Wilful

 Wilful Blindness  
( .. Folding results from gravity collapse, not colliding continents.  )

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"To know or to delibately *not* know, :: Zat iz ze Qvestion, Vladimir." "Zigackly, Boris, .. 'hic!"

Fig.1.  'MEDICINE' :=: The sugar pill of Plate Tectonics, or the bitter truth of an Earth getting bigger.

The Challenge for Earth science is to make a choice - either to remain with the stale hash of contradictions that Plate Tectonics has served the Earth sciences with for the last half century (and unless something is done about it, looks like it might serve it for another half century), or to roll boldly forward where some have gone before and add to their achievement by saying that not only is the Earth round, rotating and orbiting the sun, but that it is also getting bigger. What could be simpler, .. round, rotating, orbiting the Sun - and getting bigger .. .. (?)

..And flatter. The  Earth keeps getting flatter than it used to be. When are those two geezers on the park bench going to waken up? (We might well ask. ..)

The mustard is cut. The Big Ship is turning.

Sundry

20181004 (Trump's reported "mocking"  
watched on youtube) https://tinyurl.com/y8r2hlqm

He challenged her on her facts, and actually (thereby) adds fuel to her fire, when he should have targeted her emotional manipulation. Apart from managing to escape (@5:50mins) through a locked door (@4:05mins), her complaining about a teenage romp with a couple of drunken louts at a pool party (the one-piece bathing suit under the clothes - though she couldn't remember a venue - possibly because there were many at the time in her circle) who were a year or so older than her and one of whom was drunk enough to fall off the bed (which for me added a light touch to what sounded more like a comic romp than anything else) and classifying it as "sexual assault /violence", is an affront to women who have to live with it every day of their lives. 

Well, true or not, if it goes down she has to be ticketed as someone who knows exactly how to pull the emotional strings of others.  I noticed that throughout the narrative there was no attempt at all to collect herself once the bedroom scene was told. If the appropriate response to the memory of an event some thirty-odd years ago is more serious than just dinner-table bemusement, then the woman is maybe getting confused with other more serious (and hidden /forgotten /projected /unresolved) issues. What sort of paragons of virtue do people want to represent them to sit in judgement of their peers anyway (her Central Point in speaking out, by the way - not the assault itself, and somewhat cleverly displaced in the narrative) (and very much a questionable motive, especially for a psychologist).  You would have thought she would have been able to demarcate the two a bit better, given the global venue.  It's not the woman who's screwed up in my opinion, it's all those who are buying it.

And therein may lie the next big subterrannean story to come out of the woodwork as all the witches in the forest congregate under the full moon and lather themselves with all sorts of 'men' issues, .. though it has to be said (since we're saying), that men have much to answer for in the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost when it comes to all sorts of things - like not opening their mail, .. or taking the bin out when they should ('coz nobody else will), .. or mansplaining, .. or .. ..

In the world of back then 'Chinatown', was a different place.

Same time, same place (Chinatown) :=:  I Watched it last night. Very strange the way that things conspire to punctuate life with meaning.  Here's Jack getting a few clues and reflecting on teenage years. The waitress by the way *does* respond with appropriate indignation - but we do wonder what she might have to say in fond reflection thirty-five years later.  [Film Chinatown, director Roman Polanski with :-  Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunnaway, a codger, .. and an elderly waitress copping a complimentary feel.]

By extension of this 'vignette' on political life however, and what is *truly* disturbing, is the insidious and pervasive fashionable adoption of vocal fry, up-speak (/up-squeak, /up-squeal)  as a vocal badge of societal 'connectedness', particularly by women .  It has deliberate infantile appeal that subverts even further the transition from adolescence to adulthood (and responsibility) that seems to have stuttered to a halt at a time when ínstitutional 'bad behaviour' is rife. There is a lack of sense-of-proportion in many things that reflect an inversion of common sense, and that is hidden in the words used, e.g., "political correctness" - a semantic displacement for deliberately confusing the relationship of the individual to the group in order to exert control. Reversal of the world to the self (rather than the self to the world) (which former defines the psychopath) is a balance that seems currently to be very seriously out of kilter, greatly helped by Social Media and 'Fake' News (remembering that the colours flying from the ship today are, more than ever, no guarantee of authenticity or veracity.)

"We live in interesting times .."

[Added 20181011] 
 Christine Blasey Ford   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFL6k5yOAFM
 Jordan Peterson on Free speech and the right to offend  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44pERGAaKHw

She sells sea shells ..

Two thousand years of Pilgrims progressing?
( .. "the Earth is flat and that's that" .. )

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(From the archives)
 

A seat in the front row - and a contemplative mo. 

Sunset. There's just something about it, isn't there?  Especially when we see it from some westwards vantage overlooking the sea, and pause to consider that yet another day of our allotted three-score-and-ten has, with the setting of the sun, sunk beneath the waves.

Breathtaking in its beauty, magisterial in its command over all earthly things, the sun descends to our line of sight and reminds us once more of our impermanence and the cold night that follows its beneficence as the giver of life, and we are further minded to dwell on the unknowable that is at once magical, mysterious and portentous.  But night is encroaching and there's a bus to catch, we have to go home, and do (whatever) all over again the next day.

And so these ephemera of the mind, sisters two - inscrutable mystery (with her hair up) and existential mundanity (with her hair down) - set with the sun.
 
But up-and-down, in-and-out, back-and-forth, over time we're getting there, .. working it out, often by reinventing the wheel as we back-track to undo the errors that were first thought to be 'progress'. The world turns and the sun sets, and the cold, cold nights of encroaching destiny are shoving plates of crust down the gurgler, causing  (as S.W. Carey once said), the Pacific to disappear up (/down)  it's own "Rim of Fire".

  

"But the notion of a spreading ridge crabbing obliquely down its own subduction sink   under California, while continuing to excrete towards the Pacific but swallow from the   Atlantic; is as hallucinatory as a maw vanishing into its own anus, or really the reverse, if   that is any easier to conceive."  (1976, Expanding Earth, p.57)

So the world turns and the sun sets.  There is even a rate of exchange for gurgling as night falls and the Earth gets cold.

However 'modern' we might consider ourselves to be we should not assume that we are any more mindful than those who have gone before. Indeed it is by their collective efforts that we are where we are today, but denied a window to the future we cannot see where the endeavours of past and present will lead. And certainly we should not assume that any 'advance' is necessarily towards veracity or benefit.  Though it might seem so at the time, history tells us that otherwise is often the case.

And in a very considerable way this is where understanding of our world begins, with interrogating those terrestrial elements in the picture - Earth, sun, sea and sky of which we ourselves are made - Earth, both above and below the sea, with its hills and mountains, plains and strands and all growing /living things that either eat or are eaten, .. the sea itself (water, the giver of life), and the air we breath - the three foundations to our understanding of our immediate environment), which, tellingly, we now call 'spheres' when obviously the Earth is flat (well it is, .. isn't it?). (twitink to round earth).

'Tellingly', ..because it is in the transition of our perceptions of scale, of flatness to curvedness, wherein lies the key to understanding the geological history of the Earth.

More than two thousand years ago the Greeks discerned the spherical shape of the Earth and that the flatness apparent in the picture above was an illusion of scale, but more than two thousand years later there are still people who (it is said) are impervious to logic,  and believe the Earth to be as flat as they see it.   And they do make a good point - which is that skepticism is, or should be (regretfully it seems no longer to be so) the essence of science, raising the question where, exactly, do we draw the line between believing what others in supposed intellectual authority tell us, and what our own common sense tells us? Surely scepticism can be taken to extremes.  But it is the extreme that makes the point :-  

" In an age where ­astronauts send photographs of a spherical planet from an orbiting space station, how can the concept of a flat Earth persist? Shenton says, "Look at what special effects are capable of: you can produce any photograph, any video. I don't think there is solid proof. I'm not intentionally being stubborn about it, but I feel our senses tell us these things, and it would take an extraordinarily level of evidence to counteract those. How many people have actually investigated it? Have you?" [Good question? How much do we unquestioningly take on authority? d.f.] Zeteticism, Shenton says, emphasises experience and reason over the ­"trusting acceptance of dogma" – or, it seems, overwhelming evidence. Only a personal trip into space to see the world as it is for himself would persuade him. "But even then, in seeing it, I would have to be convinced there weren't any tricks involved." [ David Adam, The Guardian, Wednesday 24 February 2010 09.39 AEST]

Flat-Earthers are usually the butt of ridicule (Link), but intentionally or not Shenton is actually drawing attention to a malaise that is more pervasive in society than is healthy.  For if we cannot trust the leaders of our various institutions to tell it like it is, then we're on our way to hell in a handbasket.  And confidence in our institutional leaders is not high for the simple reason that 'telling it like it is', is regarded as a hindrance, certainly not a priority.  Too often, unfortunately, the priority is the power that high office offers to those who seek it.  We can easily judge their caliber by their propensity for spin, slogans and management-speak, and we would hope that this might be an obvious disqualification, but almost universally it seems that those who excel in this come to be preferred candidates, aided by others who would exploit the darker side of social cohesion [group-think and mob-mentality].  Thus there is a broader indictment that reflects on those who would elect them.   Shenton is simply illustrating what happens when we get a clue that our trust is being abused and scepticism overwhelms logic and reason, and there is a serious disconnect.  If this happens in a community then it becomes pervaded by the inverse of those values that should hold it together.  No need to spell them out.

Fossils origins.  If two thousand years ago the Greeks could deduce a round Earth, and who else before them may also have (but for one reason or another were not able to enclose their findings in the pages of history) it seems hardly likely they would be stumped by the ordinary commonsense reasoning anyone could exercise to explain fossils simply by walking along a beach and witnessing the carnage of carcasses and skeletons of sea animals in the sand, and the clear correspondence with fossils in the sandstone cliffs behind, or further inland.  

And of course the ancient Greeks were not stumped.    W.N. Edwards writes, ..

" Among the Greeks at about the same time there were at any rate some who have grasped the true nature of fossils.  Thus in the sixth century BC Xenophanes is said to have observed impressions of small fishes in the rocks of Paros, and marine shells on inland mountains.  Pythagoras (according to Ovid) and Xanthus of Sardis are also reported to have accepted the occurrence of these shells as an indication that the mountains were at one time under the sea.  There is a well-known passage on the same subject in Herodotus, who observed marine shells in Egypt and concluded that they had been left there by the sea. "

Yet for the following centuries :-

".. The common-sense views of Herodotus and others were replaced by fantastic and mystical explanations of all sorts.  For some ten centuries there is indeed little to record concerning fossils.  The barren disputes of the Schoolmen, and the strange hypotheses founded on current dogmatic theology, then occupied the field for several hundred years, and not until the end of the seventeenth century was the battle over the origin of fossils really won.  "Instead of solid and experimental philosophy," wrote Henry Power in 1663, "it has been held accomplishment enough to graduate a student if he could but stiffly wrangle out a vexatious dispute of some old peripatetic qualities, or the like, which (if translated into English)  signified no more than a heat 'twixt two oyster wives in Billingsgate."  [W.N. Edwards, The early history of palaeontology.p.1,  British Museum of Natural History,  London 1967; 2nd edition (1976) - originated as a guide to a temporary exhibit in 1931.]

And from China in the year ~ ` 527A.D. :-

"At Stone-Fish Mountain in Hsiang-Hsiang Hsien there is a lot of non-magnetic iron ore (hsian shih).  It is dark in colour and veined like mica.  If you split open the outer layer there are always shapes of fishes inside, with scales and fins, heads and tails, just as if they were carved or painted.  They are several inches long, and their details are perfect.  If burnt they will even give off a fishy smell."  .. [Li Tao-Yuan (?-527), Shui Ching Chu, Chapter 38, p.3a)

For an example of this dichotomy of the mind, the medieval notions of fossils are particularly instructive because they illustrate, first sight at least, how skewed simple and ordinary logic can become. However it seems (to me at least) hardly likely that the purveyors of such fantastical 'views' as those described later during the Middle Ages [e.g., Edwards reference above] were serious, but if they were, then possibly those views may be read as much as anything as attempts to remain within the religio-political mores of the time. 

Reading such accounts for a second time  - of "sports of nature" caused by "plastic forces and formative virtues" and "seminal auras' within the Earth - leads one to consider if a code of sorts was being employed to subvert the inquisitorial intentions of the Catholic Church.  Given the creepy treatment that Galileo endured at the hands of the Church it is highly possible that science, being forced underground, might have been resorting to tactics similar to those used in more recent times by the Arts in the former Soviet Union where doublespeak was employed to communicate views that clearly contravened the Church's (Religionism or Communism) views and could earn the death penalty.  Either that or they were perhaps the views of 'willing idiots', being voiced to gain favour with more powerful interests.  Even such as getting a job in a school?  Maybe.  

 It hardly seems likely that people with an ounce of common sense could ignore the obvious when a simple walk along a beach would tell all that was necessary of fossil origins, and had been spelt out centuries before by the Greeks.  How hard was it then to make the connection between sands of the beach and the shells buried them,  and the stony shells that were buried in the sandstone beds that formed the adjacent shore?  Lithifaction, whatever words are used to describe it ('fluxing salts', 'plastic virtues', 'seminal auras'), is still lithifaction.  But in the face of possible denouncement by friends and neighbours it may be no wonder that a person might feign fantastic views if he thought they gained favour with standard religious ones.   The Church (both scientific and religious) has a lot to answer for when it comes to holding up progress in science, particularly for its influence on the malleable mind of youth and its consequently neutered adult one.  

The social media hype of today evidences a powerful need to belong, and with that comes, for some,  a license to want to be seen to belong more than others. Can we wonder, then, at the inventiveness of some explanations for something that seems virtually self-evident? Though with "failed seeds of life", and reasoning such as (quote from Edwards cited above) :-

" Eduard Lhuyd (1660-1709)  maintained .. "that fossils developed from "moist seed-bearing vapours" which rose from the sea and penetrated the earth, perhaps carried down by rain."

...  we do have to wonder at the relative importance of artificial device over genuine dopeyness - or the role played by bandwagoners hoping for limelight. However we must remember too that times change and that a written opinion then may have meant something quite different from one of today.  Were Moses alive today, would his commandments carry the same weight if disseminated by email?  Or what if he put an entry in the personal column of the evening newspaper?  I think not.  There has been an irreversible shift in communication by the media available to us - "the medium is the message" and all that - and we are not entitled to make judgements on any 'outlandish media-evil views' when we fail to account for context and intent coloured by social mores of the time.

I guess we'll never know exactly how to read those views.  But one thing is certain - the minds that invented them - if they got to writing them down the way they did - were no different in their intellectual capacity from those that write today.  In fact given the hurdle of challenges to actually do that - commit word to paper in the cold and darkness of winter - they were probably substantially superior, or at least more driven.  

Mountains.  In conclusion and to further illustrate the point (of the 'then-and-now' similarites and the things that get in the way) this quotation, also from Edwards, seems particularly apposite. : -

"Concerning mountains and the fossils found in them, Avicenna [980-1037A.D.] writes :- Mountains may be due to two different causes.  Either they are effects of upheavals of the crust of the earth, such as might occur during a violent earthquake, or they are the effect of water, which, cutting for itself a new route, has denuded the valleys, the strata being of different kinds, some soft, soft hard.  The winds and waters disintegrate the one, but leave the other intact.  Most of the eminences of the earth have had this latter origin.  It would require a long period of time for all such changes to be accomplished, during which the mountains themselves might be somewhat diminished in size.  But that water has been the main cause of these effects is proved by the existence of fossil remains of aquatic and other animals on many mountains." (From A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, by J.W. Draper, who does not state the exact source of the quotation.) "

A thousand years ago?  I don't think it is said any better today.  The Church of course appropriated fossils as evidence for The Flood, thereby imbuing common sense with a superfluous religiosity (and Plate Tectonics speaks in tongues of "colliding plates") but I guess we could say that water such as constitutes the oceans of the Earth *is* very much a flood of sorts. It just didn't happen in Moses' time - whenever that was, given that the Moses Story was handed down by word of mouth until the old testament was committed to paper (/papyrus).

The Flood :-   is not a theological issue - it is simply a question of dates. Walking the beach and doing the sunset thing goes back to antiquity.  Writing it down in the fifth and sixth centuries BC utilised the then existing technology to create a record.  An Old Testament some three hundred years later and a new post-Jesus Christ one speaks for itself as regards Johnnies-come-lately :-:  fossils representing the remains of animal life preserved in cemented beach material by some sort of "plastic salty virtues" in rocks that all around the Mediterranean were flat-as-a-tack and hardly differentiated from the beach material itself, .. well, .. lithifaction would have been virtually tacit knowledge long before the writing down of any old testament that these were the remains of sea animals that once lived, and, in a curious way, give a clue to the essence of life. Religion has no copyright whatsoever on common sense, and we should beware of anyone who speaks in tongues to (dis-)colour reality (including government) (and much of  Earth science too). .

Any religious canon talking about Earth Sea and Sky and the creation of All Living Things would naturally have incorporated such-like common-sense lore as best it could ..

"She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore .. " [.. even children .. .. .. ]

.. though giving emphasis of course to the theological, rather than geological, intent in the writing.  In other words, the natural origin of fossils even then would have been tacit knowledge regardless of religious texts written afterwards attributing them to some heeby-jeeby jumbo-mumbo.  Of course the land was flooded.  Its littoral margins still are.  It's not a theological issue, .. probably wasn't then either.  It's just a beat up by the 'Shentons' who prefer to adhere to their own religious version of the world, rather than common sense.

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Religion is comforting, where common sense can be greatly disturbing, particularly when it hits on a truth with implications for other truths in a domino-like chain reaction.  Avoid both and be your own person.  Make it up as you go and why not 'cos everybody else does - merchants of spin and management speakers - rolling it out and going forward, working towards something that you can bet your bottom dollar has nothing to do with you.
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And so, by a series of retrospectives and fast-forwards we have travelled to the Greece of two-and-a-half thousand years ago and back again - twice, .. once to juxtapose the recorded origins of roundness of the Earth with today's flat-Earth believers (and thereby to highlight the importance of scepticism in science), .. then again to juxtapose the ancient but commonsensical and right view of the origin of fossils with the peculiar but much later views of the Middle Ages - probably skewed by an Inquisitorial Church.  And finally ending with fossils again, getting a forty-days and forty-nights beat-up by The Biblical Flood.  Along the way we have also noted the views of a thousand years ago on mountains being no different from those of today.  [So much for two thousand years of progress in thinking - or observing.]

Thus we have highlighted :-  That just as the Catholic Church sought to skew the common sense of the biological origins of fossils towards the great big jumbo-mumbo of  "The Flood", geophysics has sought to skew geological reality by conflating earthquakes, the faults they represent and the destruction wreaked when they happen,  with "slab strength"  in order to introduce what has become the dogma of  "The New Global Tectonics".

Where will it all end?

( Who knows.  We haven't even started yet. )
--->

With Earth expansion, that's where, when the slabs of subduction zones are discarded and the Wadati-Benioff zone is reinstated as Benioff originally had it - as a great big MOAF - (Mother Of All Faults), .. the one dislocating the continental lithosphere from the asthenosphere - in a hugely extensional way.

[There are probably a few views here I might take issue with myself tomorrow, so don't hold me to them.]

".. The Earth is flat - and that's that. .."
 

Lemuria

[From the archives (don's blog - reposted)]

 Plate Tectonics and Landy Lemuria
( .. My part in the downfall of Plate Tectonics .. )

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Fig. 1.  Who remembers Lemuria?   Action Lady, Queen of the Continent that never was, is about to throw the Big Switch and create the ridge displacements of the ocean floor, which will let the Plate Tectonic genie out of the bottle.

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(...The pinnafore ... .. just in case she needs the kitchen. ) 

(.. The bazookas? ... ... Ask Madonna.)

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Fashions various :-

"Geologists, like other people are susceptible to fads.  Although most geologists believe plate tectonics is an exciting theory and accept it as a working model of the earth, the theory may or may not be correct.  Most geologists today believe that plates exist and move.  But widespread belief in a theory does not make it true.  Two hundred years ago geologist "knew" that basalt crystallised out of sea water.  In the 1800s glacial deposits were thought to be deposited by Noah's flood.  Both of these incorrect ideas were finally disproved by decades of exacting field work and often bitter debate." [ 1 ] [ 2 ].

" Forty years ago continental drift rated only a footnote in most introductory textbooks.  Now there are many believers in continental motion and text books use it as a framework for the entire field of physical geology.  Although the idea of continental stability provided the framework for many past textbooks, today the idea that continents are fixed in position rates only a footnote as an outmoded concept. [link lost; (find another.  There are lots similar.)] [Interesting wordsearch checklink dates April 2018]

On Continental Drift:- 

 "...Utter, damned rot!" said the president of the prestigious American Philosophical Society. 

"....If we are to believe [this] hypothesis, we must forget everything we have learned in the last 70 years and start all over again," said another American scientist.

"...Anyone who "valued his reputation for scientific sanity" would never dare support such a theory", said a British geologist. 

 "Thus did most in the scientific community ridicule the concept that would revolutionize the earth sciences and revile the man who dared to propose it, German meteorological pioneer and polar explorer Alfred Wegener. Science historians compare his story with the tribulations of Galileo." http://www.pangaea.org/wegener.htm

mole

Posting note
( .. .. )

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< back >
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This posting was interrupted by the killings in Paris by Islamic State. I delayed posting because I could see that by viewing a page beginning with an illustration of religious iconography readers might get the wrong idea and think I was exploiting religious sensitivities, particularly (in view of those shootings) in taking a tilt against Islam. Which I am not. .. Well, I am not taking a tilt against Islam (although 'Islam' - according to the multiple and various interpretations that are put on it - is heavily implicated in the current events, news of which was just coming in as I was posting), but I hope I am offending those sensitivities that see a role for religion in organising political affairs. If the Theocracy of Islam happens to be particularly good at that, then I'm agin' it on that score. But, .... 

Before continuing, I had better explain. 

I'm actually voicing a larger concern - that organised religion as a whole is motivated to appropriate ordinary human (/'spiritual') values, and, beginning with the child, preys on the natural tendency of people to put trust in others' goodwill, and thereby lead them by the nose up the garden path in the name of something that is supposedly good. Not that I am against 'goodwill' of course, though I have to confess the older I get, the more grumpy (cynical) I find myself to be. There's just so much bullshit around, .. so you have to be careful what you do with yours. Trust is essential to living a life, and is (I think) the default setting. That's why lowest common denominators can, when they feel like it, have a field day. It just takes one low-life cat among all those nice cuddly pidgeons to .. (if you get my drift). 

But there is nothing good about coercing the most emotionally vulnerable. So even more particularly I'm objecting to the way that theocrats - by commission (cultural sanction) and omission (dog whistling - giving tacit approval while expressing abhorrence), invoke 'religion' to manipulate others for self-serving political ends and their own power. Religious practices that exploit the weak need to be repudiated in the strongest possible way. And this, by no means, is restricted to Islam. 

Islamic State insist that these killings are carried out in large part for religious reasons. In the past, the intrusion of religion into political affairs proved to be a disastrous failure that western democracy sought to correct centuries ago. To see it raise its head again, particularly when this is coupled with the increasingly strident tone of religious affiliations of political elites in powerful nations (e.g. America), is unacceptable, dangerous, and highlights the darker subterannean currents of religion that stir society generally. 

Abhorent though these killings are, there is a certain, in-principle tit-for-tat rationale to them - "collateral damage" of a 'state-of-war', .. even though it is as Pope Francis says, "in bits" (remembering that it took the deaths of nearly thirty million people to stop the last one that was carried out (partially and arguably wholly) in the name of biblical genocide). 

So why am I objecting to religion? Because I see in it exactly the same cognitive deficit (/failure /displacements) that has led to Plate Tectonics in Earth science, namely legitimising figments of imagination by 'groupthink' and attempting thereby to give them physical substance when in reality they have even less than a will o' the wisp. The parallels are remarkable. 

However the really objectionable (and dangerous) thing is the power that comes to be wielded through a symbiotic, reciprocative, societal need of people to belong to a group. 

 Expressed through people's succeptibility to received wisdom from others whom they credit with authority, and its manipulation by those others for self-serving ends, this power has no foundational trappings, no substance in realism or resource. It is a power that is unconditionally bestowed, and received, by warrant, and therefore has no accountability. It is naked and absolute. Anyone can wield it, and whoever does can do so for great good or incomprehensible harm. Even as the parable of the Emperor's New Clothes adds the scalps of National Socialism and Dictatorial Authoritarianism (/'communism') of the last century to its belt, by the killings in Paris we are reminded yet again of the harm that can be done when individuals feel empowered by allegiance to a religious authority to do things in its name that otherwise by their own accountability to their own, they would not. 

This is especially dangerous today because of the nihilistic direction that popular culture has taken in the wake of those theoretical -ísms that, made bane by their corruption, have been laid to rest. But the source of their power can always arise again in another form. Rather than being a solution for mayhem, that "old-time religion" may well turn out to be a cause of it, creating a chain reaction of more problems in ways that we cannot imagine [link], and that could make the downfall of the Roman Empire and the still-born failure of a 'Third Reich' (from this to this) seem like a cup of spilt milk. ['Milk', and .. "Give me the child until he is seven."] 

 .................... 

So, that is why I am objecting to religion (and its deistic derivatives). Because through a serendipitous visit to the Oracle at Delphi I came to realise that Plate Tectonics (in science) and Religion (in human affairs) are closer similars than I thought. People have to be nuts to believe (in) either - forgivable up to a point for religion (one's spiritual issues /values are nobody else's business - though in some instances culture might well be), .. but not for science. Something is going on here that needs attention, .. and revision. The killings in Paris are simply the catalyst that has raised awareness of the problems that can arise when religion is conflated with politics, or, more exactly, with the failure of politics. What happens when religion is conflated with science? Intelligent Design if you are lucky; or Boko Haram if you're not. 

 Everybody needs to sit up and pay attention here. So long as politics spawns disaffection and hopelessness, this will continue. Society, under the rubric of religion, is at war with itself only this time, unlike the last when it became polarised in National Socialism, it is more like the breakout of a diffused cancer than a malignancy with a specific core that can be excised with a single snip. 

Previously I would have said that religion, with its displacements in metaphor and symbolism and the gobbledegook of theo-speak, has nothing to contribute but confusion, and for it to "keep off the grass", but I am wondering if, by a similar displacement, the Pope's duet with Shakira at the United Nations General Assembly was another dog whistle, this one being directed to the crew of his sinking ship, .. at least the one they have previously known. 

 Fig.4  The captain's cabin - looking towards the stern of the Big Ship which is showing a slight list to port, suggesting there could be a storm brewing.  ("Passing through the eye of a needle"and all that.)

Do we have a leader, making 'religion' relevant again?  [The Third World War "ïn bits".]  Pope Francis does look to me like the sort of a coot who would be quite happy in a lifeboat, though it has to be said he would have to choose his crew carefully.  If that 'duet' with Shakira was officially sanctioned, then there are more than a few would be very willing to toss him overboard - "by the light of a silvery moon".  I mean, would the U.N have asked her beforehand what song she planned to sing (her being forward with the rights of the child and all that), ..but then, being cognisant of possible papal sensitivities, would they have cleared it with the Pope?  Or are we supposed to see it as an ambush, and letting her do a 'Pussy Riot' on him ..  like they did on Putin?

 It is possible.  The Vatican has had a troubled relationship with the United Nations over population control for a long time, so it is interesting to see even as I write, that Pope Francis has opened St Peter's Holy Door and said that "by passing through it, Catholics should take on the role of the Good Samaritan".  Symbolism (re. "the eye of the needle")? or another dogwhistle with larger intent?

Remains to be seen.

[ Sicily as a litmus test?]

 "How high's the water Momma?"

( Let's hope he's got a long pair of wellies.)

20151115.
20151208
20161121   Yup, .. he's on track.