Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 6

The photo to the left is a photo of the final space shuttle trail taken a few minutes after take off.

This photo shows what human civilization's space efforts look like from a fairly close proximity.

Another photo of the Earth, below, shows what that same civilization's space effort looks like from further out in space.

Clearly, the effort of human civilization to develop space travel, up to this point, does not show up at all from further away in space.

There are a couple of additional photos, below, which show strange structures in space.

They naturally inspire some scientists and amateurs alike to wonder if we are taking photos of the results of engineering efforts by other civilizations out in the deep cosmos.

If so, these would be civilizations that existed long ago, in the sense that the light reaching the cameras that took those photos left those civilizations millions of years ago.

Which begs the question, "if these are photos of civilizations that did exist millions of years ago, do those civilizations still exist now?"

Some also wonder how long into the future our own human civilization, which can't be seen from deep space yet, will exist.

It is interesting to note that these odd shaped structures in these two photos were predicted by scientists well before we ever photographed them.

Well before the mystery of their shapes sent the anti-SETI people scrambling for rhetoric to support their fear of aliens, a fear that has engendered their cosmic theories which hold that human civilization on this little planet Earth is the only civilization that exists anywhere in the vast cosmos around us.

The visionary scientists, who predicted these strange shapes before we had these photos, realized that any civilization that was to become exceptionally advanced would have to find a permanent source of abundant, clean energy in order to continue to survive in an advanced state.

Those scientists expected elaborate solar system sized energy fields or mechanisms which would be visible for millions of light years distance in space from those sources.

One of them, Freeman Dyson, predicted the bubble shaped entity that was photographed in the Cygnus region of the night sky.

If they had advanced to the point we could see their efforts, surely they were also experiencing cosmic sanity don't you think?

If not, then we can conclude that they did not pass "The Test", so they no longer exist, at least in the advanced stage required to proceed further into cosmic adulthood.

The next post in this series is here.

On The Definition of Sanity

This post has been moved to the Ecocosmology Blog: here.

100 Yrs Of Psycho Therapy - Take Cover - 2

In this post I would like to talk about the contrast, overlap, and difference between intelligence and sanity.

That "intelligence" and "sanity" are not the same can be at once seen with a simple quote from a recent Dredd Blog post.

That post concerned, among other things, mass-murderer James Whitman who went to a high building on a Texas college campus with a long range rifle, then killed 32 people:

Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.

(New Government ... Policy..., emphasis added). The guy was very intelligent, but he was also becoming insane, and if you read that post you will read that he knew he was going insane, so he sought professional help, but to no avail.

Many people are intelligent but are not sane, while many others are far less intelligent, yet they are sane.

It may seem obvious that intelligence and sanity are not the same, but many do not contrast the two concepts, instead they conflate them.

Some would even say that James Whitman was "stupid" to commit his crimes, but the mental tests, as well as his early life, show that he was anything but stupid.

The United States is going through what James Whitman went through, in the sense that many individuals express concern that we are morphing into something we have never been before, that we are becoming violent and inhumane in both our perception as well as our behavior, as a nation engaged in endless wars for oil.

Whitman noticed that violent thoughts were bubbling up into his conscious from somewhere, just like many writers, scholars, scientists, politicians, and activists are saying about the nation.

Whitman also knew for awhile that such thinking was not normal, before the not-normal became his final "normal" and he went totally insane.

Is our demise like his, that is, are we going to be unable to stave off our own national insanity, or the insanity of civilization itself, with mass psychotherapy or the like?

In the first post of this series we reviewed a book "We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy -- And the World's Getting Worse", authored by Hillman and Ventura, and published in 1992.

One interesting section of that post was:

In that book I came across this back and forth between them:

HILLMAN: There is a decline in political sense. No sensitivity to real issues. Why are the intelligent people - at least among the white middle class - so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! They've been in therapy in the United States for thirty, forty years, and during that time there's been a tremendous political decline in this country.

VENTURA: How do you think that works?

(ibid, page 5). Yes, how does that work? I think Noam Chomsky, a great scholar, gave us a hint when he said:

Throughout history it's been mostly the property holders or the educated classes who've tended to support power systems. And that's a large part of what I think education is — it's a form of indoctrination. You have to reconstruct a picture of the world in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes, and this involves a lot of self-deceit.

(Noam Chomsky, emphasis added). Chomsky indicates that our educational system is perceived to be controlled by the private sector. But there are other considerations ...

(100 Yrs Of Psycho Therapy - Take Cover, emphasis added). The "no sensitivity to real issues" and "indoctrination" can be said to be related both to education as well as to psychotherapy.

The psychotherapists are a professional group who are educated within a national system that has not only preconceived notions, it also has an agenda, and is part of the media world in significant ways (a system that wants to influence how and what you think).

Individual psychotherapists do not tend to deal with the mental health of civilization, nations, or groups, instead they typically deal with individuals or couples.

Further, as Chomsky pointed out, the educational system is controlled by an elite who tend to promulgate the "everything is fine" mantra, which is, whether we like it or not, pure propaganda, especially when it is perfectly clear that everything is not fine.

In the Peak of Sanity series we did not say that the peak of intelligence had been reached, but some readers conflated intelligence with sanity, thus they missed the point of that series.

In yesterday's post we broached the subject of how the media likes to sensationalize issues that are not real in the larger sense.

For example, the Casey Anthony case was mentioned, a case that had a jury verdict which drove thousands out of their mind, at the same time up to 30,000 children starved to death, but were not mentioned.

People are not incensed at the death of as many as 30,000 children each day, but are incensed at the death of one child on one day.

We need a psychology that faces national problems, as well as the problems of civilization, with a mature outlook dedicated and determined to stop such insanity.

Otherwise, like James Whitman, the nation and civilization are possibly going to become totally criminally insane without any real hope of recovery.

Ok psychotherapists, start your engines, end the administration of pabulum and tell the world it is going mad.

The previous post in this series is here.

Etiology of Social Dementia - 4

The massive publication and broadcasting of the Casey Anthony trial by the MOMCOM media served its purpose well (finish up what the OJ trial left undone).

Its purpose is to turn the people against trial by jury and in favor of military trials that put the "bad guys" up against the wall and then please god by shooting them down.

Now that the media has already succeeded in turning the public against congress, and in favor of the most diseased institution, they are now massively attacking the jury system.

My "educated friends" are absolutely oblivious to what is going on, which reminded me of course of Chomsky quotes.

Dredd Blog explained in the posts Stockholm Syndrome On Steroids? and Crazies Are Seeking To Be Elected, quoting annual Gallup polls, that the public has been brainwashed into believing that the most competent and trustworthy institution in all America is the military.

Yes, those who are destroying America in order to save it are seen as the greatest institution of all.

Kim Sung Ill of North Korea must be envious at the martial law plan they have in place.

The previous post in this series is here, the next post in this series is here.

MOMCOM's Movie "Independence Day"

On Independence Day I watched the movie Independence Day.

The contrived story is about an alien race who travel through the cosmos wasting planets by using up all the planet's resources, then moving on to the next planet (in this case, Earth).

This is a complete scientific falsehood, violating the smell test, the common sense test, as well as the fundamental cosmic test.

Those civilizations who destroy their planet's ecosystem cannot survive long enough to develop the technology that produces the kind of space travel necessary for interstellar migration.

Thus, the movie is MOMCOM propaganda developed with the intention of deceiving the public into forgetting that our survival requires that we take excellent care of our planet.

Another purpose is to deceive the populace into dependence on the military doctrine that the military is the mother of all freedom, when in fact the opposite is true.

Independence From What? - 2

Sometimes people make declarations.

There is even a federal statute for it (28 USC §1746).

But what is a declaration of independence?

It is a declaration that one has been dependent but is changing the game, that one is now going to be independent.

But independent from what?

That brings up last year's post:

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Last year, on the 4th of July, the Declaration of Independence was posted.

A few days later (time for the hangovers to subside) in a post the question was asked "Independence From What?", indicating that it was not a person or place our ancestors sought independence from, but as we will see, it was from certain ideas.

Of the list of items set forth as the reasons for declaring independence from The Ideology of the British Empire, was the reason:

He [the king] has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

(Independence From What?). The king made the military subject to himself alone, and imposed the military upon "the little people".

Recently President Obama removed a general from a command because that general was promoting disrespect toward civilian power.

Nevertheless, according to a general who later became president, that may be an illusion because, while we left a place, the idea we thought we left has returned like a weed returning to a garden:

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual --is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

(President Dwight Eisenhower, emphasis added). The Unitary Executive Theory was preached during the Bush II Regime years in a manner that made it indistinguishable from the notion of a king-high priest who did his own thing, the rest of the government be damned.

During the Bush II daze the president was wrongly called "The Commander In Chief" of the people, a perversion of his command of only the military:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States

(Article II, Section 2, emphasis added). The office of the president is not commander in chief of the people.

Originally "commander in chief" only applied temporarily when the nation was in a war declared by congress, because we did not have "standing armies" back then like we do today.

We have come a long way baby, but it has not all been in the direction of the freedom once envisioned.

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Stay independent.