Blog — April, 2008

You are the river: An interview with Ken Wilber.

Various Salon readers, commenting on the piece:

Wilber can prattle on about "super consciousness," "Big Mind," "Big Self," "supreme identity," or "the identity of the interior soul with the ultimate ground of being in a direct experiential state." But what he's really getting at is that he is having feelings and sensations that he really can't put a finger on and therefore must be "mystical" in some way. Does it ever occur to these purveyors of woo-woo that the feeling they may be having are the result of chemicals running around in their brains?

Charlatans like Wilber will always try to convince you that certain experiential phenomenon lay outside of the domain of scientific method. That by virtue of it being personal and untestable (a dubious assertion) we should accord it some sort of status that science can't touch. This is precisely the kind of logic that dogmatic religionists have been foisting on us for hundreds of years. Wilber, like so many other new age gurus, likes to dress his touchy feely claptrap up in rational and scientific clothes. But hey, hogwash is hogwash by any other name....

Wilbur confuses feelings of transcendence that can arise from meditation/religious experiences, as well as from mind-altering substances, with primary evidence for some sort of reality. Such experiences ARE evidence for something—the way in which the brain reacts to certain types of stimuli/contexts—and more critically, the kinds of subjective experiences that result. As such, the study of trans-rational states of consciousness can be extremely useful in understanding brain function and the neural bases of consciousness....

Wilber's rantings are nothing more than the product of his brain in hypomanic overdrive (which I'm sure is a pleasant - and seemingly powerful - experience for him) complicated by a bit of generalized seizure activity. This is producing a vision of self-superiority, resulting in his racing from one end of the intellectual universe to the other to imperially force knowledge and fantasy together by his own, self-generated laws. Unfortunately, he believes he's actually making sense of it all....

Neuroscience is one of those fields of study. It's a very new field, and there's still a lot we have to learn. And yet, people like Wilber have already decided that it is impossible for us to understand his mystical experiences because they're ... well ... special....

It is good that Salon is continuing this series of interviews with people who cut across different philosophical traditions. Wilber, however, seems to be be wrestling with rather tepid reruns of other writers' work....

The section that shows perhaps the best what sort of a fool he is, is his simpleton distinction between altered states of consciousness being "real" versus "just a brain state."

And the point which Kensho just can't ever seem to understand, in his dismal comprehension of basic neuroscience:

Language works as a form of communication, and therefore the information is in the brain. You cannot tell tapioca from baseball in a brain state now [i.e., with today's theories and equipment], but the information has to be stored in a consistent manner. If you can remember which one you discussed yesterday, it is in principle possible to read that from your brain.

As always, though: "Wilbur" was the loveable pig from Charlotte's Web; "Wilber" is the pathetic New Age charlatan. It's insulting (to the fictional pig) to confuse the two of them.

And so it goes, for the gunslinging Master of Transparent Bullshit.

Me, I'll just have a sarsparilla....

Take me to the river
Wash me in the water

—Talking Heads, "Take Me to the River"

Egad, so this is what Kensho's favorite philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, has been up to: Co-authoring a book with Ratty.

"There is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in theology. In or out of theology, it doesn't matter...."

P.S. More on Habermas at the fine and very non-postmodern blog, Obscene Desserts.

A reader of James Randi's website writes, on the subject of qi:

1) "Qi" can be translated as "air," "breath," "spirit," "energy," or a number of other words, depending on its context and use. In fact, "qi" can be used in reference to objects that are entirely solid, and have no "air" aspect whatsoever.

2) The meridian lines that qi energy is supposed to follow bear little resemblance to the circulatory system in the body. Everything that I've seen regarding acupuncture indicates that a general theory of energy moving through the body came first, and that later observations about the circulatory and nervous system were used to support that original theory—not the other way around.

I think that the best way to describe "qi" in English is to go back a long time in Chinese history, to their early efforts to understand and classify the world around them. They saw everything as being made up of something they called "qi," which in this context might best be described as "energy." This "qi" could be divided into various fractions, or densities, so a cloud would have a much smaller "fraction" of qi than a rock would, but both would still be described and categorized using "qi." You might consider "qi" as the fundamental unit of matter, but depending on its form and concentration, it could take on many different appearances, and have many different effects.

See, I had actually written a couple of sentences exactly along those lines in the rough draft of my previous posting on the subject. But then I read the article in Skeptical Inquirer which Bob Park linked to, and it seemed to be so well-researched, from sources I hadn't been aware existed, that I swallowed it whole.

I should know better than that by now....

Oh, and Randi's chasing after another obvious quack, in spite of the fact that (i) it's "not his policy" to approach people for the Paranormal Challenge, and (ii) he won't do the same for Ken Wilber or Barbara Ann Brennan. 'Cause he's "never even heard of either of them," i.e., they're not important enough for him to spend time on; but some clueless inventor with "fuel magnets" apparently is.

Sometimes I wonder just how thick that magic-man's skull really is....

This is from Mary Lefkowitz's fascinating (1996) Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History:

In 1783 the Masonic Lodge of Doing Good initiated one of its most enthusiastic members, the composer Wolfgang Amadé[us] Mozart (1756–1791)....

Mozart had read Terrasson [and his description of the "Egyptian" initiation rites in a three-volume work of European fiction published in 1731, entitled Sethos, a History or Biography, based on Unpublished Memoirs of Ancient Egypt], and to him his ideas about the importance of the mysteries were not only credible but inspiring. In Thamos, King of Egypt (1773) and the opera The Magic Flute (1791), Mozart portrays "Egyptian" religion with deep respect, but as if it were an ancient version of Christianity. In Thamos, the worship of a supreme being (the sun god) in an Egyptian setting is portrayed with dignified choruses that would have been equally appropriate in the mouths of a church choir. In the first chorus, contrasting major and minor keys emphasize the contrast between light and darkness. The high priest, whose name (not coincidentally) is Sethos, alludes to an initiation ceremony, speaking of the education the hero Thamos has received and the burden that that places upon him.

But it is from The Magic Flute, where the reminiscences of Sethos are even more obvious, that we can get some sense of the continuing appeal of Terrasson's novel in the eighteenth century. Mozart's librettist was a fellow Mason, Johann Emanuel Schikaneder. Schikaneder had also read Terrasson in Matthias Claudius's newly published German translation (1777–78). The influence of Terrasson helps explain many curious features of the opera, such as its being set in Egypt, rather than somewhere in Europe. Isis and Osiris are the principal gods of the opera, as of the novel. In the first scene the life of the opera's hero, Tamino, is threatened by a snake; Sethos also sets out to kill a serpent. He brings it back alive; but Tamino, a less idealized character than Sethos, is rescued by the Three Ladies. Tamino, like Sethos, is impressed with the grandeur of the pyramids. Tamino enters the sacred precinct of the pyramid from the north, like Sethos; like him he is watched by priests and confronted by men in armor. In the opera, Sarastro offers a prayer to Isis that is taken almost directly from Terrasson. Papageno, who has been accompanying Tamino, is too frightened by the thunder (another legacy from Sethos) to continue the ordeal, but Tamino is able to proceed to a second stage of the initiation. The men in armor sing a duet. The tune is from the chorale of Luther's versification of the twelfth psalm. But their words echo the words of the inscription over the entrance to the pyramid in Terrasson's novel:

Whoever travels on this road full of difficulties, will become purified through fire, water, air, and earth. And if he can overcome the fear of death, he can raise himself from earth to heaven, and when he stands illuminated on this level, he will devote himself completely to the Mysteries of Isis.

The text of Terrasson's "inscription" cataloguing the dangers of the initiation was apparently read out in certain Masonic ceremonies, and the ritual of purification through the four elements is acted out in several different ways in The Magic Flute. In the Masonic initiation that Mozart himself underwent, the liturgy emphasizes the ability to face and so to triumph over death. Masonic initiates must triumph over the serpent, who represents temptation, as he does in the Bible. There are many other specific allusions to Masonic ritual in the opera: in the progression of chords, for example, and in the frequent use of the numbers three, five, and six. Both Sarastro's second aria and the final chorus of act 2 express the benevolent humanism of the Order. The opera celebrates the triumph of reason and wisdom over the irrational. In that respect particularly it remains faithful not only to Terrasson but also to his classical sources, Virgil and Apuleius.

Lefkowitz's book only digresses into the whole Freemasonry question because the nonsense embraced by that Lodge provides a basis for a lot of the "Greeks stole philosophy from the Egyptians, and Egypt is in Africa, therefore blacks invented philosophy" garbage purveyed by our world's Black Studies "scholars." The way Lefkowitz picks apart their utterly false claims, and backs up her deconstruction with chapter-and-verse-and-page-number footnotes, is damned refreshing.

This is a short summary of Lefkowitz's book, from The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy:

A close cousin of "cultural studies" is Afrocentric scholarship, which attempts to fashion a heroic past for black people, even as it is based on a rather remote relationship with the actual discipline of history....

Among the dubious factoids in the Afrocentric canon: that Socrates and Cleopatra were both black; that Greek philosophy and science were stolen from Africa; and that Aristotle stole his philosophy from the library at Alexandria.

None of these assertions was based on any new scholarship—not on discoveries in Egypt or in Greece. These claims were part and parcel of Marcus Garvey's Harlem stem-winders in the 1930s. But they are now being taught as fact in places like Wellesley.

Lefkowitz wades patiently through the assertions—some of them, like Cleopatra's origins, at least worthy of debate; others, like Aristotle's "theft," plainly preposterous—and disposes of them.

But what is most interesting here is that Afrocentrism continues to thrive at prestigious universities, even though administrators acknowledge privately that it is a crock.

One reason why (though Lefkowitz doesn't delve into this) presumably is that it provides employment opportunities for pseudo-scholars (like Leonard Jeffries) so that universities can tout the diversity of their faculty.

And that surprises you?

I do not know if Garvey was the originator of the idea that Europeans had deliberately concealed the truth [that the ancient Egyptians were supposedly Negroes] from blacks, but wherever the idea came from, it was not inconsistent with his philosophy of racial purity and separation. He believed that one reason why whites had reached "such a height in civilizations" was that they had been taught that they were superior: "the white race has a system, a method, a code of ethics laid down for the white child to go by," and that black children needed to have a similar creed. (Lefkowitz)

Leonard Jeffries' even-greater delusions have been suitably dissected in Skeptical Inquirer.

Well, this is interesting. From W. E. Butler's otherwise hopelessly woo-wooey How to Read the Aura, Practice Psychometry, Telepathy and Clairvoyance (p. 174-5):

It often happens that someone in an audience will remark of a speaker to whom he has been listening intently that his aura was quite perceptible to him.... [O]ften the cause is a purely physical one and has nothing whatever to do with this radiating influence which we call the aura. The explanation is fairly simple. If one gazes with fixed attention at someone for a lengthy period of time, as, for instance, when one is listening to a lecture, the muscles controlling the focusing mechanism of the eyes become fatigued, and the eye focus suddenly alters. When this happens, the new image being received upon the retina falls on a slightly different point, and the result is that the old image is seen as a "surround" to the one we are looking at. This surround will be in the complementary colors to that of the person, and will usually be seen as a white or yellow band of light around him. This is purely a physiological phenomenon, but in an exceedingly large number of cases it is taken to be a vision of the aura.

P.S. Also stumbled on this much-quoted article: Murder in good company - Gebusi people of New Guinea have high homicide rate.

From Gary Doore's (ed.) Shaman's Path (p. 130):

Nancy is a forty-year-old woman with the Epstein-Barr virus. Before being referred to our clinic she had been thoroughly evaluated by modern biomedical techniques, which found that nothing could be done for her. In our program, however, Nancy learned that the shaman speaks about the larger energies of the world in a metaphoric language. Thus she discovered that the "ghosts" of her dead mother (a suicide), best friend (also a suicide), first horse, most loved horse, ex-husband, and others lived within her body in the essence of the viruses.

Well, no wonder she felt ill! With all those suicides and horses ... and suicidal horses, even, galloping through her veins. Not to mention the ex-husband ... "and others"! Medical science just has no treatment for that. So it's a good thing, in that sense, that utter quackery like neo-shamanic "healing" exists.

"Take two 30-X homeopathic nightshade tablets, and call me in the morningshade." (You have to imagine Leslie Nielsen as the doctor.)

Don't try suicide
Nobody's worth it

—Queen, "Don't Try Suicide"

I have a pony.

—Steven Wright

Remember kw/Li'l Stewey's addled notion that "one would likely have to be at least at a worldcentric level of development to even consider cross-dressing a perfectly acceptable practice"?

This is from Barbara Tedlock's The Woman in the Shaman's Body:

During the early nineteenth century, a Gros Ventre girl who had been captured by the Crow was raised as a warrior by her adoptive father. From the age of ten, she carried a gun and hunted deer and bighorn with the men. When her father was killed in battle, she assumed charge of his family lodge and performed the duties of both mother and father for her orphaned siblings. In time she joined in raids on the Blackfeet, and her daring feats elevated her to the third-ranking position in the band. Eventually she married four women who cooked, tanned hides, and looked after her large family. After numerous vision quests and initiation as a shaman, the tribal elders raised her to the most prominent rank ever achieved by a woman: from that day on she was called Woman Chief....

Sitting-in-the-Water Grizzly Bear was a famous woman warrior among the Kutenai of Washington state. As a "two-spirit" person—a [recently coined] Native American term for a lesbian or transgendered person—she married a white man, but soon ran away and returned home to her own people. There she put on men's clothing and weapons, assumed a masculine name, took a woman as her wife, and became a famous shaman and warrior.

So, that transgendered Gros Ventre girl was being given widespread respect by her community even well before her shamanic initiation. And the cross-dressing Sitting-in-the-Water Grizzly Bear was seen by her community as being fit not only to function as a shaman but even as a respected warrior, when the fate of the tribe was at stake.

When you understand as little about the non-integralcentric world as Ken 'n' Stewey do, it's certainly easy to think you've got it all explained ... and to imagine that the only reason anyone would disagree (vehemently) with you is for being "altitudinally challenged" or for feeling "resentiment" at your (ill-gotten) "success," etc. But, of course, that has always been precisely the favorite line of deluded quacks who imagine themselves to be misunderstood, persecuted "geniuses."

P.S. Michael Shermer's response to the Expelled controversy.

From Charlie Brooker's screen burn:

Welcome to a dangerous new era—the Unlightenment—in which centuries of rational thought are overturned by idiots. Superstitious idiots. They're everywhere—reading horoscopes, buying homeopathic remedies, consulting psychics, babbling about "chakras" and "healing energies," praying to imaginary gods, and rejecting science in favour of soft-headed bunkum. But instead of slapping these people round the face till they behave like adults, we encourage them. We've got to respect their beliefs, apparently.

Well I don't.

Me neither!

P.S. If you still think that chakras exist, try reconciling all of the mutually contradictory information on these pages. Hint: You can't. No one can.

I've got a plausible explanation as to exactly how all the "chakra" nonsense (esp. in terms of "seven wheels") got started in the first place ... but I'm saving that for the next book. :)

Bob Park:

America's addiction to acupuncture began with New York Times correspondent James Reston's 1971 trip to China, during which he was operated on for acute appendicitis. Contrary to widespread accounts, he was injected with a standard local anesthetic, not acupuncture. It was two days later that he experienced indigestion with only a traditional Chinese physician on duty. He was treated with moxibustion, a form of acupuncture, and needles were used to "get the qi flowing." An Alka-Seltzer might have been better.

Heh. I already knew that "Traditional Chinese Medicine" was actually "a rag-bag of ideas put together under Chairman Mao to try to fill in the gaps left by a shortage of 'the superior new medicine.'" But I had no idea that the standard presentation of Reston's experiences was fabricated, too.

"Only goes to show...."

Because dissection of the human body was culturally discouraged, very little anatomical information was available [in ancient China]. The only opportunity for anatomy lessons came after battles (or executions, where beheading was the preferred method).

Professor Yuan Zhong of Beijing Union Medical University, a member of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, is a specialist in Chinese medical history focusing on medical philosophy. He explains that after the fall of the ax, blood quickly leaves the body and ancient observers assumed that this liquid came from the body cavity, not from the curious, seemingly empty tubes that they later were able to see after the blood had drained away. We now know that these other vessels are the carotid arteries and jugular veins, which transport blood. Ancient observers guessed that because these tubes appeared empty and deflated, that some form of air or special gas must inflate them, hence the name qi (air). They believed that our bodies were inflated and nourished by this special air and that the arteries and veins were simply part of the respiratory system. According to the ancient medical text Ling Shu Jing Shui, this is where the idea of qi began. Pulse diagnosis appeared in China during the early Warring States period (about 2,500 years ago). At that time, doctors believed that what they were feeling were pulses of air (qi), not blood. Later, when closer observations revealed residual blood inside veins (trapped there by the bicuspid valves), the theory of qi was modified to state that veins carried blood and arteries carried air. As early as the late Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) the famous anatomist Wang Qingren held to the mistaken belief that arteries carried air, not blood. (Donald Mainfort, The Roots of Qi)

With the Beijing Olympics coming up, one of our Hockey Night in Canada television hosts recently did a short spotlight on Traditional Chinese Medicine during an intermission of a game. Not surprisingly, he failed to bring up any of the above points. (Aside from the fact that he's just a commentator and amateur referee who doesn't need to know anything about medicine as part of his job, can you imagine the reaction from the Chinese community in Canada if he had dissed their "pride and joy"? If you wanna wake up wearing cement chopsticks....)

If you've read the chapter on Ram Dass and his equally discombobulated buddies in STG, you've already heard this story about Neem Karoli Baba, as told by one of his female students:

The first time he took me in the room alone I sat up on the tucket [a low wooden bed] with him, and he was like a seventeen-year-old jock who was a little fast! I felt as if I were fifteen and innocent. He started making out with me, and it was so cute, so pure. I was swept into it for a few moments—then grew alarmed: "Wait! This is my guru. One doesn't do this with one's guru!" So I pulled away from him. Then Maharajji tilted his head sideways and wrinkled up his eyebrows in a tender, endearing, quizzical look. He didn't say anything, but his whole being was saying to me, "Don't you like me?"

But as soon as I walked out of that particular darshan [the blessing which is said to flow from even the mere sight of a saint], I started getting so sick that by the end of the day I felt I had vomited and shit out everything that was ever inside me. I had to be carried out of the ashram. On the way, we stopped by Maharajji's room so I could pranam [i.e., offer a reverential greeting] to him. I kneeled by the tucket and put my head down by his feet—and he kicked me in the head, saying, "Get her out of here!"....

That was the first time, and I was to be there for two years. During my last month there, I was alone with him every day in the room.... Sometimes he would just touch me on the breasts and between my legs, saying, "This is mine, this is mine, this is mine. All is mine. You are mine." You can interpret it as you want, but near the end in these darshans, it was as though he were my child. Sometimes I felt as though I were suckling a tiny baby (in Dass, 1979).

That's from the 1979 edition of Miracle Of Love, on pages 292-3.

Yet, I've just been informed that that story is absent from the 1995 edition of the same book.

Meaning, of course, that the "offending" and easily "misunderstood" text regarding the guru's "miraculous loving" was removed between the editions, by the Powers That Be at the Hanuman Foundation.

Very interesting. 'Cause, do you think that significant edit could have been made without Ram Dass's knowledge? Given, you know, that "[f]rom 1974-1997 the Foundation served as a primary vehicle for producing and facilitating educational workshops, retreats, lectures, and gatherings led by Ram Dass ... as well [as] a host [of] other well-known teachers...."

Hmm, starting from the Wikipedia page for Sirius, footnote #17 leads us to this web page ... which ends with a quote from "one of India's greatest sages," Sri Yukteswar.

Yukteswar was Paramahansa Yogananda's guru. And excerpts from the essay linked above were included as Appendix B in Cruttenden's Lost Star of Myth and Time, which in turn is published by "St. Lynn's Press"—obviously a reference to James Lynn (Rajasi Janakananda), Yogananda's "most spiritually advanced" Western disciple. With that book pushing the old "24,000-year cycle," what we have there is obviously some disciples of PY out to prove the validity of the old "four yugas" notion, and its claims of a cyclic evolution of human consciousness.

P.S. Also stumbled on this interesting essay: Neo-Darwinian Theories of Religion and the Social Ecology of Religious Evolution. It even manages to (peripherally) mention shamanism and Newberg's books!

You remember the Robbers Cave experiment?

Well, I've just been informed that there's this alternative version of it:

The Robbers Cave experiment, a classic study of prejudice and conflict, has at least one hidden story. The well-known story emerged in the decades following the experiment as textbook writers adopted a particular retelling. With repetition people soon accepted this story as reality, forgetting it is just one version of events, one interpretation of a complex series of studies. As scholars have returned to the Robbers Cave experiment another story has emerged, putting a whole new perspective on the findings....

What is often left out of the familiar story is that it was not the first of its type, but actually the third in a series carried out by Sherif and colleagues. The two earlier studies had rather less happy endings. In the first, the boys ganged up on a common enemy and in the second they ganged up on the experimenters themselves....

The three experiments, then, one with a "happy" ending, and two less so, can be seen in terms of the possible outcomes when a powerful group tries to manipulate two weaker groups. Sometimes they can be made to play fair (experiment three), sometimes the groups will unite against a common enemy (experiment one) and sometimes they will turn on the powerful group (experiment two).

Ah, and Elliot Benjamin has responded to my Salmon Of Belief piece. Oddly, aside from a few minor quibbles about his wording, I don't have anything nasty to say about that response.

[P]si phenomena deserves to be studied with a true scientific openness, from my perspective in both quantitative and qualitative research studies, to explain Ray Hyman's statement that "something" is going on.

I agree completely. But you know, for the most part psi has been studied with "a true scientific openness." Ask Susan Blackmore, David Lane, or John Horgan—all of them "sheep" who became skeptical "goats" (or at least psi-agnostics) simply because solid "evidence for psi" has not been at all forthcoming, in spite of the best efforts by (esp.) believers to produce it.

Unfortunately, when it comes to research into alleged psi phenomena, they (e.g., Radin, Salmon) won't stop presenting the extant experiments as if they had stood up to the same type of critical scrutiny which all (non-postmodern) academic work has to be able to withstand, when of course (a single quote from Ray Hyman notwithstanding) the research has done nothing of the sort.

Pursuing psi research with "a true scientific openness," as opposed to having one's conclusions follow one's pre-existing beliefs? Heck, that's all that the skeptics have ever really asked for from the True Believers: To perform the experiments competently, and then just follow the data wherever it may lead.

A big part of the point of a "merciless criticism" of any field, you know, is that when you've hit as hard as you can at its ideas and claims, to demolish the nonsense, the incompetence and the fraudulence, what remains standing is likely to be as close to the truth as we humans can get at any given point.

Just stumbled on this:

The God Who Wasn't There (torrent).

All the big names, too: Doherty, Price, Dawkins, Harris....

From Old Tibet no Shangri-La:

The lamas and the feudal landlords, who owned the lands of Tibet, did not represent the majority of the population, who were illiterate and poor. The Drepung Monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, and it lent money to the peasants at an interest rate of 20 percent to 50 percent. In theocratic feudal Tibet, torturing methods such as eye gouging and amputation were common as punishments for thieves and runaway slaves. This is quite the contrary of the peaceful teachings of Buddhism, isn't it?....

Reverting Tibet to its old days and restoring power to the Dalai Lama means Tibet will continue to be backward and oppressive. If we continue on the current trend, the Tibetans have only two limited options: live under oppressive Chinese rule or live under oppressive lama rule.

Western proponents of Tibetan independence often argue on the grounds of human rights. Well, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights forbids torture and slavery, which were completely legal in the lama-ruled Tibet.

Ah, but you already knew that. Not that a Dalai Lama-led Tibet would be worse than it is now, though, since it's unlikely they'd go back to torture and slavery, even in a Buddhist theocracy. (One hopes.)

An interviewer from the British newspaper The Independent questioned [rocker Ted] Nugent about a 1977 interview in High Times magazine in which Nugent allegedly detailed elaborate steps taken to avoid the Vietnam draft.

"I got 30 days' notice of the physical," Nugent told them. "I ceased cleansing my body. Two weeks before the test I stopped eating food with nutritional value. A week before, I stopped going to the bathroom. I did it in my pants. My pants got crusted up."

While not denying that he made the statements, Nugent dismissed their veracity, claiming that when confronted with "glazed-eyed" interviewers, he would "make stories up." He explained that he did not go to Vietnam because he had a one-year student deferment. When questioned, he admitted that he had "not wanted to get his ass blown off in Vietnam," but made note of a tour he made with the USO in 2004 to Fallujah and Afghanistan as support of his assertion that "I am not a coward." (Wikipedia)

A USO tour as proof that you're not a coward? I'm sure Judy Garland, Lucille Ball and The Andrews Sisters would agree.

No wonder he and Dubya get along so well. A couple of total cowards who just can't wait to go to war and risk other peoples' lives.

From Barbara Tedlock's The Woman in the Shaman's Body:

Marshall Sahlins in his book Stone Age Economics ... examined statistics he abstracted from primary research reports on traditional hunting-gathering societies and published this information together with his interpretation of an incredibly short workweek for hunter-gatherers.

However, from Wikipedia:

Sahlins' argument relies on studies undertaken by McCarthy and McArthur in Arnhem Land, and by Richard Lee among the !Kung. These studies apparently show that hunter-gatherers need only work about twenty hours a week in order to survive and may devote the rest of their time to leisure.... However, Kaplan points out that it can be difficult to distinguish between work and leisure in hunter-gatherer societies as members of these societies do not have jobs or employment. Lee did not include food preparation time in his study, arguing that "work" should be defined as the time spent gathering enough food for subsistence. But, Kaplan argues, if work is defined as mere subsistence, people in Western societies would do hardly any work at all.... When work is seen as all life-sustaining activity, the !Kung will be observed as working for more than forty hours a week....

Some anthropologists claim that the studies Sahlins relies on are far from representative of the people they observe. The Arnhem Land studies observe groups of only nine and thirteen over a period of one or two weeks. Moreover, McCarthy herself admitted that the individuals used in one of the studies were picked up from a mission station and were accustomed to using the food available at these stations....

Lee's study is also alleged to be a poor representation of a hunter-gatherer society. Kaplan argues that as the investigation only covered a four-week period, it is in no way representative of the living conditions of a whole year—especially as there are significant differences in climate between the wet and dry seasons.... Moreover, Lee discovered that the !Kung he studied occasionally worked for wages or grew their own food.... Hence, it is claimed that the society studied is far from "purely" hunter-gatherer.

Yeah, no kidding! So much for academic competence....

The Bear Rub.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first—rock 'n' roll or Christianity.

—John Lennon

Well, I know which one I'd like to see disappear first....

(Via B&W:) If you weren't previously aware of the influence that the Islamic States are exerting at the United Nations:

For the past eleven years the organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), representing the 57 Islamic States, has been tightening its grip on the throat of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yesterday, 28 March 2008, they finally killed it.

With the support of their allies including China, Russia and Cuba (none well-known for their defense of human rights) the Islamic States succeeded in forcing through an amendment to a resolution on Freedom of Expression that has turned the entire concept on its head. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression will now be required to report on the "abuse" of this most cherished freedom by anyone who, for example, dares speak out against Sharia laws that require women to be stoned to death for adultery or young men to be hanged for being gay, or against the marriage of girls as young as nine, as in Iran.

This is maybe not the best time to be thinking about how little the trials and tribulations of our species and its disintegrating planet actually matter in comparison to the vastness of the universe, but: SkyChart III. Free demo (unlike Starry Night), and it shows star charts at least back to 100,000 BC, not just back to the fifth millennium BC.

Well, this about sums it up:

Very nice. But then, so are these....

P.S. Love and Tensor Algebra. And My Love is a Theosophist.

How the Council of Nicea Changed the World

[T]he bishops decided upon a date for the holiest of Christian celebrations, Easter, which was being observed at different times around the empire. Previously linked with the timing of Passover, the council settled on a moveable day that would never coincide again with the Jewish holiday—the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox.

And speaking of eternal life: Rotten Eggs: Secret Ingredient for Suspended Animation?

Hydrogen sulfide is the key stinky compound in rotting eggs and swamp gas. New research shows it can slow down a mouse's metabolism, or the consumption of oxygen, without dampening the flow of blood.

And then there's the whole MMR vaccine controversy. Considering the public health risk which has come out of that quackery, it's rather satisfying to see that the doctor who first (cluelessly) proposed the MMR-autism link—which even Jenny McCarthy is selling, in promoting her book on daytime talk-shows—is now defending himself against charges of "serious professional misconduct."

Because, you know, it turns out that Scientists say they have strong evidence that the MMR vaccination is not linked to a rise in autism. And a recent study of Japanese children "should put the final nail in the coffin of the claim that the MMR vaccine is responsible for the apparent rise in autism in recent years."

Like Quackwatch says:

Some parents of children with autism believe that there is a link between measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. However, there is no sensible reason to believe that any vaccine can cause autism or any kind of behavioral disorder. Typically, symptoms of autism are first noted by parents as their child begins to have difficulty with delays in speaking after age one. MMR vaccine is first given to children at 12-15 months of age. Since this is also an age when autism commonly becomes apparent, it is not surprising that autism follows MMR immunization in some cases. However, by far the most logical explanation is coincidence, not cause-and-effect.

Based on data from 12 patients, Dr. Andrew Wakefield (a British gastroenterologist) and colleagues speculated that MMR vaccine may have been the possible cause of bowel problems which led to a decreased absorption of essential vitamins and nutrients which resulted in developmental disorders like autism. No scientific analyses were reported, however, to substantiate the theory.... [T]he theory that autism may be caused by poor absorption of nutrients due to bowel inflammation is senseless and is not supported by the clinical data. In at least 4 of the 12 cases, behavioral problems appeared before the onset of symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease.

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