Heddy Lamar Did Not Invent Frequency Hopping

 I'm just a little tired of seeing this trope on various social media platforms.

Heddy was a beautiful women, she ran naked through the woods and was filmed doing it, which was the basis for her later success, but she really did not have a head for engineering. She mostly just stole stuff from the men around her and acted as a marketing girl. 

It is true that Lamarr and her unlikely partner, the radical modernist composer George Antheil, hold a patent for an important radio-transmission method that finds its way into several modern communications technologies, including Bluetooth. But it is equally true that their patent was hardly the first in this area. It is further true that the earliest operational systems employing this technique were created after World War II independently of their patent, and the essential idea can be traced back nearly to the birth of radio itself.

And more:

Now incontestable evidence shows that the U.S. Patent Office itself dismissed the idea that Lamarr and Antheil were first to propose frequency hopping. David R. Irvin, a patent agent and engineer with 44 patents to his credit, has examined the original documents related to the invention, which are preserved by the Patent Office and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History

And still more:

Abstract: Analysis of primary-source documents archived by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and the U.S. Patent Office refutes the widely accepted legend that actress Hedy Lamarr and musician George Antheil invented frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) communication.

Polytheism Guards Against Divorce

 According to Pew Research, Hindus have the highest rate of marriage and the lowest rate of divorce.

When the survey breaks down the various religious groups by marital status, the findings show that Hindus (78%) and Mormons (71%) are the most likely to be married. These two traditions, along with members of evangelical churches, also have the lowest rates of never-married members. Hindus also have the lowest divorce rate of any group; only 5% have been divorced.

So, apparently converting to Hinduism is a great way of assuring you have a long and happy marriage.

Also, if you want children, Christianity may not be the way to go. Again, Hinduism and Islam are apparently more "pro-life" than any Christian group.

The more ya' know, huh? 

Bacchanal and the Olympics

What does the Bacchanal have to do with the Olympics?

According to Livy, the Bacchanal was a murderous cultic instrument of conspiracy against the Roman state. Livy points out that seven thousand cult leaders and followers were arrested, and that most were executed. He considered the Bacchanalia scandal to be one of several indications of Rome's inexorable moral decay. The earliest version of the Bacchanalia was open to women only. The cult held particular appeal to those of uneducated and fickle mind (levitas animi), such as the young, plebeians, women and "men most like women". It was confined to the Italian peninsula.

The Olympics, on the other hand, were officially sponsored and recognized by all participating GREEK city-states with a universal peace treaty. Greek athletes modelled themselves on the physical competitions of the gods themselves. It was restricted to an all-male audience, and only the strong were permitted to compete and attend. The point of the games was to win prizes by displaying the highest ideals of masculine honor and courage.

In short, Bacchanal, a privately-funded Roman festival, has absolutely nothing to do with the Olympics, a multiple state-sponsored Panhellenic Greek festival.

Persons are Products and Always Have Been

The pro-life position is that human persons are not products, and should not be turned into a commodity. While that may be true in a theological sense, it has almost never been true in a practical sense. Humanity has commodified persons for all of history.

That's what slavery is, and slavery appeared in every culture on every continent for all of recorded history, universally.

Out of the entirety of history, there has been a period of only about a century when people were not commodifying other people. Between the English-American anti-slavery movement of the early 1800s through roughly the mid-1900s, cultures were forced to back away from slavery by European military fiat. During that same period, we were unable to widely implement abortion due to medical risks.

But that's all done with now. As Islam surges, slavery resurges, and as tech grows, abortion predominates. That golden century has passed. Persons are, again, products.

The Soul of the Matter: A Theological Problem

This is a problem for Catholic theology.

In 2002, Lydia Fairchild, a mother from Washington State, faced a baffling and distressing situation when DNA tests required for public assistance showed she was not the biological mother of her two children—despite having physically given birth to them. The results raised suspicion of fraud or surrogacy, and authorities even considered removing her children from her custody. When she gave birth to her third child in a hospital under supervision, the same outcome occurred: DNA tests again claimed she was not the mother.

Fairchild’s legal battle intensified, and she stood on the verge of losing her children based on genetic evidence alone. Her attorney, Alan Tindell, began researching unusual biological conditions and came across a similar case involving a woman named Karen Keegan. This led to the discovery that Lydia was a chimera—a person with two sets of DNA. In her case, it was caused by absorbing a fraternal twin in the womb.

A cervical DNA test finally matched her children's DNA, confirming her biological relationship to them. This critical breakthrough not only saved Lydia’s family but also raised important concerns about the reliability of DNA evidence in legal settings. Her case became a landmark example of how rare genetic conditions like chimerism can challenge long-standing scientific and legal assumptions.

Lydia absorbed her twin. The first and most obvious theological question: what happens to the soul infused at conception? 

Different reproductive tract vs somatic DNA raises the question of whose DNA she is transmitting when she has children. Is the different DNA considered hers by right of conquest, for having essentially eaten her twin in the womb? This is not an isolated problem. About 8% of fraternal twins could end up with blood chimerism. In the case of triplets, the chance for blood chimerism rises up to 21%. True tetragametic chimerism (such as Lydia's case) is believed to be rare, with only 100 documented cases in the medical literature, but it may be more common than once believed. It is possible that up to 10% of singleton births may have started as twin pregnancies.

Lydia's case is a less obvious form of the even more pressing problem presented by Abby and Brittany Hensel, conjoined twins who share a common torso and common reproductive tract. Abby Hensel, one of the conjoined twins, married Josh Bowling. Now, the only difference between Lydia Fairchild and the Hensels is the latter has two fully developed brains. But, as noted, the Hensels do share a common reproductive tract.

So, if it was licit for Lydia to conceive, carry and give birth to children that do not share her DNA, then why would it not be licit for the Hensels to have children, especially since Abby and Brittany have the same DNA? In what sense is the Hensels' marriage valid, given that the two were already conjoined into one body, so that both women are having sex with one man, but only one of those women is married to that man? Is the other woman always committing adultery? Or is Josh actually married to both women? 

But if the Hensel's marriage is invalid, then in what sense is Lydia Fairchild's marriage valid? Unlike the Hensels, Lydia's reproductive tract is actually someone else's body. Now, true, the other body belongs to someone who is not ensouled and alive, as far as we know, but her reproductive tract is certainly not "hers" in the same way her somatic cells are "hers", are they? If we argue that a baby in the womb is someone else's body because of DNA, then Lydia's reproductive tract is also someone else's body because of DNA. If we argue that her reproductive tract belongs to her, then the baby in the womb also belongs to her in very much the same way, and the somatic argument against abortion collapses.

But, if we try to keep the pro-life somatic argument alive, and insist her reproductive tract is not hers because of its different DNA, then is having sex and conceiving with Lydia a form of necrophilia? The organs are alive, but the soul that animates the DNA is not the original infused soul, again, as far as we know. When a person dies (that is, when a person's soul separates from the body), individual organs within the corpse can stay alive for hours or even days. This is what allows for organ transplant. If we argue that the soul of Lydia's twin has departed, then Lydia's body has just kept her deceased twin's body on "life support" for Lydia's entire life. Thus, a strong argument can be made that having sex with Lydia really is really just necrophilia with her dead twin. The Catholic Church does not permit necrophilia. 

So, can marriage with a true tetragametic chimera be valid? Under what circumstances? And how would you know that you married a chimera if no DNA testing has been done? Is that grounds for an annulment? 

The Catholic Church isn't equipped to deal with this. 

Silicon-Based Persons

Jimmy Akins is not the brightest bulb on the tree. He is of the opinion that AI cannot be a person, cannot be ensouled by God. He's got absolutely no theological reason to hold this position.

Remember when the fake Bayside apparition claimed IVF children had no immortal souls, because the IVF embryos were created outside the human body? Condemned by the Church.

Consider that sperm and egg cells can now be created by manipulating normal somatic cells. It's called in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), and it works: 

"Japanese scientists describe how they've already perfected IVG in mice. The researchers used cells from the tails of adult mice to create induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, and then coaxed those iPS cells to become mouse sperm and eggs. They've even used those sperm and eggs to make embryos and implanted the embryos into the wombs of female mice, which gave birth to apparently healthy mouse pups."

Would a human being created this way NOT have a soul? Obviously, that's absurd. Any human being created this way would have a soul.

The question is, would God create and infuse a soul, create a person, in something made of silicon instead of something made of carbon? There's nothing in Scripture that says He won't. And if we can manipulate carbon-based materials to create a new human life, then what's so holy and sacred about carbon?

Alien life forms are not beyond the ability of God to create, and we participate in God's creation of new human persons, so why would He deny us the ability to participate in the creation of silicon based persons? Perhaps we are meant to participate in the creation of every new person, human or alien, so God is just waiting for us to figure out how to build the silicon soma so that He can create and infuse the necessary rational soul. 

Akins is just making up shit because he needs clicks, and he's more likely to get clicks from stupid and ignorant people than he is from others, so he's playing to his audience.

The Vaccine Paradox

1. Vaccines work.
2. Vaccines have negative sequelae
3. Diseases have negative sequelae

Discussion: at some point an effective vaccine will drive the incidence of disease so low, that your are more likely to be injured by the vaccine than your are to catch and be injured by the disease.

Consider polio. For the inactivated virus, the risk of anaphylactic shock is 1-2 per million doses. For the oral polio virus, the risk is estimated at 1 case per 2.4 million doses distributed, with higher risk for the first dose (1 in 750,000). This equates to a probability of approximately 0.00004% per dose, or 400 chances out of 1 billion. The attenuated virus in OPV can circulate and revert to a virulent form, causing outbreaks. This is rare, with fewer than 1,000 cases globally since 2000.

The global population stands at roughly 8 billion. In 2024, there were 62 confirmed cases of wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) globally, all reported in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the only two countries where WPV1 remains endemic. Afghanistan reported 23 cases, and Pakistan reported 39 cases.

So, the polio vaccine has 400 chances out of 1 billion of harming you, while you have less than 8 chances per billion of catching and suffering adverse consequences from polio.

At this point, for most people in the world, the polio vaccine is far, far more dangerous than the probability of catching polio.

The 21st Century Information Barons

Information technology corporations own

• the data storage space, 
• the data transmission space, 
• the data analysis space, 

and those same corporations will soon start locking up the energy space in order to guarantee their holds on storage, transmission, and analysis.

Data determines everyone's future, so IT corporations determine everyone's future. They know this. The politicians also know this. 

For most of human history, the elite were the people who controlled communication with the gods or with God (for the monotheists). As technology advanced in the Middle Ages (500 to 1500 AD), via horse collars with heavy plows and three-field agriculture, the control of society shifted to secular kings, royalty who were not viewed as gods. The new agricultural and transport techniques permitted by literally harnessing the power of the horse permitted nations to develop military power without necessarily referencing religion.

Notice, that throughout the Middle Ages, religion is still important. In fact, it grows at an accelerating rate in Europe throughout this period, but the locus of power had already begun to split. This was reflected in things like the investiture controversy and the calling of the Crusades. The first four Crusades were powerful and called by Popes, but subsequent crusades, such as the Children's Crusade, were either not called by popes at all, or were essentially useless. While the Pope called the Albigensian Crusade, the northern crusades local royalty had already put those crusades in motion well before the Pope sanctioned them. By 1200 AD, religious power had already begun to fracture. 

As control of communication shifted from the clerical monastics to royalty, and subsequently to anyone who owned a printing press, knowledge of additional technologies, like gunpowder and time-keeping, also spread and shifted. The Church tried to control information by establishing an Index of Forbidden Books and by burning books in public ceremonies. It didn't work. 

Religion didn't just lose control of information, but of time itself. Cathedrals used to be constructed as enormous master seasonal clocks, but by 1800, the cathedral's time-keeping function began to be eroded by tech that had reduced the size and cost of clocks so they could be used even in homes. Society built itself around time that was no longer sacred. Religion no longer controlled the military. It no longer controlled time-keeping. It no longer controlled the transmission of information. 

Religion still exists, but the locus of power has shifted to those who controlled the technology that defines society. Advanced tech allowed secular politicians to step into the role that god-kings once held, that the priesthood and Church once held. But even as politicians rose to power, the corporations that controlled the technology rose to supplant them. England endured a 300-year long struggle between Parliament and the British East India Company, vying to see who would dominate. The EIC dominated agriculture and transport in multiple countries around the world, but  it wasn't enough. The EIC eventually lost. 

It's not clear who will win this time around. Many science fiction/fantasy novels posit a future in which corporations rule worlds. The tech companies have already vertically integrated data. If it can add  power generation into the stack, that should cover all the bases. Like priests, politicians will continue to exist, people will continue to vote for them, thinking the politicians can actually do something. But, like the priests, the politicians will be useless. Information technology corporations will rule the world. 

Israel is Antisemitic

 If Israel didn't exist, the enormous amount of antisemitism we are currently experiencing probably wouldn't be happening. 

Between 1795 and 1918, Poland ceased to exist. After WW I, the League of Nations brought Poland back into existence, taking territory from Germany, Austria and Russia in order to accomplish the deed. This created an enormous amount of anti-Polish hatred during the inter-war period in those nations, as both Russia and Germany viewed the League of Nations intervention as outright territorial theft. Poland was seen by many Eastern European Axis supporters as an illegal state, created out of whole cloth by the Western Allies who had conquered them. 

So, what was the very first act of WW II? Germany and Russia invaded Poland and repartitioned it, taking back the territory that the League of Nations had stolen from them.

That whole sequence of events worked so well, that after WW II, the UN repeated the mistake. The UN tried to bring Israel back into existence, with similar consequences. But the attempt to reconstitute Israel failed for an even more foundational reason. Poland had been out of existence for less than two centuries. Israel had been out of existence for nearly two millennia. The new Poland had never lost its majority Catholic population, but that wasn't true for Israel. The original Israel was a religious state built around Abrahamic faith. But the 20th-century version of Israel was created by secular atheists, socialists who weaponized Christian ignorance and stupidity in order to guilt the West into attempting to recreate the country. Ben-Gurion himself saw socialism and Zionism as two sides of the same coin. 

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Zionist socialist ideology has nothing to do with post-Temple Judaism. And post-Temple Judaism has literally nothing to do with Temple Judaism. The current state of Israel is founded on socialism and nominalism, the idea that words are just interchangeable labels. But words mean things. As Lincoln pointed out, if you call a dog's tail a "leg", that doesn't mean a dog has five legs. 

The current state of Israel has literally nothing to do with any preceding entity, much less any Biblical entity. Israel is a bullshit country that exists by fomenting antisemitism in other countries in order to force Jews to emigrate to Israel "for their own safety". Apart from redefining "Jewish" (which is also a constant work-in-progress), it was, and still is, the only way to keep the Jewish population at high enough levels to justify the existence of the country. Recall that between 1948 and 2010, the country with the largest Jewish population in the world was the United States, not Israel. 

Israel can only work if Jews feel unsafe everywhere else and think their only hope for safety lies in moving to Israel. Wherever non-Israeli Jews live, Zionists must drive them out of that location and into Israel. 

In December, 1938, David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of the state of Israel, specifically said, "if I knew it was possible to save all children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, because we are faced not only with the accounting of these children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish people." This was not just rhetoric.

In 1945, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 orphans from Germany to England, even though the necessary permits had been secured and these children were in grave danger of death due to the harsh winter. Zionists also managed to stop another group of roughly 500 children from reaching France, where rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven. 

As 1930's Germany demonstrated, the best way to drive Jews out of an area is to make it impossible for Jews to live there. Antisemitism serves the political purposes of the state of Israel. Antisemitism is a nation-building activity for the state of Israel. Zionism is functionally antisemitism run by a nation-state actor for their own political purposes. Seeing the Zionist success, Palestinian-wannabees imitate it. This is why both the Muslims who attack Israel and the Jews who defend it are so politically insane that both sides literally sacrifice their own children in order to attain their nation-state objectives. 

Parents who care about their children move to safe locations to raise them. Israel is not a safe location. Only politically insane people would move to Israel/Gaza/West Bank, or stay there, to raise a family. Raising a family in that area necessarily involves you, as a parent, to be willing for your own children to be killed so that the greater good of the nation-state can be attained. This attitude is purest socialism, the elevation of the state above everything, including the family, just as Marx and Engels commanded.

But this is not a surprise. Again, most people in the 21st century forget that Israel was founded as a socialist state. Most conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, find it impossible to grasp that nearly all modern Jews are extreme leftists, generally socialists. Jews always vote for the most extreme left-wing candidate available. Christians are so blinded by Biblical references that they literally cannot see that post-Second-Temple Jews are not Biblical Jews, or that the 1948 socialist-founded state of Israel is nothing at all like ancient Israel. 

Christian conservatives created the phrase "Judeo-Christian morality" in order to facilitate conversion of Jews to Christian faith. It didn't work. But the Christians used their invented phrase so frequently that they successfully fooled themselves into thinking there was some commonality between Jewish and Christian worldviews. In fact, Judaism shares as much, if not more, of a worldview with Islam than it does with Christians. Jews can worship in mosques, but not in churches. Most medieval rabbis agreed that Jews could pray with Muslims, but not Christians. According to this Jewish expert, the Torah says Jews must kill Christians. Jews and Muslims share a morality that Christians consider self-centered, even bordering on narcissistic. 

Zionism is antisemitism. Period.