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Disks in Rotation: Books Lying
Open Soul-Devouring
Worry When I Grow Up:
Curse of the Day:
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Thursday July 4, 2002 |
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of the Day I am an atheist in the sense of someone who does not think there is any good reason to believe in a supernatural entity that created and somehow supervises the universe. I do not know that such an entity is non existent, but until extraordinary evidence is provided to substantiate such an extraordinary claim, I relegate God to the same realm as Santa Claus. -- Massimo Pigliucci |
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Daily
Blog But as I said, it's a patriotic sort of day, and the US has been a much more patriotic country the last 9+ months than it was previously. If that's a good thing or a bad thing I leave to your discretion. I don't have any plans to do anything special today, not even blow off my fingers with a Roman candle. Sorry. I don't even like to think about that (blowing off fingers), as it's just a horrible concept. I'd almost rather lose a leg or an eye than a finger, since I type so many hours a day. This is how I communicate, and how I'm going to earn my living, eventually. I guess I could learn to compensate for a missing finger; the ones next to it would just have to take over 3 additional keys, or I'd have to move my hand side to side somewhat, but it would be very inconvenient. It's not like I'm a shop teacher here or something, where a missing digit is almost a prerequisite, and is useful in some ways, such as getting the little shits to listen when you warn them about the band saw. Anyway, the lower portion is pretty long today, and I've got a bunch of stuff backed up on the notes page; enough to do tomorrow's whole update instantly. Here are a few news items, though they are long on comment and short on news. Fark off if you don't like it. Funny article on the Village Voice website, by a lesbian dating a gay man. It's full of porno-style sexual exploits, and will probably confirm all of your stereotypes about wildly-promiscuous homosexual behavior. If you have such stereotypes to confirm, that is.
An accused child molester who fled to Mexico has been found beaten nearly to death and thrown into a cactus patch. Officer Emma Bribiescas, a Chandler police spokeswoman, said there is no evidence that Younglove molested children while in Mexico, or that angry parents are responsible for the beating. Gee, you think? As a side note, his last name was "Younglove". Is that 1) incredibly ironic? 2) The cruel hand of fate? 3) Not his birth name? A law I heartily-endorse is being passed in a town in Australia. It's an extra tax on pubs and bars for the street clean up required by the filthy drunks who stagger out of them and vomit in the streets, piss on walls, break bottles, fight, vandalize shoppes, etc. The bars are complaining, but you know they'll just tack $.25 onto the price of everything and cover it easily enough. The downtown tourist area of New Orleans is basically one long pub crawl, with bars every 20 feet, and the streets are literally soaked in vomit every night. They have street sweeping vehicles that go by every day pre-dawn to make it presentable for the tourists again the next day, and I assume that's covered in the taxes bars pay. Ironic article about the FDA banning sales of nicotine-tinged water. The FDA has also banned nicotine lollipops, lip balm, and other such things. Their justification is that since nicotine is a drug found in regulated prescription and over the counter medical devices such as nicotine patches, it can't be put into just anything. The tobacco industry has managed to keep nicotine in cigarettes and chaw though the might of their lobbying industry, so it's an obvious hypocrisy that those poisonous products remain legal, while no new products with nicotine can be introduced. Here's your "cops are dicks" story of the day. Pittsburgh police are routinely arresting people for using simple profanity, which, oddly enough, isn't illegal. Obscenity is, but that only applies to sexually explicit talk, not just a bad word or two. Simple misunderstanding of the law?
Nothing more fun than to be nearly run over by a careless cop, who then returns and arrests you for having the nerve to call him out on it. Then again, shouting "fucker" ("shithead"? "asshole"? pick a noun) after a police car isn't the best way imaginable to stay out of jail. As usual, thank God for the ACLU stepping in to preserve our god-given... I mean constitutional, rights. *hums patriotically* |
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Whatever I went on and on about, a friend of mine read it and had this to say in email about it. I have to say you are in somewhat wrong with the less than 0.1% unexplained...read the following books as I have an see where these people, as somewhat skeptics, seem dumbfounded by the amount of data collected to say they are true, and that the debunkers are the ones that will never believe. Hard to explain why stuff don't grow where saucers crash, and why the govt. is so quick to hush...check them out, if not for just more ammo for your debunking... Above Top Secret by Timothy Good Alien Agenda by Jim Marrs (the same guy who wrote Crossfire about JFK assn...and Rule By Secrecy...the dark govt book. I have started the Alien Agenda book and it is interesting... even accounting 1897, yes 1897 news article of a saucer crash, and days of news clippings across the US as to multiple witness to the craft in flight...and the town and the govt. trying to call it a hoax...interesting read even for the skeptic like you. Check them out.
Bill
Here's my reply to him, very slightly edited.
Well sure, accounts by believers are going to make it
sound unexplainable, mystical, etc. You can find equally convincing
accounts of finding Noah's ark, reincarnation, bigfoot, etc. Hell, there
are a lot of people who believe that no plane hit the pentagon,
eyewitness accounts, radar readings, missing 767, black box findings,
etc be damned.
Skeptical analysis of UFOs has debunked every single
case, at least to hear the skeptics
tell it.
The other issue I have is the concept of some vast
government conspiracy hiding the truth. This is the same government that
can't catch on to a dozen terrorists in flight schools who don't want to
learn how to land, can't help but bomb wedding parties and Canadian
troops, loses billions in budget every year, can't build stealth
fighters that can fly in the rain, etc. I mean look at the idiots we
elect, business-owned class presidents? Generals aren't that bright,
soldiers drink and gossip in bars, they couldn't keep a secret any
better than ex-senators.
I'm not prepared to give the US government anywhere near
enough credit to keep anything major a secret for decades, given how
many people would have to know and keep quiet. Also, every media
organization on earth would kill to have credible UFO information, NASA
would love it to boost their funding and general interest in space, etc.
Perhaps he explains all of those objections away in his book though.
The problem with most UFO sightings now is the kook
factor is so high. There have been so many hoaxes, rubber alien
autopsies on FOX, crop circles, etc that any proof of a UFO short of one
landing in Times Square is probably going to be
dismissed by most non-conspiracists. There's also the guilt by
association problem. Most people proclaiming UFOs to be real are nuts
with a long history of chicanery in their past. Most UFO claims are
later disproven beyond a reasonable doubt. So you've got people claiming
things that have been proven false dozens of times in the past, and some
of the people doing the claiming are known con artists, frauds, etc. As
the CSICOP motto goes, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence."
I'd heard of that 1897 UFO thing in the past as just a
newspaper hoax of the time, with most newspapers reprinting the story
with changed details. Just a quick search found this
site, which more or less says what I recalled hearing, and dismisses
the whole thing pretty succinctly.
I'd love there to be UFOs, it would make things much
more interesting, and it's pretty much certain there is intelligent life
out there somewhere, but I'm not at all convinced that the theory of
relativity is wrong and faster than light travel
is possible, and that alien ships have reached earth. And if they have
they are certainly conducting themselves in odd ways now that they are
here. IF they want to be secret, why are they flying through the
atmosphere, zooming aircraft, buzzing the earth with their running
lights on, mutilating cattle, and kidnapping rednecks? And if they don't
want to be secret, why don't they just land somewhere public and get it
over with?
I don't have a whole lot to add to that, but I thought it was an
interesting-enough exchange to post it here. If you read something
on this site that you disagree with, feel free to email your
thoughts. I'd be happy to post more opinions and PoVs on stuff,
but I don't get many mails of that nature.
Something I meant to add but didn't, is the basic
observation that we tend to believe in things we are inclined to believe
in. I'm a skeptic and a rationalist, and automatically regard any
claims of conspiracies, magic, bizarre phenomena, etc with
skepticism. I think it's bullshit, and am open to changing my
mind, but I need damn good proof of that. Bill is not the
opposite, he's not some sap who believes everything, but he's much more
inclined to lend credence to accounts of supernatural happenings than I
am. So he and I (or any 2 people with similar PoVs) could view the
same phenomena, and afterwards both could pass lie detectors describing
what they saw, and have very different accounts. While looking around on the CSICOP website after finding
the UFO article I mentioned to Bill, I saw another good article.
By Paul Kurtz, it discusses supernatural beliefs. Occasioned by the Heaven's Gate cult
suicides, you can see
it here. He discusses the Heaven's Gate beliefs, UFOs in general,
the way the media (uncritically) presents UFO mythology, how such
"new age" beliefs fill a need in humans, and how they compare
to traditional religions.
He doesn't go so far as to suggest it, but what do you suppose the odds of current cults growing to be popular religions over the next 50 years? Will Scientology, even with the utter lunacy of most of its core beliefs, become accepted? Or Aum Shinri Kyo, if it tones down the apocalyptic stuff? Or will the central UFO beliefs become codified and unified? It's sort of a clichι to see the fanatical splinter sect leader out in some desert with a pack of human sheep, waiting for the Revelation, or UFO, or meteor, or whatever. But what if everyone believes it? I find this an extremely pessimistic possibility, even worse than the continued idle religious belief evinced by most people. As I optimistically wrote yesterday, I sort of expect religion to die off over the coming years, as humans grow more technologically advanced and scientifically aware. The problem with this is that there's not much evidence of it over history. True, most scientists are atheists, but most people aren't scientists, and never will be. The average technical knowledge of most people in the Western world today dwarfs that of a scientist from 30 or 40 years ago, but that's just because we've grown up with microchips. Knowing how to operate a phone or microwave or computer isn't any special intellectual breakthrough, it's just a learned behavior, and not one that's especially amazing. Humans 5000 years ago knew how to hunt, grow food, make clothing, skin game, cook food, stay warm in the night, light a fire from rocks and wood, etc. Can you do that? I certainly couldn't, at least not much of it, and not very well. They couldn't program my digital answering machine, but I'd starve to death in a week in their world. So who is the smarter human? Now admittedly, I wouldn't think the wind blowing was the spirits of the dead whistling their anger, and I wouldn't think thunder was the gods fighting in heaven, and the caveman here would think all blinking lights were magic, or fireflies, would run in terror from the sounds coming from my stereo (actually most modern humans would also, given my musical preferences) and the pictures on the television. Anyway, my point is that most human superiority over our distant ancestors is just in the form of learned behaviors, rather than any higher state of being, or elevated level of knowledge. So there isn't human intellectual evolution. People today are nearly as likely to believe in magical invisible gods or spirits as they were thousands of years ago; it's just that such belief today is inculcated from childhood by religious parents, churches, etc. The human mind seems to be very susceptible to superstition, and there is a strong need in most people to believe in something more than the observable, physical world. People want there to be more, they want heaven, or reincarnation, or alternate dimensions, and they aren't real picky about the scientific basis of the belief system that gives it to them. As Paul Kurtz says in the Heaven's Gate article:
You can apply this psychological reality to many aspects of life, in my observation. Not just the intensely-held beliefs, but other lesser beliefs. People like to believe things, and when they hear about something new, they'll often start to believe it as well. Check out this excellent article with a run down of the of the major mass delusions of the past millennium.
Some rather obvious parallels to UFO sightings of the modern era in that one, eh? Of course that was before Roswell incident, which proved once and for all... how eager to believe bullshit people are? |
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