Getting To The Root Of Little Bobby's Snake Oil Show

IT WOULD BE good to know just what it is that fed RFK jr's superstitious notion of genetics that leads him to believe that precision bio-weapons that successfully target a small, very diverse, certainly mostly imaginary ethnic group or, even more stupidly, be reliably designed to not harm others, is a real thing.  

I heard Lawrence O'Donnell's claim that Little Bobby is entirely lacking in a scientific education and I'm quite prepared to believe it.  Though having taken advanced courses in biology at college at about the same time he would have, much of what we were taught on that particular topic has now become what is best considered quaintly old fashioned and anything from somewhat to entirely untrue.  Of course, when when maintained as a belief such college-credentialed lore is best considered to be superstition. Which was the basis of my comparing it to flat-earth silliness, what one snarker objected to.   But even back in the late 60s and early 70s, at least in my land-grant education,  were taught that the concept of race and ethnicity in human beings was not borne out in what genetics showed about similarities within such artificial groupings and between People assigned to different racial groups.  Dr. Theodosius  Dobzhansky's findings were hardly new, even then. In my casual reading of science, that is one of the things taught us that has stood up quite well in the revolutionary changes in actual science while the neo-Darwinian fundamentalism that is exhibited by RFJ jr.'s use of such superstition among the college-credentialed has not stood up as well.

I say that knowing that much more than anything taught in an accredited high school or university or the current consensus of scientists working in the field, total nonsense spewed in science-fiction, in popular books, in movies and the simplistic, often distorted reporting on science is probably what most of Kennedy's biological education is based in and snake oil show is informed by.  And also what his suckers' conception of it is made of.  Anyone who pretends that that junk which is actually what replaces actual education for most People is innocuous is irresponsible and stupid.  You can make similar statements about such popular replacements for rigorous history based on primary documentation and other areas of such common received "knowledge" carrying similar dangers.

His now infamous declaration about racially targeted Chinese and US bio-weaponeers designing such intentionally deadly on the one hand and innocuous, to others,  viral diseases was an appeal by a self-aggrandizing dolt hoping it would find fertile ground in the ignorance of those as or even stupider than he is.

In what Ben Franklin noted was the last resort of education, we can be certain that they are resistant to learning even from hard experience.  As Josh Marshall pointed out, if there's one thing even college-credentialed idiots might have picked up in the Covid-19 pandemic was that viruses in the wild change mighty fast and there's no way for even real scientists to be able to predict what those changes will be like.  While politicians and generals might ignore that hard truth, I doubt even the most degenerate of scientists working in that area can now ignore that hard reality.  Though other scientists will take money or attention to pretend otherwise on FOX Lies or Lies Max or on so many Youtube Channels and other social-disease media.

Another thing they might have picked up on in the school of hard knocks is that the wealth, access to nutrition, an ability to take cover so as not to be infected instead of working unprotected AND TREATMENT WITHIN THE MEDICAL INDUSTRY that in the United States and virtually everywhere is often based on white supremacy, on racism, economic inequality and other engines of inequality can drive those lower in societies to take the brunt of any such pandemic disease.  That is as true for infectious diseases as it is for heart disease, diseases related to industrial and other pollution, etc.  

I don't think it is merely gratuitous to point out that considering him showing off his newly muscular elderly physique leads some (myself included) to suspect that Little Bobby is juicing, it's hilarious that he passes himself off as an expert in health care issues.  Only I suspect he's probably in it for what others take Viagra for, he may well take both.  I've come to distrust serial adulterers, they live a personal life of self-interest and lies and such People should be suspected of carrying those habits into the public sphere.

The world of sons of admirable Democrats who use their name to join the enemy is not new. One of Franklin Roosevelt's sons did that, too, often making common cause with Republicans who detested his father's work.  Like him, RFK jr. is an affluent, attention seeking huckster who makes his appeal to others of his class, middle and upper-middle class People, mostly white and college-credentialed, mostly Western European, mostly not Jewish or Chinese so he will use prejudices he will expect to find among such People while avoiding things that will offend them.  So he won't bring up that the differences in outcomes from the Covid-19 pandemic among People of unprivileged racial identities is more knowably attributed to discrimination, social and especially economic disadvantage and a margin of racism within those who adminster the medical system, insurance companies and hospital and clinic owning corporations, most potently in our system.  He certainly isn't going to stress that the disaster of profit medicine in the United States which, apart from the pandemic had long given Americans among the lowest life expectancies among advanced countries, AND THE CHAMPION WORLD-CLASS SUCKERS WHO HAVE BEEN SUCKERED INTO PAYING THE MOST FOR THAT ABYSMAL OUTCOME.  The racial and ethnic disparities in life expectancy and health care outcome far predated the pandemic, it is best correlated with the lower life expectancy and health care outcomes of others who are economically and socially discriminated against even those of us whose perceived race doesn't have provide a biological reason for that difference.

I think to a large extent the stupid stuff that RFK jr. peddles is a product of the ubiquitous "public understanding of science" that includes a disastrously simplistically stupid and cartoonish notion of geneticism derived from even long ago superseded science. And that's largely true among such college-credentialed People who run the media and write for publication, some of them among the biggest names in what's officially taken as the public understanding of science.  In the beginning of that lecture by Dr. James Shapiro I keep encouraging People to listen to he said:

What I want to do is try and recapitulate what we've learned within the last 60 years about genetic change and how it fits in with evolution. And there have been lots of really very important discoveries but if you look in the press or you listen to public discussions of evolution or even if you watch debates as I did one between Lynn Margulis and Richard Dawkins, it's as if the 60 years of molecular biology has never happened and we haven't learned anything.

I could also mention how in the Youtube about the fad of string theory, it was stated that the public is always at least ten years behind the times in things like particle physics, only I think that's a vast underestimate about the length of the lag.  Never underestimate the force that science fiction has to create what even allegedly educated people believe about science.    

But when it's something as charged and dangerous as the public conception of genetics and, especially, when combined with scientific racism, that educated ignorance  enormously dangerous.  The entirety of Nazi genocide, other racial genocides including American biological genocide, racist laws and policies, and the many tens and scores of millions who die because of that such superstition is mighty dangerous and proven to be deadly.  And that's not fixed simply by making offical laws against it.  The many who die from not legal but social, group and mob action, implicate both the over-sold official science and the generally badly understood public understanding of that science in a charge of mass murder.  Lynching was illegal in every state that it happened in, all along but the law didn't stop it nor punish the guilty.   

The current rise in scientific racism and neo-eugenics is a direct consequence of the popularization of that old-line neo-Darwinist lore through Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in the period when such as RFK jr. and those in his audience grew up. There were warnings from scientists that what has resulted was going to be the result of adopting that as reliable science.  Its damage to the weakly held post-WWII ideas of egalitarian democracy have been obvious and brutal, the most overt form of it deriving from such stuff as The Bell Curve and neo-Darwinian economics.  As Marshall said, Kennedy's anti-vaxx cult is only one aspect of the higher ignorance.

That boobs like RFK jr. use that for his advantage is, as Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out through using RFK jr's own words, a Trumpian move should lead scientists, teachers of science and, most dangerous of all, those who push a dangerous and inadequate understanding of what science can show and do to take far more care in what they say about science. And as important as being accurate about what science can be relied on, they have to stress what science can't reliably reveal.  For a start the organs of official science could use more rigor in choosing what claims to publish, so-called peer review is as broken as anything in the process.  It should never be forgotten that the anti-vaxx cult got its biggest push forward when that most august of medical journals, The Lancet, published a disastrously fraudulent science paper that it had to retract fairly fast.  Like all journals, it is in the business of selling itself and that is leading to all kinds of fraudulent or merely bad science to get published by them. Reviewers have to be required to practice far more rigor in their so-called review or they should stop pretending that's what it is.

And it should make us all worried.  But we shouldn't only worry, we have to try to overcome it.  I will point out that when People make idiotic and stupid claims of racial superiority as that fathead Bret Stephens did in the New York Times a while back, they stupidly and unintentionally feed the same thing.  

Except in a very few inherited genetic diseases and hardly to be depended on tendencies toward resistance in some hap-haphazardly imagined, perhaps imaginary  racial groups, human beings of all groups are so closely related that the idea that it would be possible to manipulate viruses to target one group expecting that once released its rapidly mutating descendants wouldn't overcome any resistance, is sheer superstition. I doubt "Ashkenazi  Jews" as a group are notably biologically different in any important way from other European groups with whom they have had children for millennia.  The popular conception of thousands of years of genetic isolation is probably no more valid than it is for any other imaginary ethnic or racial grouping.   As an aside, I found this video about when Judaism started quite fascinating.   That some scientists employed by the Russian or Chinese or American military and weapons industry might share in that superstition or merely work it for their own professional flourishing wouldn't surprise me much, a lot of them are probably as far behind the scientific times as RFK jr, but I think it's far less likely that they would be as stupid as RFJ jr and the suckers he ropes in among the college-credentialed middle-class, upper-middle class and rich idiots of the English Speaking Peoples.

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Why I Am Entirely Over The Kennedy Mystique

Little Bobby's father, Robert F. Kennedy in 1967 and 68 jumped into the engine of the jerks' Curtis Gans and Al Lowenstein's "Dump Johnson" train.  In doing so he pushed off the first one to drive it, Eugene McCarthy* and helped to get Richard Nixon elected.  When the elite fascist William F. Buckley was one of those who eulogized Lowenstein at his funeral, it didn't suprise me much, he did so much for Republicans, helping elect the first of the uniformly terrible Republicans after Eisenhower, now Republican-fascist presidents. The ones who gave us the Court we've got now.

In 1980, Ted Kennedy ran for the nomination against Jimmy Carter and helped Ronald Reagan get the presidency.  I will admit that after Ted lost that one he seemed to lose the Kennedy obsession with running for president and became a much better Senator.  His son, after a rather mixed and short stint in the House seems to have given up politics, too.  

Patrick Kennedy, after a short and not that illustrious term in the House of Representatives decided to follow in the family tradition of trading on his last name to run against the far more accomplished Ed Markey for Senate.  Luckily Massachusetts voters seem to have tired of the Kennedy mystique probably through having been over-exposed to the fever or just through seeing its tragic effects close-up over the years.  

Now RFK jr, stupidest and most dangerous of all, wants to promote himself in a stunt candidacy of the kind Trump originally ran as a PR campaign.  I am sure RFK jr is doing it for the same reasons, to enhance his visibility and, no doubt, sales potential of his snake oil. In doing that he is ready to risk putting Trump in office, again, and he has no shame in how he'll do it.  That the jerk is doing what Jill Stein and the Republican-spoiler Green Party cult did in 2016 and, like them, aligning himself with Putin, repeating his lies is all any informed American should need to know to reject him.

More generally America should give up the Kennedy cult, Democrats certainly should.  I don't know how history would have played out if Lyndon Johnson or someone else had had the Democratic nomination in 1960, he may have lost the race or won and in that case even speculating at what would have happened is futile.  If that had happened JFK may have stayed in the Senate, matured and become a far better president if he ran in 1972 or 1980 or even 1996 and become the kind of president that Joe Biden has turned out to be. All of that youth and freshness bullshit may never have happened. I do know that Johnson, benefiting from long years in the Senate was a far more effective president than JFK was or likely would have been if he hadn't been murdered in Dallas, Texas.  JFK's administration had its best years after Johnson became president, which pissed off the Kennedy faction Harvard boys, no end.  Bobby's run was due in no small part to that.  It should never be forgotten that the Vietnam war which was used by RFK to topple Johnson was something Johnson inherited from the Kennedy boys and their boys.  I doubt there was ever a more determined anti-communist president than JFK or as militaristic a one since the 19th century.  And it should never be forgotten that RFK got his start in Washington with Joe McCarthy, his legacy was hardly pure and pristine.   

One thing that Democrats should have learned from the past seventy years is that having a long time Washington hand like Johnson or Biden as president is entirely more likely to make important and positive change than the inexperienced "NEW!" "YOUNG!" "FRESH!" etc. face with no experience has been. The comparison in effectiveness of Biden's first two years to those of the Washington outsiders, Carter, Clinton or the DC neophyte Obama, even when they had a more progressive Democratic Congress, tells it all.  A Republican can succeed in what they want to do with a total idiot like Trump or Bush II in the presidency.  You can quickly drive a country into ruin to enhance the wealth of the wealthy with a corrupt neophyte like Bush II or Trump because our system AND EVEN MORE SO OUR MEDIA is geared to do that.  But it takes a seasoned, tested, wise and experienced Democrat to do the opposite.

We should destroy the old script of Camelot (the West Wing was melodramatic fiction with badly written and recorded dialogue) and the related ad industry hype that was as much a part of the Kennedy mystique as anything.  The aspirations of egalitarian democracy aren't anything new, they aren't flashy or packaged for easy sale to superficial and stupid People, they go back to the start of our history.  They are not old because they've never been implemented yet, they are as old as the Exodus story and the Golden Rule, as new as the next performance of a charitable act.  Equality and fairness never get old.  That's what egalitarian democracy is made of.

Note: The relative who I was helping to take care of died, I will probably pick up in posting again soon.  

* What is it about Wisconsin Senators?  

About "Modernism"

"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
 

APPARENTLY MY most persistent troll has come out of retirement though I didn't put a No Help Wanted sign up.  He objects to my criticism of the ideology of modernism attributing to me the idiocy of what under Republican-fascism passes as intellectualism as they rail against what they might call "modernism." I will note that that world of what I've called untellecutualism has raised up everything from Little Benny Shapiro to the absurd and pompous Victor Davis Hanson (or "VD" as I used to call him back when he got more attention).  That is something that also holds Ted Cruz as a brilliant debater and Thomas Sowell as a great scholar.  And anyone who could pretend to mistake what I criticize as the same as what they do has more in common with them than I do.

It is one of the dumbest things about most peoples' concept of political identity that they think Republican-fascism and what is called "modernism" are necessarily at polar extremes of some graph of positions in politics.  That is entirely wrong.  What is the polar opposite of Republican-fascism is to do unto others what you would have them do to you, to love others as you love yourself, to tell the truth even if you don't want what comes of that and to do to the least among us what you would do for God.  Those have nothing to do with either Republican-fascism or modernism, those truths are beyond time and are the very foundation of the only genuine alternative to materialist depravity there is, no modernism which does not have those as its foundation will ever be a real alternative to some kind of oppressive, deadly, gangster-ruled hell.  Those are what every period of history either takes as the basis of human behavior and society or it will be just another period of human depravity, whether it hankers for the inadequate and superseded past or some present and pretend future based on some other guarantee of depravity.  

The denial of religion, a human administered thing and so guaranteed to be imperfect, is among the stupidest tactics of the would be alternative to it because there is no other sufficiently strong force to oppose gangsterism, whether fascist or Nazi or Marxist or capitalist, than the prophesy that articulates that genuine truth.  The would-be materialist alternatives to that inevitably devolve into the same if not worse gangsterism under a different label, as the history of one such phony alternative, Marxism, without but especially with power proves.  So does the history of anarchism, one of the daffiest ideological positions ever adopted by those who have some repute among the so-called intelligentsia.  Anarchism is a guarantee that gangsters and thugs and will rule because there is no alternative power which will prevent that.  I remember Karl Hess who was a popular voice for anarchism in the 1970s and 80s who had once been Barry Goldwater's speech writer.  As I recall he claimed to have coined Goldwater's statement about extremism in the defense of liberty, during his flagrantly racist 1964 campaign profiting from the resentment of white racists for Black People gaining their freedom and rights, in case you're wondering what the idiot Margery Taylor Green was ignorantly emitting the other day, Goldwater's politics was all about racism.  Last I heard of the Goldwater anarchist, he was one of the early voices advocating no gun regulations, an even stronger evidence that anarchism benefits gangsters in every way.

But that brings up the thorny problem of what anyone means when they use the word "modernism" as I did.  

What set off the Troll Signal was  me saying this:

And I'll also point out that James Shaprio's masterful management of including both hard science and far more philosophical handling of the consequences of our own cognitive equipment and language  as it must mitigate what we find out and how we find that out which is certainly not good news for the old-fashioned automatic materialist causative ideology which is dominant in science and the general culture of 20th century style modernism.  

I did specifically intend to place the style of modernism put into difficulty by James Shapiro's brilliant EVIDENCE BASED SCIENCE in the last century, perhaps I should have noted that his most well known work is titled Evolution: A View From The 21st Century. That modernism as I use the term has been tied to materialism from the start.  Both in Indian Carvarka ideology and Greco-Roman atomism, materialism has been tied to atheism and a belief that life is merely an aggregation of particles in a particular, transient and ephemeral form.  Enjoyment of sensual pleasure as you can have that is an inevitable conclusion from that nihilistic idea, so elite and vulgar materialism are pretty much the same thing.  While morality is probably the most significant victim of materialism, truth and reason hardly can escape deadly damage from it, as well.   

That with its more or lesser consequences has been adopted and adapted from quite early in the history of science though it was certainly something that predated that in the renaissance as such writers as Lucretius were rediscovered and published, inspiring, among others, that advocate of strong-man rule, Machiavelli.  It was something that was a minor riple in the fabric of kulcha a while back as that boob Stephen Greenblat re-popularized it for a while through his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.  For an interesting critical review of it from a better scholar, read this.   Greenblatt's alleged scholarship should always be read as fiction, though I won't get into that again just now.

More importantly, it became an increasing part of the culture of scientism and, as the profitability and utility of science (and even more so its application in technology) grew, and so its status in the stratification of repute, in academia and the wider world, reaching its current nadir in the 20th and 21st centuries in the explosion of decadence in popular and would-be elite culture, in academia, in the pseudo-sciences and sciences, and even in philosophy which apparently now has room for scholars who make their living by debunking consciousness, on which any wisdom, what puts the "soph" in philosophy, depends.  That is what a superficial and stupid concept of science adopted as an all-controlling world view can do, produce an academic culture in which what universities and colleges and, in fact, science exist for and are bothered with, employ eliminative positivists to get rid of God by dismissing the existence and so significance of consciousness and the paying suckers buy it in the name of science or reason or logic or even wisdom.  

And it's especially popular among the mid-brow wise guys and folky poseurs and would-be tough guy gangsters who pretty much have the same motives for that as anyone, a. cynicism is easy and irresponsible and groovy, b. it gets you acceptance in some clique you want to be in with, c. it's a quick and easy substitute for research and hard thought.  I should add, d. making naughty sex more available.

And I did specify that it was 20th century modernism that was the focus of my comment.Hard as it is for my critic and, perhaps me, to believe it, the world of our childhood, youth and middle-age has been over for almost a quarter of a century.  That modernism of materialist-atheist-scientism at its higher rent end was something different from even other modernisms that co-existed and sometimes conflicted with it, some of them having little to do with MAS other than that it was the general culture among many, quite likely most of those who had been to college, graduated from high school or those who watched movies, TV, pop-music or, if they still did something like that, read magazines and books written during that time.  

On the one hand there is the elite modernism of academia, on the other end was the vulgar modernism which has produced both the already past retirement age "new left" and the Republican-fascist left, all of them sharing the same materialism, demotion of rigorous striving for the truth and a degraded sense of morality. Trump is roughly the same age as my troll, after all.

As to things called "modern" that means a lot of things.  Some of them are quite harmless, some of them death dealing. I think the term "modernist" and "modernism" as applied to art is probably wrongheaded except in those cases where the adoption of the pose of modernism intentionally adopted as self-conscious tactic of those who generally aren't that good at art.  

I have a liking for looking at Eames furniture, though I find sitting in the knockoff chairs copied from it rather uncomfortable. The rickety old wooden folding chairs I got when they shut down a church here are a lot better.  I like much of the substantial art produced after WWII (and much from the 30s) and even some of the content free abstract art. I have a good deal of affection for Marc Rothko and Robert Motherwell, though I like the anti-modernist Jack Levine far better (see the masthead above, he said it a lot better and shorter).  I have to admit, most of the splashiest recent art fails to move me in anything but revulsion for its commercialism, art made to be bought by phony kulcha vulchas, who only hope they get some frisson of attention before they hope they can unload it at a profit.  And for its pretension.  

When I was on a committee to plan a public building about thirty years ago I was outvoted as the only one who favored a more modern style architecture over "traditional" styles.  Though lots of architecture from big name architects considered modern is a tedious and stupidly expensive waste of materials and space.  That can include the buildings in which it is displayed.  Modern architecture has gone from good to bad to totally decadent Frank Lloyd Wright's roofs are notorious for leaking.  Look also at what I wrote about the absurd and similarly disastrous Strata Center at the Vatican of science and, yes, technology, MIT. I see it as impeaching its status as such that such an architectural plan could get to the building stage there.  One house carpenter I know who saw pictures of it said anyone who would build that many wacky roof-lines in New England, some of which look as if they would shed onto other building surfaces, clearly doesn't know the first thing about roofs, which are supposed to keep rain and snow out of the building.  And don't get me started on what the dictator of Saudi Arabia is paying to get built, something that the Ceausescud would have loved to do and probably worse.

Though I think music is quite a different thing from the object producing and so profitable arts, the "M" word is used for it, too.   I think other than self-conscious "modernism" most of what gets called "modern music" is inaptly called that.  I have been a dedicated listener to, player of and producer of "modern music" from before I was born and during my lifetime and wish I had had the training to participate in the jazz of my time, all of that from the period after the PBS high priest of culture, Ken Burns and his chosen reactionary authorities, tacitly declared jazz to be over.  There is nothing more current than real jazz which as the great Betty Carter noted has to be "new every day."  

In my criticism of science I've certainly never rejected science like the boob in the link thrown at me.  I've got so much respect for the real accomplishments of science that a lot of my criticism is of science which rejects the necessity of observation and so measurement OF WHAT IS OBSERVED, rigorous analysis of that and that what has been reported can either be replicated by experiment or confirmed in observation by independent scientists. Much of my criticism of science is exactly of them doing it about things that either can now be observed or which certainly never will be observed.  If you aren't well read on the critique of science by other scientists and those who report on things like the replicability crisis, not only in the squishy pseudo-science such as psychology and, God help us, ethology but, also, in what are supposed to be harder sciences.  If you aren't aware of that going on largely through the lapses in what is supposed to be scientific method, you can't have enough respect for science to read what's going on in it, as I'm sure my troll doesn't.  And I don't mean watching NOVA* or, God help us, again, the alleged science programming on commercial cable stations.

The modernism I criticize is not science, it's ideology. That ideology has, in fact, been a big part of the decay of science from quite early in its existence, starting as far back as the early 17th century.  If I had the time I would link to a post I did in which Francis Bacon gave some warnings about keeping things like ideology out of science, so it's clear that even one of the founders of modern science saw the potential of that happening and that it could lead things astray.  

In fact, they have gotten seriously astray in many areas of science, especially in those branches of genuine science that rely dangerously on theory without possibility of observation, without which you can't even get to the second stage of quantitative analysis of NATURE. That would be the opposite, of using math as a permanent replacement for observation, to see if the measurements of that agree with the predictions.  That includes ALL of the "social sciences" that claim to report on minds, singly or collectively and most of what is claimed about the evolution of species in the forever lost past.  And also the spectacle of what happens when highly mathematically trained physicists and cosmologists want to go past where observation is possible.  Which can make you world famous in ways that scientists who do, you know, science, seldom are.  Listen to that very brilliant critique of string theory I posted a while back (though don't watch the screen with its annoying and distracting video game) and you'll hear some of the biggest names of recent popular science mentioned.  One was Brian Greene's whose series on string theory on NOVA was about the last time I ever watched that show because it seemed to be promoting decadent ideology and not presenting science anymore.**   

I've done many other criticisms of 20th century modernism here, one of the longest and strongest was about the close relationship of cultural modernists to fascism, Nazism, Marxism and other forms of anti-democratic government. I have never been able to listen to Stravinsky's (Schoenberg called him "Kleine Modernsky") music in the same way after reading his disgusting admiration for Mussolini's fascism in the early 1930s, thought I never really did like most of his "neo-classical" period stuff.  Neo-classicism has too often been too close a relationship with fascist and Nazi ideology. Thought I like much of the poetry and some of the other literature that falls within "modernism," as a literary movement I think it's mostly decadent.  I never felt any admiration for the putrid Gertrude Stein who was an admirer of Hitler and a collaborator with the Nazi-puppet Vichey regime. Though even before I knew that, having tried to read her, it's as artistically and intellectually substantial as throwing confetti in the air and about as fun. I have linked some science to that as it is obvious to anyone who wants to check the record that especially Nazism is largely a creation of the theory of natural selection mixed with modern-period academic assertions about linguistic, national and cultural "purity" and putting those in another scheme of economic valuation.  As any close student of Darwin will know, his theory of natural selection does much the same purportedly on the basis of science.   

Marxism is both a pseudo-scientific ideology and, as became obvious during, especially, the Stalin regime, a powerful distorter of science.  The number of scientists murdered by Marxists and such other, earlier, expressions of modernism as the French Revolution dwarfs those who were allegedly oppressed by the Church which is the stuff of so much legend, movie and theater crap and pop-historical-scientific bullshit.  Of course Nazism played a double game, rejecting especially modern physics in public due to its creation being due to Jewish scientists such as Einstein while using it to try to build an atomic weapon first.  No regime has ever in my knowledge rejected science when it was in the business of weaponeering.  Not even the worst regimes, from Hitler to the Kim regime in North Korea, has lacked scientific collaboration and collaborators.  

That Republican-fascism is doing the same in suppressing genuine science around climate change, which is unprofitable to the oil, gas, other polluting industries is no great shock as they wallow in the same amorality that science is given license to practice.  Which I've called probably the most important science ever done.  There are a number of those credentialed as scientists who are whoring for the side that pays the best, that's been an intrinsic part of science from its earliest figures, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, and even Newton ended up that way, though I don't know how much his science was involved with his term in the Exchequer.

The romantic view of science is a particularly dangerous feature of modernism as is the notion that science is to be held immune from criticism.  Given that it is one of the pretenses at worst and best features of science as it's supposed to be done that criticism is an intrinsic part of it, anyone who holds that science is not to be held up to criticism proves they have little to no regard for actual science.  Though there are certainly professional scientists who hold that, many of them while they attack scientists who don't share even extra-scientific ideologies with them.

* As a past weekly watcher of NOVA and a listener to such things as the CBC's science program Quirks and Quarks, those have really let us down in so many ways.  A good part of my growing criticism of science was due to what I read scientists online claiming and proclaiming and slamming on the old Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell financed ScienceBlogs and associated online babble by their club-mates such as Jerry Coyne.  That alone convinced me that there was a lot of philosophical idiocy and destructive ideology within American science.   

** I did watch one with my brother at his house, I think it was last year, about the fossil evidence from likely the very day of the meteor impact that ended the Cenozoic era.  It was fascinating, I hope that they're doing more of that instead of fame fucking fashionable physicists, now, though I ain't buying another TV.  One of my brothers-in-law encouraged me to for the good things on TV but I said if he poured a bucket of quarters into a cesspool I wouldn't wade trough it to find them.  I'd rather listen to a lecture five times, you waste less time that way. 

Update:  Having spent several hours at the hospital last night and being exposed to TV the whole time,  I told my surviving siblings that if I'm ever bad enough to have to go to the hospital, I want them to shoot me.

 I want to know why I've never heard anyone but me call him Ronnie Go-Go Boots DeSantis.

Update:   Not funny?  The pictures of him in white go-go boots is funnier than anything John Waters put Divine in because it's a real politician making himself look extremely funny.  

I don't guess you found Trump in tennis shorts to be especially funny, either.

 

Andrew Hill - Erato

 

Andrew Hill, piano, composer

Richard Davis - bass

Joe Chambers - drums 

"There is no two-word summary for the processes that go on in evolution" - Hate Mail

MY FAMILY affairs are at a critical point right now so this is being typed hastily and with transcription done on the fly.  The transcription is taken from the masterful lecture of James Shaprio posted here recently, What DNA Teaches About Evolution, given as the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture 2012-13.  I would love to transcribe the whole thing and go over it, it is one of the best lectures on these topics I've ever listened to, finding more honesty and nuance than most lecturers present.

In the unusually well structured lecture, after a short exposition about the two formerly known types of cells, the eukaryotic cells, cells with a well-defined nucleolus within a membrane, such as our bodies and amoebas are made of and prokaryotic cells without a well defined nucleus and that there is also the archaea cell type discovered about half a century ago.  Dr. James Shapiro said:

Carl (Woese) set out to examine relationships (among cells) by looking at the ribosomal RNA.  And when he did he discovered, at the end of the 1970s, less than forty years ago, was that there are not two kinds of cells, there are actually three kinds of cells.  They found that bacteria which produce methane and live in certain extreme environments have ribosomes that are as different from those of (prokaryotic) bacteria and eukaryotes as bacteria and eukaryotes are from each other. So less than forty years ago we found out that our view of life was inadequate and there are actually three kinds of cells that make up life.  And that discovery has a lot of very important implications.  Among them is the implication that we really don't know what the early history of life was like. There might have been dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands of different kinds of cells which went extinct before they could leave any record that we can discern in fossils and in rocks today. And we just don't know how many types of cells there were and whether there was one single type of cell at the very beginning, which is what many people believe, or, in fact, there were multiple cell types. 

But this was a very important discovery and this put the study of relationships between organisms on a very firm molecular, empirical basis and it was hard to argue with this and identify organisms by extracting their RNA and looking at them. People use this today to go out and do what is called "meta-genomics,"  that is you just take a sample from the environment, this has been done in the oceans, in soils, on the human body, in different places on the human body, in our intestines, recently in the upper atmosphere and just take all of the DNA and ask what kinds of ribosomal DNAs are there. And in this way we can describe the organisms that are present even though they haven't been cultured in a particular environment.  And we've learned a lot about that, a lot that is relevant to our own health because we've learned a lot about the microorganisms that live with us and affect our health.  But one of the things we've learned that's very important and very humbling is that we've cultured in the laboratory about one percent of all the organisms that are present in nature. So, most of life is there, we can detect it but it's relatively unknown to us and we've got to do a lot of work to learn more about it.

I will point out to you what he says about very early life on Earth not being known to us BECAUSE THERE IS NO PHYSICAL EVIDENCE ON WHICH TO BASE THAT KNOWLEDGE. He didn't say it but if there was one kind of cell near the beginning of life as might be reasonable to surmise, it could have been of such a different type that we could never know what it was like.  As our ancient mammal and pre-mammal ancestors from much more recent epochs, so many of which are extinct as a species and of which we have no trace, so may that cell type. If there was one original organism from which all life now is evolved, that evolution would have included into those different cell types.  All current cells which these types are known from are almost certainly a product of an evolution far longer and far less in evidence. Modern single and multi-cellular animals are as evolved as we are, the relationship of their physiology to the earliest life on Earth is unknowable.

Considering that unknowable early life would have to be what was the basis of all later life which is available to us to study in fossils - though no where near even a hundredth of one-percent of the total of life before the rise of modern biology is actually known to us.  If not even one-percent of life on Earth now, when it is available for study, is known to science today, then that would be true for the entire period of life on Earth going back more than three billion years ago, so what is not known as opposed to what is known is an enormous though unknowable multiple of what is known today.  The farther back you go, the less fossil and other evidence is likely to have survived, very possibly that's true also of the resolvable genetic information these scientists can interpret to tell us what we can't see directly.

The idea that there is possibly even a general understanding of the evolution of life on Earth in hand is as absurd as the rantings of that wacky online flat-Earther, the parodying of whom I posted last week.  Wrong as she is, though, at least she is talking out of her own limited, uninformed and badly reasoned observation.  Which is evidence of a sort. Though you can certainly pretend evidence of the nature of early life is in hand and teach science at any modern university, today, the fact is it isn't.  Anyone who believes that natural selection is the sole mechanism of the evolution of species or even an important one does that without admitting that's what they're doing.  As James Shapiro also said, "It's not reducible to simple formulas.  There is no two-word summary for the processes that go on in evolution. We can't use just a phrase and say we've explained such an immense and important set of events that have occurred over such a long period of time."   I'm sure he knew that the most well known of those possible two-word phrases, "natural selection" would have come to many minds, though "genetic-drift," "Lamarckian evolution" "Mendelian genetics" or other such explanations of evolution would certainly have to be included in insufficient explanatory ideas.

I hope someday to get around to transcribing the subsequent parts of his lecture, especially the next section about the work of those like Lynn Margulis who figured out that eukaryotic cells are evolved from symbiotic combinations of previous independent cell types, one of the most important refutations (as I prefer to think of it) or modifications of the old neo-Darwinian synthesis.  The complexities of that certainly don't fit very well in to that just-so tale as I learned it in biology classes in high school and in college.

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I can't not talk about that without going through one of the questions and the brilliant answer given to a typical materialist ideological qualm about consciousness where only automatic, deterministic chemistry is supposed to operate. I will note, first that during just that section a drastic change in the sound quality of the video happened which makes coming up with a near verbatim transcript impossible with my equipment.  And I'll also point out that James Shaprio's masterful management of including both hard science and far more philosophical handling of the consequences of our own cognitive equipment and language  as it must mitigate what we find out and how we find that out which is certainly not good news for the old-fashioned automatic materialist causative ideology which is dominant in science and the general culture of 20th century style modernism.  I think James Shapiro must be one of the most brilliant and honest scientists I've ever encountered.

Questioner: About halfway through your lecture, where the use of the term "cells know"?

James Shapiro:  Well, I was quoting Barbara McClintock but. . .

Questioner:  Ok, but just the term, you know, I guess I have trouble with the idea of a cell being so self-directed.  I mean, fundamentally, it's all bio-chemistry.  That they would know in a cognitive sort of way, because that's kind of like I understand it.

James Shapiro: Well, "cognitive" is the word I like to use and cells are always sensing what's going on inside of them and outside of them and responding to that sensory information and they do it pretty well. I mean cell division is a pretty complicated process, more complex than any human manufacturing enterprise. Millions, hundreds of millions, billions of events have to be coordinated sometimes very quickly. E coli replicates DNA two thousand base-pairs a second and makes less than one in a billion mistakes because it has sequential proof-reading mechanisms which are based on monitoring the DNA and picking up those errors and directing them. So this is a form of cognitive behavior and I know we're taught not to anthropomorphize, although, I do it all the time, it's the only way I can understand what my bacteria are experiencing.

I will break in here to point out a post I once did in response to reading a casual statement by the geneticist Richard Lewontin about the experience of bacteria, in which he asserted that for a bacteria Brownian motions were far more relevant and for their experience gravity is non-existent, which makes sense but my question was how can we know what bacteria experience? Though even as sophisticated a materialist as Lewontin had to anthropomorphize a bacterium so as to come up with an understanding of it, which, in fact, any scientist of any kind has to do when trying to explain any animal's behavior because they are the only ones who could explain anything about their experience, and they don't. Even if they could explain it, for us to understand it they would have to bridge the chasm from their scale of experience to ours for us to understand them.  Even with the self-reporting of other humans in a language we share with them, you have no possible way to check to see if they're accurate about their own experience or if they are misrepresenting it in some way.

It is one of the biggest lies of materialist-scientism that that kind of interpretation of nature as if it is conscious doesn't lie at the very base or at least in the background of everything scientists discover and report. It is impossible for us to filter how we think out of our thinking apart from some very crude, very general, very unevenly and unreliably applied rules of thumb to get rid of only some of the most obvious of sources of distorting bias.  It is, from a small to complete extent the way we comprehend even the most inanimate of objects. I think Shapiro's admission that he does that about even the enormously complex organisms that bacteria are is shockingly honest.  It also goes pretty close to the whole way to answer why such ideological scientists as Jerry Coyne and his gang go totally nuts over the science he articulates.  It is a violation of another of those ways that humans think, out of our ideological preferences.  Admitting that you inevitably think the way you do is denied by that ideology.

And I think what McClintock is trying to tell us is we have to realize both the cell is a sensory, a sentient entity and it's using that sentience for its own needs and requirements and functions.  And sometimes that involves changing its genetics, changing its DNA.  

Breaking in again I'll point out that given the enormous survival and successful reproductive power given to perception, understanding and acting in accord with those which is an intrinsic part of Darwinism, which are taken as basic to the conception of natural selection, it's remarkable how that claim, especially among such Darwinian fundamentalists as Coyne, Dawkins, and especially all true believers in "smart genes" it's astonishing how they are the first to claim that all of life other than human beings and maybe a few other "highly evolved" multicellular creatures, probably by a huge percent the largest number of species that have ever existed, are unconscious. 

Given the claim for the Darwinian efficacity of not only consciousness but also the necessity of "superior" intelligence in human terms in escaping being selected out of the future by nature, you have to wonder how they explain the persistence of organisms, single cell as well as multicellular ones, if they aren't not only conscious but highly cognitive.  How do they explain that for not only the large majority of the history of life on Earth that signal aspect of Darwinian selection was absent from the entire epoch of life on Earth, in fact, the extreme fundamentalists of that faith hold that it would have to be irrelevant to the evolution of almost every species of life that has ever existed on Earth.   Yet all of those species survived Darwin's mechanism of culling.

When you consider what James Shapiro said about the working of the cell being more complex than the most complex human manufacturing enterprise, it's a lot harder for a materialist, Darwinian fundamentalist to explain why we shouldn't interpret that as consciousness and cognition. It's certainly more difficult for the school of the most extreme Darwinism such as Daniel Dennett became, he attributed natural selection to aspects of the univere outside of living organisms, who also is an eliminative reductionist denying the reality of consciousness even to human beings.  I would like to know from him how something which isn't real could, in the classical exposition of natural selection, then be a factor relevant to the working of natural selection.  His Darwinism might find itself in the embarrassing situation of being a Darwinism with no use for Darwin's thinking.

But, there's a whole school of study, one of the pioneers is in Seattle at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Lee Hartwell who got the Nobel Prize I think about seven or eight years ago for studying control of how the cell cycle progresses and you may know about that. And the cell cycle, the eukaryotic cell cycle involves lots of different things that have to happen and they all have to happen in a coordinated way.  And the cell is monitoring how all of those things are happening. The operation of the cell is being monitored, it sends out signals that says "stop, don't go through cell division." That's how we finished our [unintelligible] of DNA.[unintelligible]  If a chromosome doesn't line up in the right way cell division cannot occur because a signal is sent out that prevents it.  These are checkpoints, so they're based upon sensory, internal sensory information, I'm not talking about metabolic regulation or something that involves external sensing or morphogenesis which involves getting signals from other cells. There is all of this information coming in from other cells and its very common language now to talk about a cell making this decision or that decision. Sometimes cells decide to undergo cell death.  And that's conditioned by what cells find in the environment. A tumor necrosis factor. . .

I will leave it to you to try to hear more of the impressive reasoning BASED ON PHYSICAL EVIDENCE and some very impressive science that leads one of the finest biologists of our time to say what he does. His point that "anthropomorphizing" is essential to coming to an understanding of what's going on within and among cells, either independent organisms such as bacteria or cells within multi-cellular organisms, to understand what these scientists see as cognitive and sensory activity within them is certainly as central to that science as the just-so stories that, in fact, ALL OF EVOLUTIONARY LORE IS FOUNDED ON far more directly that than the mathematical analysis of subatomic particles. As I recently pointed out the entire theory of natural selection is based on telling stories about not only single organisms we imagine in the lost past but stories about their parents and children for many, many generations.  Only what James Shapiro is narrating is based on exactly what the theory of natural selection will never have, actual close, careful, rigorous direct observation and measurement and analysis of actual organisms and cells which are available.

About Racism: First When It Isn't Then When It Is

IF GOVERNOR JANET MILLS of my state follows through and does what she proposes her explanation of her controversial veto of, LD 2004,  concerning the status in relation to the Federal Goverment of Native American Tribes in Maine, her veto will be proven to have been made in good faith.

In her statement about her veto she said,  "I want to focus on the specific problems and the specific Federal laws the Tribes may not be benefiting from, and work together with them and Maine’s Congressional Delegation, and make those laws apply where we think they make sense,"

The purpose of the bill was, as she put it, "ensuring the Wabanaki Nations can access benefits that are generally available to other Federally recognized Tribes."  While I agree with the intention of the legislation and was initially very angry that she vetoed it, if she sincerely tries to do what the bill intended while avoiding the legal tangles she said would come of it as written, that would be to the good of everyone.  The outcome of the landmark 1980 settlement with the Tribes in Maine does, in fact, make things somewhat different and more complicated in Maine than it would otherwise be.  Though we will have to see how this works out, too.

The comment I heard from another person angry about the veto attributed to her the racism against indigenous people which is shockingly present in much of Maine.  But that is contradicted by the other bills she did sign into law last week but which the media has not concentrated on nearly as much:

"I signed into law the historic Mi’kmaq Restoration Act to extend to the Mi’kmaq Nation the same rights and benefits enjoyed by other Wabanaki Nations in Maine. I signed into law the Maine Indian Child Welfare Act to preserve the rights of Indian families during custody and child welfare proceedings involving Indian children. And I signed into law An Act Regarding the Maine Indian Tribal State Commission to improve the functioning of the Commission at the request of the Tribes and legislative leadership."

The electronic media in Maine, including public radio and TV, is mostly controlled by partisan Republicans, so it's not surprising that they would try to discredit her with her constituents, though the Republicans they support would almost certainly never have signed the law she vetoed, either. I doubt under Republicans as they are today any of those laws would have been adopted.

I don't think attributing to her the often crude racism that I heard on the playground in Southern Maine when I was a kid is valid on that basis.  The points she made in her explanation of the veto are things that an experienced lawyer like her is would think of.  Those wouldn't occur to most non-lawyers, even those in the legislature who supported the bill as it was written.  As she explains herself, though, and if she really does want to do what the bill intended while avoiding the problems she anticipates, she will try to pass a bill as soon as possible which will do that.  

After suffering through the putrid two terms of the vile and flagrantly racist Paul LePage, the incompetent Jock McKernan, I've had so many instances to be grateful we had her as governor instead of the alternatives, especially during Covid, that I'm willing to see if she does or just tries to do what she committed herself to doing.  I am certain that now that she has said that's what she wants to do, that she will carry through, though its success depends on the others working toward that end, as well.

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Thinking about this in the wake of the Roberts Court's recent actions, especially the comment on the flagrant racism that is too common in Maine, remembering how shocked I was to hear not only university students at the University of Maine but, also, white collar professionals, particularly from Northern Maine sounding like the crude little brats I used to hear spouting racism on the playground when I was a kid, it got me thinking about the stereotype of "racist white trash," and how it stigmatizes poor white people as a group while letting off the worst racists who are affluent and who never use racist language, themselves.

Some of those who always have a clean shirt on and who would never use a racial invective are, in fact BY THEIR PROFESSIONAL ACTIONS the most damaging racists there are.

John Roberts and his Supreme Court Colleagues by destroying the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action have done more to harm more Black People, Native Americans, and members of other discriminated against minorities than all of the crude blue collar and near destitute racists I've ever heard in my lifetime combined.  And it should never be forgotten that not all of those who did that were Southerners like Roberts.  Some of the worst have been from the North East, Mid-West and West, though all of them on the Court had an Ivy League, prep-school education.  If they didn't start out as affluent and privileged, they certainly worked or pimped themselves to attain that status.  None of them started off as poor or destitute, they got their vicious racism from those with money, probably all or most of them had been to elite schools.  Much of the racism most vicious in its impact is as thoroughly genteel as can be.

I think Roberts, Alito, George H W Bush,* . . . certainly should be thought of as "rich white trash" or some other such construction.  Rich whites are a smaller group than poor whites and far more accepting of the racists among them so why shouldn't they all suffer that stigma?  They've certain escaped the stigma of "white trash" through being considered to be well spoken and educationally credentialed -it is worth wondering why anyone would consider a racist lie delivered in proper English as being "well spoken"** - and affluent and successful in their elite careers, though there are certainly those who have made that THE major focus of their professional lives.

Much of the media who have promoted racism, paving the way for the Roberts Court destruction of the legal progress against racism are as worth thinking of as "rich white trash" because the media, especially the entertainment division of it, is pervaded by racism.  Some of it is overt though much of it is somewhat covert.  The racist history of The New Republic has been commented on extensively though I would doubt there are many long standing media companies which don't have at least a significant record of racism, as well.  The news divisions of all of the networks certainly have questionable practices in their past and many in their present.  Though, of course, few can match the record of FOX New. . . no, as proven by their recent massive libel settlement they should forever more be called "FOX Lies," CNN and the past of even the far improved MSNBC.  Even PBS and NPR which have featured such genteel ones as William F. Buckley and at least such rich ones as Tucker Carlson, so them too.  The cabloids and the current "conservative" media are a throwback to the worst of our media past and they have certainly brought the rest of it along to more and lesser extents.  The direction the corporate media can generally be counted on to take only goes down. That some of them, like the rich white trash Republican criminals who put Clarence Thomas on the court, have hired black faces to deliver their racism, that is a long standing practice of white supremacy in America just as male supremacy has often solicited females to reinforce the worst of misogyny to the public.

I think, given the long history of both promoting racism among "poor white trash" by writers, playwrights, screen writers, directors, producers, etc.*** who certainly have promoted it as the way to be for poor whites (all those "redneck" movies which inevitably featured the American swastika, the Confederate flag) and who, then, use that stereotype as a cover for the really effective white racism among the affluent, the powerful, the white collar professionals, owe it to us to really do a deep and long investigation into the John Roberts, Bush family, Ivy League racists.   

They certainly have promoted racism to, especially, the white middle class as well.  If they hadn't paved the way Trump would never have gotten out of the criminal rackets where he and his father prospered. And by them I would include the owners and producers of the New York Times and other media in the North East who publicized Trump and thereby sold Trumpism to the country.   His style was sold to his cult by the media, to start with, just as that of Ronald Reagan - certainly another major figure in the revival of rich white trash racism - they were sold through the media, entertainment and the "news" divisions, too.   

*  Just off the top of my head, Charles Murray, Marty Perez, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney-Barrett, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron Desantis, . . . pretty much anyone prominent in the Republican Party and in most of the conservative and in most of the "moderate" media.  I doubt a real anti-racist could remain there long because they couldn't agree to cover up for their colleagues, and, more so, their bosses. They'd get fired if they didn't quit or leave the party or company in disgust.  They probably wouldn't be able to stand working in Hollywood, though so many swallow their mildly held morals for the money there.

** It's worth considering how any kind of well-spoken racism would be considered intellectually or academically respectable and deserving of the bestowal of respectability, such as that given to those credentialed by the grad schools and law schools of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc."  Academic racism is pervasive, I know it is at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, etc. though that's only through familiarity with their faculties and what they and their alums and faculties write.  The racism in academic guise, the social sciences, etc. is some of the most damaging exactly because it is camouflaged in language that's supposed to mark something as more worthy of belief.  Hardly anyone mistakes it for what it is when it's expressed in non-standard grammar and avoids crude words but sell it as scholarship or science and even those tending towards non-racism are suckers for it.  I think the way that "academic freedom" functions as a protection for racism is certainly worthy of some academic attention.  Such freedoms can cut both ways, the freedom allowed promote racism is certainly cannot morally protected from the informed criticism of it.

Though there are certainly anti-racists who can, somehow, stand working at or going through the Ivies.  It has to come as a shock to them as much as it was to me as a student at the University of Southern Maine a half a century ago.

*** It's such a staple of entertainment media that it's used by self-regarded  liberal anti-racists in the media who think they can diminish it by ridiculing "white trash." It was intended to be that by those who did "All In The Family" though they  never noticed it doesn't work to do that.  No more so than the similar show biz insulting stereotyping of "Amos and Andy" changed anyone's behavior. If you want to point out that Amos and Andy were done by white people presenting negative stereotypes, well, those who produced All In The Family considered themselves outsiders of the milieu they ridiculed, too. The constructive use of comedy as a means of social, political and legal reform is one of the most extravagantly proclaimed and fervently believed in myths current among academically credentialed suckers.

When you present that kind of stereotype to even the comparatively privileged poor whites, you give those among them so disposed the permission to repeat what they hear and expand on it even as it provokes their resentment of the mostly wealthier white guys who ridicule them.  I don't think there is any great mystery in why the expression of racism in America became MORE regularized and steadily rose in frequency for the more than fifty years after All In The Family aired. It was either entirely ineffective in its intentions or it actually was counterproductive.  Media works to peddle anything, especially bad things.  Even what is promoted between commercials. Even what is unintended by those who write it.  Comedians aren't generally the brightest bulbs, I learned that when I heard the playground comics of my childhood mentioned above.

RFK jr. Should Be Charged With Crimes Against Humanity, Not Running For President

 

the danger has already reached a level high enough that something has to be done, now

THE SUPREME COURT'S use of the "speech" clause of the First Amendment to relegalize denial of public accommodations to a covered group in civil rights law, LGBTQ+ people, in a bogus case phonied up by billionaire funded court-packing organizations troubled me a lot over the weekend.  That troubled me more than the reported speculative nature of the case or the erroneous report about a straight man who was alleged to want a site for his same-sex wedding figuring in the court filing.   Though, neither am I much troubled if that misconception enters into the folklore about this case and the Court that issued the ruling.  They're the ones who made lying a "right", afterall.

Unlike its use of "religion" in that same style of Republican-fascist maneuver,  "freedom of speech" especially as the extra-Constitutional expansion of that to mean "freedom of expression" has no possible limit to what this or another white supremacist or Republican-fascist court could do with it to do whatever they or their patrons want.  Their billionaire and millionaire patrons include some pretty serious bigots who will supply the motive to the "justices" for doing that, though through their own bigotries and political maneuvers and personal grudges seem to provide an explanation for what they're doing even without it. The Republican Party has been trying to harness racism and other bigotries as a political tool for longer than most of those presently on the Court have been alive.  That the filthy rich who originally tried to harness white supremacy don't seem to be keeping it in harness very well doesn't seem to bother those theorized to not be racists themselves, anymore.  Not that anyone making that kind of corrupt bargain should be suspected of being a big fat supporter of any kind of equality.  The "good" Republicans who used to be depended on were never really dependable, especially after Goldwater and Nixon.

I have no doubt that this white supremacist majority will, now or when they have paved the way with immediate "precedent," see it as a terrible denial of the "free expression" of a reincarnated Lester Maddox to legally force them to serve Black People or an insurance company to insure unmarried Women on an equal basis with men.  This is just the start of it, do you really want to bet me it isn't as the current six Republican-fascists overturned many more "justices" opinions, some of those previous rulings overturned by them declared as "settled" in their confirmation lying, along with duly adopted laws and regulations to destroy affirmative action and overturn Roe v Wade?

I didn't think my nightmare of the consequences of that use of "speech" would be so obvious so fast as it is in the absurdly expansive lower court ruling that tells the Executive branch that they can't talk to social media companies or even academics in so many areas of vital importance, dealing with a deadly pandemic which was the focus of so much life threatening misinformation, something which could have gotten millions more Americans killed or the Putin regime, very probably Chinese or Saudi interference with our electoral process.

But that has happened and God only knows how that is going to be overturned in the present Republican-fascist dominated Federal Courts and the damned Supreme Court with a Republican-fascist, billionaire bought majority on it.  The Supreme Court, many lower courts, are blatantly Republican-fascist partisan dominated, Leonard Leo-billionaire bought and ready to do whatever they can to solidify Republican-fascist power, even at the cost of millions of lives. Every ruling by this court emboldens those also put into place by the Republican-fascists and billionaires in their court packing operation.  The Supreme Court majority is bought and installed through corruption.

How that will happen to save us from them in the next election is something that has to worry anyone who still favors the right of government of, by and for The People on the basis of accurate information to inform their votes instead of lies empowered by the Supreme Court.

This is a perfect example of just how dangerous some of the rulings on the speech clause and other clauses of the First Amendment can get when the mere language of them, not their reasoning but the mere words of them can be twisted for anti-democratic purposes by corrupt judges and "justices."  As those familiar with what I post here know I often mention the Sullivan Decision as among the most dangerous of those rulings made in all innocence by the Warren Court only to see that metastasize into Buckley v. Valeo, a series of rulings overturning clean elections legislation and the Citizens United ruling that allowed Putin and others to ratfuck our elections with the collusion of the Republican-fascist party and those behind Trump.  

It should be noticed that in so many of their corrupt rulings the Republican-fascists on the court have weaponized words and slogans either provided to them or popularized through the "liberal" court during the Warren years or through the popular notions of libertarian liberty in movies, TV shows and political blather. I am certain that the learned Warren era and even other liberal justices had little appreciation for how thier attempts to expand the meanings of words to allow strip-tease artistes to work without risk of a police raid would be used to empower the enemies of equality and electoral democracy.  But, then, I doubt that the drafters of the Constitution ever imagined that the sloppily worded First Amendment would mean what Republican-fascists "justices" and judges make it mean nor that the as sloppily worded Second Amendment would be used to kill white people, it having been written to protect white slave-holders against slave insurrections.

The Court is the epicenter of the danger to America's democracy, it is the source of the dangers, from the insane invention of a "right" to lie right down to putting automatic weapons in the hands of American mass murderers.  And the foremost tool which it has used to do most of that is the idolized Bill of Rights.  The idols of secularism would seem to be a lot more dangerous than those made of  false gods.  That they could do that, especially with that Court created power to overturn duly adopted Federal legislation and to openly lie about the legislative record of other amendments to the Constitution proves that the Supreme Court, now exposed for its monumental corruption, has to be reigned in and stopped as soon as possible.  And we don't know what is possible until it is tried.

When the now Murdoch owned Völkischer Beobachter of American Mammonism, The Wall Street Journal is whining about court reform in terms of disempowering the stolen Court majority it should be taken as a certain signal that doing that is absolutely in the interest of the American People.

That the Supreme Court is the epicenter is a combination of it not being a legitimately democratic branch of government wit the possibility of removal by the voters, the folly of giving them lifetime appointments who are no more removable by impeachment than the most criminal presidents of our lifetimes have been, and the flagrant corruption that is bound to happen when any group of people with power are left to police themselves.  It was one of the telling follies of the amateurs who drafted the Constitution that they thought a group of people given the power they gave the Court such as the Supreme Court would be any less prone to corruption than a single monarch would have been. The history of the Roman Republic should have told them otherwise, the Imperial system came out of only one of those schemes of shared power.  The extra-Constitutional power to nullify legislation the court gave itself should stand as the first, worst and most successfully sold corruption in the history of our corrupt Supreme Court.  The Constitution makes the court unaccountable to anyone else, in fact. Their imaginary limit of impeachment by the Congress as laid out in the Constitution has never worked.  We should face that is a reality which makes the members of the court unanswerable to anyone, not even each other.

Its actual history, as told by the self-interst of "justices" such as John Marshall and the other slave holding "justices" those who could be counted on to rule in favor of slave-holders, oligarchs, plutocrats, aristocrats and other rich, especially white people and corporations is the real, non-amber tinted, non-Nina Totenberg narrated history of that body.  It is remarkable the extent to which the popular history of the Supreme Court has been told in its remarkable exceptions, its short epochs of justice ignoring the majority of its history.  That John Marshall is held in such regard as he is shows how successful the PR con job has been.

President Biden should study Jefferson's warnings about Court power and Lincoln's response to the meddling of the Taney Court in the conduct of the Civil War, he should look into the criticism made by law scholars of the Dred Scott decision and the others who have been critical of that power which started out modestly enough in Marbury v Madison but which led directly to the Civil War.  He should look at the criticism by Louis Boudin of the Marbury decision* which pointed out that not only did the authors and Congressional and Executive adopters of the provisions in the Court Act overturned in Marbury comprise many of those who drafted and adopted the Constitution but which included a founding father, John Marshall's immediate predecessor as Chief Justice, Oliver Ellsworth, who, if I recall, drafted both the Court Act and had a direct hand in the drafting of the very creation of the Court in the Constitution.  Marshall declared that he, not a drafter of the Constitution, knew what it meant better than those who wrote it, voted for and adopted the Court Act, including Madison and Adams and Washington, himself.  I am pretty certain that if the Constitution had included that Court created ability for unelected "justices" to overturn duly adopted legislation and to, actually, create law from the bench, the Constitution would never have been adopted.  As Marshall, himself, wrote in his biography of Washington, the adoption of the Constitution was remarkably close, as it was.  I would bet that the founders, themselves, would have concluded it should be sent back for further work on it if it contained that Court power, so obviously dangerous is such a power.

The Court has to have that power stripped from it, it has to be restored to what a normal supreme court in a democracy is because in this Robert's Court as the Rehnquist one before it, it is again proven to be a danger to democracy.  Especially the only democracy that is legitimate, egalitarian democracy.  And, now, it is even proven to be a danger to our personal safety against automatic weapons in the hands of psycopaths and open AND CONCEALED carrying crackpots.  It is an immediate danger to the the security of the country in opening up our elections to the influence and lies peddled by fascists foreign and domestic and the proven influence of dictators such as Putin. It is a danger which is reestablishing white supremacy and male supremacy.  It is a weapon against widely discriminated against minorities and poor people. The present day Court has to know that these reforms and reigning in of their power are openly being discussed as a reaction to their florid corruption and outrageous power grabbing and their service to the corruption of modern Mammonism.  Roberts should know that if they continue to pull anything like they've been pulling that it is a danger to their position. AND THAT INCLUDES BOTH BY THEIR ACTION AND ALLOWING CORRUPT LOWER JUDGES RULINGS TO STAND THROUGH THE SHADOW DOCKET.  I would favor rewriting the rules to term out the majority of today's majority at the quickest possible date, ALONG WITH A LIFETIME BAN ON FORMER "JUSTICES" PROFITING OFF OF ANYONE WHO PROFITED FROM THEIR RULINGS MADE DURING THEIR TENURE ON THE COURT.

I think it's time for the Executive and Legislative branches to assert their legitimacy OVER the court.  They must acknowledge the normal powers of a Supreme Court in a democracy but they should absolutely reject the Court created powers which were never ratified by anything but that Court.  It's a dangerous maneuver, considering how strong white supremacist fascisim in the country, how dangerous the billionaire class is.  But the danger has already reached a level high enough that something has to be done, now.  If, by a miracle, Biden wins the election with a strong enough majority in both houses of the Congress, they should immediately adopt a new Court Act which, among other things, explicitly rejects Marbury v. Madison's nullification provisions.  They should formally overturn the Dred Scott and other decisions of that kind and they should disempower the fascists on this court by swamping them with new judgeships and justices.  They should adopt a term limit for the court which would get rid of some of the worst.  The best long-lived "justices" in all of our history have not made up for the worst long-lived "justices" in our history.  

As the tragic legacy of one of the best justices of my lifetime, Ruth Bader Ginsberg proves, it is extremely dangerous to allow them to decide when they are leaving the court, since there is no removal of them by the Voters or a term limit.  It is the tragedy of her life that she didn't have the wisdom to retire in the repeated warnings of her own mortality that she was given.  If someone of HER character and wisdom can't be counted on to know when it's time to leave, no one now or in the future should be trusted to know that.  No one, not the best of them, is worth keeping a Clarence Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Taney, etc. on the court till they decide to leave or they die.  There are so many more Scalias and Taneys in the Court's history than RBGs.  So many fewer John Paul Stevenses than Clarence Thomases and Roger Taneys.  

* Marshall accomplished his purpose by convincing the Associate Justices of the unconstitutionality of that section of the Ellsworth Judiciary Act of 1789 which expressly conferred upon the Supreme Court the power to issue writs of mandamus and prohibition, and in persuading them to allow him to announce that conclusion as the opinion of the court.  When we consider that, while all of the Justices agreed with Marshall that the provision of the Ellsworth Judiciary Law requiring them to sit as circuit justices was unconstitutional, and yet refused to act upon the belief as Marshall wanted them to act,* we can realize the measure of his triumph in inducing the same men to hold unconstitutional another provision of the same act - a provision, too, even less open to objection than the one they had sustained.

The Theory of the Chief Justice that Section 13 of the old Judiciary Law was unconstitutional was absolutely new, and it was as daring as it was novel.  It was the only original ideal that Marshall contributed to the entire controversy.  Nobody ever questioned the validity of that section of the statute which Marshall now challenged.  Ellsworth, who preceded Marshall as Chief Justice, had drawn the act when he was Senator in the First Congress;  he was one of the greatest lawyers of his time and an influential member of the Constitutional Convention.
 

One of Marshall's associates on the Supreme Bench at that very moment, William Paterson, had also been, with Ellsworth a member of the Senate Committee that reported the Judiciary act of 1789, and he, too, had been a member of the Constitutional Convention.  Senators Gouverneur Morris of New  York, William S. Johnson of Connecticut, Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, William Few of Georgia, George Read and Richard Bassett of Delaware, and Caleb Strong of Massachusetts supported the Ellsworth Law when the Senate passed it;  and in the House James Madison and George Wythe of Virginia, Abraham Baldwin of Georgia, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut heartily favored and voted for the act.  Most of these men were thorough lawyers and every one of them also helped draft the National Constitution.  Here were twelve men, many of them highly learned in the law, makers of the Constitution, draftsmen or advocates and supporters of the Ellsworth Judiciary Act of 1789, not one of whom had ever dreamed that an important section of the law was unconstitutional.  

Furthermore from the organization of the Supreme Court to that moment, the bench and bar had accepted it, and the Justices of the Supreme Court, sitting with National district judges, had recognized its authority when called upon to take action in a particular controversy brought directly under it.  The Supreme Court itself had held that it had jurisdiction, under Section 13, to issue a mandamus in a proper case, and had granted a writ of prohibition by authority of the same section.  In two other cases this section had come before the Supreme Court, and no one had even intimated that it was unconstitutional. . . .

There's An Objection To My Supposedly Slighting "The Public Understanding Of Science" - Hate Mail

TAKE THIS DESCRIPTION from Practical Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Python 3, 2nd edition:

The most important difference between a computer and an old-fashioned calculator is that you can "teach" a computer new operations by defining them in terms of old ones.  For example,you can teach the computer(*) that "Take the average" means "add up the numbers in a sequence and divide by the sequence's size."  You can then use the operations you have just defined to create still more operations, each layered on top of the ones that came before.  It's a lot like creating life by putting atoms together to make proteins and then combining proteins to build cells, combining cells to make organs and combining organs to make a creature.

That is from three authors, all of them working at the elite University of Toronto, two of them, Paul Gries and Jennifer Campbell teaching in the Department of Computer Science and Jason Montojo who is a research officer at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research at the same university.  He writes software for their projects.

These scientists may have given a reasonable description of how computer programming is done but their simile allegedly related to biology describes something which is entirely imaginary and not real, never having been done or observed, something which is science fiction and which has no demonstrable connection to how life came about in the beginning or how life is, in fact, propagated now.   Nor is it mentioned how it's supposed to clarify what was said about computer programming. The complexities of how cells and then a zygote and then a fetus form organs WITHIN A LIVING ORGANISM is not like making programming routines and putting them together, and that's just one aspect of how incompetent that conception of life is.  Our bodies, our cells are not like computer programming, our cells (or "DNA" in the imaginations of the authors, since they talk about protein synthesis) don't work that way and how organs are formed is hardly understood except that it's far more complex than that. I think it's far more likely that the way in which that happens is not discoverable by science as it's deemed to be now. I doubt human beings will ever discover how that happens before our species destroys itself.

I would bet you most scientists who works in the relevant areas would find that description absurd, or would as soon as its absurdities are questioned.  The simile is totally ridiculous but I will bet you not one out of a thousand college-credentialed readers of what is actually a rather good book on computer programming would notice that as they had the general sense that it was accurate based on what of neo-Darwinian lore they'd already imbibed.  I would expect that if they hadn't thought much or read much about it, that simile would enter permanently into their "public understanding of science"  much as Dawkins' "first bird to call out" fable has.

In one of my recent go-rounds on these topics I noted that even fine scientists are pretty much at sea once they've left their own specialty, when they get as far afield as computer science or a casual layman, it gets really absurd.  That Oxford seat endowed for Dawkins by a computer jillionaire hasn't really helped at all.

Essentially the idea that any of us has "an understanding of science," as if science was a comprehensible entity for any one of us is ridiculous, even the most eminent of scientists has no such "understanding" of science. That realization came to me when I was interested in reading about the calculation of an 8-dimensional object back in the 00's when someone said if the mathematical calculation of it were written on paper it would cover the island of Manhattan, I immediately realized that not a single member of the team who worked on it could possibly hold all of that in their, no doubt brilliant, minds.  There is no such a thing as a composite of human understanding, "mind meld" is a creation of cheesy sy-fi.  Someone can only understand as much as they understand, whatever they don't know is not part of their understanding.  

* I have to wonder why we don't call making a gear of a specific size for a watch "teaching" a watch what that does, or, rather, teaching the watch to understand what the movement of the hands of a watch in relation to the face of the watch means. For that matter why not call drawing the clock face "teaching the clock" that the Earth rotates in relation to the Sun.  It is pretty much the same thing as the idea that you can "teach a computer" anything.  Whether it is by making the gear to specification to produce a result or making a routine in a computer program to produce a result, it's the same thing.  It's absurd to think the machine understands it or "learns" anything.

Which reminds me of the idiot professor of psychology I read about who once came up with a chart of the IQs of various entities.  As I recall he said that an alarm clock had an IQ of 5. I almost am convinced that I recall he rated a typewriter higher.  Considering how much the clock would have to "know" to function, I think the man of science did what most everyone who talks "IQ" does, and decides those they don't respect are stupider than what they hold in higher esteem.  Which also falls within "the popular understanding of science," which includes the "understanding" of many esteemed and powerfully influential scientists who are so stupid as to believe that something deemed to be an "intelligence quotient" is determinable, observable, measurable and subject to scientific knowledge is real.
 

Parody of Beyond Parody - I don't think I need to add anything

 

The Republican-Fascist Majority On The Supreme Court Is Arguably Worse Than The Taney Court Which Issued The Dred Scott Decision

I SAY THAT because they are in the process of overturning the second wave of hard  and long won progress towards equality by the fiat of the white supremacist 6 votes on the court.  The first wave of progress was abolition, which the Taney Court tried to kill with the Dred Scott decision which claimed that Black People under the Constitution had no rights that the federal courts or the federal government was bound to uphold and protect.  They declared, in effect, that the entire country was comprised of slave states, where slave holders were free to move anywhere and set up a slave household, plantation or other operation where Black People could be enslaved and even state law could not free the People held in slavery as long as they were Black.  Free Black People could be kidnapped and brought into slavery as, in fact, the Supreme Court had previously allowed in cases where it was clear they were legally free in the free state or slave state they'd been abducted in.  No Black Person was safe from enslavement under the Taney decision.  

The Taney decision led directly to the election of Abraham Lincoln, who ran for president on his opposition to it including the usupratory  overturning of the Missouri Compromise of 1820.  The Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court was decisive in the treason of those who created the Confederation, their attack on the legitimate government of the United States starting the Civil War and once the Union won, legal slavery was abolished through the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th and other Civil War Amendments which settled the citizenship status of Black Americans, at least in so far as the Constitution was supposed to be concerned.  It took a terrible civil war to overturn the work of Taney and his fellow Dred Scott majority.  That blood and carnage added to that shed in the struggle for abolition, many abolitionists, Black but some White Peoples' blood, added to that lost in that war and its aftermath. One of the Civil War Amendments, the 14th, has been lied by the Court into meaning the opposite of what it means, they prove by that that, for purposes of the law, the Constitution is far less than what the words on paper and even the legislative record of its adoption means, it means whatever a majority of dishonest "justices" says it means and the real history of that court proves that even some of the most illustrious names on the court were thoroughly dishonest in their decisions.

For a too brief period under Reconstruction there was considerable progress in enforcing equality in the former Confederate states but that was overturned with the corrupt Electoral College bargain that Rutherford Hayes made with the slave power, which were never really defeated since their powers in the Federal Government under the slave-holder parts of the Constitution were actually enhanced because the former slaves formerly counted as 3/5ths human beings, in a provision that allowed slave holders to exercise power by counting those they held in slavery for purposes of congressional representation, stealing their political rights for themselves while stealing their lives and labor, was extended to 5/5ths under emancipation - once the slave power reasserted terror, oppression and in many cases de facto slavery over Black People and prevented them from voting.  

The recent rulings that mostly aided the drawing of dishonest gerrymandered maps and allowing the suppression of the votes in Republican-fascist controlled states is a repeat of that theft of not only the political power that rightly belongs to those whose votes are suppressed, but, in fact, all voters everywhere whose government is stolen by the same powers that have blighted the United States for our entire history, starting with the rigged adoption of the Constitution.  It is estimated that, largely by design, a mere 6% of even eligible white, male, property holding voters had a hand in the ratification of the Constitution, with its many provisions enhancing slave power and protecting that evil while also giving powers to the Northern financiers who largely made up the remnant of the Constitutional Convention who drafted the Constitution.  The Supreme Court has been the foremost force in thwarting the efforts to reform and clean up our corrupt system, efforts by Voters and the political branches, the two which have some claim to legitimacy since they are the product of a vote.  Not least of all by the absurd interpretations of the First Amendments that created a right to lie in the mass media, only one of the many evil purposes to which that most absurdly idolized passage in the Constitution have been put to by the Court.

The subsequent Supreme Courts eventually got around to establishing America's apartheid system of de facto slavery in place of legal slavery in other infamous rulings, the Plessey v Ferguson (I hear Clarence cites that atrocity as precedent for some of his claims in his recent concurrence with his fellow injustices) one that made a pretense of "separate but equal" which even the most addled of those "justices" knew was nothing like equal anymore than the Roberts Court majority really believes that the United States is not rigged for white privilege, they should know, all of them having been beneficiaries of that privilege except the one who was a major beneficiary of the affirmative action he voted with his fellow white supremacists to kill.

The many decades of struggle for abolition which was older than the Constitution, the post Civil War struggle against American Apartheid, culminated in the adoption of Civil Rights laws in the 1960s, the most important of which were the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and relatively few Supreme Court decisions, few considering the number of those which upheld and extended slave power and then its changed for into white supremacy power.  The Roberts Court and the Rehnquist Court before it has been destroying that in order to send the country back to the status of legally protected American apartheid, the six "justices" doing that work as much as they dare to, for now.  And it's clear they dare to go quite far, as of now, they no doubt would like to go much farther.

That the white supremacist majority have a "justice" deputed to be Black is of little importance, other than to mark him as someone as detestable as Roger Taney, himself. That is as significant as the fact that they voted to nationalize Women's' bodies with the aide of one deputed to be a Woman.  As has been pointed out by many in the past few days, Clarence was one who enjoyed considerable benefit from the Civil Rights struggle and, especially, affirmative action for himself before he decided to shaft all other Black People in the country over his own personal perceived slight BY WHITE PEOPLE after the head of one of the most corrupt political families in American history working on consent with such Republicans as John Danforth who hired him on the basis of his race, put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court because he was Black.  His record of service to the wealthy and racist put him where his pathology and corruption has flourished and been protected by Republicans who will never vote to impeach him no matter how corrupt he is and the damned Constitution that makes impeachment of even the most corrupt Supreme Court member as impossible as the most dangerously corrupt president in our history, Trump, who, working with the Republican Senate and the billionaire serving criminal lawyer network of which Leonard Leo is a member protect not only him but some of the other corrupt members of that damnable Court.  That Clarence's wife was thick as thieves with the January 6th insurrection, something he certainly knew as he ruled on cases relevant to that massive crime, only proves how dangerous a criminally vile "justice" he is.

The original evil of the Dred Scott decision included the second time that the Court dared to use a completely Supreme Court created power to issue the Dred Scott decision which, among its worst features, overturned a decades old law that allowed Missouri to become a state, the slave power having blocked the admission of Maine to become a state on its own, independent of Massachusetts of which it was a part until 1820.  The reason for that was, of course, it would have added two free-state Senators while Free State members of Congress would have resisted allowing even more of an imbalance of slave power from the admission of Missouri without Maine.  

That was the second time in its history that the Court used the power John Marshall gave him and the Supreme Court, without any ratification process, to nullify duly adopted laws passed by the Congress and signed by the President.  It is a power that has steadily increased in use since then, it is, in fact, how the Roberts Court has overturned the most important parts of the Voting Rights Act.  

The romantic fiction that had grown up about the Supreme Court, especially during the Warren Court years, that held it was the part of government that was most protective of the rights and even freedoms of us, that, in the lying phrase over the gaudy entrance of that hideous building the Court built for itself, Equal Justice Under Law, is a disgraceful lie, in the Roberts years, one of the most shameful hypocrisies as it would have been had anyone claimed that of the Court for most of its history.  

The keys to doing something about this corrupt court have to include definitively removing that power that John Marshall, one of the most consistent slave-power enhancing figures of American history, created for the court.  It was a power which Abraham Lincoln opposed and, in fact, ignored when Taney and his colleagues tried to meddle in his efforts to preserve the United States against the slave power they favored.  In the many posts I did on "Government By Judiciary" and associated texts that prove both the illegitimacy of that power and its danger, I asserted that the Court will never agree to give it up, it will have to be taken from it by the other two branches of the federal government.  

The theory of extending the bench of the court, while good in the short term, will not really protect us from the Court which is unelected and which can't be changed by involuntarily removing corrupt members from it.  The only way to protect equality and democracy from them is to remove that power from them and give them a status which practically every Western democracy gives its supreme courts which don't have that power to overturn legislation by mere fiat.  Whatever dangers there might be in that, which could be said to enhance the powers of the legislature and executive, are more than matched by the danger of a court that can nationalize Women's reproductive systems and send us back into the worst era of white supremacist supremacy and never have to face removal by the Voters.  How much worse can it be that the Court using that power threw us into the Civil War?  Do we need to rerun that, this time with the automatic weapons in the hands of the white supremacists by Supreme Court ruling and Republican-fascism during the Bush II regime?  

I think those are going to be the stakes in this struggle, which has become increasingly bad during my lifetime.  I've watched it develop since 1969 as Nixon took office and started the process of changing the Court to a Republican partisan, and so billionaire bought one which would overturn any progress which had been made or would be made, still, for a little while.  And the Supreme Court has been becoming increasingly bad in that period. We have to do something serious about it as soon as possible and it will have to be bold and decisive.

In the largely suppressed knowledge of how the Constitution was written and adopted, one of the more interesting objections to it was the theory of three branches holding a balance of power, if I had the time I would look up the critique of an opponent to ratification who, rightly, pointed out it was an entirely novel theory of governance coming largely from the head of John Adams.  If there is one thing that is certain of the original Constitution, as adopted in the 1780s, it was the work of some rank amateurs whose conceptions of republican governance was taken from systems which were pretty bad while they were working and which all failed.  They looked with the typically romantic affluent, white, male, college-credentialed eyes on the Roman Republican system which, of course, was extremely unstable, resulting in civil wars among the gangster families that ran the Republic and which corrupted into the Roman Imperial system.  I think that is what the present Republican-fascist party is doing to the United States.  

The thing has failed NOW, it needs enough reform that what would come out of that would be an entirely new government with an entirely new Constitution, hopefully one that would require a legitimate and informed vote by the entire People of the country.  Among its many provisions written out of the experience of OUR HISTORY, not that written by aristocratic "historians" who were almost all members of one faction of crime families or other who wrote the history the "founders" relied on in the 1700s.  It should certainly make it clear that Voter suppression and prevention of voting, rigging of elections is 100% unconstitutional, that lying is not a right but telling the truth is a right, in most cases an absolute right.  It should also make it clear that the powers created by John Marshall to enhance the power of the branch without the legitimacy of the popular Vote in Marbury v. Madison are abolished, once and for all.  If the Voting Rights Act was in full force, if the Electoral College had been abolished, we would never have had Bush II or Trump, the Supreme Court would not have done what it did this or last term. 

The presently constituted Roberts Court is arguably more evil than the Taney Court was, it has overthrown the entire struggle for equal rights fought, the blood and work and struggle, the hopes against oppression of all of the generations after the Dred Scott decision was issued.  I'd include the blood shed in the Civil War in that calculation because the evil idiots who issued that most damned of decisions stupidly thought they were preventing a civil war, "restoring national harmony" in that ruling.  The corrupt 6 Republican-fascists on this court have no possible excuse of that kind of innocence as to what they are doing.