Projections of infinity

Tom Wolfe anticipated the failure of modern neuroscientists to discover the soul in his 1996 essay “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died”.

If I were a college student today, I don’t think I could resist going into neuroscience. Here we have the two most fascinating riddles of the twenty–first century: the riddle of the human mind and the riddle of what happens to the human mind when it comes to know itself absolutely. In any case, we live in an age in which it is impossible and pointless to avert your eyes from the truth.

Ironically, said Nietzsche, this unflinching eye for truth, this zest for skepticism, is the legacy of Christianity (for complicated reasons that needn’t detain us here). Then he added one final and perhaps ultimate piece of irony in a fragmentary passage in a notebook shortly before he lost his mind (to the late–nineteenth–century’s great venereal scourge, syphilis). He predicted that eventually modern science would turn its juggernaut of skepticism upon itself, question the validity of its own foundations, tear them apart, and self–destruct. I thought about that in the summer of 1994 when a group of mathematicians and computer scientists held a conference at the Santa Fe Institute on “Limits to Scientific Knowledge.” The consensus was that since the human mind is, after all, an entirely physical apparatus, a form of computer, the product of a particular genetic history, it is finite in its capabilities. Being finite, hardwired, it will probably never have the power to comprehend human existence in any complete way. It would be as if a group of dogs were to call a conference to try to understand The Dog. They could try as hard as they wanted, but they wouldn’t get very far. Dogs can communicate only about forty notions, all of them primitive, and they can’t record anything. The project would be doomed from the start. The human brain is far superior to the dog’s, but it is limited nonetheless. So any hope of human beings arriving at some final, complete, self–enclosed theory of human existence is doomed, too.

This, science’s Ultimate Skepticism, has been spreading ever since then. Over the past two years even Darwinism, a sacred tenet among American scientists for the past seventy years, has been beset by…doubts. Scientists—not religiosi—notably the mathematician David Berlinski (“The Deniable Darwin,” Commentary, June 1996) and the biochemist Michael Behe (Darwin’s Black Box, 1996), have begun attacking Darwinism as a mere theory, not a scientific discovery, a theory woefully unsupported by fossil evidence and featuring, at the core of its logic, sheer mush. (Dennett and Dawkins, for whom Darwin is the Only Begotten, the Messiah, are already screaming. They’re beside themselves, utterly apoplectic. Wilson, the giant, keeping his cool, has remained above the battle.) By 1990 the physicist Petr Beckmann of the University of Colorado had already begun going after Einstein. He greatly admired Einstein for his famous equation of matter and energy, E=mc2, but called his theory of relativity mostly absurd and grotesquely untestable. Beckmann died in 1993. His Fool Killer’s cudgel has been taken up by Howard Hayden of the University of Connecticut, who has many admirers among the upcoming generation of Ultimately Skeptical young physicists. The scorn the new breed heaps upon quantum mechanics (“has no real–world applications”…”depends entirely on fairies sprinkling goofball equations in your eyes”), Unified Field Theory (“Nobel worm bait”), and the Big Bang Theory (“creationism for nerds”) has become withering. If only Nietzsche were alive! He would have relished every minute of it!

Recently I happened to be talking to a prominent California geologist, and she told me: “When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren’t even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other.”

I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He’s floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can’t see it, but he’s much impressed. He names it God.

It’s one of his better essays. Read the whole thing. What it eventually comes down to is the obvious and incontrovertible fact that science cannot explain that which falls outside its conceptual limits. As human souls, we are projections of the infinite into material reality, which is why both physics and neuroscience have been unable to quantify, or even meaningfully describe, the phenomena of life and consciousness. Scientists will only ever be able to wrestle with the materially observable effects of those phenomena, because they lack the ability to directly observe the infinite.

And one of the primary goals of the Deceiver is to convince those projections that they have no connection to the infinite, and by doing so, eliminate it.

The ticket sale

Tanith Lee, the late, great dark fantasy writer, rather succinctly describes the putative appeal of the ticket to those who take it in Le Livre Safran:

“It is Lucifer, Lord Satan, who rules the world,” said the priest. “To survive here, we’re bound to worship him.”

He showed them a drawing on parchment, a rose transfixed by a dagger.

“Remember this sign. We meet here, under the old church. You will be obliged to render passwords. In time, who knows what riches and power we shall accumulate, through the favour of our Master. I myself,” he said, “survived the plague. That was his sign to me. God smote me, but Satan raised me to do his work and glorify him. You’re an artist of the City. Who spoke to you of this secret society?”

“Several,” said the young man. “But Motius the Artisan was once my tutor.”

“The magician? Yes. His house was burned up and flaming fiends carried him to Hell. You understand, there’s no escape at last. It ends in fire.”

“Hah. Yes.” The young man smiled.

“But meanwhile, a life of wishes fulfilled. His servants he never cheats. All the joys of the flesh, full dominion over others. The end is horror, but you may have three hundred years of pleasures before that payment comes due.”

Of course, even when the prince of this world purports to be telling the truth, he deceives. He ALWAYS cheats his servants; indeed, they are the only souls over whom he has total power to use and abuse as he sees fit. And when a servant ceases to be useful, he is, like Hawkins in The Dark is Rising or Harvey Weinstein in Hollywood, hurled from the Black Rider’s high horse to break upon the ground.

This is the primary danger of atheism and nihilism. These false philosophies render one susceptible to the illusion that one trades nothing for something of value when one is offered the ticket. But the reverse is considerably more close to being true.

An MD in New Orleans

One doctor’s clinical perspective on fighting Corona-chan.

I am an ER MD in New Orleans. Class of 98. Every one of my colleagues have now seen several hundred Covid 19 patients and this is what I think I know.

Clinical course is predictable.
2-11 days after exposure (day 5 on average) flu-like symptoms start. Common are fever, headache, dry cough, myalgias(back pain), nausea without vomiting, abdominal discomfort with some diarrhea, loss of smell, anorexia, fatigue.

Day 5 of symptoms- increased SOB, and bilateral viral pneumonia from direct viral damage to lung parenchyma.

Day 10- Cytokine storm leading to acute ARDS and multiorgan failure. You can literally watch it happen in a matter of hours.

81{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} mild symptoms, 14{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} severe symptoms requiring hospitalization, 5{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} critical.

Patient presentation is varied. Patients are coming in hypoxic (even 75{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3}) without dyspnea. I have seen Covid patients present with encephalopathy, renal failure from dehydration, DKA. I have seen the bilateral interstitial pneumonia on the xray of the asymptomatic shoulder dislocation or on the CT’s of the (respiratory) asymptomatic polytrauma patient. Essentially if they are in my ER, they have it. Seen three positive flu swabs in 2 weeks and all three had Covid 19 as well. Somehow this ***** has told all other disease processes to get out of town.

China reported 15{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} cardiac involvement. I have seen covid 19 patients present with myocarditis, pericarditis, new onset CHF and new onset atrial fibrillation. I still order a troponin, but no cardiologist will treat no matter what the number in a suspected Covid 19 patient. Even our non covid 19 STEMIs at all of our facilities are getting TPA in the ED and rescue PCI at 60 minutes only if TPA fails.

It sounds like they need to implement the TrumpCure+ as soon as possible. And the early observers who observed the need to prevent the cytokine storm with massive doses of Vitamin C, Vitamin D3, and zinc appear to have been precisely on point.

Cuomo for Biden?

It is beginning to look rather like the DNC establishment set up Joe Biden to drive off all the other candidates, then take a fall prior to the convention so they could hand-select their preferred anti-Trump candidate. Creepy Joe is already getting MeToo’d. And no, it’s not going to be Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama, since either of those two non-starters would be as easily destroyed by President Trump as either of those two non-starters.

If you’re paying attention, it’s pretty clear who they have in mind.

Some Democrats are openly talking up New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose profile has soared during the crisis, as a Biden stand-in. 

The prospective peaks

A former Corona-chan pessimist is revising his expectations for the better:

Government coronavirus advisors say crisis will be ‘over by Easter’ but warn the next two weeks will see a ‘continuous tsunami of cases’ – as they warn a THIRD of deaths are ‘healthy people’

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Professor Ferguson said: ‘London is going to be very difficult in the next two to three weeks.

‘All I would say is, with the lockdown now in place, those numbers are going to start to plateau. The challenge we have is there’s a lag. The people being admitted to hospital right now were infected a week, two weeks, even sometimes three weeks ago, so without doubt the next one [or] two weeks are going to be very difficult.’

I was wondering why Prof. Ferguson was changing his tune until I looked at the Italian statistics and realized what he also must have noticed. Now, I am no medical expert or epidemiologist, but if we simply apply basic math, logic and statistics, and we assume that the cases of infection will follow the statistical bell curve that many historical epidemics have exhibited, we can derive predictive estimates from the fact that Italy appears to have hit its new cases peak on March 21, with 6557 new cases and 793 new deaths. That was on Day 31 of the outbreak, so we can speculate that the Italian crisis will be largely over by April 22.

If the US situation follows a similar curve – which will probably not be the case due to the much larger geographic area – then the current urban hotspots should be hitting their peaks the week of April 5-11 and seeing the crises more or less come to an end around the first week of May.

On the theoretical downside, if the peak has not actually passed and this four-day statistical decline is just an Elliott Wave-style even countertrend, that would indicate that the Italian situation is at least an order of magnitude worse than it presently appears and the crisis will be extended. So, let’s hope that the new case numbers continue to decline.

The TrumpCure worketh

And apparently, the TrumpCure works even better if a megadose of Vitamin C is added for a TrumpCure+:

A physician in New York state claims he has used the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine and zinc to treat 350 patients for COVID-19 with 100 percent success.

In a video posted on YouTube, Dr. Vladimir Zelenko said he saw the symptom of shortness of breath resolved within four to six hours, the Gateway Pundit blog reported.

Zelenko, addressing his message to President Trump, said he’s a board-certified family practioner in the community of Kiryas Joel in Orange County, New York, in the Hudson Valley, about 50 miles north of New York City.

The bad guys must know the TrumpCure knocks out Corona-chan, because they’re trying very hard to shut it down and prevent the infected from being saved by it. These people are not only sick, they actively promote disease and death.

Free speech was never more than bait

Two federal judges have ruled that hate speech trumps free speech:

Feeling that the university violated his rights, Meriwether brought a lawsuit against the university late in 2018, aided by Alliance Defending Freedom. He argued that the university violated his rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments by punishing him for his speech in addressing students and his refusal to refer to Doe as a woman and thereby “lend credence to cultural ideas Dr. Meriwether does not share or wish to advance.”

On September 5, 2019, U.S. Magistrate Judge Karen Litkovitz, to whom the case had been assigned, completely dismissed Meriwether’s complaint.  The crux of her ruling was that (citing a 1989 Sixth Circuit case), “Universities may sanction professors whose pedagogical attitudes and teaching methods do not conform to institutional standards.” Thus, First Amendment rights and academic freedom fall before the scythe of “institutional standards” shaped by the perceived need to satisfy the most aggressive “woke” students.

Then, on February 12, U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott upheld Judge Litkovitz’s dismissal of the case. Meriwether’s attorneys immediately appealed the dismissal to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

There is no free speech. It’s nothing more than an attempt to overturn Christian blasphemy laws, many of which are still on the books in various jurisdictions. All free speech has ever been is an attempt to convince Western civilization to put down its guard and allow the wicked to freely spread their propaganda and wizard spells.

In the mouths of the wicked, “freedom” is just the English translation of non serviam.

Corona-chan comes for Prince Charles

Prince Charles has tested positive for coronavirus, suffering mild symptoms. He is self-isolating at his home in Scotland with the Duchess of Cornwall, who does not have the virus, Clarence House has confirmed. A statement released on Wednesday morning, said that it was “not possible to ascertain” from whom His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales had caught the virus, but that he had been continuing to work from home “throughout the last few days as usual.”

Well, that’s not going to inspire calm and tranquility in the UK. But in related news, Corona-chan is good for nationalist trade policy:

Pharmacists are urging UK drug firms to manufacture paracetamol in Britain amid a nationwide shortage caused by panic buying and production lines drying up in Asia amid the coronavirus crisis.

Britain relies heavily on India – the world’s biggest supplier of generic drugs – for the painkiller, but the South Asian nation has restricted exports of the painkiller after factories in China, where the ingredient is mainly made, ground to a halt…. UK manufacturers now need to step up and start making the painkiller in Britain to prevent the ‘grim reality’ of COVID-19 patients not being able to get pain relief, pharmacists say.

Free Trade Kills. That’s the important takeaway here. Open Borders = Open Virus.

Stilt-Man vs the SJWarriors

Science fiction grandmaster and classic comics aficionado John C. Wright contemplates the results of a minor Marvel villain, Stilt-Man, facing off against Marvel’s new superhero team, the new New Warriors (2020 SJW edition). Read the whole thing there.

Let us say Stilt-Man has decided to rob a helicopter. Let us moreover say that Screentime uses his power of the netsurfing to come across a police bulletin, twitter post, or cellphone selfie showing the crime in progress.

Perhaps the crime takes place very nearby to the Old Folk’s Home where Fat Chance, the diversity hire orphan girl, is pulling cakes and pastries out of her god-given backpack (not the god you are thinking of, however) to share with the elderly and unloved senior citizens. They watch in awe as she consumes whole peach pies in one gulp.

Now, according to the official Marvel continuity, vigilante activity is illegal in the United States, and the government has passed ‘Kamala’s Law’ making teenagers doing vigilante activity even more illegal. So the teen heroes don their supersuits, and the bold yet chubby leader dons her double plus extra large sized supersuit. Not a single one of them wears masks or otherwise hides his identity. Except for Safespace, who does not wear a mask mask to hid ‘their’ identity.

So Fat Chance, the leader, waddles to the scene, puffing!

Meanwhile, Snowflake and Safespace are embracing each other with undue intimacy for a brother and sister (but it is perfectly fine, since the sister is neither male nor female, so technically she is his sibling, but not his sister). They see the Fat Signal, which Fat Chance pulls from her god-given backpack (not the god you are thinking of, however).

The amazing powers of Snowflake do not allow her to create a giant slide made of ice, like Iceman, nor to fly, like Snowbird, so she and her brother just run there. Fortunately, despite his girl hips and lack of muscle tone, he is a stereotypical jock, and get there while the crime is still in progress!

Screentime uses his power of internet connection to hire an Uber. In this case, the driver is Willy Lumpkin, the mailman for the Baxter Building, doing odd jobs to pick up some extra cash in his off hours

So the combat is joined!

Fat Chance rummages into her god-given backpack (but it is not the god you are thinking of) and pulls out a tuba, or perhaps a tortoise shell, or a taco, or a tape recorder, or a tea set, or a tricycle. But let us say, against all odds, she pulls out something useful, like a Tommy gun, and opens fire. Her flab wiggles and flaps in an alarming yet unsightly fashion from the jarring recoil of the hammering gunfire!

At the same time, Snowflake creates a dozen whirling, razor sharp crystal shuriken, and throws then with the full strength of her non-binary arm!

Screentime gets out of the Uber car and pays the driver, Willy Lumpkin, using Paypal, a convenient service that allows one to pay for goods and services over the internet! And, uh, he looks up information on Wikipedia about Stilt-Man or something, diagramming the battle suit.

Then B-Negative finds a convenient updraft, and launches himself skyward, closing with Stilt-Man, his bad attitude of which he has proud ownership displayed in his nonchalant yet abrasive teen demeanor!

Stilt-Man can detect the attack with his rear and downward view mirrors (not show in the diagram above) and can duck under the initial swoop by quickly retracting his legs!

The Stilt-Man armor was seen to be bulletproof in its first appearance back in Daredevil comics. The non-binary arm of the shuriken throwing sexual deviant cannot possibly top a thirty-story building, nor strike harder than a bullet. So both the snowflake-shaped crystal shuriken and the Tommy gun (or whatever) pulled out of the god-given backpack (not the god you are thinking of) simply bounce off.

And they do not bounce off Stilt-Man’s chest, by the way. A Tommy gun’s effective range is about 300 feet when fired level, less so when fired straight up, so the man himself is out of range. Shuriken and bullets alike are bouncing from the lower or upper segments of his stilts.

Then Stilt-Man steps on Fat Chance.

But let us say her life is saved by Safespace, who has enfolded her instinctively in a pink force field, which can protect others but not himself. So Stilt-Man steps on Safespace instead, with a hydraulic ram able to smash through a brick wall. Now, the information says Safespace can protect others, so if he casts his pink bubble of protection around the beached-whale bulk of the team leader, he can hide in her voluminous and extensive shadow, safe from attacks issue from that quarter to that half of the horizon. But, alas, Stilt-Man is the one villain able to step over the massive flesh blob of the leader, and approach the unprotected Safespace from above.

Our stereotypical jock with his girlish hips and Bambi eyelashes is not noted for having the super senses and reflexes of Daredevil, nor the spidersense of Spider-Man, and so he gets pounded into the pavement like a tentpeg and will spend the next fifteen issues in a full body cast, while every bone in his body except his left ulna are mending.

With Safespace out of the way, the force-field goes away, and Stilt-Man punts the fat girl and the non-binary ninja wannabe across Times Square with one sweep of his stilt-legs that can overturn a truck.

Ah, but the kid who is not Morbius joins the fray!

His superhuman strength is … wait for it … exactly the same as Stilt-Man’s in his armor. And his speed when he glides is … wait for it … exactly the same as Stilt-Man’s with his legs extended. But Stilt-Man is armored and B Negative is not. So Stilt-Man simply clocks him from fifty yards away with his telescoping fist which is strong enough to shatter brick walls.

If that does not work, Stilt-Man shoots him with knock out gas, and the teen bloodsucker with bad attitude plummets to the ground thirty stories, also crushed into jelly and with all his bones broken. But he can regenerate from wounds, so he will eventually get better.

He will rise again, and give chase. But, as was before said, since Stilt-Man travels at the same speed on his Stilts as the glider wings of Morbius (and presumably, Morbius lite here), Stilt-Man carrying the loot from the robbed helicopter stilts away on his long legs.

Meanwhile, Screentime is watching nonbinary incest porn on the internet. Stilt-Man does not bother to step on him, because how would he even know Screentime is on the superhero team?