Saturday, February 3, 2018

Now, That's Theater - Dossier vs. Memo

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Ellen Dryden - Any Other Name And an editorial, of sorts.

A woman teacher disappears. There is no reason for her to leave home, a long term partner, two children and a job she loves. Then her car is found, with her blood inside, and her partner is held by the police for questioning......

David Bamber 
Teresa Gallagher
Carl Prekopp, 
Helen Longworth, 
Richard Firth, 
Laura Doddington.
Directed by Marc Beeby.


I was thinking of just posting the same plays by Gordon Pengilly I posted last Tuesday and recommend them again, I like them so much.   While watching, really listening to a Youtube of Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter and thought of what Pengilly said in the introduction to a small collection of his work, Metastasis And Other Plays:

My first professional show was a CBC radio production of my one-act play Seeds, directed by Mark Schoenberg in 1977.  the play worked well on radio, and I remember saying to myself how I'd like to do more of that.  Eight years later I moved to Calgary from Toronto (where I'd spent three years) to become resident playwright with Theater Calgary.  I soon ran into Martie Fishman, who was producing drama for CBC radio and, over the next dozen years or so, we created some fifteen hours of radio drama together.  I love writing radio plays, sort of the poor man's screenplay, the movie-in-your-ear, as it were, where you can really go places and blow things up if you want to, and for a fraction of the cost of making a movie.  Being at the bottom of the sea in a nuclear submarine is no more difficult to produce than popping the top off of a can of beer.  And those of you who haven't ventured beyond The Shadow or Jake and the Kid - well, you can't know how poetic and sophisticated and experimental radio drama can be in the hands of people like Pinter, Beckett, Stoppard, and Dylan Thomas.

Only, much as I like Pinter, I kept thinking as I listened to his play that I'd really rather have been listening to Pengilly,  the obscurity of even a Pinter can get old and needs to be taken in smaller doses.  I can't much take absurdist theater at all anymore, there's nothing there but sensation and that gets tiresome, too.

What Gordon Pengilly said in that passage, especially about the poetry, sophistication and experiment that you can find so abundantly in radio drama - as well as the merely entertaining and thoroughly traditional (nothing wrong with those if they're good) - is why I like it and find I can't much watch movies anymore.  Radio drama spoiled the movies for me.  I realized on reading that passage that it was just about the same time I started listening to drama on shortwave in the 1980s that I started not watching movies much.

If the CBC board had its wits about it, they'd revive radio drama up there.  You don't want to end up like the Staters, do you?   You don't want your domestic theater and TVs to turn into rote cop shows and thrillers hoping to get on in the States.   Someone I know who went on the movies, as they used to say, said the only thing good about the movies was the money.

They've Got Less Than Nothing And They've Destroyed The House Intelligence Committee's Credibility For Nothing

Nunes, Trump and the FOXfascists aren't just trying to make bricks without straw, they're trying to make hay without straw. 

Hate Mail - In Which I Ask An Atheist Proponent Of The Multiverse Dodge If They'd Have To Believe In God If There Were No "Multiverse"

I don't know if those incredible improbabilities of finely-tuned constants and other vast, next to impossible probabilities of the kind asserted by the atheists John Barrow and Frank Tipler* in regard to human intelligence are accurate, the little I've been able to understand looks like enough of them know what they're talking about.  Are you saying I shouldn't believe what so many, very eminent physicists and cosmologists tell me about their subject area? Many if not most of the cosmologists coming up with those stupendously huge improbabilities of life supporting, intelligence permitting universes are atheists or agnostics.   The creation of the multiverse faith was largely a reaction to the idea that in our one, observable universe such improbabilities in the universe that produced us gives a rather compelling argument for a Creator, in short, someone like the God of the monotheistic faiths.

Have you ever asked yourself if, as I believe is likely, the multiverse conjectures in all their various versions and contradictions are all wrong and the product of atheist hope are a delusion, doesn't that compel an admission that a belief in God is rather justified?

I think in the multiverse religions we see exactly the kind of creative faith product that atheists discount as religious delusion, that it's a product of a fear of God, a phobic, visceral and controlling hatred of God, or the god that such atheists imagine would have to be the one and only possible god.   You know, the one that tells old geezers in physics and math and biology departments that they shouldn't try to screw their young, nubile undergrad students.

Why, if there are no other universes or even if there's no actual physical proof of even one other universe, nevermind the jillions to the jillions power necessary for this atheist dodge to do what you need it to, isn't it far more rational and parsimonious and just plain convincing to believe in God?

You should understand that this multiverse stuff doesn't even do what the atheists want it to do.  For one the improbabilities, when looked at hard, don't necessarily work the way they want them to.  We have no idea what other conditions might give rise to intelligent observers (or even the kind who make up such conjectures to make God go away) in other conditions and we have no idea if the Creator who created our one universe might have some reason for creating other universes that we're not in on.  I don't know if it's true, as I've read, that the fine tuning of any multiverse system would have to be ever more exquisitely fine-tuned, depending on the size of the ensemble, but I'd certainly want to ask about it if you happen to find even one other universe.

You'd, of course, have to confirm that that universe didn't give rise to intelligent observers of a kind that you might not even be able to imagine based on our one and only model to imagine from.  And, good luck with that.  Some have criticized the attempt of Earth based scientists who imagine what "other life" would be like, inevitably coming up with something like Earth based life when the only way to know that would be to directly observe "other life" to find out what it was like.  Physicists, which most cosmologists are, so often seem to fail to understand the complexity and unpredictability of even Earth bound life.

I think the whole thing is a product of wishful thinking by atheists in exactly the same way they claim that God is a figment of wishful thought, even though the monotheistic God is always telling us to do things we don't want to and to not do things we really want to, like Bertrand Russell screwing around.

And a second point, if those vast improbabilities of even our, one, line of what we like to believe is intelligent life are accurate, wouldn't the existence of "other life" in our universe not grow in improbability with every independent line of life on other worlds?   Instead of being, what Carl Sagan claimed, a nail in the coffin of God, wouldn't the improbability of it happening twice or however many times (up to whatever power of ten the optimists like to speculate), rise based on how many times life arose in this universe finely tuned against the possibility of it happening once?   If you answer that, show your work.   Maybe God does favor life and, despite the improbabilities, created it all over creation.   And if that improbability is shattered in this universe, why expect it to hold in other universes we have no real idea of?

*  I do think it's interesting that when Frank Tipler went a number of bubbles out of level and wrote some atheist-materialist physics tripe about the inevitability of people being able to raise the dead or attain immortality without God that it was the Christian physicist John Polkinghorne and the Christian cosmologist, George Ellis who the secularist scientists turned to to write negative reviews of his book. 

The Dangerous Percentage Of Those Trained By The Media To Buy Lies

American mass media is not a vehicle for informing The People, it's all about selling people stuff, mostly junk that they don't need, can't afford or which is bad for them.  It's very good at doing that.

It's important to remember something when puzzling over why Devin Nunes, Paul Ryan and the Trump regime would have hyped the release of the "Nunes memo" since it not only contains nothing that alleges anything illegal or improper was done by the FBI in looking into the Putin asset who was brought into the Trump campaign as a foreign policy advisor,  Carter page, it undermines if not contradicts Nunes and, more importantly the FOX case that the Mueller investigation and the FBI investigation were a. primarily motivated by the Steele dossier and b. that the dossier is poison because it was associated with the Clinton campaign and not telling the FISA judge that was some kind of violation of something.  For a start, the Intelligence Committee Democrats, of whom Adam Schiff has seen the classified information that Nunes said he didn't bother to read, says that the FISA application was based on far more information than was contained in the dossier and, as the stupidly constructed memo admits, FBI surveillance of Carter Page had begun in 2013, while Donald Trump was still trying to get an Emmy for his "reality" TV show, not running for president.

What's important to remember is that the Republican-fascists aren't interested in the truth or even a coherent narrative, what they are doing is appealing to their base which consists of a. amoral crooks and racists for whom the truth and logical coherence don't matter, they really figure that a lie is better than the truth if you can make it work for you and b. the rest of Trump's hard core base are those who have been trained into stupidity by fascist hate-talk radio and watching TV such as Rupert Murdoch and most of the rest of TV produce.   Trump's hard core base is those trained to suck up lies through cultivated stupidity or through an appeal to the worst in them, greed, racism, cowardly blaming the powerless for their troubles instead of the dangerously powerful billionaires who are the ones who shafted them.

Our elites, especially those in the legal profession, the judiciary and in the media, but others as well, have had a huge role in creating this class of lie-buyers or, rather, swelling their numbers through the corrupt American mass media.  It's now big enough that about a third of Americans seem incapable of recognizing the truth from the most obvious of lies or to be so morally corrupted that they don't believe there's anything wrong with even the most transparent lie if you can get people to believe it. 

If that sounds familiar, it is exactly the same thing that Putin has done in Russia, corrupting a nation through sensational propaganda that encourages the worst in people, it was something he certainly knew from his time as a Communist Party apparatchik and a cynical student of autocratic politics.  It was no secret to other Communist regimes and their kissing cousins among the Nazis and fascists.  It is one of the most bitter of ironies that under the guise of secularism and science, the same practice was deemed allowable in the United States, allowing the media to corrupt and degrade a large segment of the population was a glorious expression of freedom when many examples in recent history showed that it produced Nazism, fascism and the red-fascism of Communist rule. 

The very least that liberals and the left should do is stop kidding ourselves that the Trump regime and their Murdoch State Media are vulnerable to the truth because the people they've corrupted don't care about that.  The idea that any of the Trump hard core are going to be moved by morality or truth is absurd.  The only thing you can do is appeal to the minority of that base which might be shaken into reality and a sense of decency and to hope that the margin who vote in 2018 will be enough to defeat the Republican-fascists.  You won't find more than you can count on one hand in the House and Senate who will do anything decent, they have the same voting base that Trump depends on.  Look at the two-faced "moderate" Susan Collins if you want a good reason to conclude that.

If we don't face that much reality, we're the dupes of the "civil liberties" lines that got us here. 

Friday, February 2, 2018

I Read The Memo and Read Responsible Reaction To It.

If this is the best they've got then they've got nothing.  A nothing as big as the nothing in the head of the grinning idiot Carter Page, the star of the Nunes Memo.   

It won't stop FOX and the rest of the Fuxisher Beobachter media in the United States trying to lie up something out of it to save Trump and, who knows, it might work, but if this is the best hope of Trump and the Trumpzis then they should all go down.  

If Carter Page ends up in prison, as he deserves to, I'll put a picture of him being perp-walked on my wall.  I'll bet he's still grinning like the idiot he is.  

If Trump tries to fire anyone over this it will constitute obstruction of justice and Devin Nunes should be under investigation as well as his staff.   Coordination with the Trump regime should be looked for,  I'll bet it comes out within the week.

If we've still got a republic, Republicans should lose in a landslide.  If not, we know it's gone and should face that fact without pretense.  

Question In Anticipation Of The Nunes Memo Release

Hands up everyone,  who believes Paul Ryan has gotten paid off by his billionaire backers for supporting the Nunes crimes? 

Hate Mail - It Will Always End Up Supporting the Billionaires And Corporate "Persons" vs The People

Well, I guess you're right.  You could say I actually do hate the ACLU because of its role in permitting both the corporate media to propagandize for Republican fascism and white supremacy (there's no difference) and its role in such landmarks on the road to the death of democracy as Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United and a host of others.  The false front of supporting a few arguably liberal cases on behalf of "little guys" covers the massive enablement of the billionaire boys club, the corporate "persons" who are the ones who crush "little guys" in our tens and hundreds of millions.

The turning point for me was the Skokie case in which American Nazis, with the support of the ACLU, deliberately held a march through a neighborhood that didn't want them there, that they didn't live in (I doubt any of the ACLU lawyers did, either) and which was the home of many Jews, a number of them Holocaust survivors.  Reading the sanctimonious drivel coming from the ACLU, stroking itself on the back for their higher free-speechyness it suddenly occurred to me that that the lawyers and judges and their families had little to fear from Nazis and their associated thugs as they went back to their affluent enclaves and elite lives as the Nazis and skinheads and Klan attacked, murdered and terrorized Black People, Latinos, Asians, Jews, etc.  From there I took a different look at their advocacy in many areas and realized that they were largely a fraud who, just as the media companies and corporations they argued Sullivan v. New York Times and many other cases for, did the bidding of the millionaires and billionaires even as they asked dumb, gulled, liberals to send them their money to support their real efforts at destroying democracy.   I read and watched and listened to the media, even the "public" media, going ever farther right and dragging the country with it under the deregulation that the ACLU favored.

And there was the promotion of the photographic and filmed porn trade which, by then, I already knew destroyed many of the people used in it.  Like prostitution, which it is, sex for money only in front of a camera, value-added prostitution.   I doubt the executive directors and lawyers of the ACLU had much of a concern that their daughters or sons would be drawn into that trade in bodies and lives through addiction as one of my relatives was. 

And, as well, they encouraged the left to take up a lot of totally unnecessary and counterproductive stands against such things as towns having a manger scene on public property or other such nonsense.  It took me a little while longer to realize how totally unimportant that was.  I mean, it's not as if it had any effect on the behavior of anyone.  It says "Equal Justice Under Law"  over the door of the Supreme Court 365 days a year and it's never kept them from diligently doing injustice inside that building. 

The ACLU's positions on religion have mostly just encouraged the left to get suckered into promoting ballot box poison.  It's advocacy for a few tiny sects doesn't change the fact that it has been, mostly, in the promotion of advocating atheist materialist ideology.   A lot of it originated, not in a support of egalitarian democracy and moral obligation, a lot of it was in support of the Marxism of some if not most of the founders of the ACLU, not least of which was its hostility to religion and morality.

No, I'm sorry to say that for a number of years before the Skokie case the ACLU suckered me out of my money and had my support.   But it was no more after Skokie, for me.  The left might need an outfit of lawyers to argue cases for real, traditional style American liberalism but it won't be one like the ACLU which is the servant of exactly the same millionaires and billionaires and racists and pimps who real liberals have to fight against for egalitarian democracy and a decent life for everyone.

There is no reason that we have to pretend that Nazis, skinheads, fascists, etc.  and their equivalent, the Marxists don't have a real history in recent history that exposes their guaranteed behavior when they gain power, they murder people in the millions.  There is no reason to pretend that we can't discourage and even suppress them and the results wouldn't be anything but an enhancement of democracy in the United States.  The old slogan that "we must allow them" to recruit through lies and the promotion of hate or some pathetic splinter group of Marxists could be silenced was one of the stupidest ideas ever to sucker American liberals.  By reason of the millions of people they'd murdered when they had power, for the support of our domestic Marxists for Stalin and Mao and other Hitler equivalents, there was never any reason for anyone but those who didn't care about millions being murdered to support them at all.  Certainly by the time just about all of us living now were born, what they produced was known.  To still be falling for that ACLU slogan as we see the media creating and putting a Nazi supported white supremacist Trump in the presidency, with the help of the "post-Communist" Putin crime regime is just another knife in the back of democracy.

The American left would be well shut of the ACLU and its ideology.  It will always end up supporting the millionaire and billionaire oligarchs, corporate "persons" against The People.

Thursday, February 1, 2018

old odd ends stolen out of holy writ - just sayin'

I came across a Youtube of the reburial few years back of the mortal remains of Richard III of England.   I wonder if it struck anyone else as odd for a Catholic to have been reburied with such pomp and circumstance in an Anglican cathedral with Anglican ceremony and music when it was the heretical, wife murdering, son of Henry VII - whose henchmen murdered the king - who invented Anglicanism so he could steal everything that belonged to the Church, murder numerous Catholics, lay people, nuns, monks, priests, etc. because the Pope wouldn't give him a divorce?  The Tudors were about the worst dynasty ever to oppress the English, Henry VIII alone is estimated to have killed more than 70,000 people, especially in his reign of terror years up to the end.  

I know it's let bygones be bygones, which is totally great,  but shouldn't they have buried him in his own church?  

That play, as much as most people who know anything about him knows, it's Tudor propaganda.   He'd have had no motive to murder his nephews, for a start.  Henry VII was the one with the motive to have engineered that.   

Amazing how many TV shows they got out of finding him buried beneath a parking lot.   There are dozens of shows and clips on Youtube. 

". . . repeating William Dembski blah, blah, blah . . . " With a "Geesh! how stupid are you guys" Update

I think you could search everything I've ever written on the topic and you'd find I've never supported anything that William Dembski has said, try searching this blog for his name and you'll find out I've never mentioned him once in a blog post.  Nor have I ever dealt with one of his theories.

I am not even certain we'd agree on the existence of natural selection.  I, unlike, as I suspect, you, have read some of what he says and have listened to a few of his lectures and think that he's not irresponsible in many of his claims - I think we'd disagree on one thing, he seems to believe in natural selection whereas I think it's a product of imagination, wishful thinking and self-interest turned into required dogma.

I think natural selection is a lot like Ptolemaic cosmology, an attempt to come up with a mechanism to scientifically and rationally explain natural phenomena, the movements and positions of planets, stars, the Earth and the Sun, from a pre-set point of view on the basis of very limited information.  Only the phenomena that classical-medieval cosmology attempted to explain is simple childs play as opposed to the vast, huge, largely unobservable natural history and events which produced the diversity of species on Earth.   And, I'll point out, natural selection has both been the dominant ideology in biology and associated sciences and pseudo-sciences for a small fraction of the time Ptolemaic cosmology was the dominant model and it has already undergone both drastic, I would say basic modifications and and has spun off an enormous diversity of variant, sometimes opposing and contradicting definitions and versions.  And it has had to contend with other, far less overstretched and distorted theories of evolutionary change even as it's retained as the required dogma that all sciency persons must swear allegiance to in order to avoid being declared to have cooties and not an uncouth, declassé hillbilly, which is probably the strongest motive in its retention.  I'll point out in passing, uncouth hillbillies aren't that different than college credentialed snobs.  Look at the college grad who support Trump.

The short answer is, look at what I wrote that you're whining about,  I don't believe intelligent design has any prospect of being proven scientifically anymore than I do abiogenesis does or, in fact, that natural selection can either be adequately defined or confirmed as actually happening in reality.  I've declared over and over again that unless you discover THE original organism that did not, as all other organisms have, come from an already living organism,  You can know nothing about how that original organism arose, what the organism was like or how the various parts of it, including I would insist, a containing membrane in which its body chemistry would have had to happen, formed, and how it metabolized and, most importantly, reproduced.   The only way you can know what that original organism was you would have to have it or its resolvable fossilized remains and even those could only tell you a small fraction of what you would need to know.  It's doubtful that even if you had the best possible micro-fossil of its structure to observe it would tell you much if anything as to how it came about or even what infinitesimally small probability of that happening spontaneously would have been.  I think it's entirely unreasonable to believe that could have happened by random, chance events because I believe those are more than size of the universe against 1 of happening unlikely to have ever occured even once.  But any such belief in intelligent design, even if it had enormous power of likelihood would remain invisible to legitimate science because science couldn't do the work to confirm that.

Not everything important to conclude is resolvable by science.  I don't think science has any exclusive claim to the issues involved and only has a claim in so far as, within its rules and capabilities, it can contribute information supporting a conclusion.  But in biology and cosmology, not to mention the pseudo-sciences, the claims of atheists far outstrip the legitimate bounds of science and, when looked at rigorously, are no more well founded than the 6-day creationists.  I know, I've argued with atheists about abiogenesis and they're totally faith-based on the topic.   Only their ideology being atheism instead of religion, they're allowed to insert that into science where neither belong.

Update:  YOU CAN'T CLAIM I'VE REPEATED WHAT WILLIAM DEMBSKI SAID BY SENDING ME A VIDEO OF MICHAEL BEHE.  They aren't the same person.   Either get the guy with cooties you're claiming I'm copying right or admit that I never copied the one you claim I did.  As I challenged you, search my blog for Behe and you will find I've never mentioned him before in this blog or, as I recall, did I ever mention him in an argument except to make the point that in order to know what someone was saying you had to know what they said, not what someone attacking them claimed they said.

That Micheal Behe pointed out in his disagreement about mousetraps with John MacDonald that there's nothing surprising about an intelligent designer being able to design an irreducibly complex system ONLY SUPPORTS MY CONTENTION THAT ANY INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED EXPERIMENT OR CONSTRUCT ENABLES A PROPONENT OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN TO POINT OUT THAT IT IS A PRODUCT OF WHAT THEY ARE CLAIMING IS NECESSARY FOR DESIGN.   Behe is, with complete justification, pointing out something I pointed out in a blog post about the claims that scientists had been able to synthesize DNA and getting it to replicate after a series of very well conducted experiments (which, of course, blog atheists claimed nailed their case for them) about four years before Behe claimed it in that video.  Though I doubt Behe got the idea from me, it's so friggin' obvious that anyone smarter than your typical online atheist can see it.  In other words, most people.


Geesh, you guys really have no clue as to how reason works, do you.  And you claim "WE own it, man."

On The Day That Devin Nunes and The Trump Regime Release The Lying Phony Cover-Up Memo

-Josef Goebbels, 1933

e now know, a year into the quickly developing catastrophe that the Trump regime is, that the theory of the free press saving us from such a thing is wrong.   If Jefferson's assertion that a free press would save us from, not only protections from the domestic enemies of freedom but foreign ones were true,  Trump would have already been gone, his collaborators in the House of Representatives, Devin Nunes and Paul Ryan would be in jail along with many of the other figures in the federal government.    But they aren't and I doubt they will be.  With few exceptions, those hired by the large, influential media have either been complicit or, either by virtue of their timidity or their relatively few numbers, ineffective in causing the last hope of democracy in the United States, a swelling and effective protest against their blatant criminality and cover up and enabling of the most floridly corrupt presidency in our history.   

FOX, Sinclaire, and various other media under the control of billionaire oligarchs have been the primary engineers in producing a Trumpian fascism, yet you can bet on the ACLU and the "civil liberties" industry of lawyers, law scholars and hack writers would go nuts in exactly the same way they aren't now, if those corporate entities and their owners were held responsible for the sedition and treason they are blatantly guilty of.   They'd haul out that most tread bare of mottos,  The First Amendment, to argue that what they've done MUST, MUST be allowed because a bunch of 18th century slaveholders and mercantile aristocrats wrote an inadequate Bill of Rights as an afterthought to a Constitutional system which would have immediately turned into a feudal oligarchy without even that list of truncated and over-general slogans.   That they included "freedom" for the corporate entities of 18th century book and newspaper publishers may have seemed like a good idea at the time - the slaveholders would soon realize their mistake and repeatedly try to take that back in suppression of abolitionist agitation - must have seemed like a good idea but as that developed, especially in a line of rulings started as dissents by Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. and Louis Brandeis and reached a level of unrealistic insanity as the Warren court gave carte blanche to modern, massive corporate media to lie with impunity and pursue its owners financial interest above those of The People and democracy.  That has now been proved to produce government based on lies successfully sold to enough people to put a Trump in office, a Paul Ryan in the Speakership and a Devin Nunes in a position to conspire with the criminal regime in the White House to obstruct justice.   

You will hear even some of the good guys in the media, such as Lawrence O'Donnell talk about the time when things are back to normal, like they used to be but that is a pipe dream.  The tendencies and direction of things that produced Trump have been in place since the mid-1960s and are a product of lies successfully sold to the American People so that they will not be able to recognize morality form the most blatant of immorality, truth from the most blatant of lies told by the most extravagant and blatant of liars,  Donald Trump, the media that created him and made him president and the billionaires, domestic and from the Putin crime family that put their puppet in the White House.  The same people put Paul Ryan in the Speakership and Devin Nunes in charge of the Intelligence Committee of the House.  They put the Republican-fascists in office, the free-press, the freest in our history produced this under instruction of their owners, even the most allegedly responsible of media had a hand in that, none so much as the New York Times which carried on a quarter-century campaign of libel and vilification of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats even as they obviously knew what they were doing because they made a show of opposing Trump.   

The Jeffersonian theory that the "free press" would keep us safe from exactly what our free press has created in Trump, mixed with the Warren Court's conception of he First Amendment has gotten us here, it didn't protect us.  It caused this. That theory of press freedom, the freedom to lie for profit, for ideology, for racism, etc. has produced this as certainly as it kept slaves enslaved and promoted the reaction to emancipation that led to the reimposition of de facto slavery and apartheid.   One of the most obvious of things about the increasing Trumpian fascism is that a lot of White People might be able to understand what "freedom of the press" has meant to Black People in the age when TV shows briefly went from a positive depiction of People of color in the 1970s to the blatant promotion of racism in shows such as C.O.P. S. on FOX.   The part that "entertainment" TV played in the production of American fascism is little noted though, since far more people watched it and had their thinking and fears and paranoia and resentment fueled through it, it probably had more influence in producing the revival white supremacist fascism which gave us Trump than the "news" programming did.  

There is no rational reason to pretend that even if Democrats win a supermajority in the House and Senate that the same media won't produce Republican misrule because the people who own and control it have used their freedom to lie, given it by alleged liberals on the Supreme Court will always use it to support a party which, if The People had been truly informed by the media, would never hold any important office in the United States.   The same party that was voted out of office after the Bush II regime's crimes and disasters was propped up by them within one year into the Obama administration through their promotion of the billionaire financed fascist "Tea Party" movement which they covered in exactly the same way they have mostly ignored the agaition against Trump.   I remember, as I recall, the fine blogger Southern Beale pointing out that there was a Tea Party "convention" held in her city which got wall to wall coverage on the cabloids and other media even as they had fewer participants than a convention of knitters held in the same city.  How much coverage do you remember in the anniversary demonstrations against a year of  the Trumpian fascist misrule and blatant crime spree as compared to the Tea Party astro-turf? 

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

The Bad Plus Joshua Redman - As This Moment Slips Away

Ethan Iverson - Piano
Joshua Redman - Saxophone
Reid Anderson - Bass
David King - Drums

I'll point out the two radio plays by Gordon Pengilly I posted last night to anyone who missed them.  I've listened to them several times, they're really good.  I'm going to try to post more music than I have been lately. 

What Do You Think of Prohibition, Professor? - Einstein Showing Scientists How It Should Be Done


One of the most ridiculous icons of pop-science, Bill Nye, has disgraced himself by lending his TV created persona as the "science guy" to the Trump administration, probably the most anti-science president in our history and scientists are finally waking up to the fact that the guy is a celebrity douchebag.




Which leads me to point out, though there are many real, as opposed to TV show, scientists who laudably reject those things, their presence in science is hardly a secret, especially that last list, you can say the same thing about many Nobel laureates and some of the foremost figures in the history of science, I've certainly documented that within biology and among scientists from non-biology disciplines when they tip toe into biology, such as the infamous scientific racist and post-war eugenicist William Shockley.

That the 500 Women Scientists who published their criticism of Billy Nye in Scientific American want to get that stuff out of science is laudable, but you can't do it without coming to a basic criticism of the Darwinian dogma that rules biology and which is borrowed by such pseudo-sciences as psychology, sociology, anthropology and ethology.  As I have pointed out, as recently as a few days ago, all of that list of bigotry and a scientific support of it in social, legal and political policy and practice will persist until natural selection is ousted from its position as required ideology in science.

I sympathize, entirely, with the contents of the letter and the scientists who wrote or endorsed it.  But Bill Nye has used the neo-atheist fad to keep himself a public figure popular, especially, with young people who were kiddies when his show was on TV.   As they acknowledge, he's not ready for serious, adult, prime time as a representative of real, serious, even species and planet saving science.


But Bill Nye is hardly the only one you can say that about, to an extent it's endemic with celebrity scientists who use their credentials to assert various retrogressive ideologies spreading unneeded, counter-productive, harmful and entirely unnecessary baggage on the public understanding of science.  Carl Sagan was one of his teachers as he was of Neil Degrasse Tyson, none of them is free of the sin of overextending the legitimate range of their expertise to give celebrity pontifications into things they know little about, especially when they talk about things like history and philosophy.  It should be considered a scandal that an evangelical philosopher and theologian,  William Lane Craig, regularly demonstrates far more responsibility and discipline than the celebrity atheist-scientists in not speaking past his competence and in bothering to master the essential points of scientific arguments in debates with them.

I remember the first few times I heard Carl Sagan talking within his specialty, the physics of planets and being fascinated by him.  But, then I heard him going into biology (his invented field "exobiology" especially), and, worse, history and philosophy and a cartoon version of theology and that spell was shattered.

Celebrity scientists who talk outside of their competence are no more likely to know what they're talking about or to have an important opinion of than anyone else, sometimes their erudition is based on the rankest of popular and ideological lore, sometimes it's not that far removed from the tabloid-cabloid level of things. Some are a lot more careful, some are even, sometimes, responsible and admitting to not knowing anything. 

And what the hell is it with letting that Nye twerp get away with playing a scientist on TV?    Despite Cornell taking advantage of his Saturday morning kiddie show celebrity to let him teach a few intro-level science classes, the guy doesn't even have the credentials, nevermind the publications history to be a scientist.   I know he impresses blog-rat atheists and sci-rangers but the guy doesn't have the cred to represent science.  Look at his stupidity in lending his fame to Trump's anti-science disaster.

Scientists should really reject this stuff, it costs them a lot more than it buys them.  And I didn't even mention sci-guys like Dawkins, Krauss, etc.

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Tuesday Night Radio Drama - Gordon Pengilly - Lucky Girl - The Rawhide Hour

This one's pretty subtle, I've listened several times and gotten more of it every time. I've said before how much I like Gordon Pengilly's plays, It would be great if someone posted more of his radio plays online.   I've heard a number of them and read some more (never saw a production, though) and all of them were really fine work.    I'd much rather see a production of Flesh and Ghost or Contraption or Metastasis than see another production of Hughie or even Hamlet at this point.  Instead of the 10-minute play fad they should tap the huge number of radio plays that got done once and never again.   

This one is a radio-based, rodeo themed play.  If you listen with earphones, I'll warn you there's lots of whooping and loud radio announcements.   It's pretty funny and a little sad and kind of disturbingly appropriate for the week before America's Mammonist high holy day of brain-killing neck breaking mayhem and high cost advertising, sex, violence and money. 

NOTE:  I was going to post this tomorrow but figured I'd provide something for people who, like me, won't be listening to Trump's Numbnutzburg Address tonight. 

The Republican Party Is A Fascist Party Who Sold Liberals The Rope They'll Hang Us With

The events of yesterday, Andrew McCabe being forced out of his job at the FBI, the clearer intention of Republicans in the House and Senate allowing Trump to get rid of Rod Rosenstein to stop the Mueller investigation into his very high crimes and treason, the party-line vote of Republicans in the House Intelligence Committee to release a clearly biased memo written by Devin Nunes - probably to cover his own high crimes and treason as part of the Trump transition and to protect his fellow criminals - and the impending release of that memo containing what are reported to be highly misleading and dangerous classified information proves that there is no such thing as a patriotic Republican in the federal government. 

I knew a number of Republicans who left the party as the crimes of Richard Nixon were made public.  Apart from one here or one there, all in lower offices or just private citizens,  I don't see any similar abandonment of an even more blatantly criminal Republican party now.  

This has been an ongoing, planned destruction of American democracy for at least a half a century, in which an effective margin of people would be lied to, their regional and racial animosities channeled through television, radio, the movies and other media to destroy egalitarian democracy.  It was a plan funded and promoted by billionaire dynasties, oil oligarchy and their fellow billionaires wherever they've accumulated their billions.  That is the real source of the stinking wreckage of democracy and it was participated in by the pseudo-liberals who sought, got and enjoyed the ability to lie with impunity and to make money off of porn and degenerate messaging in entertainment.   That is what produced where we are today.   You have to corrupt an effective majority of voters to pull off this kind of destruction of a democracy and the way you do that is through the mass media.  That is something that has been known since the aristocratic attacks on semi-democratic Athens four centuries before the common era, it is something which was successfully done in the age of yellow journalism and the emergence of mass, nationwide media with the coming of radio, then television, using it to lie people out of democracy became even easier.  That is something our idiot-complicit judiciary and legal system and those most complicit of idealists in the "civil liberties" racket and their duped supporters among the would be educated class of the United States went along with on the basis of a few slogans, "free speech absolutism" "The First Amendment" etc.   We all loved the idea that we were so smart in falling for that stuff even as it was clear that a population which has been successfully sold lies, not even a majority but a minority which could deliver elections to Republican fascism, would lead us where we are now.  Nixon in 1968, Reagan in 1980, the Bushes, and now Trump and the would-be liberals are still suckers for that strategy.  

You're going to hear more and more that we are in a "Constitutional crisis" as Trump and the Republican-fascist party destroys the rule of law and democracy, on both a state and national level.  The truth is that the shaky democracy produced by the Constitution has been in continual crisis for the entire history, the florid ante-bellum period, the Civil War, the florid corruption of the gilded age, . . . right up to now, the age of Trumpian fascism are a product of a Constitution that was set up by slave owners and their Northern commercial interest partners to thwart the possibility of democracy.  Whatever democracy we've gotten has been a product of constant struggle.  That struggle depended on people knowing the truth in sufficient number and having a general  sense of moral obligation which the left was suckered out of by fashionable ideologies of the 20th century.   

It's a mess that one blog post or even an encyclopedia wouldn't comprehensively document but it all starts with those two things, a relativization of the truth and of morality which means that neither of them has the power to steer a nation out of danger.   The ideology that talked otherwise good people out of that is how we got here.   The billionaires, a few oddballs among them excepted, used whatever we handed them in that regard.  Like Putin, they were looking out for the things we did that they could use and they used them.  

Hate Mail - Even Stupid Claims That Science Can Conduct Experiments That Prove Atheism Require Intelligent Design

If the hypothesis you want to test in an experiment is that evolution could happen without the actions of an Intelligent Designer, so that you can claim a victory for atheism and materialism,  ANY INTELLIGENT DESIGN THAT GOES INTO THAT EXPERIMENT IS MADE RELEVANT TO YOUR OUTCOME BY THE CLAIM ABOUT INTELLIGENT DESIGN NOT BEING NEEDED.  Your goals and claim have made that intelligent design relevant to the outcome and not honestly left out of any claims about what you've actually done. 

YOUR EXPERIMENT REQUIRED AN INTELLIGENT DESIGN, no matter how unintelligent your choice to ignore its presence in what you did was because you give the proponents of intelligent design an ability to make a totally legitimate point that what happened in your experiment happened through the intelligent design that produced the results.   Your results wouldn't have happened without the presence and action of an intelligent designer,  you've only proven that an effect CAN happen through the action of an intelligent designer. 

Though that is exactly what some eminent scientists, such atheist ideologues within science, have been doing for more than sixty years with complete success, inserting their ideology directly into science in exactly the same way that any insertion of religion into science would, rightly, be rejected.  Atheism and materialism are only dwarfed by the pollution that money and the interest of the wealthy - the military industrial complex,  plays in science. 

Any experiment conducted to make assertions about the origin of life on Earth or about the "mechanism" of evolution cannot escape the inclusion of intelligent design and so any experiment that can be conducted cannot disprove intelligent design in the origin and evolution of life on Earth. Science can neither confirm or disconfirm the necessity of intelligent design in either the origin of life or evolution.  You would have to remove both intelligence and design from science to do that and, though the claims of atheist-materialists are far from intelligent, even to make that error in analysis requires flawed intelligence and design.  

Science can't do that, scientists can't do that, though they can lie about what they've actually done.  Even that lying required intelligence and design.  

Monday, January 29, 2018

"except I think it's true ' - The Issue For Me Is The Reality of Justice And The Need To Make It Real In Reality

Way back, years ago, I mentioned that one of the crucial events that led me back to the Jewish-Christian - Islamic tradition from the agnostic-Buddhism that dominated my thinking for about 20 years was a discussion I had with some far more convinced Buddhists about the issue of justice.  When I use the term "justice" I don't mean what the police do and, perhaps even more so, what happens in prosecutors offices and in courtrooms.  I mean what the Jewish - Christian scriptures mean when they use the word, equality, liberal economic equality, provision for the least among you, fair treatment to the alien living among us, etc.  In the discussion the Buddhists asserted that justice, as I was saying I didn't find much of in the Buddhist scriptures, said that was because justice - like everything else - is an illusion.

I can still recall how it finally clicked with me, I remember where I was and what the room looked like, I think it was a warm afternoon in June,  as I realized that I really didn't believe that it was an illusion, that justice was more real than many of the things we experience or believe in and that if these affluent, contented Western White Buddhists had experienced a lack of justice in their lives, they would certainly not pretend that it was an illusion, a delusion, etc.  I'd read a Jewish criticism of Buddhism by a Masorti Rabbi a couple of years earlier in which he rejected the assertion of that kind of illusion,  his statement was "Reality is real,"  which I also say clicked with me.

I also didn't believe that such Buddhists as were telling me that this and that and that were "illusions" really believe it.   It was similar to when I heard someone point out that the intellectuals and university professors who asserted everything from  biological determinism of our minds to post-modernism (which has a lot in common with the popular Buddhism of those mentioned above) never led their lives as if they really believed what they were claiming, often asserting in ways that they recommended have a real effect in the real lives of people or, as in biological determinism, have real effects in society, in institutional and legal and political policy.  Though I didn't doubt that if it ended up disadvantaging them, they'd suddenly discover they really didn't think so, anymore.  It was a lot like the ardent Marxists and even Bolshevists who discovered that, far from a workers paradise, Marxism in reality as opposed to in books and pamphlets,  rivaled and far surpassed Czars and Emperors in hellish depravity and the generation of an oppressive oligarchy.  I certainly didn't believe, for a second that the most ardent post-modernist professors would let their ideology rule their financial remuneration or such things as people cribbing their copyrighted text for profit or their lecture and media appearance fees.  Post-modernist agents, what would they be like?  Imagine the discussion of the terms in contracts and ownership papers.

That's a long way round to getting to why I'm going over the Old Testament so much.  In his Fretheim lecture, named for his long-time friends and colleagues,  Old Testament scholar Terrence Fretheim and Faith, his wife , Walter Brueggemann summed up what I've come to conclude as to the indispensable value of the Old Testament and why it cannot be allowed to "go away".   The online recording of his giving the lecture, full of impromptu asides and humorous interjections, he said what I've concluded, the part I transcribed (in blue, below), after the text as given in the published version of the lecture.

In my view, it is the God who inhabits the text that generates all of these problems and possibilities. It is this inhabiting God who causes the Old Testament to be problematic. It is this inhabiting God who causes seminarians to vex over faith and criticism, because this God will accommodate none of our explanatory categories, even though we have done our JEDP best to dispel the vexation by explaining things away.

It is this inhabiting God who causes us embarrassment, who causes theologians to misread in order to make things come out right. This God creates such scandal that we cannot bear to read of such a God in church.

It is this inhabiting God who does not go away, because it is this God who asserts many times and in many ways, to Pharaoh and to us: “I am the first and the last; before you were here and after you are gone, I am and I will be.” It is this inhabiting God who must not go away, who is indispensable for the church and the life of the world, because this is the God who keeps the world—and our pretensions—open and penultimate, thus resisting lethal idolatries that come packaged as though they are precious.

The Old Testament is indispensable, will not go away, and must not go away, because it is a peculiar witness to the elusive, irascible, multilayered, multivoiced holiness that can affect agency in the world.

In my Theology book I carelessly wrote – so I've been told -  that the God of Old Testament theology, as such, lives inward and under the rhetorical enterprise of this text and nowhere else, in no other way – I'd have lived longer had I not added that last phrase - “nowhere else, in no other way” has turned out to be terribly problematic and careless and and indefensible, except I think it's true.  

I certainly haven't found the same content in other scriptures, certainly not as strongly asserted or insisted on as in the Jewish tradition.  And I absolutely think that it is only the extent to which we, as a country, as the English speaking People, as "Western Civilization" as the Human population really believe that justice and the moral obligation to enact equal justice because we really do believe that, that we have any prospect of real democracy or even survival.   Materialism, either that of the watered down Hollywood school of Buddhism or that of the Brit distortionist Stephen Batchelor or Sam Harris or the billionaire oligarchs and their retinue of rented thinkers and pundits or that of the professional atheists in the media and their online cult fans are probably the biggest obstacle to that.

Sunday, January 28, 2018

Improvisation on "La Añera" by Atahualpa Yupanqui | Roger Helou

Atahualpa Yupanqui - La Añera

It's not every day you hear a medieval instrument used to improvise on a 20th century Argentinian Zamba.   Atahualpa Yupanqui was one of the greatest of Latin American songwriters and singers. 

Would You Choose To Be Judged On The Behavior Of Your Siblings? Your Cousins? Your Third Cousins? . . .

Just this week, while reading the blog I used to write for, Echidne of the Snakes, I came into contact with the claims of the Toronto University Psych prof, center of what seems to me to be a vast, somewhat informal but very aggressive psychotherapeutic cult, Jordan Peterson and his claims that the stories of ethologists about lobsters and researchers who have serotonin injected into them tell you a lot about human hierarchies and how they are biologically inevitable - much to the joy of right-wing American hack writers and misogynist online bullyboys - because human beings and lobsters share a common ancestor, the informed current estimate of that being about 500,000,000 years ago when descendents of the common ancestor of chordates and arthropods diverged in evolutionary history. 

I fully believe that we share that common ancestor with lobsters, though I will point out that the time in figuring out the closeness of characteristics we share with our fellow descendents, the lobsters, has to be multiplied by 2, about a billion years,  because the line that produced lobsters has been developing and changing and losing common traits with that common ancestor for exactly the same length of time that we have.  And that the unknown, unknowable generations separating us from then also has to include all of the generations in both lines of descent.  And I will also point out that in order to have a social hierarchy of the type that Peterson promotes requires that a species lives as a social animal.  We have far far more closely measured commonalities with solitary mammals than we do with lobsters.   And Peterson's argument, when used to explain his or his cultists preferred claims about the divergence of women and men, whose common ancestry is identical, ignores the diversity of sexual relationships in other mammals and, let me point out, anthropoid species such  as the black widow spider and preying mantis in which females regularly kill and eat males who not only try but fail to mate with them, ending up as a meal, instead, but even those who were the ones who successfully mated with them before ending up as food.  Those creatures share exactly the same common ancestor with us that Peterson uses in his argument. 

Our closest animal cousins, everything from baboons, bonobos, gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, etc. are different from each other, (individually different from even members of their species) and us, I'd argue radically so.  The idea that you could possibly tease out a meaningful commonality between human societies and lobster "social organization" is more likely to tell you MORE ABOUT THE  PERSON claiming that then it will life among the lobsters or, especially, their entirely unobservable experience and motivations.

The status of serotonin as a biologically active substance and the effect it has on organisms is hardly as Peterson claims in regard to human beings and lobsters





In the same article, Leonor Gonçalves )Research Associate in Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, UCL)  points out:

I haven't thought or read about it but I would point out that one of my favorite chemicals in that system, caffeine, will kill some of our closer cousins, in passing. 

I'd go back and ask if even scientific descriptions of hierarchies in even animals closely related to us genetically are realistically defined in terms of human societies, human hierarchies, human legal treatment of different "ranks" of human beings, which are hardly a uniform or consistent phenomenon in human history.  The often successful use of Darwinist claims about the efficacy of natural selection, mixed with naive (though at the time orthodox) assumptions about genetics, the ability of science to determine "natural" superiority or fitness and, so, inferiority and unfitness,  have a now long history of rising, having malignant, even genocidal effect in some of the most scientifically sophisticated countries on Earth.   Germany was certainly among the most scientifically sophisticated countries in the world, its elite, in universities, in the professions, in the professional military political and legal clases when it mixed 19th century nationalistic claims drawn from linguistic theory and Darwinism to create first proto-Nazism and then Nazism.  To some extent the same can be said about the history of eugenics wherever that arose among academic and legal elites in service to the existing elites in politics and finance. 

This is always going to be done as long as a naive view of evolution including natural selection and a naive simplification of genetic inheritance is claimed to enlighten our politics and laws.  It is a fact that it produces oppression and death on an industrial scale.  

Hate Mail - How Much Has To Be Ignored To Produce The Claims Of Atheist Materialism

As it happens, I'd read about Dmitri K. Belyaev's fox breeding experiments a number of years ago and, I'm sorry, they don't support the theory of natural selection and atheist materialism at all as the foxes allowed to be bred within the lines he developed instead of murdered and skinned for the barbarous, cruel fur trade, were not naturally selected, they were artificially selected not only by humans, they were artificially selected by scientists to see if they could develop foxes with specific behavioral characteristics which, to some extent achieved, also selected for traits they weren't necessarily expecting to see at the commencement of the experiment.   Once those showed up, they were included in the experiment.

I will point out to you several things you apparently ignored in the text of the Scientific American article you refer to

a Russian scientist, may be the man most responsible for our understanding of the process by which wolves were domesticated into our canine companions,  What might foxes be able to tell us about the domestication of dogs?

"May,"  "might" aren't definite claims that they tell us even what's asserted in the article, and that's a lot more restrained than the claim that it proves natural selection, the material origin of minds and that materialist atheism rules, man.  And I'll note this in the concluding paragraph

these foxes could provide us with a sort of natural experiment

Well, no they couldn't and the contents of the  article, itself would have led a careful observer or reader to the reason it can't provide us with that.

The whole thing, I'm no longer sorry to have to point out, proves that you can develop a line of development through, brace yourself, intelligent choices in an intelligently designed experiment.  It's not an example of natural selection, it is an example of intelligent design.  The experiment was anything but natural in that only "less than" 20% of any generation were allowed to breed within the program, those "less than" 20% at the choice of the experimenters and for anything but naturally selected traits.  A naturally selected trait would have been something like an ability to escape from the fur trade to live in the wild instead of as an animal bred and killed for human purposes.  It is in no way "a sort of natural experiment."

There is no scientifically designed experiment that can escape the fact that the results of that were through the intelligent design of the experimenter, there isn't even any way to remove the role of human intelligence from the description of the results of an experiment or the description of any naturally occuring, observed event.  That's probably many times more relevant to the extremely complex phenomena of life than it is when it has been found to be inescapable in the observation of extremely (by comparison) simple objects and events in physics in the early 20th century. 

I don't know because I've concentrated mostly on the malignant effects of the doctrine of natural selection in the human population but the last I knew all of the various lines of organisms bred by human beings hadn't actually resulted in anything like the diversity of life.  Arguably, I guess, you could say that cross breeding had bred new lines of small fruit or grain - though that they could be cross bred, artificially, makes you wonder if the definition of "species" is inadequate to describe a real thing, the direct manipulation of genes, of course, isn't an example of natural selection or natural anything, it's most unnatural.   At any rate, since that article in Scientific American points out the claim that Belyaev's experiment with a different species, foxes, tells us something about the unobservable change in wolves that produced dogs which became companions of people,  that's not really an example of a change in species in so far as some dogs and some wolves breed and have fertile offspring which could mate either with wolves or dog.   I would imagine that the artificially developed foxes could breed with their wild cousins, even now.  I wonder what the survival rate of those young as compared to entirely wild lines would be or how long they would persist in the natural population.  If some of them survived and their offspring were incorporated in the natural population, I don't think the results would support natural selection.

Nope, it doesn't support your contentions that natural selection is a thing,  the extent to which conventional Darwinists had to ignore so much about Darwin's arguments - such as its enormous dependence on the very opposite of natural selection, artificial breeding - only shows how they reduced an unknowable, billions of years long and vastly huge phenomenon into a ridiculously simplified and schematic description in line with human institutions - so as to pretend they really understood the phenomenon of the diversity of life.  I doubt that the billions of species, the trillions of variations in life developed for any one reason.  I suspect there are thousands or millions of "mechanisms" that created the diversity of life as we observe it and that science will never know most of them.  I wondered a while back at how many times in the billions of years in any of the lines that developed all of those species, scenarios such as a "bottle neck," a drastic accidental reduction in the numbers that would go on to continue that line happened, "selecting" the individuals that would carry on in ways that had nothing to do with their inherited traits.  Does "natural selection" constantly have to be reset whenever that happened?   Isn't the "power" of natural selection as the ultimate explanation of the development of that species reduced every time that happened in that line of life?  And that's only one such non-Darwinian possibility, any time sheer chance -  lightning strikes, location during a storm or other weather or geological event, even just happening to be happened on by a predator with no means of escape, etc - was the reason for the survival of one individual as opposed to another surviving and breeding is a similar reduction of the role that Darwinian natural selection would play in it.   I doubt you could effectively even model the force of such things in the actual survival of the line of life but I'll bet added up they would reduce "natural selection" into something of nugatory instead of ultimate importance in the history of it.

I think natural selection is way, way oversold through ignoring the problems with it.  It certainly can't disprove that species developed through intelligent design, I don't think science can do that.  Which should have been no surprise as that kind of thing - so desired by so many of the devotees of scientism - never really had any business being inserted into science.   Scientists should stick with what they can do instead of pretending they can do what they can't.