Leave a Comment

Mike's Blog Roundup
Crooks and Liars — The Reality-Based Community: Latest religio-legal comedy: the Seven Aphorisms of Summum The Reaction: Minnesota is not Florida Your Right Hand Thief: The KKK took my baby away The Mahablog: The jokes are writing themselves Helena Cobban: Rahm Emanuel apologizes for dad's racist comments The Black Snob: Gonna be some changes... ...

Summum on causation
The Reality-Based Community — [image] Summum on causation Just one of Summum's seven aphorisms states something definite: Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is just a name for Law not recognized; there are many fields of causation, but nothing escapes the Law of Destiny. or as Einstein put it , "God does not play dice with the universe". This quintessentially Greek argument still divides science. The classical view of Aristotle/Newton/Laplace/Kant/Einstein is roughly that causation is universal ; if we knew the initial conditions and laws of nature to sufficient precision, we would see the fundamental particles that make up the universe evolve in a quite ...

The Statue of Despotism
The Reality-Based Community — [image] The Statue of Despotism Jonathan Zasloff's very sound attack on policy "czars" (tsariks?) reminds me of the latest developments in the entertaining Summum case. Mark wrote : Adherents of a religion called "Summum" are suing a Utah town with a Ten Commandments monument in its park to insist that it put up a monument to Summum's "Seven Aphorisms ..." The case has reached the US Supreme Court. From Dahlia Lithwick in Slate , we learn that CJ Roberts asked Summum's lawyer the hypothetical: You have a Statue of Liberty; do we have to have a statue of despotism? St Petersburg has a statue of despotism: the Bronze Horseman , a gigantic equestrian statue of Peter ...