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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've dealt with this endlessly already,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And such is the state of the American law. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The strengths and weaknesses of the republic are discussed below.

Strengths

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weaknesses

Despite the above, the republic had four weaknesses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The German Writer Günter Grass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"then one may ask, What are are the limits that are non-negotiable even in terms of US power?"

IN MY NEVER ENDING, far from sophisticated program of continuing self-education,  I'm typing out and making notes on the late, much missed, Walter Brueggemann's  An Unsettling God:  The heart of the Hebrew Bible.  

It's a condensed, short, popular version of his Theology of the Old Testament, which I have but which is far, far longer and would take a large number of months to type out, maybe after I'm done with this book I'll do that.  

In today's portion,  I just typed out this text and as it's certainly highly relevant to us today,  thought I'd share it.  

The God of Israel is confessed to be sovereign over the nations.  This is not an easy case to make in the modern world of autonomous national states.  Much modern thought has solved the problem by leaving God to be engaged with individual persons, and letting the public sphere of life be “might makes right.”  But of course the Old Testament is unwilling to leave any part of life -- including international life -- outside the scope of God’s dialogic engagement.  

The great temptation of modern national states is to imagine independent autonomy without answering to anyone.  There is, moreover, no more blatant example of such arrogant autonomy than the recent unilateralism of the United States that has conducted policy on the assumption that it could do anything it wanted, that it owed nothing to the other nations, and that there was no compelling moral limit to aggressive acquisitiveness.  

But arrogant national states, all the way back to ancient Egypt and ancient Babylon, have assumed the same.  The faith of ancient Israel, especially voiced in prophetic oracles, asserts that there are God-given, God-enforced limits and lines of accountability that curb and chasten raw power.  A study of this dimension of Old Testament faith poses exceedingly difficult questions about the governing limits of God in internal affairs:

- Could it be possible that South African apartheid reached its limit because such brutality was beyond the limit of God?

- Could it be that the fall of the Soviet Union occurred because the power of the state outran what would be borne in the world of God?

- And if one entertains such thought, then one may ask, What  are are the limits that are non-negotiable even in terms of US power?

Study of this topic invites engagement with the prophetic rhetoric of the Old Testament that knows that the entire political enterprise has a theological dimension to it that cannot be disregarded.  Such thinking is reflected in the language of the church that prays regularly.  “Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.”  The terms of the prayer, faithful to the Old Testament, are political in a way that places all other political claims in question  Study of this topic must resist “silly supernaturalism,” but may nonetheless take seriously the claim of God that renders all other claims as penultimate. 

I will note that the modern state of Israel follows the old pattern in the Hebrew Bible in which Israel, repeatedly, over and over again violates the limits just as the United States does,  only partially is that explanation that Israel is a client state of the United States,  its majority of voters makes their own choices and puts the governments it has in power.  

Under Trump we have gone far, far beyond what the Bush II criminals did when Brueggemann was writing this.  He wrote his Acknowledgements in September eighteen years ago, just as the 2008 financial crash was starting.   

I think it's well worth asking if Trump isn't all the rotten last kings of Judea rolled into one, or some combination of the final kings (according to the Roberts Court) of the US.  Perhaps our protest poets will add a new confessional Scripture to the ones the Prophets of Israel did as their nation refused to be a "priestly kingdom" in a way that was as blatant as the secular one that formed the modern Israel did as a matter of policy.  The Temple authorities, as well. 

It wouldn't surprise me if our Babylonian exile experience is about to really begin, if not the final calamity of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem.   That one should start with the demolition of whatever Trump puts up and the Supreme Court's fascist-marble palace.  

It also sets me off thinking that along with such secular heresies I pursue, such as the dangers of "free speech and especially 'press'" and the evils of the Supreme Court and lawyers, anti-Darwinism,  to what extent is "might makes right" a foundation of liberal democracy in which a German election might result in a Hitler, an Israeli election, a Netanyahu, a Russian one a Putin or an American one a Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, or a Trump?    Now that I've concluded that there can be nothing "right" about something that is wrong or certainly evil,  how does that apply when "democracy" produces evil results?  

I don't have any ultimate faith in any human institution, something I learned from reading the Hebrew Scriptures, not even the ones I support like egalitarian democracy (if we can ever achieve it under our corrupt system) but unless we deal with such problems, we won't avoid them or even recognize them when they are staring us in the face like climate change or nuclear war. 

I was vaguely aware that there was some entity called "Pink"

in pop music but I didn't know if it was a man a woman or a band named that until the day before yesterday when I watched a couple of vids about Pink* getting someone else I'd never heard of before  called Macklemore black-listed by a billionaire asshole football team owner I had been aware of because I live in Northern New England,  Robert Kraft and his billionaire stadium-owner buddies because Macklemore opposed genocide and apartheid by the state of Israel.  

It's so telling about the cultural icon, this god of secular, American "democracy" "free speech" that someone could be black-listed for opposing genocide and apartheid BY THE VERY SAME BILLIONAIRES WHO HAD NO PROBLEM LETTING THEIR STADIUMS BE USED BY THE LUNATIC KANYE WEST WHO IS A HUGE FAN OF HITLER AND A FLAMING ANTISEMITE.   It's not surprising, in the most oppressive dictatorships you're perfectly free to praise dictators and lie for them.   It's something our "free speech" has in common with them, there is a "right to lie" under both.   That is as long as it's the right lies.  

I would imagine if Macklemore  sued Kraft and the other billionaires and Pink for very financially and reputationally consequential slander and libel (some of the lying was in text) that they'd pull out the legal status of the IHRA "definition" of "antisemitism" because Macklemore told the truth about Israel and the entire point of that self-discredited and discrediting bunch who came up with that was to shield Israel from the truth about its genocide, apartheid, racism, international propaganda lying campaign being told by those who wanted to tell the truth.    

That was only the officializing of a practice of equating Zionism with Jews so as to protect Israel from the truth about it.  The irony in that is that making that equations IS ONE OF THE HALLMARKS OF THE REAL THING, ANTI-SEMITISM SINCE THE CZAR'S SECRET POLICE WERE FABRICATING THE PROTOCALS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION and the leaders of Zionism started making the exact same claim to the protest of many other non-Zionist Jews. 

What Pink and Kraft did was entirely and completely more antisemtic than what Macklemore said and in line with what the worst enemies of Jews have done since the creation of Zionism.  

I would hope that if Macklemore decided to test the ability of someone to defend themselves from the kinds of lies told about him that it would turn into a definitive rejection of the IHRA lyin' shield that protects the genocide and apartheid of Israel AND THE FUNDING AND ARMING OF ISRAELI GENOCIDE AND APARTHEID BY WESTERN GOVERNMENTS, OURS HERE IN THE U.S. ABOVE ALL, but I'm not sanguine about that being the result.   

Robert Kraft is a piece of shit,  I knew that a long, long time ago, his support for Republican-fascists and behavior with Women convinced me of that.   Off hand, there aren't many billionaires I wouldn't say that about though there are a very, very few who are quite a bit less shitty than others.   I still say level them all out of existence.  

Pink is lying garbage but in the world of pop music, that isn't necessarily a professional liability.   Show biz hasn't vomited out Kanye or myriads of other racist, lying, vile shit, it still eats it up because the audience for such stuff is so degraded, there are still millions who will buy their shit when the others drop them.  They perform in the vein of Thomas Rice, American minstrelsy, Birth of a Nation,  or the Merchant of Venice or, some would argue, The Jew of Malta.  The later is sometimes sold as a satire of antisemitism but I would bet you that if that was Marlowe's intent, less than five percent of the audience for it has ever gotten that message from it.   The trouble with satire is that its accuracy in hitting the target depends entirely on the perception of the audience,  and most of them generally don't get it.   Satirizing is a rather stupid way to get a message across and carries that risk.  Especially when it's inexpertly done. 

What Macklemore said was unambiguous and it was nothing of the sort.   And he's being blacklisted for it.  Ed  Sheeran, who I'd also never heard of before this, was a coward and stupid for not realizing that he was setting himself up by not cancelling the tour.   If he'd endorsed what Macklemore said instead of chickening out, he'd be a hero in exactly the opposite way that he is now taking the fall for Pink and Kraft and the other billionaires.  Let that be a lesson to other such moral cowards. 

* I listened to some of her stuff.  Mediocre mainstream pop crap is what I heard.  She can sing in tune but has the typical pop music habit of women, singing in ways that damage the vocal apparatus.  If she knew how to do it the right way she probably wouldn't be popular.  The touted lyrics,  no one said it better than Paul Simon, if you want poetry, read a poet. 

Update:  Rereading this to find typos,  "satire" also has the problem that often the claim will be made that something is "satirical" when it isn't, never was, never was intended to be.  That's especially true when a piece of racist, misogyinistic, etc. garbage is called out for that and there is a post-facto claim that "it's satirical" is then made.  Such is some of the strongest evidence of the highly defective genre of writing and show-biz making of satire.   

Just come out and say it,  for the love of Mike!  

What Is Allowed To Go Unstopped and Unpunished Is What Is Really Legal and Constitutional In the United States - A Bad day post

I HOLD THAT WHENEVER someone talks about the Epstein criminal operation they should name Maxwell, Wexner and Black,  that is, of course, Ghislaine Maxwell, Les Wexner and Leon Black.   Perhaps I should add, since Black is suing People for mentioning it that is "in my opinion."   What a degenerate legal system we have when you have to mitigate telling the truth but not to lie. 

That list probably should grow to include all of those who enabled and likely participated in the crimes of Epstein and Maxwell.   Here's a too short documentary,   The Billionaires Who Bankrolled Epstein, that fills in many of the details of the billionaires who financed Epstein's creation of his massive criminal operation and allowed it to continue years after his arrest,  the child rape, the trafficking, certainly the collection of blackmail material, its almost certain distribution or,  I think most likely sales to foreign and perhaps American intelligence "services."    I think it's certain that the Israeli government was one of those who obtained that blackmail material and very likely the Russian government.  I fully believe that if we knew everything it would be clear that Putin had information and very likely video of Trump raping children along with many powerful men.   

And don't tell me that all of that is illegal in the United States and not allowed under our laws and Constitution 

BECAUSE WHAT IS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN AND GO UNPUNISHED, ESPECIALLY WHAT GOES UNPUNISHED WHEN AUTHORITIES WITH ANY KIND OF POWER TO ARREST AND PROSECUTE IT KNOW ABOUT IT, IS WHAT IS ACTUALLY LEGAL AND "CONSTITUTIONAL" UNDER THE REAL LAW AND CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES.  

Nothing is going to change unless we admit that unspeakable, forbidden, taboo, truth about our Constitution, the fake one on paper and the real one that the Court writes and rewrites and creates with its actions AND ITS CHOICES TO NOT ACT and the real law that results in letting billionaire and millionaire rapists, murderers, enslavers and those who profit off of all of that get away with it with the authorities' quite adequate  knowledge of it.   That's as true as when it IS* lynching, maiming, enslavement, rape, etc.   as it is when it is profiting off of that.   Our law, our courts enabled Epstein-Maxwell as much as Wexner and Black did.  It enables Wexner and Black and their like, as well.  

If the lawyers, judges and "justices" don't like me stating that fact, THEY HAVE THE POWER TO STOP PARDONING CRININALS BY INACTION AND ACTION AND ENABLING  IT AND THEY HAVEN'T MUCH TAKEN THAT OPPORTUNITY YET.   And I don't recommend that anyone hold their breath waiting for it to happen.  You might be holding it for decades more than you'd have had to up till now. 

Here's the documentary.

I should say that I think the modeling business, the beauty pageant business and the others involved in the Epstein-Trump world of sleaze should be considered as complicit in sex trafficking.   Probably much of the most profitable aspects of show-biz and music should as well.   I think those combined are probably far more extensively involved in the trafficking, rape and sexual coercion more than the far more widely talked about Catholic priest sex-abuse crimes but, since it's all secular and talking about such areas of secular life in those terms is taboo, that's not going to happen.   The men involved, and the women procurers and, as Maxwell, participants, won't be held nearly as accountable because of that.   James Levine got away with crimes of that sort for decades and he was only an opera conductor.  

* The lie is that lynching isn't something that happens to People of Color continuously and Women, LGBTW+ People,  every single day right now, every day. 

Just What The World Doesn't Need - The Evil That Comes With Libertarian Freedom At The Expense Of Morality And Reason And Life

IT'S REAL,  the deadly pursuit of "AI"  WHICH EVEN THEY ADMIT MIGHT END UP KILLING US ALL by billionaires and post-democracies and dictators in pursuit of economic supremacy.  Only calling it "economic" might make you think there is even the slightest element of common-shared benefit that will come of it, some notion of social or national benefit when the only ones who will benefit are the billionaires and their associated thugs who will profit from the ruin of everything and, as mentioned, their willingly risking the lives of all of us to pursue this current version of tulip mania or a fictitious South Sea bubble. 

And our Constitution, our law, our legal system, the Courts,  goddamned Supreme Court are all OK with it as is the most powerful part of our propaganda system,  what we call "the media" and which our pathetically inadequate 18th century "Bill of Rights" calls "the press" is cheering it on and doing nothing to impede it.   And, yes, that's the lying excuse of the media, the lawyers, the judges, and "justices" that they're being "impartial" when they've never been anything of the sort.   Many of them as financially invested in it as members of the Trump regime and Congress and, I have little doubt members of this Roberts Court, either directly or through their patrons.    The "fee press" [a typo but I'm keeping it]  is as guilty as the Trump they imposed on us and the Republican-fascists in the Congress which they also imposed on us by lying for them 

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

It took a demented cultist soiling herself during a bizarre "fitness" event which, I read, is enormously expensive to get into and watch - I'm wondering if it might be the worst entertainment deal in the history of paid events - to bring "Hyrox" to my attention.  Just what the world didn't need, yet another commercial "fitness" cult. 

I first learned about it listening to commentary about the health risks of the other "athletes" being exposed to the shit on the track and equipment and the ass-covering of the owners of the event who claimed that they removed that danger when that's highly disputed.   Doing in this one event what the "AI" billionaires and their supporters are doing to the whole world. 

Apparently this kind of thing isn't uncommon in such events, "athletes" crapping their skin tight costumes and keeping on with it instead of doing what someone who wasn't deeply disturbed would do, stop and get cleaned up.   Doing what a four-year-old would be humiliated for the rest of their lives if it happened to them.   In what I've read it pointed out numerous instances in which even arguably real athletes shit themselves and didn't take themselves out of the game.   Is that some kind of point of pride for them?    And you expect me to pretend that's not sick?  

And I do think that this is a case in which most everyone involved is mentally unwell,  including the owners of the cult since that level of greed has crossed the line into a dangerous pathology.   Whatever the motivation of the "athletes" to participate in that consists of,  it's clearly gone past whatever you might take to be healthy.  

I had been aware of the Crossfit cult in which it was a point of pride to drive your body to the point where participants vomited.   I've heard some of those who had been high up in that organization who dropped out of it and were critical of its pathological aspects.    

Like American football in all its brain destroying violence, like American-Canadian hockey, "figure skating with clubs,"  like elite sports of many different kinds, it quickly turns pathological.   And I won't go into the fact of how many professional jocks are Republican-fascists, racists and crooks. 

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

But this Hyrox cult is just a microcosm of the more general ideological trend that it is a part of.   The ubiquitous ideology that is going to kill us all. 

There is something really sick in the general culture that produces these things whether it's elite athleticism or the desire for those who come up with this stuff to get rich.   I'm not sure what to call it more generally but along with the rest of the current mind set that dominates the lives of so many and especially those with affluence it seems to me to be related to the pathology that has revived fascism and capitalism and billionaires who are willing to pursue ever more money even as it's clear they are destroying the biosphere AND THE LEGAL IDEOLOGIES THAT ARE OK WITH THAT.   

And the predominant economic, political and legal ideologies are OK with that.   And it is as true of a large number of the most powerful alleged democracies as it is the dictatorships.   That is the pathological form of democracy that the American system has turned into and may be the model of AN ANTI-EGALITARIAN, LIBERTARIAN DEMOCRACY WHICH, AS IT DEVELOPS, TURNS INTO ANYTHING BUT A DEMOCRACY.  

Democracy that isn't first and last egaliarian and a pursuit, not of a twisted 18-19th century notion of libertarian freedom but a freedom that is in pursuit of what is good, what sustains life, what improves the lives of everyone, but of exactly that common good life,  will become something evil as the American democracy has become evil. 

Modernism is a failed project, as Marilynne Robinson said,  I'll add it's as failed as the entire past that it proposed to replace, selling itself as a definitive improvement on it.    It is not, it is, if anything, more dangerous because it replaces morality with notions of freedom and Darwinian notions of national and "race" hygiene for morality.    I remember a number of time during the new-atheist fad of the 00's taunting many a devotee of materialist-atheist-scientism that if the products of science ended up killing us all, bringing our species to extinction through synthetic chemicals, nuclear weapons, etc. that the only scientific  conclusion was that the capacity to do science had turned out to be a mal-adaptation.   Of course, I never suggested not doing science,  I noted repeatedly that the science around climate-change was some of the most important science ever done and, as it turns out, valid in ways that other science, such as the ideology of natural selection, never has been.   

I think that libertarian notions of freedom are a much more potent and evil such mal-adaptation, one which dominates the legal framework of the United States and a number of other countries which are deputed to be democracies.   Libertarian freedom is built on the foundation of all evil, selfishness. It is the house ideology of our media, the propaganda outfits that run most of the commercial news and almost all of entertainment - entertainment far more dangerously because it is far more watched and far more seductive in its influence.  

Another and related mal-adaptation is the legal pose and pretense of "impartiality."   The sole virtue of the Roberts Court is that its every move, even the pathetic little gestures they make to cover their Trump-Republican-fascist favoring asses, has exposed the massive lie of the "impartiality" of the law in the American democracy.   

I favor leveling it all,  dumping the false swearing of fealty to the fake Constitution which,  as even Jefferson said, means nothing in the hands of the post-Marshall Supreme Court,  replacing it with a potent and legal obligation to EQUALITY, legal, social and economic equality and the only legitimate and genuine form of government EGALITARIAN democracy.    And the protection of that, above all other "civil liberties" is the obligation to protect the right to tell the truth but to absolutely reject the idea that there can be a "right" to do evil, to lie, to promote inequality, to promote the destruction of the basis of life.   The notion that there can be any kind of "right" to do those things is what got us here to start with. 

The Court invented "right to lie" is an uncivil liberty as is everything which permits inequality and injustice.  

The 18th century notions of libertarian freedom,  UNEQUAL, white-supremacist democracy,  amorality and immorality posting as "impartiality" . . .  those aspects of modernism are what brought America's democracy to ruin, what repeatedly mowed down the hardest won progress towards equality and morality passed by rare, reforming congresses and legislatures,  mowed down  BY THE TANEY, WAITE, FULLER, TAFT, BERGER, REHNQUIST AND ROBERTS COURTS which is the true history of our country,  all of that is what allows the billionaires,  foreign, domestic, outside of governments and running them, to risk our very lives and the lives of all of us.    

This is the moment that such 18th century notions either die or we will.   Democracy in the American style has shit itself in the forms of Trump,  Johnson, McConnell, Thune and Roberts and the entire world can see that shit and so can a lot of us here.   And the danger to the health of everyone is higher than the other Hyrox cultists who were exposed to the shit in that event.    And there are certainly Democrats, especially those trained in the lore of the law and "civil liberties" who go along with all of it despite its proven danger and toxicity to genuine democracy.  

You either choose the egalitarian morality of revealed religion or you choose libertarian depravity and the inequality that it guarantees,  you can't have both.    We choose morality or we die in squalor, in shit.   The death that will come with that is the only equality that will come with it in the end.  There won't be any escape for the billionaires no matter how many shelters and how much "prepping" they pay for.    They are MORE DEPRAVED than the shit covered "athlete" in the cult. 

It's from a certain kind of reactionary traditionalism that prefers, as Peter Thiel put it, the Christ of Constantine to the Christ of Mother Teresa . . . Well, as Elon told us, you know, empathy is a sickness.

TRANSCRIBING A LECTURE can be difficult, translating an interview into text is often far harder.  Among other things you never know how someone whose words you try to take down would have done that themselves, especially when they are a master writer and thinker.   But I decided to go on to provide some more stable form of what was said in that interview I excerpted on the fly yesterday.   You should go listen to the  interview,  starting at about minute six will get you into this section. 

No, I mean but this is this is the rising [situation]. . .  I've I [hear] this all the time. I mean this talk now of young men gravitating to the church.

Well, a lot of them are gravitating there for politically reactionary reasons that this is like,  this is this isn't Islam.  This isn't secularism which "has disappointed me because I'm an incel."  

You know that I I'm not I want to make that clear. I'm married.

And they're embracing Christianism — to use a phrase that was popular in Russia at one time — rather than Christ. 

And this is very much a part of this this surge towards the right wing that we see going throughout the [world]. 

I've met a number of young . . .  there are others who are very sincere. Don't get me [wrong] . . . (cross talk) No, no, that that there is always the person that whose motives are good.  It's just the motives are confused.

That's why I want a discrimination between fidelity to this ideal of Christendom and fidelity to Christ. Many  who go in,  these young persons, who are being drawn back to Orthodoxy or Catholicism or want Christ but  the two things are still united in the minds of a lot of them.   

And then there are real culture warriors who, you know, who if they could like . . .  I don't know, they might have tattoos of crusader crosses on their on their chests. And and that's actually  the most dangerous temptation at the moment is not certainly not from atheists. 

It's from a certain kind of reactionary traditionalism that prefers, as Peter Thiel put it, the Christ of Constantine to the Christ of Mother Teresa.

He was saying that is something desirable. He prefers the Christianity of Constantine to that of Mother Teresa.   Well, as Elon told us, you know, empathy is a sickness. 

I don't know that it can be put better than that,  the Christianity of Constantine as opposed to that of a Mother Teresa - I will remind those who absorbed the late Christopher Hitchens' debunkery of Mother Teresa that he ended his days, though a famous ex-Trotskyite neo-atheist,  as a proponent of the worst of that Constantinian tradition, a crusader of the Bush II regime's Iraq crusade (some of the stupider among them were stupid enough to call it that in public, as if that was likely to go over well among those the neo-cons needed to make common cause with if their oil grab - he was an open advocate of taking the oil -  and pro-Israel gambit was going to work).     

I also remember that in his obituary of his fellow Nation columnist, the then dying, himself, Alexander Cockburn noted that Hitchens was notably stingy to beggars and the indigent.  He said that if he were dying in the gutter and had a choice between the Hitchens approach and that of Mother Teresa,  at least the nun would give him a bowl of soup and other material aid.   

And that has been characteristic of way, way too much of Constiantinian "Christianity"* that morphed into that very distortion of the Gospel of Jesus into its opposite in feudalism.   

I would get into some of the low-lights of that in such things as Augustine's late works and the disastrous effect that those had on later Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist - and from there the current and putrid heresy of dispensationalist hooey, but that would take a series longer than my several on Darwinism's consequences and the current one I'm still working on against the Supreme Court's Marbury usurpation. 

I go back to Senator Warnock who put it so well when, during a committee hearing, he said he was a "Matthew 25 Christian."  One who takes seriously the commandment of Jesus that what we do for the least among us we do for God - the least including more than those he included in the saying,  the hungry, the homeless, the sick, the prisoner,  and would certainly include the alien living among us - he said that most strongly in some of his most pointed and inclusive parables - and what we fail to do FOR THEM we fail to do to God.   

The disaster that the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of Rome, of other countries, and of particular denominations of Christianity was that it made the religious authorities and traditions collusive with the secular states which are certainly not likely to follow the teachings of Jesus, the Prophets (talk about your savage protest poets) the Law and the Epistles.  There was a reason that a combination of state powers and colluding religious authorities killed the Prophets and Jesus and James and Peter and Paul (by the best evidence we have of their ends) and why what they taught cannot ever be entirely compatible with any form of government yet devised by human beings - though I hold out some hope for a truly egalitarian democracy - and why those lists of modern day apostate "pastors" I listed are some of the least convincing in their professions of Christianity but who fit in so well with the distinction that David Bentley Hart makes between the Gospel and the pseudo-Christian ideology of "Christianism."  

* And an enormous part of secularism, the Fabian distortion of socialism, much of Marxism, as well as capitalism.   

"Christianism" "Christendom" So I Suppose The Word I've Searched For Is "Christianist"

DAVID BENTLEY HART is a master speaker and writer and thinker so I should have guessed he'd be the one who would provide the term I've been searching for since before the turn of the millennium and the idea put succinctly to talk about the pseudo-Christianity that is flourishing and has been promoted by the media since at least the rise of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart . . .  Paul White, Robert Barron, etc.  

Here is how he starts this more than excellent interview. 

Rainn Wilson:  What do you hope for the future of Christianity as a whole? 

David Bentley Hart:  I'm hoping for vast historical failure, which has already happened. But I mean, as long as the temptation of power, the discourse of rescuing civilization in which we love the preeminence of the throne and altar accommodations of the great age of Christendom more than we love the humility and kindness and compassion of Christ. 

I mean, look, we have people in the American,  Christosphere - I don't know what to call it - colluding with a government that that is, you know, torturing, abusing, the stranger in our midst or even the right.

Sure. Well, I mean, what's Matthew chapter 25  What does Christ say? 

I mean, it's precisely these persons where you'll find me. "As much as whatever you do to them, you've done to me."

I mean that and if you want to love Christ according to Matthew 25, you had better love the the little 5-year-old boy in the bunny hat who was taken away to a hellish prison.  You should love all these people whom uh whom I is and and the DHS general are abusing and arresting and and tormenting and making, you know, the the objects of hatred. 

I want to see the whole project of Christianism of Christendom. collapse,  collapse under its own weight in an absolute abject historical failure so vast that the very words Christian civilization will have to be nothing other than soup kitchens. . . . 

I was listening to a discussion by a specialist in the recently excommunicated cult of SSPX, the followers of Marcel Lefebvre, the "trad-catholic" cult who said that his ideology was the bizarre neo-medievalist, French monarchist fascism that wants to revive the French monarchy and reestablish the system of king-church collusion, destroying democracy and reestablishing that kind of feudalism.  Exactly what the trad-caths of the United States claim they want to establish here with a Republican-fascist president and their christianist fascist "church" becoming the state religion and, no doubt, money flowing to them.  If you think that's far fetched, look at who is sitting on the Court and running the other two branches these days.   Only watch out when the various factions of christianism with a financial interest in looting the treasury start fighting among themselves.  Pete Kegbreath will be ordering the military to put his racist, misogynist, christianist "pastor" in charge and the lunatics of the Pentachostalist factions, the Southern Baptists, the neo-Calvinists and the trad-caths all want preeminence and the biggest cut for themselves. 

The trad-catholics are struggling to maintain and set the remnants of the long tradition of Catholic feudal distortion up over the Vatican II Church that was, itself, a part of a long, more than century long effort to reform the Church, starting with Leo XIII.  There has been nothing more pressing within the Catholic Church than to reestablish it as a Christian Church, suppressing those centuries of distortion under feudalism and,  I say, the nationalist garbage of the late 18th through 20th centuries.   Nationalism has a lot more in common with feudalism with a gloss of late 19th century biological romanticism which - by the way - also infects a lot of the alleged liberalism and leftism that has failed to win against it. 

I completely endorse this. 

. . . That's where you would like to see Christianity end up in the future is people that would remain behind.

Yeah. I want to see  the last illusory traces of Christendom, the last temptation of the sword rather than the cross just utterly destroyed by historical misfortune.

And we may be heading heading there. I'm very hopeful at that.  But of course we may take the world out with us. That could be a bit of an inconvenience.

Here's the whole thing.

I'm glad to see that DBH is looking so much better these days after his long illness.