Cynthia McFadden, Nightline Anchor – “Would I lie to you?”

“Inside a Truther Convention.”

“Chris Bury and producer Katie Hinman did just that this weekend — attending a convention in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, alongside hundreds who share a collective distrust of the official explanation for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

As they will report tonight, the attendees come from several different viewpoints, knitted together in this “movement” largely online.

We talk to conference organizer Betsy Metz, who tells us there is “absolutely a cover-up,” and the producers of “Loose Change” a conspiracy theorist film that is among the most downloaded videos in Google history.”

Indeed. Let’s ask this question:

How do you investigate a crime? How do you cover one up?

In the first case, a detective or investigator looks for clues to see how a crime occurred. In the second, when propaganda is being manufactured to avoid investigating a potential crime, those who are asking for an investigation to occur are themselves investigated, libeled, humiliated, and ‘discredited.’

Call it the Kremlin School of Journalism.

So, when ABC News investigates 9-11, what do they, in fact, dig into? The evidence in question? No, how could they? They don’t work for you, they work for their salaries. So, they ‘investigate’ the citizen activists who have real and empirical concerns about the official narrative, and libel them, and paint them red and black and blue. [Video]

ABC pretends to investigate the 9-11 controversy by pointing a wane spotlight, not at those who might actually hold some detailed evidence of how three buildings collapsed and or exploded at free-fall speed on that horrible day – but by asking a few citizen whistle-blowers if they were “conspiracy theorists.”

Huzzah. We can always count on the mainstream media to be the Pravda that it is.

Is that the end of the story? It has been revealed that the 9-11 commission itself now realizes that it was fed false information, misled, and badly.

9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon

Chairman of the 9/11 Commission Thomas H. Kean:

“FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue…We, to this day, don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us… It was just so far from the truth.”

Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission Lee Hamilton:

“We got started late; We had a very short time frame…We did not have enough money…We had a lot of people strongly opposed to what we did. We had a lot of trouble getting access to documents and to people…So there were all kinds of reasons we thought we were set up to fail.”

These are the thoughts of the men who put in charge of sorting it out. What does it mean?

Here’s an interesting site: Patriots Question 9/11. I wonder if Cyntha McFadden or Nightline knows about it? Maybe you can email ‘em the URL. It’s probably too hard to find there at ABC News…

(Neo)-Darwinists always talk about the ‘laws of nature.’ No question is too difficult to answer, because the answer is always the same…

Q: How did oxygen precipitate from a barren, heat-scorched earth and bind with nitrogen and hydrogen to somehow magically combine to make the first, and second, and two-hundred-fiftieth amino acid?

A: “Natural processes.”

Q: How did hardened, arrayed, differentiated, multilayered calcium outcroppings (teeth) emerge in soft tissue?

A: “Natural selection.”

Q: How did the human brain evolve, millennia ahead of the need for all that we do – but entirely prepared for it: Newton’s Calculus, computer programming, electric engineering, and Fashion Week?

A: “Natural laws and processes.”

Natural laws. The laws of nature. There it is, and there you have it. Now, where can I find these laws? Are they written down somewhere? In City Hall, perhaps? No?

Well then, tell me: What are ‘laws of nature?’ Who enforces them? No one?

What good is a law if it is not energetically enforced and maintained? (No good at all). So, who does the enforcing? Right, I know: “Nature.”

Ah. Back to square one.

Okay. Well, tell me, at least, what are the ‘laws?’ Is gravity a law of nature? Gravity has not been a constant. The dinosaur bones which paleontologists dig are far too large to exist in a lithe and limber darting, pouncing, sprinting, pounding and…flying animal!

Too heavy to fly. [click, click]

Too heavy to run. Too heavy to walk:

- ‘Do you think I’m fat?’

Apparently, gravity is not a law, but a changeable habit…

Where do the laws of nature apply? Only on earth? Or everywhere in the universe? Is the speed of light a ‘law of nature?’ Astrophysicists have suggested that the speed of light has been altered substantially over time.

Are the ‘laws’ really only habits?

And so, back to square one: What is nature? Are there any limits to what “nature” will allow the Darwinian rationale in terms of describing the universe? If there are no limits to how Darwinians will use this deus-ex-machina, then isn’t “nature” another word for “infinitely powerful, prescient, all-knowing, guiding force?”

You Neo-Darwinians can let me know. I’ll be interested to learn the difference between an all-pervasive, organizing, creative, teleological force, and that more ‘correct’ concept of ‘nature’ that you use so often, and so easily.

published by W.W. Norton and Co. 2006
Amazon link.

Dr. Carroll likes his rock and roll, and he’ll give you an unwanted lyric from time to time, to let you know that he’s cool, as well as really smaht. The under-title of the book, and its constant refrain throughout – the rhyming, new-wave rock-sounding “Evo Devo,” gives the biggest hint as to what’s wrong with this ‘new’ science.

The clever, cloying catch-phrase will now be employed by undergraduates, and Ph.D. candidates everywhere, to describe a myriad of processes that they don’t understand. (They’ll just sound cute and clever saying it). Carroll throws it around blithely, to cover a variety of sins.

The trouble with the book isn’t what Dr. Carroll gets right. Indeed, things develop! There are patterns to that development. Those mechanical patterns can sometimes be elucidated, even described, even tinkered with to produce horrible, horrible animals (that researchers should be remorseful for causing to suffer, but don’t seem to care much at all).

The reductionists have named genes, described some intermediary functions, given clever, populist names to their ideas: Hox genes! Toolbox genes! Do they control the birth and regulation of the entire organism? Are the great mysteries solved at last!?

Yes! Or, well, no, goes the answer. It’s just another step on that ‘right track,’ we’re told, with firm self-assurance. Indeed, the research is interesting and daring, and he should be praised for his courage in (perhaps unintentionally) undermining the Darwinian world-view. How fast is change? How quick evolution?

Fast. Quick. As needed. (As needed? To that in a moment).

When Dr. Carroll sticks to the short descriptions of laboratory process, the book is most interesting. His ’science by analogy’ was less so – and even more dubious in content. Dr. Carroll takes a leap into an empty water glass by proposing that much of DNA should be seen as “Dark Matter,” something Dr. Carroll admits he knows little about – something which competitive research in plasma physics will tell you simply does not exist: “dark matter,” that invisible, untestable non-substance is a fashionable but empty pseudo-explanation for another failing post-Enlightenment theory – the Big Bang.

But back to the genome. We’re given a short tour, which is both a little dense, and a little under-served in true technical description. We’re all too quickly pawned off with those glib shortcuts, genes are “turned on and turned off,” and “selected for or against.” By the end of the book, we’re brought back to the 19th Century, and reminded of the value of Darwinian “fitness.” “Selection and fitness!” What do they mean? How does it really work? (You just have to believe it does, or you can’t go along for the rest of the tour).

But for all the complexity on exhibit in the work, we learn what we might have learned by opening our eyes in a field of wild grass and little creatures: Life emerges from a vital, unified, endlessly-renewing matrix; living things are reflections and refractions of each other. They mimic and recapitulate form ever and always in subtle or wild new arrangements.

Dr. Carroll gives us his specialty’s machinist point of view of their great discovery: A repeated signal or segment of chromosome can give rise to related parts across species. That is, one gene from fly to mouse seems to activate the creation of parts that have similar functions – the ‘toolkit gene‘ for your rump, for example is a hind-quarter in whatever other animal that gene appears in. A gene that seems to give permission for an eye to develop in a fly or small insect, also seems to give the same permission in a mouse.

But Carroll and his supporters will tell you that these genes ‘control’ the development, or ’cause’ it. All they do, however, is give permission for a process to arise. But more on that in a moment.

There are two concepts in evidence here that will trouble the Darwinian mind to no end; two themes that jump up and out over and over again in the work. The first is the ever-present ghost of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, the French biologist who determined a theory of evolution before Charles Darwin, which stated that living creatures adapt to their environments willfully – by force of activity and desire. That is, by the application of energy to use of their body, that over time, and increasing in progeny, new structures would be formed.

Neo-Darwinism has made any kind of active feedback loop informing the morphology of the next generation strictly verboten. Their theory clings like a nervous boy in a sea of hot-blooded women to it’s virgin idealization of that fortuitous, prescient “chance accident,” which allows all of life to magically produce that just-so variation which colors its tail red and makes its beak into a snout, just ahead of the need for it. How very lucky is Darwin’s evolution!

But all common sense, and all practical application cries out for an active feed-back loop, a refinement of Lamarck. And here in these conserved genes, we have a potential receiving vessel: In Carroll’s observations of the separation, duplication and recapitulation of raw forms, remade again and again across lines and species, we have a soft, doughy template onto which structural changes could be projected. It just asks a feedback loop to be present, to alter, where alteration is desired. And those feedback mechanisms are banging down the door of Darwin’s house, and very soon, the charging work of the Epigeneticists will be living here, in Carroll’s work, if it is not already.

What Carroll makes apparent – again - is that evolution occurs most easily in the plastic state – it is fast, and it is supple, and it responds to the environment, and the environment to the organism. And Richard Dawkins should get some salt and gravy for his hat, because he’s going to be eating it soon, and for a long time…

The second concept arising from Carroll’s work is more radical still: The fractal and field nature of existence; increasing complexity through serial repetition; this is the avenue of the formation of individual beings, from masses of cells, sub-dividing into identical sub-sections, like flour and water and salt rolled into doughy balls, and lined up on a tray, not yet shaped or baked – but ready and waiting. This soft line of identical parts is a description of larva, of embryos of formative species, the earlier, smaller, more flexible versions of sentient beings.

These individual ‘buns in a row,’ then flow down Waddington’s “chreodes” – established pathways, like a depression tracing down a hillside, or a well-worn path – into ever increasingly stylized, augmented, stretched or squished, bleached or burnished, flexed or jointed parts; parts of all kinds, arising from identical, duplicated little bits of dough – of potential energy and form. Here we have an opening as wide and deep as the Valles Marineris for morphegenic field theory, in action.

What is a morphogenic field? It’s a concept – an idea – of a field which shapes development, an energizing form that exists above the small mechanics of four base pairs in DNA. Rupert Sheldrake proposed this field theory in his book, “A New Science of Life.” A morphic field is a shape which exists not only in three dimensional space – up, down, forward, back – but also in time – from ancestor to progeny, across endless generations. It is shared with all of the organisms of its kind, reinforcing their similar development. The energized field achieves the creation of patterns through morphic memory held in a field similar to an electro-magnetic, or gravitational field.

But Sheldrake could offer no specific biochemical technology through which this might be achieved. He admitted as much, to his credit. (If Darwinians would have as much humility, their version of evolution would still be a theory, indeed, and not a hardened ‘truth.’) But Sheldrake’s work gains direction from Dr. Mae-Wan Ho’s observations (in The Rainbow and the Worm) of the electrostatic nature of living tissue, which she describes as ‘polyphasic liquid crystal,’ built from collagen networks. That is, living tissue is a liquid crystalline structure, based in collagen matrices, which acts as a transmitter, receiver and storage place for sub-atomic energy – proton transfer across hydrogen bonds in water.

Could this be the domain of a charged field, which, electrically or atomically direct, perhaps in holographic memory, the fractal-like differentiation observed by Carroll, et al?

Well… maybe. It’s certainly fun to think about. But back to Dr. Carroll.

He tells us, with nice evidence, that embryos of all variety arise from nearly identical templates; they differentiate into their complex form through activation by shared collections of genetic material; they seem to ‘canalize’ into final forms almost by a kind of pre-determined magic, once in the right place, at the right time.

It’s neat stuff to know. But why is this revolutionary? It is certainly a turning of the wheel for the Darwinians; there can be no doubt about that. It demonstrates ably (though unconsciously) that most of the old established evolutionary ‘truths’ were mostly bunk. That is, they weren’t true – they were men grasping in the dark at ideas of how life could come into existence – and once in existence, could mutate or metamorphose into so many forms, so endless, most…you know.

The old idea was, well, ever-changing. But it had one solid idea at its core, and in its foundation: Life was a machine, and not a spiritual adventure; it was logical, and mechanical, and would be understood to be so, and all other points of view would be hanged.

How did evolutionary theory come to reside in this place?

The pioneers of today’s evolution, have themselves ‘evolved,’ changed and mutated over time, from theologically-inclined naturalists, to reactive brittle atheists. They are pressed against a wall, not of their creation, but of their inheritance. They are the children of René Descartes, and the hostile European determination that the Church would never influence the life of mankind – of Intellectuals – so cruelly and totally as it had, at times, in the Middle Ages.

And so, to cleanse themselves of that way of thinking, they erased the soul of the world. It needed to be a dead thing, machine-like, and without spirit or vital force – only pulleys, levers, cogs and wheels. Intellectuals wanted to dispense with Church authority-as-fact, and sought to find their own testable basis for reality. And they did – they left the spirit behind, and boy, did they. To the degree that the screaming in pain of tortured animals, to René Descartes (and his intellectual children) became nothing more than the squeaking of gears in a wooden machine.

And so life, devoid of vital force, or a transcendent penetrating universal spirit (or energy), was to be explained as such: “The world and all its creatures are machines; one cannot mention transcendent forces, or a Creator, or intelligent, organized, systematic creativity. No! It is all ‘blind chance.’ That is science!“

And that is where we live. Or, that is where scientists live. The world continues to be a vitalistic, spirit-infused entity, which the mechanists struggle and fail to describe in their self-limiting vocabulary. And so science writers endlessly commit a series of gaffs when they write or speak about the actual world, always referring to nearly magical events that evade mechanistic description in passive and strained verb tenses, which beg the question: But WHO or WHAT made it happen?

There in the standard literature on evolution, you will discover a world of teleological intention: Limbs and organs “adapt themselves to,” “choose a new pathway,” “invent,” “are designed to,” “free themselves from;” living creatures “take advantage of,” “devise a new plan,” and “run riot with innovation.”

Does this sound like a dead, mechanical, mindless process? But so it goes, on and on, in every book, article and documentary on the topic. But who did the devising? Nature! Who’s that? Is it a she? No, just a set of laws. A set of laws devised and maintained by whom?

This is the place all Western science writers live and die. They’re still fighting an idea of an Medieval God (The Judeo-Christian Jahweh, and El – look up any reference on ‘father gods‘). This, an exterior force, all-knowing, all-controlling, who either started the entire project rolling, and walked away, or is watching, like Santa Claus, taking notes on good and bad behavior.

But this is a particular Western fascination – or illness, transmitted through wandering reductionists. Taoism certainly has no bias against examination of both the earthly and the metaphysical. The Tao is all, it manifests in infinite form, in endless and myriad opposition. Make a study of it! Hinduism is centered in greeting the purpose emanating into us, and our world, from and through a transcendent source. This in no way excludes mechanical science in their world view. Why should it in ours? Their gods are not separate entities who never mingle with the people; their creator God Brahma, dreams the world into existence, and in the dream, plays all the parts, and in playing the parts of you and me and everyone and thing we see and know, forgets that it’s a play, and takes it seriously…

But what does that have to do with this book?

The author, Carroll, struggles as all reductionist Darwinian synthesizers do with the “why” of things. In fact, they often are so confused themselves about why anything should exist at all, in a purposeless, dead, accidental, mechanical wind-up, winding-down universe (that of Darwin and Dawkins and Einstein – but not of Halton Arp), that every time they find a mechanism that better describes a process, they attribute the entire process to the little ’switch’ they think they discovered.

It is interesting, indeed, that the current batch of evolutionary biologists are moving recklessly beyond Richard Dawkins and the Great and Holy Synthesis of Huxley and Mayr; it is wonderful that they are looking into the process that describes life as it is changing shape. What will remain a bane for all of them, though, is that they will always fail to find a prime movement. Nothing will ever stop leading them back, and back, and back – because whether they realize it or not, they are still trapped in that reactive Enlightenment worldview, desperate to disprove the existence of a certain idea of a creative universal transcendent force…

And yet remaining so unwilling to admit that it is not in the mechanists purview to either prove, or disprove it, nor should they try.

It’s neat stuff, watching the seeds develop into beings. You can describe the growing, to some degree, the “how,” but you can’t tell anyone WHY it bothers to happen. Except to say that it does…remarkably, in endless form, most infinite, indeed.

There is a mind at work in the universe, always and throughout. That the reductionists don’t want to see it, lets us know that Infinite Mind, which makes us and everything else from itself, has a remarkable sense of humor.

I want to share with you excerpts from several items I’m reading, more or less unfiltered. It goes like this:

We’re all connected, right? Everybody says so – somewhere beneath the surface, we’re ‘one,’ part of a single organism, being, entity. Everybody’s had an experience – touching, sensing, feeling, knowing – transmitting information, thoughts, feelings, ideas, images, across a room, in the presence of a friend, or someone you’re just meeting, or in a place, or waking from a dream, or in a dream itself… We’ve all had bits and images of feelings of connection and knowing and transcendence despite our rational selves…. Despite our ’scientific, modern’ idea of an accidental, mechanical world – something we inherited from the 17th Century, caught in the wake of René Descartes’s Enlightenment discoveries of logic and method.

But to prove it? You can only say it, know it, feel it. Share it with people who understand. But prove it? Is there a ruler, a graph, a measuring stick for this sort of thing?

There have been attempts, but I’ve never seen anything that made physical sense of this transcendent or spiritual – or holographic life that we so often lead. Holographic – what seems real, but is not physicalized – memory, thought, desire – images you carry from childhood, from yesterday, from things you’ve read, places you’ve been.

These are real to us. But we can’t print them, or show them on our laptop. We can, and do, recreate them in art, in imagery, in story-telling, in dance, in architecture, in movement. We create these images and feelings in our psychology, in our group dynamics, in our construction of these metal and brick cities that never appeared before humanity’s use of fire on the materials of the world.

We re-make much of our little part of the biosphere, altered according to the designs that appear to us from….

Well…that’s a neat question, isn’t it? Where does thought flow from? Where do ideas, images, feelings, dreams come from? The body? The brain? It’s all locked in these blocks of water and mineral and fat and protein?

Here’s a neat idea: Those blocks of water and protein and mineral, such as we are, are in fact….well… read on. These are wonderfully interesting ideas. In fact, I think they’re better than that… see what you think:

From “The Genie in your Genes” – by Dawson Church, Ph.D.

The tendons are composed of twisted collections of collagen bundles, each composed of collagen fibers. Collagen fibers are composed of collagen fibrils, assemblies of molecules secreted outside of specialized connective tissue cells called fibroblasts. Taken as a whole, the connective tissue system is the largest organ of the body.

Yet the simplicity and ubiquity of the connective tissue system masks and important characteristic: connective tissue fibers are arranged in highly regular arrays. There is a name for a highly regular parallel array of molecules, whether it’s in liquid or solid form: it’s called a crystal. The collagenous molecules in which all your organs are encased function as a system of liquid crystals. Crystals – highly ordered arrays of molecules – are found in several different kinds of tissue, including: the DNA in genes; the photosensitive rod and cone cells at the back of the eye; the myelin sheath of nerve cells; the collagen molecules that make us connective tissue; muscle tissue’s densely packed molecules of actin and myosin; the phospholipids of cell membranes.

The crystalline structure of the collagen molecules that make up your connective tissue has a remarkable property: it is a semiconductor. Semiconductors are not only able to conduct energy, in the way the wiring system in your house conducts electricity very quickly from one point to another. They are also able to conduct information; think of your high-speed internet connection. Besides many other properties, semiconductors are also able to store energy, amplify signals, filter information, and to move information in one direction but not in another.

In other words, the connective tissue system can also process information, like the semiconductor chips in your computer. Your connective tissue system is well suited for the task of conveying both energy and information, because it connects every part of your body to every other part.

Think of the communication possibilities of this structure: every organ of your body is encased within the body’s largest organ, which functions as a liquid crystal semiconductor in the form of the connective tissue system. Another property of connective tissue is that it is a piezoelectric substance [a substance that] when compressed, generates electricity. The piezoelectric constant of a dry tendon, for example, is nearly the same for a quartz crystal.

[...]

Cell biologists studying collagen reductively would miss these unique properties. Broken down into individual collagen molecules, connective tissue does not have the same characteristics; it takes its collection into a parallel array structure to produce its ability to conduct and store energy. The electrical properties of the connective tissue also explains how cells can communicate much faster than the speed of neural transmission. [Link to the book]

And from Dr. Mae Wan-Ho, of the Institute for Science in Society (read full articles here):

“Collagen is the main protein in connective tissues of animals and the most abundant protein in mammals. Connective tissues contain a lot of water; soft connective tissues (all apart from bones and cartilage) are typically 60 to 70 percent of water by weight. The proteins together with the water form a liquid crystalline matrix in which every single cell in the body is embedded, which makes connective tissues the ideal medium for intercommunication, as I have suggested in my book The Rainbow And The Worm.

In traditional Chinese medicine, a system of acupuncture meridians are supposed to transport qi or living energy to every part of the body, but all attempts to locate the meridians to anatomical structures have failed. A colleague and I proposed in 1998 that the acupuncture meridians may be the structured water aligned with collagen in the connective tissues, and that the qi may be positive electric currents carried by the jump-conduction of protons through the hydrogen bonds of the water molecules aligned along the collagen fibres. Evidence for the idea has been accumulating since.” [Link]

Collagen as a semi-conductor – ‘jump-conducting’ protons through water in the collagen matrix? I love it!

More on water (from “The Wholiness of Water” from I-SIS):

“Decades of bombarding water with X-rays and neutron beams have convinced most scientists that there is no long-range order in water. And although extended networks of hydrogen-bonded molecules are present, these networks are simply the result of local interactions between molecules at close range.

However, other measurement techniques are beginning to yield results suggesting that bodies of water behave as coherent wholes, in other words, their collective structure extends globally to all the molecules. One such technique, NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), measures chemical shifts of the nuclei of certain atoms by their response to radio waves when placed in a strong magnetic field.

The atomic nucleus in a molecule is influenced by other particles that are charged and in motion. NMR spectroscopy can therefore distinguish one nucleus from another and reveal the chemical surroundings of a nucleus. The NMR chemical shift is known to be very sensitive to intra- and intermolecular factors, and hence capable of give information concerning collective phases of molecules.

[...]

This global phase transition, involving the entire solution, can be explained by changes in water structure occurring as a result of changes in the hydrogen bond strength, due to changes in electrolyte concentration, and “electron delocalisation throughout the liquid”. In other words, dissolving salts in water changes the structure of water globally as a whole.” [Link]

Collections of water – small to large – may respond as a unified entity to stimuli? Wow…neat-o…cool… I mean…

- Fascinating, Captain

And one more from I-SIS, on Water as an organism (from “Crystal Clear – Messages from Water“):

“Tap water in cities subjected to chlorine treatment or heavily polluted failed to form crystals at all, with no sign of the characteristic hexagonal (6-fold) symmetry of snowflakes. Partial crystals sometimes appeared, as if “trying desperately hard to be a clean water”. Whenever the quality of water was good, complete crystals formed, each distinctive in detailed pattern and colour. Some of the loveliest, most perfect crystals were from natural, unpolluted water sources, such as the Sanbu-ichi Spring in Nagasaka, and the spring water of Saijo, a town located in the highlands 500 to 700 metres above the sea, famous for its sake.” [Link]

[end excerpts]

So, water, proteins, minerals – the structure of life – is a transmitter, receiver, a conduit, a passageway, a beacon, a beam, a node in a global – or a universal – circuit?

That would explain a few things, wouldn’t it though?

Let me know what you think. Please do check out the I-SIS website, and for researchers, a membership will get you access to longer, fully-referenced articles.

But he did exactly that. And the building was, indeed, impacted by an airplane – a small airplane. Equivalent, I do not doubt, to a good deal of debris falling from a significant height. And there was a fire, a significant fire, as you may be able to distinguish in the news photos and video.

- The carnage in Austin. Now, if memory serves, the precise thing to do is find out where he is from – and invade a neighboring country (or two) – and “democratize” it. Also, vilify all who practice his religion.

I am confused, however, why the customary action was not taken at the scene? That is, why did the FBI not seize and destroy all photo and video surveillance equipment within a mile or more of the scene? I would have thought that ‘tradition’ by now.

In any case, I do have a single question, and it is the following…

Or, first, this background information. I have it on the authority of the American Government, the CIA, FBI, Fox News, CBS, ABC, Time Magazine and the New York Times, that on that dreadful Tuesday in September, 9 years ago, three very large buildings in New York city exploded, imploded, and otherwise tumbled to the ground at free-fall speed – as fast as a baseball tossed of your garage roof with nothing in between but the cool winter air - leaving nothing but twisted broken fragmented metal that was, as quickly as you can flush your toilet, piled onto cargo vessels and shipped to India and China, where it was melted into red hot liquid, and remade into building materials…

That is, I have been convinced, by the power of persuasion by authority and force, that when a tall building has a fire in it, of any reasonable magnitude – say, on three to eight floors – the entire building will, by needs and with scientificistic proofs by retrospective analysis, tumble to the ground, falling at free fall speed into its own basement, leaving nothing standing above the height of Dustin Hoffman on the ground.

So…

Ahem…

Why is this building still standing?

Right, of course you do. You’re an educated individual…

So, have you read Charles Darwin? It’s not so hard to do. You can read his work – all of it – for free, online, at various websites, if you have a computer (which evolved from the abacus, of course).

So, have you read Darwin? Maybe not? Probably not. But who needs to? Evolution is true. That’s apparent. Things change. Animals change over time. Legs become fins, fingers become wing struts, scales become feathers. And vice-versa. It’s just so. We come from things that we used to be. We used to be other things. Things change! And life is connected.

Right?

Sure, why not. Life is connected, certainly – to life, to itself. And it comes from… itself. It evolves from itself into…itself. Just differently. How simple! How self-evident.

But, what is the theory of Evolution?

Well, what about it? It’s self-explanatory. It’s not a theory, it’s a fact. And you do know it, even if you think you don’t. Venture a guess?

Survival of…

Yes! That’s it. “Survival of the Fittest.”

That is the theory of evolution, in abbreviated form. But really, that wasn’t Charles Darwin’s phrase. That came from a man named Herbert Spencer, who wrote those words a bit in advance of good Charles. Mr. Spencer was talking about the survival of human beings, struggling against poverty in the dog eat dog world. (Dogs eat dogs, don’t they?) And the fit survive. Those other folks don’t. That’s how it goes. Keeping up with the Joneses sure is getting old, but that’s how it goes, said dear Herbert.

Mr. Darwin, Charlie, himself had called his theory one defined by “natural selection.” Mr. Spencer put his spin on Charlie’s work, and Charlie accepted. A few printings of the book later, and even Charlie called his theory “survival of the fittest.”

So, now you know. That is the theory of evolution. Survival of the fittest. That’s how all life came into being.

The fit survived. And those that survived were fit! How nicely it fits together! To be fit is to survive, to survive is to be…well…it sort of does become a bit of a slightly wanky idea, when you say it out loud like that. But there’s more to it.

It’s not that the “fit” survive, it’s that the fit survive long enough to make more babies. Therefore, those who are fit enough to have babies…that is, the babies are the ones who “survive.” Or, I mean, the line, the line of descent survives. Because mom and dad were fit! See?

And that’s how life emerged from nothingness on a barren volcanic earth! Mom and dad were…fit. Fit! Fit!! Fitness!!

What about before mom and dad, you ask? Oh, you. You are troublesome…

Well, that’s easy. Very simple, in fact. So simple it’s painful that I have to tell you. It’s like this:

There were a number of processes in which materials were organized… by natural forces…into other materials…which…eventually…

Look. Life came about, and it’s not really worth fighting about the fact of it. Life exists! That’s clear. Self-evident! So, why are we fighting?

The important thing to remember is that after that self-organization of material into greater and greater complexity, reproduction began by which organisms learned to split and duplicate themselves, probably as survival strategies, and then over time, the fittest survived!

And that’s how it all came about.

How wonderful! How grand!! Remarkable! “But how in the world,” you ask, wide-eyed, “did Mr. Charles Darwin discover this grand theory!?”

Ah, what a story! It goes like this:

Charlie was reading a book by a man named Thomas Malthus Poor Tom was an unhappy and dour fellow, worried to death over the breeding, the non-stop humping, the rapacious screwing and baby-making of people. Of poor people. Of mostly the poor people. All over the world. Very very worried.

Thomas felt sure that people made more babies than they could support, more than they could feed, clothe or care for. He was certain that the poor (and also the Africans and Natives everywhere, the non-Christians that is), would over-breed. And as a result, the human species would be so starved for the limited resources of the field and granary that great famine and flood and horror would come and perish untold numbers of us. Of ‘them,’ of course, as well – them being the poor. But of ‘us’ too, those impacted by the irresponsible screwing of the irresponsible poor.

He wrote a tremendous book about it. You can read that for free, too. Clickity click.

So, it was Thomas who Charles was reading, when he arrived at his radical and revolutionary idea. “If it’s true for people, is it not also true for animals?” asked Charles. That is, if there is a natural struggle for survival among humans, can we not also assume that there is an identical struggle in – and between – all of God’s creatures (or, well, whoever’s creatures they are. That remained to be seen).

In this struggle, considered Charles, a few lucky ones would rise to the top. But not “lucky,” no, not lucky… but “chosen.” But not “chosen,” not by God, but by Nature. Nature would do the choosing. And it wouldn’t be “luck,” and it wouldn’t be “choosing.” It would be…

Oh, what would cause the goodness of Nature to choose – or select? That’s it, “select!” What would cause Nature…or “nature,” (small “n,” not a supernatural force, but a ‘natural force,’ governed by ‘natural laws’); What would cause nature to ’select’ one animal over another of its kind for survival in this endless struggle against overbreeding and hunger?

Why, an individual would have to be better….

“Adapted!” Better “adapted” than any other. It would have to be different!

Wait!!! No, it couldn’t be different. Not really different. It was born, it came from its mother, it looks like its mother, and father of course. Father too…It must be the same. But also different. Slightly, every so slightly different. Different enough!

Different enough to be ’selected’ by ‘nature’ to survive!

Just different enough. Just barely enough. It would have to be slow, very slow, very very very slow, and unintentional change. Absolutely unintentional. Without purpose or intention. No purpose. No direction. No will. No ‘choosing.” No intelligent operator in the spirit of the thing. No! Just the struggle and an accident. Just an accidental change. And nature likes it – on occasion! On occasion, of course! Sometimes! Sometimes, from time to time, for no “reason,” nature likes…selects…the little being with that slight accident more than those without it.

But…what kind of change? Who knows. Who can say? Perhaps it’s a bird. Perhaps it’s a finch. Perhaps the beak of a finch is 1/16th of a millimeter longer than the beaks of its brothers and sisters.

Why? Why would it be longer? It almost indicates…creativity. Desire. Will….Being….

No! No, no. That is crazy talk. It changes because…because “things change!” It’s a natural law! No will. No purpose. Just…things change! Law. Nature!

Resolved! And so, over another 100 years, that bird’s progeny accidentally have ever-so-slightly larger and larger beaks. Within a few thousand years, you might have a bird with a very large beak, indeed!

Fortunately there has been a lot of time. Billions of years, for all of these intention-less accidents to pile up. And so, as a direct and unimpeachable result, unimaginable complexity has been arrived at, by accident, and without intention, feedback, or will. No desire exists but that which drives us, we machine bodies for our accidentally-mutating genes, to replicate them.

Oh, right. That’s the new wrinkle – the Neo-Darwinians. They added a great deal to the discussion, by letting humanity know that it was the Genome, the Great and Holy Genome that was the selected, by nature, which chooses and chooses and chooses. But accidentally, of course, and without intention, direction or purpose.

So, now that you know a little more about the official theory of evolution – accidental change over time resulting in endless variety and complexity – you may now return to your meaningless, arbitrary, spiritless, empty, hollow, shallow, trite, wafer-thin life. Science has told you it is so, and so it is. Who are you to argue?

“If there is any one way to confess one’s own mediocrity, it is the willingness to place one’s work in the absolute power of a group, particularly a group of one’s professional colleagues. Of any form of tyranny, this is the worst; it is directed against a single human attribute: the mind–and against a single enemy: the innovator.

The innovator, by definition, is the man who challenges the established practices of his profession. To grant a professional monopoly to any group, is to sacrifice human ability and abolish progress; to advocate such  a monopoly, is to confess that one has nothing to sacrifice.”

- Ayn Rand, “The Return of the Primitive”

Take that, peer review…

On that note, and after years of observing it, I can agree that the value of peer review truly seems to be to repress movement. “Reproducibility” should be the measure of success in any venture, and reproducibility can be seen by any 3rd grader…

“Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon us the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies…”
—King Lear, Act V, Scene iii

Who was Shakespeare? A poor, unschooled glover’s son from a rural English village? Or a man of great learning and talent – and of sensitive political stature – who chose to hide his compromising poetic and political works behind the name of another, less important, less politically vulnerable man?

If we are to believe conventional wisdom, we must choose the former – the village lad of no means and no instruction in the arts, letters and sciences. If we choose the latter, we must argue against what is currently written in history books – that William Shakespeare was an uneducated, only passably literate calf-skinner, who just happened to write the greatest works in the English Language – because he also happened to be a genius.

In this series, Mark Anderson, author of “Shakespeare by Another Name,“ takes us through the history of the history of the Bard, and explains why biography is the only lens through which the works of Shakespeare can truly be understood. What is genius, and what is required in the training of that mind, to create history’s greatest works?

Liam Scheff: How did it begin, this investigation of Shakespeare?

Mark Anderson: From the mid to the late 19th Century, there was a tradition of scholars (George Greenwood being a noteworthy example), who began to re-examine the life of the traditional Shakespeare, aka William of Stratford, and found that conventional biography lacking.

Throughout the 19th Century, it became a very active movement along two fronts: the anti-Stratfordians, who just knew that something was deeply wrong with the conventional story of the Stratford actor; and the Baconians, who picked one of the most famous people from the era – Francis Bacon – and said, “He must have been Shakespeare.” They had any number of reasons to say so, though they latched onto acrostics [poems with a secondary alphabetically coded meanings] that I think are pretty much indefensible.

In 1888, Ignaitius Donelly wrote a book, The Great Cryptogram. In the first half, he cited all the reasons why Will Shakespeare of Stratford is not the author that history has claimed him to be. For example, he grew up in a small town, and died in that same small town, and does not seem to be recognized by anyone in that small town as somebody who was an author. His meticulous last will and testament does not indicate any kind of life of the arts or letters, (though it does mention a few actors, so he was clearly involved in the stage in some sense).

Then, in 1920, J. Thomas Looney (pronounced Lone-y), picked up on the anti-Stratfordian tradition and really did the first forensic examination of the mystery.

LS: A Century ago, Mark Twain wrote a book, “Is Shakespeare Dead,” that outlines the documentary evidence that we have for William of Stratford. When Will of Stratford died, he left his wife his -

MA: His second best bed.

LS: And he left his books to?

MA: Nobody, he didn’t possess any books. There is not the slightest particle of anything to do with writing in the will: No books, no letters, no manuscripts, no paper, no writing desk, no pens. There is not even a hint of any kind of writer’s occupation. But you can’t excuse the lack of evidence for lack of detail. Twain also talks about how meticulously detailed the will is. “And if the man had a dog, the man probably would have bisected him and offered the second best half to his wife.” Wrote Twain.

LS: So, who was this man, who possessed two beds, but no books, no paper and no pens?

MA: Well, his father was a glover, He grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon. He almost certainly worked in his father’s business for some time, so he was skinning calves, honest work at that time.

John Aubrey in his Brief Lives, wrote that, “When he would skin a calf he’d make a great speech!” This was the same historian who mangles facts in a series of biographies; he claims, for instance, that the poet and playwright Ben Jonson killed another playwright from the Elizabethan period, Christopher Marlowe. And on that point there’s no controversy at all: Aubrey was just completely wrong. This flowery rendition of the early life of Will of Stratford was taken as gospel truth by many Stratfordians, though not all, to be fair.

It is presumed that Will went to Stratford grammar school, which is built up by defenders of the orthodoxy as a great institute of higher learning, which imparted young Will with all that he needed to write the greatest works in the English language.

Not to disparage the Stratford grammar school of 1570, but you’ve actually got to get the guy there. As one Oxfordian researcher, Bonner Miller Cutting, recently pointed out, it was commonplace in wills of that time that people made bequests to the school that gave them the learning that they needed to succeed in life. But there is no such bequest in Will of Stratford’s will. And there is no evidence that he ever attended the school.

Will of Stratford’s mother and father were illiterate. Of course, we don’t get to pick our parents. We do, however, get to choose how our children are brought up; and as far as we can tell, Will of Stratford’s children were also illiterate. We’re talking about the greatest writer in the English language, a man for whom letters and correspondence are a centerpiece for practically all of the plays. And he never taught his daughters to write?

We all work with what we’re given, and greatness can come from all kinds of places. But raising illiterate offspring is a matter of choice, of priorities that do not bespeak a literary life. This is of a piece with all of the documents from the Stratford man’s life. The greatest literary manhunt in history has turned up nothing.

LS: You say that there is no silver bullet for proving that Will of Stratford isn’t William Shakespeare, author, or for proving that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is the author of Shakespeare’s plays – or is the central figure in the workshop that produced the plays.

MA: There’s no silver bullet, no. But there’s a hell of a lot of of good evidence.

LS: Besides the will and testament, there is one piece of writing attributed directly to Will of Stratford; it is the poem – or prank – that we see at his graveside.

MA: “Good friend for Jesus’ sake forebear, to dig the dust enclosed here,
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
and curs’d be he that moves my bones.”

Is this the parting shot – the closing salvo from the greatest writer in the English language?

End of Part One. Stay tuned for Part Two – the Authorship Controversy Continues…

Visit the Shakespeare by Another Name Blog.

A wonderful mind. I regret that I didn’t look him up in 2007, when I first picked up the book…

Of all the writing in this book, his correspondence zings loudest and clearest, (as it does with many of us – we know our audience, and are trying to make our point with wit and force). His mind so nicely, cleanly and lucidly understands and separates the biologists’ fiction of having it both ways: That we have a supernaturally all-powerful, choosing, remaking, selecting and altering “nature,” always spurring on life to ‘greater’ accomplishment and ‘higher’ levels of expression; which we also and simultaneously must, by definition regard as a dead, ‘chance-driven’ evolutionary machine.

The book takes the form of several essays, together with long excerpts from considerable correspondences with two evolutionary biologists, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and Ernst Mayr. Below is an excerpt from one exchange with Mayr.

Mayr to Greene (p. 222):

[Y]ou still have the 19th century concept of science as something absolute, something that provides ironclad proofs and totally logical conclusions. But this is no longer the concept of science and even [Karl] Popper is now hedging on his falsifiability criterion. All conclusions of science are tentative, they are what at this moment is most probably and consistent with the greatest amount of evidence. Hence the alternatives which you offer on p. 33 [the "positivistic dilemma"] are a parody.

Greene to Mayr (p. 227):

I come next to your argument that “as modern scientists we must reject escape into non-material causations, and if we look for the science that can serve as the basis for our interpretations, we find that the only one that is suitable for this purpose is evolutionary biology (broadly defined to include psychology and sociology, as far as they evolutionary).” What a host of philosophical assumptions and attitude lie embedded in that statement!

…

These supposedly scientific explanations in terms of natural selection are embedded in a matrix of philosophical interpretation of physical science. We are told that evolution is a “mechanistic process.” But what does “mechanistic” mean? To me it means either “exemplifying the principles of mechanics” or “like a machine,” but it is doubtful whether evolution is mechanistic in either of these senses except insofar as all bodies in the universe exemplify the principles of mechanics.

Again, we are told that the evolutionary process is “materialistic,” but this turns out to mean that the process involves nothing spiritual or “supernatural” or “ineffable.” But this is a philosophical assertion based on the maxim that nothing can be attributed to nature that is not manageable within the frame of reference of scientific investigation. In short, scientific investigation exhausts the field of rationale inquiry.

…

There is also a deep-seated fear that to admit the validity of metaphysics and theology as intellectual disciplines would be to undermined the security of the scientific enterprise by opening the door to non-material causation. It is this fear that underlies your belief that I must be motivated by religious considerations: [Mary wrote:] “One continuously reads between the lines, “let us go back, let us go back to God, then we will be comfortable, and then we can refer all objections to all viewpoints to Him.”

You sense a threat to the autonomy of science in any suggestions that the positivistic world view associated with much (though not all) of modern evolutionary biology is open to question. Your mind conjures up fanatical creationists crusading to force creationist biology on school children. The threat is a real one, but it is generated in considerable measure by the insistence of [T.H.] Huxley, Simpson, Darlington, Wilson, and others on palming off evolutionary biology as the only safe guide to human duty and destiny. The claim is preposterous.

It is one thing to argue, as you do, that natural selection might select for “open programs” that permit ethical systems. It is quite another to claim that evolutionary biology (and only it) can discover human duty and destiny. If evolutionary biologists go around making claims of this kind, they should not be surprised if parents decide to take a hand in determining what kind of biology their children will be exposed to.

- The iPad, soon to take over your life, or the life of every twenty to thirty-something near you.

You can watch the video, if you want to watch some truly delusional people practice a level of mock-holy douchebaggery, rarely seen since the time of… (fill in your favorite mock-holy douchebag).

Q: How many apple iPads can dance on the head of a pin?

A: How much money you got?

It doesn’t run a complete Mac operating system, so you’re stuck running gadget programs from the iTunes store. You can spend all day playing games though, if that helps you while away your life. It also lacks a single USB port. Yes, that’s right. Indeed, why let people work with anything but proprietary technology?

And, it’s “Magical!” You can read newspapers on it! (You can in real life too). You can look at photos! You can watch YouTube! ANYWHERE! You can even touch it! And it will touch you right back.

You’ll never be without a friend again. Go buy one. It’s only 500 dollars. Be an individual. I mean, what’s 500 dollars? Surely not much money to the people in Africa who have so much clean drinking water that they die every 5 minutes from dysentery – Sorry. Sorry…I forgot. Fun. Apple is fun.

Hey, can I get any large business to sign on to a well-digging and sewage-treating charity for South, West and Eastern Africa? Like, you know, two percent? So, let’s see… two percent of 500 dollars… 10 dollars? Could 10 dollars from the purchase of every iPad go to a well digging project in any African nation?

Cause they don’t have really like a lot of totally clean water there, you know. And like, it would be really cool, like you know, if they could, totally, like, drink water without getting parasites and dysentary, and like, wasting away to nothing.

But, then, product “RED” will be there to help them with the drugs they really, really, really need. Like Nevirapine.

Oh, but I’m such a bother. I know, Apple is a wonderfully innovative company, making fun and creative electronic tools for so many people to tool around with. But at some point, when we can’t read without a 500 electronic device, when we can’t walk down the street without calling our spouse or roommate to find out if the plain yogurt is “okay” to buy, when we can’t draw or write without the presence of a ‘touch screen qwerty device,’ then, my friends, we’re no longer using the computer. It’s using us.

As the comedian said: It’s not the tool. We are.

And it’s good as far as it goes. It might hold up the massive health care fraud. It does announce that many old Dems will be vacating their positions soon, and Congress and the Senate will see some new blood, most of which will be quickly corrupted.

New can be good, but it only goes so far…

Democrats will remain what they have been, and so will Republicans.

Democrats have played the part of the willingly brainwashed by every bit of pandering fear-mongering pushed out of the unholy craw of the WHO and NIH (Bird, Goat, Snail, Mouse flu, SARS, HIV, HTLV, H1N8, R2D2, etc),

Or the the Fed (“The sky is falling, the sky is falling (give us your money”), or of just about anything else (with one notable exception… hold tight for a moment and I’ll get there).

On the other shore, Republicans have the general good sense to mistrust D.C., the NIH and WHO on most counts, stating the following, more or less:

“People get the flu, that’s life. HIV seems confined (mysteriously) to very high ‘risk groups.’ Global warming? Puh! Phooey! Government science is bought and paid for. Anyway, we’re not going to gum up good business for Al Gore’s fantasies of religious grandeur!”

I am pleased that Dems and Repubs battle each other on these issues, because they tend to prevent the greatest of all possible calamaties from occurring: That one side could have their way entirely.

But where both cast a blind eye is toward the fairly complex idea that has bedeviled every society on earth:

That what we, (as a nation of individuals), do, want and defend as ‘right,’ might in fact, at times, or often, be self-destructive. Even pathologically self-destructive.

The defense of hamburger, factory-farmed, as a badge of national identity. The embrace of NASCAR amid violent wars for acquistion of oil-rich nations. “The Defense Against Exercise Act,” sure to be enacted as soon as its called for, as a means to reduce the cost of pharmaceutical-only health care.

Are we a pathological nation? (Aren’t all nations, at times, self-destructive?)

Take public policy issue number one: The War, the cause of the War, the causes of the War, the War, and the War. It is now seen as universally important that “we” be always and forever, and for eternity “against the terrorists,” in whatever means are necessary to be “against the terrorists.”

I have no problem with being against terrorists, myself. But, (and I’m quoting a friend of mine just un-indentured from his military service), “What is there left to bomb in Afghanistan?”

Let it ring for a moment, because you won’t hear the question in D.C. press briefings.

How about this one: “We, (that is “We,” the government of the United States, without much regard for the wishes of the people), are occupying a now destroyed, once sovereign nation in the Middle East. “We” have killed some hundred to two hundred thousand individuals in this occupation and quest. We rationalize this by not talking about it at all.”

This site claims to tally civilian deaths, have a gander, s.v.p. www.iraqbodycount.org/

Does this make us less than “noble?” If we are to believe the Republican cause – the nobility of our invasion of the Middle East after the events of 9-11, then we should at least believe the grievance – that 3,000 Americans were killed on that day by an attack, and that all else is justifiable retribution – but not retribution. “Democracy bringing,” though not “nation building.”

If we then begin to tally the loss of those lives, on that September day, we must go to the cause of those deaths – the collapse of two, or three, buildings in New York City. Collapse of steel structures at free-fall speed, with concrete exploding outward into dust plumes that blanketed the five boroughs, and beyond.

Who believes that a steel tower can dissipate into dust and shrapnel, with no assistance, other than heat? No explosive material, just heat, applied in only a small part of the entire structure?

Three times?

On the same day?

In the same place?

Who believes it?

Belief is easy. “Who looks into it,” is the question.

(“Not us,” say the American people….)

But, back to “reality…”

I take as my military inspiration Union commander and Indian fighter William T. Sherman, a man whom I dare you to hate, because hating is easy. Sherman marched his army through the South, and in line with his political philosophy, made it near to uninhabitable, burning a path behind him, tearing up railroads and communication lines, so that the recalcitrant, trouble-making South (in his opinion, certainly), would have no option but to surrender.

I am not a fan of warfare, per se, but if I were going to wage a war, I’d wage it to win it.

The Democrats can’t wage war to win, because it’s not in their philosophy. They are too concerned with human rights not to continue the slow torture and murder of a country (ours or theirs). They’d rather that than a brutal but shorter-fought military victory.

And Republicans, it seems, are little better, confused as they are by the rationale for invasion and occupation.

Now, I am not for the razing of Iraq or Afghanistan. I was not for their invasion and occupation. I consider all of it a crime of such immense proportions. I do not doubt that many future historians will be as occupied with counting those murdered in their own countries by American adventures in ‘democracy-spreading,’ as they are in real or perceived attacks against America.

But, I am left to wonder, with my mouth agape, at the manner in which “we” are conducting these two wars against sovereign people. So much like a badly applied tourniquet, slowing and fitfully strangling the life from them, because we know, deep in our hearts, that we should never have waged a war on those people to begin with.

Victory in warfare requires a pure, distilled hatred, that rationalizes, for a moment, total suspension of the 10 commandments, or any other injunction against inhumanity towards another. Without that gut feeling, war cannot be won.

I’m not confused that these nations do not harbor an historical feeling for pluralistic bi-partisanship in the philosophy (but not the actual manner) of the French Enlightenment. I am aware that violence brews beneath the surface of much of the world, with only a thin veneer of repressive authoritarian government to keep it at bay. And if I am aware of these things, who in the world isn’t?

Or, more to the point, how is it that the military leaders, graduated from West Point and the like, entered this war with the idea of bringing “American Democracy” to nations that do not have the infrastructure, or the historical or philosophical disposition, to carry the weight of such a strange, historical experiment, such as are we?

And so, while I am pleased that Scott Brown won in Massachusetts – and while I am pleased that a whorish old Democratic machine in that State has been pushed backward onto its duff, perhaps to re-consider its disregard of its citizenry – I remain absolutely frightened for the future of this country, having waged two illegal wars, against nations whose crimes were, primarily, guilt by association, or by projection.

Terrorism can be fought in many ways. Creating unstable nations in areas of terrorism is not one of them.

And now the false question will ring: “What will Scott Brown do?”

And the deeper questions will remain in obscurity.

I’ve recently had an experience with the very friendly Facebook platform, which has made me evaluate its friendliness and utility.

I had accrued some massive coterie of ‘friends’ on the site – most of whom I did not know (that’s the great lie of the internet age – that we’re all one happy group of well-informed people just amiably chatting with each other (about the end of the world and other topics))…

I began to use the site for longer for conversations in topics of my interest, such as religion, philosophy, science, etc, and was enjoying some of that banter, and so was somewhat put off when I arrived one day at the sign in to find that I could not sign in! I had been deleted, in total, and without explanation.

Following the advice of the ‘you no longer exist here’ page, which was displayed before me, I wrote the Facebook architects, wherever they may be on earth, and asked them for some assistance in returning use to me.

Alas, four letters over a week sent, and nary a response.

So, I posted a new profile, and left a note for everyone to contact me via email or my webpage, and not FB.

Now, having much free and useful time returned to me, I have noticed something that I had indeed noted before agreeing to use that damned site:

It is a terrible, terrible waste of time and energy. It might have been invented by those very ‘powers that be’ to persuade all interested people to abandon the very public and ‘google-accessible’ world wide web, as a lure to create an artificial bed of newspaper and wood shavings, upon which to sit and nestle oneself comfortably, while regurgitating self-reinforcing opinions to each other, cyclically, so that a great feeling of comfort and sleepiness takes over, and all motion and movement in the visible world ceases, all at once, and for good…

Call that a conspiratorial view – and I’m sure that it wasn’t really invented to hurt activists – but the activity on outside of Facebook websites on some issues that I follow has ground to a quiet whisper, whereas the ‘Facebook universe’ hums and throttles with noise.

Noise that is mute, inaudible, invisible, un-hearable to Google search, to public viewing, to, in that sense, utility.

I share this as an observation. Please keep your Facebook time limited, very limited, and perhaps consider making the posts you would make there, on your own public blog. And if you don’t have one, then please make one:

http://en.wordpress.com/signup/

http://www.blogger.com/home

http://www.blogtext.org/

http://www.google.com/search?q=get+a+free+blog

And link it to the other existing blogs and sites, and make at least the best of what you do, write, think and say about these important issues, or philosophical battles, public, and useful to the entire reading world…

Thank you for your time and consideration, kind regards,

Liam Scheff

– The Big Scam

The first thing you should know is that I don’t really believe in the Big Bang. I mean, no, I don’t believe in it at all, for a variety of reasons, which I’ll boil down into a singular potato for you:

I don’t believe it because it’s not true.

Okay, I’ll do better. But it requires some explanation of my particular philosophy.

I am of the opinion that the sciences have taken the place of the religions of the past. That they have inherited the position of ‘answerer of existential questions,’ that used to fall to the Church elders, before the Church was up-ended by Galileo, Bruno and Copernicus – but really, by the relentless march of technological progress by the human species.

Today’s sciences now hold the place of dispensers of great truths, and of great mysteries. “Why are we here? Where do we come from? What are we made of? Why do we get sick? How do we get better? Why do we think these thoughts? Where does our creative spirit come from? Where do we go after we die? What is the meaning of it all…?”

But who answers these questions now? “God is Dead” spake Zarathustra – or Nietzsche, I mean. The church is passé’, declared Voltaire. We are in an age of reason!

And so, these questions fell away from the philosophers, priests and prelates of old, and were gathered up by a new priestly class: the scientists. The inheritors of the mantle of trust and truth. And they did good work, for awhile.

And the relentless surge of technological progress that is the hallmark of our species sped on, and that, in itself, was proof to most people that science answered all questions. Television, CAT scans, Special effects, the MP3…The iPod is proof. Proof that science can’t be wrong.

Or is there a difference between that relentless march of technology, and knowledge? Of knowing, truly knowing, the answers to those large, penetrating, eternal questions: Why are we here, and where do we come from?

In 1927, Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Priest and astronomer, thought better of letting 2000 years of hard work go down the drain, and devised a method of aligning the Biblical story of Genesis with Galileo’s heretical observations and Newton’s heretical physics: “First there was nothing, then there was everything.” Could it be that simple? he must have asked himself, “To put religion back into astronomy?”

“First there was silence on the face of the deep, then the Lord said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.”

First there was nothing, then, BANG. There was everything.

At first, the idea was ridiculed, and seen as a ruse to resuscitate Genesis. But then, it was decided that this emotionally-satisfying Judeo-Christian idea should be treated more generously, and “proof” was sought out to make it stick. And so, proof was found.

The proof constituted the observation that some objects in space are moving away from Earth at a faster rate than others. And if there was a creation ex-nihilo, out of a “central nothingness,” then it stands to some sort of “reason” that the farther out you get, the older the stuff-that-came-from-nothing is. And as some objects were farther away, they therefore must be ‘older.’

(Now, I want to interject, for the record, I’m no atheist. I’m also no fundamentalist. My spiritual life is of deepest importance to me, but I don’t believe that we humans can take logos – the word – and believe that it can easily transmit total truth, in our metaphorical, limited language. So, when I hear “First there was silence on the face of the deep,” I hear a profound poetry, that signals to both truth, and belief. It points to a moment of creation – not THE moment. It is a resounding phrase, and I do love it, but it is not the only phrase that is resounding, that comes from ancient texts, to describe the birth of life, or of us. Interjection completed..now on with the essay).

Where were we…Right. The further out you go, the older things must be.

And so it came to pass, that by looking at the lightwaves that emanate from distant objects, the astronomers who saw them decided that the red light represented the oldest phenomena, and blue, the youngest. And so “redshift” became the measuring stick that proved the Big Bang correct.

Except that it didn’t. Because it also came to pass that a curious astronomer, named Halton Arp, regarded the heavens and noted that the theory did not hold. Red and blue objects were often closely aligned, in fact, touching, stemming from the same cosmic vortexes. Were red and blue signifiers of a singular moment of creation, or instead of an ongoing creative process?

It has been considered by many that Halton Arp’s observations “falsified” the Big Bang theory. (Falsified is a special ’scientist’ word that, in schoolyard English, simply means, “proved it wrong”). For his trouble, Dr. Arp was banished from his University, and had to flee overseas to continue his research. (Galileo sends his regards, Dr. Arp).

Nevertheless, in subsequent decades, continued blows rained down upon the poor Big Bang. It was seen that there was not enough matter in the visible universe that would explain how it could hold itself together, if gravity were the only force active in outer space.

Oh! I forgot. Underpinning Father Lemaitre’s ‘discovery’ of the Big Bang, was the condition that the only active force in the universe was Sir Isaac Newton’s “gravity.” And gravity was determinable, (though it was a changeable and very weak force), through a mathematical equation. And in applying this math, it was also discovered that nothing really should be as it is, by any stretch of the imagination, and that neither you nor I can be here.

The astronomers were in a bind. They had two choices:

1. Throw out the Big Bang, throw out the gravity-only universe, and start looking for answers, or…

But, what do Priests do when an idea controverts a Biblical fact? They invent something to explain the contradiction.

And so, the astronomers put on their priestly hats and frocks, and began to invent. They invented “black holes,” immense space creatures capable of destroying galaxies, that were also invisible! They invented “dark matter,” immensely weighty material that comprised 90 plus percent of the universe, that was also invisible! And “dark energy,” which…yes, was also invisible, and could not be measured…

The Big Bang, as it now exists at all, rests on these hallowed ideas. Father Georges Lemaitre’s Gospel exists because of invisible space monsters.

And so, I don’t believe in the Big Bang.

But I’ve been anxious to ask a real astronomer, one who practices at the level of the current state of the art, to respond to my bothersome suggestion that this is all, at present, an irritating hoax, which is siphoning tax dollars and research years into a very real black hole. I spotted my chance last week, when the Wall Street Journal published a brief editorial by astronomer Lawrence Krauss, director of the Origins Institute at Arizona State University.

Mr. Krauss was writing on the “thrilling, possible breakthrough” that “leaked a tantalizing hint” on dark matter. The experiments took place in a giant hole in the ground – the deep Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota – where “something remarkable” was “discovered”:

“The actual result? Two pulses were detected over the course of almost a year that might have been due to dark matter, CDMS announced on Dec. 17. However, there is a 25% chance that the pulses were actually caused by background radioactivity in and around the detector.”

Thrilling, indeed! The published research paper itself is less thrilled, however, at the “chances”:

“Based on this revised estimate, the probability to have observed two or more surface events in this exposure is 20%; inclusion of the neutron background estimate increases this probability to 23%. These expectations indicate that the results of this analysis cannot be interpreted as significant evidence for WIMP interactions [those that 'might indicate dark matter'], but we cannot reject either event as signal.” – Results from the Final Exposure of the CDMS II Experiment, Dec. 2009 (Note – thanks to Dave Smith of PlasmaResources.com for this citation).

Why would a non-significant event be talked up in the Wall Street Journal? (A paper read by investors…who may not be very critical of the science…who might be looking for an investment opportunity?) Who can say?

This is one of many such holes in the ground where Big Bang research is being conducted. The most famous hole is the eight billion dollar (and then some) Large Hadron Collider (also called CERN), in Geneva Switzerland, of which Mr. Krauss made comment:

“[M]y colleagues and I had concluded that in order to understand what we see, it is quite likely that a host of new elementary particles may exist at a scale beyond what accelerators at the time could detect. This is one of the reasons there is such excitement about the new Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. Last month, it finally began to produce collisions, and it might eventually directly produce these new particles.”

“These new particles?” What new particles? Answer: Imaginary particles – those that “quite likely may exist” in order for the children of Lemaitre to understand what they see.

The question being asked by the scientists and engineers who’ve spent years and billions of tax Euros digging this giant hole is, “Can we collide sub-particles quickly enough to ‘recreate’ the Big Bang?” Nothing has come of it yet, nor of any previously existing giant hole they dug, but who can stop them from digging?

And so I put it to Mr. Krauss, in the comments section of the Wall Street Journal online:

“Present one study, any one study, that gives non-falsified evidence that we human beings can indeed measure a ‘beginning of time,’ and please make sure this number hasn’t been altered 30 times for political reasons, and been begrudgingly reached by ‘consensus agreement.’”

“Better yet, is Halton Arp correct? Is Redshift now falsified – ie, not a true measure of distance – and distance, or movement ‘away’ from a presumed ‘galactic center’, well, not really ‘distance’ at all, but something else entirely?”

Mr. Krauss wrote several responses, in which he exclaimed, “I have read a number of openly iignorant [sic] responses, a bunch of irrelevant political responses but yours concerned me because it has the aura of knowledge, but contains little.”

He added, “Your statement “What is invisible, and cannot be seen, measured, or located, does not exist,..” represents the antithesis of scientific progress.”

He continued, “blah blah blah…since you are such a pompous person I will respond briefly.” And provided a list of ideas which were “evidence for big bang,” including, “prediction of existence of microwave background with observed temperature,” and “prediction of observed hubble [sic] expansion.”

I held him to the questions he did not answer, and asked after his tendency to ad hominem, and he wrote the following:

“I am done with this particular piece now, and have other things to move on to, so this will be my last note to you. But in the spirit of the season I will apologize for expressing in print the frustration raise by your statements.. There are, alas, some arguments not worth pursuing, and some people not worth trying to convince. By predictions, I mean that one set of observations leads to a theory that predicts the result of another set of observations that have not yet been made.. in this case perhaps 1-2 dozen observations. When the results of those observations are in agreement with the predictions this suggests the theory that led to the predictions is on the right track. In the case of age, the GR predictions of expansion allow us to determine a dynamical age of the universe based in inferences using the presently observed rate of expansions. Then when that age is compared to the age of stars and globular clusters, derived using completely independent physics (nuclear reaction rates and the equations of hydrodynamic equilibrium) one derives precisely the same age. Similarly when one uses the derived age to predict what the present temperature of the microwave background should be, one gets the correct number. THis [sic] is how science is done. Happy holidays. I cannot give a physics course here, but if you want more details look in one of my books, or someone elses.”

Indeed…If you can find any one reproducible bit of evidence, so resilient as to allow itself to be called a “fact” in there, I’d be happy to buy you a drink. Any of his points, by the way, dissolves into controversy when prodded even slightly. That is, try to track the history of what the temperature of what the microwave background radiation “should be,” and you’re in for a journey.

I asked once more after those two questions, but he never did supply that paper, nor did he answer the question about Dr. Halton Arp.

Which leads me back where I started. I don’t believe in the Big Bang, because scientists tell me, by their actions, that I have no reason to trust them. That is, I don’t believe it, because it’s not true – it’s not in evidence.

What is in evidence, on the other hand, what has been observed, is a universe powered not by gravity, but by electricity, by the flow of ionized particles, bubbling and pinching, exploding in plasma and diffusing in aurora, pushed and pulled, prodded and goaded, excited and flung across lightyears, by the electro-magnetic forces that live in – that are – outer space.

I invite Mr. Krauss and his colleagues to have a look, and soon, because we, the tax-payers, are getting a little fed up with a scientific authority that insists on wearing Papal clothes.

• Mr. Krauss’ December 21, 2009 Wall Street Journal Article, A Dark Matter Breakthrough?
• The comments section for that article.
• The Wikipedia rationalization of “The Big Bang.”

“Oh, Avatar! It’s the best movie I’ve EVER SEEN! It’s about US! We, the oppressed people!!! US!!! US!! MEEE!!!! MEEE!!!!”

That’s the general tone of reviews, from whichever group of oppressed peoples you happen to be speaking with. So, how can a movie speak to so many, about one issue? Easy: It uses surrogates – blue people – as stand-ins, for….Well, that’s the genius of ‘avatars.’ They can stand in for all of us.

I seem to be the only one finding the ‘evil super techno society’ message a little over-cooked, especially since the movie that brings you the message is the product of said society.

If it had been a movie about the evil of cellphones, and the idiots who use them while driving, walking, biking, shopping and everything else, I would have been right there with you. Down with cellphones!

(Did I mention biking? I did. Have you seen this? People riding bicycles, in the street, with traffic whizzing, or pushing by, chattering on their radioactive telephone? Where’s that movie?)

I also seem to be the only one even slightly interested in the cost of this great and glorious and ‘important’ movie: $450 million is the the estimated fee (300 million for the film, 150 for the marketing, estimated).

I would therefore like to recommend a short list of films that cost very little, comparatively, and in some cases, simply very little by any measure.

Please do add to this list with your ‘makes you think’ movies. (Note: If “Transformers 2″ is on your list, then I want you to go to the theater right now, and wait for the next sequel. Put a tent on the sidewalk, and let your intentions be known. No need to say anything here).

My list of non-450 million dollar, makes you think, makes you feel, makes you evaluate, makes you wonder, or inspires you movies (in no particular order):

• Festen
• Blind Spot
• 400 Blows
• Joe the King
• Godfather Part II
• Little Big Man
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
• Richard Pryor Live in Concert
• Downfall
• Hard Day’s Night
• Catch a Fire
• Red Dust

And for you sci-fi fans:

Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009 series). Whoops! Try Here.

And finally, because Avatar is, in fact, a 450 million dollar 3D movie that claims to be anti-Imperialist and pro-Nativist (and therefore pro-ecology and anti-technology), which was also produced in the most technologically dependent and complex society ever to exist on earth…I think this would be a good time to review Cracked Magazines 5 most unintentionally racist movies about racism.

“In its earliest days, Christianity did not celebrate the Nativity at all. Only two of the four Gospels even mention it. Instead, the Church calendar was centered on Easter, still by far the most important day in the Christian year. The Last Supper was a Seder, celebrating Passover, which falls on the day of the full moon in the first month of spring in the Hebrew calendar. [...]

By the time of the Council of Nicea [325 AD], the Christian Church was making converts by the thousands and, in hopes of still more converts, in 354 Pope Liberius decided to add the Nativity to the church calendar. He also decided to celebrate it on Dec. 25. It was, frankly, a marketing ploy with a little political savvy thrown in.

History does not tell us exactly when in the year Christ was born, but according to the Gospel of St. Luke, “shepherds were abiding in the field and keeping watch over their flocks by night.” This would imply a date in the spring or summer when the flocks were up in the hills and needed to be guarded. In winter they were kept safely in corrals. [...]

It is hard to escape the idea that by making Christmas fall immediately after the Saturnalia, the Pope invited converts to still enjoy the fun and games of the ancient holiday and just call it Christmas. Also, Dec. 25 was the day of the sun god, Sol Invictus, associated with the emperor. By using that date, the church tied itself to the imperial system.

By the high Middle Ages, Christmas was a rowdy, bawdy time, often inside the church as well as outside it. In France, many parishes celebrated the Feast of the Ass, supposedly honoring the donkey that had brought Mary to Bethlehem. Donkeys were brought into the church and the mass ended with priests and parishioners alike making donkey noises.

In the so-called Feast of Fools, the lower clergy would elect a “bishop of fools” to temporarily run the diocese and make fun of church ceremonial and discipline. With this sort of thing going on inside the church to celebrate the Nativity, one can easily imagine the drunken and sexual revelries going on outside it to celebrate what was in all but name the Saturnalia.”

[end excerpt.
Read the full article at the WallStreetJournal.com.]

And so, friends and neighbors, I am inclined to think that we’ve moved yet again, from honoring Saturn, (or rebelling from him), to Christ, to… well, I think we should say a prayer in honor of our true Patron Saint, Adam Smith, whose holiday this is, in so many, many, many ways…

But whoever you pray to, and whatever you worship, a happy Christmas – a good, safe and warm holiday – and best wishes to all. Merry Christmas, everyone.

But, it struck me like a shovel in the kisser. We’re gonna be okay. Maybe not all of us – maybe not me! Maybe not you. But, we, as a group, will be alright. India, China, Amexico. All of  us.

Why?  Nuclear POWER! Oh, kiss my grits. We can run out of oil, and we’ll still be wanking away on our iPods, thanks to unstable radioactive material. That’s right. Nuclear Power. Kiss the blarney stone, the future is bright GREEN.