Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Why the Founders fought for the Separation of Church and State.

Who really wins in the abolishment of the Johnson Amendment?

Another domestic terrorist disguised as a pastor. Collapsing the FDA is also domestic terrorism.

Government Bible study teaches that the Jews killed Jesus.

A new Christian nationalist church in DC has Pete Hegseth in the pews.

In the Punjab imaginary crimes against imaginary gods can get you life in prison.

Evangelicals lose their minds over gay couple on reality show.

Charlie Kirk complains about young women that are infected with the Jezebel spirit.

World of Woo: Are high-protein snacks worth the hype?

Environment: Nano fertilizers prove as effective as conventional ones.

Reason is not what decides belief. Something deeper does.

Super-resolution microscopes showcase the inner lives of cells.

Babies from three people’s DNA prevents hereditary disease.

Why many Americans still think Darwin was wrong, yet the British don’t.

Many college students can’t read good.

Long Reads:

The ‘We Evolved to Eat Meat’ argument doesn’t hold up.

What’s it like to be a dolphin who likes jazz?

Four ways to interpret quantum mechanics.

Who runs the News?

Now that MAGA has drained the swamp, who exactly oversees the weather now?

At Senate hearing, anti-vaxxers seek to capitalize on friends in high places.

The Texas flood.

July 20, 1969, the world watched as Apollo 11 approached the lunar surface.

Sunday Book Club: On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (see final video below).

Some photographs taken last week. Astronomy Photographer of the Year Contest.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil……

Coffee Break Videos:  The Good Liars explore Creationism.  America’s richest pastor. Douglas Murray Book review (a great conversation).

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Have a great week everyone!

 

[Strega]

Thank you Reg!!!

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

You’re very welcome Strega!

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg,

That sign is wrong on one point and only half-right on others.

Hitler didn’t start by blaming immigrants. The people he blamed for all the world’s problems were part of Germanic and European society for nearly 1000 years. Today’s Hitler would gladly bring in Islamic invaders if Germans didn’t want to do Krystallnacht.

Also, while Hitler banned books, targeted the press, defunded art he called “degenerate”, and demonized educators he also subsidized and mandated books, media, arts. and education that propagated Nazi ideology.

Hitler would have adored Germany’s present police raids on people who post insults on social media, as well as our own government agencies banning Misinformation/Disinformation/Malinformation MDM *Growl!* 🦁

Hitler also would have loved academies that produce the Postmodern/”Race”-obsessed Woke/”Free Palestine” crowd.

Whoever made that sign needs some introspection and situational awareness.

[jakelafort]

Intelligent believers: Not stupid, just illogical

Excellent article. Economic and packed with information. All of those concepts should be integral to basic education. Nevertheless i disagree in how the author chracterizes intelligence. General intelligence is ruthless in its critical nature. It does not bend over for its own comfort. It questions its assumptions. It is malleable and demanding of reason rather than identification and attachment.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

That sign is wrong on one point and only half-right on others.

Yes, but it is still the contents page from the “How to become a Dictator” handbook. The extreme right are all wrong.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

In 1946, George Orwell described good writing as “picking out words for the sake of their meaning,” a practice that dictionaries catalyze and writing programs stifle. Writers consulting a dictionary make a choice — writers guided by an app like Grammarly have their choices made for them.

Where Grammarly says, “Stay on-brand with consistent communication,” Orwell warns that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” Grammarly urges users to “generate text with A.I. prompts,” while Orwell cautions that “ready-made phrases” inevitably “construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you.” Grammarly brags that its users can “rewrite full sentences with a click,” while Orwell notes that “the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them.”

It’s a fight between robotic consistency and human creativity. The digital-native approach delivers hands-off, derivative communication. The analog approach requires leafing through pages without knowing exactly where you’ll end up. One cedes the conviction of writing to a machine. The other bestows the crucible of thinking critically about what and how to write solely on an imperfect writer. Without dictionaries to provide us with a manual guide to English’s potential, writing that way is nearly impossible.

Web dictionaries like Wiktionary and Google Dictionary — whose contents are often derived from existing works by actual lexicographers and resources such as Google’s Ngrams — empower writers to some degree, but they can be lexicographically lax. I’m not convinced, for instance, that listing “amazeballs” as a synonym for “astonishing” helps clarify the scope and potency of the English language. Codifying English as it is spoken requires not just itemizing neologisms but making deliberate choices. It’s traditional dictionaries’ human scrutiny and advocacy that make them catalysts for exploration rather than aggregators of information.

NYT today….about the value of dictionaries.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

On Friday, during an interview on CNBC, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, claimed that President Trump was among the most popular people to ever occupy the Oval Office.

The president is the most maligned and attacked political figure in the history of American politics. There’s no question about it, but he’s also the most resilient. And you see at the same time, his approval ratings are skyrocketing. CNN had a story, I think, a day or two ago. He was at 90 percent approval rating. There’s never been a president that high.
You can decide for yourself if you think this president is “the most maligned and attacked political figure in the history of American politics” (Abraham Lincoln might disagree), but it is frankly ludicrous to say that Trump’s approval ratings are “skyrocketing” or that he represents a high-water mark of presidential popularity.

Recent surveys from YouGov, Quinnipiac University, The Associated Press-NORC and Reuters/Ipsos place Trump at roughly 40 percent approval. CNN, contra Johnson, puts Trump at 42 percent approval and 56 percent disapproval. Overall, according to the Strength in Numbers presidential approval average, 42.6 percent of Americans approve of the president’s performance while 53.5 percent disapprove, for a net negative of -10.9 points, a low for his second term so far.

But the substance of Johnson’s absurd claim about the president’s popularity is less interesting to me than the fact that he would even say it. The House speaker’s assertion that Trump was at a “90 percent approval rating” is the kind of falsehood you might hear from authoritarian state media. It is a servile display of allegiance as much as it is an attempt to mislead viewers. It’s Johnson telling Trump he is his man.

In the neo-republican ideology that shaped the American founding, civic virtue is a key part of self-government. A corrupt people cannot, in this vision, form a free government. “Just as good customs require laws in order to be maintained,” Machiavelli observed, “so laws require good customs in order to be observed.”

For Frederick Douglass — the great abolitionist and thinker whose political philosophy was shaped by republican thinking — virtue includes self-respect, cultivated through education, and self-reliance. “Liberty has its manners as well as slavery,” Douglass wrote to the Black abolitionist and journalist Martin Delany in 1871, “and with those manners true self-respect goes hand in hand with a just respect for the rights and feelings of others.”

My immediate thought upon seeing Johnson’s performance on air was to reflect on this relationship between self-respect and self-government. To tell such egregious lies for the approval of some higher authority is to prostrate yourself — to show, for the world to see, your lack of self-respect. This becomes all the more egregious when one considers that Mike Johnson, as speaker of the House of Representatives, is more an equal to the president, in the American constitutional order, than he is a subordinate. He should have the dignity, at least, to act as a peer and not a supplicant.

With that said, Johnson’s behavior as speaker makes sense if he lacks the self-respect befitting a free citizen of a republic. A man who takes every opportunity available to show his belly to his leader would sign his constitutional authority away to an aspiring tyrant, ceding his power like Esau did his birthright. But where Isaac’s firstborn son could at least get a bowl of stew, all that Johnson really has is the idle approval of Donald Trump, a man not known for loyalty or even appreciation. That, I’d say, is thin gruel for what one must sacrifice to receive it.

Jamelle Bouie, NYT

[Simon Paynton]

Yes, it’s frightening how quickly all the rich and powerful (except Rupert Murdoch) are spinelessly caving in to kiss the orange arse.  After Trump’s reign is over, they will be called collaborators.

[jakelafort]

What form of government do Americans want?

I asked Zonk, my LLM.

Around 21-25% of Americans favor a system where the president has unilateral power, akin to a dictatorship. This percentage is relatively consistent across different polls. Here’s a breakdown {{IE_0}}¹{{/IE_0}} {{IE_1}}²{{/IE_1}} {{IE_2}}³{{/IE_2}}:
– Support for Authoritarianism:
– 21% of Americans think it would be a good thing if the next president could act on important policy issues without Congress or the courts’ approval.
– 24% of Americans view the US as a dictatorship, with 35% of Democrats and 7% of Republicans holding this view.
– 25% of Americans support authoritarian views, according to the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWAS).
– Demographic Variations:
– Republicans: 26% favor unrestrained executive power, rising to 57% if Trump wins.
– Democrats: 17% favor unrestrained executive power, rising to 39% if Biden wins.
– Independents: 30% believe the US is a dictatorship.
– Forms of Governance:
– Authoritarian leader: 41% of Americans think having a strong leader who doesn’t need to bother with parliament or elections is a good system.
– Theocracy: 34% of Americans support a system led by religious leaders.
– Army rule: 33% of Americans support a system governed by the military.

These numbers indicate a significant minority of Americans are open to authoritarian or non-democratic systems, but most still reject political violence and value democracy {{IE_2}}³{{/IE_2}} {{IE_3}}⁴{{/IE_3}}.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg,

Yes, but it is still the contents page from the “How to become a Dictator” handbook. The extreme right are all wrong.

Doesn’t make it Gospel (and, of course, The Gospel is not Gospel.). A book that doesn’t get it right about Hitler can’t possibly be any help in understanding the nature of tyranny.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg,

Collapsing the FDA is also domestic terrorism.

Color me unterrorized but very disgusted. This is just another day of government plodding with a different boss.

Look, all they have to do is see that products are not dangerous when used as prescribed. Effectiveness is something that takes trial and error to determine and that should be left to Doctors and patients willing to try.

It should not take ten years and $100 million Dollars to get life-saving drugs and devices to market.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

@Enco – This is just another day of government plodding with a different boss.

I can’t make a very strong argument against that. But this time, while it is a different boss, it is also a new form of plodding. Collapsing the FDA will be a mistake. Reforming it should be the priority. It should have happened a lot sooner, but meaningful reform can only happen when there is an actual plan in place. This requires experts with a deep understanding of the problem and long-term vision. It would need coordination across various agencies and stakeholders.  But in the current climate “reform” is reduced to soundbites: “cut red tape,” “drain the swamp,” or “make it more efficient.” These slogans are used as justification for slashing budgets or gutting review processes—without offering better alternatives.

Some libertarian or anti-regulatory factions believe the free market is better at sorting out safe products than government oversight. For them, weakening the FDA isn’t a bug, it’s the end goal. To some extent I do agree with allowing “right to try” laws to bypass normal clinical testing, especially when the approval may be years away. The current model is very centralized, and this may not suit personalized medicine. The approval process can take years, potentially delaying access to vital therapies, even if they are still considered experimental.

But I think defunding or politically (MAGA politics) neutering regulatory functions and offloading approval responsibility to private certifiers is asking for trouble. The problem with MAGA, imo, is the conflation of dismantling services with reform of same. The FDA, like some other institutions, is under strain from what appears to be either deliberate sabotage or a kind of ideological negligence masquerading as efficiency.

Underfunding, political appointments with no scientific background, or mismanagement can create the appearance of a system collapsing under its own weigh. So, this type of plodding could, paradoxically, have a similar outcome to the historic way things were done. There will be a further erosion of public confidence, a loss of global trust in U.S. medical exports and a faster spread of dangerous products.

Before the FDA’s modern powers (e.g., before the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act), the U.S. experienced mass poisonings, ineffective “snake oil” treatments, and contaminated food—problems the FDA was created to address. (See the last 15 years of Sunday School for examples!!).  FDA approval is considered a global gold standard. Removing it could isolate the U.S. scientifically and economically, as other countries might question the safety of U.S. products. The line between reform and ruin is not only thin, but also often intentionally blurred. Real reform requires craftsmanship.

Collapse is easy. The problem with plodding is that you tend to walk in circles because there is no guidance given, and the new boss will be the same as the old boss. Yeah, we sure “Won’t Get Fooled Again”.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg,

I’ll be the first to say that there need to be private alternatives set up side-by-side with attempts to scale back bureaucracy, not just a willy-nilly tearing things down.

AI could provide vastly sped up analysis of drug interactions and side effects…provided, of course that it isn’t infected by Elmo Hitler. (By the way, would there be an Elmo Hitler if there were no Corporation for Public broadcasting to birth Elmo in the first place? 🤔😁)

AI could also be an invaluable tool for analysis of the human body…once it learns how to portray the right number of fingers on a normal human hand and doesn’t draw them like ET fingers.👽💅

And combined with Ion Mass Spectrometry, AI could probably detect multiple biological infections and toxic chemicals in foods instantly. It could be like the Mideaval royal food and drink taster who cannot die…provided that the AI doesn’t tell vulnerable people to “come home.”

A tall order, but it could be done if only we all got past the false binary of a status quo that doesn’t work versus a will-of-the-wisp undefined MAHA that might go even worse.

• This reply was modified 8 months, 4 weeks ago by TheEncogitationer. Reason: Addendum for humor

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