We are sending this mass emailing out around the country to inform people of the child abuse of having creationism put in kids’ science textbooks and to ask people to go to Austin, Texas, on March 25 to show their revulsion for religion taught as science in the schools as that completely screws up young children’s minds. What may come about without such a mass protest to the Texas State Board of Education is very ugly as textbook publishing efficiency will have these creationist adulterated science books for Texas used in school districts nationwide for the next ten years...
We are sending this mass emailing out around the country to inform people of the child abuse of having creationism put in kids’ science textbooks and to ask people to go to Austin, Texas, on March 25 to show their revulsion for religion taught as science in the schools as that completely screws up young children’s minds. What may come about without such a mass protest to the Texas State Board of Education is very ugly as textbook publishing efficiency will have these creationist adulterated science books for Texas used in school districts nationwide for the next ten years.
The American people are generally uninformed as regards fundamentalist conservatives and the way they do their best to exploit people when they can. I know the game from the inside because my father was a fundamental minister and many years ago, while in my twenties, I was married to a fundamentalist missionary whose game, like Ted Haggard’s, was more to pervert than convert the young males who wandered into our mission seeking the truth about God.
So take this seriously and make up your minds to come to Austin for this pivotal battle between the Ted Haggard two-faced creationists and those who see the importance of kids being taught science properly. For those who can look beyond the horizon, it is also part of a bigger battle against all the creepy, double talking, two-faced conservatives like Larry Craig and Rush Limbaugh and Mark Foley and the skunks at Fox News.
This is a necessary battle to fight independent of Obama’s efforts because as things get tough, he is just going to preach forbearance while the rest of us suffer. This well meaning but still standard young politician is not the lion his oratory skill makes him out to be but rather an inexperienced donkey just dressed up in a lion’s skin. He will not be able to come through for the people when the chips are down and Great Depression II takes hold and puts a knife in all our backs.
This watered down stimulus package, in the end, will be nothing but a token effort to show our populist president’s good will and cool off the fury of suffering people who would otherwise rise up to take down this conservative capitalist tyranny we are forced to live under and exchange it for a government truly of, by and for the people. The tip off to Obama’s limitations is his enthusiastic embrace of the faith based initiative, the left hand of his conservative enemies who will smash him with their right hand by frustrating everything good he tries and by ultimately blaming him for the economic and international mess that results that they created to begin with.
To get a microcosm look at the conservatives who are taking the country totally to hell, consider our attempt at intellectual debate here in rabidly fundamentalist Lubbock, Texas. We were banned from posting our ideas on the forum of the Avalanche-Journal, the city’s newspaper whose intolerance is manifest in its printing a Bible quote on its front page every day but not once mentioning the real news of our and others’ efforts to affect the children’s textbook debate in Austin by organizing a pro-evolution rally.
We are asking that media in Texas and around the country do a short article on the textbook issue and that readers forward this email to as many others as they can.
To get the news out about it locally in Lubbock, given the censorship from the city newspaper and its forum, we took to sending emails out directly to as many Lubbock Internet email addresses as we could find. These included a goodly number of the high school science teachers here. Their very revealing replies and our and other professionals’ emails on the matter follow. While many will be amused by what they read, for these people are ridiculous in the way they think and talk, we hope that people will also be aroused to the action needed to stop the fundamentalists from destroying the minds of our children and grandchildren.
The very first reply we got to our science textbook email was from a high school math teacher, Paul Vann.
From: "Paul Vann" <pvann@lubbockisd.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 11:03 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: RE: Darwin SOS
Are you kidding me? How did you get my e-mail? Evolution is the single most unintelligent idea ever. The big bang? The stuff that blew up came from? That is never addressed in evolution because they don't have an answer. The first cells magically came to life and survived on? But anti-science is superstitious. I am a mathematician and the idea of evolution is more statistically improbable than winning the lottery five times IN A ROW. Mathematical proof of evolution? How lost can you be? Religion is based on emotion? Just because some avoid what they know inside until they are forced to deal with it does not mean it is based on emotion. You do experience a great deal of emotion when you accept the TRUTH. I hope the text book allows students to make up their minds by presenting both sides.
From: "Peter Calabria" <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 11:42 AM
To: pvann@lubbockisd.org
Subject: RE: Darwin SOS
I love to debate with mathematicians because we can both start with 2+3=5 and accept that as correct, though I once met an illiterate Jehovah's Witness who insisted that God could make 2+3 be something other than 5 if He wished. You do agree with 2+3=5 as being absolutely correct whatever God might wish, no?
We got your email, not from some Satanic or communist conspiracy list but because it is publically posted on the Internet and available for anybody who might wish to contact an educator in their town they thought should be informed of the TRUTH. Yes, our words can be a bit sharp for our sense deep down is that all creationists, not just you, sir, are a little cuckoo in not being able to tell the difference between a wrestling match, a religious conversion and an intellectual debate. Most non-fundamentalists take the tack that fundamentalists are basically good people who just think a bit differently than they do. We don't. Why? The hostility of your letter, extremely emotional as you might see if you read it again, indicates that creationists get very, very crazy when creationism is shot to pieces by any kind of sane argument.
Our website is stuffed with mathematics, www.matrix-evolution.com. Open on Internet Explorer to get all the equations. I don't believe you are a smart enough mathematician to follow a simple algebraic derivation, one as clear as any proof in Euclidean Geometry. If you can understand how the matrix formulation of mathematical information derives from the Tsallis entropy with a=2, the first dozen equations or so and no problem for a REAL mathematician, my most profound and deep apologies. I mean that. If not, don't ever write me again, loudmouth phony baloney puppet of your lying minister's ridiculous sermons. You're part of the school district? Pity the kids.
Dr. Peter V. Calabria, PhD, (Biophysics), Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Retired
Came back his reply:
From: "Paul Vann" <pvann@lubbockisd.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 12:45 AM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>, "Paul Meredith" <pmeredith@lubbockisd.org <br>Subject: RE: Darwin SOS
You blanket e-mail people with your nonsense and then when they are annoyed you assume that they think you got their e-mail from a Satanic list? Do you really have a PHD? Your little rants don't seem typical of what I have become used to from PHD holders. I have been around a few growing up in a family of educators. Your comparing an interest formula to a population formula? The first problem with this is war, famine, etc. The population could be reduced or increased for many different reasons and is in no way a constant like the interest formula. It proves nothing. Oh, you still did not talk about how the big bang happened. If your population thing is right that disproves God exists how? And the hostility started in your letter that I never asked to receive. You talked about religion as superstitious, that we need to return to our senses as though all religious people are insane I guess. You get mad when you feel people make blanket assumption about you because you are an evolutionist but then you do that very thing to an extreme about creationists. Very hypocritical. I know you feel you are very intelligent. Maybe that is why you cannot accept God. You have a need to be at the top of the ladder. The thought of a higher being makes you angry. No need to pity my students. They are just fine. Many have even figured out something you have not. Jesus is Lord. I like how you list out all your degrees and that you were a professor as though that makes what you say carry more validity. Many wise people have no degrees and many with degrees are far from wise. Just for fun, I can even make 2 + 3 = something other than 5. It does not take God to do that. You just change to a base less than 5. 2+3 could = 101 in a different base. The illiterate Jehovah's witness was right.
From: "Peter Calabria" <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2009 10:16 AM
To: pvann@lubbockisd.org
Subject: fw: Intellegent Design
Creationists must respond to the bald fact that experiment after experiment and observation after observation has shown that evolution is correct. Further, idiot who calls himself a mathematician, changing the base does not change the fact that 2+3=5, which is universally taken to be to the base ten unless otherwise indicated, you utterly nutcase, word twisting, game player, aka, liar in any argument as fits your pre-ordained conclusions. You are the typical delusion peddling creationist who would go so far as to deny the truth of common counting to win in power games disguised by the morality and piety that the wolf of fundamentalism clothes itself in.
Back to evolution, the fellow who dropped this note, admittedly a friend of mine, is a lifetime Christian, a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Breckenridge, Colorado. So Christianity is not part of the argument. Sanity is. Elmer Koneman is also Professor Emeritus of Pathology at the University of Colorado, Denver, and author of the Textbook of Diagnostic Microbiology, another one of a half million medical professionals around the world, you know the people who save lives and such, who understand that you can’t think sideways and do humanity any good with Howdy Doody creationist prattle, let alone shove it down kids’ throats with the hell fire zealotry of Ted Haggard screaming about the evils of homosexuality before the truth popped up sixty times and made clear how completely full of two day old uneaten noodles he was. Him and you. What you do and your kind do, pedophile, in dominating trusting youngsters with your pushy lies is nothing but rape of little children. But beyond the inherent immorality of teaching creationism in the schools, it is illegal, dummy.
From: Ekoneman@comcast.net
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 11:52 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: Intelligent Design
Hello Peter,
I have read through your long email on the ID/Creationist problem. This may be synchronicity; however, last evening I viewed the two-hour NOVA program: "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial". You may know that the town and township of Dover, Pennsylvania has been irreconcilably divided over the issue of evolution vs. ID. I don't know how much time you want to spend on this, but you can find a summary of the arguments both for ID and for Evolution that were put forth in a 6-week long trial that was held to determine if the Dover school board had the authority to insert ID into the school science curriculum (sounds like the same process going on in Texas). If you want to follow through you can access the summary of this legal action by going to pbs.org, then clicking on "Nova", and then on the link "Intelligent Design on Trial". You will then have a number of hyperlinks to choose from to take you to arguments on both sides as presented by a variety of people. Of particular note is a very long dissertation by Phillip Johnson, a lawyer, and who has been tagged as "the father of ID". The evolution counter argument is presented by a scientist, Ken Miller. The judge John Jones sat through this long trial process, after which he issued a 139-page report. You can read through the full statement on the Board vs. Teachers link printed below; or, you can listen to some audio highlights, where Judge Jones reads a summary of his key findings. I have listed these below.
Following is a brief summary of the events leading to and derived from this trial. Bottom line according to Judge Jones' ruling--ID and creationism are considered religion and therefore are in violation of the 1st amendment on separation of church and state and therefore insertion of ID into the science curriculum is disallowed. Following the public announcement of his ruling, Judge Jones was swamped by an avalanche of hate mail from the ID fanatics, some with life-threats that for a period of time required police protection. I hope this doesn't happen in Austin. Anyway, you can read through the following brief summary and follow with accessing the web account if you want to take the time to learn more. Thanks for sharing your ideas with me.
Elmer Koneman
JUDGEMENT DAY: INTELLEGENT DESIGN ON TRIAL
The 2005 trial of Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. was the latest major bout in a long-standing legal battle over the teaching of evolution in U.S. public schools. The crux of the case was Dover's newly implemented policy requiring biology teachers to read to students a disclaimer purporting that "gaps" exist in Darwin's theory of evolution, and moreover, that there is an alternative scientific explanation called intelligent design (ID). The disclaimer suggested that students learn more about ID through a book called Of Pandas and People, 60 copies of which were available in the school library. (To read the statement in full, see Board vs. Teachers.)
Was Dover's ID policy a covert way to introduce religion into a public school, and therefore in violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? That is what Dover parent Tammy Kitzmiller and her co-plaintiffs claimed. Following six weeks of testimony from some of the country's leading biologists, as well as arguments from the nation's most ardent supporters of intelligent design, Judge John Jones issued a 139-page ruling on the case. In the following audio highlights, hear Judge Jones read some of his key findings.
Summary of Judge Jones’ ruling:
ID is not Science
ID is the progeny of creationism
Evolutionary theory is not antithetical to religion
The disclaimer Dover wanted read to students is flawed
The goal of the ID movement is to foment a revolution
It is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution
We were thoroughly upset by this person, Paul Vann’s, nonsense. Can you believe that anybody would dare say that about 2+3=5 and expect to be respected by other than the vulnerable kids this fundamentalist school district puts on his plate to eat every day? Pete replied to this next teacher with equal outrage.
From: "Paul Meredith" <pmeredith@lubbockisd.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 12:19 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: RE: Darwin SOS
I will be thrilled if creationism is taught in schools.
Paul Meredith
Geometry/Algebra II/Academic Decathlon
Monterey High School
From: "Peter Calabria" <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 3:13 PM
To: pmeredith@lubbockisd.org
Subject: RE: Darwin SOS
That's because your type would be thrilled if 2+3=4 were taught in the schools if it glorified the unseen God who holds your hand when you get scared. You know, Darwin's natural selection can be proven mathematically. We show how it is done on www.matrix-evolutions.com. (Open on Internet Explorer) This proof of natural selection is as tight as the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem and mathematically puts God in His Rightful Place, back in your imagination and out of the creation business. Since you might not be able to get permission from your pastor to log onto this heresy, I'll spell it out for you in terms simple enough that your obviously cogent mind will see its correctness in two seconds.
Start with the exponential population growth differential equation. If God insists you argue this starting point to show your piety, you can begin more basically yet with the seventh grade daily compounded interest rate formula, which nobody argues except for kids who don't want to be promoted, which is the same thing as the exponential with the interest rate as the population growth rate. Now solve the differential equation for size as a function for time.
Next write that solution out for two populations. Next take the sum of these population sizes as a constant as would be in a competitive niche of fixed carrying capacity. That boundary condition develops the Verhulst equation, (named after the noted 19th Century, Belgian mathematician, August Verhulst), with the rate constant term equal to the difference in the growth rates of the competing populations. This is a mathematical expression of Darwin's differential birth and death definition of natural selection.
For good measure we empirically show on the website that selective evolution is neither a thing of God nor a thing not of God, but is a purely mathematical operation as applies to any system whose members come to be (or are born) and cease to be (or die), as in amorphous-crystalline phase transformations whose laboratory data perfectly fit the equations, thus proving natural selection generally mathematically.
But there's no way you could accept or understand that because the belief in a God creator is an emotional thing, a thrill as you say, even if it is denied by mathematics as simple as 2+3=5. This was also the case when Newton expressed sun centered planetary motion mathematically but was yet denied by Bible believers wearing blinders for another 60 years until the Church finally realized its foolishness in telling its supplicants that black was white and took Galileo's books off the banned list.
In time this mathematics will make the creationists look like the walking jokes they are, too. Sorry to be rude, but those who propound stupidity with that air of infallibility that only fundamentalists can manage can only and should be laughed at heartily. Especially when such stupidity is propounded by a school teacher whose authority so dominates vulnerable kids as to make it impossible for them to resist this destruction of their developing minds.
Dr. Peter V. Calabria
Trying to talk mathematics to this mathematics teacher got returned not mathematics but the following sermon from the jackass.
From: "Paul Meredith" <pmeredith@lubbockisd.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 8:57 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: RE: [BULK] Darwin SOS
Dr. Calabria-
Now, I did read your e-mail all the way through and would appreciate if you would read my response (don't worry, I didn't call you any names like you called me!).
What if you could predict that a major world event would take place five minutes from now? What if you could accurately describe what would happen? Would knowing the future give you unusual power? Would anyone believe you? Possibly some would, but how many would not?
Many people do not believe the Bible, yet it miraculously foretells hundreds of events, sometimes in minute detail, and usually hundreds - sometimes thousands - of years ahead. Some prophecies concern cities and countries, such as Tyre, Jericho, Samaria, Jerusalem, Palestine, Moab, and Babylon. Others relate to specific individuals. Many have already been fulfilled, but some are still in the future.
Jesus Christ is the subject of more than 300 Old Testament prophecies. His birth nearly 2,000 years ago, and events of His life had been foretold by many prophets during a period of 1,500 years. History confirms that even the smallest detail happened just as predicted. It confirms beyond a doubt that Jesus is the true Messiah, the Son of God and Savior of the world.
I will pray for you daily.
Paul Meredith
Geometry/Algebra II/Academic Decathlon
Monterey High School
To which Pete replied:
From: "Peter Calabria" <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 10:02 PM
To: pmeredith@lubbockisd.org
Subject: RE: [BULK] Darwin SOS
The name calling is directed to the way of thinking, which deserves ridicule, along with the individual, thou mathematics memorizing jerk. Who the heck do you think you are talking to? This is not a child that believes your silly tales of pinpoint Biblical prophesies because he or she is stuck in your class and has no choice but to have his or her mind raped by your nonsense.
The Bible implies by genealogy that the world is 6000 years old. That literal interpretation of it, Paul, is wrong. If you think it is right, then you are denying very basic geological and chemical science so absurdly that any school district who cared about the education of the children entrusted to them would throw you out on your ear, one utterly deaf to scientific reasoning and truth.
You teach geometry. Presumably you respect Euclid. I had an odd experience of home teaching my oldest boy, now grown and a CPA, that subject. The text we used was a simplified one that left out the proofs. My son insisted on the proofs, so I had to do them all from scratch myself. On the one hand, I felt rather good that I had no trouble deriving them. But, more, what I came away with was the beauty of the material, the tight logical fit.
Evolution is not a twit different. It is not a matter of belief. It is a matter of sensible, logical, thinking. And when you chuck that out the window and replace it with what you heard on The God Learning Channel last Tuesday night, you are in major error, doubly ugly and cruel when such ways of pseudo-reasoning destroy a child's mind and ability to think straight.
We also heard from a pious woman math teacher who felt a need to be flagellated verbally so that she, too, could revel in the fact of being persecuted for her pious beliefs.
From: "Jill Mariott" <jmariott@lubbockisd.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 9:26 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: RE: How to Talk to a Creationist
I do sincerely hope that creationism is taught in the schools. If you now feel the need to criticize me, that is okay. Have a nice day.
Jill Mariott
Algebra 2/Geometry
Monterey High School
Pete obliged.
From: "Peter Calabria" <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 10:12 PM
To: jmariott@lubbockisd.org
Subject: How to Talk to a Creationist
It is the need to criticize people who think the earth is flat, and preach it to children, and who think 2+3 can be something other than 5, as I am sure you would say in agreement with your fellow nitwit, Paul Vann. All mechanisms suggested in the Bible for the creator's means of creation violate every natural law and are as impossible as making a right triangle whose hypotenuse is other than the square root of the sum of the squares of its legs. Which I am sure you would also say God could also make be if He wished to. You would have no problem, Saint Jill, deceiver and abuser of children, in disagreeing with all professional mathematicians and with all professional biologists to save your mortal soul, of course, and keep the hump on the children’s minds as the creation spouting minister Ted Haggard did before he was caught at his nonsense.
And finally we got to hear from the big billygoat gruff, the head of the high school science department, who told the lies in the most educationally pious tones of all.
From: "Joanie Wheeler" <jwheeler@lubbockisd.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 7:06 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: RE: How to Talk to a Creationist
I will say only one thing, I will not be there because as teacher/educators we are to teach all our students to think critically about their world. If we only present one side, how can they think for themselves? I know I do not want other people to think for me.
Joanie Wheeler
Science Department Head
Pre-AP Chemistry
Monterey High School
Pete tried his best to answer in kind.
From: "Peter Calabria" <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 9:25 PM
To: jwheeler@lubbockisd.org
Subject: RE: How to Talk to a Creationist
In my extended career as student, teacher and researcher, the high school I attended being considered the best in the Boston area and the science and engineering university I attended being number four in the country, there was never any consideration for the students to question the science taught them until one reaches the PhD track level and is doing research. Why? It is because students are ill equipped to question the science subjects taught them. It is more than enough that they strive to grasp the scientific ideas taught them, let alone question them. I never heard of it. I never saw it. It would never have made any sense, for what is taught to students in these areas has been thoroughly vetted by tens of thousands of scientists crossing conceptual swords for countless years in the hundreds of scientific journals that fill university libraries.
You're a chemist, by background, I take it. Though I am nominally a biologist, chemistry courses predominated in both my undergraduate and graduate matriculation. I cannot even imagine why I would question the organic, inorganic or physical chemistry taught me. Are you telling me that you did? If so, you’re a damn liar. I both learned and taught at the university level. What you and every other student in chemistry did was study hard to pass your exams.
At the lower levels, the notion of students in grade school and high school questioning scientific theory is so utterly ridiculous that your using it as an excuse to downgrade evolution as science and leave enough room for creationism to stick its superstitious nose in is transparent, word spinning liar. Of the tens of thousands of PhD biologists in this country, there are but one or two extremely stupid religious zealots from some second-rate universities who don’t accept evolution. Why? Because biology is incomprehensible without it. Evolution stands in relation to biology as the theory of the atom stands in relationship to chemistry. That is the scientific consensus of a hundred thousand scientists who have collectively studied and researched the theory for the last 150 years.
What joy to parents to have a head of science in their high school who can’t tell a science lecture from a Sunday sermon and supports the rape of kids entrusted to her by her underlings. A well spoken rationalization for creationism, madam, but nonetheless disgusting for the real harm it does children.
Dr. Peter V. Calabria
In the meantime, another Lubbock high school teacher, Mr. Botrell, took the email we sent about the rally in Austin and posted some of it on the forum under his name. Some of the comments on it are noteworthy in indicating the extent of brain damage this stuff can inflict on people. Don’t laugh. True, Lubbock is extreme enough to have as its unofficial motto be: Lubbock, Building Bridges to the 11th Century. But as goes Lubbock, so may go the rest of the country.
"That is more garbage from the Calabrias trying to dictate and control what is taught in life. They are doing what they are accusing others of doing - filling people’s minds with Darwinian hocus-pocus and selling it as science. The emails are full of false statements - they were not banned because of their main discussion issues, they were banned because they attacked those who disagreed with them. Let’s get the story straight."
I personally choose to forget anyone that will not allow the thought of creationism. One thing the Calabrias and their ilk have a total ignorance of is: The Power of Prayer."
"Evolutionism is as much a religion as is creationism. Either ban them both or permit them both. Only narrow-minded, fearful, insecure people wish to ban the teaching of creationism. Benito Mussolini Calabria is attempting to pick up where the others left off."
By the way, if anybody knows President Obama’s secret email address or White House phone number, they should clue him into the dreck that lies under the faith of faith based organizations and their members. Here is the thread of emails from various scientists, educators and legislators we originally mailed out that he should also be informed of.
We are a group of scientists, educators, legal representatives and grandmothers who are deeply concerned about the material about to be put in the science textbooks of the children of America. In March, Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) will vote to determine whether the superstitious anti-science ideas of creationism will be taught alongside evolution in science texts. This is not a trivial issue. It is imperative that those who understand the dangers of filling our kids’ and grandkids’ minds with medieval hocus-pocus and selling it as science should come en masse to Austin at 1701 N. Congress on Wednesday, March 25, on the day before the vote, armed with enthusiasm and signs indicating their feeling that there must be a return to sensibility and sanity in the teaching of our children. We ask that people from all around the country come because the nature of textbook publishing has what the Texas SBOE decides for the children of Texas also determining the science textbook and teaching used by school districts all around the country for the next ten years.
If the person receiving this is a journalist, we stress the fairness and need for this announcement of the rally to be made to the public as in a letter to the editor or in a short article. If you are an Internet blogger, please display this in a prominent place on your blog. If you are an individual who understands the dire need for science and evolution to be taught correctly, we ask that you use any influence you may have with your local media to have this announcement made public and to please forward copies of this email to professional colleagues and to all sensible people you know who understand the importance of having this Texas SBOE vote go the right way.
This rapidly growing movement came about spontaneously from my scientist husband trying to talk about his discovery of a mathematical proof of natural selection on the forum of the second rate newspaper of Lubbock, Texas, the Avalanche-Journal, which includes a Bible quote on its front page everyday and which eventually banned and censored my husband from talking because of his strong Darwinian views and his eventual realization, tongue in cheek, that the creationists commenting on evolution were little more than murdering rapists who got whatever meager sexual pleasure they had in life from causing hurt to others. His email to academics and legislators and their replies follows. If there are any questions as to the March 25 rally in Austin or anything else, please do not hesitate to ask.
Mrs. Ruth Calabria
From: Peter Calabria [mailto:petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com]
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 3:26 PM
To: SBOESUPPORT
Subject: Darwin Resurrected
State Board of Education:
For a hilariously impolite quarrel between an evolutionist PhD from New York and a hoard of death threat creationists from Lubbock, Texas, America's premier city of Republican conservatism and redneck intolerance, log onto http://forum.lubbockonline.com/... Topics begin with an attempt to give a mathematically firm proof of evolution to keep the Texas School Board from mandating America's science textbooks to include the Biblical story of creation as an alternative to Darwin and quickly descend into nasty arguments over Holy and unholy Spirits, personal miracles, the shuck of democratic capitalism, Ted Haggard as the paragon for all fundamentalists and a call by the scientist to civil disobedience to put an end to foreclosures, the dangerously interminable wars in the Middle East and other things that will drive the government to bankruptcy and people to homelessness during Great Depression II. Tailor made for those who placed their hopes in Obama and are now disappointed at his inability to get things done for the people. For a different kind of Internet experience, exchange ideas and insults with devilish born agains who truly believe that God can make 2+3 be something other than 5.
All kidding aside, it is very important to log on and express your opinion to put pressure on the Texas School Board to keep anti-science myth and superstition out of our the children of America's textbooks for the next ten years.
Dr. Peter V. Calabria
www.matrix-evolutions.com
From: David Berlanga <david.berlanga@att.net>
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 12:05 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: Re: FW: Darwin Resurrected
Thank you for your letter. I support your view 100%. The following eight members voted at the January meeting ( 8 - 7) for good science and to teach evolution in the schools. Mary Helen Berlanga, Rick Agosto, Lawrence Allen, Bob Craig, Patricia Hardy, Mavis Knight, Geraldine Miller, Rene Nuñez. The seven who did not are: Don McLeroy, David Bradley, Barbara Cargill, Cynthia Noland, Terri Leo, Gail Lowe, Ken Mercer. Make calls and write letters to the seven SBOE member who oppose good science in the schools because of religious beliefs. They are sending emails in mass to try to change the vote. They will probably show up at the March meeting brought there by church busses. We are well aware of their ruse of using "strengths and weaknesses" as a guise to inject religion and ignorance into the classroom".
Dr. David Berlanga,
Administrative Assistant to Mary Helen Berlanga,
Member, Texas SBOE, District 2.
From: "Bob Craig" (State Board of Education Member for the Lubbock area)
Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 4:14 PM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: Science TEKS
Dr. Peter V. Calabria
Dear Peter:
Thank you for your recent e-mail. I wanted to provide to you the exact wording of the proposed text concerning revisions to the Texas Essential Knowledge & Skills for science. Work group members appointed by the State Board of Education have worked on the revisions for many months, and have spent countless hours discussing K-12 revisions. The work groups were comprised primarily of teachers throughout the State of Texas. I think they did a good job in their revisions to the TEKS for science. The specific new language you are asking about is found under (3) (A) in each science subject, and is as follows....
This new language does not restrict or otherwise limit discussions about theories or scientific concepts. Using the words "analyze and evaluate" requires critical thinking on the part of the student and allows academic freedom to both the teacher and student. Under the present wording, a teacher could say there are no weaknesses to a particular theory, and then talk about only the strengths. The proposed new language requires the student and teacher to analyze and evaluate scientific explanations, which is a balanced approach. The new language does not promote or otherwise say that Darwinism is a fact. It does not include any such wording. It does not prevent a teacher or student from analyzing and evaluating evolution or other scientific concepts. There is no censorship with the revised language.
I have attached for your benefit a copy of the proposed revisions to the high school curriculum for science. If you have any comments or questions after reviewing the same, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Yours truly,
Bob Craig
From: "Peter Calabria"
Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 7:32 PM
To: bobc@cthglawfirm.com
Subject: re: Science TEKS
Bob,
The politics of this game and the need to walk a fine line as to wording become very clear as I read the curriculum you sent. Let me take a large step back from the details for a moment and try to give you a sense of how science looks at the core problem, whatever good this analysis may have for the nuts and bolts argument you have to present in the end.
Every memory I have of any science courses I took starting in high school did not get into the philosophical problem of deciding scientific hypothesis from theory from fact. To even have to bring it up is to cast doubt on scientific explanations for nature. If I am looking across a highway at ten thousand professional biologists armed with textbooks all of whom totally accept Darwin as the explanation for natural history and I am 13 years old, my interest in crossing the road is to have these scientists teach me their understanding of nature, not for me to debate what they are about to educate me with. Ensconced in a technical university for 10 years, the only time such concepts of hypothesis versus theory versus fact came to light for me was in a graduate course in the philosophy of science, one that had little value. Otherwise, it is assumed that science does explain the world as well as it can be explained with its methodology of common sense sharpened with mathematics and instrumentation.
Let me clarify this further by distinguishing the two kinds of assumptions that creationism and evolution are based on. The one is emotional and derives from instincts telling you what you need. If you are starving and you're mind flashes thoughts of delicious food and the anticipation of the good taste of food and relief from hunger, you BELIEVE that such food exists. The assuming that food exists to be found when you have an intense need for it is very powerful. Nobody denies that potential solutions exist for pressing needs as are instinctively flashed into the mind. Religious belief derives from such an emotional basis. All superstitious thinking does. If you're scared, and there are arguably lots of things in life to be scared of, there can be an assumption of a protective figure somewhere out there that will make things better for you.
I am not looking for a grand debate on this, but God does have a way of popping up in response to the fear felt in a foxhole. Or when you can't pay the rent, and so on. And when He does pop up, whatever the specific nature of the scary foxhole you may be in, it's near impossible to tell somebody who gets a rush of hope from the thought of a supernatural deity protecting them, that they are wrong. The primary problem lays in confusing what you hope to be with what actually is, this significant mistake very destructive for the developing minds of children. Confusing what you feel or hope to be with what you observe to be destroys the thinking mind for the kids.
If you don't catch the difference in the nature of the arguments in terms of starting assumptions, you can get confused into thinking that both arguments are rational. They are not. Science is thinking based on what is sensed. Creationism is based on wishful thinking, based on an assumption of a God existing, not as observed, but from what is taken on faith out of an emotional need to assume its existence as a solution to a problem. There is a big difference here and I assure you that no advances in computer technology were ever achieved or will be by somebody who can't tell the difference between what is and what should be. That is the danger to the kids in losing respect for scientific truth. I suppose we shall have to be happy with whatever we can get in the end, this argument that reduces the creator God to an emotional need, bordering on blasphemy. But it may help to have it handy if final decisions depend on everything that can be poured into the debate. A great deal is at stake.
To restate in brief synopsis, there is a vast difference between hypotheses or theories that arise from emotion based conjecture and those that arise from observation. The two cannot be argued against each other as creationists do in arguing against evolution because the so-called competing theories of creationism versus evolution are based on entirely different kinds of assumptions, one emotional, the other observational.
If you feel this fundamental distinguishing between these two kinds of assumptions, one scientific, the other speculative and having no place in a science classroom or textbook, might have practical merit, I can work it up better for you if you can be more specific as to what form you might want it to take.
Sincerely,
Dr. Peter V. Calabria, PhD (in Biophysics)
P.S. We derive the mechanism of selective evolution (natural selection) mathematically from the most inarguable assumptions and empirically validate it from laboratory data on our website, www.matrix-evolutions.com. Interposing God in this mathematically explicated evolution process is equivalent to suggesting that 2+3 is something other than 5, such an educational philosophy adopted from the perspective of the need to "keep an open mind" in teaching science so as to include emotion based creationism being distinctly dangerous especially when you understand that what comes about from the next two months Texas debate will affect the thinking of all the kids in America for the next ten years.
From: ncb@ldeo.columbia.edu
Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2009 12:04 PM
To: bobc@cthglawfirm.com, Peter Calabria <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Subject: Science TEKS
Dear Bob and Peter:
David Berlanga was good enough to forward your correspondence to me. I agree very much with Peter's nicely worded perspective on the differences between scientific methodology and faith-based understanding of the world around us. It is true that school kids are not yet well equipped to make fine philosophical distinctions between what is well established and what is hypothesized with less confidence - though the school curriculum surely focuses mainly on the big picture stuff in the first category. However, I think that it is very important to connect any idea with the basic observations upon which it is based. It is also OK to allude to the status of current debates within a particular scientific community on matters that are not yet settled because that is where the excitement of science lies.
From my vantage point as an Earth scientist, and recognizing how cautiously one must tread politically around evolution vs creationism in Texas, I have to say that the matter is fully resolved among specialists in my field. This is not simply because the fossil evidence is overwhelming, and because we now have a molecular basis for thinking about how evolution takes place. Fossils are preserved in an internally consistent geological, geophysical and geochemical framework that requires a planetary timescale of billions of years and unidirectional changes in the history of life at the finest resolution. The human species is without any doubt part of that framework, not separate from it, though for only the past 200 thousand years or so versus the more than 3.8 billion years over which living organisms have flourished. As a literally understood statement, the biblical account of creation is inconsistent at the most fundamental level with what has been discovered through painstaking research over more than two centuries.
With regards,
Nicholas Christie-Blick
Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University
Palisades, New York 10964-8000, USA
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/...
To: cb@ldeo.columbia.edu ; bobc@cthglawfirm.com ; david.berlanga@att.net
Cc: kbazinet@nydailynews.com
Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2009 12:23 PM
Subject: re: Science TEKS
Gentlemen,
As made clear in this excellent round robin of emails, we have two problems here. One is the very important practical one of insuring that the kids' science textbooks teach science and not medieval dogma. The other, less important because science does unanimously accept Darwin, is fine tuning our description of evolution so as to have it understood as much as possible as truth, to use that old fashioned word.
In the first instance, I really do hope that all of us pushing as hard as we can in whatever areas we have leverage in can bring public pressure to bear on the SBOE by amassing large numbers of professionals and the sensible thinking public to Austin the Wednesday before the vote, on March 25. Let all whom we contact by private or mass emails as that date approaches be made aware of the need to gather in Austin on that day.
In regard to the latter point, having just gotten the firming input from Dr. Christie-Blick from the earth sciences perspective, I would like to add that my family and I have derived a mathematical expression for the natural selection component of evolution. When we first derived it a decade ago, I thought it was original, only to be told later by Dr. Sean H. Rice, author of Evolutionary Theory, the accepted graduate text on mathematical evolution, that what we had come up with was a special case of the work of the classical population biologists, R. A. Fisher and J.B.S Haldane, back 80 years ago.
We were very happy that the equation for selection was correct even if not original. In its classical derivation, the equation is never proven empirically because of the stochastic nature of the birth and death rates of living populations. What is different with our work is that we prove the evolutionary selection equation empirically from firm kinetic laboratory data on "molecular populations" of inorganic crystals which grow by a templated replication that is a perfect fit to the DNA templated replication of organisms, but whose Avogadro's Number level of entities is so great that the law of large numbers smoothens out the stochastic irregularities and gives a perfect fit of equation to data, thus an empirical proof of natural selection generally.
What it proves is that natural selection is a pure mathematical process of differential births and deaths, of any population whose members are born or come into existence and die or go out of existence. The derivation and empirical proof is quite beautiful in its being numerically as tight as 2+3=5. I am sure it would be an exaggeration to compare it with the firm mathematics of planetary motion that, as the poet Alexander Pope said in reference to Newton, "kicked the angels out of the heavens." But it makes you understand the evolutionary selection process as being as entirely mathematically mechanistic as adding your grocery items at the checkout counter to calculate the bill that must be paid.
One looks for a killer thrust to kick the angels out of the science texts once and for all and end this mini-lunacy of Christian fundamentalist America being the only nation on earth other than Muslim fundamentalist Turkey to have the majority of people doubting evolution, dangerous in its denial of scientific reality without getting into the detailed ramifications and nuances of that danger.
Peter
From: david.berlanga@att.net
Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2009 7:51 AM
To: petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com
Subject: Re: re: Science TEKS
Pete,
It is my feeling, and it is only a hunch, and judging by the number of emails the SBOE members are getting, they are planning to bring their people to the meeting. It will be forceful and intimidating. The day of the meeting is Thursday March 26 (Committee of the Whole) they go over the agenda items and vote on all agenda items including "strengths and weakness" and on Friday they have a final vote (that's the important one). Wednesday is reserved for Public Testimony, that is, if they McLeroy allows it. He's quite the dictator. I will call Monday to find out if there is going to be a public hearing; I'll let you know as soon as I find out. Your question is well taken, and demonstrations are not counterproductive. It helps the 8 members who are on our side to stay on our side...talking to board members before the meeting is very good...It's useless to talk to McLeroy and David Bradley and Co.
They won't budge. So, If there is a public hearing, the SBOE members will be there. If there no public hearing, the first time we see the SBOE members is Thursday morning for the Committee of the Whole. I'm not sure when the busses or their mass of anti science people will be there; as I told you, it is a hunch, but I am warning all fold coming to the meeting about this hunch. They mean to change some minds and/or introduce amendments to water down the whole thing and get what they want.
I don't know when the busses will show up but I think the best time for a large mass of pro science people to converge on Austin is Wednesday between 11 am and 1 pm in the lobby of the building where the SBOE meeting is always held. 1701 N. Congress; 512-463-9734; not hard to find and access once you get to Austin. The English teachers had their press conference and protest around noon on Wednesday during the day of public testimony and they had a large number of people involved; speakers; individuals holding signs; even Barney the purple dragon showed up outside the building asking to see Don McLeroy...and by the way the Chair has banned signs and banners from the SBOE meeting room; so this is the place to have them. So, if there is public hearing, that's the day to come. On Thursday and Friday, the Chair will not let anyone speak unless he is on his side of the issue. I'm not kidding.
I hope all is well,
David
From: david.berlanga@att.net
Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2009 4:51 PM
To: dhillis@mail.utexas.edu
Subject: Fw: Science TEKS
Dear Dr Hillis,
For the last week I have been trying to coordinate the efforts and input from scientists and other individuals so that we can all be on the same page regarding the March 26-27, SBOE Meeting. I have been emailing Dr. Nick Christie-Blick of Columbia University and Dr. Peter Calabria of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute up in Troy, NY, Dept. of Biomedical Engineering. We all agree that the vote on March 26-27 is crucial and that we must not only be in agreement in our belief regarding evolution vs. Creationism, but also realize the political circumstances we find ourselves in Texas. We must all completely and fully appreciate the fine wire this whole decision is hanging on to. I cannot emphasize enough that it will take only one vote to change the course of history. Dr. Calabria has been in touch with the national media and is emailing in mass his colleagues all over the US. Dr. Christie-Blick has also been writing to the board members and has invited the 7 non believers on a field trip to Death Valley in an effort to educate and illuminate. He has been received with a not surprising and thundering "no thanks". Tim Hart and I for the last month have also been writing to all individuals who are writing emails to SBOE members. And let me tell you, they are flooding the SBOE meeting. And 1 out of every 5 is a supporter of evolution, the rest are against. I have told all supporters this information and that I have a hunch that McLeroy and Co. are planning to bus evangelicals and fundamentalists to the March meeting. They did it once before when they came in church busses with their children and their bibles. If they don't manage to change the mind of one board member, I'm sure this will be their last ditch effort. I will share this email with Drs. Christie-Blick and Dr. Calabria.
Best Regards,
David Berlanga
(Professor of Education, Retired, Texas A & M)
Posted on DailyKos on my Darwin SOS diary, Feb. 9, by a evolutionary biologist and educator was:
I will try to be there on March 25th, the day before my 67th birthday. I am an evolutionary biologist by education and taught science at all levels in Texas and Colorado. My learning came from, and still does, from the leading professionals in the scientific community. I am, therefore, totally in tune with your position and am delighted to see your group so active.
Have you contacted Eugenie Scott at the American Institute of Science Education in California? She has been leading the fight you are immersed in. I taught high school AP Biology in Colorado Springs, so I know that Lubbock has a sister city as far as ignorant, hyper-Christian redneckism. I studied the Bible and found many classic contradictions that I used to defeat the dewy-eyed "true believers" at most every turn. It's a pitiful sight, really, to see these great kids being pushed into the swamp of life-long ignorance.
I have also written many letters to the Austin American-Statesman regarding this topic. This creature, Cynthia Dunbar must become a target for your activity. She's a perfect example of why we have too many lawyers. Feel free to contact me via e-mail at vtgolf@zeecon.com. I live in Burnet County, about an hour from the capitol.
Pete wrote to him:
From: "Peter Calabria" <petercalabria@matrix-evolutions.com>
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 1:29 PM
To: vtgolf@zeecon.com
Subject: Austin Dialogue
That’s great that you’re coming to Austin. The more people who show up, the better chance we have of keeping the creationism hocus-pocus out of the textbooks. We see this get together of sane thinking people also as potentially helpful for considering Great Depression II and the continued escalation of the Middle East conflict, the two big problems we hoped Obama might solve, but that we are near sure he is going to screw up and be slapped down on unless he starts taking some very sharp turns to sanity and the left.
These are two problems you can’t make any sense out of unless you see what their cause is. The temptation is to get technical to get the truth of it across, but math and science have their limits in the fluid communication of ideas.
Let me try to sketch out who the enemy of the people is by telling the story of how we free thinkers wound up in Dark Ages Lubbock to begin with. We came down here this summer to fight for Ruth’s $30,000 inheritance from her mother that is controlled in trust by her lawyer brother, Don Graf, a senior partner in the McClesky, Harriger, Brazill and Graf prominent Lubbock law firm. This first class mamby pamby mama’s boy told Ruth back in 2007 just after her mother died that Ruth would never see a penny of the money unless she left me. After 35 years together closer than two peas in a pod, that surely must seem a harsh proviso in a will and maybe hard to understand.
So let me backtrack 40 years or so to tell the story. The underlying plot is somewhat unusual, but not entirely new. Think of the famous Tennessee William’s, Suddenly Last Summer, play in which, in the movie make of it, Elizabeth Taylor is the bait for a homosexual’s seduction of a town full of Latino young guys who start off liking Liz but wind up on the wrong end of the homosexual. The ending to this bait and switch tragedy makes clear Tennessee’s dislike for the lifestyle he likely got caught up in via the same sort of tactic as he has all the young men chase the homosexual up a hill in revenge and eat him alive, with lots of screaming to make the point of Tennessee’s moral evaluation of that game.
Liz has a hard time upchucking this unlikely horror soap opera trapped in her "I’d rather not talk about it" subconscious and even if she did nobody would believe her because she is hinted at as being insane by the mother of the chewed up homosexual, who wants to make sure that Liz isn’t believed as to the truth of her mamby pamby son by anybody. No the homosexual isn’t played by my brother-in-law, though he could have gotten the part had he auditioned, but by Ruth’s first husband, a classic fundamentalist Ted Haggard type minister and missionary to Japan.
When Ruth finds out about her Ted type husband, rather than doing the right thing morally like Haggard’s devoted smooth lying witch of a wife who looks and acts so much like Nurse Ratched in Cuckoo’s Nest as to be informing, she wants to run far, far away from her Ted minister husband as the setting sun. This is not so easy. Fortunately for me, and that’s because Ruth was a commercial model on Japanese TV for six years along with being a missionary’s wife, and for her, she runs into me.
The rest of the plot is fairly simple if you’ve seen Suddenly Last Summer. Ruth’s holy family − father is a minister too, mother talks to Jesus every day, and mamby pamby brother Don is mama’s first born obedient runt of a son – doesn’t want this to happen because of the scandal to them all. It is hinted at that Ruth is insane, for why else would she want to leave her fine minister husband. On the weekend before she is about to be examined by two psychiatrists, friends of her Ted husband as his professors in his new career as pastoral marriage counselor after Ruth and he had to leave Japan because of the scandal along with all the other 30 fundamentalist Lutheran missionaries who got caught up in the scandal of Ted’s perversion’s, I meet her. And I tell her that life is a dark game where some people who have power sometimes will murder or otherwise destroy and silence another person for reasons in their interest.
My violent brown eyes get Ruth to take my advice. And I follow up my counsel with a severe and convincing physical beating of her Ted husband, a minister so phony that he makes Jerry Fallwell believable by comparison. Ruth’s family is not pleased by this, but efforts to break us up fail, infuriating them all the more. Eventually Ruth writes up her story in comic book form, Minister’s Daughter, Missionary’s Wife, which includes child molestation by the mother, not untypical of fundamentalist women, ex-husband Ted comes down with cancer of the throat six weeks after we send out 1000 copies to relatives, neighbors and fellow ministers and Father Graf is retired from his parish and ministry early, thence to become a real estate salesman. Would make for a great plot in a Monty Python movie, but all the above actually happened.
Ruth’s comic did its job because it was top grade, having gotten the "masterpiece of sorts" seal of approval from Robert Crumb, no small accolade as Crumb said the exact same about Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning, Maus. Crumb, a through pacifist by nature, criticized Ruth’s comic, though, in the post card he sent to us way back when because Ruth kills her mother off with black widow spiders on the last page. That is by way of configuring Ruth as an unlikely candidate for a 30K inheritance from said mother.
I was also little loved by the Graf family. During the first year I was with Ruth, I lived with her for a few months in her apartment, in what had been Ted’s apartment before I beat Ted up, which was on the grounds of the Presbyterian seminary in San Anselmo, CA where Ted was taking his master’s degree in pastoral marriage counseling. One day, Mother Graf flew up from Texas with a ten pound roast beef in her suitcase looking all the part of an S. Clay Wilson motorcycle riding heroine with a Sunday church hat on. Mother Graf hurled down various threats of God’s punishment on me, after which I threw her out of the apartment, near bodily, and two seconds later, the roast beef into the trash can sitting just outside the door.
This might make you wonder why Mother Graf would leave Ruth 30K. Or leave it with mamby pamby son, Don. For years we had nothing whatever to do with the Graf’s other than to occasionally think of the revenge we had on them, sometimes just before having sex as an aphrodisiac. This revenge included mamby pamby mother’s boy Lubbock lawyer, Don Graf. Why? Because he helped in the family’s savage efforts to bring Ruth to her knees during the divorce by giving legal advice to ex-husband Ted as razor to the throat devious as lawyers are capable of at their worst.
Ruth’s retort was to draw a few one pagers on brother, Don, showing him wearing his wife’s underpants to court to get the zip he needed to present his cases and the swing he needed in his step to charm the judge. Sending this around to all of the few people Ruth knew Don knew, however, did not give Don cancer or cause him to be debarred. But it did give rise to a standard plot for a lawyer to take me out of the picture when seven years after the divorce we had to go to Texas from New York on compelling family business.
To be as brief as possible so as not to excessively delay my revelation of our ideas to advise Obama on how to defeat the Republicans efforts to hoist his butt atop a backboard and throw tar and feather at him from below and our more important yet ideas on how to save the world from nuclear Armageddon, I’ll rapid sketch the picture of Ruth and me at the breakfast table in Don and Ruby’s house along with Don’s two large in-law’s, one a strapping pig farmer of a father-in-law and the other an even bigger speedway owner of a brother-in-law, the latter having the standard large roll of neck fat that advertizes, don’t even think about messing with me.
Littler than both, but extremely violent especially when it came to protecting Ruth’s feelings, I was also relatively stupid or, perhaps, over-confident in those younger days. But sometimes not knowing the game can be a blessing, for when brother Don started subtly but powerfully, from childhood reinforcements, ridiculing Ruth in a public way, a restrained but deep urge to kill came over my face, which afterwards, when viewed in the rear view mirror of our Buick on the way out of the game, made me look like the worst guy in the prison chow hall in one of them old James Cagney movies.
Unbeknownst to stupid me other than from retrospect a day later after I figured it out, the ploy was for Don to annoy Ruth to the extent of my getting violently angry enough to have the Texas big belly twins jump in to break my bones or haul me off to jail for a year or two for initiating violence on brother Don’s property. But mamby pamby Don couldn’t pull the trigger. He was too scared from the maximally seething vibes I was sending out to take me over the top, and collapsed visibly in a flurry of the funniest apologies for no good reason that I cannot describe by