Leonardo Da Vinci, Walter Isaacson

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/16/leonardo-da-vinci-the-biography-walter-isaacson-review

I generally like Isaacson's, biographies ... I've read enough of them; Einstein, Franklin, Jobs, "The Innovators" (my least favorite). The linked is a good summary of the book. 

I was struck by the "pseudo Christian morality" the elites "adhered to" in Leonardo's time. Pretty much all the rich and powerful men, including Popes and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy, had a mistress or two, and probably a similar number of illegitimate children. Much like Egypt, Greece, Rome, and England at the peak of its power, wealth and power were the coin of the realm - plebeian mores were for the plebes!

I suppose we ought take the fact that immorality is more egalitarian in our time? -- "everybody's" doing it. Based on the priests abuse of children, the Catholic church seems to be proof that "power corrupts" has not been repealed by "progress". 

It was also striking how devoted Isaacson is to the idea that if you are intelligent, you can't possibly have Christian faith. On page 512 we see: "In his will, Leonardo commended his soul to our Lord Almighty God, and to the glorious Virgin Mary" ... Which Isaacson immediate dismisses as a "literary flourish"', even though the page also says that Leonardo specified that his funeral should include three high masses and three low masses". 

Leonardo is clearly a mythic hero figure for Isaacson, and it is just too much to consider that with all his "heresy" -- he would be in good company with Luther on that! Any disagreement with Catholic dogma was heresy. 

On 487, "This is the heart of Leonardo's philosophy: the replication of the patterns of nature, from the cosmic to the human". 

One of themes of the book is that Leonardo had an insatiable and eclectic curiosity, and was just completely fascinated with eddies in water, curls in human hair, birds, anatomy, and  documenting his observations in notebooks (but not publishing). 

The book seems like an excellent introduction to art appreciation, and least for me ... who is sadly lacking in that area. It made me want to see the Mona Lisa more. More than I needed to know about sfumato and squaring the circle.  

Covid Rate Of Transmission (Rt)

 https://rt.live/

The linked will take you to a chart that shows a computation for the rate of Covid transmission by state. In theory, if the Rt is below 1.0, the virus will stop spreading. The creators of the model are Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger,  the co-founders of Instagram. Tom Vladeck is a data scientist and owner of Gradient Metrics. 

I find it to be "interesting/useful" ... lots of caveats / discussion below.

The bars for each state are the 80% confidence interval for the model ... meaning there is an 80% chance that the actual number is in that range. So why can't they be more correct? Basically, the map/model is NEVER the "territory" that is what "model" means! 

If you choose to dig into more detail, the Faq gives that ... the basic fact is that like all models, reality may be different from reality. This is true of ALL models! The "proof" of model correctness is in the rear view mirror, but must people reporting on models often don't tell you that. The reaction to Covid was based on models ... "masks are not effective at all", "we are going to be shut down for 2 weeks to flatten the curve", "masks are effective to protect others, not you", "it doesn't spread outside", "masks provide significant protection for you", "it does spread outside", etc Draw your own conclusions on how good the models have been.

Why look at the model? Basically for the same reason you look at the weather forecast -- to give you a general idea of how future weather looks  TODAY ... the prediction  may  (and often is) be different tomorrow. Good models allow you to look back at how accurate they were in the past, and discuss a bit about updates to the model they have made, and some they would like to make. (this one does) 

Although many statisticians don't like to admit this, this is the reason there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics". Statements like "women are better drivers!" based on them having less accidents are ridiculous, but often made. A "better" statistic would  be per mile driven ... just using accident statistics would call a woman who never drives a good driver. 

Getting a good statistic is HARD (election predictions should be a clue here). It gets REALLY complicated, and moves into the area of art rather than science. "Correlation is not causality" is also key. Drowning is strongly correlated (meaning the graph curves look alike) with ice cream sales and high temps. Of course neither of them CAUSE drowning. 

The important factor here is that today statistics are often presented as "science" when they are in fact just mathematical TOOLS. Climate change is often portrayed as "settled science" of which there is no such thing. Science is by definition NEVER settled! If something is "Science", then it MUST be falsifiable -- the next experiment may show the "settled" to be wrong. This is doubly true for statistical models ... especially as they predict the future rather than look at the past.

So why is Rt a useful statistic? It is just "better" than number of cases which is essentially meaningless ... more cases resulting from more testing doesn't mean more people are getting it, it just means we are finding more. cases (this model attempts to account for that). We don't have good data on number of asymptomatic cases because we are not doing randomized testing. Assuming we are tracking asymptomatic cases (which I doubt), we MAY be able to get a better idea of how many people have had it but did not know it.  

Naturally, even THAT doesn't really help us that much, because the "experts" claim that you don't get "much" immunity if you have had it ... therefore you still have to take protective measures -- for a disease that we believe you will be asymptomatic of in at least 50% of cases ... although we of course don't KNOW that either! 

Socrates was the wisest man because he knew that he knew nothing. 

VDH: Chaos On Chaos

 https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/22/a-time-of-chaos-upon-chaos-atop-chaos/

Not one of VDHs best in my opinion, but these are certainly pretty much "the worst of times" ... at least until they get worse, so perhaps this is the best that can be done. It is a worthy read as a more detailed description of the current chaos ... but then, can chaos really be "described"? 

Meanwhile Trump’s once-solid ranks may be in danger of fracturing. Half believe that not just his long-term legacy, but also his short-term utility in winning Georgia are endangered by unsubstantiated claims of a stolen “landslide” victory of a 70 percent majority and 400-some Electoral College votes. Of course, Trump supporters are furious over the weaponization of polling, and the violations of the voting laws of state legislatures that led to irregularities, controversies, and suspicious data, endemic with massive mail-in voting. But they are not assured that either episodic or systematic skullduggery automatically translates into a provable case that Trump won the election, much less won by historical proportions involving fraud of the sort never witnessed in past elections.

The other half is convinced of just such a “landslide” victory taken from Trump by computerized trickery and engineered through a vast coverup and conspiracy, again the greatest political scandal in American history.

I would have hoped that the latest 3+ generations of Americans steeped in media exaggeration would be more or less comfortable with Trump's over promising. Certainly Democrats back to FDR have generally received accolades beyond all reason  ... admittedly, they generally didn't have to self promote since the global media'/fascist complectx did it for them. Can't we be smart enough to see that? 

Really, a Nobel Prize when BO had hardly got into office? Fawning accocades of BO being "the one"? Spare me. 

Anyway, a confusing and chaotic column, just like our times. 

The Great Reset

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/the-great-reset-if-only-it-were-just-a-conspiracy/

A rather long article on what I've been talking about for a decade -- the increasingly overt close relationship with the Davos Elite, Global Corporatism, bureaucratic "DeepAdminisrative States, universities and media. They are just coming out of the closet now in the form of the "Great Reset". 

Remember "WEF", the "World Economic Forum" -- it is the public name for "The Great Reset". It isn't a conspiracy, if is fully out in the open, and as long as people are distracted, drugged, media manipulated, and generally comatose except for the "Fear Of the Day", nobody cares. (well maybe 70 million Trump voters do, but Voter Fraud). Why care if you truly are powerless? 

... because the Great Reset is, in essence, corporatist, not communist. The participation of companies of the type that Sixsmith mentions is, in reality, the participation of certain members of their senior management, using shareholder funds for purposes that have nothing to do with the bottom line and everything to do with the wielding of power within a system akin to a concert, with the state — if not necessarily the government — acting as the conductor.

No, it isn't communist, it is fascist! The term that may not be stated, so they call it "corporatist", which is incorrect, because the government bureaucracies, media, education, and increasingly judicial systems are part of it. 

The article is sadly so poorly written and obscure that it makes me look like a good writer. I've covered the message ... if you are looking to take a nap, I'd recommend it. 

The Voter Fraud Is Strong With This One

 https://spectator.us/reasons-why-the-2020-presidential-election-is-deeply-puzzling/

Well, it isn't "puzzling" to me. 

The only reason to fight voter ID tooth and nail as Democrats always have, is that you know you generally need it to win elections. It has been true since Reconstruction and Jim Crow, through Boss Tweed/Tammany Hall, Mayor Daley, etc. JFK was "elected" though voter fraud ... Joseph Kennedy was at least honest in this case: "Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide". 

Certainly modern Democrats have lost any semblance of parsimony -- with their money or ours, but if we are paying ANY attention, we knew that already. This time they over achieved by millions. As Biden said. it was the greatest vote fraud organization in history! (so far)

Since the media has been mostly Democrat for a LONG time, and Americans (especially the hard working ones) have a strong aversion to the seedy, wasteful business of politics, most Americans don't want to look in that sewer. It is clear now that if they want to retain any illusion of "freedom" while they are masked and locked in their houses, they are going to have to jump in that sewer now. The toilets are backing up.

The article is WELL worth the read. A teaser ... 

Midwestern states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin always swing in the same direction as Ohio and Iowa, their regional peers. Ohio likewise swings with Florida. Current tallies show that, outside of a few cities, the Rust Belt swung in Trump’s direction. Yet, Biden leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because of an apparent avalanche of black votes in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Biden’s ‘winning’ margin was derived almost entirely from such voters in these cities, as coincidentally his black vote spiked only in exactly the locations necessary to secure victory. He did not receive comparable levels of support among comparable demographic groups in comparable states, which is highly unusual for the presidential victor.

Book Burning Fires Often Spread

 https://spectator.us/five-books-penguin-ban-along-jordan-peterson/

I’ve read most of these dangerous books, commentaries and excerpts on all. I’d add the Bible part of my daily reading. 

17but you shall devote them to complete destruction,^a the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded

To be completely "woke", statues and history itself need to be destroyed. The dogma of wokeness must be celebrated.  As the BLM signs say; "Silence is Violence" ... however we must be silent or censored on whatever our woke masters decide is the "dogma of the day". Ever changing, ever perfect -- as they are certain. They are indeed, "legends in their own minds". 

They only require a single thing to achieve their goals -- Power. Well, we aren't just going to let them walk away with that. Are we? 

Lynd Minnesota, Larvita McFarquhar, Civil Disobedience

 https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/11/a-heroine-for-our-time-2.php

My wife and I took the 2.5 hour journey to Lynd Minnesota to show support for Ms McFarquhar. By the time we left at 9:30 (the official start of the event), there were approaching 100 maskless people in a fairly large space in defiance of El Capitan Walz decrees that thou shalt stay cowering in your home lest thou surely die. 

Well maybe. I agree that I shall surely die. Will it be because of Covid due to taking this risk? Through the experiences that my wife and I have had in the last 5 years, I've decided that even my next breath is God's decision, not mine. What about others? I believe that no matter their beliefs, the length of their lives and the date of their departure are likewise not under their own authority. Every knee will bow before Christ, even that of der Fuhrer Walz. 

We used to live in a country that had a Constitution with a Bill Of Rights, of which the first amendment stated: 

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Today, freedom of religion can only get a 5-4 decision from a supposedly "conservative" SCOTUS, and the Woke are all in a tizzy because the court didn't "listen to the experts".  Praise God for Amy Coney Barrett! "The experts" have a long record of being certain and wrong. They were all certain that we were out of oil in the 1970s, and more recently that fracking could never make us energy independent. On a personal note, my faith in "experts" really went down after a top surgeon at Mayo screwed my radius and ulna together. So much for "measure twice, screw once"! 

We have been told many things about Corona -- no need to wear masks, they are not effective anyway; stay home for "a couple weeks to flatten the curve"; "we are all in this together" while the elite got their hair done, had big maskless parties, arbitrarily shut down small businesses while letting the big ones stay open;  etc; ... the list is so long it is very tedious. 

Freedom has never been free, easy, nor risk free.  Soldiers risk their lives and die to get and preserve it. Police likewise not only risk and die to preserve it, and also become the targets of abuse while they do it. Freedom requires people to make their own decisions and ALSO to allow others to do the same. Will either your or their decisions be "right"? 

We used to live in a fallen world where everyone had at least a basic understanding that the answer to that was most certainly NO! However, even in the Civil War, while we were in the process of killing 600K of our fellow Americans, there was understanding of the cost of freedom that is close to vanishing today. We still live in that fallen world, many just think that the "experts/elite" will "save us". 

The foundation that we once pretty much all agreed on was: 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We don't live in that place anymore, and even our supposed "leaders", think that they are endowed by "you know, the thing".  We have no foundation, and therefore we have a nation divided that will not stand. 

So we took a little trip, took a risk, and met some nice people. Talking to a retired 10 year military veteran proud that his discharge was signed by President Trump, and hearing a very stable and rational woman say that as she has been watching in horror as once sacred rights have been abandoned by so many, that she has needed to frequently pray to control her anger. 

We were once a nation that held phrases like "Give me liberty or give me death", and "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" were held to be near sacred. 

Today? I suppose "Trust the science and the experts" would be the key article of faith for a majority of this territory that was once America. 

Darwin's Doubt

 https://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Doubt-Explosive-Origin-Intelligent/dp/0062071483

This is a book that doggedly works to put some meat on the challenges to the modern Darwinian dogma. We are at a point in history much like the time of Martin Luther, where the dogma of the Catholic church was crushing all other Christian thought. The "church", meaning the Catholic Church had all the power, and the keys to Heaven and Hell -- to question was to be a heretic, and eternally damned. 

Today, dogmatic Darwinism is the scientific religion -- a statement that is an oxymoron, as an any real scientist like Richard Feynman knows -- the core difference between science and religion is that actual science is NEVER "settled" ... it's "truth" is always conditional on the next piece of discovered knowledge. Whatever fails that test is religion,  not science. Much of modern "science" is religion, and one only needs to visit one of their "science" museums to attend a scientism worship service. 

 Starting in the "1950s" as more and more information about the actual mechanisms required for "evolution" to randomly create "more adaptive" phyla, rather than just modify through selection within the same phyla (meaning they could breed and reproduce) became more clear, some actual scientists began to doubt the Darwinian dogma. As in the time of Luther, the reaction of the Church of Darwin was to punish and excommunicate the heretics. 

Even as eminent a biologist as Stephen J Gould has declared that neo-Darwinism is effectively dead based on current genomic research. I cover a much easier to follow than this book introduction to why in here.

What "Doubt" covers is a whole lot of detail behind what are currently considered the odds of a SINGLE helpful inheritable mutation. What are those odd? From David Gelernter  (an eminent Yale computer scientist) ...   

The odds against blind Darwinian chance having turned up even one mutation with the potential to push evolution forward are 10⁴⁰x(1/10⁷⁷)—10⁴⁰tries, where your odds of success each time are 1 in 10⁷⁷ — which equals 1 in 10³⁷. In practical terms, those odds are still zero. Zero odds of producing a single promising mutation in the whole history of life. 

To get to life AT ALL by randomness has not been reproduced in the lab, even by "stacking the deck" with what we believe to be the perfect "primordial soup. We can't get a SINGLE viable, let alone successfully reproducing cell. 

We can get all sorts of mutations in the lab by chemical or radiation exposure ... as we would expect, even when you cause millions of mutations, they nearly always kill the next generation, or produce offspring that are grotesque and anything but "improved / more adaptive". 

However, as unlikely as adaptive DNA mutations are, it turns out they are not the only operative factor ... there is "epigenetics" ... which at a high level means that Lamark had a point. Changes to the phenotype in one generation CAN be inherited. 

If you choose to undertake this book you will be introduced to lots of biology, genetics, genomics, geology, statistics, history, information theory, etc ... almost certainly, no matter how studied or intelligent you are, your eyes will glaze over at some point. 

... and of course it won't "prove" anything if you have already accepted the Darwinist faith. While Christianity promises a better life now, and eternal life hereafter, Darwinist faith only promises that life has no underlying meaning or purpose, and that when you die, that is it.  

My purpose in going to all this trouble is that modern "Wokeism" of which the Darwinist faith is a foundation, asserts that all who disagree need to be ridiculed, isolated, and punished in this short life. The results of this "Wokeism" so far are many despondent people choosing to end or effectively end their self understood as meaningless lives via suicide, drugs, distraction, or being motivated by hate and virtue signalling relative to those that question the Darwinist / Woke doctrine. 

The result of this is that we now live in a decadent, increasingly fascist world -- a new "Dark Age of Dogma". 

I recommend reading the suggested/linked intro post, as well as "Purpose And Desire" prior to taking on this book. It is a worthy book, roundly criticised by The Unholy Church of Darwin" as "creationist drivel" -- although other than asserting that one doesn't get complex entities without  some kind of plan/direction, it says nothing about God and in no way defends young earth creation.  

Why did the chicken cross the road? Perhaps it was because he wanted to ... rather than because it was predetermined materialistically since the Big Bang. 

Biden The "Palmist"

 https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/joe_palmtificates_on_thanksgiving.html

A "devout" Catholic that doesn't know the "P" in "Psalms" is silent. Why, I'm "certain" that this will create a covfefe  type media frenzy! Important coverage from the Atlantic of the terror of that misspelling of "coverage". Why, how are we even to know that he is sentient? He may be so delusional to think he is a legitimately "elected" el presidente of the banana republic of BOistan!

This must be covered! It sounds like as many as ONE thousand people may have seen his crucial Thanksgiving address. 

Perhaps he needs to contact a palmist? 

Influencing Elections, MSM vs Russian Style

 https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/11/theres-more-than-one-way-to-steal-an-election.php

From the day Trump won in 2016, to April 18 of 2019 when the public saw the Mueller report, we were told by the MSM, Democrat / Deep State complex that the 2016 election was invalid because it was "influenced" by Trump / Russia "collusion". 

What was that "collusion" supposed to consist of? A very few false Facebook posts! 

Even though as far left a media source as the Washington Post now admits that for all the MASSIVE media coverage, there was no "there there". It really was a massive hoax perpetrated by the MSM/Democrat/Deep State, and they got caught -- without consequence. 

However, that fact is largely unknown to Americans. All the while though, there  really is MASSIVE misinformation influence in American elections. The media once at least claimed, and to a minimal degree attempted to be "unbiased". No longer. The MSM/Democrat/Deep State complex is a coordinated apparatus to advance the power of their collective  and suppress any who have differing opinions. 

While the MSM/Democrat/Deep State complex railed against the supposed but fake "Russian interference" that was never asserted to be anything more than some FB posts for years, they were and continue to be engaged in the most massive political influence campaign in history right before the eyes of what has to rank as the most complacent and ill informed populace in history! 

The link provides some documentation of how this works.