History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
http://darwiniana.com/2011/11/28/spare-me-the-conspiracy-nut-charge/#comment-360250
The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report About 9/11 Is Unscientific and False [Paperback]
David Ray Griffin
The facts here are shocking.
How Bats ‘Hear’ Objects in Their PathScienceDaily (Nov. 28, 2011) — By placing real and virtual objects in the flight paths of bats, scientists at the Universities of Bristol and Munich have shed new light on how echolocation works. Their research is published today in Behavioural Processes
I should rush to point out that the term ‘Hinduism’ as per the previous post is highly ambiguous. I criticize ‘Hinduism’ because I distinguish it from the true Indian tradition, which is classic, deep, and one of the great legacies of mankind. That legacy was already ancient at the point that ‘Hinduism’ came into being. The issues here are complex, but at least we can say that Brahminism, and the Code of Manu are later imposters.
It is these issues that are relevant to a revolutionary Buddhism. And if you study Jainism, wary of its now confusing surface culture, you see glimpses of the more ancient ‘Indic religion’ that was corrupted in later decline.
So, while some attack Hinduism out of prejudice, I criticize it frequently out of respect for the real Indian tradtion. Yoga, for example, belongs to that earlier tradition, not to Hinduism. And so on.
Occupy Buddha: Reflections on Occupy Wall Street
Perhaps this should be ‘Occupy reactionary buddhism, or Tibetan buddhism…
I am glad for this article, agree or not. Read… It is good to point out that Buddha was one of the 1%. This ambiguity pervades Buddhism, even as it, at least originally, was a revolutionary movement in India, the reason perhaps for its traditionalist condemnation there. Buddhist revolution took over India for several centuries, but lost out finally to the neo-Brahmin reaction with its creepy distorted Hinduism that has corrupted the great legacy of Indian religion.
The history here is charmingly told in this book, often discussed here and at The Gurdjieff Con, which has most of the text scanned for the web:
The role of Bhagavad Gita in Indian history–Prem Nath Bazaz
Buddhism attempted to take over India and rationalize Hinduism. It’s failure has left such monstrosities as the law of caste intact. Bazaz’s account needs some further scholarly work, and I often wonder why this type of analysis never finds any venue in the sterile world of conservatized New Age Buddhism, with its sweet smiling Dalai Lama fronting for a reactionary fascist occultism (now mostly defunct).
We have to wonder, not so much that Buddha was from the 1% (after enlightenment that was no longer the case!!), but why Buddhism conservatized in its last phase into an occult conspiracy against modernism, democracy, and spiritual autonomy.
We need a new Buddhist Reformation, yielding a post-Buddhism, and even a movement that can recover Buddhism’s revolutionary fire. OWS!
Many of my Buddhist friends are sympathetic to this movement, and want to help. Many of them, like me, were themselves youthful demonstrators once, long ago when the issues were civil rights and the Vietnam war. Just as now, that awakening in the 1960s was to perennial truths to which we had up to then been oblivious. “Black people in the South can’t vote! They are oppressed!” Yes, as they had been forever. “This war is unjust. It’s horrible! The innocent die!”–another perennial truth. In those days it was television, rather than the internet, that broadcast these truths into everyone’s living rooms and woke us up.
I was once one of those youthful anti-war protestors, linking hands and facing down riot police armed with batons and guns. We self-righteously referred to the police in those days as “pigs,” ignoring the unwiseness of hurling such insults at a phalanx of heavily armed men. We too were beaten, bloodied, and in a few cases killed. When I look back through the lens of my own youth at today’s protestors and their pithy slogans (“We are the 99%”) I see myself.
However, we Buddhists all need to remember that Gautama was in his time a one-percenter or worse–he was, after all, a prince. He had his own awakening from unknowing (or so the accounts of his life tell) when he walked out of the palace as though for the first time and saw what was really happening — “People are old and poor! People are sick! They die! Look, a monk!” This is an archetypal moment (referred to in Buddhist literature as the “four sightings”); I think it happens in some fashion for each generation–an onrush of awakening that keeps societies from sinking totally into the quicksand of their own corruption.
Published on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 by CNN
Egypt’s Elections Can’t Be Trustedby Cynthia Schneider and Khaled Abol Naga
“The people and the army are one hand,” the chant of Egypt’s January 25th revolution on the eve of President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, has yielded in the face of toxic gases, rubber bullets and live ammunition from the security forces, composed of army and police, to “the army and the police are one dirty hand.”
Michael Behe and I had the same reaction after reading Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Our reaction was, “Why haven’t we heard any of this stuff before?”
The answer is simple. All criticisms of Darwinian orthodoxy were successfully branded by Darwinists as the mindless fantasies of religious fanatics whose purpose was to destroy “science.”
But let us ask, Who are those who have engaged in mindless fantasies concerning origins?
In the information age, the notion that random errors can produce highly sophisticated biological information, information-processing machinery, and the associated error-detection-and-repair mechanisms and algorithms, is so preposterous that I conclude that Darwinists have either lost their minds, are pathetically uninformed, or have chosen to deny evidence, rationality, and the discoveries of modern science in order pursue a thoroughly irrational commitment to materialistic philosophy.
In an attempt to defend the clearly preposterous, Darwinists have become the preeminent enemies of science concerning origins.
By BRIAN HANDWERK – NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NEWS
Added: Monday, 28 November 2011 at 9:57 AM
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/644037-great-dying-lasted-200-000-years
Long before the dinosaurs, a bleak environment of widespread fires and oxygen-poor coastal seawater killed off some 90 percent of all Earth’s living species. The whole process took less than 200,000 years, according to a new study of the planet’s most catastrophic mass-extinction event.
The end-Permian extinction probably isn’t as well known as the Cretaceous extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. But the end-Permian collapse nearly spelled the end of life on Earth.
Now scientists have painted a picture of just how fast the “Great Dying” unfolded 252 million years ago.
While the causes of the Permian extinction remain a mystery, from here on out, any theory must be compatible with a 200,000-year time frame centered around 252.28 million years ago, the authors assert. This time span is span indicated by analysis of fossils and chemical evidence of changes in Earth’s carbon cycle in rocks from southern China to Tibet.
The two-millennia period is far shorter than the time span that has been widely accepted, according to study co-author Shu-zhong Shen, a paleontologist at the China’s Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology.
The rock and fossil data show that the nightmare scenario for living species unfolded on land and sea simultaneously, said co-author Sam Bowring of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
As of now, Bowring said, “whatever mechanism you invoke [as the cause of the mass extinction] can’t be purely marine or purely continental.”
Wherever a life-form might have been during the Great Dying, the picture would have been anything but sunny, the researchers say.
“Widespread wildfires played an important role in the rapid deforestation at the end of Permian,” said Nanjing’s Shen, citing plentiful charcoal-rich and soot-bearing beds found in sedimentary rock of the period.
Rocks also provide hard evidence, via carbon isotope signatures, of oceans under stress as the carbon cycle was reorganized and oxygen levels fell during the Great Dying.
“Marine-organism fossils during the extinction period show a shift from normal species to those who could better tolerate low-oxygen waters,” Shen said.
Also, “survivors of the extinction were smaller than the species that came before them—a phenomenon known as the Lilliput effect,” after an island home to tiny humans in Gulliver’s Travels. This shrinkage is partly attributable to the low oxygen levels, according to Shen.
MIT’s Bowring added, “The beauty of those rocks is that we can see what’s happening before the extinction event, during the extinction event, and after the extinction—and calibrate it all in absolute time.”
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/11/lonely_broken-hearted_creation.php
How the Brain Strings Words Into SentencesScienceDaily (Nov. 28, 2011) — Distinct neural pathways are important for different aspects of language processing, researchers have discovered, studying patients with language impairments caused by neurodegenerative diseases.
Published on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 by The Guardian/UK
Report Highlights Obama’s Broken Environmental Promises
Critics say White House office operates as ‘one-stop wrecking machine’ for important environmental protections
by Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
Barack Obama has been just as zealous as George Bush in stripping away environmental, health and safety protection at the behest of industry, it turns out.
Read the rest of this entry »
Trevor Timm: Cablegate One Year Later: How WikiLeaks Has Influenced Foreign Policy, Journalism, and the First Amendment
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/28-2
Pablo Solon at the UN Climate Talks in Durban: Occupy Movement Is a Source of Hope
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/11/28-1
Is a Universal Social Net Good Macro Economics?
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/11/28-0
Internet Has Become ‘Surveillance Machine’: Julian Assange
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/11/28-1
Climate Change Denial Still Runs Strong in US
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/11/28-0
Democrat Calls for Hearing on ‘Secret’ Gift of Trillions to Banks
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/11/28-4
Despite Pakistan’s NATO Cutoff The Drone War Carries On
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/11/28-5
Dean Baker: Time to Retake Politics From the One Percent in Both Political Parties
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/28-7
Reposted on top, from today
http://darwiniana.com/2011/11/27/french-revolution-as-model-vs-bolshevik-revolution/
Let me repeat that I am a parallel traveller to the OWS, not even a fellow traveller, or a spokesman, and for this reason pursue angles that may be out of tune, or too radical, for those who wish this movement to find concrete political realizations. The reason for my reserve is that I wouldn’t trust myself to pontificate to such a group.
The question of the French Revolution is outlandish, and meant to be: history never repeats itself, and that revolution veered off into many failed episodes. My point is that the beginning resembles the current situation, and that of the Russian, pre-Bolshevik revolution. And there is no reason to imitate the succession: the point is that the beginning of anything is a potential, then the realization is something else. Still, I am wrong, in a way. As any old-fashioned leftist would note: the ‘democratic’ revolutions were won, but still there was a problem: socialism should redo the result. OK, but that became the Leninist tyranny that took that sequencing of stages as an excuse for a new form of dictatorship. Still, the left can’t figure out this was a failure.
But I think that the current situation is so far from democracy now that the format is almost ‘democratic revolution’ all over again. A true democracy must be implicitly socialist if it is going to limit the tyranny of markets and bankers. So the French, and, better, the American Revolution remain as potentials in the background, all of this perhaps far from the OWS dynamics. But I think that if a government is close to a criminal mafia trying to work inside the system is going to fail, step one. I don’t know, any my analog is a tossed up paper airplane, food for thought.
It is not really clear at all what we are dealing with in the Arab Spring and OWS, and comparisons to past revolutions may be a disservice to creative action. But it might be helpful to see that a Leninist style revoluton is a chimera now, and my remarks might remind leftists that you must tear up your notes and start from scratch. That work, which is still undone, should have been done a decade ago. Maybe you have to have a concrete situation to reckon with the unknowns, and produce anything practical. It is simply my observation that Marxism is both a complete set of answers, and totally useless at this point. You would spend ten years arguing the obvious: Marx/Engels were not Leninists and actually created a form of social democracy.
Still, the old left could help here, if they could be more intelligent about their history. The OWS can’t proceed very far without some kind of guiding thought. Who can provide it?
I suggested something else here a few days ago: the American system is a colonial imperialism all over again. In the global context of OWS a colonial revolt seems the right move. And, remember, some of the founding fathers themselves enjoined future revolutions, a unique legacy. Your move.
I am reposting this on top, from earlier today:
http://darwiniana.com/2011/11/27/alternet-needs-to-re-research-911-exposes-no-more-bullshit/
Yesterday’s swipe at Alternet shouldn’t be taken out of perspective: that ezine is one of the best on the left, and I usually read it everyday. Nor is Alternet the worst offender here. I am pointing to the near universal confusion here on the left, and it goes back to the equally obfuscated issues of the JFK assassination. These issues are confusing and anyone but those trying to counsel the left might be forgiven for confusion, or buying into the official stories. But it should be the job of the left to expose the ideologies at work here. It never happened, and we can see the start of the confusion with E.F.Stone fumbling the ball on the question. Then people like Chomsky. The question of JFK is trickier, and I wasn’t discussing it, but the 9/11 case is not so hard to deal with, and it is a real shocker: the evidence is a knock-out punch. The perps here were strangely careless, and the botch with the WT7 building, for example, should have alerted many, but, strangely, did not.
My point was simply that for pompous ‘leaders’ on the left to berate innocent readers of the literaure as conspiracy theorists is going to backfire from now on. Early on that charge may have stuck, but it is impossilbe now. Consider the books of David Ray Griffin: he is clear, meticulous, and thorough. Pick one of his books and study it. And then ask if you are going to denounce someone who sees this evidence as a conspiracy nut. Come on. This could destroy the left: intelligent skeptics will be driven away.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=david+griffin+9%2F11.
Instead of massively broad conclusions here, instead, pick from the long list of truly damaging pieces of evidence, and demand some clarity for those. A good example is the melting point of steel in relation to the burning temperature of jet fuel: you are stopped in your tracks here. To say that crashing jet liners brought down the Twin Towers in their fires is not a valid claim, that’s that. Over and out. Final.
The list of such facts, whatever they mean, is long, and growing longer. The next step is to consider who might have ordered a stand down of the Air Force defense apparatus on the fatal morning. From there the careful steps in the argument start to get uncomfortably close to charges against the government. That’s that.
I am not a conspiracy nut, but a student here who is tired of the pompous bullshit from leftist bigwigs who, incomprehensibly, think they can suppress awareness of the obvious.
Where we go from there is not clear, but the government must wonder at the stupidity of the public that can accept such a screamingly blatant record of incongruities. This must embolden them to persist in the brazenness of the deception.
I think the OWS should be the first movement on the left to be savvy on this issue.
So, unless you are mentally retarded and can’t read, the evidence in the public record here is very very tight, not something you can harangue anyone for considering, and probably believing.
Top Ten Myths About the Brain By LAURA HELMUTH – SMITHSONIAN.COM
Added: Sunday, 27 November 2011 at 6:53 PM
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/644032-top-ten-myths-about-the-brain
Friends mention that David Deamer wrote a book, First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began (2009), whitewashing the many conflicting narratives in origin of life studies, to create a general impression of progress. It was preceded by an article, “Calculating The Odds That Life Could Begin By Chance” (Science 2.0, April 30th 2009, claiming that a chance origin of life is statitically probable. It would be smart to read Robert Shapiro’s “A Simpler Origin for Life” (Scientific American Feb. 2007) for balance.
Human Nature’s Pathologist By CARL ZIMMER – NEW YORK TIMES
Added: Monday, 28 November 2011 at 2:08 PMhttp://richarddawkins.net/articles/644040-human-nature-s-pathologist
Pinker’s basic assumptions from evolutionary psychology are all suspect, so his theories on violence are up in the air.
Pinker’s whole career has been wrecked by Darwinism: Chomsky was close to seeing beyond Darwinism in the language-evolution conundrum. Pinker soon took up that thesis and reconfused the issue, and Chomsky’s contribution.
These ‘smart Darwinists’ are delaying paradigm change. The first case was S.J. Gould who took Niles Eldredge’s beautiful punctuated equilibrium thesis and twisted it out of shape as a Darwinian sophistry.
Being supersmart is apparently not enough here: such people simply make the sophistory too complicated for the public to understand. A fine form of social domination.
http://darwiniana.com/2011/11/27/french-revolution-as-model-vs-bolshevik-revolution/
Let me repeat that I am a parallel traveller to the OWS, not even a fellow traveller, or a spokesman, and for this reason pursue angles that may be out of tune, or too radical, for those who wish this movement to find concrete political realizations. The reason for my reserve is that I wouldn’t trust myself to pontificate to such a group.
The question of the French Revolution is outlandish, and meant to be: history never repeats itself, and that revolution veered off into many failed episodes. My point is that the beginning resembles the current situation, and that of the Russian, pre-Bolshevik revolution. And there is no reason to imitate the succession: the point is that the beginning of anything is a potential, then the realization is something else. Still, I am wrong, in a way. As any old-fashioned leftist would note: the ‘democratic’ revolutions were won, but still there was a problem: socialism should redo the result. OK, but that became the Leninist tyranny that took that sequencing of stages as an excuse for a new form of dictatorship. Still, the left can’t figure out this was a failure.
But I think that the current situation is so far from democracy now that the format is almost ‘democratic revolution’ all over again. A true democracy must be implicitly socialist if it is going to limit the tyranny of markets and bankers. So the French, and, better, the American Revolution remain as potentials in the background, all of this perhaps far from the OWS dynamics. But I think that if a government is close to a criminal mafia trying to work inside the system is going to fail, step one. I don’t know, any my analog is a tossed up paper airplane, food for thought.
It is not really clear at all what we are dealing with in the Arab Spring and OWS, and comparisons to past revolutions may be a disservice to creative action. But it might be helpful to see that a Leninist style revoluton is a chimera now, and my remarks might remind leftists that you must tear up your notes and start from scratch. That work, which is still undone, should have been done a decade ago. Maybe you have to have a concrete situation to reckon with the unknowns, and produce anything practical. It is simply my observation that Marxism is both a complete set of answers, and totally useless at this point. You would spend ten years arguing the obvious: Marx/Engels were not Leninists and actually created a form of social democracy.
Still, the old left could help here, if they could be more intelligent about their history. The OWS can’t proceed very far without some kind of guiding thought. Who can provide it?
I suggested something else here a few days ago: the American system is a colonial imperialism all over again. In the global context of OWS a colonial revolt seems the right move. And, remember, some of the founding fathers themselves enjoined future revolutions, a unique legacy. Your move.
http://darwiniana.com/2011/11/27/alternet-needs-to-re-research-911-exposes-no-more-bullshit/
Yesterday’s swipe at Alternet shouldn’t be taken out of perspective: that ezine is one of the best on the left, and I usually read it everyday. Nor is Alternet the worst offender here. I am pointing to the near universal confusion here on the left, and it goes back to the equally obfuscated issues of the JFK assassination. These issues are confusing and anyone but those trying to counsel the left might be forgiven for confusion, or buying into the official stories. But it should be the job of the left to expose the ideologies at work here. It never happened, and we can see the start of the confusion with E.F.Stone fumbling the ball on the question. Then people like Chomsky. The question of JFK is trickier, and I wasn’t discussing it, but the 9/11 case is not so hard to deal with, and it is a real shocker: the evidence is a knock-out punch. The perps here were strangely careless, and the botch with the WT7 building, for example, should have alerted many, but, strangely, did not.
My point was simply that for pompous ‘leaders’ on the left to berate innocent readers of the literaure as conspiracy theorists is going to backfire from now on. Early on that charge may have stuck, but it is impossilbe now. Consider the books of David Ray Griffin: he is clear, meticulous, and thorough. Pick one of his books and study it. And then ask if you are going to denounce someone who sees this evidence as a conspiracy nut. Come on. This could destroy the left: intelligent skeptics will be driven away.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=david+griffin+9%2F11.
Instead of massively broad conclusions here, instead, pick from the long list of truly damaging pieces of evidence, and demand some clarity for those. A good example is the melting point of steel in relation to the burning temperature of jet fuel: you are stopped in your tracks here. To say that crashing jet liners brought down the Twin Towers in their fires is not a valid claim, that’s that. Over and out. Final.
The list of such facts, whatever they mean, is long, and growing longer. The next step is to consider who might have ordered a stand down of the Air Force defense apparatus on the fatal morning. From there the careful steps in the argument start to get uncomfortably close to charges against the government. That’s that.
I am not a conspiracy nut, but a student here who is tired of the pompous bullshit from leftist bigwigs who, incomprehensibly, think they can suppress awareness of the obvious.
Where we go from there is not clear, but the government must wonder at the stupidity of the public that can accept such a screamingly blatant record of incongruities. This must embolden them to persist in the brazenness of the deception.
I think the OWS should be the first movement on the left to be savvy on this issue.
So, unless you are mentally retarded and can’t read, the evidence in the public record here is very very tight, not something you can harangue anyone for considering, and probably believing.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/11/rallying_to_dar053511.html
Monarch Butterfly Genome SequencedScienceDaily (Nov. 23, 2011) — Each fall, millions of monarch butterflies from across the Eastern United States use a time-compensated sun compass to direct their navigation south, traveling up to 2,000 miles to an overwintering site in a specific grove of fir trees in central Mexico. Scientists have long been fascinated by the biological mechanisms that allow successive generations of these delicate creatures to travel such long distances to a small region roughly 300 square miles in size.
Dreaming Takes the Sting out of Painful Memories, Research Shows
ScienceDaily (Nov. 23, 2011) — They say time heals all wounds, and new research from the University of California, Berkeley, indicates that time spent in dream sleep can help us overcome painful ordeals.
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