Roswell

Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Dick French talks about how he was ordered to investigate and debunk flying saucers. He says they're real and that he'll be surprised if they stay a secret for long.

The Bible Code - McKay Strikes Back

Remember the documentary where Brendan McKay claims to have discovered the assassinations of famous people in Moby-Dick? An analysis from a Bible code website breaks down in detail why McKay's stunt is not a refutation of the existence of the Bible code, and does not answer Michael Drosnin's challenge, which was: "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby-Dick I'll believe them."


The unnamed author of the piece points out that all correct codes found in the Torah must meet at least three criteria:

1. they must use a priori key words that are logically and historically related to the event being searched, meaning the key words must be chosen before the search is conducted in order for a code to be valid;

2. the a priori key words must have a relatively compact arrangement of ELS (equidistant letter skips) within the code cylinder;

3. one or more of the a priori key words must have a low rank skip ELS.


Every one of McKay's codes do not meet one or more of the criteria for the Bible code, meaning McKay did not find similar code in Moby-Dick and he did not refute the existence of the Bible code.


The first example given is of India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated 31 October 1984. The following is an example of the code table, or matrix, McKay found regarding the assassination (there are many such tables in the piece, this one is used here as a reference):





What McKay did, according to the article, was search for every instance of "IGANDHI" in the text of Moby-Dick and searched all of them for words related to killing. The one example he did find was "THEBLOODYDEED". This does not meet the first criteria for a valid code. The article goes on to say: "The second problem is that the ELS for bloody deed is not a low rank skip ELS. Its rank is about 200, meaning there are about 200 ELSs of I. Ghandi in Moby Dick
having smaller absolute skip than the one shown in the McKay table. Low
rank skip for a primary key word generally means a rank smaller than
about 30."


A similar method is used for the deaths of other prominent people. Lebanese President Rene Moawad crosses the entire phrase "ANEXPLODINGBOMB", a rather complex phrase that one would not use as an a priori key word (just as you wouldn't search for the entire phrase "SHOTINTHEHEAD" when looking for the Kennedy assassination, you would use words like "SHOT" and "DALLAS"). Leon Trotsky is found with the word "EXECUTED", when he was murdered by a criminal while exiled in Mexico, not killed in an official execution. The other codes found by McKay either display odd complete phrases, indicating cheating, or are not statistically significant (McKay's code for JFK has a probability of 34.5 in 100, whereas the probability of the results of the original rabbi's experiment he said was fake had a probability of 1 in 10 million).


The conclusion is clear: Brendan McKay did not perform an experiment. He used no experimental protocal, certainly not the rigorous one used in the original experiment he was criticising. McKay performed a debunking exercise where he cheated at every chance he could, searching the text for anything he thought would look good, and put on a show to purpousfully deceive the uneducated reader. His whole purpose was to discredit genuine code researchers because he has an a priori metaphysical objection to the existence of codes, not a real scientific objection.

The Man of Miracles

A 50 minute film on Sathya Sai Baba called "The Man of Miracles", narrated by Rod Serling. This film was made between 1973 and 74 (during the renovation project at Prasanthi Nilayam, though there's no date, the construction gives it away).



Attention is paid to Swami's early life and interviews with prominant Western devotees.

Ancient Aliens

A more accomplished inventor than Edison, a more sinister killer than Hitler.



Back in 2009 I watched a program on what was then called The History Channel (now just History, which is ironic as it no longer has anything to do with history but is instead reality shows about ambiguously gay garbage men and all sorts of utter crap) called Ancient Aliens. At the time it was the most viewed program ever aired on The History Channel (over 2 million views). The program presented speculation that many of the things ancient people built, supposedly with one foot still in the stone age, which modern technology cannot replicate (the Great Pyramid took 23 years to build, supposedly by thousands of people pulling stones along a ramp that would have stretched for several miles and contained several times the voulme of material as the pyramid itself, and with the entire world's supply of boom cranes it would take at least 100 years to build and cost more money than the GNP of most countries; the Stone of the Pregnant Woman at Baalbek weighs over 1000 tonnes and does not have enough surface area to attach sufficient ropes for it to be moved), and proposes that it is possible that extraterrestrials visited Earth and had some role in these astonishing accomplishments.



From there it degenerated into idiots claiming that absolutely everything in the universe was done by ET, and has retconned itself at least once.



According to the man with the hair, show producer and host Giorgio Tsoukalos (according to wiki his day job is running an ET themed amusement park, which sounds wicked cool until you realise that it's probably all desk work and meeting with people with deep pockets), all the world's religions were started as cargo cults by ET (because things like God/gods, angels, and anything nonphysical is laughable on its face, and because no one ever used entheogens until the 1960s), every single artefact "looks surprisingly like" some modern machine which isn't the least bit odd considering that ET is supposedly millions of years more advanced than humans and yet is using Apollo era technology, ET started the American Revolution and was in communication with the Free Masons, George Washington, Ben Franklin, and maybe gave Sam Adams the recipe for beer, ET was behind the works of Shakespere and Leonardo da Vinci (because if you use a computer to distort da Vinci's paintings you can make ET heads or something), ET is responsible for every war in history, selects every US President, and mines the atmosphere for gold, somehow. Apparently "ancient astronaut theory" is no longer a theory, it's a deus ex machina for everything in the universe (except explaining where ET came from and if there is an even older race of ancient aliens who created the ones that visited Earth, and why the definition of "ancient astronaut theory" keeps changing for every episode).



In Season One ET visited the Earth looking for gold or liquid water (gold being a very heavy element should actually be more abundant on Mercury than Earth, and water is very common throughout the universe and can be found in huge quantities on the outer planets) and they found primitive ape creatures which they infused with ET DNA (or ENA) to make humans to mine the gold. Once they had enough they left until Roswell in 1947.



In the latest episode ET visited the Earth millions of years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs with laser weapons so the planet would be free to grow humans to mine for ratings on History's sister channel H2. The reason this change in ET agenda was never explained.



Here's what Charlie Sheen has to say about Ancient Aliens:

The Bible Code

Looking through a box of books I discovered Michael Drosnin's original The Bible Code. This got me thinking about a documentary film on the Bible code I had seen a few years ago. Here it is below:



It runs 45 minutes.







The above film includes interviews with charlatan Brendan McKay (who admits his stunt with Moby Dick was a stunt and that he didn't bother with the scrambling method that produces the real statistically significant results in the actual code, and despite this he is still touted as an expert all over the Internet) and Barry Simon (who believes that God would not create the code because then it would prove God's existance and then everyone would be forced to believe against their free will), both of whom reject a priori the possibility of the code and are therefore not scientists.



It also includes interviews with Eliyahu Rips, who discovered the code using computer technology.



Here is a brief (7 minutes) detailed explanation of the original experiment, it's supposed refutation, and the second study that the skep-dicks have ignored and remains unrefuted, presented by Moshe Zeldman.

The Star Spangled Banner

The band Madison Rising performing The Star Spangled Banner.





Never before, or since, has anything like the United States been attempted. For all its flaws, still the greatest country ever by a long shot.

Reformed Epistemology and Religious Pluralism

Alvin Plantinga





John Hick




Alvin Plantinga's argument against religious pluralism points to one particular reliabilist argument and tries to refute it. He uses the argument of John Hick, that nearly 99% of people, the religion that an individual professes is the religion in which they were raised - an accident of their birth. Someone born to Buddhist parents will almost always be a Buddhist, a Muslim to Muslims, a Christian to Christians, etc. Plantinga accepts this at face value, but then moves off in a direction I see as a tangetn. Plantinga asks "does it follow that I ought not to accept the religious views that I have been brought up to accept, or the ones that I find myself inclined to accept, or the ones that seem to me to be true? Or that the belief producing processes that have produced those beliefs in me are unreliable? Surely not."*



Plantinga goes on to imply that Hick's argument works against the pluralist. If the pluralist is right and beliefs are largely a product of our upbringing, then if a pluralist were born in a different time or place he likely wouldn't be a pluralist. If our beliefs are largely an accident of our birth, then so is the belief in pluralism.



He continues, that if his (Plantinga's) beliefs are true, they could be produced by a reliable, properly functioning belief producing process. From this he concludes that "there is no reason whatever to think that the exclusivist might not know tha they are true."



For Plantinga, the existence of the multiplicity of religions counts for nothing to advance the belief in pluralism. The fact may call into question the source of one's belief, but it does not follow from the existence of many religions that any one particular religion (Plantinga's own) is false. It may be a shame that billions of people may have faulty belief producing processes and will burn in Hell forever, but Plantinga can accept that with stoic resolve.



I don't buy this. If most people go through similar belief producing processes and tend to find themselves believing the dominant set of beliefs as their culture, how can Plantinga claim that his beliefs are more likely to be true than someone else's just because they formed in him? What offers him special status? How does he know his belief producing process (which just so happens, by coincidence, produce beliefs conforming to his culture) is functioning reliably and properly and is not working as such in others with different beliefs? What makes Plantinga's belief that his belief producing process is functioning reliably and properly and the process in other exclusivists who have different beliefs is not functioning properly and reliably?



Furthermore, Plantinga's Reformed epistemology is anti-foundationalist. Plantinga rejects the notion of evidence or proofs for supporting beliefs; instead affirming that his beliefs are basic beliefs, that can be known without proof or evidence, yet are not self-evident (such as belief in an external world or belief in other minds). What, then, is the basis of Plantinga's belief that his exclusivist belief generating process is working reliably and properly?



It can't be that this metabelief (the belief that his belief generating process is functioning reliably and properly, and furthermore, is producing the correct set of exclusivist beliefs and all other exclusivists with contradictory beliefs have faulty belief generating processes) has come about through an analysis of different religions and assessing which one is most correct, because Plantinga rejects any method of assessing the truth value of these beliefs. Plantinga affirms this metabelief either because it is an attempt to justify a rejection of Hick's pluralist argument based on nothing at all, or is itself a product of the culture in which he was raised.



This does not mean that the pluralist position is correct, or even that Plantinga's own exclusivist beliefs are false, merely that his refutation of the pluralist falls apart on its face.







*All quotes from "Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism"