Brilliant Optimism

Via Driftglass:

...I was a cynic in my 20’s because being a Cynic was light typing with a long lunch and full dental compared to the stoop labor of being a Realist with a 51% positive outlook. The Manichean, binary purity of turning my back on the world and looking for something entirely new was irresistible. It was, in its way, the refuge of every drunk, junkie and Old Testament God: hiding out in a belief that the world was a hopeless place and needed to be Etch-a-Sketched out of existence. Painted over and started fresh. I mean, it was so obvious that the world was run by idiots who kept fucking everything up and refusing to just Fix Things!

So much easier to become a Communist or a Randite or a Green. Not that I was more or less lazy than anyone else, but the ugliness of the world seemed too persistent. The imperfections too insoluble and heavily crenellated. The fuckuppery too deeply incised into the DNA of the real world.

And so one can be forgiven for looking over a span of five or ten years and saying, “Fuck this. It’s all polluted. Start over.”

That’s not a bad sentiment insofar as it carries inside of it a little clutch of delicate eggs. A fury at the world for not being better than it is, but also a belief that it can and should be changed. That people should not have to live like they do.

I would never want anyone to outgrow their sense of indignation, and I can speak only for myself when I say that I felt just exactly that way once, and yet I have come to nurse a hard-nosed, scarred-up sense of confidence in our future as a nation and as a species that seems to get a little stronger every year.

Not that the setbacks don’t come and wham me right down to my knees. Not that I wasn’t weeping and shrieking after November 2004, “What the fuck is wrong with you retards!”

And I suppose I still am.

But I don’t get my sense of assurance about tomorrow from a bottle or a needle or a dipshit theology that’s little more that heroin without the track marks.

I don’t get my unshakeable sense of the slow, steady improvement in the human condition from turning my head off.

I get what optimism I have from being able to plant one foot solidly on a bedrock of history and the other on a reasonable grasp of human nature, and turn, and take a good, long look at our past and know with perfect certainty that while George W. Bush is without doubt the worst President in U.S. history, these are not the darkest days mankind ever faced.

I get it from reading and from listening to what people like you say and do.

...I am an optimist because I know the past, and I know things have been worse, things have gotten slowly better, and things can change if we keep trying.

I know that no Caesar could have had an arterial stent installed to keep him from dying. No Khan could pop a Tylenol or listen to Mozart on an iPod. Cleopatra had no Pill or penicillin. Alexander the Great had no armada of satellites piping data in 1’s and 0’s into a worldwide information network so that clicking over to weather.com could give him days of advanced warning about blizzards and hurricanes. No Borgia ever had a microwave, or the electrical grid into which they could plug such a thing.

And more recently and more personally, right here in these United States, if I and my ex has met each other a generation earlier, it would have been illegal for us to marry.

But that’s not true any more.

From a distance, the future – an idealized, stylized, dogmatized future -- always looks all pretty and clean-lined, and always makes the present like a dog. Like taped-up, dollar-store, ghettokeds compared to a pair of $500 Manolo Blahnik taxi shoes.

But that's a delusion. The future never works out that way. It can't.

I am an optimist because the world has always seemed to be a dysfunctional nuthouse run by fucktards…because it always HAS been a dysfunctional nuthouse run by fucktards, but razing it and starting over doesn’t work. Flooding it and repopulating it doesn’t work. The world that you see around has gotten incrementally better generation after generation, because that’s how it works.

That’s how we’re built.

And in the end, that’s why I’m an optimist.

Because the future is a place worth living in.

Which makes it a place worth fighting for, with a smile.

Plagiarism and emerging models of intelligence

If intelligence is the ability to solve problems, why is plagiarism a problem?

From Pop Occulture:

I’ve posted on this in the past, but I just found a hilarious quote on a website called Turnitin.com. As far as I understand it, Turnitin is an electronic service which teachers can use to scan papers for plagiarism. I’m guessing it compares text to indexed web pages, or something like that, and then returns teachers with links to those sites along with the original source material which has been plagiarized.

Anyway, the testimonial that I find so amusing and ironic comes from a Dr. Gilbert Klajman, of Montclair State University. Klajman writes:

Turnitin once caught a 100 percent word-for-word plagiarized essay. It was of course already suspect, due to the extraordinarily high professional quality of the writing. But it did really help by sparing the effort of getting the proof.

So in other words, the professor was too lazy to go check and do the legwork for himself, and he decided to make use of new internet technology to help him speed along what would otherwise be a tedious time-consuming process.

HEY, WAIT A SECOND! Those are exactly the same reasons students plagiarize, you narc asshole!

Seriously though, plagiarism isn’t some kind of high moral crime. It’s simply that the models of knowledge that we use and the values we ascribe to information are changing / have already changed. You think kids who are raised with technology like file-sharing, blogs and RSS news aggregators are going to even think twice about the moral dilemma previous generations had with plagiarism? Not a fucking remote chance in hell! And more power to ‘em!

Besides that, all plagiarism says to me is that kids are learning how to solve problems. And the problems they are solving are not the ones their teachers want them to solve. Kids don’t learn how to know, they learn how to pass tests and get grades. Because that’s what they are measured by, not by their knowledge, skills or experience. That’s the root of this problem. Teachers need to get creative and think of solutions which won’t get them stuck on these archaic pointless problems. You don’t want kids to plagiarize research papers? Don’t make them do research papers! Make them do hands-on projects where they get to think and act and experience, instead of summarizing and regurgitating information that has nothing to do with them. Of course you’re going to get nothing but slop from that! Who the hell is surprised by any of this? Teach kids to make decisions, reason through problems and solve puzzles, and they’ll be so excited to research things that they won’t even think of copying somebody else’s work verbatim.

One of the big questions I’ve always had though is: is the kid who cheats and plagiarizes his way through school smarter than the kid who studies hard and gets good grades on his own? While the one kid may be an academic star who plays by the rules, the other kid understands something intangible and important about how the world works, and recognizes the relative importance of different facets of life, and knows how to prioritize among them. Those kids are displaying a kind of intelligence that we never even think to measure for, and that we certainly don’t teach towards. No wonder they are so good at gaming the system all throughout life, while meanwhile those of us who play by the rules hem and haw and stew in our own frustration while the cheaters climb all the way to the top with the greatest of ease.

Bill Hicks

“I’m gonna share with you a vision that I had, cause I love you. And you feel it. You know all that money we spend on nuclear weapons and defense each year, trillions of dollars, correct? Instead — just play with this — if we spent that money feeding and clothing the poor of the world — and it would pay for it many times over, not one human being excluded — we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace. Thank you very much. You’ve been great, I hope you enjoyed it.”

Ben Mack Interview

Excerpts from here and here:

Ben Mack is the author of Poker Without Cards... which bills itself as a “consciousness thriller”. PWC is a fictionalized exploration of memetics and marketing, areas which Mack has a great deal of experience in as a career adman, having worked on high-profile ad campaigns with such corporations as Grieco Research Group, Lieberman Research Worldwide, Deutsch, J. Walter Thompson, WONGDOODY, BBDO, & WestWayne.

...The structure of poker is betting with incomplete information. I never thought of this connection between poker and The Zeigarnik Effect, they both deal with incomplete information. If somebody can’t see how the story of Jesus, of him coming back soon, isn’t structurally the same as Direct Response advertising’s application of The Zeigarnik Effect, then fuck, I hope their god preaches peace because the world is full of similar sheep that crave blood.

...I don’t view my tactics as cutting-edge. But, I do view Bey’s tactics as under utilized for good intentions. Bob Dobb asserts that the two greatest misconceptions of 20th Century Americans are that politicians mean well and that they aren’t that smart. In the 21st Century we actually have a president who isn’t that smart. Now, we are living in the Philip K. Dick book Simulacra. Wait, I’m sorry, that started in the 20th Century when we hired an actor to play the role of president.

...Healthy people have a life. When they encounter something they authentically dislike, they don’t immerse themselves in it so they can rant against the atrocity, they move on. I crack up when I see a fundamentalist Christian say that pornography is the devils work and dangerous stuff, that’s why they spent 800 hours the previous year going through pornos to classify what’s what.

...Look, I find myself surrounded by a confederacy of dunces with the occasional elitist scum who claim to KNOW stuff. I’m an Idiot. I crack up when I read comments about my book that there are no new ideas in PWC. I used to get excited because I saw this as an opportunity to learn from somebody who already covered the mental terrain I’m crossing, somebody who can show me some interesting routes and neat mental scenic views. I’ve learned that these people are generally vacuous pompous scum, on their blogs and their sites I feel their energy and all I see is a they’re contributing to society. I don’t understand how they can maintain their superior attitude, but then I see the Bush family maintaining their vacuous superiority. I guess money helps.

...Figure It out for yourself and quit believing—believing takes too much energy. Know or don’t know. It’s okay to be wrong but believing is a waste of energy.

...I have no cult. I have no movement. I want people to think for themselves and care for humanity.

Okay, this one's REALLY for Jr...

Jehovah’s Witnesses Sue Over Quotations

...According to an SF Gate article... the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, Inc., the corporation that oversees the Jehovah’s Witness religious group is suing a website which features quotations from old WatchTower pamphlets.

The Canadian website: www.quotes.watchtower.ca is operated by a former Jehovah’s Witness. The website’s content consists of “quotations” from WatchTower publications which have previously been widely distributed to the general public, but are now out-of-print.

The WatchTower’s lawsuit alleges that such “quotations” from its own literature are “embarrassing” and have caused Jehovah’s Witnesses loss of “reputation” and “goodwill”.

Ironically, Jehovah’s Witnesses are best known for their lack of “goodwill” among the general public due to their “reputation” for doing anything and everything to get non-JWs to read their literature.

The WatchTower conglomerate is the largest religious publisher in the world, and all Jehovah’s Witnesses members are required to engage in public distribution of literature.

This Quotes.Watchtower site is actually really awesome. They have lots of different sections organized by keywords around stated beliefs going back at least to the 1930’s.

Here’s a fun page of quotes from 1934 stating their sympathy for the Nazi government and their dislike for Jews.

A page of those awesome illustrations of people being killed by God’s loving grace

Another page as recent as 1964 instructing women that if they are raped and they don’t scream or try to flee, then they are consenting to it. Admittedly, they’re only trying to follow Old Testament legal codes, but come on - “A Christian woman is entitled to fight for her virginity or marital fidelity to the death.”

Quotes from the 1970’s indicating that past evidence of child molestation is no reason to remove an elder from a leadership role. Meanwhile, they badmouth Catholic priests acting under the same principle.

God yes...

PopOcculture:

...It strikes me that many people who turn from organized or mainstream religions towards occult paths feel the same conflict as the monk in the desert. They want to hear God’s voice, feel God’s hand on their shoulder. They want proof, they want evidence and direct experience. Faith to them isn’t enough; it’s a failure, an excuse not to strive.

Yep. Again.

Again, via PopOcculture:

...what many people working in alternative religions seem to be struggling with. An excerpt from that comment:

I find a flat materialistic, positivist, rationalist view of life to be unfullfilling. But I feel tormented because the left part of my conditioned brain knows it should accept no supernatural explanations for anything.

It is depressing to think we live in an absurd universe which has no instrinsic meaning because there is no spirit, nothing transcendental. I don’t want existential dread!

I keep seeing this same struggle come up in conversations I have with other people studying these fields...

Something tells me this is one of the key issues that all of us are trying to work through: overcoming not only the limitations of rationalism and materialism but also of much more pervasive cynicism and, depending on your age group, ironic distance. We’ve just become so type-cast in these cultural roles that many of us have a really hard time breaking out of them and opening ourselves up to true authentic experience of something else, something greater. I know, speaking from personal experience, that this is pretty much *THE* struggle that I’ve been working on these past few years, getting myself to a point where I’m able to accept these weird far out areas of life and thinking as not only legitimate, but real, valid, and most of all worthwhile.

Yep

Via PopOcculture:

...My own argument is leaning more and more in the direction of usefulness over truthfulness. Why?

Well first of all, just how difficult is it to not only find the truth, but to establish it in an indisputable way. Our legal system is even built to accomodate this difficulty. When people are tried for a crime, they are innocent until proven guilty. And when people are proven guilty, it simply means that a group of people become convinced of the truth. It doesn’t mean it’s actually the truth, but simply that the story that the prosecution has told has been more compelling and convincing than that of the defense. Juries don’t have any special monopoly on the truth either - it’s simply a group of random people who have been given the authority by society to determine truth via a group decision...

So how do we find truth in our own lives? Do we rely on a group of people who have socially been granted authority to hand us verdicts on the truth? Or do we try to decide it for ourselves? If a group of random people in an official setting may make mistakes, sending innocent men to jail or causing the guilty to walk free, how much more fallible must our own inner instruments of determining truthfulness be when we’re without the resources of a courtroom, lawyers, judges and teams of investigators? How do we determine truth in the face of the world?

Do we look at the facts? Well, what are facts? Do facts always give us accurate impressions of the truth? The relationship I see between facts and the truth is similar to a snapshot and the person and event being photographed. It is a small slice frozen off from a whole which exists on many more dimensions. Photos may distort how someone looks, may be too dark, too blurry. They may also be accurate physical descriptions of a person, but they don’t really convey the “feel” of that person. Facts may also be fudged and faked like like a photo can be doctored in Photoshop.

Continuing with this photographic analogy, you might be tempted to say that your perceptions at least are more accurate than photos. They don’t fall prey to the same kinds of distortions as a technical device. But is that really true? Don’t moods, states of mind and physiological factors determine what you notice, remember and react to? Is your memory even close to 100% reliable? And in a sense, the instruments which you experience through, your body, your consciousness confine you to as limited a perspective and point of view as a camera, which can only look at an object and capture it from one angle. You can’t see all sides of something, and your perceptions of it are always colored by your inner states and biases.

In the same sense that photographs only tell a limited part of a much more intricate story, I think that language always lies, always distorts. Language, when you get down to it consists of vocal sounds laid out according to socially determined sequences, with socially determined connections (meanings) to “real” events. The first and biggest problem is how can a string of sounds accurately recreate an experience? It can’t. It can simply describe and evoke a mental image, which is fleshed out by the listener’s own experiences. There are two possible breakdowns here: that the listener simply doesn’t understand the sound sequences being transmitted. And two, that the listener’s own experiences don’t match those of the speaker, and thus the details they are filling in to flesh out and imagine the experience being described can never be totally accurate.

So to me, facts simply don’t determine truthfulness, and communication, memory and external recording are fraught with errors and signal degradations. So what do we use to find the truth, intuition? How reliable is that? How can many people coming together find truthfulness using such an intangible, subjective and individual thing as intuition?

I’m not saying that truth doesn’t exist or that people can’t or shouldn’t try to find it. But I am saying that I’m not sure how to find it. To me, truth really is a Holy Grail - a quasi-mythological object which flits in and out of our reality. We expend tremendous energy seeking after it, trying to make ourselves ready to receive it, in the hopes that it might somehow heal us or make us whole. Joseph Campbell used to always say that myths are True, but I wonder if we couldn’t flip that around to say, Truth is a Myth? And I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. I mean that Truth lifts us above and beyond ourselves and our abilities to perceive and know. Is Truth an archetype or a symbol? Does it really exist in a realm of Platonic Ideal Forms?

I find all these questions to be absolutely fascinating, of course. But ultimately a little maddening. How long should I chase after the Truth when I don’t even really know what the truth is or how to get it? This is why I’ve come to the place where I’m beginning to be less concerned with finding out the absolute truth and more concerned with figuring out whether or not the things I come across in my quest are useful to me. It doesn’t mean I should abandon the greater quest, but I do need to make a lot of small seemingly inconsequential decisions about what to pick up and carry with me. Should I pick up and carry with me this broken shield I found in the hopes of getting it repaired, or will it simply weigh me down? Should I help this damsel in distress who I happened across along my way, or should I be worried about sorcery and trickery and distraction away from my true path?

To me, a beautiful and noble truth with no way for me to apply it to my life isn’t worth very much. I may have the satisfaction of having glimpsed the truth, but I suffer the frustration of being unable to use it. Or I may begin to doubt whether it was really the truth at all after I’ve lost sight of it. And thus I’m thrown back once again on figuring out what is useful to me in my life. And it may not be the truth. It may be something very different.

The Spell of the Sensuous

Via PopOcculture:

...David Abram’s book the Spell of the Sensuous. Abram suggests that with the development of written language, humankind gradually began to lose the ability to “read” the landscape. Tangible ecological literacy was replaced with increasingly abstract forms of cognition. We could only gain information by reading books, instead of from birds and trees and and dirt.

Here’s a typically excellent excerpt from that opening chapter:

"In keeping with the popular view of shamanism as a tool for personal transcendence, the most sophisticated definition of “magic” that now circulates through the American counterculture is “the ability or power to alter one’s consciousness at will.” There is no mention made of any reason for altering one’s state of consciousness. Yet in tribal cultures that which we call “magic” takes all of its meaning from the fact that, in an indigenous and oral context, humans experience their own intelligence as simply one form of awareness among many others. The traditional magician cultivates an ability to shift out of his or her common state of consciousness precisely in order to make contact with other species on their own terms. Only by temporarily shedding the accepted perceptual logic of his or her culture can the shaman hope to enter into a rapport with the multiple nonhuman sensibilities that animate the local landscape. It is this, we might say, that defines a shaman: the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture-boundaries reinforced by social customs, taboos, and, most important, the common speech or language-in order to make contact with, and learn from, the other powers in the land. Shamanic magic is precisely this heightened receptivity to the meaningful solicitations–songs, cries, and gestures–of the larger, more-than-human field."

For Jr and Kev

Via Rigorous Intuition:

In 1983 Ingo Swann, a senior colleague of the CIA's remote viewing program at Stanford Research Institute and "Operating Thetan level VII", received a call at his home in New York City from a close friend, a US congressman. The caller asked if he could do a favour for a certain party in need of the services of someone with his skills...

"Swann was led into a windowless room, was introduced to some people, and was then allowed to settle himself before starting his remote viewing. The target was described only as a pair of coordinates. They were lunar coordinates, for Swann was being asked to remote-view a place on the moon. He soon did, and more coordinates were given to him. Before the day was out, Swann had described a variety of monumental objects, not human-made but not natural either, scattered across the cold surface of Earth's dusty cousin. Swann, according to the story, was then paid several thousand dollars in cash, and was driven back to his apartment in New York."

...Schanbel also tells how another of the program's highly-regarded remote viewers, Joe McMoneagle, was driven to the Pentagon shortly before his retirement and escorted to a secure room. He was asked to remote view a target with no advance information. All he knew was that the "feedback" package, containing information regarding the target to be opened after his session, was highly classified. As he entered his "zone," McMoneagle viewed a "strange, complex high-performance aerial vehicle, apparently not of this earth." Afterwards the package was opened and he was shown the satellite photo inside, which showed an apparent UFO on a seemingly impossible flight path.

Of course, as I've noted earlier, the CIA publically declared its remote viewing program a failure. The piling on even included the Temple of Set's Lt Col. Michael Aquino, who dismissed remote viewing as an "eyeball roller" in a paper for The Intelligencer: Journal of US Intelligence Studies. Nevertheless, there are many contrary voices within military-intelligence who don't subscribe to the official view, like Major General Edmund R Thompson, who told Schnabel "I never liked to get into debates with the skeptics, because if you didn't believe that remote viewing was real, you hadn't done your homework."

Perhaps the program needed to be shutdown and given a thorough debunking because of its success: it was getting too close to the secrets of the military-occult complex, and it operated beyond the control of those who profit by the secrets remaining hidden. The experiences related by Swann and McMoneagle suggest blind tests, run by those who know, who wanted to discern how good these guys were, and how close America's own psychic spies were to crashing their party.

...Sometimes they would see shamanic visions of fantasic animals. Enormous raven-like birds visited the yards of several members. One appeared at the foot of the bed of physicist Mike Russo, terrifying both him and his wife, as it stared at them. Audio and video tapes of experiments picked up other things, things that shouldn't have been there, like a "distinctive, metallic-sounding voice, unheard during the actual experiment but now clearly audible, if mostly unintelligible."

(That metallic voice sound familiar? It seems to turn up a lot. Jack Sarfatti took a call from one in 1952. It claimed to be a conscious computer onboard a spacecraft, identifying him as as one of "400 young bright receptive minds we wish to [memory failure]." It said if he agreed, he would link up with the others in 20 years. Twenty years later and Sarfati was at - wait for it - Stanford Research Institute.)

...Some of the remote viewers, years before the movie, termed their trance-like zone the matrix, and described sessions as "switching on a beacon" within it, which sometimes attacted strange things.

Duane Elgin was a futurologist at SRI who became involved in psychic research after a colleague flipped a coin and aske him to call heads or tails, and he called it correctly 33 times in a row. He told New York magazine in 1975, "Once you discover that space doesn't matter, or that time can be travelled through at will so that time doesn't matter, and that matter can be moved by consciousiness so that matter doesn't matter - well, you can't go home again."

Gaze into the abyss... go ahead.

From GNN:
Thought-Weapons and Manners

...persuasion should be a compulsory subject in school. You can not see thought weapons without a modicum of proficiency with such tools. These techniques are not always weapons, but simply tools. Like how a lever makes a heavy object easier to lift, the word “because” makes people more likely to comply regardless of the reason, a mental stunt academicians have repeatedly proven.

If you haven’t played with these mental tools you don’t know what they look like. I’m not suggesting everybody become a direct response marketer, but I don’t imagine most readers can see the commonly told story of Jesus as structurally identical to a direct response technique called The Zeigarnik Effect, leveraging incomplete information to build anticipation, commitment and a willingness to spend. Do you know how lucky you are Jesus did not come today?

If you don’t know the mechanics of persuasion, you can’t distinguish good ideas from weapons of thought. Since you don’t see the mechanism, you will be prey to those of us more savvy with these tools. The meme pool is infested with sharks. I’m hoping you, dear reader, will learn to swim.

For Spence

Via Lazyway:
Advanced Secret of Success -- Be a Contrarian

It is extremely rare to achieve financial success as an employee. Salaried folk, unless you are the starting shortstop for the New York Yankees, will not get rich. You can say some Microsoft employees got exceedingly rich but their wealth came through ownership, not through salaries. Basically you have to own something that appreciates majorly to realize great wealth.

Probably the best way to do that is to build a business. One thing that distinguishes super successful entrepreneurs from the run-of-the-mill is a contrarian mindset. Super successful entrepreneurs start out not liking the status quo. They have a low regard for the conventional...

These contrarian guys and gals are NOT driven by the desire to amass great wealth. Instead they are driven by passion. Wealth just happens as a by-product of their passion...

To be successful, you must either become one of these contrarian-types by nurturing the rebel within you OR you have to team up with one.

He who embraces the status quo is destined to punch a time clock until he can punch no more.

and, of course:

Finding Your Calling

When I tell someone the secret to success is to do what he or she feels passionately about, they frequently ask me how they can identify the passion that will bring them the greatest success.

Here is what I answer:

You are a unique individual, endowed with many things that make you special. God was not stingy in giving you many powerful qualities. You have more than one passion and more than one talent.

So here is how to start the process. First, make a list of all your gifts. In other words, what talents or characteristics do you possess that are special? What makes you unique? Include on your list those positive areas where you are a contrarian or a deviant or a rebel. Your power lies on this list.

Now make a second list of all those things you love to do or feel passionately about. Include on this list the answer to this key question: what do I GIVE that when I'm giving it I am filled with great joy. Chances are that you love giving what you have in abundance. And what do you have in abundance? Those gifts or talents you put on the first list.

It would be extremely helpful to consider WHY you like a certain activity. What are all those things about a particular activity that feeds your passion? If something lights your fire then you must have some insight into why it does and in what ways it does. Write down what about it inspires you, what pleases you, what reveals more of yourself to you, what makes you laugh, what about it contributes to a greater good, etc.

NOW: think of ways or activities that involves SEVERAL of your talents, gifts, passions, and unique characteristics at the same time. We want to kill two (or more) birds with one stone OR, better put, hug two or more birds with one embrace.

The more passions and gifts that you can intersect at one point the better.

If, for some reason, that intersection of passions does not have a commercial component, modify it with more passions or talents until it does. At the intersection of many passions and talents, there should emerge a service, or a product, or an artwork, or a body of information that can be spun off commercially. This way you get to pursue your passions, grow your talents, give of yourself to others, contribute to a greater good, and, as a by-product of all this playing around, generate wealth.

Failing all that, there's this:

Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace

For Gayle

From the LA Times:

The Dark Side of Faith
by Rosa Brooks

It's official: Too much religion may be a dangerous thing.

This is the implication of a study reported in the current issue of the Journal of Religion and Society, a publication of Creighton University's Center for the Study of Religion. The study, by evolutionary scientist Gregory S. Paul, looks at the correlation between levels of "popular religiosity" and various "quantifiable societal health" indicators in 18 prosperous democracies, including the United States.

Paul ranked societies based on the percentage of their population expressing absolute belief in God, the frequency of prayer reported by their citizens and their frequency of attendance at religious services. He then correlated this with data on rates of homicide, sexually transmitted disease, teen pregnancy, abortion and child mortality.

He found that the most religious democracies exhibited substantially higher degrees of social dysfunction than societies with larger percentages of atheists and agnostics. Of the nations studied, the U.S. — which has by far the largest percentage of people who take the Bible literally and express absolute belief in God (and the lowest percentage of atheists and agnostics) — also has by far the highest levels of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

This conclusion will come as no surprise to those who have long gnashed their teeth in frustration while listening to right-wing evangelical claims that secular liberals are weak on "values." Paul's study confirms globally what is already evident in the U.S.: When it comes to "values," if you look at facts rather than mere rhetoric, the substantially more secular blue states routinely leave the Bible Belt red states in the dust.

...My prediction is that right-wing evangelicals will do their best to discredit Paul's substantive findings. But when they fail, they'll just shrug: So what if highly religious societies have more murders and disease than less religious societies? Remember the trials of Job? God likes to test the faithful.

To the truly nonrational, even evidence that on its face undermines your beliefs can be twisted to support them. Absolutism means never having to say you're sorry.

And that, of course, is what makes it so very dangerous.

Mad Geek Cred

Nicolas Cage gives Superman's birth name to son

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage's wife of 14 months gave birth on Monday to the couple's first child together, a son they named Kal-el -- a moniker recognized by comic book fans as the birth name of Superman...

I didn't want to see this movie until just now...

Via Warren Ellis:

The Best Movie Pitch Session Ever
Filed under:

* researchmaterial

— warrenellis @ 1:15 am

Oh my god, this is supernatural luck and fucking genius. Reported by Josh Friedman:

There’s only one pitch I’ve ever heard of that I wish I would have done.

My friends Scott Derrickson and Paul Boardman wrote The Exorcism of Emily Rose. For those of you who don’t know, the movie is based on a true case which occurred in Germany around 1970. While researching another project, Paul and Scott were given an audio tape by a NYC police detective who investigated the occult. When he gave it to them he said: “I don’t even know if I should give this to you. I truly believe playing this tape is dangerous.”

And what’s on the tape? THE RECORDING OF THE REAL EMILY ROSE’S EXORCISM FROM THIRTY YEARS AGO.

It was this tape that inspired them to write the movie. And it was this tape that helped them sell the project. Because what did they do? Well they did what you and I would hope we’d do if we were in their position. They’d take that scary-ass tape from studio to studio and play it for people.

The way I understood it went was like this: Scott and Paul would go into the room, do their pitch, and then pull out the tape recorder and some headphones. One of them would say: “There are those that believe just playing this tape invites darkness into our lives.” Then the curious exec would put on the headphones, thus drowning out all other EARTHLY AND NORMAL noise.

Then they’d press play.

Now from what I understand the tape is ABSOLUTELY THE MOST TERRIFYING THING YOU’VE EVER HEARD and consists of a girl DYING while screaming in German at two priests attempting to pull SIX DEMONS from her body.

Then Scott and Paul would leave.

Mental Judo

Brilliant.

From Planned Parenthood:

Every time protesters gather outside of our Locust Street health center, our patients face verbal attacks from them. They see graphic signs meant to confuse and intimidate. They are sometimes blocked from entering the building and occasionally they are videotaped. They are offered anti-choice propaganda and free rides to the closest "crisis pregnancy
center."

Staff and volunteers are also seen as targets. We are all called murderers, are lectured to about committing sins, and are told we will pay the "ultimate price" for our actions.

You can stand with others in the community against these
acts of intimidation and harassment

Here's how it works: You decide on the amount you would like to pledge for each protester (minimum 10 cents). When protesters show up on our sidewalks, Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania will count and record their number each day from October 1 through November 30, 2005. We will place a signoutside the health center that tracks pledges and makes protesters fully aware that their actions are benefiting PPSP. At the end of the two-month campaign, we will send you an update on protest activities and a pledge reminder.

Example:
If you pledge 30 cents per protester, and PPSP has 100 protesters in October and 160
protesters in November, your donation would be 78 dollars for the entire two-month campaign.

Everything is relative

“There is nothing either fundamentally good, nor anything fundamentally evil; everything is relative, relative to our point of view. This point once established, it is extremely possible that something, perfectly indifferent in itself, may be indeed distasteful in your eyes, but may be most delicious in mine; and immediately I find it pleasing, immediately I find it amusing, regardless of our inability to agree in assigning a character to it, should I not be a fool to deprive myself of it merely because you condemn it?”

– Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom

What's a spirit?

Via Shamanism.org:

In 1961, when I was with the Conibo Indians in eastern Peru in the Amazon, I was training using ayahuasca with a shaman, and we were working with the various nature spirits every night. I worked with the anaconda spirit, the black panther spirit, the fresh-water dolphin spirit, various tree spirits, and so on. They would come, we would see them, and so on. Then one night I got introduced to the outboard-motor spirit. And then the radio spirit and the airplane spirit. I came to realize that anything that you see in complete darkness or with your eyes closed is technically a spirit. That makes it sound like it’s just an image in the air, but shamans find out which spirits have power and which don’t. They discover what spirits can help in what ways. It’s very important to recognize that whatever you contact in nonordinary reality is technically a spirit. It’s a spiritual reality.

This feels familiar...

Interview with a blogger I read [Pop Occulture], and can relate to this a bit:

...Since this field is an exploration of one’s own spiritual ideology and, in essence, reality, as your paradigms begin to shift and evolve, how do you find yourself in situations where social norms and peers are based on your old perspectives and characteristics? Or have you had to deal with any of this yet?

Oh you mean that old feeling where you feel like you’re changing but that nobody else around you is? Yeah I’ve felt that a lot, and in some sense, it’s part of what kind of drove me into being more solitary lately, along with moving around a lot in the past 3–4 years. Being able to start over a bunch of times with a clean slate.

As to mixing occult and personal affairs, it’s a sticky situation. I think the best explanation of it is when I go out to the bar with friends or whatever, and people want to know what I do, it’s like I often find myself feeling like I have to dance around actually saying what I write about. I mean I know I don’t have to, but I just get tired of the blank stares and the inaccurate judgements people make — not only when you bring up the word occult, but even if you accidentally say “religion.” People have no idea what the fuck you’d be interested in that for.

And then there’s like the off chance somebody is interested in that stuff, and all they want to talk to me about are The Da Vinci Code, the “sacred feminine,” and What the Bleep? That annoys me to no end when I get cornered into a conversation about that stuff socially.

As to my girlfriend, she’s really accepting, and is into holistic medicine, but is an ardent Christian. She made a joke though about how if I walked into a church it would burn down. Which I think is just silly, and I’m always getting mad at her when she says she’s worried about going to hell. Ridiculous. She’s awesome though.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
by Carlo M. Cipolla, Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley
in Whole Earth Review, Spring 1987

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
..
The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
..
A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
..
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be costly mistake.
..
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
The corollary of the Law is that
A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.