“We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever masquerades as science.” (Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan)
Via the Internet and a blog, now called the Montana Post (formerly called Intelligent Discontent), I got to know a man named Don (who goes by the nickname Pogie.) Don frequently assailed critics by quizzing them on their use of sources. If something came from the New York Times, OK. If not, if from something less ‘reputable,’ Don would smugly dismiss both the person and the opinion.
Don’s blog posts repeat one theme only, that Democrats are splendid public servants and Republicans scoundrels. It is unnerving to see this as a “thoughtful” outlook on our landscape. I have traveled only sparingly to his site in these past few years, and only bring it up now to make this point: Don doesn’t think for himself. He relies on authority figures and sources.
I know, this is common. This is how most people process things, even those who read a lot, as does Don. He is, after all, a high school teacher, and this is how he trains his students. He considers himself a thinker, part of an outstanding minority in our land.
That attitude is common in the schools … what is the SAT but regurgitation of ‘correct’ information? What does it teach us other than to look up to authority figures for the right answers? Kids want to get ahead and get into good colleges and so study hard for that test. Also, they are afraid of making mistakes, which are costly.
Mistakes, our best teachers, are to be avoided. Regurgitate! Excel! A student might otherwise learn how to weigh evidence, question authenticity and authoritative sources, and be skeptical. That is not taught, not learned.
So it is no surprise that as I look around me I see the American public as a herd groomed to be milked of its resources like cows, udderly unaware of its state of existence.
I recently finished a book, The Pseudoscience Wars by Michael D. Gordin, a professor of history at Princeton and a very thorough researcher. (More on the profession of history later.) It’s a tough book to get through, and I shy away from its main thrust, that those within the areas of what we call science are qualified to pass judgment on those outside who question their findings. He intimates this idea rather than stating it outright. It may well be that much of what we see around us that is labeled crackpot is just that, but it might also be the case that what comes down from science on high is something else … not crackpottery, but rather fraud.
Grodin centers the book around Immanuel Velikovsky, and gives him rough treatment for personality quirks like mood swings and tantrums. I find it however to be a fair treatment. In general, I like his thrust, as on page 209 where he dismisses peer review as a useful means of weeding out fraud, and suggests a better way … no, he doesn’t. There is no better way. There is nothing but our own brains. Creationism journals are peer-reviewed. Most of what we call science is groupthink, people who rely on a sense of belonging rather than natural curiosity. These are people who punish authentic and original thinkers.
The Miles Mathis Group (my opinion on that source) recently put up a post called Beyond Velikovsky, which I read with great interest. That source claims that Velikovsky was a “project” to give us a false choice between mainstream science and another, equally fraudulent. I don’t necessarily buy that, as Velikovsky was a serious man of considerable intellect and depth. MMG makes the point that a run-in by Earth with a body the size of Venus (Velikovsky’s main thrust in Worlds in Collision), equivalent in mass to the earth, would do more far than cause a deluge. Earth would have been vaporized. Instead, they posit that something catastrophic indeed happened around that time, just not that. Maybe a minor comet. The group misses point that earth went through the comet’s tail, according to Velikovsky, and that there was no collision. So I tend to dismiss that opinion.
We have wondered aloud at this blog about the origins of the families that seem to control the planet, The Peerage, the owners. We cannot know, as secrecy is their calling card. I wonder, however, if they go back in time to the events that Velikovsky examined. It would have been a new beginning. Perhaps that is the knowledge they hide? Did Velikovsky violate the code of secrecy? Is that why he was crucified? If so, the book would not have been condemned as it was. It would not have been published. That is the true power of censorship, not to even know about ideas. Allowing a best seller to be published and then publicly squashed can only mean those ideas were meant to be seen and shot down. So this does have some signs of a project.
Matters of this nature require a base of knowledge and experience far beyond what I possess or have time to acquire. I will probably never know what is true. Instead, I have found the material in Velikovsky’s Earth in Upheaval (1955) to be far more useful. The fact, undeniable, that millions of carcasses of mammoths and other animal were flash frozen in the Siberian and Alaska tundra indicates something very big and very recent happened, possibly a tidal wave that swept them there. Massive glacial erratics are found uphill, in places where they could not have been moved by downward flowing ice. Something big and bad happened, and did so recently in terms of our geologic past. If anything is fringe or pseudoscience, it is uniformitarianism, the theory that what we see around us is the result of billions of years of slow change. If that is bunk, then so too is evolutionary science. How we came to be, how we got here is far more mysterious than they think we know. If it is known at all, it is by precious few and closely guarded.
Regarding Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision, the 1950 work that created the uproar, there was in the ensuing debate the matter of a typo on page 349 (page 345 of my Doubleday edition) where the ecliptic from one new moon to another was set on the average of 33 degrees 14′ too great. The actual number printed in my version is 3 degrees. I doubt the number “33” appears anywhere, and that the criticism is invalid. If it did appear that way, it was a typo, and in those days, books were heavily pored over by intelligent eyes before being published, unlike today. Velikovsky had years to edit the galleys, and would not have missed that one. What struck me, however, was that damned number, 33, that appears in every major hoax. Was this tempest in a teapot a signalling device? (The book was transferred to Doubleday as a best seller after being available for eleven weeks.)
In my Iconoclast post on Velikovsky, there was quite a bit of discussion about spook markers around this gentleman (plus the fact that “Miles Mathis” had already “written” on the subject, so there). Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes 33 is just the number that follows 32. Was Velikovsky scamming us, misleading us, distracting and muddying the waters on purpose? If so, to what end? MMG says it is to divert us truth it possesses, but I remain skeptical of MMG’s true purpose being enlightenment.
The image above is the official history of our planet. It is very precise. New geology students are required to not just study it, but memorize it. If Velikovsky was right, this chart is nonsense. But the way science is constructed forces this chart into our brains as reality. Any prospective geology student who doubts it will not advance. There will be no research grants made available for those who question it. Testing is as follows: Memorize, regurgitate.*
Consequently, I am far more interested in the reaction of the scientific community, and of historians, to Velikovsky.
First, the historians: They simply ignored him. I don’t care much for history, don’t believe much of it. Even a professor of history as Grodin at Princeton is suspect in my mind, as to qualify for that position he had to pass judgment by his peers, meaning that orthodoxy is his calling card. I don’t automatically assume his position offers anything more than rigor and hard work rather than original thinking. Entire aisles at Barnes and Noble are dedicated to the work of people writing about the past, and I pass on it.
A mere 6,312 days ago (today is 12/22/18) an event took place that violated the laws of physics. Aluminum aircraft left a clean hole in the sides of steel structures. That cannot happen, and therefore did not happen. But if any historian in any college or university in this country were to state that simple fact, that person would be fired.
I was informed by a book store clerk at the University of Montana ( a blogger, now retired) that scientists in that very institution puzzled and wondered over Newton’s Third Law, violated on that day. It states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. An aluminum aircraft hitting a concrete and steel building at 500mph would be identical to the building traveling at that speed and hitting the aircraft. It would crush it. Not so, said the clerk! The scientists at MSU had added a variable, “v”, or velocity to the Third Law. That changed everything. The jet was going really fast, so it was able to penetrate the building.
In other words, if I throw a baseball really, really fast, it will penetrate a brick wall. Horse shit. I pray he was not right about those teachers and professors. But wait, something else happened around that time.
In 2007 a tenured professor at University of Colorado Boulder was fired from his position for speaking out in an essay about 9/11. He did not question the events themselves, but rather only stated that the attacks were the result of US foreign policy. He wasn’t fired for that, not explicitly anyway. (Don’t kid yourself. He was fired for that.) The whole affair is suspicious, and strikes me as a public execution to send a message. Churchill himself may have been a scapegoat rather than willing participant, as it appears he did not land on his feet. However, the affair was used as an example. His expulsion sent a powerful message to every professor and teacher in the country, tenured or not: STFU. Churchill’s expulsion was used not just to chill academia, but to freeze it.
History is knowledge, and knowledge is power. Therefore, real history is confined to powerful circles, and for the rest of us, or the few who even read, there are the bookshelves at Barnes and Noble. History is bunk. If we cannot even know the truth of an event from a mere seventeen years ago, how can we trust any of it? Historians form a closed circle and write circles around well-known events like the American Revolution and World War II and Nazis Nazis Nazis … all for public consumption, all … not so much fabricated … as written with an eye on peers. Nothing dicey will make its way to print.
Historians insulate themselves from criticism, and so become a band of brothers and sisters who self-gratify and ignore any and all critics. That is why they were silent about Velikovsky, whose work was more a direct affront to historians than scientists. They become what one man, Wallace Thornhill, calls “trivially self-correcting,” that is, they make a show of the scientific method, but fail to use it.
They are smug. For that reason, I don’t care what they thought about Immanuel Velikovsky any more than I care what they might think about goose-stepping, their real life’s work.
Scientists are another matter. They openly and vigorously attacked Velikovsky, and this is where I suspect the MMG might, emphasis on “might”, be on to something. They forced resignations of credible and serious people at the Hayden Planetarium and Macmillan Books. The “national controversy” (I wonder if it was a tempest in a teapot) made the book a best seller, and its impact resonates to this day. Was it staged? If so, to what end? MMG claims that such events are staged to offer us false choices, with the real truth offered us by a man of historical stature in Taos named Miles Mathis. That too is not credible.
We are dealing here with the same issue as with historians, the power of ownership of knowledge. It was no different in the time of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe and Galileo Galilei, if that history is real. In their age the Catholic Church owned knowledge, and did not let anyone upset that reign. Insiders might well have known the these men presented a more accurate view of the universe, but also knew that to acknowledge that was to lose power.
We imagine today that we have advanced beyond such brute-thug behavior. Scientists pat themselves on the back for their openness. The “scientific method” is said to weed out junk and pseudoscience. And yet … 68 years after Worlds in Collision was published, it lingers in the shadows. We seemingly suffer from “presentism,” defined as “uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.” In other words, we think we are smarter that those who came before us, and not subject to massive and crippling error, as in the time if Galileo. Horse shit.
I no longer trust science. I am not Pogie, and seeing something handed down from a credible source does not move me. I am not insulated or smug, as I know that I can and do make many mistakes. The halls of laboratories and academia are filled with men and women of high intelligence and noble purpose. However, they are all subject to control of others, and the means of control are many … tenure, peer review, groupthink, prestige and money. Do not discount the last. Money rules.
I am going to spend my time in the near future writing about several areas of science that have led me to doubt science as a whole: Theories of evolution, geology, astrophysics and cosmology, AIDS, ZIKA and virology in general, the PSA … I’ll add more as time goes on. I want to offer a differing perspective on the moon landings, as they are so well covered elsewhere that I cannot offer any new evidence. It all appears to be fraud and/or bad science, some of it deadly. Science today is the Catholic Church. It is to be rigidly taught and never questioned.
This blog exists to question reality and search for truth. I am still having fun, as I hope you the readers and our other writers are too. Happy New Year. And Pogie, may your rigid orthodoxy lead you to write 365 new posts on the wonders of Democrats in the coming year. I will read each one! No, wait. I will read but one. Same result.
*This reminds me of a line from a book by John Cleese, that a “lecture” is a magical process by which words on a teacher’s notepad appear on a student’s notepad without passing through the mind of either.
Piece of Mindful 
Glad to see you’re planning to write on science, as I have the same fascination and curiosity about its role as modern religious dogma. People who question almost every institution of society often still have a naive credulity when it comes to the priestly pure men of science (I’m thinking specifically of the comments at NakedCapitalism, w its relatively skeptical commenters. Who nonetheless won’t brook climate science skeptics.)
One of the sharpest critics of science, mainly medical, I’ve come across is Jennifer Daniels. Harvard trained doc now living in Panama, says she was hounded from the profession. If you search her name and “truth-files” there are podcasts on AIDS, ZIKA etc with an always unique angle.
On evolution, my current hypothesis is that what the mainstream calls microevolution has some validity, but is misleadingly used to make the case for macroevolution. I.e. the basic species types seem to have latitude for “evolution”, or variation, within a window. And this is then extrapolated to suggest that if it continues long enough, complete new species will appear. It’s more of a rhetorical trick to persuade those Cleeseian profs and pupils not looking too closely. Other than “microevolution” examples, they don’t seem to have much concrete evidence.
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“In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government, but not Darwin.” Jun-Yuan Chen in The Wall Street Journal, August 16, 1999.
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“It is now blasphemy to criticize Darwin.” Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Click to access MPP2010Blasphemy.pdf
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Thanks for the name, Jennifer Daniels. Will for sure look her up.
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You will not be disappointed! She has an amazing life story, of great interest to all who want to “wake up” or see through the propaganda. And she continues to expose numerous cons and psy ops, with highly original research and insights.
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Science, or rather its method is rightfully to learn and enthusiastically accept the structure of Nature.
The evil of science begins when man attempts to use that knowledge to alter its course or change it, and profit from its destruction. In the end, science is only a creation of man struggling to “know” the unknowable. Silly rabbit.
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the last sentence nailed it Mark, all the mainstream is repeating what somebody else told us. No thinking necessary. History is something that already happened and cannot be reproduced to check the evidence. That is why I no longer trust any historical “evidence”. If I cannot derive any instructions from it for my future acting, I ignore it. If it influences my decisions I’m very carefully thinking twice and double checking the credibility of the source. In German there are two words for knowledge: “Wissen” and “Kenntnisse”. The first one means something which is always and everywhere valid, which can be reproduced by anybody and anytime, the second one is just an information, which may have a short expiration time or not be valid at all. Schools mainly teach “Kenntnisse” to give us the ability to live in our manipulated world and “Wissen” is only a sideeffect of it, not necessarily desired.
Mass media are not to tell us, what’s going on in the world but to make us decide in a required way. Which is not as bad as it sounds at all. Just keep in mind, there is nothing to fear except the fear, do you best and you’ll be fine. HNY 2019 everyone.
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Here is a small example: In the matter of the rape of my daughter by an intruder in 1987, my ex-wife took control of narrative to exonerate herself from her drunken state that night. She did this over time as I got on with my own life, unaware of her careful manipulations. She made sure that centers of authority and knowledge in Billings, Montana, the newspaper and county attorney and police, only knew her version of events. It was so skillful, so treacherous, that my own version, told in candor and honesty, became the ramblings if a crank.
That is how history is done, with malicious and deceitful intent to protect miscreants and deceive bystanders. Authentic and honest people have no place to rest.
By the way, the case regarding uncovering of the supposed real culprit via DNA will be heard before the US Supreme Court on January 14, or delayed again, as US courts are painfully slow to move on anything. At issue is whether a man known to be guilty of a despicable crime should walk free due to Statute of Limitations. It is a sticky wicket. I would settle for frontier justice, but that is not available either. My guess … he walks.
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“like cows, udderly unaware” that’s just smooth…
The beginning of Science is: I Don’t Know.
Then you go out to find the answer. Not whore yourself out to the highest bidder that buys an answer. Problem is: the entire world ends all discussion with: I Don’t Know. Here in ILL Annoyed it is a badge of honor to be brain dead (started to type: grain dead).
I find Velikovsky amusing (and hard to remember how to spell) but there is a difficulty in logic and critical thinking that transcends any dialectic. If the PREMISE is false then all else that follows is false. I no longer subscribe to orbital mechanics. I have seen Jupiter and its moons and Venus and Mars and Saturn with a small telescope yet my final pronoucement is: I Don’t Know what they are or what they are capable of. However, if Venus was not able to do a drive-by then the entire system is obviated from the start.
As to dating systems. I read an opinion that solar neutrinos can reset the radioactive clocks back so that they start their countdowns around every 2000 years so no matter what they claim they are dating then that weird bi-millennial number keeps hauting the ‘history’ of mannequine-kind. I just shared a story on a youtube where a private cave owner in Missouri was showing around some university experts in a section of a cave he had spent quite a bit of time developing for tourists. They remarked on the helectites that were growing at eye level on a wall. They said that it probably took about 10,000 years for them to form. He said that he was in that section of the cave every day until there was a flood but they were not there until it dried out a few months later.
So much for geological time…
“I throw a baseball really, really fast, it will penetrate a brick wall. Horse shit.”
Bricks maybe… horseshit out in the sun in the Midwest…. perhaps they might make skyscrapers out of that instead. …And… did you have to pay a copyright fee for that airplane photo? I’m sure I saw that in Wiley Coyote & The Road Runner. Acme airlines?
another thing I have a hard time with:
“In other words, we think we are smarter that those who came before us, and not subject to massive and crippling error, as in the time if Galileo. Horse shit.”
I will concede that back in the day they might have had superior optics to what we have today, but if Gally was peeping through the equivalent of my 3″ refractor, then I seriously wonder how he got all of his data.
The best that we as individuals can know is our current experience coupled with the eye witness of those who we might trust but then our parents told us Santa was real… At best the most we can account for of the Real World is about 100 years and then the rest is a fantasy novel because even our own experiences are filtered through controllers’ outlets.
please don’t yell at me for citing Princeton! I think the first time I saw this was National Geographic:
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/11/27/study-darwins-finches-reveals-new-species-can-develop-little-two-generations
“Researchers previously assumed that the formation of a new species takes a very long time, but in the Big Bird lineage it happened in just two generations, according to observations made by the Grants in the field in combination with the genetic studies.”
So much for slow change over time…
I will not abandon the Scientific Method because it has never let me down. I will not subscribe to those who pretend to use it. Hell, I can’t even prove the Finch thing, I wasn’t there and I didn’t do the lab work. I Don’t Know.
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I read Origin of the Species … it is really a very easy book, written for the general public. With finches in the Galapagos he found variations to adapt to different food sources, but not different species. A finch is still a finch. Darwin was on to something, variability within species, the ability to manage reproduction to fine tune animals to suit our needs, but a dog is still a wolf and not a cat. There is nothing in the fossil record showing one species becoming another. Darwin left that open, speculating that in the future his theory would find evidence. It never did.
Regarding Velikovsky, it becomes more manageable when you realize that the planets are all in a flat plane … I gulp when I say this, but “Mathis” explained this in terms of an electric solar system, photons moving from the poles of the sun to the equator and then outward, and planets on that plane because of magnetic attraction. I may have mangled that as I am just getting into it, not “Mathis,” but Thornhill and Talbott. So you are dealing with a much smaller area in which there can be intersections and collisions. If Venus and Earth collided, we are not here, but if Venus is a comet on an erratic path but on the solar plane, Earth passing through the tail of that comet would be disastrous. I don’t imagine it outlandish because the comet’s tail of a large body like Venus is very long, millions of miles, so that Earth passing through it is not as incredible as imagined. Astronomers who say everything is built around gravity find this unacceptable.
I accept the scientific method, but it is like what Mark Twain said about great books, talked about but not read. People preach it but do not practice it.
I read about half of Ages in Chaos by Velikovsky and gave it up, realizing that I have to have graph paper and a pencil on hand to keep track of things. He claims the dating system is off by at least 600 years. I have to give that book another try.
That whole paragraph with the word “udderly” … I only put it in there to insert that cheap trick of a joke. I am glad you caught it.
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It’s like in that JFKTV piece.. Laypeople don’t examine the claims, they just go with expert consensus. Nor do they examine how that consesus is arrived at, lol.
But don’t question it… Makes them itchy.
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I personally think Velikovsky maybe right about the 600 years. Why else did they change the calendars – Russia only a 100 years ago, and why else is language being distorted from it’s original meanings?
Young people say bad when they mean good.
Our languages are being stolen from us to hide, cloak the real past/history.
I saw an interview – part of a 60s concert – and a hippy was blethering on using all kinds of street slang from those times, man, and he just seemed like a total idiot as language has moved on from those times, and his words now jibberish.
Then there’s Reformation – common people couldn’t even read or write in those times, so what difference would the Bible in their own tongue make? Something is being hidden.
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You are on to something. This may help. http://webstersdictionary1828.com/
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Thanks Steve
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Mark, history as we learn it in schools is full of holes and inventions. For instance, there is no real, convincing proof for the existence of Charlemagne. There only are some artefacts of unknown origin and lots of things created long after Charlemagne was already gone. That doesn’t mean, this time did not exist. The powers in charge at the time (kings and popes) had their own interests in inventing history to base their claims on it. We still continue to repeat their lies. But this also doesn’t mean everything we learn is a lie. Human history goes back much longer than we can reliably prove. All we have are stories retold and rewritten through generations never 100% true and never 100% fake. Just take a look on contemporary history. WTC wasn’t destroyed by some Afgans, yet still it was destroyed. Future generations will probably know that because of people like us, but things that happened in the past are not so easy to debunk. History is not to be trusted. That is the only lesson we can learn from history.
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I am not one who thinks everything is false. Indeed those seven buildings were destroyed that day. That we can all agree on.
Suppose you live in a small town, and a building burns to the ground. Everyone near it can see what happened, and everyone will hear about it via the grapevine or see photos and stories in the newspaper. But suppose also that the cause of the fire was arson, and that it was set by a very wealthy local merchant to collect insurance for a failing business. That part we will never know about. The newspaper will not print it, as the editor is a Mason, as is the Chief of Police, who will squelch the investigation. They take an oath of silence. That is far more normal than any CSI fantasies soread by TV writers.
I said “Mason” as if I know that to be the source of all the secrecy around us. I know no better and could be off by 180 degrees. Just vague suspicion.
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I just took a look at the ” The Black Swan” book in amazon. The comments give it away even though the people got it wrong. They complain mainly about the arrogance of the author. The book confirms correctly that there are constantly events happening which appear unpredictable and illogical. Those events are all those hoaxes we are analyzing here. Of course they make no sense because they are scripted to be that way. Rational people never do such things and irrational people are not capable of doing anything of importance. Remains me of the claim, the Germans must have it in the genes to be able to make all those horrible things which are told to happen in the holohoax. It contradicts the empirical facts that the Germans have a long tradition of cultivating arts and philosophy, Germany being a “land of poets and thinkers”.
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Some people take the lesson that “it shows how ordinary people are capable of evil”… Hannah Arendt and “banality of evil”.
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exactly dear TIMR, she’s one of the propagators. First they invent an idea, then others jump on and produce lots of garbage based on this invented crap and in an instant they build a pyramid of fake news and then suddenly it starts to live on its own and nobody wants to see the lies anymore it is based on. Does anyone know the story of one “Binjamin Wilkomirski”? In real life a Bruno Dössekker, who invented himself as a Holocaust survivor and even when it came out that he was lying he was defended for spreading the right lie.
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Black Swan is a good book … it has been some years and I was only able to quote it as someone else did so and brought that quote. I don’t have my copy anymore. Speaking of the stock market, he used the analogy of a turkey … it grows and grows and the outlook is always good, right up until the day before Thanksgiving. Here in thr US we traditionally slaughter them for our Thanksgiving.
Hannah Arendt was supposedly on to something with her “banality of evil” but missed something even bigger … the guy was just an actor.
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Well said.. There’s a book “The holocaust industry” (prob limited hangout but what isn’t) that gives cases of admitted frauds, who are supported anyway for being on the “right” side of the narrative.
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https://www.mintpressnews.com/un-panel-details-organ-theft-staged-attacks-white-helmets/253441/
A look into the mechanics of the “fake news,” “fake history” process. Or, perhaps just some pretty sophisticated propaganda from anti-West factions. I have no way of knowing, but interesting, IMO.
The accused strike back: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-eva-bartletts-claims-about-syrian-children
Two giant propaganda machines at work. Or is one telling the truth? This is happening in our time, making our analysis much more likely to produce something of real importance, vs. trying to unravel similar “historical” accounts allegedly that happened hundreds of years ago.
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