Saturday Night Radio Drama - Garret Baker - The Shepherd

The Shepherd 

 

Jim and Louise, a happily married young couple have just moved into a new house with their baby girl, Beth. However, when they receive an unexpected visit from the loquacious Darragh, things start to unravel.

With themes of an adult nature and language some might find offensive, 

Stephen Rea played Darragh
Katie Davis was Louise
Jim was played by Rory Keenan
Music was by Mark Hendrick
Sound supervision was by Philip Cooke
The Shepherd by Garret Baker was directed by Seán Rocks.

Series Producer of Drama On One is Kevin Reynolds

Your god Fails To Perform - Hate Mail

YOUR SNARK CAN BE answered very simply by citing something that the eminent expert in cellular biology, James Shaprio said in a recently posted lecture on Youtube.  The title given to the lecture is "How Biology Brings Cognition Into Evolution."  It comes very early in the lecture but I'll recommend you listen to the whole thing several times, James Shapiro is always worth listening to and trying to understand.   Maybe I'll transcribe more of it someday.   This is only the beginning of why just repeating "random chance" doesn't cut it. 

By "cognition" I mean action based in knowledge.

How does cellular and genome modification occur in evolution?  which is my specialty. And the fact is that it occurs organically (biologically) it doesn't occur randomly!  It's not accidents, it's not physics, it's biology. And we'll see that as we go on.

Random mutation cannot explain evolutionary variation.  If we assumed an impossibly high mutation rate a positive variation of one-percent, which is orders of magnitude too high and we're just looking at random mutations in the genome, in the DNA, to make a sequence of ten base-pairs would have a probability of one in ten to the twenty.  It would take one in the twenty generations to make a sequence of ten base-pairs. And one can't build a genome on that basis.

We know that in organismal reproduction 99.9 percent of all incorporation errors in the DNA are removed by replication proof-reading systems, which are biological systems.  They scan the DNA, they detect changes in the double helix and they detect mis-pairing  and they remove the newly incorporated incorrect nucleotide. So, that's cognition in action in reproduction.

And also, more than 99 percent of the "spontaneous" mutations that occur, so-called spontaneous mutations it turns out are enzymatically induced by various kinds of mutated polymerases or enzymes which modify the bases in the DNA and when those functions are removed we see a drop in so-called spontaneous mutation rate.  

So biology is central to genome change.  

I'm giving you that quote for several reasons, first is that one of the finest of living experts in this area has said "random mutation" can't do what it is claimed to do in the conventional neo-Drainist (and, in fact, the old-fashioned Darwinist) doctrine must depend on it doing for their theories to work.  It's clearly mathematically impossible to explain evolution in those terms.  On top of that there is the resistance to allowing those "spontaneous" imaginary random mutations to be passed on except in the most rare of instances and that even a large number of those will be caused by irregularities in the cellular chemistry which, when removed, the rate of such "spontaneous mutations" drop.

In this the specific type of "random chance" which the old-line materialist claims inserted wherever the materialist has no explanation is the mutation rate.  'RANDOM CHANCE' being one of the many atheist gods of the gaps used in exactly the same way that atheists accuse religious believers of using God.  Only as "random chance" can be known not to work and the more than slight implication of James Shapiro that the very cellular mechanisms that regulate the replication of DNA is cognitive in nature, attributing that to God is a lot more intelligent than empowering numbers to do what Shapiro has demonstrated they can't do.  If, as he says, that is controlled by biology and not "physics" then it is clearly not controlled by probability mathematics.  

If "DNA" can't do what neo-Darwinism insisted it had to do to produce the enormous evolutionary diversity that we know arose, when some of the necessary physical mechanisms needed to do what you guys insist it does do in that case, when it has a far longer time-scale to do it in, the idea that it can account for the instantaneous experience of having new ideas and immediately putting those into use, keeping in mind the rather good provisional definition of "cognition" given by James Shapiro, "action based in knowledge," there's not nearly enough time for DNA to do anything to produce physical structures in our brains to give rise to those ideas, those units of cognition because DNA is entirely too slow to account for the speed with which we think, though in your case perhaps that takes longer.  

The Validity of Science Is Utterly Dependent On Morality Which Science Cannot Demonstrate

IT IS SUCH a classic example of the limits of the abilities of science that the most fundamental statement of science as an unlimited entity cannot be sustained with science.  That ideology, scientism, is based in the faith that what science cannot prove cannot be known by human beings, a statement which is, itself incapable of being proved by science. It would have to be false if it were true, so it can't be true.  In the past I've given that statement as said by a man who should certainly have known better than to say it, the great mathematician and logician Bertrand Russell.  He certainly was able to understand that the statement collapsed under the inability of his all-powerful oracle, science, to support the claim of its definitive decisiveness in what can be considered known which proved that the statement was false.  

Every once in a while I go through a math or other textbook to see if I've still got it, I'm doing that right now and so far it would seem I've still got at least a college frosh level of algebra.  At my age it's reassuring to find that out.  It's a book that has a lot of basic set theory in it so evaluating statements as to whether they're true or false through their mathematical support is in my mind.  But even that activity doesn't make much use of the idea that you should prefer a statement of truth over a false statement.  Math, like science might be able to help you decide if something is true or false but it can't tell you why you should prefer the truth nor can it give you a reason to prefer truth over falsity, it obviously didn't inform Bertrand Russell as to why he should prefer the truth that science can't be the sole means of finding truth because the statement that it is the sole means of doing that that can't be demonstrated with science.  

Science, as a method of finding reliable information about the physical world can be a very powerful means of finding information of superior reliability in those areas it can be practiced at any given time.  But science, not even math is a stand-alone entity, both depend on a far broader range of human experience than either of them can contain, the idea that either of those is capable of being a totalizing or monistic system is sheer stupidity.   The idea that either are an entity independent of human minds is as imaginary as Russell's orbiting teapot or almost everything that comes out of FOX Lies. 

Science always has to be done within the limits of what can be observed, measured and honestly analyzed, when it strays far from that the chances of what is asserted by scientists being true falls as certainly as it does in any other field of human activity when objective verification can't be had.  Science done without that quickly become nothing much but a series of ideological holdings as it so often does when there is an over extension outside of what can be effectively observed or measured or honestly analyzed, in my lifetime one of the most significant of those struggles surrounded the completely speculative neo-sciences of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in which the assertions of the ultra-Darwinists (as their opponent Stephen Jay Gould called them) could never be confirmed because no one can go back through the tens, scores, even hundreds of millions of years during which evolution happened to trace the persistence of "traits" alleged to have survived into the most distantly related species, everything from ants to human beings and even more distant ones.  It is impossible to even identify such proposed shared "traits" as being the same thing in the species which supposedly share them.  It's impossible to tease out whether or not many of the "traits," especially those invovling alleged behaviors are really there or if they are imagined to be in one or both of the speices by a scientist motivated to see what they want to.  That last thing is something which is ubiqitous in the supposedly scientific study of "behavior" and other aspects of mental activity, especially likely when one or more of the species is inarticulate and can't report on the internal experience of that "behavior" or mental activity.  In fact, even when the organism can articulate that it only adds a whole host of other problems.  If, as is so often done, the behavioral scientist uses college students as their subjects, many of whom may well have some idea of what the study might want to be there.  I had an aquaintance who annoyed his psychology prof by pointing out that many of the studies they discussed in the class he was taking were done on Yale students who couldn't comprise a legitimate sample of the human population, at that time they were uniformly males, just as one of the problems with the validity of it.  

Another thing I do once in a while is look at the latest postings on the very active blog Retraction Watch, one of the few blogs which doesn't seem to have suffered much of a fall off in current and sometimes very hot new content and which doesn't seem to ever lack for informed, interested and insightful readers.  While quite a bit of the stuff that gets retracted is done so through honest mistakes, much of it is a result of clear and obvious fraud and fraud which becomes quite obvious once there has been what there should have been before it was published,  rigorous review of the methodology and substance of the study or experiment which was retracted.  Quite a bit of that right now concerns obvious fraud involving the dishonest use of photographs and images which could not have been used by those publishing the paper without their intending to commit fraud, TO LIE, IN PLAIN ENGLISH.  

As well as being a methodology, an ideology and even an atheist substitute for religion, science is a profession, one which in a professional or academic context carries enormous financial and professional motives to publish something, anything, academia tying advancement and even retaining a professional engagement on the requirement that you publish, no matter whether or not it is legitimate or even honest.  There are a whole host of professional practices that will add to the professional record of an academician, publishing supposedly original work (plagiarism and copying are also covered by Retraction Watch), acting as a peer reviewer, being involved with a professional journal, etc.  And that's on top of everything else a scientist is supposed to do to get and retain a job and, they hope, advance in the profession.  One of the greatest scandals of the recent spate of scandals in science is the grotesque laxity of what so-called "reviewers" review so as to get their colleagues published.  I've mentioned before that during the Marc Hauser scandal I asked a biologist friend of mine how his reviewers could have failed to look at the videos of the "behavior" he was describing, what proved that he had lied about what his very influential papers claimed he was seeing in the lab.  She told me that reviewers never look at that kind of thing, they take it on faith that their colleagues are being honest about that kind of thing, they just look to see if the reported results are in line with the claims made about what they saw.   Clearly that faith would often fail the truth test if it were tested in line with what scientific method is claimed to be.  

In the brawls I got a on many a Scienceblog and many a play-lefty blog frequented by scientistic materialist-atheists, I was decreasingly surprised to find out the extent to which honesty was beside the point when discussing science or anything else with them.  I can't say that my former assumption that atheists don't lie more than the general population survived the new atheism, my experience of arguing with so many of them wouldn't support the idea that they especially value the truth, especially among the true believers in science as an ideology, their ideology, their religion.  That was true whether the atheist was a scientist or mathematician who allegedly valued science for its method which is alleged to be a heightened method for discerning the truth, I never found they had an especially well developed passion for the truth no matter where it lay, especially when it could be demonstrated to lie somewhere other than where they wanted it to.  In that they are not especially different from the general run of human beings.  The difference is that they claim to be better than that by virtue of their higher sciencyness.  In that they are no better than the frequently encountered whited supulchers of conventional religiosity.  In the age of Trump and the pseudo-Christianity of his fascists, no one could honestly go through this exercise without mentioning them.  Perhaps the fact that religion and its methods can discern that it is a sin to tell a lie makes the religious liar more wicked than the scientific one, though they'd certainly pretend that they were better than them.   To me a liar is a liar, especially when what they lie about is so dangerously consequential.  One of the recent listings on Retraction Blog was a paper alleging that there were serious health problems from taking Covid vaccinations.  In that the two kinds of lying intersect at a mountain of corpses from those who bought into fatal lies.  The ground for that was set in the scientific fraud of a British doctor who got published in the Lancet, one of the most prestigious of all science publications, one whose paper was retracted but well after it set off a horrific and deadly superstition and cult which is entirely relevant to the Ivermectin cult.  And it has far reaching consequences, I recently found out that one of my relatives needed to be treated with Ivermectin and had trouble getting it as a consequence of its use by the anti-vaxx, Trump chumps.  He had to climb through extra hoops to get it for one of its licensed uses in the United States.  

Science, to be any good at all, depends on what it cannot generate but which is properly a religious holding, that you should tell the truth and you shouldn't lie.  It's not much use without that.

Hate Mail - The Stupidity At The Blue Blog

used to be fun to write about but it's just boring now.   I mean, they believe what Simps says without ever verifying what he says so how interested in the truth could they be?

They can soak their heads.   

I'm planning on posting a real piece tomorrow.   Oddly enough, it's on the topic of science being reliant on a moral value that science can't support, the need to tell the truth. 

Someone Writes To Me

 that Simps says that I write like old people have sex.   

As if he'd know.

Maybe I Should Give Up Hate Mail Posts For The Rest of Lent

But they're sooooo easy to write!

SOMEONE APPARENTLY WANTS me to fight the Darwin wars today, so soon after I'd thought about limiting myself to a major post a month repeating what I've pointed out which Darwin's Defenders have never yet once addressed honestly.  

I'm still sick from whatever it is - Covid test was negative, no idea what it is, so I'll do something easy that I haven't done so recently.  I'm going to bring up the more basic level of materialist nonsense, that our thoughts, our consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon of material structures in our brains.  I think that like so much of materialist, atheist, scientistic lore, it suffers from a mistaken belief that a static, abstract model of something can be made to account for the most basic phenomena of our experience which is the opposite of static and abstract.  Maybe most telling of so many such materialist, atheist, scientistic models, this one is remarkably set apart from one of the most basic aspects of our experience of consciousness, that it happens in time. You could only hold with any of the various models if you refuse to acknowledge how fast things happen in our experience, when our experience of consciousness has to be that part of "nature" against which such models are compared to test their adequacy.  Instead, materialst-atheist ideology insists that it is consciousness that must be fit into the confines of their ideology, not the various and inadequate  schemes they come up with to explain it in materialist terms.

One of the more basic problems with that is in the question of novel ideas, new to us and new to, perhaps, the entire previous line of life on Earth. Certainly the majority of ideas that organisms on Earth came up with had to, at some point, be entirely unprecedented in living beings.   How would our brains know how to construct the right material structures to give rise to the right ideas for us to have any hope of knowing or navigating reality external to our bodies and brains.  How our brains could construct, in real time, the right structures to give rise to new and novel thoughts in order for us to act appropriately to, for example, keep us from being involved in fatal accidents.  That is something that happens to each of us pretty much starting with getting out of bed in the morning and starting to navigate around the house, seeing things we couldn't have expected to see, encountering new things.  Listening to the news or reading it, etc.

Remember any proposed mechanism for our bodies making the right structures to give rise to those novel ideas has to account for how we experience that happening in time, which is realistically estimated to be almost immediate. Any proposed biological action would have to happen that fast or it is not credible as an explanation.

In previous brawls with materialists about this, that would pretty much take care of one of their materialist creator gods, "DNA."  The time which it would take for DNA to come up with a sufficiently novel and appropriate string of amino acids to form a protein (what DNA "does," though not without an extremely complex and largely unknown series of cellular actions).  Structures WHICH WOULD THEN HAVE TO BE BENT INTO THE CORRECT SHAPE FOR IT TO PERFORM THAT FUNCTION would take too many minutes to account for our experience of having, using and confirming the validity of new ideas.  A car you don't expect to see coming at you, for example.  And that proposed solution would merely force the question of how "DNA" would know how to do that.  The same thing can be said for the other atheist creator gods within our brains that would have to know:

1. That it needed to make a novel structure to give rise to the right idea in the brain before the materialist model of consciousness would allow the information to do that to be present in the brain;

2. What it needed to make in order to give rise to the right idea in the near instantaneous time that such ideas arise in our conscious experience.  

3. How to make that correct structures and not the wrong ones to account for the efficacy of the hundreds if not thousands of novel ideas we deal with to get through the day;

4. How it could know that it had made the correct structure and not the wrong one by mistake since, in that case, only the wrong one would be present in the brain.

The other creator gods of atheism that were brought up, such as "natural selection" are even less credible because "natural selection" as it is imagined doesn't exist within our brains, it is supposed to be a force of nature that is always actively trying to kill us.  Though that would get me into the philosophical incompetence of the idea of natural selection and its scientific deficiencies, exactly what I didn't feel like going into again right now.  

One of the most common resorts of materialist-atheist ideology, "probability," certainly doesn't work to step in and rescue the materialist, atheist, scientistic model of consciousness because any given probability would almost certainly not allow for the consistent effective correctness of what goes on to give rise to successful ideas, I'd think if it were possible to tease out a plausible probabilistic calculation, it would soon start making the vanishingly small, generally abstract calculations of the improbability of our life-supporting universe seem unimpressively  small by comparison.  You would have to account for the absence of all of those perhaps quadrillilions of possible outcomes which couldn't show up much or our very existences would be swamped by them.   I've got some real questions about the way that probability is imagined as applying to the real world.

I am struck that those improbabilities that gave rise to desperate materialist, atheist, scientistic physicists and cosmologists inventing jillions and jillions of universes to make it go away would have to become ever more remote from the facts of the observable universe we know something of the more elaborate the phenomena and experiences of life that would have to be accounted for under any complete theory of the improbability of our reality being real.  I think that the reality of our lives and consciousness makes the idea that material probability accounts for it to be far less credible than intelligent design is, though I don't think that science as it exists now could deal with that question, either.  

I don't remember which scientist it was who said that a little learning gives rise to atheism but deeper knowledge gives rise to faith but that's been my experience, especially in considering, deeply, the claims of current atheists during the new atheism fad of the 00's.  I'm far more confident in both the Creation of the universe by God and the design of life, as well, the more I've thought deeply about the claims of the atheists.  And I mean the higher brow atheism, not the pop version of it.  In recent weeks I've been amazed at how readily the scientistic atheists are to violate everything there is about science to promote their ideology through its manipulation, especially the premature and entirely outsized claims surrounding those recently discovered giant galaxies so close to the Big Bang.  I'd come to see that it's not just people like Jerry Coyne who, much as I disagree with him and very much dislike him [confession, I think he's a real pill] at least his formal science generally has links to actual observation.  It's especially true of those like Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose whose careers in conjecture are entirely unrelated to any observations of nature.  I wasn't surprised by Hawking and his colleagues in cosmology doing it, I was shocked to realize recently that Penrose does the same thing.  I have too much respect for science to not notice the claim that it can be done in the absence of observation.  
 

Having Criticized Hossenfelder Yesterday

I recommend the video she posted today about the horrific extent of and the growing problem of scientific fraud.  

I left a comment pointing out that science absolutely depends on something that science can't generate or support, a moral obligation to tell the truth and honestly follow the supposed methods of science, honesty in reporting, honesty in review and the independent replication of results.   If they don't do those things there is no reason for anyone to believe any of it.   And that would be a disaster but scientists, in whose hands science is, don't seem to be taking care of the problem very effectively.

William Bolcom - Gospel Prelude 1 What A Friend I Have In Jesus

 

Gabriel Dessauer

Göckel Orgel der Liebfrauenkirche in Frankfurt/Main im Rahmen

Ours Is The Darkest Age

TWO THINGS I recently heard have gotten me quite depressed about the near term future, a future which is near enough if I live as long as some of my direct ancestors did, might mean I'll still be here to see it.

One was a comment that David Cay Johnston made about the abysmal ignorance of some of his university students about the most basic and simple facts of current events.  He had to tell them a reason that they should care if Putin invades a NATO country would be because they would be drafted into the military and not all of them would come back from the fighting.  Apparently the "information age" that idiots in the media were going on about twenty-five years ago has produced even more of those kinds of idiots among the kollege kredentialed kohort than were paying customers when I was in college.  And there were plenty of ignorant narcissists then, too.  I had a distinct feeling that the generation I was in was a decline from previous years when you were expected to pay attention to the world and take reality seriously if you were to be a respectable adult.  Now even more of them don't even seem to want adulthood while getting all of the legal privileges, thereof.

The second one was while listening to one of Sabine Hossenfelder's youtubes in which Hossenfelder talked about a survey of "artificial intelligence" experts who speculated on several things, one was the terrible effect that AI simulations of information would have on the ability of even experts to distinguish between artifice and reality, truth and fiction and the effect of that on things like the possibility of the conduct of our daily lives, not to mention that such lies saturating the body politic would remove one or more of the absolutely essential prerequisites a society and country must have for egalitarian democracy to even be possible.  

That last point may not have bothered Hossenfelder much as she, out of her devotion to materialism, atheism and scientism doesn't think very highly of democracy.  Here's something she said eight years ago in an interview she did with John Horgan:

Horgan: What’s your utopia?

Hossenfelder: That we finally use scientific methods to restructure political and economic systems. The representative democracies that we have right now are entirely outdated and unable to cope with the complex problems which we must solve. We need new systems that better incorporate specialized knowledge and widely distributed information, and that better aggregate opinions. (I wrote about this in detail here.) It pains me a lot to think that my children will have to live through a phase of economic regress because we were too stupid and too slow to get our act together.

I'd point out to her that we saw what governments who intended to "use scientific methods to restructure political and economic systems" were capable of doing in the 20th century,  Today's united Germany experienced both the Nazi and the Soviet attempts to do that, as, in fact, the western and Asian liberal democracies have, though not so totalistically as the hard-core true believers in that sciency road to "progress."   Every Marxist dictatorship was an attempt to do just that, including the Soviets, the various countries under its hegemony,  China, Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia and the Kim dynasty in North Korea.  

The results of that are directly relevant to another thing that she rather blithly talked about in the speculations of the surveyed AI experts, that they believed the capacity of AI systems to mimic information would, by 2040,  lead governments (perhaps corporations?) to take actions that would produce at least one "megadeath," a term which is, itself a product of the application of science without much democratic input, the nuclear arms military-industrial complex. Of the AI experts who didn't agree with that believed that AI would produce large, though lesser numbers of those murdered through buying into computer created irreality.  But that's nothing new in that kind of instrumental thinking.  The devotees of scientism didn't need AI to be blinded by science in that way.   The French Revolution which immediately took the form of the Reign of Terror was an early such attempt to "use scientific method to restructure political and economic systems."  That would be a use of "scientific methods to restructure political and economic systems," as, I would argue, the thing which led liberal democracies to permit a situation that has demoted the value of truth over lies starting with the extremely dangerous framing of the First Amendment in the United States, one which does not explicitly value truth above lies,* one which has led the United States directly into the line of presidencies starting with Nixon in the wake of the Supreme Court issued carte blanche to the media to lie about political figures and "public figures," to Reagan who destroyed requirements of public service and the presentation of alternative view points in broadcast media, on to the Bushes and the logical conclusion of that in Trump and on to a situation in which even with the disastrous lessons of terrible experience, with a very large body count, of both the Bush II and Trump regimes, a seriously large number of Americans and probably a far larger percentage of the American "free press" are ready to have a re-do of that.  

The "enlightenment" philosophy, which is based in a clearly false and illusory imitation of scientific method, a notion of which pervades our legal system based in the amateur attempts of such as Madison and Hamilton and the rest of the "founders" may be a somewhat better attempt at the use of scientific methods to restructure political and economic systems than the totalitarian ones, but it is also pervaded with the treatment of human beings, other living beings and the environment as if they were mere objects of commerce and wealth creation and concentration, none of which "scientific methods" has the least problem with because science was, by mutual agreement, exempted from considering such moral questions which are important in the wider reality which science cannot possibly cover and which scientism and its habits of thought have no interest in or feeling for.  

How insane is our darkest of dark ages when the possibility of computer simulated "reality" can be believed capable of producing "megadeaths" and not only societies but governments are going head first into that out of the possibility of money being made from it?   Who will those millions killed by us looking into the carnival mirror of computer created reality be?  I wonder if the proponents of AI have ever seriously entertained the possibility that it wouldn't be those who they consider far off and "exotic" or biologically inferior to them who are the ones who will be killed as a result of computers grinding out a convincing simulation of reality to the likes of Putin or Trump or which ever idiot who rules in Britain or France or any other nuclear country?  Have they never considered that it could be them and anyone they might care about?   In her libretto for the self-congratulatory "modern" and supremely stupid opera, Four Saints in Three Acts Gertrude Stein posited the question, "If it were possible to kill five thousand chinamen by pressing a button would it be done."   Being as stupid as she was, she didn't discuss it but had her imaginary "St. Teresa" bush the question aside because she wasn't interested in it.  Which proves how far from reality that an imaginary person could be in the superficial mind of an idiotic modernist.  I doubt the collaborationist Gertrude Stein who, as late as the last years of the 1930s believed that Hitler wasn't going to go to war with anyone and believed enough in his "greatness" that she nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize could have imagined a world in which it might be a "Chinaman" who was duped by AI into killing a million people, not that I think it would bother the reportedly quite stupid Xi anymore than it would the obviously stupid Trump or the criminally insane Putin (or whoever the idiot Tories gull the British public into leadership).  I wouldn't put it past any of them from killing a million of the people in the countries they control.   You can add the dictators of Pakistan to that list and the Kim regime in North Korea, thanks to a Pakistani nuclear physicist selling them the knowledge of how to get nuclear weapons for his own profit.   I really meant it when I said in response to the scientistic, atheist, materialist Sam Harris proposing to murder "tens of millions" of PEOPLE in Islamic countries in a day that a far more rational act would be to kill all of the scientists capable of producing and maintaining and deploying nuclear weapons, perhaps using the threat of wider annihilation as a means of turning them over to make the world save from their intelligent designs.  As insane as such an idea is, it's far more sane than murdering tens of millions of entirely innocent and incapable people living under a government they never had a hand in choosing.   I'd like to hear what Sabine Hosenfelder would think of that modest alternative proposal of getting rid of those in her profession as a superior act of instrumental reasoning.

It is one of the supreme ironies of the history of humanity that the age of science, the "enlightenment" has produced such a depraved and fraudulent view of life and reality as to produce an educated class who can accept such possibilities, and if we are to believe in the expertise  of such experts, probabilities.  If that's true then it is far more depraved than any previous age which we imagine out of the evidnece of the historical record.  Only I doubt they were as arrogantly unaware of the reality of what they chose to believe and live out.  You need modernism for that, modernism as began when science was transformed from a method into an ideology and a totalizing system of thought.

* It should be remembered that so many of the framers were lawyers.  The legal profession is certainly inclusive of those who have little use for the truth as opposed to lies, choosing either as long as it serves their purpose.  And such are the highest paid members of the legal profession.  The legal profession has "ethics" that don't lead to the removal of such people from it in very large numbers.  Roy Cohn was only removed from it while he was dying of AIDS, I will be interested to see if Rudy Giuliani is really removed from it in the final years of his rakes progress if liquor doesn't do him in first.  I would say that the elevation of so many of those, not only to the judiciary but the highest levels of the judiciary, many quite adept at lying and contorting reason in service to, ultimately, their self-interest, could probably produce nothing but a legal system which elevates lying to an equal level of valuation to the truth and gives lies the protection of law.   It's the lesson of the replicability crisis and the exposure of widespread corner-cutting, outright fraud and the fraudulence of "peer review" in science in the last twenty or so years that the legal profession isn't the only area of educated eliteness that does that.   These days I'm a lot more impressed with the less formal and pretentious level of review that exists among historians, though plenty of lies get told through that academic field and, even more so, on the popular level.   

PS.  I thought I'd add this as a preemptive update:

Horgan: Steven Weinberg recently told me that science will never explain why there is something rather than nothing.

Hossenfelder: I agree with him. It’s not a scientific question, or at least I don’t see how to make a scientific question out of it. Unless of course you want to reinterpret “nothing” as “quantum vacuum” as Lawrence Krauss does. I would argue though that even a quantum vacuum is still something.

Horgan: If physics can’t solve that problem, does that mean we’ll always be stuck with religious explanations?

Hossenfelder: Religious explanation is an oxymoron. Religion is what people draw upon if they don’t want to admit that they have no explanation. Will we always be stuck with problems to which scientists don’t have an answer? Yes, I think so.

Horgan: Do you believe in God?

Hossenfelder: No.

Horgan: What is “the free will function”? And why doesn’t it persuade you that free will is real?

Hossenfelder: The free will function allows the universe to evolve in such a way that the future is neither determined by the past nor its becoming fundamentally random. If you want to hang on to the belief in free will, then you need to find a law for the universe’s evolution which is different from the laws in our current theories. This new evolution law must partly be based on a process that was neither random nor pre-determined. This process is what the free will function provides.

It doesn’t persuade me because the example that I constructed isn’t embedded into the current theories of nature and I don’t know whether it’s possible to do this. It is not a realistic construction – it is merely a proof of principle to demonstrate that is possible at all. And of course I am cognitively biased to believe in free will, so how much can I trust myself in my own argument?

Clearly, among the other things which her high intelligence and expertise in her field don't provide her with is a particularly informed knowledge of the enormously varied phenomenon of religion (she only knows of a God of the gaps) nor one of free will.   Free will would be a mental ability which, in order to be free, would have to exceed in its action her conception of causality despite whatever resulted from it. Many, even most People could choose the same thing freely, even to believe in whatever of physics they might be able to conceive of.  Even if that turned out to be quite wrong. Even to have a blind faith in physicists.  Physicists certainly have done that as have other scientists in other fields.  Science is no guarantee of omniscience.  If free will is real, and I think the consequences of not believing in that are sufficiently bad to choose to believe in it, physics would probably be the worst possible means of thinking about it because it is based in an ill-defined and largely unknown causality that even physics can't make much of a dent into defining.  Her specialty of particle physics can't even come up with a firm definition of what a "particle" is.  The rational conclusion of such realities is that the "current theories of nature" are hardly able to exclude possibilities that can't be fit into it, though she chooses to believe that they can.  Why anyone who values egalitarian democracy or even the corrupt approximation of something like that, liberal democracy would find the denial of free will a respectable ideological position has more to do with ignorance of the consequences of it or a particularly naive acceptance of the authority of scientists.  As I pointed out, such an ignorance of the most consequential lessons of 20th century history discredits that ideological faith.   They're not gods, they generally aren't very good when they get far outside of their narrow specialties, especially those they don't value such as history and the wider consideration of hard human experience.  A lot of them are unable to distinguish their ideological preference from validly demonstrated science, a lot of them are as immune from looking at what they don't like  as possibly being true as the most benighted fundamentalist or a fan of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.  

I would love to hear her give a detailed description of how her government under the rule of science would work, how in lieu of "representative democracy" laws would be adopted and enforced, how the legal system would work, how economic inequalities would be either evened out or, as I suspect it would be under such a scientistic, atheistic, materialistic priesthood, ignored.   I think Benjamin Franklin got it right when he said a government of wise men would be a very foolish thing.  While I think science should inform government, a government of scientists would be even stupider.  I've known scientists who would have a hard time knowing their ass from an elbow joint.  

"Too High" - Dave Stryker Trio w/ Warren Wolf

 

Dave Stryker, guitar

Jared Gold, organ, 

Warren Wolf, vibes 

McClenty Hunter, drums

The Lamb Of God - Ash Wednesday (Posted a day late by accident)

I thought this posted yesterday but I was wrong.   So I'm posting it a day late.

THE CHRISTIAN IDENTIFICATION of Jesus as the Pascal Lamb is something I have always found unsettling, enough so that I never much thought about it seriously.  The timing of the trial and execution of Jesus in regard to the Passover meal forces the question as to why was it followed on the day of the slaughter of so many lambs, probably thousands in Jerusalem alone, lambs such as the one which, no doubt, Jesus and his followers ate at the Last Supper.  The traditional answer that Jesus was the unique sacrifice, making later such sacrifices unnecessary never sat right with me.  But, then, I grew up in the Christian milieu in which such sacrifices of animals was left behind more than nineteen centuries before I was born.  Of course most People don't think of the animals they eat as being sacrifices, they think of them as objects to be killed and eaten.  That makes the identification of the crucified Jesus with one especially fraught, if you think about it which I have to admit I'm doing for the first time in my life.

When I made the change from my decades long vegetarian diet to veganism it was in response to two things, a speech that the Chief Rabbi of Dublin made in which he said that the world situation, especially climate change made veganism a moral duty, as well as the moral duty to treat sentient beings well.  The second followed on reading that speech, I remembered a poem by the early 20th century Maine Poet Holman Day about a farmer selling calves to be slaughtered, something which I've posted here before, if I recall correctly.   Growing up on a farm I know baby cows are extremely appealing animals, as are baby goats and lambs, I remember a women I knew who raised goats telling about a Greek family who bought a kid from her right before Orthodox Easter and how when they bound its legs to transport it to be killed she was so appalled that she gave them their money back and kept the animal, her husband slaughtered goats but she knew he'd do it humanely.  Though I don't think there's any such thing as a humane method to kill a sentient creature.  

I know from growing up on a farm and among farm people that there is no such a thing as raising animals for food which doesn't involve killing them, whether as young adults or as juveniles.  The number of male chicks killed as soon as they're hatched is appalling as, in fact, is that it's not uncommon for them to be sorted from females and sent into a shoot where they are chopped to pieces.  That's something you should know about even if you only eat eggs and not flesh.  Even before I became a vegan I'd only eat eggs from our hens which were never slaughtered but allowed to die of natural causes (though in some cases those natural causes were raccoons and dogs and foxes.  And the slaughter of baby mammals can't be separated from the consumption of milk products.  The calves, kids, etc. are superfluous to the goal of making their mothers lactate so humans consume the milk instead of the babies they give milk for.  That is until the still fairly young cows are considered less profitable and they are sent to slaughter, as well, something that happens even sooner for chickens in an egg factory.  The cruelties of the dairy industry are extensive and inescapable.  It's not as if that paused for even a second as ritual sacrifice of animals was left behind with the destruction of The Temple and the adoption of Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity.  The people who have refused to eat all animal products for moral reasons is probably one of the smallest groupings of human beings in the history of our species.

What does it mean for God incarnated as a human being to so obviously take the role, not of Moses but of a sacrificed baby animal?  A human being who did not resist the  slaughter he knew was coming before he even started out for Jerusalem.   What are Christians supposed to conclude from that?  That's a real question, I don't know the answer to it.  I'd think that we're supposed to think hard and without regard to what we want about what it means not only for us, human beings, but also as to how we treat animals.  As a vegan I know what I'd want to conclude about it though that's complicated by the passage in which Jesus is given a piece of fish to eat after he appears to his followers after the Resurrection.  

The meaning of the Eucharist, instituted by Jesus breaking the bread and passing a cup of wine telling his followers to eat and drink his body and blood must tie his sacrifice to our eating and drinking, though I'm somewhat heretical in thinking that it was in the sharing of food and drink that contains his essence as much as the bread and wine.  I think any time food is shared has  Eucharistic content embedded in it, especially when it is vitally needed food and drink.  

Ash Wednesday's most notable sacramental of anointing with ashes, being told to remember that our bodies came from unliving matter and our bodies will return to unliving matter has to tie into that too.   The traditional expectation of so many Christians that our bodies will be resurrected goes against that declaration, though people can know that their bodies will decay or be burned up into ashes before there's any such resurrection.

Apparently Simps Never Heard Of

 Lord Haw Haw

Note what a piece of crap he was from the start, an Irish guy who betrayed Ireland by being a Unionist spy and likely murderer as a teenager, later one of Mosley's Brit fascists before becoming a Nazi propagandist.   Yeah, Lord Ca Ca has more than a little in common with him.   But, Simps only knows what he got from TV, the movies and post-WWII crap kulcha so he misses a lot of references.

Reading About Tucker Carlson's Emasculation By Putin Just Now

 I realized that from now on he's Lord Ca Ca to me.

Dump Garland

THE OUTRAGEOUS deceptive structure and partisan bias of the Robert Hur report on President Biden's retention of classified materials is just the latest of the many obvious bad judgements of Merrick Garland.   I'd have said before the loss of his membership of the Supreme Court was mitigated by his bad judgement and all-too-lawyerly cowardice in avoiding criticism from those who had blocked his nomination, once he became Attorney General.  Now his idiotic enablement of Republican-fascism in his appointment of Hur, who obviously briefed himself as an unofficial operative of the Trump campaign should be the final nail in the coffin of his career.   If I were President Biden I'd wait till after the election and fire him, especially if he wins reelection, having such a Republican-enabling jackass in that position will do him and the country no good.  

After listening to the Harvard product as sits on the Court yesterday I'm in favor of a long term moratorium on the appointment of the graduates of Harvard Law to the courts and other positions in the legal realm.   Hearing them seemingly not realizing that states keep people off of ballots ALL THE FRIGGIN' TIME and for less weighty and democracy threatening reasons was the final straw.   I am convinced that those elite law schools that prepare elites for profitable and, or eminent careers in the lawyer industry produce self-protecting cowards who ill serve the People of the United States and egalitarian democracy.   The same can be said, generally, of the products of other Ivys and Ivy equivalent schools of law.   I will say again that during the House hearings on that led to Trump's first impeachment for trying to involve the Ukrainian government in his efforts to sandbag Joe Biden, I was stunned at how all of the courage, risking themselves in service to the People and democracy,  came from the diplomats and the military officers as the lawyers pretty well stuck to covering their own asses.   These years of observing, not only the things lawyers get away with and cover up for each other over BUT THE CONDUCT OF THE COURTS, JUDGES IN MANY CASES BEING AS OPENLY PARTISAN AS JAMES COMEY AND ROBERT HUR HAVE BEEN BUT GETTING AWAY WITH IT WITH NO ISSUES BEING RAISED,  has made me far more cynical about the lawyering industry and its senior branch on the bench, certainly none so deserving of such cynicism as the Supreme Court.

President Biden, I'm begging you, as soon as the election is over, fire Garland, don't be sentimental about it due to him losing the court seat, you gave him his chance and he has repeatedly reenacted "the laws delay" and not infrequently it's forfeiture.   Find someone who will not be partisan BUT WHO WON'T BE THE GODDAMEND REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS' HANDMAIDEN.    Democratic Presidents from Carter to you have suffered for the bad choices their Attorneys General have made, for their scrupulosity in wanting to avoid the cabloids and tabloids and liars in the media making the slightest criticism of them and the clearly cowardly and corrupt Department of Justice.   Since it's clear not even the Supreme Court under Republican-fascism is not pretending to be "even-handed" in the administration of "justice," there's no reason not to play that same game for the angels instead of the spawn of Satan.   Dump Garland.

Notice

 Been sick, getting better.  Lots of Covid around here right now, not sure that's what I had.  Not dead, yet.

I'm not big on nil nisi bonum,

so I'll leave it at I'll never think of Toby Keith without thinking of the pro-lynching song he sang at Trump's inauguration non-star concert.   I agree with Natalie Maines' shirt.  What happens to him now isn't my responsibility.  

Update:  I wonder why when someone like that dies, they say he's a country music legend, or he's a show-biz legend.   Legends are make believe, I'd rather be remembered for reality not PR bull shit. 

Nunc Dimittis - George Dyson

 

Sung by the boys of Lichfield Cathedral

I've posted the Magnificat from the same Service in c minor a number of times but never the following canticle.   

Here's another setting of the text in Latin by Paul Smith, sung by his group VOCES8.  It puts a slant to the canticle I'd never considered while reading it.  It reminds me of some of Schubert's heavier music for male quartet. 

 

God Don't Preserve That Goddamned Court

SUPREME COURT "justices" are required to take two oaths of office, from the Supreme Court website, those current are: 

 “I, _________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

“I, _________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as _________ under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.” 

On the basis of that the four "justices" who refused to uphold the Supremacy Clause in the federal government over Texas on the border issue should all be impeached and kicked off of that goddammned Court but, of course, they won't be.  The impeachment provisions of the Constitution are a quite stupidly and naively believed in myth, never having protected us against even the most criminal presidents in our history, three or four of whom gained and kept office in my lifetime, Nixon having been the only one who was forced out of office but by a group of Republican senators because they were afraid of the electoral blood bath for their party if he had been impeached and put on trial, after.   The impeachment provision hasn't protected us from some of the most obviously criminal presidents, vice presidents and "justices" on that jumped up court.  

As that example alone proves, we are and have not been a "government of laws, not of men," certainly not after 1803 when that court in Marbury vs  Madison gave itself powers never in the Constitution, one of the results of that, which started to become not only significant but having the most dangerous of consequences in the first example of that court using that power to nullify duly adopted and long standing laws when the Taney Court issued the Dred Scott Decision, nullifying the abolition of slavery in every state and territory - nullifying not only the Missouri compromise of 1820, but the abolition of slavery in the "Northwest territories" from before the adoption of the Constitution.   That decision was what Abraham Lincoln both ran for president, against but which he flouted repeatedly as the slave power racist Taney tried to sandbag his waging of the Civil War.   It recently came to my attention that Taney, in anticipation of Lincoln issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, had a decision nullifying it in the ready,  which he could not give because the evil old man died and went to hell before he could do that.   So one of the, even now, respected members of that goddamned Court would have nullified one of the greatest and best things that any elected official of the United States did to protect, along with one of the two or three most evil things about the United States, slavery, but which also protected his own personal wealth as a slave holder from a slave holding family.   In that he was doing exactly what most of the members of that Court, including the most lauded member in its history, the slave-holder, ever slavery-supporting John Marshall, who repeatedly sided with slave holders against even Black People who could provide evidence that the had never been a slave.  

The claims of our pious grade-school civics and history mis-educations along with the NPR, Nina Totenberg hallowing of that goddamned Court and the cinematic bullshit that comprises our collective fantasies about our country are almost entirely lies.  It is those lies and even bigger ones that fuel our native form of fascism, white-supremacist Republican-fascism.   So, no, I don't regret anything I've said about that or the Constitution which they twist and turn and selectively read and deceptively "interpret."   That the Constitution was inspecific enough for the Supreme Court to steal that power from themselves and which was stupid enough to rely on the "honor" of such men as the "founding fathers" were and knew each other to be - they were slave holders and crooked financiers, not saints and scholars - to allow this can't be rationally or morally held to have been what we are required to pretend it is.   

In a pamphlet from Wendell Phillips, he pointed out that taking such oaths to the Constitution which was (and remains) riddled with pro-slavery provisions was impossible for an honest abolitionist as long as slavery was the law of the land.  I couldn't honestly take an oath to it knowing not only what it actually says BUT WHAT IT HAS BEEN MADE TO SAY BY COURTS, ESPECIALLY THAT GODDAMNED SUPREME COURT, because of that.  

There is no provision more obvious than the one which gives the federal and not state governments responsibility and what is naively called "the right" to control and enforce the borders of the country.   Any federal officer, any office holder who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and who hasn't and will never be removed from office due to what four members of the Supreme Court did proves that, as Louis Boudin said, we don't have a government of laws but, exactly of men, not only the long dead ones who wrote the Constitution and its amendments but, in the final assessment, of nine or any number down to five who impose their will on the Constitution through their decisions.  

I think it is necessary for the continuation of the United States as a republic instead of some form of self-crowned monarchy or assembly of the same for an honest President and an honest Congress to overturn that two hundred-twenty year usurpation of power by the Court and to once and for all turn it into what it was supposed to be, even if that has to be spelled out in an amended version of the Constitution AND A LONG NEEDED REVISION OF THE ORIGINAL ORGANIZING LAWS THAT FORMED THAT GODDAMNED COURT.  First of all, they have to make it easier to remove the most corrupt of them, such as Thomas and Alito are known to be and others who I suspect are at least close to them in corruption.  They also need to limit the term of office so that we don't suffer under the worst of them for as long as they choose to stay on into their dotage.   As the tragic finale of the admirable Ruth Bader Ginsburg proves, even the best of them can't be trusted to know when it's time for them to leave.  And there aren't many in that category, "best" of them.   

The United States Supreme Court has to be reduced to the state of courts in other near democracies, ours having the worst and most lax and most permissive of boundaries of any of them.  It is and has, since at least Marshall's chief "justice"ship of that body, been the most frequent source of significant corruption in our country.   The tiny little list of times when it didn't play some kind of malignant role, the mostly symbolic Brown v. Board, the now Court nullified Roe v Wade,  along with the frequently naive and, in the end, dangerous "free speech-press" rulings that produced, among other things, Trump, aren't the real and honest history of that body.  Though you'll never know that from the naive and lying pop-civics lore surrounding it. 

 

The Same Powers The Same Temptations - Maybe The Last Post On The Slave Powers Inserted Into The Constitution For Now

The slaveholders of the South have used the powers vested in them by the Constitution for their own interests, as every other selfish association of man would have done under the same circumstances, with the same powers and under the same temptations.
Josiah Quincy, Sr.  August 16, 1854

MOST OF THOSE "same powers" are still there lying in wait to be used in the Constitution and "same temptations" have used them right up to today.  Only today it's not only what would be the Confederate states but a number of states, many of which hadn't been in the country at the time.  It is the combined powers of white supremacy and Republican-fascism whic uses those and the extra powers they get under the usurpations of the Supreme Court and the anti-democratic Senate rules.  In the end, and in the ever slippery issue of the "interpretation" of the Constitution by legally trained "justices,  it's those "same temptations" that have brought us some of the worst results.  

I got that excerpt from Josiah Quincy, Sr., others below,  and the one from J. Q. Adams given the other day from Wendell Phillips' book "The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact," third edition, 1856.  I have looked at the pages around that date from Adams' enormously important and just plain enormous diary - maybe the most extensive diary ever kept - from November 4th 1844 when he was talking to a friend about going to North Bridgwater to give the speech to the entry for November 6th in which he describes the meeting at which he gave it.  There's something chilling in being able to read a text and then read the author talking about what he was doing in the days he was writing it and, in this case, giving it as an address.  You feel a real connection to him through reading his diarys.  In the case of John Qunicy Adams, I doub there is anyone who could have given a more inside and intimate view of the years from the Revolution to 1846, he having been a public servant of the period, boy, man and old man, on the most initmate terms possible with one of the chief founders of the country, his father, on very intimate terms with many if not most of the most illustrious of them and a witness to the entire period who recorded so much of it in his decades long diary.

I should have kept on with the quote as given by Wendell Phillips because the paragraph after what I gave here the other day is even more obviously relevant to the actual corruption of the Constitution as we live under it today, not in small part because the constitution of the Senate and the Electoral College and other pro-slavery features of the Constitution have given small, often reactionary mostly lily white states such outsized power over states like California and New York.  And the role that such things hold in the reimpoisition of neo-Jim Crow and the nationalization of the bodies of Women who were just as excluded from exercising the political power that was ennumerated through their numbers, under the Constitution.  We still have no Equal Rights Amemndement.  

Of the increasing abomination of slavery in the unbought hearts of men at the time when the Constitution of the United States was formed, what clearer proof could be desired, than that the very same year in which the charter of the land was issued, the Congress of the Confederation, with not a tithe of the powers given by the people to the Congress of the new compatct, actually abolished slavery forever throughout the whole Northwestern territory without a remonstrance or a murmur.  But in the Articles of Confederation, there was no guarantee for the property of the slaveholder - no double representation for him in the Federal councils - no power of taxation - no stipulation for the recovery of fugitive slaves.  But when the powers of government came to be delegated to the Union, the South - that is, South Carolian and Georgia - refused their subscription to the parchment, till it should be saturated with the infection of slavery, which no fumigation could purify, no quarantine could extinguish.  The freemen of the North gave way, and the deadly venom of slavery was infused into the Constituion of freedom.  Its first conseqence has been to inver the first principle of democracy, that the will of the majority of numbers shall rule the land.  By means of the double representation, the minority command the whole, and a knot of slaveholders give the law and prescribe the policy of the country.  To acquire this superiority of a large majority of freemen, a perserving system of engrossing nearly all the seats of power and place, is constantly for a long series of years pursued and you have seeen in a period of fifty-six years the cheif magistracy of the Union held, during forty-four of them, by the owners of slaves.  The Eecutive departments, the Army and Navy, the Supreme Judicial Court and diplomatic missions abroad, all present the same spectacle;  - an immense majority of power in the hands of a vary small minority of the peole - millions made for a fraction of a few thousnds.  

. . . From that day (1830) SLAVERY, SLAVEHOLDING, AND SLAVE BREEDING, AND SLAVE TRADING HAVE FORMED THE WHOLE FOUNDATION OF THE POLICY OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, and the slaveholding States, at home and aboroad;  had at the very time when a new census has exhibited a large increase upon the superior numbers of the free States, it has presented the portentous evidence of increased influence and acendency of the slaveholding power.

Of the prevalence of that power you have continual and conclusive evidence of the suppression for the space of ten years of the righ of petition, guranteed if there could be a guarantee against slavery, by the first article amendatory of the Constitution.  

I'm not exactly certain of what the 1830 date refers to, I suspect it was one of the many pro-slavery Supreme Court rulings that tried to make the entire country effectively slave-country.   I've been looking for the entire text of that address because I think there must be far more in it relevant to my argument that the slave-power infection of the Constitution was known and exposed by John Quincy Adams who may have had the most comprehensive knowledge of the background of the drafing and adoption of, not only the Constitution but the Articles of Confederation and knew their relevance to the struggle against slavery and how the anti-democratic features of the Constitution held that abomination in place.  What he said about the abolition of slavery in the Northwest territories (as they were then) by the Congress under the Articles of Confederation formed the main issue in the later Dred Scott case that allowed the Supreme Court under Taney to, effectively, extend slavery to even the free states om what he hoped for, was perpertuity.  As I've pointed out here, the Dred Scott decision was the first real and effective use of the Supreme Court usurped powers, not found in the Constitution, to nullify duly adopted laws of the federal congress and executive banches.  A power which the Court has continually used to overturn any effective remedy against our indigenous form of fascism, White Supremacy - probably mirroring somewhat the proportion of time that Adams gave as how much of the time the slave-power held a stranglehold on federal offices.  

There is so much here that is of obvious relevance to the bending of the Constitution under the corrupt feature of the undemocratically constituted Senate (certainly part of what Adams called "the double representation," not based on the population but giving states with even the lowest numbers of people, far more than double the power to confirm or block the appointment of federal judges given to the most populous states, Supreme Court "justices," federal appointees of the kind that Adams noted were in the hands of slave holders for the large majority of his time up to and even after the Civil War.  Today that designation might be given by what we call the same thing today, white supremacists.  They certainly held the Supreme Court most of its existence, the Roberts Court is firmly held by the modern form of that, today.   

Wendell Phillips went on to give other excerpts, not only from abolitionists but, also, to pointing out that Taney and the corrupted once-abolitionist James Storey who issued what was the prior abomination to the Dred Scott decision in the Prigg vs. Pennsylvania.  It makes real eye-opening reading as, in fact, does the entire literature of abolitionist writing, especially when they talk about slavery under the Constitution, in the Congress (especially the Senate) and, most of all, under the most corrupt and least democratic of the branches, the Supreme Court and the lower courts under them.  The Roberts Court is merely doing what is typical of most of the Supreme Courts in most of their decisions and actions have done, preserved the rights of privilege of the wealthy and powerful which were obtained by blackmail during the Constitutional Convention and inserted into the Constitution where most of it lays unchanged by the Civil War Amendments.  

Wendell Phillips give an except from an Address on the Annexation of Texas, by Stephen C. Phillips, of Salem, in it he says.

Still, while I am reluctant to receive the Constitution from the hands of its framers as a bequest of slavery to their posterity,  I am compelled to admit, that, in the light of the subsequent history of the country, I now see clearly, that, in its legislative and judicial interpretation, in the claims which have arisen under it, in the measures in which its authority has been exercised, the Federal Constitution has practically become the palladium of slavery, - that by fixture of its provisions, though it is not named in one of them, slavery has been accredited as an institution, and has been maintained as such on the basis of a compact binding upon all the States - and that the"compromises of the Constitution, " in the popular sense of that Shibboleth of the anti-abolitionists, comprehend the power to enforce the most odious pretensions of slavery, and especially to make the free States the instruments of guarding it against the influences of freedom, even to the extent to requiring of their citizens, in opposition to their moral and religious principles, to act as a police for the arrest of fugitives, and to expose their lives in military service in resisting the retributive consequences of insurrection.  

In the subsequent history from then, it's clear that the structures of the federal government in the Constitution, and especially under "judicial interpretation" that the same privileging of a minority in the corrupt compromises of the Constitution have been put to use for white supremacy and the millionaires and billionaires who are the current players in the role that the slave-powers and "Eastern" financiers played in the late 18th and early 19th century when the book was published.  All of the anti-democratic features of the Constitution have served that purpose, from the anti-democratic constitution of the Senate, the role given the second least democratic body to confirm people for the federal judiciary and other offices, the doubly corrupt Electoral College, etc.  And those appointed and in the Senate have served that function more than they have egalitarian democracy.  Adding to that are the previously mentioned usurped powers the Court took for itself and things like the filibuster which allows one senator from a tiny state to have the power to thwart any legislation or a supremely stupid senator and failed football coach from one of the most backward bastions of white supremacy to block hundreds of vitally important military appointments.  
 

History isn't even over - I Wasn't Making It Up - Hate Mail

Here is part of what John Quincy Adams said in November 6, 1844

The representation, ostensibly of slaves, under the names of persons, was in its operation an exclusive grant of power to one class of proprietors, owners of one species of property, to the detriment of the rest of the community.  This species of property was odious in its nature, held in direct violation of the natural and inalienable rights of man, and of the vital principles of Christianity;  it was all accumulated in one geographical section of the country, and it was held by wealthy men, comparatively small in numbers, not amounting to a tenth part of the free white population of the States in which it was concentrated. . .

In some of the ancient, and in some modern republics, extraordinary political power and privileges have been invested in the owners of horses;  but then these privileges and these powers have been granted for the equivalent of extraordinary duties and services to the community required of the favored class. The Roman kings constituted the cavalry of their armies, and the bushels of rings gathered by Hannibal from their dead bodies after the battle of Cannae amply proves that the special powers conferred upon them were no gratuitous grants.  But in the Constitution of the United States, the political power invested in the owners of slaves is entirely gratuitous.  No extraordinary service is required of them;  they are, on the contrary, themselves grievous burdens upon the community, always threatened with the danger of insurrections, to be smothered in the blood of both parties, master and slave, and always depressing the condition of the poor free laborer, by competition with the labor of the slave.  The property in horses was the gift of God to man at the creation of the world;  the property in slaves is property acquired and held by crimes, differing in no moral aspect from the pillage of a freebooter, and to which no lapse in time can give a prescriptive right.  You are told that this is no concern of yours, and that the question of freedom and slavery is exclusively reserved to the consideration of the separate States.  

But if it so be so, as to the mere question of the right between master and slave, it is of tremendous concern to you that this little cluster of slave owners should possess, besides their own share in the representative hall of the nation the exclusive privilege of appointing two fifths of the whole number to the representatives of the people.  

This is now your condition, under the delusive ambiguity of language and of principles, which begins by declaring the representation of the popular branch of the legislature a representation of persons, and then provides that one class of persons shall have neither part nor lot in the choice of their representatives;  but their elective franchise shall be transferred to their masters,  and the oppressors shall represent the oppressed.  

I will break in here to point out that what was begun in blackmail corruption in the original Constitution ironically and tragically achieved an even more perfect deal for our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, after "emancipation" because under voter suppression and terrorism in the Supreme Court sanctioned Jim Crow era of de facto slavery,  that partial representation became, legally, full representation which was then stolen by the white supremacists.  AND THAT IS SOMETHING THE ROBERTS COURT AND REPUBLICAN-FASCISM IS BRINGING US BACK TO AT  FULL SPEED.

The same perversions of the representative principle pollutes the composition of the colleges of electors of President and Vice President of the United States, and every department of the government of the Union is thus tainted at its source by the gangrene of slavery.

John Quincy Adams's Address at North Bridgewater,

As valuable as it is to consult the historical forms of anti-equality and the thwarting of real democracy - which is egalitarian or it's just a democracy of gangsters and aristocrats lording it over all others - the innovative and creative applications of those old forms which are a product of the language of the Constitution, further laws adopted under it, including The Bill of Rights and, especially at the hands of the Supreme Court, as I think we're about to see again in a novel interpretation of the much Court corrupted 14th Amendment,  they are always turning the best intentions of reformers of the past on to themselves often taking advantage of or using the slave-power privileging features of the original document.  

There is no such a thing as a perfect human invention, that's true whether it's a fairly simple computer program or the structure of institutions or of governments and codes of law.  There is not any one of them which cannot fail unintentionally, and in the cases of Constitutions, "Bills and Charters of Rights"  there is not one which lawyers will not look for opportunities to make corrupt loop holes in them and which the senior level of the lawyering industry, judges and "justices" won't join with them in using those to legislate from the bench, even distorting the plain meaning of the law and its legislative record of drafting and adoption.  The profession of "law scholar" is full of those who have made a career of creating and promoting even the most corrupt of those, as the overt "unitary executive" fascism among the perfumed, well-manicured "Constitutional scholars" in their fine-wood paneled and upholstered studies are always putting into effect.  There is nothing in the Constitution which protects it OR US from the courts doing that.   Never trust the elites of any sector of life, but those in the law least of all.   That's what I meant in pointing out that not all of the slave-power,  which can be effectively called "Republican-fascism" in 2024 terms, were originally intended to be that.  That the "founders" didn't intend that to result in enhancing the power of them does not change their character in their real life application.   Basing representation and, with that, the Electoral College representation on the mere Census count INSTEAD OF THE NUMBER OF ELIGIBLE VOTERS WHO ARE IN FACT ALLOWED TO CAST A BALLOT,  was turned into an empowerment of slave owners or, under white supremacy and Republican-fascism, those who steal that representation for themselves.   I don't think there's any way to end that usurpation except to base the representation of every state on the number of eligible voters counted in the Census who are then allowed to vote and who, in fact, DO VOTE.   If that were in effect, every ex-Confederate State, the Northern, Mid-Western and Western states in which voter suppression is practiced WOULD BE FORCED TO ENCOURAGE EVERY ELIGIBLE VOTER TO BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS AND TO CAST A VOTE IN VERY ELECTION.   Instead of the practice of voter suppression and representation stealing which was instituted in the Constitution from the start.  Considering how such practices as gerrymandering arose as soon as the ink was dry on that thing, INSTITUTED BY ONE OF THE SIGNERS OF THE DOCUMENT, I have no doubt that the advantage of stealing the representation of those enslaved for themselves in the 3/5ths provision to the slave holders was in their minds even as they were arguing for stealing 5/5ths of it.

He continued:

Fellow-citizens, - with a body of men thus composed for legislators and executors of the laws, what will, what must be, what has been your legislation?  The number of freemen constituting your nation are much greater than those of the slave holding States, bond and free.  You have at least three fifths of the whole population of the Union.  Your influence on the legislation and administration of the government ought to be the proportion of three to two.  But how stands the fact?  Besides the legitimate proportion of influence exercised by the slave holding States by the measure of their numbers, there is an intrusive influence in every department by a representation nominally of persons, but really of property, ostensibly of slaves, but effectively by their masters, over-balancing your superiority in numbers, adding two fifths of supplementary power to the two-fiftha fairly secured to them by the compact, CONTROLLING AND OVERRULING THE WHOLE ACTION OF YOUR GOVERNMENT AT HOME AND ABROAD, and warping it to the sordid private interest and oppressive policy of 300,000 owners of slaves.

From the time of the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, the institution of domestic slavery has been becoming more and more the abhorrence of the civilized world.  But in proportion as it has been growing odious to all the rest of mankind, it has been sinking deeper and deeper into the affections of the owners of slaves themselves.  The cultivation of cotton and sugar, unknown in the Union at the establishment of the Constitution, has added largely to the pecuniary value of a slave. And the suppression of the African slave trade as piracy upon the pain of death, by securing the benefit of a monopoly to the virtuous  slaveholders of the ancient dominion, has turned her heroic tyrannicides into a community of slave breeders and converted the land of GEORGE WASHINGTON, PATRICK HENRY, RICHARD HENRY LEE, and THOMAS JEFFERSON, into a great barracoon - a cattle-show of human beings, an emporium of which the staple articles of merchandise are the flesh and blood, the bones and sinews of immortal man. 

The Ken Burns view of the Civil War, for whatever virtues it had, did an enormous disservice by repeating and enhancing the original lie of that war and its aftermath, that it defeated our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy and the slave power which is the foremost motive of it and its greatest benficiaries.   The Reconstruction experience was suppressed not even a dozen years after the Civil War ended and the long period of de facto slavery and voter suppression and terror lasted for more than ninety years after that.  The brief period after the mid-1960s Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts began to be eroded with the 1968 election in which a combined force of George Wallace and Richard Nixon took the presidency and began the turn back which is in full force right now.    That the figurehead of the Civil Rights movement that brought us to that brief period of an attempt at actual democracy, The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. was assassinated that year is certainly relevant to a real understanding of how the slave-power never has been defeated, in the form of white supremacy.  And, as John Quincy Adams noted,  among those who were victims of that were many white people, being able to hold people in virtual slavery or at even lower slave-wage wages  " always depressing the condition of the poor free laborer, by competition with the labor of the slave."