I Think We've Found The "Demon Sperm" And It's Got Nothing To Do With DNA

The most bizarre thing about Donald Trump grasping at any straw, even one burning on the other end, in this case the clearly demented Dr. Stella Immauel, is that seeing her, she's not what you might call a "Donald Trump kinda person".  I'd have expected she's more the kind of person he'd want to deport back to a country he no doubt would call a, and this is an exact quote, "shit hole country."  In her case Cameroon.  It is rather hilarious how fast after citing her as an impressive voice he dumped her as soon as a reporter brought up some of her more bizarre ravings.   Why, one might conclude his endorsement wasn't entirely sincere. 

I see her "ministry" and am forced to think we have allowed 18th century rhetoric to keep us from calling a sham of religion just that, a sham.   Though maybe it's the fault of Christians deciding to be too nice and middle-class comfortable in being too delicate to talk about when religion is a clear, money-making scam.   So much of it would have to be open for discussion.  

It would seem likely that Donald Trump came to his minimal awareness of her in his, no doubt, last minute looking for something to support his previous lies through the neo-Nazish "news" site Breitbart who promoted the crackpot.   Which lead me to repeat that I'm certain allowing liars and spreaders of dangerous lies to get through and infect the American population on "First Amendment" grounds is an even greater danger.   It's getting thousands killed every week as I'm typing this. 

I'd love to go into her bizarre idea of "alien DNA" and the bizarre idea that "other life" would even have DNA and the incredibly dumb ideas that have grown up in popular and, obviously, even "scientific" minds around that bizarrely over-sold, popularly conceived of molecular structure.  But that's for another time.   

From what I read around the internet as I try to find out about Dr. Immanuel,  it would seem that other tower of intellectual integrity,  Madonna seems to be endorsing her.  As is pointed out,  Immanuel's insane hatred of LGBTQ people would call into question Madonna's past support of LGBTQ rights.   But, then, that's how it is with show-biz intellectual and moral engagement in so many cases.   It's no deeper than Donald Trump's respect for Dr. Immanuel.  You wonder what movement of the Zeitgeist Madonna's trying to jump onto with her endorsement.  

Lets See If I Can Manage To Keep This Resolution Announced Two Days Early

I am making a number of August resolutions this year, those are resolutions that you want to try out before January comes round,  I make them a number of times a year on the theory that if you do it often enough, something might stick.

Mine is to give up some of the online time wasting that I am sure I won't have time to indulge in.  Including playing on my alternative blog, mocking and baiting my long time obsessive libeler and slanderer, a recently resumed bad habit.  

We have had a number of brawls there, one that led to him finally going too far and giving me total justification in cutting him off completely when he mocked my father who was was a permanently disabled WWII veteran, wounded in battle and decorated - I have his Purple Heart in my desk drawer as I type into my computer.   That was something that went past the point of my endurance.   So I cut off all possibility of communication concerning him and his lies, which will continue but without my knowledge of them. 

The brawl started when I was sent a dubious claim that he had watched his parents trembling in fear while watching the Army McCarthy hearings, which he more than just implied were a manifestation of antisemitism - he calls everything antisemitism, including someone wishing there were more Jewish citizens in the United States.   

I knew that was total and complete bullshit because I knew why McCarthy started his feud with the Army, it was all over the drafting of his Chief Counsel's close associate and, many believe, boyfriend, G. David Schine and the Army's refusal to provide the rich Harvard boy with privileges that would have pleased Cohn and McCarthy.   The irony is that what was claimed to be a terrible manifestation of McCarthy's antisemitism was started, by him, over the refusal of the Army to give into Cohn's badgering them to get Schine special treatment.   I think you really have to stretch that fraying, overstretched word to past the breaking point to call that "antisemitism."   Most ironic of all was that McCarthy putting his neck out for Cohn and Schine is what led to his downfall.   Here is an accurate but brief description of what happened:  

This case of overkill is one of the things that brought McCarthy to his Waterloo, the Army-McCarthy hearings, held in the spring of 1954 and followed, Tye estimates, by eighty million Americans, half the population. The hearings had nothing to do with Communism. Their purpose was to determine whether the chief counsel on McCarthy’s subcommittee, Roy Cohn, had put improper pressure on the Army to give special treatment to another member of McCarthy’s staff, a wealthy nonentity named David Schine, after Schine was drafted. As he always did when attacked, McCarthy punched right back, countercharging that the Army had been holding Private Schine hostage—putting him on K.P. duty, threatening to send him overseas—in order to get McCarthy’s subcommittee to drop its investigations into the Communist infiltration of the armed services.

It was obvious that Cohn had made threats in an effort to get Schine excused from the ordinary duties of life as an Army private. On the behind-the-scenes advice of President Dwight Eisenhower, who loathed McCarthy, the Army had compiled a detailed chronology of Cohn’s many phone calls to and meetings with Army officials, and a list of his demands. There was no way McCarthy was going to win that argument.

And yet McCarthy didn’t do what almost anyone else would have done. He didn’t throw Schine and Cohn under the bus. McCarthy knew that Schine was worthless, but he also knew that Cohn was deeply attached to him, and McCarthy valued Cohn as a man who was as free of scruples as he was. McCarthy put his career at risk for Schine and Cohn, and he lost. It may have been honor among scoundrels, but it was honor, of a sort.
The most interesting thing about the hearings, looking back, is the story behind the celebrated dénouement, an exchange between McCarthy and the Army’s hired counsel Joseph Welch, seen by millions on television, and by many people afterward in Emile de Antonio’s documentary “Point of Order!” It began when McCarthy, incensed by what he regarded as Welch’s overly aggressive examination of Cohn, revealed that a young lawyer named Fred Fisher, at Hale & Dorr, where Welch practiced, had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, an organization accused of being a Communist front.

Welch was a crafty courtroom performer of the “I’m just a simple country lawyer” variety, and he put on his best basset-hound face. “Until this moment, Senator,” he said, “I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” McCarthy spoke up again, repeating things he had just said about Fisher. Welch tried to stop him. “Senator, may we not drop this?” he asked. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Again, McCarthy refused to change the subject. Welch let him talk. “Mr. McCarthy,” he said finally, when McCarthy was done, “I will not discuss this further with you. . . . If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good.” The room erupted in applause. Even reporters applauded. It was June 9, 1954, the thirtieth day of the Army-McCarthy hearings. The dragon had been slain.

The article is worth reading for what follows on there because it says that McCarthy going after Fisher wasn't a result of McCarthy and Cohn and Schine outting a former commie, they found out about that through a carefully and skillfully laid out trap laid by Joseph Welch.   But I'll let you read that. 

Notice while you're reading this fact:

McCarthy was a bomb-thrower—and, in a sense, that is all he was. He would make an outrageous charge, almost always with little or no evidentiary basis, and then he would surf the aftershocks. When these subsided, he threw another bomb. He knew that every time he did it reporters had two options. They could present what he said neutrally, or they could contest its veracity. He cared little which they did, nor did he care that, in his entire career as a Communist-hunter, he never sent a single “subversive” to jail. What mattered was that he was controlling the conversation.

McCarthy would never have gotten anywhere if it hadn't been for the "free press" naming, among others two of the most influential scumbags in journalism of the time,  the odious Westbrook Pegler and the gossip smear artist Walter Winchell (I believe I was the one who informed my attacker that Winchell was one of a number of Jewish supporters of Joe McCarthy).   And, contrary to claims made during the course of the brawl, McCarthy never prosecuted anyone, including the foolish Mariam Moskowitz who he claimed was one of McCarthy's victims.   She was prosecuted by the Southern District Federal Attorney Irving Saypol in a trial heard by the judge most infamous for his convicting and sentencing of the atomic spys Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,  Irving Kaufman.   During the trial Roy Cohn, Harry Gold and the odious and ever present Elizabeth Bentley testified against Mariam Moskowitz and the boyfriend she stupidly lied to the FBI for - she said later that she was too embarrassed to admit having an adulterous affair with a married man.   I pointed out that the only persons she had to blame for her trouble were herself and her boyfriend.  I knew it wouldn't go over well - it's so opposed to the tedious show-biz formula of the unfairly embattled victim of the commie hunters - but in her case she did the crime, she did the time and she had no right to be exonerated, especially as she admitted to it.   From what my troll said,  I doubt he ever met her, he certainly didn't get the story right.   

More generally, the question is why we seem to have the need to attribute every bad thing to a piece of garbage like Joe McCarthy?   I mean, I was brought up to despise him and I certainly do - in no small part for bringing the name into such disrepute but he was hardly the most odious villain of that disgusting era.   Cohn and Saypol and Kaufman did do what the idiot troll accused McCarthy of,  prosecuting people - getting two of them fried in the electric chair.   Cohn of course did a lot more than that.   But McCarthy was horrible enough for getting on with without accusing him of conducting an anti-Jewish witch hunt - which he didn't - and other sins which a look at the record doesn't support.  

And while we're at it, a lot of those who were prosecuted and convicted were actually guilty of things which were crimes, some of them as serious as the spying for Stalin which may or may not have helped him obtain the bomb earlier than he would without it.  But other crimes were committed during the course of that, often lying to law enforcement, a crime which, when it's a Scooter Libby or a Mike Flynn we would have no problem seeing as a serious crime.  The mythology that all of those prosecuted during the red scares were hapless victims is a huge lie, a number of them were guilty of serious crimes.  A lot of the ones who were persecuted were actually pretty terrible people who supported one of the world's all time worst mass murders, guilty of Nazi level genocide and terror murders to keep in power.   Some of them were unjustly accused of things and some of them were persecuted and injured though they did nothing.   Doesn't it diminish the wrong done to the innocent to excuse the crimes of the guilty as much as it diminishes the guilt of the guilty by insisting that someone like McCarthy had to not only be held accountable for what he did wrong but for things he didn't do? 

That disgusting era was disgusting on both sides, that's a fact.   You don't have to choose one side to be less disgusting, you can reject both.  And I do. 

I have put commenting back up with "word capture" which I assume means you've got to type a word into a box though as the administrator of the site, that apparently doesn't come up on my screen.  If that's enough to thwart the porn bot,  we'll see. 

I have retained comment moderation.  Comment moderation was put up when people who troll me started attacking other people here, something I won't sponsor.   I don't care much what you say about me as long as it isn't true and it often isn't, but that doesn't mean I'm required to post it, either.   Amuse me, and I might post it, attack someone who doesn't get a choice in what gets posted here and you won't get your comment posted. 

By the way,  I will be sticking with the "New Blogger" some of the things about it I don't much like but I guess I'll get used to it.  It is a lot easier to see on the screen for someone with less vision acuity such as myself.   I might actually learn to like it, sort of. 

Joe Biden Had Better Be Forced To Be A President Of The Future Instead Of A Return To The Trump Producing Status Quo Ante

If Joe Biden wins the election one of our most important jobs is to immediately put pressure on him to mount a full investigation of the many crimes of the Trump regime, its treason, its theft, its violations of the rights of people. STEALING BABIES AND YOUNG CHILDREN AND PUTTING THEM IN CAGED CONCENTRATION CENTERS FOR FUCKSAKE!, some of them citizens, its massive crimes against egalitarian democracy - and so attacks on the American People - and to prosecute and punish a lot of very rich, white people, people of privilege wealth and fame, the kind of people who get away with everything in what was, before Trump, the normal course of events.  I support Biden's election fully,  I am skeptical that he will be any better at doing what was necessary to protect all of those people and things attacked by Trump than Obama was.    If Obama had dropped the bipartisan bullshit the day after the election and played hard ball he might have been the great president that his voters were led to expect from his campaign and the idiotic romanticism best exemplified in the TV show that came to quickly seem like a lying mockery of that kind of mythical excellence in the presidency,  The West Wing. 

The Trump era has been an epoch of Constitutionally enabled, permitted and sustained evil the like of which we have never seen in our lifetimes,  though the history of the American government, especially throughout most of the 19th and early 20th centuries have provided ample preludes to.  The 19th century, in fact, can be seen as one long example of  the problems with and evils permitted in the system set up by the Constitution leading to the Civil War . In recent decades, especially through the legal theories championed by the Republican establishment and elite law schools,  the Constitution has been weaponized to destroy American democracy,  the unitary executive theory is an explicitly fascist view of the American presidency favored by some of our most elite and corrupt legal minds. It is matched by many others tending towards if not explicitly endorsing the kind of corruption that is personified in Trump and his government.   

Biden's long time in the Senate will have provided him with some of the worst tendencies in Democratic politicians, the emetic calls for "comity" in that body, the idea that we should return to the "normal" which is the thing that got us Trump will be at work immediately.   There is some chance that Biden and those around him will have learned something that will keep them from doing as Obama did, as Bill Clinton did to a lesser but still disastrous effect (remember Louis Freeh?), trusting Republicans.   GETTING SUCKERED BY THE DC-NYC MEDIA INTO APPOINTING THEM TO POSITIONS OF TRUST.*  

That is the mortal sin that any desire to turn to any past is, the refusal to participate in the creation of the future by demanding a return to what produced the evils we have to struggle against.   THAT IS THE REASON THAT I SO DETEST THE CULT OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE FETISH OF THE FOUNDERS, those are the conventional version of Confederacy romanticism that are the required superstition of the show-biz, the journalistic, the educated and elite areas of American life.  Deviation from those, violations of those are met with everything from confused incomprehension to furious excommunication in the cheesiest tradition of Brit anti-Catholic theatrical and movie scripts.  

Biden, old as he is, has to be convinced he is not a return to the past, he, by running for president in 2020 chose to make himself a figure of the post-Trump future, if we are lucky.   If there are two people in the world he should not look to as models for a Biden presidency it is the last two Democratic presidents,  Bill Clinton and, especially, Barack Obama.  

We have got to face the terrible fact that that Constitution which is the idol of civic idolatry in educated and uneducated America carries terrible features intentionally put into it by the slave power and their Northern allies and those who compromised with them with the explicit intent of giving us rule by a malignant minority.   And those have worked too often for us to tolerate them anymore.  Getting rid of a host of things, starting with the Electoral College that gave us both Bush II and Trump is essential to protect equality and democracy.   The extra-Constitutional privileges the Supreme Court granted itself, making it the McConnell-Trump vehicle for destroying American democracy have got to be decisively and permanently removed from it.   The rigging of it by McConnell, as well his Grassley's and Graham's corruption of the federal courts is all we need to attack that problem.  If a Democratic President and Congress refused to allow that to continue, it would not.   It's not as if the present Courts will not allow Republicans to ignore past precedent set by the courts when the time is ripe for 

Republican-fascism.   I doubt any product of any Ivy League law school is going to be willing to imagine anything so bold a response to the real reality instead of the pantomime of judicial tradition that is the typical bull-shit presentation of a pretty corrupt reality. 

*  If you take nothing else away from this, take away that we have to end the convention that has put the FBI and other such agencies in the hands of Republican leadership.  The one and only person from that world who came out of the period in which Comey helped give us Trump by playing politics during the crucial election and its aftermath of it who I have any respect for is Andrew McCabe.  I have no idea what party he belongs to if any, he is the only one who I have as of yet found did little to nothing to condemn. 

NO DEMOCRAT SHOULD EVER AGAIN APPOINT A PERSON WHO HAS BEEN A REPUBLICAN DURING A CRIMINAL REPUBLICAN REGIME TO ANY POSITION OF TRUST.  Especially in the areas of law enforcement.   

Update:   For some reason this new fangled Blogger is not letting me put up a new post this morning, Tuesday, July 2020 .   I will try again later today.

All Too Successful Dodges: Praising Slavery With Faint Damning Of It.

The aptly named Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas gave an interview to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in which he attacked an initiative to teach American history, telling some of the truth about the role slavery played in the founding of the United States by, idiotically, admitting the truth of what the 1619 Project reportedly says.  

The Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton has called the enslavement of millions of African people “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”.

Though the "necessity" of Americans doing such monumental evil produced what it produced, a different choice by the people who introduced and accepted the evil of slavery into the United States would have produced a future as well, there was no necessity in doing it. They could have chosen a far different path and the results would have been based in morality instead of the immorality that Tom Cotton praises with faint damning.  

The funniest thing about this is that even as the highly touted 2024 Republican-fascist presidential candidate (whether touted by him or by others, I don't exactly know) is introducing a bill to prevent federal funds to go to that educational initiative BY CONFIRMING WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE CENTRAL PREMISE OF IT! he is calling his call to deny that "saving American history".  

The double-speak coming from the more than slightly ironically named "Tom Cotton" (as some have also pointed out) is a good example of how American history is now taught.  

Cotton’s Saving American History Act of 2020 and “would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts”, according to a statement from the senator’s office.

“The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project … is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable,” Cotton told the Democrat-Gazette.

“I reject that root and branch. America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”

He added: “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as [Abraham] Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”

First, the last statement was disproved in the most dramatic of ways possible by the bloodiest war in our history (if you don't count the slaughter of the Native Americans) disproved that fraudulent ass-covering by the Founding Fathers.  That view of the drafting and peddling of the original Constitution is, itself, a falsified, hagiographic view of history because if there is one thing that is bleedingly obvious it is that the American Constitution was drafted with the full intent of the slave powers, the slave owners AND NOT ONLY THOSE FROM THE STATES WHICH WOULD BE LED BY A CLASS OF ARISTOCRATIC TRAITORS TO FORM THE CONFEDERACY to maintain slavery, certainly for as long as it was possible to retain it but in perpetuity if its abolition could be thwarted.   That is obvious from the writings of the slave owning Founders who, occasionally, talked out of both sides of their mouth as their spiritual descendant, the slavery excusing, lying about slavery insisting Tom Cotton trying to ride this insane wedge issue to the presidency.  

The irony in him using the Republican-fascist hobby horse of slamming the  New York Times in this is that the Great Gray Drab has promoted a similarly false and romantic view of the same history,  its part in promoting the lying musicial Hamilton covers up the incredible sleaze of one of the worst of the Founders who, as well, spoke out of both sides of his mouth on the issue, pretending to favor abolition of slavery as his own wife and in-laws AND HIMSELF owned slaves and as he as one of the writers of the Federalist Papers sold the slavery enabling Constitution on the benefits that Northerners, especially those with money and power and the vote, that came from slavery.   

Cotton calls slavery a "necessary evil".   Well, someone else said "Necessity is the mother of invention." which is apropos if you remember that "invention" can mean a lie.   Alfred North Whitehead said it well when he said,  

"Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb, "necessity is the mother of futile dodges" is nearer the truth. 

The popular history of the "Founding fathers" and the adoption and life of the Constitution, and also not anywhere near a little of its official AND ESPECIALLY LEGAL ARTICULATION is one such dodge.   In 2020, with the state the country has gotten into through the Constitution and its mythologization, we can't afford anything but the most exigent AND ACCURATE criticism of all of them.   If we don't get past it, the same Constitution that has produced and maintained Trump will lead us into slavery and I am afraid the bloodshed that was necessary to merely end the legality of slavery will be outdone in the bloodshed which will be necessary to end it in reality and to try for egalitarian democracy.  

The Constitution of the Confederacy is worth looking at because the kind of double-speak that Cotton engages in is the language it is written in.  I might do that,  whenever the talk is of "liberty" and "freedom" as slogans, you should always be looking for the dodge because not all of those dodges are futile except in so far as people buy those words that so often cover up slavery and similar evils.  Our history is full of that.   So is our present. 

Apparently Blogger has made the switch to "New Blogger" overnight.  It's going to take me  a while to get used to it.  I'll be trying it out so if things look different,  I didn't do it, if things are bumpy, that's the reason.   I don't see any great advantage in anything I've seen yet but we are at the mercy of the blog hosting company,  I guess.  I'll be testing to see how I can post music and other videos and the radio plays, I've heard complaints about such things from people who have tried it out in previews.   Maybe addressing the complaints are what took them longer than they had announced.  We'll see. 

Update:  If Blogger wanted to make a useful change, they'd separate the "Sign Out" button from others you meant to press.  I don't know how many times I've hit "Sign Out" by mistake,  also "Delete" also "Revert to Draft".   I don't know what they could do about the boring old porn bot that has forced me to pause the comments.  Assuming it is a bot and not just another way for the trolls to try to get under my skin.  If that's the case, cutting off their noses to spite their false faces. 

Hot Saturday Night Radio Drama - Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe - Cordially Invited To Meet Death

Cordially Invited To Meet Death 

Hot as hell.  Really busy in the garden today harvest, next week I expect to be making pickles and putting up tomato sauce.  So I haven't had much time to look for new radio dramas.   

I figure it's always time to listen to one of these excellent CBC adaptations of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe made in 1982.  As long as you don't re listen too often. 

Mavor Moore, Nero Wolfe

Don Francks, Archie Goodwin

Cec Linder, Inspector Cramer 

Frank Perry, Fritz

Barbara Hamilton, Beth Huddleston

Terry Tweed, Janet Nichols

Mim Daragon, Maryella Tims

Ken James, Daniel Huddleston

Tom Harvey,  Dr. Brady

Allan Portus, Larry Huddleston

The Trump-Barr storm troopers should be disbanded, investigated, when appropriate they should be prosecuted and imprisoned.  So should anyone who had authority over them right up to Barr and Trump.  This is blatant fascism in America.  

Seven Myths about Religion: Rupert Sheldrake and Jonas Atlas

Following His Hypocritical Oath - Yeah, That Sounds About Right For A FOX-Forbes Expert

Can anyone tell me where I can verify this claim made in an Amazon review of  a screed by FOX, NY Post, Forbes "medical expert" Dr. Marc Siegel, it was on Amazon, reviewing a book he wrote in 2006 pooh-poohing the possibility of what we're living through right now ever happening, even as the piece of crap with two letters after his name is doing his act and being cited by the Commander In Crap. 

1.0 out of 5 stars hypocrite
Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2009
This man claimed that the people who have been following this and other flus were fear mongers. This week while his child was at a camp that cost 10,000 dollars a child there was a outbreak of the H1N1. He panicked and went against the CDC's advice and prescribed tamiflu for all 350 campers and staff. He had to justify to the CDC why he did it. Not all the children were sick, not even his own child. Just the fact that they might have been exposed sent him into a panic. Instead of using that tamiflu for people that were really ill, it went to a bunch of rich kids. Marc Siegel is the poster child for "do as I say, not as I do".

Karen, Please Just Wear A Mask

If the common superstition that comedy was a powerful way to make change were true, we'd have won a long time ago.  But it is very funny and funny is good. 

Believing In Things We Like When We Like Where That Leads

Had to turn off the comments again, the porn bot came back worse than before when I tried to put them up.  I'll turn them on again in about a week to see if that works.   I will try word verification if that doesn't work or something else.  Must keep up with my hate mail. 

Before I turned it off I found a piece of snark from an atheist jerk who recited two common atheist snarks, a. I only believed in God because I liked the idea and b. that I should believe in atheism because "science gave you the computer you use." In effect, the argument is that science gives us things we want, science gives us things we like, it makes life easier and more fun. 

So, he's arguing that I should be an atheist because the idiot equates atheism with science and science with engineering and engineering was his cargo-cult mentality, perhaps ignorant of the fact that every major figure in the founding of modern science was not only a religious believer, they were professed Christians, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, etc. and that many eminent scientists up to and including the present time have been Christians, believing Jews, Muslims, etc.   

But even more so, he's saying I should believe in atheism for the same reason he says I shouldn't believe in God, because it works to give me things I like.  

Which is actually the level of intellectual discourse which is held to be perfectly respectable when the end is atheism and is held to be illegitimate when the end is God.   

I've gone over other things that you can logically get with atheism, in the materialism and the scientism which completes the intellectual trinity that almost all of modern atheism fully believes in, things like a total absence of significance to our minds, our thoughts, the near impossibility of our materially based minds stumbling blindly on something like the truth - as I noted recently, the current coolest physicist on Youtube and religious rejecter, Sabine Hossenfelder, pointed out that science cannot give us either the truth of a view of "reality".   

And it certainly can't produce a morality which would make believing in God for the most base of childish desires any more wrong than rejecting God for the most rigorous of intellectual arguments.   If you want arguments against believing in a convenient, selfishly self-interested, facile and selfishly believed in God, you will probably find about your most secure bases for that in the in the Bible.  Over and over again, when the Children of Israel figure they've got God all figured out, on their side in worldly matters, God makes it clear that God is not figured out or on anyone's side in particular.  

And the same is certainly true of the Christian part of it in which Jesus, presented as closest to God of all certainly didn't get a very easy time of it.  It's interesting in Acts and the Epistles,  none of the earliest believers in God as explained by Jesus seems to have tried to rig things to get rich and have a good life with all the available conveniences.   

There are far more adult and intellectually honest reasons to believe in God and to believe in Christianity - as well as other human articulations of the experience of belief than the utilitarian, desire-based ones.  Though that isn't to say those are invalid of even disreputable.   I think if we could go back and understand and comprehend why any of us believes anything, from the testimony of our own eyes and ears, to the abstraction of grouping things and ownership that are the presumable origins of mathematics, to further analyses of those experiences and abstraction THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF SCIENCE AND THE BASIS FOR ITS METHOD they all started in wanting to believe all of it.  To denigrate that is, very possibly, I'd say likely, to denigrate the origins of science as well as religious belief.  Only it's honestly admitted when it's religion and it's denied when it's science. 

There is another bit of atheist double speak that says religion is a pathological entity which causes us to fear and be anxious for our welfare, that, especially, Christianity is a "death cult" a "cult of eternal pain," "dismal" "a horrible alternative to those lovely pagan religions it unfairly suppressed and ended"*  Which is certainly the opposite of the idea that we believe in it because we like it.  There are certainly things in scripture I don't like, not least of all is the mainstream understanding regarding things such as slavery, the assigned roles of women, adult, consenting same-sex, sex (as understood by straight people) and things like capital punishments.  

Science as given in the materialist, atheist imagination and claims, on the other hand, telling us that when we die we rot in the ground, are no more, that our loved ones who die just rot, that there is no good or evil, that our minds and lives are no more significant than iron oxidizing or rocks falling and bumping into each other, the whole range of terrible Darwinian cruelties - that to accept these terrors and horrors is a virtuous and manly (it's always presented as manly) thing to face bravely, that dark and awful view of reality is considered admirable. 

I certainly didn't like the doctrine of eternal damnation as taught by the pre-Vatican II Catholicism I first experienced, especially in the most pathological versions of that as are found in Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin and their line.   I now know that that last one is most likely based in quite bad Latin translations from the Greek and the line of the transmission of those malicious mutations in Western academic theology and doctrine - Calvin was able to read Greek, his ability to read the Greek words that indicate that punishment is meant to reconcile sinners by giving up their sin even as he was so emotionally attached to the misreading that he gave it its most terrible claims.  As David Bentley Hart said, if you believe that the God of Calvinist predestinarianism is the one taught by Jesus, disbelieving it is totally justifiable. 

And in that scheme of predestinarian belief, no one in this life could be sure that ulitmately cruel, evil god had not for no other reason than god willed it, decided a mostly good person was bound for eternal suffering.   

There was every reason for someone to reject that on the basis that they didn't like it, and many a religion hater did, in fact, come from that background.  Which, it is odd, then becomes a virtue, of believing what you want to believe, to believe in no-god than in that God taught to you in your Calvinist or Jansenist, etc. childhood.  Which, if the believer merely opted for a belief in God as really presented in the Scriptures without the late-classical fall-of-empire gloom and its mutation in the Western medieval period, a God of universal reconciliation and salvation - the other predestination to salvation - BECAUSE YOU LIKE THAT VIEW OF REALITY, that what is a virtuous action for the atheist is presented as an unforgivable weakness and vice when the result is a belief in a good God. 

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Paul, the best documented of that generation, certainly doesn't seem to have led the rest of his life to that end.  He must have often felt ill at ease as a Pharisee, one zealous for The Law, as he had to shed his most cherished habits and ways that were comfortable to him, a comfort that, according to Acts, led him before his conversion to kill and oppress the members of this new movement of Jews who he clearly felt enraged by.   Traces of that remain in his authentic letters which show that he was deeply uneasy about sexual and gender roles - and I don't think it was entirely for the important reason to keep the distinction between his movement and the ubiquitous pagan cultures they lived in and the terrible evils of things like the sexual abuse of children and women and slaves that was commonly practiced in them.  Though I certainly think Paul would have had that motive as it is explicitly implied throughout the entire Scripture and the Gospel. 

I think Paul is a far more fascinating figure than I'd ever realized before because he is so brilliant a thinker and so passionate and so honest in revealing the interaction between deep religious experience and our oh-so-human minds and lives. Just when you find him completely spot on, he says something that clashes with your own comfortable thinking.   He reminds me of Joe Biden in that ability to suddenly do that.  The key to my noticing that was in that talk by Elizabeth A. Johnson in which she talked about feminist hermenutics specifically noting that even as Paul said that women should be silent in the church (which would have been home churches) HE was the one who documented women leaders in the movement, very likely as presiders at what were developing into liturgy-euchariestic meals, his own trusted colleagues in ministry who he asked other, non-Pauline communities to accept as speaking on his behalf, answering their questions about his very letters that are what we now base our understanding of his ministry in.  If he could do both - he must have realized the inconsistency, he was too smart not to have - he certainly could have other kinds of short-comings and discrepancies in his thought.  As Johnson pointed out when he told the Women of Corinth to keep silent in church, a. he must have known they were not keeping silent or he wouldn't have bothered to mention it, b. we don't know what the Women of Corinth, so instructed, did.   It's quite possible they, probably some of them members of the movement before Paul was, ignored that. When Paul sent his letters, they were just letters.  They didn't become Scripture till after that. 

*  Atheists mostly having a pretty stupid, ahistorical, undocumented and clearly wrong view of the dismal, pessimistic, human-sacrificing, etc. classical pagan religions, a product of Renaissance and later romanticism, not in a real understanding of what those slave-based societies were like.  Pagan societies were no bed of roses, no matter how those renaissance artists painted it, how those 18th and 19th century meat-heads romanticized it as a tool to attack Christianity which they hated for its inconvenient egalitarianism that deprived them of enjoying the things their money and social position, Trumplike, made them feel entitled to. 

GEE, ANTHONY FAUCI! - A Randy Rainbow Song Parody

"Dear Donald, you're satanic
You should have stayed in Queens,"

I loved Randy before, after that line I love him five times as much. 

Update:  I have no idea how that link got changed, weird things going on in Blogger this week.  I've changed it back to Randy's channel. 

On The Passing of Michael Brooks

Michael Brooks is someone who could do everything from thrill me when I agreed with him to enrage me when I thought his Bernie or Buster stuff earlier this year was the final straw.   And he could make me laugh out loud, his Jordan Peterson and other imitations were quite spot on and very funny.  

He died yesterday of a "sudden medical condition" at the age of 37.   37 is too  young to die.   I'm very sorry that I was feeling on the outs with him since the spring, though I would occasionally listen to him on Youtube.   I wish he'd lived.  It's particularly sad for an old man to see young people die before them.  It's something you see too often by the time you're my age.  Now I'll never get to hear what he says when Kissinger kicks the bucket. 

At least I suspect he was pleasantly surprised to find that his materialism was wrong.   I hope he enjoys the afterlife. 

We Have To Force The Changes That Will Protect Democracy Or We Will See Another Trump Within Twenty Years

After Trump, if extensive and serious changes are not made to to the Constitution banning his full range of crimes, up to and including the deployment of secret police without any known authority snatching people off of the street in the style of dictators around the world, the next Trump will repeat it and go farther.  

When the American media, when lawyers, when politicians use the phrase "Constitutional crisis" they mean some decorous lawyerly thing that will be  solved by reinstituting the habits of the past.   That is entirely dangerous lazy and stupid nonsense,  mere restoration to the past will only get us back to what produced Trump, it guarantees that they'll do it again, learing how to do it more effectively through the Trump years.  We have no choice but to tear out what made Trump's corrupt election possible and, more so, what has kept the criminal Trump regime in place for four years.   The Trump regime exposes every gaping flaw in the Constitution, flaws that are golden opportunities for the very same people who put him in power to do it again and again as long as those mechanisms are in place. 

That Trump is still in office with the huge range of crimes he is known to have committed, even what should be called "presidential treason" of acting as the agent of a foreign dictator is all the proof a rational person would need that our Constitution's long-standing flaws and dangers have been made operational by intent, with the help of lawyers and judges and alleged law-men and nothing short of drastic change to the Constitution as well as host of new laws will crush this danger from ever being resorted to by a future criminal, Republican-fascist president. 

It is also vitally necessary that the legal movements that promote actual fascism through a reading of the obviously dangerously written presidential powers sections of the Constitution be fully exposed as the fascist movement that it so obviously is.  That extends from the sewers of billionaire funded organizations and "societies" around Washington to the legal faculties that have hatched propaganda for the effort of making the United States a nation of one-man rule, not laws. 

The Trumpstapo, Barrstapo agents among "Homeland Security" the Federal  Marshals,  etc. have to be exposed and named and, when possible prosecuted.  They must not only be fired, the ones who have abducted people from the street,beaten and teargassed have to be prosecuted and imprisoned with a lifetime ban on any police work and they should have long periods of supervision on release with a ban on associating with fascist organizations.  

The "never Trump" faction of the Republican Party have got to repudiate all of that because it was within their former party that all of this incubated, through the Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and II years and within the Republican members of the Supreme Court starting with Rehnquist.  This is a Republican Party effort and if they don't a. admit that and b.repudiate it entirely,  I don't trust them.   I have certainly repudiated the worst of what the left has nurtured and permitted in in the past, it's time for all of us to do the same with ALL anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic factions on all sides.  

I have annoyed some people by discounting the actual ideological pretensions of anti-democratic ideologues, noting that Nazis and Stalinists,  fascists and communists and Marxist "socialists" are all anti-democratic and they share at each level of depravity more than enough with their alleged counterpart on the other alleged end of the alleged linear graph of political identity to admit that those similarities make them all the same kind of thing.  Anyone who figures it's OK for "our sons of bitches" to kill and oppress because their ideas of what to do with the economy are more to our liking should be kicked out of the effort to finally adopt egalitarian democracy.   

It's simple, either you are an egalitarian democrat or you are a gangster, a thug as exemplified in the unmarked fascist police that are abducting people from American streets.   And, if these changes aren't made, much, much worse, perhaps as soon as next year if the Republican-fascists corrupt this election as they did in 2000, 2004 and 2016.  

Our Eyes and Appetites And Our Strongest Weaknesses Are What Lead Us Into Slavery

Like the entertainment media that absorbs the attention span of most Americans and which is the substitute of everything from education to moral formation - through that same media - Republican-fascism has flourished by appealing to our most destructive weaknesses, appetites and moral defects.   That is what Trump and his his henchmen are doing now,  William Barr, certainly, an old hand at facilitating that for the Bush crime family starting with George H.W. and then his son during the Bush II regime.  

Trump is making one of the balder appeals to racism right now, to white privilege, white fear of People of Color but his only follows on to a stream of that back through the Bushes, Reagan, Nixon all of whom used it and prospered by doing that, along with the neo-Confederate nihilists, Newt Gingrich being the central figure in that on the state level and in the legislative branch, but many others as well.  And they have certainly been helped in that by the media, not only the right wing media of FOX and Sinclair but in the op-ed sections of the print media from lowest to the New York Times and Washington Post, not to mention those more influential but largely ignored parts of the media,  "features" and entertainment.   That the two central figures in that Republican fascism,  Reagan and Trump, as well as not a few of those in Congress, including Pence, come from that area of the media is no coincidence at all, it is a rationally expected phenomenon of how the media participates in producing fascism and other varietal flavors of gangster governance.  That the media are so comfortable with producing as well as promoting them is exactly the same phenomenon as their making their money from advertising and entertainment programming that appeals to our worst defects.  

In the present crises, environmental, medical, economic, etc. we are meeting head on a problem with the concept of freedom and liberty and rights in a morally nihilistic world, one which has, in fact, been brought to a wider world through the entertainment industry, a popularization of the elite form of nihilism that became popular in academia much earlier through the ideology of materialism and the promotion of anti-religious atheism.  

I will break into this to answer the, no doubt, thought of point that Trumpian nihilism is OK with the "evangelicals" and the kind of Catholics who get their religious formation through the putrid EWTN and its like by by pointing out that that those are a part of the same thing and have nothing to do with the morality advocated in the Bible, as is proved, beyond question, by their championing of today's Herod on steroids, our Pharaoh on amphetamines,  Trump.  They are, as mentioned, largely a TV and media fed entity, they, a somewhat calmer and sedate form of the variety show-game-show "prosperity gospel" come on, appealing to the same moral failures and weaknesses with an added silk screen of religious imagery on top.

The freedom of libertarianism is freedom for those who have money and power at the expense of not only the freedom of those they exploit and destroy, but their very lives,too.  And our system does not make that distinction between that kind of freedom and that which leads to equality and democracy on anything like an effective basis. The laws, the Constitution, the legal system, the legal profession, the articulation of "freedom, liberty and rights" in the media mostly favor that libertarian view of those things when those two meanings of each of those words mean exactly different things.  Either those mean limited freedom so as to produce a better life for everyone or they mean complete freedom limited to those who have power and money and misery for everyone else. 

And most of all, the biggest chumps of the whole thing are the college credentialed ersatz left that they can depend on to champion their "right" their "freedom" their "liberty" to keep on doing that even in the face of what it has gotten us in the last forty years and right on down through the disastrous at-least-for-now worst of that in Trump.  If the white "evangelicals" are chumps who sell out their claimed faith for it, the "civil libertarians" the "freedom of speech-press" lovers of liberty - SEEING ITS DISASTER IN THE WORST IN THE WORLD COVID-19 PANDEMIC RESPONSE IN THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD - can't see that they as much as FOX or Sinclair, Facebook and Twitter, Murdoch and Putin brought us here.  Not least of which those lefties in the media who live off of advertising pandering to our strongest weaknesses and worst inclinations which is the real freedom that the media wants to protect.  They are as invested in it as the Trumps and others who hope to appeal to the worst in us to win just as they have been doing since the colonial period.  

John Lewis Should Be Even More Missed

John Lewis passing on happened the same day I was told that my last friend who had vivid memories of before the Great Depression had died.   It never seems to become routine, to suddenly have a world with people whose lives we are used to expecting be entirely missing them.   Waking up this morning to a world in which I know that my friend and I will never talk together again was like waking up into a much different world. We seldom let a week go by without talking to each other in person and on the phone for almost half of my life. Now that's not going to happen anymore.

And that thought led to thinking that the same is true in a world without someone like John Lewis. 

John Lewis was and is someone who should have been even more mourned because he should have been a far more familiar figure to far more people.  Instead he was semi-disappeared by the white-operated media in plain sight.

That kind of human moral witness  and courage and persistence in the face of setbacks that John Lewis not only showed but lived has not been in abundant supply in those put on TV chat shows.   I would guess that John Lewis was not called upon even one in a hundred times to go on the Sunday morning talk shows as compared to Lindsay Graham, Susan Collins or others whose lives were dedicated to the opposite of what John Lewis's live was given to.   I will guarantee you that people and shows that will lavish temporary praise on the memory of John Lewis had his absolute opposite,Donald Trump on far more often to spew his vulgar, racist mendacity than they ever had the great example of morality with the slight speech impediment on. I mention that as an example of the things that disqualify even the most important voices from being heard, especially when it's someone like John Lewis.  I would bet that most of the more active racists like Jeff Sessions got more invitations to spout their poison on the very same shows that will, today, maybe tomorrow recite hypocritical pieties on his name. In life the American media is in the habit of shutting down such voices just like Mitch McConnell shut down Elizabeth Warren reading the words of Coretta Scott King.  I don't think that American TV will ever be much more than a venue that does that,  not while it's a business.  

I don't doubt that there are those like John Lewis in the Black Lives Matter protests, the anti-fascist protests, the protests against police crime but I doubt we're going to be made aware of them and so they will not have the same impact that John Lewis did.   If the talk shows this morning and the next few days wanted to back up their empty praise for him, they would have those people on to do it by renewal of the campaign for what he spent his life doing.  Anything else is just talk. Cheap talk.