Author: White Whale

What if religion became a matter of empirical analysis? What if we could speak with the dead, and ask them questions? What if we determined scientifically that the nature of life depends upon an organizational energy that underlies the entire cosmos, that we can call God?

The reality is that it is impossible to understand radical Islam except as a reaction to the materialistic pessimism of modernity. Their leaders, quite often, are Western educated, and use much the same rhetoric that leftists do. Our cultural system is failing–or at least has been failing–and the proponents of Islamism see it as a defensive bulwark against the same thing happening to their culture. Rigid people are always fearful people, and it is fear that leads to the cruelties we see from them.

I do believe we can grow beyond religion as our primary moral narrative, and embrace simple decency and light and goodness as our creed. Such a thing, anchored empirically, would be extremely attractive to most all psychologically normal people.

Recently I have stopped praising my children for success in athletic achievement, but rather asking them how they would grade themselves. If they grade themselves highly, and I agree, they get a high five.

I tell them that only they can fairly judge their level of effort, and if they know it was high, then they don’t need external reinforcement, which in any event will often not be forthcoming in the “real world” of adulthood. And if they know they didn’t do their best, then praise is saccharine, unnecessary, and unhelpful.

Surprisingly, they often don’t grade themselves that highly. My oldest recently gave herself a 20% on a cross country run. This seemed unfair to me, but I didn’t dispute it. I suggested that evaluation be remembered, and taken into account in the next race.

John Wooden once commented something like “I never got 100% out of my teams even when we won the national championship, and asking for 110% is just stupid.” He of course would never have been so unkind (at least, when not under direct competitive pressure) as to say stupid, but the sentiment was clear enough.

Action precedes affect. What you do tells you who you are. You cannot “be” in a moving world, without action of some sort. There is no essential self which is external to action, at least until one penetrates to the very core of Being itself, which is not what the Self Esteemists are talking about.

I think it is useful to get your ass kicked sometimes by events, especially as a child, so that you can learn the basic movement of getting back in the saddle and going again. Too much, of course, and you cringe and shrink from life; but too little and you are a superficial, silly little human being, who has nothing to offer to anyone that is worth a damn.

As a general rule, I don’t like to comment on current issues, since they are normally just foam on the waves, and it is the depths we need to plumb. All of our momentary problems have deeper causes, which in my view is where we should focus most of our time and thought.

Since this it taking up a lot of room on the internet and airwaves, I wanted to add some facts that I feel are relevant.

First off, there is already a mosque at 51 Park Place . Where is the need arising for a new one? Has there been a sudden and overwhelming influx of Muslims? From where? Why?

Secondly, what is currently the largest mosque in the nation is in Dearborn, Michigan. It can house some 1,000 worshippers at the same time.

This is the same size that is being proposed for this new mosque. To be clear, that means this new mosque might well be the largest in the United States, since far more than worship space is being built.

Third, the date proposed for dedicating this mosque is Sept. 11, 2011, which quite obviously is the tenth anniversary of the attacks. This is not a date with any significance to Muslims, except if and to the extent they sympathized with those attacks. What any rational person would expect would be something like the date of the Hajj, or Muhammad’s ascent into heaven, or the end of Ramadan, or something else with religious significance.

The fact of the matter is that this building was so close to the World Trade centers that debris from the airliners–which had been filled with screaming, innocent Americans–hit the building. That is close enough to associate it with the attacks.

In my own view, the only possible conclusion is that the developers want to build this sight to CELEBRATE the attacks. Even if they are never overtly mentioned, not one person there will fail to appreciated the message, and the fact is this could and likely would become a pilgrimage site, for those Muslims wanting to celebrate a Muslim “victory” over we infidels. It will be open to the Islamic public, and anyone can travel to New York.

This conclusion becomes yet more obvious when one looks at the Islamic habit of building their own mosques over captured holy sites, as happened throughout the Muslim world, with the most obvious example being the Dome of the Rock, built over the ruins of the Jewish second Temple.

We are being spit on. I do not dispute the right of people to practice their religion, but they are already able to do so, in the same place they want to build this new mosque. To the precise extent they insist on this exact location, we can rest assured they mean us nothing but harm and enmity, regardless of whether or not they are ever able to express that hatred overtly.

Common sense dictates opposition at least in the court of public opinion.

is paved with bad ideas. This popped in my head the other day. This is related to “the good is the enemy of the perfect”.

If you become completely focused on never making mistakes, you won’t do anything. If you never notice, though, that you ARE making mistakes, you can’t improve. Logically, then, there are points where you just have to take your best guess and go, knowing full well that two steps down the path you might need to alter your plan, based on new information. This process, repeated over a lifetime, is the basis of wisdom.

It is an old saw, but I will repeat it: Good decisions are the result of experience, and experience is the result of bad decisions.

Academics, dealing as they do all day every day with abstractions, are generally unable to understand this. They look at the world, see imperfection, and demand perfection. Towards the end of perfection they are quite willing (in aggreggate: obviously there are exceptions, like that one oddball at that one university, and that professor at the other that just got denied tenure) to countenance in theory and practice the imposition of tyranny.

Now, the reality is that this solution by force–which is so viscerally attractive to people who don’t really DO anything, possess physical courage, or really even encounter principled vocal opposition, since they have the proverbial on/off switch to the microphones–does not make the world better. It makes it worse. Cuba is a horrible nation, that categorically would have been better off under Batista, if for no other reason than that people were allowed to leave, and that the economy had not collapsed. They still made good Cuban cigars back then.

I have often said that the theory of the people who have white collars is that anything done by someone else, that they don’t understand, must be easy. Why isn’t that deck finished? Why does it take so long just to paint a room? Why isn’t that truck loaded?

To the point: why isn’t our world perfect?

The reality is that “perfect” is a word which they define negatively, as the absence of things and people they don’t like. They have nothing positive to offer. They quite easily condemn “homophobia”, but are unable to offer homosexuals a solid reason to live, or sense of meaning.

Improving the world is something for people in overalls, not suits. It is something meant for people who know that your first plan always fails, who expect this, and who are quite willing to change their tactics to suit their strategic end.

What should our ends be? Global peace, a global standard of living such that people have the time to develop their souls, and sufficient morality in the world that governments are largely unnecessary.

These are my goals, at any rate. Note I am describing Presence, not Absence. To do otherwise is to plead guilty to infantile imbecility, which is a common enough condition, and one quite close to mental illness. Certainly it is a moral illness.

I’m reading Doris Lessing’s book “Mara and Dann”. First of all, it is an excellent text for the process of the rejection of self pity. I find it useful to read narratives by authors who describe great suffering and personal difficulty without ever lapsing into sentimentality or self pity. Andy McNab does that very well too, and the only fiction I’ll likely read this year is by those two. Ms. Lessing was no Spec. Op soldier, but she is sure as hell tough as nails. I like her a lot. If I could meet any living person, it would be her.

In any event, I’m digressing. Education in a culture in the future that has been ravaged by famine, war, and “climate change” (she got the Nobel, I think, largely for this theme, even though the change in question was a new Ice Age, which I personally think is more likely than global warming) consists largely in the teaching of observation and deductive and inductive logic (I get them confused, so I won’t pretend to use them correctly individually).

Specifically, the parents of young children start asking them at a very young age “What did you see today?”. The children answer: I saw stones in the river, trees by the river, some were dead, I saw two monkeys and a turtle.”

The adult then starts asking questions, like “why do you think monkeys live in trees?” Why do you think river rocks are smooth? If they aren’t all smooth, why are some rough? Why do turtles have shells, do you think? Why do you think those trees died? Etc.

The goal is to teach observational awareness. I was thinking about this today, then thought about the Sherlock Holmes story where he tells Watson he is an idiot for not knowing how many stairs there were in his house, which he traversed daily for years, and then decided to count the steps on my ladder. 12′ ladder, 12 steps. Being the genius I am, I thought HMMM, maybe the steps are 1′ apart. Not many people would be that clever. That was my own idea. So I measured them, and lo and behold they were exactly 1′ apart.

In any absolute sense this doesn’t matter in the slightest, but I find the idea of approaching the world that way–of recounting for yourself what you saw daily, and trying to draw conclusions from those observations–intriguing. I would suggest this to my kids, but they don’t like to be overtly taught. I had been doing something similar to that with them anyway.

For example, when I saw a patch of flowers along the freeway on the way to Missouri, I speculated as to whether they were natural or planted. What we saw was that color only occurred at the edge, and nowhere else. Yet, the grass was mowed, so we couldn’t eliminate the possibility that they has simply been mowed down. How do we test ideas? We find a patch that is NOT mowed. When we did this, we saw that indeed those flowers still only occurred on the edge, and therefore had likely been planted by the State. Then we got to talking about who paid for it, and how they did it. Was it by hand? Did a special truck spray seeds? How? Etc.

These sorts of things sound dull, but when you actually start trying to figure the world out, it’s quite entertaining. For myself, I watch internal pictures all day, so most days if I played this game, it would be a summary of ideas. That’s useful too, in its own way. Really, this post is an example of that.

This is a word I invented to describe the process of–shall I use Academese?–“narrative interaction” which is characterized by the substitution of labeling for understanding.

Example: Statement one: “I value private property ownership.”

Statement two: “you are obviously a right wing conservative, so I can’t talk with you.”

What true dialogue looks like is a lot of question asking and answering, confirmation of understanding, and presentation of competing or complementary narratives such that even when world views are not reconciled, the outline of each world view in some detail is clear to both or all parties. What does it mean to say property is theft? If someone says that, the job of one who seeks understanding and not coercion is to find out what THAT person means.

The word itself is the past tense of the word “think”, if we use abuse the English language. It connotes that if any thinking took place, it was in the past, and probably sloppy.

It is also an interesting sound: “thunk”. Say it aloud. What I wanted was something that evoked the sound of a rock being thrown into water, and rapidly disappearing. This is actually how the word came to me, trying to express that feeling. When a rock hits water with speed, it passes through it without interaction, correct? It gets wet, but neither the essence of the rock or the water is affected. All the information that might have been found in that water–in authentic and open give and take–is missed completely.

Will Smith never got “jiggy” to work, and frankly I’ll probably forget this word myself before long, but nonetheless I have always found neologisms both fun and useful. Useful because some thoughts need new words, since the old ones don’t quite get what you are aiming at, as they are often so loaded with the prejudices of the reader’s past that you fail to communicate and likewise fail to realize it.

When I say “puppy”, can I predict what sort of image of a puppy you come up with? If I assume it’s a German Shepherd puppy, and act on that assumption, I’m already mistaken for most people.

I will add that the entire Communist notion of collective guilt relies on thunking. You kill people because they fit some label, without any concern whatever for their individual cases, or whether the label even matches them in the slightest at all.

Some while ago, I posted my four step plan for saving the world. I have it on my wall in my bedroom, and chuckle from time to time at my audacity. Hell, why not try to save the world? The worst that can happen is I die trying. Certainly, I’ve already suffered a lot trying, but you do what you can with what you got, then repeat. That’s the way to live, in my view.

I’m pretty much beyond embarassment, so that’s not even really a consideration.

When I get time, I am going to formally apply to the Templeton Foundation for grants to take any or all of these deeper, but figured I’d post them in the meantime since I might get hit by a bus, or be kidnapped by aliens, or devoured by wild beasts. Like I said, I posted this before, but thought I’d try to flesh the ideas out in a tad bit more detail.

Anyway, Step One is fixing our financial/economic system. I have a plan for that that hopefully someone more knowledgable than me will someday vet, or possibly improve. It is here. If you want to skip, it’s the last one; but the solution won’t likely make sense until you see the problems it’s designed to solve.

Step Two is solving the problem of meaning as embodied in moral relativism. I have done that. I still need to collate everything into a book, but the basic work is complete, and posted in general outline on my other website, www.goodnessmovement.com . It’s an unpleasant piece, but my version of the Grand Inquisitor probably does the best job of summarizing my thinking on the point of life and the nature of good and evil. It’s posted on the tab for Goodness, on the left.

Step Three is developing a system for speaking with the dead. Edison tried to do this, as did a number of other inventors of their era. Today, there are literally thousands of recordings and video images that seem to be the voices and faces of people who are dead. The field as a whole is called Instrumental Transcommunication.

The Holy Grail of this field would be developing a means of communicating real time. What happens currently is people stand around in dark rooms, recorders going, and ask questions. They then go back to their labs, and spend many long tedious hours trying to detect minute traces of voices. Some of them believe they get better results from radio noise. They tune a radio to between the stations.

Obviously, this generates the response that they are simply picking up the voices that appear sometimes even on non-used frequencies.

Here is my thought: use actual white noise as a background. Ask your questions and make your recordings, but plug earphones in to a sound filter that follows the recording, that digitally deletes the background sound, which would leave only extraneous sounds. Systems exist which can be tuned by frequency, such as the Lencore i.Net system. You could experiment with different frequency profiles. My thought is that we don’t know what entities use to create sounds–assuming such entities exist, which is not proven for me–but it would be useful to procede in a formal way.

Here again is the sequence: sound generation, recording (on say a ten second delay, so you are hearing what was recorded ten seconds ago), acoustical filter, earphones. If a sound appears on the recording that is not the white noise, then potentially that is signficant. If it is a voice, then you have real time communication. The technology to do this already exists. I have no idea what it will cost, but I will chase it down when I get time.

In my view it is silly to pretend that the beliefs we have about death don’t fundamentally color our entire lives. We live in a scientific age, and it is equally silly not to exhaust all possible avenues of proof/inquiry prior to reaching firm conclusions. The world works the way it works–and I will accept reality, whatever it is–but my clear preference is for us to live forever in a happier form.

I think this could work. I could be wrong. It happens often, since I take many positions and make many decisions.

Step Four is curing cancer and falsifying the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm, which are related.

Some time ago I spent some six months reading an exhaustive (and exhausting, for me) text in German on the state of biophotonic theory. I need to pull it out and translate enough of it to keep me fresh on the details, but the net is that our bodies emit small amounts of light, and that it appears to be coherent. There are alternative explanations–such as incomplete chemical reactions–but they don’t really explain what we can observe. Such explanations are good enough for skeptics, but not for actual scientists (the two are regrettably often quite distinct from one another).

Cancer appears to be a malfunction of the biophotonic field, in which the constant “refreshing” of our physical morphology is interrupted, such that some part of the body gets out of the whole. It goes dark, literally. It is no longer synchronized. Most of the chemicals which are carcinogenic seems also to interfere with light transmission/biophotonic signalling. Interestingly, glucose–which is what cancer cells feed on–does the same.

Logically, there would be two components to this. The first would be strengthening the field such that the person never falls ill to begin with. The second would be getting light into the cancer cells, such that communication is reestablished.

I see two ways of doing this. I feel that the reason that saints in all ages have been reported as glowing is because they literally gave off light. I think that growth in spirituality and goodness causes an increase in biophotonic/field activity. It is under our control. If so, then it would be amenable to biofeedback.

We could create a box filled with the ultrasensitive sensors used to detect biophotons. We could play pleasant music, have the person lie down, and give them, say, a set of carefully sealed goggles with little monitors in them, such that the more light they emit, the more light they see in the lens.

We could carefully measure the frequency of this light, and see if individuals have their own frequencies. Do different organs have their own frequencies?

We could feed such light back to them. If people do have their own frequencies, then we use those exact frequencies. You could alternate the two. You could radiate someone with light, then see how much they could reradiate. The Germans and others have done some of these experiments, but as far as I can tell nothing really interesting has happened in the last 15 years or so. Most of the research is either really expensive, published in languages other than English, or otherwise inaccessible. I have written Marco Bischoff, who wrote the book I read, but he never got back with me. Perhaps I need to try again.

With respect to Darwinism, I simply don’t believe that his thesis–which I frame as “morphogenesis through random mutation coupled with random benefit”–is tenable. Obviously, self evidently, beyond any reasonable doubt, the genetic profiles of all animals change over time, and appear related. Yet it is precisely the degree of relation that creates the largest problem. We share some 50% or some crazy number of our genes with sea sponges. How is all the remaining difference crammed into the remaining 50%?

We understand how single cells transmute themselves into babies, but we don’t have any idea how stem cells “figure out” what they need to become. It is like the DNA is the raw materials, but the architect is elsewhere. We can track every moment of the process, but it just HAPPENS. We don’t know how, and I don’t think we will ever answer that question until we integrate field theory back into the process.

Logically, if these ideas–not really my ideas, but my particular articulation of them–about biophotons are correct, then they can be immediately utilized as a thesis on how beneficial adaptations were and are retained. The field interacts with the environment as a whole. Darwin has no room for interaction, which is a point about his theory that most people miss. Those who don’t understand him assume that animals “adapt” to changing environment. He has no room for this. He has random change coupled with random benefit, expressed over immense amounts of time.

I do actually think animals interact with their environment–consciously, if you will, or purposively. An experiment I would like to see done is to take some animal that multiplies rapidly–say mosquitoes–and introduce a natural selector, say some toxin that will kill most of them. Darwin claimed that no rapid adaptation was possible, since the chances of just the right mutation occurring just when the selecting event occurred was vanishingly small. That’s why he needed so much time. Over enough time, everybody wins the lottery. This is the theory.

What I believe can be shown over and over and over is that whatever the animal, and whatever the selector, adaptation will happen at far, far greater speed than can be explained by mere coincidence or change. Rather than proving “evolution” (used imprecisely by everyone as Darwin’s theory), it would rather DISprove it as unable to account for an empirical fact demonstrated in a lab.

Simply getting any significant result with the biophotons would also falsify Darwin, in my view, but why not be systematic?

Such are my ideas as they exist today. Steal them if you like, but be diligent and do good work.

One of my core values is the necessity of perception. I have toyed with many ways of framing it, but the simplest is the necessity of perceptual “movement”, as I call, which is simply allowing perceptions–opinions, ideas, understandings–to evolve over time. This happens naturally if you allow it to, which is to say if you are not rigid and dogmatic.

One of the core intentions of propaganda is to halt perceptual movement. This fact is typically concealed within an overwhelming volume of seeming change. Propagandees are bombarded daily–hourly–with change, with new ideas, with the “someone said this and someone said that” sort of news cycle.

Manifestly, our media talks constantly, but says, in the end, very little. Very few consumers of news can offer a systematic and coherent understanding of almost any aspect of our contemporary political, economic and social landscape. Deep thinking simply isn’t a part of the process. This point is missed simply because people assume that since so much is being said, that something substantial must be embedded in there somewhere. It isn’t–not in my view at any rate.

The actual effect of being simultaneously overwhelmed with “information” and underfed with respect to actually substantive discussion is to generate perceptual stasis. It is to cause people to cling to one group or another and instinctively defend them as people, and to fail to differentiate the people and the policies. If a Republican/Democrat/Libertarian/ACLU/Heritage Foundation/Drudge Report/Glenn Beck/Daily Kos member says it, then it must be true. Woe to those who disagree.

It is my personal opinion that the solution is simply actual dialogue among groups which disagree. If it is done with respect, maturity, and sincerity, it cannot fail to generate progress. Perception is a sort of self organizing system, in which patterns emerge simply from the process of moving around within a conceptual space. Obviously, some of them are wrong, but continued movement will sort this out.

I have said this before, but one of the foundational intents of democracy is to leverage the power of individual perceptions so as to get things most right. This effect is particularly powerful over time, since given sufficient information, democracy is that system which best adapts and uses new data to generate new behaviors.

I had a dream quite some time ago that my last post reminded me of. I was getting coronated as a Sufi, in a very solemn ceremony. They had a crown for me, and when they went to put it on my head, it was much too big for my head, and it fell on my shoulders. We all thought that was very funny.

This is a simple enough metaphor, but it can be “decoded/interpreted” several different ways. The hint I will offer is that if your crown ever fits, your usefulness is at an end.

We already had oxymoron–Oxford moron–but this word connotes the fact that thinking is almost never undiluted with stupidity and “blinkering” of some sort. Even when we are seemingly most intelligent, there is always that invisible added perception that remains just outside our peripheral vision. It hides out there, while we smugly proclaim our brilliance.

A story I like to tell is the fact that Einstein lost almost all the money he won for getting awarded the Nobel Prize in the stock market. Further, he was a moral idiot, in that he had promised his first wife–and indirectly his first son–half the money. He failed to keep his promise, which is quite dishonorable in my view.

If normal people are ones you don’t know very well, then I would submit that geniuses are people about whom you only have a limited sample of decision making and behavior. In my view, it is impossible to “be” intelligent. You are always, all your life, only as good as your most recent perception.

This is wonderful. Life asleep is, uh, life asleep.

Was that clever?

I love irony. It is a useful tool.

If you missed that, perhaps it was because I was smumb.

I will add that in my view we are all idiots. The smart idiots realize this fact.