This IS How It Probably How It Went Down At Vivek Ramaswamy's Campaign

 

 One of the better shorts I've watched.  He got the profession of campaign consultant down pretty well. 

Now I'd like to see him do one about James Carville and his recent perfidy.   

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Forty Three, Fifty Nine Wake

 Forty Three, Fifty Nine Wake 

Jess is travelling with her mother, Avril, to see Danny one last time. She's not been back for 24 years; she and Danny were childhood sweethearts and were going to get married, but Danny's dead and he was only 39.

She wants to say goodbye to him one last time, which doesn't seem too much to ask - except Jess's father killed Danny's sister in a hit and run.

On Jess and Avril's day trip, one lie leads to another and soon they find themselves embroiled in a rare old pickle.

Katie Hims comes up with the most unusual plots.   Who needs Halloween with plots like this? 

Forgot I'd Done That

SOMETIME IN THE new atheist fad of the 00's I felt moved to type out the entirety of A. S. Eddington's Swathmore Lecture, Science And The Unseen World and post it online.  I don't remember where I first posted it but I posted it later  on my now largely unremembered utility blog.   I haven't gone through it in the next fourteen or so years to check for typos and other problems and like all major efforts, its importance to me has faded since then.  If I'd known about it, I could have saved myself the bother of typing it out because Archive dot org had posted it the year before that.   Though I think I first typed it out earlier than that posting, I don't remember when that was. 

Some of the descriptions of science are quite vintage, now.  Though looking at it, it had some good things in it.  Here's how he ended.   I think I kept Eddington's Brit spelling though probably not consistently. 

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require. I recognise that the practice of a religious community cannot be regulated solely in the interests of its scientifically-minded members and therefore I would not go so far as to urge that no kind of defence of creeds is possible. 

But I think it may be said that Quakerism in dispensing with creeds holds out a hand to the scientist. The scientific objection is not merely to particular creed which assert in outworn phraseology beliefs which are either no longer held or no longer convey inspiration to life. 

The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton’s laws of motion, to Maxwell’s equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, of if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and transcribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science to maintain our stand against creed and dogma. I would not be sorry to borrow for our scientific pronouncements the passage prefixed to the Advices of the Society of Friends in 1656 and repeated in the current General Advices:

“These things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by; but that all with a measure of the light, which is pure and holy, may be guided; and so in the light walking and abiding, these things may be fulfilled in the Spirit, not in the letter; for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.”

Rejection of creed is not inconsistent with being possessed by a living belief. We have no creed in science, but we are not lukewarm in our beliefs. The belief is not that all the knowledge of the universe that we hold so enthusiastically will survive in the letter; but a sureness that we are on the road. If our so-called facts are changing shadows, there are shadows cast by the light of constant truth. So too in religion we are repelled by that confident theological doctrine which has settled for all generations just how the spiritual world is worked; but we need not turn aside from the measure of light that comes from our experience showing us a Way through the unseen world.

Religion for the conscientious seeker is not all a matter of doubt and self-questionings. There is a kind of sureness which is very different from cocksureness.

I'll add that I doubt anyone, no priest, bishop, pope, patriarch, reverend, etc. has ever been as rigidly attached to and observant of creeds as is imagined even by them.   I think for just about everyone who is sincerely religious, all such things are held as the late Walter Brueggemann once put it,  held onto but loosely, in regard to the reading of Scripture. 

And I think Eddington viewed the actual culture of science in regard to rigid creedal adherence with unrealistic idealism.  It may not be formally required that an affirmation of belief in creeds be made in science but in most science departments in most universities there will be one or two different denominations of whichever science holds sway there through the ideological and professional interests of the faculty members (often chosen by which ever faction dominates) and in places where two competing creeds are represented on a faculty,  students will be under pressure to choose one or the other.   Eddington certainly experienced that, himself, in the earliest years of his adoption of the new physics starting with his acceptance of Einstein's theories.   

While the evidence in physics may have been sufficiently compelling to force the reluctant to adopt those theories as the evidence grows vaguer along with the complexity of the subjects of science lends itself to less and less exactness,  those denominational struggles and wars can get pretty bad.  The slapping fights in the soft sciences can get really vicious.   

At times during Eddington's lifetime, such as in biology in the Soviet Union, the state supported ideology oppressed and even executed many scientists in ways that the supposed martyrs of science, such as Galileo never was subjected to by the Catholic Church.   Copernicus, by the way, had the full support of bishops and even popes for his science during his lifetime, as he noted in his book dedicated to Pius III AND AS GALILEO POINTED OUT IN HIS OWN DEFENSE.   And that was hardly the only place where science with support of the state and ideological and financial institutions enforced creedal discipline.   That can be everything from such drama instigating incidents as Edward Teller getting Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance revoked to scientists making sure that those who are not strictly adherent to their preferred creed don't get grants and funding.   That is a weekly if not daily occurrence in science. 

But I especially liked how Eddington ended in advocating the opposite of arrogant certainty in our conceptions, that the sureness we have is a matter more of experience than of articulating stands and dogmas.   Sincere religion isn't what the new atheist faddists of that time claimed it was but it also wasn't what the rigid creedalists and other religious types hold it to be, either. 

Polling In Regard To Elections Are Election Fraud - Just Posted Video About How The Media From Elite To Sub-Gutter Fell For A Fake Polling Firm

 

It is sheer lunacy that in a deputed democracy that ANYTHING INTENDED TO SUBVERT, DISCOURAGE OR MISINFORM THE BASIS OF THAT DEMOCRACY, THE VOTE IS PERMITTED WHETHER BY LAW OR BY THE FRICKIN' BILL OF "RIGHTS."

And America's democracy is that loony.   The result is corrupt, illegitimate governance under corrupt, illegitimate law or, rather, the corrupt thugs who get elected. 

Debussy - Ballade

 

Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano

A lot of musicians play Debussy (and most other things) as if they're pieces, objects like furniture.  This performance strikes me as the opposite, playing it like it's a life experience, living in time and in the time it takes to play and hear it.   You really can't put it into words, those are too tied to thinking of things as objects.   Music doesn't work when you do it like that.   

Three Cheers For Cultural Wokeness -

There have been several principle musicians of the Boston Symphony over the years for whom I hold special affection.   

There's their former Concert Master, the late, great violinist and conductor Joseph Silverstein, whose performance of the Schoenberg Concerto with the BSO is one of the finest concerto performances of any style I've ever heard*.  

There is the great tympanist Vic Firth whose performances, for example,  in the Michael Tilson Thomas's recording of Carl Ruggles Suntreader never fails to chill me to the bone as soon as the first note of the piece sounds.   The one he recorded with the Buffalo Philharmonic is pretty good too but there's something about that earlier recording and Firth's playing that is singular in my experience.

But the former principle BSO trombonist Douglas Yeo has a special place in my heart for many reasons, first his playing of his instrument.   Longtime readers may know I have a thing for the trombone as an instrument.  I love the deep brass and it is the most musically flexible and often best played of them.  Yeo also is an adept player of the serpent and other related instruments. 

Though, if I had not gone the route in music that I did, the thing I'd have wanted to be more than anything else is a choral conductor, high on the list of other alternatives would have been to play trombone.   I don't know if one of the reasons for that is because my closest music friends have happened to be trombonists or that I had an intense crush on a particularly nice one who happened to also be very handsome when I was a teenager.    Alas, he was straight and were were just friends.  Though that would probably have been for the best.   I met someone else in an area of music entirely removed from what I did and had a long, faithful relationship with him. 

But that's enough of me and my senior reminiscences.   This comes because I clicked on a video that came up with the unlikely title, "Why Everyone Stopped Playing Lassus Trombone."   

I won't go into why I clicked on it, something to do with curiosity about what a trombone had to do with Orlando di Lasso, aka "Orlande de Lassus". 

But it had nothing to do with that 16th century composer, it was the name of a band piece featuring the trombone from the early 20th century and the grotesquely racist associations given to it by the man who composed it.   It's a piece I'd heard and which was familiar to me but I didn't know what it was called, who wrote it (Henry Fillmore) or those racist associations it and a host of other trombone pieces witten by Fillmore had.   It's a really insightful and interesting short video that goes into a lot of background and why Douglass Yeo called for not playing those pieces, part of the central repertoire of his instrument, due to those associations.   It comes about from a piece that Yeo wrote that went viral (among Trombone players, I'm guessing).  I have to say it did everything to make me respect and value the musical judgement of Mr. Yeo even more than I had.   I also didn't know he wrote a blog which I will be reading all of when I get the chance.  

From a quick glance, his pieces going into the history of "Gospel Trombone" look fascinating,  I'll be looking for recordings from some of the figures he mentions in those.   Mr. Yeo is also a rather fine researcher and historian of music. 

* Like the person who commented on this excerpt which he performed previous to that, I've long wished that they would issue a recording of that BSO performance.

Note:  I have not really been keeping up with the current crisis that the Boston Symphony is going through, a mix of idiots on their board acting like idiots,  firing the conductor without any consultation of the orchestra's musicians,  the shrinking of their audience, probably due to ticket prices and bad promotion as much as the stupidification of the American culture.  Just as an aside, if I could get to Boston I'd be interested in hearing them but I couldn't afford those prices. 

If that kind of symphonic institution is still viable is open to question, or maybe it's just that such an institution in a city like Boston which is incredibly expensive to live in - and musicians except at the top tend to be anything but affluent  - I don't know.  

I'd be very sad if the Boston Symphony went under but I don't doubt that music will continue on.  Though such large ensembles may not be nearly as common as they once were. 

They should stop filling their board with lawyers and corporate gangsters.   If they aren't supporting the orchestra, they're going to gut it.   They should watch Slings and Arrows to see where that kind of thing leads an arts institution. 

I Don't Give Zionists Any Benefit Of Any Doubt After Gaza

 it is a nationalist, chauvinist, supremacist movement and a criminal one.   And I oppose all of those, including the native one in the United States and the one rising back up in places like Germany under Russian supremacists' online instigation.  There should be no freedom for any site or platform to push that,  they should be required to ban such destruction of equality and democracy and that the idiotic 18th century conception of liberal democracy refuses to be morally responsible, it has failed no less than the monarchies of Israel and Judea did in Scripture times. 

I don't give anyone license for that because it always leads to murder and oppression.   I'm not going to cut Israel any slack I'm not going to cut my own country.   No one, gentile or Jewish who pushes Zionism after Gaza and the ongoing terror campaign to force Palestinians out of every place they live has clean hands.  No more than the apologists for lynch law here had OR HAS.   It's all fascism and it should be defunded, destroyed and its future promotion forever forbidden.   I believe in learning the hardest lessons of history, unlike our idiotic mainstream legal experts who hold we are never to learn from them so "never again" really means always again.   English language media is covering up for the equivalent of Nazism today. 

This is a response. 

Abolish The ICEstapo, Expose These Nazis, Put THEM In Prison

 Democrats should pass a law making it illegal for police to mask their faces and hide their ID numbers and names.  These AmeriNazis have to be crushed out of existence.

Some Notes And Rants

JOURNALISM ISN'T THE ONLY so-called profession that shouldn't have come to rely on an aspirant having a bachelors or higher degree from a college or university of whatever purported credibility as a credentialing board.    I think that the arts are far better learned on something like an apprenticeship model.   I have told a number of very good musicians who wanted to know about majoring in music in college that the only degree program I would ever recommend anyone take a degree in is Music Education where they might get a job teaching in a school which will provide them with a salary,  insurance and enough leisure time during the summer (assuming they didn't have to take a job as a store clerk) to pursue some outside music activities.   I would hold the same about visual arts as a major.   So called "artists degrees" are worthless and a waste of money.   I can tell you that from personal experience.  

I would say the same about writing as a career, only its worse because even the lower levels of the paid writing racket have imploded with the death throes of the ink on paper journalism.  Nowadays it's primarily having your voice or face on some screen or on the radio, and the radio part of that in the US is shit.   You'd do better to learn makeup.  Knowledge doesn't seem to be much required in that profession. 

Unlike the arts, though, real journalism, the collecting and reporting of facts and, occasionally, the telling of the truth is a vital necessity for the possibility of legitimate governance in an egalitarian democracy.   You no doubt notice I stipulated FACTS, TRUTH, AND EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY.    The current professional practice of the decadence that "journalism" has become serves none of those, it reports obvious lies and did even before Bari Weiss took over and destroyed CBS "news" or what was left of it after the firing of the likes of Dan Rather.    It concentrates on "opinion" instead of reporting, it reports opinion polling instead of presenting issues, it has retreated into the cowardice of first, both-siderism" and gradually that become one-siderism as it presented what the owners, the publishers, the editors, the advertisers and the wealthy wanted it to present.   It's no accident that the whore Bari Weiss was brought into "journalism" first with the backing of millionaires and then billionaires whhen she had absolutely no journalistic abilities (as she proved at that Ivy League oligarchic whore training academy she attended) and absolutely no intention or inclination to publish facts, truth or to serve egalitarian democracy.   She intended to service the millionaires and billionaires here and the Zionist government in Israel, on behalf of whom she so notably lied from the time she was a poisonous liar in college. 

I was entirely sincere when I said the First Amendment was stupidly written in several ways, though here I'll only concentrate on "freedom of speech" and the freedom of the "press" which has taken both and used them to not only use that recent innovation invented by the Warren Court, the "right to lie" but to privilege lies over facts and truth and to the intentional determent of egalitarian democracy. 

James Madison and his colleagues who wrote the so-called Bill of Rights were a mixed bag.   As the great American historian Paul Finkelmann has noted,  Madison was forced into supporting one in the first Congress because Virginia would not have voted to adopt the Constitution if he had not made that promise.   He didn't want to have one.   I think the reluctance to do that shows up in no places so much as the badly written and considered First and Second Amendments.  The problems with the Second Amendments will certainly show up in those weekly if not daily mass shootings and I'll deal with that again another time.    

As mentioned by me many, many times over the past three or so years,  the failure to distinguish between the absolute right to tell the truth (albeit, a right that is only morally exercised with real responsibilities in regard to the consequences when telling that truth might lead to a moral atrocity) and the absolute fact that there is no such a thing as a "right to lie" is the major defect in the "freedom of speech" part of it.   I think the fact that so many of the members of the First Congress were lawyers (51% by this paper from that Ivy League training brothel, Harvard Law*) can account for why they may have wanted to give lying the benefit of Constitutional protection.   Though it could have just been the stupid urge to write bad late 18th century poetry instead of the typical and probably safer dry prose that would have made that clear.   The result has not made the United States or its law and legal practice notably more honest than that of many other countries when the sanctimony that oozed and gushed out of the founders and framers about erecting a "new order of the ages" would have led you to believe that was the intention.   It clearly was not and never was.  I will note that the very same men, in many cases, when it came to the protection of the slavery that made them wealthy, either through the holding or the importation and selling of human beings into slavery, didn't just leave it to vague poetics.** 

The same kind of defect saturates "freedom of the press" which was mistaken as the protection of a right when a "press" is an artificial entity and can have no rights.    What they did was foolishly erect a privilege for the press to lie and to spread lies more effectively than a speaker at a podium or pulpit or on a stump to a lynch mob could, to corrupt We The People with cleverly told lies, fashioned for far easier sale to the vulnerable and morally deficient than the harder to take truth is.   That failure of reasoning and writing has been one of the most dangerous defects in the Constitution from the time of its adoption.   We remember the martyrs of the "free press" such as Elijah Lovejoy  because they told the truth, the reason so many journalists are getting fired these days.   That happens while those who practice their "right" to lie and to publish lies (as the NYT was given by the Warren Court) prosper.  And, yet, the "journalists" like the lawyers wonder why they are so distrusted and despised. 

An artificial entity whether  a media corporation or the kind that the Supreme Court playing God granted "person-hood to" (by lying about the 14th Amendment) cannot have rights which are a characteristic of a naturally living being.   There is no rightful claim by an artificial entity to the kinds of rights that were dangled in front of the common American People by the Declaration of Independence to get them to fight the war for independence on behalf of the aristocrats who wrote that document.   There is no real instead of notional obligation to allow them ersatz "rights" though they can be given certain privileges, which is what the "freedom of the press" really is.   

The defect in the First Amendment is that that was not made specific WITH AN OBLIGATION THAT THAT PRIVILEGE DEPENDED ON THEM SERVING THE NEED FOR PEOPLE IN AN EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY TO HAVE THE FACTS AND THE TRUTH AND NOT TO BE PEDDLED LIES AND BIGOTRY AND HATRED THROUGH AN APPEAL TO WHAT WAS WORST IN THE AMERICAN POPULATION.   Instead Madison and his colleagues didn't mention any of that and much if not most of the "press" and now the even more degraded form of that "media" serves up lies to the People to gull them into voting the worst of the worst into office and on to courts.    And I have every confidence that there was some level of intentionality for that to happen, so many of those drafters of the Bill of Rights as it became being lawyers and "planters" (that would be big slave holders, in most cases) and others who were served by lies and who, as in so many cases among the framers and members of the First Congress, despised equality and democracy.  They were certainly experienced in the management of lies and peddling them.  Again, lawyers.   They'd have seen that possibility. 

It is one of the major defects of the teaching of American History that the major force in that history is almost never mentioned,  the agitation and struggle AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION by those who were enslaved under it, those who were subjugated under it, those who the laws that were made on the basis of it - whether by the Congress or under  the usurped powers stolen by the Supreme Court.    As I have pointed out, starting with the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800 and in many states and at times the federal government after that, the real virtue of the United States has been in the expansion of the exercise of rights and freedoms (though, alas, hardly ever with mentioning the responsibility of that freedom) AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION INCLUDING THE SO-CALLED "BILL OF RIGHTS." 

There a reason that fascists on the Supreme Court always pretend to be going back to the original intent of the framers and the text they produced IT'S BECAUSE THAT IS HOW THE COURT ROLLS BACK EVERY MEASURE OF PROGRESS MADE AGAINST THE INTENT OF THOSE SLAVEHOLDERS, INDIAN MURDERES AND LAND STEALERS AND CON ARTISTS.     When Little Ms. Amy Coney Barrett or a thug like Alito mouths such civic seeming pieties, that is what they really mean. 

And all that comes from the defects in the original Constitution made worse by the usurped Marbury and other powers stolen by the Supreme Court.  

That is what we face and until it becomes the common understanding that that is what we face,  the enemies of We The People, the despisers of egalitarian democracy and the common welfare that we were falsely promised reap the benefits of it.   And the strongest tool they have is the "right to lie" that the Courts gave them and the "press."  

* I'm not sure that the law having been one of the earliest professions to give up an apprenticeship model in favor of the erecting of law faculties at elite universities wasn't a decision to make the profession both more pretentious than it was and far more adept at lying and pretending that there was some higher virtue in that.   But it's worth thinking about.   

I'd never send a kid wanting to be a musician to an Ivy League or its equivalent.   If they wanted to be a teacher there are land-grant universities that do a much better job and if they wanted to try their luck as an artist or composer, it would probably be a huge mistake.   And an extremely expensive one.   I know a young woman who has an "artists degree" who can't get work in her field and who has large student loans to pay off.   She realizes now she was had. 

** I don't know if it's really necessary to point it out, but rereading that passage while editing this reminds me of the gangster Meyer Lansky who sardonically noted that the Mafia's "men of honor" were so honorable that they couldn't trust each other to not kill them.    It's not much different in the early history of the founders and framers.   The struggles and bile thrown in the early struggle between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian-Madisonian "Democrats" and the attempt of the Federalists to throw their fellow founders in prison for sedition is certainly relevant. 

Last Word On This For This Week

WHAT PART OF "although we seem to have very definite conceptions of objects in the external world, those conceptions do not enter into exact science and are not in any way confirmed by it;"  

and let me repeat this part of that, 

DO NOT ENTER INTO EXACT SCIENCE AND ARE NOT IN ANY WAY CONFIRMED BY IT

don't you get?

And Eddington was addressing  "very definite conceptions in the external world" as not being able to be confirmed by science.   

While those with a professional motive might want to pretend all kinds of things have a "very definite conception" you generally only have to look at their conceptions of those "things" about which their as-qualified colleagues disagree to see that those conceptions are in no way definite.   AND THOSE ARE JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT COMPRISES THE SO-CALLED SCIENCES I AM SLAMMING.   Everything from those shifting quicksands of psychology, sociology, anthropology, . . . and on to that most notable minefield of self-interest by those who practice it and those who pay them, economics.   At best such fields as are totally unsuited for the methods of science can come up with a generally enforced required agreed point of view about such things, that only lasts until the next big thing erodes that requirement in regard to  that general agreement as has happened in every one of them.  Economics is the quintessential academic whore house.  At least among those that purport to practice science, though to some extent all of them will whore out of necessity. 

And huge swaths of biology could be included within that, especially when it consists of speculation about things not visible or in any way measurable as physical phenomena, as the entire assertion of "natural selection" is not.

"Before exact science can begin to handle the problem they must be replaced by quantities representing the results of physical measurement." 

No such physical measurement of the "selective forces" that purportedly resulted in the evolution of a new species has ever been taken or could ever be taken.   As I recently repeated here, even a convinced Darwinist of the level of the geneticist Richard Lewontin admitted that.  To purport to apply that to the pseudo-science of economics "economic Darwinism" as a number of recent academic economists have is something of an ultimate absurdity.   I think natural selection is an illusion, a product of ideology, not scientific observation.   And they have led to the deaths of millions of People and the oppression of many more. 

"The essential point is that, although we seem to have very definite conceptions of objects in the external world, those conceptions do not enter into exact science and are not in any way confirmed by it. Before exact science can begin to handle the problem they must be replaced by quantities representing the results of physical measurement. " - Hate Mail

JUST BY CHANCE I have been reading a biography of the early sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and just last night read this quote by him, “Nothing in nature can escape natural law.”   

It's not for nothing, though I don't think the author of the biography meant it, that she noted in the beginning of the book that Hirschfeld was a product of the 19th century and, though unusually modern in many aspects of his thought, he was a thoroughly conventional 19th century materialist.   I don't think it would have been easy for someone to make much of a splash in the soft-sciences of his time if he hadn't been.  Especially in his line of trade.*

The confident assertion by an educated man working in what has to count as certainly the softest of sciences,  something which depended entirely on the self-reporting of human beings about not only their sexual activity but their interior sexual consciousness, that "natural law" had some independent existence apart from the PEOPLE who formulated such laws and that such "natural law" which had its basis in the observations of non-living and systems, planets, objects moving and being affected by gravity and other seemingly involuntary forces could have anything to do with his area of study has to count as a monumental leap of faith, not based on religion but based on an ideology that was intrinsically hostile to religion and in that attempt to win out over it,  clung on to entirely unfounded articles of faith such as that one. 

People like to think of "scientists" such as Hirschfeld who had some progressive ideas about forbidden sexuality in heroic terms  He is generally presented as a hero to my fellow LGBTQ+ People.**  Also for the extreme opposition to him that the Nazis had, both due to him being Jewish and due to his subject of research but also due to the fact that a number of Nazi Party members had exposed their own homosexuality to him and his colleagues.  They were especially targeted by the Nazis for that.   And there was a lot to respect in what Hirschfeld did, though certainly not everything.   I have to say that the book's reporting of his fears for the direction that Zionism was headed in during his time were prescient. 

And a lot of his "science" is as definitively rejected now as an enormous part of what was accepted as even hard science, published in books and journals, taught at universities and colleges and high schools, especially the farther you get from physics and inorganic chemistry.   Which shows you just how durable the 19th century notions of "natural law" are.   

If 21st century notions of natural law are any more durable, we don't know yet,  no more than someone who died an old man in 1935 could have - though if he'd read, for example, the eminent astro-physicist and non-materialist, A.S. Eddington on the topic he might have had a more sophisticated view of what "natural law" is.***   Though you could say the same thing about a lot of current professionals in science, even many a living physicist and, especially, cosmologist.  

The "natural law" that we can talk about is a human creation.   Just as every aspect of everything we can talk about, write about, make mathematical calculations about, teach about, etc. is a product of human consciousness.  And it is nothing like a complete picture of even simple realities.  The farther you get from those simple entities, the less scientific the science gets. 

* Like all of the social-pseudo-sciences, anything that depends entirely on reports by People of their own unobserved behavior and, ever more so, their internal experience of their own consciousness,  can never, ever have anything like the reliability of the observations of planets or molecules or subatomic particles.   People lie about their sexual activities,  they lie to their partners,  they lie to themselves about it.  Those lies are so basic to the pretense that what they are doing is science that they are reported as fact in publications held to be science, even as the resulting statistical analyses are mathematically incoherent and impossible.   Sexology might be a suitable topic for academic study and publishing but any alleged scientific handling of it is pseudo-science. 

See the reports of the numbers of sexual partners of heterosexually identifying males and the different numbers of sexual partners of heterosexually identifying females as only one glaring example.   Yet it is published as science. 

I would go into the history of political opinion polling and, especially, the notoriously partisan polling results of Republican favoring polling firms but I won't for now.   I'd ban political polling and the reporting of them before elections if it were my call. 

** I hadn't till last week come across the designation "2SLGBTQ+" and had to look it up.  the "2S" means "Two-spirit."   Since it was a Canadian source that I found it in, I gather that it's given its first place out of respect for First Nations ideas, which I have no problem with, though it's a bit cumbersome to keep adding to the inclusive term which I prefer, I might adopt it out of respect.  

But the complexity of any one of those identities included in that ever expanding acronym shows how pointless and hopeless it is to come up with a real "science" of human sexuality.    I often half-joke that I refuse to share a sexual identity with Republican-fascists who like to have sex with men, but that's only half a joke. 

***  To get some idea at the extremely tenuous relationship of exact science and the (pseudo-)would-be-sciences, especially something like sexology, take this passage from Eddington's 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World.  

As is my current MO, I have inserted breaks for the ease of modern readers who aren't accustomed to reading long paragraphs but I have not changed any words or their order. 

 Nature of Exact Science. One of the characteristics of physics is that it is an exact science, and I have generally identified the domain of physics with the domain of exact science.  Strictly speaking the two are not synonymous. We can imagine a science arising which has no contact with the usual phenomena and laws of physics, which yet admits of the same kind of exact treatment.  

It is conceivable that the Mendelian theory of heredity may grow into an independent science of this kind, for it would seem to occupy in biology the same position that the atomic theory occupied in chemistry a hundred years ago. The trend of the theory is to analyze complex individuals into “unit characters.” These are like indivisible atoms with affinities and repulsions; their matings are governed by the same laws of chance which play so large a part in chemical thermodynamics; and numerical statistics of the characters of a population are predictable in the same way as the results of a chemical reaction.

I break in to note that even with Eddington's quite unusual caution in describing the then presumed knowledge of genetic inheritance,  that view of biological inheritance AND IT IS PROBABLY STILL THE DOMINANTLY HELD VIEW OF "GENES" EVEN AMONG MANY BIOLOGISTS! it is extremely naive in light of the ever increasing complexity and non-fixity of the behaviors of genes and the general area of biological inheritance.   "Mendelian theory," that is genetics, has become ever less like that description of it with its presumed proximity to 1920s chemistry, starting with the work of geneticists even in the decade after these lectures were published.  I don't know the extent to which Eddington may have known about that cutting edge work before his death in the 1940s.  

Now the effect of such a theory on our philosophical views of the significance of life does not depend on whether the Mendelian atom admits of a strictly physical explanation or not. The unit character may be contained in some configuration of the physical molecules of the carrier, and perhaps even literally correspond to a chemical compound; or it may be something superadded which is peculiar to living matter and is not yet comprised in the schedule of physical entities. That is a side-issue. 

We are drawing near to the great question whether there is any domain of activity - of life, of consciousness, of deity - which will not be engulfed by the advances of exact science; and our apprehension is not directed against the particular entities of physics but against all entities of the category to which exact science can apply. 

For exact science invokes, or has seemed to invoke, a type of law inevitable and soulless against which the human spirit rebels. If science finally declares that man is no more than a fortuitous concourse of atoms, the blow will not be softened by the explanation that the atoms in question are the Mendelian unit characters and not the material atoms of the chemist.

Let us then examine the kind of knowledge which is handled by exact science. If we search the examination papers in physics and natural philosophy for the more intelligible questions we may come across one beginning something like this: “An elephant slides down a grassy hillside…” The experienced candidate knows that he need not pay much attention to this; it is only put in to give an impression of realism. 

He reads on: “The mass of the elephant is two tons.” Now we are getting down to business; the elephant fades out of the problem and a mass of two tons takes its place. What exactly is this two tons, the real subject matter of the problem? It refers to some property or condition which we vaguely describe as “ponderosity” occurring in a particular region of the external world.

But we shall not get much further that way; the nature of the external world is inscrutable, and we shall only plunge into a quagmire of indescribables. Never mind what the two tons refers to; what is it? How has it actually entered in so definite a way into our experience?

Two tons is the reading of a pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing-machine. 

Let us pass on. “The slope of the hill is 60˚.” Now the hillside fades out of the problem and an angle of 60˚ takes its place. What is 60˚? 

There is no need to struggle with mystical conceptions of direction; 60˚ is the reading of a plumb-line against the divisions of a protractor. Similarly for the other data of the problem. The softly yielding turf on which the elephant slides is replaced by a coefficient of friction, which though perhaps not directly a pointer reading is of kindred nature. No doubt there are more roundabout ways used in practice for determining the weights of elephants and the slopes of hills, but these are justified because it is known that they give the same results as direct pointer readings.

And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left with only pointer readings. If then only pointer readings or their equivalents are put into the machine of scientific calculation, how can we grind out anything but pointer readings? But that is just what we do grind out. The question presumably was to find the time of descent of the elephant, and the answer is a pointer reading on the seconds’ dial of our watch.

The triumph of exact science in the foregoing problem consisted in establishing a numerical connection between the pointer reading on the weighing-machine on one experiment on the elephant and the pointer reading on a watch in another experiment. And when we examine critically other problems of physics we find that this is typical. The whole subject matter of exact science consists of pointer readings and similar indications.

We cannot enter here into the definition of what are to be classed as similar indications. The observation of approximate coincidence of the pointer with a scale-division can generally be extended to include the observation of any kind of coincidence - or, as it is usually expressed in the language of the general relativity theory, an intersection of worldlines. The essential point is that, although we seem to have very definite conceptions of objects in the external world, those conceptions do not enter into exact science and are not in any way confirmed by it. Before exact science can begin to handle the problem they must be replaced by quantities representing the results of physical measurement. 

Look at the above link to the post about something as seemingly simple as the statistics of numbers of sex partners and the knowing scientific reporting of what are mathematically impossible data for reference. 

I have to confess, reading that again makes me eager to use the word "superadded" and getting some online knickers in a twist.  The ones this kind of a post gets knotted up. 

I Hope Canada Shows Us How A Real Democracy Deals With Traitors

 

Hate Mail Already

I don't know if anyone has ever formally studied it from this angle, but the perpetual hostility of Republicans and their whores to Social Security may well have originated in the crooked bankers and other entities through which they could steal the life savings of the underclass were diverted into Social Security where they couldn't directly steal them.   The bankers alone would have hated it, not to mention that other major venue of unillegalized theft, insurance. 

If I were twenty years younger I might try to make that study but it would take a lot of digging because they would have never actually admitted to the reality that SUCH THEFT IS AT THE BOTTOM OF JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING THEY DO.  

And the ideological opposition to it and other government programs is probably the afterthought cover-job  to push in order to con and convince the stupider members of the underclass into electing their tools who will do that stealing for them.   As Max pointed out in that passage I quoted from,  every president from Ronald Reagan,  Republican and Democratic has either pushed or failed to stop such transfers of wealth, though so far not through the gutting of Social Security though Medicare has already taken huge hits and Medicaid is a shell of what it used to be.  

What you think you favor "on principle" is actually a huge line of con-jobbery as pushed by whores in the media and academia and the law.  

Just Curious

so I looked up what the CBS skank Jan Crawford to see which universities or colleges produced her.

She majored in "journalism" at the University of Alabama* and got a JD from the U. of Chicago.   Sort of a double whammy in terms of my themes here.  

To back up my recent slamming of the "journalism" specialty of fluffling the Supreme Court, she did that for the Chicago Tribune,  the NewHour with Jim Lehrer, and Face the Nation.    She was enough of a fluffer that Supreme Court "justices" as varied as John Roberts and John Paul Stevens chose her to do those kinds of bespoke interviews that are the only kind that just about all "justices" will do.  

And now at the Ellison-Weiss CBS, she's breaking their "journalistic" standards in support of paid Republican-fascist trolls pushing racist narratives.   Well, I don't think that she's a native white Alabamian is irrelevant to all of that.   Alabama being one of those states which has been under our native form of facist controll, white supremacy, for its entire history, apart from a brief era during Reconstruction (but going into that might get me back into ranting about Profiles in "Courage" again).  

Such is American "journalism" under free-speech-press absolutism and the "right to lie" that was created for the NYT that her job is almost certainly more secure than Lesley Stahl's is at this point.   And I've been plenty critical of ol' Lesley in the past, too.  But compared to Crawford, she's a monument of journalistic integrity.  

*  That goddamned movie and book, All The Presidents' Men and the academicization of what used to be better when it was the realm of those without degrees but who learned to be reporters on an apprenticeship basis has been part of the ruination of American reporting.   "Journalism" should never have been allowed to become an academic major.   Especially on the end where they hire the stupider sons and daughters of the affluent class who are too stupid to do what's most important to them, go into banking, insurance swindles and other direct forms of self-enrichment.    Now that the tech billionaire bros are hiring the executives and staffs at traditional media,  it's even worse than it was at the end of the last century when it was already totally decadent. 

First This Excellent Explanation Of A Complex Entity

Joe Kernen of CNBC’s SquawkBox is everything that is wrong with mainstream media. While most media critics focus on the hyperpartisan presentation of debate segments and opinion shows, the real malignant nature of news is hidden in the mundane. In this episode, Max sets the table with examples of Kernen’s uncritical approach to news from a right wing perspective to determine the host’s bias then illustrates how this bias shows up in even the most innocuous and seemingly harmless observations. 

This like most of Max's commentary is worth listening to until you understand the details because so much of it is quite detailed.   And Max highlights why what they are peddling on virtually ALL of the commercial media and much of the non-commercial media is either knowing lies or total PR bullshit for the oligarchy. 

I especially liked this sarcasm after playing a clip of the tool, Joe Kernan and the corporate whore Peter Boockvar because it contains so much information about why the common consensus of the media-corporate-academic class repeatedly leads us to disaster and hints at part of the basis of it.

As usual, this is my editing of the auto-generated transcript,  Max's delivery is so good that that is unusually clear in the text when it's from him. 

"We all know where the problem is. 'It's entitlements.'" [Sarcasm quotes added by me.]

It's you. You and all that retirement security income and your health issues because you want to live in the world after paying into a system your entire life because you expect some sort of return on investment after your 40 hour work week over 40 years. How dare you? 

Don't you know that we have wars to start? I mean, sure, Trump is asking for a half a trillion on top of the trillion already allocated for defense. And sure, every president since Ronald Reagan has either cut or maintained tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations and allowed them together to hide nearly $4 trillion in offshore tax havens. 

Okay, take a breath. Here's the thing.

It's not the panel debates that actually influence public opinion. It's not the opinion shows themselves that drive opinion. Like the late night CNN lineups of the he-said-she-saids or the Piers Morgan ruses where they put seven faces on a screen and let them all yell at one another hoping for something clippable.

Which, I will insert, is a rather succinct summary of what American journalism in the cabloid age has devolved into.  Like the 500+ channel age with nothing on TV phenomeon, the 24-7-365 "news" cycle is as news free, as information and fact free as most "history"  Youtubes.  

It's the stuff that goes unchecked and unchallenged day after day,  stuff that's passed off as common knowledge and settled science.  Like every assumption out of this guest [Peter]  Boockvar, every assumption out of his mouth could be annihilated,  at a minimum scrutinized.

See, when people on the left criticize the mainstream media, this is what we're talking about. It's not the hyper-partisan fictions propagated by the likes of Fox

News or MS Now. 

It's the mundane, repeatable offenses that worm their way into the record and become the law of the land. That's why I go out of my way to give a tongue lashing to feckless stenographers of corporate shibiliths designed to maintain the status quo. 

I'll start by saying the reason that these guys peddle that line on "entitlements" doesn't have anything to do with the alleged economic damage done by We The People having the money to live, be housed, eat food that will keep us healthy, get healthcare when we aren't,  IT'S BECAUSE THE OLIGARCHS KNOW THERE IS A HUGE POOL OF MONEY THAT IS THERE FOR THE STEALING AND ALL THEY NEED IS TO GULL ENOUGH PEOPLE INTO VOTING THEIR CRIME GANG INTO OFFICE AND THAT'S WHERE THE "NEWS" MEDIA AND THE ENTERTAINMENT "MEDIA" COME INTO IT,  THEY ARE TO SELL THAT LIE SO THEY CAN STEAL THAT MOUNTAIN OF MONEY.  

I'm sure some of those who read me often will note a particular sentence that was like cat-nip to me, 

It's the stuff that goes unchecked and unchallenged day after day,  stuff that's passed off as common knowledge and settled science.

The truth that a large percentage of those who are called economists or play them on cabloid TV pass off their oligarchich mythological lore as "science" is aided and abetted by academia who, enjoying the patronage of the oligarchy pretend the study of the generally artificial, man made, intentional conditions (to the extent that is controllable) of economies can achieve the reliability of science, and so their desired narratives have the same status as the discoveries of Newton or Mendeleev.  And that is among the things that allows them to get away with it.   

The study of economies could be a legitimate academic study, as could some other things included in the "soft-science" if they would give up the pretense that their incredibly complex, largely unseeable and often entirely artificial areas of study can be treated as science or find hard facts that are as reliably true and basic to more complex phenomena as those findings of mathematics, physics and chemistry (especially inorganic chemistry).    They could honestly admit that, in the example of economics, that the focus of their study is nothing like a natural phenomenon that can generate similarly hard "laws of nature" but might be honestly done if it was an analysis of choices made, laws imposed by human choice and the consequences of those "laws" playing out in reality.   In which case NOTHING ABOUT IT IS INEVITABLE NOTHING ABOUT IT IS UNCHANGABLE, NOTHING ABOUT IT IS SET IN STONE OR MOLECULES OR ATOMS OR SUBATOMIC PARTICLES.   It was the ideological foundations of all of the "soft-sciences" that all of reality was subject to the same laws and conditions as generated the laws of Newtonian gravity or atomic theory.   And that was always a rather obvious lie from the start of the formal study of economics and the subsequent areas of such pseudo-science as sociology, linguistics, anthropology and psychology.     And, as I have repeated endlessly,  the infection of that ideology entered into the real life sciences through the theory of natural selection to the extent that in the past half-century the absurdities of "evolutionary psychology" what Stephen Jay Gould called "Darwinian fundamentalism" has become the currency of similar "common knowledge and settled science."  

I will note in passing that while the hack Peter Boockar has a degree in finance and attended law school (I don't see that he ever graduated from it),  the total tool and asshole joke, Joe Kernan actually got a masters in molecular biology from that ultimate military-industrial whore house MIT.    I would love to know how much of what he learned there informs his view of economics as a science. 

Marylin Robinson, in her excellent book Mother Country, in which she took apart the British class system and its disastrous consequences, noted that the early economist whose false plaster-image and name is an idol of American and Brit oligarachic culture was really nothing like that false front.  She did what hardly anyone who invokes his name these days has done, SHE READ WHAT HE SAID.    And so did the current Democratic candidate for the Senate in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed, clearly also has read Adam Smith and knows what he actually said.   Here he is giving a really interesting answer to a CNN gotcha question about democratic socialism.   Note how he differentiates his motivations based in science-based medicine and his accurate analysis of what "capitalism" was supposed to mean, before the Chamber of Commerce "Adam Smith" was errected. 

I don't think I've ever heard a better candidate cutting through the cabloid BS narrative to get right to the real truth of things.    And the American news media is doing everything they can to take him down.   I've seen a lot of that this year, especially in Senate races.    The lies in Maine to support Susan Collins are as over the top as those under white supremacy in the old South ever were.    

Message At The End Of Two Hard Days

 What Hawk says about James Carville saying he'd rather have Republicans keep control of the house instead of DSA members having some influence on policy.  That is despite DEMOCRATS, members of the party he allegedly is a member of, voting for them.

 

He reminds me of his fellow campaign consultant, I believe it was Bob Shrum, who I recall hearing on a TV talk show talking about the "strategic advantage" in losing elections.   Which, considering how many losing campaigns he worked for (NO ONE SHOULD GET MORE THAN ONE OF THOSE BEFORE THEY ARE NEVER HIRED AGAIN) you can imagine him coming up with such a stupid idea. 

ANY FORMERLY DEMOCRATIC CAMPAIGN CONSULTANT WHO ADVOCATES REPUBLICANS WINNING CONTROL OF ANY BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE HELD TO HAVE ENDED THEIR CREDIBILITY AS A DEMOCRAT FROM THEN ON.   There should never be any coming back from that.   Especially after Trump I and Trump II.   Carville is a Republican tool. 

 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Katie Hims - Listening To The Dead

 Listening To The Dead

This is a series of five substantial plays, enough for a whole week of nightly radio dramas.   It is one of the best things I've heard in radio drama both as individual plays and in the arc of the complete story. 

Here's the description at Archive.org 

1. Enoch's Machine

First broadcast: Mon 30th Dec 2013, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM

Enoch Cartwright, Victorian gentleman scientist, invests everything in the development of a machine to record the voice of his dead daughter, Emily, unaware that his living daughter Clara talks to her sister every night.

Enoch …. Michael Bertenshaw
Clara …. Eva Sayer
Emily …. Georgie Fuller
Wesley Blackburn …. Ben Crowe
Woman at door …. Carolyn Pickles
Joe …. John Hughes
Josie …. Priyanga Burford

After developing the means to make long distance radio transmissions, Marconi devoted much of the rest of his life to listening out for the voices of the dead. If radio can conjure a voice disembodied in space, he expected, as have legions of people since, that radio can capture the voices of those disembodied in other dimensions - in time, in ethereal planes. 

As technology becomes more sensitive, more diverse, more obscure, there are pioneers always ready to harness the new to the service of this age old fascination.

This is the story of five generations of a family whose members can and can't hear the dead. It's an enterprise to explore the myriad ties, stories and quirks that bind families through the generations, across the spectrum of meanings of 'listening to the dead'. 

Between allowing the echoes of a beloved's voice to live on, and the notion that the dead can engage in communicating new information, are vast grey areas of misinformation that beguile the bereaved and thrill the imagination.

2. Four Sons

First broadcast: Tue 31st Dec 2013, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM

It's 1914, and Clara Tully, a Leeds baker's wife and the proud mother of four beautiful boys, knows the war won't be over by Christmas. And she knows a much darker secret besides.

Clara …. Michelle Terry
Eloise …. Georgie Fuller
Charlie …. Harry Jardine
Robin …. Joel MacCormick
George …. John Norton
Customer …. Priyanga Burford
Customer …. Sabina Arthur
Customer …. Carolyn Pickle
Lloyd George …. Sean Murray
Finley …. Will Featherstone
Joe …. Will Howard

3. The Great Pretender
First broadcast: Wed 1st Jan 2014, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM

Ralf Little stars as a small-time 1950s psychic, who hungers for fame, despite his inability to read the thoughts of anyone, let alone the woman he works with.

Frank …. Ralf Little
TV presenter …. Arthur Hughes
Eloise …. Carolyn Pickles
Girl …. Carys Eleri
Betty …. Harry Jardine
Betty …. Joanna Monro
Peggy …. Lizzy Watts
Joe …. Sean Murray


4. Ruby's Shoes
First broadcast: Thu 2nd Jan 2014, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM

Ruby Tully grows up unaware of her clairvoyant heritage, and finds that her gift is a curse in an age of experimental psychology.

Ruby 8:…..Nell Herrin
Ruby:…..Ami Metcalf
Nish 8:…..Leon Human
Nish:….Hamza Jeetooa
Peggy:…..Lisa Stevenson
Frank:…..David Seddon
Doctor:….Michael Bertenshaw
Miss Violet:….Carys Eleri
Tuesday 3:…..Rosa Yevtushenko
Ralph:….Arthur Hughes

Emily:……Georgie Fuller

5. Tuesday's Child
First broadcast: Fri 3rd Jan 2014, 14:15 on BBC Radio 4 FM 

Tuesday grows up assuming her mother abandoned her, despite the voices in her dreams that try to tell her otherwise

Tuesday ..... Jeany Spark
Tuesday 11 ..... Rose Hilton Hille
Tuesday 3 ..... Rosa Yevtushenko
Frank ..... David Seddon
Peggy ..... Lisa Stevenson
Maggie ..... Carolyn Pickles
Ruby ..... Ami Metcalf
Nish ..... Paul Bazely
Oliver 20 ..... Joel MacCormack
Oliver 55 ..... Michael Bertenshaw
Dan ..... Harry Jardine
Melinda ..... Georgie Fuller
Boss ..... Sean Murray

Directed by Jessica Dromgoole

Yes

@TheRickWilson

I await the multi-day stories on the cover of the NYT about Trump's declining mental and physical health. I SEEM to recall a lot of those in 2024.

As seen at RMJ's

There should be a massive and continual call out of the New York Times, it's editors and especially its publisher calling attention to the contrast between its treatment of the old and at times temporarily infirm Joe Biden and the clearly criminally insane and senile Donald Trump and the ruin they brought the United States to in order for all of them to get the second round of Trump billionaire-millionaire tax cuts.

I loathe the New York Times and the Sulzberger family which is among the more malignant forces in the United States that gets passed on from sentimental attachment to what its (largely undeserved) reputation used to be.   The Boston Globe (alas, nothing like its former self)  got ruined by them.  They are not the friends of an accurately informed American People given the information they need to govern themselves and they seldom were. 

No, I Hadn't Read That

the lying, grifting, hallelujah peddlin,' Jim Bakker had died and has most likely gone to hell.   I hope he gets out when the last of the evil he did in this world is burned out of him,  as described in Paul and, as I recall, it says in both Luke and Matthew's Gospels.   But not till then. 

Though I will admit that I had a sentimental affection for the original Azuza Street Pentecostalism which was  integrated both along racial and gender lines and produced some great music,  seeing the antics of, especially, the racist, sexist, hateful white supremacist majority of Pentecostals and not a few non-white Bakker level crooks and grifters among the current herd of them,  I don't consider Pentacostalism to be Christianity,  it is just another of the many pseudo-Christian, ideological-financial-political manifestations of the Antichrist which are most accurately considered christianist,  not Christian.   Nor, by the way do I any longer consider much of what is called "evangelical" Protestantism or "traditional Catholicism" to be much better.   

As I said in the post you objected to,  it's not the fault of authentically Christian People or those of other faiths that the lawyerly language of the First Amendment and the love that our lawyers, judges and, especially, "justices" have for playing even stupider than they are when it comes to determining a religion from a con job,  faith for robbing the vulnerable and mentally deficient,  enriching a small circle of crooks for those who give everything to the least among us,  that our Constitution and law is that stupidly written and dishonestly administered.

But there is every reason for those authentically Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Native and other Religious Believers to reject such dishonesty and stupidity.   There's nothing to keep us from calling them out and condemning them.

And daintily not doing that is not a matter of niceness or fairness,  we've got the history of such abuse of the forms of religion and the enormous numbers of People they harm to reject the idea that our own, personal and temporary tranquility overcomes the need to condemn and reject and fight against those things. 

Jesus did it continually in the Gospels.   Paul did in his letters, Luke did in Acts, and the rest of the Scripture from the time of the Prophets did too.   It's clearly a religious duty to forego the ease of that cowardly, scrupulous refusal to tell the truth about it.   At least if you take the example of the Prophets, the Apostles and Jesus as normative.  

Time To Stop Funding Israeli Fascists And Murderers