Sunday notes

Demystifying Science: I stumbled upon what I consider a treasure trove of videos at the site linked to the left and also in the blogroll. The very first one that caught my eye was this one,  A Billion Years is Missing, featured above. I once read the works of Immanuel Velikovsky, who claimed that Earth had once had a near encounter with part of Jupiter that had broken away and eventually became the planet Venus. Poor Immanuel was loudly and publicly criticized and humiliated. He never backed down, although his daughter reported that he was almost suicidal for a time.

Velikovsky brought evidence to the game. He speculated based on that evidence that the events of the Old Testament such as the Great Flood and the plagues of Egypt were actually a response to a near miss by a passing comet. Further, he found similar accounts all over the world, but since it happened so long ago, the accounts are usually in the form of mythical stories, such as Noah and the Ark.

I read everything I could get my hands on, including Earth in Upheaval, which was his attempt to get away from ancient storytelling as evidence and to instead bring forth hard science. Still, the noise was too great to overcome, and these days, including the video above, the name Velikovsky is never mentioned. That is a shame. The world needs nonconformists far more than go along getalongers, who engage in groupthink and ridicule those who fail to ride with them.

My suspicion: Some things are known and kept private, and Immanuel was too honest and forthright to abide by this. He wrote about forbidden knowledge, and so was punished. He  persisted, possessing as he did that rare quality called moral courage.

The whole episode turned me off on the field of geology, which insists that gradualism explains all phenomena. In my mind, geology belongs with virology, astrophysics, trips to the moon, and history itself as science gone awry … bunk.

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Dave Klausler occasionally contacts me with reading projects, the last of which, Hiking the Big Hill, I posted on the blog. Prior to that he emailed me his piece called Goonie Goo Goo, Big Data. I print these things out, as I cannot read for long periods on a computer screen. Goonie when I printed it turned out to be 68 pages long. Good grief, I thought. Does he expect me to drop everything?

The opening scene in Goonie is a terrifying incident that took place in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming a while back. Dave had a personal encounter with a man assigned to investigate the incident.  In Goonie, the opening story is recounted accurately. The couple underwent a horrifying night and were headed back to their vehicle, perhaps never to backpack again. Who knows? Although we can never know these things with certainty, Dave suspected the young couple had an encounter with Sasquatch.

As I read on over the next several days, I came to the conclusion that groupthink is the dominant feature of human beings, perhaps even more prominent than lying. The 68 pages given me are mostly intelligent questions asked by Dave of ChatGPT, perhaps an AI source, or a writer so boring that he can put anyone off thinking hard about anything. Dave asks intelligent questions about real human beings who have had encounters or investigated the Sasquatch phenomenon. ChatGPT, who Dave labels BigData, is highly repetitive and vague, and continually refers to peer review and a highly credentialed and reliable scientific community. Losing his remarkable patience towards the end, Dave adds a preamble to a question:

“Once again, set aside the subjective opinion of mainstream academia and the alleged peer-reviewed scientific community…”

I was grateful for that. I had enough of BigData, and were he walking down a sidewalk I would consider driving my vehicle up over the curb to run him down.

Years ago, when we still lived in Bozeman, my wife and I took some outdoor classes that included a leader named Jim Halfpenny. (Not the musician.) Jim is a PhD, and professional animal tracker. I was very much impressed with him and his work, sometimes called upon to testify in court regarding incidents involving wild animals. At the end of the day, we were invited to his home in Gardiner to chat and look over some things he had for sale. Among the items he had on display was a book about Sasquatch. Like a bull in the proverbial china shop, I mocked the book, thinking Sasquatch to be the stuff of mythology. It does not exist, I was sure.

“Don’t be so sure,” said Jim.

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Finally, a while back I decided not to write about Climate Change anymore, as I had long since learned anything new and was becoming repetitive. Since then, I’ve had a dry spell, as other topics to write about do not usually blow my dress up.  I received an email from Jon LeBon on other matters, but in it he politely questioned my decision, as CC is one of the major psyops and propaganda campaigns of our time.

Thinking  on it some more, I will again embrace the topic, but will keep the posts short and infrequent, hopefully embracing new information. After all, I enjoy it, and don’t at all mind being counter-cultural and controversial. Did I just now not write about Sasquatch? Travis Mateer once suggested to me as he interviewed me that I do not care what people think. That is not quite true. I do care what people think. I just refuse to let that be my governing force.