Chappie Says Ben Carson is So Wrong He's HALF RIGHT about the Pyramid!

Chappie knows it's hardly fair or helpful to join in the fray when someone has exposed himself as Ben Carson has on...let's see...the issue of the pyramids of ancient Egypt being constructed by Joseph son of Jacob as grain storage facilities? That's the one. Carson's religious faith tells him this must be true. Many folks snicker. Chappie, you see, laughed too because he thinks he is smarter than Ben, who has left his metaphorical fly unzipped, thus exposing himself to ridicule. In all fairness: Chappie has mistakenly left his fly open in the non-metaphorical sense--in front of a classroom full of students, no less! The best response would be to tell Ben (in a low voice so no one else can hear) "Be careful when you zip up, Doc, so you don't catch your thingy in the zipper!"  The plain fact is that even if Ben DID snag himself in that zipper, he'd probably emit little more than a low moan. He's a stoic, that Ben. All guts and thought-control.

The aforementioned "cheap shot" that I have taken at Ben is actually the remark I'm about to make as he's reeling from the effects of a particularly troubling bit of silliness: his "personal theory" about the pyramids of Egypt being built by Joseph to store grain in. The refutation of this bit of arrant silliness has been neat and complete. What is not complete is an evaluation of this incident for what it reveals about Carson's fitness to lead a large organization dealing in complex realities and issues.

So called "people of faith" are believed to be favored by the American people as their (our) leaders. And yet none of our great presidents, NOT ONE (if we ignore Woodrow Wilson, the exception who proves the rule), has been what any god fearing holy roller or snake handler would consider much of a man of faith. Specifically not much of a church goer. This is not to say these men have not been spiritual. Perhaps the one good bad president, someone upon whom History may well smile, James Earl Carter, is both a man of faith and a spiritual man? Sadly, he will be leaving us ere long heading for that great Sunday School in the Sky, and at that time a great many of his fellow citizens will recognize, many for the first time, just who he was and how we'll miss him. Anyway, comparisons between Ben Carson and Jimmy Carter are very premature, not to mention invidious. Ben has to get elected before he can have a disastrous presidency...

My topic here is merely Carson's presumed fitness to lead the country, something which 26% of Republicans seem to be in favor of. Since card-carrying Republicans constitute no more than 25% of the votable population, only perhaps 6% of the population (26% of 25%?) believes that BC would make a good president. Better than Trump, say...

Since we know that almost all of the Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential nomination express skepticism about the reality of the global warming phenomenon and reject the "theory" of evolution outright, it shouldn't come as any surprise that one of them also believes that "Joseph" built the pyramids (the work of a thousand years, 2700 BCE to 1700 BCE.) Since Methusalah only lived 960 years and Joseph only 110, he of the many colored pipe dream coat has some 'splainin' to do.  Back to the calculator, Ben.

 
But let's not get carried away with this beat down of Ben Carson. Our topic is his fitness to be president. Alas, he is clearly not terribly fit. He is not even fit for a mid-level position with Archer Daniels Midland at the Brewster, Iowa silos.

How to explain this in a man so obviously intelligent? Well, a recognized medical/surgical expert who has helped thousands of people to longer lives is still a medical expert and as anyone who knows many doctors knows...they know pretty much everything. Yet there are doubters...Dr. BC is part of a helping profession that recent studies seem to indicate helps the most when it helps least. Can you spell i a t r o g e n i c  ?  I'll bet Dr. Ben can. Perhaps we'll just have to conclude that being intelligent doesn't make you smart.

Anyway, as Carson becomes the front-runner to 6% of the total US population, questions about the survival rate of his patients may reasonably arise as other areas of his judgement and common sense come into serious question. Chappie's theory, PERSONAL theory, is that Carson has confused Memphis, Tennessee with Memphis, Egypt. It's damned easy to do! If one visits the Mississippi River town today, one will see a pyramid that actually could be used to store grain because it in not a dense pile of cut stone. It's called "The Pyramid" locally after it has been called many things in it's failed career to be anything at all. WHY NOT a grain storage facility? The fact that the floor floods occasionally doesn't matter. THE NILE FLOODS 2!!!   Ben Carson is a problem solver, he solves them in his walking sleep!

The (former) Pyramid Arena, Memphis TN (Now a Bass superstore)  1991

The Hostess Twinkie truck parked in the foreground should raise some questions of a nutritional nature. But surely there is some grain product in a Twinkie?  Ben there, done that!

Chappie Says Tony Scalia May Be Onto Something...

The immensely honorable Associate Justice Antonin G. Scalia has let us into a secret. In a few words, AS asked rhetorically, "“Do you think the American people would ever have ratified the Constitution if they had been told the meaning of this document shall be whatever a majority of the Supreme Court says it is?”  BUT, Mr. Ass. Justice, "The American people" didn't ratify the Constitution, not by a LONG shot. And this is why:

A minority of propertied white men (such as you imagine yourself to be?) ratified it with some difficulty. Many combat veterans of the Revolution were excluded because they had lost everything and couldn't meet the property test. Other combat veterans of our war of independence because they were free black men. Property test? NO women and NO members of any non-white minority had a vote nor is there any evidence in the record that any of the men who crafted that remarkable but deeply flawed reactionary document in secret during the summer of 1787 ever thought for a second about any proposition that their WIVES might be entitled to vote in approval of the document which they hoped would rule their lives going forward. And our lives?

In fact, Tony, if they had seen YOU wandering off the boat, I very much doubt you would have been allowed a vote. If, as a swarthy, penniless Sicilian peasant, you hadn't been blocked from voting, as a Roman Catholic you wouldn't have been respected and venerated either. Actually, as a Roman Catholic, you almost certainly wouldn't have BEEN here in 1787. That's right, in 1787, Catholics comprised less than 1% of the US population, perhaps 25,000 total in the country. More than the Jews but not much more. There was a synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina FIFTY YEARS before there was a Catholic church. The first Catholic bishop in the US, John Carroll of Baltimore, wasn't installed until 1790.

Your endless celebration of "originalism" or textualism as you call it ignores that there was little or no place for you originally. Your conservative Roman Catholicism was no where in the mix among the founding fathers, exactly one of whom was a fellow adherent. Doesn't this give you a queasy feeling?  But leaving all that aside, consider originalism, the notion you famously promote that is famously summed up by your 2013 meltdown where you asserted that “Words have meaning, and their meaning doesn’t change.” What sort of ignorant, bomb-throwing undergraduate nonsense is that? You know as well as the next person that the meanings of words change radically with the passage of time, right? Aren't you pulling our legs, you queer old duck? This is egregious nonsense and I don't mean "remarkably good" as "egregious" once did. But even ignoring the incontrovertible fact that meanings and usage change with time, it is equally obvious to any breathing bi-pedal that different people at the same moment in time have in mind different meanings for the same word.

Your notion of "freedom" (which I would equate with sophomoric license) is not my idea of freedom. My idea of freedom is "to have meaningful choice in as many situations as possible." No, your assertion of your notion of the utterly conservative nature of language (!) with the clear implication that everyone who voted to render the document of Sept. 17, 1787 as the law of the land had the same understanding of the meaning of said words...is applesauce. And I mean it the way you habitually use it--errant nonsense--not as the delicious concoction of cooked apples, sugar and spices that I like to make at home. You must know what I'm going on about, you hypocrite.

Worshiping the Constitution? (Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images)

Facts, fact, facts, Tony...so many facts which all point to the simple fact that you, a conservative Catholic associate justice (one of SIX Catholics--out of nine justices...how did THAT happen?) do not represent the values of the Founding Fathers who in many cases voted in local ordinances discriminating against Catholics. They didn't like you or trust you or know you. Catholics in 1787 and for years afterwards were regarded as negatively in this country as Muslims (also people of the book) are today. Perhaps worse. The values of the FFs were anything but pristine and they are not the values of many if not most Americans today, people who weren't in any way represented in the vote that summer of 1787.

Besides which, the Constitution wasn't even ratified by a plebiscite of those few PWM eligible to vote, perhaps 30% of the total population.  Our defining document was ratified by state legislatures, a total of well under a thousand propertied white men out of a population of nearly four million. Democracy? I have a bridge to sell you...

Like it or not, the constitution of the People's Republic of China was ratified by a more representative group than was our own sacred founding document. There were actually women and members of minority groups involved, if only as window dressing. Facts are a bitch, Tony.

Since Tony, kindly if inadvertently, raises the gross non-representational origins of our founding document, perhaps he would go along with a call for a NEW Constitutional Convention? The first since that summer of 1787. A document that could potentially (if actually ratified) represent the actual beliefs, wishes and aspirations of people who were never dreamed of by the original drafters. I can hear the outraged screaming from all sides. Can the people, after two centuries be trusted to revise the rules under which THEY (we) and our descendants will live for the next century or two? Commie! Terrorist! Liberal!

So thorough is our indoctrination, our brain washing as to the unsurpassed perfection of The Document, that few Americans could even CONSIDER calling a constitutional convention. Am I wrong? But why not? Perhaps the third time would be the charm? We would have the original (actually our SECOND constitution--the Articles of Confederation were absolutely our first constitution) as our default in case we couldn't decide on a re-write of #2. Could we be that much worse off than we currently are? Yes. Could we get there without a Constitutional Convention? Absolutely.

We need a Constitution written by Americans with Tony Scalia and his ilk both in mind and participating. Let's do it!  Oh wait...Tony says this is not a good century in which to re-write the constitution?

PS. All the white people who view the coming of a time when their (our!) kind no longer comprise a majority of the American people but simply the largest minority in a nation in which no group has a quorum--white people should grasp that there will NEVER be a more advantageous time for them (us!) to call a Constitutional Convention than...yesterday.  

Chappie Has Some Odd Thoughts...

For example, consider this observation: we can pretty well say how little is too little of anything or how small is too small, but we almost never seem to be able to agree on how large is too large or how much it too much. Is this a foolish topic? I can remember the first school writing assignment I ever had that revealed the role of writing in thought. It was in 7th grade, Mrs McKeith's class, and the assignment was to write a paragraph for homework on the question, "How small is small?" My first reaction was "This is stupid!" but within moments I realized (without knowing the word) that the real topic of the question was the meaning and importance of "relative." This may have been the frst time in my life that I engaged in abstract thought of a higher sort. I was astonished and have never forgotten that assignment after more than half a century.

At that time, the extent of the cosmos was barely dreamed of.

So what is it about this large/small conundrum?

Computer renderings and actual images of a DNA molecule, as seen through an electron microscope (Enzo di Fabrizio via New Scientist)

I am particularly struck by the apparent impossibility of our putting any limits on how large we will grow? In any area or zone. Americans in particular consider any discussion of placing limits on the growth of anything as an affront to their basic freedom. One id obliged to add that both cancer and obesity are biological processes characterized by excessive, unlimited growth. Just saying...

A cogent argument says that things like population naturally limit themselves. Perhaps Malthus was getting at this? But there also seems to be a realistic lag time involved which, given the size of the entities involved, could possibly lead to catastrophe. Consider Easter Island.  Although scientists are increasingly at odds in their respective views of what happened on Easter Island after the arrival of humans, the clear implication is that the ecology of the island and it's ability to support a variety of life forms was altered permanently by the arrival of Man and his pests (rats or European diseases.)

The purpose of this line of thinking is not to demonize mankind for its success in colonizing the planet and thereby causing numerous extinctions (including proto-human extinctions), as regrettable as this may be. If I take a view that would be acceptable to a Dominionist, I would still be obliged to recognize that in the case of Easter island and in numerous other historical instances, the scale of "our" dreams and aspirations made real have had devastating consequences. But we were either unable to see disaster coming or we were unable to help ourselves once recognition had set in.

The current problem of global warming is in this vein. Interestingly, most of the opposition to crediting the reality of global warming and the mortal threat it poses to our continued presence here comes from the same primitive Christian elements who propound openly or implicitly the Dominionist ideology. Christianity is being revealed as a religion not primarily of Love but of Death. Or of love of death and a yearning for the End times. (The charming adherents of the Islamic state share this mordant fantasy with all the Flat Earthers here and there and everywhere.) Death loving given the implicit promise of Life After Death...  I you really buy that I have several rusting bridges to sell you.   It is not my desire to single out Christianity since the negative effects of human over-population and lack of self-control are most extremely demonstrated in the societies of Asia, which are decidedly non-Christian (though not without values highly similar to Christian ones...patriarchy?)

We see everywhere about us evidence that nothing succeed like excess. But where can it lead? To too much of good things and bad. To a world with too many of us in it and no place for any of us...