I just love this thing, which bills itself as a Venn Diagram. Found it recently when I was looking for something else. (Sources for it here and here.) It succeeds, I’m sure, beyond its designer’s wildest dreams in depicting the precipice on which our culture now stands, all without mentioning political parties, cell phones, or social networks. This is the rationalist model writ large. All the category names around the perimeter contain overlapping flavors of nonsense sneered at by the professional skeptics who presume to know so much more than the rest of us. It’s impressively voluminous, but that means there are ways in which it is, well, talking too much. I’m going to be spending some time explaining that last statement, but I’m not going to apologize. When a thief tries to sell you a noose, it’s too good an opportunity not to ignore it but to tighten it around his neck.

Truthfully, the olive drab, shield-shaped pentagon in the center should be dressed in some sharply contrasting color (or empty) because it’s obviously the most important region of the diagram, the visual highlight, the position of control over the rest of the so-called nonsense. In Venn terms, it’s the apotheosis which contains and make sense of all the other regions of the diagram. But that would have disrupted the esthetic design of the creator, who is intent on showing us an intrinsic order of things that relate in some meaningful way. The pentagon at the center is here the function of five perfect Easter Eggs of nonsense, which overlap harmoniously to demonstrate graphically the intuitive rightness of the conception. It is therefore a muddy mixture of all the colors it comprises, and because its originator has no belief in meaning as a concept, its content here is a mere placeholder, an afterthought which is not an apotheosis but a crude and very partial example of the rest.

Now for some content observations:

 

First, some general points, in no particular order. ‘Nonsense’ is a strong word, sweeping in its dismissal of everything it’s applied to. By definition, it represents a judgment that something said, written, or done is utterly without value, devoid of interest, and either stupid or silly or both. The choice of a Venn diagram* for communicating absolutist determinations is interesting in this regard. The Venn is not a quantitative tool in any respect, neither scientific nor mathematical, and is in common practice a mere presentation tool, a thought-starter meant to suggest possible relationships worthy of consideration. Used here to suggest relationships between topics that are definitely not worthy of consideration. A funny irony. But the vast scope of the content and the designer’s intent are not at all funny. To see this, we’ll need to look at some of these hundreds of bits of nonsense in more detail. Not all of them (rest easy…). Just enough to see how far reaching it is and how disingenuously compiled.

So. You see that I have pointed in various ways at items on the “nonsense” lists which are, at a minimum, debatable. Obviously there are numerous other items which are, obviously, nonsense. Which ones are those? I have not concerned myself particularly with the question of who created these lists. He seems to be, on the face of it, an Eastern European pseudo-intellectual more or less indistinguishable from the smug, grinning professional skeptics who make a living from the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and PBS. It doesn’t matter who he is specifically, because he speaks for millions of those who believe that the only province of rational minds is those subjects that can be counted, weighed, measured with real and virtual calipers, and studied to the point of proof or disproof in a laboratory, under precise clinical conditions. Their response to this so-called Venn Diagram is a breezy, grinning, “Well, yeah. That’s it in a nutshell, right?”

Wrong. Truth is, anyone who basically agrees with the purport of this diagram is less intellectually rigorous than those they are gang-jeering at. Bigfoot (uh, Yeti) is nonsense? Every major inhabited region of the world has independently developed an anecdotally transmitted legend of primate breeds that correspond to the definition of “Bigfoot,” including North America (coast to coast), Australia, China, Siberia, Tibet, Indochina, the Himalayas, and parts of South America. Who’s missing? England, a country that killed off all its wildlife a millennium ago, the seats of blind reason we admire as France and Germany, and the continent of Africa, where science has always taken a back seat to malnutrition, malaria, and murder. We’re supposed to,overlook the fact that serious scientists are bravely pursuing Bigfoot based on all kinds of evidence that exists despite the lack of a dead body that can be weighed, MRI’ed, dissected, measured, and filed away in formaldehyde-filled flasks. One real scientific field investigator archly observed, “When Bigfoot is finally found, it won’t be by me. It will be discovered in the bottom drawer of a back room of some natural history museum.”

Crop circles? Yeah. Two old duffers with boards strapped to their feet, snickering the night away in jolly old England at our expense. They did all these, right? Two old assholes on their home from the pub stomping around in their Wellies and giggling the night away. Right.

Same deal with cattle mutilations (‘bovine excisions’… cute) and UFOs. Do they exist at some level above the metric of “nonsense”? Yes. Serious scientists are seriously studying the evidence, even some evidence which can be counted, weighed, measured with calipers, dissected, and filed away in a bottom drawer of some museum somewhere. People keep misquoting Carl Sagan, probably to his post-mortem delight: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” Not what he said. The sentence is frankly unscientific. Proof is proof. Period. Never needs to be anything but ordinary, well, proof. Even if it’s counter-intuitive. Like Euclid repeatedly demonstrated. What Sagan actually said was probably correct: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Which works both ways. It is possible in many states of our nation to be convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without a dead body. The rest of the evidence has to be extraordinary to be sure, but not all cases of unexplained human disappearance are automatically “nonsense,” even to the myopic eyes of the legal system.

Intelligent Design? No, not nonsense. Increasingly, the Darwinian theory of evolution probably is nonsense, much like the once vaunted “consensus” of the scientific community about Eugenics and Climate Change caused by human industry. All three of these scientific delusions are based on antique mechanical metaphors which missed much more complicated underlying realities. Eugenics, founded on Mendel’s genetic research on peas was ultimately undone by the guy on the top floor of the lab who was ignored for the six years he was studying the genetics of fruit flies, which defied all his concerted efforts at predicting even so small an attribute as eye color. The Eugenic Consensus wreaked untold numbers of sterilizations and abortions based on bad data. Avoidable errors. Same with climate change science. Is the climate changing? Yes. That’s what climate does. It changes all the time. It’s weather writ large on a much greater than human scale. (Did you know that the weight of all humankind is approximately equal to the weight of all the ants on earth? A bit sobering, eh, but a verifiable statistic nonetheless.) The computer models devised to predict the effects of climate warming have ALL failed, not by a little but by a lot. We don’t know enough to predict climate behavior, no matter how many ways we try to weigh, count, measure it, and model it. Our theories are uniformly superficial, regardless of consensus, a term which Michael Crichton brilliantly argued is a contradiction in terms. Science does not progress by a process of democratic buy-ins by the scientists whose research grants depend on an unchallenged consensus; it progresses by means of scrupulously practiced scientific method. But our Venn diagramming hero lists Climate Change Denial as a “conspiracy” and omits including Climate Change in his list of Pseudo-Sciences. Go figure.

Back to Intelligent Design as a Venn overlap of Religion and Pseudo-Science. Imagine taking Henry Ford’s Model T and trying to upgrade it to 21st century standards by just adding and replacing parts without carting the chassis itself to the nearest landfill and starting over. Even Darwin had doubts about his theory, declaring that if the fossil record did not produce examples of species transitions that had to have occurred, in accordance with his random mutation model, then his theory would be disproven. Well, the transition fossils have never materialized. No instance of a species that survived thousands of years with sightless blobs of flesh set into a skull that would eventually accidentalize its way to highly focused, full color, swiveling vision. But just look at the superior grin of World-famous Richard Dawkins, who had the balls to write a book called “The Blind Watchmaker.” (I regard that as an eponymous title, by the way, entirely in keeping with the author’s narcissistic delusions of brilliance.)

Want to see how easy it is to disprove Darwinian theory? Look at any documentary about Evolution. Repeatedly, you will be told that this or that species “evolved” this or that physical attribute (in order) to adapt to some critical environmental factor. Cheetahs become blindingly fast, twice as swift as any other big cat (in order) to succeed as solitary hunters. I keep putting “in order” in parentheses because it denotes an intention its omission underplays, which is certainly the intention of Darwin apologists, that is, the intention to make a sale based on the idea of purpose, even though the wrap-up text returns repeatedly to the absurd position that there is no purpose in Evolution, never was, it’s all just a giant long-running accident, so please move along now.

But if you don’t want to watch a bunch of documentaries, all you really need to do is watch this short video:

Some additional facts. You hear a lot about the Great Barrier Reef, and how it is dying, and how it must be the fault of Mankind with his fossil-fueled Climate Change and all, but there are some things they don’t tell you, meaning you have to look them up. Like, the Great Barrier Reef is actually only about 20,000 years old. That’s not a lot of time in evolutionary terms. The first paragraph will tell you that Australia started sprouting a Great Barrier Reef maybe 600,000 years ago. But the breaks just weren’t right. It collapsed under the sea because of, wait for it!, changing water temperatures, the same villain that’s afflicting the current reef. Also, the reef tried making itself a couple of other times less than half a million years ago. Those attempts also failed. Is it possible that gigantic reef archipelagos have their own life cycles and like other living organisms eventually die?

Well, forget all that. The important thing here is to realize that the unique, highly specialized fauna of the Great Barrier Reef are creatures whose random “mutations” seem to be focused not very randomly on camouflaging their bodies from predators and prey. Now pretend you’re a scientific documentarian specializing in the ridicule of Darwin skeptics, and explain to your audience how the smallest vertebrate in the known universe “accidentally” acquired the body chemistry to change his color and skin conformation to match exactly whatever kind of coral he/she is nesting in. Try to believe that he/she is mentally and physically incapable of understanding the concepts of color, skin growths, and the value of camouflage as a survival strategy, given that he/she doesn’t even know it’s alive. Now try to explain to yourself why the idea of accidental mutation is more rationally appealing than the simple and obvious solution of purpose-driven change. The usual Darwinian escape hatch (“Understand, we’re talking millions and millions of years here…) is absent in the case of the Pygmy Seahorse. These are “mutations” which had to have occurred in less than 20,000 years, a trifling moment in Darwinian time.

One of the great scientific breakthroughs (and simultaneous sellouts) was Stephen Wolfram’s very large book “A New Kind of Science.” In it he argues that a great many natural processes exhibit compelling evidence of artificial intelligence, meaning that many natural phenomena are not random per se,but the product of self-writing and self-correcting code. He demonstrates his evidence with innumerable examples which he compares to early computer attempts at coding artificial life. It’s a fascinating read if you’re interested in things like that. My takeaway was that he’s probably right, but he also suffers from Darwin Syndrome. He does exactly what all those Darwinian documentaries do. He ultimately rejects the idea of purpose. He cannot yield up his scientific atheism even on the altar of his own brilliance.

Never mind that he is nakedly showing us a computer creating real organic life while insisting that there is no purposeful consciousness at the keyboard. All right, then. I guarantee you Wolfram is way smarter than Richard Dawkins, though balder and therefore less famous, but Darwin is a humongous trap hardly anyone anywhere can escape from.

I have a wonderful essay, not yet written, called The Problem with Math. Look for it after I’ve posted it on one of my websites. It actually explains the God Problem pretty neatly. And ironically, if I dare say so myself. “Ah,” you will say to yourselves. “You expect us to believe, to have faith in, the existence of a brilliant essay for which there is absolutely NO evidence.” My reply? “Exactimundo.”

The essay does exist. It is written. In my head. Has been there for many of my 67+ years. I use it as a personal resource in other writings, which consistently confirm its consistent points. In other words, which is to say many millions of words, there exists a context for believing that the essay exists, even though you can’t find it at a single Internet address.

You may choose to believe or not to believe that the essay exists. If you’re the scientific sort, you will be inclined to disbelieve, because there is nothing to count, weigh, measure with calipers, or dissect in a laboratory under approved clinical conditions. In still other words, there is no body produced in court to enable a well-intentioned jury to be an objective finder of fact.

What am I even talking about? The casual assignment of Religion (unlike the other categories of our Venn Master, disingenuously — he should have more truthfully called it “Superstition,” to him, admittedly a mere provocative synonym) as across-the-board “Nonsense” is actually the only honest aspect of this, forgive my pun, Trumpery.

Two points before we move on. The use of a Venn Diagram is a deceptive exercise in preemptive propagandizing. His labels around the outside of the diagram are immediately prejudicial. His construction of the lists contained within the diagram use all the tactics employed by Professional, supposedly scientific, Skeptics. We are presented with a seemingly comprehensive set of “nonsense” beliefs that are in fact nothing but a parade of grossly false equivalencies justified by an apparently objective scientific tool used as an appealing context that is, in fact, utterly devoid of context. He nowhere justifies or explains his inclusions. He’s simply demanding acceptance because he’s done the homework(?) every one of his dullard brethren is too lazy to do. Ipso facto, he wins. Anyone who doubts this elegant graphic is a fool.

All of the world’s major religions are “nonsense,” on a par with Truther conspiracies about phantom planes and thermite bombs on 9/11. Indeed, the lists are better proof of what he doesn’t know anything about than anything he’s quite certain he does know about. Which is not much. Like all Professional Skeptics everywhere. They boast about the scientific method and never use it. The embark on every unanswered question with the conviction that any extraordinary claim is, a priori, without merit.

Point 2. He gives himself away with the architecture of his diagram. By giving himself away, I mean he is revealing his own sinister intention, perhaps without realizing it at a conscious level. His diagram is not Venn; it is Sacred Geometry. He is building a five-pointed star, a pentagram often claimed by Satanists but in fact conceived of by Christians and other religious faiths, including peoples from Vikings to the Chinese.

It’s esthetically pleasing but at its core it’s just a hard-hearted lie. The centerpiece he has so much trouble filling in is also Sacred Geometry, a pentagonal symbol that is a mathematical function of the surrounding star. It’s supposed to have meaning. But our Venn master has no meaning and is thus at a loss.

 

Or, to be more precise, this:

He is therefore using precisely the same kinds of deceptions he would cheerfully ascribe to people who espouse what he considers pseudo-science, quackery, and religion.

In conclusion, needless to say, he has a missing essay of his own and takes no accountability for it. This dumb chart is the sum total of his context. But that’s how we’ve chosen to live our lives in this, the 21st, century. Who really should be occupying this boy’s pentagon of elders? These guys.

 

 

Why is it so hard to see the wrong turns the “consensus” makes us take? Think of your mind as a table. Like a good skeptic, you accord yourself faith to those things which fit on the table, if they don’t fit, you just push them off the edge, out of existence.

Here’s how the Professional Skeptic table looks. Room for dinosaurs, apocalyptic fears, Darwinian Evolution, and Science & Technology. Kewl. Anything else? No way, José.

Thing is, their center pentagon still has no meaning. I’m thinking that for an atheist, the Venn rendering should look more like this.

But they think they have values, beliefs, and morals. Which turn out to be reducible to this.

All in all, this lavish Venn diagram is a beautiful example of what Urban Dictionary calls a Self-Eating Watermelon.

P.S. By the way, Satanists DO tend to get the credit for Sacred Geometry (i.e., Heretical Geometry), which like most symbols Satanic is merely stolen Christian imagery. Like their upside down cross. Very original. Their use of geometry is very much the same, namely upside down.

They flip the Spirit star point to the bottom and replace it with matters of material earthiness. Bracketed by the devil horns we all know and love. I’m not accusing Venn boy of anything, mind. If you want to play with his diagram in this bizarre context, feel free. I’m pretty sure he’s not a Satanist but just a not-too-bright garden variety atheist who knows way more than less than nothing.

 

*Sample Venn Diagram for those who don’t know how they work. This one is simple enough as to require no explanation. What one region overlaps is related to it somehow.

 

Epilogue… Or Prologue…

 

1968 was a series of hammer blows, one pain after another. 1969 was worse, the harrowing that followed. Not just broken bones but a kind of constant gnawing of our insides that ate out of us the core of American character, including our faith, hope, and charity as a people. Nothing in our nation has been the same since that year. We are coarser, lazier of thought, greedier in venal ways that would have appalled our parents. That was 50 years ago.

2018 was likewise a series of hammer blows, most importantly in terms of the body politic, where the root word “polity” finally proved itself an oxymoron if not a joke. The year was dominated by a ramping up of the most concerted attempt to destroy a sitting president by the mere expedients of never ceasing to accuse him, month after month after month, and then formalizing this obsession into an entity unto itself, called an investigation but consisting in reality of the equivalent of a SWAT team breaking into every home, and life, of the prime suspect’s family, friends, associates, and acquaintances, with the usual TV FBI result — no one home.

if 2019 follows the 50 year cycle of repetition, the coming year will be as loud as the continuously escalating liberal media hatred of Richard Nixon and as subtle as the unheralded arrival in this country of AIDS. Events will be not singly catastrophic but continuous, a deliberate and cynical death of a thousand cuts that may very well leave many of us gasping and enervated from loss of energy even to watch what is happening in our country for another day.

Maybe the Fates will be kind and spare us this sapping ordeal. But I fear not. In so many ways, like the children of the Sixties, we have asked for this, participated in it to some degree or at least failed to stand up strongly against it. Which means we likely deserve what we have brought upon ourselves.

You are, of course, free to disagree.

 

DEATH OF THE REPUBLIC