Saturday Night Radio Drama - Charles Tidler - Pocket City Blues

 Pocket City Blues

Horton Spring is a 45 year old freelance writer and amateur detective who struggles to make ends meet in Victoria, British Columbia.

Cast:
Horton Spring - Michael Hogan
Jennifer (ex-wife) - Susan Hogan
Nelson (son) - Chris Lovick

4 episodes from March 1997 to April 1997.

Episodes:
Ep.1 “When Things Go Wrong”
All the family’s belongings are lost in a suspicious fire. And Nelson knows more than he’s letting on.

Ep.2 “The Double Door”
Horton is drawn into the mystery of a dead man found in a van.

Ep.3 “Rose Violin”
When Horton champions a young jazz singer on his radio show, everyone assumes that his interest in her transcends music.

Ep.4 “Woke Up This Morning”
Horton meets a woman in a bar. She tries to seduce him, but he just sees her home. Later her husband claims that, unknown to her, she is HIV-positive.

This was quite popular when I posted it several years back, a lot more people seem to be coming for the Saturday Night Radio Dramas these days so I'm assuming a lot of people missed it then. 

It's been a busy week, I haven't had any time to write anything, I'm hoping it will rain again and I can get a down day to do that.  I'm still alive.

An Indelicate Response On The Fifth of July: Either Lincoln Was Right Or Slavery And Genocide Are OK As Darwinism More Than Implies

"In the first lecture I laid stress on the great importance of Natural Selection – the selective deathrate – as tending to human efficiency,"

Karl Pearson

AS COULD BE GUESSED, there are a lot of things that I disagree with the brilliant evangelical Christian apologist, philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig about, though there is much in what he said and has written that I either agree with or come close to agreeing with him.  But I always take him seriously even when he asserts ideas I really don't agree with at all because if someone is going to have an argument that refutes me, he's one who is likely to have it.  No real belief is possible without serious doubting and testing of ideas.  

I used to listen to many of his debates with atheists and others he disagrees with because he is such a rigorous debater who seems to always come fully armed to the arguments he has with them and, most of the time, always can out argue even the most competent of them. He often faces famous atheists who are arrogant enough to have obviously not done their homework and who don't have a chance, he always comes prepared to argue their arguments on their own terms - while refusing to allow them to claim privileges that aren't extended to his position.  Famously, when he foolishly made an especially arrogant claim about his abilities as a debater, Craig challenged Richard Dawkins to debate and Dawkins chickened out entirely, no doubt because he knew it was likely he'd have a hard time as real scientists had trying to out argue him before.  

One of the things I listened to a while back was an argument that he had with the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein in which she made the rather incredible argument that you can find moral absolutes within a philosophical-ideological framework of naturalism, one of the more popular sects of materialist-atheists.  A number of atheists became enraged with WLC when he read her a quote by her husband, the pop-atheist icon and Harvard pseudo-scientist linguist, Steven Pinker that backed up his position that it was impossible to find such moral absolutes within naturalism, it was, apparently held to be a dirty thing to show that her own and more famous pop-atheist husband disagreed with her claims made during the debate.  I've had a similar experience, though in my case it was a pop-atheist daughter whose not nearly as famous pop-atheist psychologist Pop made statements within his academic publication that supported my position and not hers.  It was called out as dirty pool to use that even though the daughter had used her connection to her dad, she had a sort of sideline career in her dad's old sideline, pseudo-skepticism based on her relationship to him and his old colleagues.  

But those are only illustrations of the problem with your objection, you can either have one of the alternatives be true, you can't have both of them be true and if you try to claim them both, it is entirely fair and intellectually responsible to reject your attempt to do the impossible.  Either natural selection is true or egalitarian democracy is legitimate, you can't have both.  And it goes a lot more than merely the possibility of egalitarian democracy being legitimate, either murder is wrong or it is right, in the end, even genocidal murder.

Well.  Which is it?  You aren't going to pick fights and then claim you can have it both ways, at least not when you pick fights with people who are not prepared to let you try to have it both ways.  I am not prepared to.

Either you can oppress and kill People, entire groups of People without moral violation or consequence  or you can't. Either the moral basis forbidding murder and genocide is as real as the motion of bodies in gravity or the products of the most basic of chemical reactions or they are not real and enduring truth and there is no reason for someone not inclined to believe those are wrong.  Even if I were to temporarily allow you to pretend you can have both - out of the dainty practice of middle-class niceness that such amoral dispensations are made of - the history of moral depravity by governments in the 20th century, before and to now,  proves to beyond a preponderance of the evidence, that eventually others will insist on making that amorality the law of the land and people are going to be enslaved and murdered, accordingly.

It being the Fifth of July in the United States, to the point of your objection to what I said, either the reality of human beings is that they are, in fact, endowed by their Creator - or some other as real entity not discernible with science - with rights and liberties and are created equal or natural selection is the truth of it, with its inherent and merciless inequality and that might makes right or at least the survival of the "fittest" is the basic rule of life because you can't have it both ways.  The basis of natural selection, Malthusian economic theory, wasn't based in nature, it was based on the entirely artificial British class system which was a product, not of natural laws but of laws made by monarchs and anti-democratic politicians and judges who flourished under the British class system as it grew out of the putrid Tudor and earlier anti-democratic, aristocratic and royal political and legal systems.  In other places Darwinism, once formed, was used to reinforce and enhance native forms analogous to the British Class System, unsurprisingly in Germany it was eventually adopted by their elites who were not much discomforted by its inherent glorification of the already privileged and powerful, scorning those lower in the economic, social scale, ethnic and racial minorities and, of course, those at the lowest end in the class system.  What the German educated, Darwinist biologist Vernon Kellogg was horrified to find was the result of Darwinism among the very well educated officer corps in the German army during WWI, his fact finding before America's entry into the war horrified him that he abandoned his pacifist position to advocate the total defeat of that German military elite, some of whom were his colleagues, acquaintances and former friends.  Those were, of course, either the instructors of or, in some cases, the actual men who formed the Nazi hierarchy or, having no central core of democratic principles and having had to abandon anything like egalitarian moral absolutes, found they could work under Nazism as it began and, in some cases, right to the vilest ends.  That was as true of the German academic and intellectual elites who accepted natural selection as a law of nature as it was the political-legal population so trained.

I've had these arguments with materialists on the basis of Darwinism and also as a consequence of the materialists' intellectually and ideologically necessary position that there is no such thing as free thought or free will and I find the most obvious thing about these people, especially those who are what I have come to see as the otiose herd of secure if not tenured academics and professional scribblers and babblers, is that they want to both claim that their ideological holdings that make absolute morality impossible to believe in while claiming that they and their fellow clean-handed, standard grammar using colleagues, do not hold that there is no such thing as an absolute moral prohibition on genocide, other forms of mass murder, individual murder, the oppression of people on their biological or gender or class assignments.  They claim both, depending on which one is temporarily advantageous in the context they are making the claim in.  Richard Dawkins does that, Steven Pinker does that, Rebecca Goldstein did it, they all do it.  Materialism is the most decadent of all ideologies, it eventually destroys the very foundation of the minds that hold it as well as all moral absolutes.  Even in its less directly deadly of expressions in the mild-mannered claims of do-nothing intellectuals.

But the thing is, their very ideological claims make all of those things everything from morally ambiguous instead of forbidden or they eventually get round to making up lists of those who it's OK to kill.  That was something that is inherent to materialism, it certainly is inherent to Darwinism which began in Malthusian advocacy of letting the underclass starve to death because they were merely excess population that could not be sustained - something that there was no reason then or now to believe is true, the wealth of the British rich and its basis in non-food production would certainly have been enough to sustain the population.  Darwin's second book in which he deals with natural selection's claimed consequences for the human species is full to the top of such homicidal stuff and where he demurred, he could count on those he cited as the most reliable of science, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel and others to make those claims in their most radical forms, including advocacy of murder, for him. And when you add his other writing, especially many of his letters which are more candid than his scientific writing, he, himself advocated genocide as a positive good.  I've documented that exhaustively and conclusively.  And the subsequent history of Darwinism, up to WWII and increasingly after a short interval in which such talk was not considered respectable, right now among such clean-handed, elegantly writing and speaking Darwinists.  While it would be hard to assign the ranking of most depraved among them, among the worst today are the academic and professional "ethicists" who seem to believe among their most important tasks is writing up lists of who it's OK OR EVEN A MORAL NECESSITY! to kill.   It is breathtaking how materialist "ethicists" insist on what they insist can't be real to have real existence, such as morality.  Have I mentioned materialism is a decadent ideology?

For liberals - those who try to practice the real thing based in egalitarianism and provision for the least among us, not that 18th century lassiez faire perversion of it - you can't have it both ways, either.  Either you are, as Abraham Lincoln gave his interpretation of the founding documents of the United States, "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" or you are dedicated to the Darwinist proposition that all are created unequal and that those who are superior should be allowed to crush those who are inferior.  

Both cannot be true, no more than a nation divided against itself, half free-half slavery,  can stand. 

That, as the universally acknowledged expert in it, Karl Pearson put it, death is the engine of progress under Darwinism.  That is the central idea of natural selection, it was from before it was formally defined and it is its central claim right to this very day.  You cannot change that without the idea, itself, falling apart, no matter how much you might babble that you can do the impossible in that regard.  I think the idea falls apart for any number of reasons, the list I gave for why it is retained, starting with its enhancement of the status of evolutionary biology but, probably most of all, for its utility to ideological atheism, has more to do with it than its enduring success as a defined law of nature, as the Guardian article that was the motivation for Saturday's post showed but wouldn't admit.

I will note in passing, there is much justification in using Lincoln as a contrast to Darwin, they happened to be born the same day.  No doubt Lincoln the son of an unfortunate or near-do-well would have been classified as among the intellectually degenerate population of the time by the aristocratic Malthus and, latter, by the aristocratic Darwin if he had been writing about the poor People of the United States.  The speculation that Lincoln may have had Marfan's syndrome is worth contemplating in terms of Darwinian fitness, too.  Once you start assigning people to a ranking of valuation, there's no end to it.

I have also pointed out that Darwin, among his colleagues and latter day disciples, drew up lists assigning superiority and inferiority to different people based on their race and ethnicity, among others, the Irish were assigned a particularly depraved status, he cites the non-scientist W. R. Gregg's claims about that as if it was reliable science. He was especially hard on those in the South Pacific.  He  listed the Maoris of New Zealand (see the radio play I posted last Saturday) as only one of many racial groups that would lose in the struggle for existence with the British invaders.  Darwin, in letters, enthused about the Brits wiping out native populations around the world.

Those who Darwin and his sciency disciples have marked as inferior, especially those in ethnic, class and biological-medical groupings who they have marked for death, have every reason and right to be skeptical of such badly based science, no matter what its temporary status among those in control of academia and popular science media is.  I find Darwinists among those who were explicitly targeted as inferior by Darwin, those whose work he cited and the mainstream, academic scientific Darwinists such as Karl Pearson stunningly ignorant of the history of those claims as made real in such things as the Nazi exterminations. All they have to do is read them and look for the direct links and citations in the relevant literature - including the science that Nazi scientists advocating eugenics cited - it's not hard to find.  I'd go into that farther but it would impinge on something else I'm thinking of typing out about Clarence Thomas who is not dissimilar in the basic depravity of that kind of non-thinking.  Any Person of Color who holds Darwin up as some kind of icon could only do so out of ignorance of what he said and cited, anyone who is or had ancestors of the British underclass during the 19th century as well, according to Darwin, they would still retain the taint of inferiority which he assigned such People as did his inspiration, Malthus.  I thought that when one of my genealogically enthusiastic relatives showed me that one of my great-great grandmothers had been interned in a British work house (death camp for the poor) in the 19th century, during the time of Dickens.  It showed where, when she married, she couldn't write her name, as was not uncommon with the Brit underclass of the time, she made her mark. I often wondered how the heritage of that worked out in our family after that but not on the basis of biological inheritance, on the basis of the entirely unnecessary, legal and politically based spiritual and intellectual damage that is passed on by culture, not biological inheritance.  But, this is just a quick answer.  This is going to be a really busy week for me.

I will point out that I could make exactly the same kind of challenge to evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics, either they can believe in the Gospel of Jesus or they can believe in the politics of Republican-fascism or even that earlier position on the same road, late 20th, early 21st century Republican politics.  Because you can't have both and there is no reason for anyone who isn't willing to lie about it to pretend you can.  There are moral absolutes that become absolutely clear due to the consequences of them.  Anyone who prefers the abstract theoretical musing of scribblers and babblers to the hardest lessons of human experience is a total idiot and very likely morally depraved no matter how nice they seem to those of their own kind.

NOTE:  I had a close encounter with a Constitution fetishist over the holiday and I think it should be our position that only Lincoln's definition of what the basis of the founding of the United States is valid and of proven value.  The 1776 ideals were overturned in the letter of the Constitution but, as Martin Luther King jr. said, the Declaration was an unhonored promissory note that the Constitution attempted to nullify.  It's always time to insist on full payment of the original debt. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Bruce Mason - Awatea

 Awatea

Another week I haven't had the chance to listen to much radio drama and looking for something different I found this, started listening to it and decided to post it.  I hope it's as interesting as the description of it is.  Considering the possibilities of anachronisms due to the time and the provenance I'm expecting to be made uncomfortable.  Which isn't bad.  Comfort leads to stupidity, which is why pop kulcha is overrated.

In 1964, The New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation (NZBC) commissioned Bruce Mason to write a play that would feature Opera star Inia te Wiata. By Christmas that same year, a draft treatment was written. The original name for the play was The Hui, but  later changed to Awatea. In April 1965 Inia te Wiata successfully toured George Gershwin's Opera Porgy and Bess in New Zealand.  The timing fell into place and while Inia was in the country, he took on the role of Werihe Paku, the blind māori rangatira of his community and father to Matt Paku (played by Don Selwyn).

Matt is a scholar and gains entry into University, he heads to Dunedin and becomes a doctor, his community have hailed him as their local hero. Matt writes to his father and sends  money every month, the letters are read to Werihe by Gilhooly, the postmistress.

The letters signifies the depth of the relationship between father and son, but things take a turn when Gilhooly reads one of Matt's letters. The drama plays out as the community prepares for the hui on New Years Eve.

Te Ahi Kaa features Act 1 of Awatea, written by Bruce Mason (1921 – 1982),  engineered by John McGregor and produced by William Austin.  

Awatea Cast
Ana - Ngaire Karaka
Pera - Hannah Tatana
Kani - Sam Stevens
Moki Boy (Voice One) - Peter Gwynne (1929 -2011)
Moki Boy (Voice two) - Ian Mune
Irapeta - Newha Taiaki
Werihe Paku - Inia Te Wiata (1915 - 1971)
Gilhooly - Pat Evison (1924 - 2010)
Jameson - Peter Read (1923 - 1981)
Brett - Tim Elliott (1935 - 2011)
Matt - Don Selwyn (1936 - 2007)
Hamiora - Kingi Ihaka (1921 -1993)
Tina Keritahu - Diana Winterburn (1937 - 1966)
Male Chorus One - Peter Gwynne (1929 -2011), Michael Woolf, Martyn Sanderson (1938 -2009), Ian Mune.
Female Chorus - Dorothy Munro, Wendy Gibb, Ngaire Karaka, Hannah Tatana
Children - Paula D'Emden, Rosamund Packer, Sonny Mulheron, Treena Kerr

By Request - The Overselling Of The Current Knowlege Of Evolutionary Biology Or Its Prospects In The Future If We Have One Of Those

I'VE HAD A REQUEST from the estimable rustypickup to go over an article that was in The Guardian a few days ago, unusually for this blog, it was a friendly request.  I was thinking of going more into the link between the Darwinism that is the thing behind so much of right-wing as well as left-wing secular ideology, it saturates the Supreme Court's rulings, so much so that it's not always apparent that the stench of natural selection is behind what it does, and it is so pervasive that it saturates the ideology of even much of the anti-Darwinists' agenda.  

Though I've got some problems with it, it's a useful article that goes over a lot of what I've shocked people by saying here and elsewhere, starting with the problems the entire field of biology, not to mention psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. have gotten into by the blind faith in what they call "natural selection."  Natural selection is to be regarded as a sacred doctrine even as the problems with the theory are so serious that I doubt there really is any such thing except as an object of scientific and secular faith.  As can be seen, it holds a place more absolute in modern secular and, especially, atheist piety that I doubt any religious sect's catechism of dogmas and doctrines was more insisted on by those with a vested interest in their imagined solidity.  

Stephen Buranyi's article asks, "Do We Need A New Theory of Evolution?"  He starts:

Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection.

I can't resist asking why it should sound strange that scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved?  

Evolution of life on Earth is probably the single most complex thing that scientists have ever proposed studying with the methods of science invented to study some of the simplest OBSERVABLE phenomena of human experience - only the tiniest fraction of the history of life evolving on Earth is or ever will be available to scientific study and much of that is handled in only a very cursory manner because, individually, those specimens are all enormously complex within themselves.  That it should seem strange that evolution is so unknown is an artifact of cultural arrogance and successful overselling, not a product of honestly facing the impossibility of coming up with comprehensive answers to it.  Such intellectual and even scientific faking us out is one of the most successful ruses of modernism derived from the culture of science.  And it goes entirely past where it is at all justified or even scientific.

You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls.

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.

For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”

I will state as a certainty that what he said in his article would already get the high priests of Darwinism such as Jerry Coyne  into a lather though what he said is certainly true, nothing about Darwin's theory, as he stated it or as it has been constantly modified and "extended" actually gives an actual origin of species or even an unambiguous origin of parts of species.  

I will also state that there are a few things unrelated to natural selection that I believe Darwin was right about, common descent of all known species from earlier ancestors and, though it is impossible to look that far back, it is reasonable to believe it is likely life on Earth today is all part of one long chain of descent from an original living ancestor.  

Though that is belief, it is not science, it is not provable even in the lesser standards of scientific provability because none of the evidence supporting  that is in hand and it certainly never will be unambiguously in hand, our fossil record of sufficient resolvability will never be had to back it up.  When you are talking about life forms, living organisms of particular character, you cannot make the same generalized assumptions you can make about the objects studied by physics or chemistry, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles or about the movements of planets and stars.  To know a particular organism or a particular species, you have to have it in front of you to know what can be known about what you can see of it.  You can't make the same kinds of generalizations about it that the harder sciences do about much simpler objects or about the most general aspects of more complex objects such as planets and stars.  Without that, without even fossils, you are making up monsters and telling stories about them.  Darwinism inevitably does that because it makes unknowable assertions about the unknowable past.  While much can be known about fossilized organisms, nothing can be known about those you don't have evidence of and little to nothing can be known about even the lives of those you have fossils of if you can't observe them living out your tales told about them.

I used to have more faith that what projections of the currently available DNA record shows about common possession of genetic materials would lead us farther back than the fossil record goes but I now think that gets you only so far.  I believe DNA (and RNA) evolved in early life and were not present in earliest life, those. so complex in their structures and so reliant on cellular chemistry, almost certainly could not have been present in the earliest life on Earth.  What they evolved out of is unknowable without specimens of sufficient resovability.  The physical mechanisms and chemistry in the cells that produce and work those molecules is certainly not something that is rationally believed would have spontaneously assembled themselves out of the available molecules to form a discrete, living, functioning organism which could obtain or produce and concentrate nutrition (energy to live on) to conduct other essential life sustaining functions and, most remarkably of all, to reproduce itself or something else living, reproducing successfully without any knowable motivation and to do what must have been among the most complex things matter ever did in the universe and do it successfully producing another being that could do all of those things.  It is reasonable to conclude if it was not successful, the first organism would have been the last one.  I doubt, very much, that such an organism could have done all of that without a containing membrane of sufficient character to concentrate the needed molecules, containing the "organs" to do all of that in a sufficent concentration and in proximity to each other to even just sustain life and I am entirely more skeptical that such a membrane and the organism it contained could just happen by random chance events, which leads to:

There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact – and whether other forces might also be at work – has become the subject of bitter dispute. “If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.”

I don't think you can explain things with those "tools" and I don't think any thinking person thinking seriously and honestly about the problems would honestly say you can.  A lot of how we talk about them is a product of habit, not deep consideration. 

Look at these "core evolutionary principles" and how they are talked about in this paragraph.  First, the statement that "everyone agrees" to those playing a role "starts midway through the story," just as much as his criticism of some of the central conventional concepts of Darwinism does.  

One of the earliest things I did when I started my criticism of natural selection as the origin of eugenics was to ask several people, some biology teachers in high school, some working, publishing biologists of different concentrations to define natural selection.  As I recall I asked six people and I got six entirely different answers.  One, probably the most professionally accomplished and very likely the most intelligent of those biologists, included things like the quite non-selective theory of genetic drift in the definition they gave me.  Much as I respect that scientist, I don't think that is philosophically coherent. But, then, I don't think classical definitions of natural selection are much more coherent.

I have the strongest feeling that like the word "socialism"* if you asked a host of competent, professional scientists who worked in biology to define "natural selection" that you would get a wide number of often mutually refuting answers as to what it is.  I can guarantee you that is something that started immediately upon the publication of the theory of Evolution, as I've pointed out a number of times, Darwin, himself, had to continually explain what his own theory meant and some of that change seems to me to be a basic revision of his theory as first published in 1859 right through to his last edition of On The Origin of Species which he, himself issued.  If someone had been able to pin down Darwin in a completely informed review of his own claims, I doubt he, himself could give a fully coherent definition of it. And I'll bet if he did his own closest colleagues would have disagreed with parts of it as his co-inventor. A. R. Wallace did.  Things did not become more unanimous after Darwin died.

Yet, as the article has it, natural selection, along with mutation and, most incredibly of all "random chance" are actual "processes" even more so, it is asserted they are "forces" which I doubt is what any of those are.  The idea that random chance is a "process" or "force" (and it is essential to conventional Darwinist thought that it be a supreme "proccess" and a supreme "force")** seems to me to be rather strange, implying there is nothing random or chancy about it.  How does "random chance" assume the tangible qualities of a process or force without losing its randomness or chance aspects?  To me that seems like an extremely important question upon which the actual existence of "natural selection" not only must rest - certainly in its conventional assertion by most Darwinists, especially the ideologues among those Darwinists - but without which its explanatory power is diminished if not entirely illusory.  
The idea that "mutation" is a process or force is even more bizarre because that would seem to imply that it necessarily has a predictable outcome and the use of it as an engine of biological change would lead us to believe that it must have a statistically significant and identifiable goal.  

I don't think any of those three things are sufficiently knowable in terms of their workings or results so as to justify categorizing them as "processes" or "forces" in the way that physics or chemistry might be able to justifiably use those terms.  I think later in the article the reason biologists have mimicked the language and terminology of the hard sciences is given and it has entirely more to do with professional status than philosophical justification.

Behind the current battle over evolution lies a broken dream. In the early 20th century, many biologists longed for a unifying theory that would enable their field to join physics and chemistry in the club of austere, mechanistic sciences that stripped the universe down to a set of elemental rules. Without such a theory, they feared that biology would remain a bundle of fractious sub-fields, from zoology to biochemistry, in which answering any question might require input and argument from scores of warring specialists.

From today’s vantage point, it seems obvious that Darwin’s theory of evolution – a simple, elegant theory that explains how one force, natural selection, came to shape the entire development of life on Earth – would play the role of the great unifier. But at the turn of the 20th century, four decades after the publication of On the Origin of Species and two after his death, Darwin’s ideas were in decline. Scientific collections at the time carried titles such as The Death-bed of Darwinism. Scientists had not lost interest in evolution, but many found Darwin’s account of it unsatisfying. One major problem was that it lacked an explanation of heredity. Darwin had observed that, over time, living things seemed to change to better fit their environment. But he did not understand how these minute changes were passed from one generation to the next.

The trouble is, it was nothing of the sort, it was and is mostly an ideological holding of a. professional scientists who want to maintain their standing and respectability, b. others who would like to be taken as modern, educated people, members of a club with all of the rights and privileges they believe are due them, c. ideological anti-religion atheists who cling to Darwin like a terrorized and tortured monkey in a psych lab will cling to a grotesque chicken wire substitute for a protector mommy, d. scientific racists and others who may well, at the same time, reject evolution in favor of "young earth creationism."   It is ironic that even as those YECs cling to the racist, class ridden aspects of natural selection, Darwinism proper, that its cultivated supporters will fell mildly impelled to reject its all too temporarily unfashionable but inherent racism and eugenics.  As the post-WWII history of first largely concealed eugenics among the latter day champions of Darwin, Watson and Crick, Jensen and a whole host of other, especially, psychologists, Herrnstein, etc. the racism and eugenics that are an intrinsic aspect of Darwin's Malthusian based theory will always come out of the closet in the end.  It is its most potent and enduring aspect in real life as opposed to the ideological wars among the Darwininists within biology that is its most important product.

That is where I got into it, I first looked at Darwinism because I did what almost no Darwinists ever do, I read what he said and I read what those he glowingly cited as supporting his theory said and it totally refuted the post-WWII lie that Darwinism and eugenics, including the murderous eugenics of the Nazis, were totally unconnected and I was gauche enough to point that out on some of the Scienceblogs - as funded by Jeffrey Epstein and his pimpess, Ghislaine Maxwell - and other places online.  I mention that because no matter how clean and well manicured the hands of the Darwinists look, they are never far from the filth that the theory of natural selection was born in and which is its motivation for existence as well as its continuing use in the world.  When it is married to the pseudo-sciences, especially those that veer close to the pseudo-science of economics, it has had some of the more devastating effects even within lived life experience.  "Herd immunity" is a thoroughly Darwininan concept, something which united the secularist pseudo-socialists of Sweden with the pillage and plunder Republican-fascists of Trump world.  And it's probably even more dangerous when political scientists and law-scribblers have it as the foundation of their thought.  We know it had that effect when Holmes wrote the Buck v. Bell decision because he was a thorough Darwinist who believed he got nearest the heart of a legal issue in playing biologist in a black robe.  He did on the Supreme Court what the Nazis did in Germany not long after.  It is certainly not dainty or nice to admit that, though I am gauche enough to have just done that.  I have no doubt that the six Republican-fascists on the court in other parts of government will make resort to its worst features repeatedly, maintaining them as the an intellectual foundation to their thought, knowingly or, as so many seem to, unknowingly.   Given their ideological and professional service to the rich, their concurrence with Darwinism is far deeper than even natural selection.

I will probably go farther into this article because it does lay out the problems of current biology which has this in common with what I found in looking hard at Darwin's theory [natural selection, not evolution] that the more I read about it from its proponents the less I found it made any sense at all and the more obvious its malignant motivations became.  

And that was true from almost as soon as the first edition of On The Origin of Species was published, Darwin's own scientific champions, those whose support he bathed in as he cited their claims to support his scientific assertions.  They started in the early 1860s imagining it in not only passive eugenic terms but in drawing up lists of groups of those who should be excluded from the future, including, entire races of People, something Darwin joined such followers as Huxley and Haeckle in listing and in classes of People as his cousin and colleague, the official inventor of eugenics, Francis Galton did.  

I have demonstrated with full citations, links and long quoted passages in scores of posts that conventional Darwinism from the start, through the early decades of the 20th century, among some of the most famous and accepted names in science such as Karl Pearson and many English speaking scientists, their German colleagues, others in other countries, through the post war period, to today's neo-Darwinist racists prove its eugenic and scientific racist features are inevitable.  And there is no reason for anyone to uncritically accept it as established fact.  There is every reason for it to die the death it should have before racists such as Fischer revived it by pasting it awkwardly to the naive conception of genetics available in the immediate pre-WWII years.   It is an ongoing and active evil among us as its origins in the artificially constructed Brit-class system ravings of the murderous degenerate Thomas Malthus guaranteed it would be.

*  No word that covers everything from the most egalitarian democratic assertions of socialism, through the myriad of other "socialisms" down through the various Marxists, anarchists, democrats-republicans, down through the vile Fabians and further down to the state-socialism of the Nazis has any useful coherence today.  "Socialism" like "natural selection" is so discredited by its use that I'd advocate any person of good will or even basic honesty should scrap it and junk most of its historical associations.  I don't think AOC does herself or her agenda any favor by keeping the word, no one that young should still have to have the skeletons in socialism's closet holding her down.  

** I have repeatedly pointed out that conventional materialist-atheist-scientism substitute all of those, especially "random chance" for God the Creator, attributing to all of them exactly the same powers that the book of Genesis attributes to God.  Atheists have their gods, they just don't admit that's what they are.  I have found that "natural selection," "DNA," "random chance" and occasionally things such as "quantum vacuum" are all attributed divine powers by college-credentialed atheists.  

That the problems of the origin of life present enormous problems for materialist-atheist-scientism while they don't present those problems to those who believe that God created life as an intentional act does nothing to diminish the insurmountable difficulties for the SAM would be faith-less faithful.  The problems for them seem to me to be of the same kind as the problems for those who insist on a literal belief in the early chapters of Genesis as if those were stating history or science.  Which strikes me as rather satisfyingly ironic.

It is a product of the soul, not of the body. It is a contribution to common honesty without which nations as well as individuals sink to ruin - Hate Mail

IF YOU WANT A EXPERT OPINION in comparing the would-be secular with the religious left, I'd resort to the great American leftist Fredrick Douglas in his speech on The West India Emancipation where he explicitly said pretty much what I've concluded watching the regression of the American and other would-be lefts as they abandoned a foundation for it that works for one that doesn't.

The abolition of slavery in the West Indies is a shining evidence of the reverse of all this profanity.  Nobler ideas and principles of action are brought to view.  The vital, animating, and all-controlling power of the British Abolition movement was religion.  Its philosophy was not educated and enlightened selfishness, (such as some are relying upon now to do away with slavery in this country,) but the pure, single eyed spirit of benevolence.  It is not impelled or guided by the fine-spun reasonings of political expediency, but by the unmistakable and imperative demands of principle.  It was not commerce, but conscience; not considerations of climate and productions of the earth, but the heavenly teachings of Christianity, which everywhere teaches that God is of Father and man, however degraded, is our brother.

The men who were most distinguished in carrying forward the movement, from the great Wilberforce downward, were eminent for genuine piety.  They worked for the slave as if they had been working for the Son of God.  They believed that righteousness exalteth a nation and that sin is the reproach of any people.  Hence they united religion with patriotism, and pressed home the claims of both upon the national heart with the tremendous energy of truth and love, till all England cried out with one accord, through Exteter Hall, through the press, through the pulpit, through parliament, and through the very throne itself, slavery must and shall be destroyed.

Herein is the true significance of the West India Emancipation.  It stands out before all the world as a mighty, moral, and spiritual triumph.  It is a product of the soul, not of the body.  It is a contribution to common honesty without which nations as well as individuals sink to ruin.  It is one of those words of life that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, by which nations are established, and kept alive in moral health.

Now, my friends, how has this great act of freedom and benevolence been received in the United States.  How has our American Christian Church and our American Democratic Government received this glorious new birth of National Righteousness.  

I'll spare you the suspense and tell you Fredrick Douglas showed that the "land of liberty" didn't take well to it at all and it proved that in so far as its secular government was concerned, it had no intention of doing that because of the "rule of (secular)law."

The contrast between the Brits who worked effectively for abolition and most other great moral advances on the basis of belief in what the Scriptures say and those who pretend they can find the same or better in secular, usually admitted or unadmitted anti-religious thinkery is enormous.  As I've pointed out numerous times the effect of "educated and enlightened selfishness" (a far more honest description of secularism than what it is generally given) is everything from generally impotent to counter-productive if equality, material and spiritual equality is the goal AND THERE IS NO LEFT WORTH CALLING THAT WHICH DOESN'T REST ON THAT AS ONE OF A VERY FEW ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY FOUNDATION STONES.

"Freedom," "liberty," "rights," are either equally available and real in the real, material and spiritual lives of all or they are tools of enslavement.  The Taney court held that the restrictions on slavery, the existence of free states in which People were not enslaved was a violation of the "freedom" of movement of slave owners, their "liberty" and their "rights" to "their property".  And those are just the kind of "freedom, liberty and rights," that you can hear the Neo-Nazis and Neo-fascists and Republican-fascists and their media liars whine and cry about as those who are their victims object and who are denied to equally have any of those things because of the corruption of the secular laws that emanate from "educated enlightened selfishness," as imagined by those educated members of the 18th century "enlightenment" whose words the new-Taney Court, the Roberts Court just used to put Women in bondage, even those who are forced by rapists to bear children for them.  

In his speech on the Dred Scot decision published, conveniently with the earlier cited speech at the link, he said:

It is no evidence that the Bible is a bad book, because those who profess to believe the Bible are bad. The slaveholders of the South, and many of their wicked allies at the North, claim the Bible for slavery;  shall we, therefore fling the Bible away as a pro-slavery book?  It would be as reasonable to do so as it would be to fling away the Constitution.  .  .

The American people have made void our Constitution by just such traditions as Judge Taney and Mr. [William Lloyd] Garrison have been giving to the world of late, as the true light in which to view the Constitution of the United States.  I shall follow neither.  It is not what Moses allowed for the hardness of heart, but what God requires, ought to be the rule.  

This is remarkable considering William Lloyd Garrison was as much associated with anti-slavery as Taney was with championing slavery.   And it is clear that Douglas used him as exactly a representative of a secularist would-be abolitionism.  Though, typically, the atheist-family business, the "Freedom From Religion Foundation" exaggerates Garrison's a-religiosity, they managed to find a place where he sounds like a typical post-WWII pop-atheist in this regard.  He is, though, I think a good example of the secularist, would be secularist white condescending "abolitionist" who Douglass and his colleagues struggled against even as they were anti-slavery, read the two speeches and see for yourself.  They're more than worth the time, especially relevant in his description of the country in and around the Dred Scott decision.

But even the slavery laid out by the Mosaic Law due to that "hardness of heart" was mild as compared to that in the Americas upheld and championed by the reasoning of the Taney Court in the Dred Scott and earlier and later courts in other decisions.  Fugitive slaves were, by Mosaic Law, to be protected in freedom by those who lived where they fled to.  The limits on slavery as opposed to the ambient Roman and Greek slavery and later American slavery were remarkable and, as I've pointed out before, if you took the Law to treat others as you would have them treat you seriously you couldn't hold someone in that kind of slavery.   

Given the enormous inspiration that abolitionists, the real ones, starting with those who stole themselves away from slavery, those who rescued others from it, took from the freeing of the Children of Israel from slavery and the equality commandments contained in the Bible, given the habit of secularists to drift back into inegalitarian and anti-egalitarian ideology, I don't take back a word of my skepticism about impotent secularism on the left.

Yesterday, thinking about the objection to what I said, it occurred to me that you're far more likely to make yourself despised and a pariah for being skeptical of natural selection - founded on an elite conception of all things in terms of ranking for worth and inequality - than to be a college credentialed exponent of scientific racism or sexism or other proponent of inequality.  There is a reason that the flagrant racism of later day Darwinists like Jensen, Crick, MacDonald, Herrnstein, etc. had a place in eminent university science faculties until external criticism led to their being shunned,  but only partially in only some of those cases.   A modern education is eminently suited for talking yourself into moral ambiguity and agnostic indifference and, so, inaction.

And how much of today's huge collge-credentialed whine about "cancel culture" is a response to those who refuse to give their lazy, polite, self-enlightened indifferent silent acquiescence to it.   I think those who refuse to acquiesce to the promotion of their inferiority will have to, in the end, come to rely on the same things the Abolitionists and other fighters for equality did, religion because materialist secularism and scientism has nothing there to support them.  

Let me know when you achieve more than Fredrick Douglass did in the cause of the American left. 

Listening to today's hearing . . .

hearing the video of General Michael Flynn "taking the fifth" when asked if he believes in the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next one, just now,

PRESIDENT BIDEN, REACTIVATE FLYNN TO COURT-MARTIAL HIM.

NO member of any military branch, especially an officer, no member of a police force, no minor functionary of the federal, state or local government who doesn't willingly answer "yes" to that question should hold any public office or job. 

Flynn has to be made accountable for this outrage.

The Screwed Up Priorities Of The Those Who Won't Learn From Experience - Hate Mail

THE STUPIDITY OF ANTI-RELIGION is as vast as the dishonesty of those who insist that the worst of those who lie about their religiosity are the true owners of and legitimate definition of religious belief.  If any of the six Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court really believes in the Christianity they profess, well, their actions prove that they don't, their actions on the Court and in life prove that they don't.  That goes from the sexual predator and perjurer Clarence Thomas to the latest of them, Amy Coney Barrett who is one of those who certainly lied about their views on the Roe decision, under oath, where if the secular law were sufficient and any more efficacious than the Gospel, she would be under indictment for lying under oath to a committee of the Senate.  By the way, there is nothing more obvious than that the oath to tell the truth - never mind protect and defend the Constitution - she and the others took is a direct violation of one of the most unambiguous of commandments given by Jesus, not to swear but to let your yes mean yes and your no mean no.  That you are always under a moral obligation to tell the truth.  That is one thing that practically the only Christian sect I'm aware of took really seriously were the old Christian Quakers who got into trouble for following that.  The history of Republican-fascists proving that they swore falsely to tell the truth or defend the Constitution and getting away with that with complete impunity is all the evidence anyone really needs that secularism is an impotent force for doing anything important.   It can't even force a Supreme Court nominee to tell a Senate committee the obvious truth as everyone in the room knows they're lying their damned heads off about.

Secularism as a substrate for egalitarian democracy is a flop,  The history of the American left dating by convenience from the death of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. gave secularism a test of time that it more than flunked, it squandered the progress won almost as soon as it got the chance. It was a flop even before that.   It has been flopping disastrously for more than fifty years now. It started flopping exactly at that time and largely due to the rulings of the Warren Court, including its "non-establishment" rulings which provided Republicans and the right propaganda victories over mostly non-important issues.  That as well as its "free speech-press" rulings that removed any requirement for the media to not lie which is certainly another feature of secularism.  There is nothing in secularism to stiffen the resolve and the spine of those who really favor equality and the legitimate modern definition of democracy under equality into getting the work done, there is nothing stupider or more counter-productive than the academic left, their ascendancy over the likes of the religious left demonstrates that most effectively.  Secularists have long proven themselves far more interested in the petty distractions of anti-religion than they are even winning elections and taking a majority of the legislature and executive at the same time so as to change real life in reality.  My faith is in an ecumenical religious left that believes equality is divinely mandated - one that is unduped by the secularists who should not be trusted because of their track record.

While I certainly find enormously annoying the decision allowing a pseudo-Christian, such as such faith-professing football coach has to be,  to use a public school event to make a false demonstration of Christian religion, with the certain coercion to participate found in that scenario, I don't think it's worth the cost to the American left to fight it.  If this month in that foetid Court proves, there are real life and death issues abounding that are really important.  Anyone who wants to avoid the bullying that this pseudo-Christian coach wants to exercise merely has to opt to not participate in the football game and, if I really had my dream scenario happen, they would coerce  the school board into dropping that evil sport from its budget in the coming year.  Participation in that bullying is entirely voluntary and even less than necessary, it is voluntary self-destruction and self-degradation.  Compared to that, the bullying of the players to play the pathologically violent game, of their parents to allow the participation, of encouraging it is absolutely and importantly wrong. 

ANYONE WHO DOESN'T BELIEVE THAT TAKING THAT CASE AND RELEASING THE DECISION JUST NOW WAS AN INTENTIONAL DEFLECTION AND DISTRACTION TO THE ANTI-RELIGIOUS IDIOTS AND AN OPPORTUNITY OF THE KIND I AM LAYING OUT FOR REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS IN AN ELECTION YEAR IS JUST PLAIN STUPID.

There is no minor program cut by Republican-fascists and the Manchin-Sinemas of the Senate that is worth standing stupidly tall on the matter of a scumbag of a football coach urging players to make a false-display of religion that is entirely more like the empty pagan pieties of the Roman state and its violent, deadly games than it is Jesus.  If anything, the only thing worth objecting to in it is that it is distorting the public image of Jesus while violating everything about the Gospel of Jesus, the epistles and the rest of the New Testament.  

The priorities of the American and other lefts have continually been distorted by secularism of the kind I've condemned.  Secularism should never have been mistaken as a value in itself, it is a mere measure of efficency under a broader egalitarianism because of the many different varieties of religious belief and non-belief.  The government should always be secular to the extent that is possible but governments exist in a reality in which there are other matters that are often far more important than others and as the rights of People of Color and Democrats to cast a vote is under attack, as the rights of Women, LGBTQ People to the ownership of their own bodies and lives is under attack, as the very environment we all depend on to live is under attack by the Republican-fascist Supreme Court, the annoyance of this attempt to turn Christianity into a modern Roman Imperial pagan state religion is not worth spending any time, resources or good will on.  No more than reciting a prayer in the public schools was when the Warren Court handed Republican-fascists that issue to rally the gullible and the foolish on it.  I am certainly not in favor of any pressure being put on school children in that way but I am far more in favor of Democrats taking power, taking over the Court so that school children can be protected from military assault weapons first, second, third, . . . . I can't think of any number large enough to make a comparison of the importance of those two issues that elevates the ACLU style obsession of enforced secularism to even being in the same category of importance to getting assault weapons out of the hands of civilians.  Anyone who thinks those are of even remotely similar concern is too stupid to take seriously on anything.  Or they might be a civil libertarian  with legal training of the kind who are regularly asked on to spout such total nonsense by the free-press.  Lawyers are trained to focus on such unimportant crap, it's their bread and butter.
 

This Is Not The Time For The Anti-Religious To Substitute Their Agenda For The Real Agenda Of Equality And Self-Ownership

IN THE JUSTIFIABLY OUTRAGED coverage of the Supreme Court's Dred Scott II decision, (This Time It's Women Who Aren't Humans Under The Constitution) I've noticed a real and obvious difference between those commentators and talking heads who have a knowledge of religion and those who don't.  The ones who do, such as those who pointed out the hypocrisy of the leadership of the Southern Baptists who went from agreeing with Roe to opposing it for obviously political and financial motives, those like the late and vile Jerry Falwell whose hypocrisy on that was obviously political and financial - Carter's administration stripping segregation academies of federal funding was his great motivation.  Those informed commentators who take religion seriously, perhaps believers, themselves,  and others whose inside or at least informed knowledge of the many different positions of the Catholic and other churches informs their criticism are in sharp contrast to those whose indifference, hostility to and sometimes quite obvious ignorance of the role religion has played for and against freedom of choice.  If you think we are going to save freedom of choice without pro-choice Catholics, Southern Baptists, etc. you should go back and review elementary school math because you really don't get that this is about numbers, first, last and always.

Those whose reflexive, go-to position is that religion being involved with political and legal issues is creeping "theocracy" those who seem to have no ability to distinguish between Catholics or, for that matter, Southern Baptists or Mormons or whatever who oppose Women having full and exclusive ownership of their own bodies and those who want to nationalize them as the Republican-fascists on the Court and throughout the Republican-fascist leadership do, really are not the most helpful of people on this issue.  Their disdain for, disregard for, ignorance of and, at times, obvious bigotry is not going to help.  They should not shut up, they should learn about the differences and the sides of those differences that we need to mobilize to win on this issue and the other issues that the most pathological of the psychopaths on the Roberts Court is talking about going for next, Clarence Thomas.

I think the pathology of Thomas, Alito need to be gone into in ways that are rare for members of that most corrupt arm of the federal government, the Supreme Court, that has to be gone into honestly, on accurate information and with scathing depths because it's clear from the language of Alito's depraved majority ruling and the depraved Thomas concurrence that they have real issues on these issues.  I wouldn't be at all surprised if Thomas sees this as payback for the exposure of his sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings. He is an evil and petty man.  I am sure I will have more to say about the motives of Alito and the others as this outrage rolls out.

We should be documenting every outrageous result of this, young girls forced by the Supreme Court and Republican-fascism to bear rapists babies, their own relatives being the rapists at times, we should document every abortion made dangerous, every instance of Republican-fascist prosecutors going after women who had miscarriages, every Woman dead or maimed or whose life is destroyed by the Roberts Court and the Republican-fascists who put them there.

Getting distracted over anti-religion is not going to do what needs to be done.  Attacking bishops or TV hallelujah peddlers or whited sepulchers like Mike Pence and total scumbags like Mitch McConnell is entirely fair and necessary.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Poetry In Motion

 

Poetry In Motion

 

We hear the thoughts of five people sitting near each other on a train traveling to Manchester. They all get on alone but they all leave a little less so. By award-winning playwright, Katie Hims.

Valerie ..... Rachel Davies
Leonard ..... Alan Williams
Karla ..... Karla Crome
Reece ..... Ashley Kumar
Bridie ..... Adie Allen
Cashier ..... Kirsty Oswald
Train Announcer ..... Nick Underwood
Director ..... Mary Peate
Writer ..... Katie Hims.

Other than the Canadian playwright Gorden Pengilly, I think Katie Hims is my favorite author of radio plays.  Really, they're both my favorite, why should anyone have just one of those?  This one took a minute or two to grab me but it was worth it.

The Republican-fascist Supreme Court Declares A Shooting War Against We The People

THE SUPREME COURT decision making Americans even more targets and random hits in the shooting gallery they've already made us is either the product of willful and stupid inattention to the epidemic of gun violence that is so regular the smaller mass murders don't make it into the national news in a big way or it is the product of an intentional program to put the most dangerous weapons into the hands of Republican-fascists and their Neo-Nazi and fascist allies so that even if the unlikely happens, egalitarian democracy wins, they will be able to prevent it by even more widespread mass murder and terror.

I don't think there is any plausible other explanation to it and I do, really and fully believe the six Republican-fascist "justices" who rendered that decision gutting the gun control laws in New York are really all in on the contingency plan for their armed allies in the far right to do that.  They certainly have no plausible deniability that they are unaware of the results of their already criminal acts in that regard, those make it into the arguments and the briefs that they are exposed to now.

They have willfully and openly allied themselves with those who are in open warfare against the American People, mostly, for now, people of the under and middle classes, not those who those "justices" really care about "people like us" the white-collar, protected, gated, guarded class which they stupidly think can escape what the federal courts have produced in their reign of judicial dictatorship which, until the president and the Congress refuse to go along with it, will continue to destroy not only the hope for egalitarian democracy but the possibility of a peaceful, decent life, even for the elite-white-rich class that they care about.  

They have created a situation which the police even now find impossible to police, for us, not for them in their well guarded lives - for now at least.   The Ivy League idiots in black robes who sit on that bench stupidly bet that the federal police can protect them from what they are raining down on the rest of us forever.  Well, that's just a good sign of how stupid making believe you can do what the do is.  Let me break it to them, if the German elites of the late 1920s and early 1930s couldn't control the Nazis they put into power,  you guys are never going to do it.  They will consume most if not all of you next time.

It is time for the president and the Congress to declare war on the Supreme Court and to destroy for good the Court-created power not found in the Constitution which declares that that court can exercise the powers of the legislative and the executive in doing something the Constitution never gave them the power to do, to reject laws that the Congress and the President have adopted, even those laws most vital to the protection of the very lives of We The People, against whom the Republican-fascists and especially those who sit right now on the Supreme Court are making war, using the gun-wielding neo-fascist, neo-Nazi terrorists as their instruments of control.  

If you think that's an exaggeration, wait till the next right-wing or crack pot mass murder event, which should be coming anytime now, perhaps as I am posting this piece, it is brought to you by the Supreme Court and sponsored by the Republican Party, Cheney and Kinzinger and Raffensberger and Bowers included.

Nikki Giovanni - My House

i only want to

be there to kiss you
as you want to be kissed
when you need to be kissed
where i want to kiss you 
cause its my house and i plan to live in it

i really need to hug you
when i want to hug you
as you like to hug me
does this sound like a silly poem

i mean its my house
and i want to fry pork chops
and bake sweet potatoes
and call them yams
cause i run the kitchen
and i can stand the heat

i spent all winter in
carpet stores gathering 
patches so i could make
a quilt
does this really sound
like a silly poem

i mean i want to keep you
warm

and my windows might be dirty
but its my house
and if i can't see out sometimes
they can't see in either

english isn't a good language
to express emotion through
mostly i imagine because people
try to speak english instead
of trying to speak through it
i don't know maybe it is
a silly poem

i'm saying it's my house
and i'll make fudge and call
it love and touch my lips
to the chocolate warmth
and smile at old men and call
it revolution cause what's real
is really real
and i still like men in tight
pants cause everybody has some
thing to give and more
important need something to take

and this is my house and you make me 
happy
so this is your poem

 

Few Things Considered Nothing Much Said About Them And Those Untrue In The End

IT WAS A MISTAKE in my time offline to think that listening to National Public Radio again was going to be anything but an exercise in disgusted disappointment.  I'd stopped listening when I came to rely more on sources found online though I'd increasingly found it was far from a reliable source of information decades ago.  

Listening to All Things Considered (yeah, right) last night and their alleged profile of the rich and connected Republican-Catho-fascist Leonard Leo, the guy behind the court capture scheme as worked out to put the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary into the hands of the fascists who largely control it, it was an exercise in the kind of even-handedness that lies on behalf of that very thing.  Balancing, for example, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse's fact, document and reason based presentation of how the Courts were handed to fascists with the non-fact based denials of Leo and his buddies.  Neglecting to notice there is all the difference in the world between the struggle to abolish slavery (Leo the liar really did bring that up as the equivalent of the billionaire financed court capture program) and using the Supreme Court to nationalize Women's bodies and to destroy the Voting Rights Act.  Their reverent regard for how now, as Leo's wet dream of the nationalization of women's reproductive systems is about to happen, how that must make him feel after all these years was one of the most repulsive things I've ever heard on any alleged news program, and I did, once in a while, hear clips from FOX and ABC and CBS.  

I used to buy the lie that if we only got rid of all of those awful commercials that we could rely on those idealistic truth-seekers, the journalists, to produce at least radio news that was factual to the level of adequately informing voters of who will best represent them and rescue democracy.  Well, that was a pipe dream.  NPR and PBS are a pretty definitive demonstration that journalists without ads (allegedly) are not going to be those idealistic truth-seekers instead of self-interested mouthpieces of conservative convention.  They aren't any more likely to be that than any other group of people who get paid to do something.  There are better nationally financed news operations in places like Canada and Germany, thought the BBC is not like that anymore.  But we won't get that here, oddly, before the Republicans sank its reliability, the old Voice of America did about as good a job at that as has been done in American journalism. Though they were for exclusively foreign consumption, not broadcast to a domestic, American audience.  That is far less the case, today.

When I was growing up it was the conventional wisdom that the paper moving and producing white-collar class were morally superior to the grimy lower class, that was what we got in the media, the movies, TV, certainly the writers, for the most part, were invested in the idea that their like were on a higher moral level than the great unwashed.  Though, at least in our family, not from my parents.  

Journalists liked to present themselves as such as the profession went from an apprenticeship model to being a job that the lesser aspiring members of mid-level affluent families would go into.  The movie All The President's Men might be the dividing line between the two, showing that reporters could be pretty men.  Before that people even in the movies and on TV were quite cynical about journalists and many of those in journalism gave them good reason to be cynical about their profession.  Quite a bit of that cynicism came from those who worked the job.  It went from being a job to being a profession.  Those of today are probably far more cynical but they have better hygiene and use better grammar and might have a larger recognition vocabulary.  And they are cynical enough to keep the pretenses up in their work.  I think NPR is about as cynical an operation as there is other than the likes of FOX.  They know that the formula of other-sideism and how its rules rig the game to get things right where their sponsors want them to get.  

It's too bad that the thing continued after its big financial crisis in the late 1970s because it has been pretty bad for a very long time.  When it finally is ended it will probably not even be a bad thing, it will merely be an example of irrelevance, drive-time distraction that petered out.  It might make a good study in how what started out as an allegedly idealistic non-profit turned into such a both-sides sewer of dishonesty.  

The Child Abuse Scandal Of The Catholic And Secular Institutions That No One Really Admits Is What It Is

Or, just another reason I detest "Ted Lasso."

IT'S NOT ONLY CATHOLIC elite prep-Ivy League equivalent schools that are engaged in some of the clearest and most obvious hypocrisy when it comes to school sports, the private preps and public schools are, too.  But when it's an alleged religious institution, especially when it is an institution in a religion that would probably fire an employee for being in a loving, committed, faithful marriage to a member of the same sex or some theologian over some minor issue of doctrine,  that hypocrisy is multiplied.  And that's only one of such multipliers in this story.

Like so many sports related school scandals, it is that most absurdly and hypocritically worshiped sport in the United States, football.  Read this opening of this article from the National Catholic Reporter:

Pride. Poise. Courage. Red block letters in the varsity locker room spell out the motto of Mater Dei High School football. A California powerhouse, the program boasts three Heisman Trophy winners among its graduates and in 2021 was ranked No. 1 in the country by USA Today.

But a recent spate of allegations linked to the Catholic school in Santa Ana appear to highlight behaviors antithetical to the motto. Late last summer, several football players sexually assaulted a teammate, according to claims in a Santa Ana Police Department document obtained by the Los Angeles Times. Seven months prior, a football player allegedly suffered a broken nose and a traumatic brain injury during a team ritual, leading the injured player's parents to file a lawsuit against Mater Dei and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange.

Other claims suggest the violence extends beyond football and the walls of the locker room. In 2019, two football players reportedly punched a basketball player in the head and face, breaking his jaw. This spring, Santa Ana police investigated allegations of assault and hazing in the Mater Dei boys water polo program.

Critics of the high school say these incidents are not isolated but are part of a toxic culture stretching back decades — to past allegations of sexual abuse that involved administrators, teachers, coaches and priests. And they say it reflects an ongoing lack of accountability from the school and diocese.

"Mater Dei has continually escaped accountability when it comes to abuse and violence; it has a cultlike mystique that makes it untouchable," said Joelle Casteix, who was sexually abused by a Mater Dei choir director in the late 1980s. She's now an author and advocate for survivors of child sexual assault and institutional cover-up.

NCR reached out to administrators at the school and diocese with questions about the recent alleged incidents but received no response. Bradley Zint, a diocese spokesperson, said no employees of either entity can comment on pending litigation or affairs regarding minors.

"As a general principle, however, our entire clergy, teachers and staff take the safety of students very seriously," Zint said in an emailed statement. "Toward that end, Mater Dei and the diocese remain committed [to] finalizing our previously announced campuswide assessment, which is ongoing and being conducted by an independent agency."

Bradly Zint's claim that the elite Catholic prep and the diocese that owns and operates it "take the safety of students very seriously" is entirely obliterated by the fact that football is entirely dedicated to risking the safety of students WHEN THE GAME IS PLAYED ENTIRELY BY THE FRIGGIN' RULES!  It is only one of the current American equivalents to the decadence of gladiatorial games in pagan Rome but they haven't, at least so far as I know, taken up "mixed martial arts" or car racing at most elite prep schools.  

No institution that sponsors a football team, whether private prep, allegedly religious or public can claim that they "take the safety of students very seriously" when they sponsor games and practices in which students are routinely injured, maimed for life and even killed.  The violence that is inherent in the game, which is intrinsic to it, is covered with the most transparent of denials on every level.  And with that violence come the worship of size, strength, willingness to inflict damage on other students - those on the other teams and, unsurprisingly as a result of that, on the members of the same team.

The school and diocese are being sued by parents and students on the basis of such violence off the field but which the "culture" of the sport has always encouraged, bullying of the most extreme kind is regularly practiced and exposed and, I will accuse, encouraged by the coaches and staffs and promoters of football AND CERTAINLY AMONG THE PLAYERS, THEMSELVES.

On Aug. 31, 2021, Mater Dei football players forced a teammate to the ground, exposed their genitals and "began humping him" through their pants, according to the Santa Ana police document cited in the Los Angeles Times. The document said the student was not physically injured but suffered anxiety following the incident. It did not indicate if the assault claim would be investigated.

Brian Williams is a lawyer with Greenberg Gross, one of the firms representing the football player who received a head injury in February 2021. "I would have hoped that months after my client's injuries the school would have implemented some steps to avoid this kind of thing from happening again," he told NCR.

The football player's lawsuit, filed in November, alleges negligence, negligent failure to warn, train or educate, negligence per se hazing in violation of the California penal code, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Anyone who thinks for a minute that any of that description really troubles those who run that joint, the coaches, the clergy and bishop would be forgiven to think the thing that would really bother them was the simulation of male on male sex, ignoring that in the context it was intended as part of the humiliation and mental violence that has nothing to do with the homosexuality that is the great big denial that American football is based.  The psychological feast of dishonest depravity and unadmitted, unmentionable  same-sex sexual fixation that is American football and, really, most sports is one of the greatest taboos of our depraved culture.  That's not the exclusive extent of that mental dishonesty in American popular culture.    Not to mention the Catholic hierarchy and its functionaries.  

Football, sponsored by schools, organized among minors instead of consenting adults (brain damaged as so many of them already are when they reach the age of majority) is one of the most organized and financed forms of ritual child abuse. 

It is ritualized brutality inflicted on children which is fully known of by the coaches and other alleged adults involved.  Encouraged and, when they have it brought up to them, they deny their responsibility as the adults fully in on it.

Signed by Williams, the suit recounts a game on the football team known as "Bodies." It involves two players punching each other between the shoulders and hips.

"The persistence of this hazing ritual is longstanding, well known by Mater Dei leaders and apparently condoned by its head coach," reads the lawsuit.

A newer member of the squad, the plaintiff was "trying to fit in and gain acceptance" and was "coerced" into playing the game, says the complaint. The newer player and one much larger exchanged blows, with the larger teammate eventually punching the smaller one in the face multiple times, it says.

Amanda Waters is a former athletic director at Mater Dei who resigned about two months after the locker room fight and nine months after she was hired. In a sworn deposition filed in Orange County Superior Court in April, Waters said she left the school in part because of how it handled safety issues and the hazing case.

"Everything from … when [the injured player] walked out of the locker room to the silence after was handled wrong, in my opinion," said Waters in the deposition.

She said later in the deposition that when she confronted head football coach Bruce Rollinson about the locker room incident, he told her: "If I had a dollar for every time these kids played Bodies, I'd be a millionaire."

The lawsuit, first reported by the Orange County Register, alleges the school tried to cover up the student's injuries by not calling the paramedics and not contacting his parents for 90 minutes. Initially Mater Dei officials also declined to cooperate with Santa Ana Police Department investigators, according to police reports.

I'll remind you, it is at an allegedly Christian, a Catholic institution that this has been known to be going on for years and decades.

None of the adults involved in this can claim they don't and haven't known about this, it isn't something that could go on without their knowledge, it certainly couldn't be for any of the graduates of the school who participated in it.  If they have supposedly kept knowledge of it from the bishops and other clergy who have ultimate control of the place, I doubt it.  

Go back to that school slogan, "Pride, Poise, Courage" and ask yourself what in the Gospel of Jesus is it a reflection of?  Certainly the courage of Jesus was not the kind of "courage" encouraged by such Catholic prep schools that are so heavily focused on athletics.  The courage of Jesus was in deliberately preaching a counter-establishment, egalitarian Gospel that he certainly knew was going to get him killed by those who are far more like the products of such Catholic elite prep and Ivy Equivalent education.   I can't recall a single example of pride or the kind of poise implied in that slogan coming from Jesus or, indeed of anyone in the followers of Jesus until Paul and Paul's pride and poise were of an entirely different kind and certainly for an end which, probably and by tradition, led to his own death.  

Certainly the products of such "Christian" schools who really follow the Gospel of Jesus are very rare, if leading a real Christian life is the goal, the expense and effort involved makes it one of the worst investments the Catholic Church has ever made.  Though it's certain that such a thing is far, far from the thinking of even the priests and bishops who run such places.  And that's as true for some of the more prestigious blue-collar Catholic schools with prominent sports teams as it is for the most elite of the Catholic colleges and universities with famous football teams and other sports teams.  

The poster boy for such places is likely the sexual assaulter on the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, though never forget such was the origin of Clarence Thomas, as well - I will never forget that old teaching-order nun they had saying what a nice boy he was during the confirmation hearings, I often wondered what she thought of some of his rulings.  I would almost guarantee you that Kavanaugh's prep school has done absolutely nothing in the aftermath of the exposure its football team and other practices got during the hearings into his nomination - no more than the Supreme Court has improved since that likely criminal joined its fascist majority.  Most of them, I will point out as a Catholic, Catholics, at least at the start.  

The Supreme Court is earning the infamy that its entire history has certain earned it, now that it is in Republican-fascist hands for the foreseeable future, now that the huge cover-up of its identity as the most corrupt arm of the government is being torn away by their actions.  The Catholic hierarchy and its enormous institutional edifice, its physical holdings,  has certainly earned infamy due to things such as are listed in the story of only one of its elite prep schools.  But they certainly won't change, whether due to a desire not to change or, the often given excuse, that the support of rich, former students would dry up if they did what they did in late imperial Rome as the Church gained influence, they abolished the game.  If the support of their products is so reliant on them maintaining a program of moral atrocities like that, then their entire identity as a Christian entity is a sham.  They produce Pride and Poise but it's certain that those in control lack even the most basic level of courage as it should be practiced by someone attempting to follow Jesus.

The American Catholic establishment is morally corrupt in so many ways it's hard to maintain any level of faith in it. It's no wonder that, As Good Pope Francis noted recently, that it is the epicenter of anti-Vatican II activity based on the financial support of multi-millionaires and billionaires who despise the Gospel but want the power and probably the property.  I would bet that most of them are a product of American Catholic elite preps.

American Medical: Where You Die Because A Hedge Fund Buys Out A Hospital You'll Never Go To

I WAS TALKING today to a 69 year old man I know who was told earlier this month that he will need a biopsy on something which showed up in an MRI but who cannot get one scheduled at the hospital his insurance will cover BECAUSE THE BIG-NAME HOSPITAL IT IS ASSOCIATED WITH TWO STATES AWAY IS UNDERGOING A BUSINESS SHAKE UP - I repeat that, two states away from where we live.  

It seems a group of hedge funds is buying that big-name institution and all of the doctors specializing in that particular part of the human anatomy have, suddenly, left hospital he has to go to.

The American medical industry is a total mess, perhaps even as big a mess as it was in before the Affordable Care Act was supposed to reform it because of its attachment to for-profit investing.  I remember listening to Obama touting how the ACA was going to make everything better and I was skeptical then.  As I recall it was his absurd faith in computer technology that was the thing I was most skeptical of, something which has certainly not made things seamless and as easy as clicking on a key.   

I also remember the scare stories about surgeries being delayed in Canada under its National Healthcare system, something which, even then, for those without a lot of money, was the reality in the United States.  There are certainly problems in the Canadian system, most of those I'm aware of come from allowing the different provinces to have different practices - I am ever more skeptical of federalism even as I'm aware of the problems of national governments.  But the fragmentation and ever-shifting profit-driven American system is a total disaster.

It's very possible that this might end up costing the man his life depending on what the biopsy shows.  God only knows if it's serious how long it will take for treatment to start and how long he'll be able to afford that.

The ACA would certainly have been better if the Roberts Court hadn't seriously weakened it but it was no last step in making medical care available to all on an equal basis.  Nothing like that will happen as long as hospitals, clinics, individual doctors are so tied in with the profit system.  And it's costing us lives, right now, even after the ACA has been in place.  We need to get the investors out of the medical business and that's only one area of life we need to do that in.

 Still alive, just having a really bad week.   I'm hoping for more regular posting of more topical substance soon.  

In the meantime 

LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE!

En Fin

I DON'T KEEP copies of many novels around my place, they pile up and, really most of them I regret reading once.  Mostly I read fiction from the library.  I worked at a library when Handmaid's Tale came out, that's where I read it.  Even then I didn't think it was Atwood's best work. I remain uncontrite at somewhat misremembering the title of it, not being online when I wrote that and not checking when I was.  Compared to the problems with the book and, even more so, the show-biz franchise, my mistake is trivial.

Since the mid 1980s, learning more about Puritan New England, learning the difference between traditional American style liberalism, originating in the commandments of providing liberally for the destitute and poor, in the Puritan tradition of the 17th century and earlier, based firmly in the Jewish* and earliest Christian traditions, tracing the actual history of the great 19th century liberal change movements under America's would-be democracy, abolitionism, Women's suffrage, workers' rights, I saw that the Hollywood-Broadway cartoon version of Puritanism that Atwood used to create her dystopian scare story was historically misinformed.  If you, as Marilynne Robinson does, consider Quakerism as a form of puritanism, one which in the uniform garb of Atwood's novel has some striking similarities, then the difference between puritanism and the fictional future which recreates it couldn't be more apparent.

Like that other mid-to late 20th century use of cartoon puritanism, The Crucible, which I've criticized here for its grotesque dishonesty about actual history, the thing used by fiction is inapt and its danger wildly inaccurate.  In Mary McCarthy's not entirely unfavorable critique of the novel in 1986, she may have been too quick to discount the eventual power of "the Moral Majority" but even given the idea that it would gain power made Atwood's use of puritanism inapt, the Southern Baptist tradition of Jerry Falwell is quite and importantly different from Calvinism, more different than Quakerism is or was.  Its present day political power is based in racism and other forms of extreme, divisive and malignant inequality whereas in most of its present day forms, what Puritanism developed into was far less so.  The United Church of Christ - which I've seen slammed by anti-Christians for its Calvinist roots - is and has long been one of the most egalitarian and liberal (especially in that American sense of the word) institutions in the country. My point is that racism and inequality is entirely compatible with the "liberal democracy" such as it was in the 18th and 19th centuries and into today when it has used the permissions of "free speech" and even more so "free press" to weaponize and encourage racism, sexism, extreme hatred and disregard of the poor, etc. and permission to the most obvious and blatant use of sexual and other violence as "liberty".  The inaptness of believing "liberal democracy" is an adequate sanctuary for those who want what Atwood seems to is that it is exactly the thing that was harnessed by the billionaires, their fascist servants and those they've duped to get us where we are, now.  The control and use of the media is the issue, its permission to lie and promote racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry.  Preventing that is anathema to "liberal democracy" which is a powerful enough thing that Bill Clinton and his administration were chickens, afraid of the flack they would get for taking out the radio tower in Rwanda as it was telling the genocidalists where their prospective victims were hiding.  And their pious civic devotion to "freedom of the press" was the reason they gave for their malignant, amoral non-feasance.

No, my criticism of taking what should have been a scary story and making it into some kind of prophesy of a future is that it doesn't work for the future such as it has developed and it was, as Mary McCarthy pointed out, not especially revelatory of the time it was written.  I think Cat's Eye, though certainly not a spectacularly great novel (those come at a far slower rate than the publishing industry claims) is more likely to reveal something about real life.

This whole business of reading fiction and pretending it's more important than it really is is something I wish people would consider.  Perhaps it got it start among English teachers and writers of fiction, the teachers so they could do something other than teach English grammar and composition, the writers of fiction so they could pretend they were doing something more important than it is.  

If they started teaching reading using non-fiction, not stories but actually informative texts, short ones to start with, gradually longer and more challenging ones, I think we'd be a lot better off than where we are.  I like a good story once in a while but I'm not going to pretend it's important.  Marilynne Robinson's essays are a lot more important than her novels which are, certainly, better than Atwood's.  I have not read the collection of Atwood's writings that, from the review I read of it, contains a number of rather tedious speeches such as those regularly given at PEN conferences as well as some quite good pieces and passages.  I did read a number of them as published in magazines and found those generally very good and at times very insightful.  

That's my last word on this topic, for now.  I've got a feeling Margaret Atwood if she spoke about it would not welcome having become a figure of mid-brow, college-credentialed sacrosanctity.  I certainly feel no obligation to piously regard her as a frozen, plaster saint of secular libertarian liberalism.  I have more respect for her than that.  

*  Yet the stern orthodoxy of their religious practice, which seemed to isolate recent Jewish immigrants from the rest of the city, was closer than they might have thought to the Puritan orthodoxy that had defined the spiritual orientation of the Boston community from its inception.  Years later, noting that "the old Puritan and Jewish beliefs are really quite similar," Bloom appreciated the commonality of these two faiths anchored in the Hebrew Bible and the ascetic spirituality, which became sources of his inspiration.  These synagogue visits left an indelible impression on the child that would draw him back. 

From Boston Modern
Figurative Expressionism as Alternative Modernism