, letting some shrink work you over is probably a really bad idea.  And if you can't pay, the psychiatric industry isn't really interested in you or your problems, they'd rather rope in people with good insurance or an ability to pay so they can convince the affluent that it's other people who are responsible for their unhappiness and why they can't get what they want.

*  I don't think it's for nothing that the psychiatric industry has the word "statistical" in the title of their professional catalogue.  Given what you find when you look behind the generally deeply flawed methodology of their collection of such statistics, their use of the term is a good example of what I said.  If they have ever, once, achieved one of the logical necessities for such use of statistics asserting to demonstrate something about the general population, gotten a genuinely random sample of sufficient size to support their contentions, I'd be extremely shocked.  If they have done it twice I would say it would have to force a belief in miracles happening.  

Medicine is a mixture of science and art, we should be thankful that those doctors who treat our bodies rely on more valid science than those who allegedly treat our minds are allowed to get away with. But whenever anyone relies on self-reporting of unobservable things as all of the so-called behavioral sciences do, it's bound to go wrong.

I'd read theology, or philosophy.  Those guys who suggested that people talk to a philosopher instead of a shrink, for most people, probably did someone some good.  If you get one who isn't interested in forming a cult with them at the center.  ALWAYS avoid people who have that kind of chrasima, they are dangerous no matter what their line of work is.  I'd trust someone who has those fabled symptoms of "Aspergers" more.

Update:  Perhaps if you don't like me pointing out that "DNA," "natural selection," "random chance," and "probability" function as god in the gaps for the atheist, materialistic and scientistic I can piss you off more by saying that even within science, which is comprised of what's published by scientists as science, all of those have the same role as demiurges in pagan mythologies as creators of everything from species of living beings to the entire universe.  In Stephen Hawking's late work "the law of gravity" had the same character, he even credited it with the creation of the material universe out of "nothing".  In other MAS believing scientists it's other little understood forces, some of which may not even exist except in their equations.

Atheists believe in gods, lots of them, dragging them up for veneration as the occasion warrants.  They just don't like it when some impious person like me points out that they have their gods just like everyone else does.  And that they junk up science with them and get away with it as a matter of course.

I Am Told I Have "Symptoms of Asperger's" - This Is Going To Be Fun

I SUSPECT THAT IF SHE WERE AWARE OF ME  Sabine Hossenfelder might not be so happy to have me as a fan of her Youtube videos.   If that were true, too bad, you can't choose your admirers though you might exercise some control over who are your enemies.  

A while back when she did a very interesting video on a problem I've used as a refutation of atheist-materialist-fans of scientism's "brain-only" ideology in my unanswered series of questions about how the brain would know everything from that it needed to make a new structure, what kind of structure it needed to make, how to make that structure, . . . . and whether or not it had made the right structure to be the physical basis of a new idea - an essential problem for their claims that consciousness is materially founded - before the idea, itself was present in the brain to instruct it on all of those things.  The problem was the brain making the literally thousands of ideas a day it would have to make in the time it takes for us to have ideas.   

The relevant resort of the few atheist-materialist-scientistic ideologues who tried to come up with answers was that "DNA" did it.  Which is absurd because DNA would then have to be able to contain all of the information for all things that all human beings think in its "code" and, since all DNA does is make strings of amino acids, how that minutes long process could possibly work to create the proteins and, with an even longer time lag, fold them into just the right shape to then be turned into physical structures to be that idea.  And that it could possibly do so through that other unadmitted god of AMS (atheist materialist scientism) random chance and the actions of probability since there are myriads of ways in which proteins can fold.   

The answer to that was the one Sabine Hossenfelder, I suspect routinely and automatically threw out when it was simply her trying to find an explanation of how proteins folded in just the right way so often "natural selection."   I said to her assertion:

I would challenge your resort to the golden parachute used when you really don't have an explanation for something in biology "natural selection" in this video.   Every living being, those which or who leave offspring and those who don't require protein folding to succeed.  The difference in the efficacy of protein folding in those who leave more or fewer offspring is something I'd need some explanation of then some actual evidence to support it before I'd believe it.  "Natural selection" is, I think, an ideological illusion, not real.

I was a bit disappointed that she didn't take up my challenge because it would have been a lot of fun to see what she came up with, though I doubt she could have answered my point.   Those who say "natural selection" whenever they can't answer a question present it as a very real and very serious god-in-the-gaps all of the time without doing what is never done when "natural selection" is asserted, realize that it is all about differences in the rate of successful reproduction persisting in the line of life and the failure to do that which is absurd in a good percentage of the occasions in which even highly intelligent and rational scientists such as Sabine Hossenfelder say "natural selection."   In the case of attributing the success of all living organisms to produce correctly folded proteins when ALL OF THEM EXCEPT THOSE WHICH DIE AT CONCEPTION would have to have cellular mechanisms that make correctly folded proteins to even survive that long, to use "natural selection" as an explanation of that is ridiculous.   

I will point out that even if the algorithm used in the contest she based her video on were "solved" it would do nothing to get my questions about "brain-only" orthodoxy answered.  I really don't think that any computer algorithm "solving" a problem which is beyond human capacity to fully understand is really an understanding of something.  Though in Hossenfelders' case, her skepticism about the claims made that "protein folding has been solved" is miles ahead of where most people are on it. It also does nothing to explain how it happens in actual cells in actual bodies.  

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

I am bringing this up for several reasons but one is someone riffing off an old post has made a novel accusation to me, that my probing into forbidden areas of thought and expression reveals "symptoms of Asperger's."   Apparently one of the "symptoms" of that alleged syndrome is that people who have it can't resist the urge to say what they're thinking.   I'd say they have the virtue of devotion to the truth but, I suppose, if you're in the business of pathologizing peoples' minds you would see that as a pathology.   When the question is honesty, that doesn't surprise me when it's people in the psych racket who come up with that. 

I've known a couple of people who were "diagnosed" with "Asperger's" and didn't see much wrong with them.  They may have been slightly eccentric - I like people who are "different" - but they never did anything to harm anyone that I saw.  While I know one of the foundations of the psych racket, since Freud discovered it, was that they are always on the look out for ways to get more people coming back for "treatment" over a long period which generally proves to be futile, paying a small fortune for it, I'd guess that most of the people so "diagnosed" are more the marks for them than patients with a real "disorder."

My repeatedly asking the questions I do, making the points I do is directly related to the problems that I address being based on ingrained habits of thought and persisting and the needed analysis that MIGHT, and that what might lead to an improvement being forbidden thought and expression requires not leaving it alone.  

My theme is the failure of the "left" in American political life and the reasons for it, much of that failure is a product of the inadequacies of the controlling ideology of the "left," as my investigation of that developed the inadequacy and at times utter stupidity of the secular, college-credentialed, atheist-materialist-scientistic "left,"  the "left" which ascribes to the controlling ideological bases that just simply don't work to produce egalitarian democracy, economic and social justice based on a sustainable environment and human community.   If that commitment is a pathology, what is the idiocy of demanding and doing the same things over and over again for more than a century and only having it fail more every time?   ALL of the progress made against the 18th century Constitution has been a product of religious commitment to justice and equality and the Christian interpretation of the Mosaic foundations of those in love.  That is what I have concluded in the two decades I have been investigating the failure of the secular "left" and the reasons for that failure. 

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

The regime of Trumpian lies - the Free Speech-Press rulings that protect lies and the liars who tell them.  Ever worsening in our fools' golden age of free-speech-press absolutism.

The Senate blocking protection of elections (as they did in lynching, etc.) - the demand of the slave-power and Northern financiers among the "founders" to have an anti-democratically chosen Senate.

The Supreme Court using shifty shadow-docket tactics and 5-4 rulings to destroy individual rights and clean elections - The language of the First Amendment and other amendments that they use to do that with.  Not to mention their self-given, unConstitutional and absurdly accepted power of negating validly adopted laws on a 5-4 basis. . . .

It would be possible to make a list of terrible consequences and the real character of those secular idols which are held to be beyond questioning that are right there in plain sight and go unremarked because of the taboo on talking about them honestly.  I break that taboo because it helps evil people to do evil things, in the Senate, on the Court, in the House, in state houses across the country.  I don't see any reason not to break that taboo and be honest about that.   Give me one and see if I can knock it down.

Really Mad Hate Mail - If Kyrsten Sinema Doesn't Prove Me Wrong You Can Blame Her For What I Said About Her Atheism Because It Is Verified In Her Behavior

THE ISSUE I RAISED LAST WEEK that asked if Kyrsten Sinema's betrayal of the stands she pretended to champion in her various political campaigns, her shifting from a play-leftie Green-independent Naderite to the best friend of big money corruption as she does nothing might not be explainable by her atheism* which, there being a lack of an ultimate moral authority and judge of our behavior, figures if you can rig things the right way you can get away with anything without paying consequences you pay for.   That there seem to be people willing to call themselves Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc. who do the same thing does nothing to change the fact that it is her religious stand that comes with a denial of the very things that should prevent that bad behavior in those who pretend to believe in moral absolutes and consequences for bad behavior.

Clearly she doesn't care that she is setting herself up for this Senate seat for this term being the highest and last elective office she will likely get from the voters of Arizona,  if she thinks Republicans are going to nominate an supposed bisexual, atheist non-Republican to be their champion, maybe she is.  They nominated Trump and regularly nominate Lindsay Graham in South Carolina but my guess is her plans are to cash out when her term is up and make even more money. 

She could, of course, prove all of the above to be wrong but the only way she could do that at this time would be to not be a roadblock t o the things she pretended she had favored to dupe her supporters into getting her elected.  That's entirely on her, not me, not on her disappointed supporters and other voters who voted for her, not for her fans in other states who thought it would be groovy to have a bisexual atheist former Green in the Senate.    I was more inclined to distrust her for the Green-Naderite connections than her atheism before getting a load of what she did this year, the first time her own party held power in any of the offices she has held - according to Joy Reid last night.   I think she was always a self-serving operator, weighing what would get her what she wanted, if she wants to prove that wrong, this is the time and the Reconciliation bill is the one to do it with.

*  I strongly suspect that her atheism is quite relevant for determining her motives and goals.  She was honored, after their fashion, by one of the major atheism promotion rackets, the Center For Inquiry.   Which, considering how the gal bats off all inquiries from her own constituents and the real media is rather a hoot, though in line with that brand of atheist-"skeptical" inquiry which is all about shutting down the study of things they hate because they perceive that they endanger their ideology and its pretended solid foundation in logic and science. 

If she would whine about someone bringing her atheism up when what she's doing is no violation of any code of morality advocated by atheism and one which its critics have pointed out is a logical consequence of atheism, that's also ironic considering how atheists constantly bring up the religious identity of people acting badly.   Atheists, of course, do so to discredit the religion that, for example, Christians behaving badly, they are violating by their actions that hurt the poor, the dispossessed, that favor the rich and privileged.   They're hardly in a logically sound position to whine and complain when I point out that Kyrsten Sinema's duplicity, betrayal, self-serving, etc. are in violation of no moral absolute held as the truth by atheism.    That other atheists might hold to moral absolute positions that are found nowhere as a necessary consequences of their atheism is the anomaly, the evidence that there is more to their atheism than atheism.   Sinema's previous positions, if they were anything other than a means of gaining support and votes from people she intended to dupe were such anomalies if they were sincere.  Whether or not anyone should believe they were is also entirely up to her. 

The White Whine Spills

SO FAR as I know, "people of pallor" is something I thought up while I was writing my morning post.  If someone else said it first, good for them.  It was a joke but like some jokes, I really meant it.  I live in friggin' Maine, the sometimes second, sometimes first most blandly white state in the country.  And summer's over and the color is fading.  "Pallor" I don't take back.

The "Friendly Atheist" Attacks "moderate or progressive Christians" For Not Cleaning Up "Christian schools" With A Flock Of Twitter Shit

I'LL GUESS WITHOUT FIRST CHECKING that the "atheist blog" "CD" mentions is Hemant's blog so I'll go check it out to see what it says.

Later:  Yeah, I found it, a post of mostly Twitter shots from a hash tagger asking people who went to "Christian schools" to tell their horror stories and, guess what, they got a bunch of horror stories.  

And from that the "Friendly Atheists" of Hemant's "hate the Christians +" website concludes, with minimal ass covering:

There are so many more responses where those came from.

And obviously these don't represent all Christian schools or even all kinds of conservative Christian thought, but the fact that these things are happening in plain view at all should be troubling.  The fact that the Christians who work at those schools and the parents who pay for their kids to go there see nothing wrong with all this ought to be a giant stain on the entire religion.

The question should be what moderate or progressive Christians are doing to fight back against the extremists in their midst.  Doing nothing isn't an option.

I'm almost tempted to learn how to use Twitter so I could post a hash tag asking for people to document atheists who act badly to children to see what kind of reaction that would get.  I think you could post such a thing and if it went viral you'd get an eyeful though, as is always the case with online commentary, who the hell knows if any of them are the truth or accurate?   Since I slammed the DC Press Whores yesterday, let me say that online ideological sources such as this one, feeding off of the raw feed of unverifiable Twitter shit is even worse than they are.  You could probably get as many or more responses hatin' on chocolate ice cream or any aspect of pop kulcha.

Since the comment sent my way riffed off of one of the Twits* who said that they were told at their "Christian school" that Black People were made for slavery and got an answer that said "most Christians think they're superior to other people, . . . 

I'll break in here to ask Christians think they're superior to other people?  That's as opposed to ideological atheists, such as at THAT PARTICULAR BLOG, than whom I have never found any identifiable group except, perhaps the graduates of the prep-Ivy system, more inclined to believe in their own superiority.  

Though that's hardly a rare character flaw in any identifiable group I've ever seen except, perhaps, the destitute, the poor, the working poor and other groups acculturated to accept their own degradation.  A status that the Gospel of Jesus, the teachings of James and Paul and others who wrote the New Testament provide the greatest refutation of that I know of in human history.  That follows on the radical egalitarianism of Moses.  Christians who believe themselves to be superior and exalted do so when Jesus taught that the last will be first, those who exalt themselves will be humbled and that to enter the Kingdom of God you had to become as humble as a little child would have been in First Century culture, a nobody.   That the destitute go to heaven and the rich go to hell.  For any Christian to be anything other than a radical egalitarian is for them to not only deviate from but to betray the central teaching of a figure they claim to believe spoke the truth with divine authority.   On the other hand,  I've never seen an atheist expression of egalitarianism that was influential within atheism as a whole, either.  Or even widely agreed to among atheists.

. . . I decided to check out what Black People might think of that as a characterization of Christianity and found that that go-to source of online atheists, Pew, would seem to say People of Color and especially Black Women, are far more likely to profess Christianity than us people of pallor.   In short:

Roughly eight-in-ten (79%) African Americans self-identify as Christian, as do seven-in-ten whites and 77% of Latinos, according to Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study. Most black Christians and about half of all African Americans (53%) are associated with historically black Protestant churches, according to the study. Smaller shares of African Americans identify with evangelical Protestantism (14%), Catholicism (5%), mainline Protestantism (4%) and Islam (2%).

Which would sort verify a number of things, starting with the fact I learned during the atheist fad of the 00's is that most atheists seem to not understand that Black People, other People of Color hold religious belief, most of it in the United States, Christianity, as a belief, many of them have it as a much more significant part of their lives than many White people who profess Christianity.   I always found it bizarre that such white atheists of the alleged left were dead set against religion in political and public life when the greatest force for progressive change in our history has been religion, much of it coming from Black Christians, first in abolitionism and then the long, hard, dangerous and far from complete struggle for equality.  Christians have also been instrumental in the struggle for Women's' equality, universal suffrage, economic justice, the rights of workers, protection of the environment.   As a student of the history of  the struggle for LGBTQ rights, attaining those rights are and have been dependent on the support of straight people who are religious, many of them on the basis of Biblical egalitarian justice. Perhaps I'll go into detail sometime soon on what Pew says about that, including the problematic features of Pew's tendency to choose to pretend that "unaffiliated" was the same thing as "non-believing." 

I will, for now, refrain from going into details but I think the white dominated atheism of most online atheists is liable to be rather condescending to the views of People of Color, figuring religion is a childish mode of thought that they figure is tolerable as long as it's People of Color professing that belief.   I think that practice is endemic to the culture of organized and culturally expressed atheism, especially among those among the college-credentialed who learned it as the required received POV during their credentialing as respectable members of the White dominated, white-collar class. 

* I checked the pseudonymic identity of the Twit who posted it and I'd guess it's just another piece of unverifiable online lie, what you can expect to get when you ask people for something like that. 

There's so much to honesty condemn among such "Christian" schools that this is just a lazy-assed, self-discrediting and stupid thing.  It's like that ass who tried to get Jen Psaki to go out on his limb without naming his sources, only that's what 99.9999 % of online commentary is.  What percent of it is true and accurate is hardly possible to discern but I'm betting it's less than anyone would like to rely on. 

And a note to "CD" I hope you're getting help, you need it badly.