The Popular (Kids) Understanding Of Science

The ongoing controversy over my dissing of what is, apparently, the atheist-secular-groovy-scientistic crowd's latest sacred cow, tattooing, is hilarious.  

Apparently these champions of the sciency and something I'm sure they would call "reason" hold that I wasn't supposed to learn anything when I read that 2011 Scientific American article about the health hazards of tattooing, including exposure to known carcinogens in the ink being injected under poeples' skin, permanently, and the article listing a number of the diseases you can get from being punctured with a dirty needle, including those known to include the development of some of the most deadly of cancers,hepatitis B and C and HIV.  

I knew about the cancer causing properties of cadmium and arsenic because, you know, scientists had studied them and found them to be carcinogenic.  I also remember that getting them listed as hazardous substances to be treated as such by industry was not an easy thing back during the Reagan and Bush I years, as I recall.  Perhaps they were too busy with pop music and 80s movies to remember.  As to the diseases, I was paying, perhaps, closer attention to what the scientists and medical professionals were saying about the consequences of both forms of hepatitis before and during the AIDS epidemic than these champions of science and public health, though as I found out when you mix the pubic into issues of public health, the very same people will go totally stupid, as well.*

Apparently the college-credentialed champions of science at Eschaton hold that the greater good is following a fad which an ever larger and irresponsible industry benefited from.

It's too bad that I can't post the hilarious comments of Simels in which he accuses me of mathematical illiteracy because I corrected him on a fairly simple logical consequence of set theory, that a subset of a larger set cannot have more elements than the larger set does,  his claim that Queens can be more diverse than the New York City it is a mere borough of.  I'm surprised that his great admirer Grandmere Poisson hasn't corrected him on that one. 

He also proves his illiteracy by attributing a passage from a Pew report which I cited and set off in the typical bold italics I use when I am directly quoting something as something I said.  

I have to conclude that the amount of grade inflation they practiced in private colleges in the late 60s and 70s in order to pretend those raised on American TV had been educated was more serious than I'd realized, as a grad of Land Grant universities.  It's clear that Simps was credentialed but never learned the most simple of things and, apparently, he, his fellow Eschatots, his host, the wider world of play-lefty leftism have never learned a thing since their credentials were granted.  

Tattooing strikes me as a typical cause celebre among the college-credentialed white, play-left, it is stupid,it is a contradiction of other stands they take, it is dangerous, it is expensive, it is an absurd fashion statement, the kind of "individualism" that consists of following the fad, it is something that benefits an amoral and irresponsible set of industries and shady businesses - which real liberalism would probably regulate to make a lot less dangerous but that won't happen because, you know "freedom of expression" - and I could go on and on and on.  It's not unlike the entirely stupid, decades long campaign to keep public property free of manger scenes which benfitted Republican-fascists over something that was a complete and utter waste of time, resources and attention.  Though it helped clarify my thoughts on the total idiocy and futile counter-productivity of the college-credentialed, white, middle to upper-class, play left. 

I wish the old Haloscan comment threads were still up so I can see how many of them were ga-ga over Richard Dawkins when he was groovy, back in the 00's.  Clearly the first Oxford Chair for The Public Understanding Of Science, failed in his mission - and among some of his biggest fan guys and gals - though,as I've been pointing out the last few days,  Dawkins' is the kind of understanding of science these idiots have.  

Have I mentioned that Dawkins' great inspiration in his selfish-gene science, W. D. Hamilton died as a result of his own anti-vax quest to prove that HIV had started in a polio vaccination program in Africa?  The ass, frustrated that peer reviewed journals wouldn't publish his speculations, went to Congo to find evidence, didn't find it, and caught Malaria which ended up killing the ass.   I have to wonder if it wasn't a personal thing he had against a specific scientist, a far more accomplished one, whose work in virology and immunology probably saved millions of lives.  I may get around to seeing if I can find evidence to support my speculation, it's what I was taught to do, not in college, in sixth grade in public school, when we were assigned to write our first practice research paper.  Apparently they didn't teach that in the more "progressive" schools that Duncan and the Eschatots attended. 

*  Just last week at Echidne's I had occasion to remember when I set off a fury at Salon and Alternet by pointing out that even as they had multiple articles up slamming, correctly, anti-vaxxers for putting people at risk of being infected with life threatening diseases, they had up articles encouraging the then new thing among hetero-sexual kewelsters, anal oral sex which did exactly the same thing they were slamming the anti-vaxxers for, only the exposure was far more likely.  I could have pointed out that if it were the meat industry irresponsibly exposing people to such things as e-coli they would be doing a back double flip to cover all of the positions they were advocating at once. 

Update:  "You're the scientific illiterate."  

I once noted that Simps was so dense he should be The Wizard of Osmium.  I don't think he got the joke. 

Update 2:  Now he's repeating the idiocy that "Queens is a separate place with its own government" when the last time we went over that I listed, from the official website, the representatives on the city council who represent Queens as they represent all the other boroughs.  Not only did they not teach that idiot member in good standing at The Brain Trust (see above for explanation) basic math or science, they never taught him anything about civics.  Not to mention that "Queens" as all such political subdivisions are entirely artificial human constructs which are whatever they're defined as being at any given time.   

These secular-sciency-play-lefties are only marginally smarter than the Trumpsters on a few things.  Some of them important, many of them counter-productive.  They are idiots the real left must dump after watching them lose us elections since 1964. 

Update 3:  You remember I said that I'd only quote the Simp if it wasfor a good reason?  Or implied that?  Well, he just said,  "Queens is a seperate place onto itself. With its own government, defined geographical borders and its own culture, which is different from that of the rest of New York City,"  not realizing that a. he admits in it that Queens is a part of New York City, which would mean that New York City would have to be as diverse if not more diverse than Queens, b. that even if that were true that it has a political status different from the other boroughs it would still make it a part of New York City (I doubt it's true but I don't care enough to fact-check, it doesn't matter for my point.)  and c. to claim that Queens has "its own culture" as a means of proclaiming its diversity would seem to be rather at cross purposes and, d. that if Queens had "it's own culture which is different from the rest of New York City," which is doubtful, it would prove that the larger set,  New York City, which contained both the "culture" of Queens and any different "culture" in even one of the other boroughs is more diverse than Queens, alone. 

Mentally retarded by choice.  Typical of the play-lefties. 

Update 4:  Maybe he'll get it if I do it by picture.  I figure he's still stuck at the Colorforms stage of development, something he shares with Trump. 
Sorry, couldn't find one that has his name on it, to help him focus. 

Today In Post-Literacy In The Conceited And College-Credentialed

Well, the example of Simels' daily idiocy and those who concur proves a few of my claims:

A. The Eschaton crew, conceited as they are college-credentialed, don't or, perhaps, have lost the ability to read.  

B. They don't think very clearly. 

C. They believe what Simels says which is a sure sign of 1. not caring about the truth because 2. he's an habitual liar and, so, 3. being gullible.

The claim of Simps is that I have a "theory that tattoo ink causes cancer" that is refuted by the CNN article linked to.  First, I never stated such a theory, the only thing that came up in a search of my archive was this post in which I speculated that the who-knows-what that tattoo artists are injecting into people could very well give them cancer.  I said:

The story makes me wonder about the faith people put in people they pay for things, the faith that a commercial company would be selling accurate and well-understood genetic testing, well done, and the faith that so many people put in tattoo artistes to not be injecting them with potential poisons and the clearly inadequate, at times criminally irresponsible safety-testing industry and the corrupted government agencies that permit ill-tested things to be injected into us, fed to us, to enter into us and our environment.  Not to mention the blatantly corrupt state governments that permit a lot of that under our idiotic federal system.

You would think that someone scared enough of their own genes to spend two-hundred bucks on a genetic test of dubious worth would have at least given as much thought to getting tattooed as that.  I don't know what you do about it once it's been done.  Even the removal of it would, I believe, leave the chemicals in your body.  I expect any day now we'll get reports on cancer caused by people getting large tats, which I am told are called "sleeves". 

As far as I can see, that's what I've said on the subject, though I pointed out to a couple of my nieces and a friend of theirs who got tattoos pretty much the same thing. I wrote that in 2018.

And, sorry, Simps, Chicago Dyke, and Grandmere Poisson, that's not my theory, it's an obvious and documented potential problem with the largely unsupervised, poorly regulated and criminally irresponsibly regulated market in tattoos (let me guess, you gals got tats to make you feel like you're still groovy, I suspect Simps didn't because he figures he's the grooviest, already.).   Here's a passage from an article from Scientific American, October 2011 that I'd read before I wrote that.

Helen Suh MacIntosh, a professor in environmental health at Harvard University and a columnist for the website, Treehugger, reports that as a result of a 2007 lawsuit brought by the American Environmental Safety Institute (AESI), two of the leading tattoo ink manufacturers must now place warning labels on their product containers, catalogs and websites explaining that “inks contain many heavy metals, including lead, arsenic and others” and that the ingredients have been linked to cancer and birth defects. 

Rereading that in response to your upvotes for Simps' comment, did your mothers have tats? 

And the carcinogenicity of the chemicals in tattoo ink isn't the only cancer risk involved, some of that comes from infections that are a known risk of the unregulated tattoo market.

Of course, exposure to mercury and other heavy metals is hardly the only risk involved with getting a tattoo. The term tattoo itself means to puncture the skin. Tattoo ink is placed via needles into the dermis layer of the skin, where it remains permanently (although some colors will fade over time). Some people have reported sensitivity springing up even years after they first got their tattoo; also, medical MRIs can cause tattoos to burn or sting as the heavy metals in the ink are affected by the test’s magnetism.

Beyond the long term risks of walking around with heavy metals injected into your body’s largest organ (the skin), getting a tattoo in and of itself can be risky business. If the tattoo parlor’s needles and equipment aren’t properly sterilized in an autoclave between customers, you could be exposing yourself to hepatitis B or C, tuberculosis, mycobacterium, syphilis, malaria, HIV or even leprosy.

As to the article  at CNN that led to Simp's comment, it doesn't say anything about tattoos, it mentions that the decrease in cancer deaths - from what I can see it doesn't really mention a decrease in cancers but only cancer deaths -  may be due, among other things, to decreases in the number of people who smoke and better treatment for cancer, perhaps, I wonder, if that might not be due in no small part to the ACA being passed by the Democrats.

Clearly none of them read what it said at the link. 

I would not expect that the groovy geezers of Eschaton to know much about how hard it was for scientists to overcome industry propaganda to establish that smoking caused cancer,  it took a lot longer than the tattoo fad was revived so spectacularly.  And, as I pointed out, who knows what inks and dyes people are getting injected with and what health consequences there will be from it in the same time frames that it can take for smoking to produce lung cancer and other cancers.  The junk they're putting into peoples largest organ, the skin, ain't the stuff your ol' grandad's tattoo was made of (my grandparents and parents didn't have them, though my mother's brother got one when he was drunk in the army, it drifted and looked really disturbing by the time I saw it). 

You people make me think that going to college in our generation must have figured as a risk factor for functional illiteracy and stupidity.  Though the ever lasting teenage hood that you desperately hold on to is probably more of an explanation.  Pop kulcha makes you stupid.  Voluntarily retarded.

Update:  Simels is claiming, and I quote (and that ain't gonna happen very often anymore)  . At this point in time. the vast majority of the American people -- aged between teenage something and 65/70, all have multiple tattoos. We're talking about going back to the fucking 80s. If this was gonna be a public health crisis, WE WOULD FUCKING KNOW IT BY NOW.

Typical of Simps and the "Brain Trust" (The Eschatot community really do call the Eschatots of Eschaton that) he doesn't give a citation.  I asked google and got this:

Tattoos have become more common over the past couple of decades. A Harris poll in 2012 found that 1 out of every 5 adults — 21 percent — has at least one tattoo. An earlier Pew Research Center study found that the number was closer to 40 percent among those ages 18 to 29.

I would guess that 20% counts as "a vast majority" if your grasp of fifth-grade math is half-vast.  

As for that figure on younger people, the Pew surveys in what was their most recent article I found on it said:

Nearly four in 10 people born after 1980 have a tattoo and one in four have a piercing some place other than an earlobe, the Pew Research Center has reported. (The Pew Charitable Trusts funds both the center and Stateline.)

So even then, the "vast majority"  of young'uns (in a Simels time frame) is well under 50%.  Not only are the Brain Trusters illiterate, they are math deficient.  As I recall Grandmere Poisson teaches math at some college or other, perhaps she can explain it to Simps.  While she's at it she might work on his inability to understand how time works, that some things come after other things and things that come after can't cause the things that happen before them to happen.  He really doesn't understand that.  I'd go on looking up the proof he's pulling it from the same place he pulls everything else, but why bother?

As to the amount of time it would take for health consequences to develop through any of the who knows what the hell is in those metallic and other new inks - and who knows how many of them have been adequately tested for safety?  I doubt many of them have.  Who can tell when they will generate enough health consequences for coroners and doctors to notice?  Look how long it took for them to come up with solid evidence that tobacco caused cancer to the level to gain wide acceptance.   And that was only one substance, who knows how many dozens or hundreds or thousands of inks or dyes or whatever people are getting injected into them.  

Conceit among the college-credentialed play-lefties seems to be directly related to how stupid they are.   And the ones who troll me are incredibly conceited. 

Update 2:  I really can't be too worried about what someone who calls themselves "Mothra" thinks about what I wrote when they didn't read what I wrote.  Opinions about something they haven't read comprise a good part of the contents of Duncan Black's blog that he allows his wheezers and geezers to pretty much write on the fly.  As I noted at the beginning, the Eschatots are post-literate with a handful of exceptions.  

A Meditation On Family And Why Maybe We Should Treat The Country More Like We Treat Our Family

I took down my sister's Christmas decorations for her today, she's not well enough to do it herself.   It's an occasion to remember the mixed blessing of remembering who made what, who had what.  This ornament was made by our niece who died of her terrible and tragic mental illness, made worse by the authorized, approved "treatments" that she sought.   This one by a beloved aunt long passed, this one a favorite of our mother, this one given to her by another sister of my generation who may well not live to see another Christmas.  

It's not a happy meditation on loss and not knowing what becomes of them but good to understand them better for having the complications of things like a  mental illness to mask that they were good people mixed up and weak like we all are.  I find that I understand a lot of the people I lost far, far better than I did when I was with them every day.  

Taking down the lights which, for some reason, my sister thinks look best if they are put any which way, tangled together and so frustrating to take apart, I thought of what it must have been like for our father to navigate the world blinded fighting Nazism and fascism in World War Two for the decades after that.   He and all of us certainly tangled not a few times when we lived together, but that's all past and done and gone and seems so much less important than it did when he was still alive.  I won't bother trying to talk my sister out of doing that crazy stuff when she puts her own tree up, she'll never change.  She's way too old to change.  I'll try to remember to ask her if she wants me to do it for her, next time.  Maybe I'll look back on it some day as a folly I miss.  Maybe she'll remember me and how cranky I could get around taking down the tree.  

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

One of the things I do some days is listen to the daily mass, in the past from the Boston archdioceses, now the Daily TV Mass from Canada.  I started doing that in memory of our mother who listened to the one from Boston.   Today's sermon by Fr. Michael Coutts S.J. was, in no small part, about Donald Trump and his unsuitability for having the trust those who put him in office.   

He didn't mention him by name but he asked if someone knew a guy who was a flagrant womanizer or a sleazy, dishonest multiply-bankrupted businessman or otherwise a sleaze asked someone if they would be OK with them marrying their daughter, wouldn't they decidedly not be OK with that?  Of course no one in their right mind would want their daughter to marry someone like that, like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson or so many others you can name around the world.  Why, then, did so many of us think someone like that would be a good Prime Minister or other national or more local leader.   Typing this, I believe Fr. Coutts didn't  say "president," but I'll bet not a single person who heard the sermon didn't know what he said directly referred to Donald Trump, it's impossible that he didn't know that as he wrote his sermon, the week that Donald Trump might well have set off World War III.  

It's a good question, certainly a better one than our idiot media made the standard for deserving a vote, if you'd want to sit down and have a beer with someone, an idea that I was amazed Barack Obama was dumb enough to try when the cop arrested Prof. Gates for trying to get into his own house while being Black, one of the reasons I'm hoping that the idiot Biden doesn't last far past New Hampshire, as well.   You go home after you've had a beer with someone, if he's a drunken jerk, he doesn't go home with you and burn the house down. 

I think that is the answer to Fr. Coutts question, we are sold these sleazes through the media and the debased standards of judgement that are promoted in it, this one especially condescending to that iconic plaster dummy that Biden references so often, the "working class white guy".   If the working class white guy was shown more respect maybe he'd be less likely to buy into that insulting upper-class, college-credentialed presentation of him in the media.  Someone who respected himself more than the media gives him permission to might be more resistant to a con man like Trump.  I'd ask him if he'd want his daughter to marry Trump - the real, probably infected philanderer, sexual molester, daddy-financed con-man and gangster and all round piece of crap - and when the answer is no, asking why anyone would want him as president where he has the chance to ruin all of our lives. 

"Ethnic Purity" Is The Herpes That Eats The Mind And Soul - Yeah, it's an answer to a spammed comment

That study that notes all Europeans and, yes, including those of mixed-European, African, Asian, Native American, Australian, etc. ancestry around the world,  almost certainly have the 8th-9th century Emperor Charlemagne as one of their ancestors, also, even more certainly, proves that they have ancestors who were Jews, Muslims, Roma, etc. haters and oppressors killers of Jews, Muslims, Roma, etc. as well as those who may rightly be remembered as saints - or at least the parents of saints, in the case of saints who didn't leave children, etc.  The reason for that is while there was only one Charlemagne to have been our ancestor, there were many, many times more Jews, Muslims, Roma, sinners and saints, heroes and cowards who left children.   

I will note that a similar thought experiment produces the mathematical liklihood that a huge number of us all over the world also have one of the most notorious and vicious genocidalists in history,  Genghis Khan, as one of our great, great, . . . great-grandfathers.  And he was in the Hitler-Stalin-Mao league of those.  And there's no real way to know who isn't one of his brat's brats. 

We are all of us mutts, or most of us who are lucky enough to be mutts are.  That's good because the artificial practice of maintaining pure blood lines is human folly guaranteed to produce genetically inherited problems.  Look at the British Royals if you want an example of those troubles.  It is remarkable the extent to which people in science misidentified that artificial practice in animal husbandry was an example from which "natural" selection could be deduced.  What they were deducing was the creation of genetic bottle necks, there was nothing natural about it and many of the desired "traits" to which Darwin attributes "superiority" or through the shell game he practiced, "fitness" were accompanied with seriously dysgenic characteristics among those "superior" types which were deemed "more fit".  Again, look at the Brit royals for a good example of the practice.  There are natural examples of what happens when a small population of animals has only itself to breed with and the results are not usually anything anyone would take as good over time. 

I had a discussion with someone who seemed to not like the idea but who knows enough math to know the rather simple figures that come from a. what happens when you progressively raise 2 to the next power up and, b. the absolute and ever decreasing numbers of members of the human species in the past makes these conjectures almost impossible to not believe.  I noticed in our discussion that he kept imagining our ancestors as having been strictly monogamous, which is certainly not true.  I looked and found a study that guessed that about 15% of men father children with more than one mother and if that's the case then the same percentage of women must have children with more than one father - those percentages have to be equal.  That's not an insignificant percentage of the population who are doing extra-mixing of the lineage.  I don't know that much about the sex lives of the Carolingians but I know royals and such others as soldiers aren't famous for their strict fidelity in marriage. 

I find that near mathematical certainty to be wonderful and if became more universally realized in place of the kind of Darwinian bull shit so many have as their understanding of science, Nazi-white supremacist type of poison I've spent so much time debunking would be seen for the stupidity it is.   I think it might have that good effect, a universal acid against chauvinism, racism and bigotry.  It would certainly take the ginger out of the Nazis, so called or otherwise named, if it became the popular understanding of science that a "pure blood line" "racial purity" "ethic purity" were about as desirable as a genetic defect or an incurable STD.  Ethnic purity is the herpes that eats the mind and soul.  It produces monsters. 

Dump Biden

Forgot that I intended to mention Joe Biden's recent senior moment of predicting that when Trump is gone, Mitch McConnell will want to cooperate with Democrats on some things.  Which should have lost Biden any Democrats who will caucus for him in Iowa because it proves he really is the stupid guy who stole a speech from the leader of the British Labour party and he didn't think anyone would notice.  He didn't have the age to shield him from suspicions of stupidity then, adding senectitude onto stupidity doesn't improve the vintage.  What we see here is a clear inability to learn anything from the hardest of experiences, something the man who made Biden what he is today,  Obama, shared with him as he never stopped mouthing similar lines to this one that came out of Biden.  

And if Biden's idiotic statements about Mitch Putin's Bitch McConnell gettin' religion wasn't enough there was him musing that he might choose a Republican Vice President should have lost him everyone.   Any Democrat running for President on a promise to put a Republican a heart beat away from handing a Democratic victory in a presidential race is even stupider than I thought Biden was.  

Biden should be retired,  no one over the age of 75 has any business running for president,  there should be an age limit that prevents senile icons of failed presidencies from using their name recognition to sink the Democratic Party.  

Biden, fade into the sunset.  Your presidency would be a catastrophe.  You learn nothing, you are an idiot. 

Pausing On the Razors Edge Of Disaster

Every Republican in the House and Senate and in the Trump regime, many in the Judiciary own the developed putrid criminally insane disaster that Trump is.  They should be the ones to immediately suffer for it and I think it is our obligation to make certain that it is constantly put on them.  

That we got Trump in the first place is first and most of all the fault of the media, entertainment and news, both created the Trump that got Republicans to give him their nomination and the ones who voted for him against a woman they have been lying about for more than a quarter of a century.   The American media has proved that given permission to lie by the Courts and the worst of flaky Constitutional theory, is not the protector of democracy, it is the enemy of democracy, equality, decency and morality.   Last night Rachel Maddow said that in the catastrophic danger that Trump set off with his macho grandstanding in Iraq and Iran, we needed good journalism more than we have at any time, well, good luck finding any.   And good luck with finding any that isn't swamped by the sewer of "opinion journalism" and "balanced journalism" that will do back-flips while bending over backward with its head up its own ass such as NPR is the example I noted the other day.  

It all started with the Constitutional fundamentalism that allows lies told for the benefit of the wealthy who own the media and the political party that serves the interest of the rich.  Things have gotten steadily worse since 1964, step by step, starting with the election of the criminal Nixon with the support of the media in the very next presidential election after the Sullivan ruling was handed out.  Democracy has been destroyed lie by lie, lies that have debased the culture, the establishment and ultimately, through lies on TV and hate talk radio and on social media, The People.   That and the skilled playing of the defects in our system, such as the Electoral College by domestic billionaires like the Mercers and foreign ones like Putin got us here today.  

Iran is not Saddam Hussein's Iraq,  it is a far larger country with a far more unified culture and a far more supported government.  I am prepared to believe that Trump had never looked on a map to see just the size of the country he's committed an act of war against - and it will not be admitted here that Trump had America strike first but the rest of the world will not fail to notice.  This will not be a war that Trump goes into with the support of Europe or Canada,  Australia is otherwise occupied with dealing with the climate change it continues to contribute so heavily to, the House of Saud, that gangster regime that poses as a country, will have its own problems, now, and so will our other buddies there.  I think we're going to find that all of those "allies" were not our allies.  And there is Israel which will certainly, now, find that the Likud calculation of benefiting by America going to war in Iran was as stupid as it obviously was.   

Pick any of the above because even if some of the other possible complications don't become relevant the results will still certainly be worse than the Bush II disaster in Iraq.  I doubt Trump, cold, could tell you the difference between the two countries, I'm certain that a large percentage of those who support Trump couldn't.  They've learned everything they know about it from TV and the movies.  Which means they know nothing and they have put a know nothing in the most powerful office in the world.   It was lies freely permitted that brought down America from its height,  Auden, thou should be living at this hour, we have need of thee. 

Susan Collins Is Mitch McConnell's Bitch

I have been telling people Susan Collins was a Republican scum bag since before most people outside of Maine had ever heard of her.   I've been telling people, especially, and I'm going to say it,  Maine women who proclaimed "she's different,"  no, she isn't different, she's just got the entire Maine media as her lying PR operation and the national media largely picked it up. She's always been who she is now, always.  She's always been the bitch of whatever Republican held leadership of the Senate or the presidency.  Right now she's Mitch's bitch even as he's Putin's bitch. 

The most apt thing I've ever heard of her notes that she occasionally votes the right way in the Senate but only when her vote doesn't matter.  She is probably the most cynical phony in the Senate after Lindsay Graham, and in the Republican caucus of the Senate, it's hard to compete for biggest cynical phony.  

Why anyone expects that skank to do what's right other than when her vote would make no difference, after all these decades of watching the liar pull her Susan Collins act is either a tribute to even the most stupid hopes springing eternal or it is a sign of how even those who know better are suckers for the most tired of PR lines.   

I will work to get rid of that piece of crap with all my strength.   I don't want to see her retire, I want to see her exposed and humiliated.  Her and the rest of her disgusting party.  There isn't one of them I'd not happily see exposed and shamed. 

Steve Swallow - Playing In Traffic

Ohad Talmore, sax
Steve Swallow, bass, composer
Adam Nussbaum, drums

Update:  Here Comes Everybody 

Carla Bley - Sing To Me Softly Of The Blues

Carla Bley, piano
Steve Swallow, bass 

One of the greatest partnerships in music. 

Untitled Because The Title "Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity" Was Taken In 1976*

* I think that sort of qualifies as prophetic. 

You Keep Objecting I'll Keep Making My Points - Hate Mail

Dawkins success in introducing an obvious lie as well as an absurd and self-contradicting fable into the popular understanding of science and almost as certainly into science education is an excellent example of why natural selection is such a really shitty theory.  Take this part of his claim gone over yesterday:

. . . There is indirect evidence that the bird who gives the alarm call puts itself in special danger, because it attracts the predator's attention particularly to itself. This is only a slight additional risk . . . 

A.  There is no such evidence, that evidence would have to be in the form of a sufficient number of filmed examples of the behavior of flocks of birds in relation to flying predators to objectively show their relation to each other to support the claim.  You would have to have the film to analyze and review (though behavioral science pretty much does without review, as recent scandals prove). 

1. First, they would have to show the predator, in flight, to show, clearly its perception of the flock containing a bird it would kill and eat at the time it heard the "first call".  [ Editing this after I posted it, it occurs to me that since the stimulus that led to the proposed event is sound, it would have to be a sound recording that would identify when the "first call" was made and when the "flying predator" heard it.  If you really wanted to be scientific about it.  I doubt that there is much behavioral science that takes something like that into account.  I am certain that such evidence in the lost, unrecorded past is not available to support just-so stories told about the lost past.]

2. It would have to show the flock from which that bird was taken so as to see which bird was "the first to call out".  

3.  It would have to show that the "first bird to call out" was the one killed. Or not 

4.  Since Dawkins claims that the risk he invents is "only a slight additional risk," his claim would anticipate that there would be many such filmed examples that the "first bird to call out" was not the one caught, which you would also have to be able to determine. 

5.  To support his claim of a "slight additional risk" you would have to be able to generate data to support any such "first birds to call out" were at a statistically significant greater risk of being the one killed.  I don't know how many such examples it would take to make the mathematics support Dawkins' claim but I am certain that 

a. no such filmed examples exist, certainly none that show the relation of the predator and the flock (not to mention other birds or animals in the predators range of perception who may be a possible alternative meal), certainly not at the resolutions required, 

b. there are certainly not enough to come up with numbers that could achieve statistical significance showing what he claims. 

B. There are no such items of "indirect evidence" that could dispose of alternative explanations than "genetic altruism" such as the one I posed yesterday, that any "first calling out" which would certainly be heard by birds (and other animals) closer than the "flying predator" would cause a chaotic situation even before the predator heard the "first call" which would prevent the predator from even determining which bird was "the first to call out".   Some of which don't contain the disqualifying mathematical incompetence that I started my list with.  Some of which don't, as Dawkins' does, contradict the very thing he invented it to support, neo-Darwinian natural selection. 

The fable is so incompetently and dishonestly posed that I'm sure there are many other problems with it,  yet, in the habits that we got from Darwinism and its myriad of "just-so stories" that we believe this kind of crap is reliable science and act on it.  The just-so stories of evo-psy and its allied fields are the stuff that you'll hear support proposed laws and social policy promoted as reliably supported by science on NPR and Fresh Air and online.  I have repeatedly pointed out that it had successfully revived the kind of pre-war antisemitic racial science within accredited, reputable American universities and as promoted by Dawkins' in The God Delusion - to talk about academic antisemitism such as I also mentioned yesterday.   That asshole law hack and Republican impeachment witness, Jonathan Turley, is a big proponent of something that strikes me as similar,  "neuro-law" which is generated with a similar line of bullshit behavioral science related to it. 

John Horgan, at Scientific American, in a piece I linked to recently talked about the "decadence of science"* as personified in the scientific patronage of Jeffrey Epstein.  He talked about both the decadence of  decades long regimes of scientific culture which not only are totally unsupported with observational evidence but for which there is no hope of getting supporting evidence for.   I believe he concentrated mostly on current theoretical physics, though he certainly went into the scandals of fraud in the behavioral and life sciences.  But that stuff, science divorced from observation or the possibility of observation is as true of any claim for natural selection as it is for string theory or multiverse theory.  And it certainly always will be in any claims made about it in the past and for many of the reasons I give above for Dawkin's just-so story. 

*  I don't remember if I pointed out to Horgan that Bertrand Russell's gloomy response to Eddington's description of recent physics of a hundred hears ago predicted such decadence, though not in the terms I've put it in.  I may have, I post comments there from time to time.  Eddington wasn't gloomy because he wasn't a materialist, but materialism has been an intellectually unsupportable ideology for more than a hundred years, now.  Science is still in its clutches.  Even more so academia. 

Update:  Not related but when Simels says "I'm not making this up,"  yeah, he is.  He's an example of a yet named pathology that is like corprolalia, only with lies instead of dirty words. 

What It Will Take To Keep The US From Getting Into These Wars Of Political Utility

Before Christmas I was intending to go on with the evidence that links Darwinism to Nazism and I still am going to, going through the proto-Nazism of the British Fabian-socialist geneticist and self-proclaimed keeper of the Darwin flame, Karl Pearson.  I wasn't anticipating that Trump would try to stop impeachment by putting us on the path to a war as terrible if not more so than Bush II's invasion of Iraq, the third such politically motivated war by a Republican-fascist since Bush I fomented his Gulf War by having his ambassador, April Glaspie, give Saddam Hussein permission to invade Kuwait.  I will never pass up an opportunity to name the war whore whose words to Hussein got so many murdered because Bush I wanted to run as a "war president" and reap the glory that the American media whores give to any Republican they can give that title to. 

Commenting on that will have to take precedence, especially as the media is already softening up any resistance to Trump's political war. 

We pay a huge price for having a media in the hands of people who have, mostly, not had their own sweet fat at risk of getting sent to war, a media staffed with the middle and upper class brats who look good on TV or can be presented as such.  I was opposed to the United States having a peace-time draft or for anything less than a legally declared war like WWII was but if we're going to keep killing lots of brown people in these unillegalized wars - at odds with the Constitution that politicians swear an oath to uphold - I think Americans, white, middle-class, upper-class, billionaire brat Americans of the classes that don't join the all-volunteer military should be at risk from the wars made in our names.  

No deferments, not even for conscientious objectors, not illnesses, except those diagnosed by a team of military doctors who have had to treat battlefield injuries - assuming they'd be less inclined to rubber-stamp the kind of medical deferments the children of the rich get corrupt doctors to give them.  President Bone Spurs joins a long list of such 4F war mongers. 

I have seen too many people who got CO deferments who went on to become war mongers or the staff flunkies of war mongers to believe them.  If we oppose war we should expect to put our lives on the line, certainly we should face putting our our comfortable daily lives at risk,  because eventually that's what it will have to come down to to keep the United States from starting these wars of political utility.  

If the three whores who sit on the couch on FOX and Friends had loved ones who would stand a good chance of getting killed in this war they might not be such whores for war.  If they'd been conscripted for the Bush I or Bush II wars, they might be less so inclined.  Or they may have gotten killed for Republican-fascist presidents they supported and would not be there mongering this war.  I think that's worth considering, since I'm in a mood to be up front these days. 

Update:  I should add in anticipation of someone saying the Generals don't want a draft because it would lower the quality of the military Good. If they didn't have so much confidence in their troops maybe they wouldn't have been so stupid as to give Trump the irrational option of killing Soleimani believing the senile millionaire-media made brat boy commander-in-chief wouldn't be so pathologically amoral as to take it to distract from impeachment.  I can't believe they didn't understand he would do that after three years of him in office.  I want our generals and admirals to be afraid they might lose one of these Republican wars of political opportunity.  Maybe they wouldn't support Republican-fascists as much, either. 

Hate Mail - Someone Is POed That I Slammed NPR

NPR has essentially the same relationship with Republican-corporate-fascism as a piss-stained mattress in Moscow does. 

The reason I listen to them is because the state news that is broadcast during Morning Edition is the least bad broadcast state news in Maine and that is as pathetic as you might suspect it is.  Bad as Gratz is, the stuff on every other source I've tried is worse.  Republicans control the media in my state, which is why so many Mainers have been such suckers for Susan Collins' Two-faced Two Step of Obvious Hypocrisy.  

Steve Swallow - Up Too Late

Dave Liebman, sax 
Steve Swallow, composer, bass
Adam Nussbaum, drums 

I love this.   Maybe I'll try posting at least one piece every day.  

Hate Mail - "How Dare You Say That!"

Yep, someone didn't like me being brutally honest about it.  I find the "free speech -free press" absolutists are always trying to shut down straight-talk about the consequences of their hobby-horse, those who are "Israel right-or-wrong" types among them among the most ready to try to suppress talk they don't like. 

What a bunch of lying, double-speaking hypocrites they are.  They are never, ever going to be the ones to find a way to effectively fight against fascism-neo-Nazism and its indigenous American form, white-supremacy.   Neither is NPR, by the way. 

Update:  And in other hate mail:

"If you get rid of natural selection all of biology over the past century would be falsified."

A. Don't be such a drama queen, there are enormous swaths of biological knowledge that don't depend on natural selection, for all anyone knows some of it would be better explained if it didn't use that framing.  

B.  I think you mean about a hundred-sixty years of biology.

C.  Even if that tsunami happened and an enormous part of currently held biology did disappear, that's not unprecedented in the history of science.  

Ptolemaic cosmology held sway more universally for far, far longer than Darwinism has.  I would say that all of the mathematical epicycles and whirly-gigs and fixes that were necessary to keep ol' Ptolemy propped up has more than its like in what props up Darwinism, especially the neo-Darwinian synthesis, the basis of claims that it had a solid basis.   

You're acting like the professors of astronomy who were the ones Galileo complained wouldn't look in his telescope for fear of seeing what he was seeing, the firmly established science that was washed away starting when the Cardinal of Capua and the Bishop of Culm and, if my memory of Galileo's famous letter is right, Pius III urged Copernicus to publish his findings. 

Isn't that the claim of science?  That all holdings of science are merely contingent, always susceptible to being overturned with further knowledge?   Yeah, right. 

Hate Mail - Someone Didn't Like Me Dissing Dawkin's Dumb Avian Altruism Asininity And I Thank Him For It

Oh, I'm so proud of that old post how could you have missed it the number of times I've linked to it?  

A hate-troll has led to me going back to look at my evisceration of Dawkins' "first bird to call out" fable I mentioned recently and, rereading Dawkins' claim has made me think of two several ways in which it is even more incompetent and absurd even as it is so widely taken as reliable scientific fact.  I wonder how many high school or college texts or classes present "first bird to call out" stuff as "proof" of or support of Darwinism, natural selection.  I have never checked but if anyone wants to steer me to titles or syllabi that present it as such, I'd be much obliged. 

Laying down one's life for one's friends is obviously altruistic, but so also is taking a slight risk for them. Many small birds, when they see a flying predator such as a hawk, give a characteristic "alarm call", upon which the whole flock takes appropriate evasive action. There is indirect evidence that the bird who gives the alarm call puts itself in special danger, because it attracts the predator's attention particularly to itself. This is only a slight additional risk, but it nevertheless seems, at least at first sight, to qualify as an altruistic act by our definition.


Richard Dawkins:   p.6, The Selfish Gene,  Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, 2006

Passing up the opportunity to pass up the obvious fact that such "altruistic genes" as the story is invented to support are completely unevidenced - natural selection introduced non-observation into science in a really big way -  Darwkin's most famous example of and  claim for natural selection, his "first bird to call out fable"  is - 

A. mathematically incompetent requiring that a decreasing number of "altruistic, self-sacrificing birds" within a species result in a higher percentage of them in their species.

B. It is incompetent in terms of 4th grade physics (I mean the stuff you learn when you're about 10 years old, the speed of sound) because it requires a "flying predator" to hear the "first bird to call out" before other birds it's flocking with would hear it.

C. It's incompetent as scientific method, claiming something which is not evidenced in observation, that the "first bird to call out" would be the one more likely to die in the "flying predator's talons" than other birds in the flock, when no such observational evidence is presented (or exists).

[C - a]  I just thought while editing this that without a very large number of filmed examples from the wild (such films don't exist) that proves that the "first bird to call out" was, in fact, at even a "slight" statistically significant risk of being the bird preyed on, it's impossible to prove it as "genetic altruism,".  It's possible that such a "first bird to call out" would have benefited itself from setting off a chaotic flurry of birds who were closer to hear the call than the "flying predator" and being hidden from it.   It could work as a far better and more Darwinistically conventional example of getting someone else killed so you can benefit and live to breed.   Hamiltonian "selfish-genes" nowhere in evidence.  

[Not to mention, any such "first call" call might call the attention of a "predator" to that dumb bird's flock instead of that of a different species, near by.  Who said the "predator" was looking at that flock?  Something that occurs to me as I continue editing this after it's posted. ] 

Apparently Dawkins and his colleagues are so unskilled at self-criticism that this hadn't occurred to them, something which my reading of Darwin and his conventional disciples leads me to be less surprised to find than I would have fifteen-years ago.   They're stupid enough to believe you can do science without observation, after all, which is what any claims of "natural selection" in the hidden, unobserved, undocumented billions of years past is. 

D. It's incompetent in terms of Darwinian natural selection because such "altruistic, self-sacrificing birds) would be removed from the breeding population of their species - a rather glaring and direct contradiction to the very basis of what NATURAL SELECTION IS DEFINED AS BEING.

E. It would put the "altruism gene(s)" that Dawkins' reifies into existence at a disadvantage in the population of the species as a greater percentage of birds not having that would have a chance to breed the next generation(s).

I'll note in passing that the entire species of biological theory that Dawkins bases this on has the rather odd habit of forgetting that in order for "natural selection" to select anything others of its kind have to be not-selected.  That, for example, "non-altruistic birds" of the same species would be as well advantaged by any such self-sacrifice as "altruistic" ones.   Perhaps they don't understand that in order for organisms to be "selected" something has to not be selected, in which case, in all their many years of getting PhDed in evolutionary biology, they never really understood what "natural selection" claims.  I will not pass up the chance to point out that they also ignore that all birds in their scenario, "altruistic" and "non-altruistic" would have enormously varied complexes of other genes that would go with the dead birds and the ones who live and propagate.  Concentrating on these isolated, theorized "genes" ignores the genetic variability within such theorized groups would probably be as great as in the general population, any "traits" produced by those genes, as "selected" or not "selected".  

F. It rather obviously turns superior eyesight and hearing in any such "altruistic self-sacrificing birds" into a maladaptation because, presumably, the better they could see or hear the "flying predator" the more likely they would be "the first bird to call out" and so more likely to "die in the predator's talons" than any "altruistic birds" with inferior eyesight or hearing (perhaps intelligence, as well) and so all of the relevant problems with the theory already stated would kick in for those who had excellent eyesight and hearing and (perhaps) intelligence. 

G. That point about intelligence is one I didn't go through in my earlier treatment of Dawkins' ridiculous fable but it would complicate the definition of "intelligence" in so far as Darwinism makes claims about "intelligence" it is supposed to help animals escape predators and, so, make them more likely to leave more intelligent offspring.  In this fable intelligence could be reasonably believed might make it more likely that the intelligent, sharp-eyed-sharp-eared "altruistic self-sacrificing bird" would leave their "genetic intelligence" on to fewer and fewer birds of the next generation. 

As is typical of claims about natural selection, you are allowed to hold contradictory claims about what it is and what it does and definitions of things that are claimed to be true due to natural selection and the opposite is also held to be true.   It really is one of the most incredibly dishonest things held to be "the greatest theory in science" in history. 

H.  If you still believe in "selfish-genes" in line with Dawkins stupid ideas, they'd be best advised to not reside in such birds.   Maybe like selfish people, selfish genes are stupid. 

I.  What is really stupid are the biologists, etc. who have bought this bull shit, Hamiltonian altruism,  for the past sixty-years.

Hamilton was a Darwinist-eugenicist and scientific racist, just to gild the feces.

I'd better stop for now.  Every time I look at claims like this the more problems with them come up. 

If You REALLY Want To Address Violent Hatred You Can't Do That Without Being Brutally Honest

As I'm typing this I'm hearing NPR covering a march in New York City protesting the rise in antisemitism in the wake of the most recent attack during Hanukkah.  They're wondering if its due to Trump ramping up bigotry and, it being goddamned NPR they pretend that there is balance in pretending that Democrats passing criminal justice reform has something to do with it.  From everything I've read, the "liberal" Republican Nelson Rockefeller dumping the mentally ill on the streets had quite a lot to do with it.  The attacker had no serious criminal record but he was seriously mentally ill.   I hate NPR and wish to hell we had let the Republicans shut it down in the 1980s when they tried to.  It is dishonest to the core.

In the United States, it starts with having laws that allow hate to flourish and propagate, "free speech-free press" absolutism.  Those court rulings and laws allow commerical dispersal of hate speech, targeted for maximum profit for the companies by sending more of what those prone to the mental illness will compulsively focus on.   Lies and hatred are certainly among the primary beneficiaries of the definitions of "free-speech-free press", today, just as they were all through our history.  

Racism and the maintenance of slavery, in its legal form before Lincoln and after in the Jim Crow period depended on hate speech freely permitted.  What the recent free-speech-press rulings and the ACLU style cult of free speech-press did was to generalize what hate-speech was never suppressed for some groups, Black people, Native Americans, Latinos, never had much of a period in which that was suppressed other than for a brief period in which the media felt inhibited from broadcasting it.*  Slavery is more than intrinsically linked to violence, violence is the thing that made it possible, that violence was as connected to expressions of racism.  Lynchings, the very real and most pervasive forms of hate-violence in American culture were a product of hate speech, hate press as was the form of it that became extinct,to a large extent, the 18th and early 19th century violence against Catholics**.  

There is no huge secret as to why antisemitism is rising, IT'S AS OBVIOUS AS THE SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE WHILE YOU'RE READING THIS.  And antisemitism isn't the only kind of violent hatred that is rising in the same way.  Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, other venues of online hate talk and organization of neo-Nazis, the indigenous forms of that in white-supremacy, other, smaller rashes of antisemtic hatred.   Their algorithms that feed even the latent tendencies they pick up on in their commercial surveillance which feed more of the same to people who make searches that might imply they would be like more hate.    

I would point to the great increase in expressed hatred for the Jewish religious tradition in atheism and academic culture as a possible contributing factor - a lot of that coming from atheists.   Some of the most viciously antisemtic content I've seen online is anti-religious and some of that comes from atheists who are ethnically identified as Jewish.  When you insist that nothing is sacred, you might not like how far that goes. You might just find the one you desacralize, is YOU.  When morality is inverted or debunked, all forms of hate are allowable, anything is allowable, the only thing inhibiting you is what you figure you can't get away with.    

There is, certainly, anti-Zionism that turns to antisemitism and that is directly related, in many cases, to the actions of the Israeli government.  And you can't separate that from what the United States does which aids or permits their actions in that regard.  To leave out the part that the Likud fascists who rule Israel and what they have done in Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza, etc. not to mention the expulsion policies of the Israeli government is grossly dishonest.  Anyone who pretends that such actions don't provoke a response which will include either the generation or magnification of antisemitism is lying and are not interested in finding out how to fight it.  And related to that there is the effort to blur the distinction between anti-Zionism or even just criticism of Israel for the kind of actions that have that result and what is really antisemitism.  

The real question is whether or not we really want to suppress antisemitism and antisemitic violence.  If you REALLY want to stop that, it comes with a cost and a risk. Though the risk in this case has been grotesquely and dishonestly magnified.   Whether those who will, no doubt, talk about it in the media really want to address the part that "free hate speech-free hate press" the stuff that those pious, free speechy,  bluestocking (of both genders) ACLU types will piously declare we MUST allow or talk of equality and love and allowing people to follow whatever religion they wish to will be fatally imperiled.  That is, of course a huge pile of smelly primate shit.   What endangers equality and love speech is hate speech.  What endangers true speech are lies, propaganda.  And as "free press-free speech" absolutism has replaced any kind of real morality, as it becomes a required scruple, it results in de-facto bans on telling even the hardest truths, of speaking that inconvenient speech.  With the free-speech-press absolutism came an increase in hate speech, bigoted speech.  Anyone wants to know what inspires the attacks, it's hate talk freely allowed. 

*  I'll have to look for the link to that piece about All In The Family by Laura Z. Hobson mentioned below.  I think the part that that show had in permitting the reintroduction of overt racism in the media cannot be overestimated, no matter what the intentions of those who produced it were.  It backfired, disastrously. 

**  The attacks on Synagogues today have their equivalent in attacks on Catholic churches, schools and other institutions in the 18th and 19th centuries, less so, today. 

Jack Levine - Painting Witches' Sabbath

I adore Jack Levine.  I love hearing his voice so much that I almost resent the music in the movie, though I like Henry Brant's music and I always love to know composers and musicians are getting work.  I'd have hired Brant to write music for a movie about his music and had more Levine narrating his working.  Levine's timing was more appropriate.  I love seeing and hearing him explain how he developed the painting. 

I remember once when the Portland Symphony in Maine did a piece of  his - I can't remember which one - and Brant showed up.  Someone said one of the teachers at the University said he reminded him of me.  It was kind of dumb, he was about eight hundred years old by the time, I was not, and he was dashing around very eccentrically wearing a cape.  I wore the drabbest work clothes comfortable for practicing, less fashionable than a Mao jacket would have been and didn't dash around.  It's funny, I remember the time Barbara Kolb was there better.  Her piece was called Grisaille, after the classical technique of painting that I thought was going to be where Levine went at the start.  As I recall, at a rehearsal she had the sudden inspiration to have about seven snare drums around the front of the stage playing together to end the piece.  I remember it being very effective, though I haven't heard the piece since that night. 

Funny how things form associations in your memory.  I wonder what year that was. 

Update:  I looked up the scoring for Grisaille at the Boosey and Hawkes websites, as of now there are 5 snare drums listed.  I only recall knowing two of the drummers at the premier so my memory might be faulty. 

Update 2:  Auto spell check is being especially artificially unintelligent right now so I've got to be more careful than I got used to.  

The 2 watt bulb of musical enlightenment is bringing up the sword and sandal movie Spartacus again, I didn't know why till I looked at the Wikipedia article on Brant.   Apparently, as happened not infrequently, a show biz tune writer needed help on the orchestration - you'd be surprised at how much of the show biz-movie music that they push as great depended on orchestral effects that they had to hire better composers with better training to create.   Apparently Alex North, credited as composing the score for the movie Spartacus, needed Brant's help with the scoring in his movie stuff.  Something that if I remembered about Brant, I didn't have any reason to remember it.  Even the Wikipedia article states the obvious, that one of the major influences on Brant was Charles Ives.  Before I realized whose music it was in the film I thought "someone was listening to Ives, weren't they."  

Just for fun, I'll remind you that we have only a few scanty records of the Spartacus rebellion, all of them written by upper class members of that slave-owning society, the modern story of it having anything to do with the abolition of slavery is modern invention.  We have no record of what,if any, motives Spatacus and his fellow slaves had, for all we know they intended to keep right on with slavery, them being the slave masters.  I think it would have been a lot better if they'd invented characters and didn't present it as ersatz history, though in that case it's so remote in time that it probably is innocuous. 

I do have to say, the time we went over that before did make me grateful for one thing, it led to me reading the NOVEL, not the history but the NOVEL by one of those dear old commies, Howard Fast, who I hadn't remembered as being as good a writer as he was.  It's sad that the lower end of show-biz has led us into post literacy and no one reads those books anymore. 

I was recently reminded of how good another writer of his general vintage and milieu, Laura Z. Hobson was - though as often happens, it was her occasional pieces I found online and not her dated novels that led me to remember she was a very good writer.   I remember reading Consenting Adult and being annoyed at it's upper middle-class values, though she handled the scene where the kid loses his virginity better than I'd have expected a straight writer to.  I'd have at least had it happen in bed among men who knew each other.   Her analysis of what was bad about All In The Family was one of the best pieces of TV criticism I've ever read.