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This last summer, within a couple of weeks, I heard and saw multiple ads for civilian police officer training, in San Francisco, some small towns in Kentucky, and a third place that escapes my recollection. Here is an article on the San Francisco project.

This feels Stimulus-funded to me. I have been saying since the program began that it was quite literally a checkbook against which checks could be written to anyone for any reason. I have posted about how the supervision was almost by design entirely dependent on the honesty of those reporting receipt of the funds; given dishonorable purposes, it amounts to a slush fund of laundered money for criminals.

Any student of revolution knows you have to have at least a significant portion of the police and military on your side. In the modern world, this may have changed, in that superior technology–or aggressive use of current technology, like EMP’s–can have disproportionate effect, but anyone who wanted to ensure a reasonable orderly transition to tyranny would have to have people with guns on their side.

In my view, the TSA clearly amounts to one such group. Obama and our female Big Brother have vastly expanded it in size and aggressive capabilities with respect to touching our bodies and photographing us naked. They are now some 50,000 strong, believe it or not, and have just been granted the right to unionize, meaning that their representatives will be negotiating pay and benefit packages with Obama Administration insiders, subject to funding by Congress. In my view, the TSA should be abolished outright, and the same function done by a quarter as many people. Airlines should be able to opt in or out of varying levels of security, with the lowest what we saw BEFORE 9/11, with the only provision that the doors to the pilot’s area be bolted. All full body scanners machines should be junked.

To the point here, could one not imagine the creation of a civilian police corps that parallels the official one, and which could come to the fore in some manufactured crisis? We should assume, I think, that leftist agents have penetrated our military. There is no reason to suppose that under some pretense or other they are not getting into our police departments, and signing up for civilian training programs.

We need to be clear that decent people can be manipulated into helping leftists, since their method is deception. What one sees, in case after case after case of Leninist subversion, is the skillful use of lies to get peoples temporary allegiance, which is then betrayed the moment it becomes tactically expedient. Leninism is nihilism, which is evil, which is the Big Lie. There is no moral order underpinning it. There is no effort to accomplish any good. There is no effort to abolish poverty, address injustices, or foster human potential. It is purely and entirely a project of hatred and violence.

One should not assume, then, that otherwise innocent people could not be used as unwitting agents in larger plans. This is clearly conspiratorial, but modern history is little but the history of conspiracy. The horrors in the Soviet Union, China, Nazi Germany, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, and other nations were the result of somnolescent spells cast by perfidious magicians, walking in the darkness, and calling the world to join them in their public moral suicides.

I am going to insert 3-4 thought blocs in here.

In some respects, this blog represents an effort to reconcile not just “conservative” and “liberal” approaches to improving the world, which was my original thought, but also an effort to show that respect for science is consistent with spirtuality; that intellect and emotion require one another to operate properly; that compassion untempered by prudent ruthlessness is damaging; that truth can never exist unmixed with error in a time-based system; and that identity is never a final thing.

A couple nights ago I was in a motel room in Indianpolis–a cheap one which needed a printed warning about noise, doing drugs, and sneaking extra people in the room–and I found myself dreaming someone elses life. I was a young black man, getting locked up for the first time. I felt the sadness, the resignation, the almost inevitability of it; the getting through, the moments of small triumph, and final release.

One can certainly psychoanalyze dreams. Some warrant it. In my view, though, imprints can be left on the world that endure, and they can be picked up. This metaphysical question is less interesting, though, than this: who was I, when I was him? Was I him, me, or someone else? I know these questions pop up a fair amount on this blog. They interest me.

William James, who I will refer to again as easily the most underrated mind produced by the American nation, talked of consciousness as continuous. He felt this was the most useful way of thinking of it, even though we have no way of knowing we were not just placed in a two day trance and our memory removed; or kidnapped by space aliens and our memory eradicated by trauma.

When you sleep, who are you when you do not dream? You are dead, are you not, for all intents and purposes? But you don’t know it. This would be, I suppose, a consolation for those who think death is final: you’ve practiced it many times, and only vanity would compel mourning.

What I wanted to propose, though, is thought I had a while back, and decided to insert here. This is a sort of thought experience, a thought movie, with different scenes, changes of milieu [my God, I am a nerd].

As I have said now quite a few times, I think of thoughts as machines. I see them floating in a stream. If consciousness is a river, thoughts are places you can disembark (from your boat, let us say, although you are the water in the river too) and walk around. They are fixed, and their approximate operation rarely changes. Machines don’t really repair themselves. Once they exist, they tend to operate within narrow limits until they break. And even then, MOST of the machine is still intact.

The brain, the physical brain–which I do not consider the same as the mind, which I think transmits through the physical brain–is a machine. It is a relatively uncreative machine, which has as its major function sorting. It places things in categories. Edward de Bono’s whole career, in some respects, can be seen as prefigured in his book “The Mechanism of Mind“.

The point I wanted to make here is that consciousness, per se, exists as a background to thinking. Thoughts are evanescent things, and emotions are a sort of thought too. This is certainly not original to me–it is an essential element in some forms, perhaps all forms, of Hindu philosophy. I am thinking here of the Samkhya philosophy that is paired with Yogic philosophy. They posit that your “self” is composed of an immortal soul whose sole attribute is consciousness, and “attibutes”, which are material and perishable, and which contain all the personally distinguishing traits we think of as us.

And how unique are any of us, really? Is our identity not largely a function of the people around us? Is this not in part the reason solitude is painful, that it is harder to know who we are, and what to do?

Life is change, and no path can be straight which is not crooked (this is borrowed from Chuang Tze) and if the self is conflated with a mechanical structure–a fixed pattern of thought–then you can’t bend when the road does.

This is the point made in the first line of the “Tao Te Ching”: the path which can be named is not the eternal path. Nothing with fixed attributes can be hewn to.

Few thoughts for a Saturn-day morning.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from all evil.”

This is a funny phrase, is it not? Yes, we can justify evil on the basis that without the possibility of error we could have no free will, and no moral autonomy, but why would a just God LEAD people into temptation? Can we not find it well enough on our own?

One of the things it seems to me is often missing from Christian ceremony is an understanding that Christ himself likely had a very abundant and often expressed, mischievous sense of humor.

What MIGHT have been going on here was a sort of inside joke, in which he is asking of God not to serenade him down the pathways he likes to go down anyway.

Again, why would a just God do that?

Let’s talk about karma, by means of getting to that. There is this seemingly common-sensical view of the South Asian (Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism I think and Nestorian Christianity) notion of the wheel of reincarnation that bad karma is when bad things happen to you, and good karma when good things happen to you. You are born a male Brahmin if you did good things in that past, and a “foot” (Shudra) or lower if you did bad things. For us Americans, we have bad luck if we were bad people, and good luck if we were good. John Lennon had a song “Instant Karma”, and one reads about “burning off karma” in places smelling of patchouli.

But need this be the case? If the task is learning, then is there any better teacher than difficulty? For those who want to learn about life, can you get any “luckier” than to be forced to endure hard times? The stronger the will, the more learning is possible. Thus, the very strong willed ought, logically, to want the most trouble.

But you can’t go seek trouble and derive the benefits from it. It has to come to you.

What I think Christ was talking about here was something like this: “look, God, I know there’s a truck getting ready to smash into me. I accept that, it is what it is. But can you take that smile off your face? Seriously.”

What is the primal temptation, as I have framed it, and as He might have? Self pity. Is it not reasonable for him–psychologically healthy for him, as a non-masochist–to at least try and petition his way out of the trouble he knew was coming? And failing that, to at least ask that he not be tested as much as he knew was possible.

It could be reframed: please lead me not to my trial, but deliver me from its necessity.

He knew that was impossible. But I can’t help but wonder if he thought encouraging others to pray the same might not at some point help. And I can’t help but think he had a little silent grin when he did it. He wasn’t afraid. He loved life. Troubles only exist when they are there. For those who live well, they are distant both when they are in the future, and when they are in the past. “Take no thought of the morrow; sufficient unto the day are the evils therein.”

This may well be lousy psychology, and is almost certainly unorthodox–and certainly certainly lousy on some accounts–theology, but there you go. That’s what I do. I may slap myself in the forehead in the morning and delete it. I may add to it. Who knows?

Latest Krugman piece, I think. The New York Times gets no money from me. I’m not sure they get much from anyone else. We have a local leftist rag that I have literally had access to for free for some six weeks, but reading it invariably makes me feel stupider. In general the NYT has the same effect. It temporarily deducts IQ points since they so consistently post such patent nonsense that I have to suspend my normal rational orientation to get into their world.

Anyway, here Krugman points out that Republicans have not been very good historically at cutting budgets. He’s right, of course. His seeming implication is that Democrats are basically like Republicans in this regard. To the extent this is true, this is precisely what is BAD about them. He does not support the point that spending cuts are bad through such idiotic equivalency. We are going bankrupt quickly. This is the point that matters.

Then he makes this for him routine point that “Slashing spending while the economy is still deeply depressed is a recipe for slower economic growth”. This, to put it bluntly, is stupid. The reason we are not growing is because the people who create jobs, for people who pay taxes–and whose growth expands the corporate tax base (hint, hint, not the government)–are AFRAID. They are afraid of Socialism, and the tax increases that everyone knows MUST come at some point, coupled with the massive governmental fecundity that has attended the reign of our Rabbit Lord. He’s sort of like Bill Clinton, but in his case he’s never seen a bureaucracy he didn’t want to dip his stick in to, so that all sorts of agencies get spun off. They are, after all, so cute.

The question is not that the government has to increase income–taxes–at some point. It is that every time we have done that in the past, government spending has risen to keep pace. More than keep pace. WE HAVE TO STOP SPENDING MONEY WE DON’T HAVE, THEN REDUCE THE SIZE OF OUR GOVERNMENT TO A HEALTHY LEVEL. This will facilitate economic growth, the alleviation of poverty, and help us avoid bankruptcy (although in my view we are too far along for less than drastic measures; that is another discussion).

Then he gets into healthcare. Unclever person that he is–and I have no patience for people in positions of influence who peddle snake oil that DOES affect in damaging ways the lives of the poor, the sick and the hungry–he seems utterly unable to assign a cause to healthcare cost increases. It is not greed. It is increased use. I deal with this in a piece simple enough even he would grasp it, if he chose to: Healthcare in ten paragraphs.

As far as the temporary entitlement increase Obama funded disingenuously through the Stimulus, and which is not being renewed by the Republicans: Krugman, why do you have to be so dishonest? Yes, I know that hungry children is a great theme, but really: have you and your ilk created anything but a permanently dysfunctional segment of our society? Can anyone of even the most robustly optimistic disposition see anything positive developing in the near, middle, or long term of the communities where these handouts are apparently important, absent economic growth?

The actual reality here, is that the spike in spending on “Single mothers nursing children destined to fail” was always supposed to be temporary. They said it was temporary then; now it is being treated as some sort of latent principle of the universe. This is what leftists do. They claim they only want a little, then they take a lot.

“Single mothers nursing children destined to fail” is a harsh phrase. As I ponder it, it is quite accurate. Krugman doesn’t care about the lives of the poor. You know he has a nice brownstone somewhere, or Park Ave. suite, or country home.

He doesn’t care about the messes leftists like him leave behind in cities like Detroit, Washington D.C., Chicago, or Phillie. He doesn’t care about the aggregate of suffering. As long as the money keeps flowing, the votes will keep flowing back. It’s an ebb and flow that enriches Democrat politicians, while ruining the lives in advance of the not-yet-born.

Edit: some of the ill humor removed.

I propose we christen the demonstrators in Wisconsin–many of them no doubt bussed in from out of State on the more or less direct orders of Obama–the “pro-bureaucracy movement”. It sounds a lot like democracy, but of course you can’t call what they are doing “pro-democracy”. They are, after all, a movement specifically working to thwart the will of a legislature (and governor, if I’m not mistaken) just sworn in a month ago after a fair election.

They are pro-government protesters–they just represent the parts that are never ratified by the electorate, and who in most years get everything they demand.

Several points to make here. First, I would like to mention that one of my favorite books is “The Wisdom of the Idiots”, by Idries Shah. I may post a few of his stories. One short one is this:

A voice whispered to me in the dark last night, saying “there is no such thing as voices whispering in the dark”.

I think the analogy of a joke would be a propo here: if I have to explain it, the effect is lost in any event.

A second point I wanted to make, though, is that although I have been very much influenced by what I understand to be a Sufi approach to life, Sufi tradition itself says that all of their orders are prone to constant decay, forgetfulness, and getting lost.

I audited, briefly, a class on the Sufis in college. Perhaps two lecture in, the Professor–Hamid Algar–started talking about how Sufis were leading anti-colonialists. This clashed quite a bit with the understanding I had had. Then later, perhaps the same lecture, perhaps another, he commented that Islam had spread peacefully. I had to raise my hand at that point and ask: “what are scimitars for then?” Actually, I wasn’t that clever. I just pointed out that, as one example, Iran was not colonized by the Islamic ideology peacefully, at least according to my understanding. Another student, who is probably at this very moment working or trying to work for some arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, somewhat angrily told me to take a class in Islamic history. I then realized that I had interrupted what I would now call a session in what we could call Islamic “community organizing”, and stopped going.

The Mahdi of Sudan was a bloodthirsty, sybaritic pig. There was nothing kind or enlightened about him. In fact, his death was due to the diseases that swept his camp following his armies failure to bury or take care of in the slightest the thousands of corpses they had left lying around after their conquest of Khartoum.

He was called a Sufi. Suffice it to say that on my reading Sufis are not bloodthirty pigs.

Thus when we see this word in Iran, or Egypt, or Sudan or elsewhere, we need infer nothing. Inner reality is inner reality. The tradition is so full of this basic teaching that in many respects it could be said to constitute Sufism outright.

Many of you will have experienced Christians invoking love in a spirit of hate. The Islamic equivalent is invoking God in the name of injustice and evil, as did the Mahdi, and as do the Iranian mullahs at this very moment. You cannot hide evil. They seem not to realize this.

It seems to me that if one is to use this word, it should be defined. All too often in human history it has been used to designate anyone who did things differently that you did. The way I use it, it means taking pleasure in the pain of others.

Yet, it exists on a continuum. Indifference to the pain of others is also a type of evil. Empathy is a fundamental element of goodness. Anything short of being able to experience deep happiness in the success and well-being of others is a sort of evil, it is a sort of shadow, a falling-short.

The desire to rule the world is a sort of evil because it implies an indifference to the fact that one’s own ideas about how life should be lived may differ considerably from those one wants to rule.

The emotion of wanting-well for others cannot be compelled. True empathy cannot be forced. It is a type of perception, an awareness that can blossom in the right circumstances. It is intrinsically an individual and individuating process, since it always looks from a specific point in the universe.

A metaphor that came to me this morning is a meadow covered in flowers. Each of them is slightly different than the others. Each came from a seed that had to sprout on its own–albeit not without the help of sun, water, and a nurturing soil. Each of them is in a place, yet each contributes to the whole, while able to live on its own, to stake its own claim on a spot of Earth.

Now, the use of power is inevitable in human life. Some sort of power must be exerted over us. The question is whether we exert it over ourselves in the form of a chosen moral order, or someone extrinsic to us compels it on us.

A religion, or any social order based on traditional values, is a power, isn’t it? It is the sort of restraint rejected by the hippies and radicals of the modern era. (I hate to say 60’s, since that was just a widespread public manifestation of something that had been going on for some time even when Keynes Bloomsbury Group had their heyday many decades before).

In my view, it is not necessary to hew to tradition, simply because it is tradition. But you have to choose a master. That master may be Yoga. It may be getting up early every day, doing an hour of exercises and another hour of meditation; it may be adopting a vegetarian lifestyle, and learning Sanskrit.

That master may be a religion. That master, to the point here, may be a political philosophy that organizes thought and behavior.

You cannot be loving all the time. We are all Yin and Yang, particle and wave. You have to have a starting point, a home, a more or less stable source of identity–which can be specific habits, like praying five times a day, and fasting during the day for a lunar month.

It can be habits of mind. That is what I have tried to articulate with my conception of Goodness, which I discuss on my other website, linked on the side.

Never feel sorry for yourself.

Never quit, if the task is worthwhile.

Always try to understand what is happening around you, and orient your behavior and thought around empathy, love and happiness.

My thought process is that you cannot walk standing on one foot, and that life is walking.

A few thoughts for a Sun-day morning.

No, nothing like that. I was at the Humane Society today, and walked 5-6 dogs with my youngest. If memory serves it was two Lab’s, a Beagle, one Australian Sheepdog (my favorite), and several others.

Muslims hold dogs to be dirty creatures. They feel no sense of connection or compassion for them. A “revolution” would be feeling these sentiments. Unfortunately, I am insufficiently scholarly to say if this would be rejecting their Koranic injunctions-which is simply not possible for someone who wants to remain a Muslim, and I would not ask someone to renounce their sense of purpose and personal organization–but it is my hope this is the case. An inability to sympathize with affectionate animals like dogs is symptomatic of a larger empathetic problem.

There is so much potential love floating around this world. All that has to be done is grasp some of the threads floating around, and claim them as your own. There are more where those came from–an unlimited supply.

I was listening to Howling Wolf this morning while cooking. I really enjoy him. Then I got to searching YouTube for videos of him, and found this. Call it what else you will, this is direct and honest.

He says the blues is when you don’t have the money to pay for your house. It’s when you are thinking evil.

Few points: this song was first recorded in 1951; this session is from 1966. I wonder if he would have said that in 1951. I don’t think so. Evil was still bad then. Nowadays we more or less look to serial killers as heros. I can’t help but think many people watch movies like Hostel or American Psycho (to be made into a musical soon in New York) and wonder what it would be like to let the world know what they really think.

But all that was in its germination phase back in 1966. He could say things like that without fear of rejection, since especially in the early stages of the War on Poverty–and the late stages of the Civil Rights Movement–he could have counted on sympathy.

I wonder, though, if he would have FELT that way in 1951. The ethos he is articulating here is that of helplessness that leads to a sense of paralysis, then violent retribution against the world that put you there, “by whatever means necessary”. This, in my view, is a political ethos, that is external to the spirit upon which the old blues were based.

The old blues were tragic, but were meant to share pain, such that everyone could relate to you, to one another, and take strength from a sense of shared trouble and difficulty. The blues is not different, in principle, from Hamlet. It describes the world not how it ought to be, but how it is.

Useful art is local. I was going to make this a separate post, but will make the short statement here that I feel as if there is a certain isomorphism between the professionalisation of art, and modern Statism. We only want to look at those “heros” who made it to the gallery. We don’t want to create it ourselves. We let someone else lead us, dictate our taste.

You want to know the bald truth? I don’t have a freaking clue why Picasso is so famous. He was a shit to most everyone around him. I have an article I printed some time ago showing him and his friend Apollinaire to be knee shaking cowards, who damn near peed themselves whenever confronted with anything hinting of danger. They were the sort of people who would shove their girlfriends in front of them to not get hit by bullets.

Why can’t I just ignore him? Why can’t I just ignore most of modern literature, and all the slack-wristed and morally obtuse modernists that we are told to respect, but most of whom operated on a much, much lower level of moral integrity than the average man or woman in the street.

In my view, local poetry, local art, local drama and all that–with wide participation–will be a part of our cultural renaissance. And we need to ride out on a pole most of what has been foisted on us as “modern” in the last 100-150 years.

The question is this: does it helps us grow as individuals and as a society? If not, throw it away.

Had more to say, but things to do. This is close enough.

Look at this video though. By and large it is only white people who listen to the blues nowadays. As far as I can tell, black music gave way first to sex, and now violence. The “blues” was transformered into gangsterism, which is more less open and proud evil.

Since I have mentioned it, I will discuss a little bit of the evidence for the survival of death. It is voluminous, and at this very moment there is a medium named David Thompson who, on hundreds of accounts, can actually materialize spirits of dead people IN THEIR BODIES.

The following quote is taken from Victor Zammit’s website. Lord knows he has his share of critics. Lucky man. You have to have balls to get everybody shooting at you. The site is in my view filled with too much stuff. It is too busy. He talks about being a lawyer too much. But for someone really trying to see what evidence is out there, he is a great resource. Look at his book, and use that as a sort of Bibliography. As you get into it, you find some very evidentiary stories indeed. The story of David Thompson is the most remarkable. It may sound far-fetched. The question I would ask is this: what skeptic who wants to deride these claims has attended one of his seances? None that I can see. If you want to claim a phenomenon cannot be replicated, surely the first step is to attempt to replicate it in the manner decribed by the researcher? This is the most basic element possible of the scientific method.

Anyway, to the story:

We investigated materialization medium David Thompson weekly for 15 months. But the most spectacular evidence for the afterlife was when my wife Wendy’s father materialized announcing his name. He was in the ‘flesh’. He was speaking as when a loved one talks to you. It was his voice. It was his mannerism. No one in the experiment knew of Wendy’s (pictured) maiden name. No one knew about the intimate circumstances raised by Wendy’s father about their early life; no one knew about very special relationship she had with her brother. There was physical contact when her father kissed Wendy on the forehead. Further, Wendy’s father materialised a piece of paper with his signature on it – which perfectly matched his signature on existing documents. Absolutely, that kind of evidence would have sent an accused to the gallows in a courtroom situation. Of course, the spiritually blind, deaf and dumb – and other dummies, would not understand the hugely great value of this magnificent materialization evidence.

A conventionally trained–can I say drained?–mind will of course find that farcical in the extreme. Of course death is the end. What serious person would suggest otherwise? We know what parts of the brain control what. We know, for example, that if your Broca’s area is damaged, that your linguistic capacity is affected. We can track genetic mutation over millions of years. We know what parts of the DNA select for what traits, and our knowledge grows larger daily.

The body is nothing but a complex system of chemical events, and human consciousness nothing but an epiphenomenon of a material evolutionary artifact whose primary purpose is survival. We have no “will”. We have no purpose. And our deaths are no more significant than leaves falling from a tree. We wilt in time. We melt, then are no more. Whether you like it or not, that is the truth: deal with it.

As with most matters that matter in philosophy and psychology, though, William James offered the most common sensical, logically rigorous treatment of the matter I have seen. If you adore athletic Victorian prose, as I do, read this.

The man is brilliant; in my view, he is the best thinker we have produced, after the first generation of Founding Fathers. No one should read Freud. Everyone should read James “Principles of Psychology”.

For the short of attention: the net of it is that James was a trained physician. He was quite up to date on the physiological knowledge of his time, which in important respects has not really evolved that much in the last 100 years. They knew far more than you might suppose.

As he put it, the brain need not be a SOURCE of consciousness, but a TRANSMITTER, where the mind, per se, is separate. This explains why drugs can affect our consciousness, why strokes can permanently damage our capacity to speak, and why genetic traits–including personality traits–can be inherited.

How can this be, you ask? How can a mind exist which consists of us, but is not available to our conscious awareness? Let me ask this: how much of your own desires are you aware of? How much of what your brain processes on an average day are you conscious of? How much of who you are is accessible to you, even in a purely material sense? Have you ever had a dream that you were sleeping, then woken up, then woken up again? Who is to say you are awake now? That is the key point, and of course a standard point expressed by mystics over the ages.

I have argued often on this blog that consciousness is split. In the hypnotic experiments of Janet, he found that psychologically normal people, under hypnosis, could be made to manifest multiple, independent selves, each autonomous. We must accept that in some respects this is the nature of our reality. It is continuous to some part of ourselves, but we have no way of knowing what disparate elements there may be.

In terms of physical reality, the best theorists cannot say in what it may consist. We seem to have an interactive relationship with the physical universe, which we cannot be sure would or could exist if there were no consciousness to be aware of it. This is a primary conclusion of most philosophical extrapolations from Quantum Theory. As I have said before, the experimentally observed fact of non-locality–the potential connectedness of all physical matter in a way beyond space/time–falsified Einstein’s General Relativity as a POSSIBLE explanation for the nature of all reality.

Thus, explanations can be offered for observable facts which are consistent with the hypothesis that mind is separable from brain; and nothing in our current understanding of the nature of reality compels us to reject such ideas. In my observation, almost all scientistic dogmatists are literally stuck in a 19th century view of the universe.

Then you get to evidence. I need to go to bed, but will post a few example of things I found interesting. One sees this idea that the “multiple of anecdote is not evidence”, but of course it is. If 100 people walk up a hill, and claim to see a red bear, then if they are credible people, most people will accept that.

None of us go to the trouble of verifying what we read in scientific journals. I would not know how to verify if neutrinos exist, or how DNA is sequenced, or what happens when I mix chemical A with chemical B. I take people’s word for it. And sometimes, I am wrong. The whole Global Warming thing seems to be a massive hoax. The Earth may be warming, but the efforts to gather evidence for it have been half-hearted, and filled with more or less overt and intentional fraud. We have no temperature monitors in the Arctic regions where we are supposedly experiencing warming. One would think this would have been one of the first things done. What do they do? They estimate temperature using models which in turn assume that warming is going on. That’s another topic, though.

I’ll confine myself to just a couple examples which are readily accessible since I posted them on my Facebook. This is not a thorough or even especially diligent treatment of the topic: this is meant to be illustrative of some of the types of evidence out there. For those with an interest, further research can be done. Start with Zammit’s book, then look up his resources.

Here is one on a woman who claims to be the reincarnation of Anne Frank. I found the part about her cousin quite evidential. This is not compelling, but will be interesting for some.

Here is an effort to separate cold reading-based mediumship from actual communication. Cold reading has its limits, and it can be experimentally defined and eliminated as a plausible causative mechanism for clearly visible patterns.

This is the most evidential Near Death Experience of which I’m aware. There are no plausible explanations within a standard brain=mind paradigm.

This is stating the obvious, but when you are clinically and measurably brain dead you cannot form new memories.

Finally, a well put together intro on Near Death Experiences:

Oxygen deprivation does not work as an explanation because the effects, for example, of drowning are universal. Everyone feels them the same way. Why? Because they are based in physiology. It is precisely the seldomness of NDE’s–perhaps a quarter of the people brought back from clinical death–that speaks for their authenticity.

I will add that creating an explanation for something is not the same as doing science. If you can write a compelling and best selling book about the evolution of human kind from primitive RNA molecules, but offer up not lab or other experiments by which your ideas could be tested, then you are a fiction writer, not a scientist. It really is that simple.

None of the critics of NDE’s seem to have done their due diligence. They look at a few non-representative cases, then come up with an explanation of what MUST BE happening, provided we reject the survivalist hypothesis in advance.

Here are a couple books you might read: http://www.amazon.com/Science-Near-Death-Experience-Consciousness-Survives/dp/1594773564/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298085863&sr=8-2
http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Beyond-Life-Near-Death-Experience/dp/0061777250/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298085863&sr=8-1

In this one, cardiologist Pim Van Lommel “provides scientific evidence that the near-death phenomenon is an authentic experience that cannot be attributed to imagination, psychosis, or oxygen deprivation.”

And so it goes. Why believe the worst when we have an abundance of evidence to the contrary?