The Electric Car

An interesting movie: Who Killed the Electric Car?

It's ironic that the American government subsidizes huge SUVs that give more money and support to Arab dictators while the technology to make an electric car that can go from zero to sixty in under four seconds sits around unused for one reason or another. Even if it's not quite economically sound politicians could subsidize it or at least subsidize it as much as they do other vehicles. That would be cheaper than trying to stabilize the Middle East, although we should do that for other reasons.

Anyway, if you care to argue the efficacy or desirability of electric cars then leave me a comment and I'll argue the issue with you. Perhaps a first reaction: "Say, we're still polluting because we get electric from coal plants or somethin'." Etc.

A more appropriate title for the movie would be "Who crushed the electric car?" given the fact that GM recalled and crushed their electric cars and apparently Ford and Toyota are doing the same.

Oh well.

Predestination...

I was formulating some thoughts on it here, so any theologians who happen by can correct me.

Plumbing the depths of a distant mind...

The funny thing about my old pal Carl is that his mind is always running away from what he writes. This post is as good an example as any, although there are plenty. In this one his mind eventually runs so far away that he almost loses it: "Although it is generally true that one should not hear, much less listen to the voices in one’s head, I have decided, or, rather, we have decided that we shall write this article having to do with poker and not at all related to what Mr. Mynym has written."

Usually a distance between the thoughts of the mind and the knowledge of the body makes their fusion all the more satisfying but in this case I have no idea what Mr. Plumberman was writing about.

Fair warning, I suppose: "If par-chance, that is ‘on par with chance’ or by chance, you ain’t played the game of Hold’em, just ignore this here post."

Interesting to note that nothing can be on par with "chance," and nothing isn't really anything but an abstraction of the human mind that is comparing it to something. So as far as the human mind goes there's always something behind the illusion that it sometimes tries to conceive of as the "nothing" that it thinks it has knowledge of.

Windsurfing this weekend...

Teaching the guys a little:



My cousin Jay, up and sailing:



My pal Daniel, also up and sailing on the first day:



I wish I had expert advice and proper equipment and rigging when I was learning. I've taught about ten people now so I should move to Maui and become a windsurfing instructor. Ah well, some things are better left as a dream.

A picture from when I was coming in for lunch I think:




Here's a small video.

Jay's kids, the cuties:

Barely...

For Anna Venger:

A note on what the Pope was actually saying...

It seems that once again the sensationalistic dynamics typical to the Old Press and terrorists have combined to shape the "news," or what passes for news among those who still take news generated by little more than the sensationalistic interplay between journalists and terrorists seriously.

The Pope's focus on reason and his call to it in his speech are utterly lost on both the Old Press and terrorists. What the Old Press and terrorists want to focus on in the speech is a bit of text that they want taken out of context, one to sell you some controversy and the other because they adhere to a religion of violence predicated on victim status.

Some of the context:

[R]ecently...I read...part of the dialogue carried on...by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian.

The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the three Laws: the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur'an. In this lecture I would like to discuss only one point--itself rather marginal to the dialogue itself--which, in the context of the issue of faith and reason, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: There is no compulsion in religion. It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat.

But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels,” he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words:

Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.

God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death....

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: "For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality." Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.

As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: In the beginning was the logos. This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts with logos.

Logos means both reason and word--a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.

(Full Text)

I think it is possible to trace the decline of Islamic civilization back to a rejection of reason and philosophy rooted in Nature, planted by God. The notion that the gardening God will uproot his own creation on an incoherent whim is quite a contrast to the Founders of America who focused on knowledge of Nature's God and came to the conclusions about unalterable, inalienable self-evident truths that must be admitted as reasonable forms of knowledge.

The death of Islamic reasoning: "For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent."

I may write more later to try and get at the truth of some transcendent self-evident truths that are evident in the immanent Self because there is scientific evidence for an anthropic view of the evidence which would be quite easy to meander off into, to an almost infinite degree. But on the topic, it's ironic that the Pope was saying something based on sound moral reasoning only to have journalists and terrorists run off with part of it to serve their own interests. Given the interplay between their interests a message of: "I invite you to reason about religions based on...well, reason." can be changed to "Extra! Extra! Read all about it, the Pope hates all Muslims!"

The sad thing is that people often get killed thanks to the sensationalistic interplay that often emerges between terrorists and journalists.

The problem with kookiness....

I was thinking about buying this book: The Origin Map: Discovery of a Prehistoric, Megalithic, Astrophysical Map and Sculpture of the Universe by Thomas G. Brophy, as another book dealing with possible anomalies and lines of evidence refuting the idea that ancient peoples were less evolved. I have a bit of space on my kooky books shelf. Usually the actual evidence is pretty interesting, even if the New Age type of speculation that swirls around it is kooky. But I think I'll skip it given that I haven't even read two or three of the kooky books that I already have.

An Amazon review notes some of the problems typical to books dealing with this type of evidence:

Quite simply, this book is extraordinary and should be read by anyone interested in archeology and anthropology.

On the other hand, despite his awesome credentials, the author diluted this book by having had John Anthony West write an introduction. Mr. West is a swell guy but his longtime association with the fringe and New Age pyramid set gives his presence here a corrosive quality. He wrote a book titled "The Case for Astrology." Worse, Brophy has authored another book that steers directly into New Age turf. Few tenured professors (and even fewer hoping for tenure) of Archeology will leave a copy of this book sitting on their desks for all to see. In fact they'll be frightened to death of it.

I know these sorts of folks, have great discussions with them, and ask them why we can't simply look at the possibilities of the past without dragging metaphysics into it. This stuff will always sit on the fringes as long as that happens.

However, the problem is so persistent (even Charles Hapgood, a former Military Intelligence guy, went woo-woo at the end of his career--authoring "Voices of Spirit") that I'm lately wondering if it isn't intentional. Take the recent book "The Hunt for Zero Point"-- a remarkable exploration of possible anti-gravity and exotic energy technology by an editor of Janes Publications--who is also a specialist in high-end military aircraft. The book is largely excellent and then, at the end, there's a totally gratuitous and jaw-droppingly flakey chapter about some bizarre Canadian psychic. There are a few other singularly odd moments scattered through the book including an odd "reverie" that plants the idea in the reader that exploring the topic at hand could be deadly for them. The result is that the reasonable content, for the critical reader, is thoroughly wrecked...and for no reason as these "extras" added nothing to his material!

So, we find this wrecking going on to some degree in the UFO field (which may be a sort of mega-wrecking machine anyway--no one who spots anything unusual in the skies is taken seriously any more) but almost always in anything about Black technologies (every book on Tesla is rife with wild speculation and goofy anecdotes), ancient civilizations (Atlantis), and ancient catastrophes. All the information is suspect but the common factor is what I'll call a "Strange Attractor," a ghostly presence touching a certain set of subjects and making absolutely sure that no books on these topics will ever be taken seriously by real scientists or thoughtful mainstream readers. The best one can hope for is to get a "sense" that something's up, that something's behind the curtain.

(Link)

It's ironic that a writer can begin with a critique of metaphysical spookiness and end with reference to a "ghostly presence." The thing of it is, unfortunately some things are so craaazy that only a motley crew of prophets, visionaries, kooks and weirdos will be correct about them. Of course the other 99% of the time kooks are incorrect. I suppose if some UFOs/beings of light come down over Jerusalem and other ancient temples one of these days, etc., then we'll supposedly know for sure. Yet I sometimes wonder if people would know based on "seeing is believing." Provided you're not blind, that notion is a convenient metaphor for belief. It comforts we who see a limited spectrum of light in limited ways with our limited brains with the notion that our minds can encompass all knowledge worth believing or admitting as truth. In fact, one may not believe everything that is seen even now, or one may invert the sentiment too the point that believing is seeing instead. So the debates go on, many revolving around such issues.

Some people....

I've linked to Anna Venger seven times and she links to me once. Now I've as many links from smallbiztrends as her.

I rewrote that Aces and Turkeys post using blockquotes, etc. The issue reminds me of gaming and how you can tell that some guys are Aces and some are Turkeys in any given game. In some cases you can tell by the speed of learning or "getting it" that a poor fellow is a turkey in the game and no matter how many hours he plays he'll probably just plateau with other turkeys.

Rosie O'Donnell

Rosie O'Donnell once again showed her ignorance of what radical Islam and "radical" Christianity are all about yesterday on "The View" when she stated, "Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America."

Anna Venger

I heard a soundbyte on that as well. O'Donnell has a history of being a narcissistic ignoramus on the level of Michael Moore so her opinions don't carry much weight. As a result of mental disorders her opinions have more to do with her own psychological dynamics than reality as revealed by history, logic and basic forms of knowledge. It's not for me to try to give a clinical definition of what type of mental disorders she has and I don't even agree with the way psychologists usually attempt to but sometimes there are basic judgements about order vs. disorder that are so true that they are trivial or assumed by the very people that try to deny them. For instance, the biological basis of sex and sexuality as an ordered reality which can be used to define psychological disorders such as "gender identity disorder" and such where a person's feelings do not match reality, O'Donnell's mentality tends to be disordered in this way.

Gay© activists don't like the order of reality that the terms "gender identity disorder" are based on so they often work to censor the terms and play pretend again. Logical consistency is meaningless in their minds and so it is that they may publicly maintain: "No one chooses to be Gay©, why would anyone choose to be this way!" while also maintaining that psychologists should not help children with gender identity disorders in order to prevent homosexuality and sexual confusion. Apparently Rosie O'Donnell is once again playing pretend for narcissistic reasons with no concern for basic facts and logic, she wants what she wants and feels that Christians are in the way. It's either that or she's phobic, which is sometimes the case and something that is often projected by Gays© onto other people. And so it is that some insist: "They, they are all out to get me! I'll be beat down in the street and hated! It's, it's THEM!" "Say, they're probably all out to get me because they're phobic or somethin'."

O'Donnell would be right to assume that American Christians are standing in the way of the notion that rights can be based on sexual desires because Christians tend to adhere to a view of Nature and human nature as being ordered by more than one's own desires and feelings.

Children suffer the most when people fall into narcissism to the point that they are willing to deny the basic forms of order written into Nature, as Narcissus did. The pattern of narcissism is evident in the case of O'Donnell to the point that the public eye can catch glimpses of it. For instance, it was reported that O'Donnell demanded that her partner stop breastfeeding their child because she was jealous, O'Donnell has also stated that her son wishes he had a father and so on. It seems that if gender narcissism becomes narcissism in general then the best interests of children are never the focus. As a legal scholar noted of Gay© activists in general their interests in marriage as an institution and their methods have generally been structured around their own rights, their own desires, etc., with children and the interests of children generally being relegated to a means to their ends.

At any rate, Gay© activists like psychologists defining gender identity disorders about as much as they like doctors defining gay bowel syndrome. So if you are a doctor or a psychologist interested in basic forms of truth then be aware that some who define the truth by their own sexual desires will work to censor any knowledge that seems to oppose that "truth" or play pretend about you and so on. So be prepared for: "But if you say that then Gay© kids will die, just die! It's them, THEM again!"* "People aren't really dying of these diseases you just hate me personally, don't you?" no matter how trivial the truth involved actually is.

In the end you can either avoid the topic or lie but you won't be able to tell the truth about the behavior patterns involved and so on.

*On that note I'd like to know who O'Donnell was talking about. I know playing pretend isn't about specifics and facts but supposedly she's doing an actual news and opinion show.

Darwinian Fairytales

Here is an excerpt from a book I'm reading that ties in with the last two posts. The book is Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution by David Stove. Like many critics of those with the urge to merge he works to define them by their texts and points out that when "evolution" has been defined in falsifiable ways by Darwinists the empirical evidence refutes Darwinian hypothesizing. I use terms like Darwinists and Darwinism instead of evolutionist and evolution because Darwinists have made the term evolution into a pollution of language that supposedly seamlessly merges with whatever they're currently imagining about the past. It is interesting how a pattern of purposely lacking specificity (and therefore lacking falsifiable forms of information) is fitting for those who argue that all organisms with information "fit" to live emerge out of formations of matter that ultimately form from...nothing and no form or information at all.

Stove notes that when it comes to specifics that can be verified based on empirical facts as compared to the textual model or theory, Darwinism is typically lacking. It seems that a philosopher is more interesting in the empirical evidence than biologists generally are or have been. E.g.:

Huxley naturally realized that, as examples of Darwinian competition for life among humans, hypothetical ancient fights between Hobbesian bachelors were not nearly good enough. What was desperately needed were some real examples, drawn from contemporary or at least recent history. Nothing less would be sufficient to reconcile Darwinism with the obvious facts of human life [evidence of cooperation]. Accordingly, Huxley made several attempts to supply such an example. But the result in every case was merely embarrassing.

One attempt was as follows. Huxley draws attention to the fierce competition for colonies and markets which was going on, at the time he wrote, among the major Western nations. He says, in effect, “There! That’s pretty Darwinian, you must admit.” The reader, for his part, scarcely knows where to look, and wonders, very excusably, what species of organism it can possibly be, of which Britain, France, and Germany are members.

A second attempt at a real and contemporary example was the following. Huxley says that there is, after all, still a little bit of Darwinian struggle for life in Britain around 1890. It exists among the poorest 5 percent of the nation. And the reason, he says (remembering his Darwin and Malthus), is that in those depths of British society, the pressure of population on food supply is still maximal.

Yet Huxley knew perfectly well (and in other writings showed that he knew) that the denizens of “darkest England” were absorbed around 1890, not in a competition for life, but (whatever they may have thought) in a competition for early death through alcohol. Was that Darwinian? But even supposing he had been right, what a pitiable harvest of examples, to support a theory about the whole species Homo sapiens. Five percent of Britons around 1890, indeed! Such a “confirmation” is more likely to strengthen doubts about Darwinism than to weaken them.

A third attempt is this. Huxley implies that there have been “one or two short intervals” of the Darwinian “struggle for existence between man and man” in England in quite recent centuries: for example, the civil war of the seventeenth century! You probably think, and you certainly ought to think, that I am making this up; but I am not. He actually writes that, since “the reign of Elizabeth . . . , the struggle for existence between man and man has been so largely restrained among the great mass of the population (except for one or two short intervals of civil war), that it can have little, or no selective operation.”

You probably also think that the English civil war of the seventeenth century grew out of tensions between parliament and the court, dissent and the established church, republic and and the monarchy. Nothing of the sort, you see: it was a resumption of “the struggle for existence between man and man.” Cromwell and King Charles were competing with each other, and each of them with everyone else too, à la Darwin and Malthus, for means of subsistence. So no doubt Cromwell, when he had had the king’s head cut off, ate it. Uncooked, I shouldn’t wonder, the beast. And probably selfishly refused to let his secretary John Milton have even one little nibble.

Huxley should not have needed Darwinism to tell him— since any intelligent child of about eight could have told him— that in a “continual free fight of each other against all” there would soon be no children, no women and hence, no men. In other words, that the human race could not possibly exist now, unless cooperation had always been stronger than competition, both between women and their children, and between men and the children and women whom they protect and provide for.

And why was it that Huxley himself swallowed, and expected the rest of us to swallow, this ocean of biological absurdity and historical illiteracy? Why, just because he could not imagine Darwinism’s being false, while if it is true then a struggle for life must always be going on in every species. Indeed, the kind of examples for which Huxley searched would have to be as common as air among us, surrounding us everywhere at all times. But anyone who tries to point out such an example will find himself obliged to reenact T. H. Huxley’s ludicrous performance.

There is (as I said earlier) a contradiction at the very heart of the Cave Man way out of Darwinism’s dilemma: the contradiction between holding that Darwinism is true and admitting that it is not true of our species now.

(Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution
by David Stove :7-9)

I.e., supposedly Darwinism applies to its own iconic imagery such as the Cave Man but doesn't actually apply now in ways that can be verified empirically and historically. Is Darwinism some type of religious mysticism based on faith in large amounts of time and invisible happenstances in the past*, or empirical science?

It seems that if evidence is lacking that Darwinian theory applies throughout known history then there is little reason to assume that it is a sound theoretical model for prehistory. Similarly, if it doesn't always apply to man as an organism then there is little reason to always try to "fit" all organisms to it by trying to imagine past sequences of events supportive of it. At some point one has to allow a hypothesis to be tested and refuted by facts.

*E.g.,

Kronos [time] is a God who cannot be denied by any other God. Nor was he by the God of the Jews, since however speedy the Jewish God acted when he got busy, his work did take time. The point to be made is not that a priori it is necessary to assume any particular rate of evolution; but that it is inherently and absolutely unavoidable in order for life to be able to be present that successive events occur.

(Link, Kronos...that old Titan of the Kosmos, apparently some want to go back to the metaphorically dark gods of Nature.)

Evolution, obesity....and the mental flabbiness typical to journalists

Evolution and the environment, not just gluttony, has led to a global obesity pandemic, with an estimated 1.5 billion people overweight -- more than the number of undernourished people -- an obesity conference was told on Monday.

"The mounting epidemic of obesity in children would see many die before their parents," said Kate Steinbeck..."This is the first generation in history where children may die before their parents," Steinbeck told the conference.

(Anna Venger citing journalists, uncritically)

Journalists never seem to question experts or report knowledge as such, apparently they're usually too flabby intellectually to do anything other than repeat what they're told. (Except when it comes to Republicans, then there is usually a comment, contrast, or the ubiquitous "critics say" interwoven in every other bit of text.)

In this instance why not report some relevant facts? Perhaps reporting: "She said that this is the first generation in history where children may die before their parents. Critics note that children often died before their parents throughout history thanks to malnutrition and infant mortality. I also found this one critic who argues that scientists often engage in fearmongering for funding."

Or: "Evolution and the environment, not just gluttony, are now said to be leading to a global pandemic of obesity. Critics expect a new 'War on Obesity' and argue that a state of fear keeps some types of journalists and many scientists that work for the State in business. Some critics note that Darwinian and Malthusian versions of evolution were always said to predict vast famine and starvation, yet now evolution predicts obesity. This has led some critics to question what falsifiable predictions the so-called 'theory of evolution' makes."

You would never read that because journalists never find "some critics" to quote when it comes to a modern bugaboo like evolution, so no matter how contradictory and moronic Darwinian hypothesizing becomes there is almost no criticism of it to be found in the Old Press. Ironically, if there is, then it is combined with plenty of "critics say" or "scientists say" and so on.

Evolution = the Platonic ether
Evolution = phlogiston

And so on. Evolution is the modern form that hypothetical goo has taken. Like all forms of hypothetical goo it "explains" one set of empirical facts as well as their exact opposite equally well, easily overwhelming mental midgets with the illusion of vast explanatory powers. There are always a few scientists (Those who are aquainted with basic logic.) who know that when your hypothesis is capable of explaining all sets of possible facts then there is no way of testing it against the facts and given the history of science explaining all things is most likely an indication that your hypothesizing is pseudo-science.

In colloquial use the vast explanatory powers of "evolution" is an ethereal illusion that has no logical basis in empirical facts, so moderns saying: "Evolution does such and such..." is the equivalent of an ancient Greek saying: "Platonic ether causes this and that." Neither is actually scientia or systematic forms of knowledge encoded in the language of mathematics that is verified or tested against empirical facts, instead people are murmuring some pseudo-scientific terms to pretend that they are not ignorant.

Caveman

It's odd how the caveman evolved into a symbol and a metaphor for the Darwinian creation myth, despite the fact that various lines of evidence refute the ignorant notion that the human brain evolves based on natural selection and random mutation. But at any rate, he's become a common symbol, the caveman. Given that many ancient peoples buried their dead in caves and catacombs one might wonder if their remains should be counted as evidence for "cavemen." For that matter, if modern humans were stripped of civilization as we know it by great natural catastrophies and Great Doom to the point that they had to live in caves would they be cavemen? After all, I'd probably be a caveman if I came to live in a place with nothing but what I could carry away from my former civilization.

So what is true? Apparently those who write the Darwinian creation myths on such topics are reading the evidence based on their own imagination sans logic again:

In a previous chapter, we emphasized that the interfertility test could not be applied to the Neandertals. In his 1989 article in Discover, Jared Diamond thus imposed the false test of culture and found that the Neandertals were not fully human because they had no glue or adhesives for hafting tools; no unequivocal art objects; no boats, canoes, or ships; no bows and arrows; no cave paintings; no domesticated animals or plants; no hooks, nets, or spears for fishing; no lamps; no metallurgy; no mortars and pestles; no musical instruments; no needles or awls for sewing; no ropes for carrying things; no sculpture; and no long-distance overland trade.

Yet in a 1993 article in Discover, this same Jared Diamond recognizes that the Tasmanians were fully human even though they had no glue or adhesives for hafting tools; no unequivocal art objects; canoes that quickly sank; no bows and arrows; no cave paintings; no domesticated animals or plants; no hooks, nets, or spears for fishing; no lamps; no metallurgy; no mortars and pestles; no musical instruments; no needles or awls for sewing; no sculpture; and (being on a rather small island) no long-distance overwater trade.

Why would Diamond consider the Neandertals to be “subhuman” solely on the basis of their alleged limited cultural inventory, when he considers the Tasmanians, having the very same limited cultural inventory, to be fully human? This is one of the most glaring lacks of logic I have ever read in the scientific literature. In a more perfect world, evolutionists would be required to take a course in logic. I cannot explain such an obvious inconsistency on the part of this scientist; I can only report the problem. I know that evolution blinds the soul. I have reason to believe that it also blinds the mind.

(Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils
by Marvin L. Lubenow :214-215)

Unfortunately debate about cavemen isn't really about a reasonable and logical view of the evidence because cavemen serve as an icon of the Darwinian creation myth, that great modern bugaboo.

I watched the movie Rabbit Proof Fence over the weekend. It reminded me of the impact of Darwinian icons and the way that they permeate Western culture and the pseudo-Christianity typical to it. It's a good movie but it can only show a limited view of what was done to the aboriginals. For instance, no hunting of aboriginals or collecting "specimens" and so on is dealt with. I'm not sure there are any movies about such things, just as there seem to be no modern movies about the eugenics movement either.

The whole Darwinian mindset of dealt with in the movie is that in which man shares his ontological status with animals, which thus turns civilization and intelligence into a way of alienating man from animal. If man is not endowed by his Creator with anything that is unalienable as per the ignorant cast of mind typical to Darwinists, then that is what the "emergence" of civilization becomes. If you turn civilization into a way of keeping man and animal distinct because you deny the real basis for that distinction then civilization becomes alienating and uncivilized people become less than human and so on.

This pattern of denying the foundation for being human while trying to prop up the notions of human beings with language and civilization alone reminds me of how it tends to go wrong as far as the distinction between human and animal. E.g., the story of Ota Benga and some original reporting on it:

There was an exhibition at the Zoological Park in the Bronx yesterday which had for many of the visitors something more than a provocation to laughter. There were laughs enough in it, too, but there was something about it which made the serious minded grave. Even those who laughed the most turned away with an expression on their faces such as one sees after a play with a sad ending...
“Something about it that I don’t like,” was the way one man put it.

The exhibition was that of a human being in a monkey cage. The human being happened to be a Bushman, one of a race that scientists do not rate high in the human scale, but to the average non-scientific person in the crowd of sightseers there was somethlng about the display that was unpleasant.
The human being caged was the little black man, Ota Benga, whom Prof. S. P. Verner, the explorer, recently brought to this country from the jungles of Central Africa. Prof. Verner lately handed him over to the New York Zoological Society for care and keeping. When he was permitted yesterday to get out of his cage, a keeper constantly kept his eyes on him.

The news that the pigrny would be on exhibition augmented the Saturday afternoon crowd at the Zoological Park yesterday, which becomes somewhat smaller as the Summer wanes. The monkey—or rather, the primate—house is in the centre of Director Hornaday’s animal family.
[...]
Like his fellow-lodgers, the orang outangs and monkeys, Benga has a room inside the building. It opens, like the rest, into the public cage.
A crowd that fluctuated between 300 and 500 persons watched the little black man amuse himself in his own way yesterday. He doesn’t like crowds, especially the children, who tease him. So he wove at the hammocks and mats which he knows how to make, . jabbered at the parrot which came from the jungles with him, and shot at marks in the ample cage with his bow and arrow. For the latter diversion the Zoological Park managers had macla proviSion by tying bundles of straw against a side of the inclosure. The children got a good deal of fun out of his arrow-shooting when he missed his mark, which was not often. Then he made faces at them.
A little after the noon hour Benga was allowed to go into the woods. A keeper watched him from a distance. It is doubtful if any one has ever seen a happier mortal. Grabbing his bow and arrow, he jumped to the thickest of the underbrush and frisked about.

At liberty Benga seemed to live in Africa again. He peered into every hollow tree and looked at trees and shrubs for birds and squirrels. But the crowd soon found him and he had to move from spot to spot. In the end the keeper had to send him back into the monkey house again.

(BUSHMAN SHARES A CAGE WITH BRONX PARK APES
The New York Times, Sept. 9, 1906; pg. 17)

It sometimes seems that Darwinists would make monkeys of us all if they could.

It's odd how people forget and believe the same old progressive mythology about Scripturalists and conservatives in general taking us back to the Dark Ages and so on. It seems that many believe Leftist scientists engaging in charlatanism. I.e. those who claim that science reveals all knowledge or must be the sole truth which governs the State and man, all of which will inevitably lead society to ages of Enlightenment. (Provided that religious forms of knowledge are private and "separated" from public life. )

Ironically that type of progress has happened before in the West yet instead of grand new ages of truth and light, some rather dark ages followed. After all, by what are we judging "progress"?

Comment...

Comment here, I'm thinking about doing further research on the "magical" roots of science in occult magick because of the level of irony involved in the claim that Christians generally want science to be conflated with magic and so on.

Once again a philosophy rooted in Logos and logico-mathematical thinking is a victim of its own success. E.g., just as people forget that the very reason we have the principle of separation of church and state is because the Founders upheld it on religious grounds based on faith and reason they also forget that the reason that magic was excluded from scientia/knowledge as we know it was also based on faith in a reasonable God subtlely leading people on to reason and progress.

Ironically, there are now Darwinist organizations that seek to support the notion that all progress has come about based on their false philosophy or belief in their utterly absurd creation myths.

[Edit: Some elements of Seeker's list could use a fair bit of definition (e.g. #4), the only problem is that by the time you're done few would understand what you said. That's the problem with portions of creationism, those elements that are structured with ministry to others in mind become dilluted as a matter of precise or accurate knowledge. There's good and bad in all of it I suppose, because on the other hand many scientists tend to structure their representation of knowledge with themselves and perhaps their professional identity as "expert" in mind. So they seem to tend towards technical jargon and charlatanism about as much as creationists tend towards oversimplification or bombast.]

Ernesto

I windsurfed the remains of Ernesto this weekend. Unfortunately by the time it stopped raining it wasn't that windy.

Here's an old post with a video in it. No one takes pictures for me anymore. =(