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Title: Suppression of Science Within Science
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URL Source: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/bauer1.1.1.html
Published: Dec 17, 2009
Author: Henry Bauer
Post Date: 2009-12-17 06:41:52 by Ada
Keywords: None
Views: 310
Comments: 15
I wasn’t as surprised as many others were, when it was revealed that climate-change "researchers" had discussed in private e-mails how to keep important data from public view lest it shake public belief in the dogma that human activities are contributing significantly to global warming. I wasn’t particularly surprised because just a few weeks earlier I had spoken at the Oakland Rethinking AIDS Conference about the dogmatism and strong-arm tactics that are rampant in a seemingly increasing range of fields of medicine and science. PowerPoint presentations of most of the talks at the Conference are available at the Conference website. Here’s a slightly modified, more readable, text version of my own talk. The theme in a nutshell: For several centuries, modern science was pretty much a free intellectual market populated by independent entrepreneurs who shared the goal of understanding how the world works. Nowadays it’s a corporate enterprise where patents, pay-offs, prestige, and power take priority over getting at the scientific truth, and the powers-that-be have established knowledge monopolies. I had met Peter Duesberg in person only at the Conference, but I had been quite familiar with him from many videos. What had always stuck in my mind was his expression of surprise, astonishment, sheer disbelief, as he told what happened to him after he questioned whether HIV could be the cause of AIDS: I had all the students I wanted . . . lab space . . . grants . . . . elected to the National Academy. . . . became California Scientist of the Year. All my papers were published. I could do no wrong . . . professionally . . . until I started questioning . . . that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Then everything changed. What happened then was that he got no more grants; his manuscripts were rejected without substantive critiques, just that "everyone knows that HIV causes AIDS"; Robert Gallo, who earlier had talked of Duesberg’s distinction as a leading retrovirologist, now publicly called him dishonest on scientific matters. Defenders of the mainstream view have even held Duesberg responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of South Africans and have described him as the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier. What had Duesberg done to bring about that radical change? Absolutely nothing. He was doing science just as before: gathering data, documenting his sources, making his analyses, presenting his conclusions for comment by others. Of course Duesberg was surprised that suddenly he had gone from lauded leading scientist to discredited crackpot. Of course Duesberg was surprised, because his experience of suddenly being sent beyond the pale was obviously an aberration. Science isn’t like this. Science is done by the objective self-correcting scientific method. Peer review is impersonal and impartial. Arguments are substantive, not ad hominem. This experience must be unprecedented, unique. Or, perhaps, shared just by other AIDS Rethinkers, because questioning that HIV causes AIDS is just too outrageous, and quite justifiably it puts AIDS "denialists" outside the norms of scientific behavior and discourse. You wouldn’t find anything like this in other, more normal fields of medicine or science. Well, actually, you would. You do. Duesberg and AIDS Rethinkers are not alone in this. Duesberg’s experience is not unique, it’s even far from unique. For example, there’s The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press, 2001) in which Bjørn Lomborg discussed global warming and pointed out, documented by >500 mainstream source-references, that Kyoto-type policies would not reduce warming enough to avoid such major consequences as sea-level rises. Therefore it makes sense to devise adaptations that will be needed in any case, a much better investment than trying to reduce global CO2 emissions. A rather unremarkable economic argument based solidly on calculations from mainstream data. So Lomborg was surely just as surprised, astonished, disbelieving, as Duesberg had been, to find that his scholarly discussion placed him beyond the pale of civilized scientific discourse. The Chair of the International Panel on Climate Change asked, Where is the difference between Lomborg’s view on humans and Hitler’s? An Australian columnist agreed: Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence – it is a crime against humanity after all. An American environmentalist seconded the notion, writing that there should be "war crimes trials for these bastards – some sort of climate Nuremberg." Of course those comments were not made in the scientific literature, which doesn’t countenance that sort of character assassination. Or so one might hope. Hope in vain, it turns out, because a book review in Nature (414: 149-50) held that Lomborg’s text employs the strategy of those who . . . argue that gay men aren’t dying of AIDS, that Jews weren’t singled out by the Nazis for extermination. . . . So global-warming denialism is as much beyond the pale as AIDS denialism. Except that – and perhaps you’ve noticed – Duesberg has never denied that AIDS exists, he just has a different explanation for what caused it. And Lomborg doesn’t deny that global warming is occurring, he doesn’t even question that human activities are contributing significantly to it, he is just making a cost-benefit argument. Of course, both HIV/AIDS and global warming are matters that involve not just science but public policy and large public expenditures. You wouldn't find anything like this in a pure science like astronomy or cosmology, would you? Yes, you would. Yes, you do. Take cosmology and the Big-Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Halton Arp was a respected, senior American observational astronomer. He noticed that some pairs of quasars that are physically close together nevertheless have very different redshifts. How exciting! Evidently some redshifts are not Doppler effects, in other words, not owing to rapid relative motion away from us. That means the universe-expansion calculations have to be revised. It may not have started as a Big Bang! That’s just the sort of major potential discovery that scientists are always hoping for, isn’t it? Certainly not in this case. Arp was granted no more telescope time to continue his observations. At age 56, Halton Arp emigrated to Germany to continue his work at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. But Arp was not alone in his views. Thirty-four senior astronomers from 10 countries, including such stellar figures as Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, Amitabha Ghosh, and Jayant Narlikar, sent a letter to Nature pointing out that Big Bang theory * relies on a growing number of hypothetical . . . things . . . never observed; * that alternative theories can also explain all the basic phenomena of the cosmos * and yet virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology go to Big-Bang studies. Just the sort of discussion that goes on in science all the time, arguing pros and cons of competing ideas. Except that Nature refused to publish the letter. It was posted on the Internet, and by now hundreds of additional signatures have been added – just like what happened with the letter the Group for Rethinking AIDS had sent to Nature, Science, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine, all of which had refused to publish it. At a mainstream conference on "Outstanding questions for the standard cosmological model" – there was not even a mention of the stunningly outstanding question of those anomalous redshifts. So the non-Big-Bang cosmologists organized their own separate meeting – again, like AIDS Rethinkers, or like those who question the mainstream dogma about how to cope with global warming. For some reason, non-Big-Bang cosmology is as much beyond the pale as AIDS "denial" which isn’t denial or global warming "denial" which isn’t denial. Then there’s that most abstract of fundamental sciences, theoretical physics. The problem has long been, How to unify relativity and quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics regards the world as made up of discrete bits whereas relativity regards the world as governed by continuous, not discrete, fields. Since the mid-1970s, there has been no real progress. Everyone has been working on so-called "string theory," which has delivered no testable conclusions and remains a hope, a speculation, not a real theory. Nevertheless, theoretical physicists who want to look at other approaches can’t find jobs, can’t get grants, can’t get published. (Read Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics.) You begin to wonder, don’t you, how many other cases there could be in science, where a single theory has somehow captured all the resources? And where competent scientists who want to try something different are not only blocked but personally insulted? Well, there’s the matter of what killed off the dinosaurs. Everyone knows that the dinosaurs were killed off 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Earth. Everyone knows that, that is, except the paleontologists, whose specialty this sort of question is supposed to be. The asteroid theory had been developed by Luis Alvarez, Nobel Laureate in physics, and his son Walter, a geologist. Paleontologist Dewey McLean had earlier developed a detailed theory based on volcanism – it had long been known that tremendous volcanic activity, the "Deccan Traps," had occurred at the relevant time. Do you think Alvarez engaged McLean in civilized, substantive discussion? Or would you be surprised to hear that at a conference, Alvarez said to McLean in private: "I’ll wreck your career if you persist." And Alvarez did indeed contact McLean’s university and tried to block McLean’s promotion – I know that for sure because I was Dean of Dewey McLean’s College at the time. Of course, there’s always been resistance to change in science, as in other human activities. But this degree of suppression of minority views and the use of gutter language and character assassination makes it seem like a new phenomenon. At least it has seemed so to the people who have found themselves suddenly ejected from mainstream discourse and resources. Arp, Duesberg, Lomborg, McLean and other "denialists" of various mainstream theories are surprised because it isn’t supposed to be like that in science. Lomborg doesn’t know that "AIDS denialists" are treated rather like "global warming denialists." Arp doesn’t know that AIDS and global warming "denialists" have it even worse than those who question the Big Bang. McLean doesn’t know that "denialists" about AIDS, Big-Bang, and global warming also have their careers threatened. Everyone who experiences personally this sort of thing imagines it’s a unique experience, because science isn’t supposed to be like this. But science nowadays IS like this: Disagree with the conventional contemporary scientific wisdom and you won’t get grants, won’t get published, will be compared to Holocaust deniers. And it really wasn’t always this way. Nowadays "science," "pure research," has become cutthroat in the extreme, and there’s much corner-cutting and sheer dishonesty in science. For example, NIH newsletters routinely name specific individuals who are being barred from seeking grants for some specified period because of some act of dishonesty. There was no need, in the good not-so-old days, for a federal Office of Research Integrity – a designation that George Orwell would have relished. But now we do have such an Office, and at colleges there are Centers for Research Ethics, and publishers put out journals like Accountability in Research – there’s a burgeoning young academic industry devoted to telling scientists how to behave properly. That’s what science has come to. Genuine science, the search for better understanding, has been hijacked by self-interest and vested interests and is now captive to knowledge monopolies and research cartels: A single theory exerts dogmatic control over grants, publications, jobs, promotions. WHY?? How did this happen? In a follow-up piece, I’ll describe how we arrived at this New World Order in Science. December 17, 2009 Henry H. Bauer [send him mail] is Dean Emeritus of Arts & Sciences and Professor Emeritus of Chemistry & Science Studies at Virginia Tech. His books about science and scientific unorthodoxies include Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method (1992), Science or Pseudoscience (2001), and The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory (2007). He currently writes an HIV Skepticism blog.
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#1. To: Ada, earthchild, Original_Intent, Christine, SonofLiberty, Jethro Tull, HOUNDDAWG, TwentyTwelve, X-15, James Deffenbach, gengis gandhi, IndieTX, Horse, noone222, randge, RickyJ, bluegrass (#0)
(Edited)
Of course, there’s always been resistance to change in science, as in other human activities. But this degree of suppression of minority views and the use of gutter language and character assassination makes it seem like a new phenomenon. At least it has seemed so to the people who have found themselves suddenly ejected from mainstream discourse and resources. But science nowadays IS like this: Disagree with the conventional contemporary scientific wisdom and you won’t get grants, won’t get published, will be compared to Holocaust deniers. The church of corporate science (Big Science) desperately needs to be questioned and found wanting, needs its own version of the Protestant Reformation. Since Big Science is the religious voodoo backing the Materialistic cult and used to run cover for the Luciferian elite, attacking its formerly unassailable credibility is key, one of the bigger keys to unlocking the minds imprisoned in the media-Matrix. Fortunately, the web of deception is vulnerable to the winds of change and Climategate may be the beginning of the end for the empire of lies that undergirds the political tyranny of the oligarchic elites. Even if the MSM is stonewalling, as always, on the Climategate story, the leak in the dike will inevitably continue to expand. Funny how the healthy, test-it-all, keep-the mind-open skepticism that created the scientific revolution and all of its good fruit, has become verboten when aimed at the Church of Corporate Science. One of the most effective mind-control techniques ever devised was to create a class of "experts" that cannot be questioned, nor their pronouncements parsed for logical fallacies, without the shout-down of: "What do you know? From which (corrupted) institution did you get your (brainwashing and corruption) credentials? You have to be a scientific "expert" to have a voice. Shut up and go back to your programming, serf!" Unless you have learned the specialized "logic" taught to the scientific priesthood, you may NOT point out the nakedness of the Emperor. Never mind how well you understand Nature and its laws by direct experimentation, to the point of even creating inventions based upon those laws that actually work, unless you can speak double-speak party-line like the trained seals can, you are not in the game and not allowed to raise objections that might break the trance of the masses. Why is learning to lie convincingly (without doubt or guilt, with a total sense of entitlement) the core of expensive "education" in ALL the professions and why is learning to reason so much harder then lying convincingly that even intelligent people choose the easy way to success: learn to lie, in lock-step with your pack or tribe, in the jargon of your chosen niche? Corruption is so much easier than creation, I guess it's just the path of least resistance and by now, we all know where that leads! 8=>
Is that a veiled implication that my perspective is un-scientific, in the purest sense of the word? No Luddite here, I assure you! In fact, the point is that the Church of Big Science is ITSELF un-scientific and anti-renaissance in its behaviour, using the corrupt peer review mechanism to politicize scientific process and suppress progress in any areas that threaten the current corporate hegemony!
Well ......... those days are over........ now that the "Jews" control the "media".
lol - not at all. The sights were set on the scientists who would massage the data to fit their agenda and desired out-comes.
I would say you pretty well nailed it. Controversies and suppression of new, and often valid, ideas is part and parcel of the history of "science". In fact it seems to have become intense, I believe intentionally so, in the Post WWII era. Harvey was ridiculed when he came up with the theory of the circulatory system. He was lampooned in the press and villified in the journals of the day. Now several hundred years later medicine is to no small degree based on his discoveries. Alfred Wegner, a lowly Meteorologist and explorer, dared to suggest that the continents move - he called his theory "Continental Drift". This was met with derision, invective, and insult. Why he wasn't even a Geologist. Harummmmmphh! Of course he was proven correct and we now have the branch of Geophysics called "Plate Tectonics". Apostates to the "true faith" are ever so villified by established interests who made their careers propounding and pontificating upon whatever the established theory of the day was. Of longer debate, and enduring interest because of its broad implications, is the battle between the advocates of Scotsman James Hutton's Uniformitarian School of Geology and the French Geologist George Cuvier. Uniformitarianism, the Geology of Hutton - for the uninitiated, is the theory that geological processes operate uniformly over long periods of time and that catastrophes are localized events having no great impact upon the Earth's geologic history. Alternatively Catastrophism, put forward by Cuvier, argues that large scale geologic changes can occur in a very short period time, days or weeks, resulting in very large changes in the Earth's surface and environment. Uniformitarianism, if you have studied any geology, is the accepted dogma. I say dogma because there are both legends in human history as well as a growing body of evidence which tends to suggest that the discredited Cuvier was quite right. The battle is still ongoing but their are intriguing bits that do not fit the Uniformitarian dogma, and thus are ignored, ridiculed, or buried. Just to cite one example: The ruins at Tiahuanaco, near Lake Titicaca on the Altaplano (High Plateau) have multiple anomalies. Lake Titicaca has the only known species of fresh water Seahorse. There are quays and docks sitting there high and dry - near the continent crossing canals that appear to have once stretched across the continent. One problem Tiahuanaco is now about 2 miles above sea level. And yet much of it appears to have been built AT sea level and then when the Andes were suddenly upthrust everything took an elevator ride into the sky. This occurred about the same time that the semi-mythical island continent of Atlantis sank into the ocean in, as Plato put it, a day and a night. Time coincident with that the rock isthmus stretching between Europe and Africa, now called the Straits of Gibraltar, appears to have collapsed thus flooding the dry basin we now call the Mediterranean (and there are ruins at depths greater that 200 feet deep even today). So there is evidence suggestive of a worldwide catastrophe that changed the surface of a large amount of the planet. Catastrophism is a big no-no for another reason. Darwin. Darwinian evolutionary theory, the dominant dogma today despite mountains of contradictory data, depends to no small degree on the Uniformitarian concept of gradual verrrrrrrrrrry sloooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwww changes in the Earth's crust and surface. So, a shift to Catastrophism upsets the Holy Darwin Apple Cart and therefore the evolutionists are busy fighting. Herein lies the crux. Eugenics, as practiced by our elite Bankster Criminals and Psychiatrists, relies upon Darwinian Materialistic mechanology as its justification and proof. Upset Uniformitarianism and you upset Darwinism and in turn pull the rug out from underneath the Materialists who use Social Darinism, and eugenics, as justification for their predation upon mankind: They are "superior beings", as proven by their Great Grandsire's ability to steal a lot of money, and we, because we are not of the monied class, are inferior beings and in any event we're all just animals anyway and it is OK to cull the animal herd of "useless eaters". There is a lot more I could say but the upshot is that a lot of our current scientific manipulation seems to have another dark element. An element of control of the society by controlling what people are allowed to know and how they are taught to think of the world in which they live. Never forget, as James Burke put it, "what you see is to no small extent determined by what you know, and when that changes everything changes". The controllers do not want major scientific breakthroughs or technologic advances, such as cheap power, as that would upset the status quo which they are manufacturing, through knowledge control, to suit their own psychotic ends. When you control what people know you can to some degree control how they will think, see, and feel. You control their view of the world and how they react to it. That is why our psychotic would be masters oppose new ideas and scientific breakthroughs - they see it as a threat to their control of the society and the world.
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. ~ Anatole France
Thanks for the excellent essay, Original_Intent! Informative and to the point, as always. At this time, I would settle for breaking the thrall of the Church of Science and eroding its credibility. The truth, in geology, biology, history, physics etc. is WAY TOO MUCH for the sleeping mass mind to accept. You touched on several controversies but when we as a species are finally allowed to discover/re-discover ALL of the mysteries, most deliberately obfuscated, the comprehensive picture will literally be mind-blowing. Small steps, Ellie. Let us begin by getting people to feel empowered enough to call bulls#!+ when Glowbull swarming, vaccination, the Big Lie that created Big Pharma and weapons of mass distraction lies are fronted on the MSM and by shills even here in the neuronal nexus that is the Internet, supported by the "authority" of the Church of Big Science. We desperately need more people to say, with emphatic spontaneity: "You lie!", when confronted by lies in "scientific" clothing. Then, the discovery, exploration and integration of the truth about both the outer world and the inner world, that is true science, can return to being the most fun game in this Universe to play! And when you include the science of metaphysics, the game with the most gifts for our species and all others with which we share this gorgeous planetary being. One last case in point (I hope!): I have been surprised with how effectively the totalitarian agenda has co-opted ecological thinking. I began looking for which essential truth has been twisted into a big lie, a tool for exploitation. The latest Yes magazine has a cover story, "Be a Climate Hero" with an empowered woman on its cover, smiling with a smug, monobrain certainty that she knows enough to judge people. That she has seen enough "information" to be convicted, once and for all (anti-science attitude there, dearie!) that anyone who begs to differ and point out the agenda behind the climate scam is a "denier". How drearily predictable the trotting out of that meme has become! In addition to the blatant appeal to the egos of the non-thinking, mind- controlled sleepers-who-think-that-they-are-awake, giving them their marching orders, literally, based upon the coverage of the duped protesting at Copenhagen “We must have global crap and raid NOW! Give us our NWO shackles now, hurry before the fire sale of the Earth is over!”, if the MSM is telling its story straight for once, this article in Yes demonstrates that the climate diversion taps into and exploits a deep knowing that our relationship to the Earth’s fertility and abundance is abusive, that the corporate gang’s current MO is not sustainable for much longer. No doubt empowered by being on the side (perhaps in ignorance) of the globalist scammers from all tribes, this cover woman's eyes betray the particular arrogant self-righteousness that is mainly characteristic of one tribe. The answer, the easy answer, is more divide and conquer, dividing the true “heroes” who align with the global tyranny’s agenda, from the “deniers”, those callous selfish people who, in the name of freedom, reject the “necessary” restrictions needed to “save the planet”. Back to the point: the power and appeal of the climate-gate agenda, in the face of common sense and the facts, comes from a deeper truth that has been shamelessly co-opted by the control freaks on top. Intuitively and objectively, we have been raping the planet in numerous ways, or I should say, global corporations and governments have been, supposedly at our demand and in our name, using 19th century mechanistic technological paradigms, enhanced by 20th century sophistication to control the market for human necessities. This gives ammunition to the population cullers, claiming that the poor earth cannot sustain the population when it is no more than the knowing over-exploitation of the ecosystem using primitive, brute force, linear approaches that serve the concentration of economic and political power that is pushing the limits of sustainability. Put more simply: it is not the population per se that is exceeding the carrying capacity of the Earth. It is the brain-dead, over-centralized, low-tech-on-meth industrial over-harvesting by our current economic ways that is un-sustainable, as blind human persistence rapes the Earth into unconsciousness (metaphorically only). Reorganizing our civilization, allowing all suppressed knowledge and technology to be employed in voluntary cooperation from the bottom up instead of top down, will allow every species to co-exist in greater numbers than our present insanity allows. We are just playing the game wrong, nothing more. The fact that we have been lead by the nose into playing the game wrong is the elephant in the room. Apparently, after years of 24X7 mind-control programming, it is the path of least resistance to automatically condemn ourselves and all of our brothers and sisters to total slavery than to simply open our eyes and see the patterns of social control and order looming over our heads, to see the evil crust directing this horror show and upon seeing it clearly for what it is, to say: “No more! Freedom is my birthright and I will have it now!”
Thank you for the kind words. That is a mindset which is of relatively recent vintage - coming from the enlightenment of the 17th century. With figures such as Voltaire, and Diderot pushing the "humanist" atheistic primacy of cold reason, which was never cold and not always reasonable, we had thrust upon us a new secular religion called science. Even today we can find advocates of this narrow viewpoint - which has become the new orthodoxy, and was regarded as radical at its birth. Taken to its illogical extremes we wind up with such as the "Less Than Amazing Randi" and the Septical Enquirer crowd - with their hatred of all viewpoints not in conformity with their narrow minded materialist viewpoint. They remind me most of the mindset of the bureaucrat that closed the U.S. Patent Office in the 1880's because everything that could be invented had already been invented. Of course that was long before Kittyhawk, Rural Electrification, and Project Apollo. However, the Skeptical Enquirer Crowd was poured in the same mold. It is not that science, and the scientific method, are not without value. No, they are of great value, but their primacy has gone from inquiry to a staid controlled orthodoxy which will not admit, without great furor, new ideas. Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" that the orderly conquest of knowledge of the workings of the universe was rarely as orderly as misrepresented in mainstream histories. It is one of the more amusing sidelights that those making the biggest breakthroughs and advances were often considered cranks and kooks by their contemporaries. The materialist, absolutist, viewpoint now espoused by such mediocrities as the "Skeptical Enquirer" crowd, and their relatives in the Atheist community, is one of tunnel vision supported by invective and vituperation. They treat science, and the scientific method, as though it were an absolute and not what it truly is: A means of gathering, analyzing, and explaining observations about the world in which we live. It is nothing more, and nothing less. To rely on it solely is a dead end. One thing history shows is that advances have been often inspired by flights of fancy and inspiration. Neither is part of that great, but limited, tool called the "scientific method". The worship at this altar by those who reject other means of exploring and understanding reality demonstrates only their limitations. Most definitely. The problem we run into though is that through manipulation, and dumbing down of the school curriculums, one of the greatest crimes of our age, is that the false assumption that the common man cannot make great leaps or think great thoughts has been created. With no teaching of logic or philosophy, the bowlderizing and slanting of history, the person "educated" in one of those indoctrination centers called Publik Skools is not even aware of what they have been deprived of. It is only the natively curious intellects who strike out on their own to rediscover the world that break free of this intentionally planned Matrix of limited skills and thought. It is as was postulated by Thorndyke in the 30's - taught as their masters would have them taught they have not even the symbols or tools to think other than their masters would have them think. That people do break free from this Matrix is much to the discomfit and irritation of those who would rule by keeping others ignorant - even to the point of being ignorant that they are in a totalitarian thought controlled society. Orwell was much too conservative in even his darkest moments in 1984. Bradbury captured some of it in "Fahrenheit 451". Combine the two and you reach a closer approximation of the planned society which such as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers and their ilk have in mind. Think the worst excesses of Hitler and Stalin with Psychiatrists and Psychologists running mind control and you get closer to the hell which they would bring. Psychiatry has never been able to help any one, they cannot cure but instead their hellish treatments (such as drugs, lobotomies, and frying people's brains with electricity) make people worse. One thing they can do is manipulate and control, and given free reign to do so their psychoses are dramatized to a hellish degree. So, yes people must be brought up the line, truly educated, and be willing to stand up and name a lie, a lie. Science is not an absolute and should never be treated as one. It is one means of learning, and nothing more. The common man is quite capable of taking part in this discussion, but must first be given the tools to even know that it is a conversation worth taking part in. More of the mind control Matrix used to guide and control what people "know" and thus what they think. "Ignorance is Strength". Popular culture, and magazines such as "Yes" are Popular "Culture", is used to implant memes and thought patterns, to disinform, to reinforce the propaganda already catapulted. Music is another venue often overlooked - but just read the content of popular "Hip Hop" songs and the memes of hatred, violence, and worship of ignorance are so strongly apparent as to strike one with force. It is no wonder that young black men become violent upon a steady diet of such vileness. It inspires hatred and that is its intent. The same manipulative elements are present in other popular music although often more subtle - but the assumptions it speaks of are the fabric of the popular culture. That perverse stew called "Heavy Metal" is a mixture of hatred, perversion, death worship, and darkness. I ride public transit a lot and pay attention to the people around me. The two groups that most evidence a seething anger and hatred are those who, often turned up to annoying levels despite using headphones, listen to Rap and Heavy Metal. Asking them to turn it down in respect to other riders is to provoke them to near violence. The Bus drivers have become afraid to do so. A profound observation that will be lost on too many. Yes, it is a game, but not a fun one. There are other games to play and many many with a much brighter outlook. The first step is to refuse to play the game which the psychos are trying to force upon us. A game consists of freedom and barriers. I prefer one with a bit more freedom than our psychotic would-be masters and mistresses would have us play. Yes the mind control programming, which most cannot even see, is ever present and combined with the dumbing down has been sadly effective. I would not be a slave, and would not wish others to be enslaved. Too many cannot even see the evil and too many others are fearful to look. So, the first step is simply to alert those who can and will look, and then to try to wake others. I think William Wallace had the right idea - you can kill me but you cannot take away the thirst for FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. ~ Anatole France
Oops! Meant to keep youse guys in the conversation.
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. ~ Anatole France
Exactly. One picture is worth a thousand words and this amplifies the points nicely.
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. ~ Anatole France
I was also bumping #8 which is really good, thank you for the ping.
Thank you and you are always welcome. If my small talents can be used to inspire others to reach I am well rewarded.
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. ~ Anatole France
It is not that science, and the scientific method, are not without value. No, they are of great value, but their primacy has gone from inquiry to a staid controlled orthodoxy which will not admit, without great furor, new ideas. Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" that the orderly conquest of knowledge of the workings of the universe was rarely as orderly as misrepresented in mainstream histories. It is one of the more amusing sidelights that those making the biggest breakthroughs and advances were often considered cranks and kooks by their contemporaries. The materialist, absolutist, viewpoint now espoused by such mediocrities as the "Skeptical Enquirer" crowd, and their relatives in the Atheist community, is one of tunnel vision supported by invective and vituperation. They treat science, and the scientific method, as though it were an absolute and not what it truly is: A means of gathering, analyzing, and explaining observations about the world in which we live. It is nothing more, and nothing less. To rely on it solely is a dead end. One thing history shows is that advances have been often inspired by flights of fancy and inspiration. Neither is part of that great, but limited, tool called the "scientific method". The worship at this altar by those who reject other means of exploring and understanding reality demonstrates only their limitations. We agree that the scientific method, in the form that it has devolved into, is a tool too limited to explore metaphysics, the realms of higher consciousness and the holistic, fully inclusive Big Picture of life. However, the gist of the scientific method, the core, is the empirical method also known as the experimental method: Test every idea before accepting it, even provisionally. Even when an idea graduates from hypothesis to thesis or working theory, it is and always will be subject to revision or even complete falsification, as the recognition of the limited nature of knowledge and truth at our current level of human consciousness is one of the triumphant philosophical advances from the Renaissance and the foundation of the scientific method. That being said, I would like to clarify the essence of the empirical method, the crown jewel of Western thought, when applied to the search for truth. What it is NOT, as misconstrued by the co-opting of the empirical method into the "scientific method" by the Positivist, Reductionist and Materialist philosophers, is a set of socially-approved procedures and hoops through which one jumps to arrive at truth. The essence is simply: TEST FOR YOURSELF, REPEATEDLY, CONTINUALLY. The duplication of your experiment by others is added confirmation and ultimately, the way a truth can be socially validated but it has nothing to do with truth, since understanding truth is an individual creative act of integration and if we believe that individual human consciousness has its own sovereignty, then what even one person discovers as truth is still truth. Only when one person tries to convey his discovered truth successfully to others (or to sell his idea) does the requirement to pass the test of duplication by others come into play. With the foregoing as preamble, I would like to point out simply that even in the areas of consciousness, where Materialist Big Science cannot tread, at least not without trampling the evidence into the noise floor, the core empirical method is still the ultimate tool for validating so-called subjective experiences. When we have epiphanies and deep insights, they are not validated by mindless repetition as the "duplication" required by "scientific" process, since in reality, without severely and artificially limiting the context, there is no such thing in the universe that is an exactly repeated event! The nature of the dynamic Universe is such that everything old is new again, that we never step into the same river twice (Heraclitus). Validating experiments in consciousness while exploring the psyche is through testing by feedback: we take the insights we discover about ourselves and the deeper laws of the Universe and apply them to the choices we make, the things and energy we create, progressively into levels of finer and finer detail, testing the results by observing in minute, agenda-less, fearless clarity, the results both outer and inner, "objective" and "subjective", in the flow of our experience. We test truth in the laboratory of life, selecting from the now widely available conceptual tools, as the primary participant in the experiment. All of the great teachers of higher knowledge, including the Christ, were clear that you must put their revelations to the test in your own lives, before accepting them as truth, with the implicit acknowledgement that that truth will evolve and deepen through the dynamic of life, not stay static like a book. One of the many corruptions of knowledge by the Catholic church in the service of its own bureaucratic imperative to grow fat and powerful was to sell the idea of "taking on faith" what the priests were selling. i.e Trust us, we know better than you" This was a co-opting of the misunderstood recommendation "to believe". Believing in enlightened ways of being is simply a valuable modeling tool to train our consciousness, not to be misunderstood as turning off the mind, only the mind's incessant chatter, its feedback error. In more mundane contexts, for example when you are privileged to be conducted by a great conductor or trained by a great singer, you learn more effectively and much more quickly by direct association and modeling, temporarily suspending your analytic faculty in order to be truly present to the experience, learning how to raise your game by their example, nothing more complicated than that. Faith is what you rely on AFTER you have done everything in your human power to create the desired outcome. It is the psychic energy-conserving strategy of trust, resting in a serene understanding that you have done everything you are able to do with limited human consciousness and can now glide and surf on the waves larger than yourself. All of us exercise some form of faith, whether we are intellectually honest enough to admit or not, even if it is only the simple faith in the engineers, builders and pilots of the aircraft you board in the reasonable confidence that you will live through the flight. A "rational" faith but faith nonetheless. Or the simple trust of the farmer who, after doing all the required work, relies on Nature and good weather to supply the increase, to grow something from a seed into a mature plant. A good test of any purported teacher of wisdom is that they emphasize that the individual, you, ultimately have the responsibility to test and try on for size ALL higher wisdom. The Renaissance that birthed the scientific revolution began as the long overdue rebound from the dark ages' tyranny over the mind, body and spirit, by the church, the state and all social institutions and psychologically required a swing to the other extreme, that ALL abstract concepts were bulls#!+ and ONLY the senses and their reports could be trusted. The subtle point thrown out with the bath water was that sense perception is not even close to being an objective analog to reality and is completely mediated by what the mind thinks it "already knows". The humorous irony of the Renaissance is: Though the herd may have been sold on the bastardized version that there is power beyond mere utility in the (over)simplification of reality by reductionist materialistic thinking, making it easy for left-hemisphere, by-the-book, military-style "thinkers" to operate unconsciously with confidence, in fact, with the restoration of the philosophical concept of test-it-for-yourself, "don't believe the liars in power around you" (Church, State, "scientific societies", etc), the way to higher truth was revealed again! The door of the mind was open once again to the layers of reality beyond the senses, beyond what sense-enhancing technology can reveal. The way back to the center of our being, the center of all life was given a boost by clearing away the accumulation of many centuries of illusions and ignorance. That way involves direct experimentation with the world and your own consciousness, testing for yourself what is true, with no one between you and the truth, empowering each and every individual to grow out of our limitations BY OUR OWN EFFORTS, though totally supported by the intention behind the laws of the Intelligent Universe) into closer parallel with the Universal Consciousness.
As always you challenge me to think - an enjoyable experience I assure you. If I might summarize. We are agreed that the Scientific Method provides a good deal of utility in tackling some types of problems but that it is not a complete solution as regards knowing - knowing what we know and how we know it i.e., epistemological certainty. Of course in the real world "absolutes are unobtainable" - certainly not with the degree of certainty that metaphysicians are wont to reach for and proclaim. For any idea or datum to be of use, to have utility, it must be accepted as a true datum and that implies exploring it, comparing it against other data, deciding based upon the weight of evidence that it is true. So, what is true is true for you. Meaning that after examination you have accepted it as true and in conformity with your view of reality. Not that something cannot be true independent of someone's reality but if it violates their reality they will not accept it as true. We can see this at work everyday as we go about our affairs and deal with other people. We have even evolved, or had planted, terms to classify datums in conflict with our reality e.g., "Conspiracy Theory". "Conspiracy Theory" as a usage is most commonly used as a rejection of a datum in conflict with someone's reality. If someone "knows" that the government can be trusted to do what it right in all cases and that it is up front in its dealings data indicating otherwise violates that person's reality and will be rejected. So, while empiricism is of value here, it is again not an absolute, because observation without evaluation is of little value. So, in determining the value of a datum we have evolved various tests to check its validity. However, again, since absolutes are unobtainable no test is absolute or valid in every case. As well is the interesting anomaly that people simply will not see things that are not “real” to them. They remain unseen or rejected as “impossible”. “If man were meant to fly God would have given him wings.” Just as it is possible in logic to begin with a false premise which then leads, logically, to a false conclusion empiricism is dependent upon the observer's reality and their ability to objectively evaluate observations against other datums and on occasion to operate on their own "sense of rightness" or "knowingness" to draw a conclusion at variance with their initial empirical observation and conclusion. So, the problem with the "Scientific Method" as applied in practice is that it is often taken as an absolute which is not to be examined or evaluated for its validity, or utility, in a given situation. So, we have arrived at a false orthodoxy which in effect states that "if something is called scientific it is scientific. Following that it is to be accepted as an “absolute truth". In other words it becomes an authoritarian pronouncement on the truth of something. Which is a concept itself at variance with the tenets of the scientific method which states that at any time a datum is found to be in conflict with the "theory" that the theory must be revised to account for the datum or the theory thrown out and a new one formulated. This can be seen in action very strongly in debates on evolution and in archaeology where the absolute "theory" is taken as the authority and conflicting data is thrown out, ridiculed, or buried rather than to undertake the "burdensome" task of objectively examining it and reformulating the theory, if the observation is found valid, to accomodate the new datum. For example: In Archaeology, mainstream Academic Archaeology, it is taken as an absolute that the entire indigenous population of North America was derived from nomads crossing a postulated land bridge across the Bering Strait about 13,000 years ago (some of the real daring ones will go 26,000 years as a maximum). Yet the physical evidence disputes that. Virgina Steen McIntyre of the U.S. Coastal and Geodetic Survey dated artifacts, using standard dating methods, to 240,000 years ago. So, what does establishment Archaeology do? Revise the theory to accommodate the conflicting data or throw out the observations in conflict with the established theory? Why they throw out the conflicting data - which of course is in direct violation of the Scientific Method. Thus they are not practicing "science". Virginia was hounded and driven out of her job and ended up becoming a florist because her results threw into question the "absolute". More recently was the discovery of “Kennewick Man” in Washington State. The problem with him is that his remains are ten thousand years old and he is a white caucasian - thousands of years before caucasians were alleged to have first visited this continent. Thus he is largely ignored and his existence sidestepped. Indian activists wanted him reburied and not examined. His existence violates “reality” i.e., the accepted theories. ”There is nothing new under the sun.” ~ Parmenides (Just joking.) The two are reconcilable but I won’t take the time to do it here. Just to simplify - we compare it against our reality to evaluate the datum for validity in our reality. Which is daily violated by their followers. I once had this argument with two pastors one who agreed with my viewpoint that the dictums, or Biblical Laws, can and should be validated by the follower so that they understand their basis and why they are sound. Thus praxis follows understanding. The other, from the authoritarian school, objected because it violated his reality that they were to be accepted and followed on a rote authoritarian basis and without question. Whenever someone starts demanding that I accept on “faith” alone I start reaching for my wallet to make sure it is still there. There is a difference between “faith” and “belief”. Faith is acceptance upon authority and without examination. Belief is founded upon examination and validation of the truth of something. I don’t believe in faith. I’m glad someone can sing. Not one of my talents. Although at some point I do want to write a Symphony. However, I need to spend more time studying orchestration - one of those “minor chores” I keep putting off. Composition I find easy compared to writing it down so that others can perform it. As you say modeling in one’s awareness is an important aspect of understanding and of that unique human ability called creative imagination. Now all I need is to be able to notate for Alpenhorns in the opening fanfare. Never having written in full score does present something of a challenge. ;-) “What is true is true for you.” The discovery of truth first requires the willingness to seek it. The rest is details. Of course “the Devil is in the details”. One difference in viewpoint - the intelligence in the universe is us - those self aware sparks who are aware that they are aware. Matter does not think and has no intelligence and any apparency to the contrary is just that - an apparency. As to that first awareness whom we call God my abilities and knowledge do not extend beyond positing his existence.
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. ~ Anatole France
For several centuries, modern science was pretty much a free intellectual market populated by independent entrepreneurs who shared the goal of understanding how the world works. Nowadays it’s a corporate enterprise where patents, pay-offs, prestige, and power take priority over getting at the scientific truth, and the powers-that-be have established knowledge monopolies.
Anger? as a first reaction to get your a$$ moving, once you see through the Media Matrix and set yourself free from your lifelong mind control collar. Sustainable? not enough to screen your intention to be free from the Talosians, who can’t read primitive emotions but know what you watch on cable/sat, read on the Internet and eat. Our ultimate weapon is laughter and amused detachment at the folly of the would-be emperors. Fear mongers HATE it when that card doesn’t work. The humiliation of being seen as merely a naked ape is THEIR big fear. Laugh the bastards off the stage! Tell your friends that we can build a real civilization from the ashes of the totalitarian game!
#2. To: HighLairEon (#1)
flat-earth bump
#3. To: Lod (#2)
(Edited)
flat-earth bump
Anger? as a first reaction to get your a$$ moving, once you see through the Media Matrix and set yourself free from your lifelong mind control collar. Sustainable? not enough to screen your intention to be free from the Talosians, who can’t read primitive emotions but know what you watch on cable/sat, read on the Internet and eat. Our ultimate weapon is laughter and amused detachment at the folly of the would-be emperors. Fear mongers HATE it when that card doesn’t work. The humiliation of being seen as merely a naked ape is THEIR big fear. Laugh the bastards off the stage! Tell your friends that we can build a real civilization from the ashes of the totalitarian game!
#4. To: Ada (#0)
For several centuries, modern science was pretty much a free intellectual market populated by independent entrepreneurs who shared the goal of understanding how the world works.
#5. To: HighLairEon (#3)
Is that a veiled implication that my perspective is un-scientific, in the purest sense of the word?
#6. To: HighLairEon, christine, Ada, earthchild, SonofLiberty, Jethro Tull, HOUNDDAWG, TwentyTwelve, X-15, James Deffenbach, gengis gandhi, IndieTX, Horse, noone222, randge, RickyJ, bluegrass (#1)
#7. To: earthchild, Original_Intent, Christine, SonofLiberty, Jethro Tull, HOUNDDAWG, TwentyTwelve, X-15, James Deffenbach, gengis gandhi, IndieTX, Horse, noone222, randge, RickyJ, bluegrass, ada (#6)
(Edited)
Anger? as a first reaction to get your a$$ moving, once you see through the Media Matrix and set yourself free from your lifelong mind control collar. Sustainable? not enough to screen your intention to be free from the Talosians, who can’t read primitive emotions but know what you watch on cable/sat, read on the Internet and eat. Our ultimate weapon is laughter and amused detachment at the folly of the would-be emperors. Fear mongers HATE it when that card doesn’t work. The humiliation of being seen as merely a naked ape is THEIR big fear. Laugh the bastards off the stage! Tell your friends that we can build a real civilization from the ashes of the totalitarian game!
#8. To: HighLairEon (#7)
(Edited)
At this time, I would settle for breaking the thrall of the Church of Science and eroding its credibility.
We desperately need more people to say, with emphatic spontaneity: "You lie!", when confronted by lies in "scientific" clothing.
The latest Yes magazine has a cover story, "Be a Climate Hero" with an empowered woman on its cover, smiling with a smug, monobrain certainty that she knows enough to judge people. That she has seen enough "information" to be convicted, once and for all (anti-science attitude there, dearie!) that anyone who begs to differ and point out the agenda behind the climate scam is a "denier". How drearily predictable the trotting out of that meme has become!
We are just playing the game wrong, nothing more. The fact that we have been lead by the nose into playing the game wrong is the elephant in the room.
Apparently, after years of 24X7 mind-control programming, it is the path of least resistance to automatically condemn ourselves and all of our brothers and sisters to total slavery than to simply open our eyes and see the patterns of social control and order looming over our heads, to see the evil crust directing this horror show and upon seeing it clearly for what it is, to say: “No more! Freedom is my birthright and I will have it now!”
#9. To: christine, Ada, Dakmar, Big Meanie, Esso, 2big2fail, Cynicom, IDontThinkSo, abraxas, farmfriend, James Deffenbach, gengis gandhi, IndieTX, Horse, bluegrass, noone222, X-15, Jethro Tull, CadetD, TwentyTwelve, wudidiz, all (#8)
#10. To: Original_Intent, HighLairEon, all (#9)
"The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so." ~ Josh Billings
#11. To: wudidiz (#10)
#12. To: Original_Intent, all (#11)
"The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so." ~ Josh Billings
#13. To: wudidiz (#12)
#14. To: Original_Intent (#8)
(Edited)
That is a mindset which is of relatively recent vintage - coming from the enlightenment of the 17th century. With figures such as Voltaire, and Diderot pushing the "humanist" atheistic primacy of cold reason, which was never cold and not always reasonable, we had thrust upon us a new secular religion called science. Even today we can find advocates of this narrow viewpoint - which has become the new orthodoxy, and was regarded as radical at its birth. Taken to its illogical extremes we wind up with such as the "Less Than Amazing Randi" and the Septical Enquirer crowd - with their hatred of all viewpoints not in conformity with their narrow minded materialist viewpoint. They remind me most of the mindset of the bureaucrat that closed the U.S. Patent Office in the 1880's because everything that could be invented had already been invented. Of course that was long before Kittyhawk, Rural Electrification, and Project Apollo. However, the Skeptical Enquirer Crowd was poured in the same mold.
Anger? as a first reaction to get your a$$ moving, once you see through the Media Matrix and set yourself free from your lifelong mind control collar. Sustainable? not enough to screen your intention to be free from the Talosians, who can’t read primitive emotions but know what you watch on cable/sat, read on the Internet and eat. Our ultimate weapon is laughter and amused detachment at the folly of the would-be emperors. Fear mongers HATE it when that card doesn’t work. The humiliation of being seen as merely a naked ape is THEIR big fear. Laugh the bastards off the stage! Tell your friends that we can build a real civilization from the ashes of the totalitarian game!
#15. To: HighLairEon, christine, TwentyTwelve, FormerLurker, wudidiz, IndieTX, Jethro Tull, all (#14)
The nature of the dynamic Universe is such that everything old is new again, that we never step into the same river twice (Heraclitus).
Validating experiments in consciousness while exploring the psyche is through testing by feedback: we take the insight and apply it to the choices we make, down to finer and finer detail, testing the results by observing in minute, fearless detail, the results both outer and inner, "objective" and "subjective", in the flow of our experience.
All of the great teachers of higher knowledge, including the Christ, were clear that you must put their teachings to the test in your own lives, before accepting them as truth, with the implicit acknowledgement that that truth will evolve and deepen through the dynamic of life, not stay static like a book.
One of the many corruptions of knowledge by the Catholic church was to sell the idea of "taking on faith" what the priests were selling.
Believing in the way of an advanced being is a valuable modelling tool to train our consciousness, not to be misunderstood as turning off the mind entirely. When you are privileged to be conducted by a great conductor or trained by a great singer, you learn by association and modelling how to raise your game, nothing more complicated than that.
A good test of any purported teacher of wisdom is that they emphasize that the individual, you, ultimately have the responsibility to test and try on for size ALL higher wisdom.
though the herd may have been sold on the bastardized version that there is power in (over) simplification down by reductionist materialistic thinking, making it easy for left-hemisphere, by-the-book, military-style "thinkers" to operate unconsciously with confidence, in fact, with the restoration of the test-it-for- yourself, don't believe the liars in power around you (church, state, "scientific societies", etc), the way to higher truth was revealed again!
That way involves direct experimentation with the world and your own consciousness, testing for yourself what is true, with no one between you and the truth, empowering each and every individual to grow out of their limitations BY OUR OWN EFFORTS (though totally supported by the intentions of the Intelligent Universe) into closer parallel with the Universal Consciousness.
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