Pop died today at about 1:40 pm. He was 97. He broke his hip about a month or 5 weeks ago & got pneumonia. I could have kept him in the hospital but he would have been on life support and he didn't want that. So I let them move him into a convalescent hospital. His hip healed but he stopped eating. The pneumonia came back. When I came in, he was breathing hard, the nurse said "he's dying, this is the way it starts with pneumonia". I sat beside him while his lungs filled up. My brothers were flying in airplanes over the pacific to be here. He gasped a few times & died. The nurse came up and held a stethoscope against his chest and looked at the clock. She was patronizing & only slightly vulturene, (as opposed to the hospice workers who are actually repulsive) and offered condolences. I said "thank you", but meant "go away". I sat beside him for awhile & a physical therapist came in & said to Pop in a loud jolly voice : Hello Mr. Cornelius, How are you feeling today?" I said "he's gone", The therapist looked at me then at pop & then said "I'm sorry" and left. I held Pops' hand & said "go hunting pop, & bring home some bacon". It's something he always said before he'd leave to go hunting when I was a kid.

Then I took my dog for a walk in Doyle park where he played with some other dogs in a fenced in area for dogs that they close off in the winter so it won't get muddy, but people lift the gate and go in any way. There was a rotwieller and a brindle sausage shaped mutt. My dog has no social graces and he dumped in the middle of the play yard. People put plastic bags on the fence for just such occasions, & I used one.

Then we drove back to the convalescent hospital and retrieved Pops' things (clothes, shoes, razor, hearing aid). My older brother sent a bouquet from Hawaii, I put it all in a plastic bag & put that on the passengers seat of my car. I drove back to moms' apartment, she was asleep so I worked on my computer for an hour sending out emails to family, till she woke up & I told her. She'd been expecting it for awhile so she didn't break up. I verified that she had plenty to live on and the car was running (though she hasn't driven for 8 years & has no license).

Ok I'm sorry to bum everybody, but I just found God, (in the back of the sock drawer). I was just imagining what it would take to get away with all the stuff that gets blamed on God. (wouldn't be the devil because that's still the same thing). It has to include both, not good, not evil, not even indifference because god's not aware, (at least there's no evidence that God has awareness, that doesn't come through the filter of someone with their own motive. that's why it's exasperating to reason with the sucker). So god's indifferent & still has some kind of form or weird utility, & be a default "reason" for everything. (God invented daughters so they could wash the car)? I don't think so. It's more like this:

See, whatever it is has to be coherent & not contradictory, so just skip all the stuff that is, like science, politics, religion, truth, lies & all. What's left? Well, the physical world, like outside your head. but it's meaning & utility are entirely inside your head. So, are you God? shure that fits (sort of). wait there's more!

The classical form of prayer is beseeching someone invisible for favors, (you know the drill) because it's deserved. ok? so why's that a recognizable condition for God. (hint: it helps the definition) Nobody says "oh great God: give me cannibalism, incest & kiddy porn because I deserve it". No, see it's a kind of social thing, God is. God doesn't have secrets or a plan, God IS a plan, what you see is what you get: a universal mechanism, which helps the people survive. God says "Be good & Do right, & thou shall/shant & so on & I'll reward thee with all the riches of the earth plus free upgrades. Wild gods might do the same thing, but they do that only as people see them. Like whatever pushes the planets & cares for fuzzy animals (with big brown eyes like bunnies & aging wolverines). Those gods only attain meaning & existence through the perception of people, but like a tree falling in the forest, those gods also have their own worlds that people may never know. Of course a person could pray to those gods (or one cooked up by fundamentalists to serve some immediate folly) for ones cannibalism, incest & kiddy porn, but that's like plugging part of that world & it into the people, so it would have to have some kind of meaning for the people world too, to be recognizable. For example when you answer the door with blood up to your elbows & all you have is a flippant excuse ("Hey God said it was ok!"): it might not be the same meaning. So our first labor for God isn't to create light, it's to homogenize society.

Another point of definition says god'll punish you (for evil thoughts, etc.). looks like he's back to square one, except If you consider that God IS a plan, instead of having one, the plan is that stuff that breaks down society, ultimately comes back on the person that perpetrates the deed (just like flies on poop or Karma on Dubya!). Not that any of that stuff is intrinsically destructive to the perp, because there are cultures in the world today that consider almost anything to be acceptable behavior somehow, just as there are those that don't. But because we get along SO well with each other, legal stuff provides employment for someone to go around and insure that people who continue to eat up the neighbors are held responsible for whatever's wrong with it. Now all those guys that make their living selling God finally have something worthwhile to promote, like social tolerance, and liberal bias, so predators can have another harvest in a few years when the next peace matures. And the legal people employed to see that everything is legal will surely constrain themselves so that harmless & non-violent people aren't busted for the security of the legals' own employment because that's ultimately bad for society.

So: how come some societies COMMIT SIN & get away with it & some don't? Well heck! it's natural selection in action. Like all those societies that ate up their kids, pretty soon ran out of people. The Shakers (famously good, kind, pious, wholesome, etcetera), ran out of people & became extinct because they were celibate. Some societies even thrive on WAR, probably because they don't run up a 10 trillion dollar debt on the say-so of their pin headed commander in chief. (Note: all those that did, had to eat the leader to avoid starvation.... Just a thought).

OK now here's gods will: (I God, being of sound mind & body, record herewith my will & testament...) Gods will is what someone decided was the solution for social misfits: make nonconformity so unpleasant that people won't want to go there. (actually it was some bureaucrats plan and not Gods), and it doesn't work (see footnote 1). Writing down all the possible ways a person might disrupt society (& disobey God), makes for a predictable future, so long as the code is relevant. Then maybe someone decides that the letter of the law is more profitable than the spirit (I love that comparison, it could mean anything), so the codified plan becomes a tool for exploitation & is no longer Gods plan. a couple of examples are: the Statutes of Negritude (legal reasons why white people could exploit blacks, cir. 1650-1860), & 3 strike laws applied to nonviolent offenders (reasons why rich people may exclude marijuana users from society, cir. 1980-present). Sure if you agree with those laws then they're relevant, ie.: The cranial measurements of the heads of the colored races predisposes them to servitude, and, Marijuana makes you crazy. The point here is that nobody can write a perfect law & nobody can define God for the same reason. (see footnote 1)

1: Because right & wrong are subjective & dynamic, while laws and judges are static and objective, Law & Gods definition try to keep the world from changing, but without constant feedback and adaptation, it's inherently futile. Ideally, a democracy provides as much feedback as it needs, (the price of freedom is constant vigilance), but of course depends on the social honesty of it's representatives & poll takers (there's always a catch).

Here's another post copied off the web (NY Times). It describes an old religious scam that has been honed & refined by the republican right, and fed back with more "authority" than ever. At the bottom I placed a link to one of the groups who want to impeach Bush, please sign their petition.

Op-Ed Columnist
Design for Confusion

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 5, 2005

I'd like to nominate Irving Kristol, the neoconservative former editor of The Public Interest, as the father of "intelligent design." No, he didn't play any role in developing the doctrine. But he is the father of the political strategy that lies behind the intelligent design movement - a strategy that has been used with great success by the economic right and has now been adopted by the religious right.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Related More Columns by Paul Krugman

Forum: Paul Krugman's Columns

Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.

Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit."

"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government."

Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money into think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers.

You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.

The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.

There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?

Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.

Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.

Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.

But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?

Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed. Check this example (it's real): "The Final Theory"

The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com


Impeach Bush NOW.

It may be that this particular argument (see below: 1/15/2005) was just poorly presented, that another description would offer another conclusion, but this one presents the crucial dilemma: Why is it necessary to describe the indescribable? Well that's the question. The old 60s' Twilight Zone TV series (in B/W eh?) did a story about a neighborhood that went bonkers & started shooting each other when they decided unexplainable stuff was caused by Aliens or Russians trying to take over. It turns out it was Aliens in flying saucers trying to find out how people react to impossible events. Their conclusion was that we were all unstable but ripe for invasion (if they could think up any reason to do it (this was when GW was like 16)), because our psyche requires that we deny half of our awareness. Carlos Castaneda's friend Don Juan describes everything we know as being a thing called the Tonal & everything we don't know (everything else) as a thing called the Nagual. The Tonal is made of conventions and knowledge. The Nagual is indescribable and is the media of sorcerers (also of charlatans and demagogues)

The intelligent design movement essentially says that the unknown is a "force" which is attributable to God.
The Non believer says if it's real, show me?
The Believer says what you don't know is god, so you can't argue.

So: is a vacuum actually a force? sure, metaphorically speaking, just like darkness is light.

My opinion is that animals, and humans especially (because we depend on thinking so much) are stuck with an intellectual blind spot: if it doesn't have a name, it doesn't exist, and if it does have a name, then it has to exist: GOD. So for all practical purposes, God is a catchall to explain a certain vacuum in the human brain. Dogs run away when they don't understand & that's a very realistic and pragmatic reaction. Fundamentalists however fall down & beg forgiveness from earthquakes & volcanos, or blame what they don't understand on unexplainable designs of a projected social superior. (see below: November 28, 2002) Then if they survive, it's proof that god accepts their homage, & if they get covered up with lava, no one ever hears about it. Because life's complexity can’t be explained without a supernatural creator, eh? Sez professional evangelical business persons.

Here's a post I had to copy because it'll be replaced with other topics shortly on his site at
The Schwartzreport

Genital Theology and the Quest for Pelvic Orthodoxy
Stephan A. Schwartz, Editor

Unless you live in some very remote portion of the earth over these past weeks the death of one Pope and the coronation of another, has exposed you to a seemingly endless discussion about the Roman Catholic Church and what is likely to happen with Benedict XVI at the helm. At the same time the American Religious Right, which seems to have taken control of the Republican Party has, itself, been focusing intensely on many of these same issues, and making a politician's position on them a litmus test for their support, which has skewed the national political process in profound ways. Based on what we view and read the inner spiritual experience once considered the well-spring of Judaeo-Christian thought has been replaced by Genital Theology.

A preponderant number of the public statements made in the name of religion actually deal with sexuality: Adultery, pre-marital sex, abortion, homosexuality, priestly chastity; this is the stuff of the religion pages of almost any newspaper. Conclaves of American bishops, rabbis or pastors routinely discuss masturbation and pre-martial sex, but it is almost inconceivable to imagine them discussing angels or individual transcendental experiences such as those that created their religions in the first place. Issues of the groin dominate almost all so-called religious discussions, and taken together they comprise a quest for pelvic orthodoxy.

The use of religion to regulate sexuality is not new. What is different is the self-righteous linkage of fundamentalist Christianity and patriotism. During the administration of John Adams, the second President of the United States, the Senate ratified the Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli which had been negotiated by American diplomat Joel Barlow during Washington's administration. Article XI of the treaty said, "The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."

James Madison, the fourth President, and the father of the Constitution is on record saying, "Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise. He wrote, "During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride, indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both superstition, bigotry and persecution."

It would be correct to say that the founders were Deists. They believed in a "guiding intelligence or principle." Like the third President, Thomas Jefferson, they felt, "The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained." America's Christianity, then, as now, when the Religious Right frames everything in terms of Jesus and Christian faith, when their arguments are carefully considered are actually arguing about culture not spirit.

This failure to address spiritual needs and the placement of tribalizing judgments, above all other considerations, is having an effect on democracy in America. According to a survey conducted by the University of Chicago's, National Opinion Research Center as long ago as 1984, 43 per cent, or 101 million men and women have had an "unusual spiritual experience." This is a much larger group than the "born agains" alone. It is even larger than the entire church going population. And of that more than 100 million, 68 million men and women, 29 per cent of the total population, believe they have received a "spiritual vision." It is one reason the Consciousness (New Age) Movement, that often underground river that has flowed through American culture from Revolutionary Masonic presidents, to the 19th Century's Transcendentalists, to today's public shamans such as Deepok Chopra or Mary Ann Williamson has become so prominent in recent years. This dereliction from addressing spiritual experience has divided the country and is, I believe, at the core of the Red/Blue split. This abdication by religious leaders of their traditional role, has made psychiatrists, psychologists, mediums, and astrologers, the true priests of our culture, while our theologians and clergy have increasingly become political operatives.

The concept of god as an evolutionary dead end.

Some say god created us because he was lonesome, like he needed company

ok here's God. he's either us or not, whatever. Let's assume He created us and not vice versa. God existed first so He has to be perceived on a scale of time, which may be called His Great Plan. Plans require a purpose/goal. The rapture perhaps, but then what?. The rapture is a development of his son's advocates, maybe not bad, but NOT God The Original and wasteful in the writers opinion, because the chosen enter heaven in their physical form, and the rest of the physical world is discarded (where does it go?). If God gets angry because humanity rejects his plan for a perfect world, then He must put some value on it. Heck, what's this God the Son revisionism anyway, if there's one god, he needs to be updated more plausibly. Ok, I'm digressing, this is just hypothesis anyway, the main point here is that there's a time scale & a goal (and it looks suspiciously like a perception of those who live in a time-space continuum ie: not-god).

Since God has no beginning & no end, & He can look at the future like we look at the past, He should have an advantage in the evolution of events. Apparently He chooses not to use it, possibly because He's inscrutable and mysterious, (or perhaps we're just idiots). This is serious: Why not use the advantage of total consciousness?
I'll wait while you ponder & then present my fecklessly self serving opinion/answer.
.....

Ok, it's because planning to avoid past mistakes increases entropy instead of reducing it because there are fewer evolutionary options. (like crop mono-culture) "nay nay" you say "because God isn't bound by the laws of thermodynamics!" Maybe, but so far we don't have that evidence, and we do have evidence that everything He created is. Could it be that God is made up as we go along, designed solely to refute opposition to His existence? well duh! How about a self serving waste of time. (not me, Him) Well, ok, if one makes a living from selling God, it's not a real waste of time.

So here's the given:
1) God exists and he knows what he's doing.
2) His Plan revolves around humanity and is subject to the laws of thermodynamics.
3) Planned evolution reduces options thus increases entropy, in humanity's case resulting in the natural disintegration of the universe because His Plan depends on humanity and not the universe.
4) God expects humanity to become obsolete because otherwise the universe has no physical limit.

For a being that knows how it will come out, this seems like an exercise in futility. More likely, it's a social device promoted by people who have serious doubts on how it will come out, to insure their own personal, and relatively temporary, safety by planning to abandon this world of contradiction and hemorrhoids, and get raptured into dreamland.

These are the people that say "we'll all meet there in the great by & by", & require faith as a per-requisite. Well, when one looks at the option of eternal, gloom &/or wandering lost spirits, meeting with friends in the hereafter isn't such a bad idea.

So what would one (you, me, or anybody) do if you knew how things would turn out? What would ones outlook on life be like?

Ok, my guess is that either it comes easily, or one ha s to work at it. I can't really imagine God working at it because while I've never created a universe or anything, work is a burden by definition, & it seems that if it's done for ones self, it must be enjoyable. The basic question as a mortal is: "Is this s action fatal & are things ok for now?" But for God, food & shelter isn't a problem because he can extenuate the situation to his best advantage & dwelling on mortality is a wet blanket. But since God's immortal, his main problem would be what to do with himself. They (Hindus) say Shiva once incarnated himself as a pig because he was bored, but I think the concept of awareness that story relates, comes from a finite perspective, I mean given all the possibilities of an infinite universe, why create a finite existence? did it just pop into Gods head one day "That's it! No more total awareness! I'll create sin & suffering!" What the heck for?? Probably as punishment, right? One slowly perceives a realization that maybe God's missing a few marbles. Maybe he's been alone so long that he's cracked up (14 billion years + whatever he did before the big bang) (smirk). So: It's the duty of humanity to kick his loony butt back in shape.

Aaah! But see, I'm digressing again.

The main point of this post is that if we assume god exists, even for the purposes of argument, then all options depend on that assumption. A person who assumes the existence of god, reading this (above) about the advantage of total consciousness, will use it to validate their belief (see! that's why god doesn't use the advantage of foresight!).

But a person who doesn't assume god's existence will use the same argument to validate their assumption. (see! if god exists and uses the advantage of foresight, he'd have to also plan for the extinction of himself and everything, which is suicidal, pointless, & sort of un-godlike).

The believers have the advantage because the whole point assumes there's something here to argue about, and a negative (meaning there isn't) can't be proven.

My opinion is that god's a conceptual name for the center of the herd. everything else has to be seen in relation to it. The biggest threat to an individual is banishment, excommunication, solitary. “Cast out & cut off from gods presence”. More even than death & torture, there’s stories of people who are given a choice & choose banishment, but return to their people in a few weeks or years to be executed. Socrates knew he would be useless without his people. Of course we never hear about the ones that make it to Shangra-la, because (1) nobody ever sees them again, (2) it would embarrass the king.

Here's an interesting link: http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/. It's interesting the way god is taken for granted in 99.9% of societies. I think there's a hormonal thing that happens when a social creature is ex cluded from it's herd.They become prone to diseases & stress that changes their scent which makes them into food for predators. Us at the top of the food chain have our own predators in the form of cops, gangs, republicans, lawyers, rip-offs or others who make their living off the "weak". Homeless people do smell funny y'know, & they're just scum anyhow.