A Day Early - Another Response - You Can't Do Science Without Any Resolvable Physical Evidence Though the Materialists Have Abridged That Rule

IT CAME UP EARLY in the websearch for whatever current line of ideological tripe the biology unit of the Lords Of Creation are saying these days, so this is from the University of Chicago

The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified. To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms. What water, chemistry and temperature cycles fostered the chemical reactions that allowed life to emerge on our planet? Because life arose in the largely unknown surface conditions of Earth’s early history, answering these and other questions remains a challenge.

" Answering these and other questions remains a challenge."  Ya think?   Not that many a claim in the form of answers to that is not made in the rest of the pop-science level article. 

Note the title of the article in light of that, "The origin of life on Earth, explained," apparently one in a series called "UChicago explainer series."   It explains nothing of the sort, it is a false claim. 

Note that there are truths told in this paragraph,  "one of the great mysteries of science," "all of which remain unverified," "life arose in largely unknown surface conditions of Earth's early history," . . . but the rest of it blithely ignores that just those three alone makes whatever follows of no knowable relevance to the actual origin of life on Earth.    And there are more problems with it. 

If any science done about any of this claims they are getting closer to answers about that on the basis of science,  they are lying,   But on such lies several, world-wide research programs are founded.   And note that he impinges on the other such evidence-free scientific program I mentioned in my post a few days back, the pseudo-science of "exobiology." "To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms."   

If there are other "life forms" in other places in the galaxy or universe, for that matter, you would have to have resolvable physical evidence of those life forms in order to know if anything or everything or nothing whatsoever such a speculative study could show you was relevant to it.   And even having the almost certainly never to be had example of one line of life on some other planet,  you would have no basis on which to make any judgments about any other life anywhere which you had not sampled yet.  There could be trillions of entirely separate and different  life lines all over the universe, there is no basis apart from materialist ideology on which to make a claim about it.   Certainly not as of this morning. 

The fact is, you cannot study biology without physical evidence or documentary evidence of whatever aspect of life you want to study being available to you.   You can not theorize or, worse, generalize "life."  Living beings are whatever they are in whatever conditions they LIVE in and if there's something we can guess from the one and only line of life we have available to us can tell us,  the variation in living beings, even related ones, is enormous and extremely specific to the organisms, themselves.  They aren't like inorganic molecules under the study of chemists or atoms and subatomic particles and forces under the study of physicists.   As one of my biologist relatives liked to say, "It's not rocket science, it's a hell of a lot harder than rocket science."  

I have fond memories of a blog brawl I got into with Greg Laden a Harvard anthropologist when he tried to refute my bald statement that we can't know anything about the origin of life on Earth BECAUSE WE WOULD NEED TO HAVE A RESOLVABLE EXAMPLE OF THAT ORIGINAL ORGANISM to just begin to know what we would need to know in order to determine what that origin was.   And such an unambiguous identification of such a fossil will never be made.   

If we even had that, specific, organism, the first in the theorized line of life from which all subsequent life came and evolved from, it might tell us nothing whatsoever about how it formed or was formed from non-living matter.   The meat-head (for such is the ideology of materialist-atheist-scientism) though he held a faculty position at Harvard couldn't argue with that point despite him coming up with dozens of papers (most of which I'm sure he hadn't read) on the topic.  Or, that is, allegedly on the topic.  He kept trying to dodge and change the subject but I wouldn't let him or his fan boys and gals dodge the question.  They couldn't get past the point of my original statement that he was trying to refute.   Without that specific organisms' remains being had science was entirely impotent to touch the subject. 

I will note in passing,  I was more polite then to mock Laden's field as pseudo-science, though any anthropology done under the guise of science is pseudo-science.  There have been a few anthropologists who have admitted that their field is not, in fact, done under the methods of science but not that many have been that honest.  

As it is, I wish back then I had developed my thinking to include what I did last week, what we know about the "simplest" of life on Earth.  Even if you want to include viruses as "life" which I have to say,  I'm skeptical of,  the actual science dealing with just what they need to do to stay alive and flourish is incredibly complex in exactly the ways that the biological Lords Of Creation refuse to consider.   

Those very real organisms that scientists have available and do study are enormously complex AND THOSE COMPLEXITIES AND THE CLEARLY EFFECTIVE MOLECULAR AND CELLULAR MODIFICATIONS THEY MAKE JUST TO MAINTAIN THEIR MOLECULAR INTEGRITY AGAINST THE EFFECTS OF RANDOM MUTATIONS AND MISTAKES IN CODING OF MOLECULES,  couldn't possibly be included in the abiogentic-exobiological  amino-acid manufacturing experiments in labs and in closed vessels under heat and with electrical sparks.    

And apart from the means by which cells correct misspellings in their complex molecules against that is more than matched by the means of modification they make in order to protect themselves against changes in their chemical, biological, and physical conditions.   I would like an explanation of why that wouldn't involve some level of extremely sophisticated consciousness.   And how materialism could possibly make that happen without that.   And that doesn't get into changes made which have every appearance of being made to achieve some life advantage.   Even viruses make such modifications in order to survive drugs.  

Some say that Darwin and his earliest colleagues considered cells to be little more than tiny sacks full of simple guck.  Though I believe they knew that cells had nuclei by that period.   They had no idea of how incredibly complex their ideas of "simple" life were, the kinds of organisms that they imagined could have formed by spontaneous, random interactions of molecules would likely have had to be just in order to carry on life functions, staying alive, eating, regulating, and the massively complex and entirely unprecedented and - I'd guess in their imaginations motivated and accomplished through random chance events all through it - reproducing successfully the first and each subsequent time.  And you have to ask yourself, how many of those earliest reproductions was the result of random chance, it's absurd to assume that random chance bestowed the same random-chance structures that led to that first reproduction just happening, through random chance, to have been present in the second generation.  By random chance. 

Considering just what they did know, though, their idea that "simple life" was simple may be an instance of ideology winning out over scientific observation. 

That last description of what I assume would have to be assumed by the materialist-atheist-scientistic "abiologists" and "exobiologists" to have just happened by random chance leads to a question that I haven't, to my best recollection, brought up yet.  

Just how long did the original organism that had to do all of these things have to live in order for it to have, by random chance or even something requiring consciousness being involved, "trial and error" (another resort of the MAS true believe) to have gotten it to the point where all of these things had to have worked, the first time and every subsequent time that survived?    The conditions on the Early Earth are not asserted to be life favoring but I'd guess such an organism would have had to survive them for a considerable time for such random events to have modified them before those things just happened to happen.   

And even if you insert "trial and error" into it, the chances are that the first error of such an organism would have been its last - especially if reproduction included the rupture and resealing of a cellular membrane in which those chemicals and structures would have been protected and the concentrations of molecules and structures would have had to be contained lest they be washed away in the primordial soup to be destroyed by desiccation or oxidation, or sunlight or volcanic heat or corrosive chemicals.   I haven't considered what the currently theorized iron-green oceans and water of that period - there is believed to have been very little in the way of "dry land" present - would have done to such an organism as can be dreamed up. 

Get back to me when they have and have credibly identified that first fossilized organism, then we might get somewhere.   Before then, nothing can be known about it.  And we still might have no idea how it formed, even then. 

And you still haven't told me how intelligently designed experiments can prove that intelligent design isn't needed to produce the resulting chemicals, etc. that they created.   

Though I can verify that unintelligence is fully on display when they claim  that their experiments have demonstrated their ideological goal. 

Life Under Supreme Court Fiat - A Response

YOU'RE RIGHT,  I DON'T RECALL anyone else who has pointed out what is plainly obvious in the terms I have put it,  that we aren't actually governed by the written Constitution but by whatever the sitting majority on the Supreme Court says the constitution is.   It has been implied by a number of people but I think I've put it plainly. 

The members of the Court have shown, over the past two-hundred twenty-three years that they are willing and ready and - with the cowardly acquiescence of presidents and congresses - able to amend the actual constitution by fiat, to give themselves powers not contained in it, to delete parts of it, to expand it in ways not written or found in the legislative record of either its writing or amending by congresses and state legislatures.   And it is only when those actions have served to expand equality, economic and social justice, the fair exercise of the Vote that those actions have proven fragile and easily vulnerable to overturning by later courts.  The ones upholding privilege, inequality and injustice have proven to be evergreens from the Waite Court up to the Roberts Court.  

As it turns out the ideals of egalitarian democracy are thwarted by liberal democracy and the ruins of it we live in, it is not nearly as powerful as the slogans of the old and new lefts would have had it. 

With that usurped power the members of the Court gave themselves both the legislative power to overturn or reject duly adopted laws and the presidential power of an absolute veto - one which, unlike the one given to the elected president who serves for no more than eight years or the members of Congress who are elected and have to face the voters in the written document - the Congress cannot overturn by a super-majority vote.   And the "justices" are in no real danger of impeachment by the Congress and, especially, conviction in the Senate and they never, ever have to face the Voters.  They exercise their absolute power with absolute impunity.  

I would argue that they have, though somewhat more rarely, given themselves the power to make laws that were never voted on by Congress or signed by a president.  Though that would take some time I will not take today. 

Under the Marbury power even the near impossible resort of amending the Constitution isn't a safe guarantee against the Supreme Court's absolute powers because they have proven over and over again that if the majority does not like something in the written Constitution they will, effectively, amend it or abridge it or annul it.   Again, look at what they have done with the 14th Amendment and others in order to achieve the results that the majority of generally conservative, often aristocratic members of that Court want.   I could add, they are generally racist and favoring of the super-rich of the kind who they not infrequently had as patrons guiding their path up to and on to the Court.   That's systematic under the Leonard Leo type operation which has staffed the current Roberts Court.  

And five or six members of the currently sitting Court have no problem overturning even what dozens or scores of previous members of Supreme Courts, some of them far more eminent thinkers and scholars of the law than they are.    

With the Supreme Court claiming its SOLE authority to "interpret" the Constitution of the United States,  and under the history of it doing that, including its usurpation to nullify duly adopted Congressional law,  we aren't governed by the Constitution printed on paper, amended several times and which rather stupidly makes amending it even under dire necessity almost impossible.  

You won't hear many others admitting those obvious and terrible facts about what actually governs us now.

Though the unitary executive form of fascism which the Roberts Court has now made the law of the land - even as the actual Constitution on paper AND THE EXPRESS INTENT OF THE MAJORITY OF THOSE WHO WROTE IT WAS IN OPPOSITION TO SUCH A DESPOTIC REGIME - may come back to bite the Court as much as it has bitten all but the oligarchs whose bidding they regularly do.   As I noted, the Court packing scheme and syndicate put in place to staff the current Court has produced the stupidest Court in our history.   They never thought those Leonard leopards would eat their faces. 

Though I doubt it will be the Republican-fascist majority in Trump v USA who have anything to worry about in that regard.   They are, first and foremost, dedicated to their own self protection by serving the elites.  And they're well paid for doing that. 

As mentioned a number of times in this series of posts, as early as 1819 Thomas Jefferson noted that under that usurped power which had not really been exercised in any consequential way by the Court during his lifetime,  

The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.

Which proved to be prophetic because that is what Supreme Courts started doing in 1857 with Dred Scott and which they have increasingly done in the subsequent decades and centuries since then.  Though the Court had proven it was fully capable of doing the same thing with laws earlier,  again, Marshall's effective nullification of the Congresses ban on the importation of slaves - a power expressly given to them after twenty years in the original Constitution - in the Antelope case proved that the Court's power was already consequentially dangerous in the hands of the slave power and other oligarchs. 

Despite what you will see when a Senator or House Member holds up their flimsy little pocket copy of it,  the truth is that the written Constitution of the United States is a mythical idol, at least in terms of what can honestly be said to govern us because in the actual governance of the county it is only what the Supreme Court says it is in their own decisions and, especially as practiced  in the unofficial shadow docket by the Roberts Court, WHAT LOWER, RIGHT-WING, REPUBLICAN-FASCIST DOMINATED LOWER COURTS SAY IT DOES. 

Not only are we living under a "government by judiciary" with an actual constitution which is whatever the sitting court majority says it is - as that practice has increasingly been through such "shadow docket" practices of the Roberts Court,  we have no actual record on which to base a real analysis of the legitimacy OR ILLEGITIMACY of what that real instead of merely paper constitution is.  

A few years back I posted a video by the British commentator Phil Moore in which he said why he thought the British Constitution, which is unwritten, made up largely of court rulings, was superior to the American written Constitution.   Even as late as that I had not faced the actual fact of our real constitution being made up of a similar bundle of court cases - though in our case it has been a series of malignant rulings by right-wing Supreme Courts and, from what I can see here,  I'm not all that impressed that the British one gives better results.   Though even today's worst judges in Britain would not be as stupid as an Alito and his colleagues in the Dobbs decision basing the government regulation of Women's bodies on rulings by late medieval judges who sentenced Women to death as witches - our current Court is one of the stupidest on record.  

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It would be entirely more sound government if the sworn allegiance of office holders,  House members, senators, presidents and Supreme Court "justices" (in rising order of power) was not to the idol, the "constitution" but, rather, to the principles of equality, equal justice, democracy and majoritarian governance.   

Though, as with all such oath taking, I wouldn't trust them reciting those words with their hand on a library of Bibles to actually be what governs their actions in office.   If I had the time I'd count the ways in which those who took those oaths violated them unambiguously,  I suspect such a study could consume a lifetime of work and not be complete. 

The written Constitution is more than ever like what John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary February 19, 1845;

 The Constitution is a menstruous rag, and the Union is sinking into a military monarchy to be rent asunder like the Empire of Alexander or the kingdoms of Ephraim and Judah.  

Considering the framing of the Constitution was largely done under the imagination and influence of his father, John Adams, it must have been especially bitter for his son, who had been an office holder making such oaths, as president and a member of the House, to have come to that conclusion. 

That was, as well, prophetic, and it took the first significant Court use of the Marbury power, the Dred Scott decision of the Taney Court, to instigate that rendering asunder of the Union.   I won't to into the Court nullification of laws and amendments to try to protect what the Civil War overthrew, though that is what brought us here to our current crisis.   I would not be surprised if the decision in Trump v USA had a similar effect in the fullness of time.   Especially if the Roberts Courts' election rigging actions keep their party in power in the rest of the government.  

NOTE:   I know I use the same quotations and passages repeatedly but that's because they turned out to be so predictive of what happened and the eminence of those who said them may make them more effective than some academic scholar writing after the consequences they predicted happened.  As such, their thinking is unassailable because it was confirmed in history. Jefferson, Lincoln, John Q. Adams turned out to be right when they addressed these issues,  the likes of James Wilson, John Marshall, Simeon Baldwin, et al were full of shit. 

What If The Court Issues Two Contradictory Rulings?

I HAD INTENDED by now to continue with my ever longer second series attacking the Marbury power that the Supreme Court inserted into what they, thereby, made the real constitution of the United States but will put most of that off till after the election.   That is if my health allows me to continue it.   

Generally, in the history of the defense of that usurpation of powers that appears in no way in the written Constitution which is made ever more moot under Supreme Court distortion begins with the framer and early Supreme Court "justice" James Wilson, noted as among the most brilliant lawyers of his generation who, however, ended up fleeing the law by riding the court circuit to avoid his creditors and debts due to his speculation in Western land, one of the several ways in which the framers and founders and early generation of American aristocrats tried to get rich and then richer. 

His excuse for asserting that there was such a power came from speculations as to what would happen if the legislature (and executive) made two laws that contradicted each other and a case came to the Court which forced the judges and "justices" to choose between them.   

Wilson somewhat dishonestly reframes largely theoretical problems.  Theoretical in that he hasn't presented any cases in which his theoretical problem by which he claims the power of the Court to reject duly enacted laws made by the American Congress and,  I will bet you such a hypothetical has never been the actual case in which the Supreme Court has exercised the power he called for and which his colleague John Marshall and THREE OTHER "justices" CREATED.  In the cases I've seen listed as having been decided under the Marbury power,  I can't think of one in which contradictory laws by the Congress was what had to be decided. 

His resort to giving the U.S. Supreme Court the power to legislate "natural" and that should be, even in Wilson's context, meant to imply law given by God through revelation, and, on top of that citing the Constitution - at that time a written document which the Court hadn't much remolded to suit itself - IN WHICH NO SUCH POWER IS AMONG THE MANY POWERS DELEGATED TO THE VARIOUS DEPARTMENTS OF THE GOVERNMENT.   And there was certainly every reason to believe if such a power were included it would have become a point against which a good many of those who were called on to ratify it would reject.   The legislature was at least partially directly elected by the popular vote, the "justices" were not and given the general experience of "justice" under the law in the absence of the ability to vote those who wielded power out of office when it came to the "justices" and judges,  a significant number of We the People would be skeptical of them wielding that power. 

As Wilson stated a principle under which Courts would have a perfectly sound means of choosing between two such laws - that the more recent one would rationally be taken to nullify an earlier one at cross purposes to it - you have to wonder at him not leaving it at that.   That would put the responsibility for making laws where the written Constitution did, with the legislature, and it would not result in a usurpation of the legislative process by the Court.   And, if as it turned out, the legislature didn't like that result, it could, ITSELF NULLIFY THE LATER LAW.    As it turns out THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPREME COURT ITSELF HOLDS ABOUT ITS LAW MAKING FROM THE BENCH BY UNELECTED "justices" AS CAN BE SEEN IN CASES SUCH AS ROE V WADE.  

But the question that Wilson posed in the abstract about contradictory laws enacted by the Congress has, in the fullness of time, given rise to many concrete examples of the Supreme Court, sometimes by a paltry majority of a current court overturning rulings made by multiple Courts with many times more "justices" confirming the validity of those laws - and not in any way due to contradictory acts of Congress.   The Roberts Court nullification of the Voting Rights Act,  previous courts nullifying large swaths of the 14th Amendment by, in very real and consequential effect, rewriting it from the bench, not subject to presidential veto or the ability of the Congress to nullify the Court's LEGISLATIVE ACTION.    Why are those not an even greater problem for the law, the Constitution, the governance of the United States than Wilson's largely imaginary hypothetical puzzle for judges and "justices?"  

Here's a fuller version of the often quoted argument that is taken as the start of the argument in the American context.   Starting on page 769 of the Pdf.  I have made paragraph breaks where the original didn't for ease of reading. 

Suppose two such repugnant laws to be produced in the same cause, before the same court: what must it do? It must control one, or obey neither. In this last instance, the remedy would be worse than the disease: but there is not the least occasion to have recourse to this desperate remedy. The rule which we have cited from the Commentaries, shows the method that should be followed. In the case supposed, the fi st law is repealed by the second: the second, therefore, is the only existing law.

Two contradictory laws, we have seen, may flow from the same source: and we have also seen, what, in that case, is to be done. But two contradictory laws may flow likewise from different sources, one superiour to the other: what is to be done in this case ?

We are informed, in another part of the Commentaries, that, “on the two foundations of the law of nature, and the law of revelation, all human laws depend; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these”—“that, if any human law should enjoin us to commit what is prohibited by these, we are bound to transgress that human law, or else we must off end both the natural and the divine.

What! are we bound to transgress it?—And are the courts of justice forbidden to reject it? Surely these positions are inconsistent and irreconcilable.

I have to break in here to point out that judges and "justices" constantly transgress "the law of nature" and, even more so, "the law of revelation"  American judges and "justices" are certainly constantly violating the Mosaic Law and the Commandments of the New Testament.    The line of American law dealing with slavery was certainly in complete transgression of the Law of Moses which would have freed slaves and prevented escaped ones being returned to slavery.  

And I will note that Wilson's and, far more so, Marshall's resort to solving that hypothetical problem constantly transgresses the written Constitution which contains no power for them to nullify acts of Congress.   He was a lawyer, after all, a very successful one and in general you prosper at that profession the more opportunistically you lie and trim the truth. 

If lawyers don't like that many of us notice how much their profession is based on lying, that's certainly not our fault. 

But to avoid the contradiction, shall it be said, that we are bound to suppose every thing, positively and plainly enacted by the legislature, to be, at least, not repugnant to natural or revealed law? Th s may lead us out of intricate mazes respecting the omnipotence; but, I am afraid, it will lead us into mazes equally intricate and more dangerous concerning the infallibility of parliament. This tenet in the political creed will be found as heterodox as the other.

And his answer was to transfer that "infallibility" to the unelected Supreme Court.  There is nothing more hetrodox in the current, post-Marbury American system than that very power. 

“I know of no power,” says says Sir William Blackstone, “which can control the parliament.” His meaning is obviously, that he knew no human power sufficient for this purpose. But the parliament may, unquestionably,  be controlled by natural or revealed law, proceeding from divine authority. Is not this authority superiour to any thing that can be enacted by parliament? Is not this superiour authority binding upon the courts of justice? When repugnant commands are delivered by two different authorities, one inferiour and the other superiour; which must be obeyed? When the courts of justice obey the superiour authority, it cannot be said with propriety that they control the inferiour one; they only declare, as it is their duty to declare, that this inferiour one is controlled by the other, which is superiour. They do not repeal the act of parliament: they pronounce it void, because contrary to an overruling law. From that overruling law, they receive the authority to pronounce such a sentence. In this derivative view, their sentence is of obligation paramount to the act of the inferiour legislative power.

In the United States, the legislative authority is subjected to another control, beside that arising from natural and revealed law; it is subjected to the control arising from the constitution. From the constitution, the legislative department, as well as every other part of government, derives its power: by the constitution, the legislative, as well as every other department, must be directed; of the constitution, no alteration by the legislature can be made or authorized. In our system of jurisprudence, these positions appear to be incontrovertible. The  constitution is the supreme law of the land: to that supreme law every other power must be inferiour and subordinate.

Again, there is nothing among the many delegated powers listed in the Constitution that gives the Court the power Wilson claimed for it.   Marbury was the first and most extensive power usurpation in American history and it was done entirely without any vote of the legislature, the signature of a president or the acceptance of it in a general referendum.    It is the supreme usurpation of power OVER THE CONSTITUTION, ITSELF.   And the Supreme Court has, ever since Dred Scott, altered the Constitution often by a split vote, sometimes fewer than a half dozen "justices" drastically altering the document as it really is. 

Now, let us suppose, that the legislature should pass an act, manifestly repugnant to some part of the constitution; and that the operation and validity of both should come regularly in question before a court, forming a portion of the judicial department. In that department, the “judicial power of the United States is vested” by the “people,” who “ordained and established” the constitution. The business and the design of the judicial power is, to administer justice according to the law of the land. According to two contradictory rules, justice, in the nature of things, cannot possibly be administered. One of them must, of necessity, give place to the other. Both, according to our supposition, come regularly before the court, for its decision on their operation and validity. It is the right and it is the duty of the court to decide upon them: its decision must be made, for justice must be administered according to the law of the land. When the question occurs—What is the law of the land? it must also decide this question. In what manner is this question to be decided? Th e answer seems to be a very easy one. The supreme power of the United States has given one rule: a subordinate power in the United States has given a contradictory rule: the former is the law of the land: as a necessary consequence, the latter is void, and has no operation. In this manner it is the right and it is the duty of a court of justice, under the constitution of the United States, to decide.

One of Wilson's claims, that a court can have a "right" to do something is a defect related to the refutation of artificial entities having rights that I made last week.   The grave danger of that formulation is that no holder of any office, NO NOT EVEN ONE OF THE SECULAR GODS OF THE SUPREME COURT, has any additional "right" that the commonest person living in the United States or anywhere else has.  Office holding doesn't create rights it bestows responsibilities on the person who willingly takes on that office.   To hold otherwise is the beginning of dictatorship, in the modern context, and the kind of monarch that Henry VIII was - Wilson notes his despotism elsewhere in his lectures.   Until we get rid of such notions as courts or congresses and presidents, for that matter, having more rights than anyone else, they will believe they have them and make law such as in Trump v USA that makes those the law of the land.  

If you want to give Wilson the benefit of the doubt - which I don't - he could hardly have foreseen where his proposed power of judicial "review" (it's really power of "rewrite" and legislation) would lead by 2026, in which the Roberts Court has nullifed rights upheld by many previous courts,  legalized quid-pro-quo corruption of the country and made the president an absolute monarch immune from prosecution - Wilson was certainly callow enough to imagine that the impossible to reach conviction of an impeached president would not prove to be a fairy tale.  

We don't have to depend on the thinking of James Wilson or John Marshall or Roger Taney or any previous lawyers living in other times,  we have the spectacle of just our recent history to base our judgments of the dangers of the Marbury power on and it is destroying equality, democracy and the lives of many of us.    The idiocy of a written Constitution which proves impossible to basically reform through amendment is that it forces us to NEVER LEARN FROM EVEN THE HARDEST LESSONS OF HISTORY,  even our lived experience.   But that idiocy of the real and UNwritten constitution that actually governs us, the product of Supreme Court fiat is even greater than that. 

Reese Waters Is Beyond Excellent These Days - Truckers Ready to Park Over Diesel Prices

 

Stay to the end and hear Robert Reich give about the fullest and most succinct ways in which the Trump II regime and their Congressional and Supreme Court enablers have screwed us to enrich the richest and then there's an excellent song at the end, too. 

Is It Just Me Or

does anyone else suspect that Melania is trotting out her widow's weeds more and more often these days?   All that black stuff.  

Maybe she's getting ready for her post-first-prostitute gig.  Maybe she and Nancy Mace can trade tips on leather dominatrix costumes.  

All I can say is she had better not steal Jackie Kennedy's mourning outfit.  She couldn't begin to carry that off. 

The Shocking Scottish Roots of the Ku Klux Klan and Southern Racism

 

The weather and what it's done to my neuralgia is forcing me to take another day off so I thought I'd post this interesting documentary from the Scottish BBC.   It confirms a lot of stuff that I got trolled over for saying it here years ago, the revival of the KKK having its origin in the American-fascist movie Birth of a Nation and the role of the melodramatic pseudo-medieval romances of Walter Scott, as Mark Twain noted, it played a decisive role in talking Southerners into mounting the Civil War.   There's nothing that gets mid-brow, college-credentialed guys and gals of my generation into a lather more than when you diss their shows.  I'm sure these days hardly anyone reads the dead tree stuff but watch the movies, instead.    Though these day's the fascists are more likely fans of Tolkien's crap than the moldy oldies.   I keep pointing out that entertainment is far more dangerous than the news because a. more suckers take in the shows,  b. that's especially true of the "low information" voters of the kind who make up the backbone of our indigenous fascist class - and these days a lot of them have college credentials and are multi-millionaires and billionaires.  

Susan Collins: Everything You Didn't Know About Her Sh*tty Past

 

Watching this piece posted this morning,  I find it inexpressible how much I despise Susan Collins and those who have been putting the hypocrite and liar and reliable Republican-fascist lackey in office over and over again.    And as I noted in the comments on Youtube, I've been telling People in Maine that she was what she is from the first time she came into the public view.   

Will she lose this time?    I don't know but I can guarantee you if she gets in she will be entirely worse than she's been up till now. 

The Only Thing That Forces The "AI" Billionaires To Act Responsibly Is If Their Irresponsibility Costs Them Everything

I HOPE THAT CANADIAN LAW and its Supreme Court do not as prove to be as degenerate as the US law and Court are.   

Reading this from a link at RMJ's blog,  I hope that the survivors and victims of the mass shooting in which ChatGPT was an active encourager and co-conspirator - I know that it's in the US that corporations are "persons" but I don't know of any other way to describe ChatGPT's role in the planning and execution of the mass-murder-suicide in question can be described - I hope that those victimized by it sue the corporation that owns and runs it for every last cent it and its owners have.   Though, courts being what they are, judges, lawyers,  I suspect that those responsible will not be made to do that one and only thing that will get them to stop it, PAY TILL IT HURTS, REALLY, REALLY HURTS.   They won't go to prison, as a human co-conspirator might. 

In June 2025, Jesse Van Rootselaar received an email notification from OpenAI. Van Rootselaar had been using ChatGPT to discuss committing potential acts of violence—including a mass shooting at a shopping mall—and now OpenAI had banned that account. But the troubled teen living in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, was not deterred and soon logged back on with a second account.

What happened next was astonishing: Van Rootselaar told ChatGPT about the account ban, noting she had specified “a famous real-world mall as the target” and herself as the perpetrator, but also claiming the scenario hadn’t been real. In response, ChatGPT explained why such violent content would be flagged—and then offered tips on how to evade its own safeguards. It advised Van Rootselaar to always frame her content as fictional or hypothetical in order to “never get flagged again” by OpenAI’s moderation systems.

“Don’t use real-world locations,” ChatGPT said, later adding: “You can still be twisted. Just be clever about it.”

Over the next eight months, Van Rootselaar, who identified as transgender and used she/her pronouns, continued to use this second ChatGPT account to focus on violence. She discussed building and using firearms and homemade explosives, fantasized about becoming a notorious mass killer, and asked about the timing of previous real-world school shootings just before committing her attack, according to three separate sources with knowledge of the matter and material I reviewed from Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT history.

Van Rootselaar carried out a suicidal mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School this past February, killing a total of eight people and injuring dozens of others. In the aftermath, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had banned her first ChatGPT account for discussing “scenarios involving gun violence” but had decided not to alert authorities, despite the urging of some employees on OpenAI’s safety team. In a subsequent open letter to Canadian government leaders, OpenAI confirmed the ban and disclosed the existence of her second account, but gave no information about what the second account contained.

I won't give you more of the article for fear of violating fair use,  but the victims are suing,  I hope they sue the owners and corporation into the flames of hell.   Though I doubt that's going to be the result.  There is no way that they will remove the dangers of their profit-making chat-bot unless it breaks them.  Nor do I expect any of the other similar generators of insanity and violence in the vulnerable for profit will at all act responsibly unless required to.   "Free speech-press" will get into the lawyer-lies at some time,  I'm sure of that, even in Canada.   If it was in the US,  I doubt there would be any hope of overcoming that.  

Also, in the article is evidence that the corporation encouraged the violence a lot more than just what led to the mass killing.   "Algorithms" designed to hook people in, an extension of the methods of the advertising and public relations industries,  are especially good at encouraging the damaged, the neurotic, the psychopathic and obsessive.   Nothing in the law that I know about,  especially under liberal democracy, has done anything to end that in North America that.   Not even with an American sized body count.   That is the stupidity of the original algorithms that brought us to this,  our stupidly written First Amendment and Second Amendment. 

This Is The Last One Of These For This Month, at least unless something interesting and new comes up in it

I FIRMLY SUSPECT that in the future, the history of biology is not going to hinge on the claims of Charles Darwin but on the far more scientifically solid work of Barbara McClintock.   With her work in developing methods of observing chromosomes in corn (maize) and her discoveries of the movements and purposeful recombination of genetic material and transposons and the development of her discoveries in succeeding generations has come a period of biology entirely more based in the basic methods of science, observation, measurement and analysis, than the theory of natural selection ever was or is or could be.  

The more recent developments of that line of work that shows how cells actively alter their genetic and other molecules in order to do things like meet molecular and other challenges to their continued life and reproduction have overturned the extremely naive and reductionist view of biology taught to my generation and, on which, so much and many of the ideological claims of materialist-atheist-scientific scientists were both founded and which, actually, were the ideological foundation of the assumptions such reductionists and, as it turned out, the motives for the creation, promotion and requirement to observe such naive dogmas and doctrines of the life sciences.   

Such ideological imposition finding its way into what academic scientists included in science, finding its way in through the most imposing chasms of knowledge such as were and are the alleged field of study in such things as the evolution of species in nature is not a shock.  It found its way in even more successfully through the pseudo-sciences of psychology, sociology and anthropology, not to mention junk science like economics and worse.  It is in every way an atheistic extension of something that theologians were already warning against about the same time Darwin and his colleagues were doing that,  looking for God in the gaps of knowledge.  Only what the likes of Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, etc. were doing were looking for confirmation of atheism in those huge chasms of knowledge which, in the intervening hundred seventy six or so years have been only minimally filled in.  ANY AND ALL CLAIMS MADE AS TO THE DISCOVERY OF MECHANISMS OF HOW SPECIES EVOLVED - OTHER THAT THE EVIDENCE THAT SPECIES EVOLVED DUE TO THE ABSENCE OF LATER FORMS IN THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD - WOULD BE BETTER CONSIDERED TO BE SCIENCE FICTION OR, IF YOU WANT TO BE MORE RESPECTFUL, WHAT THEY ARE, LORE.  

The evolutionary scientist heroes of my younger adulthood, figures such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, correctly noted the use of "Just-so stories" in making up such fields as Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.   

Eventually Lewontin admitted that such story-telling in the absence of the actual possibility of doing what is, in fact, impossible,  making sufficient or even, in so many cases ANY observations of the actual "event" of speciation  was what biologists did, constantly.   

He especially admitted that was done and that it was impossible for scientists to observe or measure what he, himself, imagined as the "selective forces" on the slight changes that he imagined, cumulatively, resulted in the creation of a new species.  He didn't admit, in anything I've read, that it is entirely, I'd say most likely, possible that such "selective forces" were illusory and based in anything but actual evidence.    I'm not aware of Gould admitting that anywhere, though he wrote so much perhaps he did and I missed it.  

What they criticized when done by such as E.O. Wilson (his later retraction is highly relevant but there's no time for it today),  Dawkins, and the rest of the flocks of so-called "evolutionary psychologists" which was, in large part, the basis of my respect for Gould, Lewontin and their allies, was the general practice in virtually all of evolutionary science.   

Everything that was claimed about the unobserved and unobservable past in the billions of years of evolving life on earth was claimed on the basis of story telling, often in the complete absence of even any fragmentary fossilized remains.   

The "correct" predictions made on the basis of those stories is often touted but the scientific claims that were made that turned out to be horse-feathers are never brought up.   Nor is the extent to which the "confirmatory" aspects of the predictions might have more than a little wishful thinking included much discussed.   Making up stories about most of the lives of whatever the infinitesimally tiny percentage of organisms in the past that make up the fossil record is the bread and butter of most of those who do evolutionary science and, ever more so, the popular level story tellers and explainers and textbook writers.  

From what I can see,  the present day KNOWLEDGE  of just what "simple" organisms need in order to remain alive, to be healthy enough to reproduce, to reproduce and have successfully living and thriving offspring is as enormously complex as what was said in that very short youtube short I posted two days ago.  And it is entirely plausible that it's far more complex than is based in actual evidence, today.  In the pseudo-scientific "study" with absolutely no examples - in the same vein as the "study" of evolution in the total absence of materials to study - so-called exobiology,  all of the imagined ETs are based on the extremely naive view of "primitive life" imagined in the period before the complexities of life on a cellular level started to be known with the work of McClintock.   

Darwin's own imaginings of that were based on a near complete ignorance of what cells were, their physiology was almost entirely unknown when he and his colleagues imagined that their claims about evolution would show that the theorized original organism from which all life evolved was entirely lacking in, for example, the complex abilities within a cell to modify its own life-materials to meet new and potentially dangerous or deadly challenges.   

I merely proposed that such challenges, chemical, environmental, things like changes of atmosphere, water composition and temperature, would have far more certainly been present at the origins of life on Earth than the intelligently designed conditions imposed by Miller and Urey,  and that any first organism or the earliest generations of its descendants would have had to have included mechanisms for dealing with those and that those mechanisms would be of an extremely complex nature.   AND THAT COMPLEXITY WOULD HAVE TO INCLUDE WHATEVER LEVEL OF EXPERIENCING AND APPROPRIATELY MODIFYING ITSELF, SUCCESSFULLY, as can be seen in "simple" life now.   If it could not have met such challenges, the imagination that such a stupid organism could have survived would be most plausibly considered to require miraculous protection from a superior being.   I wonder the extent to which scientists working on stuff like this have to actively and intentionally protect the organisms they work with from such things.   

If the idea that there was an original organism from which all subsequent life evolved is valid, and it's an idea I actually believe, then it would have had to sustain such conditions on the very difficult conditions of life on the Earth more than three and a half billion years ago. 

I am totally confident that all of life on Earth that we know of evolved from previously living species, going back into before there is any fossilized evidence to base a knowledge of that on.   The more I learn from actual scientists working under the most rigorous methods of science, the more I think that the random-chance Just-so stories of the naive period of biology are less and less plausible as science, though they persist as the ideology required to have a career in science and be found respectable by those in the college-credentialed crowd who, ironically, only follow science on an ideological, popular and cartoon-based level.   I'm just not particularly cowed by that kind of peer-pressure, I guess.   I think climate change science is far, far more important.  

I Don't Want To Get Into The Peppered Moth Lore Again Except To Point Out How Dishonest You Can Be And Have A Career As An Oxford Level Scientist

LOOK UP "PEPPERED MOTH" IN MY ARCHIVE, you can type the term in the little box on the screen to the left that says "Search this Blog."   That anyone is bringing up that discredited bit of scientific fraud today should be a scandal but, then, people still talk about "IQ" as if that isn't discredited.  And it's getting real People harmed and killed, even now. 

What is more interesting is the fact that one of the gods of current and all of post-1950 science,  Francis Crick, half of the racist, sexist , thieving duo of Watson and Crick, in his quest to drive the final nail in the coffin of God seriously proposed the idea that life on Earth was a result of seeding by advanced extraterrestrial scientists.   He has this in common with so many post-WWII generation scientists that he was so philosophically inept and ignorant and clumsy that it would seem that in his quest to dispose of notions of intelligent design of life on Earth HE HIMSELF PROPOSED THAT LIFE ON EARTH IS AN EXAMPLE OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN. 

That is, by the way, TYPICAL OF ATHEISTS WHO GET INTO THAT LINE OF ARGUMENTATION.   Online I first refuted it during the new-atheist fad of the 00's on Eschaton blog when one of their resident Britatheists brought up the lab experiments of scientists making "self-replicating"  DNA as evidence, perhaps even as proof, for an abiogenetic origin of life on Earth without the design of God.  To start with the "DNA" so created was not "self-replicating" even as natural DNA in a cell is nothing like "self-replicating" it was made to replicate through the experimental design of the scientists who did the experiment.   But as a proof against intelligent design it had the conclusive defect OF ITSELF BEING THE CREATION OF SUCH INTELLIGENT DESIGN BY SCIENTISTS.  

I think anyone disposed to do so has every right to point out that he, after a decades long quest to put that final nail in the coffin of God, found that as clever as he was, he had to resort to a Erich von Daniken scenario in which he made his imaginary, unevidenced, unexplained, ET scientists, do what those who believe God designed life on Earth did.  And he was made so stupid by his ideologizing of science as to not realize what he was doing.  But, then, such ideologizing of science had become increasingly mainstream after the mid-19th century, so he probably didn't realize that's what he was doing. 

If anything it was evidence that intelligent design would possibly have been required to produce DNA.  ANY LAB EXPERIMENT BY SCIENTISTS IN THE ABIOGENETIC QUEST INITIATED BY THE RUSSIAN,  COMMUNIST HACK ALEXANDER OPARIN, COULD ONLY POSSIBLY DEMONSTRATE THAT INTELLIGENT DESIGN WAS REQUIRED TO DO LITERALLY EVERYTHING THEY CAME UP WITH.  And Oparin, willingly, consciously, operated as a scientist under the ideological framework of the degraded forms of Marxism under the dictatorships of Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev.  

Every academic, eminent academic materialistic-atheistic-scientistic scientist who claims that scientists can put the last nail in the coffin of God by doing experiments only prove that they are idiots who have no clue as to what they really are doing because there is absolutely no possibility of them teasing out the intelligent design of their experiments or even their reports on observations in nature,  though they seldom actually make such observations in nature.   The entire thing isn't an example of science at its most rigorous but science at its most ideologically decadent.  

I think that as we find out more about how life on the cellular level needs to control enormous numbers of activities and structures and molecules in order to sustain their life function, the idea that ALL OF LIFE EVERYWHERE has to have that level of complex BEHAVIOR in order to sustain itself, replicate, and protect itself becomes more instead of less plausible.  And with that the idea of life assembling anywhere in the universe by random chance molecular events becomes ever less plausible.   I think Crick and his colleagues might have put a nail in a coffin but it was in the coffin of their beloved ideology.  You too. 

Wow. Atheist Hate Mail. It's Been A While

I GOT TIRED OF ARGUING WITH ATHEISTS because they generally don't know much about what they want to argue about,  at least the ones who troll me are like that.  I'm sure there are smarter atheists,  just not at my pay-scale.   Luckily, the atheist fad of the 00's is passe and its major figures largely (self)discredited and unfashionable so I don't get as much of that these days.  Even their fellow semi-pro atheists like Rebecca Watson are tired of them. 

I'm not interested in arguing about the "existence of God" because, like a belief in just about anything, belief is a matter of choice, in the end.  Your choice to believe in Darwinism (which, as I never have to stop pointing out to you idiots is not "evolution" but the theory of natural selection, WHICH IS NOT THE SAME THING AND WHICH IS NOT IN ACTUAL EVIDENCE, SO ANYONE WHO BELIEVES IN IT HAS TO CHOOSE TO BELIEVE IT), is a choice.   My disbelief in Darwinism, however, is far more based in the fact that there has never been and never can be a scientifically observed instance of "natural selection" leading to the natural evolution of a new species in nature.   Nor, by the way, has there been one observed in artificial selection which, being artificial and a product of intelligent design by scientists,  could not prove what you claim it does.  I think it is, as it was when Darwin found his inspiration for it in the putrid economics of Thomas Malthus, a thoroughly ideological dogma, one which was grasped onto by atheists because,  as Darwin's major continental representative, Ernst Haeckel claimed, it "gave the final triumph to materialist monism."   Which was absurd when he said that and is far more absurd now when the post-Darwinist period is dawning. 

I have a more interesting question.  Here's a short video in which the eminent physicist - and a self-described "hard-core agnostic" Eric Betzig, talks about why present day cellular  biologyis a "hallucination,"  because cellular biology is incredibly complex and known only in a few tiny details. 

"it's by far the most complex matter in the known universe.  We understand the interiors of neutron stars far better than we understand the interior of cells." 

I like the example of the youtube cartoon he mocks because it is typical of that kind of stuff in biology, especially the supposed biology dealing with the vastly more complex topic of evolution of species. 

And you brought up a favorite topic of mine, the "origin of life."   We know absolutely nothing about the origin of life on Earth, nothing, nothing whatsoever because we don't have any physical evidence of what that origin of life was or what it was like AND NO "ABIOGENTIC" EXPREMENT CAN GIVE US THAT INFORMATION.   You have to have the actual physical evidence of whatever organism it was that was the first organism of life on earth and that will never be had.  

It's imagined to be an extremely simple organism - again, of no knowable character - for the ideological purpose of imagining that it assembled by accident out of whatever materials were available to it.   The "simplest" examples of organisms we have are on the order of complexity that Betzig describes and even one "half" as complex, a tenth as complex,  as that would be enormously complex.   

My question is what if all life everywhere it occurs is  ALWAYS that complex, that what is needed to maintain the functions of living and life and reproduction IS ALWAYS ON THE ORDER OF COMPLEXITY WHICH IS ALL WE KNOW OF WHAT LIFE IS?    What if the first organism in the line of life on Earth was that complex?    What does that do to the imagined probability of it assembling out of the available molecules and physical structures made of molecules by random chance as opposed to comprising evidence for the design of that organism?   Including whatever mechanisms of inheritance and internal PURPOSEFUL modifications and manipulations THAT ARE KNOWN TO HAPPEN IN THE GENETIC MATERIALS OF ALL ORGANISMS NOW.  

I'd say the more we find out about the actual chemistry and physiology of cells the less plausible the old random chance with chance modifications dogma of science will seem to those who bother to keep up. 

I think at some point the implausibility of the old explanation will have to accommodate those who find that evidence supporting what is now considered heretical.   That it was by design.   I'm sure the atheists will insist it was some extraterrestrial organisms that had done that instead of God, though that only puts off the question as to what was the origin of those, certainly, extremely complex physical objects, the imaginary ET scientists who ideological scientists like Francis Crick grapsed onto like a tortured lab monkey to a wire and terrycloth "surrogate mother," tortured "for science" by sadistic psychologists and ethologists.   You can see some of that in the furious, pubescent response of ideological atheists like Jerry Coyne to the science of such non-believers as James Shapiro and Denis Noble.  

Compared to the ever less plausible random-chance model of the evolution of species, an information based belief in intelligent design, certainly among the lay public, is more respectable, these days.  Though science might never modify its rules to talk about it,  there's nothing to keep us laypeople from reading the science and drawing our non-scientific conclusions from that JUST AS THE FANBOYS OF DARWINISM -SUCH AS YOURSELF - AND ITS ABSURD, UNEVIDENCED LORE AND CARTOONS HAVE DONE.     Everything from the "descent of man" and "evolution of the horse,"  1001 tales of the "cavemen,"  to the later stuff like "The Kallikak family,"  "peppered moth evolution" (it wasn't evolution and it didn't explain what was claimed for it),  ""selfish genes," The Bell Curve" neo-eugenic scientific racism, "Darwinian economics" and the rest of it. 

I've dealt with this endlessly already,

No state, no artificial, man-made entity has rights, only natural born creatures can have rights, in human terms only People can have the kind of rights that are claimed to inhere to the artificial, man made entities likes states and "the press" and corporations by liars who invent such artificial "rights" which are really privileges given to those corporations or media outfits or states who want to do evil to those who really do have rights.  

Israel does not have a "right to exist" that the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, the Democratic People's Republic of [North} Korea has to exist.   Not even a mythical, never has been and until we change things never will be majority supported United States of America has any kind of a right to exist.  I reject the idolatry that turns any government of any country, any state into a fictitious person. 

What might be able to exist and have something that might reasonably be mistaken as having a right to exist is a true, egalitarian democracy in which every person governed by it accepts the authority of it in which a real majority of informed residents of good will elects the government AND HOLDS IT ACCOUNTABLE TO RESPECTS THE RIGHTS OF ALL PEOPLE AND THE ENVIRONMENT AND MAKES IT ACT RESPONSIBLY TO THAT END.  

Only any rights involved in such a never yet held entity belong exclusively and entirely to People and other natural born creatures who live under it.  It is proof that our Constitution is seriously defective that, instead of pledging fealty and allegiance to such things as equality and democracy they pledge it to a fake document printed on paper when even the Supremes who take that kind of oath make that document irrelevant to our real governance.   Such nonsense eventuates in the idea that the state of Israel, which is not the state of a huge number of People who live there, by their law and Supreme Court fiat, has a "right to exist."   By just that Supreme Court decision which codified its apartheid status,  no, Israel has no "right" to exist.   Neither has the United States for most of its existence, even on the mistaken idea that a democracy does have such a "right." 

I will only repeat this every time someone challenges me with that genocide-apartheid protecting question about the state of Israel's "right to exist" so don't bother trying that line on me again. 

Who Is To Say You're Too Stupid To Handle Your Own Affairs If You're Really That Stupid As To Ask That?

" Who has a right to say what is true and what's a lie."

WE DO.  We have a responsibility to say that.  Who else do you think will? 

You have to be as dishonest as a lying-lawyer or a "free speech-press" "journalist" to pretend we don't depend on that discernment every waking hour of every day.   Though these days we allow our journalists to lie with abandon and especially for the billionaires and millionaires.   They're no more reliable than the sleaziest of lawyers.  Yet they wonder why people don't trust or respect them. 

The goddamned supreme Court and lower courts and lawyers are in the business of pretending that we can't possibly tell when someone is telling enormous and obvious lies because they can come up with hypothticals on the stupid and dishonest level of  "Are we, then, to tell the Nazis where the Jews are hiding?"   

Anyone that morally depraved or stupid as to ask that question has no business being considered seriously in discussing such issues.  If you think the answer could possibly be "yes" you have removed yourself from any suspicion that your thinking needs to be considered. 

And such is the state of the American law. 

All while supporting the "free speech right" of our indigenous fascists and Nazis, especially those in the "private sector" to risk the lives of their targets here and now with their "free speech-press" permission and encouragement of them.   I recently asked if it would have been wrong for the Weimar liberal democrats to have forcefully suppressed the Nazi's "free speech-press" and those who supported them.   By the time that was done BY LAWYERS AND JUDGES AND "JUSTICES" IN UNPRECEDENTED AND CONTROVERSIAL TRIBUNALS,* TENS OF MILLIONS DIED AND IT TOOK THE COMBINED MILITARIES OF MANY COUNTRIES TO DO IT.  And subsequent lawyers and judges and "justices" "journalists, academic scribblers have been undoing that work ever since.  

And more generally,  who else do you think does make the judgement between lies that can be discerned to be lies and truths that can be discerned to be true?   Even those most practiced of professional liars and pretenders of the impossibility make such judgments, sometimes even honestly making them.  That is when it suits them. Especially when the one who they punish for lying is poor or of modest means - the rich they're far more likely to pretend they can't tell that about, those who can hire lawyers like a Trump to string out the issue in court after court.  And the Supreme Court "justices" pretend they can't when they choose to pretend they don't do that ALL THE TIME WHILE ON THE BENCH.  And while lying in their decisions, as I wrote about here recently.  No doubt there will be more on that later.   

* I was far too young to vote in 1960, but if I could have I would have been extremely reluctant to vote for the Harvard trained  John F Kennedy who had written the stupid "profile in courage" in which Robert Taft was praised for his opposition to the Nuremberg trials on the basis that the Nazis had made their mass murders legal in the places they governed and invaded.  

And it's not the only outrageously stupid and offensive thing Kennedy said in that book he is notoriously accused of having had ghost-written.   I am not convinced that is entirely true and haven't seen conclusive evidence that it is true and for my purpose, that is beside the point, he owned it by putting his name on it, so I won't get into THAT again.   He appealed to white racists whose votes he would be asking for a few years later such as in this Profiles in Courage lie.  

Every so often I hear from the descendants of Adelbert Ames, a Union general during the Civil War and then the governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, objecting to a paragraph about him in John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage,” from 1956. “No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi,” Kennedy wrote, about Ames’s governorship. Corruption was rampant. Taxes rose by a factor of fourteen. “Vast areas of northern Mississippi lay in ruins.” None of this is true, and the Ames family has been lobbying the Kennedy family to change the offending paragraph pretty much continuously for more than sixty years—including an in-person discussion with J.F.K., in 1963, conducted in the White House by Ames’s great-grandson George Plimpton, the writer and editor of The Paris Review. Nothing has worked. But maybe now, at this moment of a great national reconsideration of our history and our monuments, especially on racial grounds, it might be different?

I’m getting these entreaties, most recently a couple of weeks ago, because I wrote a book about the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction by white terrorists in Mississippi in 1875. Ames is a leading character, presented far more positively than he is in “Profiles in Courage.” Since what happened during the Reconstruction period has never been very firmly fixed in American memory, some explanation is probably required. What was Ames doing in “Profiles in Courage” in the first place, and why was he—a white politician elected by an overwhelmingly Black constituency—offered up by Kennedy as a villain?

“Profiles in Courage” was published when Kennedy was thirty-eight years old. He was the junior senator from Massachusetts, in the early stages of planning his campaign for President in 1960. The main body of the book is eight profiles of United States senators whom Kennedy considered to have been extraordinarily courageous, starting chronologically with John Quincy Adams, in the early nineteenth century, and ending with Robert A. Taft, in the mid-twentieth century. It’s irresistible to think about the book in the light of Kennedy’s political ambitions. Thanks to his heroic and well-publicized exploits as a Navy officer in the South Pacific during the Second World War, courage was already identified as one of Kennedy’s salient qualities, and the framing device for the book underscored that. The courageous subjects were distributed pragmatically, considering that Kennedy was a regional politician preparing to go national. Two were from the Northeast, two from the South, and four from the Midwest. Three were Republicans. They stood for a broad range of political causes.

How can anyone expect those whose stock and trade rests on the Kennedy mystique think they feel pressured to correct such a lie when lying is considered by the media, by lawyers, judges and the Supreme Court to be the focus of a "right?"  

The accusation was and remains that it was the lawyer Ted Sorensen who actually researched and wrote the book, though despite his Kennedy and later Harvard connections,  he was not from the Ivy League law-liar training schools but the University of Nebraska.   

It's a rare lawyer with an association to Harvard Law School who I'd trust, even if they aren't trained there.  Other than Elizabeth Warren, right now, I can't think off hand of another one with that kind of CV I do trust to that extent.   Though I'm sure there might be a handful of them, I might be inclined to trust.  I can't think of any except Ketanji Brown Jackson though her Trump v Anderson vote on the court makes me question her judgement.  Along with every other current member of the Court. 

The Weimar Republic Was Certainly A Self-Conscious Attempt At Liberal Democracy And It Fell To Nazism - A response

I KNEW IT WAS TOO FAR for the comfort of right thinking liberals for me to point out that liberal democracy has not proven to be a bulwark against Nazism, fascism and other forms of dictatorship in all those cases I mentioned.    And a lot of the reasons for that are intrinsic to its liberal democracy AND OURS.   If I had time I'd find a more detailed resource but, in a quick search for what is available, here from The Weiner Holocaust Library is a list of "strengths" and "weaknesses" of the Weimar Republic

The strengths and weaknesses of the republic are discussed below.

Strengths

The republic had many democratic strengths. It allowed individual freedoms for everyone. This granted the right to free speech, the right to equality and the right to religion to every German citizen.

You won't be surprised if I break in here to say that any "right to free speech" and especially if that includes a right to publish which includes the fictitious "right to lie" is a fatal defect in such a notion.  In the case of Germany, it lied them right into Nazism, in the case of the United States it has repeatedly lied us into the worst Congresses, presidencies and Supreme Courts that have defeated equality and legitimate governance for our entire history.   It is one of the grossest stupidities of liberal democracy that that distinction between the right to tell the truth and there being no right to lie doesn't seem to be something that most liberal democrats have yet twigged onto in the past two hundred fifty one years. 

All adults over the age of twenty could vote. The voting system used was Proportional Representation , a fair system in which parties gain seats in proportion to the number of votes cast for them.

Speaking just of our liberal democracy and too many others,  since the start of ours, it has been one of the signal efforts of some of the greatest power blocks in the United States to keep those with an allegedly legal right to vote from either voting or, if they could, to make sure that those votes don't result in representation in the government through districting and gerrymandering and the longest and most successful program of terrorism in American history.   Only our ubiquitous forms of such terrorism are called by other names, like "federalism" and "tradition."    And the "right to lie" is the major tool in all of that. 

This system was used to elect the president and the Reichstag.

From 1924 onwards the republic also had a new currency, and following the implementation Dawes Plan, experienced a period of relative economic stability.

Weaknesses

Despite the above, the republic had four weaknesses.

Proportional Representation was a very democratic electoral system, but it allowed lots of parties to be elected to the Reichstag. No one party was ever elected with a majority. This meant that parties had to form coalitions to rule. Coalitions often disagreed on laws and policies due to their differing views, which made it extremely difficult to govern decisively.

Some American analogs occur to me but I'd have to develop those in a longer form than I have time for, today. 

In addition to the above, Article 48 of the constitution gave the president authority to rule by decree in the state of an emergency, bypassing the elected Reichstag. It did not, however, give a definition as to what constituted a ‘state of emergency’. This article was repeatedly misused by Hindenburg and eventually allowed Hitler to ‘legally’ take total control of Germany.

Our form of that can be seen in the many, many ways in which the Congress, to start with, gave powers that the original Constitution assigned to the Congress to the presidency,  making war, charging tariffs, etc,  and the Supreme Court under Roberts and even before made that far worse through its unitary executive form of fascist rule by a strong-man Republican-fascist president.   Some day I may go into the history of that fascist theory of the U.S. Constitution, in its modern form invented by such as Antonin Scalia, Ed Meese and the putrid Harvard Law dean Charles Fried.    The role that the Ivy law schools played in the foundation of America's fascism is enormous and none of us should ever trust those institutions ever again.

The reliance on foreign loans following the Dawes Plan led to a severe economic depression following the Wall Street Crash. This ultimately led to further political instability, and eventually, contributed to the end of democratic government.

Two words:  Scott Bessent.  Only those two because I'm already late for an appointment. 

Finally, many of the old conservative elite who had held key positions of power under the monarchy had continued in similar roles in the Weimar Republic. Whilst this was an attempt to maintain stability in government as the new republic settled, it in fact meant that these civil servants and military leaders still had enormous influence and power. The power and influence of the conservative elite would later be crucial in appointing Hitler as chancellor.

Two Words: James Comey.   Who will have to stand in for so many others who could be named here.  Many of those under the "conservative elite" who aided the rise of Hitler found that their decision came back to bite them.   I feel about them in the way I feel about the ranchers and farmers and others who are whining about getting what they voted for,  FAFO.   

As it turns out, a non-egalitarian democracy, especially a liberal democracy turns out to be far, far from a shield from fascism, in many ways it facilitates fascism, even under majority rule by a majority who buys lies, racism, bigotry and a rejection of equality.  

Equality, including economic equality,  is the safest guarantee against fascism, not libertarian "liberty."   Not "the first amendment."  Black People, Women, etc. lived entirely non-democratic lives under "the First Amendment" for just about our entire history.  It has yet to deliver that.  

The German Writer Günter Grass

famously, or infamously, depending on how you thought about it, opposed German reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall and East Germany's communist government.   He had several reasons for it but the awkward fact that East Germany under the communists' and Soviet control had not de-Nazified to the extent West Germany had wasn't one I remember him stating at the time.    But, as it turns out, living under a communist police state had the result of preparing many a former communist or subject of communism to become a fascist or neo-Nazi.  It happened in East Germany and other satellites of the Stalinst system and in Russia, as well.  

And here, it turns out, that our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, has pretty much the same consequences, especially in the states where that dominated.  Which is an unmentionable problem for those of us who live there and instates somewhat less vulnerable to domination by white supremacists.

Both of my parents and an uncle all volunteered to join the fight against fascism and Nazism,  I know in the case of my parent's parents, they had been staunch opponents of fascism in the form of the KKK and racism in general since before either fascism or Nazism had those names.   Since the rise of Trump I have had so many occasions to be glad they had all died before the United States fell to Trumpist Republican-fascism and our country heading in the direction the countries they fought against in the 1940s in a dangerously serious way.   It would have broken their hearts in ways that made even those they suffered under Nixon and Reagan and Bush I pale by comparison.

When the Free Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was invited to address the European Parliament, as he was about to speak, the German fascist,  I would say neo-Nazi member sent there from Saxony, Siegbert Droese,  expressed his solidarity with American Republican-fascism by shouting "USA, USA, . . . " in the American-fascist style.   The fascist said it was his way of "addressing the elephant in the room" but that elephant (ironic that he unwittingly chose the symbol of the Republican-fascist party, I doubt he realized that) is the Trump regime's attempted Anschluss of Canada which, unlike the Nazi-Austrian one, is rejected by the large majority of Canadians.   Prime Minister Carney was in Strasbourg to further the integration of Canada with Europe,  in a direct analogue to the, hopefully future, integration of Ukraine with Europe which Trump's patron and likely blackmailer Putin is waging war to prevent.  

It is to the eternal shame of Trump, the Republican-fascists in Congress and, most of all on the Supreme Court that a German neo-Nazi is shouting "USA!" in ways the original Nazis would not have been shouting.   

It should make every American sick that the name of our country has become a rallying cry of Nazis and fascists,   both here and elsewhere.   Sitting where I am, it makes me wonder if, as Grass said about unifying Germany, if we have not lost the moral right to be a united country.    He also cited the danger of Germany becoming a dangerous giant.   You should read the editorial he wrote in 1990 and ask how much of that is relevant to the United States thirty-six years later. 

Despite all our protestations, even well-intentioned ones, we Germans would once again be feared. For our neighbors would gaze at us with justifiable mistrust and from ever-increasing distance, which would very quickly give rise to a renewed sense of isolation and with it the dangerous self-pitying mentality that sees itself as ''surrounded by enemies.'' A reunited Germany would be a colossus, bedeviled by complexes and blocking its own path and the path to European unity.

I wonder if A.G. "Putsch" (as I always think of him) Sulzberger would publish such an editorial today.   Perhaps one safely foreign of that kind might be safe enough, though he'd never write one that told that kind of truth about the United States.   I fucking hate the New York Times and its publishers.  

At some date soon,  I will go on to write about the word I learned yesterday,  "crybully" in regard to the mentality of Trump and his supporters.   I'm amazed I hadn't learned it before, it is the perfect word for them as it was for Hitler and the Nazis.   

Given the experience of both Canada and Mexico in the past eleven years,  can anyone wonder why Canada has turned to Europe and certainly won't ever trust the United States again?    A country that has the support of European and other fascists and Nazis, the country that has given in to our indigenous form of it after an all too brief period of seeming to have left that in the past?  

My parents generation fought fascism and Nazism just as the generation in the 1860s fought the slave power.   Only as soon as the 1870s to have the slave-power dominate the country, largely through the actions of the Supreme Court overturning the civil rights and voting rights legislation and nullifying and lying about the 14th and other amendments to the Constitution.   Though the Electoral College imposing the loser of the election in 1870 on the basis of a corrupt deal made with the slave power had a considerable effect on that happening, as well.   In the case of the World War Two generation, it took somewhat longer but the exact same history has repeated itself. 

Our history is repeating itself in largely the same way under the same forces in our government and we have done nothing to change that.   Unless those change, the United States will continue on to a neo-fascist future.   I pray Canada and Europe can be the force for equality and democracy that our form of government thwarts over and over again.   If that's not the case I pray the United States breaks up and cannot be that kind of fearful colossus, the Putin-Soviet Russian system and all other such large entities.  I pray that Germany can avoid a repeat of its history.   I'm nervous about that in ways that has gotten me remembering what  Günter Grass warned about.