Life of Lincoln

William, a regular commenter at Michael Prescott's Blog provided three links for similarities between JFK and Abe Lincoln. By the end of reading the first link I was stunned off my gord. Some nay sayers will say that it is all coincidence, but when you have that many parallels there can be no denying that something other than coincidence is at work here. I'm not putting out any positive hypotheses, just stating that coincidence can't be behind the similarities between the two presidents lives, deaths, families, policies, and friends. Take for example:

• Both presidents were elected to the House of Representatives in ‘46.
• Both were runners-up for the party’s nomination for vice-president in ‘56.
• Both were elected to the presidency in ‘60.

Both had friends Adlai E. Stevenson, both were succeeded by Southern Democrats named Johnson who were former senators who choose not to run for reelection who had urethreal stones, both were born second children, were named after their grandfathers, married women age 24 while they themselves were in their mid-30s, both were boat captains, had served in the military, fought for the rights of blacks, studied law, were over six feet tall, etc., etc.



Here is another link.



-Dee

The Great Wall of Solomon

Remember from an earlier post that biblical verses were discovered on tenth century pottery, casting sharp doubt on the documentary hypothesis? Well this just in from AP, a section of wall was found running 70 meters just outside of Jerusalem's Old City along with a gate house. Dating from the tenth century as well, providing good evidence that there existed a strong, centralized government in Jerusalem at the time capable of such monumental construction. There are some nay-sayers who say this is no evidence at all, mostly because they either don't want the Bible to be true or because they don't want the Jewish presence in the holy land to be true to perpetuate the myth of a single ethnic group known as the Palestinians who lived in the area always. Both sides present their case in the AP article, which is very short and does not use any big words like hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. Is this a remnant of the city built by Solomon? I'm excited to find out.



-Dee

War and Religion

I was asked to comment on the notion that war causes religion. Such a task is too great for any ordinary mortal and possibly even Evel Knievel, and so I decided to look at the first crusade and the war on terror, thinking that if I could show they were not caused by religion than the strongest case for the argument that religion causes war would be defeated. Here is ten minutes of musings on the relation of religion and warfare (cut down from twenty minutes).



-Dee

The Mullet Militia

I should use this as my profile picture because this guy looks sexier than I do.

Celebrating Freedom

Dr. King might not have made it to the promised land, but we're moving toward his dream. A time when we all love one another and treat eachother with respect regardless of any petty differences in these physical bodies is approaching. I can't say when, but we are getting there. Here is his "I Have A Dream" speech.

The Age of The Bible

Yahoo News has put up an article about a piece of pottery discovered last year that includes parts of biblical verses. This finding, which took a year to discipher, indicateds that the Bible dates back to at least the tenth century BC, 400 years earlier than previously thought. It also indicates that the kingdom of Israel existed at least since the tenth century, and is the first clear use of the Hebrew language yet discovered. The text resembles portions of the books of Exodus, Psalms, and Isaiah, which, if they existed at the same time helps to discredit the documentary hypothesis, that say different people wrote the Torah (the five books of Moses which he is supposed to have recieved from God directly on Mt. Sinai) and some priest later put the differend books together and edited them to create a religion (Judaism) to basically make people fall in line.





-Dee

The Geller Papers: A Final Assessment

Sorry, but I've been a bit off this year and should have posted this days ago.



What can I say about the paranormal abilities of Uri Geller. Before reading this book I was, in fact, thoroughly convinced that some of the abilities manifested by Geller were genuine. I have personally had experience with ESP and metal bending, so I know they're not fake like Geller's critics claim.


At times The Geller Papers is very involved and makes scientific references to areas in which I am unfamiliar and therefore cannot assess the quality of (there were several pages I barely understood, mostly involving statistical analysis and engineering equations). This should obviously appeal to the scientists who no doubt should read this tome to spark interest in psychical research. Many scientists who wrote for this book came away concluding that science should invest more time, effort, and money (especially money, if you ask me, and I suspect if you ask them too) into psychical research involving psychic all stars like Uri Geller and other people dubbed "mini-Gellers." Don't get me wrong, all this research involving "ordinary mortals" (read: college sophmores) and their performance in Ganzfeld, telephone telepathy, micro-PK, etc., is very good and very important, but you learn far less about basketball by watching gradeschoolers play than you do by watching professionals. Some people are more talented at generating psychic effects as others, just as in every field of human endevor, and it makes a lot of sense to study these psychic super stars so we can learn the limits of these abilities and work toward developing practical technologies to utilize psychic phenomena.


From my own experiments I must concur with J. G. Taylor's findings that length of an object corresponds to the ease of bending that object, with longer objects bending more easily, and also that objects with a regular shape bend easier than others (which explains why I can bend a spoon or fork, but not a key of identical thickness). The metal becomes momentarily plastic when it is ready to bend, then deforms at a point where the least effort is required - the metal's weakest point, where a bend or break would first occurr under mechanical stress.


Uri Geller of the 1970s was phenomenal. Uri Geller of today, seems to have watered himself down. On a television appearance he made promoting his new show with Chris Angel he broke a spoon in half and said something to the effect of "some people say this is magic, others say it is psychic, but I want to leave it a mystery." This is a huge departure from thirty years ago when he went around the world claiming to be psychic and damn the opposition. In no way does this detract from past performance. He has bent metal without touching it; several magicians came away from testing him staking thier reputations that Geller was not using any form of trickery known to magic; he has performed in ESP experiments with odds against chance of a trillion to one, but perhaps in recent years Uri has gotten soft and accustom to the fame, and perhaps now he is under more pressure to perform and employs a degree of trickery to reclaim the audience he had decades ago.


Anyway, I highly recommend the book The Geller Papers: Scientific Observations on the Paranormal Powers of Uri Geller, edited by Charles Panati. This book gives a glimps at what psychical research could be if we employ modern tools and techniques to pro-psychics like Uri Geller.



-Dee