Don't Know Don't Care Don't Miss It

APPARENTLY the person who used to tell me the lies about me posted at Duncan Black's blog either lost interest, died or . . . otherwise just stopped telling me about it.  I never went there except to document that what I was told was accurate before I answered it here - Duncan blocked me from countering the lies on his blog - so either that is the case or . . . maybe Duncan finally decided to uphold the standards advocated by the legendary Horse of Media Whores Online, his original online mentor?   Something he hasn't done much since he decided to take on the irresponsibility of his style of blog maintenance.   I'd say stranger things have happened but, off hand, I'm having a hard time to identify one.

For me it will certainly cut back on the number of easy posts for me, since I try to never post anything I can't back up I know how to refute the lies told about what I say but I write too much anyway.   It could be fun, at times, I love to mock and tease and the opportunities given me by the Tots of Eschaton for mockery were many and those who provided them so mock-able.  

Since you ask. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Lewis, Yergainharsian, Slavin - No One Ever Asked Me That

 No One Ever Asked Me That

Written & devised by Louise Lewis, Nyree Yergainharsian and Gorretti Slavin 2021 and women are reclaiming themselves. They have the right to choose. But that doesn't mean they are all choosing the same thing. Supported by real stories from real women, this play follows Jenny and Claire's opposite journeys along the same path.

"he's our foremost advocate of people understanding science" - Hate Mail

YOU SHOULD LOOK AT my take down of Dawkins' "First Bird To Call Out" explanatory myth because I believe I pretty much shredded one of his foremost contributions to the popular (mis)understanding of science.  I mean, he didn't seem to even account for things like the speed of sound and distance when he made it up while sitting in his chair, making up the "indirect evidence" for it the same way.   I've been challenging his fanboys and gals to defend it for going on a decade and not one has explained away a single criticism I made of it.  Made in response to yet another citation of it in a brawl I was involved in a decade back.

I was not surprised to read that Dawkins' who, sometimes is talked about as an expert in animal behavior, really has never been much interested in animals. 

The dogs are generally more Ward’s concern than Dawkins’s; he is not hugely interested in animals. As a child, he preferred to read books while his nature-loving parents John and Jean were out spotting birds and plants. (Jean, aged 98, lives on the family farm in Chipping Norton, outside Oxford, where Dawkins visits her weekly.) Dawkins was born in Nairobi in 1941; until he was eight, the family lived in colonial east Africa where his father worked as an agricultural officer before joining the King’s African Rifles during the second world war. Even then, surrounded by nature at its most vivid, Dawkins remained uninspired. He remembers, as a young child, being taken in a safari car to watch a pride of lions gnawing at a carcass. While the rest of the group stared in fascination, he stayed on the floor playing with his toy cars. He does, however, know every class and order of the animal kingdom, a product of the classical zoological education he received as an undergraduate at Oxford. If he has trouble sleeping, he mentally scrolls through the alphabet and assigns mammals to letters.

As a postgraduate, Dawkins excelled at the early stages of the research process, mulling theoretical questions and coming up with hypotheses. But he lacked patience with the laborious hours of data collection or methodical lab work. His interest in zoology was philosophical, not naturalistic: animals were simply the language he’d chosen to learn in order to interpret the world.

On a recent spring afternoon, sitting in his back garden, he explained the evolution of social insects by imitating an ant whose sole function was to guard the entrance hole to a giant bamboo stick in which the ant colony lived. The ant had an elongated head that it used like a door to block the hole and prevent the entrance of intruders. Dawkins hunched in his chair and stuck his head forward, then jerked it back, blocking and unblocking the hole. The performance was strangely captivating, but the ant was simply a means to explain the social behaviour of insects. “Everybody knew that if Richard asked you why you were interested in zoology,” said Kate Lessells, a former student of Dawkins in the 1970s and now a field biologist, “‘Because I like animals,’ was not an answer that was going to go down well.”

Instead, his students knew him as “the computer man”: a pioneer in the developing strand of biology based on the mathematical modelling of animal behaviour. He would regularly stay up all night writing code on the sole computer in the zoology department, an Elliot 803 – at the time a relatively compact machine, now the kind of elaborate object kept for historical interest by the Science Museum. When it broke down, the joke among undergraduates at the time was that Dawkins had been trying to “wire himself into it”.

Considering the incompetence of his alleged description of animal behavior, created in his imagination to support his debasement of "altruism" into gene selfishness, he should have gotten out and about more and looked at some animals.

I'm also asked what I mean by "brawls."   Arguments online can be civil and rational and based in evidence but most of them are anything but that.  They're not "debates" they seldom are arguments (you argue facts, not opinions) considering how dirty and pointless they tend to be "brawls" is the most honest word for them.  I find most of them to be useful to teach me how degraded the life of the mind is among the English typing People in the age of mass media and the internet.  I think even for the alleged thinking classes they indicate that we've lost grounds since the scholastic period, we haven't gained on it.  Which isn't an argument for going back in time, that can't be done nor should it, the Creation moves on from the past.  What it means is we need a better future than the one in the offing right now.

Pseudo-Science Goes After Pseudo-Science And Demonstrates More Than They Bargained For

IT IS MORE THAN A LITTLE IRONIC for an Alternet-RawStory scribbler named Alex Henderson to get an easy article out of slamming astrology and pseudo-science as being an indicator of narcissism and using a bogus and anti-scientifically conducted study at the University of Lund to do that with. 

 I'm not speaking up for astrology which I don't happen to believe in and which I think should be regulated to prevent it being used to cheat and dupe and rob people who want to consult with astrologers.  Astrologers should be required to be licensed with some actual and strict requirements, both educational and reporting due to a. people are going to consult them no matter how much anyone else doesn't like that and, b. as they are in the advice giving business, their practices should at least be open to inspection.  Something which, I will point out, in many states and countries is not a requirement of psychologists and other pseudo-scientifically based practitioners are not really required to do.  In some states anyone can put up a sign calling themselves a "counselor" and start roping 'em in and milking them for big bucks.  I would like to see the archive of articles in either place that expresses concerns about the malignant practices of any of that stuff.

The bogus nature of the study is obvious from the description of its reported motive, goal and methdology, from the article:

Heingartner says of the Lund study, "The authors suggest that current 'stressors' which might explain the increasing popularity of astrology include climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. And understanding why people believe in astrology matters. Although astrology in itself may seem harmless, it also correlates with belief in other pseudo-sciences and conspiracy theories. So, the researchers wanted to find out whether individual personality traits might play a role in understanding why people who believe in astrology hold that belief."

And here's how they got what they wanted, with my running commentary:

Referencing the Lund researchers, Heingartner explains, "264 English-speaking participants…were recruited via Facebook.

That is an entirely inadequate sample size to tell you much of anything about a larger population, nevermind the general population.  Finding them through Facebook alone should have pulled the plug on the thing, the users of Facebook are not a knowably typical sample of the general public, the sample they got could not even be typical of Facebook users, I doubt that the sub-samples of either believers or non-believers in astrology would be accurately represented by such a sample.  The simple and hard truth is, no non-random sample can really be rationally presented as typical of a far larger general population. That is inconvenient in the extreme for any rational and honest person who would like to be able to use these kinds of methods to do such studies to find things they can assert are generally true of a larger population, that the social sciences, everything from psychology and sociology down to the dregs of opinion polling do so comprises one of the biggest and potentially most dangerous of pseudo-scientific practices in modern life.  That they get to call themselves "sciences" while doing nothing like science is to today what astrology and its associated "sciences" were in the credulous Renaissance and early modern periods.  I don't think it's to be unexpected that they would be taking pot shots at their closest competitors.  It's kind of like Mac v. Windows only bitchier and more pervasive.

Most of the participants, 87%, were women, and their age range was 25-34….

So a sample size ridiculously skewed by gender and I would bet it's as skewed by other factors, income, race, ethnicity, amount of leisure time, not having anything better to do than waste time gossiping on Facebook, etc. And the age cited is rather funny, considering how the author gets his digs in at the hippies of the 60s being agog with astrology due to the Fifth-Dimension having a hit with that Age of Aquarius song from Hair.  I knew more than a few would-be hippies and I didn't know one who really believed in astrology though I did know a PhD in Neuro-Biology from Purdue who did.  She got another degree and took up psychology after that.
 

The researchers also wanted to investigate the links between astrology and narcissism, 'due to the self-focused perspective' at the core of both. Finally, the researchers wanted to measure the participants' IQ levels, as intelligence has been found to correlate negatively with belief in pseudoscience and the paranormal."

It is a sign of the absurdity of this that they were looking to find one of the most safely generalized aspect of human personality "the self-focused perspective" which is endemic to the human population.  I have never known more vehemently "self-focused" people than I have the materialists and, especially, the self-defined "skeptics."  Is there a human being alive who was more "self-focused" than the late James Randi?  Madalyn Murray O'Hair?

Heingartner says, "As the researchers write, the link between astrology and narcissism 'is possibly due to the self-centered worldview uniting them.' They also suggest that the positive framing of astrological predictions and horoscopes might reinforce grandiose feelings, 'and thus might appeal even more to narcissists.'"

Oh, give me a break. I have a feeling that if you were trying to find examples of the "self-centered world view"  ONE OF THE SAFEST BETS ON WHERE TO FIND CONCENTRATIONS OF SUCH PEOPLE  WOULD THE THE PEOPLE WHO USE FACEBOOK WHERE THE FACE PRESENTED TO THE WORLD IS USUALLY THAT OF THE USER!  I doubt that any non-believers in astrology they found would have really been less self-centered than those who did believe in it, considering how they got the participants in their study.   I would like them to check out the membership of any "skeptics" outfit to rate them on an accurate scale of self-absorption because I have a feeling there's plenty of that stuff among them, too.  

 
Intelligence was measured as well by the Lund researchers. Heingartner notes, "Intelligence had a small but significant negative effect: the higher the IQ, the lower the likelihood of believing in astrology. The researchers also found that female participants and older participants showed slightly higher rates of believing in astrology." 

Anyone who uses IQ as a measurement should immediately be considered to have abandoned science.   IQ is a dangerous superstition introduced by the social-sciences, one which has damaged more lives and blighted more people than all of the astrologers in modern history.

The researchers designed specific questions to measure how narcissistic a person is. And they asked participants to respond to statements like "I get bored hanging around with ordinary people" and "people see me as a natural leader."

Always assume when they come up with an ad hoc, novel, one-off methodology of "measuring" something like this that their method will a. be bogus, b. be designed to find what they want it to find, c. be tweaked to produce the results they want it to.  

In that age group I would look to the English language media, entertainment, pop-music, movies, TV and ads as a better source for any self-aborption.  Perhaps it might be best explained by that decrease in belief in the Abrahamic religions which are all about being focused on justice for others, perhaps it's explained by the navel-gazing of the "mindfulness" fad that took such hold in that generation.  To attribute it to astrology seems absurd when you consider the power of the media as a more likely source for it.

This is such a ridiculous study presented as science that it's useless to show you much except how much bull shit has been introduced as science in the general culture by the phony sciences starting with psychology.  I couldn't resist pointing these things out because this is the kind of stuff that informs the religion I've been slamming so much, the religion of scientistic atheist materialism.  The scientism of it is especially hilarious because you would think anyone professing such devotion to science would be the first to call this bullshit out instead of, as I suspect, defending it with all their might.

War On Stuffmas

I'm enjoying a Buy Nothing Day as the news is full of Christmas fights at the Walmarts and other stores. 

I'm enjoying it so much I think I'll keep on buying nothing for a while.  

I hate Stuffmas. 

"Why Are You Making Such A Big Deal About This" - You Can Always Tell When An Atheist Knows They're Losing The Argument

IF THE ATHEISTS who invented multi-verse theory to support their materialist monism, and there is every reason to believe that is their motive, if they insist that one and two dimensional universes are real things, real things that cannot have material existence, then they have actually invented another disconfirmation of the basic claim of materialist monism, that matter (and the energy they were forced to accept as real) are the only thing that there is.   They can either have their materialist monism or they can have the one and two dimensional universes they invented in their scheme to get past the fine-tuning of the one and only universe they have actual access to,  You know,   what scientists used to once consider the ultimate test of any scientific claim, and the People who notice that the Big Bang and the fine tuning rather supports the implication that God is the Creator of all of it.  An implication, by the way, they are free to reject only, that's right, they can't believe they really are free to reject it because they also have to give up free thought because their ideology can't support that, either.

It's hilarious when you think of how much that discovery made from Einstein's evidenced theories freaked out the atheists, Hoyle one of the hardest cases and how much nonsense they pushed directly and successfully right into the heart of science to try to make it go away.   Materialism is the origin of decadence, the elite variety as well as the vulgar variety of it.

So, to accuse me of making too big a deal of it is rather funny.  I'm happy to be able to put your mind to rest,  it was the atheists who started doing that before I'd learned to do long division and had the vaguest notion of what subatomic particles are.   

I actually don't think any of this is very important, the consequences of it, other than leading to governments getting suckered into letting them make ever bigger colliders costing ever more billions of dollars so they can look for ever more fleeting things of ever more attenuated utility to keep God at bay (in their imaginations) the consequences of the widespread belief in natural selection and scientific racism is far more dangerous. That and suckering stupid people who can't do division without a calculator and probably couldn't balance an equation of one variable if it got too involved.   

I don't think it's a surprise that three of the Four Horsemen of the new atheist fad of the 00s have turned out to be regressing to pre-war Darwinism, Christopher Hitchens to a cynical and self-profiting economic social Darwinism and Republican-fascism, Sam Harris to old line scientific racism and eugenics, the more careful Richard Dawkins playing the line of explicit endorsement of it on a few issues, careful not to go too far except when it comes to sexism.   I'm not sure about Dennett on that, he never was the flashiest of them, more of an annoying  little dog following the horses barking, not a serious member of the crew.  It was really more the Three Amigos than Horsemen.  I wouldn't even call them Musketeers. 

Oh, and I will point out again that any atheist who believes, as their hero, Stephen Hawking said that the universes, free from the restraints of logic or physical law, universes having entirely different physical characteristics than our universe where we do mathematics to do such things in, then HE IS THE ONE WHO INSISTS THAT MATHEMATICAL OBJECTS ARE NOT PART OF THE REALITY WE CAN KNOW OF AS MATERIAL EXISTENCE.  If they can describe non-material one and two-dimensional universes or any unreal thing then they are not a mere epiphenomenon of matter-energy, the thing that materialists insist comprises the entirety of existence.  You can't have it both ways, Bunky, there's no reason for anyone to have gone this far with the imaginary Grand Design, it's an illusion created to support atheist ideology, not science.   I'm kind of shocked how many otherwise intelligent people are suckers for it.  It's sort of like Trumpism for the sci-ranger crowd.  Intellectual Ivermectin peddling.

Harold Darke - Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in a minor

 

Direct link to video

Byron Consort 

I'd like to hear this sung by this group in a way so the words were more audible because, musically, this is one of the most spectacularly beautiful English language settings I've come across.   

An antidote to Black Friday

Reger: "Nun danket alle Gott" op. 79b Nr. 11

 

Direct link  

Score for the complete set of preludes, this one is #5 in the second set.  

Bernhard Schneider, organ 

The Klais organ of the church of St. Aegidien, Braunschweig

 

Now Thank We All Our God

 

Direct link to video

Huddersfield Choral Society 

Joseph Cullen, conductor

Now thank we all our God,
with heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done,
in Whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers’ arms
has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
and still is ours today

O may this bounteous God
through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts
and blessed peace to cheer us;
And keep us in His grace,
and guide us when perplexed;
And free us from all ills,
in this world and the next!
 

All praise and thanks to God
the Father now be given;
The Son and Him Who reigns
with Them in highest Heaven;
The one eternal God,
whom earth and Heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now,
and shall be evermore.

Though I know nothing about the group or their conductor, I liked this performance in English, very clear and straight forward.  Catherine Winkworth translated from the original text by Martin Rinkart.
 

J. S. Bach - Nun Danket Alle Gott BWV 386 - Chorale Prelude BWV 657

 

Direct link to video

Artist: Gerhard Gnann 

Choir: Stuttgart Gachinger Kantorei 

Conductor: Helmuth Rilling 

Someone once asked the great Catholic theologian Hans Küng about his funeral, that he'd once said he wanted the final hymn to be the Lutheran hymn Nun Danket Alle Gott, Now Thank We All Our God.

SPIEGEL: You want your funeral to end with the hymn "Now Thank We All Our God."

Küng: Because it expresses that my life has not perished but has been completed. It's something to be happy about, isn't it?

The closer I get to the end and at my age my body reminds me I'm getting closer every day, I'm finding I am kind of looking more hopefully on it.  But there's no reason to wait for that, there's lots to be thankful for right in the terrible times we are in.   That there are People who have not surrendered to evil one of the biggest of those reasons.  It's a pretty good Thanksgiving Day song, too. 

Horace Silver - Red Beans And Rice

 

Last Hate Mail Before The Holiday

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man.   With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe.  There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.

Alex Velenkin:  Many Worlds in One: The Search For Other Universes 

ANYONE WHO HAS spent time arguing with atheists will know their first and last resort to any reasoned argument will be "prove it," it is their all purpose demand along with another one that insists that they are exempt from having to present the kind of proof or even evidence because  . . . and they will change the rules as to why they don't have to as suits the occasion or not, every claim suffices to exempt them from it. It's not unrelated to the old logical positivist tactic of declaring by fiat that questions they don't like are "meaningless" on the basis of their ideological holdings,  holdings which are, as well, unevidenced and unproven, which are designed for the same purpose of making them not have to deal with the weaknesses of their claims and the problems with their holdings.  Though the idea might have some merit in some limited cases, the practice of people like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins refusing to argue with their opponents is often a resort to a similar kind of intellectual cowardice masquerading as principle.  Gould was one of those who popularized that stand in the late 20th century, he did so out of the mistaken conviction that his side held a stronger hand than it did.  Dawkins may well know that he is intellectually unequipped to take on a really competent and tough opponent in a debate, even if they are willing to abide by the set up job that the Oxford Union kind of debate so often is.

One of the more surprising things I've learned from online brawling is the extent to which those kinds of tactics have taken over from the kind of evidenced based, reasoned arguments in which all parties agreed that there was a requirement of evidence or at least rational arguments presented and that those were evaluated on the basis of their merits instead of the basis of them conforming to the likes and dislikes of those involved.  In many cases, maybe most cases, it would seem that everything from the merit of an argument to the capability of the person making the argument means no more than whether or not what is said agrees with the prejudices of those involved in the argument.   If that habit were as widespread as it is today when I was a teenager and young adult, I don't know.  I didn't encounter it nearly to the extent I have now.

I have in the past made a joke about the need to have a requirement of all college grads that they pass the kind of rigorous basic Freshman Rhetoric course that was being dropped when I was in college because it was ungroovy and not customer friendly with the TV trained idiots of my generation.  Things got steadily worse after that and it's embarrassing to try to argue with the college-credentialed idiots of the English Speaking Peoples in too many cases. 

The addling of the internet added to the vidiocy induced by the TV during my generation has left our allegedly educated class dangerously stupid.  There's no reason for it, they could learn, if made to.  

That a long answer to why I so often won't post the comments I answer.  I don't feel any responsibility to present their nonsense anymore than I'd feel it was necessary to present lies told by Republican-fascists, not wanting to give them a repetition by doing so.  But that doesn't mean that I don't want to use what such people give me to work off of.  I can do that on my own terms without the trash talkin' and the lies and the attacks on third parties whose permission to post insults against I don't have.

The extent to which so many with college credentials are immune to any evidence or reasoned argument that doesn't match their prejudices is really disturbing,  to the extent that they will claim that any evidence presented that doesn't support their prejudices isn't there.  And it's not just the young'uns who do that. 

Update:  One of the things that set off my sense that I was listening to bull shit peddled as science was the talk about "one-dimensional universes."   I doubt that physical existence is possible in one dimension, a straight line of no physical dimension.   Every physical object I'm aware of, even on a subatomic level, has dimension in three dimensions, if physics has come up with something that doesn't, point me to where it's described in space.  Space has dimension.  These "one dimensional universes" would seem to exist in no realm of physicality that can be known to have the properties of actual existence, they are rationally believed to be no more than an imaginary thing which, since imagination must be imaged - images requiring dimension - can't be imagined in anything thing but a metaphor that can't really be imagined.    The same thing applies to the absolutely flat surfaces of two-dimensions which would lack the third dimension that is required for something to have knowable physical existence.  To imagine that one and two dimensional "universes" exist is probably an artifact of superstition based on mathematics and there are, in fact, no "one and two dimensional universes" and they can't even be imagined except through ignoring the three dimensions, more than that, really, to imagine physical existence. 

I don't know how reliant the various flavors of crap that multiverse theory are on these imagined, non-physical "universes" are but if they are reliant on their existence, I'd think the entire thing as "physical theory" is a blatant illusion and superstition of the materialists.  It would be ultimately ironic if their ideology foundered on the rock of them imagining things that could not have material existence.  Though they've never let logical incoherence stop them in the past, especially those who take the stand of scientism, that only science can provide us with knowledge because that statement is, itself, not a statement of science but of ideology and, therefore, must be false if it is true. 

Steve Nelson Quartet From Last Night

 

  

Steve Nelson(vb), Rick Germanson(p), Kiyoshi Kitagawa(b), Charles Goold(d) Live at Smalls Jazz Club

I'm enjoying this right now, I love to listen to jazz in the morning. And it couldn't be fresher unless you listened to it when it was livecast.

Curves And Their Knowable Limits - Hate Mail

HERE IS the quote from Hawking's Grand Design, again

It appears that the fundamental numbers, and even the form, of the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle. The parameters are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and different forms in different universes.

The first amazing thing is the claim that "the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic," when his motive is to claim the creative power of "self-consistent mathematical theory" when that mathematical theory could not in any way be distanced from the logic necessary not only to arrive at that theory but all of its supporting mathematics right down to those at work in the primitive arithmetic of the set of counting numbers.  The mathematics cannot be separated from the operations of logic that, first, proved the next levels of mathematics, going back to provide a logical basis for (though not ultimate and complete foundation of) basic arithmetic.  

It's less shocking that wanting to make up jillions of universes out of equations so as to win the God argument - which seems to be the primary motivation of a lot of the more decadent physics and most of the cosmology done in the post-WWII period - Hawking demanded that physics be freed from "physical principle" by which he certainly means, but doesn't include, the principle that scientific imagination be reigned in by actual measurable observation of nature in this, our only known universe in order to actually do science so as to achieve reliable results.  It's less shocking but no less decadent than him and his colleagues insisting that the mathematical models he wanted to win his argument with not have to cohere to logic when it couldn't exist without having a foundation in quite a bit of very rigorous though often attenuated logic. 

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

I remember having a discussion with a mathematician friend in which I told her I was extremely skeptical about an equation I'd seen conjured up in the social (so-called) sciences that used the fourth power of pi as a constant.   I told her I was skeptical that any aspect of social behavior was determined by the forth power of pi, she said she was skeptical that pi, itself, could have any relationship to what was real about something so removed from the shape of a circle.   I wondered later if maybe the fetish for making curved lines on a graph, believing that added explanatory power to an academic paper might have had something to do with it while having nothing to do with what was really happening.  I might look her up and run that idea past her.  A good part of current scientific-political racism is based on just that from a Harvard Psychologist and a racist political hack.

That would be interesting to investigate, the extent to which this kind of seeming mathematical coherence might actually be an illusion, though, considering how easy it is for the most bogus of soc-sci to be adopted and to assert itself, however temporarily, into the common received wisdom of the academic field it's inserted into, you'd probably never convince them that they were teaching an illusion, publishing and, so, becoming self-interested in the adoption of illusion within that field.  I think that's common place in the non-observational sciences, it's so telling that the scientistic atheist materialists want to bring that standard not only to biology through the degraded practices of psychology and sociology and, worst of all economics,  but, also to physics.  That they might find their greatest success in the non-observational aspect of that in the Lords of Creation style of cosmology might not be that surprising.  

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It's not surprising that self-sacrificing generosity is such a huge problem for the Darwinist treatment of evolution to deal with whereas depravity is no problem at all for it.  Darwinism being founded on the depraved, Brit class system based, and so based not in nature but in the laws of the gangster ruling British elite, economic theory of Thomas Malthus.  As I've pointed out any number of times Marx astutely pointed out not only the defects of the theories of Malthus and the man himself but also that Darwin turned those theories on their head to impose the British class system on all of nature.   Marx, alas, was a far better critic than he was at coming up with something better.  Though I think he may have been more bothered by the results of his theories than either Malthus or Darwin were theirs.  He did tell people he was not a Marxist, after all.

Malthusian economics made the artificial, man-made laws erected by the English then British elites to allow them to steal the property of and the product of the labor of the lower classes.  Malthus turned science into a weapon to further promote robbing the poor and destitute of the benefits of morality and so to cost them their lives.   That he did so while a Parson of the Anglican Church shows what a low point that institution was at during the "enlightenment" period.  

That his depraved "enlightenment" theory was adopted by the academic elite, almost to a man members of the upper classes wherever they were,  needs little explanation.  Why they were and still are allowed to misrepresent an entirely artificial situation set up by gangsters to benefit themselves as being some aspect of "nature" is less clear now that so many members of the lower classes have attained university credentials is less clear.  Darwinism, today, natural selection retains all of the coarser motives and defects of its parent ideology.  Maybe it's part of logic being a sometimes thing even within science such as goes right to the top of physics these days in support of the ideological motives of the atheist-materialists.  Maybe that idea has some explanatory power. 

Update:  It occurs to me that I should look to see if any of the multiversers creating universes of one dimension has ever used statistical curves to peddle their claims, which would strike me as sort of ultimately ironic. 

It's This Kind Of Thing That Puts My Better Angel To The Test And They Are Failing It

 

Seven doctors contract Covid after attending Florida anti-vaccine summit

Doctors tested positive or developed symptoms ‘within days’ of conference at which alternative treatments were discussed

The two of the seven discussed in the article, especially the scumbag who slammed his his 97 year old father at the meeting held at the World Equestrian Center in Ocala, Florida for doing the smart thing and taking the Covid vaccination and who got it from his fellow anti-vaxxers, do not leave me wishing them well.  I might if they immediately and publicly turned around, disavowed their lies and endangering their patients, expending more of an effort into recanting their lies that get other people killed feel some sympathy for them but I'm afraid my rule for such people is that if someone has to get Covid and die or suffer permanent injury  from it they are ones who deserve to.

Andrew Hill - Pumpkin

 

Direct link to video

Andrew Hill — piano 

Joe Henderson — saxophone 

Richard Davis — bass 

Roy Haynes — drums

 Was thinking about posting Thelonious Monk's little known composition Stuffy Turkey but as an animal lover and vegan, I couldn't do it.  So I went right to dessert.  Not big on Thanksgiving,  We're up to four vegetarian-vegans in the family now, we're getting together Friday.  All vaccinated but we'll distance.

Why The United States Is Going To Hell In A Handbasket: See Also

Internal anti-neighborliness yields external risk and danger.

Walter Brueggemann: Slow-Wisdom as a Sub-Version of Reality 

More to come

"you're lying about what Hawking said"

BUT HAWKING DID SAY THAT, in his book The Grand Design he and his co-author said exactly what I said.

It appears that the fundamental numbers, and even the form, of the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle. The parameters are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and different forms in different universes.

So many aspects of the decadence of current materialism are condensed into that that I have to keep coming back to it, it is truly a breathtakingly decadent demand to make. And so revealing of how badly thought out that is. 

How these "self-consistent mathematical theories" differ from the demiurges of some pagan systems is only a matter of nouns and adectives, Hawking was a materialist so he had to create material gods but that doesn't work "the apparent laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle."  And, like the classical gods of paganism, their demiurges didn't really solve the problem of ultimate authority, their gods and goddesses were, themselves, subject to higher realms of existence.*  Even the gods had their life cycles. 

Hawking and his buddies, needing to have a multiverse to deny that a belief in the extreme improbability of our universe being as "finely tuned" as it seems to be (as expressed in the mathematics of probability and statistics) might suggest the Creator was a respectable conclusion, he goes every which way to make his scheme work.  He even seems to divorce logic as a controlling principle in physical science and, bizarrely enough, the creative force he claims balanced equations are.  How he divorces the balancing of equations from logic is something I wish someone would have asked him about.  

That puts mathematics out of the realm of having been a product of the material of the universe and puts it into the role of the creator or, rather, his "Grand Design" which I don't see how he divorces from the math he also gives divine power to. 

It was one of the first things I thought way back, while being introduced to the lore and mythology of the multiverses (there are many, many multiverses, no two very much alike) that I wondered a number of things about them, among them how, if they had different physical parameters how any Earth bound scientist could know that the principles of science they based their speculations on would hold in these unseeable, strange universes which could not be imagined.  When they started talking about one and two-dimensional universes I thought the idea that they could know anything about such things was absurd but as the first scheme of multiverses I was exposed to was the utter and complete bullshit of Hugh Everett, in which every time anyone did anything or anything did anything a whole shitload of universes as expressions of every numerical valuation possible in his equations came into being, I wasn't surprised.  

How anyone could have any strong faith that the mathematics or physics or logic in our universe that dreamed up any such one or two-dimensional universe would be applicable to any such entities in reality was another of my early questions. 

I suspect that the entire thing that led to Hawking making such a decadent demand of science is no more real or relevant to reality than the mythologies that the sci-ranger fan-boys of Hawking and whatever other scientist is fashionable among them love to mock - often not getting even the broad outlines of what they're mocking accurate.  And so much of it is, so tellingly, an angry, emotional rejection of the curious confluence of modern physics of the Big Bang and a literal reading of the first few verses of Genesis,  Which was a huge deal among the atheist physicists right up till the turn of the century and even today.  I think that ideological campaign that was allowed to be inserted right into the center of modern science has produced what may, in the future, if we have one of those, will be seen as one of the most widespread and massive areas of decadence and rot in the history of science.  

Though, since you seem to take Hawking seriously, what he did certainly is based in what I said, that mathematical objects are independent of any physical substrate and, so, must have an independent existence if they can be said to exist at all.  If that were not the case then Hawking's demand would be total nonsense from the get go. Though I wouldn't be surprised if he and his co-author wouldn't insist on having it every-which-way, having mathematics be both dependent on the physics of our universe and independent of it at the same time.  After all, they demanded that physics be divorced from logic, freeing "laws of nature" from it and, if the passage is to make any sense, mathematics, too. If that were not the case then any mathematical calculation created universe would have to have the logical coherence to balance the equation.  Or, perhaps, in his zeal to make his grand scientistic, atheist, materialist god work, he didn't understand that logic is an inherent aspect of the balancing of any equation.

* I learned a lot about that by reading an explanation of how Lwa as articulated in Vodun are under the authority of The Good God, it was a surprise to find out that a lot of so-called polytheistic religions were really monotheistic, something that the frequent association of the "gods" of African-New World religion with Catholic saints might have been a clue to anthropologists and others. . I don't believe anything about any religion until I hear an insider say it, though I never believe anyone has the last word on that. 

Update:  Well, I'm not the only one who believes that atheists are in the business of replacing God with their own gods, Tim Radford famously observed in his review of The Grand Design.

In this very brief history of modern cosmological physics, the laws of quantum and relativistic physics represent things to be wondered at but widely accepted: just like biblical miracles. M-theory invokes something different: a prime mover, a begetter, a creative force that is everywhere and nowhere. This force cannot be identified by instruments or examined by comprehensible mathematical prediction, and yet it contains all possibilities. It incorporates omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence, and it’s a big mystery. Remind you of Anybody?

I've identified all kinds of atheist created gods to stick in gaping chasms in the explanations of science and their ideology, random chance, probability, statistics, natural selection, something they call "DNA" to which they attribute supernatural powers, super natural because they expand its role way, way past where scientific evidence supports it.  As a political blogger I'd point out the catastrophic effects with enormous body counts and immeasurable pain and suffering, oppression and enslavement that natural selection on the one hand and Marx's god of the dialectic have brought to humanity.  

In the United States, preceding it but then adopting Darwinism (even as it rejects evolution), white supremacy, our indigenous form of fascism has done the same while espousing an anti-Christianity in opposition to every word of the Gospel.  Its adoption of Trump as their As Seen On TV messiah, it's clear that it is the anti-Christ, the only real relationship it has to Christ.   In the similarly vulgar materialism of capitalism, "the market" with its unseen hand has demanded many sacrificed victims, billionaires being deified in that form of materialist deification of things.

Monday Night Standards - Duke Ellington - Ivie Anderson - It Don't Mean A Thing

 

"It Don't Mean a Thing" is originally a 1931 composition by Duke Ellington with lyrics by Irving Mills, singed in 1932 by the vocal diva Ivie Anderson.

I should know more about Duke Ellington's career than I do as well as the People he worked with. 

Mood Indigo  

DUKE ELLINGTON & HIS FAMOUS ORCHESTRA Duke Ellington, p, dir: Wallace Jones, Cootie Williams, t / Rex Stewrt, c / Joe Nanton, Lawrence Brown, tb / Juan Tizol, vtb / Barney Bigard, cl / Johnny Hodges, cl, ss, as / Harry Carney, cl, as, bar / Otto Hardwick, as, bsx / Fred Guy, g / Jimmy Blanton, sb / Sonny Greer, d / Ivy Anderson, voc. New York, February 14, 1940 WM-1137-A Mood Indigo - vIA Columbia 35427

I'll Never Get Why These Self-Appointed Geniuses Believe That To Reject One Thing Means You Have To Accept Something Else You Reject

 First Known Use of secular

Adjective 

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

[1a : of or relating to the worldly or temporal secular concerns]


Noun

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

[ Essential Meaning of secular
1 : not spiritual : of or relating to the physical world and not the spiritual world secular concerns]

Merriam Webster  

LOOKING IN MY TO BE TRASHED FILE, there's whining about a post I did on the 12th, about why I thought the ideology of secularism was far from the boon for humanity it's peddled as being on behalf of atheism.  There is nothing that gets you more angry fury than thinking freely in contradiction of the self-appointed "free thinkers"  who at the same time deny that free thought is possible because of material causation being one of their a-gods. 

It is one of the great ironies of modernism that, as I pointed out, the idolology of secularism has its most reliable political association with governments which have been among the worst, if not the worst examples of violent, murderous, genocidal suppression of people, robbing them of all of their rights, robbing them of their property and suppressing their free thought and free expression of their thought AND THERE IS NOTHING IN SECULARISM OR THE ATHEISM THAT IS BASED IN THAT WOULD SAY THAT WHAT THEY ARE DOING IS WRONG.

To make a fair and honest criticism of governments which do the same thing while claiming to support Christianity either as an explicit state religion or as an expression of the values of Christians THEY HAVE TO VIOLATE THE MOST BASIC AND STRONG MORAL TEACHINGS OF A PERSON THEY CLAIM TO BELIEVE SPEAKS WITH THE AUTHORITY OF GOD.    

Secularism that kills, totally self consistent, 

Christianity that kills, in total violation of its existential claims and pretentions. 

Clearly the problem with secularism isn't that it's been tried and found to not live up to its basic properties.

The problem with alleged Christian government is that it has never tried to do the the least among us that we should do for The Lord, doing to others what we would have done to us, giving everything to the poor and destitute, forgiving those who offend us, praying for our enemies, letting our no mean no and our yes, yes (not lying). etc. 

Establishment of religion is a terrible idea with a history of terrible performance and the corruption of religion.  Secularism is a far more clear cut terrible idea based on its terrible performance and the fact that when secularism does terrible things, it remains self-consistent.  

You don't have to choose one or the other, you can reject both.

Reductionism Might Be Best At Revealing How We Can't Get To The Bottom Of Things Or That What's Down There Isn't What's "Really Real"

THE BASIS Of MATERIALISM has always claimed to be able to reduce reality to its smallest and most real unit, all composites being assumed to be temporary arrangements and, so their ultimate significance illusory.  The atomists weren't only at work in the Greek and Latin speaking worlds, they were more widespread than that and it took a long time for their imagined smallest unit of what was really real to be known to be composed of smaller units and those units of smaller units, etc. The imaginary strings of the fading-in-popularity String Theory - which has yet to cohere into a uniform ideology (it's not a science until it makes predictions and confirms those in observation).  I don't think they'll ever be able to peel the onion down to that level and I doubt, if they could, it would give an always and eternally complete answer as to what's really, really . . . . reallyreallyreallly real.

And it's not only that part of modern reductionism that is full of problems, quantum theory, though a real science, is hardly uniform in what it holds or claims.

I don't keep up with the latest of the latest but I wonder if they really have any idea what and how what they're discovering really is or how it works.  This is related to my pointing out that science can't explain how either consciousness or, in fact, mathematical objects can interact with the physical objects that science was invented to investigate, explain and control.  Since the movements and interaction of objects is the topic, does science really understand what forces and fields are and how they move objects?  Does it understand what the energy that is theorized as the mover is or how it accumulates or dissipates into different areas, perhaps into different objects so as to cause them to move apart or come together?   Where within a subatomic particle does this energy gather so as to initiate movement?  Or if it's not contained within the object, why does the energy choose to move this or that subatomic particle or entity and not another one?  Does an electron have some mechanism or regulation of the accumulation or effect of energy some internal structure that will explain how this happens.  And, again, how is mathematics that to us appears so complex as to not be apparent until we've had many, many years of advanced schooling, interacting with a seeming perfection with these unconscious entities continually?  

The immateriality of mathematical entities - calling them, numbers and operations and results "objects" is merely a physical metaphor - is made clear through their relevance to different physical phenomena and rational applicability in different areas.  Why should counting discrete objects and counting accumulated measurements, the measurements of physical objects and the areas of time and speed work if the numbers and operations are tied to the physical natures of these different things?   The truths of mathematics, about things we can only access through the most obvious of acts of imagination, would seem to transcend any physical substrate, so the basic claim of materialism would have to be wrong if science is to be taken seriously.

I don't think reductionism gets you closer to a finite truth than any other ideological program is going to.  Mad, God drunken William Blake's mystical insight into the inadequacies of The Atoms of Democritus and Newton's particles of light as the last word (since then confirmed by science)  is more impressive to me than the fussy, petulant insistence of a Sean Carroll or the absurd demand of Stephen Hawking that we just allow equations to have the powers of creator demiurges and that he gets to call that science, not a single observation or measurement of the natural world ever made.   And, due to his credentials and PR, that's considered to be science as seen on TV and in the flicker pictures.   It's sort of ironic that hate mail has led me to writing two pieces about the ultimate decadence of modernism in one morning. 

I left the play left and modernism for the real left about fourteen years ago, I haven't missed the play left at all.  And I'm far more radical now than I was then. 

Update:  Considering the fleeting status of any theory of cosmology as being durable in the culture of contemporary, credentialed thought, it's hilarious for materialist cosmologists to try to determine what has the status of eternal reality.

The idea that something that changes and disappears, or, rather, seems to disappear isn't as real as something that persists for however many billions of years current scientists believe a proton or electron might persist is pretty funny, especially among those who, on the basis of calculation and not observation come up with tales of the first fractions of a second or minutes after the Big Bang and what came into being then and, on the other end, the various dismal scenarios of either the heat death or the big bounce or whatever is coming.  Clearly those would have to include not talked about realities that materialism and scientism can't include and atheism detests anyone believing makes more sense than the various things atheist cosmologists make up to avoid anyone believing that God makes more sense of it all. 

When pressed as hard as I'm willing to take it, most atheists seem to angrily give up and resort to their more typical rhetorical devices of ridicule, trash-talkin' and appeals to the prejudices of their camp.  But I don't buy that anymore.

American Democracy Died From Libertarianism, The Lies Peddled In The Mass Media, The Real Story Of The Libertarian-Secular "Left"

ANYONE WHO HOLDS that Rupert Murdoch and the hundreds of liars he employs should have been allowed to lie in the mass media had that as a right because James Madison and the First Congress were too stupid or dishonest to make a distinction between the absolute right to tell the truth and there being no right to lie, that is as much of the thing that got us into the possible destruction of representative democracy as Rupert Murdoch is.   No matter how much they love to believe otherwise.  What Murdoch did is take advantage of the gaping hole they blew into the moral foundation of egalitarian democracy, far more effective an attack on the United States than the first attack on the World Trade Center Omar Abdel-Rahman plotted.  And they did it with ink on paper, no one getting their fingernails dirty.

I would include the ACLU, Floyd Abrams, Joel Gora and pretty much all of the big names in the "civil liberties" "First Amendment"  law industrial game.   I long thought it was telling that one of the big names of the past in that racket, Ephraim London, filed the lawsuit for that phony goddess of the phony libertarian left, Lillian Hellman that financially ruined Mary McCarthy for telling the truth about Hellman, that she was a huge liar.  That is the real motive of the civil liberties racket, I am convinced it got its biggest start in the early 20th century when the communists realized they'd never be able to win by telling the truth and having so little respect for the intelligence of The People and no use for good will, wanted to be able to lie themselves into power like the Republican-fascists are, using the legal fictions that the play left helped to create.   Though, as I've said, what really opened my eyes was the ACLU campaigning to make "Well, Maybe Again" the law of the land in the Skokie case even as so many of their supporters adopted the phrase "never again.'  Anyone who believes Nazis and Stalinists, Maoists, etc. have a right to get a retry is morally and intellectually depraved.

Of course the lawyers and judges did a lot of it on behalf of the massively profitable movie, TV and porn industries out of a far more obvious motivation of being well rewarded financially for that, which is also the reason I believe the ACLU got the idiot Supreme Court to create ersatz "rights" for the tobacco, liquor, addictive prescription drug and other industries to spread their propaganda in the mass media.  The same reason Ephraim London filed the suit against cousin Mary for telling the truth about what a huge liar that show-biz tart as the goddess of liberty was. 

The 20th century secular left in the United States has a lot more sleaze in its history than it would ever want Hollywood to tell and when it wasn't sleaze it was utter stupidity and irresponsibility.  Getting suckered by the anti-democratic communists was a big part of it, betting conned by the haters of religion an even more fundamental guarantee of that because they never really cared for the moral foundations of egalitarian democracy, lots of them never believed in equality to start with.  We paid a lot for their snobbery.