Getting To The Root Of Little Bobby's Snake Oil Show

IT WOULD BE good to know just what it is that fed RFK jr's superstitious notion of genetics that leads him to believe that precision bio-weapons that successfully target a small, very diverse, certainly mostly imaginary ethnic group or, even more stupidly, be reliably designed to not harm others, is a real thing.  

I heard Lawrence O'Donnell's claim that Little Bobby is entirely lacking in a scientific education and I'm quite prepared to believe it.  Though having taken advanced courses in biology at college at about the same time he would have, much of what we were taught on that particular topic has now become what is best considered quaintly old fashioned and anything from somewhat to entirely untrue.  Of course, when when maintained as a belief such college-credentialed lore is best considered to be superstition. Which was the basis of my comparing it to flat-earth silliness, what one snarker objected to.   But even back in the late 60s and early 70s, at least in my land-grant education,  were taught that the concept of race and ethnicity in human beings was not borne out in what genetics showed about similarities within such artificial groupings and between People assigned to different racial groups.  Dr. Theodosius  Dobzhansky's findings were hardly new, even then. In my casual reading of science, that is one of the things taught us that has stood up quite well in the revolutionary changes in actual science while the neo-Darwinian fundamentalism that is exhibited by RFJ jr.'s use of such superstition among the college-credentialed has not stood up as well.

I say that knowing that much more than anything taught in an accredited high school or university or the current consensus of scientists working in the field, total nonsense spewed in science-fiction, in popular books, in movies and the simplistic, often distorted reporting on science is probably what most of Kennedy's biological education is based in and snake oil show is informed by.  And also what his suckers' conception of it is made of.  Anyone who pretends that that junk which is actually what replaces actual education for most People is innocuous is irresponsible and stupid.  You can make similar statements about such popular replacements for rigorous history based on primary documentation and other areas of such common received "knowledge" carrying similar dangers.

His now infamous declaration about racially targeted Chinese and US bio-weaponeers designing such intentionally deadly on the one hand and innocuous, to others,  viral diseases was an appeal by a self-aggrandizing dolt hoping it would find fertile ground in the ignorance of those as or even stupider than he is.

In what Ben Franklin noted was the last resort of education, we can be certain that they are resistant to learning even from hard experience.  As Josh Marshall pointed out, if there's one thing even college-credentialed idiots might have picked up in the Covid-19 pandemic was that viruses in the wild change mighty fast and there's no way for even real scientists to be able to predict what those changes will be like.  While politicians and generals might ignore that hard truth, I doubt even the most degenerate of scientists working in that area can now ignore that hard reality.  Though other scientists will take money or attention to pretend otherwise on FOX Lies or Lies Max or on so many Youtube Channels and other social-disease media.

Another thing they might have picked up on in the school of hard knocks is that the wealth, access to nutrition, an ability to take cover so as not to be infected instead of working unprotected AND TREATMENT WITHIN THE MEDICAL INDUSTRY that in the United States and virtually everywhere is often based on white supremacy, on racism, economic inequality and other engines of inequality can drive those lower in societies to take the brunt of any such pandemic disease.  That is as true for infectious diseases as it is for heart disease, diseases related to industrial and other pollution, etc.  

I don't think it is merely gratuitous to point out that considering him showing off his newly muscular elderly physique leads some (myself included) to suspect that Little Bobby is juicing, it's hilarious that he passes himself off as an expert in health care issues.  Only I suspect he's probably in it for what others take Viagra for, he may well take both.  I've come to distrust serial adulterers, they live a personal life of self-interest and lies and such People should be suspected of carrying those habits into the public sphere.

The world of sons of admirable Democrats who use their name to join the enemy is not new. One of Franklin Roosevelt's sons did that, too, often making common cause with Republicans who detested his father's work.  Like him, RFK jr. is an affluent, attention seeking huckster who makes his appeal to others of his class, middle and upper-middle class People, mostly white and college-credentialed, mostly Western European, mostly not Jewish or Chinese so he will use prejudices he will expect to find among such People while avoiding things that will offend them.  So he won't bring up that the differences in outcomes from the Covid-19 pandemic among People of unprivileged racial identities is more knowably attributed to discrimination, social and especially economic disadvantage and a margin of racism within those who adminster the medical system, insurance companies and hospital and clinic owning corporations, most potently in our system.  He certainly isn't going to stress that the disaster of profit medicine in the United States which, apart from the pandemic had long given Americans among the lowest life expectancies among advanced countries, AND THE CHAMPION WORLD-CLASS SUCKERS WHO HAVE BEEN SUCKERED INTO PAYING THE MOST FOR THAT ABYSMAL OUTCOME.  The racial and ethnic disparities in life expectancy and health care outcome far predated the pandemic, it is best correlated with the lower life expectancy and health care outcomes of others who are economically and socially discriminated against even those of us whose perceived race doesn't have provide a biological reason for that difference.

I think to a large extent the stupid stuff that RFK jr. peddles is a product of the ubiquitous "public understanding of science" that includes a disastrously simplistically stupid and cartoonish notion of geneticism derived from even long ago superseded science. And that's largely true among such college-credentialed People who run the media and write for publication, some of them among the biggest names in what's officially taken as the public understanding of science.  In the beginning of that lecture by Dr. James Shapiro I keep encouraging People to listen to he said:

What I want to do is try and recapitulate what we've learned within the last 60 years about genetic change and how it fits in with evolution. And there have been lots of really very important discoveries but if you look in the press or you listen to public discussions of evolution or even if you watch debates as I did one between Lynn Margulis and Richard Dawkins, it's as if the 60 years of molecular biology has never happened and we haven't learned anything.

I could also mention how in the Youtube about the fad of string theory, it was stated that the public is always at least ten years behind the times in things like particle physics, only I think that's a vast underestimate about the length of the lag.  Never underestimate the force that science fiction has to create what even allegedly educated people believe about science.    

But when it's something as charged and dangerous as the public conception of genetics and, especially, when combined with scientific racism, that educated ignorance  enormously dangerous.  The entirety of Nazi genocide, other racial genocides including American biological genocide, racist laws and policies, and the many tens and scores of millions who die because of that such superstition is mighty dangerous and proven to be deadly.  And that's not fixed simply by making offical laws against it.  The many who die from not legal but social, group and mob action, implicate both the over-sold official science and the generally badly understood public understanding of that science in a charge of mass murder.  Lynching was illegal in every state that it happened in, all along but the law didn't stop it nor punish the guilty.   

The current rise in scientific racism and neo-eugenics is a direct consequence of the popularization of that old-line neo-Darwinist lore through Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in the period when such as RFK jr. and those in his audience grew up. There were warnings from scientists that what has resulted was going to be the result of adopting that as reliable science.  Its damage to the weakly held post-WWII ideas of egalitarian democracy have been obvious and brutal, the most overt form of it deriving from such stuff as The Bell Curve and neo-Darwinian economics.  As Marshall said, Kennedy's anti-vaxx cult is only one aspect of the higher ignorance.

That boobs like RFK jr. use that for his advantage is, as Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out through using RFK jr's own words, a Trumpian move should lead scientists, teachers of science and, most dangerous of all, those who push a dangerous and inadequate understanding of what science can show and do to take far more care in what they say about science. And as important as being accurate about what science can be relied on, they have to stress what science can't reliably reveal.  For a start the organs of official science could use more rigor in choosing what claims to publish, so-called peer review is as broken as anything in the process.  It should never be forgotten that the anti-vaxx cult got its biggest push forward when that most august of medical journals, The Lancet, published a disastrously fraudulent science paper that it had to retract fairly fast.  Like all journals, it is in the business of selling itself and that is leading to all kinds of fraudulent or merely bad science to get published by them. Reviewers have to be required to practice far more rigor in their so-called review or they should stop pretending that's what it is.

And it should make us all worried.  But we shouldn't only worry, we have to try to overcome it.  I will point out that when People make idiotic and stupid claims of racial superiority as that fathead Bret Stephens did in the New York Times a while back, they stupidly and unintentionally feed the same thing.  

Except in a very few inherited genetic diseases and hardly to be depended on tendencies toward resistance in some hap-haphazardly imagined, perhaps imaginary  racial groups, human beings of all groups are so closely related that the idea that it would be possible to manipulate viruses to target one group expecting that once released its rapidly mutating descendants wouldn't overcome any resistance, is sheer superstition. I doubt "Ashkenazi  Jews" as a group are notably biologically different in any important way from other European groups with whom they have had children for millennia.  The popular conception of thousands of years of genetic isolation is probably no more valid than it is for any other imaginary ethnic or racial grouping.   As an aside, I found this video about when Judaism started quite fascinating.   That some scientists employed by the Russian or Chinese or American military and weapons industry might share in that superstition or merely work it for their own professional flourishing wouldn't surprise me much, a lot of them are probably as far behind the scientific times as RFK jr, but I think it's far less likely that they would be as stupid as RFJ jr and the suckers he ropes in among the college-credentialed middle-class, upper-middle class and rich idiots of the English Speaking Peoples.

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Why I Am Entirely Over The Kennedy Mystique

Little Bobby's father, Robert F. Kennedy in 1967 and 68 jumped into the engine of the jerks' Curtis Gans and Al Lowenstein's "Dump Johnson" train.  In doing so he pushed off the first one to drive it, Eugene McCarthy* and helped to get Richard Nixon elected.  When the elite fascist William F. Buckley was one of those who eulogized Lowenstein at his funeral, it didn't suprise me much, he did so much for Republicans, helping elect the first of the uniformly terrible Republicans after Eisenhower, now Republican-fascist presidents. The ones who gave us the Court we've got now.

In 1980, Ted Kennedy ran for the nomination against Jimmy Carter and helped Ronald Reagan get the presidency.  I will admit that after Ted lost that one he seemed to lose the Kennedy obsession with running for president and became a much better Senator.  His son, after a rather mixed and short stint in the House seems to have given up politics, too.  

Patrick Kennedy, after a short and not that illustrious term in the House of Representatives decided to follow in the family tradition of trading on his last name to run against the far more accomplished Ed Markey for Senate.  Luckily Massachusetts voters seem to have tired of the Kennedy mystique probably through having been over-exposed to the fever or just through seeing its tragic effects close-up over the years.  

Now RFK jr, stupidest and most dangerous of all, wants to promote himself in a stunt candidacy of the kind Trump originally ran as a PR campaign.  I am sure RFK jr is doing it for the same reasons, to enhance his visibility and, no doubt, sales potential of his snake oil. In doing that he is ready to risk putting Trump in office, again, and he has no shame in how he'll do it.  That the jerk is doing what Jill Stein and the Republican-spoiler Green Party cult did in 2016 and, like them, aligning himself with Putin, repeating his lies is all any informed American should need to know to reject him.

More generally America should give up the Kennedy cult, Democrats certainly should.  I don't know how history would have played out if Lyndon Johnson or someone else had had the Democratic nomination in 1960, he may have lost the race or won and in that case even speculating at what would have happened is futile.  If that had happened JFK may have stayed in the Senate, matured and become a far better president if he ran in 1972 or 1980 or even 1996 and become the kind of president that Joe Biden has turned out to be. All of that youth and freshness bullshit may never have happened. I do know that Johnson, benefiting from long years in the Senate was a far more effective president than JFK was or likely would have been if he hadn't been murdered in Dallas, Texas.  JFK's administration had its best years after Johnson became president, which pissed off the Kennedy faction Harvard boys, no end.  Bobby's run was due in no small part to that.  It should never be forgotten that the Vietnam war which was used by RFK to topple Johnson was something Johnson inherited from the Kennedy boys and their boys.  I doubt there was ever a more determined anti-communist president than JFK or as militaristic a one since the 19th century.  And it should never be forgotten that RFK got his start in Washington with Joe McCarthy, his legacy was hardly pure and pristine.   

One thing that Democrats should have learned from the past seventy years is that having a long time Washington hand like Johnson or Biden as president is entirely more likely to make important and positive change than the inexperienced "NEW!" "YOUNG!" "FRESH!" etc. face with no experience has been. The comparison in effectiveness of Biden's first two years to those of the Washington outsiders, Carter, Clinton or the DC neophyte Obama, even when they had a more progressive Democratic Congress, tells it all.  A Republican can succeed in what they want to do with a total idiot like Trump or Bush II in the presidency.  You can quickly drive a country into ruin to enhance the wealth of the wealthy with a corrupt neophyte like Bush II or Trump because our system AND EVEN MORE SO OUR MEDIA is geared to do that.  But it takes a seasoned, tested, wise and experienced Democrat to do the opposite.

We should destroy the old script of Camelot (the West Wing was melodramatic fiction with badly written and recorded dialogue) and the related ad industry hype that was as much a part of the Kennedy mystique as anything.  The aspirations of egalitarian democracy aren't anything new, they aren't flashy or packaged for easy sale to superficial and stupid People, they go back to the start of our history.  They are not old because they've never been implemented yet, they are as old as the Exodus story and the Golden Rule, as new as the next performance of a charitable act.  Equality and fairness never get old.  That's what egalitarian democracy is made of.

Note: The relative who I was helping to take care of died, I will probably pick up in posting again soon.  

* What is it about Wisconsin Senators?