Dame Edna Interviews K.D. Lang with Ivana on the couch

 

Includes one of the most brilliant set ups of a joke I've ever heard, a couple of others almost as good.

How Very OO's - "I believe in science, not your sky fairy"

WELL, I CERTAINLY ACCEPT THAT evolution is the current best explanation of how the diversity of life arose on Earth and I certainly accept the current estimate that life began about 3.5 billion years ago. I said something to that effect in the pieces you slam so, not a careful reader, are you.  I certainly go along with the current theory of Big Bang cosmology, though I am certainly curious about whether or not that will last through the latest telescopic discoveries at the edge of the known universe.  If there is a revival of steady state  cosmology, I have to wonder why things haven't devolved into entropy infinitely long ago in the past but I have to wonder if even some of those holdings of classical physics will turn out to not have been complete at best or in some other way less than fully effective.  

Having been extremely critical of Genesis 2 around the end of last year and into January, I have to say that Genesis 1, when you aren't stupid enough to believe it's either a historical or scientific account of the creation of the universe instead of a philosophical experiment into explaining to People how their world and the heavens (as much of the universe as they could know about) and life on Earth arose to produce their life and what they experienced isn't bad considering what they knew.  

The idea that it began all at once by the will of God is certainly analogous to the Big Bang, that was obvious enough that many scientists rejected it on that basis alone,  the ideological bigot in charge of Nature,  John Maddox raging against it as late as the 1990s. Only Genesis has an explanation of where it came from whereas materialism can't come up with one.  And that a choice of order over chaos was necessary for the creation of the world, of the heavenly bodies that those People so long ago were so sophisticated in observing and noting their regular patterns, the separation of water and land, necessary for the rising of different kinds of life, including themselves.  Probably as impressive as any of it was the repeated observation that it was good, not some dreary and oppressive system tied up with human beings being tortured puppets of the all-too human gods that were common at the same time among other groups of People coming up with their own ideas about such things.  The pagan gods tended to be real assholes and existence under them, a nightmare.

It is one of the unremarked things about the Jewish Bible that until the rise of the Kings of Israel and, then Judah, they didn't have kings to lord it over them.  I've noted before that when they were demanding Samuel anoint a king for them God had him tell them how awful it would be to have one, how they'd lose their freedom, their rights, even their children to one.  That, to me, is one of the most impressive passages in the Jewish Bible, I think in those things the best about the modern period is anticipated even as modernism as an ideology has been far more destructive than it has been a blessing. Modernism, indeed, is a failed project on balance.  If human beings survive it that might be a miracle of the Biblical type.  In fact, I already suspect it will take one of those for us to survive.

If the Jewish monotheistic tradition, which includes Christianity and Islam, has to answer for the sins of those who claim to follow it, even as they don't, "science" in your adulation of it should have to answer for nuclear weapons, other modern weaponry, automatic rifles,  biological weapons, chemical weapons, global warming, etc. Science doesn't happen without scientists making it happen. Very few of the perils we face do not have their fingerprints all over it.  Few if any of those would have come about without credentialed scientists knowingly producing them or credentialed hirelings by things like the fossil fuel industry to pooh-pooh scientists to propagandize against environmental science.  As I recently pointed out, they have a lot more in common with the profession of lawyering which doesn't kick out people for being mercenary, self-seeking scum. I wouldn't be surprised if such science as well as such lawyering didn't account for the actual majority of those who go into those professions.  There is nothing like moral content in science and little of it in the secular law to discourage that kind of lying and destroying life and creation for the profit of scientists and those who hire them.  Yet modernistic, materialistic, atheistic sci-guys never seem to notice any of that. 

It's kind of funny,  someone so much older than you leaving a 20 year old fad behind while you want to keep it going.   Atheism strikes me as kind of like an intellectual leisure suit worn at the turn of the millennium.

Blaming The Corruption On The Court On Catholicism Is Worse Than Wrong It Is Counterproductive

THOUGH I HAVEN'T SEEN much written about it yet, not even by the Francis haters, I'm sure his statement that young people trying to hook up using Tinder is "natural" is bound to get him slammed by trad-Catho-fascists and others.  His statement made on the same occasion that Catholic theology around sex is still "in diapers" is certainly true.  But what else can be expected of the thinking of almost exclusively unmarried, probably for the most part allegedly officially caste men?  I do believe most Catholic priests have kept their vow to refrain from having sex with other people, though they know and we all know, a lot of them haven't.  

I am not especially in favor of using social media to hook up with other people, especially for the purposes of finding romance, or, really, sex. It's more likely to lead to a social disease than a romance.  But I think Francis's approach will probably be a more effective as a pastoral practice than that of the right-wing clergy and hierarchy and laity of mere condemnation. Francis's idea could hardly be worse than that.  It's not been effective.  

I don't think there's much of any of that in the Gospels or even in Paul or James.  Though, as I've found as I read Paul more carefully, sometimes when you think he's going in that direction it takes quite a number of sentences and paragraphs to find out he was setting up an argument that goes in another direction than the typically careless reading of him has had it most of the time for two thousand years.

The typical reading of Paul cuts up the argument and focuses on exactly the part of it he was ultimately refuting and some of the worst of Christian theology is based on exactly what he wasn't getting at. I think most of the worst of Western Christianity would never have happened if Augustine and some others had been able to read Greek better, if Jerome had translated it better.

I started writing an answer to someone who slammed the Catholic Church for the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, but it got so long I've shortened it.  

One of the most notable things about the Catholics on the Supreme Court is that none of them consistently follows Catholic teaching as set by the Vatican and bishops.  The retreaded, stale anti-Catholic argument that Catholics in high office take orders from the Vatican, inherited from the crudest bigotry of WASP anti-Catholics. is certainly disproved by the behavior of Catholics in high office.  Jack Kennedy, no more than Bobby or Ted ever seemed to much follow its teachings on faithfulness to marriage vows or otherwise in regard to heterosexual sex. They had something in common with Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh in that regard.  Others have been and are in violation of far more serious moral instruction from the Church and Scripture but, then, so have been a lot of bishops and cardinals. If they're so influenced by the Vatican, there's little to show it in their personal lives.  The public acts of those on the Courts is even more evidence of that lapse.

The majority of Catholics in high office, especially those most adored by the small, astro-turf, billionaire-millionaire financed cult of "traditional Catholicism" violate the teachings of the Catholic Church in every other area except, perhaps, on abortion.  If you took it issue by issue, the Supreme Court "justice" most in line with Catholic teaching on the Court is probably Sonia Sotomayor.  The ones, beyond any doubt, most out of line, Alito, Thomas, Roberts, Gorsuch and catching up with them, Kavanaugh and Barrett.  It is the Republican-fascists on the Court who follow the teachings of the Catholic hierarchy far fewer times than even the non-Catholics on the Court.

One of the most obvious aspects of Catholic and, for the most part, traditional Christian sexual teaching and so including reproductive health, is that it is elevated out of all proportion to distract everyone from the substance of the teachings of Jesus.  He hardly had a word to say about sex and pregnancy except in regard to remarriage after a divorce.  He refused to judge the woman taken in adultery (I still wonder if the guy got off as a matter of course).  Jesus never mentioned abortion or LGBTQ+ sex.  The only examples used by Augustinian Christians, including Lutherans and Calvinists of the traditional kind, to argue for an eternal hell have nothing to do with sex, they are all about economic justice to the poor, the vulnerable, the sick, those in prison, none of whom are the concern of conservative politics, in fact conservatives would seem to all be in danger of going to hell like the rich man in the parable, like the goats in Matthew 25, according to that reading of the Gospel. The current Republican-fascists seem to all be in a contest to see who can violate those and screw the poor the most.  

There is no conservative member of Congress, the Senate or on the Court, and few legislators or governors who wouldn't fall into the category of the rich man who let Lazarus die at his doorstep while he lived in luxury or those who do nothing for the hungry, the ill clothed and housed, the sick and those in prison. Wealth, in the Gospels and in Paul and James, is the most certain human vice that leads to hell.  

Jesus constantly talked about alleviating the evil of poverty, of neglect, of discrimination, of injustice.  The only people who he said were in danger of going to hell were the rich, the affluent, those who did nothing for the least among us. He certainly was understood by the earliest Christians to teach that they were to have nothing to do with killing.  Every death sentence the Supreme Court Catholics approve, and I believe all but Sotomayor has, they are in serious violation of the teachings of Jesus and the official teaching of the Catholic Church.  As someone pointed out, Clarence Thomas said a possibly innocent man could be put to death because his incompetent lawyer didn't file some papers on time, even as he insists on "amending" his filings from decades ago to get his corrupt ass off the hook for his grift. They constantly violate Catholic teachings on economic justice and on a myriad of other official teachings of the church - "trad-catholics" don't have any use for any kind of official Catholic teaching except in regard to what OTHER PEOPLE do with their own bodies and the goddamned Latin liturgy.

And, as it always is with with such creatures, when it comes to what they do in regard to sex is always an exception to their "eternal truths."  It has been a topic of speculation how many abortions the anti-choice politicians were responsible for, I think it's worth wondering if any of the anti-choice members of that court have been.  I would bet that if Kavanaugh had knocked up a girl in his youth, he'd have wanted her to have an abortion. And I'll bet the same is true for others of them.  They'd certainly want any Girl or Woman  they didn't want to breed with to be using contraception when they had sex with them.

It should always be asked why, if Christianity or even Catholicism is the problem in regard to the separation of church and state, why the strongest and most repeated teachings of the Gospel,the Epistles are the ones that such "Christians" and "Catholics" never seem to take at all seriously or follow.  Jesus said you'd go to hell if you neglected the homeless and hungry, the sick AND THOSE IN PRISON, he never said you'd go to hell for having an abortion or choosing to live in a gender role you were more comfortable as.

I think it's a real measure of genuine religious faith, how much do you follow it when it is something you don't like FOR YOURSELF.  I've never encountered a religious conservative who could measure up in that, especially if they had money and or status and, so, power. If there is one thing that Christianity as a social and political and, so often, an intellectual manifestation deserves to be slammed for it is that it far too seldom is Christian.  The "trad-catholic" cult isn't even particularly Catholic.  

American "tradtional Catholicism" is a fascist cult, especially that aware enough of itself to use the word "integralism" for it.  It's not alone in that as the late Benedict XVI was forced to face when he stupidly accepted some of the irregularly consecrated, heretical Piux X cult bishops only to find that at least one of them was a flagrant Holocaust denier. For the first German Pope in centuries to have overlooked that was astounding or, worse, telling.  But that is typical of the cult of integralism.   At least some of the Republican-fascist members of the court are part of it, Thomas and Alito are. Barrett probably qualifies as well, she belonged to a particularly nutty cult out there in Indiana. You can contrast her with the former mayor, Pete Buttigieg on that count. He strikes me as far more Catholic than she is, he's certainly far more Christian.  Though some of them are merely fascists who happen to be Catholics.

In some of its most elite propagandists, up to and including Ivy level law-school faculty, integralism is an overtly fascist cult.  Neo-integralism is certainly something that should be suppressed by the Vatican, though it certianly has some support among JPII and Benedict XVI era bishops and priests.  There was a time when a much much less influential cult of fanatics, such as that around the putrid Fr. Feeney had in the middle of the last century could get you excommunicated.  It was even, eventually, possible for the Vatican and American bishops to suppress the really dangerous Fr. Coughlin so much in American commentary this week.  The current catho-fascist cult has power at the top of the American government that even Coughlin never had no matter what Rachel Maddow implied by focusing on him the other night merely in the context of media figures.  Though as an actual cult among American Catholics, it's relatively tiny it's got big bucks behind it and fanatical followers who will fill up comment threads with it. A better comparison for Coughlin would be the putrid EWTN founded by that "Nazi nun" as I used to call her.  Which was, perhaps, a bit unfair but alliterative.  Her media empire has certainly been influential in the rise of current catho-fascism.

But to think that Catholicism is the root of the problem with the Supreme Court is a counter-productive expression of ignorance and bigotry.

The real problem for us is Alito and Thomas, Barrett and others on the Supreme Court being capable of exercising dictatorial power over us all.  THEY HAVEN'T REJECTED THE RULING OF THAT TEXAS JUDGE REVOKING FDA APPROVAL OF THAT DRUG AND THEY WELL MIGHT NOT.  My guess it they are biding their time for after the next election when they hope to not ruin another election for their party, the Republican-fascists as they must suspect the Dobbs decision did the last one.  

The bigger foundational problem is that any Supreme Court could exercise such power and the Executive and Legislative branches will just go along with it, which makes any such cult on the court far more dangerous than it should ever have been allowed to be.   It could as easily be a secular cult though the most dangerous to us all is that the members of the court are, overwhelmingly, servants to and partakers of affluence.  The United States Supreme Court, far more years than not, has been dominated by those, the cult worship of Mammon. Those on the court now, those who are identified as Catholics, are, in truth, except Justice Sotomayor, the slavish servants of Mammon no matter what that nutter Barrett made an oath to be a slave to.  She did swear to tell the truth at her confirmation  hearing, as she, as well as all the others in the court majority lied their asses off.

That they have dictatorial power is the fault of the lame-brained idea of giving them life tenure on the court and the power grab of John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, along with the acquiescence of Jefferson and Madison and others as the early republic quickly rotted into the corruption of the antebellum period reaching its full malignancy in the expansion of that illegitimate power under Taney in Dred Scott decision and enduring up to and including today.  Taney was only one Catholic thug on the Supreme Court at the time, he was joined by seven others who were definitely not Catholics.  The Supreme Court has been the most potent force for producing depravity in our history, the few rulings held up as a banner proclaiming that the system works are a smokescreen covering the actual history of it. They have done it through the installation of fictions such as "corporate person-hood" and under guises of "judicial philosophy."   For anyone worried about a rogue Congress and/or executive acting with no check from the Court, what part of the line of rulings from Dred Scott to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to Dobbs don't they get as the Supreme Court being such a rogue element which will never have to face the voters on continual display?

AND IT'S CENTRAL TO THE CORRUPTION THAT WE CAN'T GET RID OF THE CORRUPT "justices" BY VOTING THEM OUT OF OFFICE. Impeachment of Supreme Court members as a means of getting rid of even criminals, the most corrupt such as Thomas and Barrett and Alito and Kavanaugh, is as much as a myth as impeaching the worst criminals in the presidency, Trump, Bush II, Bush I (remember those pardons Barr signed off on), Reagan, Nixon.  

No, the problem might include right-wing catho-fascism, but the worst part of it has nothing to do with that, it has to do with the usurped powers of the Supreme Court and the rigged and gamed Constitution and the corruptions that the slave-holders and money men who wrote the thing put in it from the start.  Blaming Catholicism as if it was even a major part of the problem is worse than foolish, it is the opposite of an effective way to fix what's wrong.  

That such corrupt people and, especially, those trained in the law would find and exploit every defect in the Constitution is no great surprise, it's what can be expected.  The legal and judicial professions are allowed to game and rig the imperfections of human made law. That we can't fix it is due to the absurdity of making it next to impossible to amend the Constitution to get rid of those venues of corruption.  The alleged dangers of unwise amendment of the thing is more than matched by the consciously inserted corruption in it and the unconsciously gamed words that have allowed the Court to corrupt the best of intentions by blatant and impune dishonesty.  

The usurped powers of the Supreme Court, objectively on average the most corrupt part of the United States government since FDR, make those far worse.  And it has been corrupt ever since John Marshall's time when he and his colleagues repeatedly ruled in favor of their own slave holding and others in ways that enriched them.*  Clarence Thomas is just a more flagrantly confident rotter of the same kind and who knows what the others never reported on, it's not as if we have any reason to be confident of their integrity.  He knows he's untouchable unless, by some miracle, Democrats get the house and a super-majority in the Senate.  I wouldn't wait up nights.  Americans are delusional about the Constitution and, especially, the badly written Bill of Rights. They're taught to be by Hollywood and pulp fiction and Broadway productions and popular kulcha.  It's all lies.

* If you haven't yet, you should listen to that interview with Paul Finkelman, noticing how the Court and his legal education led even the formerly ardent anti-slavery "justice" Joseph Story to issue what Finkelman notes would be the most infamous pro-slavery ruling if Dred Scott hadn't been issued. I have written posts about it in which Louis Boudin attributed it to Story's adoration of citing medieval English law as precedent, something Alito did so recently and so infamously to write his Dobbs decision as Senator Whitehouse pointed out the other day.  I would wonder if a rigorous study of Supreme Court "justices" might not show that time on that court had an average effect of making them more corrupt and out of touch, often on the basis of legal theory and "judicial philosophy."  Senator Whitehouse is right about that bullshit, "judicial philosophy."  It's a method of covering their asses when they issue a corrupt decision. It's like Nazi doctors excusing their evil by calling it "science."  Judges and lawyers excuse their murderous immorality and depravity on the job in the same way, believing it removes responsibility for what they do from their own soft, immaculately clean hands. I think they should all be required to visit the next mass shooting in the DC area before the bodies are removed.  They should have to see with their own eyes what they have enabled.

It's Way Past Time For The Materialist-Atheist-Sci-Guys To Back Up Their Claims - Hate Mail

I WONDER IF the atheism fad of the 00's and the resistance to it may not have led to a shattering of confidence in it among those who think more than a little. Reading the popular understanding of atheists starting about 2000 when I started reading online writing has led me to conclude they don't think very much more than other people do. They just like to think that they do. They certainly get pissed off when people don't think like they do. They're like a jr. high clique in that and as much suckers as any other group for professional propagandists who share similar inclinations to the ones they start out with.

I know that developing those apparently unanswerable questions I revived last week - you did not, no atheist I've encountered has honestly answered them yet - they may not have occurred to me until I was forced to think about the claims of "brain-only" materialists.  I tested materialism on its own terms and concluded it cannot account for the most basic human experience of awareness or thought.  Those questions were developed within the framing of materialists in which those are, I assert, unanswerable with anything but the typical, never-to-be redeemed promissory notes of materialism.  Given the history of the cliche, it's remarkable how much pie in some far off future they promise and never deliver on.   Those have been being issued by materialists all along and I don't think one of them has really been backed with secure and evidenced support.  Certainly that's true when it's a matter of materialism being made to confront the most basic reality of human life, our own consciousness.  If it can't account for that then its central claim that the material universe is the only thing that actually exists can't make sense of our own existence.  

One previously most annoying "public scientist" Carl Sagan put it in his famous intro to his PBS series "The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be that only the cosmos exists and it's all that ever did,"   certainly a materialist-atheist credo which by defining "the cosmos" in the limits of his ideology tacitly claimed "the cosmos" for atheists. That's something they are wont to do.  But their ownership of it is certainly contestable since far earlier and far more inclusive schools and ways of thought claimed it was never human beings' property but God's, however they conceived of God. Considering we all know that the cosmos existed without atheists and certainly without scientists to claim, "We own it!" their claim is as presumptuous as it is silly.    As I've said, Sagan talking on his field of expertise, the first thing I did hear him talk about could be very interesting, when he got much afield of that things went downhill.   Today's contenders generally are worse.

The modern resort of atheists, since well back into the 19th century and earlier, to demote human consciousness to an epiphenomon of physics and chemistry, is a desperate attempt to deny the most obvious thing that can't fall into their ideological materialist monist scheme of things, the very thing they use to dream up their illusory ideological systems and ideological denials, consciousness.  The most decadent forms of that that reign in large parts of academia and is widely promoted in philosophically inept schools of science that I mentioned, Dawkinsian evo-psy, many working in semi-sciences such as cog and neuro-sci, the pseudo-social-sciences and the rump of idiocy in philosophical departments where such idiocy as eliminative positivism is pushed, may be the dying gasps of an ideology that any thinking person realizes is never going to back those promissory notes and the rational conclusion is that they never can because they are issued on a dishonest basis.  

Contrary to your claim, I have a lot of respect for the methods of science, when those methods of science are rigorously tied to legitimate confirmation through honest observation, measurement and analysis AND REPEATED EXPERIMENTATION OR OBSERVATIONS within what those methods can validly be applied to.  I have noted that especially in areas surrounding the pseudo-scientific study of minds that those methods are violated from the start and from there the methods of psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. have infected even what should be the most rigorous of all sciences.  I think it is notably revelatory that the current reigning ideology of evolutionary psychology entered into biology through the unfortunately ambitious scientific interpretation of what is largely unobservable, evolution, filling in the interplanetary space of the tacit fossil record and that which can never be recovered due to its traces being entirely gone forever, not only in the physical record but the actual, lived lives of the trillions and trillions of lives which would constitute the actual life which evolved, filling it in with story-telling which can never be verified due to that lost information.  When science abandons the requirement of observation and measurement, the resultant "analysis" will mimic the worst pre-scientific practices of making stuff up which may at first seem plausible but will be built on in the most ideologically vulnerable ways.  In that we can see in the modern period that science has allowed in the most blatantly subjective input imaginable.

I probably should have noted the start of that slide into degeneracy with economics since one of the worst of those is founded on the pseudo-science of Thomas Malthus, the economic class and racism-based ideology of natural selection.  In all of those poisonous limpets and barnacles on science, the claim to be able to observe what cannot be observed is one of the most basic aspects of the con job.  

You cannot honestly observe economic activity objectively, the attempt when made will inevitably spring from the personal, family, class interests - including wealth protection and enhancement - of the ones making the attempt.   Thomas Malthus's approach, pretending the British class system, a creation of human made laws and corruption and theft, was a natural entity and its results something of a constant power was never scientific, that it is the basis of the reigning ideology of biology has done nothing to make the results any more scientific.  You cannot possibly come up with an honest model of economic activity because it is too big and too varied and too unobservable even though it goes on right now.  Whatever assertions are adopted by those with the power to enforce their adoption will be fraught with unarticulated assumptions, presumptions and wishful thinking.  I would like to be able to know enough about the biographies of the eminent economists and their academic assertions because I doubt if you look hard at it you will find much of any of them who don't assert something they favor as what is and what should be and seldom to never assert that which is not in their favor or to their liking.   In that their view of economies is exactly like Carl Sagan's view of "the cosmos" or Antonin Scalia's "originalist" reading of the United States Constitution or Amy Coney Barrett's "textualist" reading of it.  It's like Darwin's and Galton's conception of evolution, it's like Richard Dawkin's view of life, it's like that meat-head hanger-on, Douglass Adam's tedious and cynical view of reality.  

And that's assuming that what those figures in academia really believe what they are asserting and not that they're just telling the powers that be what they want to hear so as best to make a nice living for themselves.  Though I really believe that that motive in academic and judicial and scientific fudging and lying is never to be discounted.  That is if you want to be coldly realistic about it.  A look at Retraction Watch in those kinds of cases when there was clearly conscious fraud and not just wishful thinking at the root of things in science is certainly instructive in that instance. Often the powers that be are the wealthy and, so, powerful, many times it's just those currently dominant in their academic or professional field, sometimes it's no more sophisticated than what I remember a cyincal music major telling me, "You find out what the teacher thinks and write that in your tests and papers."  Works if you want to get ahead on the job, too.

I certainly have more respect for scientific method than the typical atheists who believe themselves to be "skeptics" because reading the controlled research into some aspects classified as "psychic phenomena" I had to admit that, by the rules of science, they have demonstrated the reality of a number of those.  I think the studies into what Dean Radin calls "presentiment" are especially persuasive, though it's clear that certainly as far back as Rhine's telepathy experiments, it was validly demonstrated at a stupendously higher than chance level in repeated experiments, answering their critics over methodology. "Skeptics" -many of whom would have been more honestly called "liars" - have had to continually lie about the experimental methodologies employed and every other aspect of it because their ideology can't be made to square with it.  They have certainly and repeatedly lied about the honor of the scientists who have conducted that work, relying on a con-man like James Randi and his tactics to do so.*

So, the answer to your claims is where is your answer to those questions?  I pointed out that the atheist gods of "DNA," "natural selection," and "it's like a computer program" don't work and you didn't even tell me how one of those would.  I didn't mention the other currently favored atheist creator gods of "probability" and "random chance" certainly don't work, not on the time frame of human experience and certainly not with the efficacy of our thinking to keep us alive.  If we had to depend on those two mathematical entities, human beings and even life on Earth would have probably ended within the first few generations of life if not immediately.  We can't know if animal consciousness was present on Earth at that time, I strongly suspect that life on Earth could never have even begun unless there was some consciousness behind it.  Though that's a reasonable conclusion, not science.  Most of what we can rely on in life is not the product of science, a lot which modern people stupidly rely on, including those credentialed in the degree mills - make that especially them -  unfortunately, gets passed off as science.  Science can't study earliest life on Earth or consciousness, it can't be observed or measured, anyone is within their rights to come to their own reasoned and modestly held ideas of it. Given the impossibility of us ever doing much of anything about the creation of life more than three billion years ago as we imperil life on Earth now, that scientists are allowed to waste time and resources on it is the height of the typical decadence of materialist, atheist, scientistic modernism.  That nonsense started as a means of scientists wanting to nail the coffin of God shut and it continues in that, the practice having gotten professional status and, with that and nothing like scientific validity, is unthinkingly called "science" and treated as something important, when it hardly is.

* It's hilarious that the "My Pillow" Republican-fascist crackpot got caught up in his version of Randi's bogus wager.  Though I doubt he will anymore than Randi ever would have come clean about it and put his money where his mouth was recorded as being.  Anyone with any pretenses of having any respect for science who didn't condemn Randi's "million dollar" wager as a method of verification of experimental science should have their educational credentials pulled.  Mike Lindell and James Randi were pretty much two of a kind, and there are many more like them in popular atheist propaganda, many of them public scientists.  

Paul Finkelman On Slavery And The Supreme Court

 

 

This excellent interview with the fine American historian and law scholar Paul Finkelman is part of the 1619 project.   It is full of information about how bad the Supreme Court has been from near the start and containing much about how bad the slave-power enhancing features of the Constitution have been from the beginning.   I hadn't realized that the 1800 election that brought the slave owner Jefferson to power was the first one decided by the Electoral College, for example. 

Much of what he said was known to me before in general but not in the level of detail and analysis that Paul Finkelman brings.  It's worth the seventy minutes to listen to it once and I'm listening over and over again to absorb the information.