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Ah, so this (and on Wikileaks, and as a BitTorrent) would be the Fitna film which is getting the Mo-hammeds all up in arms again.
Goats, goats ... something about goats....
I never properly researched Maharaj Ji (Prem Rawat) and his Divine Light Mission (now Elan Vital) when writing Stripping the Gurus, in large part because His Tubbiness never gets mentioned in transpersonal psychology as being one of the "Great Realizers."
Turns out, though, that Rawat has some fans at Wikipedia. Highly placed there, too. From the Wikipedia ruled by "Lord of the Universe" article:
One of [Wikipedia's] leading administrators bears an extreme conflict of interest, but you can't expose him from the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard. He created the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard.
This administrator, Jossi Fresco, is a longtime student of Prem Rawat—formerly Guru Maharaj Ji—the India-born spiritual leader who styled himself as the "Perfect Master" and fostered a worldwide religious movement encouraging followers to call him "Lord of the Universe"....
Fresco also denies he has the power shape site policies, even though he is the third most frequent contributor to the conflict of interest policy—even though he removed the clause that forbade guru followers from editing articles about their gurus....
At one point, Wikipedia's Prem Rawat article ... was a rather lengthy biography. But then Fresco took hold of it. Working in tandem with others, he soon created a separate article called "Criticism of Prem Rawat," moved all Rawat criticisms to this new article, and eventually had it deleted.
Hmm, sneaky. But when you've got the "Lord of the Universe/Kosmos" on your side....
"The thing about being in a religious cult is that something happens where the beliefs are reinforced and a person doesn't allow themselves to think anything different," [John Brauns] says. "I didn't allow myself to rationally consider even a simple question like 'What is the likelihood of this guy being the new Jesus?' That may sound stupid to someone who has never been in a cult, but that's the way it is."
What should sound just as ridiculous and "stupid" is that we take the "old Jesus" seriously. When you're already doing that, there's no good reason not to take just as seriously any "new Jesus" like Rawat ... or Yogananda. (Sigh....) 'Cause it's all the same shit; one side doesn't smell any better than the other, if you just inhale deeply enough.
In helping to shape the biographies of living person policy, Fresco has worked to ensure that editors can immediately remove negative material about a living person if it's "unsourced" or "poorly sourced." With other articles, material often remains in place while sources are validated. This is certainly a good thing for Wikipedia as a whole. It prevents libel and defamation.
But Fresco has also worked to ensure that self-published material is fair game with biographies of living persons—as long as it's "not unduly self-serving." So, if an article discusses a living person, it can include positive information from a blog or web site published by that person. But critical information isn't allowed unless it comes from an independent "reputable" source.
Hmm, so self-published information critical of gurus wouldn't be "reputable," then? Even if, like STG, it mostly just summarizes what has indeed been published by "reputable" publishers? (You know, the same ones that published books by Von Daniken and Velikovsky, etc., just to make a buck!)
"The bottom line is that a single person can make extensive changes to Wikipedia policies and guidelines if they put their mind to it," says a senior administrator." A single editor who is determined, patient, expert in Wikipedia customs, well connected, and a bit ruthless will typically prevail over many less interested, impatient, unconnected editors who disagree with him.
"In my opinion, [Fresco's] entire career at Wikipedia has one goal: promoting his guru"....
The Wikipedia elite are well aware of his conflict. And by Wikipedia elite, we mean uber-admins other than Jossi Fresco.
A while back, you may recall, there was a little bit of a WikiControversy regarding my debunkings of Ken Wilber's work, and with regard to STG in general. From the Wikipedia "discussion" page on Ken Wilber at that time:
By the way, someone once tried to create a Wikipedia article about Falk's book, "Stripping the Gurus". After some research, it was deleted by the Wikipedia community (more of whom, it should be noted, are biased against Wilber, or have never heard of him, than are biased for him) on the grounds that the book was self-published on the internet and was not notable enough to merit an article. — goethean 16:43, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
So, what do you think Fresco's attitude, for example, would have been to my "anti-guru" book ... even if he had truly never even heard of Wilber's work prior to that, and had no "integral" biases either way? Hell, the two references to anti-Premie websites on the STG Essential Online Resources page alone would probably have been enough to get the book's page deleted!
As I wrote at that time:
Only around one-fifth of STG is about Wilber; the rest of the book would offend anyone, not merely the daft Wilber-ites, who wanted to believe in childish fairy tales. So really, it's only agnostic and/or atheistic editors who wouldn't have a personal reason to regard the book as not being "notable," and thus to expedite its removal.
See? I told you so!
The ironic thing is that it's precisely because I, for one, need to have complete control over the (controversial) content of my writing, that I have to continue self-publishing my own books. I learned that the hard way with my first book, where the bastard who published that text stopped responding to my emails (and later, stopped sending my royalty cheques) ... not long after I submitted my paper on Wilber and Bohm to The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. (He's on the Board of Editors of that "refereed fairy-tales" publication, too.)
I know of other cult-busters who have had similar problems with New Age presses, i.e., where they had to sue to get the rights to their cult-exposing books back, after the press had let them go out of print. (That is, gone OOP not for lack of public interest in the writing, but presumably just so that the publisher could get hide the information from the public eye ... you know, after they realized that, by exposing cults, they were undercutting the rest of their authors and reader-base, and hence their own overall bottom line.)
Other relevant links:
Steve Hassan's entry for Elan Vital
Rick Ross's archived pieces on Elan Vital
James Randi's Encyclopedia entry for Maharaj Ji
Ex-Premie.Org
Prem Rawat - Critique
P.S. Interesting article on Where angels no longer fear to tread. You'll notice, though, that nothing mentioned there does anything to explain where particular symbols or rituals came from. Nothing at all.
That should be a glaring red flag that they're not getting at where religion/spirituality actually comes from. But then, if you're ignoring the shamanic origins from 15,000+ years ago, how would you think you could explain where it all originated, even with all the evo psych and memes in the world?
Also, there's David Sloan Wilson's overconfident piece on Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion. And Dawkins' entirely appropriate response.
Ach, now I'm going to have to read Darwin's Cathedral, too. Even with knowing, going in, that's it's just "religion as social cohesion" recast in evolutionary terms, by an author who can only see (and try to explain) exoteric religion, without regard for its esoteric basis. Or something very close to all that, anyway, which will end up being closer to evolutionary sociology or social psychology than to religion/spirituality as such.
The thing is that so long as you're just discovering/expounding principles which apply just as well to the members of a "home team" or a "fraternity" or a (political or psychological) cult group as they do to groups of religious followers, you're not yet dealing with where exactly religious beliefs come from. Because, as similar as "social salvation" is to "religious salvation," you'll never understand where the universal Tree of Life symbolism (for example) comes from, on that kind of basis.
P.P.S. This, from Natalie Angier:
Public figures didn't used to have to declare their religious beliefs. Now, even Al Gore has to put himself on display. He gives this fantastic scientific presentation about understanding the world and understanding the atmosphere. He has this incredible ability to synthesis enormous amounts of information. But at the end of his talk he feels compelled to speak about the creator. He's making some kind of gesture so that he won't be attacked, at least from that direction.
Yeah, except that with Al being a daft Fan Of Ken, he's not just yapping about a "creator" in order to not be attacked by the Christian right on that point. Rather, he really believes in something like the Erotic Kosmic Kreator himself.
Ah, well. Sloan Wilson says this, in response to Angier:
If you look at intellectual movements, academic movements, what the hell does it mean to be politically correct? What it means is that there's inadmissible stuff that you can't believe, and if you do, you're out of here. Many aspects of intellectual and academic culture are just as intolerant as any fundamentalist religious movements. I think what we need to talk about is the nature of belief of all kinds. All the things that we're talking about in respect to religion, we need to think about more broadly, in order to diagnose these problems that we both agree are problems.
Very true; but again, that can explain "cults" at most, not where "spirituality" as such comes from. And while those two do indeed often appear together, they don't have to.
This excellent comment came up in response to a posting at Butterflies & Wheels:
A commentator on Pharyngula made the sensible suggestion that if you are going to rely on faith to save your child you should first test your faith to make sure it is strong enough.
He suggested putting the barrel of a loaded gun in your mouth, asking god to protect you, and pulling the trigger.
If you balk at pulling the trigger, your faith is not strong enough. Call a medic.
If you blow the back of your head off, god has saved you from a bad decision.
If god stops the bullet, go ahead and pray.
I was looking at the website for Hexham Abbey, and then the question hit me, from out of nowhere:
Is there an abbey in the vicinity of Abbey Road?
There must have been at some time. You don't just get to be an "abbey road" without there being an abbey around somewhere....
And this fascinating piece by Earl Doherty:
The Case for the Jesus Myth.
And on the lighter side of the news:
Pilot was trying to stow gun that fired.
Geez, who was flying that airplane anyway, Leslie Nielsen?
And if this isn't the most amazing optical illusion ever, I don't know what is.
From Don Salmon and Jan Maslow's The Challenge of Writing About Sri Aurobindo's Integral Psychology:
In recent years, many have attempted to make the teachings of yoga "safe" for modern consumption—i.e., to "sanitize" the traditional teachings by presenting non-material realities as "merely" subjective aspects of objective (i.e. "real") physical phenomena. For example, chakras are explained as the "felt experience" related to the endocrine or nervous system....
Which is probably all that they are.
... various meditative experiences are explained (or explained away) as nothing more than a by-product of complex brain activity.
Which is probably all that they are, to a much greater degree than even most of the people applying cognitive neuroscience (and memes) to religion are yet aware of.
The details of all that, however, will have to wait for another day.
Richard Feynman, considered by many to be one of the most brilliant physicists of the twentieth century....
Well, that's putting it very mildly. If they were as cautious with the rest of their claims, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
We open the section of parapsychology with a series of quotations that bespeak the level of irrationality often found behind the critiques, if not outright rejection, of psi research findings.... Why do we not accept extra-sensory perception as a psychological fact? [Parapsychologist] Rhine has offered us enough evidence to have convinced us on almost any other issue... I cannot see what other basis my colleagues have for rejecting it... My own rejection of his views is in a literal sense prejudice.--Psychologist Donald O. Hebb, 1951
Why do we not accept extra-sensory perception as a psychological fact? [Parapsychologist] Rhine has offered us enough evidence to have convinced us on almost any other issue... I cannot see what other basis my colleagues have for rejecting it... My own rejection of his views is in a literal sense prejudice.--Psychologist Donald O. Hebb, 1951
Well, sometimes you can get the right answer for the wrong conscious reasons; blink and call it "intuition." Since 1951, Joseph B. Rhine's work has been debunked to a point that would unconvince us on almost any other issue. Just read the SkepDic entries which mention that particularly inept fool. We're dealing there with someone who not only thought that Lady the "talking" horse was psychic, but also "believed that persons who disliked him guessed wrong to spite him" on ESP tests ... and correspondingly excluded their low scores from his statistics. (File Under: Paranoia, Incompetence, Fraud.)
According to [Ronald] Melzack, one of the leading researchers on the psychological aspects of pain, "The field of psychology is in a state of crisis. We are no closer now to understanding the most fundamental problems of psychology than we were when psychology became a science a hundred years ago... some neuroscience and computer technology have been stirred in with the old psychological ingredients, but there have been no important conceptual advances... We are adrift... in a sea of facts and practically drowning in them. We desperately need new concepts, new approaches."
Psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker....
Leaving aside the question as to when exactly psychology became a "science" (it sure wasn't such back in the day of the hyper-imaginative babblings of Freud or Jung) ... ever heard of evolutionary psychology? Or "theory theory"?
If you really think evo psych hasn't contributed any "important conceptual advances" to understanding human behavior, or that it merely consists of "some neuroscience and computer technology ... stirred in with the old psychological ingredients," you honestly don't have a clue what you're talking about. Natural selection applied to the genetic basis of human behaviors is in no way the same thing as "neuroscience and computer technology." And if evo psych isn't dealing with "fundamental problems of psychology," what do you think it's addressing? Aside from the "hard problem" of consciousness, which no one knows how to solve (except a few fools who think they've experienced the "nondual Spirit which has become all matter and relative consciousness," etc.), it's addressing just about every other "fundamental problem" in psych.
And then in the very next paragraph Salmon and Maslow are quoting Pinker, probably the world's most prominent advocate of evo psych. Brilliant.
In my review of the research, I came across only one example of a legitimate critique of the CIA remote viewing experiments as well as Utts' and Hyman's analyses, and that was from an article published in the Journal of Parapsychology!....
[Of] the eleven most successful of those experiments [two parapsychologists] found five which could be considered, by the most stringent standards [??], to have at least some minor methodological flaws.
This left six remote-viewing experiments which were, by all accounts I could find, essentially flawless.
Well, I found this in five seconds of research on SkepDic:
[T]he later [Stargate, CIA remote-viewing] studies—done under the direction of [Utts' erstwhile co-author, Edwin] May—which were better designed and controlled than the ones done by Targ and Puthoff, were [still] fatally flawed because May, the director of the program, was the sole judge of the accuracy of the reports and he conducted the experiments in secret (which made peer review and replication impossible). David Marks tried for years to get May to let him look at his data, but May wouldn't allow it.... There were hundreds, maybe thousands of trials, where a remote viewer would draw something and give a verbal report of what he was seeing. It would be highly unusual if there weren't some that would seem very accurate for the targets. Since it was never required for success that the drawing or report be exact, it is always possible that an ambiguous image will be seen as fitting a particular target especially if the judge knows what the target is! Furthermore, we have only May's word for it that the very detailed descriptions that were spot on, were as he says they were. He hasn't made his data public.... An analysis of the Targ and Puthoff experiments was done by Marks and he found that they systematically violated the rule about blind judging. Marks found substantial evidence that Targ and Puthoff cued their judges by including dates and references to previous experiments in the transcripts, "enabling the judges to successfully match the transcripts against the list of target sites."
[T]he later [Stargate, CIA remote-viewing] studies—done under the direction of [Utts' erstwhile co-author, Edwin] May—which were better designed and controlled than the ones done by Targ and Puthoff, were [still] fatally flawed because May, the director of the program, was the sole judge of the accuracy of the reports and he conducted the experiments in secret (which made peer review and replication impossible). David Marks tried for years to get May to let him look at his data, but May wouldn't allow it....
There were hundreds, maybe thousands of trials, where a remote viewer would draw something and give a verbal report of what he was seeing. It would be highly unusual if there weren't some that would seem very accurate for the targets. Since it was never required for success that the drawing or report be exact, it is always possible that an ambiguous image will be seen as fitting a particular target especially if the judge knows what the target is! Furthermore, we have only May's word for it that the very detailed descriptions that were spot on, were as he says they were. He hasn't made his data public....
An analysis of the Targ and Puthoff experiments was done by Marks and he found that they systematically violated the rule about blind judging. Marks found substantial evidence that Targ and Puthoff cued their judges by including dates and references to previous experiments in the transcripts, "enabling the judges to successfully match the transcripts against the list of target sites."
And that surprises you? Or is the above simply not a "legitimate critique" of the Stargate experiments, in Salmon and Maslow's "integral yoga" view? Pathetic. If you're as ignorant about extant debunkings as those two obviously are, you shouldn't be pushing the "smiling, happy" side of the subject in the first place.
[P]sychologist Joseph Alcock, who responded to Utts' comments in a special Journal of Consciousness Studies issue entitled, PSI Wars, typified those critics in that he attacked her conclusions without providing a single specific piece of contrary evidence.
That would be James Alcock. He's the one without a coat of many colors....
More from the fishy Salmon and Maslow:
British psychologist Julie Milton of the University of Edinburgh analyzed 78 studies published between 1964 and 1993, "in which people attempted to acquire information [by means which cannot be explained in terms of our ordinary understanding of the working of] the physical senses. These experiments had been reported in fifty-five publications by thirty-five different investigators and involved 1,158 subjects... Milton found the overall effects to be highly positive, with odds against chance of 10 million to 1."
Yet, from the very same skepdic.com piece as above, on remote viewing:
[Dean] Radin mentions that Julie Milton did an analysis of 78 free-response psi experiments published between 1964 and 1993 and found that "the overall effect resulted in odds against chance of ten million to one".... He doesn't mention that only two of the studies had proper safeguards for the crucial protocol of "avoiding giving cues to judges and keeping the experimenter blind to the identity of the target in telepathy and clairvoyance".... Nor does Radin mention that 26% of the studies failed to provide adequate safeguards regarding the person transcribing the subject's descriptions being blind to the target's identity and that this was associated with a significantly higher effect size than the studies that contained this safeguard....
And that surprises you? Really, it surprises you? Really??
More Salmon and Mayo:
Robert G. Jahn, the director of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory (PEAR), has conducted experiments for a number of years reliably demonstrating psychokinesis—the power of mind over matter; or, in the case of his experiments, mind over machine.
Oh, not even close! Again from skepdic.com:
In 1986, Jahn, Brenda Dunne, and Roger Nelson reported on millions of trials with 33 subjects over seven years trying to use their minds to override random number generators (RNG). Think of the RNG as producing zeros and ones. Over the long haul, the laws of probability predict that in a truly random sequence, there should be 50% of each produced. The subjects in the PEAR experiments tried to use their minds to produce more zeros (or ones, depending on the assignment). In short, the PEAR people did what many drivers do when they try to use their thoughts to make a red light turn green.
Radin thinks the PEAR group replicated Schmidt's work in 258 experimental studies and 127 control studies. C. E. M. Hansel examined the studies done after 1969 and before 1987 that attempted to replicate Schmidt's work. He notes: "The main fact that emerges from this data is that 71 experiments gave a result supporting Schmidt's findings and 261 experiments failed to do so" (Hansel 1989: 185). That is the beauty of meta-analysis: you can transform a failure rate of nearly 4 to 1 into a grand success....
However, according to Ray Hyman, "the percentage of hits in the intended direction was only 50.02%" in the PEAR studies (Hyman 1989: 152). And one "operator" (the term used to describe the subjects in these studies) was responsible for 23% of the total data base. Her hit rate was 50.05%. Take out this operator and the hit rate becomes 50.01%. According to John McCrone, "Operator 10," believed to be a PEAR staff member, "has been involved in 15% of the 14 million trials, yet contributed to a full half of the total excess hits" (McCrone 1994). According to Dean Radin, the criticism that there "was any one person responsible for the overall results of the experiment ... was tested and found to be groundless".... McCrone has done the calculations and found that "If [operator 10's] figures are taken out of the data pool, scoring in the "low intention" condition falls to chance while "high intention" scoring drops close to the .05 boundary considered weakly significant in scientific results"....
The main assumption that Jahn and his colleagues made may not be warranted. "It is not clear that any of these machines is truly random. Indeed, it is generally believed that there are no truly random machines. It may be that lack of randomness only begins to show up after many trials"....
Furthermore, Stanley Jeffers, a physicist at York University, Ontario, has repeated the Jahn experiments but with chance results.... And Jahn et al. failed to replicate the PEAR results in experiments done in Germany....
If that's what you call "reliably demonstrating psychokinesis," we are clearly using very different definitions of the words "reliably" and "demonstrating." But then, I could have predicted that going in. And I'm not even psychic!
According to Alan [Wallace], one of the basic requirements for reliable exercise of what we call "paranormal" abilities is precisely the ability to maintain this awareness—unbroken—for at least several hours. Traditional yogis have generally considered that, along with this ability, a profound ethical development is also essential—honesty, sincerity, humility, etc.
I am not aware of any psi studies that come even close to training their subjects to achieve such an inner state.
No studies at all? What about the (inadequately controlled) testing of psi and PK claims done by Elmer and Alyce Green on Swami Rama (and Jack Schwarz) at the Menninger Clinic back in the late 1960s? True, Rama came into that "pre-trained" (and probably lacked a good deal of "honesty, sincerity, [and] humility"!). But if you really need people trained in "unbroken awareness" to do studies of psi ... well, I'm sure you can find them aplenty in the hills around Boulder. Start with everyone who's ever blown $249 or thereabouts on a few CDs, DVDs and booklets (ooh, and a poster too!) in the Integral Life Starter Kit.
And then when you've "proved" psi as being more than just a statistical artifact, take James Randi up on his Million $ Challenge. If you succeed in that challenge I can guarantee you (without even being psychic myself!) that even the most hardened skeptic will sit up and take notice. Until then, it's just so much chin music about "reliably demonstrat[ed]" phenomena which sadly never turn out to be what the believing sheep claim.
(I would have much preferred to see Randi simply reduce his Challenge payout to, say, $100,000, rather than withdrawing it completely in a couple of years from now, as he's planning on doing. He says they don't even need the money, so I can only guess that he just wants to spend his time doing things more productive than vetting claims from weirdoes, even though he already has hired help with that. I sympathize, but I still don't agree with how he's handled it in that context. But, of course, it's his money, not mine.)
Will any of the above dent Salmon and Maslow's "open-minded" confidence that psi phenomena have already been "reliably demonstrat[ed]" to exist, even in long-ago debunked and "fatally flawed" experiments? Of course not.
Whenever you find people quoting Dean Radin or the work at PEAR in a positive way, you don't actually even need to read any further to know that you're dealing with ones who can't tell shit from Shinola. (You can hardly go too far wrong in quoting Ray Hyman, so no points at all to them for getting that much right.)
Me, I still side with the Salmon of Doubt on this one. Or with the "Hyman of Doubt." Or even the hymen of doubt, if there was one readily at hand....
P.S. And now available on Integral World, too.
The Celebrity Atheist List.
From the entry for Kensho's friend Billy Corgan:
I'm no messiah, I'm just some dumb Mid-West guy.
Truer words were never spoken.
So I was stuck in a waiting room today with an alpha chimp, and a beta of the same species. Chattering to each other, they were. Turns out Beta was trained in social services, working with addicts; but was now working at several restaurants.
Obviously, there must be more drug addicts hanging around restaurants in Toronto than I had previously surmised.
Eventually, they started talking about movies. At which point Alpha uttered one of the ten stupidest lines I will ever have the privilege of hearing:
"They have that movie ... about the philosopher who predicted all those things? Amadeus?"
So now I know exactly how Jane Goodall must have felt, stuck in Gombe, listening to apes trying to communicate.
Coincidentally, I had been stuck with the same clueless (white) gibbon-from-Oshawa in a different room several months ago. How he wound up this far from Tanzania I'll never know. Long story short, somebody else ended up pointing out that he was being inconsiderate. So, of course, that minor correction predictably fueled his need to "teach" somebody else to be more considerate. You know, like an ape who's just been shown how to use a twig to get into a termite nest when he never in a million years of evolution would have figured it out for himself, so now he has to teach everyone else, as if he was the one to discover it.
You can guess who the knuckle-dragging dumbfuck chose for his "pupil," can't you?
So anyway, when he informed me (quite incorrectly) about what I could be doing differently to make the world a more considerate place, I just looked away, shook my head, and said quietly, "No, not really."
Of course, that only infuriated the Great Ape all the more:
"You got something you want to say to me?"
Yeah, I've got something I want to say to you: You're a fucking orangutan! Get a single clue, you goddamn, loud-mouthed primate!
(I unobtrusively thought to myself.)
Way back then, Alpha had also mentioned having previously had a ClubLink (golf) membership. Those are major expensive passes (i.e., they apparently cost over $7K), and you'd need to have a flexible schedule to connect with the tee-off times. So I'm thinking a past tenure in middle-management for the Simian Doofus.
But unless Monkey-Brain was just heading up a slaughterhouse or maybe a Foot Locker store, the guy really had no business in management.
You know who belongs in management?
Nostradamus. Wolfgang Nostradamus Mozart.
Fucking orangutans. Yet they vote, they golf, and they reproduce....
[Chrissie Hynde, of The Pretenders] experimented with hippie counterculture, psychotropic drugs, eastern mysticism, and vegetarianism....
Chrissie is now wearing three strands of tulsi-mala, a sacred necklace from India. She is also chanting the Hare Krishna maha-mantra daily. (Wikipedia)
It is time for you to stop all of your chanting....
So I was on the verge of ordering a couple of Acharya S's books on the origins of Christianity. But then I read these ruminations from her, on the topic of diet:
Junkfood causes criminality. A number of people have said this, but few have heard it....
Unfortunately, junkfood junkies are extremely untrustworthy, and we are seeing gangs of them causing chaos and mayhem worldwide....
In a sane society, the invasion of junkfood would be fought against tooth and nail, for it is major contributing factor in societal breakdown. In such a society, criminals, who are often malnourished rather than innately evil, would be fed as nutritiously as possible, such that their behavior could be rectified and they could become contributing members of society instead of burdens.
And I started to think: Geez, if she's coming to those kind of spacey conclusions even on a topic where the science is pretty darn solid....
Yes, she has links to a number of legitimate skeptical sites ... but then also to tantric sexuality (which can only work if subtle energies exist) and Osho (crediting him with "roasting numerous sacred cows," oy). And UFOs/Atlantis. Ah, and to this book featuring contributions from Erich von Daniken, among others....
I did find this debunking of the claimed parallels between the myths of Horus and Jesus. But since neither side gives direct quotes from their sources (there), you still can't know who's bullshitting you. (Plus, there's that whole other thing about the parallels between Jesus and Osiris-Dionysus, so what about that then, huh? Huh?)
From Barbara Myerhoff's The Peyote Hunt:
One can be sure he has obtained good peyote only if he gathers it in the right place and manner. The results of eating tsuwiri [i.e., "bad peyote"] are indeed terrible.... The kinds of hallucinations described as occurring due to eating tsuwiri are culturally structured and recurrent. A common one is the experience of a man encountering a huge agave cactus in the desert, thinking it is a woman and making love to it.
Cue Wile E. Coyote pulling cactus spikes out of his lower abdomen, wincing with each springy thorn he removes.
From Toro and Thomas's Drugs of the Dreaming (p. 86):
The Humr tribe of the Baggara Arabs, living in southwest Kurdofan, Sudan, is devoted to hunting elephants and, above all, giraffes. After having killed a giraffe, they prepare a visionary beverage known as umm nyolokh, employing both the liver and the bone marrow of the animal. It seems that the aim of their hunting is precisely the preparation of this beverage and not to procure food.
Drinking the beverage is supposed to cause a true obsession with giraffes. Its effects are characterized by drunkenness and the induction of dreams in which giraffes explain where more real giraffes might be found and hunted for a new preparation of the same beverage, in order to give more hallucinations with the same content. Thus those who drink umm nyolokh just once spend the rest of their lives hunting giraffes.
Reminds me of the mission statement from NutzMedia.com:
Except instead of cookies it's giraffes. But otherwise the business model looks about the same.
I suppose they could join forces and produce giraffe-shaped animal crackers....
Holidays are made for reading —Sarah Harmer, "Things To Forget"
—Sarah Harmer, "Things To Forget"
Interesting blog from a woman who spent ten years as an entourage member of Gurumayi, successor to Muktananda: The Guru Looked Good.
During the course of The Guru Looked Good being posted I was contacted once by phone by ashram management, telling me to take down the blog immediately and threatening to take legal action against me if I didn't follow orders.
Also, an amusing incident involving PZ Myers: EXPELLED!.
I haven't actually cracked open a book yet today, after shivering outside for an hour this morning and then crawling right back into bed. ("Six more weeks of winter," the groundhogs at Environment Canada are telling us.) But right now I'm gonna make myself a Bacardi and Coke (I tended bar for ten summers, back in the day), open the blue-corn tortilla chips and salsa for lunch, and get started on Wexler's Brain and Culture. It's recommended by Oliver Sacks, so you know it's gonna be good.
P.S. Happy Easter! Celebwating the wesuwwection of that wascally, Eastew, Kwistian, wesuwwecting Wabbit!
From the Rick Ross Cult Education Forum:
This message board is now again the target of a massive DDoS attack. That's why everything is slow and unresponsive right now and that's also the reason why the board was down all of the weekend 7-9 March. The attacker is the same fruit basket that has been attacking www.rickross.com ever since September last year: Bruce Raisley.
After almost six months of this shit, it really has to stop. And the way to stop it is to make the attacks counterproductive for Raisley himself. That's where you can help.
Please create a page on as many free websites and blogs as you can find and post this article on them. Post it also in newsgroups and message boards. Share it over your e-Mule, Kazaa and whatever bittorrent tracker you happen to like. With your help we can have the article on several hundred distinct URLs within a day or two, so that Raisley finally realizes that attacking this site is not in his best interest.
So, the least I could do is to re-post the story, below:
Strange Bedfellows Xavier Von Erck dropped out of college, started a pedophile-hunting vigilante group, and spent months posing as a woman to trick an online enemy into falling in love with him. Meet the new savior of NBC News Radar Investigates/September 7, 2006 By John Cook As NBC gears up for fall, no doubt full of hope that it can avoid a third consecutive season as the fourth-place network, you're likely to see a lot of familiar faces plastered on the sides of buses: Meredith Vieira, Brian Williams, Steve Carell, Donald Trump. One face you won't see, however, belongs to a 27-year-old community college dropout from Portland, OR, who is responsible for an NBC ratings phenomenon that has eclipsed or matched those stars' shows: His cunning idea, which makes for endlessly watchable and deeply nauseating television, regularly doubles Today's audience, draws more viewers than both the Nightly News and The Office, and nearly tied The Apprentice in audience last season, a tonic that NBC desperately needs as it founders in the ratings. His name is Xavier Von Erck, and the program he helped create is "To Catch a Predator," the recurring special "investigation" into the sexual depravity of drooling, sweaty creeps that periodically hijacks Dateline NBC during sweeps months. Xavier Von Erck—if the name sounds invented, that's because it is, but more on that later—is the founder and public face of Perverted Justice, an all-volunteer online organization that seeks to expose adults who troll chat rooms looking for youngsters to have sex with. Its members do this by posing as 12- or 13-year-olds online, engaging in sexual banter with older men, setting up meetings purportedly for sex, and then, after verifying a target's identity, posting his name and personal details online and encouraging readers to call his family and employer to let them know what he's been doing with his free time. But it's not only predators who have found themselves duped and publicly disgraced by Von Erck. He once set out to destroy an enemy by posing as a woman, seducing him online with graphic sex chats, posting the transcripts on the web, and threatening to release a purported video of his target masturbating—not the kind of behavior you'd expect from NBC News's golden boy. Von Erck, who previously worked tech support jobs, launched Perverted Justice in 2003. "I was a chatter in the Portland Yahoo regional rooms," he tells Radar in an e-mail. "I, like many, had the notion that individuals going online to solicit kids would be arrested, that cops were all over the chatrooms monitoring things. However, week after week passed and the same guys who would mass-post things like, 'Any 14-to-15-year-olds in here want to make money modeling?' and other solicitations would still be there. It was disturbing." He figured that if he could pretend to be a kid, he could embarrass the lurkers and make every potential predator paranoid about contacting children online. Perverted Justice initially limited itself to publicizing the names and contact information of its targets on the website. Eventually, local news crews in Portland and elsewhere began collaborating with Von Erck to set up sting operations—drawing perverts to a rented house, filming them as they approached, and using the footage to scare the shit out of parents during sweeps. It was, at best, a mediocre gimmick suitable for mid-market local news until Dateline hit on the idea that would make "To Catch a Predator" a cultural touchstone: Set up a pompous correspondent inside the house to interview the startled pervs and make them sweat. With smarmy host Chris Hansen onboard, the show takes on the classic elements of Aristotelian drama. First, viewers feel pity for the marks, who slowly come to understand before our eyes that they've just wrecked their lives; next comes fear, enhanced by creepy graphics and hard-to-prove statistics indicating that everybody on the Internet wants to molest your daughter; and finally we experience a satisfying sense of purgation as each sucker is taken violently to the ground by local police waiting outside the house. Even by the bug-eating, race-baiting, promiscuity-celebrating standards of reality television, "To Catch a Predator" is monstrously exploitative—a Television Age Roman coliseum where freakish criminals are publicly humiliated for bloodsport and ratings. Granted, these are bad men, and it's a good thing they are being stopped, hopefully, from hurting actual children. But they can be stopped—and are stopped all the time by local police stings—without parading them across our television screens for titillated and enraged audiences to gawk at between commercial breaks. And, of course, "To Catch a Predator" is not reality television. It's produced under the auspices of NBC's vaunted news division, which has gone to unprecedented lengths to secure Von Erck's ongoing cooperation, reportedly paying him in excess of $100,000 per episode for his services, and even giving him, according to one source, a cut of any revenue from future DVD sales of the shows. That arrangement, and the show's sensationalism, make some at the network squirm. "I think it's fascinating television," says one former NBC News producer who loathes the show but often can't look away. "Although I find myself rooting for the pedophiles." Not much is known about Von Erck's background. He's cagey in interviews—he agreed to talk to Radar only via e-mail—and doesn't reveal much personal information for fear of being targeted by one of the men he has exposed. He was raised in Portland by his mother, who struggled to support the family by working odd jobs—from Taco Bell to a gas station—and moved 12 times before his junior year of high school. He was the captain of his high school's mock trial team, and he continues to demonstrate a facility for debate and rhetoric on his blog, Angry German, where he alternates between charming posts about his love of Portland, video games, and professional wrestling, and vicious, unhinged screeds against various targets. Some of Von Erck's rants betray a hint of the sadism that informs "To Catch a Predator." After a spate of kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq in 2004, Von Erck wrote that he was "positively appalled at Nicholas Berg," who "kneeled meekly and struggled naught [sic] as his death was thrust upon him ... bending to the will of the kidnappers." He was even more enraged by the "shameless and pathetic" conduct of Kim Sun-il, a kidnapped South Korean translator who appeared in a video released by Iraqi insurgents (he was later beheaded). "The asshole, yes, the asshole, screamed in English, pleading for his life," Von Erck wrote. "Let me be the first and probably only American to wish for his speedy death.... No life of such a worm, a coward, can be considered important." Of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Von Erck had this to say: "I wish I could fucking kill 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Yes, kill. I'd like to kill them. Kill them all... I want you to die. I wish you would die. Why don't you die? Just die." Von Erck's birth name is Phillip John Eide. Although he legally changed it earlier this year in a Portland court, he says he has gone by Xavier Von Erck since he was 15. Erck is his mother's maiden name, to which he added the "Von" in a nod to his German heritage. "Xavier" he just picked. "My old name was the name my father gave me," he says. "Being that my father had no role in my upbringing, as a teen I did not see the logic in being stuck with his name. So I took my mother's name as a tribute to her, and a new first name." (In the Perverted Justice world, where anonymous volunteers going by handles like Epiphany and Peppermint Patty pretend to be children online, identity is a tricky thing to nail down. Von Erck's longtime friend and roommate, formerly known as Nicholas Wilkins, has also legally changed his name to his online handle, Phoebus Apollo.) Von Erck briefly attended Mt. Hood Community College before dropping out in the face of what he called a "productive Internet addiction." He then worked various tech support jobs while building up Perverted Justice; now, running the website and coordinating Perverted Justice's role in the Dateline busts is his full-time job. As for how and why he made a career of humiliating perverts, Von Erck is demure: "The site has grown and evolved because people have come to it and suggested ideas, come up with technological improvements, etc. I just organize and direct it. I try not to take credit for the site succeeding, the credit goes to how pervasive the problem is online and how dedicated people are toward fighting it." Nevertheless, Perverted Justice has many enemies. There are websites devoted to attacking Von Erck and his nameless volunteer corps, and to outing and identifying the people who conduct Perverted Justice's stings. These anti-PJ activists describe themselves as combating vigilantism and what they see as the group's entrapment tactics. According to an account posted by Von Erck, one of Perverted Justice's fiercest critics was a 44-year-old software developer from Searcy, AR, named Bruce Raisley. Raisley was a frequent poster to a forum at an anti-PJ site called Anti-Vigilante Special Operations (AVSO) and he posted several threatening and seemingly deranged comments to the site. He claimed, among other things, to have written a virus that he would unleash upon Perverted Justice volunteers, and used his computer skills to harass Perverted Justice members by exposing the online handles they used when posing as children and tracking down their real identities. He once threatened, during an IM chat, to "fuck or beat" one Perverted Justice activist if he ever met him (Raisley thought he was communicating with a woman at the time). It's unclear why Raisley, a private pilot and ham radio enthusiast, was so militantly opposed to Perverted Justice. He has claimed he was once a Perverted Justice member but broke with the group after another member found a photograph of Railey's son online and used it in a decoy Yahoo profile—in other words, used his son as bait for perverts. Perverted Justice denies this. Von Erck claims he contacted local authorities in Arkansas and the FBI about Raisley but they "simply weren't moving fast enough for my tastes, considering how bold he was getting about his threats." So he decided to mete out his own form of perverse justice, introducing himself to Raisley online, via instant messenger. He called himself "Holly." Holly and Raisley hit it off. They conducted a months-long correspondence via IM, and gradually, Raisley fell in love with his new online pal. Holly would occasionally inquire about Raisley's anti-Perverted Justice activities, but eventually the conversation turned to sex: [Raisley]: what r u doing? [Holly]: I have my fingers in [Raisley]: i am holding it [Holly]: are you rubbing it [Raisley]: r u rubbing your clit? [Holly]: yes. it feels so good baby The couple had cybersex twice. Holly repeatedly begged Raisley to masturbate in front of a webcam for her. Raisley told her about his son, his job, his role as a Boy Scout troop leader. Eventually, Raisley came clean to his wife about Holly, told her that they were in love, and declared that Holly was moving to Arkansas. After securing an apartment for the two of them to live in, he went to pick up Holly at the airport. He was carrying flowers. Von Erck never got on the plane, but he did find someone to go to the airport at the appointed time to snap a picture of a hopeful Raisley waiting for his love to arrive. Then he posted it online, along with the entire text of their chat and a threat to release a video file he claimed showed Raisley masturbating. And then this message to Perverted Justice's detractors: "[W]hen you attempt to threaten members of Perverted-Justice.com... this can happen to you. Tonight, Bruce Raisley stood around at an airport, flowers in hand, waiting for a woman that turned out to be a man. He's not in love. He has destroyed his relationship with his wife, he has denigrated her, and he has betrayed all those around him. He has no one. He has no more secrets. We at Perverted-Justice.com will only tolerate so much in the way of threats and attacks upon us." Today, Von Erck professes sympathy for his victim. "As much as I hated Bruce Raisley for what he tried to do," he says, "I felt bad for him in the sense that the guy definitely has some mental issues. My hope is that Raisley gets mental health help, he sticks with his wife, and they live a happy, threatening- and harassing-free life. The head game that was played with him was only done in order to 'knock him out' so to speak." Raisley was indeed knocked out. A call to his home in Arkansas was answered by a woman who said she was his wife. "That was just a big old mess," she said. "He's already lost one job over this, and he doesn't want anybody to know about it. I'm just hoping this will just fade away." Though she would not comment on the accuracy of Von Erck's online account, she admitted having read it. Von Erck is not the first strange man—and pretending to be a woman for the purposes of seducing a man over a period of months in order to publicly ruin him is nothing if not strange—that NBC News has worked with in order to gather the news. But the extent of the network's business relationship with Von Erck has raised eyebrows in the halls of NBC News. According to an April Washington Post story, Perverted Justice was paid a "low six figures" consultancy fee to organize a sting operation for Dateline in Ohio. Sources knowledgeable about the inner workings of NBC confirm that account, and say NBC is paying the group between $100,000 and $150,000 per show. According to one current NBC News staffer and one former NBC official, the figure was arrived at after Perverted Justice saw the ratings success of its first three Dateline shows and retained the services of Steve Sadicario, a former ABC News executive and agent with NS Bienstock, a firm that represents Bill O'Reilly, Anderson Cooper, and Dan Rather. Sadicario, according to the sources, started a "bidding war" for Perverted Justice's services after shopping an idea for a show to Fox and ABC. NBC won. The deal that Perverted Justice cut with NBC is unusual in two respects: For one, according to the former NBC News official, it was negotiated by the network's entertainment lawyers, not by the news division's legal staff. Secondly, according to an NBC News staffer, Perverted Justice is entitled to a portion of any revenue from DVD sales of "To Catch a Predator" episodes—an arrangement common in the entertainment world but unheard of in the context of a news division's relationship with a consultant. The staffer notes, "It would be the first back-end deal in the history of journalism." It's not hard to see why NBC would go to great lengths to keep Von Erck in its stable, and to ride the "To Catch a Predator" phenomenon as far as it can. So far, the original broadcasts have averaged 9.2 million viewers, beating out such entertainment-division staples as Will & Grace (with an average of 8.6 million viewers last season) and The Office (7.9 million). In the advertiser-friendly 18-to-49-year-old demographic, "To Catch a Predator" episodes ranked 16 among NBC's 41 regularly broadcast shows last season, beating Scrubs and Fear Factor. While it's a special edition of Dateline NBC, rather than a show in its own right, it was one of NBC's few successful new offerings last season. Only Deal or No Deal, Surface, and My Name Is Earl outperformed it in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic. Both Von Erck and David Corvo, executive producer of Dateline, who submitted to a brief interview and did not return subsequent phone calls, say they are unaware of plans for a DVD, and both say they don't know if Perverted Justice would get any portion of the revenues if a DVD were sold. Sadicario did not return repeated phone calls. Both NBC and Von Erck declined to discuss specifics of the deal, and Von Erck says that "by and large," he hasn't seen any of the NBC money yet. (He told Willamette Week in May that he'd only been paid $20,000 so far.) But if Perverted Justice is getting paid more than $100,000 per sting, it has earned more than $400,000 since April. "It was getting expensive," Von Erck says. "We literally could not keep our website up anymore due to the site traffic. At that point it was either no more Datelines or a consultation fee. At the end of the day, the cameramen were getting paid, Chris Hansen was getting paid, the producers of Dateline were getting paid, the police were paying themselves via public funds to do the arrests, the guy who owns the house was getting compensated, the security there was being paid. So it was only natural to seek compensation for the expensive work that we do." Asked to outline the expenses involved in operating Perverted Justice, Von Erck cites only server costs to handle traffic driven to the group's website by the exposure on Dateline and "confidential" expenses associated with the stings. Perverted Justice has no paid staff and no offices. In fact, it is not even a legal entity. Von Erck says he is in the process of incorporating it as a nonprofit, but claims not to know in which state. Von Erck says he is not personally being paid by NBC and claims not to know precisely to whom NBC is making out the checks. The arrangement, and the fact that the shows involve cooperation with law enforcement, has some NBC News staff apoplectic. "We've crawled into bed with the cops. People think this will be the pickup truck for the new decade," says one Dateline producer, referring to the notorious episode in 1993 in which Dateline was caught faking exploding gas tanks in GM trucks. "One of these guys is going to go home and shoot himself in the head. The Perverted Justice people are insane, and they'll do something to embarrass us. One of the biggest corporations in the world ought to find a better target than skanky guys in shorts." "There's no doubt," says another NBC News staffer, "that somewhere down the line, some district attorney is going to ask us for outtakes or footage from a story, and we're going to say, 'We don't do that because we don't want to be an agent of the police.' And he's going to say, 'You did with "Predator." There is a sense [in the news division] that standards don't matter." Indeed, the network has already been confronted with such a dilemma: In one prosecution that resulted from a Dateline sting, that of Rabbi David Kaye of Rockville, MD, the defense issued a subpoena for the unedited footage of Kaye's conversation with Chris Hansen. NBC's lawyers filed a motion to quash the subpoena, according to Kaye's attorney, in which they signaled their intent to argue that as a news organization they should be shielded from having to reveal the products of newsgathering. But it would be incoherent of NBC to assert its independence when it comes to judicial subpoenas at the same time it invites police officers to participate in its newsgathering efforts. NBC's lawyers quickly realized this and agreed to make the unedited footage available for download on the Dateline website. If the network published it for the world to see, the twisted logic went, it could avoid the unpleasant prospect of defending in court the very principle of independence that it had sacrificed on the screen. (On September 6, Kaye was convicted in federal court of enticing a minor and crossing state lines for illicit sex with a minor.) It's not just NBC staff that finds fault with "To Catch a Predator." Brad Russ, the former commander of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (ICAC) for Northern New England, a federal program designed to help local authorities fight child pornography and Internet predators, has participated in many online sting operations. "I have a real problem with any citizens' group conducting any investigation into any crime," he says. "It's a mistake for law enforcement to abdicate its responsibility to citizens." And NBC, he says, is playing with fire by drawing potentially dangerous men to residential neighborhoods and confronting them. "How would you feel if the media rented a house in your neighborhood and drew 30 people who've demonstrated a propensity for children to your house? What happens when they flee at a high rate of speed and they T-bone your wife's car? We would never set up a sting in a residential neighborhood." Russ adds that targets could be armed, and that an ICAC officer in Florida was shot and killed during a sting. Kimberly Mitchell, a researcher for the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, has studied both the efficacy of Internet stings and the risks that children face online. While she says properly conducted stings by law enforcement are a useful tool, she worries that "Predator" overstates the problem. "We've talked to kids, and I think [sexual solicitations online] are something they've come to expect to happen," she says. "It's fairly common for them to see these things and experience them." In fact, according to Mitchell's research, fully two thirds of children who were solicited online last year brushed off the incident, and only four percent of children who regularly used the Internet received "distressing" solicitations. "On the one hand," Mitchell says, "it's good that people are aware. On the other hand, it's blown very far out of proportion—it's extreme. It tells you one small piece of the story. It can distort the truth and present this false fear." NBC and Perverted Justice are in the process of filming more stings for this season. "They have a whole fresh new bunch for September," says the Dateline producer. "Several weeks' worth. There are a lot of people who would like to see it as a show." But if initial reports from the unaired stings are any indication, a new series based on "Predator" wouldn't last long. One of the key elements of "Predator" segments is Chris Hansen's "and you won't believe ... " moment, when the predator turns out to be a teacher, a lawyer, a rabbi. It's a message that plays well to the upscale audience NBC caters to. These people could be your neighbors. But according to an NBC News staffer, the stings have become a victim of their own success. "What I heard was that they had a tough time of it," the staffer says. "The smarter predators have figured it out. You're not getting the rabbis, doctors, and teachers. You're getting losers." And losers, as the former NBC News official put it, "aren't in the demo."
As NBC gears up for fall, no doubt full of hope that it can avoid a third consecutive season as the fourth-place network, you're likely to see a lot of familiar faces plastered on the sides of buses: Meredith Vieira, Brian Williams, Steve Carell, Donald Trump. One face you won't see, however, belongs to a 27-year-old community college dropout from Portland, OR, who is responsible for an NBC ratings phenomenon that has eclipsed or matched those stars' shows: His cunning idea, which makes for endlessly watchable and deeply nauseating television, regularly doubles Today's audience, draws more viewers than both the Nightly News and The Office, and nearly tied The Apprentice in audience last season, a tonic that NBC desperately needs as it founders in the ratings.
His name is Xavier Von Erck, and the program he helped create is "To Catch a Predator," the recurring special "investigation" into the sexual depravity of drooling, sweaty creeps that periodically hijacks Dateline NBC during sweeps months. Xavier Von Erck—if the name sounds invented, that's because it is, but more on that later—is the founder and public face of Perverted Justice, an all-volunteer online organization that seeks to expose adults who troll chat rooms looking for youngsters to have sex with. Its members do this by posing as 12- or 13-year-olds online, engaging in sexual banter with older men, setting up meetings purportedly for sex, and then, after verifying a target's identity, posting his name and personal details online and encouraging readers to call his family and employer to let them know what he's been doing with his free time.
But it's not only predators who have found themselves duped and publicly disgraced by Von Erck. He once set out to destroy an enemy by posing as a woman, seducing him online with graphic sex chats, posting the transcripts on the web, and threatening to release a purported video of his target masturbating—not the kind of behavior you'd expect from NBC News's golden boy.
Von Erck, who previously worked tech support jobs, launched Perverted Justice in 2003. "I was a chatter in the Portland Yahoo regional rooms," he tells Radar in an e-mail. "I, like many, had the notion that individuals going online to solicit kids would be arrested, that cops were all over the chatrooms monitoring things. However, week after week passed and the same guys who would mass-post things like, 'Any 14-to-15-year-olds in here want to make money modeling?' and other solicitations would still be there. It was disturbing." He figured that if he could pretend to be a kid, he could embarrass the lurkers and make every potential predator paranoid about contacting children online.
Perverted Justice initially limited itself to publicizing the names and contact information of its targets on the website. Eventually, local news crews in Portland and elsewhere began collaborating with Von Erck to set up sting operations—drawing perverts to a rented house, filming them as they approached, and using the footage to scare the shit out of parents during sweeps. It was, at best, a mediocre gimmick suitable for mid-market local news until Dateline hit on the idea that would make "To Catch a Predator" a cultural touchstone: Set up a pompous correspondent inside the house to interview the startled pervs and make them sweat. With smarmy host Chris Hansen onboard, the show takes on the classic elements of Aristotelian drama. First, viewers feel pity for the marks, who slowly come to understand before our eyes that they've just wrecked their lives; next comes fear, enhanced by creepy graphics and hard-to-prove statistics indicating that everybody on the Internet wants to molest your daughter; and finally we experience a satisfying sense of purgation as each sucker is taken violently to the ground by local police waiting outside the house.
Even by the bug-eating, race-baiting, promiscuity-celebrating standards of reality television, "To Catch a Predator" is monstrously exploitative—a Television Age Roman coliseum where freakish criminals are publicly humiliated for bloodsport and ratings. Granted, these are bad men, and it's a good thing they are being stopped, hopefully, from hurting actual children. But they can be stopped—and are stopped all the time by local police stings—without parading them across our television screens for titillated and enraged audiences to gawk at between commercial breaks.
And, of course, "To Catch a Predator" is not reality television. It's produced under the auspices of NBC's vaunted news division, which has gone to unprecedented lengths to secure Von Erck's ongoing cooperation, reportedly paying him in excess of $100,000 per episode for his services, and even giving him, according to one source, a cut of any revenue from future DVD sales of the shows. That arrangement, and the show's sensationalism, make some at the network squirm.
"I think it's fascinating television," says one former NBC News producer who loathes the show but often can't look away. "Although I find myself rooting for the pedophiles."
Not much is known about Von Erck's background. He's cagey in interviews—he agreed to talk to Radar only via e-mail—and doesn't reveal much personal information for fear of being targeted by one of the men he has exposed. He was raised in Portland by his mother, who struggled to support the family by working odd jobs—from Taco Bell to a gas station—and moved 12 times before his junior year of high school. He was the captain of his high school's mock trial team, and he continues to demonstrate a facility for debate and rhetoric on his blog, Angry German, where he alternates between charming posts about his love of Portland, video games, and professional wrestling, and vicious, unhinged screeds against various targets. Some of Von Erck's rants betray a hint of the sadism that informs "To Catch a Predator." After a spate of kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq in 2004, Von Erck wrote that he was "positively appalled at Nicholas Berg," who "kneeled meekly and struggled naught [sic] as his death was thrust upon him ... bending to the will of the kidnappers." He was even more enraged by the "shameless and pathetic" conduct of Kim Sun-il, a kidnapped South Korean translator who appeared in a video released by Iraqi insurgents (he was later beheaded). "The asshole, yes, the asshole, screamed in English, pleading for his life," Von Erck wrote. "Let me be the first and probably only American to wish for his speedy death.... No life of such a worm, a coward, can be considered important." Of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Von Erck had this to say: "I wish I could fucking kill 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Yes, kill. I'd like to kill them. Kill them all... I want you to die. I wish you would die. Why don't you die? Just die."
Von Erck's birth name is Phillip John Eide. Although he legally changed it earlier this year in a Portland court, he says he has gone by Xavier Von Erck since he was 15. Erck is his mother's maiden name, to which he added the "Von" in a nod to his German heritage. "Xavier" he just picked. "My old name was the name my father gave me," he says. "Being that my father had no role in my upbringing, as a teen I did not see the logic in being stuck with his name. So I took my mother's name as a tribute to her, and a new first name." (In the Perverted Justice world, where anonymous volunteers going by handles like Epiphany and Peppermint Patty pretend to be children online, identity is a tricky thing to nail down. Von Erck's longtime friend and roommate, formerly known as Nicholas Wilkins, has also legally changed his name to his online handle, Phoebus Apollo.)
Von Erck briefly attended Mt. Hood Community College before dropping out in the face of what he called a "productive Internet addiction." He then worked various tech support jobs while building up Perverted Justice; now, running the website and coordinating Perverted Justice's role in the Dateline busts is his full-time job. As for how and why he made a career of humiliating perverts, Von Erck is demure: "The site has grown and evolved because people have come to it and suggested ideas, come up with technological improvements, etc. I just organize and direct it. I try not to take credit for the site succeeding, the credit goes to how pervasive the problem is online and how dedicated people are toward fighting it."
Nevertheless, Perverted Justice has many enemies. There are websites devoted to attacking Von Erck and his nameless volunteer corps, and to outing and identifying the people who conduct Perverted Justice's stings. These anti-PJ activists describe themselves as combating vigilantism and what they see as the group's entrapment tactics.
According to an account posted by Von Erck, one of Perverted Justice's fiercest critics was a 44-year-old software developer from Searcy, AR, named Bruce Raisley. Raisley was a frequent poster to a forum at an anti-PJ site called Anti-Vigilante Special Operations (AVSO) and he posted several threatening and seemingly deranged comments to the site. He claimed, among other things, to have written a virus that he would unleash upon Perverted Justice volunteers, and used his computer skills to harass Perverted Justice members by exposing the online handles they used when posing as children and tracking down their real identities. He once threatened, during an IM chat, to "fuck or beat" one Perverted Justice activist if he ever met him (Raisley thought he was communicating with a woman at the time). It's unclear why Raisley, a private pilot and ham radio enthusiast, was so militantly opposed to Perverted Justice. He has claimed he was once a Perverted Justice member but broke with the group after another member found a photograph of Railey's son online and used it in a decoy Yahoo profile—in other words, used his son as bait for perverts. Perverted Justice denies this.
Von Erck claims he contacted local authorities in Arkansas and the FBI about Raisley but they "simply weren't moving fast enough for my tastes, considering how bold he was getting about his threats." So he decided to mete out his own form of perverse justice, introducing himself to Raisley online, via instant messenger.
He called himself "Holly."
Holly and Raisley hit it off. They conducted a months-long correspondence via IM, and gradually, Raisley fell in love with his new online pal. Holly would occasionally inquire about Raisley's anti-Perverted Justice activities, but eventually the conversation turned to sex:
[Raisley]: what r u doing?
[Holly]: I have my fingers in
[Raisley]: i am holding it
[Holly]: are you rubbing it
[Raisley]: r u rubbing your clit?
[Holly]: yes. it feels so good baby
The couple had cybersex twice. Holly repeatedly begged Raisley to masturbate in front of a webcam for her. Raisley told her about his son, his job, his role as a Boy Scout troop leader. Eventually, Raisley came clean to his wife about Holly, told her that they were in love, and declared that Holly was moving to Arkansas. After securing an apartment for the two of them to live in, he went to pick up Holly at the airport. He was carrying flowers.
Von Erck never got on the plane, but he did find someone to go to the airport at the appointed time to snap a picture of a hopeful Raisley waiting for his love to arrive. Then he posted it online, along with the entire text of their chat and a threat to release a video file he claimed showed Raisley masturbating. And then this message to Perverted Justice's detractors: "[W]hen you attempt to threaten members of Perverted-Justice.com... this can happen to you. Tonight, Bruce Raisley stood around at an airport, flowers in hand, waiting for a woman that turned out to be a man. He's not in love. He has destroyed his relationship with his wife, he has denigrated her, and he has betrayed all those around him. He has no one. He has no more secrets. We at Perverted-Justice.com will only tolerate so much in the way of threats and attacks upon us."
Today, Von Erck professes sympathy for his victim. "As much as I hated Bruce Raisley for what he tried to do," he says, "I felt bad for him in the sense that the guy definitely has some mental issues. My hope is that Raisley gets mental health help, he sticks with his wife, and they live a happy, threatening- and harassing-free life. The head game that was played with him was only done in order to 'knock him out' so to speak."
Raisley was indeed knocked out. A call to his home in Arkansas was answered by a woman who said she was his wife. "That was just a big old mess," she said. "He's already lost one job over this, and he doesn't want anybody to know about it. I'm just hoping this will just fade away." Though she would not comment on the accuracy of Von Erck's online account, she admitted having read it.
Von Erck is not the first strange man—and pretending to be a woman for the purposes of seducing a man over a period of months in order to publicly ruin him is nothing if not strange—that NBC News has worked with in order to gather the news. But the extent of the network's business relationship with Von Erck has raised eyebrows in the halls of NBC News.
According to an April Washington Post story, Perverted Justice was paid a "low six figures" consultancy fee to organize a sting operation for Dateline in Ohio. Sources knowledgeable about the inner workings of NBC confirm that account, and say NBC is paying the group between $100,000 and $150,000 per show. According to one current NBC News staffer and one former NBC official, the figure was arrived at after Perverted Justice saw the ratings success of its first three Dateline shows and retained the services of Steve Sadicario, a former ABC News executive and agent with NS Bienstock, a firm that represents Bill O'Reilly, Anderson Cooper, and Dan Rather. Sadicario, according to the sources, started a "bidding war" for Perverted Justice's services after shopping an idea for a show to Fox and ABC. NBC won.
The deal that Perverted Justice cut with NBC is unusual in two respects: For one, according to the former NBC News official, it was negotiated by the network's entertainment lawyers, not by the news division's legal staff. Secondly, according to an NBC News staffer, Perverted Justice is entitled to a portion of any revenue from DVD sales of "To Catch a Predator" episodes—an arrangement common in the entertainment world but unheard of in the context of a news division's relationship with a consultant.
The staffer notes, "It would be the first back-end deal in the history of journalism."
It's not hard to see why NBC would go to great lengths to keep Von Erck in its stable, and to ride the "To Catch a Predator" phenomenon as far as it can. So far, the original broadcasts have averaged 9.2 million viewers, beating out such entertainment-division staples as Will & Grace (with an average of 8.6 million viewers last season) and The Office (7.9 million). In the advertiser-friendly 18-to-49-year-old demographic, "To Catch a Predator" episodes ranked 16 among NBC's 41 regularly broadcast shows last season, beating Scrubs and Fear Factor. While it's a special edition of Dateline NBC, rather than a show in its own right, it was one of NBC's few successful new offerings last season. Only Deal or No Deal, Surface, and My Name Is Earl outperformed it in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic.
Both Von Erck and David Corvo, executive producer of Dateline, who submitted to a brief interview and did not return subsequent phone calls, say they are unaware of plans for a DVD, and both say they don't know if Perverted Justice would get any portion of the revenues if a DVD were sold. Sadicario did not return repeated phone calls.
Both NBC and Von Erck declined to discuss specifics of the deal, and Von Erck says that "by and large," he hasn't seen any of the NBC money yet. (He told Willamette Week in May that he'd only been paid $20,000 so far.) But if Perverted Justice is getting paid more than $100,000 per sting, it has earned more than $400,000 since April.
"It was getting expensive," Von Erck says. "We literally could not keep our website up anymore due to the site traffic. At that point it was either no more Datelines or a consultation fee. At the end of the day, the cameramen were getting paid, Chris Hansen was getting paid, the producers of Dateline were getting paid, the police were paying themselves via public funds to do the arrests, the guy who owns the house was getting compensated, the security there was being paid. So it was only natural to seek compensation for the expensive work that we do."
Asked to outline the expenses involved in operating Perverted Justice, Von Erck cites only server costs to handle traffic driven to the group's website by the exposure on Dateline and "confidential" expenses associated with the stings. Perverted Justice has no paid staff and no offices. In fact, it is not even a legal entity. Von Erck says he is in the process of incorporating it as a nonprofit, but claims not to know in which state. Von Erck says he is not personally being paid by NBC and claims not to know precisely to whom NBC is making out the checks.
The arrangement, and the fact that the shows involve cooperation with law enforcement, has some NBC News staff apoplectic. "We've crawled into bed with the cops. People think this will be the pickup truck for the new decade," says one Dateline producer, referring to the notorious episode in 1993 in which Dateline was caught faking exploding gas tanks in GM trucks. "One of these guys is going to go home and shoot himself in the head. The Perverted Justice people are insane, and they'll do something to embarrass us. One of the biggest corporations in the world ought to find a better target than skanky guys in shorts."
"There's no doubt," says another NBC News staffer, "that somewhere down the line, some district attorney is going to ask us for outtakes or footage from a story, and we're going to say, 'We don't do that because we don't want to be an agent of the police.' And he's going to say, 'You did with "Predator." There is a sense [in the news division] that standards don't matter."
Indeed, the network has already been confronted with such a dilemma: In one prosecution that resulted from a Dateline sting, that of Rabbi David Kaye of Rockville, MD, the defense issued a subpoena for the unedited footage of Kaye's conversation with Chris Hansen. NBC's lawyers filed a motion to quash the subpoena, according to Kaye's attorney, in which they signaled their intent to argue that as a news organization they should be shielded from having to reveal the products of newsgathering. But it would be incoherent of NBC to assert its independence when it comes to judicial subpoenas at the same time it invites police officers to participate in its newsgathering efforts. NBC's lawyers quickly realized this and agreed to make the unedited footage available for download on the Dateline website. If the network published it for the world to see, the twisted logic went, it could avoid the unpleasant prospect of defending in court the very principle of independence that it had sacrificed on the screen. (On September 6, Kaye was convicted in federal court of enticing a minor and crossing state lines for illicit sex with a minor.)
It's not just NBC staff that finds fault with "To Catch a Predator." Brad Russ, the former commander of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (ICAC) for Northern New England, a federal program designed to help local authorities fight child pornography and Internet predators, has participated in many online sting operations. "I have a real problem with any citizens' group conducting any investigation into any crime," he says. "It's a mistake for law enforcement to abdicate its responsibility to citizens." And NBC, he says, is playing with fire by drawing potentially dangerous men to residential neighborhoods and confronting them. "How would you feel if the media rented a house in your neighborhood and drew 30 people who've demonstrated a propensity for children to your house? What happens when they flee at a high rate of speed and they T-bone your wife's car? We would never set up a sting in a residential neighborhood." Russ adds that targets could be armed, and that an ICAC officer in Florida was shot and killed during a sting.
Kimberly Mitchell, a researcher for the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, has studied both the efficacy of Internet stings and the risks that children face online. While she says properly conducted stings by law enforcement are a useful tool, she worries that "Predator" overstates the problem. "We've talked to kids, and I think [sexual solicitations online] are something they've come to expect to happen," she says. "It's fairly common for them to see these things and experience them." In fact, according to Mitchell's research, fully two thirds of children who were solicited online last year brushed off the incident, and only four percent of children who regularly used the Internet received "distressing" solicitations. "On the one hand," Mitchell says, "it's good that people are aware. On the other hand, it's blown very far out of proportion—it's extreme. It tells you one small piece of the story. It can distort the truth and present this false fear."
NBC and Perverted Justice are in the process of filming more stings for this season. "They have a whole fresh new bunch for September," says the Dateline producer. "Several weeks' worth. There are a lot of people who would like to see it as a show."
But if initial reports from the unaired stings are any indication, a new series based on "Predator" wouldn't last long. One of the key elements of "Predator" segments is Chris Hansen's "and you won't believe ... " moment, when the predator turns out to be a teacher, a lawyer, a rabbi. It's a message that plays well to the upscale audience NBC caters to. These people could be your neighbors. But according to an NBC News staffer, the stings have become a victim of their own success. "What I heard was that they had a tough time of it," the staffer says. "The smarter predators have figured it out. You're not getting the rabbis, doctors, and teachers. You're getting losers."
And losers, as the former NBC News official put it, "aren't in the demo."
Never let it be said I wasn't Tough on Crime.
Of course, in following the links which Ross's sysadmin posted to their "flames" page, I couldn't help but notice his exchange with the cult exit-counselor Steve Hassan:
This somewhat heated response popped up on Steve Hassan's "Freedom of Mind" website after the Ross Institute (RI) posted a disclaimer regarding the cult specialist's fees. Complaints were received from families about the rates Mr. Hassan charged for services, which reportedly were $500.00 per hour and/or $5,000 per day. Some families mortgaged homes to pay him. Mr. Hassan refused to specifically respond to the substance of the complaints. That is, until a disclaimer went up that stated RI did not endorse or recommend Steven Hassan due to complaints received. After that was done for the first time Mr. Hassan publicly posted his fee schedule, which was reduced to $250.00 per hour and/or $2,500.00 per day. Once Steve Hassan reduced his fees and made this public, the RI disclaimer was taken down. Nevertheless Mr. Hassan appears to be miffed, and seems to think responding to complaints received about him is somehow a "personal attack."
And then, Hassan's Response to Rick Ross's Personal Attack on Me:
I want to respond to Rick Ross’s attacks on my ethics and professional work counseling people in need. Initially I tried to ignore his inappropriate and completely inaccurate accusations but it has gotten out of hand. What is especially saddening is that we are supposedly both fighting the same battle. Of course there are some differences between Rick Ross and myself and I wonder whether his perception of those differences may not be part of the problem. Unlike Ross, I’m a trained mental health professional, former cult member, author of two well-received books, and have nearly three decades of experiencing people who have been harmed by destructive mind control. As for the accusations, my current fees are not $500 as Ross claims. I charge half that for an hour of counseling and have done so for quite some time. In response to his suggestions that I am unethical in my dealings with clients, I want to assert that I abide by the ethical guidelines of my professional organizations including the American Counseling Association. Every person I have ever worked with has known what I charge in advance and has agreed to it. In recent months, in accordance with the new federal HIPAA guidelines, clients must sign a written contract that discloses all necessary information, if they wish to work with me. It is up to my clients to decide if they wish to spend the money to help their loved one, and what they are willing to pay for my services. To my knowledge no one has lost a house because of me. Ross failed to call my office and inquire about my fees. He simply sent emails, faxes, and certified letters in an accusatory tone, which I decided to have my lawyer deal with because I feel my time is better spent helping those in need. Finally I would like to add that I have done an enormous amount of pro bono work over the past 27 years. Also, I charge less for counseling former members who have difficulty paying my fees. I provide a sliding scale for former members when necessary, and also have arranged long term, no interest payment plans. I hope this clarifies the situation. I’d like to thank those of you who have come to my defense. I trust that Ross will now remove the Freedom of Mind Resource Center from his list of groups, a place it never, ever belonged.
I want to respond to Rick Ross’s attacks on my ethics and professional work counseling people in need. Initially I tried to ignore his inappropriate and completely inaccurate accusations but it has gotten out of hand. What is especially saddening is that we are supposedly both fighting the same battle.
Of course there are some differences between Rick Ross and myself and I wonder whether his perception of those differences may not be part of the problem. Unlike Ross, I’m a trained mental health professional, former cult member, author of two well-received books, and have nearly three decades of experiencing people who have been harmed by destructive mind control.
As for the accusations, my current fees are not $500 as Ross claims. I charge half that for an hour of counseling and have done so for quite some time. In response to his suggestions that I am unethical in my dealings with clients, I want to assert that I abide by the ethical guidelines of my professional organizations including the American Counseling Association. Every person I have ever worked with has known what I charge in advance and has agreed to it. In recent months, in accordance with the new federal HIPAA guidelines, clients must sign a written contract that discloses all necessary information, if they wish to work with me.
It is up to my clients to decide if they wish to spend the money to help their loved one, and what they are willing to pay for my services. To my knowledge no one has lost a house because of me.
Ross failed to call my office and inquire about my fees. He simply sent emails, faxes, and certified letters in an accusatory tone, which I decided to have my lawyer deal with because I feel my time is better spent helping those in need.
Finally I would like to add that I have done an enormous amount of pro bono work over the past 27 years. Also, I charge less for counseling former members who have difficulty paying my fees. I provide a sliding scale for former members when necessary, and also have arranged long term, no interest payment plans.
I hope this clarifies the situation. I’d like to thank those of you who have come to my defense. I trust that Ross will now remove the Freedom of Mind Resource Center from his list of groups, a place it never, ever belonged.
If the only complaints Ross received were about Hassan's fees (which is all that he mentions), all he had to do was to post those fees without presuming to "not endorse or recommend" Hassan or otherwise editorialize about that. He could (and should) have just let his readers make up their own minds (they have minds of their own, right?) as to whether the service was worth the money Hassan was/is charging. With the way in which Ross actually handled the situation, however, I personally think Hassan's complaint is quite justified.
I'm still doing all this work for free, BTW.
So then I ended up reading the archived article on Defining "cult" is no easy task, experts say:
It's often said that you can tell a cult by whether it exercises mind control over its adherents. But Dr. Zimbardo, who teaches a course on mind control, says even that is no litmus test.
"All religions want to control your mind," he says. "They all say: 'You have to believe our way.'"
Very true.
Hmm, very interesting:
What Fresh Hell Is This? A Guy Marooned in Women's Studies
Patai and Koertge's Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies is also very eye-opening.
P.S. I wasn't previously aware that "writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook." Were you?
The first chapter of Todd Tremlin's Minds and Gods is by far the best and most concise exposition I've seen of hominid evolution.
Chapter 2 is even better, detailing the embryonic (and post-natal) development of the brain, etc.
By the halfway point of that chapter, it's already the best summary of evolutionary psychology and early-childhood learning that I've found.
Beyond that, it gets into the whole ability of human beings to attribute minds to other agents and objects. Which, relevant though it is to how we come to conceive of ghosts and gods, doesn't really address the shamanic roots of all that, or the healing basis of shamanism itself (in recovering the wandering souls whose absence manifests as physical or emotional/mental illness, or in the sympathetic-magical removal of imaginary "foreign objects" from one's body).
But then, since I'm only halfway through the book, it may yet get around to that. Probably not, but maybe.
In nearby Montreal, where residents are recovering from a ninth major snowstorm this season, a man was charged this week with threatening a fellow motorist with a toy gun over a rare parking spot on a snow-clogged street.
And in likely the worst case, an elderly Quebec City man pulled a 12-gauge shotgun on a female snowplow operator on Sunday for blowing snow onto his property, after warning her. (more)
Yep, the snow's pretty much as "high as a (pedophilic) clergyman's eye" here in Toronto, too.
And this just in:
Explaining Spitzer scandal to children proving tricky for parents.
I can imagine:
"Well, Samantha, when a governor really loves a mommy who isn't his wife—and I really love your mommy, so I'd never ... and I'm not a governor anyway, uh—he doesn't use a condom when he puts his, uh ... you know what a condom is, right? ... Well, it's like a balloon ... anyway, a man doesn't want to put a ... balloon ... if he's already paid over four grand for, well, uh.... Hey Sweetie, you want to help me out with this?"
I should never have children. It would be a complete disaster....
Anyway, this all reminded me of an old Rick Mercer rant, back during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, where she had testified that Bill Clinton's ... uh, "Little President" ... was "about the size of a roll of quarters."
Mercer did a whole rant about ... Canadian politics, whatever ... and then closed it off with the comment that he was "sick of politicians nickel-and-diming us to death."
P.S. Funny/sad thing: The call girl in the Spitzer Saga is an aspiring musician in NYC ... who believes in the "Law of Attraction." Hope it works out for her: Spitzer is scum, but as far as the girl goes, we all do what it takes to pay the rent....
Incidentally, regarding the ".cfm" extensions on MySpace pages: MySpace was originally written in ColdFusion, but when it started to get popular they had to rewrite it in ASP.NET because (i) as any competent programmer knew even a full decade ago, ColdFusion doesn't scale (to large numbers of users) at all, and (ii) ColdFusion also uses a proprietary programming language which is of no use whatsoever to you in any other context. (They sensibly kept the existing .cfm extensions so as to not break existing links from outside sites into their pages, even though by now every .cfm page is actually an .aspx page.)
Only a small team of idiots (with a billion-dollar idea) who knew piss-all about programming would write a site in ColdFusion to begin with. And you can tell from the interface to the site that Tom (Bachelor of Arts in Rhetoric and English—so, of all people, he should appreciate the value of an intuitive GUI), et al., don't know fuck about user interface design (which is not the same thing as programming per se, BTW) either.
I've built software off-and-on for a decade, and websites for over half a dozen years, and yet there were times that I was nearly reduced to tears in trying to figure out How The Holy Fucking Hell to do even the simplest thing with my own MySpace page. Even their FAQs are worthless. How can anyone not even set up an FAQ area competently?
Over the past couple of months, both the Toronto Public Library system and my own bank have revamped their web interfaces. Obviously both of them had money to burn, as (i) the new interfaces are far worse than the old ones were, and (ii) any additional functionality in the new interfaces could have been added to the old ones, without rewriting them from scratch, for less than 10% of what the new programming must have cost.
But did they ask me whether they were spending their money wisely on those new ways of doing things? Nooooo....
Being on the opposite side of an argument from Steven Pinker is a pretty reliable (i.e., over 99% of the time) way to be wrong.
Witness Pinker vs. Elizabeth Spelke.
Note in particular this off-base point by Spelke, which Pinker was far too kind and polite to totally skewer her on (as she deserved):
First, which mathematically intensive jobs should we choose? If we choose engineering, we will conclude that men are better at math because more men become engineers. If we choose accounting, we will think that women are better at math because more women become accountants: 57% of current accountants are women. So which job are we going to pick, to decide who has more mathematical talent?
Having worked with accountants in the business world, after taking three years of engineering (out of a four-year degree program) back in the day, allow me to confirm for you that (i) The math used by accountants (in negative numbers, etc.) is no more than what we all learned in junior high school (plus a whack of arbitrary laws which change every year), and (ii) nowhere do they need to know how Fourier series/analyses or complex integrals work. Engineers do need to know such things if they want their bridges and buildings to stay up, or their electrical circuits to work. And they learn exactly such integrals in their third/junior years (except probably at MIT, where they teach double integrals in first-year, so they're likely doing complex integrals in the sophomore/second year).
If you can balance a checkbook and want to take several years of courses in arbitrary laws and their loopholes, you can become an accountant; it has piss-all to do with mathematics. If you want to be able to build a computer or a television from the ground-up, you take an engineering degree and then do several years of apprenticeship in the real world afterwards, to qualify as a Professional Engineer. That will get you to a high-junior or low-intermediate level of how to design and build such things.
Accountants—regardless of their sex—also typically prefer to have their data in Excel spreadsheets rather than in database tables. (A decade ago, and probably still today, 80% of the data in the business world was on spreadsheets.) Indeed, they will insist on doing things that way even if you offer to set the databases and GUIs up for them on your own time, as a programmer. Spreadsheets they understand; databases, they do not.
When it comes to technology (and math), accountants are simple pretenders whose uninformed opinions are given far more weight than they could ever deserve in the business world.
Engineers and software developers, by contrast, have built the electronic infrastructure of the business world.
"Tales from the crypt," as it were. From one who has been there.
I was really going to get some serious work done today.
But then I followed the xkcd link from the Jesus and Mo comic. And it turns out that the best of the strips there are simply brilliant.
Finally, lest we forget how important it is to "Be who you are and say what you feel": Dreams. And, just as poignantly: Kite.
So, that's how my morning-afternoon-evening went flying by. Whoosh!
Also just picked up a part-time webmaster thingy for a non-profit on the East Coast, for whom I've already done a good amount of CRM customization work over the past 2+ years (which is what I was up doing at 7 am this morning, BTW). But it's all work-from-home, and whatever hours I want ... so I think I can fit it into my schedule. :)
From R. Joseph Hoffman's Letting Go of Jesus:
[M]embers of the Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 to pare the sayings of Jesus down to "just the real ones," came to the conclusion that 82 percent of the sayings of Jesus were (in various shades) inauthentic, that Jesus had never claimed the title "Messiah," that he did not share a final meal with his disciples (there goes the Mass), and that he did not invent the Lord's Prayer....
If he lived, he would have belonged to a familiar class of wandering, puritanical doomsday preachers, who threatened the wrath of God on unfaithful Jews—especially the Jerusalem priesthood.
I've just added a Recommended menu item and page, for web materials that I've found to be particularly worth ... well, recommending.
I haven't gone back over all the years of my own blogging in any attempt to make that list complete; right now, it's just off the top of my head.
Like, for example, this fairly technical paper on spontaneous pattern formation in the primary visual cortex.
If you're not into that sort of thing, you may still be amazed by this psychedelic page documenting the progressive effect of late-onset schizophrenia in the paintings of Louis Wain.
A very good summary, by the late Barry Beyerstein, of what's wrong with psychotherapy today:
Fringe Psychotherapies: The Public at Risk (PDF, 244 KB)
Just in case, you know, you weren't convinced by John Horgan's gathering of information on that subject.
And note that April 1 - 8 is National 'Guru-Free' Week!
P.S. Excellent short essay by Julian Baggini on "Spongers."
I can't stand our former premier of Ontario from a few years back, Mike Harris. But full props to the man for bringing in workfare, i.e., for demanding that able-bodied welfare recipients participate in either training or job placements.
Of course, you'll notice that Baggini's stereotypical "Sponger" has hair down to his shoulders. 'Cause, you know, if it was anyone other than an unemployed longhair, the stereotyped group whose members were being singled out for "not pulling their weight" would be screaming bloody murder. Indeed, if the figure used in the illustration was anything but Caucasian, the magazine would be defending itself against cries of "racism." But why not at least portray the figure with, say, just medium-length hair? Why not stop at "shaggy"?
Why not, indeed. Well, I think I know why. Because for all of the stereotypes which one cannot publicly express without being either a Very Bad Racist or a Despicable Sexist, the regard for long hair on men as an indication of many other socially undesirable qualities is the one stereotype which anyone can still indulge in, even quite openly, and not be seen (or even privately feel, himself) as being a Very Bad Person.
Personally, I got so sick of being crapped on for "looking like I've never had a real job" that after a decade of wearing my hair long I too cut it short just before last Christmas. Someday I will blog—or maybe even write an entire book—about the full range of prejudices I experienced which finally pushed me to that decision.
I will give you one clue: Poor and uneducated people, especially men, of all races and ethnic backgrounds, are the worst for missing no opportunity to shit on anyone who, they think, is contributing even less to society than they themselves are viewed by the rest of the world as contributing. And per capita, for every redneck/white bigot there is one black bigot, one brown bigot, one yellow bigot, and one red bigot, etc. It's just basic human psychology: "Persecuted minorities" have a fully comparable percentage of racists (and sexists) in their ranks as do the "oppressive majority," they just don't typically have anyone far-enough below them in the social hierarchy to get away with enacting that racism. That does not in any way make them "better people" than their oppressors, it just makes them people without the power to behave like the bastards they really are and get away with it ... even though it's what they'd really like to do....
The ambition of the downtrodden is always ... to become middle-class imperialists themselves. (Gregory Bateson)
Wherever modern humans, living outside the narrow social mores of the clan, are allowed to pursue their genetic interests without constraint, they will hurt other people. They will grab other people's resources, they will dump their waste in other people's habitats, they will cheat, lie, steal and kill [and discriminate against and even enslave others, if allowed to]. And if they have power and weapons, no one will be able to stop them except those with more power and better weapons. Our genetic inheritance makes us smart enough to see that when the old society breaks down, we should appease those who are more powerful than ourselves, and exploit those who are less powerful. [And that exploitation applies, of course, not merely to individuals but to groups as well, whether those groupings are done by race or otherwise.] The survival strategies which once ensured cooperation among equals now ensure subservience to those who have broken the social contract. (George Monbiot, Libertarians are the True Social Parasites)
Notably, though, with the Native American history of long hair, like the East Indian (and Pakistani) history of "holy men" with the same attribute, I've personally never experienced any grief from either of those groups. Not even once. Living in Chinatown last autumn, and on the desolate border of the poorest (and palpably stupidest) area of Toronto now, however, is quite a different story.... (You will recall that Chinese sages are typically bald as an integral cueball, and that several decades ago their society was being mocked by comedians as being "one billion people, all of them with the same haircut." And the whole thing with baldness being "cool" and sexy in the West only started, by my recollection, with black rappers [I almost typed "rapers"!] shaving their heads. Well, and with Patrick Stewart.)
Interesting fact about traditional Chinese medicine: TCM, "described so often as dating back thousands of years, 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.'"
Anyway, I doubt that Baggini himself had any say in the illustration that was used for that piece; but somebody at New Humanist sure did.
And you thought Russell's Teapot was never meant to be taken literally? Sadly, no:
A woman has been jailed in Malaysia for joining a "teapot worshipping" cult.
Kamariah Ali, a 57 year old former teacher, was arrested in 2005 when the government of the Muslim majority country demolished the two storey high sacred tea pot of the Sky Kingdom cult.
This is from Integral Naked—meaning that even if Ken Wilber didn't actually write it (L'il Stewey might have), being the Kosmic Kontrol-Freak that he is he must surely have approved it:
[P]erhaps there is some kind of developmental aspect to humor, where increasing levels of complexity can yield increasingly rich and subtle kinds of humor.
One of the simplest models of human growth and development used by integral tracks the movement from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric levels, waves, or altitude of being. An egocentric orientation—focused on "me" and "mine"—is fundamentally concerned with physical bodily existence, and so here physical humor or slapstick would be immediately appreciated. An ethnocentric orientation relies on the mind's ability to take the role of other—but only expanding to those in my group, tribe, or nation. Here, due to the mind's ability to take more perspectives, more complex forms of humor are available—but often at the expense of those not in my group or accepted by my group's values (racist jokes, religious jokes, homophobic jokes, etc.). A worldcentric orientation expands the circle of care and compassion once more, this time trying to include all peoples, regardless of sex, religion, nationality, creed, and so on. Frankly, one would likely have to be at least at a worldcentric level of development to even consider cross-dressing a perfectly acceptable practice, let alone engage the topic with good cheer and laughter.
Now that's funny! Because, you know, there are many cultures in the world which do indeed consider cross-dressing to be "a perfectly acceptable practice," at least among their most respected spiritual leaders/healers (though not necessarily among the "less evolved" populace). Consider, for example, Edward Norbeck's (1961) Religion in Primitive Society (p. 105-6):
Sexual aberration has not been overlooked as a sign of the divine call. Among some of the aboriginal Siberian tribes the highly effeminate youth frequently evinced the abnormal nervous behavior regarded as the call to become a shaman. Males in these societies customarily adopted the clothing of women once they had embarked upon a career of shamanship. Some, but not all, of these transvestites were sexual inverts who, together with the female dress, adopted the manners and roles of women, taking men as husbands or lovers. Among the Chukchee, these individuals were regarded as the most powerful and fearful of shamans. Similar customs of valuing homosexual males as religious specialists have been reported among various other primitive societies including some Eskimo groups, the Sea Dyaks of Borneo, the Bugis of the Celebes, and Indians of Patagonia.
That orientation has actually been going on for such a long time in shamanism that some evolutionary psychologists have proposed that it may have affected the gene pool, as an evolutionary adaptation.
The societies (outside of Marin County, I mean) in which shamans typically exist would be placed at the Purple value-meme level in Wilber's Kosmic Kartography: shamans deal extensively with animistic spirits and curses, etc. (And with healing by sucking out spirit-darts into "similar" darts, as a form of sympathetic magic.) That's four levels below green. Yet, they manage to regard cross-dressing among their spiritual leaders as being perfectly acceptable.
These are the sort of things you need to be aware of if, y'know, you're hoping to "integrate" all religions from the shamanistic on up to the nondual, eh?
Hit it! Hit it! I'm just a bald transvestite From second-tier-sexual Trans-integral-vania —Tim Kurry, "Sweet Transvestite"
—Tim Kurry, "Sweet Transvestite"
C. Norman Shealy is the "mentor" of Ken Wilber's friend, Caroline Myss. In Myss' own words, "I consider Norm Shealy to be one of the geniuses of our era."
From Shealy's (2005) Life Beyond 100: Secrets of the Fountain of Youth (p. 79-80):
Excellent for weight loss in about 80 percent of people, the Atkins Diet lowers cholesterol....
The Atkins Diet is monotonous but works well for weight control and keeping cholesterol optimal in many people. You must drink adequate water (about two quarts daily) and take an excellent multivitamin when you are on this diet.
Alright, so that would presumably be where kw got the dangerously stupid idea of recommending the Atkins Diet as part of an Integral Life Practice, eh?
More from Shealy:
Probably the best adjunct to sleep that was ever devised is gamma hydroxybutyrate, but unfortunately the federal government has made that a very restricted drug. In fact, it was banned for some years but has recently been approved only for treatment of narcolepsy. Of course, once it's on the market, you might, if you are desperate, find a physician who would prescribe it.
You may have previously heard of gamma hydroxybutyrate. It's a popular "date-rape drug."
From Shealy's (1999) Sacred Healing (p. 106):
Convincing evidence of the efficacy of absent healing by prayer has been demonstrated in a study of patients in the cardiac care unit. In a double-blind study, without the patients' knowledge, half of a group of patients had absent prayer direct toward them while the other half did not. Those who received absent prayer had a statistically significantly greater survival rate and a shorter hospital stay. Those persons for whom there was no specific group prayer did not do as well. These results might have been even more striking if we knew whether those who did not receive the group prayer had families praying for them or were intervening in their own way with prayer. In other words, some of the controls may have done better because of unreported prayer assistance.
The footnote directs us to Randolph Byrd's 1988 study on the "Positive Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population." About which, the following skeptical points have been made:
1) Byrd's 1988 study was not at all properly blinded because his assistant, Janet Greene had access to all critical information during the study. See http://www.csicop.org/articles/20010810-prayer#janet.
2) Tessman again discusses how Harris et al. actually contradicts Byrd's finding, rather than confirming his results. See http://www.csicop.org/articles/20010810-prayer#contrabyrd.
3) Tessman examines the dropout rates on the first day of the Harris et al. study and find two interesting facts: 1) the test (prayed-for) group started with a significant advantage over the control (non-prayed-for) group, and 2) the test group actually lost its advantage during the course of the study. The hypothesis that prayer was, if anything, detrimental would be consistent with this evidence. See http://www.csicop.org/articles/20010810-prayer#dropout.
The full article by Tessman is here. Posner's earlier critique of Byrd's study is here.
Oh, and there's also this, from Shealy's (1995) Miracles Do Happen (p. 212):
In our [1987] book, AIDS: Passageway to Transformation, Caroline Myss and I report one "white crow," a young man who actually recovered from AIDS. The miracle of his recovery appears to have been accomplished by the nurturing acceptance of his family and the "Sea Salt Meditation" recommended by Caroline.
How's that "integral medicine" strikin' you now?
I'm no Bible scholar, but this would explain a lot. From The Jesus Mysteries:
We knew that most ancient Mediterranean cultures had adopted the ancient Mysteries, adapting them to their own national tastes and creating their own version of the myth of the dying and resurrecting godman. Perhaps some of the Jews had likewise adopted the Pagan Mysteries and created their own version of the Mysteries which we now know as Gnosticism. Perhaps initiates of the Jewish Mysteries had adapted the potent symbolism of the Osiris-Dionysus myths into a myth of their own, the hero of which was the Jewish dying and resurrecting godman Jesus.
From R. Gordon Wasson's Soma of the Aryans:
Western scholars have resisted my role for Soma-urine: one of them has called it a "surprisingly novel interpretation." But since my book came out I have received a letter from India saying that at last I have provided an explanation for a custom that survives to this day. The sadhu or Holy Man sitting among his adoring disciples, chelas, will grant a favoured disciple the privilege of drinking his urine, and thus convey to the disciple some of his own spiritual powers. My informant supposes that this practice, taken for granted in India, comes down from Vedic times when the potent metabolite of Soma was passed on to be drunk by the favoured ones.
Wasson is probably wrong in identifying Soma with the fly agaric mushroom—other writers postulate Peganum harmala as a more likely candidate. Which means that it's unlikely that the urine being drunk by the "favored" disciples, above, even has any "trippy" effect on them. (The fly agaric mushroom is "the only 'plant' that is capable of being passed through the digestive system and maintains its psychotropic properties.")
Making Wasson's "Soma" not unlike the cold-filtered piss that passes for beer, as advertised during North American sporting events.
Gillian Gibbons is an Englishwoman who teaches at Unity School in Sudan. On Sunday, the Sudanese police arrested her on account of blasphemy arising out of her allowing her class to name a teddy bear "Muhammad." (more)
CUT TO:
INT. APARTMENT — DAY
MR. BEAN and his best, inanimate friend, TEDDY, sit side-by-side at the breakfast table in Bean's apartment, ninety degrees apart from one another, with teacups and small plates. (Teddy is in a children's high chair, to Bean's left side.)
A pot of tea, a plate of danish pastries, and a bowl of fruit (with three apples and a banana in it) are on the table in front of them.
Bean reads the morning paper, its front-page headline clearly visible to Teddy: "DANISH CARTOONS CAUSE UPSET. TEACHER ARRESTED."
Bean LAUGHS appreciatively at something in the paper, then explains to Teddy:
BEAN Mo-hammed.
Bean startles and glances up, puzzled.
He FOLDS the paper and puts it DOWN on the table, then POURS himself another cup of tea from the pot.
He gestures, offering the pot to Teddy, then POURS a little more for Teddy, affably.
He puts the teapot DOWN, PICKS the paper back up, UNFOLDS it, and continues reading.
Having "heard" Teddy "say something" ...
BEAN Hmm?
... he looks inquisitively around the edge of the broadsheet paper, re-reading the headline; then looks at Teddy, and then at the plate of danishes.
Finally getting Teddy's "joke," Bean CHUCKLES and nods approvingly, pointing at the plate of pastries.
BEAN Danish.
He TAKES a pastry for himself, takes a bite out of it, and then continues reading and chewing, with the danish and opened newspaper awkwardly in hand.
A tremendous THUD comes from the floor of the apartment above, startling Bean again.
He eyes the ceiling, PUTS the half-eaten danish down on his plate, RISES, and WALKS over to the window, PUSHING back the drapes.
On the street below, several MUSLIM MEN work at taking furniture out of a moving-van parked at the curb.
Bean OPENS the window and pokes his head and arms out, gesturing at the men.
They look up at him.
His limited vocabulary fails him.
BEAN Mo-hammed!
He SHUTS the window, and WALKS back to the table, shaking his head.
He sits DOWN, OPENING the newspaper again.
Another couple of THUDS come from above, in quick succession.
Bean PUTS the paper down again, TAKES an apple from the fruit bowl, takes a pointed BITE ...
Another THUD.
... scowls, and throws the apple straight up (underhand) at the ceiling.
It HITS the ceiling, and then FALLS right down to the floor, barely missing the table.
He watches it ROLL under the couch.
He TAKES the banana from the fruit bowl, peels it with visible annoyance ...
... And THROWS the banana upward.
It HITS the ceiling, and again falls right down to the floor with a SPLAT, missing the table.
SCRAPING sounds come from the floor above.
He takes a second apple, and throws it straight up at the ceiling.
It HITS the ceiling, and then falls right down to the floor, ROLLING away.
Another THUD, and more SCRAPING on the floor above.
Bean TAKES another apple from the fruit bowl, and throws it up at the ceiling, but inadvertently at a slight angle this time. It HITS the ceiling, and careens down right into Teddy's teacup, upsetting the china and SPLASHING hot tea onto both of them.
Bean JUMPS out of his chair, and TAKES a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, seething.
He DABS all over the front of his jacket, stops suddenly, and then looks over at the also-splashed Teddy, annoyed.
BEAN Yes, yes, yes.
He PICKS Teddy up in his right hand, DABS the worst of the tea off of the stuffed toy, waves him back and forth, and then BLOWS repeatedly on him, to dry the toy out.
More NOISES, this time from the hallway.
Bean EXHALES loudly, and STALKS over to his apartment door, carrying Teddy.
He OPENS the door swiftly, and pokes his head out just in time to see the Muslim Men carrying a couch up the stairs at the end of the hallway.
INT. HALLWAY — MOMENTS LATER
He gestures after them, GRUMBLES, and shakes his head. He then glances down to see a small, black book left behind on the hallway floor, a few steps down from his entrance.
He WALKS over to the book, bends down, PICKS it up with his (free) left hand, and straightens back up.
He OPENS the book with his thumb, and glances at a few pages.
Teddy sneaks up in his other hand, to read along with him, their heads turning in unison from left to right and quickly back again on the pages.
He catches Teddy; they both stop reading; then Bean resumes; and Teddy resumes, too.
Bean's anger softens and his jaw drops, in wonder at the new truths he has found.
He turns the book over, examining the cover and spine.
BEAN (to Teddy) Kor-an.
Teddy nods.
Bean OPENS the book back up, and WALKS back into his apartment reading it, absorbed in its wisdom.
INT. APARTMENT — MOMENTS LATER
SHUTTING the door noisily behind him.
Another THUD comes from above.
Bean GROWLS, and makes as if to throw Teddy up at the ceiling.
Teddy trembles and recoils in his hand, scared.
Realizing he has frightened his best friend, and having "found religion," Bean quickly CLOSES the book, STUFFS it under his right arm, and PATS Teddy on the head with his now-freed left hand.
He points to Teddy.
Teddy nods, in Bean's hand.
Bean points toward the outside window, and smiles.
BEAN (to Teddy) Mec-ca.
He (Bean) nods quickly.
In Bean's hand, Teddy prostrates three times in the direction of the window, as Bean turns and nods along in rhythm and respect with him.
Bean nods quickly at Teddy again, smiling.
Then his face turns quickly serious. He frowns, and places his free (left) hand on his suddenly upset stomach.
He glances toward the bathroom door, takes the holy book out from under his right arm, and WALKS quickly toward the bathroom with the Koran in one hand and Teddy in the other.
INT. BATHROOM — MOMENTS LATER
Bean PUTS Teddy and the Koran down on the sink counter, and CLOSES the door behind him.
He LETS his trousers and briefs down, and SITS down on the toilet.
He PICKS the Koran up from the counter, and OPENS it, holding it again in his left hand.
He PICKS Teddy up from the sink counter in his right hand.
Teddy reads along with him.
Bean SIGHS contentedly, in the peace of the moment, exchanging a sympathetic glance with Teddy.
They continue reading.
Bean SIGHS again. Peace and harmony.
An ENORMOUS THUD comes from the ceiling right above him, startling him out of his skin as he reflexively throws his arms up, launching both the Koran and Teddy toward the ceiling.
The holy book and Teddy HIT the ceiling.
Bean half-RISES from the seat to catch Teddy. Simultaneously, the falling book tumbles DOWN between his legs, into the toilet.
Bean falls back DOWN onto the seat.
Stunned, he looks down between his legs into the toilet.
BEAN Kor-an.
He looks back up into Teddy's unforgiving face. Bean's eyes widen, horror growing on his face.
Teddy pushes right up into Bean's hyperventilating face.
Another THUD comes from above, startling Bean to gaze upward, and then back at Teddy, terror-stricken at the consequences-to-come.
Bean points with his free hand, desperately motioning through the wall toward the outside window.
BEAN Mec-ca.
As Teddy follows his pointing, Bean JUMPS up off the toilet seat, panicked, and TOSSES Teddy back over his shoulder.
The stuffed toy RICOCHETS off the wall, LANDING right in the toilet bowl with a SPLASH.
Bean hurriedly OPENS the bathroom door, and SHUFFLES as fast as he can, with his pants down around his ankles, out of the room ... and then, OPENING the door, out of the apartment entirely.
Bean comes face-to-face with the two Muslim Men, this time carrying a table toward and past his apartment.
He STOPS dead in his tracks.
He turns around, SHUFFLING with all his might down the hallway toward the upward-leading stairs.
* * *
I've had the "Mohammed/Teddy/Bean" seed-idea of this for at least several weeks, but must have been inspired by B&W's The Sound of Mullahs to finally sit down and, um, "execute" it.
P.S. And then just when I'm feeling So Very Pleased with myself for all this, I see the most-recent Jesus and Mo cartoon—which must be based on the B&W blogs (and subsequent Comments) about The uses of polemic and How to be respectful—and I am simply humbled in the presence of true comedic greatness....
In trying to find a graphic for where the Pole Star exists in relation to the Milky Way, I came across the From Stargazers to Starships lesson plans. And the Star Tales site. And the Scouting Resources website.
Growing up in the country (with "real nature," not just camping trips), I was never involved in any club like that. And going to such a small country school (graduating class of eight people), there wasn't even anything like an astronomy club. Or a chess club. Or a computer club. (This was in the early '80s; we had approximately three TRS-80's for a student body of between 100 and 150 people.)
The school didn't even offer a physics course; I had to take that by correspondence in grades eleven and twelve. In grade twelve math, the textbook we were using was published before I was even born! (That was actually a good thing, though, as it predated the watering-down of the curriculum with the "new math" in the 1970s, etc.)
So really, don't try to snow me about kids in underfunded schools not having the same "educational opportunities" as others with rich parents do. It's all in what you make of it. You don't have good science teachers in your high school? Hell, I didn't have any physics teacher at all! But I still scored 100% (literally) on the province-set exams, and walked straight from that into finishing third out of 325 first-year engineering students at the U of Manitoba, and then first out of eighty second-year electricals.
The one thing to note, though, is that the small, utterly inbred community of farmers and housewives in which I grew up knew a thing or two about the Protestant work ethic ... even while the older generation there explicitly viewed "too much learning" (esp. in university) as an impediment to one's Christian faith (which of course it is, heh). Conversely, people who take up not merely the good but also the detrimental aspects of whatever culture they grew up in ... well, sort of deserve what they get. 'Cause, since when is the world so kind and generous as to spoon-feed you only what's in your own best interests?
P.S. Buncha videos on James Randi's site. Makes me wish I had a high-speed Internet connection....
