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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

---

London, 12th Nov., 1875.

My dear Monsieur Lavrov,^[1]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

With cordial greetings,
F. ENGELS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes On Yesterday's Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He starts out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Lewontin:  Introduction:  It Ain't Necessarily So

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

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

Note this part o what he said:

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

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

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

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

Here is the end of Peter Woit's post. 

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

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

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

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

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

Erratum On The First Thursday In Lent

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember My Post Last Week Confronting The

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

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

My year at Harvard with the Epstein class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Praying with the Bible during Lent | The Spiritual Life Podcast

 

The prominent James Martin the editor at large of the Jesuit magazine,  America, who has long served a ministry to LGBTQ+ People is, you won't be surprised to hear,  a frequent target of right-wingers and the "trad cath" cult.   I don't listen to all of his podcasts though I probably should,  his fine  interview with Anthea Butler was linked to here over the weekend.  

This is an interview with the greatly respected Methodist Bible scholar Ben Witherington that covers many things, including how to pray the scriptures during Lent.    There is a lot of practical information about that.   One of the things that surprised me is his advice to those who are familiar with the scriptures,  especially for Catholics those readings that recur in the three-year cycle of liturgical readings.   He suggested reading them in a translation you're not familiar with.   Something I've found useful, myself, was listening to the daily mass in another language as a way to keep up my French.  

But his advice to read The Message by Edward Patterson really surprised me.  Patterson,  he noted was a Biblical scholar in his own right which I hadn't know, I'd only seen him described as a novelist which made me kind of suspicious on the basis of nothing but my own prejudice.   

I'd known about The Message which goes beyond the so-called dynamic equivalence method of translation instead of the so-called word-for-word method of translation to put the content of the Bible into vernacular English.   There are lots of good English vernacular translations,  I like the Common English and Good News translations so I'd never thought to look at The Message.   

It being late in the evening when my eyes give me trouble and I don't want to watch a screen,  I looked for readings of it online.  After trying a recording of the Message book of Mark which had music in the background -yuck!-  I found a good one of a man with a working class English accent reading it very well.   I was really surprised at how big the impact of hearing a close but not "literal" telling of the familiar content was.   I don't know if reading the same on the page would have as big an impact on me - I'll be ordering it when I get around to that.  

In his far more traditionally "literal" translation of the New Testament,  David Bentley Hart said that Mark which was originally written in hardly sophisticated Greek is something he translated into the equivalent of that in English,  including the use of the highly vernacular historical present tense when that's how it's said in the Greek.  That kind of thing which even scholarly revieweres have noted gives his translation a bracing freshness, something I can attest to.   The way that Patterson translated it has an even more bracing effect.  

I wouldn't  consider replacing a more scholarly and direct reading of the texts with The Message but it's as good  as reading a good study bible commentary and more direct than consulting a more extensive learned commentary.  

Also, I tried his youtube of Romans and even in that great theological, not narrative book, and found the same was true.  I will be buying that and use it as I would a commentary.  It's not hard to imagine someone finding that starting with The Message might be the most useful thing for them to do. 

Never looked into Ben Witherington before but I'll try to get to him.   One of the problems is that there are so many very fine Bible scholars, theologians, spiritual writers (as well as so many who are far less good) that it's impossible to read or listen to all of even the best of them.  

Reese Waters On The Death Of Jesse Jackson

 

His entire off-the-cuff discourse is worth listening to,  it is pitch perfect.  I will give you this passage that came after he noted part of what Jesse Jackson was doing in the 1990s after he started to be ignored by mainstream media.

I cannot allow it to go unmentioned that the man who lost the presidential electio spent his time after the election get securing the release of a US Navy pilot, 16 Americans in Cuba, 700 women and children in Iraq and two Gambian Americans from prison.

Our current president, after he lost in 2020, spent the entire four years trying to burn the country to the ground and we let him back in.

Jesse Jackson literally did more having not never been a president at all. Let's make that clear. And he wasn't out here begging for the Nobel Peace Prize.

How about that?

What The Hell Was Noam Chomsky Thinking - His Epstein Link Explained

THIS INTERVIEW OF CHRIS KNIGHT who has written about Noam Chomsky critically from the left,  someonen who revealed things about his extensive ties to the milirary industrial complex as well as being supportive of his leftist politics AND, also knowing a good deal about the collapse of Chomskys theory of universal grammar, is the closest I've come to hearing or reading anyone come up with an explanation of how he could associate with and write supportively of the most notorious child rapist, trafficker and almost certainly blackmailer perhaps in human history.    Owen Jones chose the one to come up with something like an explaination well.   

I would like to read or hear someone go in to the deep relationships that a smart though hardly qualified con-man had with many of the figures in real as well as pseudo-sciences (and linguistics is, actually one of the latter) because I think that would not only tell us a lot about how someone like Chomsky could be successfully courted and compromised by him but how so many within the post-WWII materialist-atheist-scientistic academic world were far less confusingly compromised by him.   I think that that relationship tells us a lot about the character and nature of that ideology and how it melds so easily with the world of anti-democratic politics, high finance and the modern cult of media driven celebrity. 

One of the more insightful things I recall hearing Chomsky explain was how the French cultural and establishment that made figures such as philosophers promoted and brought to fame and inluence and celebrity - as I recall he called it "vedette culture,"  movie-star culture.   And a lot of those who Epstein wooed and won, to some extent, fall into that category here as well as in Britain.   Even some of those who had actual academic and even scientific careers.   Some, such as those within the old Scienceblogs crowd were made such stars with Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner money.   

As for the failure of Chomsky's "universal grammar,"  since it was based on the wildly over-sold and over-imagined ideas of mid-20th century evolutionary biology,  including the things that evolutionary-psychology and sociobiology were based in,  it's no wonder that it was just another of those edifaces of unevidenced science that grew, matured, decayed and was abandonned as academic pseudo-science went on to the next big thing.   If Chomsky had died in his sixties or seventies instead of approaching a centenniel, he might have avoided witnessing that.   E. O. Wilson is a similar case in that he came to publicly doubt kin selection, one of the the bases of his own claim to fame, Sociobiology, the extent to which a flock of his evolutionary-psychology academic heirs howled in protest when he expressed those doubts,  some of whom also were charmed or came near to the orbit of Jeffrey Epstein,  Richard Dawkins being foremost among those.   

I will note that I'm skeptical of all theories deriving from natural selection which I think is an ideological theory and was never properly scientific due to the impossibility of observing the actual evolution of species.    As with the the acquisition of and use of language being an undeniable phenomenon,  the evolution of species is abundently supported by the geological and genetic record, its reality is not currently credibly denied.   Someone may want to do basic science about how evolution happened,  the strength and universal desire of biologists to have knowledge of how it happened,  in the worst cases insisting that there must be one universal mechanism by which that happened.   That doesn't stop almost all of them from pretending that they've got that mechanism when they have no such a thing.   Chomsky's desire to find the equivalent in his chosen field of linguistics - which is as opaque as the billions of years of the history of the evolution of speices - cannot be made truly scientific for similar reasons.   There is no way to make the necessary observations, measurements and honest analyses needed to produce science, no matter them making believe they can at MIT or the Pentagon. 

Chomsky owed us an explaination of this and, if Knight is correct, he is too disabled to be able to give us one even if he was willing to do so.  It is sadder than the implosion of his academic theory that his legacy as one of the major figures of moral criticism of governmental and corporate and oligarchic evil in our lifetimes fell under the sway of an evil, likely Israeli intelligence connected con-man who certainly was nothing like a friend to him.   It is shocking that Noam Chomsky couldn't see through him even at close proximity to his evil doing.  That's his tragedy and a tragedy of the secular left.   

In The Spirit Of Experimentation

 I decided to post the rest of this morning's post that came after what I successfully got posted this morning.    I did so at my alternative, seldom posted to (originally more tabloid type content) blog.   If you're curious to see what Blogger didn't like this morning or can try to figure out why it, combined with what I did post from it below, didn't get approved,  you can read it here.

For the life of me,  I don't get what happened.  

Wondering if it's this part of what I wrote that Blogger didn't like

It's The World Of Appearances And Illusions And A Sign Of Why That Is So Morally Risky

I HADN'T HEARD about the revelations of the Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner child-trafficking, rape-blackmail ring and the supermodel so famous that someone like me who detests that world has heard of,  Naomi Campbell, until yesterday.  

Given the extensive, perhaps pervasive connections of the modeling and fashion and pagent industries to the most notorious child-rape and trafficking gang,  I don't think I'll be able to think of any of those without thinking they're all just fronts for such things.   Oh, and throw in the movies to that mix too.  If someone who was at the top of the modeling racket like Campbell was in that sewer,  I figure most of it must be, to some extent, that kind of thing. 

I'd come to have some sense of that when I heard of the perverted and depraved world of beauty pagents using very young girls, such as the murdered J. B. Ramsay.   Seeing the nauseating pictures and video of her dressed like a prostitute and vamping like one,  it should be a crime for anyone, including parents,  to present young children in such sexualized ways.   But that is ubiquitious, not only here but in other countries.   

In the past I'd have said that while that should be considered criminal abuse of minor children,  it's clear from the reaction of many who want to minimalize the crimes of the billionaires, millionaires and others involved with the Epstein-Maxwell-Wexner ring,  everyone from the piece of trash Megyn Kelly to the evolutionarly psychologist Robert Trivers and theoretical physicists and those in computer science that making allowances for the agency of older children of the absurdly low age of "consent" and adults "consenting" to becoming comodities in that trafficking is an invitation to go ever lower.   

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

If this posts note that most of the rest of it was a transcription of the part of this video in which Norman Finkelstein dissects the "civil liberties lawyer" career of noted "civil liberties" lawyer-liar Dershowitz.  

This Is A First

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER,  my morning post has apparetly gotten some kind of content warning notice from Blogger.   At least there's a red triangle next to the index listing of it which I've never seen before saying that's what that means.    I went and looked, for the first time ever, at its guidelines and can't see how what I wrote is covered by any of it.   I don't have time to argue with Google about that right now,  if you have trouble reading what I wrote,  please let me know.

AM

Footnote On The Morning Post

FROM THE ESTIMABLE PETER WOIT'S blog:

For now, a math item and a physics item, maybe more later…

Four years ago, after the decision to have the 2026 ICM in the US was announced, I wrote:

"With the 2022 experience in mind, hopefully the IMU will for next time have prepared a plan for what to do in case they again end up having a host country with a collapsed democracy being run by a dangerous autocrat."

We’re very much in that situation now, and as far as I can tell the IMU is still planning for a normal, in-person event this July in Philadelphia.

The French mathematical society (SMF) announced yesterday that they would not participate (in the sense of not having a presence such as a booth) in the ICM this year. I’m hearing that other national math societies have taken or are considering similar action.

Setting aside the problem of lots of people for good reason not wanting anything to do with travel to the US right now, even those who do want to come here are facing serious problems getting a visa, in particular not being able to even get an appointment for a visa interview at this time.

The murders and Gestapo tactics now going on in Minneapolis surely influenced the SMF decision and may cause people now planning on attending the ICM to change their plans. The nightmare scenario for ICM organizers is having ICE and its thuggery move on to Philadelphia, which unfortunately seems possible.

Hell, my entire family, apart from one ex-sister-in-law were born here, white, working and middle-class and I don't like it when my family is traveling in the USofA during the turd reich.  

The Fairy Tale That The Ship Of State Is Going To Magically Right Itself When It Has Sunk In The Cesspool

THIS DISCUSSION between Michael Popok and Anthony Davis about how Trump and the Republica-fascists have led to the eclipse of America as the dominating super-power among putative democracies should be listened to by everyone.  One of the problems I have with such entities as Popok's channel is that they put out so much content that the real gems in it get swamped, I hope that doesn't happen with this one.  I think of the two Anthony Davis certainly has the more realistic view of the consequences of Trump II, that America's position has been permanently and fatally damaged.  In the end of the discussion when Popok is giving what I think is a rather naive, lawyerly, panglossian view of how America could regain that position,  Davis said something very interesting to me,  something which I've been saying here for years.  I've done a rough transcription of the discussion starting at about 7:22 in the video, Davis is a lot easier to transcribe than the meandering Popok, trying to consolodate the ideas through the verbiage. 

P:  Let me ask you a question because you and I had a little bit of a debate, a soft debate . . when I was on your show last week. . . . There's a premise to my question,  which is I said to you, that just as Biden was able to heal a lot of these [international, etc.] relationships after Trump I.  And through diplomacy and civility, you know, through a combination of carrot and stick, which is always present with the United States since Teddy Roosevelt or before . . . he was able to fix a lot of scarring that Trump had done in the global relationship the first time around.  But I guess implicit in my question was that is a good thing and that the next president, Newsom or otherwise, will and should do the same thing and your response was a version of "it's too late these are techtonic plates that are premanently shifted that are creating new mountain ranges and you're not getting them back."  

Two questions:

1. Should that be a goal of the Americans and is important to American interests and that the next president fix everything that Donald Trump Broke and

2 is it possible.  I think it is. to at least try.

AD: Well, it's a little bit like the relationship between Canada and the US, isn't it.  It's like family, you don't choose your family so you put up with your family.  But your friends you can choose, you can have far better friends than you can family.  We just learn to live with our family and I think with Europe and the rest of the world verses America the best that they'll be able to do is turn it into a situation where there might not be animosity but they're certainly not going to do business together.  I think that's the best that Newsom or any future Democratic president could do, yeah, we could resign a few treaties, the Paris Climate Accord and various things but in terms of infrastructure, no. It's done now,  I honestly think that's the case because unless they make a change to the Constitution, to the Bill of Rights, to the way that the system works in America, there is nothing to stop a future Donald Trump from becoming king again.   

Popok:  See, I think if we get eight years of civil discourse back led by a leader America respects and the world does, that's a true banner holder for American values as they do exist in both our aspirational Declaration of Independents and in our governing document of the Constitution, and in combination with reengaging with the world, in a way that Donald Trump has pulled in all the orrs, right forget about America First get back to our global interests we start resigning all the peace accords for the United Nations       and go into the World Court, who knows, maybe what and get the money flowing, right, reestablish money as soft power deplomacy.  The US is great for rescuing People . . . 

I will spare you more of the panglossian 2008 Obama campaign style aspirational drivel.  While Micheal Popok is hardly the worst of the media lawyers, he is, to quote my late father, 'full of soup" about this.    Needless to say, Anthony Davis is almost as skeptical as I am about that working.  You can listen to the entire discussion here.  

Notice that Popock resorts to citing the thing which has zero legal power to do anything, the "aspirational Declaration of Independence" which, if he'd paid attention to that base-level knowledge of recent  truth telling about Amerian history, he would know that The Reverend MLK jr. cited in his Dream speech, noting that it was an unpaid promissory note.  Here's news for him, after payment started to be made through the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts,  the Roberts Court stopped payment on it yet again as has been done continually through our history.  AT NO TIME SO MUCH AS THE WRITING OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS WHICH WERE NOT MEANT BY THE FRAMERS TO EVER REALLY DELIVER THE THINGS PROMISED IN THE DECLARATION.  As I've noted here, even the great Civil War Amendments which aspired to make those Constitutional law had that payement stopped by a series of Supreme Court rulings which had them twisted, distorted  and, as recently as two years ago, anulled by the Supreme Court.  You would think he, as a practicing lawyer and commentator on current events would know that everything Davis said about what it would take to make others in the Americas - including a majority of those in the United States - Europe, Africa, Asia trust the United States again WOULD REQUIRE BASIC CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE AND BASIC STRUCTURAL CHANGE of a kind that an American lawyer just can't imagine ever being possible.

Trump is certainly the one who brought the "American Century" to a definitive end in Trump II BUT THAT HAS BEEN AN ONGOING PROJECT OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTS, CONGRESSES AND COURTS ALL DURING MY LIFETIME.  That ending is now, indeed, definitive, and the world outside of the United States was not a party to that ending it or even a party in favor of ending it.  

There is a reason that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee gave Barack Obama a Peace Prize JUST FOR WINNING THE PRESIDENCY IN 2008, it is because he ended the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Neo-con disaster that brought about many evils, the greatest of them the Iraq debacle which is still playing out in the Middle East, Asia and Africa as well as Europe.  They really believed in 2009 that Obama was the promised one who would embody the fulfillment of the claims of American democracy, not in the least part because he did something no one believed was possible, having a Black American president, overcoming our more than two and a half century old regime of white supremacist hegemony, itself embedded in the Constitution in structural ways that the Civil War Amendments didn't address.  

It is the plain as day, clear as air truth that cannot be mentioned that LIES IN THE MEDIA is what Trump as a politician is made of, you will notice that the erudite Anthony Davis included the holy of holies, the sacred idol, the Bill of Rights among those things that would have to be changed, fundamentally, to make America trustworty again.   Lies are behind the success of the ever worsening presidents and congresses that we have suffered ever since the Sullivan Decision took full hold - which I would date to about 1966 and certainly the media lies for the profits of its owners were what determined the 1968 election that brought us what was then the landmark of corrupt presidencies,  Richard Nixon.  It has given us ever worse presidencies with weakend Democratic ones whenever the Republicans policies crashed the economy.  Certainly that is what got Clinton in office in 1992, Obama in office and Biden after the disaster of Trump I.  Americans may have media and entertainment induced amnesia but the rest of the world does not.  

The world wanted so to believe that first Obama, then Joe Biden had righted things and the United States would be what it had been before Trump and George W. Bush had made it in the period after the Rehnquist Court installed him in 2000.  They really wanted that to happen only to see the American Constitution AS IT REALLY IS IN REAL LIFE AND PRACTICE INSTEAD OF HOLLYWOOD-CIVICS TEXTBOOK BULLSHIT CLAIMED IT WAS.   There is no way that they are going to believe it again with the Constitution as it is now,  nor should they NOR SHOULD ANY AMERICAN WHO IS AN EGALIATARIAN DEMOCRAT OR EVEN JUST A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT (AND BY THAT I DON'T MEAN A CAPITALIST CROOK).   The faster we drop that bull shit the faster something will be done about amending the goddamned thing, getting rid of the Electoral College which brought us the two worst presidents in our lifetimes, both Bush II and Trump,  the Supreme Court which has been the major engine of the corruption of our politics on a blatantly Republican-fascist partisan basis,  the First Amendement which has created the lie that there is such a thing as a "right to lie" and that mass media, corporate media has that right to lie the oligarch's tools into office.   And that's not to mention that other opportunity for the most corruption,  the anti-democratically constituted Senate and its absurdly allocated powers to thwart democracy.  

I Was Thinking Of Spending Lent

 on a series in which I critique one of the stands of one of the New Testament Scholars and Catholic theologians I've been reading a lot over the past two years,  Luke Timothy Johnson's long standing and, perhaps even obsessive rejection of and criticism of liberation theology.    

While I strongly agree with him when he focuses on the ways of "living Jesus," especially in his book of that name,  I have to say that his rejection of liberation theology is especially surprising in that he puts so much emphasis in that book on the continuation of prophesy in the church as the experience of the Living Jesus which is inevitably informed by the experiences of People in every moment since the beginning of his public ministry right down to the time we are living in.   The diversity of that prophesy depending on different experiences of life, of living in communities, in societies, in churches, in cultures and under legal structures will certainly bring about aspects of what that experience of Jesus which were different from those of the first century Mediterranean world.   

If such ever newer and different ways of understanding the Living Jesus were not happening and meant to inform those whose lives are radically different from those who Jesus, Paul, James etc. addressed you have to wonder why the subsequent two thousand years of human history happened.  

In one of the reviews of a book in which Luke Timothy Johnson develops his criticism of liberation theology,  his rejection based on what he says is the "elitism" of those of HIS FELLOW THEOLOGIANS who were educated and lived at least some of their lives as those who were not destitute, impoverished, working poor,  the reviewer.   Joseph Quinn Rabb asks a crucial question:

Constructing such a stark contrast requires some oversimplifications.  Johnson's default position strongly favors the traditional view and he is clearly suspicious of and uncomfortable with the "social gospel/liberation model,"  seeing it as "elitist" in its origins and alien to the ones it aims to liberate.  It is elitist because the authors who developed and explicated it were trained in universities and were not themselves abjectly poor (134-34).  I wonder, though, who among all of the authors of the hortatory literature he surveys throughout the centuries were uneducated and abjectly poor?

If I were questioning Luke Timothy Johnson,  who I deeply respect and rather like,  about this I would bring up his own description of how his partly scripturally based and former homophobic attitude and beliefs about LGBTQ+ People changed to him considering their rights, their lives and the possibility of those of us living lives of both sanctity and integrity about who we are - INCLUDING HAVING LOVE WITHIN A SACRAMENTAL SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP - which he said was informed by his personal experience of coming to know LGBTQ+ students and having his beloved daughter being a Lesbian in a stable, settled relationship producing a grandchild.   He, himself, admits that his developed belief based on that is not founded in his understanding of Scripture which he claims - against the reading of other scholars - doesn't support his new belief.   Why shouldn't those living under horrible, unjust, anti-egalitarian,  economic regimes and the legal and police and military that enforces those with the violence that all of those require develop theological positions and ideas based on their experience?   

It is one of the most basic aspects of Latin American, Black, Womenist, etc. liberation theologies that those whose liberation is the focus of that theology,  what they say about their experience of living is to be consulted and considered important in that theology.   

Given his critique of those theologians of Latin America,  many of whom have made common cause with those "uneducated and abjectly poor" People in their own societies - to the extent that many of them have knowingly made themselves targets along with those uneducated and abjectly poor People and many of them are, in fact,  martyrs and saints due to that martyrdom,  what does a straight, white male from the United States who has a career as a teacher at elite American schools,  not endangered by his own writing, have to say about that which even rises to the level of the kind of basic credibility he demands of them?   I will point out that many of those very theologians he makes that criticism of have a far closer and respectful relationship to the "uneducated and abjectly poor" than he would seem to have among the associates of his I've read and heard him talk about.  

Given the life of Jesus and those he addressed,  given the earliest experiences of the church,  such People have lives today which are a lot closer to the life Jesus and his followers led than that of a middle-class, white, male, straight Christian in the United States knows based on their experience and what they say might be suspected to have deeper relevance to the New Testament than what academic theologians write.  

As I said I have deep respect for much of Johnson's writing and speaking.  It's a novel concept to a lot of, especially, college-credentialed lefties and liberals,  but you don't have to agree with everything someone says and holds with to respect them and think the balance of their ideas are worth reading and engaging in.   You can even disagree strongly with someone and make the most exigent criticisms of what they think and still respect and like them.   THOUGH THERE ARE SOME THINGS ABOUT WHICH YOU MUST MAKE A BREAK.  

I had considered, instead of going through a book like Living Jesus (which I highly recommend) for Lent,  I had considered going through the American Black Liberation theologian James Cone's book which he said (at least at one point) presented his more developed theological position,  God of the Oppressed,  which I also recommend highly.   But I don't have the time for that, it would require me to type out many long passages from the book and right now I just simply don't have the time for that.   I hope to some time in the future. 

I will, though, share with you someone who I'm not sure would call herself a liberation theologian but who is still with us and who is the intellectual and academic equal of just about anyone,  someone I didn't become aware of until just recently,  Dr. Anthea Butler.  She is so good and I can't listen to her for long without finding dozens of things she says that I could follow up on.   If I was cursed to be 20 again,  I'd try to get into her classes.  

Here is a very good introduction to her,  an interview with Blake Chastain discussing her book White Evangelical Racism.  It is the best thing I've heard on the topic so far.  She knows the topic because she had a temporary sojourn into Evangelicalism, even attending one of the largest Evangelical seminaries,  before she returned to the Catholicism she was raised in (more on that at this link).   I have not read the book yet but I hope to get to it.   I think I will concentrate on what I find from her online, which is available with links this Lent.   One of the things I really, really like about her is that she understands that the issues she deals with are so important that making nice and polite is not an option,  she tells the harsh, terrible and blunt TRUTH.   

Coming Clean

YEAH, I'M A BAD EDITOR.   Some of that is bad eyesight, some of it is the bad habit I've gotten into by relying on automatic spell-check whereas before I'd carefully read what I wrote and possibly notice that I'd typed out a word but it wasn't the right word.  I am trying to break that habit.   Another problem is that when I'm editing I sometimes delete too much and a noun or verb that agreed before editing doesn't agree anymore.  When something isn't underlined in red I have gotten too reliant on the technology,  my ever greater exposure to "AI" is making me wish I could turn some of that off.  

On top of that I don't have the time to spend hours writing and rewriting most days so what you get is like TV production,  quick and dirty - as a fine Canadian actress once said it. 

One Of The Biggest Reasons That "Equal Justice Under Law" Is Among The Biggest Lies In The World

Nothing has changed in 2,000 years.  We just have to read the newspaper and we see all these court cases where laws made to protect people,  they can be easily broken.  And the more money you have, the more lawyers we can buy.  And the more we can manipulate the rules and, quote "Bring justice our way."  And actually it's immoral.

Fr. Henk van Meijel, S.J. from last Tuesday 

DONALD TRUMP AND HIS SCUMBAG LAWYERS have openly, clearly, obviously and undeniably manipulated that evil which Hamlet listed among those unbearable things in life which he gave as a good reason to consider suicide,  "the laws delay."  And he did that by doing what Fr. van Meijel identified, buying lots of lawyers whose profession it is to manipulate not just the law but the very scheduling and work habits of courts and clerks and the entire system right up to the Supreme Court.  He did it to steal and cheat from those who contracted to do work for him, he did it to get away with some of the most serious crimes ever committed by a president of the United States,  he did it to avoid being declared unqualified to run for the disastrous term he's carrying out even as he led an insurrection against the goddamned Constitution which has proven just how useless it is when such a determined and practiced rich crook who can buy enough lawyers is determined to break the law and get away with it.

THE FUNNIEST THING ABOUT THAT, IF ANY OF THIS CAN BE SAID TO BE FUNNY,  IS THAT DONALD TRUMP IS, BEYOND MEASURE, THE STUPIDEST, MOST IGNORANT AND NOW DEMENTED PRESIDENT IN OUR HISTORY AND HE'S PLAYING COURTS FROM BOTTOM TO TOP, FILLED WITH THE GRADUATES OF THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS LAW SCHOOLS LIKE SECOND GRADE PLAYGROUND CHUMPS.   And the goddamned crooks at the top of the judiciary have not only played along with him,  they've rewritten the rules to legalize everything he's gotten away with.  The Roberts Court is singularly crooked in our history and singularly dishonest, in so far as its majority is concerned.  And, of course, nothing will be done to fix that.   As I have predicted,  the lawyers among the Democratic lawmakers will probably be the last hurdle that such lawmaking will have to jump over.   Don't get me started on the hurdles a Constitutional amendment that ended Supreme Court criminality will have to overcome.  

This what he does the rich and super rich do regularly.   One of the 19th century robber barons laid out that regular practice of the legal profession plainly,  he told a lawyer who had told him what he wanted to do was illegal that he didn't hire lawyers to tell him what the law was but how to get away with breaking it.  And by training and by the actual practices of that profession,  he certainly wasn't unable to find lawyers or, for that matter, judges who would do that for him.   Elon Musk and Peter Thiel probably have a far easier time with doing that.   Trump has, he doesn't even have to hide his intention to break contracts and the law right in front of the judges and he knows he can count on the majority on the Supreme Court to let him do it AS THEY HAVE BEEN DOING.  

The Republican Party has used the same thing as a weapon against their critics at least since the interminable hearings against Democrats during the Clinton administration.  I used to marvel at how the Democrats hauled before them, private citizens always had to have lawyers with them, wondering how much their command performance cost them.   When one woman, as I remember her a secretary appeared without a lawyer it was remarked on by one of the House members because it was so singular.  

And that is true for anyone without funds in any civil case who cannot be expected to win a big settlement from someone with deep pockets.   And it's also true of those without a lawyer or one who is inadequate whenever they are bought before the court in any criminal matter in which they're up against the police, the prosecutor, the state and not infrequently a judge who wants to demonstrate how tough they are on those accused of crimes. 

There is no equal justice under the law of the United States because those with lots of money can do what the priest identified, they can buy lawyers and if they can't find a lawyer who will do it,  they will find one who will lie for them and outrageously manipulate the habits of courts.   The rich start out with that kind of mercy that you can buy,  not to mention the prejudice in favor of the rich which is rampant in the world, no place more so than the United States and in few venues so much so as those run by and staffed by those who were educated into the lore of the civil law and the Constitution of the United States.  

I gave you a link to the video of the sermon which led to me writing this, with the Gospel it is on.   His Dutch accent might take a little getting used to and his use of English but he is a very good homilist.  I think what he said last Tuesday is more useful than anything I've heard from the lawyers of MS NBC or Meidas Touch.