The Dover decision...

Here is a good post on it.

I never actually read the thing because it is just another decision that some judge based on precedents that make both the Constitution and the Declaration "unconstitutional." You can't be any more obviously wrong and unlawful, so what does it matter anymore? Now they will do, what they will do. Your rights are as safe as their next act of their own will, as well as your property and even your life.

I probably should read the decision though. Good material.

The interesting thing is that even conservatives are so weak-minded that once they get into positions of power they often honor and conserve false precedents or in other branches also become corrupted by maintaining and establishing their power. Is it really so hard to just do the right thing based on principle even if you get booted from office for it? Note that the Founders almost got killed over what they did, is it really so hard to lose power? Is it really so hard to uphold a document in a principled way even if it undermines and limits the power of the very branch of government that you serve in?

Jefferson argued of the Judiciary that it cannot be expected to limit itself based on a mere document as the very document would become a thing of wax in its hands. He was right. But I don't really blame other Founders who put themselves at risk, some sacrificing everything, just to put their names to a document of principles for failing to see that the Judiciary would be the branch to reject textual limitation. It's hard for principled people to understand moral/textual degenerates.

In the end, any system of government must rely on people being willing to limit their will by law, as stated in text governing laws and documents. Once some of the very people with the duty of being limited by the text of documents and law become "pro-choice" enough to treat their own will as the law and begin setting precedents based on their own will then civilization is on the decline and on the way to its end.

The NCSE

I just came across this amusing comment from a Darwinist:

Nick Matzke: It’s been reported in the newspapers already. It’s a, been reported in the newspapers, and that’s just the way it is.

It seems that they actually believe that as long as they control the flow of information in the Old Press and make the Judiciary an agent to enforce their public policies then they will inevitably be successful in shaping the view of the world of entire generations, just as they were in proto-Nazi Germany.

Given this focus, the majority of the Panda's Thumb seems to be devoted to legal and political control now through their contacts and networking in the Old Press, etc. Ironically, the very existence of the blog shows that there is a new area of networking where information flows on around such things that anyone interested in the information at issue can easily use. I.e., the old worldview shaping tactics that rely on a controlled use of information may no longer work, especially when people these days are learning that often what is "reported in the newspapers" is not "just the way it is."

As for me, I don't really care if the Old Press or the Judiciary is on their side even if that means that students are taught the Darwinists' frauds and charlatanism based on inane claims about gill-slits, embryos, etc. Why? Because any student that is dumb enough to believe them is then easy fodder and most likely the numbers of creationists and ID types will continue to grow even as Darwinists continue to maintain and establish control in the Judiciary, the Old Press and so on. They seem to naturally work with the State towards the goal that no criticism of the Darwinian creation myth be allowed except what Darwinists themselves say is allowed, yet it seems to me that there are enough postmodernists and others to limit their impact to State schools. Those are areas that are a legal mess already governed by lawyers and an educational establishment generally gone wrong anyway. It seems to me that if you send your child where you know they will be subject to fraudulent claims and scientific charlatanism and other things that take place under a false governing philosophy, then that's your decision.

What matters to me are the ideas in people's minds as individuals and their view of the world, not establishing control of State schools or working with a Judiciary that is now capable of declaring both the Declaration and the Constitution "unconstitutional" based on whatever they just pulled out of their own penumbras.

It also seems to me that ideas drawn from creationism and ID will continue to do quite well just as they always have as long as forms of socialism like total Nazi or Communist totalitarianism based on mythological narratives of Naturalism are avoided. The evidence shows that it is possible to indoctrinate generations of youth away from worldviews that admit to the obvious fact of some form of transcendence and the metaphysical reasoning that comes naturally to them as a result, just as it has come naturally to all people throughout the ages. If indoctrination is generally set against metaphysical philosophy and education by the State in the total way that organizations like the NCSE seem to desire then it is a possibility. I just don't see that happening given American culture and the way that the flow of information cannot be controlled these days. American culture is something that Darwinists often lament because it hampers their shifting of education and free metaphysical thought into indoctrination based on scientism that is based on supposed brute "physical facts" which they believe are the only and total truth. Americans have been ingrained with notions of transcendence, unalienable rights, metaphysical thoughts and speech that come freely with the notion of fairness towards all sides because all sides can be looked down based on governing principles from above.

Darwinists lament American's sense of fair play and dialectical reasoning because they believe that their side of supposed "natural"/scientific facts is the total truth that need not be looked at and so no dialogue needs to take place unless they say it does.

The power of suggestion...

...I suggest looking into it.

Someone suggested that I read this book: The Case for Christ. So I did.

For this post I'll draw out a marginal topic from the book that is more of a side note in one chapter:

...Collins’ appeal to Jesus’ miracles opened the door to other objections. “Some people have tried to shoot down these miracles that supposedly help authenticate Jesus’ claim to being the Son of God,” I said, pulling out a book from my briefcase. I read him the words of skeptic Charles Templeton.

Many illnesses, then as now, were psychosomatic, and could be “cured” when the sufferer’s perception changed. Just as today a placebo prescribed by a physician in whom the patient has faith can effect an apparent cure, so, in an early time, faith in the healer could banish adverse symptoms. With each success the healer’s reputation would grow and his powers would, as a consequence, become more efficacious.

“Does this,” I demanded, “explain away the miracles that supposedly back up Jesus’ claim to being the Son of God?”
Collins’ reaction surprised me. “I wouldn’t have a whole lot of disagreement with what Templeton wrote,” Collins replied.
“You wouldn’t?”
“Not really. Might Jesus have sometimes healed by suggestion? I have no problem with that. Sometimes people can have a psychologically induced illness, and if they get a new purpose for living, a new direction, they don’t heed the illness anymore.
“The placebo effect? If you think you’re going to get better, you often do get better. That’s a well-established medical fact. And when people came to Jesus, they believed he could heal them, so he did. But the fact remains: regardless of how he did it, Jesus did heal them.
“Of course,” he quickly added, “that doesn’t explain all of Jesus’ healings. Often a psychosomatic healing takes time; Jesus’ healings were spontaneous. Many times people who are healed psychologically have their symptoms return a few days later, but we don’t see any evidence of this. And Jesus healed conditions like lifelong blindness and leprosy, for which a psychosomatic explanation isn’t very likely.”

(The Case for Christ: A
Journalist's Personal Investigation
of the Evidence for Jesus
by Lee Strobel :148-149)

I guess one would have to read through the Bible and keep an eye on where Jesus says something about "faith healing." The interesting thing is that the importance of beliefs has been verified empirically. In the aggregate it shows up in things that seem like small effects like the placebo, yet there are also individual cases in which doctors performed the wrong surgery and the patient got better and the like. So it is hard to say how many times something of this nature may be happening given that usually doctors both perform the correct surgery and so act as if the patient should be cured leading them to believe that they are. That may be combined with the brute fact that they have been physically cured, yet some cases indicate that may not be so. I would not be as radical as an anthropologist studying "ritual surgery" these days as if modern medicine is the same as the old shamans combining some physical herbs with mental beliefs, although some of it may well be. Rather, it seems to me that one could think about it this way, we already know that we think (and think that we know) with our brain cells, so perhaps our other cells are also a little more thinking and knowing than we yet know. E.g., if we feel stress then they seem to know it too. And so on.

Most of these types of effects are small yet significant enough to be noticed and studied in the aggregate while in some individual cases they may be life changing.

Interesting to note that once we admit to the paranormal or the anomalies that sometimes seem to occur even now, then it might make what was traditionally considered miraculous less significant in our minds. It's the matter of definition and what a miracle is defined by and how the sign is written against the background noise. I.e., if everyone could fly then it would not be significant or taken as much of a sign of anything about me or my knowledge/wit/witness if I could levitate and say, "Look at me, I'm levitatin' here! So here is what I have to say about things." And if the rules, patterns and laws by which things operate are perceived to be inclusive of what was previously considered significant or anomalous then people will not take a "miracle" as a sign and a wonder to be wondered at. Everything is already quite amazing if you actually look at it with an eye to see it, including a human being walking around keeping their balance in a way that a robot probably never will based on little more than tiny hairs in its ears, while its muscles run on little more than plants and meat, and so on and so forth.

If we could all fly around at will based on our mental powers or some such, then people would probably be wondering about and having dreams of instantaneous teleportation or some such.

Perhaps tomorrow I will do a post on the little anomalies of life that no one seems to notice that are similar to the placebo effect. A scientific heretic has published some books about such things so I bought his books because it has been suggested by the new Priests of Knowledge that they be burned. "Book burning?!" you might ask. Indeed, interesting how heresy has changed these days to be so scientific, is it not? The issue of heresy vs. orthodoxy seems to follow what people actually believe to be true. These days in the West the truth is what people think "science" is or what is scientific and so supposedly not theology/religion, as that can be separated as the realm of fiction or subjective faith at best. Since you usually can't be much of a heretic in the realm of fiction there are not many religious heretics these days. Or perhaps there are people suggesting that heretical books be burned and the like that I do not know about.

I'm a bit of a heretic myself in some ways when it comes to religion. I suppose that it is fortunate for me that in postmodernist times in which religion is not believed to be "true," no one cares enough to censor or burn over it!

The Art of Knowledge

Once upon a time there was an Artist who could draw other artists into his pictures, some to draw some things for him and even some who drew some for themselves too. So he drew an apprentice in his own image.

His new student asked him about a piece of art that he was working on, "What is it going to be?"

"It’s a picture about good and evil, right and wrong."

"How can you draw a picture about wrong that is right?"

"Whatever I draw is right, even that which I let look wrong to those I draw to observe it so. It's something in the lighting and my drawing, you see. I will not explain further until the picture is complete. Come close little one, so that I may ask you a question. Now, why do you suppose I would draw you to ask me annoying questions when I'm trying to work?"

"Well, I suppose...I, uh, eh, I don't know why! But it seems to me that you must know all about your own art. Say, why don't you just draw me to stop it? Huh, huh?"

The Artist turned to look at the little fellow staring up at him from his side, sighed, then said, "What you're drawing me to do is going to hurt you more than it hurts me."

"Uh, wait a minute..." the little fellow looked back at the painting, "I suppose I can wait until the picture is complete."

"Very well, and besides the answer does not exist yet in any language that you can understand. You see, I've not drawn you to understand it yet. But perhaps you can think of it in this way as I work, making a picture about good and evil consists of drawing the line someplace."

As the artist spoke he drew a line, as he did the little beings that he had drawn into his picture murmured among themselves, "Why are things this way, rather than that? I can think of things my way and want them to be so, so why should they not be my way?"

The student commented, "Say, they are a little like me in that way! So I suppose their next question about what will be would be why don't you just take their will away?"

"Only I know, as I know all of my own art. Yet I would think that some of the answers about the will would be rather obvious, if you will."

"It seems an odd decision to me."

"Yes, I knew you would say that."

"Ah, but what if I knew you knew? See how my knowledge increases to approach your own!"

The Master Artist just glanced at the little fellow and kept working on the picture. So his student asked, "Well...can you draw me to have some of your knowledge?" and the Artist answered, "For now you do not even have the symbols, imagery in your head or the language to think many of my type of thoughts, so some of the best truths about my art and this picture must and will remain ineffable and paradoxical to you. That is my will. If you are willing to learn how my will must be done in all of my pictures then I will naturally draw you to have more knowledge of my own nature."

"Naturally....that seems logical to me."

"Yes, of course, I knew it would. After all, I just drew you to think so."

The little fellow just sighed at that, and thought that he might have heard the Artist chuckle as he did.

On knowledge and Darwinism...

...here is a good post from an ID blog.

It begins with this bit of knowledge: "When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know it, to admit that you do not—this is true knowledge." —-Confucius

Debating a Holocaust denier...

This gets long so only begin if you are interested in the topic.

I mentioned this in some recent comments here and it reminded me of things I wrote about years ago. So for those who are curious, here is what the reasoning of a Holocaust denier looks like.

I will have to edit down my replies some for length but here is what the reasoning and arguments of a Holocaust denier look like, I will quote them in full first and then reply:

Now it's your turn. Show us one, just one, written order or directive by Hitler relating to the murder of Jews.

Let's make it easier for you. Just show us one, just one, order signed by anyone, of any rank, in any position of authority, whether military or civilian, ordering the gassing of Jews at any time, at any place, at any concentration camp, in any country.

That should be pretty easy if indeed there was a Holocaust--if indeed the Germans really did kill Jews by the hundreds of thousands. Such a monstrous and wide-reaching program of mass murder simply could not have been carried out without some written directions, without some official orders passed down through the ranks, with multiple copies to headquarters, without some reports passed back up the ranks that the terrible orders had been successfully carried out. That's the way military and civilian bureaucracies work--paper, paper, paper--and the Germans were known to be meticulous record keepers. So where, oh where, are all those documents on the ghastly gassings at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, Mauthausen, and other fabled "death camps?"

The real reason there are no records of an extermination plan is because there was no extermination plan. The Germans planned to deport the Jews out of Germany. The records show that they planned to move them to Madagascar. "On July 19, 1942, Himmler issued a directive setting a timetable for the expulsion (got that? "expulsion") of Jews from the Government-General. The Jews were not to be killed, they were to be resettled. The order stated: (Begin quote)
"I herewith order that the resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the Government-General be carried out and completed by December 31, 1942."

That order was followed up by a similar order by Himmler in a letter to Frank, the governor of Poland, on May 26, 1943. Jews were to be evacuated, not gassed.

(Begin quote)
"The evacuation of the last 250,000 Jews, which will undoubtedly cause unrest for some weeks, must despite all the difficulties be completed as quickly as possible." (End quote)

Here is some of my old reply, there was no further debate after it:

They said: Now it's your turn. Show us one, just one, written order or directive by Hitler relating to the murder of Jews.

Goebbels’s notes on this meeting of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter, Hitler spoke as follows:

Regarding the Jewish question, the Führer is determined to clear the table. He warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their own destruction. Those were not empty words. Now the world war has come. The destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. We cannot be sentimental about it. It is not for us to feel sympathy for the Jews. We should have sympathy rather with our own German people. If the German people have to sacrifice 160,000 victims in yet another campaign in the east, then those responsible for this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.

There were other occasions, too, both before and after December
1941, when Hitler made reference to his infamous “prophecy.” But he never before did so as clearly, as unambiguously, or in such a matter-of-fact way as recorded here by Goebbels.

(The Wannsee Conference, the Fate of German Jews,
and Hitler's Decision in Principle to Exterminate All European Jews
by Christian Gerlach
The Journal of Modern History,
Vol. 70, No. 4. (Dec., 1998), pp. 771)

It doesn't have to be detailed, just clear and unambiguous.

In the course of the final solution, the Jews should be brought in an appropriate manner and under appropriate direction to work in the east. In large detachments, with the sexes separated, the Jews who are able to work will construct roads in these regions. It is to be expected that a sizable number will disappear due to natural causes. The Jews who survive, however many there may be, will no doubt be the hardiest. They will have to be treated accordingly. Otherwise these select few, should they escape, could form the basis for a new Jewish line of descent. (See the experience of history.)

--Heydrich (Ib.)

Let's make it easier for you. Just show us one, just one, order signed by anyone, of any rank, in any position of authority, whether military or civilian...

...Otto Hofmann. In late September 1942 he revealed his ideas on future generations to a meeting of SS Officers, noting that “They will no longer recognize any Jewish danger. In twenty years there may not be a single Jew left. In the European part of Russia there are a total of some 11 million Jews. So there is still plenty of work to do. I cannot believe that we have exterminated more than one million of them thus far. It will take some time until we have freed Europe from this pestilence." Hofmann was clearly referring to his recollection, even then somewhat dim, of the Wannsee Conference. The pace of liquidation had actually been faster than he thought. For he had not been kept informed about current developments and had just met with Himmler for the first time since February 1942.

(Ib. :800)

...ordering the gassing of Jews at any time...

Heydrich’s satisfaction with the outcome of the Wannsee Conference arose for another reason. No one had voiced opposition to the extermination of the Jews, including those in the German Reich and in western Europe. In official terminology: no reservations were expressed. The minutes support this conclusion indirectly. They record no objections, though differences and disagreements on other topics are noted. ... Heydrich could write, on February 26, that Wannsee, “happily, has settled the basic outlines for the practical implementation of the final solution of the Jewish question.’ He admitted that not all the details had yet been settled...
For Heydrich, January 20, 1942, was a day to celebrate, a day when he had also signed a list of nominees for the War Service Cross Second Class. At the top of the list was Paul Blobel, up until now the head of the Sonderkommando a and the man responsible for the slaughter of Jews at Babi Yar. Third on the list was Dr. Albert Widmann, who had carried out extermination experiments using poison gas in Mogilev in White Russia. Also on the list were Widmann’s assistant, Schmidt, three other RSHA officials from Referat II D 3 a, the office responsible for the development of the gassing vans, and various members of the Einsatzkommandos.

(Ib. :797)

...at any place, at any concentration camp, in any country.

On one of Höss’s trips away from Auschwitz in August 1941, his deputy, SS Captain Karl Fritzch, “on his own initiative” conducted successful experiments with Zyklon-B (the German trade name for hydrogen cyanide or prussic acid) on Russian prisoners of war on Block II, the punishment block. Zyklon-B “was constantly used in Auschwitz for the destruction of vermin, and there was consequently always a supply of these tins of gas on hand.” Höss joined in on repetitions of the experiment on his return, observing the killing while wearing a gas mask, and noting that death came very quickly; although he later claimed, “During this first experience of gassing people, I did not fully realize what was happening, perhaps because I was too impressed by the whole procedure.”
During Eichmann’s next visit to Auschwitz, he and Höss decided on the gas “for the mass extermination operation.” After two provisional sites, operations shifted in the spring of 1942 to bunkers I and II in the area initially chosen by Eichmann and Höss. The victims included Jews from Upper Silesia (territory lost to Poland at Versailles) as well as Russian POWs. Now Höss began to take pride in the new method. Visiting the
extermination camps at Chelmnot and Treblinka, he observed that their use of carbon monoxide was inferior: the exhaust gas produced by truck engines was not always sufficient, so that a number of victims “were only rendered unconscious and had to be finished off by shooting.” Even after the war, while in Polish incarceration Höss remained proud of the efficiency of “his” gas: "Experience had shown that the preparation of prussic acid called Cyclon B caused death with far greater speed and certainty, especially if the rooms were kept dry and gastight and closely packed with
people, and provided they were fitted with as large a number of intake as possible."

(The Nazi Doctors; Medical Killing and the Psychology
of Genocide
by Robert Lifton :160-161)

That should be pretty easy if indeed there was a Holocaust--if indeed the Germans really did kill Jews by the hundreds of thousands. Such a monstrous and wide-reaching program of mass murder simply could not have been carried out without some written directions... That's the way military and civilian bureaucracies work--paper, paper, paper--and the Germans were known to be meticulous record keepers. So where, oh where, are all those documents on the ghastly gassings at Auschwitz...

Auschwitz marked a radical escalation in both the vision and the technology of mass murder. The biological image was intricately involved in the Auschwitz vision as revealed by Höss’s recollection of Himmier’s description of the purpose of the camp:
'Jews are the eternal enemies the German people and must be exterminated. All Jews within our grasp are to be destroyed without exception, now, during the war. If we do not succeed in destroying the biological substance of the Jews, the Jews will some day destroy the German people.'
As Höss recalled, he had been “suddenly summoned” by Himmler in the summer of 1941 and told, “The Führer has ordered that the Jewish question be solved once and for all and that we, the SS, are to implement that order.” Himmler explained that existing extermination centers in the East could not carry out “the large actions which are anticipated.”

(Ib. :157)

...Treblinka,

Eberl was appointed commandant of Treblinka at the camp’s opening in July 1942. An engineer from T4 had helped construct the gassing apparatus; and the personnel, as in the other death camps in Poland, came heavily from SS men earlier involved with “euthanasia.” .... The fact that Eberl was the only physician known to have headed a death camp suggests that the Nazis had good reason to feel that he was indistinguishable from a nonphysician in his attitude toward killing Jews. It could also mean that the Nazis were the time considering wider use of doctors as commandants of death camps, thereby extending the principle of medicalized killing.
If Eberl was a test case, he failed. An SS inspection visit to Treblinka a few weeks after the arrival of the first transport exposed a chaotic situation. Decaying corpses were piled up as new trains arrived, giving incoming Jews an all too clear idea of what awaited them, and making them difficult to handle; trains could not keep their schedule as one was held up behind another. Eberl was dismissed in short order. He had not been able to cope with the new dimension of murder, although his inefficiency in no way slowed down the process. At the peak in late August, trains were bringing in 10,000 to 12,000 Jews a day; by the end of that month, some 215,000 had been killed. (In comparison, as a T4 doctor, Eberl had killed “only” 8,ooo patients in a little over a year and a half.)

(Ib. :124)

...Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, Mauthausen, and other fabled "death camps?"

All the thirty odd principal Nazi concentration camps were death camps and millions of tortured, starved inmates perished in them. Though the authorities kept records—each camp had its official Totenbuch (death book)—they were incomplete and in many cases were destroyed as the victorious Allies closed in. Part of one Totenbuch that survived at Mauthausen listed 35,318 deaths from January 1939 to April 1945. At the end of 1942 when the need of slave labor began to be acute, Himmler ordered that the death rate in the concentration camps “must be reduced.” Because of the labor shortage he had been displeased at a report received his office that of the 136,700 commitments to concentration camps be tween June and November 1942, some 70,610 had died and that in addition 9,267 had been executed and 27,846 “transferred.” To the gas chamber, that is. This did not leave very many for labor duties.
But it was in the extermination camps, the Vernichtungslager, where most progress was made toward the “final solution.” The greatest and most renowned of these was Auschwitz, whose four huge gas chambers and adjoining crematoria gave it a capacity for death and burial far beyond that of the others—Treblinka, Belsec, Sibibor and Chelmno, all in Poland. There were other minor extermination camps near Riga, Vilna, Minsk, Kaunas and Lwów, but they were distinguished from the main ones in that they killed by shooting rather than by gas. For a time there was quite a bit of rivalry among the S.S. leaders as to which was the most efficient gas to speed the Jews to
their death. Speed was important factor, especially at Auschwitz, where toward the end the camp was setting new records by gassing 6,000 victims a day.

(The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
by William L. Shirer. (Simon and Schuster) 1990 :967)

Through heavy-glass portholes the executioners could watch what happened. The naked prisoners below would be looking up at the showers from which no water spouted or perhaps at the floor wondering why there were no drains. It took some moments for the gas to have much effect. But soon the inmates became aware that it was issuing from the perforations in the vents. It was then that they usually panicked, crowding away from the pipes and finally stampeding toward the huge metal door where, as Reitlinger puts it, “they piled up in one blue clammy blood-spattered pyramid, clawing and mauling each other even in death.” Twenty or thirty minutes later when the huge mass of naked flesh had ceased to writhe, pumps drew out the poisonous air, the large door was opened and the men of the Sonderkommando took over. These were Jewish male inmates who were promised their lives and adequate food in return for performing the most ghastly job of all. Protected with gas masks and rubber boots and wielding hoses they went to work. Reitlinger has described it.

'Their first task was to remove the blood and defecations before dragging the clawing dead apart with nooses and hooks, the prelude to the ghastly search for gold and the removal of teeth and hair which were regarded by the Germans as strategic materials. Then the journey by lift or rail-wagon to the furnaces, the mill that ground the clinker to fine ash, and the truck that scattered the ashes in the stream of the Sola.'

There had been, the records show, some lively competition among German businessmen to procure orders for building these death and disposal contraptions and for furnishing the lethal blue crystals. The firm of A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, manufacturers of heating equipment, won out in its bid for the crematoria at Auschwitz. The story of its business enterprise was revealed in a voluminous correspondence found in the records of the camp. A letter from the firm dated February 12, 1943, gives the tenor.

To THE CENTRAL CONSTRUCTION OFFICE
OF THE S.S. AND POLICE, AUSCHWITz:
SUBJECT: Crematoria 2 and 3 for the camp.

'We acknowledge receipt of your order for five triple furnaces, including two electric elevators for raising the corpses and one emergency elevator. A practical installation for stoking coal was also ordered and one for transporting ashes.'

The correspondence of two other firms engaged in the crematorium business popped up at the Nuremberg trials. The disposal of the corpses a number of Nazi camps had attracted commercial competition. One of the oldest German companies in the field offered its drawings for crematoria to be built at a large S.S. camp in Belgrade.
'For putting the bodies into the furnace, we suggest simply a metal fork moving on cylinders. Each furnace will have an oven measuring only 24 by 18 inches, as coffins will not be used. For transporting the corpses from the storage points to the furnaces we suggest using light carts on wheels, and we enclose diagrams of these drawn to scale.'
Another firm, C. H. Kori, also sought the Belgrade business, emphasizing its great experience in this field since it had already constructed four furnaces for Dachau and five for Lublin, which, it said, had given “full satisfaction in practice.”

(Ib. 970-971)

The real reason there are no records of an extermination plan is because there was no extermination plan. The Germans planned to deport the Jews out of Germany. The records show that they planned to move them to Madagascar.

Despite earlier remarks by Hitler regarding annihilation of Jews, the Nazis considered a variety of plans for expulsion, voluntary immigration, resettlement in Madagascar, etc. Only after these plans had been abandoned—found unfeasible for various reasons, including the reluctance of other nations to accept large numbers of Jews—was the definite decision made to implement the “Final Solution.” In 1938, there were still 350,000 or so Jews in Germany (reduced from 515,000), and the Nazis’ invasions and annexations kept acquiring more Jews. In March 1941, Keitel signed an order for the operation of Himmler’s killing units in Russia, once that invasion took place. Then, on 31 July, after the invasion, Goring signed an order for Heydrich authorizing him to make “all neces sary preparation” in respect to organizational and financial matters for the “complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.” Other agencies had been ordered to cooperate as needed.

(The Nazi Doctors; Medical Killing and the Psychology
of Genocide
by Robert Lifton :158)

That order was followed up by a similar order by Himmler in a letter to Frank, the governor of Poland, on May 26, 1943. Jews were to be evacuated, not gassed.

....the Jews of Europe were first to be transported to the conquered East, then worked to death, and the few tough ones who survived simply put to death. And the Jews—the millions of them—who resided in the East and were already on hand? State Secretary Dr. Josef Buehler, representing the Governor General of Poland, had a ready suggestion for them. There were nearly two and a half million Jews in Poland, he said, who “constituted a great danger.” They were, he explained, “bearers of disease, black-market operators and furthermore unfit for work.” There was no transportation problem with these two and a half million souls. They were already there.
'I have only one request [Buehler concluded], that the Jewish problem in my territory be solved as quickly as possible.'
The good State Secretary betrayed an impatience which was shared in high Nazi circles right up to Hitler. None of them understood at this time— not, in fact, until toward
the end of 1942, when it was too late—how valuable the millions of Jews might be to the Reich as slave labor. At this point they only understood that working millions of Jews to death on the roads of Russia might take some time. Consequently long before these unfortunate people could be worked to death—in most cases the attempt was not even begun—Hitler and Himmler decided to dispatch them by quicker means.
There were two principally. One of them, as we have seen, had begun shortly after the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941. This was the method of mass slaughter of the Polish and Russian Jews by the flying firing squads of the Einsatzgruppen, which accounted for some three quarters of a million. It was this method of achieving the “final solution” that Himmier had in mind when he addressed the S.S. generals at Posen on October 4, 1943.

'I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly I mean . . . the extermination of the Jewish race . . . Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written...'

(Shirer :966) (Emphasis added)

Sentience, Form, Design...and how biology is being destroyed, plus some frogs too...

Electrons and nucleons are not known to be sentient, while the higher animals are. If a rat laps up a solution of saccharine, the rational ex planation of this lies in the fact that the solution tastes sweet and that the rat likes that. The tasting and liking are facts that physics and chemistry as known today cannot explain.
And this conclusion gives the whole show away. Because it acknowledges a conscious desire by an individual capable of such desire, it leads on further to the recognition of deliberate actions by in- dividuals and the possibilities of error on their part. Thus a whole series of conceptions emerges that are absent from physics and chemistry as known today. Indeed, nothing is relevant to biology, even at the lowest level of life, unless it bears on the achievements of living beings: achievements such as their perfection of form, their morphogenesis, or the proper functioning of their organs; and the very conception of such achievements implies a distinction between success or failure—a distinction unknown to physics and chemistry.
But the distinction between success and failure is present in, and is indeed essential to, the science of engineering; and the logic of engineering does sub- stantiate in fact what I am saying here of biology. No physical or chemical investigation of an object can tell us whether it is a machine and, if so, how it works. Only if we have previously discovered that it is a machine, and found out also approximately how it works, can the physical and chemical examination of the machine tell us anything useful about it, as a machine. Similarly, physical and chemical investigations can form part of biology only by bearing on previously established biological achievements, such as shapeliness, morphogenesis, or physiological functions.
A complete physical and chemical topography of a frog would tell us nothing about it as a frog, unless we knew it previously as a frog. And if the rules of scientific detachment required that we limit ourselves exclusively to physical and chemical observations, we would remain forever unaware of frogs or of any other living beings, just as we would remain ignorant also by such observations of all machines and other human contrivances.
The achievements which form the subject matter of biology can be identified only by a kind of appraisal which requires a higher degree of participation by the observer in his subject matter than can be mediated by the tests of physics and chemistry. The current ideal of “scientificality” which would refuse such participation would indeed destroy biology but for the wise neglect of consistency on the part of its supporters.

(Scientific Outlook: Its Sickness and Cure
by Michael Polanyi
Science New Series, Vol. 125, No. 3246 (Mar., 1957), pp. 482)

"...the wise neglect of consistency..."

Indeed! It seems that such a lack of integrity can always be picked apart and turned back on the cold toad rendering their verdicts on Life, thus dissecting any toad who would dissect all being before they begin.

It is curious these days, how those who study Life/Bios supposedly are not allowed to admit that it is alive. This fellow argues from within the current paradigm that science is too myopic and blind to see what it is to see:

The consciousness problem was hardly avoidable by one who has spent most of his life studying mechanisms of vision. We have learned a lot, we hope to learn much more; but none of it touches or even points, however tentatively, in the direction of what it means to see. Our observations in human eyes and nervous systems and in those of frogs are basically much alike. I know that I see; but does a frog see? It reacts to light; so do cameras, garage doors, any number of photoelectric devices. But does it see? Is it aware that it is reacting? There is nothing I can do as a scientist to answer that question, no way that I can identify either the presence or absence of consciousness. I believe consciousness to be a permanent condition that involves all sensation and perception. Consciousness seems to me to be wholly impervious to science. It does not lie as an indigestible element within science, but just the opposite: Science is the highly digestible element within consciousness, which includes science as a limited but beautifully definable territory within the much wider reality of whose existence we are conscious.

(Cosmos, Bios, Theos: Scientists Reflect on Science, God, and
the Origins of the Universe, Life and Homo Sapiens
Edited by Henry Morgenau and Roy Varghese
Life and Mind in the Universe, by George Wald :218)

I'm not sure he's right about that but that's the way it looks from within the current paradigm because people like the Darwinists have been working to make sure that science is blind to what they consider "magic" and the like.

A textbook example...

...from a textbook: "It is the scientific quest for a natural understanding of life--embodied in the theory of evolution--that has led to the discovery of genetics, DNA, and virtually all modern medicine."

I suppose they're excluding the Nazi Doctors from all of modern medicine. It is curious though, how history shows that when the Christian weltanschauung is exchanged for the Darwinian then medical science is perverted.

Of course those who want to indoctrinate students with scientism and shape their worldview are probably ignorant and bigoted themselves, so they would try to sift through and revise history to claim that all that is good came from science while all that religion will result in is evil...theocracy, intolerance, etc. It is curious though, as the Darwinian creation myth that they want to promote has been known to result in "intolerance." Of course people have always been intolerant/evil no matter what they believe, almost all ancient peoples were creationists of one form or another who often believed in an Afterlife in which they would be judged, yet they still raped and pillaged each other, tortured people to death, plundered, skinned people alive, etc. So there is that. But evil seems to take more perverse forms and becomes much more amplified when worldviews that include Natural Law are removed or perverted to the pagan way of supplanting Natural Law with supposed laws of Nature, naturally. Those seem to be the times in which ancient historians begin to say things like: "And there were no lengths to which they did not go." That is what happened in Nazism, where it was said that they were following "natural laws." Contrast with Americanism, which was founded on the laws of Nature and Nature's God or the self-evident truths that are evident in the Self because all are endowed by their Creator to know them.

It seems that Darwinists who believe that they are just following "natural laws" are willfully forgetting parts of "all of modern medicine," ironically the parts embodied in the "theory of evolution." E.g.:

“[B]y 1932 . . . racial hygiene had become scientific orthodoxy in the German medical community” (p. 38). Prof. Eugen Fischer, Director of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Heredity Science, and Eugenics from its inception in 1927, was chosen as Rektor of the University of Berlin in 1933. In his inaugural address Dr. Fischer declared, “What Darwin was not able to do, genetics has achieved. It has destroyed the theory of the equality of man” (p. 345). As early as 1930 the Nazis sloganized, “National Socialism [is] the political expression of our biological knowledge” (p. 28). Proctor adds, “One might even say that National Socialism was itself progressive—if we mean by this that application of science to social problems (in a particular ‘biologistic’ manner) was an important element in Nazi ideology.” Mendelian genetics was hailed by the Nazis as proof that race was the key to history, not environment, not class.
[...]
In 1933, Dr. Gerhard Wagner, the Nazi who became the leader of the entire German medical profession months after Hitler became Kanzler, contrasted the National Socialist medical ideal with that of its predecessors—now there would be an emphasis on health leadership rather than health care, preventative rather than curative medicine, racial rather than individual hygiene. And health leadership implied distinguishing between valuable life and life “not worth living” (p. 73). Most German doctors endorsed Dr. Wagner’s program and during the Hitler regime “a higher proportion of Germany’s top university officers were held by medical doctors than at any time before or since” (p. 94). In fact, as Proctor notes, “there is little evidence that physicians ever refused to participate in Nazi programs. . . . Physicians were never ordered to participate in these experiments; those who participated did so because they were given the opportunity and volunteered” (p. 220).
In July 1933, the Nazis enacted the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring. To prevent degeneration, about 400,000 Germans were sterilized between 1933 and 1939—feeble-minded, schizoid, epileptic, alcoholic, manic-depressive, blind, deaf, and malformed, overwhelmingly Aryan Germans (p. 108). Doctors directed this program, which was so thorough that occasionally Nazis like Dr. Wagner and Heinrich Himmler felt compelled to restrain the doctors, who, for example, sought to sterilize an alcoholic in his seventies (pp. 114-15).

(Review: Nazi Science
by Hugh Murray
Reviewed works: Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis by Robert Proctor
Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany: 1933-1945 by Benno Müller-Hill and George R. Fraser
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert Jay Lifton
Polity Vol. 22, No. 3 (Spring, 1990) :547)

[Related post: So Intelligent Design will be taught in textbooks and schools after all...]

It seems that someone has lent us a hand.

I'm looking through information trying to formulate some thoughts on the anthropic principle that I've been meaning to write about and I came across this interesting note worth saving.

The Hand:

In addition to our brain, our linguistic ability, and our highly developed visual ability, we possess another wonderful adaptation, the ideal manipulative tool—the human hand. No other animal possesses an organ so superbly adapted for intelligent exploration and manipulation of its physical surroundings and environment. Only the great apes, our cousins, come close. Yet the hand of the chimp and gorilla, although possessing an opposable thumb, is far less adapted to fine motor movement and control. Although some chimps are remarkably dexterous, when one sees them attempt even simple manual tasks, they appear clumsy and inept compared to humans. Even a chimp with the intelligence of a human would have considerable difficulty carrying out many of the manipulative tasks that we take for granted, like peeling an apple, tying a knot, or using a typewriter.
One of the earliest and still one of the most fascinating discussions of the adaptive marvel that is the human hand was given by the first-century physician Galen: “To man the only animal that partakes in the Divine intelligence, the Creator has given in lieu of every other natural weapon or organ of defence, that instrument the hand: applicable to every art and occasion.” And he continues: “Let us then scrutinise this member of our body; and enquire not simply whether it be in itself useful for all the purposes of life, and adapted to an animal endowed with the highest intelligence; but whether its entire structure be not such, that it could not be improved by any conceivable alteration.” The adaptive perfection of the hand was a popular topic among nineteenth-century natural theologians.
In the context of explaining man’s biological preeminence on earth, the crucial question is not whether the human hand represents the absolute pinnacle of manipulative capability, but whether any other species possesses an organ approaching its capabilities. The answer simply must be that no other species possesses a manipulative organ remotely approaching the universal utility of the human hand. Even in the field of robotics, nothing has been built which even remotely equals the all-around manipulative capacity of the hand.
The hand not only provided man with the ability to manipulate and explore his environment but also with the ability to construct all manner of diverse tools and instruments, the use of which has been crucial to the acquisition of technological and scientific knowledge. It is impossible to envisage man progressing beyond the most primitive technology without the hand.
The hand, like any other organ, does not function in isolation. In fact, its utility is dependent to a large extent on that other crucial and unique adaptation of man, our upright stance and bipedal gait. Without these, the human hand would not be free to execute its manipulative explorations. All the great apes are basically quadrupeds, defined as knuckle-walkers by Owen in the nineteenth century.
[...]
[T]here are other aspects of our biology which have enabled us to be truly Homo sapiens, most notably that we are a social animal, a condition of great significance. Being social was not only almost certainly essential to the evolutionary development of language and other key aspects of our intellect, but only a social species could have ever developed an advanced technology through which to further the exploration of nature.

(Nature's Destiny: How the Laws
of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe
by Michael Denton :241-242)

That is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to our opportunity to be here in the way that we are here. For example, a totally different note on the music of the spheres that must be set to play in harmony in order that we can be here to hear:

If inertia had been less, then the wind could well have set a boulder in motion. In such a world we would be subjected to a continual bombardment by all types of objects in our environment. However, if inertia had been much greater, then unless the strength of muscles was much greater, we would have profound difficulty even in starting to move our finger. And once in motion, control of its direction and speed would be next to impossible. It is clear that the inertia of matter must be very close to what it is for an animal of our size to function in an environment similar to the earth’s. Extraordinary as it may seem, physicists have proposed that the inertial forces experienced by objects on the earth are generated by the total combined gravitational attraction of all matter in the cosmos, including the most distant stars and galaxies. Because most of the matter in the universe is far from the earth, this means that the greatest contribution to the inertia of objects on earth is made by the most distant galaxies. As Dennis Sciama comments in his Unity of the Universe:

The idea that distant matter can sometimes have far more influence than nearby matter may be an unfamiliar one. To make it more concrete, we may give a numerical estimate of the influence of nearby objects in determining the inertia of bodies on the earth: of this inertia, the whole of the Milky Way only contributes one ten-millionth, the sun one hundred-millionth, and the earth itself one thousand-millionth. . . . In fact, 80 per cent of the inertia of local matter arises from the influence of galaxies too distant to be detected by the 200-inch telescope.

In a very real sense, then, the existence of beings of our size and mass with the ability to stand, to move, and to light a fire[<--something necessary for the eventual evolution of things like the internet] is only possible because of the influence of the most distant galaxies, whose collective mass determines the precise strength of the inertial forces on earth. If this view is correct, then it means that our existence is critically dependent on both the mass of the earth and the total mass of the universe being very close to what they are. There is a distinct echo in these curious coincidences of the old medieval doctrine of man the microcosm, which held that the dimensions of the human body reflect in some profound sense the dimensions of the macrocosm.

(ib. :253-254)

Leonardo da Vinci was one of those, a scholar who some now believe was hiding knowledge about the Logos instead of promulgating it...will the ignorant absurdities of American pop-culture never cease?

[Related posts: Those who have eyes, let them see.
The Moon]

A nice little blog...

Here, another Delawarean, how nice. But what's this play on words about vengeance? I guess I'll have to wait and see.

Out of the mouths of babes...

...comes drool, mostly.

My little helper this evening:



Unfortunately she was too tired to offer me her words of wisdom about the new American militarism...since it was past her bedtime. She does look tired.

Drool may come out of the mouths of babes but as Noam Chomsky has found evidence for, the ancient design of the symbols and signs of our language also begins to unfold in seemingly programmed patterns. It would seem that the capacity to recognize forms that have been designed has been programmed in by the Creator by design, thus the layers of meaning to things.

[Related posts: My niece]

The New American Militarism

It cannot really be denied. It is new, it is militarism and it is American.

Political scientists have long noted that all one has to do to judge a nation as a global power is to go and count its ships, i.e. its naval power. So guess how powerful our navy is, here is a little about it from a book I have. First a note, it is written from the Vietnam perspective that has apparently shaped the generation touched by it profoundly. (All those I've ever talked to about it, anyway.) So newer generations can file that away, given that past events that seem to so utterly shape people may also blind them to different perspectives. The author is intellectually honest about it and points out various things that shape his views in the beginning.

But most of what I'll cite here about the new American militarism are empirical facts on which the debate must be based, not values based viewpoints about the facts:

Through the first two centuries of U.S. history, political leaders in Washington gauged the size and capabilities of America’s armed services according to the security tasks immediately at hand. A grave and proximate threat to the nation’s well-being might require a large and powerful military establishment. In the absence of such a threat, policymakers scaled down that establishment accordingly. With the passing of crisis, the army raised up for the crisis went immediately out of existence. This had been the case in 1886, in 1918, and in 1945. The general principle was to maintain the minimum force required [or no standing army] and no more. Thus, for example, the million-man Union Army of 1886 shrank within a year to a mere fifty-seven thousand and within another five years was reduced to fewer than thirty thousand. Even in the aftermath of World War II, when the United States had shouldered the responsibilities of global power, this pattern pertained. On V-J Day in 1945, the U.S. Army consisted of over eight million officers and men. Within a year, 1.8 million remained on active duty, a number halved again within the following year. By 1947, the army was little more than an occupation force, its combat capabilities virtually nonexistent.
Since the end of the Cold War, having come to value military power for its own sake, the United States has abandoned this principle and is committed as a matter of policy to maintaining military capabilities far in excess of those of any would-be adversary or combination of adversaries. This commitment finds both a qualitative and quantitative expression, with the U.S. military establishment dwarfing that of even America’s closest ally. Thus, whereas the U.S. Navy maintains and operates a total of twelve large attack aircraft carriers, the once-vaunted Royal Navy has none—indeed, in all the battle fleets of the world there is no ship even remotely comparable to a Nimitz-class carrier, weighing in at some ninety-seven thousand tons fully loaded, longer than three football fields, cruising at a speed above thirty knots, and powered by nuclear reactors that give it an essentially infinite radius of action. Today, the U.S. Marine Corps possesses more attack aircraft than does the entire Royal Air Force—and the United States has two other even larger “air forces,” one an integral part of the Navy and the other officially designated as the U.S. Air Force. Indeed, in terms of numbers of men and women in uniform, the U.S. Marine Corps is half again as large as the entire British Army—and the Pentagon has a second, even larger “army” actually called the U.S. Army—which in turn also operates its own “air force” of some five thousand aircraft) All of these massive and redundant capabilities cost money. Notably, the present-day Pentagon budget, adjusted for inflation, is 12 percent larger than the average defense budget of the Cold War era. In 2002, American defense spending exceeded by a factor of twenty-five the combined defense budgets of the seven “rogue states” then comprising the roster of U.S. enemies. Indeed, by some calculations, the United States spends more on defense than all other nations in the world together). This is a circumstance without historical precedent.
Furthermore, in all likelihood, the gap in military spending between the United States and all other nations will expand further still in the years to come. Projected increases in the defense budget will boost Pentagon spending in real terms to a level higher than it was during the Reagan era. According to the Pentagon’s announced long-range plans, by 2009 its budget will exceed the Cold War average by 23 percent—despite the absence of anything remotely resembling a so-called peer competitor. However astonishing this fact might seem, it elicits little comment, either from political leaders or the press. It is simply taken for granted. The truth is that there no longer exists any meaningful context within which Americans might consider the question: “How much is enough?”

(The New American Militarism: How
Americans Are Seduced by War
by Andrew J. Bacevich :16-17)

It's a good question, once we get to what values we will assign to the facts. There is no meaningful context because how many times do you need to be able to blow up the world? Unfortunately on this issue the Left in America has been quite derelict in its duty of entering into a dialectic with the Right in a sound logical and factual way. I.e., now we get their great bit of mental flatulence that they seem to have been repressing for a time coming out over Iraq, yet the issue is much bigger than that. E.g., they focus on the cost of Iraq when we have bases virtually everywhere, etc.

It is Team America: World Police:

On a day-to-day basis, what do these expensive forces exist to do? Simply put, for the Department of Defense and all of its constituent parts, defense per se figures as little more than an afterthought. The primary mission of America’s far-flung military establishment is global power projection, a reality tacitly understood in all quarters of American society. To suggest that the U.S. military has become the world’s police force may slightly overstate the case, but only slightly.
That well over a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union the United States continues to maintain bases and military forces in several dozens of countries—by some counts well over a hundred in all—rouses minimal controversy, despite the fact that many of these countries are perfectly capable of providing for their own security needs. That even apart from fighting wars and pursuing terrorists, U.S. forces are constantly prowling around the globe—training, exercising, planning, and posturing—elicits no more notice (and in some cases less) from the average American than the presence of a cop on a city street corner. Even before the Pentagon officially assigned itself the mission of “shaping” the international environment, members of the political elite, liberals and conservatives alike, had reached a common understanding that scattering U.S. troops around the globe to restrain, inspire, influence, persuade, or cajole paid dividends. Whether any correlation exists between this vast panoply of forward-deployed forces on the one hand and antipathy to the United States abroad on the other has remained for the most part a taboo subject.
The indisputable fact of global U.S. military preeminence also affects the collective mindset of the officer corps. For the armed services, dominance constitutes a baseline or a point of departure from which to scale the heights of ever greater military capabilities. Indeed, the services have come to view outright supremacy as merely adequate and any hesitation in efforts to increase the margin of supremacy as evidence of falling behind.
Thus, according to one typical study of the U.S. Navy’s future, “sea supremacy beginning at our shore lines and extending outward to distant theaters is a necessary condition for the defense of the U.S.” Of course, the U.S. Navy already possesses unquestioned global preeminence; the real point of the study is to argue for the urgency of radical enhancements to that preeminence.

(Ib. :17-18)

Again, you can pretty much just count the ships and that is usually what its global standing is. I would argue that the American Empire has been more benevolent than most. And that doesn't mean that if you get in its way that you will not get killed. What I mean is that virtually any other nation would probably be worse, perhaps some on the Left are thinking that a Chinese Empire would be better or perhaps a French or some other colonial Empire again? The American Empire is not all that imperialistic yet and the Left seems to have fallen into inane conspiracy theories instead of engaging with what is right in front of them. Like the Right when it comes to immigration they seem to be governed by fear because they value getting elected far above doing what is right for the nation or engaging in their dialectic role based on principle. Note the irony of the Right these days, supposedly we can police the whole world and fight three nations at once but when it comes to policing our own borders and managing immigration...why, that's just too hard and downright impossible!

As for me, I don't understand why the politicians care about getting elected more than they care about doing what will be right for the nation and posterity. Note the contrast to the Founders who cared more about doing what was right for posterity and the nation than their own lives, families and wealth. Then there's the Old Press that also often seems to care more about the "horse race" than informing the public on the issues. If it seems that they consider us mental retards who will sit there like this: "Oh, oh! Now one is up in the polls...oh my, now he's down, now up!" then go with it. I'm reminded of a pirated sattelite feed in which Paula Zahn is talking to a doctor who works in the innercity and he wants to go on air and talk about how it is turning into conditions found in the Third World and so on. She stops him and says, "That's rather obtuse. Let's go with this sentimental human interest side of it instead." I'm paraphrasing but the word obtuse was her own, because the Herd is just too obtuse don't you know. Maybe they are, but one reason for that is an Old Press that consistently fails to inform them of much of anything that is actually worth knowing.

[Related posts: My Mainstream Radical Ideas: The US Budget, from my local Leftist]

Another comment...

Here again, hopefully it will help people interested in breaking through the absence of reason typical to the Darwinian creation myth. It is not really that complicated to do, once you get the basic pattern it is almost always the same. Whether they are talking about viruses or the older canards like the shape of our heads, their attempt at an absence of reason seems to remain the same through time.

In a way, it seems to me it could be a good scientific education for students to try to criticize Darwinism. That's probably why they are not allowed to.

Septeus is there too. His metaphoric parable could be polished up a little, yet I thought it was good. Maybe one of these days we'll have a good disagreement.

The revolution will not be televised?

Not televised...but at least some of the information may be saved somewhere, if someone just takes the time to do it. I should begin a research service...anyway, on with this post.

This is the best documentary I've ever seen: Chavez: Inside the Coup.

It has a viewpoint. Yet unlike the films of that clearly neurotic slob Michael Moore the viewpoint comes out more as a commentary on facts that can be observed and verified instead of editing tricks and false impressionistic imagery used to create the impression of false "facts." That' s the technique that Moore's films are full of, given his proto-Nazi sort of neurosis. I don't know how they made this documentary so well, I hope that they did not rely on any tricks of imagery. They really didn't seem to. On the other hand, they proved that the corporate media of Venezuela did rely on such tricks. There is footage of pro-Chavez demonstrators being shot in the head by snipers in this film (a note for those who do not want to see that) and they prove that Venezuela's form of the Old Media portrayed the event of people getting shot in the head as the people themselves shooting other protestors. Seeing is believing? Given the rather rampant manipulation of imagery, sometimes I prefer text and logic. On a similar note there are videos of pirated sattelite feeds from our very own Old Media that sometimes float around which prove that they are biased, often in bed with the very politicians that they interview, sometimes literally. I guess that's not worth going into because everyone but the people working in it seem to know that the Old Media has to be sifted through.

If you can get a hold of this documentary it is worth watching. It may be rather hard to find.

Unfortunately Leftists like Chavez will still destroy the economy, there is that unfortunate fact that can be observed historically and demonstrated time and again. So even if he (and his good lil' caring heart!) is opposed by moral degenerates, that doesn't mean he is going to be able to lift the poor up. Given Leftism and its type of "help" people will become more poor and more hungry while the Leftist continues to focus on how much he cares about it all and how his "ideal system" would work if people were not corrupt. For if he cares and cries a little tear for the poor while being opposed by corrupt businessmen, how could he be utterly wrong? As I noted before, I don't care how much the Leftist cares and how empathetic they are if it is my standard of living or health that is on the line.

It's not about them personally. There have been good Leftists (not saying that Chavez is one) and those of a totalitarian bent as well, there have also been good and bad Rightists. The thing of it is this, the good Leftists (e.g. Robert Owen with New Harmony as well as some decent socialist leaders in the Third World) are not bad fellows. They're not the Great Satan that some people make them out to be. But unfortunately the good Leftists have all proven that Leftist "redistribution" never creates a New Man, thus the system fails. The system becomes opressive because more "management" is necessary, the creation of wealth is stifled, etc.etc., and everyone begins to suffer. Perhaps they give up the Marxist revolution as the sea of arms grows thinner and thinner. They either realize that heaven cannot be brought to earth now after all or there is increasing totalitarianism as a tyrant emerges from the Left or the Right.

Capitalism may stink but so does the fertilizer that we use to grow our food in. We have to eat, we're not spirits that we can live on the pure ideals of the Law alone. Sin has turned the Law into a death sentence written in the verses of the universe, so we can't try to take all the yeast out of all the bread all the time.

Again he asked, "What shall I compare the kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough."

Luke

Some revolutionaries who claim that they will bring heaven on earth cannot wait for the Yeast of revolt to result in the Bread of Life rising above it, thus the people starve to death. Yet now I meander into ancient symbolism and Christianity, which most people will not understand anyway. It seems that many answers about idealism are tucked away there though. I should read the Bible more often.

No time...

...some comments here but they're mainly criticisms of the deformed attempt at an "absence of reason" typical to Darwinian reasoning that I've already written here. You can't give Darwinists a chance or they will lose their mind, don't you know.

The Beast and the Harlot

Interesting lyrics, the band Avenged Sevenfold on the metaphoric Whore of Babylon:

This shining city built of gold, a far cry from innocence,
There's more than meets the eye round here, look to the waters of the deep.
A city of evil.
There sat a seven-headed beast, ten horns raised from his head.
Symbolic woman sits on his throne, but hatred strips her and leaves her naked.
The Beast and the Harlot.

She's a dwelling place for demons.
She's a cage for every unclean spirit,
every filthy bird and makes us drink the poisoned wine to fornicating with our kings.
Fallen now is Babylon the Great.

The city dressed in jewels and gold, fine linen, myrrh and pearls.
Her plagues will come all at once as her mourners watch her burn.
Destroyed in an hour.
Merchants and captains of the world, sailors, navigators too.
Will weep and morn this loss with her sins piled to the sky,
The Beast and the Harlot.

She's a dwelling place for demons.
She's a cage for every unclean spirit,
every filthy bird and makes us drink the poisoned wine to fornicating with our kings.
Fallen now is Babylon the Great.

The day has come for all us sinners.
If you're not a servant, you'll be struck to the ground.
Flee the burning, greedy city.
Lookin' back on her to see there's nothing around.

I don't believe in fairytales and no one wants to go to hell.
We've made the wrong decision and it's easy to see.
Now if you wanna serve above or be a king below with us,
You're welcome to the city where your future is set forever.

She's a dwelling place for demons.
She's a cage for every unclean spirit,
every filthy bird and makes us drink the poisoned wine to fornicating with our kings.
Fallen now is Babylon the Great.

Our false prophets, trying to get all scientific again...

I heard that this went from blogs to Drudge and so perhaps from there on to various elements of the New Media. The story is about this scientist who speaks for the proto-Nazi and Malthusian wing among scientists these days, which is more than a few.

Now it is showing up in the Old Media some, e.g.:

A respected Texas scientist wants to kill five billion people to save the world, which has an estimated six billion people.

And Eric Pianka's preferred method is the deadly Ebola virus.

"HIV is too slow," he said. "It's no good."

Pianka, a 67-year-old biology professor at the University of Texas in Austin, can't understand why people object to his views.

(Ecologist wants to use Ebola virus to kill billions and save worldCBC News Tue, 04 Apr 2006 18:13:08 EDT)

Given their adherence to Darwinism, there are actually some defenders of Pianka on blogs dealing with intelligent design and Darwinism. I think it has to do with their failure to admit to the overwhelming evidence in favor of the Anthropic Principle, thus their misanthropy. As people who agree with Darwinian standards for evidence they are probably too busy imagining historical narratives which they treat as evidence, thus becoming overwhelmed by their own imagination. I've been meaning to write about the evidence of an Anthropic Principle, maybe tomorrow.

Here is part of a comment I wrote at Telic Thoughts on it:

What is there to issue a decree about when Pianka denies supporting genocide?

Rest assured that there would be numerous decrees and proclaimations if numerous people came away from his lectures with the impression that he said, "If gays do not change their behavior patterns then HIV will probably mutate and kill us all!" It is doubtful that anyone would be concerned with parsing his statements or developing inane conspiracy theories about how people could get the impression. That would apply to any variant of the same message.

In contrast, this type of message is okay among those who believe in the latest forms of scientism, i.e. the old eugenic, proto-Nazi and Darwinist types: "If the undesirables who have a lot of kids do not change their behavior patterns then a virus will probably kill us all!"

I liked the little satire above about the apocalyptic tone and the way it seems like religious rhetoric. But wouldn't it be typical to false prophets to deny that they're trying to do a little prophesyzin'?