Civil Commotion

It is not The Donald’s inflammatory rhetoric that is causing fights to erupt at his rallies! No. It is George Soros!

Here is the individual who gains most to sabotage Donald Trumps’ presidential run since, if Trump wins, his own empire will tumble off the wall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never put Soros back together again..

Yes, that individual is: George Soros and his boot-licking Communists whose job it is to destabilize the upcoming election, knock out all he sees as a threat to his own empire, and see that only the candidate of his choice is put into the Oval Office, which is how Obama got there.

Billionaire Soros has manipulated currency including the U.S. dollar, controlled the economy, the media which is of huge significance, as well as governments to help paddle him into the ocean of dictatorship of a One World Communist Order, a goal he has spent a lifetime to achieve. That is precisely what is now taking place.

You have been warned.

At long-time readers know, I’ve been predicting for a long while that we would probably see violence as the evangelical right finds itself moved inexorably toward the margins of our civic life. Today — What do you know? — Albert the Pious grouses about the marginalization of evangelicals.

We are seeing LGBT organizations, exactly as the Chief Justice of the United States indicated in oral arguments in the same-sex marriage case last year, they are moving to defund and to culturally isolate any institution that stands over against this moral revolution. The kind of pressure we’re looking at here is not at all subtle. It’s an overt attempt to try to marginalize Christian institutions that will not join the moral revolution and to marginalize them, in this case, where it might hurt a very great deal.

The threatened penalty here is exclusion from participation in the NCAA. That is absolutely massive when it comes to American higher education and to the larger context of American culture. We’re looking here at an overt attempt to try to state that these Christian schools are outside the cultural mainstream and simply don’t belong. The moral revolutionaries are now arguing that these colleges and universities based in Christian conviction do not belong on the list of federally approved institutions for federal student aid. They are also now arguing directly to the NCAA that that organization legally defined as a voluntary association is obligated by its own claim to LGBTQ-inclusive policies to divest in terms of relationships from all religious-based institutions that in the eyes of the LGBT revolutionaries now discriminate. We’re looking here at exactly what we’re going to face in many other arenas. Some already are present, including in the economic arena in terms of America’s major corporations, in professional arenas including professional organizations such as the bar associations and medical associations.

Mohler, wholly lacking a well- or even poorly-tuned sense of irony, fails to note that in the days when his club made the rules the others were ‘culturally isolated’ in prison.

The NCAA is a voluntary association, of course, like the Southern Baptist Convention, and it can have its own rules — like the Southern Baptist Convention, which is quick to discard churches which fail to maintain an acceptable level of hostility to gays, transgenders, women who want to be clergy, on and on.

That shoe kind of pinches when it’s on our li’l buddy’s foot, though. Ho-hum.

So far as federal student aid for schools out of compliance with Title IX … that’s difficult to call. The law makes allowances for theological conviction, but it probably wouldn’t take much to strike-down that allowance when it contradicts settled public policy. However that falls out, the revocation of Bob Jones University’s tax exemption has to be causing sleepless nights for a lot of seminary officials.

And, of course, evangelicals are the most important demographic bloc supporting Donald Trump, that cartoon-Mussolini whose rallies are so often the scene of low-level violence and, always, cataracts of red-faced bluster and rage against the … others; that’s got to be bugging Mohler, too. After all, those are his folk, his army of simpletons, and instead of the polite and treacherous hissing expected of Baptists, they are flat-out howling their malice — and anybody with two eyeballs can watch it, live and in color, on CNN.

When Trump goes down, so will the evil-tempered yahoos who backed him go down — and there goes the fiction that evangelical leaders like himself are kingmakers. He faces the very real prospect that the money is going to start drying-up, and the near certainty that his political influence is going to dry-up, too. No wonder he’s having a bad day.

Jerry Falwell, Jr., explains his endorsement of Donald Trump to the Liberty University campus newspaper.

God called King David a man after God’s own heart even though he was an adulterer and a murderer. You have to choose the leader that would make the best king or president and not necessarily someone who would be a good pastor. We’re not voting for pastor-in-chief. It means sometimes we have to choose a person who has the qualities to lead and who can protect our country and bring us back to economic vitality, and it might not be the person we call when we need somebody to give us spiritual counsel.”

It’s a bland variation of that famous remark attributed to George Orwell:

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

I’ll be damned if I can understand how any genuine-article adult can believe The Donald is the man to do that, but that’s beside the point; notice what he offhandedly acknowledges: That his more-pious-than-though world is a fantasy made possible only by grown-ups more willing than he to get their hands dirty.

There is a Satanic conspiracy between “Muslims and sodomites” to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President of the United States!

On Friday night, Donald Trump-loving militant anti-gay activist Theodore Shoebat posted a video responding to the cancellation of a Trump campaign rally in Chicago amid scuffles and protests, declaring that opposition to Trump is satanic and blasting Religious Right activists who oppose Trump for having sided with the “Muslims” and “sodomites” who oppose the GOP front-runner.

There is an appetite for this lunacy; Shoebat makes his living by peddling this stuff.

Today is March 14, 2016, or 3/14/16, or Pi Day to celebrants of the mysterious number π: 3.1415…

Yes, I know — it’s hokey, and who the hell cares anyway, besides engineers and math teachers and other geeks? It’s worth thinking about because π is one of the most useful numbers ever discovered — or invented, according to your point of view — and its usages and importance have evolved right along with the rest of mankind’s knowledge.

Π is defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter; if you have a circle with a diameter of exactly 1.0-foot, the distance around the circle is approximately 3.1415-feet. (I say approximately because π never resolves to an exact value; it is what mathematicians call an irrational number.) Since scientists and engineers model nearly everything as perfect instances of abstractions which don’t actually exist in nature — circle, line, triangle, sphere, catenary, and so forth — π makes an appearance in all sorts of counter-intuitive places, everywhere from chemistry to economics to cryptography.

Here is where it gets fun: If those geometric figures don’t actually exist in nature, if they are in fact human inventions created to simplify how we think about things, how is it that they are so useful for predicting so many real, physical events with great exactitude? Why do they remain useful for understanding and predicting matters that the first users of π could never have conceived?

Did humankind invent mathematics whole, or is mathematics something which is ‘out there’ and which humankind has discovered? What can it actually mean to say that the number π even exists?

The physicist Mario Livio says we started out by inventing numbers — two hands led inevitably to the concept of the integer 2, for example — but that, once invented, future mathematical work was constrained by the rules of the invention. Humankind invented two, say, but then discovered thirty-seven according to the rules created for integers. This sounds reasonable — at first — but if π is merely a tool, how can it answer so many different needs without modification? Why do entirely new branches of mathematics having no apparent relation to geometry continue to find π so useful?

This is no small matter; such questions had put mathematics in a deep philosophical crisis at the start of the last century: What is math?

Bertrand Russell argued that mathematics is a branch of logic, and co-authored with Alfred North Whitehead the 3-volume Principia Mathematica to prove it. Whether or not he succeeded remains to this day a subject of dispute, but whenever an exasperated math teacher exclaims “It’s just logic,” she is quoting Russell.

Remember the Pythagorean theorem? That the square of the hypotenuse of a right-triangle is equal to the sum of the square of its sides? That finding was disbelieved for centuries because the ancients had no concept of any number other than integers; real and irrational number were unknown to them. How, then, could the length of the hypotenuse of a right-triangle having legs equal to one be equal to the square-root of two? What could it mean to even speak of the square-root of two?

When different types of numbers were discovered, or invented, and π, insinuate themselves into even religious disputes.

And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

1 Kings 7:23

This is quite clear: the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is 3; inerrantists lose. “N-o-o-o,” they will answer. “Those measurements are inherently inexact and, besides, what about the thickness of the bowl? What if the diameter was measured to the outside the bowl, that is, and the circumference was measured around the inside of the bowl?” Increasing the diameter, the denominator, and decreasing the circumference, the numerator, pushes the ratio downward toward 3. Explain that the author had to mean 3, however the measurement was made, because only integers were known, or invented, at the time Kings was written, and they’ll exult that the verse then proves the divine inspiration of the text, because what else could explain that the ancients got it right?

Have I ever mentioned that the average apologist is a hopeless idiot?

So, Happy Pi Day. If you figure it all out, I’d be grateful if you let me know what you came up with.