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News Briefs 04-11-2005

By Katon

We humans disagree – a lot, and about practically everything. But if there’s one thing most of us do agree on, it might just be, as Morpheus said, that there’s something wrong with the world. And possibly the one thing we disagree about most is, why? What’s your take? Genetics? Alien Reptilian overlords? Stupidity? The Illuminati Conspiracy? Original sin? Devolution? Cosmic rays? Ignorance? If you’re looking for answers, today’s John Taylor Gatto ‘essay’ is well worth your time. By Page 2 of his prologue, I was hooked.

  • ‘Know Thyself’ – Easier Said Than Done.
  • Researchers explain our all-too-human difficulty in deciding when enough is enough.
  • The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile: John Taylor Gatto’s online book The Underground History of American Education.
  • The Ivy Curtain: The code word is ‘character’ – a quality ‘thought to be frequently lacking among Jews but present almost congenitally among high-status Protestants’. A review of The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Amazon US & UK.
  • Washington Post gives Greg Taylor’s book a mention in ‘The Man (make that, Men) Riding Dan Brown’s ‘Code’ Tales‘.
  • Remains of astronomer Copernicus believed excavated in Polish cathedral.
  • Quarry yields homes older than Stonehenge.
  • The original fall Guy: In 1605, papist conspirators planned to assassinate James I by using 36 barrels of gunpowder to simultaneously destroy the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey. A review of Gunpowder Plots (Amazon UK), Remember Remember the Fifth of November (Amazon US & UK), and Gunpowder: The Players Behind the Plot (Amazon US & UK).
  • With more reviews, Gunpowder and God first provides this tidbit:Macbeth, first performed in 1606 for a court still shaken by its narrow escape, is the Gunpowder Plot’s lasting memorial.
  • New mathematical scheme can identify dinosaurs based on measurements of their copious Mesozoic dental droppings.
  • Pacific’s first settlers, the Lapita people, buried their dead in many different ways – some in ‘weird yoga positions’.
  • Two centuries ago, maps depicted the Garden of Eden, and some people believed mountains grew organically. Then along came the map that changed the world.
  • Recently-released WWII documents say U.S.-British relations were threatened by ‘a seething mass of loose women’ in London.
  • Vatican says faithful should listen to science.
  • 900 years ago, Adelard of Bath offered a perceptive analysis of the rightful role of science in a faith-based society.
  • In The Isis Thesis (Amazon US), Judy King explains the 21st century science contained in Egyptian funerary texts – the goal of which was to, at death, turn humans into gods by using bacteria for horizontal gene transfer of human DNA.
  • On a related note: Japanese group intends to ‘infuse’ the DNA of recently deceased loved ones into trees, turning the plants into living memorials.
  • Is science driven by inspired guesswork?
  • Templars & Rose Croix by Robert Ambelain, Translated by Piers A. Vaughan (2005) – online book in pdf format.
  • Japan’s Hayabusa space probe closes in on asteroid landing site.
  • Astronomers say Draco’s glow is the beginning of time.
  • Mark at Cosmic Variance explains those Ripples from the Oldest Stars.
  • Methane-producing microbes discovered in deserts here on Earth bolster theory that Martian methane was caused by life.
  • Milky Way’s big black hole gets downsized – some think it’s just a cluster of dead neutron stars.
  • Courtesy of NASA: Blue Marble – The Next Generation.
  • Gravity, Oreos and a Theory of Everything: How Lisa Randall, author of Warped Passages, Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, helped foment a revolution in string theory. Amazon US & UK.
  • Physicists offer new approach to studying antimatter in the lab.
  • Lightning researcher shocked to find that lab-generated sparks also make x-rays.
  • Can sound waves travel faster than the speed of light?
  • Scientists develop silicon chip that can control the speed of light.
  • Holy aviation, Batman!: Sir Frederick’s batwing is to be the commercial eco-plane of the future.
  • Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory issue dire prediction: If humans don’t curb use of fossil fuels, the ice caps will disappear, oceans will rise 23 feet (7 meters), and forests will cover earth’s poles.
  • Pinatubo eruption may have delayed climate-related ocean rises.
  • Scientists gain new insights into ’frozen’ methane beneath ocean floor.
  • Scientists pinpoint how gamma-linolenic acid, available in evening primrose oil, acts like powerful cancer drug. Left unsaid: Some people have a genetic glitch that prevents them from changing dietary fats into GLA.
  • Bumblebees have a surprisingly sophisticated visual system.
  • BrainGate: Matthew Nagel, paralyzed from the neck down, can now play pong, draw, and use his computer because his brain has assimilated a chip-implant and controls it as if it’s part of the body – like a hand.
  • New live-speech translation technology brings Star Trek‘s ‘universal translator’ several steps closer.
  • Sign language improves ability to grasp spatial concepts.
  • Brain structure of people with autism is an exaggeration of the normal male brain.
  • Your brain is a time machine, but scientists have no clue how most of it works.
  • Alcohol may help preserve brain health.
  • Research on instant messaging finds surprises.
  • Google makes books available online, but there’s a caveat.
  • Wikipedia aims for offline formats to distribute in the developing world.
  • CIA accused of running a network of secret and unaccountable prisons in foreign countries.
  • Store windows will soon gaze back at window-shoppers.
  • US Supreme Court debates religious freedom case involving worship with hallucinogenic ayahuasca tea.
  • Hundreds arrested for sorcery. Sorceress says strange teachings in Leviticus led to use of menstrual blood to see ‘invisible things’.
  • Female sci-fi fans now outnumber men for the first time.

A Big Thanks to Pam and Greg.

Quote of the Day:

In the last five years there has been a profound and radical change in the basic policies or moral values of our country.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter

Kat
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24 Comments

  1. Jesus Kat, is it Friday?
    I swear I woke up this morning and it was Monday.
    The news looks terrific and I will read it over the weekend when I can keep my eyes open.

    I saw something good today I want to tell you about.It was a new episode of The Simpsons,and in it the writers were taking the mickey out of the political situation in America.
    I nearly cried.I was so happy to see it.It was the episode where Bart accidently moons the flag and the whole family is detained in a re-education facility.
    The reason I got so emotional was because when people can laugh at themselves you know there really isn’t a problem.
    America is going to be OK.
    I can feel it.
    Cartoons are the very best form of media as so many people watch them and they are played over and over and over.

    Avagoodweegend.

    love shadows

    1. Rechecking my calendar
      Yep, it’s Friday.

      >>Bart accidently moons the flag and the whole family is detained in a re-education facility.

      That cracked me up. LOL 😉

      If you’ve got broadband, you can also watch hilarious clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on your computer.

      Kat

    2. have no fear dear
      shadows, don’t fret pet, I’m here and I’m cracking my whip. They don’t call us the silent majority for nothing. Like I have said before, laughter is the best medicine, as long as we can keep things in perspective we will be alright, it’s just at the present we are bent but not broken, struggling but not totally down. It’s so sad that the world has such a narrow view of American citizens. Yes, there are so many jerks, bad apples, idiots, fools, ego maniacs and gas bags. But they are everywhere, not just America. We all just have to keep on each day doing what we can. Now, where did I put that whip … Love, Pam —————————–Truth is stranger than fiction.

  2. Great Post!
    Kat

    I really enjoyed your post! I don’t have any specific favorites; but, “The Brain Is A Time Machine”, “The Milky Ways Big Black Hole Gets Downsized”, and “Gunpowder And God” were very interesting!

    Kennc

  3. Global warming
    “Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory issue dire prediction: If humans don’t curb use of fossil fuels, the ice caps will disappear, oceans will rise 23 feet (7 meters), and forests will cover earth’s poles”.

    Forests at the North pole? I was taught that land only existed at the south pole, and that the ‘land’ of the north pole was simply sea ice, floating in the sea.

    Either LLN Labs have got it very wrong, or the reporter has. (methinks it was the reporter!)

    Nostra

    1. Forests at the poles
      Since I wrote that ‘TDG headline’, I double-checked the article. Yep, here’s the actual sentence from the article:
      “Forests would cover the North and South poles.”

      Perhaps the reporter should have said, forests will cover all the land in polar regions.

      I forgot to mention, winter will also be a thing of the past.

      Kat

  4. Pacific settlers’ burial habits
    [quote]Pacific’s first settlers, the Lapita people, buried their dead in many different ways – some in ‘weird yoga positions’.[/quote]

    Thats what happens when you don’t have a shovel and can’t get the hole any bigger.;)

  6. Knowing yourself
    Damn right it’s hard!

    Whyso? It’s old news — old as Freud. We each have an unconscious, in other words, we each have one whole half (or perhaps even more than half) of our own minds that are invisible to us. Half of our own minds are alien to us, or at least stays alien to those who do not engage in rather strenuous psychotherapy or other forms of “soul-searching”.

    If you want to know yourself, you first have to acknowledge and admit that you don’t ALREADY know yourself, and I suspect that for most of us, this is the biggest hurdle to get over. Our own pride prevents us from that humbling admission. Indeed, science itself has yet to truly embrace Freud’s shocking realization of the existence of the unconscious half of the mind.

    – Peter Novak

    How divided are you already?
    Find out at http://www.divisiontheory.com

    1. Much more than half
      Although Freud did spark a new thread, he was also totally out in the left field in his interpretations.

      Jung would be a better resource in relation to the unconscious.

      So far as I am concerned, it is not a question of two halves. I would rather say that there are two major actors, one of which is much greater than the other although the other, the soul, is fundamental to the former’s plan.

      We will never truly know ourselves until we have had the possibility of really defining what we are. For this, we must be made aware of the origin by the origin itself.

      The fusion of spirit and soul, the dilution of psychological, experimental parameters of the incarnated, is equivalent to the addition of dimensions to the mind that include what is already its reality. Without that integration, man does not own its own ID, its universal number, his name. He remains a little creature resulting from a plan he believes is the result of his free will.

      By admitting that we don’t know ourselves we simply open the door to certain realizations. Still, we cannot force those realizations to come although we can intuit them.

      Human consciousness as it stands is almost totally unconsciousness in the Jungian sense. Proof of this, the impression of ourselves is totally conditioned by unconscious reflexes.

      The ego is quite apt at rationalizing everything and identifying to the first feeling it perceives. By doing this, it will constantly identify to energies that are not his as he does not control them and could not do so. Therefore, not being in control of these psychological reflexes, he would rather think of them as being his nature.

      So long as he wants to associate to his conditioning, he will be that conditioning.

      For man to know himself, he must already have met his creator, which is himself in another plane of reality. Short of that, he will be caught in endless philosophical or esoteric exercises that will render for the benefit of his soul an image that conforms to his life plan’s conditioning.

    2. Being Jung.
      Attempting to know yourself through Freud’s methodology is a recipe for destruction, in my opinion. While the basis of his work is very useful, I’ve found that when he treads into hazy territory involving the mind his own agenda undermines his ability to be as objective as possible. Besides, he was too doom and gloom to be a very productive tool.

      Now, Jung on the other hand … :-J

      ” There is no Religion higher than the Truth. “

    3. Reply to Peter & Richard
      Hi Peter,

      >> If you want to know yourself, you first have to acknowledge and admit that you don’t ALREADY know yourself, and I suspect that for most of us, this is the biggest hurdle to get over.

      Well said. You and Richard both make good points.

      But to arrive at the point of wanting to know yourself, you have to be both willing and able to think. That’s the reason why I posted Gatto’s book — and even included a link to page 2 of his Prologue in my intro — instead of posting something like Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. Gatto’s Prologue goes so far toward explaining why so many people lack critical thinking skills that, if I had the money, I’d pay everyone here a dollar a page just to read it — and I’d pay them $10 a page to discuss it!

      It’s easy to see why humanity was so ignorant before books and schools became widely available. But if we really want to understand what’s wrong with the world, the first thing we need to do is take a penetrating look into why so many people are ignorant now.

      Kat

      1. Seems interesting…
        I will read it when I get a chance.

        One thing btw, it is quite likely that for a large number of people, the matter is that from a young age, childred were mislead my mislead people who in turn had been mislead themselves in their young age by mislead people and so on since the beginning of this age.

        What I mean is that in the 21st century, the problem is less one of intelligence than it is one of information. Intelligence can become sclerosed by densified memory though.

        Unfortunately, unless one is being instructed in a young age, his perceived values, those acquired at a very young age, will have densified by the time of being a teenager and beyond, especially passed 30 years of age. This makes the mind far less malleable since this process gives us an impression of righteousness, one of being right, of knowing what is true or not, what is good and what is bad.

        Proper instruction that proceeds from the need to render people free, free of mind and free of other pesky psychological traps, if acquired in a young age should make it less prone to remain magnetized by memorial emotional values that lead to habits and routine, including the thought process that does not proceed from an act of conscious inception. On the contrary, the education that we receive in our youth is seated on the need to give oneself to the country, to think like others and to be like others. We are taught that we need models so that we can become the likeness of someone else instead of realizing what we fundamentally are and becoming what we could have become.

        This is a very important phenomenon of the psychology of societies. Once a mind has recognized that he belongs to a group or a society, the values of that society, even if they were induced artificially and even if they have no basis in absoluteness, become the values of the individual who from then on has no authority over his right to speak. Even if he is allowed to speak, he cannot say what he wants but must fit within the confines of what is already culturally acceptable in his social environment in hope of being recognized as someone who brings something to society.

        Free will cannot proceed from these mechanisms that create a social conditioning and reinforce collective unconsciousness rather than keep the mind aware, awaken and objective; free to judge because free of judgment.

        Unfortunately, as you certainly have figured already, if the individuals within a group are confined to reflexions on what is already considered the basis of a fundamental truth, cultural values induced by a system for the benefit of that system, they can never or rarely bring any real change to the mentalities, those already believing that they cannot learn but only refine what they believe they already know; which is what they will call learning.

        Really learning is not quite as tiresome as simply accumulating memorial contents based on the perpetual complexification of concepts that keep on looping upon themselves.

        What we need is less to be taught than to be instructed.

        If we were instructed on the mechanism of our minds and the laws behind those mechanisms, we would be in position to see by ourselves instead of trying to memorize all the possibilities of life, question/answer style.

        1. Prologue
          >>I will read it when I get a chance.

          Gatto’s prologue is only 8 short pages. And only 7 if you start with my link to page 2.

          You could have read it in far less time than it took to write your reply. 😉

          Kat

      2. Gatto’s Prologue
        Much of what is in there I agree with.

        Surely, what transpires in the remaining of this essay is interesting as well.

        Its like this kid who says he is talking to this little friend nobody knows about but him; he gets slapped behind the head: ‘Stop being silly, you know there is no little friend and you are ridiculous’.

        The problem is that if the kids were taken out of hte school system, they would fall under the permanent guidance of their parents who were also manufactured by that system.

        The kid must be able to see through his education and the school system, able to go along with it without ever losing sight of his identity.

        This is not a given thing, everything and everybody will pressure him into submission to common sense. It is possible though and it can happen.

        At least, one can hope that there is enough light left under the pile of conditioning so that people can read this kind of material with an open eye, an open mind. It will not change the system but it may eventually give their own kids a chance at being free of mind while retaining the ability to work in conjunction with rather than for a society that will do everything to suck them dry before discarding them.

        1. the pile of conditioning
          The Pile of Conditioning: Exposing the Factors that Suck Humanity Dry by the Knights of the Daily Grail.

          Now that would make a great title. 😉

          I really feel sorry for kids these days. The gauntlet they have to run just to have a decent life as an adult makes Perceval’s quest look like a piece of cake.

          Kat

  7. Geez Kat, where did you get all this from?
    I think this is the best lot of news you have ever done.My favourites, to mention just a few….

    The Map that Changed the World.Have you read the book by Simon Winchester? It is fantastic and Smith is one of my heroes.The job he did making the map was in my opinion one of the more stunning labours of love I have heard of.And he did it with enemies hiding behind every tree waiting to bring him down, which they did.
    Anyone who has not read the book should put it on their Xmas list.

    The Isis Thesis.Absolutely amazing! The best thing I have read for a long time.I know that Hitler decided the descent of Jewish people from their mothers, thus the mitrochondial DNA.
    It is mentioned in the article about the Ivy league colleges.
    I would love to read this book and it will go on my Xmas list.

    A seething mass of loose women in London?
    They should have thought themselves damn lucky to have them in my opinion.
    There they were, fighting one of the most evil men in history and all they could think of was the morals of the English women.
    They certainly would have made the whole damn thing a lot easier to cope with.

    Fancy our Greg being mentioned in The Washingtom Post.That is really a claim to fame.People will read the article and write down the name of his book for when Brown’s new book comes out.

    I still have a lot to check out but I have a lot to print out as well.Thanks for your hard work Kat,and take it easy.

    love shadows

  8. Female Sci FI fans
    I sort of resent the repetition of old stereotypes about men who are interested in sci fi, and the idea that women have somehow made it all about clever characterization and the “big questions.” Most male sci fi fans are–another aspect of the stereotype that happens to be true–very smart, and as interested in intellectual matters and artistic quality as are our alleged female superiors. Looking for dimwitted male boneheads? The sports bar’s *that* way.

    1. Right on Ash
      I always say that you have to be very smart to read sci-fi and I have a sister in law who reads it and she is a clever woman.I don’t read much sci-fi for that very reason, I can’t understand a lot of it.
      I absolutely love the stuff I have read but can’t find much that I can get into.

      shadows

      1. That reminds me…
        A few weeks ago you said you’d watched a video of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and were now interested in reading the books.

        I intended to give you a piece of advice on that. DO NOT watch any more of the movies before reading the corresponding book! And for pete’s sake, start at the beginning. They’re so popular, your local library is bound to have them. Or, if you’d rather buy them, you can probably find at least the first 3 second hand. The first one is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, US, or Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, UK.

        Kat

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