12.27.10
Posted in General at 1:13 pm by nemo
Is American in decline?
We have discussed this issue here many times, and Kennedy’s take is actually good.
The problem here is the ‘decline and fall of the Roman Empire’ analogy applied to American history, which won’t work. It took almost a millennium from the start of the Roman Republic to the ‘fall’ of the Empire, with the transition to Empire in the middle. The discussion confuses ‘empire’ in the sense of the Roman brand and ‘imperialistic construct’, often economic, which characterizes modern systems. Such constructs can have a moderate or democratic government, often waning under the influence of imperial corruptions. Unfortunately the usage is not consistent, and since the British Empire concept uses the term ‘empire’, our distinction won’t make it. But it helps to distinguish the cases in one’s mind.
The point is to see the right analogy: the case of ancient Athens as a propsperous enonomic imperialism that came to dominate its siblings. Followed by its fall after the Peloponesian War.
The perspective of Kennedy is reasonable: the USA is destroying itself, as did Athens, in its imperialistic nexus. It needs to abdicate this imperialism before it is too late, and to recover the integrity of its beginning. But the American system unfortunately slide into empire from the moment it began to expand westward, in the process losing control of the originally compassionate treatment of Indians. The tone of imperialism seeped in from the start.
Then the American system became the policeman of the atomic weapons technology, and it a field where things could have been worse, the coming of imperialism was a step claiming global security, etc, etc… It can be argued it was sacrificed on the altar of global cop for a greater good. I find that debatable, but…
In any case it is good to study the eonic effect (history-and-evolution.com) to see in perspective the difference between Athenian imperialism, the Roman Republic, soon to become imperialistic, and the Roman Empire, which followed the loss of republicanism. These issues have an historical meaning not only in a semantics of political systems, but in the absolute chronology of the evolution of civilization as such, with the onset of a new epoch, often dubbed the Axial Age, just at the time of the Roman Republic. A similar analog, for readers of World History and The Eonic Effect to explore, lies in the rise of the modern democratic revolutions in their absolute timing, which, surprise!, is not chance.
Whatever the case the USA is in deep trouble. Whether the first stages of a republic becoming an imperialism will degenerate into a full empire remains to be seen.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:03 pm by nemo
http://darwinleaks.blogspot.com/, in Portuguese…
UD explains
DarwinLeaks: New blog aims to leak Darwin stories, no jail time anticipated
O’Leary
With a hat tip, one supposes, to Wiki Leaker Julian Assange, a friend alerts me to DarwinLeaks hoping it will “do the same to Darwin and disciples from a history of science point of view.” The blog is in Portuguese, but can be translated at the site. It certainly looked interesting; when I checked in, the question was why the correspondence between Darwin and Mivart, the well-known anatomist with whom Darwin fell out, has never been released to the Internet. There is some thought that it may falsify some current explanations for the breach between the two men.
Well, there is only one way to find out about that …
That said, Darwinism thrives on its cultural power. It wouldn’t matter who said what or how it relates to reality. Most of the interesting revelations are pretty widely available, actually, but the cost of the cognitive dissonance of “Darwin was wrong about the key things” is much too high for many people. They suspect they look better in a monkey suit than they would in their own, and I am reluctant to offer an opinion.
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Posted in Science & Religion at 12:57 pm by nemo
Globalist Bookshelf > Global Religion
Darwin Versus Jesus
By Akbar Ahmed | Saturday, December 04, 2010
Why should the most powerful people on earth — the Americans — be fearful? And why should the richest people be angry? Akbar Ahmed writes in his book, “Journey Into America: The Challenge of Islam,” that if there were more true Christianity and less Darwinian thinking, there would be far more calmness in American social life.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:55 pm by nemo
Mary Midgley: ‘There are truths far too big to be conveyed in one go
‘Philosopher Mary Midgley on morality, mythology and the story of the Selfish Gene
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Posted in Evolution at 12:35 pm by nemo
Intelligent Design creationism is fundamentally wrong
To me the issue is not that ID is wrong, but that it arises at each point where the reigning paradigm fails, here the question of the origin of life. Fred Hoyle put the point very clearly, standard random evolutionary scenarios don’t work.
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Posted in biology at 12:20 pm by nemo
Human Immune System Has Emergency Backup PlanScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2010) — New research by scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences reveals that the immune system has an effective backup plan to protect the body from infection when the “master regulator” of the body’s innate immune system fails. The study appears in the December 19 online issue of the journal Nature Immunology.
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Posted in General at 12:18 pm by nemo
Genetic Variant That Can Lead to Severe Impulsivity IdentifiedScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2010) — A multinational research team led by scientists at the National Institutes of Health has found that a genetic variant of a brain receptor molecule may contribute to violently impulsive behavior when people who carry it are under the influence of alcohol. A report of the findings, which include human genetic analyses and gene knockout studies in animals, appears in the Dec. 23 issue of Nature.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:17 pm by nemo
Learning to Read the Genome: Most Detailed Annotation of Fruit-Fly Genome Points Way to Understanding All Organisms’ Genomes
ScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2010) — In the past decade researchers have made astonishing progress in the rapid and accurate sequencing of genomes from all realms of life. Yet the listing of chemical base pairs has gotten far ahead of understanding how the information they contain becomes functional. Even the best-understood genomes conceal mysteries.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:15 pm by nemo
Ever-Sharp Urchin Teeth May Yield Tools That Never Need HoningScienceDaily (Dec. 26, 2010) — To survive in a tumultuous environment, sea urchins literally eat through stone, using their teeth to carve out nooks where the spiny creatures hide from predators and protect themselves from the crashing surf on the rocky shores and tide pools where they live.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:08 pm by nemo
Pentagon’s Christmas Present: Largest Military Budget Since World War II
“The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates
American military spending for 2009 to have accounted for 43 percent
of the world total. Carl Conetta, co-director of the Project on
Defense Alternatives, earlier this year estimated the 2010 U.S.
defense budget to constitute 47 percent of total worldwide military
expenditures and to amount to 19 percent of all American federal
spending.”
By Rick Rozoff
December 23, 2010
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Pentagon-s-Christmas-Prese-by-Rick-
Rozoff-101223-140.html
On December 22 both houses of the U.S. Congress unanimously passed a
bill authorizing $725 billion for next year’s Defense Department budget.
The bill, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year
2011, was approved by all 100 senators as required and by a voice
vote in the House.
The House had approved the bill, now sent to President Barack Obama
to sign into law, five days earlier in a 341-48 roll call, but needed
to vote on it again after the Senate altered it in the interim.
The proposed figure for the Pentagon’s 2011 war chest includes, in
addition to the base budget, $158.7 billion for what are now
euphemistically referred to as overseas contingency operations: The
military occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:05 pm by nemo
Published on Monday, December 27, 2010 by OtherWords
Not Much to Celebrate with Obama’s Tax Deal
It could spell trouble for Social Security.
by Karen Dolan
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/27
We enter 2011 with a few more dollars in our paychecks. For about 98 percent of Americans, the extension of Bush tax cuts and the new payroll tax holiday will make it easier for us to afford a gallon, rather than a quart, of milk for our families each month, and to fill our tanks almost as high as we did with lower gas prices last year.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:03 pm by nemo
Published on Monday, December 27, 2010 by TruthDig.com
2011: A Brave New Dystopia
by Chris Hedges
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/27-1
The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:00 pm by nemo
RG mail
Four Scenarios for the End of the American Century by 2025
by Alfred W McCoy
The Huffington Post (December 06 2010)
Crossposted with TomDispatch.com (December 05 2010)
Note: The original version of this article contains many links to
references. See URL at end.
A soft landing for America forty years from now? Don’t bet on it.
The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come
far more quickly than anyone imagines. If Washington is dreaming of
2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic
assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025,
just fifteen years from now, it could all be over except for the
shouting.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfred-w-mccoy/the-decline-and-fall-of-t_1_b_792570.html
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:58 am by nemo
RG mail
The internet is being captured by organised trolls. It’s time we fought
back.
by George Monbiot
The Guardian (December 14 2010)
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/12/13/reclaim-the-cyber-commons/
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:55 am by nemo
RG mail
France’s Total and US based Madagascar Oil tangle with military
governments to push tar sands projects forward
http://www.mediacoop.ca/story/devastation-madagascar/5524
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12.26.10
Posted in Science & Religion at 2:09 pm by nemo
Why Religious People Are Scared of Atheists
Religious believers commonly attack atheists simply for existing. Do out-of-the-closet atheists — even polite ones — challenge attempts at theocracy?
The title of this post seems to suggest that the New Atheists are afraid of relgiion, and well they might be, if their strategy is such a know-nothing approach, refusing to study religion, and really meaning Christianity when they say ‘religion’.
The problem is that Christianity confuses people, who look at the decayed versions of various sets of believers, many of them unable to understand what they believe. They are not required to understand, they just float along with the organized church. Behind that lies an obscure but potent framework of the gnostic Christianity which packs a lot of power, and which is apparently beyond the understanding of those trained in scientism. Its occult self-defense is an impenetrable bastion of invisible influence, a mockery to the mentality of the type we see in the New Atheists. I, for one, am critical of Christianity on this basis, that its adherents are stuck in formation they are not allowed to understand. Critics of religion routinely miscalculate here.
The question of faith is an example. The challenge here is good, ‘faith’ has become a misleading falsehood, but critics win the battle, but lose the war.
The reason, as Kant well understood, is that while metaphysics collapses, its significance doesn’t disappear just because our minds can’t resolve it.
I think that if the New Atheists are scoring some victories it is because the old defenders of Christianity have ditched it, mindful of the fate of the Axial religions, and moving on to new things. They may want New Atheists to win a few rounds to get the system moving beyond its current sclerosis. I can think of nothing more resembling god belief than the new atheists disbelief. Anyone who wishes to escape these entanglements should be agnostic, and not get caught in dialectical tricks that can reverse themselves.
In another sense we should be afraid indeed of the New Atheists: they are the same mindless true believers that create intolerant religions, and the religion-substitute of atheism/Darwnism/scientism is a deadly mix in the hands of true believers. If we look at Tibet we see what will happen in the end if this thinking becomes dominant: we will be killed for dissent.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:59 pm by nemo
The Great Transition
Behind the transition of the eonic effect is the Great Transition that is the once and future evolution of man. We cannot know, as yet, the real nature of this evolution, whose action in the past is visible in the descent of pre-man, and the emergence of civilization, no doubt on the way to the completed speciation of Man, homo sapiens sapiens, a creature not yet in existence.
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Posted in General at 1:55 pm by nemo
The Case of the Missing Centuries
Science is too important to leave to scientists, who have shown that unaided they will drive science into extinction, as in the ancient world (blaming it on religion).
We need to be aware that science in the early modern was the result of the macroevolutionary process indicated by the eonic sequence. In the wake of that of that sequence the future is uncertan, and we can already see the deviation in the crystalization of scientism.
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Posted in General at 1:52 pm by nemo
Last and First Men
Nietzsche had it backwards: the ‘last man’ is the last humanoid on the way to a new species, Man, the descent of man complete. Man is not yet man. The last man will then be the first Man. How that happens is unknown to us, and if we can’t say how the early ‘first’ men evolved, we certainly can’t predict the future, or expect Darwinian nonsense to explain it.
We cannot judge that potential on the basis of Nietzsche’s limited philosophy, which was a decadent version of Kant and Schopenhauer, confused by Darwinism and genocideal eugenics.
We must remain alert to Darwinists harboring secret eugenic genocide in the name of evolution.
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Posted in General at 12:50 pm by nemo
The Curse of Mideonic Empire
The course of civilization, carefully studied with the eonic periodization, shows that all the advances in political formation occur in the transitions, while the middle periods degenerate into empire. We are seeing that with a vengeance now in the degeneration of the American republic into empire.
We need to get a grip on our politics and preserve our advances.
And it might help to see that Darwinism is confusing people. It doesn’t work that way, as a bunch of science idiots induce decline and mayhem in the name of evolution.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:47 pm by nemo
Stream and sequence
We are condemned to evolutionary theories that reflect the state of our technology, at best. But real evolution is like the technology of a superadvanced species, beyond our easy understanding, in theory.
The stream and sequence nimbleness of evolutionary teleology operating on two levels eludes our easy grasp as the dumbing down of Darwinism proceeds apace.
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Posted in General at 12:44 pm by nemo
Wallace’s second opinion
Our views of evolution result from the criminal act of Darwin’s plagiarism of Wallace, who ended up changing his mind about selectionist theories, even as Darwin, and his successors, were stuck forever in the Darwin legacy.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:42 pm by nemo
History and Evolution
Science and Darwinism is even more of a delusion than the god confusions of the religions.
Science has no understanding of what evolution is, save on the level of the fossil record, which shows the fact of evolution. The reality of evolution is unknown to science because it has never observed it. Studying world history can help, since it is the only record of ancient facts at the level of centuries/real time in existence. Everything else is too coarse-grained to really observe evolution in action.
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Posted in General at 12:39 pm by nemo
More on Holy Ignorance
Discussions of secularism invariably associate this with anti-religion, but that is a misunderstanding of the rise of the modern which started with the Protestant
Reformation, the first of the modern revolutions, against medieval theocracy. The defeat of theocracy to create a secular pluralism does not give licence to arrogant efforts to equate the secular with the atheistic. That tactic is false and will backfire. I personally think that secularism is moving beyond the Axial religions, but possibly to create new ones, hopefully real religions. The best foundation for this is secularism itself, and the explosion of global spirituality, for good or ill, shows that secularism is filled with religious vitality.
It is easy to critique fundamentalism, too easy. It makes the smart stupid feel superior to stupid smart. All fundamentalism means is that the less than intelligent are foundering in their religion, and using it as a tortoise refuge against the future.
The sense that irrational pseudo-science like Darwinism is overtaking the secular fanatics, and will simply bide their time.
Attacking religion in general is not the same as overcoming Christianity which has nothing to do with these fundamentalists, and which has a very deep and subtle interior complete with a manifold of occulted aspects.
It is a marvel of false courage to see the new atheists presume to a kind of omniscience and attack this formation with even more ignorance than the fundamentalists.
The reign of positivism that arrived after the Enlightenment was actually the instand decline of that Enlightenment and has spawned false instruments such as Darwinism and scientism which are subtly undermining modernity far more than reactionary fundamentalists.
We need a more robust and balanced modernity and secularism with no illusions about the complexity of religion in world history, and with less effort to find fault with the worst of fundamentalism to denigrate all of religion.
I always recommend two things as exercises for self-proclaimed secularists who are against all religion: fine, but translate the canons of self-consciousness into secular language, and take a page out of Kant who undermined religion in a far superior fashion to most humanists with his examination of metaphysics. The first point is essential, since the loss of any sense of human higher consciousness in the name of scientism will prove catastrophic in the end.
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Posted in Booknotes at 12:24 pm by nemo
Faith and Modernity
By ALAN WOLFE
Published: December 24, 2010
Every winter Fox News, seeking to stir up anger through the land, uncovers evidence of a war on Christmas. Secular humanists ignorant of religion and hostile to its traditions, someone in the studio will declare, want us to say “Happy Holiday” or give Kwanzaa equal standing. But Christmas, as its name suggests, is about Christ. These enemies of Christianity will stop at nothing to get their way. Not even Santa Claus is sacred to them.
Actually, as the brilliant French social scientist Olivier Roy points out in “Holy Ignorance,” it is those defending Christmas who are not being true to their traditions and teachings. There are no Christmas dinners in the Bible, which is why America’s Puritans, strict adherents of what that venerated text offers, never sat down by the raging fire awaiting St. Nick; indeed, they briefly banned Christmas in Massachusetts.
Yule as we celebrate it today owes more to Charles Dickens than to Thomas Aquinas. Our major solstice holiday is what Roy calls a “cultural construct” rather than a sectarian ceremony, which explains why Muslims buy halal turkeys and Jews transformed Hanukkah into a gift-giving occasion. Mistakenly believing that Christmas is sacred, those who defend it find themselves propping up the profane. The Christ they want in Christmas is a product not of Nazareth but of Madison Avenue.
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Posted in General at 12:16 pm by nemo
What would “victory” look like?
http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/568825-what-would-victory-look-like
Complete victory of New Atheism would be a calamity, and the nature of the question suggests the (a)theocratic false ambitions of the New Atheists, who have been hyped into thinking atheism some kind of scientific proof to it.
The passing away of Xtianity is probably inevitable, over a very long time, but the next stage of consciousness should be a robust study of the history of religion, the development of self-consciousness, and a kind of Kantian wariness at the tendency of all groups, religious or atheists, to create dogamatic or totalitarian cults out of metaphysical beliefs.
The intolerance of the new atheists, even to agnostics or other types of atheists, is an important warning that they are the same idiots in a new disguise as the Christians.
Lest this seem exaggerated consider Michael Parenti’s ‘new atheist’ book in the wake of the others, with its diatribe against Tibet: there ‘atheism’ means looking the other way at the destruction of Buddhists through murder ethnicide, and indoctrination.
The only safe stance is an intelligent agnosticism, and the intolerance toward even that shows the new atheists in their cultic infatuation, a mood created by Dawkins and his clever promotions of pseudo-science.
So let us fear this victory, and not let it happen. There is no need for victory. All that is needed is a pluralistic society where opinion is not controlled.
Note: this article equates atheism and secularism, an outrageous distortion of terms.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:02 pm by nemo
Five years ago, “intelligent design” ruling in Dover case set a legal landmark
The Dover trial was a complete fraud whose expose of ID stopped short of exposing the Darwin propaganda machine.
The correct stance for the education system is to be skeptical of evolutionary theories and simply teach evolutionary facts.
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Posted in General at 11:59 am by nemo
‘Un-Growth Hormone’ Increases Longevity, Researchers FindScienceDaily (Dec. 23, 2010) — A compound which acts in the opposite way as growth hormone can reverse some of the signs of aging, a research team that includes a Saint Louis University physician has shown. The finding may be counter-intuitive to some older adults who take growth hormone, thinking it will help revitalize them.
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