for all I know she's a horrible person or she might be anything less than that - as a billionaire I favor leveling her out of existence, as I do every billionaire on Earth - but with the men in that Oval Office scene, it's telling that her freakish make up and hairdo are what's getting all the attention. If she had nothing, even looking like that, I'd hold that it's entirely her own business how she chooses to look. When I am acting as I was brought up to act and be too polite as to comment on that, I'd hold that line.
The way she looks is no worse than the men, but it's what everyone is focused on.
Still, as a billionaire, level each of them out of existence. There is nothing uglier than someone owning billions of dollars.
IT'S FORTUNATE FOR REPUBLICANS that their compliant, complicit, corporate media keeps the American People so ignorant of the world outside of the United States and even within the United States that those still under their sway don't know how far the United States has sunk under Republican regimes since 2000. Under Trump the United States' dominating reputation in the post-WWII period has been totally obliterated and with his reaction to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee's awarding of their prize to Navanethem Pillay, the world is mocking his Baby Huey tantrum that it wasn't given to him.
It's funny that one of the most appropriate American English idioms to describe Trump's public behavior is to say he's got no class or that he's low class. That's because it holds up the upper class, those with lots of money as having better and more adult level behavior and self-restraint in such stuff when everything in the news reminds us that the upper class, especially those who grew up rich are more typified by the spoiled brat, selfish criminal behavior of Trump, his children, his grand children, those the Republicans in the Senate allowed him to fill the executive branch and judiciary with and, especially the billionaires and millionaires, media figures and Hollywood producers, etc. who created him as a public figure and as a political figure.
The Cornel 7 (as someone said this week, it's more like the Cornel 57) case, the fraternity boy gang rape case is a reminder that the Ivy League "Greek life" set* are among the most dangerous of criminal gangsters who become even more dangerous as they graduate and start running the real criminal gangs and their lawyer protection rackets. By a huge majority, the members of the U.S. Supreme Court have been frat boys for more than a century. And they're probably not the most dangerous of the ones that went into that career. The really dangerous ones are the ones who bought those seats for their frat bros.
The fact is, with almost no exceptions, the rich are trash.
No, in that metaphor, they're hazardous, nuclear waste. Those who are taught by the media, by movies, by fiction to look up to them are chumps. It's astonishing how much of the most popular movie and TV and pulp crap is a PR campaign promoting a totally fake and heroic view of the rich. And how their victims are convinced to fall for that shit.
When they start talking about the end of the American century, which Trump has ended about sixteen years short of it being declared (by that piece of shit, Henry Luce) they won't admit it was the Republicans and their owners the billionaires and millionaires, the corporate media, the Ivy League lawyers, the corporate class that blew it out of their greed. They partnered up with the white supremacists to get us here.
I love, absolutely love that it is a South African Woman who was a warrior in the anti-apartheid campaign and judge on the International Court of Justice who is joking about Trump's Baby Huey tantrum at not being given the apple of his eye. I wonder the extent to which the oligarchic corporate darling Maria Corina Machado bribing Trump with the one they gave her last year only to have him bypass her installation to run Venezuela played in the committee's choice this year. Preferring to make a deal with the corrupt VP Delcy Rodríguez who has an extensive record in the very drug running that Trump supposedly opposed. ** Bad bet to make, giving Trump what he wants. He'll throw you under the bus as soon as he has it in his hands and you don't have anything else he wants.
He's thrown the United States away. Including the lower and middle class white supremacists who provided the bulk of his low-information vote. And now a lot of the oligarchs stand to lose as well as Europe, Canada and others separate themselves from American corporations because they suddenly realize that relying on those is a danger to their independence and existence.
* There has been so much really insightful and important coverage of that case, much of it bringing in other cases and making the point that it's not just the frats and sororities that are rich boy and gal criminal gangs, it's also sports teams. I've been following the Hysteria Podcast and also liked what Christ Hedges said about it.
** Trump called off the American drug cops on Rodriguez.
IT WASN'T MY DOCTOR who told me the most important thing I've found to diminish the debilitating pain of the trigeminal neuralgia which has made such an impact on me since late summer, it was someone who told me that using a conventional toothbrush to brush my teeth might be making it much worse and so it has proved over the past three days.
Since then I've looked it up in legit seeming sites online and have learned a lot more than the medical advice which centered on taking debilitating drugs told me. After years of taking doctors' advice - though I have always told them I would only take pain meds when it got unbearable - I found that one bit of advice given by a long-term sufferer was worth more than everything they told me. As is so often the case, when it comes to doctors, your successful treatment to a good extent depends on your luck and chance.
I'm experimenting with those silicon finger brushes they make for brushing babies and pets teeth (didn't know those existed before she told me about them) and am looking for soft bristled brushes which it never occurred to me to try before this.
Thought I'd pay on the advice I was given for free in case someone who reads this needs it.
By the way, one of the things a doctor wanted to prescribe for me is a benzodiazepine drug that someone my age should never take - it says that right in the hand-outs they give you at the drug store. I knew that because of the terrible consequences my elderly mother suffered because she took them when she was prescribed them so I refused those.
Apparently they're handing those out to even those who the literature says shouldn't be given them like they handed out Tetracycline in the 1970s.
I DON'T THINK it was providential that I wrote that short series of posts dealing with Darwinism and the origin of life on Earth that this video of Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon that had some relevant content to that. Though I'm prepared to think it might have been. Note Rupert Sheldrake saying that our own lives are a matter of the providential because it depends on all of our ancestors "going back to the origin of life" surviving and having offspring, which isn't considered often enough.
Remember that when you hear some snob bragging about the age of their family.
The brief discussion of why the atheist fad of the 00s failed is interesting.
THIS KIND OF THING is what comes of the Republicans in the Congress and on the Supreme Court letting a Trump and his goons mount a domestic Gestapo in the United States WITH MASKED IDENTITIES. And why Democrats have to defund ICE and abolish the DHS. I told people when Bush II invented the "Department of Homeland Security" that that "homeland" sounded like it was translated from the Nazi. And it has proven to be something of the kind in the fullness of time.
THE REPORTING ON JOHN ROBERTS' and his vile wife and family being subjected to the reportedly intense disapproval of him expressed on Hupper Island where he bought an ocean front house and adjoining property to enjoy themselves, and in the mainland community of Port Clyde makes me smile.
I am glad that there are those in my state who are letting the main author of the new fascist government we are beginning to experience know that he's going to pay some price for that. He should never be allowed to live it down though he live to be 120. None of them should be allowed to do that nor should any of those who put the Republican-fascist six on the Supreme Court.
I'm sure that Roberts is mentally incapable of the kind of moral reflection that would lead a moral person to realize the evil that he has ushered in in destroying equality and democracy in the United States, if he had that kind of ability for that level of moral reflection he never would have had the career he has. - he probably would never have become a lawyer of the kind he was. I will note in passing the elite Catholic prep and the Ivy League schools he went to didn't seem to give him that. i don't trust elite preps and Ivy League level universities because they have provided the bulk of our elite criminal class.
John Roberts will never feel or even express insincere regret for what he has done, including for the murders of fishermen, of protesters, of innocent people murdered by ICE and DHS and the murders of school girls in Iran by the man he made an impume monarch. He certainly will never feel any regret from restarting American apartheid - that has been the most constant focus of his entire career as a lawyer, a judge, a "justice" HE IS A GENTEEL WHITE SUPREMACIST, among the most dangerous of that kind. I believe in the rare possibility of such an intense racist to see the error of their ways - though in the cases I know, they were blue collar people who weren't given the ideological and academic excuses to pretend their racism either wan't racism or that it was right on some "higher principle." But Roberts isn't going to be one of those. The ones I've known came to abandon their racism to any extent through human relations, often because their children or grandchildren married across racial lines. Though I've also known cases in which People were disowned for that reason. Roberts is not ever going to be a former racist. It's his professional career.
And that's only one of the issues in which Roberts has earned the loathing of anyone who values democracy, equality, justice, fairness and the lives of ordinary People of no wealth. I am not thoroughly versed in the legal decisions of Roger Taney but what earned him that kind of thing was that one horrifically bad decision, Roberts and his fascist colleagues have issued several such decisions. He may fairly be judged, someday, to have outdone Taney in earning the status of a bad name in democracy and history. As can the other five of his fascist majority and those in the majority of the Rehnquist Court.
All of them can be credited with giving the branch of government that was regularly given a pass before Rehnquist took over as Chief "justice" the status as likely the worst of the three branches. As I have been noting here since the end of July, you can credit SOME eras of Congress and some presidents with making Civil Rights, Voting Rights and other Acts that expanded on that promissory note of the Declaration of Indendence. They passed clean elections laws in the wake of the Nixon crime spree, they made laws protecting the environment and a host of other good laws THAT THE SUPREME COURT OVER THE COURSE OF ITS HISTORY HAVE NULLIFIED AND OVERTURNED AND MADE MEANINGLESS BY THEIR RULINGS MOWING THOSE DOWN. That is far more typical of the Court than even the presidents, even the Senate where under our system good legislation is often sent to die has more creditable behavior. You can really only credit one brief era of the Supreme Court with something somewhat better, under Warren and part of the Burger years up to Buckley v Valeo. And they frequently proved themselves stupid in their attempts at doing better.
You have to be really bad to earn the kind of name that John Roberts has for himself. You don't hear much about Waite or Fuller though they were pretty bad and presided of vile courts.
Roberts will already go down as one of the two worst in our history, Taney being his sole competition for that position. I'm glad that at least on one tiny corner of Maine coastline he's getting some of what he's earned in this life. I'm sure he can arrange his time in the DC area and elsewhere to shield him from consequences. His wife gets enough dirty money to do that from her side-job which in an honest system would be illegal. And I'm sure Roberts could get billionaires with business before the court to arrange that for him as they do other members of his Court. I wish there was some way to keep him away from my state but at least he can be kept from enjoying it like he used to. I haven't been to Port Clyde since I had a college friend who was from there. I'd heckle him if I saw him there.
if he were going to resign from the Court he'd do it. He's making his coy indication because he's hoping to make the Republican-fascist domination of the Supreme Court an election issue to get the Republican-fascists out to vote Republican to keep the Court in fascist hands.
It's not possible to rank the Republican-fascists on the Court for their villainy and vileness but Alito certainly ranks as one of the worst of the worst. A true believing fascist nutjob. He would certainly do whatever he could to try to tip the scales in this election, though the fascist six all would.
I think if the Senate is going to go Democratic he will resign almost immediately to put another Leonard Leo protegee on the Court, a certain fascist vote, if it's going to remain under Republican-fascist control, he probably won't resign. He likes to lord over and hurt powerless People too much, especially Women and People of Color and LGBTQ+ of no means. NOT that Roberts, Thomas or the other three Republican goons aren't as bad, they are.
OF COURSE YOU WILL PROBABLY have realized that I left one of the most urgent of issues out of those proposed constitutional reforms.
IF THERE IS ONE THING THAT IS OBVIOUS, THE PRESIDENTIAL PARDON POWER IS A VENUE OF GROTESQUE CORRUPTION, TOTALLY OUT OF ANY BOUNDS AND WAS ALWAYS A DANGEROUS AND RATHER STUPID POWER FOR THE FRAMERS TO GIVE, IN THE TERMS OF THE CONSTITUTION, UNCONDITIONALLY.
It should, at the very last be invalid for a president to give a pardon to anyone who has given him any money or favors.
It should be invalid for a president to pardon anyone in their own administration, campaign, or sitting members of the government and courts under their administration. It should be invalid for a Vice President to pardon the previous president as Ford pardoned Nixon and Vance will pardon Trump if Trump isn't dead when he becomes president. There was nothing in American history with quite the stench that the Ford pardon of Nixon had but they've certainly more than matched it under Bush I, Bush II and Trump.
It should be invalid for them to pardon members of their immediate family though I fully think that Joe Biden pardoning his son and so many others was both understandable and excusable due to the proven abuse of power the Republicans had already shown they were and still are fully prepared to use to PERSECUTE THEM FOR NO REASON AT ALL.
Our system is filthy to the core and there is no putting polish on that and pretending it's anything but that.
is a lie.
They had two opportunities in the Senate to remove Trump from office WHEN HE HAD COMMITTED SOME OF THE HIGHEST CRIMES ANY PRESIDENT HAS EVER BEEN PROVEN TO HAVE COMMITTED. And they refused to do it on purely partisan-political grounds. The second time after those Senators having experienced the violence that Trump CALLED AGAINST THE HOUSE AND SENATE.
The Republican-fascist majority on the Supreme Court - though acting with the other three "justices" - failed to disqualify Trump from becoming president again through their annulling of the very measure that the post-Civil War Congress and state legistlatures took to prevent such as made violent war in order to overturn American democracy from holding public office.
There is no party in American history with the proven track record of making the Constitution into the piece of junk it has become, increasingly, since the Republican-fascist majority in Bush v Gore decided the 2000 election than the Republican Party. That act was so vile that even two of the Republicans sitting on the court at the time condemned it.
No, when a Republican says the word "Constitution" you can bet that some form of lie or insincerity or racist, bigoted, self-enriching or some criminal act is in the works.
So to have you pretend to champion the Constitution is just another typical Republican-fascist lie.
The Republican Party is the fascist party of the United States, having taken in and elevated America's indigenous fascists, the white supremacists. We will either face that real aspect of American history and its present political conditions, the very real and consequential strength and power of that fascism which can do what it has done under Nixon . . . through Trump or the next one will be even worse. The Republican majority on the Supreme Court - the actual maker of the real instead of dead-wood Constitution - will make sure of that.
have decided I'm in favor of a literacy test for voting in the United States.
The first question on it should be an immediate disqualifier,
Who won the U.S. presidential election in 2020?
Those who answer "Trump" should be banned from voting for life.
I might put questions about why the Civil War was fought and things of that nature on such a test.
I'm not interested in fair elections because under our corrupt Electoral College, gerrymandered, vote-supressing system, those are as mythical as the removal of criminal presidents and Supreme Court "justices" by impeachment.
Face reality, fight as dirty as is necessary to defeat fascism, you can't beat a corrupt system with "fairness."
I HOPE TO WRITE a post based on what is said by Susan Neiman in this interview with Chris Hedges and especially about the long quote from her new book about the evil which Trumpism is but it's not going to happen this morning.
Obviously, I disagree with her early claim that the neo-fascist use of Darwin's theory of natural selection is a distortion of it and said so in the comments at Youttube. It might be at second or third hand but I think the fascist racism of Stephen Miller, Peter Theil, Elon Musk and Donald Trump - and the rest of the Republican-fascist party - is saturated by the scientistic ideology of natural selection. I've been saying from before I started writing blog posts that it's ironic that Darwin's greatest biblical fundamentalist haters had no problem with his immoral theory and the theories that grew directly out of it.
That aside, I think much of what else she says is well said, timely and extremely important. But you might want to draw your own conclusions about that before I influence you.
I DO STILL CURRENTLY believe that there was probably an original organism in the line of currently known life on Earth perhaps as long as three and a half billion years ago which, since it would have the unique characteristic of NOT HAVING BEEN BORN OF A LIVING ORGANISM, would have had to have been assembled out of non-living molecules.
Though there may have been other starts at lines of life, those are not in evidence as of now. Frankly, unless intelligent design was involved, I think the improbability of any of those theorized lines of life by random chance even once makes the proposed multiplicity of other such line of life and the one that survived renders that situation of vanishingly improbable probability.
In the popular, ideologues' and abiogentic scientists' imagination, that act is a simple one that could be accounted for by a still remarkable but short series of coincidences, but you have to cut so many corners and leave out so much in any such scheme of explanation - or, I'd imagine any grant proposal to fund your research into the "origin of life" - that the whole thing purported to be science becomes absurd.
This first point that they propose to reconstruct an entirely unique organism that violates the modern biological principle that life comes from life is certainly not insignificant in the assertion that there was one original organism in the line of life which gave rise through evolution has that unique character because it having been assembled out of non-living molecules is not something which has ever been observed by science in nature. Coming up with plausible scenarios of how that would have happened is the entire effort of any scientists making speculations about that and designing and carrying out experiments alleged to show how that could have happened.
I haven't looked at a grade school or high school level science textbook currently in use for decades so I don't know if such lore as a popular level description of the early scientific debunking of the belief in spontaneous generation still features in it. As I remember much was made of Louis Pasteur's various experiments of boiling nutrient rich liquids and isolating them from the ambient air to prevent air-borne microorganisms getting to it to show that life would not spontaneously arise from even such rich organic materials. From what I see in a quick online search, it is still touted as dispelling the superstitious belief that things like maggots arising from decaying flesh. Interesting from my point of view is the observation at this site that spontaneous generation is otherwise known as "abiogenesis."
Just as Terrence McKenna noted that modern materialist-atheist-scientistic cosmologists say "Give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest," the materialist-atheist-scientistic scientist who engages in the quest for the abiogenetic origin of life wants one free instance of spontaneous generation and then they will explain the rest. (Explaining the rest is not possible but I'll let that go for now.) Though what they really want is to be exempted from the requirements of science for that one free instance to match what happened in reality on the Early Earth because they can't know that. But it's far worse than just that.
What we can know is that there is no form of life known which is of the simplicity that would make any of their claims about THAT living organism actually living work. Even in the total absence of other organisms that might attack it - something which may have been a factor as soon as a few other organisms were born of it in close proximity to it in the primordial soup where they came into being* - it would have faced what can rationally be presumed to be chemical and physical dangers to its existence and living and reproducing.
Just accumulating the molecules it would need to carry on its life function as soon as it started living would have been a huge problem. It would not live in the present day conditions in which life had left huge numbers of complex organic molecules in the environment for it to come across by chance. It would not have cells to occupy and use as viruses do to make their "living".
By the way, I believe viruses evolved well after living cells had accumulated in enormous numbers, I reject them as a plausible example of that original organism. As I do such other things such as prions. A britatheist at Eschaton once alluded to those as a model of how life arose through spontaneous action during one of my brawls there. I think those are likely, as well, a product of abundant life already being present.
I cannot see how science at any time will be able to overcome the long chain of explanations that the spontaneously, random-chance constructing an organism which could carry out all of the vital life functions that comprise the lives of the "simplest" or organisms could "just happen." I don't think it could be a result of "trial and error" because such errors would be most credibly imagined to have resulted in its quick death.
In the past I brought up that it would seem to be almost a certain requirement of that original organism to have an extremely complicated containing membrane in which the molecules to concentrate and form that would start the processes of metabolism - an essential though hardly complete part of the definition of what makes a living being alive - to be present to kick off life.
That, of course, leads one to think of the fact that if such a containing membrane was present in that original organism, its first reproduction would have had to include the rupture and almost instantaneous healing of that original membrane producing another such membrane which would contain ALL OF THE MOLECULES AND STRUCTURES WHICH ALLOWED ITS "DAUGHTER" ORGANISM TO LIVE AS IT WOULD CONTINUE TO.
That act of reproduction would have been entirely unprecedented and of no knowable motivation. The act of crystalization of minerals might be proposed as an analogy but that is certainly no explanation of the reproduction of a living organism. But the inapt crystallization analogy that brings up the real problem of random chance variations and "errors" in any complex crystallization. As Denis Nobel has said about that analogy being made in the case of knowable DNA "replication" in living organisms, if there were no cellular mechanisms for correcting "misspellings" in DNA those would quickly accumulate in a fatal way for the organism and whatever "daughter" organism that it would need to pass its DNA on to. The same would almost certainly be true for any theorized molecule of comparable complexity in that earliest organism either in its reproduction during its life process but especially in the act of reproduction. Otherwise, I don't see how you could possibly explain its life functions and reproduction.
But even before that, any act of metabolism, the use of molecules in chemical reaction to power the life of that original organism, would produce by-products which were either superfluous, in which their accumulation within the cell would almost certainly be problematic, or which would be poisonous to the organism. Such an organism would have to almost immediately have means of getting rid of such waste products, which would certainly have to be expelled from a containing membrane while retaining what needed to be kept inside it.
I have, elsewhere, early on this blog made fun of P.Z. Myers, one of the stars of the new-atheist fad of the OO's who proposed that the spontaneous, random-chance, construction of the containing membrane of that original organism was analogous to driftwood and other detritus accumulating on a beach. Listening to it then, I was stunned that someone who held a faculty position in science at an accredited American university could make such an inapt analogy of a living, metabolizing . . . . reproducing cell to a non-functioning non-structure (one piece of driftwood has no functional relationship with any other piece of driftwood, their presence an artifact of gravity and no outside force to keep it moving, the same cannot be said about the components of a living cell wall or the rest of the living cell within it) using their status as a professor of biology to make about as inapt an analogy as I've ever seen made. And I've listened to a lot of Republicans at Senate and House and Legislative hearings.
As an aside, that Greg Laden I got into the brawl about the origin of life with thinks very highly of Meyer's writing and thinking. Just as another example of the decadence that materialist-atheist-scientism brings to the culture of science and the general culture.** At the Harvard pay scale, too.
You will note, if you bothered to listen to Myers pooh-poohing the issue of complexity in relation to the atheist unholy grail of explaining the origin of life on Earth without God by making his inapt analogy, that it is recognized by such as him as a problem for his ideology. Their answer is to pooh-pooh it. But that is the very real stumbling block - actually miles and miles of them - for that ideological quest to explain away the origin of life in materialist terms. AND THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING UNCALLED FOR, DISALLOWED OR WRONG WITH ANYONE BRINGING UP THOSE STUMBLING BLOCKS. They don't get to go round them or to remove them. That's allegedly against the rules of science and philosophical discourse. Though it's rampant in the current academic environment, especially in the "soft" sciences and in our degraded academic and college-credentialed culture.
They have been trying to reduce that problem by simply ignoring it from the start of their quest. But that problem has not decreased since the time of Haeckel and Huxley. With every passing decade the complexity of the problem has increased as science has discovered what is necessary for "simple" life in a single cell organism and even a cell in a eukaryotic organism to live, survive dangers it encounters and successfully make modifications to its structures and molecules and to reproduce have grown.
The original organism would have had to have analogous functions and structures to survive and reproduce almost as soon as it was formed. To pretend it would not have is to rig the discourse to make believe it would only have had to meet the challenges of non-living objects and pretend to have solved the problem.
Anyone else wanting to argue this might make believe that's the case but I'm not under any obligation to pretend that. I think the most rational conclusion was that wherever and however life arose, it could NOT have happened without design. That's not a scientific conclusion - the humanly constructed rules of science exclude such ideas as the rules of games exclude many issues that might be relevant to their conduct - but it's actually a higher level of conclusion which contains very real information that isn't allowed within science. Science is a subset of real life, real life is far broader and far more vitally important than just science is. Life existed for about three and a half billion years without the human invention of science being a necessity to it.
And this science is hardly important except as an ideological quest - it's not like climate change and environmental science WHICH WE WILL EITHER TAKE DEAD SERIOUSLY OR LIFE ON EARTH, CERTAINLY HUMAN LIFE WILL END. Though that costs the billionaires and millionaires and you need morality to overcome that. Something materialism, atheism and scientism or even science, cannot provide us with. This is the most important paragraph in this line of posts.
* You have to wonder how those earliest organisms would have known that they were like and not to be attacked, or why that might not have been a necessity if they were all living in presumably close proximity to each other in the theorized primordial ooze their mother organism arose in. And such a sense would constitute knowledge. Or how they would have early on had to deal with whatever waste products they had to expel as soon as that accumulated sufficiently in close proximity. The time limits within which such things would have had to develop is a real and hardly ever mentioned aspect of the problem.
** I will note that, though with major disagreements, Myers and I share a large number of political opinions, though I doubt he's as far to the real left as I am. I think his ideology which he shares with Laden and their allies has been a real and politically damaging problem for our political orientation. As is the puerile ways in which he and they are at express their ideology. I think the left would have done a lot better if we'd got shut of them a long time ago.
but if someone did a compilation of the trashiest scenes of Divine from Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble with Trump and his hair in the role of Divine, I'd watch it.
IT CAME UP EARLY in the websearch for whatever current line of ideological tripe the biology unit of the Lords Of Creation are saying these days, so this is from the University of Chicago
The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified. To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms. What water, chemistry and temperature cycles fostered the chemical reactions that allowed life to emerge on our planet? Because life arose in the largely unknown surface conditions of Earth’s early history, answering these and other questions remains a challenge.
" Answering these and other questions remains a challenge." Ya think? Not that many a claim in the form of answers to that is not made in the rest of the pop-science level article.
Note the title of the article in light of that, "The origin of life on Earth, explained," apparently one in a series called "UChicago explainer series." It explains nothing of the sort, it is a false claim.
Note that there are truths told in this paragraph, "one of the great mysteries of science," "all of which remain unverified," "life arose in largely unknown surface conditions of Earth's early history," . . . but the rest of it blithely ignores that just those three alone makes whatever follows of no knowable relevance to the actual origin of life on Earth. And there are more problems with it.
If any science done about any of this claims they are getting closer to answers about that on the basis of science, they are lying, But on such lies several, world-wide research programs are founded. And note that he impinges on the other such evidence-free scientific program I mentioned in my post a few days back, the pseudo-science of "exobiology." "To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms."
If there are other "life forms" in other places in the galaxy or universe, for that matter, you would have to have resolvable physical evidence of those life forms in order to know if anything or everything or nothing whatsoever such a speculative study could show you was relevant to it. And even having the almost certainly never to be had example of one line of life on some other planet, you would have no basis on which to make any judgments about any other life anywhere which you had not sampled yet. There could be trillions of entirely separate and different life lines all over the universe, there is no basis apart from materialist ideology on which to make a claim about it. Certainly not as of this morning.
The fact is, you cannot study biology without physical evidence or documentary evidence of whatever aspect of life you want to study being available to you. You can not theorize or, worse, generalize "life." Living beings are whatever they are in whatever conditions they LIVE in and if there's something we can guess from the one and only line of life we have available to us can tell us, the variation in living beings, even related ones, is enormous and extremely specific to the organisms, themselves. They aren't like inorganic molecules under the study of chemists or atoms and subatomic particles and forces under the study of physicists. As one of my biologist relatives liked to say, "It's not rocket science, it's a hell of a lot harder than rocket science."
I have fond memories of a blog brawl I got into with Greg Laden a Harvard anthropologist when he tried to refute my bald statement that we can't know anything about the origin of life on Earth BECAUSE WE WOULD NEED TO HAVE A RESOLVABLE EXAMPLE OF THAT ORIGINAL ORGANISM to just begin to know what we would need to know in order to determine what that origin was. And such an unambiguous identification of such a fossil will never be made.
If we even had that, specific, organism, the first in the theorized line of life from which all subsequent life came and evolved from, it might tell us nothing whatsoever about how it formed or was formed from non-living matter. The meat-head (for such is the ideology of materialist-atheist-scientism) though he held a faculty position at Harvard couldn't argue with that point despite him coming up with dozens of papers (most of which I'm sure he hadn't read) on the topic. Or, that is, allegedly on the topic. He kept trying to dodge and change the subject but I wouldn't let him or his fan boys and gals dodge the question. They couldn't get past the point of my original statement that he was trying to refute. Without that specific organisms' remains being had science was entirely impotent to touch the subject.
I will note in passing, I was more polite then to mock Laden's field as pseudo-science, though any anthropology done under the guise of science is pseudo-science. There have been a few anthropologists who have admitted that their field is not, in fact, done under the methods of science but not that many have been that honest.
As it is, I wish back then I had developed my thinking to include what I did last week, what we know about the "simplest" of life on Earth. Even if you want to include viruses as "life" which I have to say, I'm skeptical of, the actual science dealing with just what they need to do to stay alive and flourish is incredibly complex in exactly the ways that the biological Lords Of Creation refuse to consider.
Those very real organisms that scientists have available and do study are enormously complex AND THOSE COMPLEXITIES AND THE CLEARLY EFFECTIVE MOLECULAR AND CELLULAR MODIFICATIONS THEY MAKE JUST TO MAINTAIN THEIR MOLECULAR INTEGRITY AGAINST THE EFFECTS OF RANDOM MUTATIONS AND MISTAKES IN CODING OF MOLECULES, couldn't possibly be included in the abiogentic-exobiological amino-acid manufacturing experiments in labs and in closed vessels under heat and with electrical sparks.
And apart from the means by which cells correct misspellings in their complex molecules against that is more than matched by the means of modification they make in order to protect themselves against changes in their chemical, biological, and physical conditions. I would like an explanation of why that wouldn't involve some level of extremely sophisticated consciousness. And how materialism could possibly make that happen without that. And that doesn't get into changes made which have every appearance of being made to achieve some life advantage. Even viruses make such modifications in order to survive drugs.
Some say that Darwin and his earliest colleagues considered cells to be little more than tiny sacks full of simple guck. Though I believe they knew that cells had nuclei by that period. They had no idea of how incredibly complex their ideas of "simple" life were, the kinds of organisms that they imagined could have formed by spontaneous, random interactions of molecules would likely have had to be just in order to carry on life functions, staying alive, eating, regulating, and the massively complex and entirely unprecedented and - I'd guess in their imaginations motivated and accomplished through random chance events all through it - reproducing successfully the first and each subsequent time. And you have to ask yourself, how many of those earliest reproductions was the result of random chance, it's absurd to assume that random chance bestowed the same random-chance structures that led to that first reproduction just happening, through random chance, to have been present in the second generation. By random chance.
Considering just what they did know, though, their idea that "simple life" was simple may be an instance of ideology winning out over scientific observation.
That last description of what I assume would have to be assumed by the materialist-atheist-scientistic "abiologists" and "exobiologists" to have just happened by random chance leads to a question that I haven't, to my best recollection, brought up yet.
Just how long did the original organism that had to do all of these things have to live in order for it to have, by random chance or even something requiring consciousness being involved, "trial and error" (another resort of the MAS true believe) to have gotten it to the point where all of these things had to have worked, the first time and every subsequent time that survived? The conditions on the Early Earth are not asserted to be life favoring but I'd guess such an organism would have had to survive them for a considerable time for such random events to have modified them before those things just happened to happen.
And even if you insert "trial and error" into it, the chances are that the first error of such an organism would have been its last - especially if reproduction included the rupture and resealing of a cellular membrane in which those chemicals and structures would have been protected and the concentrations of molecules and structures would have had to be contained lest they be washed away in the primordial soup to be destroyed by desiccation or oxidation, or sunlight or volcanic heat or corrosive chemicals. I haven't considered what the currently theorized iron-green oceans and water of that period - there is believed to have been very little in the way of "dry land" present - would have done to such an organism as can be dreamed up.
Get back to me when they have and have credibly identified that first fossilized organism, then we might get somewhere. Before then, nothing can be known about it. And we still might have no idea how it formed, even then.
And you still haven't told me how intelligently designed experiments can prove that intelligent design isn't needed to produce the resulting chemicals, etc. that they created.
Though I can verify that unintelligence is fully on display when they claim that their experiments have demonstrated their ideological goal.
