Recommended Reading 8

This week’s link list is slightly shorter than usual, because my time and energy have been dominated for the past few days by the task of writing three essays for ABC-CLIO’s “Enduring Questions” academic reference database, in the enticingly titled category, “World Religions: Belief, Culture, and Controversy.” But there’s still plenty of worthwhile reading here, covering the categories of apocalyptic fears, the possibility (probability?) of a US military strike on Iran, the Wall Street-White House-Capitol Hill nexus of corruption, the rise of the American prison-industrial complex, the fate of paper books and speculative fiction genres in the era of the e-book, the influence of the I Ching on renowned Western intellectuals and artists, the role of Christianity in helping to launch Western science by shaping its philosophical foundations, a possible paradigm shift that’s in the offing for the theory of evolution, and the absolutely fascinating story of a man whose head injury from a mugging has resulted in his becoming a mathematical genius who sees mental image of mathematical diagrams and is apparently the only person in the world with the ability to draw fractals by hand.

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Apocalypse How
Mike Deri Smith, The Morning News, February 28, 2012

Teaser: Big-budget films tell us earthquakes are bad, volcanic eruptions can be catastrophic, and meteorite strikes — barring the presence of Bruce Willis — may kill us all. Seeking expert advice on how scared we should be.

To recap the expert recommendations: Tsunami and earthquake education sometimes works, or could if done properly; volcano-monitoring systems aren’t always working, asteroid-warning systems need more work, and a universal flu vaccine? Well, we’re working on it. We clearly need experts to be more involved in policy decisions, considering their almost universal and very rational frustration. And natural disasters of all sizes, not just the worst-case scenarios, would benefit from some expert policy planning…[Haraldur Sigurdsson, an emeritus professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island and the Indiana Jones of natural disasters, says,] “I hope that I can help in some way, by increasing our understanding of the way the Earth works, so that we can work with it — and stay out of the way when it becomes dangerous.” He points out that “with increasing population density, there are more people getting in harm’s way when the Earth takes a sneeze.” When the Earth sneezes the next time, society might catch more than a cold: It could reasonably be a flu strain as powerful as the one in Contagion. It could represent the end of life as we know it, as envisioned by Melancholia. The years-long winter envisioned by George R.R. Martin in A Game of Thrones isn’t so far off the mark should a strong enough volcano erupt—and the eruption of an unexpected super-volcano like in Volcano is closer to the truth than many of us are willing to accept.

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US envoy to Israel: US ready to strike Iran
Amy Teibel, Associated Press, May 17, 2012

The U.S. has plans in place to attack Iran if necessary to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, Washington’s envoy to Israel said, days ahead of a crucial round of nuclear talks with Tehran. Dan Shapiro’s message resonated Thursday far beyond the closed forum in which it was made: Iran should not test Washington’s resolve to act on its promise to strike if diplomacy and sanctions fail to pressure Tehran to abandon its disputed nuclear program. Shapiro told the Israel Bar Association the U.S. hopes it will not have to resort to military force. “But that doesn’t mean that option is not fully available. Not just available, but it’s ready,” he said. “The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it’s ready”…President Barack Obama has assured Israel that the U.S. is prepared to take military action if necessary, and it is standard procedure for armies to draw up plans for a broad range of possible scenarios. But Shapiro’s comments were the most explicit sign yet that preparations have been stepped up. In his speech, Shapiro acknowledged the clock is ticking. “We do believe there is time. Some time, not an unlimited amount of time,” Shapiro said. “But at a certain point, we may have to make a judgment that the diplomacy will not work.”

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How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform
Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, May 24, 2012

Teaser: It’s bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it – with a big assist from Congress and the White House.

Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he’d dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. “These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history,” the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. “In history.” This was supposed to be the big one. At 2,300 pages, the new law ostensibly rewrote the rules for Wall Street…Two years later, Dodd-Frank is groaning on its deathbed. The giant reform bill turned out to be like the fish reeled in by Hemingway’s Old Man — no sooner caught than set upon by sharks that strip it to nothing long before it ever reaches the shore…That means all those thousands of hours of debate and fierce negotiation spent hammering out Dodd-Frank two years ago might now go up in smoke in a matter of a few quiet minutes. Of the big-ticket items that were actually passed two years ago, the derivatives reforms have been completely gutted by loopholes, the Volcker Rule has been delayed for two years, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may be thrust under the budgetary control of Congress, which is determined to destroy it. And much of this is taking place with the assent of Democrats, for a very simple reason: because the name of the game isn’t cleaning up Wall Street, it’s cleaning out Wall Street — throwing a “yes” vote at a bank-approved bill to get them to pony up in an election year…That’s the underlying problem with cracking down on Wall Street: Our political-economic system has grown too knotted and unmanageable for democratic rule. While it’s incredibly difficult to get a regulatory reform passed, it’s far easier — and more profitable to politicians — to kill it. Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.

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Louisiana is the world’s prison capital
Cindy Chang, The Times-Picayune (New Orleans), May 13, 2012

Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s. The hidden engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt. Several homegrown private prison companies command a slice of the market. But in a uniquely Louisiana twist, most prison entrepreneurs are rural sheriffs, who hold tremendous sway in remote parishes like Madison, Avoyelles, East Carroll and Concordia. A good portion of Louisiana law enforcement is financed with dollars legally skimmed off the top of prison operations. If the inmate count dips, sheriffs bleed money. Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars. Meanwhile, inmates subsist in bare-bones conditions with few programs to give them a better shot at becoming productive citizens…A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.

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What Will Become of the Paper Book?
Michael Agresta, Slate, May 8, 2012

Teaser: How their design will evolve in the age of the Kindle.

The change has come more slowly to books than it came to music or to business correspondence, but by now it feels inevitable. The digital era is upon us. The Twilights and Freedoms of 2025 will be consumed primarily as e-books…But a literary culture that has defined itself through paper books for centuries will surely feel the loss as they pass away…Luddites can take comfort in the persistence of vinyl records, postcards, and photographic film. The paper book will likewise survive, but its place in the culture will change significantly. As it loses its traditional value as an efficient vessel for text, the paper book’s other qualities — from its role in literary history to its inimitable design possibilities to its potential for physical beauty — will take on more importance…Who will buy these new, well-made paper books? One likely result of the transition to e-books is that paper book culture will move further out of reach for those without disposable income. Debt-ridden college students, underemployed autodidacts, and the everyday mass of bargain-hunters will find better deals on the digital side of the divide. (Netflix for books, anyone?). As paper books become more unusual, some will continue to buy them as collectors’ items, others for the superior sensory experience they afford…Bookshelves will survive in the homes of serious digital-age readers, but their contents will be much more judiciously curated. The next generation of paper books will likely rival the art hanging beside them on the walls for beauty, expense, and “aura” — for better or for worse…[But] the unremarkable, unimaginatively designed rows of paperbacks and late-edition hardcovers that line most of our shelves…are headed for the same place most manufactured objects go eventually — the scrapheap.

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The death of genre
Charlie Stross, Charlie’s Diary, May 5, 2012

[W]ithin another decade, two at most, science fiction as a literary genre category may well die…The [reason for this] is both simple and non-obvious: ebooks…Genre, in the ebook space, is a ball and chain. It stops you reaching new audiences who might like your work. You are an editor, presented with “Rule 34″: do you choose to market it as SF, as crime/police procedural, or as mainstream literary fiction? Wouldn’t it be better to market it as all three, with different cover designs and cover blurbs and marketing pitches and reader recommendations and reviews for each bookstore category?…[M]y point is that our genre sits uneasily within boundaries delineated by the machinery of sales. And that creaking steam-age machinery is currently in the process of being swapped out for some kind of irridescent, gleaming post-modern intrusion from the planet internet. New marketing strategies become possible, indeed, become essential. And the utility of the old signifiers—the rocket ship logo on the spine of the paperback—diminish in the face of the new (tagging, reader recommendations, “if you liked X you’ll love Y” cross-product correlations by sales engines, custom genre-specific cover illustrations, and so on). This is going to drastically affect the quality and content of the internal dialog within our genre

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The I Ching: The Religion That Inspired 7 Great Thinkers
Richard J. Smith, The Huffington Post, April 26, 2012

Here’s a crazy idea. First, you find an ancient Chinese philosophical text — let’s say the most influential book in China’s entire cultural tradition (and also pretty damned important in Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Tibet). Then you put it in the hands of some eighteenth century Jesuit missionaries in China who think it is a corrupted version of the Bible. After that, you go looking for a second group of Jesuits who hate the first group, even though they all call each other “brother,” and convince them to translate the book into Latin. Now Latin, as we all know, is a dead language and of no use to anyone (keep those cards and letters coming!), so you find additional people to translate the book into dozens of other languages, including English. What happens next? Well, suppose a counter-cultural movement develops in Europe and the Americas during the 1960s. Wouldn’t it be great if you had an exotic Asian text that you could embrace in order to show your disdain for conventional middle-class values and frozen TV dinners? And wouldn’t it be especially nice if you could use that text to tell fortunes, write poems, produce novels, compose music, choreograph dances, and create art? Boom! That’s exactly what has happened to the I Ching (also spelled Yijing), or Classic of Changes (also known as the Book of Changes).

[NOTE: The accompanying notes and slideshow offers capsule accounts of how the I Ching influenced Leibniz, Aleister Crowley, Jung, Philip K. Dick, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, and Bob Dylan.]

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Christianity and the rise of western science
Peter Harrison, Australian Broadcasting Corporation,May 8, 2012

Teaser: Those who magnify recent controversies about science and religion, projecting conflict back into historical time, perpetuate a historical myth to which no historian of science would subscribe.

It is often assumed that the relationship between Christianity and science has been a long and troubled one…In spite of this widespread view on the historical relations between science and religion, historians of science have long known that religious factors played a significantly positive role in the emergence and persistence of modern science in the West. Not only were many of the key figures in the rise of science individuals with sincere religious commitments, but the new approaches to nature that they pioneered were underpinned in various ways by religious assumptions. The idea, first proposed in the seventeenth century, that nature was governed by mathematical laws, was directly informed by theological considerations. The move towards offering mechanical explanations in physics also owed much to a particular religious perspective. The adoption of more literal approaches to the interpretation of the bible, usually assumed to have been an impediment to science, also had an important, in indirect, role in these deveolopments, promoting a non-symbolic and utilitarian understanding of the natural world which was conducive to the scientific approach. Finally, religion also provided social sanctions for the pursuit of science, ensuring that it would become a permanent and central feature of the culture of the modern West…Could modern science have arisen outside the theological matrix of Western Christendom? It is difficult to say. What can be said for certain is that it did arise in that environment, and that theological ideas underpinned some of its central assumptions. Those who argue for the incompatibility of science and religion will draw little comfort from history.

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The Evolution Paradigm Shift
Susan Mazur, Counterpunch, May 7, 2012

I called University of Chicago microbiologist James Shapiro, who’s now also blogging on HuffPost about science, to arrange an interview after noticing that we’d both recently been bashed by Darwinist Jerry Coyne in the same column. I reached Shapiro at home. He was engaging, although he described himself as a “reclusive person” — which he says he finds key to serious thinking. The commotion was over Shapiro’s book: Evolution: A View from the 21st Century since Coyne, also a University of Chicago professor, has an evolution text he’d like to keep relevant. I decided to have a look at Shapiro’s book and see exactly why Coyne was agitated…[He told me,] “We have this terrible dilemma in science. We need to be reductionists to get meaningful results and make observations. But when we take the observations and try to understand what they mean, then we have to stop being reductionists and become integrationists to understand how the things we’ve identified and singled out fit into the whole picture. We’ve lost sight of that need for integration with the successes of molecular biology.  But I think we’re getting back to an integrationist view now because people are studying complex problems like cell biology and multicellular development using molecular tools.  It’s becoming clear that there’s an interaction between the parts and the whole which is far more complex and multidirectional than people used to think. I think that that shift from reductionism to integrationism actually needs to happen in the physical sciences as well. They still hang on very much to the idea that you can have ‘a theory of everything.’  I’m rather dubious about that.”

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Real ‘Beautiful Mind’: College Dropout Became Mathematical Genius after Mugging
Neal Karlinsky and Meredith Frost, ABC News, April 27, 2012

Jason Padgett, 41, sees complex mathematical formulas everywhere he looks and turns them into stunning, intricate diagrams he can draw by hand. He’s the only person in the world known to have this incredible skill, which he obtained by sheer accident just a decade ago. “I’m obsessed with numbers, geometry specifically,” Padgett said. “I literally dream about it. There’s not a moment that I can’t see it, and it just doesn’t turn off.” Padgett doesn’t have a PhD, a college degree or even a background in math. His talent was born out of a true medical mystery that scientists around the world are still trying to unravel. Ten years ago, Padgett was only interested in two things: working out and partying. One night he was walking out of a karaoke club in Tacoma when he was brutally attacked by muggers who beat and kicked him in the head repeatedly. Padgett said they were after his $99 leather jacket. “All I saw was a bright flash of light and the next thing I knew I was on my knees on the ground and I thought, ‘I’m gonna get killed,’” he said. At the time, doctors said he had a concussion, but within a day or two, Padgett began to notice something remarkable. This college dropout who couldn’t draw became obsessed with drawing intricate diagrams, but didn’t know what they were. “I see bits and pieces of the Pythagorean theorem everywhere,” he said. “Every single little curve, every single spiral, every tree is part of that equation.” The diagrams he draws are called fractals and Padgett can draw a visual representation of the formula Pi, that infinite number that begins with 3.14…A scan of Padgett’s brain showed damage that was forcing his brain to overcompensate in certain areas that most people don’t have access to, Brogaard explained. The result was Padgett was now an acquired savant, meaning brilliant in a specific area.

[NOTE: The page at ABC News features a video story. I can't embed it here, but this one gets across the same point, and features some of Padgett's astonishing artwork:]

‘The Twilight Zone’ for teachers: ‘Changing of the Guard’

In 1962 The Twilight Zone ran an episode titled “The Changing of the Guard.” It starred Donald Pleasence (in his first American television appearance) as an elderly literature professor who is forced into retirement and decides to kill himself on Christmas Eve when he’s overcome by the sense that his entire life and career have been futile because, as he sees it, nothing he has done or taught has meant anything, since (as he sees it) his teaching, which spans three generations of students, has never had a real, lasting impact on anyone. At the last minute, however, a collective supernatural visitation reveals that he’s wrong about this.

The episode feels — in a very good way — like a hybrid of A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life and Dead Poets Society. The CBS Video Library describes it like this:

Expectant students scurry about apple-cheeked, wishing one and all good will and good cheer as they head home for Christmas. But for the saintly and elderly Professor Ellis Fowler, this holiday will be more than just a temporary respite from Academia. After 51 years of dedication to the boys of the Rock Hill Spring School, Professor Fowler is put out to pasture. Merry Christmas Ellis. Abject and miserable, he recalls the endless parade of students that came and went like apparitions in the night. Gun in hand, he returns to his classroom for one last class…but this time the Professor won’t be teaching…he’ll be learning a valuable lesson in another dimension.

A writer for Yahoo! places the episode at No. 7 on a list of “The 25 Best Twilight Zone Episodes” (published in 2009 in honor of the series’ turning 50 years old), and offers this insightful observation:

Subtly, you can…observe Serling’s respect for the teaching profession, a role he eventually played himself in Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. Professors hold court for many years and while the students change consistently, the lessons and the settings mostly do not. It is not uncommon for them to wonder if anyone has heard their endless lecturing, if anyone looks back favorably on the role their teachers had in a life replete with accomplishment. Clearly Serling did, and in a nod to educators everywhere, he actually uses the word “perspicacious” in a conversation between the headmaster and Professor Fowler. You probably haven’t heard that word anywhere else on television in the last 50 years.

The Rod Serling page at the online Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography (which features Serling because he became a Unitarian with his wife after they got married) offers a window on his motivation for writing this particular script:

Serling enrolled under the G.I. Bill of Rights at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In the late 1940s Antioch was famous for loose social rules and a unique work-study curriculum. Serling was stimulated by the liberal intellectual environment and began to feel “the need to write, a kind of compulsion to get some of my thoughts down.” He was also inspired by the words of Unitarian educator Horace Mann, first president of Antioch College, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Serling would later feature these words and a rendition of Antioch’s Horace Mann statue in the 1962 Twilight Zone episode, “Changing of the Guard.”

I’ve known about the episode for years, but I never watched it until two nights ago, and I must say I was hugely impressed, and also deeply moved, not least because I’m now closing in on the end of my tenth year as a professional educator (my fourth as a college instructor), and Professor Fowler’s despair is something I’ve more than flirted with a time or ten. Serling’s closing narration pings directly on this emotion by describing “Professor Ellis Fowler, teacher, who discovered rather belatedly something of his own value. A very small scholastic lesson, from the campus of the Twilight Zone.” So do the words spoken to Professor Fowler by one of his supernatural visitors: “We wanted you to know that we were grateful, we were forever grateful. That each of us has in turn carried with him something that you gave him. We wanted to thank you, Professor.”

Thanks to the efforts of an intrepid YouTubist, you can view “The Changing of the Guard” in its entirety, split into two parts:

Recommended Reading 7

This week’s collection of recommended articles, essays, blog posts, and (as always) an interesting video or two, covers economic collapse and cultural dystopia; the question of monetary vs. human values; the ubiquity of disinformation in America and the accompanying need for true education of the deeply humanizing sort; the ongoing debate over climate change and its apocalyptic implications (including the apocalyptic implications of one possible means of dealing with it); the possibility of an Armageddon-level solar storm; the ongoing attempt to use the Internet for mass mental and social control, along with advice about protecting your privacy online; the clash between, on the one hand, neurological reductionism and scientism, and, on the other, more expansive ways of understanding science, consciousness, human life, and the universe; the rise of a generation of parentally-dominated college students in America (and its implications for art, psychology, and culture); religious controversies, both current and historical; the practice of eating corpses for medicine; the prospects for artistic achievement in the 21st century; the question of Lovecraft’s paranormal beliefs; Stanley Krippner’s career as a parapsychological researcher respected by both skeptics and believers alike; and a capsule summary of current UFO evidence.

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Americans: Too broke to go bankrupt
Blake Ellis, CNNMoney, May 7, 2012

This year, hundreds of thousands of Americans are expected to be too broke to file for bankruptcy. The average cost to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, the most common form of consumer bankruptcy, is more than $1,500, according to recent research submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research. As a result, anywhere between 200,000 and one million consumers are estimated to be unable to afford that steep cost this year…”For lots of people, bankruptcy has been taken off the table as an option because of the severe fees involved,” said Jialan Wang, co-author of the report…That means many of the Americans who have seen their debt snowball out of control due to events like job loss, foreclosure or a medical emergency during the economic downturn are now left without their last financial lifeline, she said.

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America’s idiot rich
Alex Pareene, Salon, May 7, 2012

Teaser: The 1 percent is complaining louder than ever. There can be no reasoning with people this irrational.

Some unknown but alarming number of ultra-rich Americans are now basically totally delusional and completely divorced from reality. This is now an inescapable fact, confirmed by multiple media accounts of billionaire thought and an entire special issue of the New York Times Magazine. Here’s a brief list of insane things that are apparently common knowledge among the billionaire class: That President Obama and the Democratic Party have treated wealthy finance industry titans maliciously and unfairly. That the fact that they are perversely wealthy and growing richer during a period of mass unemployment and staggering debt is a sign that the economy is functioning correctly. That poor people, and not the finance industry, are responsible for the financial crisis and subsequent recession. That the ultra-wealthy are wealthy because they are smarter and work harder than everybody else, and that they are resented for their success. That the ultra-wealthy in general, and finance industry executives in particular, are the victims of widespread prejudice akin to that faced by ethnic minorities. There can be no reasoning with people this irrational. Any attempt to do so will fail, as Barack Obama, whose main goal is to maintain, not upend, the system that made these people so disgustingly wealthy, is learning.

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What Money Can’t Buy
Tana Wojczuk, Guernica, May 1, 2012

Teaser: Michael Sandel on a society where everything could be up for sale.

Author Michael Sandel’s new book What Money Can’t Buy is troubling in the best sense of the word — it “troubles” the complacency with which Americans have received the rapid encroachment of the market into private life. In the post-Freakonomics world, economics has expanded exponentially, not only into the global market but into areas of life not previously governed by market forces…Sandel’s book provides a framework that challenges readers to see the world differently. This shift is a bit like the moment in the cult classic They Live (see Jonathan Lethem’s book-length criticism of the film) when the hero puts on a pair of bodacious ray-ban sunglasses and suddenly sees billboards advertising sunny vacations in fact read “OBEY.

[NOTE: The rest of the piece is Wojczuk's interview with Sandel, who is a Harvard professor, and who at one point states his thesis in a nutshell: "Economics has increasingly become the science of human behavior in general, and it’s all the more unlikely to think that it can possibly be value-free -- and, in fact, it isn’t. Economics rests on un-argued assumptions that need to be examined."]

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Disinformation on Every Front
Paul Craig Roberts, Information Clearing House, May 5, 2012

[Bear in mind as you read this rambling but worthy screed that the author is, yes, the same Paul Craig Roberts who served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, and is credited as a co-founder of Reaganomics, and is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.]

Some readers have come to the erroneous conclusion that the Matrix consists of Republican Party disinformation, as if there is no disinformation from the left. Others think that propaganda is the business of Obama and the Democrats. In fact, propaganda from the right, the left and the middle are all part of the disinformation fed to Americans…It is interesting that it is only presidents who work to reduce conflict [e.g., Nixon and China, JFK and communism, Reagan and the COld War] who become targets for assassination…[A]mericans are told that education is the answer to unemployment. Get that university degree and live happily every after…“Education is the answer” serves the colleges and universities who want the tuition payments. It serves the companies who make student loans. It helps the offshoring corporations disguise that they are the main cause of unemployment…Americans plugged into the Matrix are programmed to believe that they have correct information provided by a varied and “independent media.” In fact the media is owned by 5 or 6 mega-media companies run by corporate advertising executives and Washington…Across every front Americans are fed lies…But who cares? Back to the Matrix and the “reality show.”

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Democracy and Education: On Andrew Delbanco
Richard Wolin, The Nation, May 2, 2012

[In his new book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco observes that] “It is a pipe dream to imagine that every student can have the sort of experience that our richest colleges, at their best, provide. But it is a nightmare society that affords the chance to learn and grow only to the wealthy, brilliant, or lucky few.” To judge by all the evidence available, American higher education today more closely approximates the dystopian image of the “nightmare society” than it does the egalitarian “pipe dream” that would be more in keeping with the democratic aspirations of our founding…The postwar project of democratic expansion is steadily being reversed, to the point where today, as Delbanco convincingly demonstrates, the college admissions process serves to reinforce the prerogatives of class and economic privilege rather than diminish them…His point is that by subjecting the ends of higher education to a series of extraneous criteria derived from the marketplace, we risk distorting the very purpose and meaning of the college experience: to provide young people with the capacities of critical thought and the requisite material knowledge to transform themselves into mature individuals and engaged, cosmopolitan citizens…Delbanco’s main objective in College is to redeem the meaning and value of a liberal arts education in the face of superordinate cultural trends — the commodification of knowledge, globalization, the communicative distractions of digital technology and social media — that have compromised the existence of the meditative space necessary for robust character formation and the cultivation of individual autonomy.

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Politics Aside, Climate Research Faces Real Uncertainties
Paul Basken, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2012

[T]he truth, often obscured by the fog of politics, is that the scientists are genuinely uncertain about how fast the warming is happening, what and how strong the negative effects will be, and how quickly those problems will begin showing up in your neighborhood. That uncertainty has helped make them vulnerable to critics who have a long list of reasons for doubting virtually any science-based warnings, including the consensus hammered out by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that carbon-dioxide emissions must be reduced…153 years after the British physicist John Tyndall proved that the earth’s atmosphere has a greenhouse effect by showing that water vapor absorbs infrared radiation  — “there’s just a lot we don’t understand” about how the climate is responding to the increase in temperatures being thrust upon it, says Kim M. Cobb, an associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology…Still, a large majority of scientists believe [the IPCC's estimates about the likely extent of global warming by the end of this century] are certain enough to require a move away from fossil fuels…In fact, climate scientists can list several facts on which they’re clear: Increased concentrations of atmospheric carbon produce warming; the polar latitudes and equatorial regions are warming faster than middle latitudes where most people live; and heat waves are intensifying. Regional variations will be significant, and identifying them is another fundamental challenge for climate research.

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The Climate Fixers
Michael Specter, The New Yorker, May 14, 2012

Teaser: Is there a technological solution to global warming?

The heavy industrial activity of the previous hundred years had caused the earth’s climate to warm by roughly three-quarters of a degree Celsius [by 1991], helping to make the twentieth century the hottest in at least a thousand years. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, however, reduced global temperatures by nearly that much in a single year. It also disrupted patterns of precipitation throughout the planet. It is believed to have influenced events as varied as floods along the Mississippi River in 1993 and, later that year, the drought that devastated the African Sahel. Most people considered the eruption a calamity. For geophysical scientists, though, Mt. Pinatubo provided the best model in at least a century to help us understand what might happen if humans attempted to ameliorate global warming by deliberately altering the climate of the earth…For years, even to entertain the possibility of human intervention on such a scale — geoengineering, as the practice is known—has been denounced as hubris…David Keith, a professor of engineering and public policy at Harvard and one of geoengineering’s most thoughtful supporters, [says] “it is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on earth”…There is only one reason to consider deploying a scheme with even a tiny chance of causing such a catastrophe: if the risks of not deploying it were clearly higher.

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Hot enough for you? Warmest May to April ever for U.S
Reuters, May 9, 2012

The contiguous U.S. states posted record warmth from May 2011 through April, and drought conditions spread across more than a third of this area during the first months of 2012, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA.L said on Tuesday…It was the warmest ever May-to-April period in the lower 48 states. It included the second-hottest summer, fourth-warmest winter and the warmest March. Twenty-two states posted record warmth for the period…The U.S. Climate Extremes Index was a record 42 percent for the first four months of the year, more than twice the average value.

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Space weather expert has ominous forecast
Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2012

Teaser: Mike Hapgood, who studies solar events, says the world isn’t prepared for a truly damaging storm. And one could happen soon.

A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn’t the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before — and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet’s electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms. But the world is still not prepared for a truly damaging solar storm, Hapgood argues in a recent commentary published in the journal Nature…”A serious concern would be whole regions losing electrical power for some significant time. Here in the U.K., the official assessment is that we could lose one or two regions where the power might be out for several months.”

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How to Muddy Your Tracks on the Internet
Kate Murphy, The New York Times, May 2, 2012

[NOTE: More than just recommended reading, this one is necessary reading. Along with a host of other practical tips, it mentions two free services I already switched to a few months ago: Zoho mail (to replace Google mail) and the DuckDuckGo search engine (to replace Google).]

You know that dream where you suddenly realize you’re stark naked? You’re living it whenever you open your browser. There are no secrets online. That emotional e-mail you sent to your ex, the illness you searched for in a fit of hypochondria, those hours spent watching kitten videos (you can take that as a euphemism if the kitten fits) — can all be gathered to create a defining profile of you. Your information can then be stored, analyzed, indexed and sold as a commodity to data brokers who in turn might sell it to advertisers, employers, health insurers or credit rating agencies. And while it’s probably impossible to cloak your online activities fully, you can take steps to do the technological equivalent of throwing on a pair of boxers and a T-shirt. Some of these measures are quite easy and many are free. Of course, the more effort and money you expend, the more concealed you are. The trick is to find the right balance between cost, convenience and privacy.

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The Internet’s Battle for Our Digital Souls
Dominic Basulto, Big Think, May 10, 2012

Harvard neuroscience researchers have just confirmed what many of us have suspected all along: social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest are “brain candy” for Internet users. Every status update, every tweet, every pin is a micro-jolt delivered squarely to the pleasure centers of our brains. We get approximately the same type of pleasure from talking about ourselves on social media as we do from having sex. As Facebook bulks up to take on new challengers after its much-anticipated IPO next week, is it possible that the battle for future dominance on the Internet will actually take place inside our heads? Emotions, visualizations and new ways to stimulate our senses suddenly matter more than ever on the Internet as companies figure out how to turn us all into Pavlovian subjects lusting after the next viral meme. Getting the neuroscience right, quite simply, is the key to future billion-dollar valuations…What’s alternately terrifying and inspiring is how all this thinking about emotions, visuals and sensory stimulation is starting to flow through to the actual strategies of leading Internet competitors… Companies are looking for ways to get inside our heads, to tinker with the very neurochemical transmitters that make us human.

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The brain — it makes you think. Doesn’t it?
David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis, The Observer, April 28, 2012

Teaser: Are we governed by unconscious processes? Neuroscience believes so — but isn’t the human condition more complicated than that? Two experts offer different views.

DAVID EAGLEMAN: We have discovered that the large majority of the brain’s activity takes place at this low level: the conscious part — the “me” that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is only a tiny bit of the operations…[P]eople are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection. To know ourselves increasingly requires careful studies of the neural substrate of which we are composed.

RAYMOND TALLIS: It does not follow [from the truth that our brains are a necessary component of consciousness] that our brains are pretty well the whole story of us, nor that the best way to understand ourselves is to stare at “the neural substrate of which we are composed”. This is because we are not stand-alone brains. We are part of community of minds, a human world, that is remote in many respects from what can be observed in brains. Even if that community ultimately originated from brains, this was the work of trillions of brains over hundreds of thousands of years: individual, present-day brains are merely the entrance ticket to the drama of social life, not the drama itself. Trying to understand the community of minds in which we participate by imaging neural tissue is like trying to hear the whispering of woods by applying a stethoscope to an acorn.

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The Science Delusion
Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, The Huffington Post, January 1, 2012

[S]cience is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. The sciences would be better off without them: freer, more interesting, and more fun. The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out, but the fundamental questions are settled, in principle. Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads. These beliefs are powerful not because most scientists think about them critically, but because they don’t. The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith.

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The Primacy of Consciousness (video)

Peter Russell looks at how he study of consciousness is changing the way science looks at the world. Trailer for the Science and Non-Duality Conference, 2010. One thing science knows is that our experience is a construct. Sensory information is processed by the brain giving raise to our own experience. This construct appear to have shape color and solidity. What is the world out there actually like? Physics shows that when we look at matter it is mostly empty space. We therefore observe this nothingness, and it is our mind that gives it the appearance of solidity — which is the conclusion reached by mystics through the ages. Maybe it is not a nonduality of matter but a nonduality of consciousness we should explore. The new hard question is not how the brain gives rise to consciousness but: how do our minds take on all the different forms that we experience as reality? The nondual perspective to this question is that all is one, that there is no difference between form and emptiness, mind and matter. Could this nondual perspective heal the split between science and spirituality?

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Don’t Pick Up (or The Case for Breaking Up with Your Parents)
Terry Castle, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2012

Teaser: Why kids need to separate from their parents.

This is the play-date generation. There was a time when children came home from school and just played randomly with their friends. Or hung around and got bored, and eventually that would lead you on to something. Kids don’t get to do that now. Busy parents book them into things constantly — violin lessons, ballet lessons, swimming teams. The kids get the idea that someone will always be structuring their time for them…Parental engagement even in the lives of college-age children has expanded in ways that would have seemed bizarre in the recent past. (Some colleges have actually created a “dean of parents” position — whether identified as such or not—to deal with them.) The “helicopter parents” who hover over nearly every choice or action of their offspring have given way to “snowplow parents” who determinedly clear a path for their child and shove aside any obstacle they perceive in the way…The questions Goya raises remain awful and unremitting, more than 200 years later. Is the rule of life eat or be eaten, even if what you consume is your own child? (One of the most terrible things about “Saturn Devouring His Son” is surely the fact that the headless, half-eaten “child” has the proportions not of a newborn infant, but of an adult human being.) Should we resist our creator’s authority? When and how and why? Or should we let ourselves be murdered in his name? When and how and why? Such questions lie at the heart of great literature too. What the early novel dramatizes, it seems to me, is nothing less than a radical transformation in human consciousness — the formation of a new idea. For better or worse, the ferocious, liberating notion embedded in the early novel is that parents are there to be fooled and defied (especially in matters of love, sex, and erotic fulfillment); that even the most venerated traditions exist to be broken with; that creative power is rightly vested in the individual rather than groups, in the young rather than the old; that thought is free. The assertion of individual rights ineluctably begins, symbolically and every other way, with the primal rebellion of the child against parent. So where are we today? Are we in the midst of some countertransformation? A rolling back of the Enlightenment parent-child story? Are we returning to an older model of belief — to a more authoritarian and “elder centric” world?…[I]t is indeed the self-conscious abrogation of one’s inheritance, the “making strange” of received ideas, the cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one’s parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual and emotional freedom.

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Family Battle Offers Look inside Lavish TV Ministry
Erik Eckholm, The New York Times, May 4, 2012

[NOTE: Thank Jaysus, and thank him loudly, that this is finally happening. TBN has been a cancerous mole on a festering boil on the ass-end of American television's lunatic fundamentalist Protestant fringe for far too long.]

For 39 years, the Trinity Broadcasting Network has urged viewers to give generously and reap the Lord’s bounty in return. For 39 years, the Trinity Broadcasting Network has urged viewers to give generously and reap the Lord’s bounty in return…Now, after an upheaval with Shakespearean echoes, one son in this first family of televangelism has ousted the other to become the heir apparent. A granddaughter, who was in charge of TBN’s finances, has gone public with the most detailed allegations of financial improprieties yet, which TBN has denied, saying its practices were audited and legal…The lavish perquisites, corroborated by two other former TBN employees, include additional, often-vacant homes in Texas and on the former Conway Twitty estate in Tennessee, corporate jets valued at $8 million and $49 million each and thousand-dollar dinners with fine wines, paid with tax-exempt money…The lavish perquisites, corroborated by two other former TBN employees, include additional, often-vacant homes in Texas and on the former Conway Twitty estate in Tennessee, corporate jets valued at $8 million and $49 million each and thousand-dollar dinners with fine wines, paid with tax-exempt money…On the air, the Crouches combine uplifting talk with encouragement to give to the Lord, and so be repaid. This “prosperity gospel” is shared by several televangelists who appear on TBN. But many conventional Christian leaders regard it as a sham.

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America’s True History of Religious Tolerance
Kenneth C. Davis, Smithsonian magazine, October 2010

Teaser: The idea that the United States has always been a bastion of religious freedom is reassuring—and utterly at odds with the historical record.

In the storybook version most of us learned in school, the Pilgrims came to America aboard the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in 1620. The Puritans soon followed, for the same reason. Ever since these religious dissidents arrived at their shining “city upon a hill,” as their governor John Winthrop called it, millions from around the world have done the same, coming to an America where they found a welcome melting pot in which everyone was free to practice his or her own faith. The problem is that this tidy narrative is an American myth. The real story of religion in America’s past is an often awkward, frequently embarrassing and occasionally bloody tale that most civics books and high-school texts either paper over or shunt to the side…From the earliest arrival of Europeans on America’s shores, religion has often been a cudgel, used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the “heretic” and the “unbeliever” — including the “heathen” natives already here…Even as late as 1960, Catholic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy felt compelled to make a major speech declaring that his loyalty was to America, not the pope. (And as recently as the 2008 Republican primary campaign, Mormon candidate Mitt Romney felt compelled to address the suspicions still directed toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)…America can still be, as Madison perceived the nation in 1785, “an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion.” But recognizing that deep religious discord has been part of America’s social DNA is a healthy and necessary step.

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The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine
Maria Dolan, Smithsonian.com, May 7, 2012

Teaser: The question was not “Should you eat human flesh?” says one historian, but, “What sort of flesh should you eat?”

Not long ago, Europeans were cannibals. [University of New England in Australia English lecturer Louise] Noble’s new book, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, and another by Richard Sugg of England’s University of Durham, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, reveal that for several hundred years, peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty, priests and scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy. There were few vocal opponents of the practice, even though cannibalism in the newly explored Americas was reviled as a mark of savagery. Mummies were stolen from Egyptian tombs, and skulls were taken from Irish burial sites. Gravediggers robbed and sold body parts…Beth A. Conklin, a cultural and medical anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who has studied and written about cannibalism in the Americas…finds a distinct difference between European corpse medicine and the New World cannibalism she has studied. “The one thing that we know is that almost all non-Western cannibal practice is deeply social in the sense that the relationship between the eater and the one who is eaten matters,” says Conklin. “In the European process, this was largely erased and made irrelevant. Human beings were reduced to simple biological matter equivalent to any other kind of commodity medicine.”

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Out of the wilderness
Charles Murray, The New Criterion, May 2012

Teaser: On major artistic accomplishments.

Given what we know about the conditions that led to great accomplishment in the past, what are the prospects for great accomplishment in the arts as we move through the twenty-first century?…[Due to unprecedented social and cultural factors in America, America now shares "The Europe Syndrome,"] a conception of humanity that is devoid of any element of the divine or even specialness. Humans are not intrinsically better or more important than other life forms, including trees. The Europe Syndrome sees human beings as collections of chemicals that are activated and, after a period of time, deactivated. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible. I submit that this way of looking at life is fundamentally incompatible with a stream of major accomplishment in the arts…Religiosity is indispensable to a major stream of artistic accomplishment. [I mean belief systems and philosophies that] articulate a human place in the cosmos, lay out understandings of the ends toward which human life aims, and set standards for seeking those ends…A secular version of this framework exists, and forms a central strand in the Western tradition: the Aristotelian conception of human happiness and its intimate link with unceasing effort to realize the best that humans have within them…Whether it happens in a theological or Aristotelian sense, I believe that religiosity has to suffuse American high culture once again if there is to be a renaissance of great art…The elites who shape the milieu for America’s high culture have managed to avoid thinking about those fundamental questions for a century now. Sooner or later, they’ll find it too hard.

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H.P. Lovecraft
Daniel Harms, Fortean Times, June 2004

Teaser: Was the most influential horror writer of the 20th century a believer in the paranormal? Daniel Harms examines the evidence.

Given the power of his vision, many have speculated on just how much Lovecraft knew about the occult. Some occultists hail him as the prophet of a new Dark Age, claiming that his fiction bears genuine traces of ancient knowledge and re-emerging archetypes from the depths of our collective unconscious. Yet, all too often, their conclusions are based on guesswork, rather than the evidence of his own writing. Fortunately for us, he had perhaps one of the best-documented lives in literary history, writing approximately 100,000 letters over his 46 years. Through these letters, and other newly discovered sources, a glimpse into the reality of Lovecraft’s occult lore is finally possible.

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The Psychic World of Stanley Krippner: A quest to document ESP
Joe Eskenazi, SF Weekly, April 25, 2012

For the better part of the past 40 years, Krippner, 79, has been a psychology professor at San Francisco’s Saybrook University, a small graduate school near Jackson Square established in 1971 by the founders of psychology’s humanistic movement. He has penned close to 1,000 papers on subjects as far-reaching as childhood creativity, combating soldiers’ post-traumatic stress disorder, and worldwide shamanistic rituals. He has won more laurels from more organizations than he can keep track of, including several lifetime achievement awards from the American Psychological Association — the world’s largest organization of psychologists and the definer of mainstream thought in the field. And yet, among Krippner’s cavalcade of papers are the following eye-openers: “LSD and Parapsychological Experiences,” “The Paranormal Dream and Man’s Pliable Future,” and “An Experiment in Dream Telepathy with the Grateful Dead”…”Stan belongs on the Mount Rushmore of parapsychology,” says fellow ESP researcher Charles Tart. James “The Amazing” Randi, perhaps the world’s most prominent skeptic, also offers Krippner his benediction: “There are so few things in this field you can depend on, and there are so many people who are prejudiced and biased. But I can depend on Stan. And I don’t think he’s biased at all”…There are mystic healers perched on jungle mountaintops and tweed-suited aristocrats of academia perched within ivory towers. There are strident “believers” who equate a refusal to accept ESP as established truth with scientific bigotry and dubious scholars who insist the tenets of parapscyhology would undermine the laws of physics that gird our universe. And Krippner is the hub that connects them all. Like the shamans he studies, he moves effortlessly between any number of worlds.

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New Outer Limits: “Stream of Consciousness”

If you, like me, are feeling more and more haunted in our information-glutted age of universal online connectedness by T.S. Eliot’s famous lines “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” then maybe you’ll find this 1997 episode from Season 3 of The New Outer Limits to be as compelling as I do. Written by TV writer and producer David Shore (who later created House), “Stream of Consciousness” is a brilliantly conceived and effectively executed dystopian science fictional meditation on the clash between the computer’s “craving” for pure information and the human values and realities of the people who, if we’re not careful, may allow ourselves to become enslaved as instruments for the furtherance of this inhuman imperative.

Here’s the official description, followed by the full episode. If you watch it, notice that at one or two points the dialogue seems to indicate that Shore wrote the episode with Eliot’s words explicitly in mind.

Due to a brain injury, Ryan Unger cannot enjoy the benefits of a neural implant that allows other people to tap into The Stream — a direct connection into all human knowledge. He tries, unsuccessfully, to keep up with everyone else by using a long-forgotten skill: reading books. When the Stream develops a virus causing people to die, Ryan, being the only one that is immune, must use the knowledge he has gained from books to save the world.

Opening narration: We quantify our world in order to learn. We break it down into facts, numbers, information. But how far dare we go before we destroy its mystery?

Closing narration: We make tools to extend our abilities, to further our reach, and fulfill our aspirations. But we must never let them define us. For if there is no difference between tool and maker, then who will be left to build the world?

A Lovecraftian tragedy? ‘Prometheus’ may have finally killed del Toro’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’

The sad news is currently sweeping through the fantasy/SF/horror community and the movie-oriented corridors of the Interwebs: Guillermo del Toro has publicly announced that his long-anticipated adaptation of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is really and truly dead. What’s more, the (unintentional) culprit is Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Prometheus.

Say what? I wrote a recent column for SF Signal about the thematic links between Prometheus and HPL’s ATMOM, but I never expected to hear that del Toro would take the new film as a cue to abandon ship with his own project. So now I’ve written another column to process this information:

A couple of weeks ago, I used this space to speculate about the possibility that director Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Prometheus may prove to be a kind of heady hybridizing of 2001: A Space Odyssey with Lovecraftian horror. Now comes the news that the Lovecraftian elements of Prometheus may be so close to certain key aspects of Guillermo del Toro’s long-planned and long-anticipated adaptation of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness that they may have killed the project. And this comes straight from the mouth, or rather the keyboard, of the man himself.

…So now we are, I suppose, left with the hope that Prometheus will deliver these cosmic horrific philosophical-emotional goods…But this doesn’t soften the blow of losing del Toro’s take on Lovecraft’s novel, especially since, as The New Yorker‘s Zelewski reported, “Del Toro had hoped that a greenlight for ‘Madness’ would mark a new golden age for horror films” and had been planning to use the project as a cinematic channel for an authentically Lovecraftian sense of cosmic dread: “Del Toro loves the story in part because Lovecraft combines terror — the panicked effort to escape the creatures — with metaphysical horror: ‘The book essentially says how scary it is to realize that we are a cosmic joke.’”

Here’s the full piece: “Guillermo del Toro Says ‘Prometheus’ Has Effectively Killed ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ “

Ultimate audition: One man plays every character in the history and future of science fiction

Thanks to an emailed link from my friend Don Webb (the Austin-based horror writer, writing teacher, and former High Priest of the Temple of Set), I kicked off my day with the funniest video I’ve seen since Funny or Die’s “Wax On, F*ck Off with Ralph Macchio.” I literally almost did the proverbial coffee spit-take all over my Dell laptop.

The video shows one Jacob Fleischer, who describes himself as “a huge science fiction fan” and “not an actor — professionally,” as he auditions, in just under three minutes, for “every character from every science fiction TV show or movie that has ever been made, or ever will be made.” In the accompanying text description at YouTube, he announces, “I am available to star in any upcoming science fiction blockbusters.”

If I were a producer, I’d hire him right now.

Awesome new NASA video: “The Pursuit of Light”

I’m fairly entranced by this just-released video, and I daresay you will be, too.

Here’s a description of it, apparently issued by NASA themselves (although I’m unable to source it):

NASA dreams big science. The Space Shuttles may be gathering dust, but we’re not staying on Earth! In this awesome new short, NASA presents the Earth, the planets, the Sun, and the endless universe beyond. Come for the cool, stay for the music, take away a sense of wonder to share. It’s six minutes from Earth to forever, and you can see it here!

Maria Popova of Brain Pickings offers an on-target commentary:

NASA may have given us decades of cosmic awe, but the agency’s future and thus the future of space exploration are hanging by a thread. Neil deGrasse Tyson has argued that the only way to get NASA back on track is to get those to whom the president is accountable — the electorate, “we the people” — excited about space exploration again, and Pursuit of Light, a beautiful short film from NASA with original music by Moby, seeks to do exactly that. (“Pursuit of Light: NASA and Moby Capture the Magic of the Cosmos“)

Note that the (dazzling, beautiful, hypnotic) musical accompaniment isn’t just by Moby. The opening track is by the amazing Jami Sieber.