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News Briefs 06-05-2005

By Katon

Looks like Neo’s been a busy boy — the matrix has developed some revealing cracks.

Quote of the Day:

Face it: come 12:01 a.m. July 16, Jesus is once again going to be kicked unceremoniously into second place by a heretical pubescent, and his creator, having recently surpassed the Queen of England, will become wealthier than God. You should get on her good side.

Brendan Linn

Kat
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23 Comments

  1. Mackie’s not on The Wall
    A close look at the headline ‘Legends of the Fall: War in Vietnam continues to divide and haunt Americans’ will reveal that there are eight links there, five of which, beginning with the word War, provide an incisive history of the entire Vietnam War Era in the U.S. You can thank (or blame) Cernig’s Newshog blog for the inspiration.

    Last Friday, in response to the question ‘What overtly political music inspires you?’ he posted ‘This Is Radio Clash’, which ends with the lyrics of Hawkwind – “Days of the Underground” asking,

    what ever happened
    to those chromium heroes
    are there none of them
    still left around
    since the days
    of the underground?

    And Cernig asking,

    “Well, what did happen? Where are the protest singers now? Where is the mass movement of anger? Too many have been made over, even the rap stars are more interested in bling-bling than in the message – working for the clampdown.”

    Although he’d struck a nerve, I didn’t post a comment. During all my teen years and well into my college days, the world’s first ‘living room’ war took up most of every network’s nightly news. And I don’t mean like now, where some suit behind a desk in NY says there were 4 bombs that killed 20 people in Iraq today. There were actual live reporters — many, many reporters — on the ground, with the troops, near or in the fighting, in Vietnam. And their reports showed up in living color in all kinds of media.

    For the barest hint of what it was like, take a look at the pictures in those 5 history links. Notice the color photos on the covers of those Life magazines at the top of one page, the dead and wounded U.S. soldiers, the naked children whose skin is falling off due to being sprayed with Napalm, the Buddhist monks who pulled car tires down over their heads, filled them with gasoline and set themselves on fire in protest, the shot-to-the-head execution in the streets of Saigon.

    This wasn’t the sanitized news coverage of today — we saw blood and gore and crying and death and mangled limbs and caskets and caskets and body bags and more caskets, daily, daily, daily for years and years. The number of Americans killed in action rose from a monthly average of 172 during 1965 to an average of 770 in 1967, and kept climbing to more than 2000 a month in ’68.

    JFK , Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were all assasinated during those years. Student protestors at Kent State were shot and killed by the National Guard.

    And there are more personal memories. The draft was determined by a randomized list of all the dates in the year, and those whose birthday fell on a date near the top of the list were sure to be called up. I remember the look on my aunt’s face the day she learned that the birthdate of her oldest son, who would soon be 18, was 3rd on the list.

    In college, there were Vets like K3, who always showed up at parties in full battle fatigues, complete with loaded pistols, and real grenades hanging all over him. And three decades later, I’m close enough to a handfull of Vietnam Vets to know they still can’t sleep without a loaded pistol under their pillow.

    And then there was a guy I’d gone to high school with, Mackey Smythe. I didn’t know him as well as some because he was a couple of years older than me; so I had no idea that he was sent straight to ‘Nam after graduation. One afternoon he and Roger Bankston stopped by my dad’s gas station to fill up the tank, and I accepted their spur-of-the-moment invitation to ride with them to the closest fast food place, 15 miles away, for a hamburger. It turned out to be one of those harrowing adolescent adventures you’re glad your parents never find out about. As soon as we left they opened a fifth of Jack Daniels, and between the two of them, they drained it in under two minutes — with Mackey flooring the accelerator the whole time. I’m still amazed I got back in one piece, since he never went less than 110 miles per hour except to start and stop.

    About 8 months after that episode, I was shocked to learn that Mackey had just been found dead on his parents’ front lawn. Understandably, he hadn’t said anything about it at the time, but as it turned out, he’d been home for two weeks of R&R during that memorable hamburger run. Eight months later, he’d come back for another two weeks of R&R, and after another attempt to anesthetize his memories of the war with a bottle of Jack Daniels, he’d passed out and drowned in his own vomit.

    So like an uncounted number of other American Vietnam Vets who died because of the war, but not in actual combat, Mackey Smythe isn’t among the 58,195 names on The Wall at Constitution Avenue and 20th Street in D.C. But then, some of us will never need a stone memorial, or pictures on webpages, to remind us of what happened.

    Where are all the potential protest singers now? They’ll living in blissful ignorance in the country whose president has forbidden the media to film the caskets and wounded being unloaded from airplances that are only allowed to land under cover of darkness.

    1. Beautifully written Kat!
      Oh Kat,you made me cry.But then any talk about the deaths of the young ones today makes me cry.

      I have wondered too about protest singers and I guess they have been scared off by the barons at the top.

      One day I was distraught at the stories of the beautiful young men and women of America who are being sent to the Middle East to die, and a friend said to me that before the war there was the biggest number of people came together around the world for peace that there had ever been.

      Yeah maybe, but where are they now.

      Each day on cable TV they show a picture of the latest soldier killed and tell a little of his or her story.
      I feel such a pain in my heart to think that we have come no way at all since Vietnam.

      And of course there are all the innocents in Iraq whom the British Medical Journal has numbered at 200,000.

      There were probably a lot of Mackey Smythes if we only knew.

      shadows

      1. Eloquent
        Hi Kat,

        Shadows nailed it – beautifully written and an eloquent personal testimony of the scars that don’t show. We can expect more of those: the Iraqi veterans group Operation Truth says that post-traumatic stress disorder will be this generation’s Agent Orange. There may be less physical casualties than Vietnam but medical experts in the field say one in six of the million US troops who have now served in Iraq suffer from debilitating PTSD.

        Meanwhile, Veteran’s Administration budgets are being cut, especially in the areas of mental health treatment. It’s going to be a scandal and a disaster unless something is done, mark my words.

        Regards, C

        2. More
          Hi Cernig,

          I suggest you follow those BBC links to some of their other Vietnam War pages, such as Turning the camera back on Vietnam and Iconic Images – of the war.

          I hope you read all 5 pages on the Vietnam era, but you might find something of special interest to you on the page that I linked with the words ‘to divide’ (irony intended) — a revealing account of the beginnings of the current Republican majority. And the propaganda war.

          It starts slowly, but there are also interesting insights in ‘How far have we come?’:

          “The historical memory of Americans in particular quite simply does not exist. History to the American is right now; even four years ago is too long a time into the past to be within the grasp of memory. America writes its history as it needs it. And so humanity’s capacity for illusion — or perhaps that is delusion? — continues unabated. There are no lessons to learn from history.”

          Kat

  2. Geez great links Kat
    I don’t know how you do it.

    I intend to spend tomorrow reading everything.

    BTW what is the quote from or about?

    love shadows

  3. Testing Darwin
    Looking at this article, one could note that the function of the organisms had to be programmed and that even that could only be done after having created a computer and then inducing code that relied on the laws of that universe: Computer memory and its central processor.

    As much as it can show a mechanical model of Darwinian inspiration, it ends up being a better representation of creative design, as the whole process is highly dependant of the initial instruction implementation.

    1. well…
      Richard, with that reasoning you can argue that computer modelling the dropping of a rock in earth gravity is evidence of intelligent design of the rock.

      1. Mixed up
        Not the same at all Earthling (although it probably works too at another level).

        Here is the point again:
        If the computer were not programmed, the ‘virtual entities’ would not do anything. They would not even exist.

        If matter were not programmed, the material entities would not do anything. They would not even exist.

        There has to be a quality of ‘consciousness’ imbedded within matter at the atomic level and beyond to allow association of elements into exponentially complex organizations that become support for consciousness.

        I do not believe in spontaneous self-organization without the intrinsic program that is already part of the condition of atomic consciousness. In that sense I see this simulation as being more a model for Intelligent design than it is for Darwinism, especially his ‘freak’ mutation events that are supposed to have brought the event of super organisms.

        I would even go as far as saying that nature is more intelligent than its creations. It does it while we use empirical back engineering to ‘guess’ what is behind it.

          1. Umph ;P
            I am saying that the laws of nature, that the laws of energy are fundamentally a composite of intelligence and will and, more recently the added component of love. (Of course, this entails redefining what intelligence, will and love mean at another level than that of our psychology.)

            So in that sense, yep, the rock is intelligently designed since it is the result of the manifestation of cosmic intelligence in the cosmos.
            ;P

          2. ID and Persig
            Hi Richard,

            Have you, per chance, read Robert Persig’s works: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Lila? If you get past his story telling (which makes his work readable) and dig into the core theory, he pretty much defines what you are describing. He creates a hierarchy of existance with classes of being each of which have their own rules. It’s been a while since I’ve waded through it, but my recollection is that there are four levels or classes: 1) inorganic matter, 2) organic matter/biology, 3) social, and 4) intellectual. He uses the analogy of a computer where silicon runs an operating system and writing application that in turn provide the realm for recording the novel you write. Each level supports the others while not grasping the content of the other levels. All of this is driven by the intangable called Dynamic Quality. He carefully avoids attaching any god-like attributes to Dymanic Quality, but depending on your particular bent, it certainly meets the core essence of Intellegence as it applies to this subject.

            Xavier Onassis

          3. Unfortunately not
            Hi Xavier,

            Interesting. I find that often, the human mind is more capable of channeling reality when applying it to fiction than otherwise. Applying their intuition to everyday reality ends up being too much. Therefore, there is sometimes more to be found in works of fiction than there is in so called scientific empirical reverse engineering attempts.

  5. life after death
    Can anyone tell me why I cannot access the life after death link please?
    It seems to load and then nothing.

    Kat, that story on alchemy and Harry Potter is excellent! I will save it for when I read the other books.
    Actually FYI I have read the first book and have been lying in wait for a grandkid to leave a copy of the others around.
    But that ain’t gunna happen in this family so I will get them from the library.

    shadows

    1. proof – survival of death
      Hi Shadows,

      Well, I tested the link. The first time, it sent me to the wrong page at the site; but the second time it worked fine. It’s a mystery that’s over my head. :-/

      However, I may have found a way around the problem. Here’s a link to the main site, where the article in question is the feature of the month (top left):

      The Campaign for Philosophical Freedom

      And for good measure, I’ll try again here, with links to the original article I posted as well as two others on the same subject:

      Censored in Great Britain: The Scientific Proof of Survival After Death

      Science Confirms Survival

      There is No Justice When It Comes To The Subject of Survival After Death

      Let me know how it goes,

      Kat

      1. Nope,couldn’t get any of ’em…
        …I even tried googling the name.I sent it to my son and he sent me a link that worked.

        It’s a good site.

        Thanks,

        shadows

  6. Scientific proof of life after death?
    For a site that claims there’s scientific proof of life after death, the Campaign for Philosphical Freedom’s web site (www.cfpf.org.uk) doesn’t seem to offer any. All the articles I read there are rants, full of the usual nonsense claiming “suppression” and “censorship”, as if such rants somehow prove the author’s beliefs, and basically pointing to some supposed “experiments” done in the late 1800s, when mysticism, séances and spiritualism were in vogue. These subjects have been around for thousands of years, but the lasting charm of these particular “experiments” was that they were among the first to be performed during the age of modern science, by people who, at the time, at least initially, were held in high regard, and thus many of these people were often believed by non-scientists no matter what they said. Check http://www.prairieghosts.com/spr.html for a brief rundown of some of these “investigators”–basically, they kept finding fraud, but kept believing they’d find proof. I’ve been reading about these “experiments” since I was a kid, for about 40 years, and found years ago that it all boiled down to a lot of Victorian parlor game nonsense, perpetrated mostly by frauds, some very skilled, some not so, but still able to convince even many of the educated. It’s the sort of thing well-characterized by Arthur Conan Doyle’s naivete, in which he was convinced by two young girls that faeries existed, simply by being shown photos of these girls surrounded by paper cutouts of human-made faery illustrations. When these girls were much older, they “revealed” they had committed a hoax, and remarked on how surprised they were by how easy it was to fool adults. And Doyle wasn’t one to be easily fooled–or so he thought. He considered himself a skeptical believer, suddenly breaking up seances to point out how the medium had faked things, in an attempt to prevent dilution of the field, but Doyle was still oddly taken in by some of the simplest of tricks. It’s this sort of mentality that prevailed amongst some of his colleagues, even “pioneers of radio and television” (as described by the CFPF web site)–a supposed hard-headed investigative mentality, which was actually easily fooled, due to their preconceived notions about spiritualism, by faked evidence, and by their personal interpretation of their own experiments, so that they basically stuck to their guns, believing in ectoplasm, etc. I always wonder how people make the leap of faith, from knowing about the basic concept of electromagnetic energy at various frequencies (heat, light, radio waves, etc.), to the notion that this must certainly be the means, and the proof, by which humans must have a soul that lives after death–it gives believers a sheen of pseudoscience to hang that belief on. Most believers are content starting out believing in a soul, then learning about electromagnetism (without really understanding it or taking the time to read any science books about it), and then automatically believing that this must somehow be how the soul and life after death are accomplished, but others are doubly convinced when they read about “psychic experiments” involving electromagnetism, etc. done by “learned men who can’t be wrong”. There are a lot of missing links in that chain of thought, and the reason they’re missing, is they’re not there.

    While it’s true that people claiming to have proof of life after death aren’t commonly given time in conservative media, there’s usually a good reason: they rant similarly to the CFPF articles. I mean, come on–“[the] etheric world is the same place as our radio and television signals, but at a much higher frequency. Recent discoveries in quantum mechanics – the study of the building blocks within the atom – completely vindicate what these great physicists said at the beginning of the century.” No they don’t. This is all conjecture, picked up by people who don’t really know much, if anything, about these fields of science, and believed for a few flimsy reasons: because some of these “researchers” have credentials and accomplishments in these (or unrelated) fields (credentials and accomplishents don’t automatically prove that whatever you do is genuine); because these researchers claim to have been “suppressed”; and because it sounds good.

    I couldn’t find the text of Sir Oliver Lodge’s lecture on CFPF’s web site that they cite, but I did find it at http://www.viking-z.org/alodge.htm. Here’s the opening paragraph, which pretty much proves he has no idea what he’s talking about:

    “When we consider the question of Survival from the physical point of view, we are up against the ancient problem of the connection between mind and body. The body is certainly made of matter, but matter is inert, it never does anything, it is completely controlled by the forces acting upon it, which forces exist in the empty space surrounding the atoms. Left to itself, matter merely continues in whatever state it was last made to accept. If it was spinning, it continues to spin with constant angular momentum. It has no power of changing its state or of stopping. If it was in a state of locomotion, that motion also continues unaltered. This is called the law of inertia, and to it all material atoms are absolutely obedient, whether they form part of an engine or of a clockwork mechanism or of an animated body. There is no exception. All matter is inert.”

    This explains why the CFPF web site is so anti-Einstein–Einstein helped prove that matter is indeed a form of energy (yes, the old E=mc2), meaning that matter is not inert, and does not “do nothing”–energy is contained within matter, and is what keeps the atoms in matter together (it can also be argued that it’s the matter in atoms that generates the energy–take your pick). Energy in matter (better stated, matter IS energy) is why when you light something on fire, it gives off heat, and why when you cause a critical mass in plutonium, there’s a nuclear explosion. If Einstein was wrong about this, and if Lodge was right, not only would we not have any nuclear bombs, but we wouldn’t have fire, nor would we be able to extract energy from the food we eat, nor would we have any suns, where the pressure of all the atoms they contain causes their hydrogen atoms, to (according to http://www.solarviews.com/eng/sun.htm) “fuse together [four protons of hydrogen] to form one alpha particle…the alpha particle is about .7 percent less massive than the four protons. The difference in mass is expelled as energy and is carried to the surface of the Sun…where it is released as light and heat.” So much for Lodge’s idea that mere atoms are wimpy and inert, and don’t ever find themselves in a state where they give off energy. Photons, which are one of the primary forms of energy/matter that suns give off, are also particles of matter, as are all the other types of subatomic particles. While it’s true that an object in motion will continue in that motion until disturbed by an outside force, or by friction, it doesn’t mean matter contains no energy of its own–Lodge’s statement is a weird dysjunction, a non sequiter–the one statement doesn’t lead to or prove the other. All of Lodge’s arguments in which he tries to portray energy as existing only between atoms, is designed to support his belief in the “ether”, since that’s what he’s pinned his belief in the soul on–a thing apart from matter, a thing that exists in the spaces between matter. It’s an old philosophical and religious idea that dates back thousands of years, instead of being a principle of science–the idea that anything physical is “gross matter”, and that since you can’t see thoughts and ideas, they must be part of an unseen world, more refined and “better” than matter, which falls apart, dies, rots, etc. The knowledge that the brain generates thoughts through the energy of chemical reactions, rather than requiring an outside force, had been around for many years prior to Lodge’s time, so it’s odd he missed that lecture. There’s a lot of this “anti-matter” stance in the teachings of Jesus, and many others, and people like Lodge were either devout Christians or Catholics, or descended from them, and took these ideas for granted, and simply tried to find “proofs” for these concepts instead of examining whether the concepts themselves were true. Theirs was a clumsy, mechanistic way of trying to provide “new, scientific proof for the new age” for these ideas that were thousands of years old, but no more true for simply being old.

    1. WOW!
      Jesus, John,I wish you’d post more often.
      I could understand every word you wrote and what’s more it all makes sense.

      Thank you sincerely,

      shadows

      1. Furthermore
        Science has never proved anything either.

        What it did is provide a mechanical description or model that fitted observations until it could not be supported anymore.

        There are more avenues and scientists that are now opening up to the concept of other dimensions already while most are sticking to their guns and insist on patching up theories that don’t match with observations (like the big bang).

        Humans are humans, whether spiritual or scientific, all have a vested interest in protecting their territory.

        1. Furthermore
          Hi Richard,

          >>There are more avenues and scientists that are now opening up to the concept of other dimensions…

          The article, Alien Notion, speaks to that point rather eloquently.

          Kat

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