Blog — March, 2007

Check out Guitar George
He knows all the chords

—Dire Straits, "Sultans of Swing"

Huh, turns out Guitar George is a real person....

YouTube is featuring a number of very well done videos by Roy Zimmerman.

This is also amazing, if less "skeptical": Bohemian Rhapsody - 25 Most Annoying Voices.

If I learned one thing today, in spending too many hours watching YouTube videos, it's that you've got to put down the duckie if you want to play the saxophone.

Oh, and Crystal Gayle was the all-time best Muppet Show guest star.

But what really caught my eye was the ballet....

Oh, look: Wilber's A Brief History of Bullshit will soon be available in mass-market paperback.

Conscience-bereft morons. With "wisdom" like theirs, one does not need ignorance.

From Desilet's "Misunderstanding Derrida and Postmodernism":

At an Integral Spirituality book signing in Boulder (November, 2006) Ken Wilber and I had a brief exchange about postmodernism and specifically his understanding of Derrida....

Wilber claimed that Derrida himself came to understand the overstatement of his case and in an interview published in Positions (1981) reversed himself by acknowledging the transcendental signifier/signified's necessary role in language....

Wilber's reading is a bad misreading. In fact, it is a misreading that twists what Derrida says into its opposite....

Wilber [further] misses a crucial part of the Derridean deconstructive critique of understanding, signification, and communication....

Wilber's understanding of postmodernism remains short-sighted as he continues to insist that it does not imply what Derrida believes it implies....

Despite his sophistication, Wilber appears to have missed the point of deconstructive postmodernism.

Compare that with kw's own evaluation regarding the extent to which he has supposedly understood Derrida:

Not only did I grok what the postmodernists were saying, I have given, in dozens of writings, what numerous experts and specialists in the field (including experts on Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, among others) have called some of the best, and in a few instances, THE best, treatment of these topics.

Heh. Yeah, right. Like I've been saying for a good three and a half years, now—back to when I wrote the first draft of the Appendix for "Norman Einstein"/STG in the summer of 2003—that (integral) boy ain't right.

Julianne Malveaux points out that, because of the civil rights movement, Boomers of African-American descent bonded more closely with their own parents. "...there is not as sharp a generational divide between black boomers and our brothers and sisters from the so-called silent generation." As a result, black Boomers continue to share power, more or less comfortably, with older black leaders. Black Boomers rebelled less against their own parents and family traditions (as white Boomers did) and more against the repressive system.

—Karen Ritchie, Marketing to Generation X, p. 59

Well, that would explain (at least in generalities) how the once-revolutionary Bill Cosby, who in 1965 become "the first African-American man to play a leading role in a regular prime-time series" (Ritchie, p. 73), wound up as the tepid '80s version of "Father Knows Best." That is, the "change" occurred in no small part for his lifetime-identified-with group having a "shared enemy" to fight against, and for the repressed/oppressed members bonding within the in-group in the process.

Funny how it always comes back to that sort of thing.

If the rest of the world is against you, you need your parents on your side, right? Conversely, if while growing up the world is your oyster, you can afford to dis Mum and Dad for all of their faults and misuses of power. Either way, you need to find something to rebel against, as a rite of passage from youth into adulthood.

Opening my inbox this morning, what did I find but a defense of the indefensible Andrew Cohen, lauding his work as supposedly being "of great significance and import," and saying:

In my own personal experience of the man [NOT as a student, rather just as a relatively casual friend and admirer—red flag!], he is not what you describe....

Yes, and in Elliot Benjamin's hopelessly naïve "own personal experience" of Ken Wilber, the latter is still a "great philosopher" who tolerates meaningful questioning of his ideas without marginalizing the doubters. "From a distance, there is harmony."

The email ends with the question "What is transformational leadership anyway?" and references an attached file (from ontoco.com) which purportedly "speaks a bit to the question."

Of course, what that PDF actually does is wilber-esquely reduce resistance to the leader to being something on the order of mere psychological projection (i.e., for the "Stoppers," you, the leader, supposedly "mirror them in an uncomfortable way and they must stop you in order to maintain their world view"). Or to this:

A killer [nice fear-inducing term, there] recognizes power and potential as a personal threat. They respond to leaders with a "fight or flight" reaction. They may alienate, threaten (implied or not), disappear, and do whatever is in their power to end their connection with you. [That point strikes me as really weird, in the surely unintended but nevertheless obvious implication there might be aspects of your relation to the community which are not "in your power" to control. That is, aspects which might prevent you from severing your connection with it, even when you sincerely just want to leave. Hmmm, has that ever happened in Cohen's "true sangha"? You know, that Andy or his lackeys have reached out to people who were trying to exit, to pull them back in? I dunno, ask Andre van der Braak or Luna Tarlo.] They will attempt to kill you personally, professionally, publicly, financially, emotionally, spiritually, etc. Your reaction gives them their reason for living.

Nowhere in that pop-psych PDF, though, is there a category for participants who see that the group's leader is an abusive fraud, and then attempt to share that valid insight with the world. So, such people who genuinely care about the truth, and who evince real compassion for others in doing what they can to make the reported abuse stop, can only be regarded as either "Stoppers" or "Killers."

For my own part, I do truly think that the abusive spiritual leaders in this world deserve to be destroyed in all of the ways mentioned above. Further, I have no doubt that they could effect most of that emotional, financial, professional and spiritual destruction of themselves simply by becoming "randy toadying" disciples of gurus who mete out the same "discipline" as they do. (I haven't seen any accusations of comparable abuse against Cohen's one-time guru, Poonja, as have been made against Andy himself, so that experience doesn't count for the A-boy.) Nevertheless, I personally have plenty of "reasons for living" even without seeing the narcissistic reactions of gurus and pandits to the attempts (by myself and others) to expose them for (to quote South Park) the bastards they really are. Sheesh!

All you really need to do is read Cohen's own grandiosely inflated Autobiography to see what the guy has been about from the beginning. If you insist on being fooled beyond that, thinking that you can evaluate a guru better from a safe distance away than his now-disillusioned followers could in living under his daily, spirit-killing "discipline" ... well, some people just have to learn the hard way.

Sadly, I had to learn the hard way, too, about Paramahansa Yogananda. But, in my own defense, we didn't have anything like the Internet "when I was your age"—it was much easier for abusive institutions like SRF to hide the facts, even just a mere decade ago.

Oh, and you realize that Cohen's Autobiography of an Awakening is quite transparently titled after Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, right? And that PY's friends would have defended even his worst behaviors in exactly the same way as Cohen's friends defend his (and as kw's friends, including Stuart Davis, defend his inexcusable behaviors and worse writings as if they were some kind of wise "teaching"). And that they would have pop-"analyzed" and dismissed his critics just as you do with Andy, on precisely the same level of safe-distance "personal experience" rather than daily, resident discipline.

If guru-figures in general prove nothing else, they do at least show how far a person can go in this world on little more than charisma and the ability to believe his own hallucinations and outright lies.

This is the most insightful analysis I've encountered of hip-hop art and culture. (This is a close second.)

Not that I've been particularly looking, mind you.

For MC Flash In The Pan, the victory worth bragging about isn't that he's created a body of work that will stand the test of time, it's that he got from wherever the fuck he came from to having a major-label deal. Chances are it's never going to get any better than that for poor MC Flash In the Pan, so he better enjoy it while he can: He probably won't be receiving any royalties, and it's doubtful his label has any real interest in him as a long-term proposition. To me, a rapper's faux-omnipotence, like rap's misogyny, is really an expression of powerlessness: I have no real control over my career or how I'm marketed, but as long as I'm in the booth, I'll pretend I'm God. Similarly, rappers don't understand women and fear their sexual power, so they overcompensate by pretending that women are worthless sex objects. It's kinda pathetic, really.

Oh, and Bill Cosby's Pound Cake speech is also good, if a tad too Cosby Show-ish (i.e., "Cosby Knows Best," which has always been a problem with his work, and a primary reason why we stopped watching the show after too long back when I was just a kid).

I was looking up the old story from Ram Dass about his guru allegedly ingesting—rather than simply palming—915 micrograms of LSD, with no effect. (I'm certain that I read, when researching STG, that Maharaji was an amateur magician. Regardless, from what one Robert Forte has densely posted in response to John Horgan's blog entry, I personally wouldn't waste my time on anything else Forte has written. 'Cause the Maharaji story/myth clearly was indeed one of the "great myths of the sixties." So, it's just another damned-fool Buddhist going around teaching when he simply will not learn.)

Anyway, in doing that research I stumbled quite accidentally on Horgan's recent writings:

[Gandhi] once proposed that Indians resist Japanese invaders nonviolently, refusing to follow any orders, even if the Japanese kill every last one of them. "The non-violent resistors will have won the day," Gandhi wrote, "inasmuch as they will have preferred extermination to submission." I loathe, and fear, this macho pacifism, almost as much as I loathe and fear militarism. The death-embracing pacifist is the suicide bomber's fraternal twin....

I speak ill of other scientific opinion-shapers not to fulfill some petty selfish need but because of my deep and abiding concern for others. If a pundit promotes falsehoods, perhaps I can help him see what an idiot he is; if my reasoning fails to persuade him, I want to help others perceive his numbskullery. In this way, I humbly nudge all of humanity closer toward Ultimate Truth. This, you might say, is my Bodhisattva way....

I don't insist that science yield social utility—better cancer treatments, zippier computers, smarter bombs—just truth, or the prospect thereof, even if the truth disturbs. Particle physics and cosmology can't improve our lives materially in any way, but they satisfy our longing to know. What purpose could be more sublime?

Readers of Stripping the Gurus will of course remember the enthusiastic endorsement which Mr. Horgan gave for that particular book. :) That blurb being given well after he had interviewed Ken "The Weight-Lifting Bodhisattva" Wilber for his own Rational Mysticism book.

By contrast, this, from one of kw's lackey (and obviously lacking) integral friends, is how "disturbing truths" are welcomed by the Wilberian community:

I read Meyerhoff's MS a couple of years ago. There were some interesting points here and there, but even these I assumed you would be capable of rebutting with little problem. [Why would you assume that? On what possible grounds? And why would kw publish this letter, when it really only shows how little actual questioning his friends and followers are capable of?] I said as much to him, but then asked: What is the point of writing this document? If Wilber is as misguided as you think, why would any press bother publishing the MS? In other words, if the target is so pathetic, what's the point? And if you have turned the target into a straw man [he hasn't, that's Wilber's job, e.g., with regard to David Bohm], then again—what's the point of publishing the document?

As I commented at the time: Whoever wrote that has no business having a professional opinion in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, or philosophy. Or publishing, for that matter. Whatever happened to the inherent worth in separating true ideas from false ones, even just in the pure pursuit of knowledge?

Oh, and you know how kw disses Richard Dawkins' books as supposedly being the writings of a "religious preacher" (for evolution)? Well, as far as Dawkins, science, and questioning the ontological reality of meditative experiences comparable to kw's own goes, check this out.

Ann Coulter—yes, that Ann Coulter, the crazy, hate-filled, Christian, anti-environmental, war-mongering Republication Über-Bitch—used to be a Deadhead.

[W]hatever their myriad interests, clothing choices, and interest in illicit drugs, true Deadheads are what liberals claim to be but aren't: unique, free-thinking, open, kind, and interested in different ideas.

Just when I thought nothing could surprise me anymore.

I seriously need a drink right now. What I had mistook for reality just shifted 180 degrees....

Wilber might like her, though:

I would like evolution to join the roster of other discredited religions, like the Cargo Cult of the South Pacific. Practitioners of Cargo Cult believed that manufactured products were created by ancestral spirits, and if they imitated what they had seen the white man do, they could cause airplanes to appear out of the sky, bringing valuable cargo like radios and TVs. So they constructed "airport towers" out of bamboo and "headphones" out of coconuts and waited for the airplanes to come with the cargo. It may sound silly, but in defense of the Cargo Cult, they did not wait as long for evidence supporting their theory as the Darwinists have waited for evidence supporting theirs.

I have next to no use for Allen Ginsberg in any context.

But I like this.

"Funny Gen-Y Student Answers to Math Problems."

Pepsi® sponsored Woodstock '94. At a time when they were still doing business in Burma.

Not that a Coke® sponsorship would have been any better.

In 1984, [Paul] McCartney asked "Weird Al" Yankovic when he was going to parody one of his songs. A couple of years later, Yankovic asked for permission to put his "Live and Let Die" parody "Chicken Pot Pie" on an album. McCartney denied the use because he is a vegetarian and didn't want to promote the eating of animal flesh. Fellow vegetarian Yankovic said he respected the decision (Wikipedia).

Cooking For Engineers:

Back in grad school (ME at UC Berkeley), I borrowed a type K thermocouple (with heat resistant wire insulation) and a thermocouple reader and brought it home to check out my oven. Over the course of an afternoon I created a calibration chart for the oven dial. If I remember correctly, the offset was relatively constant across the range, about 50 F. My housemates made jokes about this for a long time. And still ask if I can calibrate their oven.

But the super engineer way would be to bring home 9 or 16 or more thermocouples, arrange them in a 3-D grid in the oven, and then run it at each temperature setting until steady state was reached. Then input the data into SigmaPlot or other 3-D plotting program. The data and plots could help you know where the hot spots are and etc.

The Hacker's Diet:

There is a difference between eating a varied diet and chowing down on a cup of lard and sugar once a day. Programmers know this instinctively: they balance their daily menu among the four major food groups: caffeine, sugar, grease, and salt.

JustStrings.com.

Brand-name products, fast order fulfillment, and low shipping prices.

The Seven Spiritual Laws of Making Big Bucks.

Turned it up this morning, quite accidentally, while searching for information on parody laws ... as opposed to parodies of spiritual "laws."

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