Reality Culture

I can relate. I would imaging at least half a dozen bombs were/are aimed at us within the Bremerton vacinity: PSNS (shipyard), Bangor (Trident subs), Keyport (torpedo testing and manufacturing), Manchester (fuel depot) – add in Naval Station Everett, Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, McChord Air Force Base Tacoma, Naval Magazine Indian Island, and several others I can't think of off the top of my head. There is zero chance of a lingering death as radiation slowly consumes you.



Right. For us kids it was just a game. Given the propensity for earthquakes in our area, it wasn't a totally wasted effort. Getting under a desk might not save you from a Russian nuke, but it could keep the roof off of your head.

Let's hope future generations can turn things around. But as I said, they seem ill-equipped to do so.

Is it so terrible that congress can't elect a Speaker of the House?

1. The left marches in lockstep. The people who chastise the rest of us for not thinking through our actions have proven they can do nothing but sing off key, but in unison.
2. Until a speaker is elected there are no speeches on the House floor about 6 January 2021
3. Until a speaker is elected no one in congress gets paid. That includes staff and all congressmen.
4. No stupid laws will be passed. 
5. Nancy is forever shut up about DJT. 

The one thing I strongly disagree with is the article's title. They are not impotent. They are complicit! People need to stop being naive' or polite. A bunch of criminal scumbags run our government. Until this is acknowledged and, to some extent, corrected the country will pick up speed in its journey to perdition. 

I will not make the mistake of accusing you of either. I don't know Jack Shit about Kevin McCarthy. But for some reason, both Hannity and Levin are big backers. I'm not in a position to make a judgment. But I suspect he is indeed too "establishment" when what we need are full-flooded counter-revolutionaries.

One of the few people who seems to be interested in accountability is Rand Paul. He should be Speaker (going by the rule that they can elect anyone they want as speaker, and he doesn't necessarily have to be a member of the House).

We need a tiger as Speaker, someone who is going to put it on his agenda to prosecute a number of bums...and, of course, stop the spending.

Yes, complicit is a good wording it accurately describes almost every member of congress, democrat or republican. I have little respect for the political class. Most of them are con artists seeking to game the system for personal enrichment. We are in the unfortunate position of choosing the lesser of evils and praying for good luck. G-d has not been helpful in this task. 

Our founders distrusted the idea of political faction (parties). The Federalist papers are full of their ideas of part time legislators who serve a term or two and ------go home. Remember David Crockett when he left DC. "you'll can go to hell, I'm going to Texas". Maybe not the best decision Crockett made but at least he was his own man. 

The current congress is more like the Soviet politburo with an even higher re-election rate. Term limits may not be the best solution, but it is one that coupled with restrictions on lobbying could actually reform congress. Of no less importance, is the repeal of the 17th amendment. It is way past time senators represented the states and not be glorified congressmen. 

McCarthy is complicit in the $1.7 trillion boondoogle recently passed. According to people in the room with him and McConnell (and others) McCarthy was happy to go along with it. This took away any financial leverage (or at least a good part of it) the new Congress might have been able to exercise until the end of September.

A good number of the Republicans who have been voting against McCarthy have, for months, discussing the possibility of going back to the old rules of running the House. He has been dismissive of them until the last couple of days. 

The guy has been positioning himself for power since he arrived in the House in 2006.  He tried to become Speaker when Boehner left, but he was so unpopular others asked Paul Ryan to run. That didn't work out well either. Even McCarthy's "mentor" in the House, Bill Thomas (retired),  has come out and said that McCarthy appears to have no principles except for his own advancement, and he will say and promise anything to further his position.  

I was never a Hannity fan, but stopped listening to him altogether many years ago. The guy is repetitious and I don't believe he is terribly bright.  I found the intellectual level of his programs fit for Junior High School students.  

I also stopped listening to Levin a couple of years back. I could no longer take his schtick. He also seems to be somewhat schizophrenic. He pushes like hell for a Convention of the States to amend the Constitution,  which has never happened before and would be enormously disruptive, which I like. But he finds a process which has happened about 20 times before in our history to be too disruptive. Go figure.  If anyone uses his brain, he will see the potential for disruption would be orders of magnitude larger in a Convention of the States than in an extended vote for Speaker. 

Both Hannity and Levin have become part of the establishment. They are willing to continue with the same people using the same methods which have brought the country to its present point.  Hannity is becoming increasingly irrelevant, as his numbers show. Levin will not be far behind if he maintains his present course.  

I have no argument with any of that.

What makes this issue of Darwinism and biology so impenetrable is that there are two interwoven elements rarely discussed (although the quote below from the above link reveals some of it):

1) The study of the cause of life and its complex and diverse biological systems
2) Atheist Fundamentalism (something that Mr. Flu has written extensively about)



Long story short, Darwinism isn't enforced as a "science" because it explains anything. It's enforced because it's a way for atheist fundamentalists to remove any idea of God from the picture. That's just how deep the rot of the materialist/reductionist view of Marxism goes.

The article linked above is interesting because it's becoming increasingly obvious to even the semi-honest researchers that Darwinism isn't working as a theory. And the remarkable fact is that more researchers are talking about this more openly than before. And that upsets the atheist fundamentalists who have a lot of emotional content locked up in the idea. And it has become an entrenched theocracy of its own type, controlling money and positions in research. Darwinism is a litmus test. If you don't believe in it (or at least say that you do), your money will dry up and your career will not advance.

That's not news for those here. The news is that this kind of talk is starting to trickle out. There is a new generation of researchers not so beholden to the atheist fundamentalist theocracy. One could say there are many folk who simply want to do science and let the conclusions go where they may – the very idea the atheist fundamentalists oppose even while they shout the mantra of "science."

That's not to say that this new breed of researchers are traditionally religious. But, ironically, biologists and other researchers have given the traditional theists more cause for their belief in an ultimate Creator rather than less. The results of research into the complex intricacies of life leave even the most jaded person stunned at what they are seeing. No one would expect something as complex as Microsoft Windows to self-assemble. But the biological systems in life are orders of magnitude more complex than that operating system.

But this is an awkward transition period (toward whatever is transitioned to). Honest researchers still speak within the reductionist/materialist/meaningless philosophical paradigm even while (sometimes) admitting that they are engaged in guesswork when they do so. The righteous atheist fundamentalist are sure that only natural selection and time are needed to explain everything. But those whose meaning-of-life isn't tied to Darwinism as an ad hoc atheist fundamentalist religion bolted onto science have other options. And some are pursuing them.

The obvious question is whether that pursuit will cause more and more to take the theory of intelligent design more seriously. Here I must speculate. I think the theory of intelligent design is legitimate but limited. Douglas Axe, via statistical analysis, has (I think) shown that it's statistically impossible for the complex proteins to have ever been arrived at by chance. But other than this, the intelligent design movement is mostly a rhetorical movement. It's a necessary and needed rebuttal of Darwinian atheist fundamentalism, for sure. But at the end of the day they are mostly booksellers selling to their own set of the faithful.

But intelligent design remains (and will remain) prominent as an alternative theory, if only because I think it is unlikely that any other cause will be discovered that accounts for life. But intelligent design itself doesn't answer enough specific questions to be particularly useful or satisfying, at least thus far. So most researchers can and will ignore it just as they increasingly ignore Darwinism as an explanation (other than as a rhetorical cover-your-ass gloss they may throw over their research). Darwinism is increasingly seen as little or no help in explaining the actual specifics of how any of the biological systems came to be.

So researches are in some kind of transition period. It's unclear to me what the immediate future will hold. The Intelligent Design movement will obviously be in an increasingly better position to sell books and give speeches. But as for explaining where life came from and how it assembled, changed, and evolved, it appears that will be an open question for some time.

That is a great question. Let me try to answer it with the caveat that I might be wrong but not from being dishonest.

I'm too cynical about academia, the media, and science-in-general to suppose that it was intellectual integrity that motivated the article. Much of the problem today (right or left) is the lack of intellectual integrity. Most things are motivated by money, power, fame, and especially ideology. The people with intellectual integrity on the right that stand out are VDH and Dennis Prager. After that, I have to think. On the left, there are none.

So I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that anyone's conscience is bothering them. But I see three possible motives, all could play a part:

1) Natural curiosity. Darwinism simply does not explain what some people have committed their careers to explaining.

2) The current generation of researchers is one or perhaps two generations removed from the founding and instigating Cardinals of New Atheism (the religion that underpins this entire discussion). Those founding Cardinals are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. These men do not merely possess a differing philosophical view. They are mean and angry. And most of all, they are not intellectually honest. They have poisoned the "science" of Darwinism thoroughly with their fundamentalist Atheist religion. I think it's a least possible, even though those involved in biological research still likely give due deference to the overall dogma of Darwinism, that today's researchers are less committed (or not committed at all) to the kind of personal animosity toward traditional Christian religion that motivated these original founders.