Blog — February, 2006

I was glancing at the back cover of my (unread) copy of Ken Wilber In Dialogue, deciding whether to just throw it out, and noticed the following blurb from Huston Smith:

A probing seminar with the most seminal transpersonal psychologist to date.

"To date." But would you really want to "date" him? You know, when he's trying not to drool all over himself (which may be an early sign of senility).

And "seminal"? Oh, I suppose that refers to him miming masturbation in public, and asking his (young? female?) students for blow jobs.

So yes, definitely a "seminal" transpersonal psychologist. "To date." ("Seminar," from "seminary," deriving ultimately from "semen" or "seed." I understand that this book, and this, are required texts. Note that kw's thinking, according to others blurbing there, is also "fertile," and contains much "bulk." Perhaps they meant "roughage." It's also "visionary," by which I think they mean deluded and/or hallucinatory.)

Could have been worse, though. Could have been a "penetrating seminar"....

"Lock up your integral daughters. Lock up your wives. Lock up your (young? female?) Naropa Institute students."

Don't blame me; I didn't write that filthy, near-pornographic blurb. Harrumpf!

Paul Graham's interesting ideas on the dynamics behind political correctness and the like:

[I]f you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of [moral] fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?

His musings on Google, though, are somewhat less insightful:

Google is much more dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was. Probably more dangerous than any other company has ever been. Not least because they're determined to fight. On their job listing page, they say that one of their "core values" is "Don't be evil." From a company selling soybean oil or mining equipment, such a statement would merely be eccentric. But I think all of us in the computer world recognize who[m] that is a declaration of war on.

Yeah, Google, the "good" company. Running their servers on Linux (on which be peace). Challenging the monopolies. Enabling dictatorial censorship in China in return for a few extra $, to a degree where even some U.S. Republicans have spoken out against their corporate whoring, there. Having become, in a few short years, exactly the evil that they set out to counter. Go figure. Human nature, or what? Have to keep growing the company and boosting the share price at all costs because ... because....

They could have done the right thing, but it would have cost them market share. So instead they caved to a truly evil government. Way to go, Larry and Sergey. "Don't be evil."

P.S. Don't imagine that simple "acting out" rejections of authority don't factor into the anti-Microsoft stance of the proponents of alternative technologies, either. If you ever read up on the history of the feud between MS and Sun, for example, a large component of it is clearly just a bunch of overgrown kids engaged in a pissing/revenge contest. ("The total cost of ownership [TCO] of Linux has been a contentious issue surrounding the adoption of Linux. Some studies, such as those by IDC and Gartner have argued that Linux had a higher TCO than Windows. Others, such as those by Soeren Research and RFG claim the opposite. Many of the studies, most notably studies which were later found to have been funded by Microsoft themselves, have been criticized as unbalanced and biased, although a number of studies which gave results favorable to Linux were commissioned by companies such as IBM and Novell.")

I found this beautiful exposition of the importance of hiring top-quality programmers today, at Joel On Software:

Several years ago a larger company was considering buying out Fog Creek, and I knew it would never work as soon as I heard the CEO of that company say that he didn't really agree with my theory of hiring the best programmers. He used a biblical metaphor: you only need one King David, and an army of soldiers who merely had to be able to carry out orders. His company's stock price promptly dropped from 20 to 5, so it's a good thing we didn't take the offer, but it's hard to pin that on the King David fetish.

From late 2000 to mid-2003, I worked for a TSE company with a similar managerial philosophy. From a dot-com-bubble high of $4 per share, it has sunk to a current value of twelve cents. Not without reason, disgruntled shareholders have frequently referred to the married CEO and dumb blonde president as "Bungler and the Ho." Neither of those two royal dunces will ever actually understand that the #1 cause of that plunge was their own inept "leadership." After all, would they have been receiving around $650,000 annually together (including hefty bonuses, even while the company was chronically losing money) if they weren't doing their jobs? (The excruciatingly dumb blonde, I was told, actually thought that one particular software project would get done faster/cheaper if it were done as a "one-off"! That "expertise," and a fear of even the most user-friendly technologies—to the point of apparently having executive minions print out her emails in hard copy for her to answer on the paper, to be retyped by the minions into Outlook—didn't stop her from micromanaging the I.T. Department, though, with the goal of reducing the cost of programmers.)

I don't think it's a stretch to believe [that relevant] data shows 5:1 or 10:1 productivity differences between programmers.

A dozen years ago, Steve McConnell's Code Complete, quoting research from the late '60s, documented an even greater ratio of twenty or more to one. It's literally more than an order of magnitude.

Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, expressed exactly the same idea, in asserting that "The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X or even 1000X but by 10,000X."

He's right, of course. (Yes, I personally am, literally, a best-in-class programmer; but who's counting?) Myhrvold was right to not buy into the anti-Microsoft-fuelled hype about Java, too. (That reality will, of course, ever be lost on the brilliant, and no less photogenic, "Digerati" at The Edge. The website, at least, is in need of competent copyediting, what with their feature book having been "Edtied" [sic] by John Brockman, and Swedish journalist Eva Wisten's writings appearing in a magazine which "would have it's [sic] closest equivalent" to some other one. If your website's very existence is based on the premise of it being a gathering-place for "an unprecedented roster of brilliant minds," you have to be able to get through simple things like that without fucking up quite so egregiously.)

The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.

Five Antonio Salieris won't produce Mozart's Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years....

The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time.

And mediocrity, as the saying goes, knows nothing higher than itself, i.e., it won't recognize properly done work even if it's gifted with that on a silver platter/PDF. Sad, but true.

P.S. All of this, oddly, reminds me of the skeptic/rationalist/hacker Richard Stallman. I had sent him a copy of the STG PDF last year. After reading a few dozen pages into it, he wrote back to point out that alcoholics (cf. Trungpa) were at most to be pitied, not scorned; that there was nothing wrong with polygamy or Playboy-centerfold wives (cf. Adi Da), etc. Utterly ignorant (in context) shit like that, where Stallman was obviously so full of himself as to be certain that he was in a position to teach and correct even with having read little more than the cover-copy and Introduction. How Wilber-esque. (Say what you want about me, but I do tend to get my facts straight and to understand their context before presuming to instruct others. Stallman's own leadership of the free-software movement has been described as "democracy under a dictatorship.") For some reason, "expert skeptics," with a few exceptions, just never seem to have a fucking clue about how cults and social psychology work, or to grasp how bad the problems there really are.

Robert T. Carroll, Michael Shermer and Paul Kurtz all initially expressed interest in STG when I first approached them about it, readily agreeing to read it. And that was the last I ever heard from any of them. I sometimes wonder whether they're just too cowardly to risk their "important and respected" positions by being associated with it, or whether they're instead simply too clueless about the obvious psychological dynamics in such communities to "get" what the book is saying. (If you're thinking that they may have the same issues with my "nasty, sarcastic tone" as others have, I would invite you to familiarize yourself with Carroll's writings, and the collective admiration of himself, Shermer and Kurtz for the work and snarky, adversarial attitude of James Randi. Unless it's only the "elders" in the skeptical field who are allowed to cop an attitude, the tone in my writing ain't the problem.)

Carroll, for one, quotes the true but vastly overrated notion that "in most cases people [in cults] have not arrived at their irrational beliefs overnight. They have come to them over a period of time with gradually escalated commitments." Yet, his own earlier attendance at the services given by SRF involved his own swallowing-whole of the existence of levitation, bilocation, Babaji as a deathless Himalayan avatar (with the power to make himself invisible), etc.—all of which claims were presented, completely openly, in Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. (Carroll calls himself a former "follower" of Yogananda. Well, so was I.) No one "tricked" him into believing those fairy tales over any period of time with "gradually escalated commitments," any more than anyone ever tricked me into it. To become involved in one or another religion or less organized form of spirituality, it is enough that one merely be gullible; no other deliberate trickery on the part of the leaders is actually necessary. I really do wonder whether Carroll, for one, can admit that that applies to his own case.

The 25-Year Wait for Immortality. And all of that anti-aging research, note, being done by people who did complete their Ph.D. theses in biochemistry, thus doing something useful with their lives....

Are some of the hopes there unrealistic? Who knows. But don't ever sell science and progress short, unless you're looking to end up looking awfully foolish and short-sighted:

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.

—Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

I would absolutely vote for this guy: Kinky Friedman.

The White House says Bush ... wants to invest more in zero-emission, coal-fired plants, as well as support solar and wind research, promote cars that run on hydrogen, encourage more nuclear power plant construction and fund work to produce ethanol—not just from corn, but from wood chips and switch grass. (more)

Huh? Bush wants that? "Who are you, and what have you done with Curious George?" What's the catch?

Clapp claims the president is promoting renewables because polls show his job approval numbers are being weighed down by Americans' concerns about high utility bills this winter and the cost of gasoline at the pump.

Ah, of course.

Plus, as I've noted elsewhere, you can't do anything resembling science by "including everything" now, and only later weeding out the stuff that doesn't actually exist. As Steven Dutch has observed, "theories that hang together pretty well logically and are reasonably consistent with most of the evidence are a dime a dozen in science. It's easy—anyone can construct one. The key to the problem lies in the qualifiers 'pretty well,' 'reasonably consistent,' and 'most of the evidence.'" Consequently: Until you've thoroughly determined what the "best evidence" that needs to be explained actually is, your theories are inherently going to be "dime a dozen" ones, which fit "pretty well" with whatever you hope may exist in the transpersonal and physical worlds. When exactly that same approach is being taken in the attempt to arrange current schools of thought into some kind of order, one truly doesn't even need to read the "breakthrough" publications in order to know that they're not going to stand up to questioning. That would be true even if Wilber, for one, were not the "bastard child of P. T. Barnum."

Further, proper theories in any field don't merely explain existing phenomena and predict new ones. Rather, they also "disallow" claimed phenomena which have failed to show themselves in proper testing. How is the integral "we'll weed it out later" approach to a "theory of everything" ever going to accomplish the latter point? Even in principle, it cannot.

Would you read Velikovsky for his "insights" into astronomy, hoping that they'll help to bring order to the divided and unordered aspects of that field? No? Then why do you read Wilber for his equally quack-ian "insights" into fantasial philosophy?

Am I saying that there is no "need to integrate the various approaches in the field of consciousness studies," via Wilber's bumbling attempts or otherwise? Not exactly: for people with an interest in such things, there will always be at least a psychological need for that integration. What I am saying is that kw (and at least 80% of his critics, and at least 99% of his followers) woefully lack the knowledge-base to effect that integration, or even to properly critique others' attempts. (That knowledge-base would cover original sources, along with one's understanding and applying of the fact that literally nothing of what one might like to believe about the hoped-for transpersonal aspects of reality has ever showed itself in any properly conducted and repeated testing.) If that weren't true, everything I've ever written in debunking Wilber's addled notions would already have been put into print previously, by others who are far more familiar with his "teachings" than I would ever wish to be. 'Cause even by now, I've sunk at most 500 hours into reading and critiquing his work. Further, since the community as a whole is blatantly unable to recognize false attempts at such integration even when the flaws are enumerated in precise detail, it doesn't have a prayer of recognizing true ones, either. Its members simply won't know the difference.

Ah, there I go, being "mean" again. Shameful, isn't it?

Still, it's never an "all-or-nothing" proposition, right? Is the attempt to put current schools of thought into some kind of order, in principle, a good thing? Of course it is. Has any good come out of it? Of course. Has any bad come out of it? You betcha. Quite a lot, actually. Does integral philosophy do more harm than good? Based on lost productivity, the psychotic side-effects of meditation, and the like, I would say yes, it does significantly more harm than good; notwithstanding that, like all "opiates of the masses," it does serve a social and salvational function for the in-group. Would I, personally, be a happier person today if I had never even heard of yoga, Wilber or integral philosophy? Yes, absolutely. No question at all. No comparison. Wasted the best years of my life on those combinations of sound and fury, told by conscience-bereft idiots, signifying sweet-piss-all.

The thing about integral/spiritual pursuits is that they're never content to be mere theories; they always want to be applied to real lives. While that may sound like a good thing, it's exactly in the applying that all the worst damage is done.

So now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to garden, or to watch American Idol. OK, living in an apartment, I don't really have access to a garden. Or a TV, by choice. And I generally can't stand pop music, though I was recently listening to streaming audio of the Top-100 singles in the U.K. and U.S., and I have to admit that, given the almost uniformly dismal character of the "art" there, Kelly Clarkson is actually one of the more tolerable performers, albeit a "manufactured" one. (Back in 1989, Neneh Cherry had already skillfully brought melody, harmony and good song structure into hip-hop, via her "Buffalo Stance." You would think that the genre might have been advanced, or at least not deteriorated, by the rappers currently cleaning up at the Grammys and on the charts. No such luck. The #1 Curious George soundtrack by Jack Johnson, by contrast, is quite nicely done.) Nevertheless, I'm off to do something—anything, really—that doesn't involve "integral" or philosophical thoughts. 'Cause I've done all of that shit, and discovered that the answers it presents invariably don't stand up to questioning. By now, it genuinely has no relevance at all to my own life, nor does it hold any interest whatsoever to me, even were the alternative-to-kw approaches to be done with less tedious hands, i.e., in writing styles that didn't put one to sleep.

Your mileage may vary, and good luck to you in that (you're going to need it); but I truly have better things to do with my time than spend it on "integral" ideas. (Wouldn't it be great if kw and his ilk could dismiss that as me just being too shallow or "first-tier" to "resonate with" his Great Ideas? If only it weren't for that structural explanation, based on at least a dozen published meditative experiences [of others] of High Realization, of the metaphysical means behind freedom of choice, given in my first book ... you know, the one endorsed by Huston Smith and James Fadiman with far greater enthusiasm than they have given publicly to any of kw's books.)

And as far as practice goes: Do you really need a formal philosophy or an integration of the current schools of thought in order to know enough to lead a balanced life (exercise, relaxation, good food but not too much of it, read a good book with proper footnoting now and then, don't believe everything you're told by persons who stand to gain from your willing obedience, etc.), or to justify living that way to yourself? If you do, here's one:

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

You know who said that? Friedrich Nietzsche—a real philosopher, who didn't need to substitute fairy tales for reality and then pretend that that was an improvement rooted in his own "exalted, second-tier spiritual realization," when all it would have showed was his own capacity for wallowing in self-delusion.

P.S. Personally, I will be reading Kensho's next book. Not in the untenable hope that it might actually be a meaningful, valid contribution to the finding of a coherent order among today's schools of thought, nor for his presentation of first-person perspectives versus third-person ones, but rather simply for debunking purposes. 'Cause as long as he keeps talking and writing, he's going to continue to show himself up for the damned fool which he quite clearly is. Guaranteed.

If you find value amid the integral foolishness, fine. But if you think you can distinguish between those two extremes, and take only the good ... well, I will then look forward to reading your rock-solid critiques of kw's ideas. And I'm sure I'll enjoy those papers as much as I've enjoyed David Lane's and Jim Andrews' unassailable contributions to that field. (Need I point out that it's no coincidence at all that neither of those gentlemen are "members in good standing" of the transpersonal or integral communities, even though they were both originally sympathetic to such "philosophy"? As I've noted elsewhere, if you just keep questioning and thinking for yourself, that transition is inevitable. All you have to do is be willing to follow the evidence. Need I also point out, again, that everything I've ever debunked in kw's ideas was, once upon a time, being widely taken as part of the "good" in his toddling attempts at philosophy?)

The extent to which you agree or disagree with all this will probably be a function of whether you think that incompetently done philosophy, based on woefully under-vetted data and swallowed nearly whole by followers who don't know any better and who will do just about anything except properly educate themselves, is better than no philosophy at all. I've never read Daniel "Third-Person" Dennett, and have no plans to; but I find it difficult to believe that he could have less to say, overall, that's worth hearing and assimilating, than Wilber and his ilk do. Either way, I don't, even as a longshot, expect either side of that debate to ever come up with convincing answers to the questions that really matter.

You already knew that Napoleon Dynamite was a pseudonym used by Elvis Costello for his 1986 album Blood and Chocolate, right? (As an ec fan, I actually did already know that.)

The producers claim it's just a coincidence. But I'd tend to go with what one amazon.com reviewer had to say: "This is, of course, utterly absurd, about as believable as someone making a movie with the lead character named Anna Karenina but claiming to be ignorant that Tolstoy had a character by that name."

Nice summary of the various mutually exclusive spins/lies that the White House, etc., has tried to put on the "unfortunate quail hunting" VP incident, across half a dozen different issues.

They really need to decide what the "truth" is there, and stick with it.

Just a hunch, but I'd bet that if anything really bad ever happened around the Integral Institute, the discrepancies between the various stories made public would be just as glaring.

Hey, Wilber's (1997) paper on An Integral Theory of Consciousness is online. (That's presenting the same "breakthrough" model, based on "the results of generally uncontested scientific research," of which Andrew Smith has more recently and validly concluded: "the four-quadrant model, in its original form, is dead." I just re-read that paper, and I can't believe I ever used to care about the subject one way or another.) From which:

You cannot vote on the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem if you do not learn geometry (the injunction)....

Heh. In the first edition of kw's A Brief History of Everything, he attempted to state that same theorem:

[T]he sum of the squares of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the hypotenuse.

The real Pythagorean Theorem, however, goes like this:

The sum of the squares of the lengths of the sides of a right-angle triangle is equal to the square of the length of the hypotenuse.

They're not the same: Wilber's statement, taken at face value, is meaningless nonsense. "No votes for you, Kensho!"

More from the 1997 paper:

Subtle energies research has postulated that there exist subtler types of bio-energies beyond the four recognized forces of physics (strong and weak nuclear, electromagnetic, gravitational), and that these subtler energies play an intrinsic role in consciousness and its activity. Known in the traditions by such terms as prana, ki, and chi — and said to be responsible for the effectiveness of acupuncture, to give only one example — these energies are often held to be the 'missing link' between intentional mind and physical body.

The "effectiveness of acupuncture"? Heh.

The NCAHF issued a position paper on acupuncture that asserts, "Research during the past twenty years has failed to demonstrate that acupuncture is effective against any disease" and that "the perceived effects of acupuncture are probably due to a combination of expectation, suggestion, counter-irritation, operant conditioning, and other psychological mechanisms." In short, most of the perceived beneficial effects of acupuncture are probably due to mood change, the placebo effect, and the regressive fallacy. Just because the pain went away after the acupuncture doesn't mean the treatment was the cause. Much chronic pain comes and goes. An alternative treatment such as acupuncture is sought only when the pain is near its most severe level. Natural regression will lead to the pain becoming less once it has reached its maximum level of severity.

Of course, to be published in the JCS, Wilber's paper was actually peer-reviewed (presumably by the hopeless likes of Roger Walsh, for one). And the same journal, to its credit, has published Christian de Quincey's attempted critique of kw's ideas. Yet, for the real debunking of Wilber's half-baked "theories," you will have to go elsewhere (e.g., here): you won't find it in the JCS. Is there any other field of academic study of which that could be said? That the leading journal fails so miserably to provide a forum for the competent critiquing of its "leading theoretician"?

The problem there, of course, is that the "Eastern side" of the editorial board (e.g., Jeremy Hayward, Huston Smith) is composed of members who made their own careers by believing in the same set of fairy tales to which Wilber is irrevocably attached. (De Quincey is from that same clueless set.) If they can't see through the fairy tales via the simplest application of the tools of science, they're not going to be able to see through or otherwise competently critique kw's fantasies and misrepresentations, either. Nor, for that matter, will they be in any way open to the demonstrable fact that Wilber is simply a consummate bullshit artist, rather than their own unparalleled "genius" of consciousness research.

Anyway, I too have a theory. It hypothesizes that you can save a lot of time by simply not reading Wilber's writings at all, but simply waiting for each new book or "breakthrough" to be thoroughly discredited by people who actually know the fields of research into which he so incompetently stumbles. It's not a matter of "if," but rather of "when." (Historically, a decade or so has usually been enough for him to either recognize the shortcomings in his own ideas—"Wilber I" becomes II becomes III, etc.—or have someone else show them to be far more wrong than there could ever be any excuse for.) You actually read all the way through SES, including the endless endnotes? Too bad: its model is "dead," and was never even logically self-consistent to begin with. You might have better spent the time gardening instead, or at the movies.

So, the next time you're tempted to spend an evening reading up on integral philosophy, just watch American Idol instead. A decade or less from now, you'll be glad you did. 'Cause, unlike real science/scholarship, the "refinements" in kw's ideas, rather than leading to a truer knowledge of reality, merely show up the logical inconsistencies and outright factual misrepresentations which should have prevented the ideas from being taken seriously in the first place.

Or, if you can't face that, you can continue to believe kw when he bullshits, of his four quadrants, that "all of this is suggested, not by metaphysical foundations and speculations, but by a rigorous data search on evidence already available and already largely uncontested."

I had a reading lamp stop working today. Fortunately, I just discovered the Guitar Lamp.

I understand Pete Townshend has one or two in his den....

"This is something that happens from time to time. You know, I've been peppered pretty well myself," said Armstrong. (more)

Guns don't kill people. Heart attack-prone, trigger-happy, oil-interested Vice Presidents kill people.

Or, as phenomenal guitarist Wendell Ferguson and the spoken-word artist Holmes Hooke put it (in Don't Call Your Girlfriend Honey):

Don't call your girlfriend "Dearie" when she's walkin' in the woods
Her doeskin gloves and jacket might be misunderstood
Her body took twelve bullets but her mounted head looked good
Don't call your girlfriend "Dearie" if she's walkin' in the woods

A recommended part of the McDougall Diet:

When I read about the recent Women's Health Initiative (WHI) report on the apparent lack of benefits of a low-fat diet (re: breast cancer, etc.), the first thing I thought was that Dr. John McDougall would have some good points to make against it. And he does. From his response to that study:

The truth is, this study of nearly 50,000 older women, ages 50 to 79 years, has only reinforced the well-known fact that "skinning your chicken" and "drinking low-fat milk" is inconsequential. The Women's Health Initiative was not the first, nor is it likely to be the last, study to prove that what most people consider to be a "reasonable, moderate or prudent diet" is at best a trivial improvement over the disease-causing, standard American diet....

Since the 1950s studies have shown that the more plant-foods, and less processed and animal foods, populations consume, the less breast and colon cancer and heart disease they will develop. Furthermore, there is no "safe threshold"—in other words, the lower the fat intake, the less the cancer and heart disease.

Not that I'm exactly adhering to the McDougall Diet myself yet: Had lunch yesterday at Lick's—Mike Myers' (SNL) favorite restaurant, for their location in the Beaches suburb of Toronto. Nature burger, large fries, and a root beer. Mmmmmm.....

Anyway, even aside from the fact that it involved only post-menopausal women, the study hardly showed, definitively, that "diet makes no difference to one's health." On the contrary:

In the diet study, the difference in breast cancer rates was not statistically different. But Dr. Rossouw [project officer for the Women's Health Initiative] said it was so close—a 9 percent reduction in risk, whereas 10 percent would have been significant—that if the study had gone on longer, it might well have become significant. That was one of his main reasons for continuing to defend a low-fat diet. In addition, he said, the women who started out eating the most fat and then reduced their intake seemed to have the biggest reduction in risk.

And Elsewhere:

Other critics said that the study made a mistake in even aiming for 20 percent of calories as fat [which only 31 percent of the subjects in the low-fat side of the study achieved, anyway]. Dietary fat should be even lower, they said, as low as 10 percent.

But Dr. Rossouw said this was unrealistic, because try as they might, people are not able to change their eating habits that much.

"You can't do that," he said. "Forget it. It's impossible."

Well, not quite. I was vegan for a couple of years in my mid-twenties, in the days before Yves Veggie Cuisine or easy (supermarket) access to soy milk, thus being on a very low-fat diet without even knowing it. It can be done, and it's "no big whoop," as Myers' Linda Richman ("Coffee Talk") would say. I can well believe that as long as you're significantly into the meat, dairy, and eggs, it would be extremely difficult to get below 20 percent. But to say that it's "impossible" to change your eating habits to that degree is just plain irresponsible: Every person who's ever gone from a meat-based diet to a vegan one has made exactly that "impossible" transition, often for reasons as unselfish as caring about the welfare of animals, not even merely for one's own good health.

At the recent World Economic Forum Bill Clinton mentioned the work of Ken Wilber to a large gathering of business people, and referred to "A Theory of Everything" saying: "...the problem is the world needs to be more integrated but it requires a consciousness that's way up here, and an ability to see beyond the differences among us...." (mp3 audio)

A comparison:

Ah, and Chapter 2 of Meyerhoff's Bald Ambition is now online. From which:

Wilber presents his model as if the consensus of scientific opinion supports it, but this is not the case. By tracking down his sources, revealing in them what Wilber does not mention, and exploring more fully the disciplines he uses, I will show that Wilber's version of individual development is not a valid generalization of scientific findings....

It is not only alternate sources that can be cited to contradict Wilber's assertion of scholarly consensus, his own sources when examined closely yield a different picture than the one he presents....

Wilber now calls the basic levels of development waves and the lines of development streams, following the usage of Howard Gardner et al in their 1990 article. He cites and quotes this article several times as evidence for his claims about the universality of the basic levels. And the parts of the article Wilber cites do support his contentions, but the quotes are carefully selected and a return to Gardner et al's article reveals evidence that runs counter to Wilber's model.

If you're surprised by any of that, you haven't been paying attention at all. 'Cause it's all exactly what you'd expect, just from knowing Wilber's history, back to his first toddling steps in transpersonal psychology in the late '70s.

These courses will begin this coming Fall. Students may choose from two Integral options: an Integral Studies Certificate or an Integral Master's in Organizational Management and Development. Fielding is currently accepting applications, which will be reviewed beginning in April. For further information on Fielding's Integral offerings—http://www.fielding.edu/hod/integral

Also, in partnership with John F. Kennedy University, Integral Institute and Integral University is pleased to announce an accredited Master's degree in Integral Theory. Currently, JFKU is the only university in the world that has an Integral Studies Department explicitly based on AQAL — so we are very pleased to extend their Integral expertise to online education.

Courses for the JFKU program will begin in October 2006. This 68 unit Master's degree program will train students in the application of the Integral Model across many scales. Courses will be taught by faculty who are experts in Integral Studies from the Integral Institute and JFKU. The first year of the degree consists of ten courses that act as a stand-alone certificate in Integral Theory. For further information on JFKU's Integral offerings email the Program Director Sean Esbjörn-Hargens: shargens@jfku.edu

If you are interested in getting an accredited Integral degree powered by AQAL then come join us. For both the Fielding and JFKU programs there are limited cyberseats so don't miss your chance to get an Integral Education. See you in the classroom.

Ken

An "integral education." With a major in Wilberian Evolution, and a minor in Non-Double-Blinded Experimental Parapsychology? Partnering with the "best schools." (Check out the "Certificate in Dream Studies"—with courses in Jungian archetypes, shamanism, and "Applied Alchemy"!—in the School of Holistic Studies at JFKU. With them teaching courses in [presumably "spiritual"] alchemy, it's a good thing they don't have a faculty of medicine, offering instruction in bloodletting and phrenology. What fucking century are they in?)

It should be just a bad joke—accredited??!—but it's not. It's real. And there are going to be impressionable kids (and adults) wasting their time and tuition getting an "edjookayshun" in a set of ideas which aren't even remotely logically consistent and which, even if they were internally consistent, are still based on gross misrepresentations (including kw's simplistic presentation of Piaget's ideas in his hierarchy of psychological stages, and his use of Skip Alexander's bumbling attempts at research as "proof" of the efficacy of meditation in effecting psychological stage-growth). Drawn there by the leadership of a raging narcissistic fool who thinks he's a genius, and who has managed to surround himself with several hundred equally foolish demi-leaders who are just as unable to distinguish pure fabrications from reality as their Pandit is.

And now, on the same day, this. Kids who just don't have what it takes to pass a simple exit exam and graduate high school think they're being "discriminated" against, and are suing the Department of Education. Where? Yes, in the same state in which Fielding and JFKU are proudly located.

California.

The Peer-to-Peer "sympathizer" geographical location map, on Frappr. The hierarchical activities in Boulder are, of course, conspicuous by their absence. Just as well:

Since the four quadrants, holons and the 20 tenets are interrelated, Edwards', Goddard's and Smith's criticisms of the latter two have implications for the former. The four quadrant map, as originally drawn in SES, depicted the four different aspects of each holon. Each holon had an individual, social, exterior and interior aspect. Yet Wilber routinely referred to individual and social holons, not individual and social aspects of holons. This may seem to be a minor linguistic shortcut, but Wilber's commentators have demonstrated in great detail how this semantic slip reveals what is crucially problematic about Wilber's four quadrant model, causing Andrew Smith to recently conclude "that the four-quadrant model, in its original form, is dead"....

Smith's criticism of the distinction between individual and social holons makes the separation of the upper right and lower right quadrants fall apart. The details of this criticism have been described elsewhere; Smith's conclusion is that "the criteria that Wilber and Kofman provide for distinguishing individual and social holons are useless. Some of these criteria either fail to make the distinction at all—as shown by the fact that they apply to some of their listed examples of individual holons ('molecules, cells, organisms') as aptly as they do to social holons; others can't be applied at all." (Meyerhoff, Bald Ambition)

Amazing, isn't it? That the mess which Wilber has created in his "great breakthroughs" over the past decade isn't even remotely logically consistent. ("Instead of having one map in which we fit three overlapping classifications—objects of inquiry, methods and validity claims—we actually have three which don't overlap. In addition, the distinctions which create each of these three maps don't stay in their respective categories.") And that's worthy of being called "philosophy"? where no mere "fine tuning" is going to fix the problems, even should transpersonal/paranormal phenomena turn out to be ontologically real.

Was reading legendary recording engineer Bob Katz's (Digital Domain) excellent Mastering Audio book over the weekend. Through it, discovered the often-amazing (uncompressed, alive) music of Rebecca Pidgeon. (Larry Klein—husband [ex?] of Joni Mitchell, and one-time bassist for Peter Gabriel—Billy Preston [Let It Be] and Steely Dan's Walter Becker all played on her most recent album. Becker did the lead guitar work in return for just a bottle of red wine.)

And then came across some utterly inane, anonymous comments against her work, here.

"Ammie Mann"? (Note to Aimee: If you'll just put some emotion into your singing, they can correct any pitch problems which that might introduce with AutoTune or better, formant-preserving software. As it is, you just sound bored, if not downright catatonic/zombie-esque, in your singing.) And "your [sic] not doing something right"?

What they really mean, I think, is that they can't stand Pidgeon's "toxic" left-of-center politics, and therefore her music must suck. Or psychological projections to that effect, where liberals are seen as being without redeeming qualities. That is, the only thing that keeps one safe and saved from the Evil Other is to reaffirm one's belief in the Good Leader, regardless of how much he has lied to you to get you living in fear in the first place.

If you saw behavior like that in the religious world, at least 90% of cult-studies "experts" would daftly insist that it could only arise from "brainwashing" or destructive subtle coercion. Show it in the political world, however, and it's just business as usual.

Just a thought, but maybe the reason one is warned to never discuss religion or politics with one's prospective in-laws is because both utilize the same techniques of manipulation, and bring out exactly the same psychological defenses in their adherents. Does it really make a difference whether the Evil Other is Satan, or communism/terrorism? (If you studied Arthur Miller's play The Crucible back in high school, with its intended parallels between the Salem witch-hunts and McCarthyism, you already know that it makes no difference.) Could the psychological reactions/defenses (e.g., the need for protection by a religious or political "savior," the witch-hunting eradication of "evil," and the willing surrender of one's freedoms [hello, wiretapping] in that hunt) really be any different against one than against the other? Isn't it obvious that, given a structurally comparable set of threats and fears in the political world as in the religious, the psychological reactions to those real or perceived dangers will likewise be hardly distinguishable?

Whether or not the dangers actually exist as presented by the leader/guru is secondary. To bring out the cult-follower defenses—e.g., death threats against the Dixie Chicks, or the regarding of anyone who dares to question the claims of the country's leaders as being "unpatriotic"—it's enough that one believes they exist and that only the right guru/president/ideology can keep one's body and/or soul safe from them.

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And that's how I just about ended up working for ChevronTexaco in ... where the hell is Abuja, anyway? (Ah, Nigeria.) And when did the U.S. embassy start using a Netscape email address?

I got phished (didn't fall for it) by "PayPal" a couple of days ago, too ... but they kinda sabotaged themselves by including links that didn't even work, to where I could supposedly update my credit card information.

Ah, those nasty, disrespectful, blasphemous cartoons....

"Can you imagine a society that added up all the prohibitions of the different religions? What would remain of the freedom to think, to speak, or even to come and go freely?" an ... editorial said. (more)

Well put. A healthy, provocative, mocking disrespect for all forms of fairy-tale religion and spirituality, is what I say. As one commentator put it: "I wanna see a cartoon of Jesus himself cornholing an altar boy—or Jesus himself being very nice but destroying capitalism, by preaching about giving away all your possessions and not sowing or spinning."

Abu Khalil (political science professor in California) said it well:

Should mocking religion be considered part of free speech? For me, the answer is a categorical yes.... To mock religions is free thinking, but to selectively mock one religion, while showing complete respect for others, is often prejudice.

Amen to that. Disrespect for all of 'em. "Lies, damned lies, and religion."

Archaeologist Kenneth Feder explains how he began transforming, in the late '60s, from a credulous believer in "flying saucers and psychic power [who] owned a Ouija board and a pendulum, and ... analyzed handwriting and conducted ESP tests," into "a scientific rationalist, still open to the possibility of all sorts of apparently absurd ideas, but demanding rigorous proof" of them. From his Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology (p. 7-8):

Of all the disciplines discussed in The Morning of the Magicians, archaeology was the only one with which I had more than just a passing familiarity. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became. The often-bizarre claims in The Morning of the Magicians that were related to physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and history seemed reasonable to me primarily because I did not have the knowledge necessary to assess them intelligently.

It was a valuable lesson indeed. The authors had not mysteriously abandoned scholarly research and the scientific method ... only in the one field in which I was well versed. As I looked further into their claims it became obvious that they had ignored the truth in just about every phenomenon they had described....

All those interesting occult claims that had fascinated me could be shown to be, at best, highly speculative and unproven or, at worst, complete nonsense.

Where have you heard all that before? Where have you seen that pattern before—of bumbling, dishonesty and overall gross ignorance of the truth in one field accurately predicting, for anyone who wanted to see, that the whole edifice was, to a very good approximation, "complete nonsense"?

Incidentally, Feder notes that The Morning of the Magicians provided the (uncredited) basis for some of von Däniken's UFO-related "ancient astronauts" ideas.

Though blue is the "coolest" color, green also relaxes. For example, sitting in the "green room" has helped many a talk show guest gain poise before going onstage. (Healing with the Rainbow Rays)

Here's one who manages to repeat the same "wisdom"—while noting that green is the color of the heart chakra—in the midst of quotes (p. 8) from Wilber himself: The Green Fingerprint. And here, too: "Another place we see green used is in the 'green room' of theaters or television studios because nervous performers are quieted by the color."

And yet—

I usually meet my ["believer"] opponents in the Green Room before we proceed to the studio. The Green Room is the term used for the waiting room for guests on a program. I've yet to find one decorated in green. (Henry Gordon, Extrasensory Deception, p. 29)

A nun's apparently inexplicable recovery in France from Parkinson's disease, the same affliction suffered by Pope John Paul II, looks very promising as the miracle needed to beatify the late pontiff, a Polish cleric said. (more)

Uh-huh.

The experts must rule out any natural explanation for the recovery before a miracle can be certified.

Understandably. The same concern applies to Lourdes. Thus, from Henry Gordon's Extrasensory Deception (p. 174):

Many labor under the misconception that miracles are a daily occurrence at that shrine. They may be surprised to learn that at last count there have been since 1858 a total of only eighteen miracles, so-called, at Lourdes. This with approximately three million visitors each year.

So, if PJP II gets credit for curing that nun, I suppose it's "one down, seventeen to go" for the future saint. Careful with that sainthood, though:

The living bodies of likely future saints were covetously watched by relic mongers; when Thomas Aquinas fell ill and died at a French monastery [in 1274], his body was decapitated and his flesh boiled away by monks greedy for his bones. It is said that Saint Romuald of Ravenna heard during a visit to France that he was in mortal peril because of the value of his bones—he fled homeward, pretending to be mad. (in Nickell and Fisher's Mysterious Realms, p. 147)

Things they don't teach you in Sunday School....

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