Saturday Night Radio Drama - Butch D'Ambrosio - Annihilators of Distance An Intimate Evening With Tesla And Twain

An Intimate Evening With Tesla And Twain 

The time is October 1900 and Mark Twain has just returned from Europe and has moved into the Earlington Hotel (formerly the Gerlach Hotel, where Tesla once lived in the late 1890s and is now the Radio Waves Building) while his family is looking for a new home.
    
On this night Twain is spending an evening with his friend Nikola Tesla at the as they discuss the latest inventions which will lead to, and, revolutionize communications.
     
This performance, featuring P.J. Ochlan as Tesla, Robert Alvey as Twain, with Radio World Edior Paul McLane as the hotel manager, and was produced and directed by Sue Zizza, explores the unique relationship between these two great thinkers.
     
According to the science blog It’s "Okay to be Smart," Tesla had a bout of cholera in the 1870s before his emigration to the U.S. His condition was serious enough that his doctors thought he might not survive. Since there was relatively little else he could do during that period of time, he read all the books he could from the local library. Among those books were several volumes of Twain’s earlier works, which Tesla described as “so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state.” He went on to say that those books may have been the reason for his recovery.
     
It would be 25 years before the men met, but meet they did in NYC — and when Tesla told Twain about his illness and the role Twain’s writing played in his recovery, Twain was moved to tears.

     
The Irish Times reports that the writer and the inventor became friends in the 1890s. Tesla was living in New York, and even though Twain and his family lived in Europe at the time, Twain was a frequent traveler to New York.

Note:  The tab to listen to the MP3 of the play is a bit hard to find on the page.

Again, this is a semi-fictitious dramatization using real historical figures, though it's more based in reality than most of that or any of the crap you'll get from Hollywood.   I'm tempted to use it to violate the pop-culture cult of Tesla who is one of the weirder figures of ignorant pop-kulcha veneration these days.   He was interesting and a genius inventor but he was hardly infallible as heroes of pop-culture are insisted to be.  

But it's hot and I'm way behind in my weeding.  It's a bit of fun that has some actual information about the two men. 

The Downside Of The Internet

Not being much of a TV watcher even before I scrapped mine when the switch to HD happened, I had been blissfully unaware of the Food Network's worst programming until yesterday when a Youtube about Sandra Lee's "Kwanzaa Cake" came up in the side-bar.  I'm sorry I watched it and have since become aware of who Sandra Lee is on TV and what she does.  I can't begin to imagine how people watch her and eat the crap she comes up with.   I'd seen a little of the Food Network while visiting relatives who watched it, I can't say I wasn't impressed by it but I can say it was not impressed in a good way. 

The "kwanzaa" cake thing does apparently seem to have generated a small genre of humorous videos where People of Color put it together (Lee doesn't so much cook, she assembles crap out of store-bought crap) and are suitably appalled by it to humorous effect.  If you haven't been exposed to it, it's a store-bought angel food cake with a hole in the center, sliced in half, filled and iced with store-bought white frosting with cinnamon and cocoa mixed into it, then the center of the cake is filled with canned gooey apple pie filling, then you pour CORN NUTS! over it and in some versions acorns(?) in some versions popcorn, in one of them made in a humor video pumpkin seeds.  Chill, cut, taste and throw out.   Oh,  yeah, and don't forget the Kwanzaa candles stuffed into it.  I wouldn't use full size ones,  Not unless you want to set the tacky table decorations on fire when those fall over. 

Has any wacky white person made this thing thinking it was going to taste anything but terrible?   Has even the most wacky of those ever made it twice? 

While it was mildly amusing in a sort of  Krazy Karen in the Kitchen way, I regret having found out about it.   It depresses me that KK has become a cabloid millionaire celebrity with that kind of crap.   I regret it in the same way I regret ever having known about Thomas Kincade's junk or most of the movies ever made.  Trash abounds.  Pop culture seldom is much but that. 

Finding out that Sandra Lee was the de-facto First Lady of New York State before she broke up with Governor Cuomo does nothing for my image of that state.  But that's snark for another blog. 

Watch Trump And The Legal System Prove My Point Within Hours Of Me Making It

To any objection that I am too hard on the judges and "justices" the judicial system as it extends through the lawyers and law professors and scholars, Trump delivers his criminal associate the duly convicted Roger Stone from prison with the express thanks to him for not cooperating in the possible criminal investigation of Donald Trump and I have complete confidence that all involved, Trump issuing a clearly corrupt, self-criminally-interested order, his equally if not more criminal Attorney General and Barr's hack lawyer-criminals, etc. will get away with it because the Supreme Court using the language of our massively defective Constitution and their own tradition of unillegalizing crime done by the rich and famous will allow that. 

This system is corrupt, it was intentionally made so, if not by the possibly merely and masively short-sighted Founders when they gave a president such unquestionable powers (if they, indeed, intended them to go unquestioned) relied on the "honor" or senators to hold a criminal president of their own class and party accountable and other such tools of criminality that lawyers are trained to find and exploit for profit and power - those going to fhe elite training schools for such gangster lawyering, the Ivies, the private Ivy equivalent, some of them supposedly schools of "christian" education, some of the best such gangster lawyers and liars there are.  

Naw,  I think I have gotten the real character of the American legal system right.  I do have to say that was one thing I got from the House Impeachment hearings, watching the lawyers who testified, who refused to testify, who commented on TV and radio and in print hedging and repeatedly telling us we could trust in the integrity of their fellow lawyers like Robert Mueller (a good buddy of the criminal William Barr, I will never stop reminding people) of the pre-Barr Rod Rosenstein (who even the compromised Comey knew would always protect and benefit his own ass, not the country) of those great "institutionalists" who had worked in the Department of Justice with them the many Republican-fascist lawyers in the House and Senate, - I compared them to the diplomats and military officers who served and knowingly went into danger in places like Ukraine, who knowingly put their careers and perhaps lives in danger by exposing the crimes of Trump and the lawyers weren't generally the ones who came up smelling like roses or even seemed to be connected to reality.   

That line I gave a couple of months back about the law consisting of people replacing reality with words that they then babble about is just part of it. Which is true as far as it goes, but it's much worse than that.  That assumes that the results of that lawyers' game depends on some kind of objective rationality.   It doesn't, it's an entirely fixed game that is governed by the interests of those with the most money and the most power. You don't see poor people getting that kind of treatment by the law, certainly not since, maybe, the last "liberal" ruling about how criminal defendants are treated by it. When's the last one of those you can remember?   And, no doubt, the Roberts' and other Republican-fascist courts have an agenda that includes gutting that precedent. 

The Darwinian-fascist Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that the life of the law wasn't reason but experience.   Yeah, experience in rigging it for the maximum benefits of gangsters.  

There are good lawyers, I loved the guy we once hired to do some work for our family, a working class guy who once had a judge look askance at him because he figured out that the lawyer had an uncle who was a minor villain well known to the lower courts in the area. He was a really good lawyer.  I like and respect a few of the more savvy ones who have appeared on MSNBC.  But they're the exception.  

What I like least of all are the media and show-biz romanticizers of the Supreme Court such as I mentioned yesterday.  They tend to not be lawyers, they're allegedly journalists and movie scribblers, to mention other disgraceful excuses for what they're supposed to be.

If We Were An Honest Country We'd Erase That "Equal Justice" Line Over The Supreme Court Steps And Put "Unillegal Graft" There

The subject of my first post today reminded me of the infamous quote from the gilded age gangster J. P. Morgan,  

"I don't hire lawyers to tell me what I can't do, I hire them to tell me how to do what I want them to do."  

Which to anyone familiar with Morgan and his fellow gilded gangsters will mean how to commit crimes while giving them a slant that some lying dishonest judge will pretend means they're not illegal.  What the great contemporaneous American author, O Henry described when engaged in by one of his shifty minor cheats  called "unillegal graft".   Only unlike "Jeff" who didn't steal from widows and orphans, nevermind steal babies and put them in cages to attract the approval of racists, the truly successful American gangsters would steal from the poorest as readily as they might the merely less rich who had bought fewer lawyers and judges and politicians.  

I found a footnote from a book that says the sleazy lawyer he told that to,  Elbert Henry Gary, in 1927, gave the Saturday Evening Post a line of bilge in which he claimed that, land sake, his employer hadn't intended to break the law, no he merely wanted to be told how to do things legally.   You may note that Gary, who was the lawyer who brought together a number of the most successful gangsters of that first gilded era to form United Steel, was often called "Judge Gary" he having for a time been a lower court judge, no doubt sworn to uphold the law and whatever else he had sworn to to get that appointment.   He retained the title in later life even as he was one of the gilded era's more successful and influential thieves and legal council to thieves.  

He was allowed to do that under the Progressive Era reforms of Theodore Roosevelt, under the kind of "gentleman's agreement" which routinely under American law and the judiciary and politics has allowed some of the most serious of crime to have happened, known and unpunished, the kind of thing that Trump and Barr thrive on as well as their associated scum like Mnuchin and the rest of his appointments.   

I mention this because this description of that T. Roosevelt era legal cutsiness is typical of the kind of unillegal crime that flourishes under our legal system, under the Constitution as interpreted by courts and Supreme Courts who have no intention of delivering equal justice under law.

But through the bureau, the president did enter into a series of gentlemen's agreements with Morgan interests. Companies such as United States Steel and International Harvester (organized in 1903) agreed to open records to the bureau's investigators, on the condition—which Roosevelt accepted—that the president would use such information only as backgrounding for his recommendations of policy to Congress and that nothing would be made public except with the consent of the corporations themselves. To make these arrangements, Roosevelt permitted Commerce and Justice department officials to confer with representatives of Morgan interests such as George W. Perkins, E. H. Gary, and Henry Clay Frick. The meetings gave the Morgan men a chance to debate the legality of their actions and to avoid prosecution by agreeing to correct any "technical" violations of the law in cases where they could not persuade the government otherwise. In spite of Roosevelt's autobiographical boasting, then, Morgan's men were meeting with the president's men to arrange matters.

In 1907, Morgan's men would meet with the president himself to arrange a steel merger that virtually handed the United States Steel Corporation nearly complete domination of the industry. The bankers' panic that year occasioned the conference. Among the feared casualties of the panic was the Trust Company of America (TCA), a major New York City financial institution whose collapse might have deepened the crisis. As it happened, the principal owners of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCIC) owed the TCA a lot of money. Morgan men Frick and Gary went to the president with a proposition. If they could be assured that there would be no antitrust prosecutions, the Morgan people would buy out the TCIC, thereby allowing its owners to pay off their debt to the TCA and keep the TCA solvent. Roosevelt may or may not have known the degree to which United States Steel's acquisition of the TCIC's steel plants, as well as its resources of coal and iron in Alabama, would substantially reduce competition in the industry. But he did see the virtue of averting a prolonged economic collapse (especially since the financial community was already whining loudly about how the crisis was all the fault of Roosevelt's "radical" attacks on the trusts). Roosevelt gave the green light to the merger. Whether he did so by explicitly approving Morgan's proposal or merely by leaving the matter as a tacit understanding, Roosevelt vigorously defended his role in the merger when he testified about it in 1911—after the Taft administration sued United States Steel for violation of the antitrust laws.

Roosevelt did not have to be apologetic about the steel merger, because he had not concealed his skepticism about the antitrust laws. Addressing Congress in 1907, he argued that the Sherman Act "should be . . . so amended as to forbid only the kind of combination which does harm to the general public." How should it be determined what kinds do harm? "Reasonable agreements between, or combinations of, corporations should be permitted provided they are submitted to and approved by some appropriate Government body." Instead of corporations testing legal limits in the courts by acting and then awaiting retaliatory action from the government or by private litigants, the new order would require the large interstate corporations to consult first with federal agencies established to pass on the acceptability of proposed moves. In the United States Steel case, Morgan had consulted with the president.

They didn't just hire lawyers to let them get away with crime, they had a president in their pocket, one peddled as a "progressive" reformer.  

I will note that that most addled brained hero of American liberals,  Oliver Wendell Holmes was an even more ruthless fan of unbridled gangster capitalism. 

All his life Holmes held to the survival of the strong, and did not disguise his view that the Sherman Act was a humbug, based on economic ignorance and incompetence, and that the Interstate Commerce Commission was not a fit body to be entrusted with rate making. However, as he said to Pollock, he was so skeptical about our knowledge of the goodness or badness of laws that he had no practical criticism except what the crowd wants. Personally he would bet that the crowd if it knew more wouldn't want what it does.

That was from a lecture that Holmes' private secretary and personal friend, the later Judge Francis Biddle, who presided over the Nuremberg trials, described him.  I should go look up to see if his private writings have been published because those are said to show that this great figure in American law really was, in his private beliefs, a rather obvious fascist.   From what I've read of those who knew him personally,  I have every reason to believe that is true.  It makes you wonder how the present Republican members would express their true political ideology if they had to.  

No, the American judicary has had some great figures but the majority of them are gangster lawyers and hacks when they aren't Darwinian fascists and old line slave-power racists.  I don't buy the PBS made-for-TV amber gelled camera images and elegiac movie music bullshit image of them.  They're gangsters. 

Glenn Kirschner Gets Closest To The Truth Of The Supreme Court Declaration Of "No Man Is Above The Law" Even As They Let Trump Be So

Trump and every other piece of garbage gangster knows that if you've got the money to hire those most expensive of prostitutes, high price lawyers, you can get that bunch of others, judges, to play stupid and let you cheat justice by delaying tactics and driving those who need justice into giving up.  That's how gangsters like Trump have operated with the full cooperation of judges and "justices" and law schools who train lawyers in how to do stuff like that.  It is one of the reasons that those most respectable of such prostitutes, Supreme Courts, are one of the weakest links in the chain of egalitarian democracy, often the link that breaks and causes the whole thing to fail. 

Kirschner worked for a long time as a prosecutor who, certainly, saw that legal-judicial game and how it was used over and over again to cheat people without money and power and to frustrate the attempt to make justice happen.   I don't know if his remedy of fast-track dedicated courts to stop a presidential criminal like Donald Trump or a scumbag lawyer prostitute like William Barr using the delay of justice to enhance their power to break the law will work.   But I trust both his experience and his perception keen enough to see yesterdays ruling for what it was,  John Roberts seeming to uphold the principle of equal justice while letting Trump, Barr and the rest of the criminals that come in with them get away with their crimes.  It's the kind of hypocritical two-step that is typical of how sleazy judges and, especially, "justices" operate.  It's why I don't trust any time that one of the Republican-fascists on the court does something that seems to be good.  

They have earned our distrust, even as they make Donald Trump go into an insane tirade of tweeting against what they did.   

I wonder what kind of an Attorney General Glenn Kirschner would be.  He seems to have some real appreciation of how sleazy the game of high justice is in America and how it knowingly and readily enables the worst of them.    Donald Trump is among the worst of them, so was George W. Bush who was installed by Supreme Court fiat.  It is the most dangerous branch of the government, in the long run, certainly, but also in the short run which can be run out the fastest. 

Dave Stryker Organ Trio - The Chaser

Dave Stryker - guitar
Bobby Floyd - organ
Jonathan Higgins - drums

Reminded Of Why I Wasn't A Huge Obama Fan

I have never made it a secret that I never was very hot for Barack Obama, he was not my first choice for a Democratic nominee in 2008 and it was mostly the memory of the disaster of 2000 that led me to both support and vote for him in 2012.   I, of course, voted for him both times and, as the estimable Charles Pierce reminds me, for the second time in one week, he immediately on winning election started to prove every reason that I didn't like him and would have preferred another president. I had him figured as a golden-boy of the ruling class and he did little to dispel that image of him.  He was all high talk and disappointing action. 

The Estimable one reminds us that in Barack Obama's never-ending quest to get Republicans to like him - he valued that far more than getting Democrats who supported him to be pleased with him - he wanted the idiot traditional-New Hampshire yankee princeling, Judd Gregg to be his Commerce Secretary, something which Gregg turned down only to have Obama console himself by appointing him to the, thankfully, pointless Simpson Bowles Commission.  The only achievement of Simpson Bowles was to lead many of us to wonder just how far Obama would sell us out to the financially and politically elite.  

The other reminder of how much I don't recall Obama with unmitigated fondness was when Lawrence O'Donnell had on Obama's prep->Ivy Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan on the other night.  I can't remember much of what he said on O'Donnell's show because I can't see him without thinking it should be an unbeakable law for a Democratic President that no one should ever be Secretary of Education who had never set foot in a public school as a student and especially one of the endless string of prep=Ivy products who have not the first clue of how public education works and what its goals should be.   

Judd Gregg is also the kind of guy Obama loves, one of his fellow prep-Ivy guys, in Gregg's case Phillips Exeter to Columbia to Boston University (a may as well be Ivy).   I watched his political career and thought even then he seemed like he probably carried some quirks of inbreeding of the kind often seen in the elite old yankee families here, idiot sons of the elite are one of the more accurate stock figures of fiction.  So much of it written by people who went to school with them. 

I don't know the extent to which Joe Biden hankers after the approval and praise of Republican-fascists though I have never seen any reason to doubt that should Obama ever find himself as president again that he'd do exactly the same thing he did before.  What has he done but party with the rich and famous since becoming an ex-president.  I don't expect him to be doing Habitat for Humanity any time soon.  I hope Biden doesn't appoint a single Republican with the idea that he will get the bi-partisan fairy dust given by the media spread on him.   They'll think he's a chump and act accordingly.   We should all force him to follow that law about the Secretary of Education, we should pressure him to open up appointments to those who went to public schools, the Ivy product has been screwing us long enough to try an alternative.   I think he should appoint people who never had the chance to go to college to something.  A lot of the people I've known who didn't get to do that learned a lot more than those who did.   

the difficulty is that all of us, liberals and conservatives, are basically contained in the ideology of consumer capitalism

I don't know if it's that summer has finally come and it's hot as hell - I don't do well once it gets over 75F and it's way over that right now - or if it's anxiety over the election, or the Covid pandemic or that my own financial situation is looking ever grimmer as I really get old or what but I am feeling stuck in writing.  That's not something that has happened to me much, knowing I'm not a writer I haven't had much in the way of anxiety to lead to writers' cramp.  Having low expectations for oneself can be very liberating.  

It's definitely not that there isn't a lot to write about, there's too much.   To deal with that I'm going to give Hans Kung a break after concentrating on him so much for the past several months and I'm going to go back to Walter Brueggemann, specifically his most famous book,  The Prophetic Imagination.   The Jewish Prophets are the most impressive grouping of human beings composing texts on the most serious topics who I'm aware of.  I found the Buddhists and some of the other Asian traditions also very impressive and very useful - I'm not convinced that they were not writing about the human encounter, witness and understanding of the same God, even the Taoists whose writings I had occasion to look over again.   I think that they were writing about the same God but with radically different, though overlapping, human understandings of God.  

To get ready for that I think the discussion that Krista Tippet had with Brueggemann about the prophetic imagination is a good introduction to his scholarship and thinking.   And I think it's time for me to re-read it more deeply than I did and there's nothing like having to type out passages and comment on them for that.  This has become one of my favorite ways to study something, I wish I'd done it when I was a kid.

One of the things I like about Brueggemann is that though we definitely share the same stream of ideological orientation, he is one of the best internal critics of Christian political liberalism - and theological liberalism who I've encountered.  He knows how dangerous it is to get smugly complacent in a belief in your own moral superiority, or, rather, for me to.  

Ms. Tippett: You’re naming something when you call the prophets poets. You’re naming qualities of this text, this Bible that people think they know so well, but in fact and partly because of the way these things were translated and transmitted, I don’t think I grew up realizing how much of the Bible is poetry. The reason that also matters — and that’s true of the Hebrew Bible in particular — and also this realization, which is very simple but not brought home very often, is that this was the text of Jesus. This was his scripture.

Mr. Brueggemann:  That’s right. He obviously knew it so well. But even in the more liberal theological tradition that I was raised, we only talked about the prophets as moral teachers, and there was no attention to the artistic, aesthetic quality of how they did that. But it is the only way in which you can think outside of the box. Otherwise, even liberal passion for justice just becomes another ideology, and it does not have transformative power. That’s what’s extraordinary about the poetry, that it’s so elusive that it refuses to be reduced to a formula. I think that’s a great temptation among liberals who care about justice — is to reduce it to a formula.

I'm reminded of how in some of the latter passages of Hans Kung I posted he said, 

These last examples especially show ore clearly that even that Jesus' requirements must not be understood as laws.  

We are so insecure, certainly in the liklihood that other people are going to do wrong - really, to hurt us and those we love or care about - that we try to make everything legalisms, laws, absolute requirements instead of relying on the power of love to make people want to do unto others as they would want done unto them.  Probably a lot of that skepticism is well founded in our experience of each other and of ourselves - who are we in a better position to know the true motives behind righteous self-interest than ourselves?   And the seductions of the system against which the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition either stands or it sags into compliance with it is as binding on "liberals" as it is those who liberals are convinced have been led into temptation even as they love to believe we have been delivered from evil. 

Mr. Brueggemann:  It’s very difficult, and I think the difficulty is that all of us, liberals and conservatives, are basically contained in the ideology of consumer capitalism. We want that to be our universe of meaning. And when you get a poetic articulation that moves outside of that, it’s just too anxiety-producing for most of us, so we try to stop that kind of talk. In a local church, obviously, people have a lot of leverage for being able to stop that kind of talk.

When I first read Isaiah and read his condemnation of the central authority of the religio-political establishment at the Temple which we are supposed to believe was established on divine authority, I was rather stunned at how radically impious it was to that priestly religion.  I think all of us could do with that right now.  

Now, I've got to find out where I put my copy of it.  

No One Will Stand Ahead Of Me In My Disdain For The Supreme Court, Give or take two of them

The obvious solution to the 7-2 Supreme Court ruling gutting the ACA healthcare protections of those who work for religious organizations is federally provided universal healthcare, taking employers out of the picture.   

The other one which I've favored, requiring a UNANIMOUS ruling in order to overturn duly adopted laws is also desirable but probably harder to achieve. 

This ruling should make the goal of universal, federally provided health coverage easier to get through, especially after all the friggin' hell breaks loose this fall and winter.  And it's going to. 

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

The geezer blog rat shithead called to my attention who used this as a way to slam "katlicks" on the Court didn't happen to notice that the Catholic Sotomayor voted against the majority as did the, I hope, ever reliable, frequently wonderful, Jewish justice, RBG - may she retire to a well earned retirement AFTER A DEMOCRAT NAMES HER REPLACEMENT.  I wonder what would have happened if someone pointed out that the two other "liberals" on the court Kagan and Breyer, who voted with the fascists were Jewish what would happen on the play-lefty blogs.  Breyer also having indicated from the bench that he's an atheist.   I have no doubt that most of the fascists on the Court are devoted servants of Mammon, the nominal Catholics among them, including the former Catholics who went Episcopalian.   

Using bigotry isn't something that just Trump does.  It is ubiquitous.  

Tell Me Any Materialist Who Has Ever Come Up With More Helpful Ideas For Someone In the Midst Of Terrible Pain

God's love doesn't protect us from suffering,  God's love protects us in the midst of suffering.  Hans Kung

and he also said:

In the last resort, a love of God without a love of humanity is no love at all. 

and

I am firmly convinced that there is life after death, nor in a primitive sense but as the entry of my completely finite person into the infinity of God, as a transition into another reality beyond the dimension of space and time that pure reason can neither confirm nor deny. 

and 

I don't cling to earthly life because I believe in eternal life. That's the big distinction between my point of view and a purely secular position. 

Driving Us Ever Farther Into Avoidable Caststrophe Is What Republicans Knowingly Do

It's not as if Mitch McConnell and the Republican-fascists don't know this is what is coming, it's that they love to watch poor people, desperate people, powerless people suffer at their hands.   

Republicans are the embodiment of evil, they do this because they like to feel their power to hurt people, it makes them feel good, they like doing it.  They are not good.  They must never have power again. 

Recommended With Some Reservations

Last week someone recommended the Youtube channel of the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder to me and I spent some of the long drissely weekend watching a number of her subtly amusing, slightly but risk-free edgy and somewhat cool videos talking about modern physics, giving some very good popular level explanations of some of the problems with it that I've discussed on a layman's level.   I will say this for Hossenfelder, too, her music videos are the best of those I've seen from scientists and their associated sci-guy rockers.   

In general I like her though in the few I've watched where she talks about religion and, to some extent, science well outside of her field of expertise, she exhibits a milder form of the parochial ignorance of a complex subject which is inevitable from someone who has to spend so much of their time on their own complex subject.   That would be fine if she didn't, also, exhibit the vice of scientists who go make popular treatment of science, etc. speaking authoritatively instead of with the caution that vague familiarity should bring.  That's especially true when the topic is religion.   She's far, far from the worst offender but she does have the same trait in a milder form. 

One of the things that occurs to me from her talking about physics is that she practices the same kind of double-step that scientists do.  Proclaiming the modest ideals of what the physical scientists claim as the strict limits of what they do - not claiming to find "the truth" not going past where strictly controlled observation can inform their analyses and conclusions, not making undue claims for what they have found, always being open to refutation etc. while also claiming the opposite powers for science.   I will note that the scientific methods she proclaims are the main and overriding virtue of science are not methods that any scientist could bring to their lives outside of science,  relying only on evidence, not installing their ideological preferences, their interested claims of what is true, etc.  To claim that anyone could strictly apply the actual, agreed to, prescribed methods of science strictly to their everyday life and experience is a whopping big lie.  While I think she is unusually good at avoiding that for a scientist of her stature and her obvious ideological bias, that dishonesty is present in some of her presentations on the usual topics. 

For us mere laymen, I think she would disclaim the vulgar statement of scientism, that science is the only way to knowledge, that what science can't tell us cannot be true, though I think she more than implies that idea in her videos.   As any number of people have pointed out, that dictum of scientism is internally and fatally self-contradicting because science cannot support that contention.  Nor can it support any number of other such contentions.  Another is contained in her repetition of the contention that belief in God is not warranted because God is "not necessary" for the findings of physics.   There are any number of problems with that claim, not least of which is that science, including physics, is a human construct which formally excludes consideration of the question of God just as it excludes consideration of questions of morality.  When you start out that way, by excluding things, it is no great surprise when your chosen method cannot support the contention that those things are real or true - even as you formally proclaim that reality or truth are not the things you are trying to establish*.   She does both in the course of her videos, makes those true statements about the formal intentions of science but she, then, also tries to use them to debunk the existence of God. 

I would recommend her videos for their unusually clear - though complex - descriptions of some of he things modern physics currently holds as reliable knowledge and her critique of some of those which are most obviously not reliably believed - though they include some of the most popular of highly promoted science of the post-war period.  Her critique of the crisis in physics is extremely good as it would be for someone who is honest and as familiar with the field as she obviously is. 

On topics outside of her professional competence, she is generally better than most but you should take what she says with the kind of skepticism that the world would be better off if her colleagues applied that to the claims within their fields.  

Her music videos are some of the better imitation Brechtian stuff I've seen.  Though I hope she expands past that rather tired set of rather empty theatrical conventions.  Brecht was a practitioner of the cynical, the sensational and the circus like.  That doesn't get you far though it might get you an audience.  I think she'd benefit from reading Hans Kung, Existiert Gott? would be a good place for her to start.  I'd recommend she take advantage of her situation and follow up on his extensive citations and bibliography.  It would be a good place for anyone to start.  It's not an easy book but it is, as Elizabeth A. Johnson noted, the best handling of atheist arguments around.   

*  I'm not going to bother answering the snark, go look at her videos.  I'm finding that I'm feeling very reluctant to continue to argue with blog-rat, youtube-rat level trolls.  You won't listen to her so I don't think answering your snark is going to make any difference.  I'm not interested in things I know won't make a difference, anymore. 

Fun While It Lasted But It's Gone The Way Of All Kew-el Catch Phrases

My mother had a cousin who was an only child who married another only child and they never had children.  They socialized only with people in their own age cohort and mostly had little to do with people younger than them.  They both died in the early years of this century but when they'd visit they sounded like people who were frozen in the 1940s, using slang that I only ever heard in old movies, expressing opinions that moved on little from then.  I loved them both dearly and enjoyed listening to them - they were seldom in a room where they didn't dominate the conversation - it was like living history when they came to visit.  My mother used to shake her head at how lost in time they were, noting that they didn't have much exposure to people younger than they were. 

As someone who enjoyed younger people saying "OK, boomer" to the full-of-themselves members of my age cohort who, like my mother's dear, fondly remembered cousins, don't seem to notice that younger people have moved on, I have to say that what was funny has now become what I suspected it would as recently as last December.

I do have a word of warning to the young people who are enjoying the "OK boomer" thing.   You want to watch out that you're not doing what the boomers did as you're making fun of us.  I might never have bought into the worst of 60s youth self-righteousness but I could have learned something from people I should have taken more seriously.  Just not the ones TV and pop-culture was telling me to listen to.   Pop culture is commercial shit about 98% of the time.  That goes for the "counter culture" stuff as sold, too. 

These catch phrases and slogans just about always turn into that, they're a lazy substitute for thinking.  Maybe it's a general rule that even the good lines go old really fast, like even the best of jokes.  Jokes sometimes carry a nugget of truth but that won't carry them past that stage of stagnation.  The slogans and buzz words, they usually don't even have that much energy in them. 

It's too bad, there should be some way to wise up the geezers and coots of my age cohort without becoming what you're making fun of, yourselves.  Maybe making better points and arguments?   Too much like work?  Well, yeah, I've been arguing with those jerks for fifty years, myself. 

Carnivores Going To Get Us All Killed With The Help Of The Media

Given the potential that a news story about bubonic plague, "the black death" being reported in China becoming a tool of American racists - from Trump on down - the New York Times should have put the last paragraph in their report, today, first.

Plague cases are found in limited numbers across much of the world. In the United States, about seven cases, usually the bubonic form, are reported on average each year, most often in rural areas of western states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

So if an outbreak happens here, blame the friggin' cowboys from cowboy country.  

Still, there is a warning in this for Americans because anyone who thinks the Republican-fascists and their supporters would handle an outbreak of the human-to-human form of this or any potential pandemic disease must have been asleep for the past six months.  Our news media certainly was for the start of it.  

Also important information carried in the story should be something of a clue as to why this is such a dangerous thing.

The Bayannur city health commission said the plague was diagnosed in the herdsman on Sunday, and he was in stable condition undergoing treatment at a hospital.

The commission also issued a third-level alert, the second lowest in a four-level system, warning people against hunting, eating or transporting potentially infected animals, particularly marmots, and to report any dead or diseased rodents.

The city government said it had put in place plague-prevention measures that would remain in force for the rest of the year.

Note the warning consists of advice against "hunting, eating or transporting" animals.  This after both the Covid 19 virus is known to have arisen from the "hunting, eating or transporting of animals," as, indeed is the other pandemic potential illness that was in the news last week.  You would think that that on top of the other pandemic illnesses that regularly sweep the planet that originate in animal husbandry or the killing and eating of wild animals would do something to make people conclude that meat eating is one of our more serious health risks but I wouldn't expect it will do much to turn the New York Times or any other newspapers reporting on food and dining vegan.  I don't get the times till one of my friends is well done with it - generally I read it months later as I'm using it to start the fire but I'll bet they've got some recipes for their mid-brow sophisticates to cook up that include species which will probably soon figure in another pandemic story carried by the news section. 

Perhaps the last great prophetic voice in Western journalism, Karl Krauss, noted that war and despotism is carried in on the feuilleton section of the newspapers, he didn't live long enough to really see what the even more destructive influence of the movies, radio, etc. would bring in.  Is it any surprise that plagues would be promoted by them, too?  I wonder if the Chinese newspapers carried features with recipes for eating exotic animals as provided by the notorious and cruel wet markets.  Though, as I've mentioned over and over again, one of the greatest potentials for that in the world is the American meat and egg industry, as well as those found in any other place on earth.  

We will be driven into extinction by our appetites, especially as appealed to by the media that exists by selling us through appealing to our worst sides. 

Awaiting Moderation - Had To Take Out The Trash After The Holiday

Going online has done more to disillusion me as to the product of American culture of the post-war period than anything else I've ever seen. I'd say I'm disillusioned about the educational system but I think they're more a victim of it than a participant in the destruction of the minds of Americans.  We've been through this before, if you want to see why people are stupid and both won't and so can't think, look at what they spend the most time doing.   And it's not sitting in a classroom and it's most certainly not sitting in a church.  It's watching TV and media planned and geared to trigger their attention at the lowest, most visceral level, appealing to their strongest weaknesses.  And those weaknesses are inevitably those which the Jewish and especially the Christian scriptures warn against.   I will grant that the encouragement to amorality in the law, in the general culture did flow from, especially, the most elite of universities which have always in the modern period been there to service primarily the desires of the rich who give them money and send their brats to get credentialing papers from them but certainly the faculties have large numbers of teachers who do care about at least their subject matter and, more generally, the morality of intellectual integrity.  Not to mention those who go into teaching in public grade and high schools.  

In short, I've been getting flack from college credentialed idiots who, finding they can't make a refutation of what was said, they start flinging any old line.   More on this later.  I'm sure.