The American answer to hurricanes?

I was wondering this hurricane season what a nuclear bomb would do to a hurricane and how the global warming crowd would cry about an attempt at real global management. The answer of the American Empire to an imminent and growing threat could be: "I say that we blow them sky high!" If this were true:

In an effort to combat the devastating effects of category 5 hurricanes, New Tech Spy has learned from well connected DoD sources, that the US Department of Homeland Security has teamed with the US Air Force, in a secret mission called “Operation Dark Sky”. Dark Sky’s purpose is to test the effectiveness of the newly developed MOAB fuel air explosive on the destructive eye wall of selected hurricanes, in an effort to disrupt the central core’s development and diminish its intensity. The program will begin this summer, primarily in the Gulf of Mexico, and extend through the 2006 hurricane season.
---The GBU-43/B (MOAB), “Mother of all bombs” was developed in the run-up to the Iraq war, but was never used in battle. The 21,000 pound fuel air bomb works by first dispersing an aerosol cloud of tritonal, which is then set off by a secondary explosion. The force of the explosion creates a massive pressure wave unlike that of any other conventional bomb, and makes it an ideal platform for US scientists to test on the different types of atmospheric conditions created in a hurricane.

(NewTechSpy)

As for the nuclear option:

During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.

Now for a more rigorous scientific explanation of why this would not be an effective hurricane modification technique. [...] To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion (500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around.

(NOAA)

From there they go on to note that any management of global proportions is basically impossible, including the "Mother of all bombs."

MOAB: "The 21,000 pound fuel air bomb works by first dispersing an aerosol cloud of tritonal, which is then set off by a secondary explosion." ...an aerosol cloud sitting there in 100 mph winds, no less.

I keep up with conspiracy theorists anyway. Good storytelling, it's an art.

Comments...

I've been commenting more than posting lately. Instead of a post today, some comments are here, here (most acerbic), here(interesting local story), here, here, here and here (longest).

And more, I can be prolific if I start focusing on this. Yet I'm not posting on my own blog, things to do.

Daniel Dennett

I was curious about his latest book. From a review:

His theory is that religion has evolved in the human cultural context in much the way human bodies evolved in the biological context. Early religious impulses, he says, have biological explanations -- the placebo effect of shamanistic rituals would likely have contributed to human health, for example. And, because humanity's animal instincts would have programmed humans to be wary of things that moved (such things might be predators), humans were predisposed to attribute agency to moving things. The movements of nature, then, must be attributable to agents we cannot see -- perhaps our dead ancestors, perhaps gods.

(The San Diego Union-Tribune
February 5, 2006 Sunday
BOOKS; Pg. BOOKS-5
Headline: The Crusader; Daniel C. Dennett's `Breaking the Spell' has good stuff -- but the wheat's hard to find in a sea of chaff
Byline: Cyril Jones-Kellett)

Besides the idiotic way that his mythological narrative of naturalism is written, the anthropological theory that spiritism evolved into polytheism and then theism was already advanced by better minds and refuted based on a broad pattern of anthropological evidence that indicates that cultures may have begun with theism and fallen away from the Great Spirit or invisible "Sky-God" rather than beginning with spiritism based on animals and evolving from there. It's a quaint little story that people naturally want to believe is true because they like thinking that they're more evolved but the evidence does not comport to it. The original theory was presented in a better form in Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom (London 1871), by Edward B. Tylor. Perhaps if Darwinists would actually look at the evidence or seek some ways of falsifying their little stories instead of writing yet more narratives about things that suit our vanities then they would not be proposing the same arguments over and over again. Most of their arguments seem to date to around the late 1800s, even the "just like gravity" nonsense. The really pathetic thing about it is that they sometimes still put the same hundred year old frauds in their textbooks even as they throw some sort of hissy fit about how technology and civilization will collapse if their texts are so much as labelled as "theory." Their hypothetical goo hardly rises to the level of a theory that can be falsified. But we can't have students thinking about the mythological narratives of naturalism typical to Darwinists, don't you know, otherwise they might start asking all the questions that Darwinists don't have answers to.

Reading Dennett is like reading a repeat of proto-Nazi times when people took Darwinism deadly seriously, even reviewers in the Old Press seem to see it. They're actually pretty critical of the little fellow. E.g.:

Dennett, who is a lifelong academic, is not really a very good writer for the general reader. He tends to get bogged down. He spends the first 60 pages minutely answering every possible objection that a religious person might have to his taking up the subject. The religious person facing page after page of begging and cajoling for open-mindedness* might fairly ask the writer to just get on with his points.

Second, Dennett is not convincing when he asserts that there is a taboo against the scientific study of religion. Religion has been the subject of "natural" study since at least the time of David Hume. What spell is left to be broken here?
[...]
In later chapters and in the appendices, he makes a startling leap from scientific speculation to social-policy prescriptions. This very nearly scuttles his entire project. It is a mockery of science to propose an admittedly rudimentary theory and then, from this sketch, start extrapolating policy implications. Perhaps a little bit of research first? Let's at least fill the theory [It's an old theory that crumbles in light of evidence drawn from many cultures.] in before we start treating it as a blueprint for our social life.

But Dennett is undeterred, and this is unfortunate, because his policy prescriptions have a frighteningly totalitarian bent. He suggests that government should perhaps forbid parents from passing on religious beliefs to their children unless the parents are willing to teach a government-approved curriculum.

(Ib.) (Emphasis added)

Perhaps next he'll be lecturing about the "fairy tale of the Jews" and the like, it seems to me that Darwinists may as well go ahead and use all the "brutally honest" language of people who took the Darwinian worldview as true, in all their own brutality. They are those who think that the truth is brutal, so they look to brutes for it.

*Did you ever notice how people constantly singing the virtues of keeping an open mind are usually the same people that want you to keep your mind open so that they can put their crap in it?

[Related posts: Evolutionism and Proto-Nazism]

Another comment...

This post apparently wound up on an activist site and now someone seems to be trying to comment on it. Unfortunately they seem to be repeating what passes for gay talking points these days.

A comment from Uncommon Descent...

In quantum cryptography, we can detect the effect of an intelligent intrusion into a crytographic system because someone’s intelligent choice has triggered a collapse. See: Dartmouth.edu

By way of extension, because we see the universe, we are detecting that some agency is collapsing wave functions in the future.

We are being created through the Ultimate Observer’s act of knowing (measurement) in the future. In other words, your question is approaching QM classically (where the past affects the future). But the Quantum idea is the reverse: the future affects the past. The fact we exist is evidence our wave functions are being observed at the end of time and have not yet collapsed in the present. The past and present exist because of what will happen in the future. If our wave functions were already fully collapsed, the world would be at an end.

So to answer your question, observant entities (you and I and everyone) encapsualted inside the Universal wave function would not even exist to make observations in the present world were it not for the Ultimate Observer in the future peering back into time. In a way, our wave functions have collapsed, but in the future. The history of the universe is fixed by a future event.

This rather shocking inference was borne out by experiments in the 1970 with Wheeler’s double-slit-delayed-choice experiment which happened actually in Tipler’s school, the University of Maryland. We were able to demonstrate the future affects the past in small quantum systems. More amazingly, one could even somewhat re-write the past (quantum erasure experiments) and thus make something anew.

Comment under: Peer-Reviewed Stealth ID Classic : The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1987)

Given that I already think that God exists, in fact I know it, I'm not focused on more evidence in that respect. The real question to me is what type of God exists. For instance, a thought may come to my mind about why any type of God or gods would not just go back in time and fix things with respect to Good and Evil. That thought can become a question or a doubt depending on how it is thought about. The interesting thing is that one could will your own ignorance into a whole chain of doubts that undermine faith in God and build faiths in other things like your own will or capacity to sit in judgment on Good and Evil, when there are ultimately answers. Or it may be that there is ultimately knowledge that we may just have to be ignorant of for now or that there are answers that only a few have the intellect to understand anyway. Even knowing such possibilities I may will to weave a little stream of doubt and the like if I choose to oppose God. It is a choice of the will that God allows and seems to keep letting exist, after all.

It seems to me that most of the time that we try to sit in judgment on good and evil in ways that are far beyond us, as in my time travel example or the condemnations of God typical to atheists, that all we're really doing is asking for our own destruction. For instance, in the example above if God had said, "People are evil, so let's go back in time and try creating them again." instead of letting evil exist for a time then I, as a sinful person, would not exist. Why do we ask for our own destruction? It's pretty consistent that we do. Most of the time when we judge we condemn ourselves with our own words.

Interesting to note that according to some sociologists who control for many variables in their studies and the like suicide rates are higher among atheists. Atheists seem to be making manifest a form of self-destructive judgment that is typical to them. Yet have they succeeded in their own destruction in the way that they think they will? After all, the events that brought them into existence were written in the dust of the verses of the universe long ago. It would seem that no one can be certain that their body, brain, form and soul will not be written again in some form given all that could be.

Some people make the mistake of assuming that the soul is some spirit divorced from the physical reality of our bodily form now or is some Platonic form that only exists in the supposed world of the Forms/Heaven. That leads to many things, like thinking that the flesh is always evil while the idealized form is always good; that people who do physical work are lesser than those who work with forms of information; that men who tend to have a sense of the sensuous form are better than women who tend to be the sensuous form, and so on and on. Read Plato, he promoted that type of thinking. Yet such notions actually do not comport with biblical texts, which instead indicate that the soul is a constant marriage of spirit/essence with body/existence, form and being in the physical here and now. In other words this is your soul, existing in your brain events here and now. Yeah. Hi there, little fella...

Plato often seems to speak of many biblical things given his understanding of basic patterns, e.g. the heavenly world of the Forms and coming out of the symbolic cave to be born again with respect to signs and symbols and so on. But that does not mean that the Bible comports with Platonic ideas.

Hate

I suspect that all I'm accomplishing here is stirring up hatred against me, personally. There are some minds that have never read an empirical fact or form of information that they cannot avoid by hiding in their own lil' feelings about it all, such as hatred.

If you fear the Gay© topic then don't click the link. I think it gets the most comments because of the way that people have simplistic emotionally conditioned responses with respect to Gay© these days. They're not thinking, generally they just have emotional motivation based on their conditioning and the buzzwords that they're supposed to repeat and the like. It's interesting because I used to debate Gay© activists at a higher level than the people who seem to just go around repeating the cultural scripts that they're given and they're often a bit more open as to the manipulation that goes on. Going way back to their treatment at the hands of psychologists, who can really blame them?

Yet as I recall, some have warned against maintaining all the language of their reactionary stance against psychologists from which most Gay© terms are drawn. E.g. sexual orientation, etc. To keep this short, if you keep medicalizing yourself and trying to define your "identity" and civil rights medically then you stand at the mercy of the people in white lab coats who tend to be rather economically minded. One day they stoke their moral vanity by making supposed individual civil rights some sort of medical issue while overlooking the collective general welfare or the equal application of standards to all, the next they may well go back to "treatments." They tend to swing rather wildly and quickly from radical individualism to collectivism because they do not base their thought on principles originally.

Darwinism and Religion

Reported today:

ST. LOUIS, Missouri (Reuters) -- American scientists fighting back against creationism, intelligent design and other theories that seek to deny or downgrade the importance of evolution have recruited unlikely allies -- the clergy.

(Scientists enlist clergy in evolution battle)

I'm not surprised. Religion, not science, is generally the way that Darwinism was originally formulated by its promoters anyway, so they may as well run back to it. As a theologian one of Darwin's main arguments was negative theology based on empirical observations combined with his own views about God and what God would or would not do, or would or would not let happen. Darwinists are still fond of comparing their hypothetical goo with gravity, in fact that argument goes all the way back to 1888, yet somehow physicists are not engaging in negative theology in arguments of this sort: "God would not have let this object land here, and would you just look at that....some objects fall on people! Well, God wouldn't let things fall on people, so my theory of gravity must be true!" They're also not nearly as given to little stories about the historical past that they "imagine" only in order to claim that their own imagination can serve as evidence. Generally they do not claim that if you do not imagine things their way then you're not being natural, which is "scientific." And so on and on. Although it's said to be just like gravity by propagandists, the methods of physicists and biologists turn out to be quite different.

Aside from negative theology, here is the general form of the argument from their own imagination:

The only required premise is that "we know of a long series of gradations in complexity, each good for its possessor." Of course, what Darwin intends here is that we simply must be able to envision such a sequence. But one can always, by thought experiment, conjure up a set of potentially useful intermediates. Thus, while it is true that there is no “logical impossibility” to Darwin’s solution, we must also say that it is not falsifiable. How could a would-be critic show that no such sequence exists?
As Darwin put it: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.” But this was hardly a concession. Darwin may sound generous here, allowing that his theory would “absolutely break down,” but his requirement for such a failure is no less than impossible. For no one can show that an organ “could not possibly” have been formed in such a way. So in short order Darwin reduced what seemed to be a dilemma for his theory into a logical truism. Evolution was protected from criticism, and all that was needed to explain complexity was a clever thought experiment. [I.e. philosophy, not science.]
Darwin so lowered the requirements that anyone with a pen and a vivid imagination can now claim to have solved the problem of complexity. It is now common to see in the evolution literature vague explanations, relying on such dubious mechanisms as “chance” or “opportunism,” put forth as though they were solutions to the problem of complexity. These solutions simply do not support the often-made claims that complexity is not a problem for evolution. Along with short time windows and abruptness, the problem of complexity remains unresolved.

(Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil
By Cornelius G. Hunter :75)

From the CNN article:

"It's time to recognize that science and religion should never be pitted against one another," American Association [of atheists] for the Advancement of Science President Gilbert Omenn told a news conference on Sunday.

I forget what the numbers were but as I recall that same organization is 80% atheist or some number that doesn't even match polls taken of most scientists. They say that science and religion should never be pitted against each other after Darwinists have pitted numerous theological and philosophical claims against traditional religion. Sometimes it is only the traditional religion in the Darwinists' own heads, e.g.

There was a time when rocks and soil were supposed to have been always rocks and soils; when soils were regarded as an original clothing made on purpose to hide the rocky nakedness of the new-born earth. God clothed the earth so, and there an end. Now we know that rocks rot down to soils; soils are carried down and deposited as sediments; and sediments reconsolidate as rocks.

It is not clear from which religious tradition he dredged up the notion of soil being regarded as original clothing for the earth, but in any case the argument does very little to support his argument against creation, simply because it is a particular religious view, of which there are many. This is far from the general argument against creation that Le Conte intended.

(Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil
By Cornelius G. Hunter :87)

Darwinists are especially fond of claiming that people they disagree with have some religious motivation, indeed they'd apparently make such a motivation illegal and join with the Judiciary in trying to police people's motivations to see if they're "religious." Yet they seem to be mixing religion in with some of their own claims, now going to the clergy for support. My point is that they always have, the favorite illusion of half-wits is that they are not making theological and philosophical claims. Given that a missing half of wit/knowledge generates the illusion, the philosophic claims that they are making are often remarkably stupid and ignorant. E.g., "The Christian God would not let these parasites exist. Because looove or somethin'..." or from the article: "The God of religious faith is a god of love. He did not design me."

Note on the topic of religion and Darwinism that many religious people have accepted Darwinism or "evolution," although not in the design denying form that modern atheistic Darwinists have often written of. E.g.:

Finally Wright proposed that there was a special relationship between Calvinism and Darwinism. He spelled out five basic parallels in an essay entitled “Some Analogies between Calvinism and Darwinism.” Darwinian evolution, he pointed out, in no sense entailed the idea of inevitable progressive development—a point on which it closely paralleled the biblical doctrine of the fall and human depravity. Moreover, both Darwinism and Calvinism affirmed the specific unity of the human race and presumed a direct organic chain linking all humanity together by inheritance. The hereditary transmission of variations and of original sin seemed to Wright a particularly close correspondence. In the Calvinistic interplay of predestination and free agency he saw a mirror image of the Darwinian integration of chance and pattern in the evolutionary system. In addition, advocates of both philosophies were uneasy about a priori methods—Calvinists because of their fear of rampant rationalism, and Darwinians because of their self-imposed restriction to observable rather than ultimate facts. Lastly, the sovereignty of law throughout nature, whether in the history of creation or in the historical transmission of divine revelation, further served to lead Wright to the conclusion that Darwinism was “the Calvinistic interpretation of nature.”
As Wright’s involvements as a theologian increased, so too did his efforts as a geologist.

(Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought
By David N. Livingstone :67)

The interesting thing about all the evangelicals who agreed with Darwinism and so on is that at about that same time the scandal of the evangelical mind came about, then most of the universities fell away from their Christian roots and so on. Perhaps there are patterns of thought inherent in Darwin's arguments that put the creation before the Creator.

Some uncommon dissent....

Both Bateson and Schindewolf had dismissed the Darwinian model as useless as did Grasse, Broom, Osborn, Petrunkevitch, Berg, Punnett, Goldschmidt and God only knows how many others both before and since. The destruction of the Darwinian fairy tale began with Mivart 12 years after the publication of Darwin’s opus minimus and has continued unabated right to the present. Failure to acknowledge this continuing mayhem has been a scandal unprecedented in the history of science dwarfing both the Phlogiston of Chemistry and the Ether of Experimental Physics.

(John Davison, cf. Uncommon Descent)

He brings up a lot of the critics of Darwinism there, who are worth reading. Listen, even now the Herd moos its fright: "Scientific consensus, peer review....but, but I'm overwhelmed by my own imagination!"

[Edit: I haven't read all the critics of Darwinism from within "evolution" that I should nor the creationist critics either. I intend to, so far I have read quite a few books on intelligent design, Michael Denton's books, as well as one collection of essays by creationists.]

Christian reporters vs. the religious right?

Interesting article from World: Abramoff/Reed scandal by Marvin Olasky The last paragraph:

One room at the National Press Club in Washington bears the name of John Peter Zenger, a Christian newspaper editor who in 1735 exposed corruption among those powerful enough to put him in jail. We are not worthy to be his successors if we don’t ask tough questions for fear of losing ad revenue and circulation. By pushing hard we risk a lot every day, because publications need money to stay in business, but what profiteth any of us if we receive big or little checks garnered through manipulation or dishonesty?

I think it's like this, American politics is like capitalism. It often does not work based on the good but instead takes evil and makes it do some good. This is something that the average prissy Leftist just cannot seem to grasp as an issue in politics these days illustrates. E.g., on the one hand there are some greedy oilmen who want to make money for themselves by selling you oil for your car, while on the other there are some Islamists who want to cut your head off. Which type of evil is easier to harness and which should be focused on and exposed more? The average Leftist focuses on the greedy oilman more than they do on Islamists. Some become so ignorant that they'll still be repeating a canard like: "I deeply disagree with what you are saying but I'll die for your right to say it." as the Islamist kills them and replies, "Thanks for dying."

It's a Machiavellian notion that evil can be harnessed to do any good to be sure. It's dangerous, possibly corrupting too. But as the Prince of Peace said of the representatives of the Prince of this world in his day, render what is his back to him. In the Leftist world he would have said, "I will now begin the revolution because Caesar's economic system is unjust, this will bring heaven on earth."

Isn't it ironic though, the Leftist mind wants to have the State guided by Christian values of charity (concern for the poor) and hospitality (healthcare, caring for health) instead of the Darwinian values of survival of the fittest when it comes to economics. They do not work for a so-called "separation of church and state" there nor do they claim that because such ethics comport with Christianity then they are "unconstitutional" or some such ignorant nonsense. Yet compare that with sexual ethics, when they are touched on in public life they suddenly begin claiming that it is "unconstitutional" for any public policy to be guided by ethics that comport with Christianity. Yet what did Christ say to tricky questions about sexual ethics and marriage as opposed to tricky questions about the State and economic justice? (Marriage summary: "This is absolutely God ordained and cannot be denied." State and economics: "This is the way of the world...for now.")

In the case of economic justice Leftists often appeal to religion while forgetting that they just got done supposedly separating it from public life based on some ignorant "interpretation" of the Constitution. E.g., they seem to forget their usual mewlings about how religious values are being "imposed" on people when it comes to imposing Jewish and Christian values on greedy businessmen yet remember them in the case of the pornographer, who is actually more greedy.

It seems that they have no true basis for their claims and generally rely on distortions of Christianity. If one accepts some values drawn from Christianity even as you try to deny it as a form of total truth then it will suffer various deformations. Given that Leftists generally do not believe Christianity to be "true" in any objective sense the Left seems to have shifted to making their judgments based on their own subjective feelings or preferences, which often leads to exchanging a consistent view based on what is logically correct for inconsistent views based on what is politically correct.

Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prodigy; a peak in the history of music. He began to compose at age five and was publicly performing at six. He produced his first symphony before he turned nine and his first opera was written at twelve. By age thirteen he "had written concertos, sonatas, symphonies and operettas”." This genius had an "“uncanny aptitude", notes Grout, and his more than six hundred compositions have been called "a magic mirror"” in which was reflected every kind of contemporary Western music, "illumined by his own transcendent genius". Music critics use words such as godlike, preternatural, and miraculous to describe the works that flowed from Mozart's pen. For example ample, Robert Reilly remarks that his spontaneous gift for music "“flowed out of him in a profusion of incomparable melodies that it is hard to believe one human being could have produced. . . . Mozart's music has preternatural purity and perfection that somehow escaped the mark of original sin. It is both a sign of life before the Fall and a promise of Paradise.”" Unlike the great Franz Haydn, who had at times to pray for ideas as he was composing, "“one cannot imagine Mozart having to pray for musical ideas", remarks Grout; "they must always have been there, and he was able to transmute them into sound with a facility at once childlike and godlike. Given a satisfactory initial phase, the process of composition went on without hesitation or interruption to the end, in a perfectly logical if essentially mysterious flow. There is something miraculous about MozartÂ’s apparently effortless perfection." Though Mozart died in his thirty- sixth year, there is a sense of completion in his achievements. "It is hard to believe that there could have been more. The question as to why he died so young is always superceded by: How could he have existed at all? How could you ask more of a miracle?" These are extraordinary words from a serious music critic, and they cast no little light on the subject of the radiant form of the splendid.
[...]
Elegant music has indeed a privileged place in any discussion of radiant form and the evidential power of the beautiful and how they relate to our human pursuit of the divine.

(The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet
By Thomas Dubay :60-62)

Art, an idea made to order.

I don't have much time right now so here are some rather temporal images. I'm a little hungry....not sure who made these:

Creation vs. Evolution?

I suppose there may be no reforming the term evolution and separating it from the Darwinian creation myth and the like. Yet it seems to me that evolution cannot be opposed to creation nor vice versa, as only the nonsense without a cause type of Darwinian "evolution" where Nature is said to be "selecting" things is opposed to creation.

When evolution is not linked to philosophic and theological claims about fundamental causation it is just the description of the way that events are unfolding after their creation. Yet Darwinists do try to make that link in a sort of "evolutionism" that is opposed to creation. So they claim their hypotheses to be explanatory with respect to fundamental origins and thus evolutionists claim to be refuting natural theology, the philosophy of Aristotle, their own conception of Victorian or prissy Christianity, etc. Yet it was noted at quite early times in the intellectual history of Darwinism that the scientific elements of Darwinism do not actually explain the origins of form, although Darwin often claimed to be explaining the "origin" of all the specification of all forms of species the specifics of his own theory do not support his own claims once it is specified and so subject to testing, observation and falsification. That's why it so often remains hypothetical goo instead.

E.g. a definition leading to distinction at early times:

That Darwinism is not the whole doctrine of evolution is perceived clearly enough by Mr. O’Neill, who devotes two or three opening chapters to a lucid exposition of the well known fact that Natural Selection does not explain the origin of characters. This truth has for twelve years been maintained by the editors of this journal, as well as by others, and has been epitomized in the statement that “the origin of the fittest” is the primary problem of evolution, while the “survival of the fittest“ (Darwinism) is secondary.

(Review: The Refutation of Darwinism, and the Converse Theory of Development, Based Exclusively Upon Darwin's Facts by T. Warren O'Neill
The American Naturalist Vol. 14, No. 3 (Mar., 1880), :193) (Emphasis added)

I.e., the most important issue when it comes to the theology, religious traditions or philosophy that Darwinists claim to be refuting with their "universal acid" is actually not dealt with scientifically.

Now that Darwinists have finally begun to run from dealing with the origins of Life and its original forming (once again being dishonest in degenerate ways even as they retreat) perhaps we can get back to the specific origins of many life forms and species instead of dealing with inane arguments that are dead and falsified at conception.

[Related posts: This post was inspired by Seeker, who seeks to set creation against evolution. See: More Genetic Evidence Against Evolution, Losing One's Faith (in Evolution) in College and What Number Do We Use For Probability = 0?)]

A conspiracy theory...

They seem to be quite popular among Leftist kooks these days, so I figure why not try one? Take Al Gore, some have noted that he seems almost mentally imbalanced given the way he sometimes talks about things that never happened when he is pandering and so on. I propose three explanatory options:

1. It was just the biochemical state of his brain at the time. Everything he said was predetermined by physics from within the matter and energy of the Big Bang, there is no such thing as a "mental" imbalance or balance for that matter because all that matters is matter. So one may as well continue on Stoically to whatever brain event is predetermined to happen next in your little head. I hope it will be an eventful day for you, as it is for me.

2. He has brain parasites and so a bit of an urge...to merge. I think I may work up a hypothesis about the Leftist urge to merge that will be just as good as the hypothetical goo typical to Darwinism. That way if I need it I can just throw some hypothetical goo around and then claim that anyone who disagrees isn't trying to "imagine" things evolving from nothing hard enough.

3. He's just another politician who craves legitimacy above all. That craving is why he got into politics in the first place, thus the disparate pandering and lies depending on whatever audience he is standing before. Above all, he must seem legitimate to them.

4. Wait, I almost forgot the conspiracy theory. So lastly, his mind is being warped by aliens, the same aliens that have pretended to be gods throughout history and that are wound up in the CIA's remote viewing programs and the like. E.g.:

...over the weeks that followed the tests, the physicists began to experience strange apparitions, both at home and in the laboratory... These were also seen by members of the physicists’ families. It is as if Lawrence Livermore Laboratories had suddenly become haunted: one physicist even received a telephone call from the metallic voice. Eventually these weird events stopped, as if a temporary rip in the veil between dimensions had been abruptly zipped up again. In addition, several participants in the Pentagon/CIA’s remote-viewing programmes experienced paranormal events outside of office hours, and also had apparent extraterrestrial contact...
These events, together with Puharich’s belief in the reality of extraterrestrial contact, raise the serious possibility that the CIA and other agencies were fully aware of the ‘otherworldly’ element attached to their psychic spying prgrammes, in which apparently nonhuman entities ‘came through’. After all, when a top nuclear weapons facility becomes ‘haunted’ and its hardheaded and sceptical scientists are so harassed by the weirdness that several of them come close to a nervous breakdown, such bizarre phenomena have to be taken seriously. They would want to know more about such things — if only to eliminate them from their psi-spy research, but, given the entities’ inside knowledge of top-secret code names, they would also want to know if a more controlled kind of contact could be made with such useful intelligences and if some kind of mutually beneficial dialogue could be set up. It would make sense: if the Nine really were space gods, it is not hard to imagine the advantages of having them on the side of the United States during the Cold War, for example, or as allies during any period of history. [...]
Many of the people involved with the Nine seem predisposed towards the idea of extraterrestrial contact, often because of their own prior experiences, for example, as mediums. And one objective of the Nine experiment appears to have been to test the possibility and controllability of such contact.

(The Stargate Conspiracy: The Truth About Extraterrestrial
Life and the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt
By Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince :240-241)

Al Gore enters the picture:

Farley records a meeting of Jones, Henry Belk and James Hurtak to discuss, among other things, the funding of the Human Potential Foundation. This suggests that Hurtak’s — and the Nine’s — philosophy is reaching the highest levels of US politics. Jones’s superior, Senator Claiborne Pell, is an extremely powerful figure in Washington. He was Chairman of the Senate’s influential Foreign Relations Committee and is the elder statesman -->>>whom the younger Vice-President Al Gore has come to respect.<<<-- [!!!] Pell and Gore worked closely together when the latter was a senator. The two share a passionate belief in the paranormal and both are great supporters of government-funded psi research. [...] Not only do Vice-President Al Gore and Senator Claiborne Pell share the same esoteric interests, but they are also political allies. It is reasonable to assume that Gore is familiar with the Nine; if so, how much is he influenced by their teachings — or, in the worst case scenario, even their instructions? The evidence suggests that he is by no means the only top-ranking American politician to have been drawn into the Nine’s sphere of influence.

(Ib. :250-251) (Emphasis added)

It's too bad I'm not a Leftist because I think I could weave some good conspiracy theories where everything is linked and associated, if not blurred together. Yes, some bits of information are linked over networks and so on but it takes a lot of arrogance to take little bits of knowledge and simply weave them together as you want to, as some do. E.g., I could weave a combination of explanations four and two: Come close and I'll tell you....it's like this, the demon-god alien type things designed parasites to manipulate human brains at their command. Enter Monsanto* and genetically modified food, they're the people who will control all Life on the planet one day by controlling food after global warming and the famines! And there's McDonalds, feeding you that aspartame that helps the brain parasites.

That's fun, not to mention that there's real knowledge interwoven into most conspiracy theories. (Except the Leftist ones these days, most actually seem to begin with stupidity and ignorance and then go on to craft absolutely idiotic associations from their own absurd set of facts.)

For the record, I think the correct answer is number three. Too bad though, I could have fun with conspiracy theory. The Christian version of the almost neurotic thinking typical to it seems to be dispensationalism, although I don't know much about it. The only thing I would note is that many people at the highest levels of culture do claim to see little visions and things, e.g. Hitler, which did seem rather demonic. Most of the Hollywood types are into weird things and cults, it would seem that the "stars" are still idols in America. Dan Rather claimed to talk to a ghost and so on, who knows what people at the highest levels of culture and the shaping of our "cult" are not saying lest they look all craaaazy. But claiming to know much about it would make for a thin conspiracy theory, maybe some good science fiction though.

*(There are real conspiracies and Monsanto is obviously conspiring corporately to control farming and the production of food, mainly because that's what they're in business to do. That's an easy conspiracy theory, valid too. I do not mean that there are not real conspiracies, just that they're usually much more difficult to have knowledge of than the average conspiracy theorist seems to think. I.e. with many of them if you were right then you would be dead already, which is the case with many of the conspiracy theories about Bush these days.)

Parasites in your brain, why it may matter.

T. gondii is an intracellular protozoan (Beverley 1976) capable of infecting all mammals. Its associate disease, toxoplasmosis, is of significant economic, veterinary and medical importance (Luft & Remington 1986; Schmidt & Roberts 1989) and has sparked renewed interest due to its debilitating reactivation in AIDS and other immunosuppressed patients (Luft & Remington 1986). T. gondii has an indirect life cycle, where members of the cat family are the definitive hosts of the parasites and the only mammals known to shed T. gondii oocysts with their faeces (Hutchinson et al. 1969). If the oocysts are ingested by another mammal such as a wild rodent (the intermediate host) small thin-walled cysts form in various tissues, most commonly the brain.
Indeed, there are several reasons to predict that the T. gondii parasite may be able to achieve this. Principally, the formation of parasitic cysts in the brain of its host places T. gondii in a privileged position to manipulate behaviour (Werner et al. 1981). Accordingly, recent studies on both wild and wild laboratory hybrid rats have demonstrated that T. gondii causes an increase in activity (Webster 1994b) and a decrease in neophobic (fear of novelty) behaviour (Webster et al. 1994; Berdoy et al. 1995b), both of which can be argued to facilitate transmission to the felid [i.e. cat] definitive host. In contrast, other costly behavioural patterns such as competition for mates and social status (Berdoy et al. 1995a), which do not have any obvious impact upon cat predation rate, are left unaltered by the parasite (Berdoy et al. 1995b).

(Fatal Attraction in Rats Infected with Toxoplasma gondii
By M. Berdoy; J. P. Webster; D. W. Macdonald
Proceedings: Biological Sciences, Vol. 267, No. 1452. (Aug. 7, 2000), :1591)

To make a long story short rats with parasites have been observed to lack a fear of cat scented-areas, which may indicate that parasites are manipulating the brains of the rats in ways that increase their transmission rate through predation, thus completing their life-cycle. This may matter to us more than the way that some parasites control the brains of ants and the like given some of the similarities of the rat and human brain. It is estimated that about 50% of people are infected with the same parasite, which could impact how they feeel. E.g.

Finally, we believe that these results may also provide a functional explanation of the altered brain function in infected humans, where T. gondii prevalence has been found to range from 22% in the UK to 84% in France ( Desmonts & Couvreur 1974). Although humans represent a dead-end host for the parasite, our results could suggest that the reports of altered personality and IQ levels in T. gondii-infected patients (Burkinshaw et al. 1953; Flegr & Hrdy 1994) represent the outcome of a parasite evolved to manipulate the behaviour of another mammal. It is noteworthy that rat behaviour is often viewed as the outcome of a conflict between pronounced neophobic reactions and strong exploration tendencies characteristic of opportunistic omnivores. The uneasy balance between these conflicting motivations, very pronounced in rats but also visible in humans (‘the omnivores paradox’, Rozin 1976), may thus provide a particularly fertile ground for manipulation by T. gondii.

(Ib. :1593-1594)

[Related posts: The Loom]

The Big Pharoah

Some commandments from the Pharoah, found through Worldmagblog:

1.Thou shall not have westophobia. The west is not plotting against Islam, they don’t give a hoot about your religion nor the religion of this old Hindu man walking in downtown Calcutta, India. The West is busy with far more important things.
[...]
4.Thou shall understand that the West gets their info on Islam not from your preaching nor from the books you translate to them but from your actions.

5.Thou shall riot and protest when Muslims kill other Muslims (for more info, contact the Shia families of Iraq and Darfur Sudanese)

6.Thou shall try to riot and protest when Muslims kill non-Muslims. If that’s not possible, at least try to do commandment 5.

7.Thou shall NOT riot over cartoons published 4 months ago. Try to riot over cartoons published 2 months ago. At least it might make more sense that way.

8.Thou shall not boycott an entire nation because a single newspaper, TV channel, radio station, politician, actor, actress, etc, etc, in that nation said or wrote or drew something that offended you. Why? Because its stupid and childish to do so and it further hurts your image. [...]

Gay©

I originally made this comment here. I'm posting it here as an archive and to extend it and archive a few other things. I've found that this blog is the best way to store information. It's going to be long, so read it or no. Some sources are dated, generally around the 90s back when the Gay© herd within the Herd thought that the electorate was going to run its way given its techniques of manipulation. I don't debate it much anymore. If you're easily taken in by emotional conditioning and the like that Gays© learn to use from within their community and culture then so be it. As long as you remain in the minority and the majority of the electorate continues to refuse to place children in despicable situations based on your stupidity and ignorance, then I'm fine with it.

Now that the Leftist mind is feeling: "Now wait just a minute here, there are exceptions that I could use to break down all rules!" ...on with the comment anyway, with revisions:
Let's just say that why would I (or anyone else for that matter) use the opinion of one self-loathing "ex-gay" man as evidence of gay life?

So-called Gays© will appear and disappear as you define "them" if you follow the methods and modes typical to hardened Gay© activists. The simple fact remains, men who have sex with men tend towards promiscuity, domestic abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, the unhealthy and abusive act of sodomizing each other, further sexual disorientation and so on. Such behavior patterns and their results can be known by empirical facts.

A man who dedicated his life to denigrate others because he copuln't face the truth about himself.

Only if one agrees with Gays© that sexual desires define the fundamental "truth" about a person and define them as a different type of person and so on.

One who seeks to destroy the thing he loves, another men...

If Gays© really love those they say that they love then patterns such as this would not be recurrent. E.g.:

In the first years of the AIDS epidemic, U.S. officials had no alternative but to negotiate the course of AIDS policy with representatives of a well-organized gay community and their allies in the medical and political establishments. In this process, many of the traditional practices of public health that might have been brought to bear were dismissed as inappropriate. As the first decade of the epidemic came to an end, public health officials began to reassert their professional dominance over the policy-making process and in so doing began to rediscover the relevance of their own professional traditions to the control of AIDS.
Bayer and Angell were not alone. Lee Reichman, director of the National Tuberculosis Center, stated "traditional public health is absolutely effective at controlling infectious disease. It should have been applied to AIDS from the start, and it wasn't. Long before there was AIDS, there were other sexually transmitted diseases, and you had partner notification and testing and reporting. This was routine public health at its finest."

(Health Matrix: Journal of Law-Medicine
Winter, 2003
Quarantine Redux: Bioterrorism, AIDS and the Curtailment of Individual Liberty in the Name of Public Health
by Wendy Parmet)

I.e., they'd be more concerned with the health of fellow Gays© than their own narcissistic forms of religious hedonism that keep recurring in both their rhetoric and patterns of behavior.

It there is someone or something that reeks of death, it is his rhetoric.

Note the historical and empirical facts vs. your own rhetoric, e.g.:

The introduction of the [AIDS] epidemic to developed countries, such as the United States, followed relatively soon after the 'gay revolution' that had its origins in
the riot at the Stonewall Inn, a bar frequented by homosexual men, in New York City in 1969.
[...]
Similar patterns soon followed in other developed countries, such as Canada, Australia, and those of western Europe.

(The AIDS Epidemic -- Considerations
for the 21st Century. Fauci, Anthony S.
The New England Journal of Medicine
September 30, 1999; 341: 1046-1050)

The general pattern is that people adhere to religious hedonism then begin to get AIDS, and some definitions of AIDS are still inclusive of a whole host of diseases leading into "immune deficiency." In general people trying to describe the empirical facts seem to be saying that Life begins to refuse to fight for itself. It is curious how medical definitions were clear and basically sound in history until that which sometimes slithers about in the words of religious hedonists resulted in a blurring and smothering of clarity. One example:

The "gay bowel syndrome" has been recognized for years, and is characterized by recurrent enterocolitis due to a medley of enteric bacteria (Salmonella, Shigella, and Campylobacter), as well as the protozoa, Entamoeba and Giardia. The organisms are assumed to be transmitted by anilingus or fellatio. In patients with AIDS, these bacterial infections tend to be more aggressive and are accompanied by bacteremia, which may be recalcitrant. A concomitant defect in neutrophil number or function may be responsible for this occurrence.

(Diseases of the Colon & Rectum
Dis Colon Rectum 1986; 29: 60-64
An Update on the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS);
Associated Disorders of the Alimentary Tract
Lawrence A. Cone, M.D., David R. Woodard, M.S., Barbara E. Potts, M.L.S., Richard G. Byrd, M.D., Richard M. Alexander, M.D., Michael D. Last, M.D.)(Emphasis added)

Note the average Gay© activist, as their move and the goal of their propaganda technique is typically to blur, smother and censor:

There is more than enough room for honest, philosophical debate on providing benefits to anyone. But that isn't what we got. Instead, we got Karen Johnson launching a speech so filled with hate-mongering and fear-peddling as to be breathtaking. [...] She even invented her own illness, something she called "gay bowel disease," an ailment with which the specialists at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are unfamiliar. But they are getting interested in studying what should be called Bigot's Brain Disease.

(The Arizona Republic.
February 14, 1999 Sunday, Final Chaser
Arts and Ideas; Pg. E15
Intolerable Behavior: Legislators Guided by Hate, Capitol Is No Place For Anti-Gay
Venom."
Byline: Stephen Tuttle, Special for The Republic)

Note the empirical fact:

The objective of this study is to document the types of micro organisms seen in homosexual men with gastrointestinal infections and the prevalence of these among HIV infected individuals. A review was conducted on all positive faecal specimens obtained from homosexual men with gastrointestinal symptoms who attended a private general practice in Melbourne between June 1993 and May 1996. Among the 108 cases isolates were predominantly protozoal. The most frequently encountered organism was Blastocystis hominis, which was present in 61 patients. Forty six percent of all patients were HIV positive. p...] Enteric organisms, predominantly protozoal, which have been traditionally subsumed under the 'gay bowel syndrome' occur frequently in homosexual men who are also HIV positive.

(Gay bowel syndrome in HIV positive homosexual men
Chen M. 1997. Venereology-The Interdisciplinary
International Journal Of Sexual Health. 10: (4) 223-225)

See also:(Harbinger of plague: A Bad Case of Gay Bowel Syndrome., Scarce M, J Homosex 1997; 34 (2): 1-35); ([Gastrointestinal manifestations of AIDS. 1: Basic considerations and viral infections] Gastrointestinale Manifestationen von
AIDS. Teil 1: Grundlagen und virale Infektionen., Prufer-Kramer L; Kramer A, Fortschr Med 1991 Mar 10; 109 (7): 169-72) ([Sexually-transmissible anorectal diseases]., Maladies anorectales sexuellement transmissibles., 30 REFS, Paulet P; Stoffels G, Rev Med Brux 1989 Oct; 10 (8): 327-34) (Prevalence of Enteric Pathogens in Homosexual Men With and Without Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome., Laughon BE;
Druckman DA; Vernon A; Quinn TC; Polk BF; Modlin JF; Yolken RH; Bartlett JG, Gastroenterology 1988 Apr; 94 (4): 984-93) (Gay bowel syndrome, Rodriguez W, Bol Asoc Med P R 1986 Oct; 78 (10): 439-41) (Gay bowel syndrome, the broadened spectrum of nongenital infection, Quinn TC, Postgrad Med 1984 Aug; 76 (2): 197-8, 201-10)
(Shigellosis and the Gay Bowel Syndrome: an Endoscopic Point of View and review of the literature., Kaufman JC; Fierst SM, Gastrointest Endosc 1982 Nov; 28 (4): 250-1)

And so on.


See also: (D. E. Koziol et al., ‘A Comparison of Risk Factors for Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Hepatitis B Virus Infections in Homosexual Men,” Annals of Epidemiology 3, no.4 (July 1993) pp. 434-41; G. Hart, “Factors Associated with Hepatitis B Infection,” International Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and MDS 4, no. 2 (1993), pp. 102-6; T. Weinke et al., “Prevalence and Clinical Importance of Entamoeba Histolytica in Two High-Risk Groups: Travelers Returning from the Tropics and Male Homosexuals,” Journal of Infectious Diseases 161, no. 5 (May 1990), pp. 1029-31; A. Rodriguez-Pichardo et al., “Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Homosexual Males in Seville, Spain,” Genitourinary Medicine 67, no.4 (August 1991), pp.335—38; D. I. Abrams, “The Relationship between Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Intestinal Parasites among Homosexual Males in the United States,” Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, no. 1(1990), Supplement 1, p. 144—46; N. J. Bodsworth et al., “Hepatitis Delta Virus in Homosexual Men in Sydney,” Genitourinary Medicine 65, no.4 (August 1989), pp.235—38; T. Takeuchi, “Sexually Transmitted Amoebiasis: Current Epidemiology,” Kitasato Archives of Experimental Medicine 61, no. 4 (December 1988), pp. 171—79; W Tee et al., “Campylobacter Cryaerophila Isolated from a Human,” Journal of Clinical Microbiology 26, no. 12 (December 1988), pp. 2469—73)

And so on, and on. It's curious how viruses are hard to define as "alive." But at any rate, it is not as if a hardened religious hedonist will see, even if their friends and those they "love" are dying right in front of them as the result of their own actions.

But as to those who have eyes to see, let them see. It seems that those that will see, see by a will that is not their own. There are none so blind as those who will not see. So let the dead in the head bury their dead? The reason that one cannot do that is because we are cultural beings and if a culture comes to be pro-death as the result of religious hedonism, as one ancient philosopher noted it will, then that has its impact on everyone Especially children and youth, e.g.:

High risk sex between men accounts for the largest proportion of AIDS cases among adolescents (13 to 21 years of age). Sex between males has been implicated in 70% of the cases that were unrelated to blood products. In a national sample of sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinics, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) seroprevalence among 20- to 24-year-old male homosexual youths was found to be 30.1%, as compared to an overall rate of 1.4% among same-aged clients.

(Pediatrics 1994; 94: 163-168
August, 1994 Section: Articles.
Predictors of Unprotected Intercourse Among
Gay and Bisexual Youth: Knowledge, Beliefs, and Behavior
Gary Remafedi, MD, MPH)

What is observed to be associated with adherence to the religion of hedonism in which one's own sexual desires define the "truth" by defining living a lie vs. honesty and so on:

Model I, Onset of Behaviors Before Age 13, showed use of cocaine before age 13 years as strongly associated with GLB orientation (odds ratio [OR]: 6.10; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 2.45-15.20). Early initiation of sexual intercourse (2.15; 10.6-4.38), marijuana use (1.98; 1.04-4.09), and alcohol use (1.82; 1.03-3.23) also was associated with GLB orientation.

(American Academy of Pediatrics
Pediatrics 1998; 101: 895-902
May, 1998 Section: Articles
The Association Between Health Risk Behaviors
and Sexual Orientation Among a School-based
Sample of Adolescents Robert Garofalo, MD.
R. Cameron Wolf, MS; Shari Kessel, ScB;
Judith Palfrey, MD and Robert H. DuRant, PhD)

And so on, such empirical associations hold cross-culturally as people choose to take up the Gay© identity to "come out" and proselytize to others while living by the tenets of religious hedonism in which it is "living a lie" not to act on whatever desires you may happen to have. (As in fact, it is your own desires that define the truth, as well as defining your identity by being "who you are" and so on.)

Sight, insight and even some insight on sight from one who is blind...

I posted this originally as a comment at Two or Three:

I'm not religious, so to me, any fundamentalist seems to be a nutbag who believes more in a book than what s/he is able to see with her/his own eyes.

How you have eyes in the first place is more important than what you see with them. Only those who have the eyes to see, can see. And you're actually making yourself subject to charlatans, "cult"ure, your own delusions or cultural illusions and so on if you only believe in the limited amount of light that you can see "with your own eyes." As even one with the urge to merge has realized, insight is superior to sight:

Earlier than the Great Leap Forward, man-made artefacts had hardly changed for a million years. The ones that survive for us are almost entirely stone tools and weapons, quite crudely shaped. Doubtless wood (or, in Asia, bamboo) was a more frequently worked material, but wooden relics don’t easily survive. As far as we can tell, there were no paintings, no carvings, no figurines, no grave goods, no ornamentation. After the Leap, all these things suddenly appear in the archaeological record, together with musical instruments such as bone flutes, and it wasn’t long before stunning creations like the Lascaux Cave murals were created by Cro-Magnon people. A disinterested observer taking the long view from another planet might see our modern culture, with its computers, supersonic planes and space exploration, as an afterthought to the Great Leap Forward. On the very long geological timescale, all our modern achievements, from the Sistine Chapel to Special Relativity, from the Goldberg Variations to the Goldbach Conjecture, could be seen as almost contemporaneous with the Venus of Willendorf and the Lascaux Caves, all part of the same cultural revolution, all part of the blooming cultural upsurge that succeeded the long Lower Palaeolithic stagnation. Actually I’m not sure that our extraplanetary observer’s uniformitarian view would stand up to much searching analysis...
[...]
If not language itself, perhaps the Great Leap Forward coincided with the sudden discovery of what we might call a new software technique: maybe a new trick of grammar, such as the conditional clause, which, at a stroke, would have enabled ‘what if’ imagination to flower. Or maybe early language, before the leap, could be used to talk only about things that were there, on the scene. Perhaps some forgotten genius realised the possibility of using words referentially as tokens of things that were not immediately present. It is the difference between ‘That waterhole which we can both see’ and ‘Suppose there was a waterhole the other side of the hil’ Or perhaps representational art, which is all but unknown in the archaeological record before the Leap, was the bridge to referential language. Perhaps people learned to draw bison, before they learned to talk about bison that were not immediately visible.

(The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
By Richard Dawkins :35-36)

One should not be surprised that science, technology and so on have had a history of following monotheistic cultures that believe symbols and signs can be designed, with insight precisely stated in a language without metaphors such as mathematics. This is combined with the assumption that the world bears the imprint of an underlying rationality, an assumption that only those who have a rationale for rationality make. Note that if Dawkin's own historical narrative is correct in any sense then such a genius forging new associations between invisible information and visible formations and so on would have had to deal with half-wits saying, "Nothing exists but the forms that we see and test. See here, I can eat this dirt to test it and taste it. Besides, believing that form can be separated from this formation here is just like believing in a Flying Spaghetti Monster or somethin'."

Of course, anyone using language is constantly stating that their own words have indeed captured meaning in some way by being "just like" this or that. It's either a good likeness or the associations which create meaning have broken down "or somethin'."

This parable represents a few things about language, likeness and how creatures try to define what they like:The Beasts

It could probably use some refining and defining, but isn't that always the case...

A side note, I guess I'm slowing down these days when it comes to writing. But I have a few stories about the invisible and the visible left in me, the metaphoric mind is all craaaazy like that. Quite insane, or so our little Soul Doctors will argue just as they always have. Their own soul is rather flat. So they must make themselves feel better about it all. So now, how does that make you feeel? These days if we go on a journey of the mind and come to the inner sanctum of the soul we will find the muddy tracks of the psychologist through its garden. They trample on the mentation that could grow so fine in the feelings of the soul and so eventually other souls come to feel as flat as their own, the poor souls.

Just a comment...

I only wrote a comment tonight.

I happened to catch the tail end of an interview on CNN with a spokesman for Islam. Oh nevermind, there's something about it that is just tiresome and too stupid to deal with seriously. Who is actually deceived by the spokesmen of Islam? But if you're some Leftist that wants to insist that the "religion of peace" itself has nothing to do with international problems in the world and instead want to try to focus on material causes like poverty then ask yourself why poor Hindus, Buddhists, Confuscians, Jews, Catholics and many others are not fighting with everyone else based on whatever their religious leaders tell them to fight over that day. Muslims are always fighting more than people normally do, with pretty much everyone else, the myth that spokesmen for Islam in the West try to prop up is that they have some valid reason for it all. There's another myth on the Left that millions of Muslims are peaceful given that they are not rioting every day. Think about the observable facts from a different perspective, each Muslim that is fighting, throwing rocks, etc., is just making manifest countless more conversations around dinner tables full of the victimization propaganda typical to Muslim culture. In the illusion of their mind they're just fighting back. And it's the Jewish conspiracy that keeps Muslim men down despite all the oil wealth. It's the Jews who make them act like moral degenerates too, see. And so on.

John Quincy Adams on Islam

And he [Jesus] declared, that the enjoyment of felicity in the world hereafter, would be reward of the practice of benevolence here. His whole law was resolvable into the precept of love; peace on earth – good will toward man, was the early object of his mission; and the authoritative demonstration of the immortality of man, was that, which constituted the more than earthly tribute of glory to God in the highest… The first conquest of the religion of Jesus, was over the unsocial passions of his disciples. It elevated the standard of the human character in the scale of existence…On the Christian system of morals, man is an immortal spirit, confined for a short space of time, in an earthly tabernacle. Kindness to his fellow mortals embraces the whole compass of his duties upon earth, and the whole promise of happiness to his spirit hereafter. THE ESSENCE OF THIS DOCTRINE IS, TO EXALT THE SPIRITUAL OVER THE BRUTAL PART OF HIS NATURE.

(Adam's capital letters)(John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy
By Samuel Bemis (New York, 1949) :267-268) His comparison with Islam:

In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant…While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.”

(Ib. :269) (I traced this down from The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam
By Robert Spencer :83)

Another contrast:

Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. They said to Him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. No in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?’ They said this to test Him, so that they could have some charge to bring against Him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with His finger. But when they continued asking Him, He straightened up and said to them, ‘Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her,’ Again He bent down and wrote on the ground. And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. So He was left alone with the woman before Him. Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She replied, ‘No one, sir: Then Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.” (John 7:53—8:11)

“There came to him (the Holy Prophet) a woman from Ghamid and said; Allah’s Messenger, I have committed adultery, so purify me. He (the Holy Prophet) turned her away. On the following day she said; Allah’s Messenger, Why do you turn me away? . . .By Allah, I have become pregnant. He said; Well, if you insist upon it, then go away until you give birth to the child. When she was delivered she came with the child wrapped in a rag and said; Here is the child whom I have given birth to. He said; Go away and suckle him until you wean him. When she had weaned him, she came to him...She said; Allah’s Apostle, here is he as I have weaned him and he eats food. He (the Holy Prophet) entrusted the child to one of the Muslims and then pronounced punishment. And she was put in a ditch up to her chest and he commanded people and they stoned her. Khalid bin Walid came forward with a stone which he flung at her head and there spurted blood on the face of Khalid and so he abused her.

(Ib. :75)

It seems there is no redemption when it comes to tyrants and slaves of the Prince of this world. I suppose people could argue that such a story is an accretion of folklore to the Islamic texts, religion and tradition. But basic facts and numerous observations* could be made to demonstrate that such a story fits into a broad pattern of Islamic history combined with attitudes towards the feminine that exist to this day.

There are other examples of inversions between the advice of Christ and the advice and actions of the self-defined Prophet, although the second tries to establish and claim similarities anyway. (You can read the Quran for yourself here.)

*For instance, one example that eventually got some coverage in the American Old Press:

Saudi media, in a rare criticism of the kingdom's powerful religious police, have accused the force of hampering efforts to rescue 15 girls who died inside a blazing school in Mecca a week ago. The al-Eqtisadiah daily said firemen scuffled with the religious police after they tried to keep the girls inside the burning building because they did not wear headscarves and abayas (black robes) as required by the strict interpretation of Islam.

(Toronto Star
March 18, 2002 Monday Ontario Edition
NEWS; Pg. A13
Saudi Arabia)

Islamic civilization?

Whatever happened to it. I was going to write about it but I've only read one book on it and half read another tangentially related, along with some journal articles. It seems to me that to describe it one would have to explain the decline of Islamic civilization to its rather pathetic state or at least speculate on it. Maybe in the future I'll venture a hypothesis, if we're not all killed over a cartoon first. It is tempting to believe that civilization is good but it is probably for the best that Islamic civilization has declined, come to think of it. One might think or believe the Wester myth that civility and civil rights are indelibly linked to civilization and so education and literacy are the key to all, but actually history shows that civilization is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition for civility.

It seems to me that to explain a decline of civilization you have to look to what defines it, i.e. language. So that's what I would try to look into in Islamic civilization. The pollution of language is generally the way that civilizations and Empires tend to rise and fall, e.g., the Roman Empire began mixing a little copper in the coin, a little more copper in the coin, and so on until its “word” was no longer as good as gold. Instead it was devalued and contained less value or meaning. It all seems to rely on the spirit and meaning of things even as people continue in their daily business with nary a thought about it. I.e., for credit to exist you have faith that someone will pay you back in the future and a contract may as well be a covenant, while things are done in good “faith” and so on. Money can be the root of all kinds of evil because it’s all quite religious.

Well, it would take a book to try to describe how the past came to be the present with respect to Islam. It seems to me that the future is bundled into the information of the present, although the whole system may not be closed. I have noticed that most of the ancient prophets claimed to see beings of light who are not bound by the system, interesting to note that light is the best way to communicate information. I wouldn’t say information derived from supposed revelation is necessarily of God. You could almost perform a study and have one person claim a form of revelation to see how many imitations there would be. But I do believe that some religious traditions were begun by an actual revelation of information, just as the original witnesses claim. It is interesting to note the impact of information technologies on such traditions, e.g.:

More than five hundred years ago there was a revolution in information technology; Johann Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press for the Roman alphabet. This made possible a further revolution, a revolution in the transmission of knowledge. Down to the Middle Ages, oral transmission was the normal way in which knowledge was passed on. Knowledge was stored up in men; the art of memory was amongst the most highly prized of arts; scholars were masters of mnemonic tricks. But, the advent of mass-produced printed books steadily reduced dependence on oral systems of transmission, until they became mere traces in our language and our values; we still talk, for instance, of auditing accounts, we still worry about the loss of the arts of memory in educating our young. Gutenberg’s press also accelerated a revolution in human consciousness. This is, of course, the particular insight of Marshall McLuhan and George Steiner, who perceive a transformation of human consciousness as it moves from oral to written speech, as it moves from a consciousness dominated by sound to one dominated by visual space. Knowledge became less warm, less personal, less immediate and more cold, more abstract, more intellectual.
It is hardly surprising that Francis Bacon named printing, along with gunpowder and the compass, as one of the three things that had changed ‘the appearance and state of the whole world’. A host of major historical developments are associated with it: making the Italian Renaissance a permanent European Renaissance, pressing forward the development of modern capitalism, implementing western European exploration of the globe, transforming family life and politics, making possible the rise of modern science and so on. But, amongst the most important of the ramifications of print was the transformation of the religious life of western christendom. Print lay at the heart of that great challenge to religious authority, the Protestant Reformation; Lutheranism was the child of the printed book. Print lay at the heart of the Catholic counter-offensive, whether it meant harnessing the press for the work of the Jesuits and the office of Propaganda, or controlling the press through the machinery of the Papal Index and the Papal Imprimatur. Print, and the enormous stimulus to literacy which the desire to read the Bible gave, was at the heart of that slow change in northern European Christianity from a time when a Church building and its decoration might be read as one great iconic book to one which was increasingly focused on the Bible, the Word, which many could read and all might understand, because at last it was in their language.
[…]
[In contrast:] Print did not begin to become established in the Islamic world until the nineteenth century, four hundred years after it began to become established in Christendom. Where Muslim regimes still wielded power, but were threatened by the expansion of the West, such as Egypt, Iran and the Ottoman Empire, presses were started up in the early nineteenth century but not widely used until the second half of the century. It is not until the years 1870—1890, according to Mehmet Kaplan, that it is possible to see the Ottoman elite beginning to be transformed by book knowledge.

( Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print
By Francis Robinson
Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, Special Issue: How Social, Political and Cultural Information Is Collected, Defined, Used and Analyzed. (Feb., 1993) :231-232)

Islam

I think I may write some on how Islamic civilization came to its current state:

"This is not a protest, this is a warning," said Khalid Kelly, 39, an Irish national who converted to Islam five years ago. "Stop murdering our women and children. We gave the same message before 9/11. We are now saying to insult our
Prophet means death. We are being attacked and an attack against our Prophet
will mean death."

Abu Jihad, 43, who was born in Pakistan, added that the cartoonist and the editors of the papers should be killed. "It is very clear: Anyone who insults the Prophet must be beheaded. Remember van Gogh?" he said, referring to the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh who was murdered in 2004 for his controversial film about Islam. "Whoever did it, bless him. Islam is peace but you see there will only be peace when Islam is implemented across the world. In the Prophet's time anyone who insulted the Prophet was beheaded. The same should happen now."

(The Globe)

The immediate reaction of the Leftist mind in America when it comes to Islam is to try to conflate all type with stereotype to try to prevent and smother other minds from making even the most simple of judgments. Its main concern seems to be sitting in judgment on stereotypes instead of focusing on the fact that nobody should have their head cut off over a cartoon.

Yet it is a historical fact that Abu Jihad's idea of Islam has Islamic text, history and tradition behind it. That's probably why there has been no Islamic reformation, if one goes back to the traditional formulation or the information in the texts there is virtually nothing there to reform to and so next to nothing for possible reformers to work with. Note the ignorance and the canards typical to the American Left with respect to Islam, apparently they are waiting on a reformation that will never come from within the information of Islam itself.

The wisdom of parasites?

I was going to write something about this weaving the metaphoric Blind Watchmaker and the feminine Mother Nature that Darwinists sometimes speak of against the metaphoric feminine Wisdom found in proverbs and reiterated by Jesus. There is a warning about throwing the pearls of Wisdom before the swine that whine, these half-wits that try to engage in denying the good half of all wit and wisdom. So I do not know, I suppose I lack the wit to know how to use knowledge, which would be wisdom. It would be easy though, as I do know that the patterns of thought and associations for such metaphors are written all over the thinking of those with the urge to merge.

Instead of going all craaazy with metaphors I would note this, the empirical evidence stops with this sentence: "It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well." From there on the text is theorizing and verbal images that degenerate into "One could easily imagine..." and "...it's not hard to envision..." that indicate the way that the Darwinian mind is so often "overwhelmed" by evidence drawn from its own vain imagination. It is easily overwhelmed.

One might say that such a mind exists only in its own imagination anyway, so it should not be surprising that it feels its way along blindly based on patterns of images that come into its brain, like a cockroach that is enslaved to a wasp of the malevolent feminine.

I'll be nice.

For Jason, I think I'll leave out where I've worked and lived, as well as movies I could watch over and over. Who actually watches mooovies over and over? As far as living, as far as I can tell I was a possibility in the mind of infinite Intelligence that transcends and finished painting the picture of Nature...it is finished indeed, bits of me were in a vast Cosmic "Big Bang," the possibility of me came together thanks to the Romance of a little Yin and Yang coming into the picture, then I lived for a time in my mother's womb, and so on. But just as I cannot remember such things, I may not be remembering much more. A lot of the picture depends on one's reference frame in it, I suppose, as it is that frame of reference that matters to a person.

Four TV shows I love:

From limited observation I would say that four TV shows worth loving cannot be found, although I watch Lost on occasion.


(The New Yorker, 1951)

Four places I've vacationed:

Hatteras, Idaho, upstate New York and Florida.

Four of my favorite dishes:

My mom's fajitas, Thanksgiving dinner, spaghetti, and things she makes up...except that dreadful weird plant salad she made this week in a moment of creativity. Creativity doesn't always work out, but one has to try to know...and besides, some people like things that others do not. It's that subjective element to life.

Four sites I visit daily:

Lexis-nexus, Google, sometimes Two or Three and the Delawarean blogs listed on the right but saying I visit them daily is pushing it. Maybe weekly...

Four places I would rather be right now:

Windsurfing in Maui, Hatteras, Virginia or Florida...which I will be soon.

Four bloggers I am tagging (so they will all have a good reason to post):

I would do this[Link removed by request, now aren't you curious?], this, this and this one since this whole exercise seems rather like Xanga. I think I could get into that though. So dearest dearie diary, there are four things that I like, oh how I like them. It's like this, like...and then I was like, like this other thing that I like, can't quite make the metaphoric connection to! Imagine that...but how nice I am on this mighty fine day, which I like!

[Edit: That is a good post. I haven't been keeping up with blog reading lately. I've been reading about other things like the origins of Life and so on, even as the possibility lurks that much of Life will be burned in a nuclear fire. I would note this, it may be a good thing that scientists, for all their claims throughout history and now the claims about genetics, still basically do not understand Life that much. It may be good because greater knowledge always seems to lead to the possibility of greater Good and greater Evil, especially greater evil in the name of the greater good. Scientists of the technically proficient barbarian sort have never demonstrated much care in using knowledge to give people bigger and bigger weapons. I.e., if Darwinists were really correct in their utterly inane "Darwinism is just like the theory of gravity." argument then one could expect armies of Ape-men on the horizon with their adaptations for warfare predicted and made manifest just as sure as people can predict the trajectory of a bomb given the theory of gravity. But you shouldn't expect that any time soon, if ever, because Darwinists are pulling their inane claims out of remarkably thin air. There is also the possibility of great good. But we're getting to the point now where great evil will result in global death from which there is no coming back and learning, like children, by trial and error as we typically do. It seems we must always try to eat the fruit and only then realize our error, trial and error.]

Nomogenesis

On evolution by law vs. "chance," alternative hypotheses often delve into the evidence that the Darwinian mind has not focused on, as it does not fit.

E.g.

Berg’s book is a serious, encyclopedic, well reasoned argument against Darwinian ‘evolution by chance’. Although Berg assembled his evidence more than forty years ago, evolution cannot meanwhile have eliminated the host of plants and animals, of every family and phylum, whose inconvenient habits described herein still need explanation. His bibliography and index of species and authors fills seventy pages.
For Berg, the crucial question is how variations arose. That chance or ‘random recombination’ alone could produce enough ‘fit’ forms for selection to work on seems to Berg incredible, and for good reason. His survey of the living world includes many variations that are neither random nor beneficial. He notes leaf galls which are not disorganised cell masses but mimics of the plant’s normal seed pods, cites multiple cases of similarly coloured plants and/or animals in given regions. He punctures the fallacy of selective evidence: for example, a toothless egg-eating snake whose vertebral processes serve as ‘esophageal teeth’ is a poor example of evolutionary providence, for other, non- egg-eating snakes have similar structures. And how, he asks, did this snake survive while waiting to become adapted? On the other hand, he finds many evolved structures which are unused, unusable, or even apparently detrimental: teeth which in many fish genera first develop at spawning season, when the time for feeding is past; crossed mammoth tusks which could not have functioned; winged insects which never fly, vegetarian insectivorous plants, and sailed fish which prefer to swim, to name but a few.
For Berg, this evidence supports development which proceeds according to an inner law—writing now, he might say 'programmed'—regardless of consequences. He distinguishes this law from teleology, vitalism, mechanism and other nineteenth century notions, and substitutes the concept of nomogenesis, or ontogenetic [the way that organisms or embryos develope and grow] and phylogenetic [the way that organisms can be traced back from descendant to ancestor] development by laws predetermining the organism’s response to stimuli. Whether these laws are inherent in the stimulus or in the respondent or in both is not always clear. This is less the fault of the author or translator than of the reader, for I had constantly to remind myself that Berg wrote long before the concept of programmed DNA molecules. Although his concept of nomogenesis needs some revision in terms of modern molecular biology, his data and reasoning demand serious consideration.
Although Berg says little specifically about man, the primates and human evolution, anthropologists need to understand the biological principles he discusses. Soberly considered, the post hoc explanations of the evolutionary status or selective advantage of many structures are somewhat weak.* Rather, it may well be that each taxon, including ours, has its built-in potentials and limits for variability and for response. The exploration of these limits and the mechanisms by which they operate will do more to advance the understanding of human variability, ancient and modern, than the too frequent assumption that if a structure is common it must be advantageous, with subsequent rationalisations about its utility.

(Reviewed Work: Nomogenesis: Evolution Determined by Law. by Leo S. Berg; J. N. Rostovstov
Reviewed by Lucile E. St Hoyme
Man New Series, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Dec., 1969), :652)


*E.g.,

What might a non-locomotor benefit [for bipedality] look like? A stimulating suggestion is the sexual selection theory of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, of the University of Oregon. She thinks we rose on our hind legs as a means of showing off our penises. Those of us that have penises, that is. Females, in her view, were doing it for the opposite reason: concealing their genitals which, in primates, are more prominently displayed on all fours. This is an appealing idea but I don’t carry a torch for it. I mention it only as an example of the kind of thing I mean by a non-locomotor theory. [A theory, so it's probably just like gravity or somethin' according to the Darwinian mind...] As with so many of these theories, we are left wondering why it would apply to our lineage and not to other apes or monkeys. [Not to mention men and women at the same time, but that's not the first time that Darwinists have made historical claims based on little more than hypothetical goo that merges and blurs itself into any evidence. Then the half-wit mind is "overwhelmed" by all the mountains of evidence...and so on.]

(The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
By Richard Dawkins :91)

Darwinian tales are somewhat weak, to say the least...but wait, that little thing is not a tail at all! Yet it is quite a tale the way that things evolve into something else by chance. In the Information Ages it may be that some little tales of deformation and supposed formation just don't have a chance anymore...so much for the little tails, they were amusing though.