Blog — May, 2008

From Steve Sailer's The "Whiteness Studies" Status Game:

[V]ast amounts of esoteric verbiage have been written to explain the rage behind the Sex Pistol's classic 1977 single "God Save the Queen." But, as lead singer Johnny Rotten pointed out, he wasn't really an "English punk rocker" but an Irishman named John Lydon, born to Irish immigrants in England. He hated the British monarchy for all the traditional Irish reasons that his relatives had taught him. Similarly, "English new waver" Elvis Costello was really Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus, and his memorable "Oliver's Army" stemmed from his still being sore about Oliver Cromwell.

And remember Olivia Dog-Chow's hare-brained notion that Canada needs more immigrant construction workers? Joe Guzzardi addresses the effects of a similar issue in the U.S.:

By working for $11 an hour, a third of the going union rate, and through their willingness to endure conditions no American would tolerate, [Hispanic construction crews] have shut American construction workers out of jobs....

Here, I'm torn by thinking that construction (like meat-packing) should be closer to $11/hour work than $33; but the point I'm making is about high levels of immigration driving down wages (and underbidding unions) in all unskilled jobs, in trades, and even in I.T. No country needs to import construction workers, any more than it needs to import meat-packers: there are always plenty of non-rocket-scientist people who will do such relatively unskilled work in return for a reasonable (or better) wage.

I asked Greg, a 33-year old African American and a United Brotherhood of Carpenters cardholder, to comment on the fate of young black men and women who might pursue those construction jobs if they paid a decent wage.

"Some enlist in the military," said Greg. "The vast majority struggle to get the few legit jobs out there and make due with whatever they can get. As for the rest, have you ever wondered why there are 1 million blacks in prison?"

P.S. On multiculturalism: Reader, She Married Him—Alas ... from 1995. And I'll bet you didn't know that "Frosty the Snowman" is a sexist and racist song. 'Cause snowmen are, well, men ... and they're all phallic-like, and they're white, too.

Guess they should have used the yellow snow, eh? Any Zappa-tista coulda told you....

Stripping the gurus: The dis-integration of Ken Wilber. The saga begins:

I am a newbie in kw studies and this book strikes me as a kind of shock about wilber. But what do you guys think about it? Just plain bitterness from the critics? Jealousy? Misinterpreted? True? Kinda true? Does this matter or not? Old news? Just some crazy boomeritis?

A legitimate question. This is how one of the integral-ites responded:

The basic point is that Falk is an asshole.

His remarks are not well founded and do not make a good impression.

Yes, we had already established my ass-holiness nearly three years ago. And far be it from me to ever "make a good impression."

But as far as my "remarks" not being "well founded": Care to provide any examples for me to respond to? No? Not even one? What a shame.

I do not know Mr. Falk. But it is clear that he is a smart guy. And probably a smart-ass sometimes too.

Well, of all the ... sonofa ... I oughta ... well, alright....

But better a "smart-ass" than an "integral dumbass," eh? Eh? We'll get back to that point again later.

The thread got pretty drastically off-topic after around a half-dozen posts, as testimony to the tendency of an Integral Life Practice to leave you with the attention span of a hummingbird. Nevertheless:

[W]hat Mr. Falk is most interested in is distinguishing between verifiable truths and b.s. He is trained as an electrical engineer, a field that makes pretty rigorous distinctions between truth and falsity, or valid and invalid connections.

All of which is true, but just to be explicit on my formal training: Straight out of high school in 1984, I spent three years (out of a four-year program) as an engineering student at the University of Manitoba. First year: 8 A+'s, 2 A's, and 2 B+'s (in Drafting and in Technical Communication, the two "b.s." courses that you couldn't really study for); third overall out of 325 first-year students. Second year: 8 A+'s, 2 A's. (I could still tell you which two exam questions I screwed up on to cost myself straight A+'s; one was a calculation error using Simpson's Rule [d'oh!] which I ran out of time [and paper] to go back and fix, and the other was where I misinterpreted a question about where exactly we were supposed to calculate the electric field for a volume of charge distributed throughout a sphere.) Wound up first overall among 80 second-year electricals. Third year, my mother passed away in the autumn, and I was burned out anyway from spending too many months in a row just thinking about one subject (especially with the NSERC undergraduate research grant working on VLSI over the previous summer).

Spent half a year in the Education faculty; then went into Honors Physics the next academic year. Finished with 4 A+'s and 2 A's; tied for top marks, in a class of two dozen.

But then I started writing my first book over the following summer, and by Christmas-time I had again dropped out. (Plus, a sibling was involved in a near-fatal car crash just before exams—it was completely the other driver's fault—so for half a year it was "the two of us against the world.") I still managed to score the top marks on the Quantum Physics mid-term, though, mostly just on the strength of what I knew from second-year.

In 2001, I did a computer programming diploma in "E-Commerce Solutions Development" at a private institute in Toronto; 96% overall average, and #1 again.

All of those fields, of course, teach you to make "pretty rigorous distinctions between truth and falsity, or valid and invalid connections." As did the intro philosophy course I took (and aced) as an elective in second year, and which was where I started to learn how to structure a logical argument in words, on paper.

Incidentally, I just recently discovered that both Paul and Patricia Churchland used to teach at the U of Manitoba. As did the LSD "Elder" Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. And, psychedelic pioneer and Leary-collaborator Gary Fisher graduated from there, too. I had no idea my old, staid, frigid alma mater was ever such a cutting-edge institution. The "Berkeley of the north," as it were.

I browsed through the text as far as my short attention span allowed, and my impression is that this guy (Geoffrey) is really trying too hard. He loses himself in endless details and doesn't seem to get the big picture. Of course I should read all the text before judging, but I'm just not motivated to read it all. I wonder for which target group he 's [sic] writing. And then 'Dis-Integration' really sounds hostile. [Good, it was meant to.] Did he mean 'De-Construction'? Anyway he's far from the brillance [sic] of a Derrida or Foucault.

Yeah, ain't that the truth! :P Or whatever the word for "truth" is in postmodern-ese.

As Derrida himself said, "What is truth?" Or was it Wilber who said that? No, wait, it was Pontius Pilate....

Anyway, "big pictures" are composed of "endless details," and details are themselves a "big picture" relative to the even finer-grained sub-details of which they're composed; it's just a matter of scale. If you can't get the details right at the first level down, you won't get the big picture right either. Exhibit A: Wilber's life's work.

If you want a bigger-picture critique of kw's notions, NE has plenty of links to the excellent work of Jeff Meyerhoff and Andrew Smith. And if their debunking of the core of Wilber's work, on top of mine, doesn't convince you of the fatal flaws in kw's so-called theories, there is truly no hope for you.

For which target group am I writing? For people like myself who are prepared to face truth and reality, regardless of what they may turn out to be. If the rest of this species wants enough spiritual rope to go hang itself, I won't be the one to try and stop them; I just don't want anyone like me to waste his (or her) life believing in fairy tales purveyed by manipulative cult leaders, when there's a whole world of reality out there.

Did I mean "De-Construction"? Er, no. Not unless Wilber has made his name in "constructive psychology" by "constructing" the phenomena in Fore diffurnt Kwadrants, and then setting up a "Constructional Institute" with the "Constructive Naked" offshoot to promote his particular brand of constructive idiocy. And not unless the collapse of his Theory of Nothing was a "de-construction."

Really, if you have to explain the joke it stops being funny, right? And if I thought that there was more than one person of even average intelligence in the world who didn't get it....

Imo the best way of dealing with such critics is to ignore them and that's what I will do.

Yeah, just like the best way of dealing with reality is to ignore it until it goes away. Wheeee!!

Which way to the Kool-Aid?

I agree with you that this Mr. Falk is rather bitter and jealous and not very scientific.

If by "not very scientific" you're suggesting that I haven't provided evidence for each and every claim I make about Wilber's life and work, well ... I'd need to see some evidence for your position. Same thing for if you think you've found flaws in my logic. (P.S. Logic is not the same thing as science. Debunking is very often based merely on logic and documenting a person's misrepresentations, rather than in the strict application of the scientific method as such to any set of claims. In real-life [e.g., in cults], we don't always have the luxury of isolating independent variables, and running an experiment over and over to see what effect altering the independent variable has on the system, to form a hypothesis and then a theory about why it's working that way. In such contexts, to say that a particular debunking is "not very scientific" doesn't really say much about anything. On the contrary, it makes one wonder if the person making the point even understands what science is.)

The word "cult" comes charged and loaded. I think it is irresponsible to call anything associated with I-I a cult at this point.

It might help to recall that I consider the Catholic Church, too, to be an overgrown cult, which meets all of Robert Lifton's criteria for a totalistic society. I also agree completely with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens that indoctrinating children into any organized religion constitutes a form of child abuse, even independent of pedophilia in the ranks of the priests, etc. Those are certainly controversial positions, but it is not irresponsible to hold or promote them: there is strong evidence for both conclusions, for anyone who is willing to see it, to the point where denying those realities borders on irresponsibility.

Ken W. has deliberately and responsibly made it known time and again that he is not interested in being a guru to anyone. And what this means is that his work is what it is and stands on its own. And the joy of this is that if Ken W. were to drop off the face of the planet tomorrow or start writing [bad, very bad] science fiction novels, it would have very little impact on the legitimacy and power of the I-I vision....

Falk does not understand the key point that Ken W. is probably the most responsible "spiritual leader" the Western world has ever seen. He goes out of his way to be rigorous and to avoid the potential of a personality cult. He has had every opportunity to deify himself and he has responsibly taken the high road.

First, compare Broken Yogi:

The problem with so much of Wilber's program is that it is really about Wilber himself, and not about the universal truths he professes to be trying to discern.... [T]he fate of charismatic figures is not a pretty one, and Wilber is, indeed, the leader of a charismatic movement...."

I would tend to agree. As might Matthew Dallman:

It also turned out that what I thought was a think-tank [i.e., the Integral Institute] was, in reality, a company, which went on to produce products like any company would. Those products include self-help DVDs, for-pay websites promising exclusive access to him, as well as expensive seminars and experiential workshops. Essentially, the whole thing is to sell Wilber as well as his model, even if advertised otherwise.

Next, allow me to quote briefly from NE:

Perhaps one in a thousand guru-figures uses his/her power wisely and non-abusively. Ken Wilber, for all of his glaring flaws as both a pretend-scholar and a desperately insecure human being who will brook no criticism of his ideas without attempting to discredit the "enemy" as being too spiritually unevolved to understand his Great Notions, has never been the worst among those "leading" figures. Rather, he is simply the one who makes the most quantitative statements. And thus, he is also the one who can be the most easily shown to be consistently wrong and/or dishonest, via simple research which any intelligent undergraduate should be able to do.

What exactly do you think I am not "understanding," there, hmm? Have you seen any indication at all that there are any gurus covered in STG that I regard as being less harmful than kw? (There aren't.) If not, then what is your point, as far as that least-harmful-to-most-harmful ordering goes?

Plus, this, in Wilber's own words, is why he has not taken on the responsibilities of being a guru:

I'm afraid if I did the guru thing, I'd be a victim of the Peter Principle. I would rise to the level of my incompetence and really start screwing some people up.

And, of course, in assuming the presidency of the Integral Institute and then running that organization into the ground, Wilber has only proved how true and unusually prescient that statement of his was, in the business-world context where the Peter Principle originated.

Yet, if that had been the real reason for his guru-related reticence, Wilber wouldn't be simultaneously gamboling incompetently through two dozen different academic fields: It's not simple incompetence he's afraid of (again, he has embraced that attribute fully, as president of I-I)—rather, his bugaboo is responsibility. As his second wife Treya put it:

[H]e may not want to feel responsible himself, it might be easier for him to think it's [my] fault. What might be behind that? Maybe he's afraid it's his fault. Maybe he doesn't want to take responsibility for his not writing....

Later that day I checked this scenario out with Ken, but very gently, no blame. He gave me a gold star, I hit it pretty close on the nose.

And it's exactly that same drastic lack of responsibility which prevents Wilber from admitting how much damage he's done in leading people into Adi Da's and Cohen's destructive groups, and which further keeps him from doing what any minimally sensible and responsible person would do: wholly repudiating those organizations and properly taking back (and apologizing profusely for) his previous, inexcusable endorsements.

Or what would you do if you had foolishly gotten yourself into the same predicament? I know damned well what I'd do: I'd expose the abusive fraud with all the tools and energy at my disposal (just as I've done with Yogananda). The gutless Wilber has done no such thing.

What Wilber has created at I-I is a world where he has most of the power a guru would have, but little of the responsibility for others' spiritual welfare. It's the perfect situation for a power-hungry, irresponsible, incompetent narcissist: The world revolves around him, and people from all over beat a path to him for spiritual advice. But he's not to blame for any negative consequences of what they do with even the worst of his advice (e.g., in following Da or Cohen). Hell, he's not even to blame (in his own mind) for flushing his own organization down the toilet with his true managerial incompetence: it's just the fault of all those Orange people who don't have the altitude to carry out his King David-like instructions without letting their own first-tier egos get in the way.

Again, Broken Yogi:

[Wilber] clearly isn't qualified to be a Guru, but that doesn't seem to stop almost anyone these days. I was kind of hoping Wilber would have more integrity than that, but it must be hard for him seeing all these doofuses out there teaching, and he has to be satisfied with being a mere pundit. So some of that is bleeding in. It's too bad. As a pundit, Wilber isn't bad, if far from perfect. As a Guru he's just an example of the Peter Principle in the spiritual world: too many people rise to the level of their incompetence. As a pundit, Wilber is at least competent to debate, to stimulate conversation, to put forth ideas, etc. As a Guru, he's woefully inadequate to the task...

If you don't get that Wilber's "humility" (and irresponsibility), in playing the pandit-game rather than the guru-game, is part of his whole schtick, you're missing out on understanding a big part of the script, fellas. False humility has long been a strength of his; the panditry is just part of the same pattern (where his fear of responsibility and his false-humility-as-a-means-of-being-liked converge, and both of them push him in the same direction).

My sense is that Falk is a really smart guy [so far, so good] who has done much of the same research as many of us and it sort of bugs him that Ken W. has managed to build a substantial community that is having fun, doing serious work, and making a real difference.

Oh, I do love it when integral-ites psychobabble, just throwing out a pop-psych conclusion with no supporting evidence at all.

I debunk a lot of other spiritual frauds too, you know, outside of Wilber World. Do you really think it's all based on "jealousy and bitterness," or on anything specific to Wilber's integral community? If so, see below. Or are you imagining that I have different reasons for exposing Wilber than I have for exposing our world's more garden-variety spiritual frauds and their communities? If so, look up "parsimony" and "Occam's Razor."

Remember the movie Amadeus? I see Wilber as Mozart and Falk as Salieri who is filled with envy.

Hmm, Salieri ... Integral Salieri ... why does that sound so familiar?

Oh, maybe it's because of this and this??!

And guess what else?

Salieri was indeed an excellent composer who actually enjoyed more success in his lifetime than Mozart did in his time.

And this:

Salieri's health declined in his later years, and he was hospitalized shortly before his death. It was shortly after he died that gossip first spread that he had confessed to Mozart's murder on his deathbed. Salieri's two nurses, Gottlieb Parsko and Georg Rosenberg, as well as his family doctor Joseph Röhrig, attested that he never said any such thing. At least one of these three people was with him throughout his hospitalization. ()

More from the thread:

I agree that Ken W. has tossed off statements from time to time that make you think "how could he possibly know this" or "how could this possibly be verified?" But, I give him the latitude to make statements like these because they may simply be helpful orientations or even poetically just.

Hmm. And is the "two stages of development in four years of meditation" claim (for which there is no evidence, as demonstrated once again by the fact that no one in the integral community has put up any source-references to it on that thread) one of those "poetically just" statements? Is all his dishonest mangling of high-school-level evolution just a "helpful orientation"?

I'm not the one who's being "not very scientific" here. On the contrary, you people are the ones living inside a bubble where you've set things up so that there is nothing Wilber could ever do, no matter how blatantly hyperbolic, fraudulent and dishonest, that can't be easily rationalized away, or simply ignored as if it didn't exist (as in the fact that four years of meditation will not typically advance you by two stages of psychological development).

As for scientific evidence, not everything that we know is susceptible to quantification. Ken W. has made this point over and over. There are truths that are impossible to verify in a laboratory. You can have knowledge and you can provide a road map for others to obtain the same knowledge and yet what you know has no physical or quantifiable properties. Truths exist in a variety of domains....

None of which counters anything I've ever written.

But the thing is that claims of the ability to see auras, and subtle energies, and to do astral travel and the like can very easily be tested. And after you recover from the fact that not one of those claims has yet showed itself to be true under properly controlled conditions, wrap your head around the fact that you can also model the form constants seen by migraine-aura sufferers, on computers; Oliver Sacks and his colleagues were doing that two decades ago, in mere 20 x 20 arrays of virtual neurons. (There's a slow wave that sweeps across the brain's neural network during that "aura," which has actually been measured to exist, and is part of the computer modeling.) What that means is that the measurable electromagnetic activities of the brain's neural network are not just a correlated activity, in a psycho-physical parallelism, with visual stuff that's going on in some higher/astral/mental reality. Rather, the physical neural activity is all you need in order to account for at least the simplest of the specific forms seen in those auras.

Sure, as far as things where there really is nothing "physical or quantifiable" (yet), there's still at least the "hard problem" of subjectivity/consciousness itself. But that's not much left to cling to, and it sure as hell doesn't justify buying into any of the other shaky aspects of Wilber's model.

Here is what Mr. Falk would tell you (I suspect): his critique can be bitter and jealous and also at the same time valid. So forget about whether he is being bitter or jealous. That is his problem. [So far, so good, logically speaking.] Instead, study Ken's works and then study the book written by Mr. Falk and arrive at your own opinions. And then after you have done your homework and are competent to enter the debate, you will be in a position to really contribute useful ideas.

And good luck to you in entering that debate with any ideas which aren't "integral enough."

When even the leaders aren't able to "really contribute useful ideas" that stand up to reality-testing, the followers won't be able to do so either. Obviously.

And don't kid yourself: I have no more (professional) use or respect for people who reach blatantly wrong conclusions based on a blinkered and biased review of clear-cut evidence, and who then try to convince others that they've thought things through, than I have for cult leaders (like Wilber) or political leaders who try to short-circuit that review. There is only one correct answer to the question as to whether Wilber's ideas make enough sense to justify your believing them or adopting an Integral Life Practice based on them, and that answer is that they don't.

The search for truth doesn't give points just for "trying" (and failing, miserably) to separate fact from fiction. And your addled membership in the integral community, after having been spoon-fed the information which would have led any truly thoughtful human being to avoid I-I like the plague-on-rational-humanity which it is, is no more a noble, respect-worthy decision than if someone were to be given the choice between living in a free society versus a communist one ... and choose the latter, and then pretend that that's some great use of the freedom for which others have fought and died. (The military analogy is deliberate.)

You have the freedom to do all that, of course—that is what freedom of speech and thought are about; and we have no more precious freedoms than those. But you are assuredly not using your hard-won rights wisely, nor are such foolish decisions (re: communism, or Wilberism) going to further the good of your compatriots, or of your children.

[W]hen U. S. troops were fighting communism, we used to even hear about how we should respect the sovereignty of communist countries, and their right to engage in communism. (James Fulford, "Return of the Nativist?")

I personally feel roughly the same way about defending people's right to believe in spiritual nonsense, as I do about defending their right to engage in the political/totalistic cult of communism: Yes, you have the right to "vote" for that, but what the fuck are you thinking?

It's never just you that's affected by your own bad decisions, you know. You may be content to throw large chunks of your own life away believing in a set of fairy tales. But your children (and other people who respect your opinion enough to investigate the ideas of which you think so highly; and their children) deserve better.

Personally, I got involved with SRF foremost on the basis of having Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi recommended to me (at my solicitation) by a naturopathic doctor whose opinion, at the time, I valued more than anyone else's. The same thing could easily happen when you encourage others who value your opinion to "make up their own minds" about Wilber and his ideas "based just on the pro and con evidence" (including my books) ... while it's simultaneously clear to them as to what your own (wrong) conclusions already are about the relative weight of those. If you have any understanding at all of social psychology (Asch, etc.), you already know how easily our perceptions and decisions are influenced by group consensus and authority, without our even realizing it. Or, since you've apparently overlooked all that while still claiming to be independent, maybe you don't know....

Beyond that, by all means take all the integral/spiritual rope you want....

(The ideas quoted above from the Multiplex thread are as close as the members of the Wilberian integral community ever get to coherent, rational thought; yet they're still shot through with embarrassingly superficial analyses, half-baked pop psychology, and blatant wishful thinking. And I'm supposed to be "jealous" of that community, when it's such an obvious waste of space, filled with second-rate hummingbirds who truly couldn't think their collective way out of a wet paper bag? Who are you trying to kid, anyway? Take a look at yourselves. Who but Stuart Davis could be impressed with what you bring to the table?)

Anyway, since there are, as above, people in the psychobabbling integral world who are under the impression that the work I have done in exposing the bald lies and incompetence of Kon Schwilber is the product of mere "bitterness and jealousy" on my part, I will now do a little more to set the record straight than I have previously attempted.

First, this is what I had written in NE about my attitude toward Wilber's ill-gotten success:

If you are even a competent undergraduate student with a conscience, there is next to nothing for you to envy in Ken Wilber's work or character: you already have more of what makes a decent human being in you than kw will ever even want to recover from his own wasted life. All you can really learn from the likes of him is what not to do with your life, and how not to behave in attempting to make a name for yourself.

That statement was true then; it's true now.

Am I envious of the fact that Wilber has, for a quarter of a century now, been able to make a very good living at writing, being endorsed (foolishly) by world-leaders in many (fuzzy-thinking) fields? Of course I am. I'm also envious of Hugh Hefner; it doesn't mean I'll spend my life trying to tear him down when I'm done with Wilber.

Would I sell out my integrity for the financial and (fuzzy-thinking) critical success Wilber has had? Of course not. When my various ships finally come in, and I'm swimming in fame and fortune, I will have gotten there by doing the right thing. The Bald Fraud cannot say the same in the context of any reasonable definitions of self-honesty or reality-testing.

And regarding "bitterness and jealousy": About what, exactly? Wilber's endorsements from leading lights in the spiritual community? Heh. Check out mine:

I endorse whole-heartedly the road you have traveled. Light is a—perhaps the—powerful entry point to Spirit, and you ring the changes on it well. It's a book I would like to have on my shelves to refer to.

—Huston Smith, Ph.D.
author, The World's Religions

Combines...astutely some of the great wisdoms of the spiritual world with the emerging understanding of the physical universe.

—Dr. James Fadiman
Board of Editors
The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology

Neither Smith nor Fadiman have spoken that enthusiastically about any of Wilber's books.

But maybe I'm jealous and bitter about Wilber's creation of the most groundbreaking synthesis of spiritual thought our world has ever seen? Heh, again. Here's what the publisher of that first book o' mine had to say about it:

now I can say that I've 'proofed' the first 9 chapters so far,
and I'm both amazed and pleased how well you express even the most subtle
thoughts...
your logic is clear throughout, and frankly, your work presents
thoughts, comments, and connections so plausibly I can hardly imagine
anyone putting it all together with 'words' as you have done........ it will
take several readings to absorb half the wisdom there.
makes me just want to stop everything and just get enlightened before I
leave!!!

anyway, it's late, but I've been intending to tell you how
impressed I am with everything I've read so far....

Judge for yourself:

The Science of the Soul: On Consciousness and the Structure of Reality (PDF, 1.0 MB).

Bear in mind that I didn't actually know how to write nonfiction until I got to the end of the editing process for my second book, STG. So SOS isn't an easy read, in terms of the disjointed style. Nevertheless, if you can look past that, the ideas sparkle ... even if they may well all be wrong.

Given all that—and the fact that I've thoroughly disowned the same book since turning skeptical—what exactly am I supposed to be "bitter" or "jealous" about in the integral world? Wilber's ill-gotten success, deriving only from his own bald dishonesty and the cluelessness of the followers who can't tell shit from Shinola? No, we've already covered that.

So, cynical, yes. Mad as hell, yes. Tired of being poor, absolutely.

But "bitter" or "jealous" of a load of worthless integral notions and a community of clueless followers who can't figure out how they're being lied to even when the evidence for that is spoon-fed to them? Not a chance. You literally couldn't pay me to be part of an environment like that.

If you hadn't noticed, I treat everyone who lies to me or tries to cheat me out of what is rightfully mine, more or less the same, from Yogananda to Wilber. So it's pretty fucking obvious that you can't account for that widespread behavior on my part, on the basis of any specifics in Wilber's community, or in his ideas.

And guess what: I'm "making a difference" too, even if I haven't even "hit my stride" yet. And occasionally I'm even having fun doing that "serious work," too, even if for the most part I'm just a "community of one."

The bottom line, as always, is that since I'm following the facts and criticizing a set of ideas and a community which you care deeply about, and which you can't/won't let go of regardless of how much debunking evidence is spoon-fed to you, the problem must be with me. Human psychology is fully up to the task of fabricating the "bitter and jealous" specifics of that; it's just Cognitive Dissonance 101.

From James Fulford's Abolishing the West: Fall of Constantinople, Part II:

Ibrahim Hooper of CAIR [the Council on American-Islamic Relations] wrote (responding to an article by Daniel Pipes), that CAIR was doing good work overcoming libels against Islam. He said

Mr. Pipes refers to one incident (again resolved with CAIR's intervention) in which a children's book offered what Mr. Pipes calls a "negative treatment" of the Prophet Muhammad, but he fails to tell his readers what that means. In World Religions: Great Lives, William Jay Jacobs offered the following description of the Prophet Muhammad:

During his lifetime he was a man who loved beautiful women, fine perfume, and tasty food. He took pleasure in seeing the heads of his enemies torn from their bodies by the swords of his soldiers. He hated Christians and Jews, poets and painters, and anyone who criticized him. Once he had a Jewish prisoner tortured in order to learn the location of the man's hidden treasure. Then, having uncovered the secret, he had his victim murdered and added the dead man's wife to the collection of women in his harem.

It seems easy to imagine why Muslims would find such a description of their prophet inaccurate and offensive.

I'd never heard that story about the torture, murder, and rape/marriage, so I took the trouble to look it up, with references to the Koran, the a'hadeetha, and the Life of Mohammed. It's all true.

The closest thing to an inaccuracy is that in describing the torture and murder of Kinana, and the enslavement of his widow, Jacobs neglected to describe the means of torture ("A fire was kindled on his chest with flint and steel until he was nearly dead.") possibly because he didn't want to give the 10-12 year-olds for whom the book was intended nightmares.

And from Fulford's Diversity vs. Freedom: Jihad on the Campus:

On February 19, Omar Siddiqui, a law student at Toronto's Osgoode Hall Law School published an article which spoke approvingly of women being flogged for adultery (as long as the skin wasn't broken), and quoting the old law that, "In cases where a child has been born which is not even seen as direct evidence of fornication, and the mother is breast feeding the child, she must not be punished for fear that the child will lose a mother."

Turned around, that sentence means that it's OK under Islamic law to flog a nursing mother, possibly to death, if her child was born as the result of adultery.

And you wonder why a (now-ex) hippie can't walk down the streets in this city without being hassled by one or another goat-fucking, homoerotically-demented terrorist?

Although religion is usually considered a purely cultural construction, it might also have deep psychotropic roots. (more)

Well, yes. But anyone with any knowledge of entheogens coulda told you that. Religion has all kinds of roots (astronomical, sympathetic-magical, form-constant, etc.) that go way beyond mere cultural constructions....

And Steve Sailer on multiculturalism: Fragmented Future: Multiculturalism doesn't make vibrant communities but defensive ones:

While no more than 12 percent of L.A.'s whites said they trusted other races "only a little or not at all," 37 percent of L.A.'s Latinos distrusted whites. And whites were the most reliable in Hispanic eyes. Forty percent of Latinos doubted Asians, 43 percent distrusted other Hispanics, and 54 percent were anxious about blacks....

Los Angeles is a representative harbinger of America's future....

The problems caused by diversity can be partly ameliorated, but the handful of techniques that actually work generally appall liberal intellectuals, so we hear about them only when they come under attack....

From 1992-2004, the military accepted almost no applicants for enlistment who scored below the 30th percentile on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. This eliminated within the ranks the majority of the IQ gap that causes so much discord in civilian America....

Because policymakers almost certainly won't do what it would take to alleviate the harms caused by diversity—indeed, they won't even talk honestly about what would have to be done—it's crazy to exacerbate the problem through more mass immigration. As the issue of co-operation becomes ever more pressing, the quality of intellectual discourse on the topic declines ... precisely because of a lack of trust due to the mounting political power of "the diverse" to punish frank discussion.

P.S. How to build your own edible Flying Spaghetti Monster. And if this brilliant project doesn't warm the stomach of an ex-engineering student....

I have about fifty Dead tapes, including the original rap song—Mickey Hart rapping "Fire on the Mountain"—I think at my alma mater, Cornell, before I was even born. It's fantastic. How about that? Just when you thought the Dead could be no cooler—they even invented rap!

—Ann Coulter

Hmm. First, there's this thread:

There are 2 versions that I know of where Mickey "raps" Fire on the Mountain. Both from the Mickey Hart and the Marin County Collective, recorded in '72 and '73. The first one, I believe, is called Area Code 415 sessions. The second is Fire on the Mountain Sessions.

Then, the Grateful Dead Hour show:

And of course, we have the legendary unreleased Mickey Hart "rap" version of "Fire on the Mountain," from an unreleased 1974 studio recording that featured Jerry Garcia on guitar and I'm not sure who else. I got a copy of M Dung's reel, which he got from Mickey's master.

You can download the mp3 from savefile (lyrics), if you require proof what white guys can't rap. Still, that doesn't tell you anything about who invented it.

The first rap single to go gold was Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," in 1979. (The very first rap single was released just a few weeks prior to that song.)

The recognized sound of hip-hop of course originated in the Beastie Boys' (Adam Horovitz, Adam "MCA" Yauch, etc.) sampling of John Bonham's drum work from Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks," with that being done under the direction of producer Rick Rubin—"the most important white boy in hip-hop." But before those whites and Jews perfected today's black music, the equally pasty Dead deserve credit for inventing the concept.

Don't you think so? Of course, given Mickey Hart's intense interest in world rhythms, he may well have picked up the idea from some Third World culture....

Hip hop music began in the early 1970s in New York City with the advent of breakbeat DJing. Kool DJ Herc, Grandmaster Flash and other DJs extended the breaks (short percussion interludes) of funk records. This use of extended percussion breaks led to the development of mixing and scratching techniques. As hip hop's popularity grew, performers began speaking while the music played, and became known as MCs or emcees.... MCs grew more varied in their vocal and rhythmic approach, incorporating brief rhymes, often with a theme. These early raps had precursors and parallels in other aspects of African American culture, such as the dozens and signifying. (Wikipedia)

The roots of hip hop can be found in 1970s block parties in New York City, specifically The Bronx. Hip hop culture, including rapping, scratching, graffiti, and breakdancing. In the 1930s more than a sixth of Harlem residents were from the West Indies, and the block parties of the '80s were closely similar to sound systems in Jamaica. These were large parties, originally outdoors, thrown by owners of loud and expensive stereo equipment, which they could share with the community or use to compete among themselves, who began speaking lyrics or toasting.

Rap music emerged from block parties after ultra-competitive DJs isolated percussion breaks, those being the favorites among dancers, and MCs began speaking over the beats; in Jamaica, a similar musical style called dub developed from the same isolated and elongated percussion breaks. However, "most rappers will tell you that they either disliked reggae or were only vaguely aware of it in the early and middle '70s." (Wikipedia)

Perhaps significantly, "Fire on the Mountain" is done in a semi-reggae rhythm.

More Steve Sailer. First, from his Sociobiology at Age 25:

[T]he most effective way to get males to cooperate with each other is to get them fired up about competing with somebody else. For example, black and white college football players work together far better than the other students on campus precisely because if they don't, their opponents will crush them. Without competition to impose costs, people naturally discriminate in favor of their kin and race.

From his America and the Left Half of the Bell Curve:

[T]he average IQ of recent [U.S.] immigrants and their children is somewhere around a mediocre 95. This is high enough to drive huge numbers of African-Americans (average IQ: 85) out of the legitimate workforce. And high enough to drive down the wages of white blue-collar workers. But not high enough to create competition for the jobs of media people and others with high Verbal SAT scores.

And from his Pondering Patterson [V]: The Reality Of Race:

Postmodernism is the result of intellectuals being shocked to learn that reality is not Platonic (e.g., races are only somewhat more sharply defined than are extended families) and thus deciding to give up believing in reality rather than in Platonism.

And then there's the Pinker-endorsed African-American John McWhorter on Affirmative Action and rap music ... and the use of the word "niggardly" (combined):

For some, the main index of black American well-being would be integration. In that light, I believe that the black community today is the main obstacle to achieving the full integration our Civil Rights leaders sought....

[Under] the Cult of Victimology ... it has become a keystone of cultural blackness to treat victimhood not as a problem to be solved but as an identity to be nurtured....

Meanwhile, black student associations invite unthinking, anti-Semitic zealots of the Nation of Islam to university campuses, black students coming away saying that the speaker "had some good things to say," unfazed by the ignorant xenophobia and sexism....

I have reluctantly come to suspect that [it is] a quiet but fundamental sense among many African-Americans of influence that the black student who aces the SAT and tolerates nothing less than top grades is stepping outside of what it is to be a proper African-American.

And, egad, Sailer on Great Black Hopes, and Tom Sowell's "Black Redneck" Theory, and on Michelle Obama And The Rage Of A Privileged Class. And on U.S. immigration policy, which turns out (contra Sailer's too-rosy view of Canada's immigration system) to have the same stupid "family reunification" ideals as does Canada, leading to exactly the same problems:

When a Vinod Khosla helps found a Sun Microsystems, American customers, workers, and stockholders all benefit. But say this tech wizard's sister's husband's mother's sister's husband gets into the U.S. through "family reunification." Due to regression to the mean, the odds are greatly against him being another wizard. So, say he buys a Motel Six, fires the old employees, and staffs it with his extended family. The economic results for current American citizens are much more mixed than when his distant in-law started Sun. American customers presumably get a slightly better product, but at the expense of the jobs of the laid off American workers.

And on intermarriage:

What can supporters of interracial marriage do to minimize the damage done by continued mass immigration? Besides cutting back on the quantity of immigrants, we need to improve their quality. We should be selecting immigrants more likely to marry out of their racial group. For example, we should favor applicants who are young and single. We certainly aren't now under our "family unification" (i.e., nepotism) policy....

Almost any kind of rational reform of the immigration laws would make America a more unified country.

And then there's this, amid an explanation of the Flynn Effect:

[S]ome non-IQ tests suggest that people are becoming less competent at dealing with old-fashioned physical objects in the real world rather than with images on glowing screens. One study found that British children had lost the equivalent of 12 points from 1975 to 2003. Richard Tomkins reported in the Financial Times:

"The results achieved by 11-year-olds had fallen to the level that children aged eight to nine had been achieving 30 years ago ... A sample question involved pouring all the water from a tall, thin beaker into a short, fat one, refilling the tall, thin beaker to the same level and asking which contained the greater volume of water."

You'll recognize that ability to understand "conservation" as one of Piaget's standard tests for whether a child has reached the concrete operational stage of psychological development. Meaning that, in spite of all the "morphogenic fields," etc., supposedly created in the ether (or whatever) by children who have gotten to that stage before, we're actually going backwards in terms of the rate/age at which children get to that particular stage of psychological development.

Who wants to break that news to Ken 'n' Rupert?

• The Mismeasure of Man: Criticisms

• The Mismeasures of Gould

• For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls

• Arthur Jensen Replies to Steven Jay Gould

And more problems with Jared Diamond and those pesky facts:

Not all sub-Saharan Africans lack domestic animals. For instance, the Fulanis are mostly lactose tolerant precisely because they evolved an ability to drink cow's milk as adults because they herd cattle on a massive scale.

It's true that Africans never domesticated the ostrich, but a Mr. Hardy pulled off the trick in the 19th Century. In the late nineteenth century, South African farmers raised almost a million of these 300-pound birds to supply the fancy hat industry with feathers.

Most strikingly, Diamond failed to recall that elephant-mounted African warriors did swarm north to decimate horse-mounted Romans and almost create an empire that spanned Africa and Europe in perhaps the most famous feat of ancient warfare: Hannibal crossing the Alps. (Although a biopic with Denzel Washington as Hannibal has long been under development in Hollywood, the North African Carthaginians were actually the Semitic descendents of the Levantine Phoenicians.)

Oh, and there's also Diamond's infamous and rather un-PC study on "Ethnic Differences: Variation in Human Testis Size" (page 1, page 2). You know, with larger genital size arising from greater sperm competition, which in turn arises from sexual promiscuity.

And Steven Pinker on "The Lessons of the Ashkenazi: Groups and Genes."

And separately, Steve Sailer on racial integration:

1) The integration of organized baseball preceded the civil-rights revolution, and in reality baseball helped make later reforms politically feasible by giving white Americans black heroes with whom to identify. 2) Government had almost nothing to do with this triumph of the competitive market. Baseball owners finally realized that the more they cared about the color of people's money, the less they could afford to care about the color of their skin.

It's ironic that the hallowed civil-rights revolution owed so much to something as seemingly trivial as pro sports. Yet, without this business of producing heroes for public consumption, whites might never have cared enough about blacks to be bothered by racial injustice.

Of course, it wasn't so much about white people having black "heroes" as it was about blacks becoming part of the "our team" in-group; but the other points above are surely correct.

WHAT lessons can we learn from this tangled tale? A few simple ones seem to leap out. The more greed and lust for victory, the less discrimination. The more competition between teams and businesses, the more cooperation between the races.

Yes, but that's just because the competition bonds "our group" together against "their group," and "our group" happens to have a mix of races in it, in a context where winning (which requires everyone on the team to do well) matters more than does skin color. Still, it is a nice side-effect of capitalistic "competition between teams and businesses."

And then, regarding racial intermarriage:

[I]nterracial marriages are increasingly recognized as epitomizing what our society values most in a marriage: the triumph of true love over convenience and prudence. Nor is it surprising that white-Asian marriages outnumber black-white marriages: the social distance between whites and Asians is now far smaller than the distance between blacks and whites. What's fascinating, however, is that in recent years a startling number of nonwhites—especially Asian men and black women—have become bitterly opposed to intermarriage....

The heart of the problem for Asian men and black women is that intermarriage does not treat every sex/race combination equally: on average, it has offered black men and Asian women new opportunities for finding mates among whites, while exposing Asian men and black women to new competition from whites.

And you didn't think they were going to take that "lying down," did you?

P.S. Sailer again: "Pinker is an enthusiastic subscriber to my iSteve mailing list. And arguments that I've made over the years pop up throughout The Blank Slate."

[American pundit Tucker] Carlson has also made polemic remarks about Canada, describing Canadians as being very "brittle." "Anybody with any ambition at all, or intelligence, has left Canada and is now living in New York," he has said. "Canada is a sweet country. It is like your retarded cousin you see at Thanksgiving and sort of pat him on the head. You know, he's nice but you don't take him seriously. That's Canada." Carlson later appeared on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's CBC News: The Hour, saying that while he had "nothing against Canada" his description accurately reflected how "a lot of Americans see you." (Wikipedia)

Well, I'd be absolutely fucking furious with that oh-aren't-we-so-superior American bastard's dissing of my home and native land if ... if, um, I didn't have serious hopes of one day getting the hell out of this two-bit, Timbit nation, and doing world-class work in a real country, myself. (I'm the telecommuting webmaster and CRM-customizer for a global nonprofit org headquartered in NYC, to which Bill Gates himself is a major donor. So I'm already "virtually there.")

It's like they say: When you're tired of Canada, you're tired of ... donuts and hockey.

Either way, sad that I never got to see CBGB....

P.S. Phil Nugent's blog. Very good writer, although he needs to learn how paragraphs work....

P.P.S. I would never have guessed that the Grateful Dead's "Franklin's Tower" had so much intended meaning.

From Thomas Schmitz' Ex Africa lux?:

[A]ccepting that every group's view of history is as valid as any other's means throwing the door wide open to new racisms of all kinds—and I do not accept the premise that blacks cannot be racists because they have not enough power to oppress other groups.* When Leonard Jeffries, an Afrocentrist who teaches at the City College of New York, differentiates between creative African "sun people" and destructive, violent European "ice people," this is ugly and abominable racism; when Mary Lefkowitz's colleague at Wellesley, Tony Martin, calls her books a "Jewish onslaught," this is Antisemitism, a special form of racism.

* This view is held, e.g., by Coleman Young, the [former] mayor of Detroit.... [As David Shipler explained:] "Many blacks define racism as prejudice plus power, thereby labeling the practice so that it lies beyond the reach of powerless people like themselves. [...] Many blacks have used [this definition] to confer a kind of immunity on themselves, a permission to be racist without admitting to it." I think [Young's] view should be rejected because it entails a one-dimensional view of power that cannot be accepted: power cannot be equated with institutionalized political might; it occurs at all points of society in a decentralized way. Most blacks may have less power than most whites, but they are certainly not totally deprived of it.

Yes but, you know, even if they were completely, utterly deprived of power, that still wouldn't change anything regarding their ability to be every bit as despicably prejudiced and racist as their oppressors.

Funny enough, Joy Behar pulled exactly the same cowardly-bullshit "get out of racism free" card recently on The View:

On March 24, 2008, [Elisabeth] Hasselbeck commented on Rev. Jeremiah Wright's recent statements.... Hasselbeck said of Rev. Wright, "I would never continue to be friends with someone who was a racist".... To refute Hasselbeck's accusation of Wright, co-host Joy Behar read dictionary definitions of "racism": "The second definition is, this is what I was driving at, 'a policy, a system of government based upon or forced such a doctrine of discrimination.' So it comes from the ruling party, the ruling class. It doesn't come from the oppressed. It comes from above."

Aside from the obvious fact that a word only has to match one of its dictionary definitions (not all of them) to be used validly (d'uh!), the above puts me in mind of the old Monty Python "Dennis Moore" episode. The point being that, when the oppressed gain a comparable (or greater) amount of power as their former oppressors, what makes you think they're suddenly going to drop the methods that got them there, when those means have clearly worked so well? And if those methods happen to involve minority racism or female sexism.... Well, good thing that definitions can always be rewritten as you go along, eh? (The only surprising thing about the View controversy, really, is that Behar is Italian-American rather than black.)

In his speech to the NAACP [on April 27, 2008], Wright speculated that, "Africans have a different meter, and Africans have a different tonality. Europeans have seven tones, Africans have five. White people clap differently than black people. Africans and African-Americans are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style. They have a different way of learning." Wright additionally compared U.S. Marines to Roman soldiers who executed Jesus Christ, saying that the "notion of imperialism" is the same, called Louis Farrakhan "one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century," and repeated his endorsement of an AIDS conspiracy theory [i.e., that AIDS is a biological weapon manufactured by whites to wipe out the black race]. (Wikipedia)

It is but a small step from accepting that blacks think in a different way to believing that their mental capabilities are inferior.... (Schmitz, Ex Africa lux?)

"[B]limey, this redistribution of wealth [and power] is trickier than I thought."

[T]he idea that our entire personality, our behavior, talents and skills, our whole life is shaped by the history of our "people" or "race" is a figment of Romantic ideology. Do only blacks have the right to be proud of the achievements of other blacks; can Germans and only Germans understand and appreciate Beethoven's music; may only Dubliners read Ulysses? These tenets strike me as ludicrous and, yes, racist, yet they seem to underlie Afrocentrist ideas. When we accept the theory that our group defines our identity and our truth, there is hardly a way of avoiding a new tribalism in which every dialogue between members of different groups is impossible.

P.S. Interesting piece (via B&W) about the history of folk music, etc.: American Dreamers: Pete Seeger, William F. Buckley, Jr., and public history.

"How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes said. "Just as we consider earthly creatures as 'a brother,' and 'sister,' why should we not talk about an 'extraterrestrial brother'? It would still be part of creation." (more)

Indeed, given all the other nonsense our blessed Catholics believe which doesn't have a vestal-virgin prayer of being true (Original Sin, Virgin birth, transubstantiation, etc.), why not believe in aliens? Why the hell not? Unlike the bulk of their faith, there's at least some non-zero possibility of those existing!

It reminds me of the time when Sesame Street's Elmo testified before Congress, thereby becoming the first and, as yet, "only Muppet ever to testify before the U.S. Congress," and thus breaking the "fur bar." (Personally, I've always thought that Cookie Monster or Oscar the Grouch would have been a better choice.) With a microphone placed at his "mouth" level. On the subject of funding for music education. (Does Elmo even play an instrument?)

But hey, if a puppet asked me for $2 million, I'd give it to him. Wouldn't you?

A sociopathic puppet with inadequate Quality Control, that is:

In January 2006, controversy surrounded the book "Potty Time With Elmo" when a mother reported that pressing the buttons caused Elmo to say "Who wants to die?" The book's manufacturer said that this was not an isolated claim, and that they'd had several complaints about the book. In fact, Elmo is saying "Who wants to try?" but the low quality of the sound chip makes it difficult to distinguish consonant sounds.

In February 2008, a Lithia, Florida woman claims an Elmo Knows Your Name doll threatened to kill her son by name. (Wikipedia)

Yeah, "find the psychotic." (Hint: It's not the puppet.)

Still, I suppose that as long as the Catholic-endorsed aliens aren't using contraception, it's all good.

But, egad, what about their eternal souls? How could they possibly have heard the Good News?

Unless, of course, Jesus reincarnated on their planet, to give them all one-chance-in-eternity at salvation. And then set up a Church and priesthood while he was at it, to hear their twisted, alien-sex, mortal-alien-masturbatory-sin confessions.

Yeah, that's the ticket (to heaven)....

Pope John Paul declared in 1992 that the ruling against Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension."

"Mutual"? How so? How the alien-hell so?? What exactly did Galileo not "comprehend" in that conflict?

The Vatican Observatory has been at the forefront of efforts to bridge the gap between religion and science. Its scientist-clerics have generated top-notch research and its meteorite collection is considered one of the world's best.

Ah yes, there's nothing like a good meteorite collection to warm a scientist-cleric's heart. From Mircea Eliade's The Forge and the Crucible (p. 19-20):

It was inevitable that meteorites should inspire awe. They came from some remote region high up in the heavens and possessed a sacred quality enjoyed only by things celestial....

... in a way, they represent heaven.... It is noteworthy that a certain number of meteorites are associated with goddesses, especially fertility [and Great Mother, cf. Virgin Mary] goddesses such as Cybele.

Yeah, not to mention the Muslims' Ka'aba stone in Mecca (which Eliade does indeed mention)....

Really, it all ultimately goes back to Paleolithic times, with our distant ancestors desperately trying to make sense of the world around them—possessing the same capacities for logical/rational thought as our species has today, but without even an inkling as to what the scientific method (in any of its variants) might be, for isolating causes and effects from mere superstition via independent variables, and inferring natural laws via that method.

Ken Wilber, speaking in What Is Enlightenment? magazine:

Amrit Sen, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, demonstrated that there's never been a famine in a democratic country. And the reason is because information flow can allocate resources where they're necessary.

First, Old Baldy meant to say Amartya Sen—"Amrita Sen" doesn't even have a page on Wikipedia. Does WIE not have editors on staff to do such minimal fact-checking?

Second, Sen's thesis is very probably wrong:

Economist Peter Bowbrick has accused Sen of misrepresenting historical data and being wrong on his theory of famines. In fact Bowbrick argues that Sen's views coincide with that of the Bengal government at the time of the Bengal famine and the policies Sen advocates failed to relieve the famine. Bowbrick accused Sen's theory of being the cause of famines.

Historian Mark Tauger disagrees with Sen that food availability wasn't a problem in 1940s Bengal and argues that the famine was mainly the result of a natural disaster. (Wikipedia)

Even if Sen was factually correct in saying that "No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press," that's obviously the type of luck which won't hold out indefinitely. Real food shortages do occur, and when they happen no amount of state-controlled reallocation of stuff that isn't there is going to fill the empty stomachs.

It's analogous to how, if you have only a few scraps of good, reality-tested ideas in a community, on which to feed the hungry minds there, no amount of information flow or reallocation of those meager resources, whether controlled by the integral state or otherwise, is going to save you from the predictable intellectual famine.

Is that too obvious?

And speaking of proofreading and the like, more Kensho:

For example, take Kurt G? [sic] who at twenty-three years old came up with the Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics.

You know: "Kurt G"—Albert E's friend....

P.S. And then! and then! the B&W News list links to this article on Behavioral Economics:

Thaler's ideas, once a cry in the wilderness, are so influential that "about half of the profession now believes that psychology has a useful role to play in economic modeling, and that number is growing"....

[There is], for instance, a strong tendency to go along with the status quo, or default option, even when it makes little sense. In addition, people are predictably overoptimistic, and they care twice as much about losing money as they do about gaining it. They are more fearful of unlikely threats like a nuclear-power accident than they are of something far more probable, like a car accident....

Sunstein explains the appeal of libertarian paternalism: "For too long, the United States has been trapped in a debate between the laissez-faire types who believe markets will solve all our problems and the command-and-control types who believe that if there is a market failure then you need a mandate." That debate has been exhausted, he says.

"The laissez-faire types are right that … government can blunder, so opt-outs are important," he says. "The mandate types are right that people are fallible, and they make mistakes, and sometimes people who are specialists know better and can steer people in directions that will make their lives better."

Sunstein argues that understanding human irrationality can improve how public and private institutions shape policy by increasing the likelihood that people will make decisions that are in their own self-interest. Most important, he and Thaler insist, such nudges can be executed while protecting freedom of choice....

On many issues, including environmental protection, family law, and school choice, they argue for less government coercion. "If incentives and nudges replace requirements and bans, government will be both smaller and more modest," they write. "We are not for bigger government, just for better governance."

I've known for awhile now that economics has a strong basis in human psychology—cf. social psych experiments on scarcity and perceived value, e.g., if there's just two cookies left in a jar, how do people rate their worth and taste versus if the jar is full; which obviously leads right into supply and demand. So it's great to see that it's actually being applied in real-life.

Ophelia Benson, commenting on the Amish and their ilk:

I sent Philip Zimbardo the link to Marie-Therese's Goldenbridge article [I, II] ... because it was yet another real-life Stanford prison experiment.

Actually, Zimbardo's findings are relevant to the whole subject of closed communities. Too bad no one in power pays any attention. He was an expert witness at an Abu Ghraib trial, and he made zero difference.

Just in case you had any doubt....

We're all crazy Mennonites
Living in an Amish paradise

—Weird Al Yankovic, "Amish Paradise"

And if you needed another reminder about the truly animal side of our species: A loving father.

(The phrase "sub-human" comes to mind.)

Oh, and check this out:

Afrocentric ideas also received a considerable boost from the cultural shift known as postmodernism and its privileging of difference, micro-struggles, and the politics of identity. Postmodernism's general assault on the authority and universalist claims of Western "culture" is also a mainstay in many Afrocentric agendas. In turn, postmodern pluralism has begun to permeate Afrocentric thought....

[C]ritics of the Afrocentric approach in the study of history include ... African-American history professor Clarence E. Walker [who] has said that Afrocentrism is "a mythology that is racist, reactionary, essentially therapeutic and is eurocentrism in black face."

And a review of Mary Lefkowitz's latest book, History Lesson. It's about her experiences in speaking out against Afrocentric racism.

As Ms. Lefkowitz puts it: "[Bernal] seemed to be saying that the most persuasive narrative was the one with the most desirable result. In effect, he was preaching a kind of affirmative action program for the rewriting of history."

And then, I stumbled upon this, from one Grover Furr:

[I]t is false and racist that anyone has any business taking "pride" in the "achievements" of one's distant ancestors, since intelligence, creativity, etc., are not inherited, and furthermore no one can take any credit for anything they have not achieved themselves. This is the case even if modern blacks were the descendants of ancient Egyptians, which they are not. Besides, if one takes credit for the "achievements" of one's distant ancestors, why not also assume the blame for the atrocities committed by the same ancestors?

Dr. Furr goes pretty squirrelly and paranoid in the latter half of that page, but the first half is good.

As is this, from The Hall of Ma'at:

[C]hildren acquire self-esteem by accomplishing increasingly complex tasks, by learning, and by being able to use what they have learned.... [O]ne of the most important characteristics of successful people is accurate perception. A curriculum that consists primarily of assertions of black superiority with little development of critical thinking, of high expectations for performance in an effort to develop self-esteem, will ultimately be self-defeating. Stevenson, Chen, and Uttal (1990) compared black, Hispanic, and white children in Chicago and found that the self-evaluation of African American children exceeded their actual achievement scores. Stevenson's group felt that this was due to blacks not getting, or not incorporating, reliable and accurate feedback on their performance. "Teachers praise the children for modestly good performance instead of pushing them to do better".... Stevenson points out that praising work that is substandard, often on the pretext of protecting the self-esteem of the child, does not do the child any favor, because one of the most important sources of children's self-esteem is realizing that they have mastered a challenging task....

So you can see why even the milder forms of Afrocentrism (which aren't outright black-racist/supremacist) woefully miss the mark, in trying to generate self-esteem for the members of their in-group by touting the accomplishments of their ancestors. We don't get self-esteem from other people's successes, even if we can find a way of viewing those people as part of our in-group.

If you're black you may look to the achievements of other blacks as proof that "you can do it too." But if you're a woman, you'd need to find women in the past (e.g., as in the "myth of matriarchal prehistory") who were highly accomplished and respected. But if you're both black and female, you'd need to find black women in the past.... On the other hand, if you're gay or lesbian, you'd need to find gays and lesbians ... but if you're a black lesbian....

In playing that game, pretty soon it becomes obvious that the only person who's enough like you in all of the self-defined important ways to act as a "role model" is ... well, you, as an individual. In fact, it's only if your self-identity is very deeply wrapped up in your own skin color, or sex, or gender, or nationality, that you could even find an in-group for that with which to identify. Or who do you think were Madame Curie's "role models," to show her that "women could succeed in physics"? And not just "women" in general (when there weren't any in the field), but Polish women in particular! ("How many Polish women does it take to distill a vat of pitchblende?" "One.") Same thing for Leonardo da Vinci: Certainly there were previous male, Italian engineers and artists. But prominent gay ones?.... And if not, how could he know that he could do the work?!

That, right there, is the difference between sniveling cowards who go through life whining about how other people (outside of their "oppressed in-group") supposedly "have it so easy," versus groundbreaking heroes: Anyone who desperately needs role models, much less takes pride in their (role-model) accomplishments, was probably never going to blaze any trails in the world himself anyway. Not that there isn't a natural pride of association when your "home team" wins a sports championship, or when someone from your old high school makes it big, and you bask in the reflected glory of that. But no man or woman ever accomplished anything in life just by living vicariously through the hard-earned successes of others who just happen to be part of one or another of the shifting in-groups to which he, too, can find a way (through no effort or success of his/her own) to belong.

There's an old Second City sketch with George Wendt (a.k.a. Norm, from Cheers), where he's trying to book a seat on a flight, which goes something like this:

George: Hi, I'd like a ticket to Chicago.

Girl: Certainly, Sir. Would you prefer aisle, or window?

George: Aisle, please.

Girl: Smoking or non-smoking?

George: Smoking.

Girl: Democrat or Republican?

George: Uh, Democrat I guess.

Girl: Owning or renting?

George: Sorry, what?

Girl: Are you owning, or renting, your residence?

George: Oh. Renting.

Girl: Apartment or house?

George: It's an apartment.

Girl: You're a high-school graduate?

George: Uh, yes.

Girl: Public or private?

George: Uh, private.

Girl: Secular or religious?

George: It was a religious—

Girl: Catholic or Protestant?

George: Catholic.

Girl: And are you heterosexual, or homosexual?

George: Is that really any of your business?

Girl: I'm sorry, Sir, I need it for the reservation.

George: Okay. Heterosexual.

Girl: So you'd like to book an aisle seat for a smoking, apartment-renting, heterosexual, private Catholic-school Democrat.

George: Yes.

Girl: I'm sorry, Sir. That seat's taken.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people whose skills I deeply admire, especially in the music industry. It's just that that has nothing to do with the color of their skin, or their genitalia, or their sexual orientation, or with them showing me that "I can do it too." Should it??

Afrocentric pseudoscientists have found allies and theoretical support from postmodernists in academia. Postmodernists argue that science is not a body of knowledge about the "real" world and a technique for testing its accuracy but rather a form of "discourse" controlled by culture, social organization, and economics... On this basis, Afrocentrists argue that their New Age claims for the existence of ESP, "transmaterial causation," and the psychic abilities of ancient Egyptians constitute a scientific paradigm that is superior to that of Eurocentric Western science. Based on postmodernism, they further argue that their interpretations of matters Egyptian should be "privileged" over other interpretations because their melanin gives them "ownership" of the topic. This attitude is reciprocated. Feminist philosopher Sandra Harding ... repeats a number of outlandish claims in Van Sertima's ... Blacks in Science, including the Dogon Sirius B myth, without a trace of skepticism or critical thinking....

Whereas the AAAS [i.e., the American Association for the Advancement of Science], the National Academy of Science (NAS), and numerous well-known scientists like Stephen Gould and Carl Sagan vigorously and openly criticize "scientific" creationism, these bodies have been pusillanimous in confronting Afrocentric pseudoscience. Several bodies within the AAAS have refused to take stands on the use of the Baseline Essay in Science when asked to do so; the Project on Science Education Standards of the NAS did not even want to hear a presentation on the topic; and the American Anthropological Association would not schedule a symposium entitled "Pseudoanthropology and Multiculturalism," which dealt with Afrocentrism, at its 1992 annual meeting, which had multiculturalism as its theme. The fear of being called racist seems to produce a paralyzing effect on consciences and on scientific integrity.

Thankfully, I'm well past that particular "fear"....

From the acoustic side, Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot have always been the two primary influences on my own songwriting. (In rock, it's Tom Scholz of Boston, Peter Gabriel, and probably Elvis Costello. I saw Boston in August of 2003, Simon in 1990, PG in 2002 and 2003, and EC twice around the same time.) Lightfoot just did four consecutive (8 pm) nights at Massey Hall, the last of those being on Saturday.

One of the items on my "Things to do before I die" list has long been to see Gord perform live: More than any other artist, his is the music I grew up on. But I'm in no position right now to be spending $80+ on a good ticket for that kind of thing. Still, I went down there with my guitar around 7:30 anyway, thinking of busking the queue.

Turns out that some other hirsute, very folksy-looking guy had the same idea, and was already in the prime spot there with a mic and an amp. So I ended up just hanging out across the street, listening to him play, and gauging how much money he was making. (Not a lot, from what I could tell.)

Then, right at 8 o'clock, as the last of the stragglers are walking into the hall, he runs over to the entrance doors, pops his head in, and then walks back, holding out something in his hand, gesturing toward me.

"Ticket?"

I ran like a jackrabbit across Shuter Street, traffic be damned!

"I saw you standing there, obviously wanting to get in, and I probably won't be able to use my ticket."

And he gave it to me, no strings attached, even though we had never even spoken to each other before that.

So after thanking that immensely kind and generous fellow musician ("Rich") profusely but still not adequately enough, I finally got to see Gord play. From the fourth row right on the stage-left aisle, just fifty feet away from the "Love and Maple Syrup" legend himself.

No concert in Toronto ever starts at 8 o'clock. But for some reason this one did, and without an opening act, either; so I missed the first song, but I'm certainly not complaining.

I won't say it was a high-energy show. Or a loud one.

Actually, during the intermission, a middle-aged, somewhat overweight (this seemed to be the norm for the demographic) woman sat down in the row behind me to visit with her friends, and they had the following conversation:

"So how are you enjoying the show."

"Well, to be honest, I can't really hear him. You know, his voice has gotten thinner, and my hearing's gotten worse...."

And at that point, I swear, an eighty-something woman in a wheelie-walker rolls by in the aisle, heading (I can only assume) to the restrooms.

So anyway, the show resumed, and a few songs into the second set, introducing the next one, Gord steps up to the microphone and says:

"I'd like to dedicate this song to my second cousin, Jessie Dyck."

And the woman two seats down from me leans over to the little girl sitting between us, and says, "That's you, Jessie."

The song was "Don Quixote":

I have searched the whole world over
Looking for a place to sleep
I have seen the strong survive
And I have seen the lean grow weak

He finished off the show with "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" as his encore. Then I got my guitar from coat-check, and followed another woman in a wheelie-walker out of there.

Overall, what with restoring a little bit of my faith in humanity and all, it was probably even a better night than the time I danced with Natalie Merchant.

Allow me to explain.

Back in 2001 or so, I took in a show with Natalie and her band in Convocation Hall at the U of Toronto, sitting just a few rows back from the stage-right speaker stacks.

Close to the end of the show, they were doing "Kind and Generous." At the end of the song, it has that repeating "Thank you, thank you" chorus, which for some reason they weren't doing any vocals for in the live version.

But it's okay, 'cause I was happily singing along, doing the "Thank you, thank you" part on my own.

The light-show at that point had the stage lights all go pure white and turn around to shine out over the audience. So it was brighter in there than if the house lights had all come up.

And it was at that point that Natalie looked out over the audience, and saw me singing to her.

And she stopped dancing and looked straight at me, cocking her head in curiosity.

And of course I'm just a total "deer in the headlights" because, omigod....

And then she turned around and did the most amazingly lithe, sensuous, twirling piece of a jig.

So anyway, even if I didn't quite dance with her, for five seconds in the history of this sorry world Natalie Merchant was dancing just for me.

And let me tell you, that girl can dance. Gord Almighty.

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That....

Also, there's Scott London's On Ken Wilber and Integral Naked:

I was constantly amazed by his misrepresentations of great thinkers such as Huston Smith, Gerald Heard, Stan Grof and others.

My initial euphoria upon discovering Wilber some years ago gave way to a deepening sadness that this was the man being heralded as one of today's most original and significant philosophers. The notion that he represented some sort of "Einstein of the consciousness movement," as somebody once said, struck me as preposterous.

I had to bite my tongue about the "great thinkers" part, but the rest is okay.

P.S. Canadian news? It goes something like this:

Most Canadians think [opposition leader] Stephane Dion is weak, uninspiring and unintelligible, a new poll suggests....

But, for all his flaws, they still find the Liberal leader more likable than Prime Minister Stephen Harper....

[Dion has] been criticized for his inability to express himself clearly in either official language....

Forty-seven per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that "there's something about Stephane Dion that I just don't like."

I live in a country which is proudly multicultural, filled with Italian-Canadians, Chinese-Canadians, Jamaican-Canadians, and every other variety of "-Canadians" you could wish for, all of them with one foot in the country and one out of it ... and whose pundits then regularly wonder out loud why we lack a national "Canadian" identity. Go figure. Hell, we can hardly even tell our politicians apart: Whose idea was it to have "Stephen" on one side, and "Stephane" on the other? Can you imagine voters in Florida trying to figure that one out?!

In December 1974, the former Beatle Paul McCartney approached [Isaac] Asimov and asked him if he could write the screenplay for a science-fiction movie musical. McCartney had a vague idea for the plot and a small scrap of dialogue; he wished to make a film about a rock band whose members discover they are being impersonated by a group of extraterrestrials. The band and their impostors would likely be played by McCartney's group Wings, then at the height of their career. Intrigued by the idea, although he was not generally a fan of rock music, Asimov quickly produced a "treatment" or brief outline of the story. He adhered to McCartney's overall idea, producing a story he felt to be moving and dramatic. However, he did not make use of McCartney's brief scrap of dialogue, and probably in consequence, McCartney rejected the story. The treatment now exists only in Boston University's archives. (Wikipedia)

Well, it could have been worse: Back in the '60s, the Beatles tried to acquire the rights to Lord of the Rings, hoping to do a musical version of it....

Asimov had been writing professionally for nine years and was shortly to face the challenge of writing up his research as a doctoral dissertation. He feared that the experience of writing readable prose for publication might have impaired his ability to write the prose typical of academic discourse, and decided to practice with a spoof article (including charts, graphs, tables, and citations of fake articles in nonexistent journals) describing experiments on a compound, thiotimoline, that was so soluble that it dissolved in water up to 1.12 seconds before the water was added. (Wikipedia)

From Muriel Fraser's "'Multi-faithism' is bad news for women" (via B&W):

"The increasing emphasis on religion and religious identities has led to the transformation of multiculturalism into multi-faithism"....

[T]he multicultural approach has done little to protect women, because it focuses on relations between groups, rather than within them. Yet, it is inside the family group that women "are most vulnerable to abuse, violence and unequal treatment." Also problematic is the space which multiculturalism provides for unelected community spokesmen to represent the whole group. A third problem is that multiculturalism is often applied indiscriminately, with no distinction between cultural demands which are valid and human rights, which must remain non-negotiable.

But there's worse to come, since we are now seeing a shift from multiculturalism to multi-faithism....

I was also disturbed to learn of the harassment of Pastafarians at Michigan Tech.

A clever rewriting of the Little Red Hen folktale:

Once upon a time, there was a little red hen who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered some grains of wheat.

She called her neighbors and said, "If we plant this wheat, we shall have bread to eat. Who will help me plant it?"

"Not I," said the cow.
"Not I," said the duck.
"Not I," said the pig.
"Not I," said the goose.

"Then I will," said the little red hen, and she did.

The wheat grew tall and ripened into golden grain. "Who will help me reap my wheat?" asked the little red hen.

"Not I," said the duck.
"Out of my classification," said the pig.
"I'd lose my seniority," said the cow.
"I'd lose my unemployment compensation," said the goose.

"Then I will," said the little red hen, and she did.

At last it came time to bake the bread. "Who will help me bake the bread?" asked the little red hen.

"That would be overtime for me," said the cow.
"I'd lose my welfare benefits," said the duck.
"I'm a dropout and never learned how," said the pig.
"If I'm to be the only helper, that's discrimination," said the goose.

"Then I will," said the little red hen.

She baked five loaves and held them up for her neighbors to see. They wanted some and, in fact, demanded a share.

But the little red hen said, "No, I can eat the five loaves."

"Excess profits!" cried the cow.
"Capitalist leech!" screamed the duck.
"I demand equal rights!" yelled the goose.
And the pig just grunted.

And they painted "unfair" picket signs and marched around and around the little red hen, shouting obscenities.

When the government agent came, he said to the little red hen, "You must not be greedy."

"But I earned the bread," said the little red hen.

"Exactly," said the agent. "That is the wonderful free enterprise system. Anyone in the barnyard can earn as much as he wants. But under our modern government regulations, the productive workers must divide their product with the idle."

And they lived happily ever after, including the little red hen, who smiled and clucked, "I am grateful. I am grateful."

But her neighbors wondered why she never again baked any more bread.

Did I say "clever"? I meant, "Absolutely fucking brilliant."

"How do we know that all 41,000 are harmless? We don't know," said Liberal public safety critic Ujjal Dosanjh, who wondered what Day was doing about the problem. (more)

Indeed, if my own experiences in being bullied by our city's "hard-working immigrants" are any indication, many of them are far from harmless, and have no business being in this country in the first place.

[NDP immigration critic Olivia] Chow said the entire immigration system is broken, noting the thousands of removal lists include undocumented workers in trades like construction who are badly needed in Canada.

What, we don't have Canadians in need of work, who know (or can learn) how to swing a hammer? There's no housing boom here; how could construction workers possibly be in high demand? (My father built his own house, from the ground up, over a period of many years. I helped out with nearly every stage of that except the plumbing and wiring, in my teenage years. It ain't rocket science, and only if you're a foreperson/manager could you ever need any formal training in it.) How could we possibly need to be importing high-school dropouts from other countries to do that work? I hadn't seen Chow's claim either way before, but there's just no way it can be true; somebody's cooking the data, there.

Chow is the member of parliament from the federal riding which includes the Kensington Market area, where I lived for a month last autumn; her office was just around the corner from my hotel room. It's the most ethnically diverse region in all of Toronto, and traditionally one of the poorer areas in the city. (It began as a Jewish enclave back in the day when Jews were poor, prior to working their way out of the ghetto by a combination of stereotypically domineering mothers, consequent neuroses, and the scary fairy-tale belief that they really are Jehovah's Chosen People. I suppose that when the rest of the world is "out to get you," you could hardly help but cling to anything that lets you feel special; but Christ....) Why do you think she's pushing the idea that even tradespeople are "badly needed" in a country that's already overrun with unskilled immigrants on top of the shops-class-dropout morons who were born here, thanks to our feel-good "family reunification" policy?

Stupid fucking teddy-bear NDP. I hadn't known it before today, but Dog-Chow is actually married to their leader.

Heads all full of stuffin'....

Linus Roache: An Enlightening Update.

Which in turn links to this "enlightening" segment from the "Raggedy Ken and Enlightendy Andy Show":

Ego Is a Closed Loop.

P.S. Online version of E. A. Wallis Budge's classic Book of the Dead.