I've thought long and hard on this subject. . .
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
--And I've also searched far and wide, and talked to a lot of people and experienced a lot of things which orthodox science must stretch to such lengths to explain as to sound utterly ridiculous.
Arstechnica's understanding of understanding of Homeopathy is limited in the common way. --They were trying to understand Homeopathy using conventional theory, and shamefully enough, the various editors of the homeopathy essays which they were knocking down like so many straw men, were doing the same thing and of course, were getting nowhere.
Strangely, in Ars' multi-page screed, the one theory they did not attack, or even deign to recognize although it is not an uncommon idea, is based on Energy. --As in Chi, (the major component of 3000 years of Chinese understanding of the universe. Surely they've heard of it. I know everybody here has.)
Energy is is the functional force behind acupuncture, reiki, various forms of kung fu, auras and numerous other phenomenon which are hotly discounted by scientists who haven't bothered to explore any direct experiences with the medium which binds the entire universe together. Essentially, with regard to homeopathy, all matter has an energetic signature and vibrates accordingly. --And we're not talking about classic atomic vibration. It's another quality altogether, although from my observations, it is linked closely to electromagnetism.
I'd love to see Energy quantified, and I strongly suspect that it has been in the darker recesses of some black-budget lab deep under a mountain someplace. --The vibration of one object or being can affect the matter around it so that it is passed on and emulated. If you put intention into water of a certain energetic flavor, then the water can take on that same energetic quality. It cannot be measured in terms of dissolved particulate matter, nor through molecular configuration, nor through misbegotten theories of quantum entanglement, (all theories which were put forth and appropriately knocked down in the article). Energy is it's own thing.
Further, energy is the medium from which consciousness is made. --My understanding is that the soul is a highly complex energetic expression which settles into the brains of these human mammals we walk around in, and directs that animal's activities. When the body dies, the soul moves on. This explains everything; all the out of body experiences, the light at the end of the tunnel, phantom limbs, ghosts, Auras, possession and why things like Reiki and Homeopathy work.
For anybody who is interested in this, Reiki is an interesting subject. --I was exploring Reiki, trying to get something happening, (and had been getting only the most subtle feelings which I wasn't sure were anything), until that one time when my friend was suffering from a headache. I asked if I might try Reiki with her, and she said, sure. So I began. My hands were over her head and I was going through the motions, trying to clear my own intentions out of the way to channel the correct energies as I envisioned them, and unlike all the other times, this time I got whammied with a sudden feeling of extreme heat. It was like somebody had blasted my palms with air from a paint stripper gun. It jolted both me and my friend so that she immediately looked at me with wide eyes. "Wow! I felt that! What did you do?"
"Heck if I know." --They don't teach this stuff in highschool science. Almost nobody understands this stuff properly, and those who do can't explain it very well. --The best we mundane folk have are a bunch of Chinese metaphors and Castaneda stories.
Anyhow, my friend's headache didn't go away, and I went home feeling really sick and promptly threw up. I felt much better after that. --I found out the next day that my friend had thrown up as well shortly after I left, and also went to bed feeling much better. And no, there were no drugs or alcohol involved and the only food we'd eaten was whatever we'd each had before I'd arrived that evening. --In any case, I'm
Quackwatch has a good section on how pseudoscience does not make progress, unlike real science.
Quackwatch is a fraudulent organization cobbled together by the drug industry in an attempt to undermine alternative medicine.
The leading speakers of Quackwatch, Stephen Barrett in particular, are liars and losers who are almost certainly psychopathic with regard to their total lack of shame when their lies are exposed. Luckily, the legal system is smarter than the average internet reader. Stephen Barrett does a good job of losing the court cases he brings to court against alternative practitioners.
The Quackbuster representatives were its founder Stephen Barrett and Ronald Gots, the founder of the Quackbuster branch, Environmental Sensitivities Research Institute. Both men are also directors of the American Council on Science and Health, another branch of Quackbusters. Their presentations were later published in the prestigious International Journal of Toxicology (vol. 18, no.6, 1999). The debate focused on whether chemical sensitivity is a psychological or a biological condition. In front of an audience of several hundred people, and aware that the entire debate was being video- and audio-taped, Gots stated that prestigious university-affiliated authors of a (named) main-stream peer-reviewed journal had recently provided incontrovertible proof, on the basis of rigorous scientific study and experiment, that chemical sensitivity was a psychological condition.
Gots [of Quackwatch] was followed by Johns Hopkins' speaker Albert Donnay who informed the audience that this prestigious study was fictitious. The authors were fictitious, too. Even the journal was fiction. A gasp went through the audience. Amazingly, Gots made no attempt to answer. Even more astounding was the body language of both Gots and Barrett. While the audience was audibly shocked and murmurs were going through the crowd, those two Quackbusters leaned back in their chairs, fiddled with their pens in the bored and relaxed manner of total self-assurance awaiting the next item on the agenda.
Stephen Barrett, although claiming to be a retired Psychiatrist, was never able to become "Board Certified." He failed his test. Also, Barrett gave up his MD license in 1993. His employment record shows he NEVER was able to hold a full-time job - and his claim to "Psychiatric fame" was his part-time (4 to 8 hours a week) employment at a Pennsylvania Mental Hospital - from 1978 through 1993. From 1976 through 1978 he could not get a paying job. He also claims to be a legal expert, though he has never had any legal training.
Bobbie Baratz, the current president of the NCAHF, was terminated from his former position at a Boston area medical center after a physical altercation with a 72 year old woman. He now operates a hair removal business. He also operates the NCAHF out of that same hair removal location.
are you kidding? i'm highly skeptical of the neurophone. wikipedia's neurophone article redirects to the inventor, Patrick Flanagan who sounds like a crackpot.
No, I am not kidding.
First of all, 'Crackpot' is one of those judgment calls which I find indicative of limiting bias.
What makes a crackpot? There are people who suffer from manic-depressive or schizoid disorders. Combine that with egoism and a refusal to look at reality for fear of one's own self-worth being diminished, and you can end up with some spectacularly misled individuals. We've all met people like this. The problem is that often some of the greatest ideas also happen to come from people who have manic brain patterns and who believe they are smarter than everybody else.
--In a similar way, many highschool geeks find themselves more interested in their personal obsessions, be it D&D, video games and science and technology, than they are in dressing 'cool' in order to fit in to the accepted social order. They are often derided, and yet they are also often far more in touch with the workings of reality than regular kids. We've all met that type as well, if in fact you haven't occupied that personality type yourself at some point.
In a sense, anybody who doesn't fit in can and probably will be called names like, 'crackpot'. So what is the difference between a legitimate crackpot and an illegitimate crackpot? I would say that it's the value of their contribution to whatever field of study they happen to be exploring. That's really the only fair way to gauge, otherwise, it comes, essentially, down to how well they fit into the herd. --Do they wear the right clothes and act the same way and hold the same values as their peers. Those kinds of questions really don't interest me. I'm interested in ideas.
So for me, the question is, "Do the ideas have any merit?" This is primarily what I was looking at. The Patrick Flanagan fellow I wasn't particularly interested in. In fact, I wasn't even looking at his exploration into the area of mind-control, but that of another, more recent group working out of an Australian university. Unfortunately, everything about that study has vanished from the web, so I don't even have any links or anything to work with, which is frustrating, but not altogether unexpected given the nature of the material. All I'm left with are the ideas. So what do they key upon?
Well, first up. 1. Is is possible to hypnotize people? --Yeah, I'd say so. I've seen and read enough to accept that people can be hypnotized, and that while under hypnosis, the mind can be called upon to do astonishing things.
Next. 2. Can the subconscious mind detect an electrical signal on the skin? --Why not? The nervous system is able to sense and react to all manner of stimuli which the conscious mind is not immediately aware of.
3. Can the subconscious mind detect an EM signal? --Well, the brain itself certainly can. You asked "Where are we learning this?" Well, with regard to EM radiation, a noted scientist by the name, Robert O. Becker, wrote a very accessible book on the subject. It's well worth looking at, and you can get a used copy for under $4.00 if you're at all interested in learning more.
Put those three items together, and what do you get? Well, I don't know about Patrick Flanagan in particular and the kitsch naming of the 'neurophone', but common sense tells me that the idea itself makes sense.
So what about practical application with regard to mind control and big bad government and all of that?
Well, that's a large subject with its own heading, but certainly one which can be analyzed. I won't go into it now, but suffice it to say that have been numerous examples of secrecy and mind-control experiments which are on the public books. The MK Ultra material is one of the bigger and better known examples. --A Canadian researcher spent a number of yea
What, like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Great Toronto Fire of 1904, or the Great Fire of New York of 1835?
I guess Halifax is a naturally nice place for reasons which may have nothing to do with the entire downtown having been turned into a vast crater. (An explosion which launched one of the ships' anchors weighing 1140 pounds some 2 miles inland.) The people in Nova Scotia are wonderfully friendly, salt of the earth types. Maybe that has more to do with it.
Whatever the case, it's a sweet town. --If you like small, that is. Some people love big cities, but they make me feel like I'm drowning in some dystopian nightmare directed be Ridley Scott. But that's just me.
Of course I wouldn't wish harm upon another person, and certainly not 10,000 of them. But that doesn't mean I'm incapable of seeing demographic patterns and making comments upon them. The world doesn't go away just because it happens to not fit with with moral code. Sheesh.
The Explosion leveled Halifax, and caused over 10,000 casualties.
And thus, Halifax's urban growth was stunted, causing it to be one of the smallest cities in the West today, (under 200,000 people), and yet because it is placed on a huge natural shipping harbor and has a nice climate, it has all the benefits of a major metropolis. --Yet it suffers from none of the congestion and other big city problems the rest of the nation has to deal with. It still has a small-town feel. Having visited, I must say it's easily one of the most wonderful cities I've ever seen. Cleanest city air I've ever breathed.
I bet New York, Chicago, Toronto and all the rest could have benefited from a city-leveling whollop a century ago as well. It'd be far, far nicer if people would just stop having so many babies and treat the land with a bit of reason and respect, but failing that, a ship full of munitions appears to do a fair job.
They just need to pull up their own employee roster to see who's largely responsible for world terrorism.
Of course, the young recruits are probably still too busy puffing their chests smartly while humming the "Alias" theme music while quietly wishing that the NSA was the one which received the big Hollywood PR/propaganda effort to notice such sticky details as who was responsible for what. But what are a few sticky details? M's and W's all look the same.
Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.
Is that the word "Ether" inclines one to think of sending messages through a mysterious invisible medium which connects all things in space, (ie, not wire so much). It's especially peculiar when something which is much closer to fitting the definition, (microwave) comes along to compete with it under names like Bluetooth and Whyfie.
Why fie, indeed?
Somebody trying to decipher our culture would be hit by numerous versions of this kind of backwards logic and blink lots, I'm sure.
Oh, and of course, anybody who wants to increase the level at which they are being saturated with microwave EM is either ignorant or making some self destructive choices.
Liberals need to keep accepting new ideas, because none of their old ideas ever work.
Ooh, is somebody feeling bitter?
Honestly, that's the kind of retarded school yard fallacy which drives conservative activity. It's baseless, emotional, and yet somehow manages to keep their spirits high even while their self-generated reality plunges ever further into disaster.
This isn't about conservatives v.s. liberals. It's about humans v.s. the psychopathic principal.
The war in Iraq is for a good logical reason; it was just poorly implemented and unplanned. Then of course we did not ask for terrorists to hijack our planes and crash them into innocent people.
You see, that's why closed thinkers are dangerous. --You quote two ideas. 1. The war in Iraq, and 2. The hijack of airplanes on 911. The problem is that the two are totally unrelated. This is proven.
So the war in Iraq is in fact NOT for a good, logical reason. However, conservative minds are more liable to make this mistake because they naturally eschew whole swaths of vital data required to know such things in their desire to hurry up and act out their hostility.
Then you say that the Iraq war was poorly implemented and unplanned. Well, I thought you said that those were Liberal traits. And who knows? Maybe you're right to some degree. Which would suggest that the quagmire of Iraq is not in fact a mistake. Perhaps the on-going blood-bath is a very deliberate condition. After all, certain parties close to the president are making enormous profit from this protracted war in Iraq. --If the fighting had been over in ten weeks, (as Bush promised), then there would be no need to buy all those extra helicopters, guns, bombs, 'private contractors' and fuel oil for all the ships and vehicles, etc. This quagmire is a military industrialist's wet dream worth many billions of dollars.
And if conservatives have trouble feeling compassion and are so good at planning and are so much more easily able to focus on serving only themselves, then maybe, just perhaps. . .
In 5 years, see who is still referencing this study, and who isn't, and then tell me who is open to changing views, and who locks into one view and sticks with it.
Cuz, you know, Newtonian physics lost relevance five years after the apple fell.
Being open to new ideas doesn't mean you automatically destroy your pre-existing knowledge structure. Any liberal will tell you that doesn't make any sense. --You only dismantle old idea structures when a new idea provides a more effective and rational means of describing reality.
But I'm going to assume you knew that already and you're just feeling bitter. Anyway, five years from now, the brownshirts won't just be engaged in cyber bullying of people like, "kdawson". They'll have been issued hand guns to take care of the people who embitter them more directly, so who's quoting who won't matter quite so much in the broad perspective. Just be sure to wear a big "M" on your shirt, cuz they'll only be gunning for the "W"s.
The only difference is that the advertiser isn't being held financially responsible for the stretch of highway you're motoring on.
I still agree with your sentiment, though. --Because the internet is built the way it is, the stretch of highway the advertiser buys doesn't have to be there and the only reason you're driving on it is because he was hoping to persuade you to visit his massively redundant piece of tarmac. Now that he's done that, he wants you to give him some money for the experience. Whether or not you do is entirely up to you, but to claim that it's morally wrong to refuse to view a bunch of billboards is exactly the sort of guilt-tripping which will incline me to keep my wallet and my heart closed.
If you can't handle one guy posting things you don't like, you need to do some serious self-analysis.
Sheesh. There's tons of people I've had scraps with on Slashdot who I'd be happy to buy a drink for afterwards. These are just ideas. Words on a screen. Unwrap your knickers, dude, or go and move to S. Korea. Are you that eager to be part of a pecking order gang? Still dealing with your having been bullied in highschool? Feel the need to pass the harm onto some other target?
Anyway, wasn't this supposed to be about big box stores playing foul? Hmm. How to make this post relevant to the story. . .
I know!
The manager at that big box store would probably condone your efforts. And you don't want to be like HIM, now do you?
Here's the Chicagotribune's reporting on the story. They offer more information and insight.
Political attitudes may be all in head
Being conservative, liberal or in-between is wired in the brain, new study suggests
By Judy Peres | Tribune staff reporter September 10, 2007
The differences between liberals and conservatives may run deeper than how they feel about welfare reform or the progress of the Iraq war: Researchers reported Sunday that their brains may actually work differently.
In a study likely to raise the hackles of some conservatives, psychologist David Amodio and others found that a specific region of the brain's cortex is more sensitive in people who consider themselves liberals than in self-declared conservatives.
The brain region in question helps people shift gears when their usual response would be inappropriate, supporting the notion that liberals are more flexible in their thinking.
"Say you drive home from work the same way every day, but one day there's a detour and you need to override your autopilot," said Amodio, a professor at New York University. "Most people function just fine. But there's a little variability in how sensitive people are to the cue that they need to change their current course."
That "cue" is processed in a part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex, and Amodio was able to monitor its electrical activity by hooking his subjects up to electroencephalographs (EEGs) while they performed laboratory tests.
Unflattering traits
The work grew out of decades of previous research suggesting that political orientation is linked to certain personality traits or styles of thinking. A review of that research published in 2003 found that conservatives tend to be more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences.
Some of the traits associated with right-wingers in that review were decidedly unflattering, including fear, aggression, tolerance of inequality and lack of complexity in their thinking. That -- along with the fact that it lumped Ronald Reagan and other political conservatives in with Adolf Hitler -- evoked outrage from conservative pundits.
John Jost, an author of both the review and the current study, was prompted to defend the research in an opinion piece published in The Washington Post.
"It's wrong to conclude that our results provide only bad news for conservatives," he wrote on Aug. 28, 2003. "True, we find some support for the traditional 'rigidity-of-the-right' hypothesis, but it is also true that liberals could be characterized on the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity."
In the current study, Amodio and his colleagues recruited 43 college students for a simple experiment. The subjects reported their political attitudes confidentially on a scale from -5 (extremely liberal) to +5 (extremely conservative). Then they completed a computer test called "Go/No-Go" while an EEG measured their brain activity.
Subjects were told to press a button ("Go") each time the computer flashed the letter "M," but not when a "W" was displayed. Each stimulus-response set had to be completed within half a second.
Testing responses
Amodio said the "Go" stimulus came up 400 out of 500 times, so "they're sitting there getting in the habit of pressing this button. But 20 percent of the time, the 'No Go' stimulus comes up -- it's unexpected -- and they're supposed to do nothing. We can see how accurate people are at withholding the habitual response."
Subjects who rated themselves more liberal had higher scores for accuracy, Amodio said.
But more importantly, they also showed stronger electrical activity when the "No Go" cues were presented, indicating that more neurons were firing.
Most people here assume just accepting new ideas at face value (which is all the study suggested) is a good thing. The article did not in any way indicate that it tested what the evaluative processes that liberals vs conservatives go through before they integrate new ideas into their view of the world. That's a critical thing to know. Frankly, I want people in charge and those voting to have some initial skepticism and to analyze new ideas before they accept them. Just because you hear it or have an initial thought doesn't make it true or valid.
Yeah, but before you can think skeptically, you need to actually be able to read and understand the data available. If a person can't tell an M from a W, then how the heck can that person be expected to have any rational insights on M's and W's in order to know which is the best option?
Measuring new ideas carefully before accepting them is very important, I agree. But installing a leader who automatically filters out the fundamental possibility of even making a choice isn't a solution. It's the result of brain damage.
It's ridiculous to think that Liberal thinkers are somehow inferior because they have the ability to make choices. That's like saying, "I prefer to be color blind because I don't want to get distracted."
Though this is understandable to a degree. --You can't expect people who have a decreased capacity for choice to necessarily recognize the value of choice. In a world filled with blind people, the guy who can see is the one they think is nuts, because his behavior doesn't appear to make any sense.
That may be the most terrifying logic I've ever heard in my life.
The really scary part is that it makes sense.
It would certainly explain why the world is blowing apart at the seams today. Muslims, Sunis. . ? What's the difference? --They all have brown skin and talk funny, so they must all be in it together. Bomb them all!
Only people who remain ignorant of the details believed that Iraq had anything to do with 9-11. Saddam was anti-Muslim on principal. He certainly wasn't about to give them guns. They might have threatened his leadership. But Bush is a monkey, so he kept punching that 'W' key without blinking.
Psychopaths need to be expunged from the world. This is probably why Bush is so anti-science. If we ever worked out a test for psychopathy, we could live in a paradise.
Has a conservative think-tank ever done a similar study with reproducible results? I've never seen one published. Maybe their department heads didn't like the results and squashed it.
Now consider the science. "Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy." Excuse me? Where was there any measurement of brain circuits? These were just people pressing keys.
EEG readings have long been accepted as an accurate way to read brain activity. It doesn't suddenly become 'junk science' simply because you don't happen to like the results.
Actually. . . I was just reviewing my own post here and realized that I'd described poorly the process by which the messages-through-skin thing worked.
The Neurophone, (look it up), demonstrated that one could transmit messages via electrical impulse through the skin and have those messages understood by the subconscious. When the subject being programmed is in a dissociative state, (you are in a dissociative state when you watch TV or play a video game), it was demonstrated that one could send instructions to the subconscious through the skin and thereby implant hypnotic suggestions. Subjects would follow these suggestions, believing them to be their own thoughts and ideas. They'd never heard the instructions given to them verbally. They had received them by direct electrical impulse. This isn't science fiction.
The subject in question needs to have been hypnotized before hand and given a series of instructions as to how to interpret the signals which are to be received through electrical impulse. --Sort of like teaching Morse code. When the suitable level of conditioning has been achieved, the subject is brought back into awareness and set into the wild, so to speak. After this point, messages can be delivered to that subject through the skin using the electrical impulses. Apparently, it can be done very rapidly. The subconscious is quite able to understand a quickly changing signal. Then a story can be told; "Bob heads out to the library and takes out a copy of Catcher in the Rye and then buys a bag of turnips and goes home again." Apparently, Bob would go ahead and do exactly this, thinking it was his own idea to perform those actions.
Just wanted to clarify things.
Interestingly, even without hypnotic conditioning, it is entirely possible to alter a target person's emotional state through different types of EM exposure. This in combination with television viewing, (TV's and that hypnotic flicker rate put people under very quickly), opens up a variety of possibilities. There was one item in relation to all of this which I didn't grasp the significance of immediately; the sudden and wide-ranging adoption of the new CFL light bulbs. I thought it was pretty obvious what the intent behind those was; installing everybody's living space with fluorescent lighting creates living environments which are constantly flickering at 120 cycles per second. Uck. --But then the bulbs evolved so that rather than using magnetic ballasts they employed an electronic ballast which served to raise the frequency from one or two hundred cycles per second up into the high thousands, which in combination with the fluorescing coating inside the bulbs appeared to remove any danger of the brain being affected by light flicker. "Hm," I thought, and wondered if perhaps I was just being needlessly paranoid.
Then I ran across an article which talked about the high level of EM radio frequency being emitted from the new bulbs, and another thought struck me. --Until now, incandescent light fixtures were never a noted source of radio frequency EM pollution, but now with this latest generation of CFL's. . .
It's very hard to find stats on what the exact frequencies are which are emitted, or how powerful they are, but I do find it curious that further EM pollution in the radio spectrum should be the result of adopting this new lighting solution. When you know the frequency range, we actually do have enough data in the public realm to work out how it affects the central nervous system.
Neuro-subconcious-what? You are talking utter, utter, shit.
Actually, I wish I was. Seriously. Take ten minutes out of your busy day to look it up. Or don't. Your level of awareness is your problem and nobody else's. But ugly realities can't be changed through ridicule or denial. That just serves to paint a big juicy target on one's bottom while their head is snug in the sand.
Linux is the result of a lot of people who don't want to be slaves to somebody else's megalomaniacal vision. Linux is a concrete expression of freedom and self-direction and all the good things society can be. Sharing and openness and ingenuity, etc.
WiFi is an expression of exactly the opposite. Microwave signals are a bad idea for a number of reasons.
--Here's a neat item worth considering. . .
The Neurophone, (look it up), demonstrated that one could transmit messages via electrical impulse through the skin and have those messages understood by the subconscious. When the subject being programmed is in a dissociative state, (you are in a dissociative state when you watch TV or play a video game), it was demonstrated that one could send instructions to the subconscious through the skin and thereby implant hypnotic suggestions. Subjects would follow these suggestions, believing them to be their own thoughts and ideas. They'd never heard the instructions given to them verbally. They had received them by direct electrical impulse. This isn't science fiction.
Okay. So cellphones, when outputting a 10 htz modulated signal, can directly buzz the brain with much the same effect. What a great system for delivering instructions!
Mind control is frighteningly easy. Heck, the Russians figured out how to beam voices directly into a person's head using EM back in the sixties.
WiFi in my house and on all the time? Um. . , gee, no thanks. There's enough garbage signal floating around my town as it is without beaming my own personalized source through my own home 24/7.
Now people will argue with this up and down. Fair enough. They can make their own decisions and refuse to acknowledge the information available. They don't want to be laughed at. But the cool thing is that Linux, for a number of reasons, is incompatible with this mode of social control. --You have to really really want it to microwave your head before it will comply. Now don't you think that's interesting? I sure do!
If you refuse to follow the leader and refuse to install your very own mind-control device in your home, then, well by gum, you don't even need a tin-foil hat. Bonus!
How sure are you that the impulses which guide you to follow self-destructive, limiting patterns at key moments of your life are really coming from within yourself?
You may also notice your voice getting deeper and hair growing where none was before. It's call puberty. Don't take it personally.
Heh. My mutation into an adult of the species happened two decades ago. My reaction was definitely of the, 'Tormented by a messed up woman' variety. Big fun! Glad it's over. But Too bad a cutie like Kirsten Dunst gives me flashbacks.
Slashdot Mirror
--And I've also searched far and wide, and talked to a lot of people and experienced a lot of things which orthodox science must stretch to such lengths to explain as to sound utterly ridiculous.
Arstechnica's understanding of understanding of Homeopathy is limited in the common way. --They were trying to understand Homeopathy using conventional theory, and shamefully enough, the various editors of the homeopathy essays which they were knocking down like so many straw men, were doing the same thing and of course, were getting nowhere.
Strangely, in Ars' multi-page screed, the one theory they did not attack, or even deign to recognize although it is not an uncommon idea, is based on Energy. --As in Chi, (the major component of 3000 years of Chinese understanding of the universe. Surely they've heard of it. I know everybody here has.)
Energy is is the functional force behind acupuncture, reiki, various forms of kung fu, auras and numerous other phenomenon which are hotly discounted by scientists who haven't bothered to explore any direct experiences with the medium which binds the entire universe together. Essentially, with regard to homeopathy, all matter has an energetic signature and vibrates accordingly. --And we're not talking about classic atomic vibration. It's another quality altogether, although from my observations, it is linked closely to electromagnetism.
I'd love to see Energy quantified, and I strongly suspect that it has been in the darker recesses of some black-budget lab deep under a mountain someplace. --The vibration of one object or being can affect the matter around it so that it is passed on and emulated. If you put intention into water of a certain energetic flavor, then the water can take on that same energetic quality. It cannot be measured in terms of dissolved particulate matter, nor through molecular configuration, nor through misbegotten theories of quantum entanglement, (all theories which were put forth and appropriately knocked down in the article). Energy is it's own thing.
Further, energy is the medium from which consciousness is made. --My understanding is that the soul is a highly complex energetic expression which settles into the brains of these human mammals we walk around in, and directs that animal's activities. When the body dies, the soul moves on. This explains everything; all the out of body experiences, the light at the end of the tunnel, phantom limbs, ghosts, Auras, possession and why things like Reiki and Homeopathy work.
For anybody who is interested in this, Reiki is an interesting subject. --I was exploring Reiki, trying to get something happening, (and had been getting only the most subtle feelings which I wasn't sure were anything), until that one time when my friend was suffering from a headache. I asked if I might try Reiki with her, and she said, sure. So I began. My hands were over her head and I was going through the motions, trying to clear my own intentions out of the way to channel the correct energies as I envisioned them, and unlike all the other times, this time I got whammied with a sudden feeling of extreme heat. It was like somebody had blasted my palms with air from a paint stripper gun. It jolted both me and my friend so that she immediately looked at me with wide eyes. "Wow! I felt that! What did you do?"
"Heck if I know." --They don't teach this stuff in highschool science. Almost nobody understands this stuff properly, and those who do can't explain it very well. --The best we mundane folk have are a bunch of Chinese metaphors and Castaneda stories.
Anyhow, my friend's headache didn't go away, and I went home feeling really sick and promptly threw up. I felt much better after that. --I found out the next day that my friend had thrown up as well shortly after I left, and also went to bed feeling much better. And no, there were no drugs or alcohol involved and the only food we'd eaten was whatever we'd each had before I'd arrived that evening. --In any case, I'm
Quackwatch is a fraudulent organization cobbled together by the drug industry in an attempt to undermine alternative medicine.
The leading speakers of Quackwatch, Stephen Barrett in particular, are liars and losers who are almost certainly psychopathic with regard to their total lack of shame when their lies are exposed. Luckily, the legal system is smarter than the average internet reader. Stephen Barrett does a good job of losing the court cases he brings to court against alternative practitioners.
Stephen Barrett, although claiming to be a retired Psychiatrist, was never able to become "Board Certified." He failed his test. Also, Barrett gave up his MD license in 1993. His employment record shows he NEVER was able to hold a full-time job - and his claim to "Psychiatric fame" was his part-time (4 to 8 hours a week) employment at a Pennsylvania Mental Hospital - from 1978 through 1993. From 1976 through 1978 he could not get a paying job. He also claims to be a legal expert, though he has never had any legal training.
Bobbie Baratz, the current president of the NCAHF, was terminated from his former position at a Boston area medical center after a physical altercation with a 72 year old woman. He now operates a hair removal business. He also operates the NCAHF out of that same hair removal location.
-FL
are you kidding? i'm highly skeptical of the neurophone. wikipedia's neurophone article redirects to the inventor, Patrick Flanagan who sounds like a crackpot.
No, I am not kidding.
First of all, 'Crackpot' is one of those judgment calls which I find indicative of limiting bias.
What makes a crackpot? There are people who suffer from manic-depressive or schizoid disorders. Combine that with egoism and a refusal to look at reality for fear of one's own self-worth being diminished, and you can end up with some spectacularly misled individuals. We've all met people like this. The problem is that often some of the greatest ideas also happen to come from people who have manic brain patterns and who believe they are smarter than everybody else.
--In a similar way, many highschool geeks find themselves more interested in their personal obsessions, be it D&D, video games and science and technology, than they are in dressing 'cool' in order to fit in to the accepted social order. They are often derided, and yet they are also often far more in touch with the workings of reality than regular kids. We've all met that type as well, if in fact you haven't occupied that personality type yourself at some point.
In a sense, anybody who doesn't fit in can and probably will be called names like, 'crackpot'. So what is the difference between a legitimate crackpot and an illegitimate crackpot? I would say that it's the value of their contribution to whatever field of study they happen to be exploring. That's really the only fair way to gauge, otherwise, it comes, essentially, down to how well they fit into the herd. --Do they wear the right clothes and act the same way and hold the same values as their peers. Those kinds of questions really don't interest me. I'm interested in ideas.
So for me, the question is, "Do the ideas have any merit?" This is primarily what I was looking at. The Patrick Flanagan fellow I wasn't particularly interested in. In fact, I wasn't even looking at his exploration into the area of mind-control, but that of another, more recent group working out of an Australian university. Unfortunately, everything about that study has vanished from the web, so I don't even have any links or anything to work with, which is frustrating, but not altogether unexpected given the nature of the material. All I'm left with are the ideas. So what do they key upon?
Well, first up. 1. Is is possible to hypnotize people? --Yeah, I'd say so. I've seen and read enough to accept that people can be hypnotized, and that while under hypnosis, the mind can be called upon to do astonishing things.
Next. 2. Can the subconscious mind detect an electrical signal on the skin? --Why not? The nervous system is able to sense and react to all manner of stimuli which the conscious mind is not immediately aware of.
3. Can the subconscious mind detect an EM signal? --Well, the brain itself certainly can. You asked "Where are we learning this?" Well, with regard to EM radiation, a noted scientist by the name, Robert O. Becker, wrote a very accessible book on the subject. It's well worth looking at, and you can get a used copy for under $4.00 if you're at all interested in learning more.
Put those three items together, and what do you get? Well, I don't know about Patrick Flanagan in particular and the kitsch naming of the 'neurophone', but common sense tells me that the idea itself makes sense.
So what about practical application with regard to mind control and big bad government and all of that?
Well, that's a large subject with its own heading, but certainly one which can be analyzed. I won't go into it now, but suffice it to say that have been numerous examples of secrecy and mind-control experiments which are on the public books. The MK Ultra material is one of the bigger and better known examples. --A Canadian researcher spent a number of yea
I guess Halifax is a naturally nice place for reasons which may have nothing to do with the entire downtown having been turned into a vast crater. (An explosion which launched one of the ships' anchors weighing 1140 pounds some 2 miles inland.) The people in Nova Scotia are wonderfully friendly, salt of the earth types. Maybe that has more to do with it.
Whatever the case, it's a sweet town. --If you like small, that is. Some people love big cities, but they make me feel like I'm drowning in some dystopian nightmare directed be Ridley Scott. But that's just me.
-FL
You're "shocked, just shocked!"?
Of course I wouldn't wish harm upon another person, and certainly not 10,000 of them. But that doesn't mean I'm incapable of seeing demographic patterns and making comments upon them. The world doesn't go away just because it happens to not fit with with moral code. Sheesh.
-FL
And thus, Halifax's urban growth was stunted, causing it to be one of the smallest cities in the West today, (under 200,000 people), and yet because it is placed on a huge natural shipping harbor and has a nice climate, it has all the benefits of a major metropolis. --Yet it suffers from none of the congestion and other big city problems the rest of the nation has to deal with. It still has a small-town feel. Having visited, I must say it's easily one of the most wonderful cities I've ever seen. Cleanest city air I've ever breathed.
I bet New York, Chicago, Toronto and all the rest could have benefited from a city-leveling whollop a century ago as well. It'd be far, far nicer if people would just stop having so many babies and treat the land with a bit of reason and respect, but failing that, a ship full of munitions appears to do a fair job.
-FL
-FL
-FL
They just need to pull up their own employee roster to see who's largely responsible for world terrorism.
Of course, the young recruits are probably still too busy puffing their chests smartly while humming the "Alias" theme music while quietly wishing that the NSA was the one which received the big Hollywood PR/propaganda effort to notice such sticky details as who was responsible for what. But what are a few sticky details? M's and W's all look the same.
-FL
EEG stands for 'electroencephalograph'.
-FL
Why fie, indeed?
Somebody trying to decipher our culture would be hit by numerous versions of this kind of backwards logic and blink lots, I'm sure.
Oh, and of course, anybody who wants to increase the level at which they are being saturated with microwave EM is either ignorant or making some self destructive choices.
-FL
Ooh, is somebody feeling bitter?
Honestly, that's the kind of retarded school yard fallacy which drives conservative activity. It's baseless, emotional, and yet somehow manages to keep their spirits high even while their self-generated reality plunges ever further into disaster.
This isn't about conservatives v.s. liberals. It's about humans v.s. the psychopathic principal.
-FL
You see, that's why closed thinkers are dangerous. --You quote two ideas. 1. The war in Iraq, and 2. The hijack of airplanes on 911. The problem is that the two are totally unrelated. This is proven.
So the war in Iraq is in fact NOT for a good, logical reason. However, conservative minds are more liable to make this mistake because they naturally eschew whole swaths of vital data required to know such things in their desire to hurry up and act out their hostility.
Then you say that the Iraq war was poorly implemented and unplanned. Well, I thought you said that those were Liberal traits. And who knows? Maybe you're right to some degree. Which would suggest that the quagmire of Iraq is not in fact a mistake. Perhaps the on-going blood-bath is a very deliberate condition. After all, certain parties close to the president are making enormous profit from this protracted war in Iraq. --If the fighting had been over in ten weeks, (as Bush promised), then there would be no need to buy all those extra helicopters, guns, bombs, 'private contractors' and fuel oil for all the ships and vehicles, etc. This quagmire is a military industrialist's wet dream worth many billions of dollars.
And if conservatives have trouble feeling compassion and are so good at planning and are so much more easily able to focus on serving only themselves, then maybe, just perhaps. . .
-FL
Cuz, you know, Newtonian physics lost relevance five years after the apple fell.
Being open to new ideas doesn't mean you automatically destroy your pre-existing knowledge structure. Any liberal will tell you that doesn't make any sense. --You only dismantle old idea structures when a new idea provides a more effective and rational means of describing reality.
But I'm going to assume you knew that already and you're just feeling bitter. Anyway, five years from now, the brownshirts won't just be engaged in cyber bullying of people like, "kdawson". They'll have been issued hand guns to take care of the people who embitter them more directly, so who's quoting who won't matter quite so much in the broad perspective. Just be sure to wear a big "M" on your shirt, cuz they'll only be gunning for the "W"s.
-FL
I still agree with your sentiment, though. --Because the internet is built the way it is, the stretch of highway the advertiser buys doesn't have to be there and the only reason you're driving on it is because he was hoping to persuade you to visit his massively redundant piece of tarmac. Now that he's done that, he wants you to give him some money for the experience. Whether or not you do is entirely up to you, but to claim that it's morally wrong to refuse to view a bunch of billboards is exactly the sort of guilt-tripping which will incline me to keep my wallet and my heart closed.
-FL
If you can't handle one guy posting things you don't like, you need to do some serious self-analysis.
Sheesh. There's tons of people I've had scraps with on Slashdot who I'd be happy to buy a drink for afterwards. These are just ideas. Words on a screen. Unwrap your knickers, dude, or go and move to S. Korea. Are you that eager to be part of a pecking order gang? Still dealing with your having been bullied in highschool? Feel the need to pass the harm onto some other target?
Anyway, wasn't this supposed to be about big box stores playing foul? Hmm. How to make this post relevant to the story. . .
I know!
The manager at that big box store would probably condone your efforts. And you don't want to be like HIM, now do you?
-FL
Most people here assume just accepting new ideas at face value (which is all the study suggested) is a good thing. The article did not in any way indicate that it tested what the evaluative processes that liberals vs conservatives go through before they integrate new ideas into their view of the world. That's a critical thing to know. Frankly, I want people in charge and those voting to have some initial skepticism and to analyze new ideas before they accept them. Just because you hear it or have an initial thought doesn't make it true or valid.
Yeah, but before you can think skeptically, you need to actually be able to read and understand the data available. If a person can't tell an M from a W, then how the heck can that person be expected to have any rational insights on M's and W's in order to know which is the best option?
Measuring new ideas carefully before accepting them is very important, I agree. But installing a leader who automatically filters out the fundamental possibility of even making a choice isn't a solution. It's the result of brain damage.
It's ridiculous to think that Liberal thinkers are somehow inferior because they have the ability to make choices. That's like saying, "I prefer to be color blind because I don't want to get distracted."
Though this is understandable to a degree. --You can't expect people who have a decreased capacity for choice to necessarily recognize the value of choice. In a world filled with blind people, the guy who can see is the one they think is nuts, because his behavior doesn't appear to make any sense.
-FL
The really scary part is that it makes sense.
It would certainly explain why the world is blowing apart at the seams today. Muslims, Sunis. . ? What's the difference? --They all have brown skin and talk funny, so they must all be in it together. Bomb them all!
Only people who remain ignorant of the details believed that Iraq had anything to do with 9-11. Saddam was anti-Muslim on principal. He certainly wasn't about to give them guns. They might have threatened his leadership. But Bush is a monkey, so he kept punching that 'W' key without blinking.
Psychopaths need to be expunged from the world. This is probably why Bush is so anti-science. If we ever worked out a test for psychopathy, we could live in a paradise.
-FL
Wow. Give that man a cigar! Freud would have dug into that one with both sets of claws. Lift that mask of sanity half an inch. . .
-FL
Now consider the science. "Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy." Excuse me? Where was there any measurement of brain circuits? These were just people pressing keys.
EEG readings have long been accepted as an accurate way to read brain activity. It doesn't suddenly become 'junk science' simply because you don't happen to like the results.
-FL
The Neurophone, (look it up), demonstrated that one could transmit messages via electrical impulse through the skin and have those messages understood by the subconscious. When the subject being programmed is in a dissociative state, (you are in a dissociative state when you watch TV or play a video game), it was demonstrated that one could send instructions to the subconscious through the skin and thereby implant hypnotic suggestions. Subjects would follow these suggestions, believing them to be their own thoughts and ideas. They'd never heard the instructions given to them verbally. They had received them by direct electrical impulse. This isn't science fiction.
The subject in question needs to have been hypnotized before hand and given a series of instructions as to how to interpret the signals which are to be received through electrical impulse. --Sort of like teaching Morse code. When the suitable level of conditioning has been achieved, the subject is brought back into awareness and set into the wild, so to speak. After this point, messages can be delivered to that subject through the skin using the electrical impulses. Apparently, it can be done very rapidly. The subconscious is quite able to understand a quickly changing signal. Then a story can be told; "Bob heads out to the library and takes out a copy of Catcher in the Rye and then buys a bag of turnips and goes home again." Apparently, Bob would go ahead and do exactly this, thinking it was his own idea to perform those actions.
Just wanted to clarify things.
Interestingly, even without hypnotic conditioning, it is entirely possible to alter a target person's emotional state through different types of EM exposure. This in combination with television viewing, (TV's and that hypnotic flicker rate put people under very quickly), opens up a variety of possibilities. There was one item in relation to all of this which I didn't grasp the significance of immediately; the sudden and wide-ranging adoption of the new CFL light bulbs. I thought it was pretty obvious what the intent behind those was; installing everybody's living space with fluorescent lighting creates living environments which are constantly flickering at 120 cycles per second. Uck. --But then the bulbs evolved so that rather than using magnetic ballasts they employed an electronic ballast which served to raise the frequency from one or two hundred cycles per second up into the high thousands, which in combination with the fluorescing coating inside the bulbs appeared to remove any danger of the brain being affected by light flicker. "Hm," I thought, and wondered if perhaps I was just being needlessly paranoid.
Then I ran across an article which talked about the high level of EM radio frequency being emitted from the new bulbs, and another thought struck me. --Until now, incandescent light fixtures were never a noted source of radio frequency EM pollution, but now with this latest generation of CFL's. . .
It's very hard to find stats on what the exact frequencies are which are emitted, or how powerful they are, but I do find it curious that further EM pollution in the radio spectrum should be the result of adopting this new lighting solution. When you know the frequency range, we actually do have enough data in the public realm to work out how it affects the central nervous system.
-FL
You are talking utter, utter, shit.
Actually, I wish I was. Seriously. Take ten minutes out of your busy day to look it up. Or don't. Your level of awareness is your problem and nobody else's. But ugly realities can't be changed through ridicule or denial. That just serves to paint a big juicy target on one's bottom while their head is snug in the sand.
-FL
WiFi is an expression of exactly the opposite. Microwave signals are a bad idea for a number of reasons.
--Here's a neat item worth considering. . .
The Neurophone, (look it up), demonstrated that one could transmit messages via electrical impulse through the skin and have those messages understood by the subconscious. When the subject being programmed is in a dissociative state, (you are in a dissociative state when you watch TV or play a video game), it was demonstrated that one could send instructions to the subconscious through the skin and thereby implant hypnotic suggestions. Subjects would follow these suggestions, believing them to be their own thoughts and ideas. They'd never heard the instructions given to them verbally. They had received them by direct electrical impulse. This isn't science fiction.
Okay. So cellphones, when outputting a 10 htz modulated signal, can directly buzz the brain with much the same effect. What a great system for delivering instructions!
Mind control is frighteningly easy. Heck, the Russians figured out how to beam voices directly into a person's head using EM back in the sixties.
WiFi in my house and on all the time? Um. . , gee, no thanks. There's enough garbage signal floating around my town as it is without beaming my own personalized source through my own home 24/7.
Now people will argue with this up and down. Fair enough. They can make their own decisions and refuse to acknowledge the information available. They don't want to be laughed at. But the cool thing is that Linux, for a number of reasons, is incompatible with this mode of social control. --You have to really really want it to microwave your head before it will comply. Now don't you think that's interesting? I sure do!
If you refuse to follow the leader and refuse to install your very own mind-control device in your home, then, well by gum, you don't even need a tin-foil hat. Bonus!
How sure are you that the impulses which guide you to follow self-destructive, limiting patterns at key moments of your life are really coming from within yourself?
The Matrix has you. Have a nice day!
-FL
Heh. My mutation into an adult of the species happened two decades ago. My reaction was definitely of the, 'Tormented by a messed up woman' variety. Big fun! Glad it's over. But Too bad a cutie like Kirsten Dunst gives me flashbacks.
-FL