Through Logic We Arrive at the Real Motives of the Lunatics Who Set the Policies of This World

Many politicians profess not to believe in climate change. Given the emphatic and mounting nature of the material evidence and the adequate level of intelligence displayed by these politicians, one must assume that this profession of disbelief is as sincere as their theatrical assertions of belief in the moral tenets of Holy Scripture.

Scientists and engineers know how to use forms of energy and technology that will not contribute to the escalation of greenhouse gases, yet they are either ignored, or else corporations make toys for show of their ideas, patents and blueprints. Instead, politicians and corporations are redoubling their efforts to use deeply embedded subterranean fuels which will further exacerbate and intensify climate change, by exploiting sand-trapped oil reservoirs and shale-trapped natural gas deposits. And now, we are even hearing loudly-voiced intentions to extract oil from the Arctic Ocean Bed, as soon as Global Warming (!) has melted the polar ice cap -- never mind that the international counter-claims for that piece of once solidly frozen real estate may start another world war!

Since unabated climate change will ultimately lead to the demise of our living planet, one is left to conclude that these politicians and abetting corporations belong to something like a "cult of death". What they are doing in stymieing such measures as the Kyoto Protocols is tantamount to a suicide pact on a global scale.

The mass of the people of America have news for these politicians and CEOs who ride the death-tide of Global Warming: we don't want to be destroyed by your ill-begotten pact with fossil fuels. We choose life! That means you need to stop this abortion of our living planet with your invasive quest for fossil fuels!

The Fallacy of the Categorical Negative: Extraterrestrials Have Never Visited (And Probably Never Will Visit) the Earth

Astrophysicists have calculated the age of the Universe to be about 13 and three quarters billion years old, and geologists have calculated the age of the Earth itself to be just over 4 and a half billion years old. Because of the Asteroid Belt (the remains of a former planet shattered by a massive primordial collision with another astronomical body), the development of sapient life on Earth has been put at a severe handicap, as evolutionary progress has been repeatedly disrupted by periodic large meteor strikes from asteroids, which have caused numerous instances of pan-species extinction. With the arrival of homo sapiens, we ourselves were almost wiped out by another collision some 70,000 years ago by a more minor large meteor strike that reduced our species from many thousands of members to only a few hundred (!), and consequently we have to this day the narrowest genetic spectrum of diversity of any other species of primate, including some ape cousins who are now extinct.

After civilization finally began among humans about 5000 years ago, advances in philosophy and the sciences (the key components for the steady and stable progress of higher civilization) enabled humankind to begin grasping and interacting with the true nature of the universe and ourselves. However, science and objective philosophy met with repeated obstructions from secular and religious institutions of power, which prized a monopoly of control, rather than collective human progress. We are a species that has conflicting tendencies between a will toward animalistic domination of each other and a desire for the altruistic improvement of the well-being of our fellows. This fundamental conflict (however accustomed we may be to its tension in many disguised and euphemistic forms) creates another source of fundamental constraint on the advancement of sapient achievements on our planet. Therefore for many, it is hard to be objective about the very idea that other species on other planets in other star systems may have outpaced us by probably thousands if not millions of years.

And yet there is hope that we will at last no longer falter. If we observe merely our own progress as a global civilization within just the last two hundred years since the philosophy of the Enlightenment liberated us intellectually (and psychologically) from the blinders imposed by absolutist secular and religious powers, it is not unreasonable to speculate how much exponentially greater might be our accomplishments in science and technology over the next thousand years, if the principles of the Enlightenment are not weakened, repressed, undermined or eroded by forces who prefer domination and subjugation of their fellows, rather than real civilized advancement.

So now we have scientists who categorically reject even the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation of our planet by a sapient species, in the past, present, or even in our near future. They claim this response stems from the same healthy skepticism that governs all their other scientific positions, approaches and attitudes. Yet objectively speaking, such an absolute position on the mere possibility of contact here on Earth with what would have to be a more advanced species of sapient life is not in principle or practice a scientific attitude, nor is it a rational philosophical stance. In fact, such a position smacks of pre-Enlightenment dogmatism and prideful anthropocentricism. One thing is for sure, the powers of our present global civilization have promoted this position, and those powers have repeatedly betrayed an attitude that the mass of the human population must be intellectually and materially repressed.

We must admit that scientists, however well trained in the scientific method, can be as fallibly human as laypeople. Scientists are hungry for money and financial security. They need ample funding so they can pursue their various expensive projects of experimental and expeditionary research. Therefore, they take their cue from those with economic and political clout, and thus. they are willing to lay aside the principles of the Enlightenment (and even stark material evidence that contradicts dogmatic positions of our uniqueness in this corner of the Milky Way) and support articulately a false and misleading position in which their benefactors (or potential ones) have (for whatever unknown reasons) a political stake. That said, it is no transgression of Enlightenment principles for a scientist to say, "in my own personal researches and in examination of materials made available for my empirical examination, I have not found evidence of visitation by intelligent extraterrestrial entities." However, it is another matter entirely to flatly dismiss the very theory, given just how old our universe is and the inevitable propensity of any sapient mind, wherever it might hail from, to continue to explore as far as developing technology will permit (including other inhabited worlds).

If we are to advance as a civilization and surmount the worrisome problems we now face, we must not permit any form of dogmatism to corrupt the purity of scientific inquiry. Where one kind of dogmatism is permitted, more will build upon the precedent of such intellectual perversion. If the Academy does not wash its hands of resorting to double-talk with the public, it will mean the same thing to its future health as the present contamination of our system of public education, where anti-intellectual forces are hard at work to effect legislation that will compel our children to be taught Creationism as though it were a science, and make it a required part of the mandatory curriculum of our public school system. You can't have some things diverted one way, and expect the rest (i.e., what you presumably prefer to value) not to follow.

A Timely Article Worth Reading

I rarely write reviews on this blog but I encountered an article so apropos our current concerns, so well written, and so well researched that I must immediately recommend it. It appears in the December 17th issue from 2011 of The Economist. It is entitled, "How Luther Went Viral: Social Media in the 16th Century: Five Centuries Before Facebook and the Arab Spring, Social Media Helped Bring About the Reformation" (pp. 93-96), by an uncredited staff writer. It is a comparative analysis of a communication phenomenon of the Reformation with the social media phenomena of today's web technology. Back then it was efficient printing presses that could turn out mass-produced and affordable pamphlets on important current issues within 2 days of a person submitting the manuscript article. Martin Luther's pamphlets, written in a broad-based vernacular, were sold on the street corners and purchased by everyone from laborers, to artisans to burghers, and read aloud to those who were not literate in the public houses and in private homes. Earnest discussions occurred in response to these readings, and people realized they were not alone in their feelings of dissatisfaction. Mass consensus was built through what constituted a dynamic form of information technology for their day, and which some authorities (not surprisingly) tried to shut down -- but there were just too many printing presses in too many cities to stop it! This mass consensus mobilized firm resistance to corrupt and established power-blocs, and revolutionary human progress was the result. Here is the official link to the article, which is now freely accessible on the web: http://www.economist.com/node/21541719

Those Who Control the Flow of Information Control Everything

We now have two bills in our Congress, which if passed (and there would have to be an override of the President's promise to veto them) will cripple the Amendment Right of Free Speech on the internet for Americans. This is what such countries of totalitarian government as China and North Korea infamously already do. Because public libraries in America are gradually disappearing due to underfunding or a complete collapse of funding under various state and local governments, because bookstores are disappearing due to bankruptcy and cut-throat competition from Amazon.com, because higher education is becoming less affordable to more and more people (and therefore a resulting decline in access to the contents of academic libraries), because print newspapers are disappearing, because network and cable news channels are becoming more and more biased and agenda-oriented, because of all these reasons free democratic citizens of the United States are finding their access to information increasingly curtailed and the internet becoming increasingly vital to remain properly, adequately and accurately informed. If the internet becomes regulated by a federal agency with a conservative political agenda (and we know this would be the result since it is the conservatives who are supporting these noxious bills masquerading as "anti-piracy" legislation), then Americans will be plunged into a total state of ignorance and therefore be more broadly subject to manipulation by the mechanisms of narrow-minded and fallacious propaganda. Please call, email or tweet your federal representative and senators, and tell them that as a constituent, as a registered voter, as a free American, as citizen of the United States, you do not support either SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act). Their titles seem perfectly reasonable, but they are veritable Trojan Horses nefariously enclosing what are effectively carte blanche regulatory controls on what sites (both domestic and international) legally get to function on the internet and be accessed by web-users in the United States. We will lose our means of practicing real democracy if we lose the internet due to arbitrary discretionary ad hominem and ad hoc pronouncements from authorities who are the puppets of lobbyist interests who seek a monopoly of political and economic power. Let us roll these Trojan Horses unopened out of our venerable City of Democracy, and then burn these false wooden horses along with their ill-begotten provisions (whose term aptly fits the metaphor here used -- legislative riders).

Why There Must Be a Soul

By "soul" I mean our consciousnesses of a self separate from but in positive relationship with our minds, bodies, the world and our fellow creatures, stemming from an immaterial quintessence of coalescent, materially animating energy. Hard science people find life to be a minor, peripheral, even freakish aberration of the normal and main purposes of the universe. In fact, they see life as an excrescence of matter in a state of senility. So what do such people mean by the "truly real"? Well they tend to focus on the life, death and afterlife of stars and their galactic communities, which surely is stupendous stuff. They are also interested in the in the dynamics of the various kinds of natural satellites attached to these stars. For them, the matrix of the real includes only the chemical, gravitational, electromagnetic and quantum processes in the space-time continuum. However, all that which lives (i.e., that which exerts autonomous behaviors outside the random dynamics of purely natural law), should therefore act in complete acceptance of the trials and consequences, however negative, of the environment for which it evolved. But this is not the case. Life resists and strives to overcome the negative forces of the heedless universe, rather than functioning seamlessly within it. For all the grandeur of stars and planets, you will never find one of these heavenly bodies singing an elegy because the planet is about to be swallowed up by a star in its Red Giant Phase (or perhaps sucked into a black hole), or that the star senses it is about to go supernova. But let's just take the case of higher forms of life, of which humans are only one. These sentient species express all sorts of unnecessary behaviors, including grief, joy, compassion, sentimentality, pride, serenity, playfulness and humor. If they were mere biological machines, their attitude toward their environment and their fellows with whom they share it would include none of these functionally extraneous behaviors. Now let's talk about humans specifically. If we were merely suffering under the delusion that we have souls because our brain chemistry had synthesized such a projection of materially transcendent identity, emotion would seem to have no practical utility. Our unavoidable feelings of attachment and sense of meaning would seem at odds with the presumption of our being mere accidents of senile organic-chemical traditions. The only emotions that would have any purpose if life were merely soul-less would be desire and competitiveness (and the violent expressions of such primitive yet practical motivating instincts). So is life a decadent phenomenon of matter? Or is there something about life (however small in proportion to things like stellar nurseries, dark matter, binary star systems, nebulae and spiral galaxies), which makes it something rather miraculous by comparison to all the other mightier things that roam infinite space?

No Shame When Our Origins Are Evidenced

Between Weeks 13 and 16 of gestational development the fetus begins growing a special kind of hair called lanugo, which is a kind of fur. By Week 20, the body is entirely covered by this hair, which forms an actual pelt. By Week 35 it begins to be shed, and by Week 36 it has all fallen out except for traces on the upper arms and shoulders, which unless prematurely born, is nearly all gone by the time the baby emerges from the birth canal. Lanugo emerges in the fetuses of all other mammals, and for primates it remains to become the permanent body hair it will grow throughout its postnatal life. In humans it is an evolutionary echo of just how closely related we are to our fellow Great Apes (i.e., chimpanzees, bonobo, orangutans and gorillas). For some rare people, this thick growth of hair is not rescinded in the succeeding stages of gestation, but they are born with it (without being premature), and it remains with them for the rest of their lives. This is due to the rare pairing of two recessive throwback genes, but the individuals with this condition are otherwise normal and intelligent. Our relationship with other Great Apes should not be a source of shame but an enhancement of our sense of connection with the rest of the natural world. Such evidence of this hirsute stage in human gestation should serve to liberate us psychologically from a sense that we have somehow become wholly "exiled from Eden". We are fortunate and should value our gift of superior reason, but it is certainly a reflection of "unreason" to be ashamed and reflexively resentful that we are so intimately related to other primates. I take joy that I am a mammal like my dear canine and feline friends, and a primate cousin of the resourceful hanuman monkey and the glorious mountain gorilla. Yet just how much more advanced must be reconsidered when we have the example of the Iraqi Army years ago during its invasion of Kuwait slaughtering all the apes in the zoo because they were "abominations". This is not to single out one group of people for chiding. Christians have shown extreme resentment ever since the discoveries of Charles Darwin in the Victorian Period that we have an evolutionary connection to other species of apes. Fundamentalist Christians grow irate when it is suggested that we are apes (or even just animals) at all. How can any animal be an "abomination" when God (according to the religious scripture of every monotheistic faith) is the Creator (i.e., the Ultimate Parent) of all living things, in effect His/Her beloved "creatures". Well, we certainly are not "godlings", and "bestial" behavior seems more often practiced by "humans" rather than by the pseudo-separate group whom the scientifically aversive identify as "animals".

Judge Not a Person By Their Government

One thing is for sure: when it gets down to the basics, everyone on this Earth (who is not criminally insane), shares the same values. Unfortunately, our governments too often get in the way of people unifying on the common ground we share as human beings. Things like compassion for fellow human beings in trouble, love of family, love of nature, love of animals, love of gardening, love of jokes and stories, love of recreation and sport, love of music, these matters are universal. There really are no "demonic" ethnic groups, there are only demonic individuals, and sometimes, regrettably, demonic governments, which do things like ethnic cleansing or denying disaster relief. There are governments that grow uneasy when groups of individual people reach out welcoming arms of humble peace across the artificial divides governments like to create for narrow partisan interests. Increasingly it is becoming evident that the stakes are so high that we can no longer afford to look the other way while governments stoke false hatreds between different groups of human beings. Not only do we have tools of unprecedented horror at our disposal that kill innocent people along with perceived evil-doers, but we can also use them to destroy the planet itself. Yet even without the question of weapons of mass destruction entering the picture, our planet, our biosphere is ailing. We are not going to be able to restore the health of this planet until we let go of these trumped-up ethnic and nationalistic squabbles and link arms with our fellow members of the human race. A mother by any other name is still a mother, no matter where you find her caring for her child on this planet. A father patiently teaching his child how to play a game can be found in any country you care to visit. A friend sitting at the bedside, cherishing an ailing companion with tender hands is a social scenario that arises in every human culture conceived. Hatred of crime and those individuals bent on committing crime is one thing, but to hate a whole people is one of the most foolish things you can do to your soul and a true handicapping of your mind. The Genome Project has proven that visual "racial" differences are the most recent development in the evolution of our species. We are otherwise the same inside, both biologically and spiritually.

Conservatives LIKE Regulation

Oh, the conservative decry "regulation" all the time as though it were the instrument of Satan. But let's be more exact and cut through the double-talk of demagoguery. The architects of conservatism just don't like regulation that protects public health and environmental safety. What they DO like is regulation which loads unnecessary and arbitrary expenses and fees on small businesses, small farms, and small-scale industries, in order that these might be increasingly crippled with overhead costs. Conservatives simply do not really believe in free enterprise, though the mouths of their politicians make a show of flapping about it on the campaign trail. However, as soon as their hand-picked politicians get into office, they listen only to the big business lobbyists. As legislators, they pass as many regulations as possible to crush the entrepreneurs. The laws they pass send a clear signal: there must be no alternative competition to the large corporations, who are all in an alliance with each other against the art of capitalism being successfully practiced by the little guy. What I would like to tell these conservative legislators is this: you clearly cannot run a durable economy on bullsh**t. An economy must produce something real, and if it doesn't produce it on home soil, the country has thrown away the economic sovereignty of its people. Unfortunately, big business no longer contents itself with remunerative success. Big business is determined to quash the emergence of small, regional competition. Of course, agribusiness and its particularly adept lobby groups are especially notorious for using ploys with legislative bills that effectively sweep away our yeomen farmers. In general, what seems to have happened is that big business has redefined the meaning of success: rather than it being about the quality of the product they produce, and getting people to recognize that quality, they would rather be predators that destroy or devour all competition. Not what I would call the economy of a once proud democracy.

The Pundits Advise and the People Feel Despised

I ran across a subtitle of a book which ran, "how to live in the new economy" [italics mine]. I will not reveal the main title -- I have no specific beef with this accommodationist author, but there are so many books on the same theme that have some variation of this same subtitle. It is nauseating. So what is this thing all these pragmatic financial and career advisors are talking about? Well, it is an economy that is certainly "economic" in its use of people: no employment for many, poor pay for most, lavish pay for some, parasitic profits for the few. Such a system is neither "livable" (in the human sense), nor even "new" (in the historical sense). In terms of the latter, it looks like the preliminary stage to slavocracy. Ancient Rome went through this transition when it passed from a simple republic to an acquisitive empire. By a more modern comparison, it also looks like the Land of Opportunity is morphing into a Third World social pyramid. What we must be clear about is that this new economy is not based on any form of necessity: there are so many resources that simply aren't being shared, but they want you to think it has to do with population increase. The economy we are now experiencing in America is actually a massive political indulgence of greed, and a full ratification of plutocratic arrogance. Thankfully, more and more Americans are standing up and saying that they will refuse to "live" in this "new" economy. These awakening Americans reject the might over right "legitimacy" of its very precept: wealth against the common weal. The world the elite are packaging for us makes a mockery of the Declaration of Independence's phrase "the pursuit of happiness". In fact, our sordidly New Gilded Age is downright anti-democratic. It is the connivance of a cabal of warmongers, sweatshop outsourcers, fossil fuel magnates, and peddlers of instantly obsolescent gimcrack merchandise. The deceivers have gotten an amazing amount of mileage by claiming that they're doing it all for "God" and the "Bible". But even among the blindly faithful, such lies will no longer work as the uncounted jobless and the underemployed face the desert these pundits know their abettors really have planned for us. If there is a God, He or She will want an Eden for the little people of this world, but the unimaginative rich don't create anything like that -- not even for themselves.

Carry On Those of Noble Heart

We might get blasted by a gamma ray geyser from a neutron star taking formation hundreds of light years away. We might suffer a years-long crippling of our electrical grid and apparati from a solar mega storm, the last of which occurred with our Sun a hundred sixty odd years ago. We might suffer a winter that lasts years unabated because of the eruption of the subterranean super-volcano beneath Yellowstone Park, which might put billions of tons of ash into our atmosphere. We might experience the largest tsunami the world has ever seen if the volcano of Tenguia on the Canary Island of La Palma erupts and causes a part of the island to subside into the Atlantic Ocean. If the cosmic pinball machine that is our Asteroid Belt causes one of those huge space rocks (or planetessimals as physicists like to call them) to change its orbit and fall into line with the Earth's, one of them could strike our planet and make a nuclear war seem like child's play. The glaciers on Greenland might melt away due to Climate Change and submerge Atlantic coastlines permanently (in terms of human lifespans), placing some of our greatest cities beneath the sea. And yet, we must go on being what we were meant to be, doing what we were meant to do, giving what we were meant to give, creating what we were meant to create. Of the aforementioned potential global disasters, only one could be prevented; if we change the basis of how we energize our society the glaciers will stop melting from greenhouse gases heating up the planet, but greed has made this issue a steep battle for change indeed. To warn about something we have the power to remedy is one thing. But if we can do little or nothing in practical terms, we must live our lives bravely and with hope, and accomplish things in defiance of the doomsayers who would paralyze us with pessimism. Threats of various kinds have always loomed over humankind, but if we had dwelt upon them, we would have never accomplished anything worthwhile. If possible dooms are being thrown in our faces now by a computer-animated media, one should inquire: what is the motive of those who so gratuitously do this? One thing is for sure: these dire possibilities hanging over us today are not slowing down the actions of those who would do harm. So let us boldly do good. If it all ends tomorrow, we can be proud to say with our dying breath that we kept our humanity. And if the world doesn't end after all, look at the positive difference we will have made by soldiering on beneath the arrogant spittle of these puppet-string prophets.