An American University Professor on ID

The fundies want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category “mythology”. I expect it will draw much media attention. The university public relations office will have a press release on it in a few weeks, I also have contacts at several regional newspapers.

Of course, I won’t actually be teaching I.D. and creationisms, but rather I’ll be teaching ABOUT I.D. and creationisms as modern mythologies, indicating that these ideas have no place in a public school science class, but can certainly be analyzed in humanities classes for their function in society.
[...]
So far, six faculty have eagerly signed up to lecture. I can probably pull Chancellor Hemenway into this also, especially in the light of his public comments supporting evolution.

Doing my part to p*ss of the religious right...

(cf. Telic Thoughts, emphasis added)

I'd like a course on mythologies, the gods and mythohistorians who think that extraterrestrials were the gods. At least they bring up anomalies like twelve inch holes drilled through granite in the "copper age," engineering feats like using hundred ton blocks for masonry, etc. But nooo, instead the only narrative allowed is that Ape-man this and that mixed in with idiotic mythological narratives of Naturalism. For all ancient peoples were just superstitious and stupid. Let's just decide before looking into anything that the only type of answer we'll allow in science is that we have a common ancestor in non-Life, perhaps an ancient mud puddle is our ultimate common ancestor.

But anyway, note how he knows his allies in the Old Press as they tend to run in the same leftist Herd. I once got in argument with a journalist and simply edited his second message as opposed to his first since he had no reply on the issue: "I am open-minded. [...] My mind is made up on this issue!" He thought that he was thinking a little thought at first, oh how he had thought so. Then like journalists sometimes do he realized that he could not think through his brain. They like to play pretend anyway.

At any rate, the main reason that many American University professors will not be teaching about ID is because they are mentally incompetent when it comes to conceptual thinking. They favor the attempts at the "biological thinking" typical to Darwinism instead. It seems to be the result of a sort of cosmic Oedipus complex leading to the urge to merge into Mommy Nature. That feeling is typical to those who deny all of the Right and so feel their way along blindly with what is Left.

The mind of that type of professor reminds me of other professors, just exchange the dread "fundies" (They might tell you about Jesus. Oh, my!) for "the Jewish influence" (The ethical code worship of the Jews, it's just like a disease or somethin'!) and you can understand their practical and violent resistance to transcendence.* The foundation now at issue among this type of Herd in the American Republic is the same one that was at issue a relatively short time ago in another Republic:

The scholars whom we shall quote in such impressive numbers, like those others who were instrumental in any other part of the German pre-war and war efforts, were to a large extent people of long and high standing, university professors and academy members, some of them world famous, authors with familiar names and guest lecturers abroad...

If the products of their research work, even apart from their rude tone, strike us as unconvincing and hollow, this weakness is due not to inferior training but to the mendacity inherent in any scholarship that overlooks or openly repudiates all moral and spiritual values and, by standing order, knows exactly its ultimate conclusions well in advance.

(Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in
Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People
By Max Weinreich
(New York:The Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946) :7) (Emphasis added)

Modern Darwinists get a little frantic about maintaining the same foundation, their urge to merge seems to be the result of the same psychological dynamic again. So if most of the attempts made by American professors at refuting ID, even apart from their rude tone, strike you as unconvincing and hollow, it is not a weakness do to inferior training but to an inferior form of "thought" typical to those who only think that they are thinking. That's why their main argument consists mainly of murmuring about "Science, science..." as if scientism is true and science can be treated as some sort of ideal abstraction instead of a tool to be used to give people some idea of what they already have ideas about.

The main talking point of "Science, science....why, right now I feel a little science overwhelming me!" is sometimes followed by weak critiques that are lacking in conceptual thinking and so are an associative argument of this type: "It's just like the theory of gravity or the earth being round or somethin'." These are common, as there is nothing else to do but to shift to something else when you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

*One political philosopher defined Fascism as the practical and violent resistance to transcendence, which is a good way to begin to define that which tries to avoid definition.

[Related posts: Anti-ID Rhetors, The Flat Earth and "It's just like gravity."]

"No WMDs," over and over....

Besides the underground laboratories with prisons for human testing of bioweapons as well as vials of bioweapons that were found which were of a type that could be surge produced, the objective facts about Saddam's WMDs are there for anyone to research.

What is most interesting to me is when there is an opportunity to study how the Old Press supports its templates regardless of facts as in the case of the report written by the weapons inspector David Kay. The text of his report is available to anyone who knows to look for it. Yet in the Old Press there are thousands of headlines and reporting that read like this: Kay: No weapons yet, but evidence of intent. That's not what he said, simply read it for yourself to see. This is why blogging and other forms of New Media are undercutting the Old Press. It's simple really, they are lying. The Old Press lied and people died and continue to as terrorists work to manipulate journalists and journalists use their standard of if it bleeds it leads. What is truly amazing is how they sometimes snivel that the New Media has no accountability. As opposed to what? As if their form of accountability to liberal editors, ratings or money leads them to write stories closer to the truth?

Some perspective about "no WMDs" and what story is close to the truth on the issue:

The US has revealed that it removed more than 1.7 metric tons of radioactive material from Iraq in a secret operation last month.

"This operation was a major achievement," said US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in a statement.

He said it would keep "potentially dangerous nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists".

Along with 1.77 tons of enriched uranium, about 1,000 "highly radioactive sources" were also removed.

(US reveals Iraq nuclear operation, BBC News)

BAGHDAD, Aug. 13 -- U.S. troops raiding a warehouse in the northern city of Mosul uncovered a suspected chemical weapons factory containing 1,500 gallons of chemicals believed destined for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces and civilians, military officials said Saturday.

Monday's early morning raid found 11 precursor agents, "some of them quite dangerous by themselves," a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, said in Baghdad.

(Iraqi Chemical Stash Uncovered, The Washington Post)

Terrorists may have been close to obtaining munitions containing the deadly nerve agent cyclosarin that Polish soldiers recovered last month in Iraq, the head of Poland's military intelligence said Friday.

Polish troops had been searching for munitions as part of their regular mission in south-central Iraq when they were told by an informant in May that terrorists had made a bid to buy the chemical weapons, which date back to Saddam Hussein's war with Iran in the 1980s, Gen. Marek Dukaczewski told reporters in Warsaw.

"We were mortified by the information that terrorists were looking for these warheads and offered $5,000 apiece," Dukaczewski said. "An attack with such weapons would be hard to imagine. All of our activity was accelerated at appropriating these warheads."

Dukaczewski refused to give any further details about the terrorists or the sellers of the munitions, saying only that his troops thwarted terrorists by purchasing the 17 rockets for a Soviet-era launcher and two mortar rounds containing the nerve agent for an undisclosed sum June 23.

(Chemical munitions found by Polish soldiers were being pursued by terrorists SFGate, the AP)

And so on, this is just what has been reported in the Old Press itself. So do these stories mean that they are actually doing their job? Far from it, and in the Information Age it can be proven how they spin things and just lie or comit fraud if they have to. One good example is the actual Kay text vs. the thousands of headlines and reporting easily found through Lexis-Nexis. I used CNN as the same source for both the report: "Here are the weapons and weapons programs that we have found so far." vs. the headline: "Kay says, no weapons found!" Although I research these issues myself at times, one does not have to. There are others who have already done the job of deconstructing the Old Press over and over.

E.g., see: (Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media
By Brent Bozell)

It seems that the job will have to be done over and over, as mental incompetents, i.e. journalists, cling to their canards. As far as its impact on the Herd I am reminded of Karl Kraus's comment on Nazism: "The Press created National Socialism." as well as Shirer's comment on the impact of Nazi propaganda that continued day in, day out, regardless the facts. It does seem to impact the mentality of the mass, even if the Herd is often too busy feeding to care.

Wasting time...

We all waste it sometime for no rhyme or reason. Maybe if I found reason in rhyme then I'd be saving time.

I waste time playing real time strategy games sometimes. This will probably be the only time I post about it. I hadn't played in about a year until last week.

These are shots from a game of Age of Mythology with my younger brother as an ally.

So, it's two vs. one on my colony. Lil' brudder doesn't seem to be winning against his man:




He farms away when he should be hunting animals for food. "Why don't I have food, man! Man!":


His guy uses god powers on me:


Fortunately, my brother sent in the calvary...all five of them:


His guy gets his titan out:



The End.

(I'm kidding, my younger brother isn't bad at it. Although he was pretty bad that game in some ways. I have bad games too but I also have l33t skillz. Oh yes.)

[Related posts: Asians stuck in feudalism work as serfs....inside computer games and He's a pinball wizard, Blind Teen Amazes With Video-Game Skills)

Why support for winning in Iraq is necessary.

I never had doubts in the hidden intentions of those in Iraq who keep saying that multinational troops must leave Iraq soon; they say their demands are essential for national sovereignty coming out of their patriotic feelings for Iraq while I see them as far as they could be from patriotism. [Note, English is his second language.]

If those people put Iraq’s and Iraqis’ interests first, they wouldn’t have asked the US to leave Iraq while the troops missions are yet to be accomplished and the Iraqi national forces are still not capable of protecting the country and the citizens.
We all know why some insist that US must leave or keep calling the presence of these troops an occupation. The problem is that the ordinary citizen here cannot talk about this in public for fear of being labeled as an agent or collaborator with the occupation and what can an unarmed citizen do to face such an accusation coming from this or that militia.

What pushes these politicians and militias to take this attitude is their dream of regaining sovereignty but not national sovereignty; it is their sovereignty over Iraq.

What is keeping these liars from making a large scale coup over the democratic change is the presence of coalition troops that are protecting the new Iraq.

(Iraq the Model)

I was watching C-Span as the new war critic Murtha was apparently arguing for withdrawal. He's a war hero and an expert on national security so at least he is a much better spokesman than a mother who lost her son. Yet he was answered in stentorian tones by a Republican war hero who demolished everything Murtha said to the point that Democrats were whining about it on the floor. Yet they didn't actually speak up to silence him when he ran out of time and asked for more. A sample:

Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, a 29-year Air Force veteran who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for nearly seven years, called Murtha's position unconscionable and irresponsible. "We've got to support our troops to the hilt and see this mission through," he said.

(SFgate)

Most Democrats seem to believe as their moveon.org fringe does, yet in the end they failed to support Murtha and did not even muster a single objection to silence his critic. I think that despite their fringe beliefs some may see that stability just may increase in Iraq, as many Marines on the ground believe that they are winning and Iraqis like the writer above seem to resolve to see things through no matter what. So I wonder what the Old Press and the Democrats are going to do if Iraq does get to the point that they cannot fit it into their template that it's another Vietnam and so on.

And the public opinion that they've shaped among the masses, how quickly it may evaporate if the Herd senses that things really are going against the terrorists and the old order in Iraq and towards a new Iraq. Perhaps that's why Democrats will not tie themselves down in history with an actual vote on the record for withdrawal, despite all their rhetoric. They fear the Herd, as it tramples politicians sometimes. The Herd is fickle and stupid, so it is better just to make a decision on principle, stick to it and try to herd the Herd along. That way if you are trampled then at least it was for standing for something.

I respect Murtha for standing for what he believes in, although he did believe the opposite when he voted for the war. I didn't see his whole speech, I wonder if he took personal responsibility for that or tried to blame-shift to "It was the Bush manufactured intelligence!" like other Democrats have. I suspect that he would be one to take responsiblity, unlike others.

In the end, it seems that the American Left would have done nothing but rely on the U.N. with respect to 9/11 and the new conflict that it represents* and since the U.N. is notoriously corrupt and inept, worse than nothing would have been done.

*Yes, there are links between it all when it comes to global terrorism. Duh.

Theodicy

...though Darwin made repeated references to the Creator, he never needed to define his terms, for the modern view of God was widely accepted.

In constructing the arguments for his theory of evolution, Darwin repeatedly argued that God would never have created the world that the nineteenth-century naturalists were uncovering. Shortly after going pub lic with his theory, Darwin wrote to a friend: “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that the cat should play with mice.”
[...]
Nature seemed to lack precision and economy in design and was often “inexplicable on the theory of creation.” In addition to this growing list of imperfections and mistakes, Darwin questioned the way the various species were designed. He observed, on the one hand, that different species use “an almost infinite diversity of means” for the same task and that this should not be the case if each species had been independently created by a single Creator. On the other hand, Darwin observed that different species use similar means for different tasks.” This too, he argued, does not fit with the theory of divine creation.

What exactly did Darwin expect God’s creation to look like? We may never know, but for our purposes the point is that Darwin was significantly motivated by nonscientific premises. He had a specific notion of God in view, and as it had for Milton, that view defined the framework of his thinking. Though biology was young and little was known about how organisms actually worked, Darwin believed he had sufficient evidence to show that God would not have created this world. God’s world had to fit into certain specific criteria that humans had devised.

This view was not peculiar to Darwin. Philosophers and scientists had become quite confident in their knowledge of God. This attitude developed over many centuries, and by Darwin’s day it was internalized and needed no justification. Today this view continues to be evident in evolutionary literature, from popular presentations of the theory to college level textbooks.

(Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil
by Cornelius G. Hunter :12-13)

Eventually, it seems that some may as well argue: "We have to go to the bathroom. Yet I find that icky. So God does not exist...and therefore, uh, evolution is true or somethin'." (Typically, all one has to do about this is to question the level of abstraction that this sort of argument exists in and the pride and arrogance that it is based on. For what excretory system for a self-replicating and self-healing automata that runs on plant and animal products would they devise? E.g., applying this type of refutation to Darwinist arguments on God and the mammalian vagina.)

But back to those wasps and things, is Darwinism really a valid scientific explanation? E.g.

The work of Chrystal demonstrates that the larva of the wood wasp Sirex is also peculiarly accommodating towards its predator, the parasitic wasp Ibalia. Sirex bores a hole in the trunk of a conifer, in which it deposits its egg. The egg yields a grub which feeds on the wood. As the grub feeds on the wood it gradually bores a tunnel. After some years the grub turns into a pupa which finally yields the adult wasp, which, using its powerful jaws, bites its way out of the tree. The Ibalia using the hole bored by the Sirex lays its egg in the Sirex grub. The Ibalia grub gradually consumes the tissues of the Sirex grub but does not eat the vital organs until last, thus ensuring a fresh supply of meat until its development, which takes three years, is complete. The presence of the italic;">Ibalia changes the behaviour of the Sirex. Normally the Sirex larva bores deeply into the wood but when infected by the Ibalia it bores towards the surface. This is a vital behavioural change for Ibalia because it has comparatively weak jaws and would be unable to bore as far through the wood as Sirex to escape from the trunk. Yet another example of interspecific altruism? What conceivable value [for natural selection to operate on] can the Sirex grub gain by changing the direction of its boring? By what curious sequence of small evolutionary steps did the Ibalias’ predatory habit induce this vital behavioural change?

Even bacteria provide examples of complex systems which pose a challenge to gradualistic explanations. Take, for example, the bacterial flagellum. This tiny microscopic hair...

(Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
By Michael Denton :223)

Enough, if I read about that tiny microscopic hair one more time...

It is odd though, that there's all these little things swimming around inside you right now. It's enough to make one's tiny microscopic hairs stand on end. Even "your" cells are moving around to make you and enough are dying and being replaced that in about seven years you'll have a new body even if information is saved in its scars. I suppose that one could say that in the fullness of time your body is born again. After all, if you didn't have a body then you'd be nobody, and everyone needs somebody.

Parasites need some body to eat and maybe somebody might say come and eat ye all of me. The parasites are not good, yet that doesn't mean that natural selections as applied to "random" mutations explain the parasites that need to eat somebody to live:

As described in Chapter Seven, in the case of certain types of insect such as butterflies, beetles, bees and ants, which undergo what is termed complete metamorphosis during a quiescent pupation stage, the transformation involves virtually the complete dissolution of all the organ systems of the larva and their reconstitution de novo from small masses of undifferentiated embryonic cells called the imaginal discs. In other words, one type of fully functional organism is broken down into what amounts to a nutrient broth from which an utterly different type of organism emerges.
[...]
The life history of some parasites, which are in themselves astonishing enough, often involve what amounts to a number of metamorphoses. Consider the life cycle of the liver fluke. The adult lives in the intestine of a sheep. After the eggs are laid they pass with the faeces onto the ground. The eggs hatch, giving rise to small ciliated larvae which can swim about in water. If the larvae are lucky they find a pond snail: they must do this to survive, for the snail is the vehicle for the next stage in the life cycle of the liver fluke. Having found a snail the larvae finds its way into the pulmonary chamber or lung. Here it loses its cilia and its size increases. At this stage it is known as a sporocyst. While in this condition it buds off germinal cells into its body cavity which develop into a second type of larvae known as rediae. These are oval in shape, possessing a mouth and stomach and a pair of protuberances which they use to move about. The rediae eventually leave the sporocyst, entering the tissue of the snail, after which they develop into yet another larval form known as cercariae which appear superficially to resemble a tadpole. Using their long tails these tadpole-like larvae work their way through and eventually out of the snail and onto blades of grass, where each larva sheds its tail and encases itself in a sheath. Eventually they are eaten by a sheep. Inside the sheep they find their way to the liver where they develop sexual organs and mature into the adult state. They finally leave the sheep’s liver and migrate to the intestine where they mate and so complete their extraordinary life cycle.

In the case of many of the more dramatic invertebrate metamorphoses not even the vaguest attempts have been made to provide hypothetical scenarios explaining how such an astonishing sequence of transformations could have come about gradually as a result of a succession of small beneficial mutations.

(Ib. :220-222)

That failure is common, not even the vaguest hand waving. It's ironic, those who write the hypothetical/mythological narratives of Naturalism often fail to actually write them. Instead they tend to be content with: "God didn't do it because it seems evil." Probably because engaging in that type of natural theology was almost all that Darwinism was about in the first place.

An interesting point...

[The Pope] Urban VIII acted precisely as scientists wish for current Popes to act on the issue of evolution. They want the church to side with the scientific majority that stands on Darwinian evolution against a small minority of scientists who favor a design model of origins. Siding with the scientific majority was precisely what the Church did in the seventeenth century. So why do people believe that this incident demonstrates that science and religion are natural enemies?

(Uncommon Descent on the rhetoric of science, science!)

The rhetorical tactic of invoking the myth of inevitable progress through time that progressives tend to believe in and combining it with Galileo as an example shows up often. That's an interesting answer to use for it. It is an accurate answer, as well. Now some of the Catholic Church is soft on "evolution" and tends to want to side with the scientific majority, perhaps they need another Catholic like Galileo to engage in some scientific rhetoric for the minority. The Mommy Nature types and the Mother of God types tend to fit together psychologically, so it would probably have to be some good rhetoric making some discriminations and separations to pry some little fellows on out of the womb.

[Related posts: Narratives and Galileo Galilei]

Homologous?

I wasn't going to do a post tonight but I was just reading some news: (Jolie, Pitt to Visit Quake-Hit Pakistan for U.N) and came across this morphological similarity:





I think a workable hypothesis might be able to be developed. But the notion that Angelina Jolie's lips may have had some intelligent designing combined with natural selections throws a wrench in it.

Going around the Old Press...

Portions of a Marine's e-mail, found on a Rightist blog (Can't say how far Rightist it may be.):

Bad guy weapons:

1) Mostly AK47's The entire country is an arsenal. Works better in the desert than the M16 and the .308 Russian round kills reliably. PKM belt fed light machine guns are also common and effective. Luckily, the enemy mostly shoots like [crap]. Undisciplined "spray and pray" type fire. However, they are seeing more and more precision weapons, especially sniper rifles. (Iran, again)

Fun fact: Captured enemy have apparently marveled at the marksmanship of our guys and how hard they fight. They are apparently told in Jihad school that the Americans rely solely on technology, and can be easily beaten in close quarters combat for their lack of toughness. Let's just say they know better now.

2) The RPG: Probably the infantry weapon most feared by our guys. Simple, reliable and as common as dog[crap]. The enemy responded to our up-armored humvees by aiming at the windshields, often at point blank range. Still killing a lot of our guys.

3) The IED [improvised explosive device]: The biggest killer of all. Can be anything from old Soviet anti-armor mines to jury rigged artillery shells. A lot found in [The Marine's] area were in abandoned cars. The enemy would take 2 or 3 155mm artillery shells and wire them together. Most were detonated by cell phone, and the explosions are enormous. You're not safe in any vehicle, even an M1 tank. Driving is by far the most dangerous thing our guys do over there. Lately, they are much more sophisticated "shape charges" (Iran ian) specifically designed to penetrate armor.

Fact: Most of the ready made IED's are supplied by Iran, who is also providing terrorists (Hezbollah types) to train the insurgents in their use and tactics. That's why the attacks have been so deadly lately. Their concealment methods are ingenious, the latest being shape charges in Styrofoam containers spray painted to look like the cinderblocks that litter all Iraqi roads. We find about 40% before they detonate, and the bomb disposal guys are unsung heroes of this war.
[...]
5) Bad guy technology: Simple yet effective. Most communication is by cell and satellite phones, and also by email on laptops. They use handheld GPS units for navigation and "Google earth" for overhead views of our positions. Their weapons are good, if not fancy, and prevalent.

Their explosives and bomb technology is TOP OF THE LINE. Night vision is rare. They are very careless with their equipment and the captured GPS units and laptops are treasure troves of Intel when captured.

Who are the bad guys?:

Most of the carnage is caused by the Zarqawi Al Qaeda group. They operate mostly in Anbar province (Fallujah and Ramadi). These are mostly "foreigners", non-Iraqi Sunni Arab Jihadists from all over the Muslim world (and Europe). Most enter Iraq through Syria (with, of course, the knowledge and complicity of the Syrian govt.) , and then travel down the "rat line" which is the trail of towns along the Euphrates River that we've been hitting hard for the last few months.

Some are virtually untrained young Jihadists that often end up as suicide bombers or in "sacrifice squads". Most, however, are hard core terrorists from all the usual suspects (Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas etc.) These are the guys running around murdering civilians en masse and cutting heads off. The Chechens (many of whom are Caucasian), are supposedly the most ruthless and the best fighters. (they have been fighting the Russians for years). In the Baghdad area and south, most of the insurgents are Iranian inspired (and led) Iraqi Shiites. The Iranian Shiia have been very adept at infiltrating the Iraqi local govt.'s, the police forces and the Army. They have had a massive spy and agitator network there since the Iran-Iraq war in the early 80's. Most of the Saddam loyalists were killed, captured or gave up long ago.

Bad Guy Tactics:

When they are engaged on an infantry level they get their asses kicked every time. Brave, but stupid. Suicidal Banzai-type charges were very common earlier in the war and still occur. They will literally sacrifice 8-10 man teams in suicide squads by sending them screaming and firing Ak's and RPG's directly at our bases just to probe the defenses.

They get mowed down like grass every time. ( see the M2 and M240 above). [The Marine's] base was hit like this often. When engaged, they have a tendency to flee to the same building, probably for what they think will be a glorious last stand. Instead, we call in air and that's the end of that more often than not. These hole-ups are referred to as Alpha Whiskey Romeo's (Allah's Waiting Room). We have the laser guided ground-air thing down to a science. The fast mover's, mostly Marine F-18's, are taking an ever incr easing toll on the enemy. When caught out in the open, the helicopter gunships and AC-130 Spectre gunships cut them to ribbons with cannon and rocket fire, especially at night.
[...]

The new strategy is simple: attrition.

The insurgent tactic most frustrating is their use of civilian non-combatants as cover. They know we do all we can to avoid civilian casualties and therefore schools, hospitals and (especially) Mosques are locations where they meet, stage for attacks, cache weapons and ammo and flee to when engaged. They have absolutely no regard whatsoever for civilian casualties. They will terrorize locals and murder without hesitation anyone believed to be sympathetic to the Americans or the new Iraqi govt. Kidnapping of family members (especially children) is common to influence people they are trying to influence but cant reach, such as local govt. officials, clerics, tribal leaders, etc.).

The first thing our guys are told is "don't get captured". They know that if captured they will be tortured and beheaded on the internet. Zarqawi openly offers bounties for anyone who brings him a live American serviceman. This motivates the criminal element who otherwise don't give a shit about the war. A lot of the beheading victims were actually kidnapped by common criminals and sold to Zarqawi. As such, for our guys, every fight is to the death. Surrender is not an option.

The Iraqi's are a mixed bag. Some fight well, others aren't worth a [crap. ;-)] Most do okay with American support. Finding leaders is hard, but they are getting better. It is widely viewed that Zarqawi's use of suicide bombers, en masse, against the civilian population was a serious tactical mistake. Many Iraqi's were galvanized and the caliber of recruits in the Army and the police forces went up, along with their motivation. It also led to an exponential increase in good intel because the Iraqi's are sick of the insurgent attacks against civilians.

The Kurds are solidly pro-American and fearless fighters.

According to [The Marine], morale among our guys is very high. They not only believe they are winning, but that they are winning decisively. They are stunned and dismayed by what they see in the American press, whom they almost universally view as against them. The embedded reporters are despised and distrusted. They are inflicting casualties at a rate of 20-1 and then see [crap] like "Are we losing in Iraq" on TV and the print media. For the most part, they are satisfied with their equipment, food and leadership.

Bottom line though, and they all say this, there are not enough guys there to drive the final stake through the heart of the insurgency, primarily because there aren't enough troops in-theater to shut down the borders with Iran and Syria. The Iranians and the Syrians just can't stand the thought of Iraq being an American ally (with, of course, permanent US bases there).

(The Jawa Report)

Emphasis added...it is odd. It's as if the Old Press believes that it is not allowed to report that our troops are winning. Most journalists seem to believe the old Leftist canard that America is responsible for radical Islamists. I have a few questions about that for any who would care to take it up. Why is it that Islamists are the only group of people that have problems with Europeans, Hindus, Jews, Russians, etc. and rely on the tactic of terrorism to the point that they are synonymous in most people's minds? Why don't other poor and oppressed groups of people around the world rely on that tactic to the same extent or have a problem with virtually everyone else to the same extent? And so on. In short, how exactly are the facts that Islamic terrorism exists and must be dealt with America's fault and what policies could America supposedly have that would be different from everything already tried by everyone else?

It's a habit of a leftist Herd to blame your own country first to the same extent that a Rightist accepts no blame, e.g.:

Orwell was a patriot of the left.

‘In “enlightened” circles,’ he wrote just before D-Day, ‘to express pro-British sentiments needs considerable moral courage.’ English intellectuals were hostile to their own country: one could criticize Churchill and lampoon his wartime government; but Stalin and the Soviet Union were sacrosanct. A voluntary form of censorship had developed among publishers and newspaper editors that simply forbade negative comments about Stalin. Orwell described in an introduction (‘Freedom of the Press’) to Animal Farm, which did not appear until 1972, the ‘cowardly desire’ that had developed within a British intelligentsia ‘whose patriotism is directed towards the USSR rather than towards Britain’. Even if Animal Farm were published, he was convinced the press would dismiss it as a ‘dull, silly book’, one that ‘oughtn’t to have been published’.

(1945: The War That Never Ended
By Gregor Dallas :237)

Two birds, one stone...

I was going to read other blogs, comment and do a post but I haven't had much time lately. So to combine commenting and posting here is some material from Down With Absolutes, citing a rabbi:

The leader of the largest branch of American Judaism blasted conservative religious activists in a speech Saturday, calling them “zealots” who claim a “monopoly on God” while promoting anti-gay policies akin to Adolf Hitler’s.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the liberal Union for Reform Judaism, said “religious right” leaders believe “unless you attend my church, accept my God and study my sacred text you cannot be a moral person.”

“What could be more bigoted than to claim that you have a monopoly on God?” he said during the movement’s national assembly in Houston, which runs through Sunday.

His transcendent historical or philosophical perspective seems to approach nil, especially for a rabbi.

For instance on history, the Nazis had "anti-gay policies" like they had anti-brown hair policies or rampantly discriminated in favor of Nordic looks. I.e., they quite simply did no such thing.* There were some policies and invidious discrimination with respect to such things depending on politics but history clearly demonstrates that they did not take such things as seriously as being Jewish. It's not even close to being comparable, so one could still be a Nazi of high rank and fail to have Nordic looks or fail to be heterosexual. Ernst Röehm was openly homosexual and led many Nazi homosexuals who considered themselves to be bonded together like the bundles of sticks of the ancient warrior cults or Sparta. Note Nazi policy:

The pragmatic position of certain nazis in power seems evident from the fact that Röehm was not the only homosexual in the nazi movement, and that before his liquidation homosexuality seems to have been tacitly tolerated in the SA and the Hitler Youth.

...the nazi movement may have attracted some homosexual men because of its...anti-bourgeois doctrines, the male comradeship in an organization like the SA, and the glorification of masculinity, youth and physical prowess and beauty. According to some leaders of the German homosexual emancipation movement, several homosexuals supported nazism for these reasons and some were even affiliated with the Nazi Party, especially the SA and the Hitler Youth. Especially prior to, but also after 1934, nazi policy was indeed characterized by inconsistency, probably due to a lack of consensus among the nazi leadership.

(Medicine, Male Bonding and Homosexuality in Nazi Germany
By Harry Oosterhuis
Journal of Contemporary History,
Vol. 32, No. 2. (Apr., 1997), :187-205)

There were also well known homosexual artists from the decadent Weimar who were never arrested and so on. In contrast, there were German/Jewish army heroes from WWI as well as Jewish scientists of the highest caliber who were still extirpated or forced to leave Germany. (This was fortunate for America, as some of those Jewish scientists came here to use their minds.) At any rate, the people with "anti-gay policies" akin to Hitler's are those who use homosexuality mainly to defame their political opponents as "closet gays" and so on thanks to their own proto-Nazi psychological dynamics. That sort of dynamic is increasingly common on the American Left. It leads into positions that make no sense, as they supposedly support homosexuality as normal yet then don't treat it that way. The Nazis came across the same contradiction and it added fuel to the dispute between Himmler and Röehm that eventually led to Röehm's bundle of sticks being purged on the Night of the Long Knives. So Nazis killed other Nazis, did the gay angle make Röehm's SA troops that had gone around eliminating electoral opposition with brutal tactics victims of it all? Note that homosexuals were on both sides of the camp fence as Nazi guards and prisoners. It is historically inaccurate to just lump everyone together as gay, Jewish...it was all the same when as a matter of fact, it simply was not.

That rabbi seems pig ignorant. Note his target as opposed to historical facts:

Although Jews and Christians correctly see in the rise of Nazism a failure on the part of the church, Hitler was made possible by the triumph of scientific naturalism in Europe, not by organized religion.

(America's Real War
By Rabbi Daniel Lapin
Multnomah Pub. Inc. (1999) :327)

The ignorant rabbi says, "What could be more bigoted than to claim that you have a monopoly on God?"

Is he a monotheistic Jew of ancient principle or a pagan who feeels a psychological urge to try to be intolerant of the "intolerance" or "the ethical code worship of the Jews" as the Nazis did?

If a rabbi is ignorant, then what does he have to teach us as a teacher? He does not even know that every claim made with words is a claim laden with the notion that it is ultimately true in some way?

Bigotry is ignorantly clinging to a false claim out of pride without regard for facts, logic and evidence. Leftists tend to use the term as synonymous with making a claim about ultimate truth because most of the time their claims reduce to: "Me like." "Me no like." That is about as far as they go into facts, logic, evidence and the search for truth. Which is why they are so susceptible to emotional conditioning. E.g., the sort of thing that relies on avoiding facts, logic and evidence:

Our effect is achieved without reference to facts, logic, or proof...through repeated infralogical emotional conditioning, the person's beliefs can be altered whether he is conscious of the attack or not. Indeed, the more he is distracted by even specious, surface arguments, the less conscious he will be of the true nature of the process. In short, jamming succeeds insofar as it inserts even the slightest frisson of doubt and shame into the previously held unalloyed beliefs regarding heterosexuality and homosexuality.

(After the Ball: How America will conquer its fear & hatred of Gays in the 90's
By Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen :152-153)

It seems that the average American liberal cannot deal with "gay issues" based on accurate philosophy or history because their feelings are conditioned into: "Me like." "Me no like." based on whether one is being positive towards homosexuality or negative.

I think I will strive for the opposite and so for an effect achieved with reference to facts, logic and evidence.

*The Nazis did enforce discriminatory policies against smoking/smokers in the name of national health and medicalization just as they probably would have followed Himmler's views on homosexuality more as well if so many Nazis hadn't been homosexuals themselves, so what lessons can be learned or implications drawn from that? It would seem none, mainly because smokers aren't that good at victimization propaganda. Yet notice how virtually everyone is following the gay lead now of medicalization combined with inflating claims of discrimination and victimization to get the public policy that you want. Supposedly it's effective as Kirk and Madsen argued, although the 90s have come and gone and still no same-sex marriage.

Liberty

Liberty is not to be enjoyed, indeed it cannot exist, without the
habits of just subordination; it consists, not so much in removing
all restraint from the orderly, as in imposing it on the violent.

-- Fisher Ames (Essay on Equality, 15 December 1801)
Works of Fisher Ames, W. B. Allen, ed., vol. 1 (256)

Fisher Ames (1758-1808), was a Congressman from Massachusetts in the First Session of the Congress of the United States when the Bill of Rights was formulated. It was Fisher Ames who, on August 20,1789, suggested the wording of the First Amendment, which was adopted by the House:

Congress shall make no law establishing religion, or to prevent the free exercise thereof, or to infringe the rights of conscience.

Fisher Ames shared his beliefs concerning education:

Should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a schoolbook? Its morals are pure, its examples are captivating and noble... The reverence for the sacred book that is thus early impressed lasts long; and, probably, if not impressed in infancy, never takes firm hold of the mind... In no Book is there so good English, so pure and so elegant, and by teaching all the same they will speak alike, and the Bible will justly remain the standard of language as well as of faith.

(America's God and Country
By William J. Federer)

The reason that someone speaking like Fisher Ames will make a Leftist snivel is that language can become text which can become law, which is the basis of the rule of law and so a civilization that cultivates culture. That cultivation is opposed to the Leftist tendency to primitive tribalism in which diversity is said to be identifying with and running with whatever Herd one happens to be in.

But if you are white then typically you're not supposed to try to create your Herd or run with it. Instead, you are supposed to herd all the other Herds and tend to them in various ways, as supposedly they cannot tend to themselves and are the hapless victims of their environment, history and so on. Here is an example, take the Leftist identity politics typically applied on American universities with respect to men and women. A few posts down, there is some history about veterans and some of the things that were typically gone through by men sans some gory detail. It is possible to spin that into identity politics and the basis for "Men's Studies" at the university. Perhaps one could begin with some propaganda and emotional conditioning based on collectivism, e.g.: "Men have always had the toughest and most risky jobs, dangerous I say! Why, all throughout history it has typically been men that have had their arms and legs blown off and then there's the torture and the psychological trauma. All of that just because women manipulate them into fighting to protect women, too. So now you can see some of the discrimination of it all, all throughout history. Women are healthier then men as the result of the discrimination that continues in current times, you think that girls are generally the children being drugged with ritalin? It's women who can kill a man's offspring if she feels like it. And...blah, blah, blah!"

It's not that difficult to play with Leftist identity politics to distort things in a propagandistic way that relies on emotional manipulation and group identity. Conservatives have noted that the American Left is guided by the contradictory themes of radical collectivism (I feel a little sad because I'm in this group that gets discriminated against.) and radical individualism (My rights! My rights!). So while feminists admit to social bonds in the sisterhood some feminist notions are also based on a radical individualism that has been divorced from social relationships, plain social facts and even social/physical bonds. This is the radical individualism that feminists have relied on to support the choice of killing their little ones.

To begin to make use of the same methods masculinists should get together at universities and gather round to study themselves intently to get better at sniveling about "their history." Then it would seem that something affirmative must be done for them as a group. (They could shift between collectivism and individualism as necessary, never really admitting that we are rather social individuals.)

It's Friday.

...and while I could write something about science and stories, instead I'll probably do somethin'. To some, it would seem that writing is not doing. I could write a parable about a court room or the place where a culture tries to administer justice, because your fate always hangs on text and so language, so to speak. Then you might care about just what sort of principles have been encoded in language. Anyway, instead of writing about that or science and stories here are some pictures about science and stories...

For Herb...

Here's one picture and I'm putting an old video back up. (3.7 Mb, Divxed for size, go to the Divx homepage for the codec)



[Related posts: Good Weekend, Gone Windsurfing, etc.]

Veterans

Some history,

'I am quite positive we must give the order,' announced a strained Eisenhower to his senior commanders on Sunday evening, 4 June. 'I don't like it, but there it is.' They had already delayed the invasion twice during that wet weekend. But now weather forecasters were predicting a slight break in the spell of bad weather. Eisenhower gave the order to sail the next day; operations would begin on Monday evening: 'I don't see how we can do anything else.' For the people of southern England, who looked up from their gardens and fields on Monday evening and Tuesday, it seemed as if the whole world was on the move.

The soldiers had been living in camps, separate and solitary places, the perimeters of which were marked with posters: 'Do not loiter. Civilians must not talk to army personnel.' With every day and every hour they felt increasingly cut off from daily life. They were aware that they were part of a great plan but, not knowing what exactly it was, felt they were just a part of a machine, a number.

There was no singing on the boats that crossed the Channel. Doug Halloway of the 49th West Riding Division (the Polar Bears) found himself on a ship crammed from top to bottom with equipment, mainly vehicles and guns; sleeping quarters were confined to amidships; 'the floor was covered with palliasses with no space between them, and above was about the same amount of hammocks.' Each sickening lurch brought up a heap of yesterday's bully beef and cabbage. 'I think', said Ronald McKinlay of the RN Commandos, 'one of the main reasons why Normandy was a great success was that the soldiers would much rather have fought thousands of Germans than go back into those boats.' On some American ships swing music was repeated throughout the night; it was still playing over the loudspeakers as the troops went into action.
[...]
Over the next two and a half months Normandy was the focus of the world. Bomber crews would look down in amazement upon the Channel now converted into a vast, living conveyor belt of ships and minesweepers sailing back and forth; like stanchions, destroyers and corvettes were moored on either side of the sea lane, their guns scanning horizons for enemy boats and aircraft. The beaches formed a mere prolongation of the sea, and the land behind it a mere extension of the beaches: a great flat expanse, the plain of Europe.

(1945: The War That Never Ended
By Gegor Dallas :127-128)


The view from the ground,

Lt. Col. Robert Wolverton Commander, 3rd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry, June 5, 1944

Although I am not a religious man, I would like all of you to kneel with me in prayer. . . . That if die we must, that we die as men would die, without complaining, without pleading, and safe in the feeling that we have done our best for what we believed was right.

Col. Frank Krebs, commander of the 440th Troop Carrier Group at Exeter, conveyed Wolverton and his command team to Normandy on Stoy Hora, the lead C-47 of a forty-five-ship serial. A BBC reporter named Ward Smith accompanied Wolverton's stick and filed a report when he returned to Exeter with Krebs that morning.

Ward Smith Reporter, BBC, June 1944

I shall never forget the scene up there in those last fateful minutes, those long lines of motionless, grim-faced young men burdened like pack-horses so that they could hardly stand unaided. . . . So young they looked, on the edge of the unknown. And somehow, so sad. Most sat with eyes closed as the seconds ticked by. They seemed to be asleep, but I could see lips moving wordlessly. . . . The time had come. We were over the drop zones. I wish I could play up that moment, but there was nothing to indicate that this was the supreme climax. Just a whistling that lasted for a few seconds-and those men, so young, so brave, had gone to their destiny.

Wolverton's combat career lasted only an instant. According to comrades who jumped from his C-47, the enemy shot him as he descended just east of St. Come du Mont, and he was dead by the time his chute deposited him on the ground. That Drop Zone D was a particularly perilous place for a parachute landing on D-Day was corroborated by the nearly identical fatalities suffered by many of Wolverton's men, including his second-in-command, Maj. George Grant, and the CO of Company G, Capt. Harold Van Antwerp. Furthermore, shortly after the drop, the Germans captured Wolverton's three remaining company commanders, including Capt. John McKnight of Company I.

Capt. John McKnight Commander, Company I, 506th Parachute Infantry, 1947

Apparently the Germans anticipated that the invaders might use this area for just such a purpose, and they ringed it with machine guns and mortars, and were sitting at their arms in readiness when the 3rd Battalion came in. . . . Floating down into this well-lit and fire-covered area, the battalion lost about twenty men from enemy action before its first groups could collect themselves.

(Utah Beach: The Amphibious Landing and Airborne
Operations on D-Day June 6, 1944
By Joseph Balkoski :134-135)

The view from home,
(Invasion!
The New York Times; June 11, 1944 pg. E1)

Bacteria Eat Human Sewage, Produce Rocket Fuel

The high cost of treating human wastewater may one day tank thanks to a bacterium that eats ammonia and produces rocket fuel.

Standard water treatment plants use oxygen-hungry bacteria to break down human waste. To feed the microbes, plants must aerate sewage sludge with costly, power-hogging equipment.

But Brocadia anammoxidans, or anammox bacteria, survive without oxygen, producing energy from nitrite and ammonia, which is found naturally in human waste.

"Conventional [bacteria] treatments do a good job, so the big benefit is doing this much more efficiently and cheaply," said Marc Strous, a microbiologist at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

Strous says savings could be enormous, up to 90 percent versus standard sewage treatment plants. A prototype facility in Rotterdam is already earning praise.

(Continued at the National Geographic)

This could make for some fun with allegories: Once upon a time there were some shape-shifting aliens who fought a civil war. Fortunately the good aliens won the war, so all was well and swell. There was just one minor problem, whether good or evil these type of aliens could not die. The evil ones were going insane over their loss of power now and dealing with them was a problem that the good ones were getting tired of. So some alien scientists got together, marshalled their knowledge and came up with some redemptive solutions based on patterns of cycling and recycling. One of the things they developed was some larva to put in the prison with the evil aliens to make use of even their excrement for good. As you can imagine, the evil aliens didn't like all these redemptive solutions.

As to this last one, they sometimes went so far as to eat their own excrement out of spite. The reason was that they had noticed that some of the larva were hatching into butterflies and flying out of the prison that they remained stuck in. They did not see the good of keeping the place clean, as they were going insane. One day, some of the good aliens had taken a sample of excrement out of the prison and were studying their larva at work.

One was looking at the larva intently and then said, "Say, do you hear that high pitched whining?"

"Yes, now that you mention it. By Xenu, is that annoying!" one replied.

"There are patterns to it. I think we can develope a translation for these simplistic frequencies to see what they're communicating to each other." So they did.

When they listened to the larva they began to hear many different messages:

"Whoa, whoa, is us! We live in excrement, excrement I say!"

Others replied, "But wait, it seems like we're designed well to live in it, as if we fit right in! Besides, reproduction is kind of fun too, it's not all so bad."

At a rather high frequency some communicated back, "What kind of incompetent designer would make us, just look at us...we're larvas. Well, I feel very larval right now!"

The good aliens looked at each other, "Odd, some seem to think that things revolve around them. You'd think that they would get a sense that things do not revolve around them, given that they eat excrement." Then they listened some more as some whined, "So you don't believe that we turn into butterflies and fly out of the cage?"

"We're larval and anything like butterflies are just like fairytales murmured over eggs. That's all the same type of fairytale. We can feel the fact now that we are larval, so that's all there is. When I feel a butterfly here and now, then I will believe that they exist."

"I hear that there is a way to see, and not just feel as we feel."

"Then why can't we see now?"

"Maybe it is for our own good that we can only feel our way along for now. For who knows what we would see of ourselves and our situation if we did see?"

The good aliens kept listening, then one turned to the other and said, "It really doesn't make much sense to condemn us as incompetent, does it?" to which the other replied, "It seems to be a losing situation all the way around for them as far as that goes. If we were incompetent, then they lack the competence to judge us anyway. And if we were malicious, then we'd torture the ones who said that we were incompetent. But some of them are silly....which I suppose they would blame us for too."

The other thought about it for a moment, "I suppose they feel that we did not give them a chance, yet we have...and we can make some more too."

Transcendence and Immanence

...on this point all religions and all sapiential traditions are in perfect agreement: man is the theomorphic creature par excellence, whence his preeminence and his position of centrality.

Perhaps the most baneful consequence of evolutionist thought is that it obscures, more effectively than any other pseudo-philosophy, the true nature of man and the loftiness of his destiny. One cannot but agree with Seyyed Hossein Nasr when he writes (with reference to the Darwinist age in which we live) that “Never before has there been so little knowledge of man, of the anthropos”.

The fact is that Darwinism constitutes a counterposition to the perennial wisdom of mankind. It represents a systematic denial of the archetypes, of the essences, of that “participation in Being” upon which all life and all existences hinge. In the climate of Darwinist thought most of what the religions teach loses its meaning or, worse still, assumes another and indeed contrary sense. To be sure, there have been attempts to fuse evolutionism and religion; but the point is that these new interpretations of perennial doctrines have in fact falsified and corrupted what they pretend somehow to restore or render more palatable to the contemporary taste. Teilhard de Chardin, for instance, has unquestionably falsified Christianity even as Sri Aurobindo has mutilated Hinduism.

At bottom evolutionism is the denial of transcendence, the desperate attempt to understand life on the horizontal plane of its manifestations. Religion, on the other hand, is perforce concerned with transcendence and the vertical dimension, in which alone the re-ligare or “binding back” can be effected. The supposed merger, therefore, of these opposed doctrines constitutes one of the most bizarre happenings in these already confused and confusing times.

(The Universe is Ultimately to be Explained in Terms of a Metacosmic Reality
By Wolfgang Smith cf. Cosmos, Bios, Theos: Scientists Reflect on Science, God, and the Origins of the Universe, Life and Homo Sapiens
Edited by Henry Morgenau and Abraham Varghese :115)

The way he picked up on a "denial of transcendence" reminds me of a political scientist who came to define fascism as the "practical and violent resistance to transcendence." In the West there has been a war waged against religion based on Darwinism. (See two posts down for an example of a reaction from "organized religion" that was too little, too late. Who says that religion is organized? Disorganized, is more like it.)

I wonder if the best way to seek the truth is not just a focus on transcendence* as opposed to immanence but instead a sort of marriage between transcendence and immanence in telic thoughts about an unfolding of events as things are thought through, i.e. "evolution." It's ashame that the word has been made into a pollution of language by Darwinists for the sake of their creation myth. It is probably best to avoid it and just write of "an unfolding of events." One that eventually brings about a union between transcendence and immanence, thought and word, word and deed or the Word becoming flesh.

An example of some vague notions of some type of union between "the hidden face of God" or "a hidden subtext" which tends to knit things together in the still waters of a womb and Life:

In claiming that water means life, NASA scientists are not merely being upbeat about their project. They are making--tacitly--a huge and profound assumption about the nature of nature. They are saying, in effect, that the laws of the universe are cunningly contrived to coax life into being against the raw odds; that the mathematical principles of physics, in their elegant simplicity, somehow know in advance about life and its vast complexity. If life follows from soup with causal dependability, the laws of nature encode a hidden subtext, a cosmic imperative, which tells them: 'Make life!' And, through life, its by-products: mind, knowledge, understanding. It means the laws of the universe have engineered their own comprehension. This is a breathtaking vision of nature, magnificent and uplifting in its majestic sweep. I hope it is correct. It would be wonderful if it were correct. But if it is, it represents a shift in the scientific world-view as profound as that initiated by Copernicus and Darwin put together. It should not be glossed over with glib statements that water plus organics equals life, obviously, for it is far from obvious.

(The Fifth Miracle: The Search for
the Origin and Meaning of Life
by Paul Davies :246)

Or perhaps one could sum that up as the Spirit of Law moving upon the face of the waters? Who can say?

A focus on transcendence can lead one to conclusions about God, yet it is a mistaken pattern of thought typical to the West that a focus on immanence is somehow contradictory to transcendence or must be "separated." Instead it is complementary, a complementary marriage that calls for wisdom.

*(E.g. I am making a collection of anomalies that are rather hard for self-appointed Policemen of Knowledge to smother into their Mommy Nature. This sort of thing seems to annoy them.)

The Pope on Intelligence

VATICAN CITY, Nov. 11 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI has waded into the evolution debate in the United States, saying the universe was made as an "intelligent project" and criticizing those who say its creation was without direction.

Benedict's comments, made during his general audience on Wednesday, were published Thursday.

The pope focused on scriptural readings that said God's love was seen in the "marvels of creation." He quoted St. Basil the Great as saying that some people, "fooled by the atheism that they carry inside of them, imagine a universe free of direction and order, as if at the mercy of chance."

(The NYT)

I'd really like to know what people think that "chance" is philosophically. Is it something outside of cause and effect which just happens, by "chance"? It is chance that is a science stopper when it comes to cause and effect. Maybe that is why Darwinists project about it so often as they so often seem to want to trace things back out into some type of "random" event or chance. They seek to eliminate the very portion of the dialectic that defines chance as happenstance. Ask them what it is that defines the "chance" that they keep talking about and they will not have an answer as the notion can only be opposed to and defined by the telic thoughts typical to intelligence.

[Related posts: The Pope on the Periphery of ID, from Uncommon Dissent ]

The separation of Church and State...

(Hitler Given First Jolt by Protestant Pastors: Refusal of 4,000 Lutheran Clergymen to be Nationalized Brings Nazi Regime Significant Check
By Edwin L. James
The New York Times; Dec. 3, 1933 pg. E1)

Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller, picked by Adolf Hitler to "nationalize" religion in Germany, was to have been consecrated today as head of the German Evangelical Church. The ceremony will not take place. Back of that slip in the Nazi program lies the development of the first real fight in Germany against the National Socialists' scheme of effecting a "totalitarian" State in which every factor of life was to be subjugated to the one purpose of a State coordinated into a machine.

In other words, the German Lutherans have given Herr Hitler his first jolt. In the face of growing opposition to his efforts to crush religious beliefs into a Nazi form the Chancellor has now decided that the results of his efforts to "nazify" religious faith in the Reich represents simply a church dispute in which the State leaders of the country should not try to take a part.

The effort to reshape religion in Germany is being undertaken by the German Christians, who belong to the Lutheran Church, but who are all Nazis. Their head is Bishop Mueller. The German Christians, in turn, are divided into extremists and moderates. The extremists would do away with the Old Testament, revise the New Testament. They wish to make a Nordic church... They would look upon Jesus Christ not as a holy figure but as an historical figure. In the long run, they would force all Germans, except Jews, into a German National Church, based not on Christianity but the consecration of the virtues represented by the Nazi political faith.
[...]
Certainly it is to the Lutheran pastors that credit goes for being at a crucial stage the only Germans to stand up against the steam-rolling tactics fo the Nazi regime. ...the Nazi attempt to take Christianity out of the church found that the German church has defenders of a nerve and determination which marked none of the political leaders whose parties passed almost without effectual protest under the crushing advance of the National Socialists.
[...]
The whole world will watch the fight of the 4,000 pastors who do not wich Dr. Goebbels to rewrite the Bible, revise the Ten Commandments or edit the Lord's prayer. There are left disciples of Martin Luther who will not yet admit that, in the words of Dr. Rosenburg, Christianity is the "product of a moribund civilization of weary Mediterraneans."

As I noted before, the resistance of "organized religion" caused Einstein to comment:

Having always been an ardent partisan of freedom, I turned to the Universities, as soon as the revolution broke out in Germany, to find the Universities took refuge in silence. I then turned to the editors of powerful newspapers, who, but lately in flowing articles, had claimed to be champions of liberty. These men, as well as the Universities, were reduced to silence in a few weeks. I then addressed myself to the authors individually, to those who passed themselves off as the intellectual guides of Germany, and among whom many had frequently discussed the question of freedom and its place in modern life. They are in their turn very dumb.

Only the Church opposed the fight which Hitler was waging against liberty. Till then I had no interest in the Church, but now I feel great admiration and am truly attracted to the Church which had the persistent courage to fight for spiritual truth and moral freedom. I feel obliged to confess that I now admire what I used to consider of little value.

--Albert Einstein, as cited in:
(The German Churches Under Hitler: Backround, Struggle, and Epilogue
By Ernst Helmreich
(Detriot: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979) :345)

An interesting contrast,

A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district-all studied and appreciated as they merit-are the principal support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty.

--Benjamin Franklin as cited in: (America's God and Country
By William Federer :246)

Compared to,

13. The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany.

(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
William L. Shirer
(Simon and Schuster) 1990 :240)

Another example,

A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader...
If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security.

--Samuel Adams

Compare to a sample of the culture of the Weimar Republic and its questionable questions:

In 1930, the same year that Marlene Dietrich's Blue Angel was released, Hannah Hoch made the photomontage Marlene. With its challenging array of sexual signs...the photomontage provokes a wealth of questions about gendery identity and sexuality, strategies of representation, and the reading of imagery by a Weimar audience. [...] Viewed in its historical context, Hoch's image takes its place amidst an enormous proliferation of images of androgyny during the Weimar years, produced by both avant-garde artists and mass-culture institutions.
[...]

...in keeping with representations of the New Woman and certain leftist ideologies of Weimar, her androgynous images depict a pleasure in the movement between gender positions and a deliberate deconstruction of rigid masculine and feminine identities.

(Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch
By Maud Lavin
New German Critique, No. 51,
Special Issue on Weimar Mass Culture (Autumn, 1990), :62-86)

Within this cultural milieu something began to happen as a "general dissolution of principles and manners" began to undermine Liberty and so Samuel Adams was proven correct philosophically by history, as the Founders often have been.

E.g.,

The only criterion for membership in the Party was that the applicant be 'Unconditionally obedient and faithfully devoted to me'. When someone asked if that applied to thieves and criminals, Hitler said, 'Their private lives don't concern me.' [...] Rauschning (276) expresses a similar sentiment:

Most loathsome of all is the reeking miasma of furtive, unnatural sexuality that fills and fouls the whole atmosphere around him, like an evil emanation. Nother [sic] in this environment is straightforward. Surreptitious relationships, substitutes and symbols, false sentiments and secret lusts - nothing in this man's surroundings is natural and genuine, nothing has the openness of a natural instinct.

0ne of Hitler's reactions which is carefully hidden from the public is his love for pornography.

(A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler, His Life and Legend
Walter C. Langer
Office of Strategic Services Washington, D.C.) (Emphasis added) cf. Nizkor

Shirer also noted it:

...in those years when Hitler was shaping his party to take over Germany’s destiny he had his fill of troubles with his chief lieutenants who constantly quarreled not only among themselves but with him. He, who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition -- a man’s morals. No other party in Germany came near to
attracting so many shady characters...pimps, murderers, homosexuals...Hitler did not care...

(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
By William Shirer (New York, Fawcett Crest, 1960) :173) (Emphasis added, that was the form of tolerance that is said to only be being intolerant of "intolerance" itself.)

[Related posts:
The Nordic Pagan Chant Grows Louder
Nazism and Christianity
A Separation of Church and State
Right2Left, revisited
and Why The U.S. Government Should Print Bibles with My Tax Money, from TwoorThree.net]

Poor French youth using blogs, cell phones to plan riots...demand bluetooth for equality

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has diverted resources to monitoring blogs—short for Web logs—in an effort to anticipate the movements of the protesters, who have set fire to thousands of cars since the unrest began on October 27.

Two youths were placed under official investigation, one step short of pressing charges under French law, early on Wednesday on suspicion of inciting violence over the Internet after urging people to riot in blogs, a judicial source said.

But tracking rioters' blogs is a big task for the security services, already stretched by the violence on the ground.

(ABC News)

Interesting...

Mike at Telic Thoughts wrote this a while ago:

I’m going to upset many ID proponents, but I have to tell you that I personally hope that some Court will eventually rule against inserting ID into a public school curriculum. Let me explain.

If the Courts prevent ID from being taught in the schools, such that “it’s pretty much the end for ID in public schools,” the anti-Wedge forces will have won the day and no longer have reason to exist. Having taken away the only real “threat” that ID poses, they should be expected to retire their attack machine and return to what it is that they would have been doing had the socio-political expression of ID never existed.

If there is any truth to the design inference, this bodes well for it. Because of the socio-political element to ID, the concept of ID is drowned out by the shouting and politicking. Consider how the terrain might change once ID can no longer be rationally considered a threat to the public education system.

(Telic Thoughts)

It would seem that the victimization propaganda, conspiracy theories and fear mongering typical to the American Left these days would dissipate on the issue. I suspect that may not be true, as that continues on regardless of facts. But in theory, this way research at a higher level could take place, as getting highschool biology teachers (of which many hate ID anyway) to teach about it is not the goal of many scientists supportive of the concept of ID.

The challenge...

I'm writing some at DownWithAbsolutes since he wrote tangentially about something that's actually worth writing about. Some of my comments could stand to be re-written for punctuation and a little refining and defining but they are just blog comments after all.

(What is it with the MTV generation and an abysmal ignorance with respect to the Founders? I should try drawing them out to see what charlatan taught them but it's probably the ubiquitous "any historian" again who is probably teaching what "everyone knows," I suppose. Why, everyone knows that!)

From an eagle's egg, an eagle?

German cytologist August Weismann proposed that egg derives from egg via the germ line, specialized cells that remain separate from the other cells of the developing organism. The organism is a sort of lateral expansion that in no way shares in the uncontaminated germ line joining egg to egg (or, in the male, egg to sperm). The germ line establishes a moat, a barrier that shields genes destined for the next generation from experiencing the world, Weismann was criticized for having segregated heredity away from life, and for having dissociated it from morphogenesis. In my view, beyond that same barrier even the morphogenetic field of the egg is shielded from the ups and downs of life’s relationships. It holds itself static, totipotent, virginal, allowing itself to be caught up in the tempests of becoming, but all the time keeping a portion of its undiminished essence within the walls of a secluded garden.

According to a theory of Darwins that is little known today but was dear to his heartthe theory of pangenesisan egg is made from fea tures of the parent organism that transmit their earthly past through the seminal fluid in the form of little particles. According to pangen esis, the entire organism generates the offspring. Only in this way could Darwin explain the evolution of the speciesi.e., as a decanting of the vicissitudes of the parents lives into the offspring. For Darwin, evolution was the cumulative experience of the worlds organisms over time. He got this idea from his illustrious, unappreciated French precursor, the Chevalier de Lamarck. Before Darwin came along, Lamarck proposed the theory of the transmission of acquired characteristics. The trans fer of worldly acquisitions from the environment to offspring was a sort of spontaneous generation of life from non-life, and this was evolution. Darwin never thought that evolution was anything else, and he would have disavowed the Theory of Evolution propounded in his name in the twentieth century.

Once the effect of the environment is excluded, whence, one may ask, come the differences between living beings Weismann suggested that the differences must have been present in the first beings to populate the earth. Species differentiate among themselves because of something received from distant ages, remaining intact for millions of years, unreachable by influences of the body and apart from transactions with the environment. To Darwin’s pangenes, coming from all parts of the organism to form the germ of each generation, Weismann opposed his biophores, present from the beginning of life and preceding all organic forms, including eggs. He maintained that these determinants, as in corruptible as ideas, were transmitted via immortal germ lines to produce bodies, again and again, as glorious and mortal by-products.
Life thus returns to its origins or, rather, holds on to its origins by clinging to the handrail of the germ line.

Samuel Butler expressed Weismann’s theory in the following terms:
”The hen is the means whereby an egg constructs another egg.” This evokes a barnyard scene where the hen is a gossipy creature, incapable of flight and good only for laying eggs. The hen well expresses the useless ness of the organism, apart from her function as a bearer of eggs. But Weismann also said: From the eagle’s egg, the eagle.

The shells of an eagle’s egg and a hen egg are barely distinguishable. Their egg cells, nuclei and DNA look almost identical. And yet from the hens egg there hatches the chicken, and from the eagle’s egg the king of birds: Powerful and immense, with hooked claws, imperial head and great square tail, it soars aloft, its outstretched wings at times motionless, at times stirring in solemn strokes, the feathers at its wing tips separated and curving upwards.

From an eagles egg, an eagle.

(Why is a Fly not a Horse?
By Giuseppe Sermonti :33-35)

Given the punctuated nature of the fossil record and the broad pattern of empirical evidence favorable to typology there has been some pressure to come up with more punctuated hypothetical narratives to comport with the evidence. One form of more punctuated mythological narratives of Naturalism use the notion of a Hopeful Monster. Yet if there is no fellow monsterous mutant to do a little mating with, it matters little how hopeful the Hopeful Monster is.

So too bad for Mothra, who ravishes the universe for looove!




Also, if species and genera really were as mutable as Darwinists and others who write naturalistic narratives try to make them, then why does the evidence show that they so often go extinct rather than "adapting"? It seems to me that the pattern of extinction is evidence of adaptive limits, which also comports with all the empirical evidence for typology.

Enlightenment myths...

 Better posts and background on enlightenment myths:
The Flat Earth
Medieval
Columbus Day
Narratives


Examples from someone who believes in about every single progressive myth there is, apparently:

Now finally, in a few enlightened places, the nation of women have been eking out a small portion of the dignity, long overdue, with which we are all ostensibly endowed, but which is in practice shamelessly denied to fully half the species. The justification? Usually a flimsy set of cultural excuses and religious edicts masking the physiological reality set above. [The feminine being threatened by the less evolved again? Scientific theories vary.]The tables are trying to turn though: Ironically, as it's beginning to develop, less testosterone, more intellectual capacity and discipline at a younger age and cool heads throughout all of life, and less wasteful morphology, are all exactly what our modern civilization selects for ...So naturally a large contingent of throwbacks, almost all of them led by males, has dug their heels in and is determined to maintain the double-standardized status quo, or better yet, reverse it.

(Link)

That isn't exactly written right because his mind is so ingrained with enlightenment myths written by the progressives of history that he doesn't even feel the need to write them. Apparently he assumes that they are all known and assumed. For how can anyone disagree? It's now such and such an age, after all! How can we even be talking about this, in this age!

Now he is a New Man, so his effeminacy will protect the feminine. Interesting to note that one of the few good parts he makes use of in his writing was immediately condemned by another Leftist, i.e. the "stereotype" of girls and women actually being feminine. For what about all the masculine women of the Left?

It's important to go through the typical Nazi attitude towards religion demonstrated here, as well as the violence promoted by these effeminates who seem to have certain types of psychological dynamics leading them into old patterns. I'll skip the issue of the HPV vaccine that he's basing venting out the evil in his mind about, as I believe it should be used just like we use everything else even when people are stupid or immoral. If people are not to be helped because they are stupid or immoral, then no one will be helped. So putting aside the excuse he is using to give vent to all the evil lurking in his mind I think it is worth taking a look at the way "the reality based community" comes to think:

Now an old force has crawled [see example] out of the darkest depths of our collective Id, as surely as racism and ethnic cleansing clawed out of their burial grounds in Central Europe once relieved of their Soviet Oppressors. And as many suspected, there's a big wide streak of sexism (And racism) running right through the heart of the Neo-Christian Base. Broader than the Mississippi and nastier than a concert outhouse.

In the laboratories of the right-wing church, the ancient prejudice is jolted back to life, unloaded from the psyche onto the sanctify of the Temple, washed clean of shame, and offered back to the faithful now refined by convoluted apologetics and stamped with the comforting Seal of Allah, God, or YVHW. From the Sunni bin Laden wannabes to the Mullahs of Iran to loosely confederated Neo-Christian groups across North America, the faithful are schooled in the age old sexist hatreds, at times openly at times subtly, but always reassuringly; women are weak and wicked and the cause of every ill plaguing mankind, natural or manmade. It says so in the Good Book.

Ironically, that is not true. He does not seem to understand the ancient prejudices at issue, as he interprets everything through a tremendous blinding filter of "progress" that seems just so very obvious. Yet the fact is that he would not even have the attitudes about the feminine that he condemns Christians by, if not for many Christians in history. Yes, men are bad, now that is rather obvious. It's from humanity being bad, you see. And did a respect for women as a global force come out of the Nature worshipping pagans with their tribalism and survival of the fittest? Did it even come out of the Darwinists, as they are fond of implying? An example comes to mind there. But anyway, such is the mind of the typical progressive, they have some pseudo-evolutionary notion of progress through time that they fit everything into, whether it actually does or not. So the old cultures were all wrong (Although somehow that is the heritage that we "progressed" from.) and we must be right now, as it is now such and such a time. Progressives write these sort of things incessantly, as it is the myth that they believe. So people in the past were all stupid degenerates, but this New Man will tell us how things really are given the supposed saftey of his own effeminacy, which is supposedly a new aspect of the progress of evolution. He'll say that there is no good and evil, yet those people over there are the evil ones par excellence! And so on. One would think that the "religious right" or the "ethical code worship of the Jews" just needs "help" and medical treatment too, to keep things safe. It will. It's a quarantine, a concentration of the disease into a camp and so on. This is what the technically proficient barbarians will often say, anyway.

Back to the example:

"Yes, the Religious Ogres [see example, for the possible morphology of a religious Ogre] of North America are finally coming out, proud Frankenstenien debutantes, crawling like some kind of deformed neo-humans from subterranean nests after nuclear apocalypse, blinking in the harsh light of day. [Why, there's the imperiled feminine now. Save her New Man, save her!] And just like those cinematic icons, the mobs are eager to foist their sickness on the rest of us through deception, raw power, thuggery, or the barrel of a gun. And ladies, along with atheists, Jews, homosexuals, blacks and other minorities, you are a top priority for persecution, assimilation, or elimination, by these NCR creeps."

He doesn't seem to understand the cultural scripts involved with the movie scripts made into such cinematic icons. But anyway, he finally got to the point of projecting out his own revisitation of the "biological thinking" typical to Nazism right there. In the interest of space, I will get to that later.

Onward, to his final "vision" for the future:

...we can press that battle onward until all people are created equal, and equally deserving of every Constitutional mandate. But in that duel against the simplest of viral creatures and lowest denominator of human hatred and fear, we must combat the cleverest and vilest among our own kind. [...] The only group I'm hoping to stick a shiv in here should be pretty clear.

(Emphasis added)

It ain't easy, being a "Frankenstenien debutante." And what do people have against viruses or parasites, are these life forms not victims of it all too? Equality, anyone? Equal rights for alligator people, I say!

(Note the morphological similarity between them and the "Frankenstenien debutantes," after all, which means they are equals somehow.)

At any rate, the New Man feels that he has knowledge like a god now and so is capable of fighting a battle to "create people equal" in the new utopia, perhaps to live forever, the last of the enlightenment myths. The supposed enlightened ones seem to think that they are the first to think of these myths, as well.

There are also the "viral creatures" that he's after. I'll go through some of the rest later. The spirit of Nazism that he is projecting is a rather brutal topic, but as you can see from where he finally ends up in his language he is becoming a rather brutal little fellow. [Hmmm, "subterranean nests"? Ah, perhaps it is the mole people threatening the feminine again.]

Perhaps when I go through a rather brutal history I will put a warning on such posts, so those who do not want to see a brutal history having to do with these technically proficient barbarians do not have to. Perhaps I should have put a warning on this post, as he gets increasingly brutal. It seems beyond their knowledge that they could be right "technically" or physically, yet wrong morally, as their neural nets settle farther into "biological thinking" and an old Beast seems to stir.

[Edit: Actually, the site is called into Good and Evil so if you don't want to read some brutal examples of evil and the like then perhaps you should not be reading this site. Hmmm, "...as surely as racism and ethnic cleansing clawed out of their burial grounds in Central Europe once relieved of their Soviet Oppressors." If I were to represent that metaphorically it would be one demon saying of another, "As you can see it's a good thing I was there, scientifically speaking to stop the other from crawling out. I'll keep you safe so worship me or the old Beast might get out again! At least I starve souls and eat my meal slowly." There seems to be a lot of material in this little fellow's head. I'll read it again and write about some of it later.]