I Feel Irresistably Compelled By My Hatred Of Little Bobby To Explain That 20 Year Old Citation

I WAS WELL OVER THE KENNEDY CULT by the 1990s, though I would admit that the then Senator Edward Kennedy,  "Ted" was the best of the Kennedy men who had gone into politics.  I was never, despite being an Irish Catholic from New England young enough to catch it,  all that gone on the Kennedys.    Not that JFK had been the worst president of my lifetime, nor his brother who he had made his Attorney General in such an open, plain and bald act of nepotism the worst democratic AG.  By then Bobby Kennedy sr.'s sandbagging of Lyndon Johnson happened, which played a big part in getting Nixon elected and Ted Kennedy doing the same with Carter,  losing to Reagan a dozen years later had opened my eyes to the irresponsibility and sense of entitlement that seemed to be a family trait.   There have been other examples since then,  Patrick Kennedy trying to do the same to Ed Markey in the Senate and, of course, Little Bobby doing the same to the only Democrat of my lifetime who could rival LBJ's political effectiveness,   Joe Biden.   See what I mean about that being a family trait.  I do not find the sense of entitlement that pervades the Kennedy men anything but irresponsibly discrediting. 

Of all the Kennedys,  there are none who I despise more than RFK jr.  Little Bobby.   Though I cited that article he wrote with Greg Palast in 2006, I never really trusted him and not only because he was a Kennedy.  Hardly because of that.   In his highly touted role as an environmental lawyer, I always had the feeling he was a bit too much of an ambulance chaser,  someone who always seemed to me to want to use issues to promote HIMSELF.   I can't remember if it was with a feeling of unease that I cited Kennedy along with Palast but I can say I think it's the only thing from him I ever cited,  I never relied on what he said.   I have always been allergic to celebrity lawyers and those who trade on their family name. 

Those on the left, those who were caught up in the post 50s (McCarthyite) Bobby Kennedy or the post JFK assassination make-over into some kind of anti-war, lefty and those who bought his son's image as a crusading environmental lawyer, especially thosein the media who worked with him asked what happened to him in the past five or so years.  A lot of them attributed his present corruption to his claims of having a brain worm,  and that might have something to do with it.  

One of the best who worked with him,  Greg Palast in the most complete account of observing his transformation closely leans on that in the end.   I'm going to give you a lot of this piece he wrote about that in 2024 because it goes a lot farther into what makes Little Bobby tick than any other thing I've read about him AND BECAUSE RFK JR. IS A CONTINUING DANGER TO THE LIVES AND HEALTH AND WELLBEING OF LITERALLY MILLIONS OF PEOPLE HERE AND AROUND THE WORLD.  

It was truly scary.  In 2012, Bobby had arranged a press conference about the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Eleven oil rig workers were incinerated in the blow-out of a British Petroleum drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Palast investigations team discovered that, 17 months before that oil rig blew out in the Gulf, British Petroleum suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.  The oil company—with the connivance of then-Sec. of State Condoleeza Rice—covered it up.

[Note:  Condoleeza Rice is someone whose vileness has never been taken as seriously as it should be.  She was one of the worst of the worst in the Bush II regime.  She should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. ] 

It was a hell of a story, which I broadcast on prime time in Britain and Europe.  I wrote a book about it, Vultures’ Picnic.

Here’s where Bobby comes in—and it gets weird.  On the second anniversary of the blow-out, Bobby, a professor of environmental law, arranged for a major press conference to expose this story of BP’s blood-encrusted perfidy.

But then, Bobby cancelled the press conference, saying he heard the story had been told previously.  Well, yes it had.  You told it.  Bobby, I was on the radio with you for an hour discussing the blow-out and its cover-up.  Bobby had a national radio/TV show, Ring of Fire.  He reviewed my book about the story.  And strangest of all, Bobby was on my Democracy Now! Report about the blow-out.    That Bobby had forgotten all these things was frightening—as if Leonardo DiCaprio had forgotten he was in a film about the Titanic.

Our investigator Leni Badpenny was listening in and she began making frantic cut-off gestures, to end a call with him. End it now!  “Something’s wrong with him, or he’s just a jerk.  I don’t know.  But something’s really wrong and you don’t want your reputation destroyed by standing next to him when it goes wrong in public.  Promise me we will never work with him, never see him again.  I think he’s dangerous.  I really do.”

This was difficult for her to say as she never got over being a bit star-struck in his presence.  “Look,” she said, “I’m just a little kid from the Swiss Alps and I got to tell my dad I just had dinner with a Kennedy!”

But she insisted, “Stay away from him. He’s become untrustworthy and he’s getting crazier and crazier.”

This was not the first incident.   Bobby was a strong guy in his late fifties talking like a 92-year-old in a nursing home trying to remember his first date.

Since then, we’ve found out that Bobby had a worm in his brain—a real, live physical critter that somehow got inside his skull.  I’m not sure about the connection because I’m not a brain surgeon and I don’t speak worm.

That's useful information but I think the rest of the article gives even greater insights into how he was already well on his way to being a dangerous lunatic well before then.   And I will say from a lifetime of observation of the American left that what I think may be the key to understanding him,  a willingness to believe unevidenced and sensational accusations, is one of the worst things many on the left have in common with those on the lunatic right.  

THAT may well give a clue into how his father could go from an acolyte of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s (he wanted the job McCarthy gave to Roy Cohn) to the would-be (I believe) opportunistic lefty of 1967.   There has been an old and very well trodden road going the other way,  from would be "far left" to fascist and even Nazi right.  Little Bobby has just been one more traveler on that road. 

And, note.  THAT WHAT HE WANTED TO PEDDLE AS FACT on the basis of conspiracy theory, without evidence to support it,  exactly melds with Trump's election conspiracy theories which he sold to his gullible fascists. 

Palast continued:  

What I liked about Bobby—and Bobby about me—was that we were always skeptical of “official” stories. After all, his own dad famously admitted to making up cockamamie lies about Vietnam to waltz us into that war. We bonded over rejecting bullshit from the government and its servile punditocracy.

[RFK sr. and JFK were both way gone cold warriors,  I doubt that he would have ended America's involvement in Vietnam, after the issue had served to get him elected.  I've seen too much of that kind of thing to believe his last minute conversion was real.  I do think that Eugene McCarthy (who I also didn't much like and whose much braver anti-war campaign RFK hijacked) may have made good on that, though I doubt he would have won the election.] 

But there was a big difference between us. He thought every official story was bullshit. But I needed to see the bull. I was, and remain, a big-time believer in show-me-the-facts. But facts didn’t seem to get in the way of Bobby’s attraction to plain whacko conspiracy theories.

Example: We co-authored articles for Rolling Stone about racial vote suppression. [The one I believe I referenced in 2006.  Though I hadn't learned how to do links that early in my blogging so I'm not sure.]  In my book Armed Madhouse, my chapter “Kerry Won” described the physical evidence of ballots disqualified—enough rejections of Black voters’ ballots in Ohio to re-elect George W. Bush. This is hard evidence.

But Bobby jumped into an evidence-free crazy-world in a cringeworthy article for Rolling Stone speculating about voting machines that magically switched Kerry votes to Bush. I checked these stories to a fare-thee-well. Nothing to them. Bobby mistook the “potential” to cheat with actual evidence. I bit my tongue and said nothing.

Later, his knee-jerk reaction against Covid vaccines was the result of the attack on his reasoned questions raised in the film Vaxxed about MMR vaccines laced with mercury. The film successfully got Big Pharma to remove the mercury. But Bobby, having been savaged by the industry, now became Mr. Anti-Vax, opposing anything injected by a needle (except, it appears, steroids to build muscles). Sorry, I’m no fan of Big Pharma—but I need proof before I tell people not to wear a mask during a pandemic. I need the proof—and his only proof was to accuse Big Pharma and the FDA of being liars. They are. Still, that’s not proof.

I think that point about Little Bobby's anti-vaxxer lawyer career may have an enormous motive of self-enrichment in it, as well.  I think that's his motive in wanting to get control of entities like the CDC, to create bogus scientific and policy documents that he and his ambulance chasing law firm can spin into profits for themselves.  

A couple of weeks back I went into the use of lies by celebrity lawyers, especially the Epstein-Trump-porn-wife killer's liar-lawyer Dershowitz, concentrating on both his documented use of some truly putrid lies and how he knows he lies as he lies them.   I noted Norman Finkelstein's theory that such lawyers can lie knowing their lies are lies and believing their lies as they lie them.   

Thinking about that more,  I don't buy Finkelstein's theory that they really believe their lies are true,  I think they're just so used to lying and getting away with it EVEN IN WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE A RIGOROUS METHOD FOR SORTING OUT LIES, BEFORE A JUDGE IN A COURT  that they lie out of habit knowing they will suffer no consequences for it.   Greg Palast isn't a lawyer, he has, as he noted, a requirement to see sufficient evidence before he claims something is true.   I think RFK's life of growing up among the trained lawyers that just about all the men in his father's generation were, imbibing the same training in an elite law school - and his Harvard years among the rich boys wouldn't have done much to get him out of that habit of lying - AND HIS HISTORY AS A DRUG ADDICT would if anything reinforce that.   I've known addicts, to drugs, to alchol, to other things and there is one thing all of them have in common,  they lie to themselves and to others as easily as a celebrity "civil liberties" lawyer does.   AS MUCH AS A TRUMP DOES.    

And here we come to a connection between RFK jr and Trump that goes back almost to the beginning.   I mentiond that RFK sr. wanted the job that Roy Cohn got,  well, that world champion class lawyer-liar is where Trump developed not only his continuing education in lying BUT IN HOW TO GET AWAY WITH BLATANT LYING AND CHEATING AND AMORLIAITY.   He learned how to manipulate courts, judges, the law and the lazy-work-shy habits of all of them to get away with everything that he's gotten away with from Cohn.    While there are entirely more moral lawyers than Cohn or RFK jr.  that permisson to lie with impunity - so long as you are rich and white - is endemic to the profession.  When you get an entitled, rich, white, straight, male who is also an Ivy leaguer lawyer, one who has a history of a drug addict and, as his cousin,  JFK's daughter pointed out, a destructive manipulator of others, the big surprise would be if he hadn't turned out to be the psychopathic criminal he is.  

I strongly urge you to read all of Greg Palast's post on this, especially the hatred of RFK jr. for Palestinians and the ease with which he supports the Israeli genocide of them.   I may go into that but will just recommend what he says about it. 

We might get a crook in an honest election, we are certain to get one from a crooked election.

IT WASN'T UNTIL I went back and looked at this post that I wrote almost twenty years ago about the urgent need to secure our elections FROM REPUBLICAN-FASCISM that I was reminded just how corrupt Little Bobby Kennedy is.   But being the kind of person who, if I have time,  I like to look into the topic I'm writing about and, in this case, mentioned as the inspiration of a post I wrote twenty years ago,  I  looked into that.  I'll post on that later.  

This has become far more urgent than it was even in 2006, I agree with Keith Edwards that it's clear trump and the Republican-fascists are actively trying to take over the mid-term election this year in order to prevent Democrats, especially those in targeted groups from voting or having their vote counted. 

Note that since 2006 and having expeienced both voting by mail and, especially, rank-choice voting - THAT IS VOTING TO GET YOUR SECOND CHOICE INSTEAD OF YOUR LAST CHOICE - I think both are absolutely essential to securing American democracy and improving that into an egalitarian democracy.   Of course, part of that is taking control of the postal service again, as is mandated in the Constitution, and making sure that a corrupt appointee and a corrupted board can't ratfuck the mail to the Republican-fascists advantage and to the advantage of the private corporations the likes of the putrid and blatatnly corrupt Louis DeJoy.   The half-century of Nixonian privitization of the postal service has been a corrupt failure, one that should never have been allowed. 

As for what I said then,  I warned you.  

Friday, June 02, 2006

OUR VOTE OUR BLOOD

Let me be clear, I am not being coy or ironic or clever. This is it folks, this is real, as real as we are going to see it in our lifetimes.

The Rolling Stone article by Robert F. Kennedy jr. and the headline article by Greg Pallast posted today on Buzzflash.com lay out the evidence that Ohio was stolen by the Republicans. Anymore reading them who says they don't believe the 2004 presidential race was stolen would have to have some conclusive evidence or they are lying. If they do, they must lay it out in its entirety for the world to see now or be forever judged as liars. But if that evidence was there they would have shown it already. They haven't so it isn't there.

We can't ignore this any longer. It's not exciting, it's not trendy, it's not sexy, it's entirely clear how it could be fixed so no one is going to gain a reputation for brilliance and become the toast of the scribbling class over it. It's only a question of whether the United States is a nation of laws and not of men, a democracy of a despotic oligarchy.

[Note 2026:  You will probably know by now that I've entirely lost any confidence that any kind of democracy except an egalitarian democracy will endure as any kind of a democracy.  American liberal democracy has not only proved to be incapable of fighting off the fascism which has been building and gathering strength since the 2000 election theft of Bush v Gore,  its holdings and character have contributed to that fascist takeover.  That is due in no small part to liberal democrats being entirely unwilling to address the problem and take the urgently needed steps to fight the fascists, especially the lawyers among them.]  

- We need one national ballot form for the national constitutional offices, President, Vice-President, Senator, Congressman. These are the only four offices that have a direct impact on us all. The citizens of the entire country have a right to these four offices being filled in a completely honest way. Everyone has a right to know that every congressman was chosen honestly, even in the district farthest from where they live. There is an overriding interest in the citizens of the entire country having an honestly chosen government strong enough to overcome constitutional objections. This is THE question of national integrity, not a detail of petty federalism.

- We need one form of ballot for those offices, no butterflies, no esthetic tampering. One form that a child learns in fourth grade and that doesn't change for as long as our form of government doesn't change. President, Vice-President, Congressman, Senator. One ballot for each office if there are that many candidates in a district but one form that is as familiar to a voter as a Lincoln penny. [Save the Lincoln penny and make it worth something, again.] 

- We need those ballots to be on paper, marked clearly by hand with an X or a check mark, either a valid mark. One ballot form, one thing for the voter to do. Both have worked for decades and there is no reason to fool with it.

- We need them to be counted by hand with observers from all parties. Those ballots are to be counted honestly, everywhere, every time. If local officials can't run a clean election it will be run by a higher level of government. If you don't like that, look at those clean, honest, simple and quick elections they've got in Canada run by Elections Canada. You can go to their web site and see how those practical people have managed simple methods for dealing with problems of disabled voters. Look now before the Conservative government starts trying to copy cat the United States to steal elections for themselves.

No electronic voting for the federal constitutional offices is to be tolerated. We have seen that electronic voting and vote tabulation is certain to give an inaccurate count and that's even when it isn't rigged to steal the election.

The results of two stolen presidential elections in a row are all the proof anyone needs that a crooked election gives us a crooked government. We might get a crook in an honest election, we are certain to get one from a crooked election. The elections of 2000 and 2004 have given us the disaster of Iraq and will produce at least one more disaster, probably in Iran. The Republicans who stole these elections are costing us in blood, in honor and in money. We cannot afford to nickel and dime democracy, the cost is staggeringly high if we continue to cheat ourselves out of honest elections.

Computers and modern research have allowed the Republican Party to destroy the last and best hope for a free people to govern themselves. We aren't living in an age where genteel comity and a bit of indulgence of petty theft can be smiled at. If the DC-NY scribblers and the law professors had the blood of their children and themselves at risk they might see it more clearly. There is nothing ironically amusing about it.

Update 2026:  I will have more to say about a lot of this, especially around the collapse of faith I once had in honest lawyers.   You can't have anyone who is relialble, even an honest lawyer who has conformed to an essentially crooked profession.   Or:  Why Greg Palast Didn't Go Bad While Little Bobby Did.  

Candombe Ruben Rada

 

Diego Paredes: Tambor Piano / accesorios
Noé Nuñez: Tambor Repique / Batería
Ferna Nuñez: Tambor Chico / accesorios
Juan Correa: Bajo
Anibal Pintos: Teclados
Leo Méndez: Saxo Tenor

I was going to listen to some Jazz from a Latin American country and it suddenly occured to me that there were lots of countries whose jazz I'd never heard before so I typed in the first one that came to me, one bordering the country I originally thought of and this is the first thing that came up in a search for "Uruguay Jazz."   The piece is by Ruben Rada who I read is a legendary musician and artist in Uruguay, nice to be reminded the internet can be useful.   

The group is Suena Candombe.   I will probably be listening to them this weekend and, if I can find them,  the musicians playing in another context. 

Here they are playing Nombre de Bienes

Last Answer to Hate Mail On This Topic For Now Unless You Come Up With Something That Doesn't Bore Me

YOU FORGET WHERE I STARTED way back in January 2008,  the challenge I posed was to just imagine just what the passage of a less than a third of the history of the evolution of species, 1,000,000,000 years meant in terms of years, months and days were,  noting that you couldn't possibly come up with anything approaching a vague notion of what was encompassed in the world in that period of time.  And many of the events relevant to a consideration of how evolution happened would be timed in terms of hours, minutes. . . fractions of seconds.   Human beings have no hope of imagining that because our experience is limited to a tiny fraction of a billion years, even in terms of the longest of lives. 

Perhaps a more useul thought experiment to demonstate that impossibility would be to consider how much of a human lifetime, how much of the experiential life of you or the most brilliant of evolutionary scientists would be taken up by the entirely easier attempt to count, outloud, to one billion.   If you conventionally - and unrealistically - thought you could count to a billion taking an average of one second per whole number, it would take you more than 31 sleepless, unceasing, not resting even to eat or drink years to accomplish that feat.  And most of those numbers would take you more than a second to pronounce, in English probably as soon as you reached much past the teens. 

The kind of geeks who want to figure out how long it would take on the popular forum for the such, Reddit in which a lot of them tried to figure out  even just how to figure out how long it would take comes up with estimates of 256 years though there is disagreement.  One points out that the polysyllablic pronuciation of numbers differs in langauges, pointing out that in German, for example, the words for thousand, million and billion have  more syllables than in English so it would take far, far longer to do it.

One of the Reddit comments gave the more easily imagined, though still impossible to really imagine in terms of human experience,   estimate of  "89 days to count to 1 million," then noting that a billion is 1000 times a million doesn't come close to the actual duration of the, at any rate, impossible feat. 

Any numbskull who contented themselves with the automatic and unasked for "AI" "answer" on Google would get the completly unrealistic answer of - 

Counting out loud to one billion would take approximately 30 to 100+ years, depending on the speed and whether you count continuously or with breaks. At a rate of one number per second, it takes about 31.7 years. However, due to longer numbers taking more time to say, realistic estimates are often closer to 100 years.

I wouldn't say "out of fairness" because I don't think fairness comes in to it when it is an unconscious machine instead of a living creature, I'll point out that it gives what it comes up with as a more "realistic" estimate, minimally, and insufficiently,  taking into account the needs of the counter in surviving to complete the task:

Realistic Pace: Because large numbers take longer to say (e.g., "nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine"), the, Math is Fun website suggests it could take over 100 years.

Taking it as a given that Math is Fun is written by human beings of some academic, perhaps even scientific training instead of a computer,  it's clear that those humans can't conceive of the actual conditions and problems involved with doing that.   

Now, consider how much more complicated the facts of the living and thriving and reproducing of any organism from a bacterium up to a large, long-lived eukaryotic organism is,  much of if not all of that being part of the riddles of evolution.  The idea that it could be studied by human science done by human scientists and them coming up with anything like an accurate account of that is absurd.  

And that is not taking into account that the actual material existence of evolution in that more than three billion years will never be had to study except in the most minute amounts, much of that being hard to impoossible to resolve to an accurate image, nevermind  the impossibility of analyzing those vanishingly few snap-shots of evolutin to analyze in order to come up with the consequent general account of evolution.   About the only thing you can take as an absolute certainty, based on the history of the scientific study of evolution IS THAT THERE WILL NEVER BE ONE AGREED TO ACCOUNT OF JUST WHAT THAT IS.  

Any claim to make even a tiny amount of progress to that complete understanding is the grossest of superstitions,  yet that is exactly what the conventional received wisdom requires of  respectable educated person demands,  to pretend Charles Darwin accomplished that with the publication of On the Origin of Species.  

The motives for the demand that we pretend to believe understanding was in hand c 1860 may vary, depending on who is making it.  

One,  the demand that the feelings of those biologists wanting to pretend they have something like a complete understanding of evolution must be respected,  is probably the most potent one for many of them.   

Another is the more sophisticated but even more dishonest of them pretending that alleged understanding seals the case for their entirely non-scientific ideological campaign to promote whatever species of materialist monism they favor.  And I will remind you that campaign was inserted directly into the formal literature of science almost at the start, certainly by the time that Haeckel wrote his "History of Creation,"  which was cited as reliable science by Darwin, himself.   That was  Karl Marx's first concusion on his reading of the Origin of Species before his critical habits dealt with the claims of it.  And he assumed a level of completeness to the arguments for it that was entirely unrealistic.   I think when you're honest about it that's the motive of all of those who bought into notions such as "kin selection" and Hamiltonian "altruism" and most of the most well known advocates of what the Darwinist Stephen J. Gould called the "Darwinian fundamentalism,"  of Dawkins, Pinker, . . . etc.  In probably the most absurd case I know of, Daniel Dennett.  Their motive is as non-scientific and ideological as Marx's was and to the extent they have any philosophical awareness, in the end, identical to it. 

Republican-fascist Hate Mail

UNLIKE YOU I KNOW why I'm opposed to Marxism,  Marx is on record as being opposed to it, too, by the way.*  So I won't go into that.    You must not be a regular reader of my posts, look up the relevant search terms and you'll find your accusation is a lie.  And, stupid as the history of that accusation has generally been in the United States,  it has never been stupider than it is when made now, during the Turd Reich made by illiterates like you.  

I'll take this opportunity to do what I should probably have done the other day, go through some of what Engels said to agree and disagree with it.   I certainly don't agree with all of what Engels said, though, again, unlike you, I know why I don't agree with him as well as knowing what he said that I agree with and why.  

(3) Without disputing the merits of your method of attack, which I might call a psychological one, I should myself have chosen a different method. Each of us is more or less influenced by the intellectual medium in which he chiefly moves. For Russia, where you know your public better than I do, and for a propagandist journal appealing to the bond of sentiment, to moral feeling, your method is probably the better one. 

I will note here that much of the letter was apparently written in French with some German and a little in Russian.  Engels, like Marx, was a typical 19th century German academic scholar.  For better and for worse.  Speaking of the latter.   

For Germany, where false sentimentality has done and is still doing such enormous harm, it would be unsuitable, and would be misunderstood and distorted sentimentally. What we need is hate rather than love – to begin with, at any rate – and, above all, to get rid of the last remnants of German idealism and instate material facts in their historic rights. 

The next seventy years would prove that the last thing that Germany needed was "hate rather than love, to begin with."  And that would prove the case in every country in which Marxism was the engine that produced anti-democratic dictatorships, as well.   Given our present experience of Trumpian-Republican-fascist-billionaire financed fascism which has, as well, harnessed hatred that seems to be as big a problem for liberal democracy as it ripens like a rotting Marxist regime.   You and your colleagues who troll me certainly are more all in with Engels on that than I am. 

It is one of the more bizarre of ironies that the charge of "idealism" was and still is thrown around as an all encompassing condemnation of whoever the one making the charge wants it to.   In this case the irony is that Darwin's inner circle, most of all in his foremost German disciple, one whose words Darwin endorsed as the highest kind of science, Ernst Haeckel,  saw the theory of natural selection as being just that death blow that Engels sought.   In his "History of Creation,"  a book which Darwin repeatedly cited and endorsed as scientific truth,  Haeckle awarded Darwinism credit as the final blow in the triumph of materialist monism.  Despite that, a number of the Darwinist critics of Haeckel (apparently they believed they were more competent to evaluate him than their common master, Darwin was) condemned his materialist monism as being their common foe, idealism.

I am generally skeptical of those dualisms so beloved of academic, especially 19th century ideological warfare,  "Dionysian - Appolonian,"   "Hellenism - Hebraic,"  etc.  certainly including "materialism-idealism" though I will say that if forced to choose,  I think the idealists have a better set of arguments than the materialists.   Whether or not the materialists are correct in their monism (and I don't believe for a second they are)  they have no alternative but to admit that every single thing they can consider, discuss and publish about the material universe must pass through the conscious mind of a human being.  Arthur Stanley Eddington put it the best way I know when he said that our own experience of our own consciousness is the absolute first and inescapable thing that we can know,  everything else is completely a product of our own mind.  There is no objective view of the material universe, the materialists only impeach their own ideology when they try to get past that fact.   THAT IS "THE FACT"  not what Engels sought to "instate" "in their historic rights."   The very idea that he says "material facts" have "rights" is an unwitting admission that he cannot think of "material facts" without imaging them as having something such as "rights."  What he really meant is he wanted HIS SIDE in that academic, ideological and, in time, legal and pollitical side to win and control human governments, socieities and culture.   

He wasn't alone in that, it is one of the unstated and entirely anti-scientific practices and holdings of the "scientific" side of ideology that they always go where scince is allegedly not to go.  I've pointed out here, before, the relevant passages from Francis Bacon's foundational philosophical texts in the ideology of science that ideology is to be kept out of it.   But science is done by all too human human beings, the pretense that that is done as a matter of course is a product of a fairy-tale, pop-fiction reading of the history of science.   In so far as materialist ideology, especially in its atheist form, it has never been far from the formal literature of much of science.   And, academics wanting to imitate that enormously successful and profitable realm of academia, even those in the so-called humanites have adopted that ideological framing, including, I will point out, those in academic schools of theology and the study of religion.   It is only in the last several decades that that seems to be cracking and may well implode as, in fact, the serious lapses in scientific practice - see Retraction Watch and the replicability crisis - are admitted to be a very serious problem. 

I should, therefore, attack these bourgeois Darwinists something after this fashion (and shall perhaps do so in time):-

The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to animate nature of Hobbes’ theory of the war of every man against every man and the bourgeois economic theory of competition, along with the Malthusian theory of population. This feat having been accomplished – (as indicated under (1) I dispute its unqualified justification, especially where the Malthusian theory is concerned) – the same theories are next transferred back again from organic nature to history and their validity as eternal laws of human society declared to have been proved. The childishness of this procedure is obvious, it is not worth wasting words over. But if I wanted to go into it further I should do it in such a way that I exposed them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad natural scientists and philosophers.

I don't know if Marx had priority in pointing that out to Engels, though I suspect his letter is what informed Engels on those points.   It is certainly true that that's what Darwin did, imagining the British class system and aristocratic order on to the entire history of the biosphere.   All of the claims made for the theory of natural selection, from the start, have been bad science and worse philosophy.   

I've noted a number of those,  such as the completely dishonest citation of human animal husbandry,  especially in its most consciously manipulating phases, as a model of what was supposed to happen, unconsciously, non-teleologically, over tens of thousands, millions and billions of years to produce new species - something that human animal husbandry, in all its conscous and teological realities, has not yet done. 

You cannot prove or even demonstrate unconcious, non-telological claims about nature through anything done consciously, to demonstrate something THAT IS FOR A PURPOSE, done by human beings.   You cannot disprove claims of intelligent design through intelligently designed experiments of intellgently conducted analyses of nature.  You cannot tease out human intelligence or purpose from the results. 

The claim of Darwinists from the start, including Darwin and his co-inventor of the idea, A. R. Wallace, that their theory excluded teleology is ridiculous and no one proves that more solidly than Charles Darwin through his claims that natural selection produces superior "fitness."   The modern, post-WWII lie of the revisionist Darwin claimed that such "Social Darwinism" was a distortion of the Brit philospher Herbert Spencer when Darwin, himself, in the 5th edition of On the Origin of Species, at Wallace's urging, admitted that when he said "Natural Selection" he meant exactly the same thing that Spencer said when he said "Survival of the fittest."  Yet that is a lie that is ubiqutous in academic and popular scribbling and, as I just experimented, is a lie that is going to appear at the top of any "AI" Google search of the topic despite what Darwin, himself, said.   Similar lies are told about Darwin's support of eugenics (what got me into this in argument c. 2005) despite what he said in support of Galton's earliest eugenics publications and what Galton, himself said about it.  

I will add that the claim (also repeated by Google's "AI" in my recent experiment) that Charles Darwin never supported governmental action to promote eugenics when he supported those proposals, including the government involuntarily nullifying marriages, made by his son George Darwin and supported the book in which Haeckel went much farther, endorsing the allegedly eugenic murder by the state of a kill list, maybe the first one drawn up by Dawinists on the basis of "mercy."   That, by the way, is a practice that seems to have been taken up by large numbers of academic "ethicists" who seem to delight in saying who it's OK to kill, these days. 

I have also pointed out just a few of the cases in which Darwinists make up stuff instead of observing nature and making up appallingly contradictory Just-so stories in support of the ideology of natural selection (look up "first bird to call out" in my archive) and, on the way, other problems with natural selection as a scientific theory, one which, I hold on the same ideological a priori commitment that Richard Lewontin admitted to, IS THE REIGNING ORTHODOXY OF SCIENCE.   The internal contradictions and claims of those Just-so stories, even refuting such things as the speed of sound,  the claims of what constitutes a benficial adaptation, and even the properties of the whole numbers, don't seem to make much of a difference in that.   In the end,  I think that scientists working as scientists in the milieu of university and publications, are too chicken to admit those problems with even such widely adopted nonsense as Richard Dawkins most famous bit of "science."  Again look up "first bird to call out."

Marx and Engels didn't know the half of it.   That all of that subsequent biological science which depends on the theory of natural selection being at risk if those critiques of it are considered and analyzed,  so what?  Wouldn't science be better if even that massive mistake was corrected?   Isn't that the claim of what makes science the superior methodology of studying things,  THAT IT IS EVER OPEN TO OVERTURNING NO MATTER THE COST?   Which, by the way, is a fraud, as I said, the sci-guys are all too human and they put on their pants one leg at a time just like we all do. 

I have noted several times the continuing danger of Darwinist eugenics, most recently in American and Swedish politics by the adoption, at the urging of self-declared "Darwinian economists" of the "herd immunity" policy that may have resulted in many tens or hundreds of thousands of additional deaths in the Covid-19 pandemic.   I will note that in The Descent of Man Charles Darwin bemoaned that widespread vaccination was keeping too many of the underclass alive to reach adulthood,  something that his son, Leonard, promoted in his, thankfully failed, campaign to become a British MP.   So the "Darwinian economists" could make one of the most respected of scientific citations in support of their murderous policy.    Trump's current Sec, of Health and Human Services has endorsed such a murderous policy in regard to measles. 

As for your accusation of me committing a discrediting act in citing Marx and Engels, blow it out your ass.   You Republican-fascists are as much if not more self-discrediting than the ultra-Darwinists.   You are all fascists, just like so many of the Darwinists were, including the Nazis.  

* I endorse what the late Howard Zinn said on that count. 

Posted Without Credit (don't know where it comes from, saw it online) And Without Apology

 Kid Rock makes music for guys who buy their girlfriends personalized, Bedazzled tabacco spit cups for Christmas.

Now you might argue that's an inappropriate gift for a 13 year old, but sisters really are the hardest family members to shop for. 

Hate Mail - I do intend to use the word rodomontade as soon as possible, it is so useful in the epoch of Trump II.

THE VERY FIRST blog post that I ever wrote in January of 2008 about my ever growing conviction that natural selection is nothing more than an ideological theory which has no knowable or,  I hold, credible existence as a force in nature started this way:

EVOLUTION is long. Really, really long. It encompasses the entire duration of life on the planet Earth. Most commonly that is thought today to be a period of more than three billion years. That’s a number we are all familiar with hearing but getting your mind around what even one billion - 1,000,000,000 - years really consists of is impossible. What could a billion years mean to a person? What would the first, the last and all of the varied unknown and unrecorded days, seasons, years and ages in between years one and one billion mean. They are incomprehensible in their vast duration and compass of possible experience in terms of even the longest human life span. We have no frame of reference.

And not only is EVOLUTION (upper case) long, it is also large in numbers, encompassing, literally, all of the lives of all of the organisms that have ever existed. All of the organisms which have reproduced or been produced. That number is of many magnitudes larger than even the incomprehensible billions of years already mentioned. Consider, just as a sample of the complications, the known time periods between generations of living species of rodents, and of one-celled organisms. Consider the number of fertile eggs some species of plants, insects and mollusks produce in one reproductive cycle. Each of the surviving, reproducing individuals was and is a variation, many have the possibility of having an effect on future generations. Leaving the entirely relevant question of individuals aside, imagining even the number of what we might classify as species, each comprising subspecies, varieties, and other sub groupings is incomprehensible.

Now it’s necessary to make a distinction between EVOLUTION, the actual fact of life in both its ancient and contemporary diversity and numbers, and the human science of evolution (lower case), which attempts to study the mechanisms and artifacts of all those lives and to understand many different aspects of them, including the attempts to make general assertions about them. Let’s allow the conventional beginning of the science of evolution as the publication date of The Origin of Species, 1859. In that case, evolution as a formal, scientific, study has been going on for about a hundred fifty years.
 

That is describing what might be called the macro-scale of evolution, what would have been there for Charles Darwin to see, perhaps measure and cite (and in many cases make up or conflate or subject to reification) in creating his theory of natural selection.  He knew nothing of genes, though he theorized - made up - little particles he called "gemmules" to serve his Lamarckian theory of inheritance, so he didn't really consider what Richard Lewontin, a notable geneticist, was talking about in that all-important quote I took from him again yesterday, dealing with what he took as the micro-scale of things.*  

In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them.  Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were. 

I'll start by noting that not only is there "no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak,"   Lewontin was not being as incisive as he was when he talked about other problems in such biology,  there is no possibility of discerning if such "selective forces" are real or just imagined.  And, since that is the case, their role in governing evolution may well be just as imagined.   That is certainly given away in the next sentence in which he admits there "is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were."   He might be seen to contradict himself, first talking about the weakness of those selective forces, so weak they can't be measured (or, I'd say, their existence even being verified) and then talk about "how strong those forces were," even while admitting there was no way to decide which scenarios that are imagined by evolutionary biologists that are alleged to explain their consequences in speciation are real.   

Lewontin certainly was aware of Marx's second comment on Darwinism, the theory of natural selection, in which he accused Darwin of inverting the inspiration of his theory.    Darwin admitted that Thomas Malthus's clearly ideological, Brit-aristocratic theory of scarcity and austerity and the desirability - from an aristocratic POV -  of harrying the poor into an early grave inspired his creation of natural selection.  After writing to Engels that Darwin's theory was very useful to their ideological program of promoting dialectical materialism, he thought about it more critically and noted that Darwin had taken Malthus's theory, distorted its essential feature that human societies were UNLIKE what happened among animals and so human populations grew, supposedly outgrowing the possibility of producing enough food to feed them all, and then applied Malthus's human economics to the entirety of nature. 

In my criticism and rejection of the theory of natural selection I am always at pains to point out that in so far as belief that species evolved over billions of years from other species, I'm a convinced evolutionist.   In citing Marx I have to also point out that I am not a Marxist and have never been,  I think his co-opting of socialism and contributing to its discrediting is a tragedy on the same scale as its co-optation by Hitler.  Egalitarian democracy is the only legitimate form of government and the only political framework under which socialism can be a good.  I will point out that capitalism, which works on the basis of inequality is incompatible with legitimate governing and any kind of democracy worthy of the name. 

I will restate that, while I think Marx as a creative thinker was a tragic disaster to the subsequent history of humanity - communism has been, along with capitalism, racism,  fascism, one of the competing engines of murder, oppression, enslavement and misery in the 20th and 21st centuries,  his power as a critic is among the greatest of anyone in the 19th century.   This letter of Marx's colleague Friedrich Engels to P.L. Lavrov, which I just found online, containing an elaboration of the relevant critiques is fascinating to read AS ARE THE FOOTNOTES AT THE SITE, WHICH I'LL LEAVE IT TO YOU TO READ WHERE IT'S POSTED.  

 

---

London, 12th Nov., 1875.

My dear Monsieur Lavrov,^[1]

Now that I have returned from a visit to Germany I have at last got to your article, which I have just read with much interest. Here are my observations upon it, written in German, as this enables me to be more concise.^[2]

(1) Of the Darwinian theory I accept the theory of evolution but only take Darwin’s method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection)^[3] as the first, provisional, and incomplete expression of a newly-discovered fact. Before Darwin, the very people (Vogt, Buchner, Moleschott, etc.) who now see nothing but the struggle for existence everywhere were stressing precisely the co-operation in organic nature – how the vegetable kingdom supplies the animal kingdom with oxygen and foodstuffs while the animal kingdom in turn supplies the vegetable kingdom with carbonic acid and manures, as Liebig, in particular, had emphasised. Both conceptions have a certain justification within certain limits, but each is as one-sided and narrow as the other. The interaction of natural bodies – whether animate or inanimate – includes alike harmony and collision, struggle and co-operation. If, therefore, a so-called natural scientist permits himself to subsume the whole manifold wealth of historical development under the one-sided and meagre phrase, “struggle for existence,” a phrase which even in the sphere of nature can only be taken with a grain of salt, such a proceeding is its own condemnation.

(2) Of the three convinced Darwinists cited, Hellwald alone seems to be worth mentioning. Seidlitz is only a lesser light at best, and Robert Byr is a novelist, whose novel Three Times is appearing at the moment in By Land and Sea – just the right place for his whole rodomontade too.

(3) Without disputing the merits of your method of attack, which I might call a psychological one, I should myself have chosen a different method. Each of us is more or less influenced by the intellectual medium in which he chiefly moves. For Russia, where you know your public better than I do, and for a propagandist journal appealing to the bond of sentiment, to moral feeling, your method is probably the better one. For Germany, where false sentimentality has done and is still doing such enormous harm, it would be unsuitable, and would be misunderstood and distorted sentimentally. What we need is hate rather than love – to begin with, at any rate – and, above all, to get rid of the last remnants of German idealism and instate material facts in their historic rights. I should, therefore, attack these bourgeois Darwinists something after this fashion (and shall perhaps do so in time):-

The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to animate nature of Hobbes’ theory of the war of every man against every man and the bourgeois economic theory of competition, along with the Malthusian theory of population. This feat having been accomplished – (as indicated under (1) I dispute its unqualified justification, especially where the Malthusian theory is concerned) – the same theories are next transferred back again from organic nature to history and their validity as eternal laws of human society declared to have been proved. The childishness of this procedure is obvious, it is not worth wasting words over. But if I wanted to go into it further I should do it in such a way that I exposed them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad natural scientists and philosophers.

(4) The essential difference between human and animal society is that animals are at most gatherers whilst men are producers. This single but cardinal distinction alone makes it impossible simply to transfer the laws of animal societies to human societies. It makes it possible that, as you justly remark, “Man waged a struggle not only for existence but for enjoyment and for the increase of his enjoyments ... he was ready to renounce the lower enjoyments for the sake of the higher.” Without contesting your further deductions from this, the further conclusions I should draw from my premises would be the following: – At a certain stage, therefore, human production reaches a level where not only essential necessities but also luxuries are produced, even if, for the time being, they are only produced for a minority. Hence the struggle for existence – if we allow this category as valid here for a moment – transforms itself into a struggle for enjoyments, a struggle no longer for the mere means of existence but for the means of development, socially produced means of development, and at this stage the categories of the animal kingdom are no longer applicable. But if, as has now come about, production in its capitalist form produces a far greater abundance of the means of existence and development than capitalist society can consume, because capitalist society keeps the great mass of the real producers artificially removed from the means of existence and development; if this society is forced, by the law of its own existence, continually to increase production already too great for it, and, therefore, periodically every ten years, reaches a point where it itself destroys a mass not only of products but of productive forces, what sense is there still left in the talk about the “struggle for existence?” The struggle for existence can then only consist in the producing class taking away the control of production and distribution from the class hitherto entrusted with it but now no longer capable of it; that, however, is the Socialist revolution.

Incidentally it is to be noted that the mere consideration of past history as a series of class struggles is enough to reveal all the superficiality of the conception of that same history as a slightly varied version of the “struggle for existence.” I should therefore never make that concession to these spurious natural scientists.

(5) For the same reason I should have given a different formulation to your statement, which is substantially quite correct, “that the idea of solidarity, as a means of lightening the struggle, could ultimately expand to a point at which it embraces all humanity, counterposing it as a solidarised society of brothers to the rest of the world of minerals, vegetables and animals.”

(6) On the other hand I cannot agree with you that the war of every man against every man was the first phase of human development. In my opinion the social instinct was one of the most essential levers in the development of man from the ape. The first men must have lived gregariously and so far back as we can see we find that this was the case.

* * *

17th November. I have been interrupted afresh and take up these lines again to-day in order to send them to you. You will see that my remarks apply rather to the form, the method, of your attack than to its basis. I hope you will find them clear enough I have written them hurriedly and on re-reading them should like to change many words, but I am afraid of making the manuscript too illegible.

With cordial greetings,
F. ENGELS.

 This is already a hell of a lot longer than I expected it to get when I started writing this piece so I won't comment on Engels, agreeing and disagreeing with things he said.  I do intend to use the word rodomontade as soon as possible, it is so useful in the epoch of Trump II.  

 *  Lewontin conventionally talked about "traits" as if those could really be teased out and honestly considered apart from the very different organisms that would, then, be said to share them.  I'm very skeptical that such a reduction is honestly made or its meaning honestly reduced to a simple issue to consider.  I hold that in any context but certainly within the context of conventional Darwinism, natural selection is the mother of all n-factorial problems. 

I don't know how much Lewontin knew of the work of James Shapiro or Dennis Nobel who have shown, decisively, that genetic inheritance is far, far, far, more complicated, far less cut and dried and far, far from the only source of significant inheritance, overturning the mid-20th century neo-Darwinian synthesis that is still the conventional view of most biologists.  One of the best illustrations of the problem of considering only the genes in that regard was when the ultra-Darwinist (Stephen J. Gould's word for them) Richard Dawkins claimed, while debating with his thesis advisor Nobel, that he could take Nobel's DNA, store it for ten thousand years and use it to recreate Nobel.  Nobel pointed out that much more than his DNA would be needed to "recreate" his body because his body AND EVERYONE ELSES is directly and decisively the product of the egg cell from which his body developed.  It's one of the most fascinating and mind blowing thing about these new discoveries that they have demonstrated, experimentally, through denucleating an egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus of another species,  that in the very rare instances where they have produced a living organism from it, it will have physiological features of the species that provided the egg cell for the experiment not found in the organism that provided the nucleus.  Needless to say, what my generation was taught as biological truth in that matter - and is still the ruling ideology of conventional biology - was vastly oversold.   That's not unusual, it's typical of science dealing with such vastly complicated phenomena.  

In the piece I wrote about the crushing complexity of such stuff,  I did note there was good news for the biologists in what, no doubt, many of them would take as bad news.

While that fact has the good news for biologists that they will never have nothing left to figure out, that there will be no “end to Biology,

I doubt they'll be replaced by "AI" or their profession become a remnant of academic classicism.  In short, lots of them will always be able to find a paying job. 

Notes On Yesterday's Post

I finally got to a very, very large screen that I could blow up the image of so I have corrected many of the typos and bad edits that I can't see on my usual computer screen - yeesh, if my eyes get much worse I'll have to do this by sound instead of sight.

 As to the meaning of 1 Ge V and 1 Te V, that refers to the size of the particles being looked for.  I'll give you this by way of explanation from the articles about some of those experiments from the CERN Accelerator site.  It gives you an idea of the difficulties and enormous physical apparatus required to find these things, one of the very real limits in the ability of theoretical physicists in getting the experimental evidence they need to go on more than speculation (ever open to wishful thinking) or, really, just making stuff up, what I think of as writing sci-fi in equations instead of words. 

One of the fundamental characteristics of a particle is its mass, which determines not only how heavy it is (its weight under gravity), but how hard it is to accelerate. For example, a car is much harder to push by hand than a bicycle. Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 tells us that mass, m, and energy, E, are proportional (related by the speed of light, c, squared). This means that a heavy particle requires much more energy to create than a light one. Particle physicists use this relationship to measure particle masses in terms of ‘electron volts’, where 1 electron volt is the energy acquired by an electron when it is accelerated by an electric field of 1 volt. This is an extremely small unit, and the proton has a mass of about 1 giga electron volts, i.e. 1000 million electron volts or 1 GeV for short, equivalent to 1.8x10-27 kg.

In these units, the up, down and strange quarks have masses of less than 0.1 GeV; the charm quark, 1.3 GeV; and the bottom quark, 4.2 GeV. So, it was natural to assume that the top quark fit this sequence – with a mass of perhaps 10 to 20 GeV. Surely, after the discovery of the bottom quark, the top quark would be ‘just around the corner’.

As each new and more powerful particle accelerator or collider began its work, physicists hoped it would have enough energy to discover the top quark. But no convincing hints were seen, and the first data from the CDF and D0 experiments at Fermilab’s Tevatron proton–antiproton collider in the early 1990s showed that if the top quark exists, its mass must be more than about 100 GeV. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, experimentalists at CERN’s Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) in Geneva, Switzerland, were probing the top quark indirectly through precise measurements of the decays of the Z boson (a fundamental particle connected to the electroweak interaction) into different types of quarks and antiquarks. Due to conservation of energy, the Z boson, with a mass of about 90 GeV, would not be heavy enough to decay into a top quark–antiquark pair if the top quark (and top antiquark) mass is greater than 45 GeV. Nevertheless, the relative proportions of Z boson decays into other types of quarks could be subtly influenced by even the possibility of decays into top quarks, and measurements at LEP suggested the top-quark mass should be somewhere between 150 and 200 GeV. But did it really exist?
 

In a particle collider, collisions between high-energy protons and antiprotons can be understood as collisions between two opposing ‘bags’ of quarks or antiquarks, the constituents of the (anti)protons. The total energy of the accelerated proton is shared among the three quarks, with a fraction also going to gluons, other particles in the proton that represent the force binding the three quarks together. Physicists expected that the most likely way to produce top quarks in Tevatron’s 1.8 TeV (1800 GeV) collisions was through a head-on collision of a quark from the proton and an antiquark from the antiproton, producing a top quark and corresponding top antiquark (a 'top-pair'). Again, due to conservation of energy, this process would require the initial quark and antiquark to have at least twice the energy equivalent of the top-quark mass – that’s more than their fair share of their parent proton’s energy. This is rather unlikely, making top-pair production a rare process that becomes even rarer if the top quark is very heavy.

In the early 1990s, the CDF and D0 experiments began to accumulate evidence for the production of top–antitop pairs in their data sample. They finally announced their joint discovery of the top quark in 1995, measuring its mass to be about 180 GeV. This was around 10 times larger than the original expectation, but in agreement with the indications from LEP. Over the next 16 years, tens of thousands of top-quark events were recorded and studied by the two experiments, allowing physicists to build a first portrait of this new particle. As far as they could see, it behaved just as a partner of the bottom quark would be expected to – but why was it so heavy? 

You can read more by yourself,  they have articles about finding the latest and grooviest of them, the one the filled in the last known piece of the Standard Model jig saw puzzle, the Higgs boson that was hyped so much a few years back.   Though a lot of their articles would seem to be more hype to keep the project funded and going, or at least that's what some of it seems to me.   What practical use any of it is, I have no idea, nor does it look to me as if they're anywhere near having a complete picture of things, notice how many questions they include in their articles.   Frankly, I'd rather they be spending resources and money on saving us from global warming or feeding, housing, clothing and fueling our species on an equitable basis without destroying the biosphere. 

"Whether or not AI is the way to make progress, right now it’s certainly the way to get paid."

I HAVE TOTAL CONFIDENCE that we are going to soon have an economic and financial catastrophe that will probably be bigger than the 2008 financial crisis.   While I believe it will have a number of different contributing factors the thing that will push the whole corrupt system over the edge will likely be the "AI" bubble that is fueling the artificially soaring stock market that the most criminally corrupt AG in American history - well, if you don't count those involved in the slave power - was touting instead of answering questions in front of the House a couple of weeks back.    "AI" is so hyped and it is exactly the kind of flashy,  sci-fi themed techological PR based con job that the richest and greediest can be suckered with by the even richer and greedier among them - the ones whose bitches the billionaire Epstein class are - that it will probably make the famous historical financial bubbles like the Tulip and the South Sea bubbles look like the ones blown to entertain toddlers.  

I will point out that both of those historical bubbles,  centering in Holland and Britain, respectively, were part of the same "enlightenment" cultures that those who are suckers for such things today like to believe they're a part of - if they have even that much historical or cultural awareness. 

Last week when I  quoted and linked to the estimable Peter Woit's blog,  "Not Even Wrong"  I was tempted to go into the other item under the "Various and Sundry" post in answer to someone who didn't like me dissing the secular-religious article of faith natural selection.   The formerly hard-science issue that Woit started with was the problem facing particle physics,  now that one of its most wildly successful research projects has long since reached its flashiest phase of discovery and confirmation and the way forward faces some of the most serious obstacles that a scientific project can face,  the extreme difficulty of obtaining further experimental or observational confirmation of hypotheses or even the impossibility of doing that.  

I will note that, though I didn't ask him,  I strongly suspect that Peter Woit wouldn't welcome the use I'm about to make of what he said,  this has nothing to do with what he may or may not think about a science that he,  so far as I'm aware, has had little to nothing to say about. 

He starts out:

Natalie Wolchover has a very good article at Quanta with the title Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying or Just Hard? Where I come down on the question is that fundamental theory is all of the above (Hard, Dead, and Dying).

Some of the themes she covers were ones I was trying to write about already 20 years ago here in the blog and in my book. A major theme of that book was that, in retrospect, the Standard Model that fell into place in 1973 turned out to be spectacularly successful: everything that it predicted turned out to be exactly what was measured, and no “new physics” that it doesn’t describe has turned up (beyond the minor addition of neutrino mass terms). So, in 1973 all of sudden, finding something fundamentally new in particle theory became very hard (the experimentalists had lots of challenging work to do exploring the 1 GeV to 1 TeV mass range, checking that what the SM predicted was there and nothing else was).

The crisis that developed in fundamental theory was not just that it had become hard, with new progress a difficult, long-term effort. It’s that the field could not change its way of doing business to accommodate this. Instead of encouraging a long-term effort to attack the remaining fundamental problems, what was rewarded was pursuit of easy but wrong ideas that were coupled with an efficient hype machine. . . .

One of the first things I ever remember reading about the methods of and philosophical basis of science was from one of my mother's 1930s era college textbooks (she had a degree in biological science).   It said that the methodology of science was based, in the first instance, on careful observation,  second, the accurate measurements that could be made of whatever phenomena were observed and, third, the rigorous analysis of those observations.   I think I was around eight or nine when I read that,  I think it was in a book on quantitative analysis - they were a lot more rigorous back then at the under-grad level at the land grant university she attended.   That has probably colored my evaluation of every claim of scientific discovery I've ever read or, heard of or seen being promoted since then.   Theories are fine but without the actual observation of them happening or being,  they're just stories.  And one of the problems with basing scientific claims, or, really any supposedly factual claims on story telling and seeming plausibility is that you can make up a limitless supply of those* and, as you'll read if you keep reading this,  there's no way to choose if you're going to believe one of them or, really, even which one of the seemingly plausible ones is more plausible. 

To answer that objection,  that problem has been an intrinsic part of the supposedly scientific study of the evolution of species from the start - that proposed field of scientific study hasn't only been hard, it is in every way impossible to scientifically study the evolution of species in the dead past of which we have an infinitesimally tiny amount of physical evidence from and you have to fill in the gaping chasms with story telling.   I have repeatedly quoted one of the most respected geneticists of the late 20th century,  Richard Lewontin when he put the problem the best way I've ever seen it put:

It is not only in the investigation of human society that the truth is sometimes unavailable.  Natural scientists, in their overweening pride, have come to believe that eventually everything we want to know will be known.  But that is not true.  For some things there is simply not world enough and time.  It may be, given the necessary constraints on time and resources available to the natural sciences, that we will never have more than a rudimentary understanding of the central nervous system.  For other things, especially in biology where so many of the multitude of forces operating are individually so weak, no conceivable technique of observation can measure them.  In evolutionary biology, for example, there is no possibility of measuring the selective forces operating on most genes because those forces are so weak, yet the eventual evolution of the organisms is governed by them.  Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were.  Over and over, in these essays reproduced here, I have tried to give an impression of the limitations on the possibility of our knowledge.  Science is a social activity carried out by a remarkable, but by no means omnipotent species.  Even the Olympians were limited in their powers.

Richard Lewontin:  Introduction:  It Ain't Necessarily So

Unlike me,  Lewontin was a committed believer in the theory of natural selection,  I think in another of his NYT Book Review essays,  "Billions and Billions of Demons" exposing the nonsense of Carl Sagan he admitted the mindset that leads even those like him who should know better to choose to believe things:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Note this part o what he said:

. . .  in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

Anyone who went through the Sociobiology-Evo-Psy controversy of the mid 1970 to now with any awareness knows just what Lewontin, one of the warriors on the side opposed to those alleged scientific projects will know what he was targeting when he said "just so-stories, which is what his ally and colleague Stephen J. Gould called the story telling of E.O. Wilson,  Richard Dawkins, et al.  But it wasn't lost on me that Darwinists,  starting even before Charles,  with his Grandfather Erasmus (whose theory of evolution was the focus when the word "Darwinism" was first coined,  Charles' bull dog Thomas Huxley adopting it for natural selection c. 1860 ( sorry Orac, you boob).  And not only Darwinism but every single other part of the biological and allegedly social and behavioral sciences for which those actual observations, measurements and honest analyses were not really possible [For more,  see Lewontin's collection of such essays in It Ain't Necessarily So and his many other essays.]

I'm not competent to go into reasons to be skeptical of the current projects in physics and,  God help us, cosmology that give Peter Woit his content but I fully believe I'm rightly skeptical of any so-called science published for which the phenomena addressed - or even the made-up phenomena which so much of such science makes up without the possibility of observation - cannot be seen or even recorded.  But the reason I've given here for my complete skepticism of the scientific validity of such stuff, AND EVEN MORE SO THE CLAIMS OF FACTUAL OR TRUTH CLAIMS ASSERTED FOR IT,  seem to me to be soundly thought out.   No one's been able to tell me why they aren't except the asserted inconvenience to scientists,  their fan boys and gals and the theories that are their meal tickets. 

The quote from Peter Woit which I used as a title is the last line in his continuation, addressing the claims that in the very close future, that such science won't be dependent,  I HAVE TOTAL CONFIDENCE,  on human generation,  but will be the product of "AI."   Which I have every reason to believe will, actually, complete the total decadence that such theoretical sciencing is coming to.   I have every confidence that real science, done by human beings in experiments and actual observations of nature will continue,  I can't recall which scientist I read a couple of years back saying he hardly bothers reading theoretical papers because the most interesting things published in Nature, these days, came from materials science, physics, chemistry, etc.  

Here is the end of Peter Woit's post. 

While I find it highly likely that AI agents can do as well or better at writing the kind of bad theory papers that have dominated the literature for a long time, it seems much less likely that they can write the sort of inspired papers Witten was writing at the height of his powers (e.g. Chern-Simons-Witten, that won him a Fields medal). Since Kaplan tells me that they’ll be doing this in a couple years, not much reason to think about and debate the issue now, we’ll see soon enough.

Whether or not AI is the way to make progress, right now it’s certainly the way to get paid.

I think that's the real motive of such science,  to get published, to get hired or retaining a job,  maybe for the lucky few to get tenure and maybe that greatest desideratum, make money from some hot new company,  making a bundle from it before it implodes.   

* I've mentioned here before about how, when they were hyping the oldest so far found 35,000 year old statue, one of a very fat woman, and the "experts" were hyping it as the ideal of female sexual attractiveness back then - I think some were saying it was prehistoric porn - I asked why none of them seemed to entertain the possibility that it was made by a woman and not some horny cave man.  Someone I was arguing with asked for alternative explanations and I instantly made up about seven of them,  including that it was a self-portrait or maybe a woman had made it to make fun of one of her enemies.  None of which seems to have occurred to the allegedly science-based descriptions of the thing.   It never occurred to them that such an old object could have been worked on by any number of different hands, maybe by people who didn't know each other or have any more of an idea of the motives of the person who started it than 21st century "scientists" who couldn't ask why it was made.   

NOTE:  I will say that Woit has shown unusual wisdom in telling his commentators that he is entirely unwilling to referee a discussion of the Epstein scandal in his comments.  Which is one of the wisest thing I've yet read concerning it.  

Erratum On The First Thursday In Lent

IN THE POST I DID THE OTHER NIGHT in which I talked so enthusiastically about the poetic parphrase of Scripture,  The Message,  I said it was composed by Edward Patterson, mixing up the novelist I knew of with the actual translator,  Eugene Peterson who is also a novelist and poet.   That's what comes of relying on hearing a name spoken instead of reading it on a page and writing before doing much real research.    I apologize for that lapse in my usual practice.    

I've been looking more at The Message and the man who produced it and am even more encouraged after hearing him and reading some interviews with him.   

Here's one of the best of the recorded interviews, one with the ever reliable Krista Tippett.  

I was especially interested to see that he shared one of my enthusiasms,  for the poetry of the too little remembered Denise Levertov.   Here is what some of the program notes say.

“Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.” These are the words of the legendary pastor and writer Eugene Peterson, whose biblical imagination has formed generations of preachers. At the back of the church he led for nearly three decades, you’d be likely to find well-worn copies of books by Wallace Stegner or Denise Levertov. Frustrated with the unimaginative way he found his congregants treating their Bibles, he translated it himself — and that translation has sold millions of copies around the world. Eugene Peterson’s down-to-earth faith hinges on a love of metaphor and a commitment to the Bible’s poetry as what keeps it alive to the world.

I will be interested in reading his rendering of the Psalms, which even in the translations I like many of the just don't do it for me like they're supposed to.   

Remember My Post Last Week Confronting The

guy who was asking why "Jews aren't addressing why so many of the Epstein circle are Jews?"   Rememer my answer asking why he wasn't asking why rich, straight, white men aren't addressing why almost everyone in the Epstein child trafficking club were rich, stright, white men?  

Here's an interesting and short video that, while it talks about her expereince at Harvard, could as easily be made about MIT, Stanford (where that Altman guy mentioned below went),  and the rest of the elite Ivys and Ivy equivalent schools that turn out the goddamned ruling class,

My year at Harvard with the Epstein class

You May Be Dust But Not Only That - Another Idea For Lent

RISKING VIOLATING FAIR USE I'm going to give you a big chunk of this article by Scott Hurd, without links, so you should definitely read it at the one I'm giving you the link for. 

This Lent, will you "unplug " and "recharge" your religious "batteries"? Try to find the "bandwidth" for daily Mass? "Rewire" your prayer life or "reboot" your spiritual reading? Lent is, after all, a chance for an "upgrade" to a better, holier you: "Version 2.0," if you will. 

Sound weird? That's because I've described typical Lenten goals with the computer jargon that's crept into our everyday talk. And I'm just as guilty of using it as anyone else. Which is why I'm making an appeal: This Lent, let's give up referring to ourselves as if we're machines. Because we aren't! But plenty of people think that we are — with serious consequences.  

Pope Leo XIV seems to appreciate the threat, especially as AI creeps into more corners of our lives. In asking why life's busyness often leaves us feeling exhausted and empty, he said: "Because we are not machines, we have a 'heart.' " And he pointedly reminded the Italian bishops that "the person is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery." 

This is all a consequence of the conscious adoption of materialist ideology as the default of academically, culturally and conventionally respectible life - so much of a default in the dim modernist past that even many of those who would claim they aren't materialists don't have any idea that is how they think about other People.  Which, by the way,   is the reason that I started capitalizing words that refer to People and other living Creatures a number of years ago, fall out from the atheist-materliast fad of the '00s.   I suppose it's more of a personal discipline to remind myself not to revert to that materialist habit of thought than something I've advocated everyone do.  Though maybe I should. 

This part of the article, which is why I had the idea to write this,  raises some questions I don't think the tweeting CEO below would like us going into very far.

But not everyone shares this understanding of the human person. To some — especially in tech circles — we are in fact "machines" driven by a "system of algorithms."

Consider the response made by Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, to an influential academic paper's claim that, unlike humans, AI chatbots don't understand what they generate because they're simply "stochastic parrots" that mimic their training data.

Altman didn't buy it. To mock the authors' conclusion, he turned to "X", the social media platform owned by his OpenAI co-founder, Elon Musk. "i am a stochastic parrot," Altman tweeted, "and so r u."

In other words, according to this billionaire tech titan, human beings are really no different from unthinking machines. You and I are simply computers whose output parrots our input. And nothing more.

While I'm sure it would be news to Altman and his, no doubt philosophy disdaining fellow CEOs,  if we are just "stochastic parrots" as are the atomated "AI" content-theft and plagarizism machines he makes what I'd bet are billions from - WHAT IS THE PRINCIPLE ON WHICH COPYWRIGHT AND PATENT LAW BASED IN?   It must be entirely make believe and nothing real if what he claims is true, especially for the things he makes his billions from.   It is allegedly based on the rights to intellectual content by their HUMAN creators.  Rights which do not inhere to machines or algorithms, themselves BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE SELVES.   If all content is merely the parroting of previously existing content, which is stolen and monatized by those tech billionaires then there is no intellectual basis for the laws which allow them to amass the billions they have - NOR IS THERE ANY REAL AGENT WHICH WE HAVE ANY KIND OF PRINICIPLED,  "ETHICAL" OR MORAL OBLIATION TO ALLOW THEM THE  PRIVILEGES TO MAKE THOSE BILLIONS OR KEEP THEM.  

Altman's arrogant confession that that's all there is to the creation of algorithms and programs and higher structures that corporations (imaginary entities given "personhood" by the corrupt lies of Supreme Courts and the corporpate lawyer who invented such artificial "persons) and those who are merely said to own them make those billions from . . . . all of that is something that we have eveyy right to use to mow down the kudzu of legal fiction that his entire professional life is founded in. 

NOT that I expect that any part of the sleaziest part of the system of "justice" or the lawyers that service and man it would ever want to address such claims if they were ever made in a lawsuit by or against such a corporation and the billionaire eliminative matrialists like this Altman as to the most fundamental of consequences - lawyers, judges and "justices" are trained to lie on behalf of the super-rich and the corporations that such "justices" have endowed with "personhood."   But I believe that, as the article points out,  that it's high time we consider these things very, very seriously because we are beyond the tipping point in them treating us not only as individual objects but as specs and drops collectively considered as raw material resources FOR THEIR USE AND DISPOSAL.  

"Remember you are dust and to dust you will return,"  may be the formular used to anoint a Person with ashes in some liturgical traditions but the intellectual basis of that, at least in Catholic theology, only refers to the material body, not the real person which is much more than the sum of its material parts .    Secularism has no such basis,  matrialist-atheist-scientism must negate it,  though without applying their ideological claims to those artificial and profitable entities that they enjoy which their ideology has to,  if honestly considered,  impeach.