Sunday, March 17, 2024

Replaying An Oldie For St. Patrick's Day

Thursday, March 17, 2016

St. Patrick Day

Some passages from Thomas Cahill's book How the Irish Saved Civilization

Patrick's gift to the Irish was his Christianity - the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history, a Christianity without the sociopolitical baggage of the Greco-Roman world, a Christianity that completely inculturated itself into the Irish scene.  Through the Edict of Milan, which had legalized the new religion in 313 and made it the new emperor's pet,  Christianity had been received into Rome, not Rome into Christianity!  Roman culture was little altered by the exchange, and it is arguable that Christianity lost much of its distinctiveness.  But in the Patrician exchange, Ireland, lacking the power and implacable tradition of Rome, had been received into Chirstianity, which transformed Ireland into Something New, something never seen before - a Christian culture, where slavery and human sacrifice became unthinkable, and warfare, tough impossible for humans to eradicate, diminished markedly.  The Irish, in any case, loved physical combat too much for intertribal warfare to disappear entirely.  But new laws, influenced by Gospel norms, inhibited such conflicts severely by requiring that arms be taken up only for a weighty cause.  Ireland would not again see a battle on the scale of the Tain till Brian Boru would rout the Vikings in the eleventh century.

The ending of human sacrifice was common wherever Christianity was introduced, which must have been a blessed relief to those who were at greatest risk of being selected for incredibly brutal, pagan, ritual murder.  I can only imagine it was through the force of personality and authenticity that Patrick was able to overturn that practice.  He seems to have had an enormous amount of courage in facing the brutality of the pagans in Ireland which, I would imagine, impressed them.

The ending of slavery in Ireland, the first place in Europe which I'm aware of it having ended, was, till the time of Patrick, unique.  There had been Chritians who called for the end of slavery,  St. Macrina the Younger and her brother St. Gregory of Nyssa had almost a century before Patrick but he got the powers in Christian Ireland to give it up until it was reintroduced by the English after they invaded and colonized Ireland.  You have to remember that Patrick was an escaped slave, himself, he knew what slavery was in only the way that a slave can know it.

Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed.  There were no Irih martyrs (at least not till Elizabeth began to create them eleven centuries after Patrick).  And this lack of martyrdom troubled the Irish, to whom a glorious death by violence presented such an exciting finale.  If all Ireland had received Christianity without a fight, the Irish would have to think up some new form of martyrdom - something even more intereting than the wonderfully grisly store they had begun to learn in the simple continental collections, called "martyrologies," from which Patrick and his successors taught them to read.

Thomas Cahill gets to the subject of his book after that, first the establishment of monaisticism in Ireland and then the rapid transformation of a nearly totally illiterate nation into the scribal publishing powerhouse on the outer edge of Western Europe that, literally, preserved huge parts of classical and even pagan culture, as illiteracy ruled in the rest of Western Europe.  He notes how it was from Ireland that not only Christianity but literacy and the texts of classical and other texts were introduced into Scotland, England, Wales, France and elsewhere in Europe as the medieval period proceeded.  I might go into the ironies, given the popularity of the English "enlightenment" myth, pretty much invented by Edward Gibbon,  that Christians burned the Great Library at Alexandria  among atheists and online Pagans, that it was those poor, put upon pagans who ended the great period of Irish scholarship and intellectual missionary efforts when the Vikings pillaged and destroyed the Irish monasteries in Ireland and elsewhere.

As to how paganism in Ireland fared under Christianity,  Cahill says:

As these transformed warrior children of Patrick's heart lay down the swords of battle, flung away the knives of sacrifice and cast aside the chains of slavery,  they very much remained Irishmen and Irishwomen.  Indeed, the survival of an Irish psychological identity is one of the marvels of the Irish story.  Unlike the continental church fathers, the Irish never troubled themselves overmuch about eradicating pagan influences, which the tended to wink at and enjoy. The pagan festivals continued to be celebrated, which is why we today can still celebrate the Irish feasts of May Day and Hallowe'en.  To this day there is a town in Kerry that holds a fertility festival each August, where a magnificent he-goat presides like Cernunnos for three days and nights, and bacchanalian drinking, wild dancing and varieties of sexual indiscretion are the principal entertainments.  It is this characteristically Irish melange of pagan and Christian that forms the theme of Brian Friel's magnificent play "Dancing at Lughnasa" - Lughnasa being the harvest feast of the god Lug, still celebrated on August 1 in parts of Ulster.   Irish marriage customs remained most un-Roman.  As late as the twelfth century - seven centuries after the conversion of the Irish to the Gospel - a husband or wife could call it quits and walk out for good on February 1, the feast of Imbolc, which meant that Irish marriages were renewable yearly, like magazine subscriptions or insurance policies.  As lat as the last century naked men (and, for all we know, women) races horses bareback along Clare's beaches thorough the surf at high tide, looking for all the world like their prehistoric warrior ancestors.  But after Patrick the eviler gods shrank in stature and became much less troublesome, became in fact the comical gargoyles of medieval imagination, peering fearfully from undignified nooks, and the belief grew strong that the one thing the devil cannot bear is laughter.

I'd like to make a distinction between that and how the commercial, brewing industry inspired American style desecration of St. Patrick Day, though the distinction would be subtle.  I'm not exactly sure I agree with him about Hallowe'en, but I will agree with him, completely, about Brian Friel who was a wonderful playwright.

Edmund Campion, the Elizabethan Jesuit who was martyred at Tyburn in 1581 left us a description of the Irish that rings true to this day:

"The people are thus inclined:  religious, franke amorous, irefull, sufferable of paines infinte, very glorious, many sorcerers, excellent horsemen, delighted with warres, great almes-givers, [sur]passing in hospitalitie...  They are sharpe-witted, lovers of learning, capable of any studie whereunto they bend themselves, constant in travaile, adventurous, intractable, kinde-hearted, secret in displeasure."

We can make out in this Elizabethan group portrait not only the Irish of our own day but the lively ghosts of Irishmen long past - Ailil, Medb, Cuchulainn. Derdriu. and, after a fashion, Patrick himself.  Whether or not Freud was right when he muttered in exasperation that the Irish were the only people who could not be helped by psychoanalysis, there can be no doubt of one thing:  the Irish will never change. 

I have often wished my grandparents had lived long enough so I could ask them what they thought about Freudian theories when they first heard of them, their lives included the period when those were translated into English and popularized.   I strongly suspect they'd have thought they were as ridiculous as, in fact, they are and that the many people who fell for that nonsense were ridiculous.  If that's a national trait of the Irish, I don't know.  I am at a loss for how anyone, anywhere, could have been so credulous as to believe in them, but, then, I'm at a loss to understand how much so much of the total nonsense that constitutes the equipment of an allegedly educated English speaker, much of it junk invented in the 18th century, is required to pass as respectable.

 

It Wasn't Only That One god Of Modernism That Failed

ALL OF THE gods OF SECULARISM have failed in the United States, just as the god of communism did.  The Constitution has failed.  If it had been what it was alleged to be, if it was the sacred document that our, to use the putrid phrasing of the corrupt Sandra Day O'Connor, "civic religion" requires be presented as infallible and holy writ, the Constitution, Donald Trump would never have been president.  Instead it was exactly the Constitution, in the forms of the Electoral College and the inanity of the lie-permitting First Amendment which produced exactly what those were supposed to protect us from, a despotic government voted into office by a minority who believed the lies spread by the entirely libertine "free press" as manipulated by billionaires, domestic and foreign to the edification of the corporate owners of the "press."   

Democracy requires that an effective majority of People know the truth that will make us free, pretending it's safe to allow lies is probably the most anti-democratic legal claim there could possibly be.  Yet the golden calf of our idolatry, the First Amendment does just that.

The courts, especially the Supreme Court, from hereon in honestly named the Corrupt Court, have repeatedly enabled Trump and the Republican-fascists during his criminal reign as they did during the previous record-holder of presidential criminality, Ronald Reagan, only far more boldly and blatantly than it did four decades ago.  Their latest move to hear a case that should never have been a question that it needed to be heard, that an American President has a carte blance to commit any crime he decides to, is a blatant attempt for him to run out the clock on his prosecutions to help him in the election this year.  That is so obvious that calling it a "ruse" is to essentially miss the meaning of what a ruse is, it's blatant Republican-fascist Corrupt Court partisan corruption to try to help install the idiot baby-man who will usher in blatant fascist rule in the United States.  There has not been anything as bald an attempt to do something that disgustingly immoral since the Taney Court's attempt to extend slavery throughout the country on the basis of "property rights."  

If you think that comparison of Roberts et al to Taney et al, ia over the top,  remember, the Roberts-Republican-fascists have enabled him to escape responsibility for the most blatant and serious attempt at an insurrection since the one Taney et al moved on in Dred Scott, the Corrupt Court decision that led to the Civil War.  At the same time the Roberts Court has made sure that their potential invisible army, the Court clique clan, will be armed with automatic weapons with which to impose Republican-fascist rule on the country, no doubt with willing and enthusiastic mass murderers to put down any resistance.  I don't think even Taney would have done that, though he and subsequent courts did his best to do so when it would have been Black People and Native Americans who would have been the target for terror killings and de facto enslavement.  

That anyone would have nurtured any reverent faith that the Corrupt Court would save us from oligarchic dictatorship could only do so from a total and complete ignorance of the history of that corrupt organ of government. But our "civic religion" is nothing if not in the business of promoting pious lies and ignorance of things like that.

Lower courts have a more mixed record, though in far too many cases they have dallied and delayed even when their results FINALLY turned out to be sound.  That a "judge" like Aileen Cannon is still allowed to blatantly enable Trump to get away with what is probably the most serious give-away of U.S. national security secrets to whoever he figures will get him something OR TO A RANDOM AUSTRAILIAN BILLIONAIRE THE MAKE-BELIEVE BILLIONAIRE WANTS TO IMPRESS is absolute proof of the utter corruption of the judiciary.  No doubt even the good judges who believe in democracy and, some of them, maybe, even egalitarian government will trim their actions because of fear of being overturned by the more elite levels of that hierarchy.  The Corrupt Court is probably the ultimate source of most of the bad habits that persist in lower courts and on down throughout the lawyering racket though many of those practices have been endemic to the profession of lawyering back to the dawn of that more damnable of oldest professions.

That more of Trumps crooked, often law breaking lawyers haven't been kicked out of that cartel is just more of the same corruption,  I think, since most of the worst of the upper levels of the judiciary come from them, the Ivy League and Ivy equivalent level law schools, those have to share in the blame for producing what they produce.  Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Georgetown, etc, credentials from those schools should carry a suspicion of being highly trained in how to lie for the deepest pockets and, if not that, then in training to come up with dishonest reasons to do awful things.  If they can get a "justice" Jackson to nullify a key provision of the 14th Amendment that would have saved us from Trump, through her Harvard Law training, it is rightly suspected of being the source of that corruption.   Though, the often vaunted credential that someone is an expert in the secular-theological "Constitutional scholarship" is largely based on studying what the Corrupt Court and lower courts of jurisdiction have held about that document.  The lies and distortions of that very amendment, alone, would comprise a huge index of folly so as to put the worst of scholastic theology in a better light.

I will point out that the Roberts Court nullification of that provision in the Constitution proves that the Marbury v Madison usurped power for the Corrupt Court to overturn duly adopted federal law has clearly now been expanded by that court to include the power to, without any Constitutional process, amend and nullify the Constitution, itself.  With that our expectations of a government of laws and not of men is made a meta-lie as whopping big as the one that Corrupt Court has over its doorway, "equal justice under law."  

The media which the relatively young Thomas Jefferson believed would provide  insurance against despotism has been, if anything, even more corrupt than the legal racket and the Corrupt Court. That media mounted god of secularism was a fraud from the start.  The more experienced Jefferson was far less naive about the corruption that the press, freed to lie with impunity embodied.  The media, including the most profitable, and so most powerful, part of it, entertainment, has enabled the corruption of the United States to an extent that puts the corrupt judiciary in the place of "also ran" us into fascism.  The freer they have been to lie, to lie about politicians, the more they have promoted the worst choices, starting with Nixon in 1968, Reagan in 1980, and the series of Republicans who have taken that party into its present fascism.  NBC, the parent of the ever less "liberal" MSNBC, is taking that same road that every other major network has.   Anyone who had a brain in their head in 1964 when the Warren Court took the greatest steps toward our lying media would have known it would be anyone who promoted equality and democracy that they would go after and not the enemies of equality and democracy.  Our media has always been, on balance, a bulwark of the oligarchs, millionaires, billionaires and our native tendencies towards facism.  That has certainly been the predictable result as the Republicans took in the native American fascists of white supremacy so as to get a majority for the billionaires and millionaires to fleece the country more than they had been used to doing so. America has never been without a dangerously large and ignorant and vicious wedge of People for whom hatred, envy and fear win out over any better angels that attend them.  And I'm not only talking about those on the so-called "right."

The American left, especially that part of it that are faithful to the "civic religion" of secularism, the de facto faith of the college credentialed crowd, have been total and complete suckers for this progress into fascism on the basis of "The First Amendment" and other such slogans.  As the fascists gulled ever more Americans they bought the ACLU line of "more speech" even though that "more speech" was never enough to protect equality and democracy from the reign of lies that were amplified through the billions of times "more speech" which the Supreme Court gave to the billionaires and millionaires when they declared that money was speech in Buckley v Valeo, another of the obvious outcomes of another daffy ruling in which a number of the "liberal" "justices" joined in on out of "principle."  The fifty plus years of descent from the high point of liberal politics in the early LBJ administration has proven that free speech absolutism hasn't done much of anything to protect us from the most criminal administrations and regimes* in our history.

The religion of secularism has failed on every count, that secularism, in its immoral "moral neutrality"  has no firm foundation on which to make moral judgements  and so always is in a neutral wash that enables the worst immorality.  So it's no great surprise that in the crisis we are in it is so impotent to protect egalitarian democracy.  The comedians who like to pat themselves on the back for in their opposition to Trump show that their highest value isn't egalitarian democracy, it's to get the laugh.  Even someone like Steve Colbert has contributed to the general attack on the last hope of even liberal democracy, Joe Biden, on the basis of his age.  That Joe Biden has been the most vigorous Democratic President, combining the moral centeredness of Jimmy Carter with the skill of Lyndon Johnson, while pulling us out of a hopeless quagmire instead of getting us farther into one, has not counted as much to them as the cheap laugh.  I strongly suspect that if Joe Biden got a second term with a really Democratic Congress, he could be the greatest president we have had.  And if he gets it, it won't be because Colbert and some other comedians support him, it will be because there are enough serious people in the country to out-vote the dupes and fascists.   

When we're this close to fascism, none of it's funny.  Comedy in the 1920s did nothing to slow down the Nazis and fascists.  

I am convinced that the reason that American democracy has failed isn't just because education has failed in the hopeless struggle for it to win out over TV and screen based entertainment, it has failed because the moral basis of democracy has been supplanted by Mammonism, the worship of money, which saturates  American life, human life, really.  The churches have certainly been effected by that, especially the ones you might think of first, the Southern Baptists and the Catholic Church.  The Southern Baptists, a denomination founded in support of first slavery then segregation and with some pretty dodgy theological ideas, is only one of a number of Protestant denominations that could be named.  Catholics, the denomination I'm most familiar with, is undergoing a billionaire-millionaire financed take-over attempt aided and abetted by the JPII-Benedict XVI era majority in the U. S. Catholic Conference of Bishops.  But going into details on that would get me into the moral disaster that the JPII papacy led to, a topic in itself.

But even with all of that, the fact that the ultimate source of Christian religion has to rest on the Gospel of Jesus, which is both radically egalitarian and economically leveling, will always leave sincere believers with a far firmer foundation on which to build egalitarian democracy than the mushy swamp of secularism.  

Secularism should never have been an excuse to refuse to name and state moral absolutes, even though ADMINISTRATIVE secularism is an essential practice of a government in an egalitarian democracy.  But it has been used to refuse the most basic of moral foundations of egalitarian democracy as an absolute list of things agreed on by anyone who is allowed to participate in it.

1. That all People have inalienable rights, to material sustenance sufficient to have a decent life.

2. That they have an obligation to accept and act out and promote the basic level of equality to everyone, whatever their ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sex, level of intelligence, etc.  That does not include those who hold an ideology, religious or other belief in their superiority over others which allows them to negate or violate the basic rights of everyone.

3. One person, one vote in determining who governs the country, the state, the locality.  The right of every person to cast a vote and to have that vote count EQUALLY.  I will point out that the Constitution violates that on the most basic level in the Electoral College (if it is not abolished it will destroy democracy) and the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate in which the People of Wyoming, the Dakotas, Vermont, my home state, Maine, etc. have far more representation than the People of California, New York, etc.  

4. That anything that violates equal rights, any ideology OR RELIGION that denies or rejects that can be allowed to propagate through the media or through organized efforts.  WE ALL HAVE A RIGHT TO THE PROTECTION OF EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY THAT OVERRIDES THE 'RIGHT" TO PROMOTE FASCISM OR MARXISM OR ANY OTHER ANTI-EGALITARIAN DEMOCRATIC IDEOLOGY.

The idea that American democracy had an obligation to allow anti-egalitarian, and so anti-democratic ideology to have a chance to destroy egalitarian democracy would have, certainly, been against the anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic financial interests in the framers of the corrupt Constitution, which leads me to the fifth point:

5. WE, LIVING TODAY, HAVE A RIGHT TO EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY THAT THE "FOUNDERS" OR "FRAMERS" CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO PREVENT OR THWART.  Nothing that they said or did which goes against equality and democracy has any moral standing which succeeds our right to egalitarian democracy from here on out.  They weren't all-wise, they weren't even particularly honest, though they may have been marginally more honest than the amoral slime that rules us under the Constitutional order.  The virtue of history honestly considered is it gives us a basis for trying something better than would have occurred to those aristocratic white men who wrote the Declaration of Independence (the founders) and those who wrote the Constitution and its amendments (the framers) who were obviously corrupted by their practice of slavery and their activities as sharp businessmen, land speculators.  That they came from a particularly bad time as the amoral pseudo-scientific "enlightenment" was the fashion didn't help much in them feeling a need to sacrifice their personal wealth and the sleazy sources of it in favor of equality and democracy.  That the sleazy practice of our Corrupt Court is based in their pretenses of "originalism" and "textualism" should be the final nail in the coffin of that particular god of American secularism.   

I may share Charlie Pierce's and others' fear of a new constitutional convention, considering how billionaire-millionaire money corrupts everything now.  But the fact is that it is already corrupting it, not only against BUT THROUGH the Constitution we have now.  I think it will become ever clearer that we have no choice but to largely renovate it if not tear it up and start over.  In that case all of the well-esteemed Constitutional Scholars may lose their specialty's relevance.  I'm not sure I'd trust a lot of them to be in on writing a new one, certainly none that have a history of speaking out against equality and democracy and, most of all, asserting that lies must be protected by the Constitution.  All the evil we have is based in lies told through the media and the worship of that most dangerous of all secular gods, money.   Unless we have a. "First Amendment" that a. makes it clear that lies don't enjoy any legitimate protection and, b. that  organizations, "the press," "religions," corporations cannot possess rights and, so, don't have rights under the Constitution, we may as well not try because that's the major source of the corruption we have now.   Trump, like Reagan before him, were creations of the media, the free press.  They, as politicians instead of just media created false fronts, were a product of the First Amendment, Corrupt Court permission to lie with impunity.  

* Only a presidency which gets a majority of the vote should be given the name of "administration."  Those which are produced by the anti-democratic Electoral College without a majority vote or by the Corrupt Court working on concert with a corrupt family run state government, such as Bush v Gore, are regimes like any other banana republican regime.  

Friday, March 15, 2024

The Difference Between Purity And Political Reality - On The Use Of "Illegals"

NO DOUBT IF he were alive and running for the presidency in 2024, Abraham Lincoln would have been effectively shut out for what he said during those iconic Lincoln-Douglas debates during his campaign to get a Senate seat, one which Douglas won in the end.  You know, the ones that are often named but almost never read or studied.  The debates that were real debates about the most important issues of a campaign, not the stupid show in which media talking heads lob gotcha questions at the Democrat and puffs of eiderdown to the most fascist of Republicans.  

Lincoln would certainly have been shut out during the first one, held in Ottawa, Illinois in which he used the "N" word as he ridiculed the fear tactic that Douglas employed, like a Lou Dobbs or Donald Trump holding out the fear of Illinois being swamped with free Black People if Lincoln's proposals for the promises of the Declaration of Independence were to become law.  

Admittedly, it is jarring to read Lincoln using that word and also denying that he held that Black People were the complete equals of white People, no doubt knowing that even a good number of those who might agree with him that slavery was evil would, nonetheless, be highly offended if someone pointed out that Black People were their equal if not their superiors in some regard. I'd guess a lot of them would have been as offended if someone said that the Irish or other groups of white People were their equals, certainly if Native Americans were, though that didn't come into the debates.

It's one of the truths of American history that the two presidents before Lyndon Johnson who did the most to further equality in reality instead of theory, Lincoln and Harry Truman, are on record as having uttered that very detestable word and probably others.  Today the idiotic political discourse would concentrate on that use of a word and not on the substance of what they did.  Thurgood Marshall once said that Harry Truman integrating the military was, up to that point, the most radical single action a president had ever undertaken in the move towards equal rights, I would guess he meant since Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  I don't know if he said that before or after the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts were passed, which I think are even more important.  If Lyndon Johnson is on record as having uttered that word, I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me if he had, being of his time and place and provenance.  Real American democracy starts with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, before that it was a everything from a total to growing less than the sham it started out being.  Which is why the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have been dismantling them, especially the all-important Voting Rights Act.  

I've been looking hard at what Lincoln said in his political speeches and am struck, repeatedly at how often he was playing the crowd while he was leading them beyond where they likely were.  I found his use of the Declaration of Independence, the language of Thomas Jefferson that convicts him of hypocrisy in his increasing dependence on and enthusiasm for holding Black People in slavery (including his own children) after the Revolution was won and the government set up.  The following passage from the first debate held in Ottawa, Illinois is especially interesting in that regard.   Answering an hour and a half of political slamming from Stephen Douglas, he said:

I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, either directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. 

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. 

I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence-the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.

To a real abolitionist, certainly to all Black abolitionists (who history still wants to ignore to focus on White abolitionists), Lincoln's statements in that political debate would be highly and deeply offensive even if his argument for freedom couldn't help but be welcomed. His argument that the Declaration of Independence claimed sufficiently equal rights for everyone, Black People and anyone who anyone claimed wasn't as smart as they were, to enjoy freedom and the right to the fruits of their labor were more radical than the Constitution was and where things were in 1858. I would point out that there were certainly many white People who were not held to be the intellectual equals of others, Women, for example, many of the immigrant population, others in the various regions of the country.  Certainly some of them, hearing or reading those arguments would have understood they applied to their condition, as well.  Though that was certainly not the law of the land.  

I recall reading somewhere that Lincoln was faulted by the most ardent abolitionists of his day as being behind their thinking and slower to act to issue the proclamation banning slavery in the Confederate States than they would have liked, some probably slammed him for not banning it in the states that just barely stayed in the union during the Civil War, Maryland being one of those.  

But it is impossible to not note that whatever the Garrisons and Phillips  did to push on abolitionism, they never held office to make it happen.  They didn't deal in the raw materials to make that happen, persuading voters to vote them into office and to keep them in office long enough to make it happen.  They were able to  remain pure, or purer than a politician can if they have any hope of getting a House or Senate seat or doing what's hardest of all, winning the presidency with the national vote and the engine of corruption baked into that, the Electoral College.  

In a public speech, be it in a debate or a State of the Union or any other, it's very easy to make a gaff or public statement that will offend a part of the audience you are counting on to vote for you and contribute to your margin of victory.  Live performance of something as generally unrehearsed as a speech, especially one containing improvisation, is very hard to pull off with total success.  

The American left, the one that most often gets called "the left" has never been in a position to make the most radical change that can be made, it has never controlled anything much more than a few city councils back in the days of the old Socialist Party - the one the "real radicals" destroyed in 1919 - they don't have much of any ability to do anything but talk and rage.  They don't engage in reality, they don't choose to do the hardest work of all to make real change, get elected in numbers large enough to even make themselves essential to the political success of those who can move things in the right direction.  There's a reason that such a "left" finds its greatest appeal among teenagers and young adults, they are the most callow and those who imagine that there is some distant horizon towards which they can insist things be pushed to RIGHT NOW!  That they have, repeatedly during my lifetime, done exactly the opposite by getting Nixon, Reagan, Bush II and Trump elected, not to mention the House Senate and State offices they've played spoiler in, and so they are not the progressive force they advertise themselves as being but are, in fact, useful idiots, useful tools for the worst among us.   That's such a useful tool for them that they are rather openly aiding the brain-dead candidacy of RFK jr. and have repeatedly financed Green Party politics.  What they don't get from them directly in terms of electoral spoiler candidacies, they reap in highlighting the ballot box poison that is provided by play-lefties with mouths bigger than their intellect playing the game of "most lefty in the room."  

The play-left has been a lot more useful to Republican-fascism than it ever has been the effective and so real left, the ones who get and hold offices, gain real power and can make real laws.  So they buy themselves not being taken seriously by real leftist politicians who know at best they'll have to try to cajole them along but who know, full well, they will turn on a dime and enable fascism.  

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

the new unexpected abundance is given by human agency that is propelled by the generosity of God

 Wednesday after Lent 4

Psalm 101; Genesis 50:15-26; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; Mark 8:11-26

God who breaks the cycles of fearful scarcity, break those cycles in our lives.  Give us enough gracefulness to receive your abundance and to accept it as the new norm of our daily existence.  In his name.  Amen

The disciples of Jesus, like almost all of us, were habituated into scarcity.  They assumed there was not enough.  They feared running out.  As a result, they had no interpretive categories by which to compute the overflow of abundance of bread that Jesus made possible.  His wondrous act of feeding the hungry crowd attests to his capacity for abundance.  But they missed the point, even when they could count the surplus baskets of bread as twelve and seven.  They had abundance in their hands, but they missed the point.

In the same way the brothers of Joseph lived in fearful parsimony.  They assumed that Joseph would act in kind toward them and retaliate against them for their hateful action earlier in their lives.  They did not anticipate that his largess of spirit would break the vicious cycle of parsimonious interaction .  Or more properly,  they did not reckon on the providential goodness of God who stood behind the generosity of Joseph.

These two narratives explicate the habit of fearful scarcity that is so powerful among us.  That fearful scarcity dictates so much of our neighborly life and so much of our grudging policy toward needy neighbors.  But these two stories also bear witness to the breaking of the cycles of parsimony that we assume will continue to perpetuity.  In both cases, the new unexpected abundance is given by human agency that is propelled by the generosity of God.  It is more than possible that we ourselves might be such agents of abundance propelled by the same God of generosity
.

I thought it was worth giving the post following on the one for yesterday because it completes the thought.  

It is instructive how even in places in the world, now, which waste enormous amounts of food, the same mental habits behind the hoarding against fantasies of scarcity hold.   

Yesterday's post got posted with a bit deleted.  The sermon against overly academic theology was given by the current Papal Preacher Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa.  This account of it is worth reading.  

Western theology risks becoming an abstract and rationalized conversation among academics rather than a tool for nourishing the faith of God's people, the papal preacher said.

"Theology, above all in the West, has increasingly moved away from the power of the Spirit to rely on human wisdom," Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, told members of the Roman Curia during a Lenten meditation March 1.

Pope Francis did not attend the meditation, though Cantalmessa told those present that the pope was following his talk remotely. Several other cardinals were in attendance.

Modern rationalism has "demanded that Christianity present its message dialectically," subjecting it to modes of research and discussion that are philosophically acceptable, he said. But "the danger inherent in this approach to theology is that God becomes objectified, he becomes an object which we talk about, not a subject with whom or in whose presence we talk."

A purely rationalistic form of theology makes it become "more and more a dialogue with the academic elite of the moment and less and less nourishment for the faith of God's people," the cardinal said.

"You only get out of this situation by prayer, by talking to God before you even talk about God," he said. Quoting St. Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth-century Christian monk, Cantalamessa said, "If you are a theologian, you will truly pray, and if you truly pray you will be a theologian." He then cited the example of St. Augustine, who he said produced his "most lasting" theology through speaking with God in his Confessions.

Faith, he noted, "does not oppose reason, but supposes reason, just as grace supposes nature."

I think that this tendency is far more true of Catholic theology than it is of much of the mainstream Protestant theology I've been reading.   When Elizabeth A. Johnson wrote a book giving chapters about theology that takes real life and real People into account, the eminent academic theologian, the then Karl Ratzinger, more or less mounted an inquisition against her which saw her having to face, single-handedly, a room full of American bishops, most of them appointed by John Paul II and ready to attack any woman who they figured JPII and his attack shepherd, Ratzinger wanted to dispose of.  She argued her case better than they attacked her but, no doubt, the experience enraged her and anyone who cares about intellectual fairness and honesty and, in the face of those two pastorally disastrous Popes, in favor of theology that addresses Peoples' real lives and souls.   

For his several missteps, such as the very serious one, his recent call for Ukraine to make concessions to the Putin dictatorship,  Francis has been about the complete opposite of his two immediate predecessors.   I pray that the next Pope continues that and is more decisive in dealing with the bishops, cardinals and media priests who serve the billionaires and millionaires.   It should be remarked on that JPII and Benedict XVI had no problems with the billionaires and millionaires even as they did the most terrible things and promoted fascism and inequality.   JPII made Rupert Murdoch a Papal Knight at the urging of some particularly corrupt American hierarchs.   I doubt he'd have cared if he realized what he did.   I have no use for the cannonization of JPII. 

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

I'm Asked If I've Seen "Maestro"

I absolutely detest that title, it's one of the things that has ruined the profession of conducting.  I detest the style of conducting associated with it.  

OH, SOMEONE made a "bio-pic" about Lenny?  I hadn't known.  Aaron Copland said that whenever a literary man writes two words about music one of them will be wrong.  While I think Aaron was being generous about literary men, when a movie guy writes two words about music, all ten of them will be wrong. And that's before the "auteur" gets hold of it, talking about pretentious titles I detest along with the milieu that led to it. 

I am not interested.   Wasn't a fan while he was alive and he's been dead for almost thirty four years.  I can tell you I don't own a single album he conducted and never did.  Though I have read some of his early work, which was never recorded, was great from musicians who worked under him in the early 40s, he declined into stardom early.   He ended up a spoiled conductor.  There are a handful of his pieces I think were good, the dance sequences from WSS,  a few of the songs,  the second of the Chichester Psalms, . . .  but he wasn't a great composer, either.  His Norton Lectures were embarrassing to listen to.  

 

The Posts From Gift And Task For Today And Tomorrow Are Pretty Good Too

Tuesday After Lent 4

Psalm 97;  Genesis 49:29-50:14; 1 Corinthians 11:17-34; Mark 8:1-10

Giver of enough for all, let us rest our lives in your abundance.  Give us a capacity to wait for our neighbors who also share in your abundance.  In his name.  Amen

Eating is a most elemental activity in which all the great human questions are operative, questions of production, questions of distribution, and questions of consumption.  Food poses questions of scarcity and abundance and creates an environment in which we may act out fearful competitiveness or generous sharing.

In the early church, all questions of food sere evident, setting Christians against each other in greed and selfishness.  The horizon of the Epistle reading, moreover, should not be confined to church behavior, because the same issues are at work in the larger economy.  In an economy of acute individualism, the strong and powerful can, in greedy ways, monopolize food and other resources and take them from the table of the vulnerable; or conversely, policies and practices of the community may generate an equitable distribution of food and other essential life resources so that all may participate together in well-being.  There is no doubt that it is the (most often quite unrealistic) fear of scarcity that propels greed and generates undue surplus at the expense of the other.

Paul Councils:  "Wait for one another."  The ground for such waiting is the assurance that there is enough for all to eat.  That assurance of enough for all is dramatized in the Gospel narrative wherein Jesus feeds four thousand folk and has a surplus of seven baskets of bread.  The narrative attests that where Jesus governs, there is an abundance for all, more than enough.  This gospel claim contradicts the greedy anxiety of economic policies that imagine that we will soon run out and we must get and eat all we can now.  The church may be a practice of alternative eating.


You can contrast this to any number of things, the Republican-fascist Iowa legislature writing drastically restrictive restrictions on what the destitute and poor can use their food assistance to buy (I never thought I'd see that hog killing operation that Iowa is putting restrictions on the buying of fresh meat), the Nazi's years long campaign to get the German public used to thinking of those on the soon to be public death list as "useless eaters" or the most effective modern assertion of that in Malthusian economics in which the entirely artificial scarcity of food in Britain - in no small part to the theft of the commons, the displacement of the agricultural poor, and other agricultural land to feed the far more lucrative  textile industry - which was turned onto its head by Darwinism to impose the British class system on nature.

Or you can go back to the nightmares of Pharaoh and the theft of the cattle and lands, then the very bodies of Egyptians in the managed famine that is reported to have come about.  It wouldn't be hard to imagine it was largely a planned famine such as those created by Stalin to  decimate the Ukrainian population or the inept theoretical famines created by Mao's gangsters or the food inflation that is the cartels rigging the Covid pandemic to their profits.  

A recent sermon given by Pope Francis's warned about the excesses of a purely academic theology that is removed from reality and real life.  I have, before, noted that the late Pope emeritus Benedict XVI was the best credentialed academic theologian in the history of the papacy, and the pastoral disaster his papacy was showed that.   That's that kind of thing Catholic style.  I don't trust a theologian who doesn't regularly come back to the questions of food and clothing, housing and medical care for the destitute, the poor and those who are struggling.  The very issues that are everywhere in the Gospels, in Acts, in the Epistles, for the most part, are so frequently seen as unimportant in the most respectable of so-called Christianity.  That is when the topic that masks that, for the most part, an obsession with sex is the alpha and omega of moral concern.  

Jesus held a last supper, he didn't hold a last lecture or seminar or colloquy or a final edit.  He didn't mention sex once in it in any of the Gospels, he hardly mentioned sex at all in any of the things he said.  And he isn't recorded as saying so much that comes out of the mouths of American bishops, cardinals, media-priests or TV preachers.   

Monday, March 11, 2024

in 2024 America and in much of Europe, if you hear "Christianity" it ain't Christ they're talking about

Jacob Did More Than He Knew - A Mid-Lent post

Fourth Sunday in Lent

Psalm 66; Genesis 48:8-22; Romams 8:11-25; John 6:27-40

Spirit of God, who stirs beyond our safe categories and our usual assumptions, give us attentiveness to your surging newness, that we may receive your stunning emancipation that moves in and through our practiced futility.  In his name. Amen

The aged Jacob transmits the blessing to his grandsons Manasseh and Ephraim.  He does so by laying on hands.  At the last moment, however, he inexplicably crosses his hands so that his right hand (of power) is laid on the head of his younger grandson.  The crossing of his hands to reverse the blessing is unexplained.  We do not know if it was luck or providence or the puckish way of an old man.  When Joseph protests this reversal, father Jacob only affirms the outcome of the blessing for the future.  Jacob's act was revolutionary.  It violated all the old habits that protected the privilege of the firstborn.  This overthrow of conventional privilege by a puckish act offers a harbinger of the acts of freedom that are characteristic of the gospel.

In Paul's wondrous lyric, it is as though the creation is hemmed in in futile ways, but the glorious liberty given by God will prepare creation permit an emancipation of all creation, including our bodies.  In the Gospel narrative, Jesus, in elusive working breaks free of all old "bread routines" to assert that he himself is "the true bread from heaven" that violates all conventional categories.

In the church's run-up to Easter, it is worthwhile to ponder how it is that that the creation - and our daily experience of it -is so much an enterprise of futility in which we regularly make all the conventional moves of coercion, fear, frustration, anxiety, and alienation.  This is the daily truth of our lives that is abruptly and deeply interrupted by the power of God.  Jacob did more than he knew.  He exemplified the opening of the world to new possibility that in the Gospel is termed "eternal life."  


Walter Brueggemann, Gift and Task

I had been doing a series of online Lent "retreats" for 2024 that started out good and then went into a rather pedestrian bunch of daily posts on the series of "mysteries" latterly attached to the rosary, which I found entirely uninspired.  

Instead, and off line most of the past couple of weeks, I've turned to the book by Brueggemann in which he has daily short prayers and sermons for everyday, using the Episcopal lectionary for "year 2".  I don't know where the Episcopalians are in their lectionary cycle this year but I figure that doesn't need to concern me.

This particular one for yesterday really struck a cord for me so I decided to type it out and post it in full.

The idea that the act of putting the last first by the father of the Children of Israel is a precedent for the gospel of Jesus which over and over again turns the expected world upside down, for its time and, when rightly used, today, is something that the world needs Christianity to recover and hold as its most important practice as well as belief.  And, over and over again, in the established churches, it is exactly what is expected, what is set down as the "right" way to do things, what has become embedded in Catholicism or Southern Baptist or "mainline Protestantism" and, especially, the anti-Christ of the television hallelujah peddlers and the Trumpzi-christofascists, the only hope for the Gospel of Jesus, the teaching of Paul and James, etc. is turning the expected world upside down. That is what not only the Gospel and Epistles, Acts and Revelation are about, it is essential to the Hebrew Scriptures.  Over and over again it is the younger as opposed to the older son who is "chosen" it is the upending and disturbing Prophet who criticizes the Temple and the anointed king and gets himself killed.  It is the Commandment to do justice to the destitute, the lower-class, the alien living among you and, in the Gospel and Epistles, to universalize those obligatory acts against personal advantage, the real religion is found and there is nothing more subversive in human literature and history than when that is taught and that is done.  

And contemporary American Christianity As Seen On TV couldn't be anywhere farther from that than it is.  

The old Zen quip that if you see the Buddha you should kill him could be said in 2024 America and in much of Europe, "If you hear "Christianity" it ain't Christ they're talking about."  It's the Christ killers. 

Saturday, March 9, 2024

No, It Takes Bad Science Accepted As Science To Really Do Evil - Hate Mail In Which I'm Called A Science Hater

ONE OF THE THINGS that I've regretted in the blow-back of a recent post is that the eminent physicist and anti-religious atheist polemicist Steven Weinberg didn't have a blog with a comment thread during the new-atheist fad, the way that the somewhat less eminent physicist and more polemical atheist Sean Carroll did.  I know long term readers might remember that I've bragged several times about forcing Sean Carroll to make a rather embarrassing if not self-impeaching admission in the course of an argument that ranged across at least a couple of somewhat atheist-scientistic blogs.  As I recall it originated from his and Stephen Hawking's declaration that physics was on the verge of a theory of everything, the elusive TOE, and so had disposed of any need for there to be a God. Which only shows that even the most famous physicist of his generation could remain at a first semester freshman level of philosophical competence, one which I know Weinberg sometimes surpasses.  

In the course of a comment thread fight I asked Carroll if there was even one, single object in the universe which physics had described comprehensively and completely.  He dodged the question on the first blog we started out on for going on three weeks but posted his claim on his own blog which I don't think I'd ever commented on before.  I pinned him down there by repeatedly asking the same question in front of his blog community.  But it wasn't until I promised never to post on his blog again if he'd answer the question if physics had a complete and comprehensive knowledge of even one object in the universe.  As I recall I specified an electron, to which he finally admitted that physics, which he and Hawking and others claimed would soon have a complete theory of the universe, didn't have such a theory of everything about even one single object in the universe.  

As a matter of credibility of his claim regarding the imminence of a TOE, physics having no theory of everything about even one object in the universe completely blows the idea that they will have a theory of everything about every object in the universe - not to mention things that aren't objects - out of any plausibility.

If I'd commented farther, I'd have asked him since physics didn't possess a complete description of even one object, how could physics know that there were not an entirely new set of issues that they hadn't known about before, which would have been another refutation of his claim that a TOE was imminently had. That problem, that there may well be, as Eddington said, "laws" of nature that surpass human comprehension, pretty well does in the claims of a "theory of everything" ever being reliably had.

I'd like to be able to ask Weinberg a similar question about his quip that "If you've seen one electron, you've seen them all."  My first question would be, "Have you seen even one electron?"  I mean that quite literally because everything that's known about electrons is inference on those limited aspects of them that physics and chemistry has managed to theorize about and demonstrate. While I don't doubt the existence of electrons or question many of the things physicists assert about them, I doubt that physics has that intimate a knowledge of them so as to make such a claim.  I'd say you have to at least have an actual confirming observation, including a number of indirect observations in different contexts, of something before you can claim to "know" something, to demonstrate it through observation of the universe or observe in a repeatable experiment.

And since science is supposed to reveal the state of the natural universe, I would like to question someone of his expertise on a good part of that experimental evidence which seems to me to be based on some extremely artificial conditions, such as smashing atoms into each other at extremely high energies and velocities to blow them apart, some of which I wonder if there is really a natural analogue of in the known universe.  I'd wonder what the difference between electrons in their typical, natural conditions and those which are put under such atypical conditions might be and how much of the information you got from that state of things can tell you about more typical conditions under which atoms and subatomic particles exist.  I've never heard anyone ask that question before, though it wouldn't surprise me if it had occurred to someone else before I wondered about it.

I would guess that if he were pressed, he'd have to admit that what we know of electrons can't really discern if they are different in ways that might be significant if we could discern them more deeply in nature than we can now.  That is if we could master the equations and concepts which comprise the "knowledge" we might then have of them.  We don't know if they may fall into distinctly different types or kinds or perhaps exhibit some level of individuality.  The image he projected in his quip may be about as complete as the crude classifications of human beings that some of the worst of biology and the so-called social sciences have made of us, ignoring our individuality and differences. Or how 19th century biologists conceived of those cells they could barely make out under their microscopes.   

I do think that Weinberg's quip may have had in it what I doubt Carroll's claim did, an element of humility about the subject matter of Weinberg's specialty, in which the objects that are studied are taken as quite simple and undifferentiated whereas other sciences attempt to study vastly more complex entities such as, you know, the universe.  

Or organisms, everything from single-celled to the largest and most complex of multicellular organisms of many different body-types between and within species,  complex behaviors and changes over long lives and in relation to other very complex and (merely relatively) simple life forms and such things that may not really be alive, such as viruses. And how, at least in humans, learning and choices can make an enormous difference in how they are different and how they are the same.   

And, also, much of what biology studies is so complex that large parts of organisms and, certainly, as those function biologically and, even more so, in their environments, that even the most known aspects of them are a tiny fraction of what they are as living beings.  Science cannot comprehend even the entire life of one single cell either within a larger creature or as a single-cell organism.  Adding speculations about the parts of organisms which are truly and will almost certainly forever exist outside of what is observable such as consciousness, personal experience, change due to experiences and choices and preferences, the effects of unknown aspects of those on future biological functioning, if and how those are determined by past experience, etc. cannot and, I will say, will never really be susceptible to scientific methods of study and discovery, I don't think that there is much reason to think that most of life can ever be the honest subject of science.  Any claims of complete theories of biology or psychology or sociology or, in rapidly declining orders of reliability, anthropology and ethology, are pure and complete sci-superstition.   

Science, especially when it has been extended past where it honestly can presently been done,  has absolutely generated superstitions which, having the confident faith in "science" that some few areas of science have generated about some limited number of natural phenomena, are extremely potent and dangerous.

I think we never really appreciate how dangerous it is to use a word to mean quite different things, such as reliably and rigorously done science and those fields which are more given the title of science with all the substantial content of some idiot who is given an "honorary degree."  

Even most scientists who know better won't consistently and insistently distinguish between hard science (such as hard sciences are) and areas that are called "science" as a professional courtesy when there's little science to them.  That any of the "social sciences" are considered science has to count as one of the greatest of all scandals in science. But even many areas within conventional biology fall outside of that, even some of the most revered and orthodox of holdings of science.

Recently, I mentioned the anti-vaxx superstition that was set off by a disastrously bad and fraudulent paper that was published in The Lancet, one which got at least hundreds of thousands killed in the United States, Sweden and other places in the context of Covid.  

I also noted that in both of those supposedly sophisticated countries, there was a distinct aspect of Darwinism, the theory of natural selection, in the death count, as well.  Trump's regime was advised by those credentialed in the dismal science of economics, specifically those who explicitly claimed to be practicing "Darwinian economics."  And considering what Charles and Leonard Darwin said about the imaginary dysgenic effects of vaccinations, opposing universal vaccination, they weren't unjustified in naming their scientific superstition, that.*  And that was hardly the only deadly superstition set off by the theory of natural selection. I have repeatedly demonstrated here, using the primary documentation from Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, (look it up in my blog, if I linked the whole thing would be red) and many others including one of the vilest of the Nazis, Reinhardt Heydrich, giving a natural selection argument for killing all Jews at the Wannsee Conference where the industrial genocide of the Jews was planned.  The theory of natural selection has repeatedly motivated attempts to cut entire populations of human beings out of the human future.  

Steven Weinberg is also famous for his claim that "for good people to do evil, that takes religion," probably a claim made out of the typical post-war college credentialed population's ignorance of the primary documentation, given that the Nazis, both by practice and by claim, were not motivated by religion but by what they understood of science.  That's not deniable in any honest way when you read the primary documentation.  Many of them were not only highly credentialed and hired as faculty in the sciences by some of the world's greatest universities, they were knowingly and intentionally engaged in the genocides of the political and military Nazi regime, supplying them with scientific justification for their mass murders, some of that having been also supplied with scientific arguments by scientists outside of Germany such as Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul. A number of them, even some of the worst, not only kept their university positions after the fall of Nazism, but at least one was given a Nobel prize in science, Konrad Lorenz.  

And it's unquestionable that Hitlers rivals in mass murder, the Stalin and Mao regimes, the lesser but still formidable genocidal regimes of Marxism such as in Cambodia were motivated by a totally different stream of would-be scientific assertion from the social sciences.  In the 20th century, any regime that sought to replace religion with science could be counted on to murder millions and millions of people.  His fellow scientists who were active as weaponeers, giving the world the means of killing all of us in a day, were frequently atheists and materialists. Time may yet prove that science has been the deadliest thing that human culture has ever given rise to.  The old argument, such as was used to defend the gas weaponeer Fritz Haber, that his development of nitrogen fertilizer saved more people than his gas weapons killed may not hold for nuclear physics.  In the immediate aftermath of WWI, the war which made him a war criminal, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  Science demonstrating that his war crimes were nothing scientists felt a need to consider.

If Weinberg spent less time on his anti-religious polemics and more time looking at the primary documentation of the Nazi and other genocides, he might have realized that.  And I'd admit that Weinberg is generally a few steps up when it comes to knowing something about things outside of his narrow specialty than many of his younger colleagues and contemporaries, he has some actual philosophical erudition.  As I quoted Sabine Hossenfelder recently, he has some knowledge of the limits of science which some others don't have.  

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

The conception of cells and single cell organisms and, especially DNA has changed drastically since the last advanced biology classes I took in college. I did well enough in those that one of my teachers encouraged me to consider changing majors, though I'd certainly have had to change a lot of what I believed when I took their classes if I'd taken that road.  Much of that was everything from overly simplistic to definitely wrong.  Some of what was known even then, through the work of the latterly famous Barbara McClintok and others, was actually suppressed because it didn't go along with the orthodoxy that reigned and, to a good extent, still does in much of biology.  The science described by James Shapiro in that lecture I posted the other day shows that the complexity of what happens on a molecular level in "simple organisms" and in the cells of multi-cellular organisms is enormously more complex than was imagined by anyone in the 19th or early 20th century, even by the majority of biologists into my adulthood.  

The complexity of just that very famous molecule and surrogate-god of atheism, DNA, and its manipulation by extremely complex and remarkably effective cellular action, on a level that human science would be hard pressed to imitate with the most sophisticated of conscious, rational thought and imagination and technique, has to make traditional materialist-atheists of a scientistic bent extremely uncomfortable when that's discussed.  James Shapiro has tangled with one of the more infamous of those, his University of Chicago colleague, Jerry Coyne who, I'm sure, bristles when Shapiro and others attribute consciousness (quoting McClintock, as I recall) to single-cell organisms or "cognition" to cells and their molecular and physical components.  As the physicist Arthur Eddington might have said, far from it being "turtles all the way down," it's consciousness all the way down.  

Though perhaps not all the way down.  I don't think it's possible or even reliable to attribute consciousness down to a lower order of physical organization, to inorganic molecules or atoms or subatomic particles, I'm deeply skeptical of the latest safety pod of materialism, "panpsychism" because if cellular consciousness might be apparent to us based on its level of sophisticated cognitive functioning, I don't think we can automatically or even reliably identify it outside of biological action. If atoms and subatomic particles have "consciousness" I doubt it would be anything like what the word means to us as the central aspect of our experience and being.  It was just a few years ago that there was a considerable furore in biology when a group of dissident scientists issued a declaration that animals, other than human beings were conscious, many of the hard core materialists among them apparently detesting the idea as much as Thomist theology detests the idea that animals have souls.**  Some of the really hard cases reject the idea that human beings, including, at least in their formal professional make-believe, themselves and their families.

I don't think the old simplistic nonsense of abiogenesis(to talk about pseudo-sciences) can be believable if you think even not that hard about it.  That anything like even the "simplest" of known organisms could come about by sheer chance, random chance (an even more widely propitiated god of atheists), or from knowably non-teleological material causes on the early-Earth.  If there was an extraordinarily simple "first organism" that gave rise to all subsequent life on Earth as a purely random-chance assemblage of molecules, it was no kind of life form that has ever been observed by science.  The idea that it was some imaginary naturally assembled RNA or DNA or even a few random amino acids that just came together would seem to be of such  incredibly remote probability so as to make that idea less believable than the idea that it happened by intelligent design.  Now that cognitive behavior is seen as necessary for even the most rudimentary of cellular functions, given the seeming improbability of any abiogenetic scheme of things which have been peddled as science, the idea that God created life at least has a definite origin for the input of cognitive possibility into it.  It's not science and it never could be but, then, neither is any materialistic-atheist scheme dreamed up by Oparin or Urey or Miller or anyone else.  It couldn't be science because they have no means of observing that original organism (which, I, by the way, believe in while admitting that's not a scientific idea, it's one of conjecture and imagination).   I reject the idea that you can do science in the absence of observation and testing and measurement and honest, NON-IDEOLOGICAL analysis.  I respect science for what it can honestly do, I reject it when it is not based on observation, measurement, etc.  I especially reject it when it is based on the only ideologies that have successfully been injected into science, economic interests and atheist materialist ideology being the most successful of those pollutions.  

*

There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.  

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

When Leonard Darwin, his son, ran for a seat in Parliament, he ran against universal vaccination, luckily, unlike in so many districts in the U.S. now, he lost.

There is also the fact that Charles Darwin, himself, admitted that the theory of natural selection was inspired by his reading of the pseudo-scientific economic theories of Thomas Malthus.  The theory that was generated in the pseudo-science of economics is a constant and continuous valuation of living beings on a scale of economic utility and value.  His use of the economic activity of animal husbandry, with its inherent practice of early killing those which are not chosen for breeding stock, and plant selection and hybridization as the entirely artificial and entirely intentional analogy and inaptly chosen demonstration of "natural" selection only ties those ties to economics tighter and unites them with the immediate product of the belief in natural selection, eugenics.

** As I understand it, Thomas Aquinas reasoned that since humans in the afterlife didn't need to eat, that animals were obviously superfluous in the afterlife, so they had no souls.  From there the idea became common in Western thought.   Considering how often Aquinas was called an ox, you'd have thought he'd have more of a feeling for animals.  I can't imagine anyone who has had a close relationship with an animal could really miss that they have a soul, though apparently most do.  While I doubt that there would have been much less brutality and murder of animals even if he'd concluded that they did have souls, it was an idea that certainly didn't make those who believed it less callous in their treatment of animals.  But, then, when Aquinas experienced a mystical experience late in his life, he told other monks that his enormous theological-philosophical work was mere straw.  As I understand it, he stopped writing at that point.

Friday, March 8, 2024

Oh For Frigs Sake, I Don't Want To Go Over Simp's Old, Tired, Reused Shtick Again

For anyone who wants to see what I had to say about the over-sold "genius" of Ernie Kovacs can go to one of my less used alternative blogs.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Strip The Goddamned Supreme Court Of Its UnConstitutional Powers To Destroy Democracy

 A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. 

Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left. 

I do not forget the position, assumed by some, that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court; nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding, in any case, upon the parties to a suit, as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the government. 

And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. 

At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Abraham Lincoln:  First Inaugural Address 

It's time to strip the Supreme Court of its usurped powers of nullification.  They're not only doing it to duly adopted laws now, they're doing it to parts of the Constitution, itself. 

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Garret Baker - The Shepherd

The Shepherd 

 

Jim and Louise, a happily married young couple have just moved into a new house with their baby girl, Beth. However, when they receive an unexpected visit from the loquacious Darragh, things start to unravel.

With themes of an adult nature and language some might find offensive, 

Stephen Rea played Darragh
Katie Davis was Louise
Jim was played by Rory Keenan
Music was by Mark Hendrick
Sound supervision was by Philip Cooke
The Shepherd by Garret Baker was directed by Seán Rocks.

Series Producer of Drama On One is Kevin Reynolds

Your god Fails To Perform - Hate Mail

YOUR SNARK CAN BE answered very simply by citing something that the eminent expert in cellular biology, James Shaprio said in a recently posted lecture on Youtube.  The title given to the lecture is "How Biology Brings Cognition Into Evolution."  It comes very early in the lecture but I'll recommend you listen to the whole thing several times, James Shapiro is always worth listening to and trying to understand.   Maybe I'll transcribe more of it someday.   This is only the beginning of why just repeating "random chance" doesn't cut it. 

By "cognition" I mean action based in knowledge.

How does cellular and genome modification occur in evolution?  which is my specialty. And the fact is that it occurs organically (biologically) it doesn't occur randomly!  It's not accidents, it's not physics, it's biology. And we'll see that as we go on.

Random mutation cannot explain evolutionary variation.  If we assumed an impossibly high mutation rate a positive variation of one-percent, which is orders of magnitude too high and we're just looking at random mutations in the genome, in the DNA, to make a sequence of ten base-pairs would have a probability of one in ten to the twenty.  It would take one in the twenty generations to make a sequence of ten base-pairs. And one can't build a genome on that basis.

We know that in organismal reproduction 99.9 percent of all incorporation errors in the DNA are removed by replication proof-reading systems, which are biological systems.  They scan the DNA, they detect changes in the double helix and they detect mis-pairing  and they remove the newly incorporated incorrect nucleotide. So, that's cognition in action in reproduction.

And also, more than 99 percent of the "spontaneous" mutations that occur, so-called spontaneous mutations it turns out are enzymatically induced by various kinds of mutated polymerases or enzymes which modify the bases in the DNA and when those functions are removed we see a drop in so-called spontaneous mutation rate.  

So biology is central to genome change.  


I'm giving you that quote for several reasons, first is that one of the finest of living experts in this area has said "random mutation" can't do what it is claimed to do in the conventional neo-Drainist (and, in fact, the old-fashioned Darwinist) doctrine must depend on it doing for their theories to work.  It's clearly mathematically impossible to explain evolution in those terms.  On top of that there is the resistance to allowing those "spontaneous" imaginary random mutations to be passed on except in the most rare of instances and that even a large number of those will be caused by irregularities in the cellular chemistry which, when removed, the rate of such "spontaneous mutations" drop.

In this the specific type of "random chance" which the old-line materialist claims inserted wherever the materialist has no explanation is the mutation rate.  'RANDOM CHANCE' being one of the many atheist gods of the gaps used in exactly the same way that atheists accuse religious believers of using God.  Only as "random chance" can be known not to work and the more than slight implication of James Shapiro that the very cellular mechanisms that regulate the replication of DNA is cognitive in nature, attributing that to God is a lot more intelligent than empowering numbers to do what Shapiro has demonstrated they can't do.  If, as he says, that is controlled by biology and not "physics" then it is clearly not controlled by probability mathematics.  

If "DNA" can't do what neo-Darwinism insisted it had to do to produce the enormous evolutionary diversity that we know arose, when some of the necessary physical mechanisms needed to do what you guys insist it does do in that case, when it has a far longer time-scale to do it in, the idea that it can account for the instantaneous experience of having new ideas and immediately putting those into use, keeping in mind the rather good provisional definition of "cognition" given by James Shapiro, "action based in knowledge," there's not nearly enough time for DNA to do anything to produce physical structures in our brains to give rise to those ideas, those units of cognition because DNA is entirely too slow to account for the speed with which we think, though in your case perhaps that takes longer.  

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

The Validity of Science Is Utterly Dependent On Morality Which Science Cannot Demonstrate

IT IS SUCH a classic example of the limits of the abilities of science that the most fundamental statement of science as an unlimited entity cannot be sustained with science.  That ideology, scientism, is based in the faith that what science cannot prove cannot be known by human beings, a statement which is, itself incapable of being proved by science. It would have to be false if it were true, so it can't be true.  In the past I've given that statement as said by a man who should certainly have known better than to say it, the great mathematician and logician Bertrand Russell.  He certainly was able to understand that the statement collapsed under the inability of his all-powerful oracle, science, to support the claim of its definitive decisiveness in what can be considered known which proved that the statement was false.  

Every once in a while I go through a math or other textbook to see if I've still got it, I'm doing that right now and so far it would seem I've still got at least a college frosh level of algebra.  At my age it's reassuring to find that out.  It's a book that has a lot of basic set theory in it so evaluating statements as to whether they're true or false through their mathematical support is in my mind.  But even that activity doesn't make much use of the idea that you should prefer a statement of truth over a false statement.  Math, like science might be able to help you decide if something is true or false but it can't tell you why you should prefer the truth nor can it give you a reason to prefer truth over falsity, it obviously didn't inform Bertrand Russell as to why he should prefer the truth that science can't be the sole means of finding truth because the statement that it is the sole means of doing that that can't be demonstrated with science.  

Science, as a method of finding reliable information about the physical world can be a very powerful means of finding information of superior reliability in those areas it can be practiced at any given time.  But science, not even math is a stand-alone entity, both depend on a far broader range of human experience than either of them can contain, the idea that either of those is capable of being a totalizing or monistic system is sheer stupidity.   The idea that either are an entity independent of human minds is as imaginary as Russell's orbiting teapot or almost everything that comes out of FOX Lies. 

Science always has to be done within the limits of what can be observed, measured and honestly analyzed, when it strays far from that the chances of what is asserted by scientists being true falls as certainly as it does in any other field of human activity when objective verification can't be had.  Science done without that quickly become nothing much but a series of ideological holdings as it so often does when there is an over extension outside of what can be effectively observed or measured or honestly analyzed, in my lifetime one of the most significant of those struggles surrounded the completely speculative neo-sciences of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in which the assertions of the ultra-Darwinists (as their opponent Stephen Jay Gould called them) could never be confirmed because no one can go back through the tens, scores, even hundreds of millions of years during which evolution happened to trace the persistence of "traits" alleged to have survived into the most distantly related species, everything from ants to human beings and even more distant ones.  It is impossible to even identify such proposed shared "traits" as being the same thing in the species which supposedly share them.  It's impossible to tease out whether or not many of the "traits," especially those invovling alleged behaviors are really there or if they are imagined to be in one or both of the speices by a scientist motivated to see what they want to.  That last thing is something which is ubiqitous in the supposedly scientific study of "behavior" and other aspects of mental activity, especially likely when one or more of the species is inarticulate and can't report on the internal experience of that "behavior" or mental activity.  In fact, even when the organism can articulate that it only adds a whole host of other problems.  If, as is so often done, the behavioral scientist uses college students as their subjects, many of whom may well have some idea of what the study might want to be there.  I had an aquaintance who annoyed his psychology prof by pointing out that many of the studies they discussed in the class he was taking were done on Yale students who couldn't comprise a legitimate sample of the human population, at that time they were uniformly males, just as one of the problems with the validity of it.  

Another thing I do once in a while is look at the latest postings on the very active blog Retraction Watch, one of the few blogs which doesn't seem to have suffered much of a fall off in current and sometimes very hot new content and which doesn't seem to ever lack for informed, interested and insightful readers.  While quite a bit of the stuff that gets retracted is done so through honest mistakes, much of it is a result of clear and obvious fraud and fraud which becomes quite obvious once there has been what there should have been before it was published,  rigorous review of the methodology and substance of the study or experiment which was retracted.  Quite a bit of that right now concerns obvious fraud involving the dishonest use of photographs and images which could not have been used by those publishing the paper without their intending to commit fraud, TO LIE, IN PLAIN ENGLISH.  

As well as being a methodology, an ideology and even an atheist substitute for religion, science is a profession, one which in a professional or academic context carries enormous financial and professional motives to publish something, anything, academia tying advancement and even retaining a professional engagement on the requirement that you publish, no matter whether or not it is legitimate or even honest.  There are a whole host of professional practices that will add to the professional record of an academician, publishing supposedly original work (plagiarism and copying are also covered by Retraction Watch), acting as a peer reviewer, being involved with a professional journal, etc.  And that's on top of everything else a scientist is supposed to do to get and retain a job and, they hope, advance in the profession.  One of the greatest scandals of the recent spate of scandals in science is the grotesque laxity of what so-called "reviewers" review so as to get their colleagues published.  I've mentioned before that during the Marc Hauser scandal I asked a biologist friend of mine how his reviewers could have failed to look at the videos of the "behavior" he was describing, what proved that he had lied about what his very influential papers claimed he was seeing in the lab.  She told me that reviewers never look at that kind of thing, they take it on faith that their colleagues are being honest about that kind of thing, they just look to see if the reported results are in line with the claims made about what they saw.   Clearly that faith would often fail the truth test if it were tested in line with what scientific method is claimed to be.  

In the brawls I got a on many a Scienceblog and many a play-lefty blog frequented by scientistic materialist-atheists, I was decreasingly surprised to find out the extent to which honesty was beside the point when discussing science or anything else with them.  I can't say that my former assumption that atheists don't lie more than the general population survived the new atheism, my experience of arguing with so many of them wouldn't support the idea that they especially value the truth, especially among the true believers in science as an ideology, their ideology, their religion.  That was true whether the atheist was a scientist or mathematician who allegedly valued science for its method which is alleged to be a heightened method for discerning the truth, I never found they had an especially well developed passion for the truth no matter where it lay, especially when it could be demonstrated to lie somewhere other than where they wanted it to.  In that they are not especially different from the general run of human beings.  The difference is that they claim to be better than that by virtue of their higher sciencyness.  In that they are no better than the frequently encountered whited supulchers of conventional religiosity.  In the age of Trump and the pseudo-Christianity of his fascists, no one could honestly go through this exercise without mentioning them.  Perhaps the fact that religion and its methods can discern that it is a sin to tell a lie makes the religious liar more wicked than the scientific one, though they'd certainly pretend that they were better than them.   To me a liar is a liar, especially when what they lie about is so dangerously consequential.  One of the recent listings on Retraction Blog was a paper alleging that there were serious health problems from taking Covid vaccinations.  In that the two kinds of lying intersect at a mountain of corpses from those who bought into fatal lies.  The ground for that was set in the scientific fraud of a British doctor who got published in the Lancet, one of the most prestigious of all science publications, one whose paper was retracted but well after it set off a horrific and deadly superstition and cult which is entirely relevant to the Ivermectin cult.  And it has far reaching consequences, I recently found out that one of my relatives needed to be treated with Ivermectin and had trouble getting it as a consequence of its use by the anti-vaxx, Trump chumps.  He had to climb through extra hoops to get it for one of its licensed uses in the United States.  

Science, to be any good at all, depends on what it cannot generate but which is properly a religious holding, that you should tell the truth and you shouldn't lie.  It's not much use without that.

Monday, February 26, 2024

Hate Mail - The Stupidity At The Blue Blog

used to be fun to write about but it's just boring now.   I mean, they believe what Simps says without ever verifying what he says so how interested in the truth could they be?

They can soak their heads.   

I'm planning on posting a real piece tomorrow.   Oddly enough, it's on the topic of science being reliant on a moral value that science can't support, the need to tell the truth. 

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Someone Writes To Me

 that Simps says that I write like old people have sex.   

As if he'd know.