Another 5th Dimension documentary. This one rates a solid A. There is a nice history of psychical research, including Ted Serios, Nina Kulagina, and Uri Geller. They talk about the work of J. B. Rhine and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program, then move on to the random event generators of the Global Consciousness Project and the work of Dean Radin. Unlike the last program this was not a debunking exercise. Overall this was a much better, more honest work that presented data and asked the viewer to draw one's own conclusions.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Monday, November 10, 2014
The Sisyphus Gambit
Think about the purpose of reproduction. Nobody cares about it anymore, as evident in declining birthrates and three hundred million aborted Chinese babies (just let than number sink in for a minute, it's more than the deaths from every war fought in the Twentieth Century combined). Reproduction is old hat. In fact, it's so old hat people get offended if you even bring it up. But think of the purpose of biological life for a moment and you'll see it all comes down to reproduction, but what's the point of that? This goes beyond asking why sex exists at all, why did bacteria divide long before sex existed?
It's real simple, but it may come as a surprise. Reproduction is an attempt to cheat death. It's a clever gambit that's been going on for billions of years. At least they tell us it has. There's no real way to tell just how long life's been going on, as I mentioned earlier in "Dreaming of Genesis" and "Dating Anything". It's based on a misperception, that just because something seems old does not mean it really is, but we're talking about appearances here. The truth may be we're in the Matrix and everything is only a hundred years old, or however old the oldest human is. However far back living memory goes there's no way to tell if it ever went back any further, but that's a different topic for a different day.
Let's just say it's billions of years old because that's what convention says. It doesn't really change how you live your life either way. Over time a cell accumulates damage that it cannot repair, mostly from free oxygen, but also from cosmic rays and other environmental hazards. At this point the cell can do one of two things, either it can die or it can divide and give half its damage to each new cell. Now, these new cells can never be as immaculate as the original cell, which started out with zero damage, so over time this whole thing is winding down unless the cells can get smart enough to find a way to repair all the damage. That's the whole point of reproduction: the cells are trying to cheat death long enough to find a way to defeat death for good. Reproduction delays the inevitable.
And somewhere along the line complex forms develop (or don't, but that's another topic), and now they can't well divide in two because there's a brain here and a heart there and to split all the cells in half and restructure everything would be too difficult, so sex has to be invented. Special cells have to be produced that can divide trillions of times and form a whole new body. And you need to bring two members of the same species together for the same reason that bacteria swap genes (plasmids: special bits of DNA that can deliver genes between different bacteria), because otherwise you keep producing copies of the same exact thing and if something comes along and knocks one off then all of the others will be susceptible too. That's why you need diversity.
Now, why there has to be two different specialised units coming together rather than have every individual be a hermaphrodite I can't really say. That part doesn't make sense to me. Maybe it's a trick. Some designer set it up to trick males and females, who aren't all that alike, to come together out of some sadistic joy in seeing if they can get along long enough to reproduce, who knows. These bacteria not only became smart they became psychopathic too, maybe.
Whatever the reason, now you have a system in place where these cells can keep at it, keep multiplying, keep cheating death just a little longer. All in the hope that one day one individual will become smart enough to find a way to repair the damage and then the whole business of reproduction will be over. There will be no reason to make new cells because the old ones are now immortal, or at least until a black hole destroys them. They'll keep making new cells until they figure out how to get rid of the black holes too.
Think about it. You're a door. Through you energy is transmuted to make more people, themselves destined to suffer, reproduce, and die, to keep this race going until either death or the cells get the upper hand. For each individual it doesn't much matter, does it? Unless you're on a farm and you need lots of kids to help plough the fields and milk the cattle, but for city dwellers, for individuals there's no real purpose for any of this, is there? For society yes, for life, yes, but what is the individual supposed to do?
Well, that depends on the individual. Where do you place your faith, in your own abilities or in some promise of a future where descendants you may never see get to live in a paradise on Earth that may never come to pass?
It's real simple, but it may come as a surprise. Reproduction is an attempt to cheat death. It's a clever gambit that's been going on for billions of years. At least they tell us it has. There's no real way to tell just how long life's been going on, as I mentioned earlier in "Dreaming of Genesis" and "Dating Anything". It's based on a misperception, that just because something seems old does not mean it really is, but we're talking about appearances here. The truth may be we're in the Matrix and everything is only a hundred years old, or however old the oldest human is. However far back living memory goes there's no way to tell if it ever went back any further, but that's a different topic for a different day.
Let's just say it's billions of years old because that's what convention says. It doesn't really change how you live your life either way. Over time a cell accumulates damage that it cannot repair, mostly from free oxygen, but also from cosmic rays and other environmental hazards. At this point the cell can do one of two things, either it can die or it can divide and give half its damage to each new cell. Now, these new cells can never be as immaculate as the original cell, which started out with zero damage, so over time this whole thing is winding down unless the cells can get smart enough to find a way to repair all the damage. That's the whole point of reproduction: the cells are trying to cheat death long enough to find a way to defeat death for good. Reproduction delays the inevitable.
And somewhere along the line complex forms develop (or don't, but that's another topic), and now they can't well divide in two because there's a brain here and a heart there and to split all the cells in half and restructure everything would be too difficult, so sex has to be invented. Special cells have to be produced that can divide trillions of times and form a whole new body. And you need to bring two members of the same species together for the same reason that bacteria swap genes (plasmids: special bits of DNA that can deliver genes between different bacteria), because otherwise you keep producing copies of the same exact thing and if something comes along and knocks one off then all of the others will be susceptible too. That's why you need diversity.
Now, why there has to be two different specialised units coming together rather than have every individual be a hermaphrodite I can't really say. That part doesn't make sense to me. Maybe it's a trick. Some designer set it up to trick males and females, who aren't all that alike, to come together out of some sadistic joy in seeing if they can get along long enough to reproduce, who knows. These bacteria not only became smart they became psychopathic too, maybe.
Whatever the reason, now you have a system in place where these cells can keep at it, keep multiplying, keep cheating death just a little longer. All in the hope that one day one individual will become smart enough to find a way to repair the damage and then the whole business of reproduction will be over. There will be no reason to make new cells because the old ones are now immortal, or at least until a black hole destroys them. They'll keep making new cells until they figure out how to get rid of the black holes too.
Think about it. You're a door. Through you energy is transmuted to make more people, themselves destined to suffer, reproduce, and die, to keep this race going until either death or the cells get the upper hand. For each individual it doesn't much matter, does it? Unless you're on a farm and you need lots of kids to help plough the fields and milk the cattle, but for city dwellers, for individuals there's no real purpose for any of this, is there? For society yes, for life, yes, but what is the individual supposed to do?
Well, that depends on the individual. Where do you place your faith, in your own abilities or in some promise of a future where descendants you may never see get to live in a paradise on Earth that may never come to pass?
Saturday, October 25, 2014
The First Swallow
Here is a 1942 cartoon about the swallows of Capistrano. It has nothing to do with mysticism, or politics, or economics, or philosophy, or parapsychology. It's just a lovely little cartoon that reminds us there is still good in the world. Enjoy!
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Do It Yourself Dowsing
The following describes a dowsing experiment in Francis Hitching's 1976 book Earth Magic (pages 197-99). Given the opportunity (and the funds) I would love turning this book into a documentary film. Hitching's thorough presentation of the facts is what convinced me that ley lines exist.
That bit at the end is telling about the whole field of parapsychology, and psi in general. It doesn't work like in the movies. You can't just make things happen on command, especially when under pressure. Psi effects manifest when a person is relaxed, which makes studying these phenomena very difficult in a laboratory setting. It also explains why a psychic cannot perform the skep-dick's much touted feat of winning big money in a casino, as the environment of a casino is very distracting (intentionally).
Having never attempted any of these exercises myself I cannot comment on
the in particular. I can say that dowsing is real (Uri Geller made his
millions not on bending spoons but on dowsing for oil) and that I do not
know how it works. Feel free to experiment on your own.
Experiments and Theories
Most dowsers were introduced to the art by watching another dowser at work and then having a try themselves, and simple experiments for newcomers have been devised. Tom Lethbridge, the archaeologist who was able to date Stonehenge correctly, used to suggest holding a short pendulum about three inches long, between thumb and finger, and letting it swing between two coins placed a few inches apart on a table. If the coins are the same metal and value – say, two 10 penny pieces – a natural rhythm will set up in the pendulum, keeping it swinging in a straight line between them. If someone then replaces one of the coins with a different kind of coin – say, a 2 penny piece – the pendulum will swing out of line and probably begin to gyrate. Switch the coins back again, and the pendulum will return to its swing.
Major-General James Scott Elliot, a president of the British Society of Dowsers for some years, thinks it is easier to imagine the pendulum as simply an instrument to find out the answer "yes" or "no" to a question. If you switch on an electric light, hold a pendulum over the cord and ask the question (in your mind): "Is this cord live or not?" the chances are that the pendulum, instead of staying stationary or oscillating, will begin to gyrate clockwise or anticlockwise. If you try the experiment again, this time with the light switched off, and ask the same question, the pendulum will probably gyrate in the opposite direction. The purpose of the exercise is to establish for yourself which way the pendulum gyrates when you want to find the answer "yes" or "no". Afterwards, it is just a question of practice, using common household objects to experiment with. Those suggested often include:
Put four similar coins and one different, under a cloth; seek the different one. (The question you ask must be precise, such as "Is the different coin here?" The pendulum's "yes" or "no" gyration will tell you.)
Take half a dozen or so black playing cards and one red; shuffle and lay face downward on the table: seek the red one.
Get someone to hid a note or object in the shelf of a book case. Work along the book case with a pendulum and locate it.
Take half a dozen cups of water. Ask someone to dissolve a little salt in one. Find the cup with the salt water.
How successful anybody is at these tests, beginners or not, may depend on a number of unmeasurable factors: how good an innate dowser the person is, his or her state of mind, the influence of outsiders – almost anything including, some dowsers would say, the phase of the moon. For the truth is that although expert dowsers would regard the exercises as very basic, none of them would guarantee to get the answers right all the time, and on unresponsive days no better than chance would predict. The very best water dowsers, of whom there are only a handful in the whole of Great Britain, can claim and prove a success rate of at least 90 percent, but they of all people know that dowsing is a tantalizing, personal and irrational gift and that because of its unpredictability, it is extremely difficult to produce enough of the repeated and repeatable experiments demanded for scientific proof.
When we try for these kinds of tests, they so often go wrong," says one such dowser. "Expecting or hoping for a specific result, anxiety that we'll fail, distraction caused by other people on the site, self-consciousness – any of these things can lead to a misleading result."
That bit at the end is telling about the whole field of parapsychology, and psi in general. It doesn't work like in the movies. You can't just make things happen on command, especially when under pressure. Psi effects manifest when a person is relaxed, which makes studying these phenomena very difficult in a laboratory setting. It also explains why a psychic cannot perform the skep-dick's much touted feat of winning big money in a casino, as the environment of a casino is very distracting (intentionally).
Having never attempted any of these exercises myself I cannot comment on
the in particular. I can say that dowsing is real (Uri Geller made his
millions not on bending spoons but on dowsing for oil) and that I do not
know how it works. Feel free to experiment on your own.
Experiments and Theories
Most dowsers were introduced to the art by watching another dowser at work and then having a try themselves, and simple experiments for newcomers have been devised. Tom Lethbridge, the archaeologist who was able to date Stonehenge correctly, used to suggest holding a short pendulum about three inches long, between thumb and finger, and letting it swing between two coins placed a few inches apart on a table. If the coins are the same metal and value – say, two 10 penny pieces – a natural rhythm will set up in the pendulum, keeping it swinging in a straight line between them. If someone then replaces one of the coins with a different kind of coin – say, a 2 penny piece – the pendulum will swing out of line and probably begin to gyrate. Switch the coins back again, and the pendulum will return to its swing.
Major-General James Scott Elliot, a president of the British Society of Dowsers for some years, thinks it is easier to imagine the pendulum as simply an instrument to find out the answer "yes" or "no" to a question. If you switch on an electric light, hold a pendulum over the cord and ask the question (in your mind): "Is this cord live or not?" the chances are that the pendulum, instead of staying stationary or oscillating, will begin to gyrate clockwise or anticlockwise. If you try the experiment again, this time with the light switched off, and ask the same question, the pendulum will probably gyrate in the opposite direction. The purpose of the exercise is to establish for yourself which way the pendulum gyrates when you want to find the answer "yes" or "no". Afterwards, it is just a question of practice, using common household objects to experiment with. Those suggested often include:
Put four similar coins and one different, under a cloth; seek the different one. (The question you ask must be precise, such as "Is the different coin here?" The pendulum's "yes" or "no" gyration will tell you.)
Take half a dozen or so black playing cards and one red; shuffle and lay face downward on the table: seek the red one.
Get someone to hid a note or object in the shelf of a book case. Work along the book case with a pendulum and locate it.
Take half a dozen cups of water. Ask someone to dissolve a little salt in one. Find the cup with the salt water.
How successful anybody is at these tests, beginners or not, may depend on a number of unmeasurable factors: how good an innate dowser the person is, his or her state of mind, the influence of outsiders – almost anything including, some dowsers would say, the phase of the moon. For the truth is that although expert dowsers would regard the exercises as very basic, none of them would guarantee to get the answers right all the time, and on unresponsive days no better than chance would predict. The very best water dowsers, of whom there are only a handful in the whole of Great Britain, can claim and prove a success rate of at least 90 percent, but they of all people know that dowsing is a tantalizing, personal and irrational gift and that because of its unpredictability, it is extremely difficult to produce enough of the repeated and repeatable experiments demanded for scientific proof.
When we try for these kinds of tests, they so often go wrong," says one such dowser. "Expecting or hoping for a specific result, anxiety that we'll fail, distraction caused by other people on the site, self-consciousness – any of these things can lead to a misleading result."
Monday, October 13, 2014
Swami Rama the Himalayan Master
Here is a lovely 20 minute video on the life of Swami Rama, who came to the West and demonstrated yogic powers (siddhis) under controlled scientific conditions.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
The Not-So Lovely Bones
So I read this book today, "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold. I had wanted to read this for several years and I finally found a copy for sale in the library. You think, a girl gets murdered and tries to communicate to her family about who did it. What could be more exciting than that?
Let me spare you 330 pages.
It sucked.
I could use this book in a writing class on how not to write well, and also as an example of how total crap can still manage to sell millions of copies.
There is a shopping list of characters I had trouble keeping track of, they were so plain and unappealing. I didn't care about a single one of them, except the villain, who I wanted to finally be brought to justice, but he wasn't. The few characters who I do remember I could probably summarise in a couple of words.
You have the mother, who is a selfish disgrace, who has an affair with the keystone cop who has never solved a murder case in his entire career (as evident from the stack of pictures he keeps in his wallet of all the victims he never found), while her husband is in the hospital after being savagely beaten by a thug who he accidentally ran across trying to get laid in a corn field. She then runs off without telling anyone to California for a decade because she just wanted sex, not kids. When she comes back under unbelievable circumstances (her husband has a heart attack and all of a sudden she cares enough to go back home) it's only the teenage son, who she left as a toddler, who has the guts to tell her to fuck off for being a horrible monster of a person, but in the end all is forgive and forget.
The father who, I don't even know what he does, it's mentioned he worked once, but let's assume he's on the welfare because in every scene he is in his study writing down theories of his daughter's death and brooding. He's the butt monkey of the story who gets beaten up, cheated on, and nearly dies.
The sister who is in permanent bitchy mode for several chapters until she becomes the bland, featureless girlfirend of some guy who is equally featureless who drives a motorcycle. He's some kind of a carpenter I think.
He's presented as kind of a bad boy greaser, but he's about as exciting as tepid bath water. They have sex at summer camp, I think.
The brother who tries really hard to be the one normal character in the whole book, but he becomes cold and distant later on after putting up with the collective shit of all the other characters.
The alcoholic grandmother who's been around the block more than a few times acts kind of as a comedy relief character. She also serves as a foil to the mother for a couple of chapters before she runs away to California.
The Indian woman neighbor wants a divorce because she's not living a story book romance.
Her son, the dead girl's boyfriend. He's supposed to be like the most smoking hot guy who ever lived because he's the one brown person in a town of white people. He's that guy all the girls go crazy for and you can never figure out why he's getting laid every night while you and your friends can't get any. Aside from the fact that he's the ONE foreign boy in town I can't figure out why he's so damn attractive. He has sex with the dead girl when she possesses the body of the feminazi in the second to last chapter. I shit you not. They're a half mile from the murder scene, the dead girl possesses the body of this girl who's driving with the Indian guy, and she has a couple hours with him to tell him "hey, my body is buried right there, behind those trees. You can solve the murder that's been open for a decade right now, just go there and dig. There's fifteen pages left in the book, you can bring colsure to the entire story, just dig up the fucking body." Nope. She says "come with me in the shower and let's fuck" and even though she's possessing the body of the feminazi the Indian guy doesn't find it at all odd and they fuck right there.
There's the keystone cop, who's specialty is not solving crimes, it's seducing other men's wives. He's apparently done it a lot of time, since the book says he has a special room where he goes to have affairs with more women than you will ever date in your entire life.
There's the feminazi who turned total batshit crazy after the girl died. She started smoking pot and drawing the women from Playboy. She writes poetry and sees crimes against women everywhere she goes. Literally. She hallucinates rapes and murders everywhere.
She'll go get coffee and see an apparition behind the counter of a dead woman. Or she'll see a murder taking place on a rooftop across the street. She obsesses over solving the dead girl's murder, but when she finally gets the idea to go to where the body is hidden, and she sees the dead girl's ghost, she doesn't say anything to the Indian boy, she writes it down and then pretends like nothing happened. She passes out for no evident reason and spends a few hours in the most boring Heaven imaginable reading poems to dead beatniks while the dead girl is having sex with her body.
There's the villain who is like the god of all pedophiles.
He's killed at least 20 people but he's so non-threatening, he's so pathetic, that nobody ever suspects him. Except the father, and the sister, but they're dismissed as crazy because the god of pedophiles can't be guilty because all the police in this world are totally incompetent. He has a diagram of the murder scene and the thinnest of tissue paper alibis, and the keystone cops believe him! After ten years everyone forgets about him and the dead girl. The dead girl, hovering over him while he's outside having a smoke, startles him with a falling icicle, he has a heart attack, and dies. On the second to last fucking page. That's how it ends. She literally could have killed him at any time in the entire story, but she waits until the second to last page because I guess the author saw the book was going to end and needed an actual ending or a lot of people would be pissed off. She would have been happy just to let him get away scott free.
Then there's the dead girl herself, who narrates this book. And she talks non-the-fuck-stop about the most boring, tangential crap nobody cares about. This book could have easily been 120 pages, but it just kept going about train rides and tomato plants, and boring every day shit like those old books the so called "great" authors wrote back in the day when they were paid by the word so they wrote these absolutely huge monstrosities that could bore you to sleep. At LEAST half the book is useless tangents that don't advance the story at all.
And you have the absolute most boring depiction of Heaven ever in all of literature. Every day the dead girl sits in a gazebo and watches the people on Earth, and every night all the dead people gather together and have a rock concert or something. It wouldn't even be a week before I got bored of that, let alone eternity.
I'm glad I only paid a dollar for it. This is definitely one to skip.
40/100
Let me spare you 330 pages.
It sucked.
I could use this book in a writing class on how not to write well, and also as an example of how total crap can still manage to sell millions of copies.
There is a shopping list of characters I had trouble keeping track of, they were so plain and unappealing. I didn't care about a single one of them, except the villain, who I wanted to finally be brought to justice, but he wasn't. The few characters who I do remember I could probably summarise in a couple of words.
You have the mother, who is a selfish disgrace, who has an affair with the keystone cop who has never solved a murder case in his entire career (as evident from the stack of pictures he keeps in his wallet of all the victims he never found), while her husband is in the hospital after being savagely beaten by a thug who he accidentally ran across trying to get laid in a corn field. She then runs off without telling anyone to California for a decade because she just wanted sex, not kids. When she comes back under unbelievable circumstances (her husband has a heart attack and all of a sudden she cares enough to go back home) it's only the teenage son, who she left as a toddler, who has the guts to tell her to fuck off for being a horrible monster of a person, but in the end all is forgive and forget.
The father who, I don't even know what he does, it's mentioned he worked once, but let's assume he's on the welfare because in every scene he is in his study writing down theories of his daughter's death and brooding. He's the butt monkey of the story who gets beaten up, cheated on, and nearly dies.
The sister who is in permanent bitchy mode for several chapters until she becomes the bland, featureless girlfirend of some guy who is equally featureless who drives a motorcycle. He's some kind of a carpenter I think.
He's presented as kind of a bad boy greaser, but he's about as exciting as tepid bath water. They have sex at summer camp, I think.
The brother who tries really hard to be the one normal character in the whole book, but he becomes cold and distant later on after putting up with the collective shit of all the other characters.
The alcoholic grandmother who's been around the block more than a few times acts kind of as a comedy relief character. She also serves as a foil to the mother for a couple of chapters before she runs away to California.
The Indian woman neighbor wants a divorce because she's not living a story book romance.
Her son, the dead girl's boyfriend. He's supposed to be like the most smoking hot guy who ever lived because he's the one brown person in a town of white people. He's that guy all the girls go crazy for and you can never figure out why he's getting laid every night while you and your friends can't get any. Aside from the fact that he's the ONE foreign boy in town I can't figure out why he's so damn attractive. He has sex with the dead girl when she possesses the body of the feminazi in the second to last chapter. I shit you not. They're a half mile from the murder scene, the dead girl possesses the body of this girl who's driving with the Indian guy, and she has a couple hours with him to tell him "hey, my body is buried right there, behind those trees. You can solve the murder that's been open for a decade right now, just go there and dig. There's fifteen pages left in the book, you can bring colsure to the entire story, just dig up the fucking body." Nope. She says "come with me in the shower and let's fuck" and even though she's possessing the body of the feminazi the Indian guy doesn't find it at all odd and they fuck right there.
There's the keystone cop, who's specialty is not solving crimes, it's seducing other men's wives. He's apparently done it a lot of time, since the book says he has a special room where he goes to have affairs with more women than you will ever date in your entire life.
There's the feminazi who turned total batshit crazy after the girl died. She started smoking pot and drawing the women from Playboy. She writes poetry and sees crimes against women everywhere she goes. Literally. She hallucinates rapes and murders everywhere.
She'll go get coffee and see an apparition behind the counter of a dead woman. Or she'll see a murder taking place on a rooftop across the street. She obsesses over solving the dead girl's murder, but when she finally gets the idea to go to where the body is hidden, and she sees the dead girl's ghost, she doesn't say anything to the Indian boy, she writes it down and then pretends like nothing happened. She passes out for no evident reason and spends a few hours in the most boring Heaven imaginable reading poems to dead beatniks while the dead girl is having sex with her body.
There's the villain who is like the god of all pedophiles.
He's killed at least 20 people but he's so non-threatening, he's so pathetic, that nobody ever suspects him. Except the father, and the sister, but they're dismissed as crazy because the god of pedophiles can't be guilty because all the police in this world are totally incompetent. He has a diagram of the murder scene and the thinnest of tissue paper alibis, and the keystone cops believe him! After ten years everyone forgets about him and the dead girl. The dead girl, hovering over him while he's outside having a smoke, startles him with a falling icicle, he has a heart attack, and dies. On the second to last fucking page. That's how it ends. She literally could have killed him at any time in the entire story, but she waits until the second to last page because I guess the author saw the book was going to end and needed an actual ending or a lot of people would be pissed off. She would have been happy just to let him get away scott free.
Then there's the dead girl herself, who narrates this book. And she talks non-the-fuck-stop about the most boring, tangential crap nobody cares about. This book could have easily been 120 pages, but it just kept going about train rides and tomato plants, and boring every day shit like those old books the so called "great" authors wrote back in the day when they were paid by the word so they wrote these absolutely huge monstrosities that could bore you to sleep. At LEAST half the book is useless tangents that don't advance the story at all.
And you have the absolute most boring depiction of Heaven ever in all of literature. Every day the dead girl sits in a gazebo and watches the people on Earth, and every night all the dead people gather together and have a rock concert or something. It wouldn't even be a week before I got bored of that, let alone eternity.
I'm glad I only paid a dollar for it. This is definitely one to skip.
40/100
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Donate not Dump
Rob Greenfield, a political activist of some kind, travels across America eating out of trash cans to demonstrate how enough food is thrown away every year to feed all our hungry. This is something I've been saying for years. It's a disgrace that so much food is wasted.
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