12-31-05 Conspiracy Theories

There are two things that the internet has made more prolific. The first is porn, and the second is conspiracy theories.

The first speaks for itself. Despite any cultural taboos and/or rhetoric to the contrary, THE MARKET has made it abundantly clear that there're not only enough consumers of porn in our society to make this type of online business wildly successful, there's also an abundance of people willing to supply it. It's all about supply and demand, and our society is certainly demonstrating the viability of this particular market.

The latter item is more about the internet becoming a platform for people to publish on. This is about "free speech", I'd have to say. You can publish what you want, and publishing on the internet is not only easy, it's got a built in distribution system. Of course, there has to be something to draw people in.

A few years ago, I did a search of the web on the word "conspiracy" and found all sorts of entertaining stuff. Today, I thought I'd do that again. I got over 35 million hits on Google, and 53 million hits on Yahoo.

Like more traditional media (newspapers, Radio, and TV), once somebody originates a story, everybody else runs with it. This is especially true of conspiracy theories. The ones that existed prior to the World Wide Web found a new home there. These include the JFK assassination (et al), UFO's, and the Illuminati, among others.

Prior to the WWW, you could read books on these subjects. But until the blossoming of these conspiracy theories on the web, there was very little Radio, TV, or newspaper material being done on those subjects. Today, however, due to the demonstrated viability of using this subject matter for public consumption, this fodder has been exploited by some of the most reputable media businesses.

The History Channel does regular shows on UFO's, and even Bryant Gumbel did a big special on this. The JFK assassination and the conspiracy theories surrounding it have been covered over and over again on TV. The grandfather of all secret society conspiracy theories, the Illuminati, has spawned countless TV and radio shows, as well.

Why is this subject matter so successful as a media product? Because it caters to the concept of "something going on behind the scenes". Anyone who's lived in the world beyond their teens can understand that our interactions with other people grow more and more complex, the larger the group you're involved with is. There develops layers of political activity within any group, and the more people that are connected to the activity, the more layers come into play. It's just a fact of life.

Consequently, the idea that any "official story" might be all there is to it is, frankly, 100% refutable in theory. Anyone can theorize another angle, because we can all easily come to doubt that any "official story" has presented all the facts. We can do this because we know how the political complexities of any large group can exist.

We also know that anyone who has something to hide will do whatever needs to be done in order to keep it hidden. It's fundamental in human nature.

The "hook" with a conspiracy theory is the presentation of any anomalies that the "official story" doesn't clearly explain. When anything that doesn't quite jive with the official story is explained by a different theory, doubt concerning the official story can be brought into the picture. Once doubt about the official story is fostered, other anomalies can be presented to line up with the alternate theory.

This is the method that was used by Woodward and Bernstein in the process of bringing down the Nixon administration.

However, where the Washington Post spent all that time playing the game of adhering as strictly as possible to journalistic ethics in presenting anomaly after anomaly as verifiable news items, one at a time, and refraining from publishing any theory to explain them, most conspiracy theory websites tend to put the cart before the horse. They make the theoretical assumption first, then spend the rest of their time pointing to things and saying, "See? Lookit that! Huh? Huh?"

The market for conspiracy theories caters to those who already have a doubt or two about any official story. They're looking for anomalies in the official story, anyway, so the presence of these millions of websites is a testament to the decreasing lack of trust in our society towards the government.

Lack of trust in the government?

Well, that's where it all tends to center because the overwhelming majority of conspiracy theories are all concerned with the government, or people within the government, conspiring to promote false offical stories regarding the JFK assassination, UFOs, and the existence of secret societies trying to control entire nations and the world. It's easy to make these cases because the "hooks" are easy to find and develop into believable concepts.

The facts, however, are usually difficult to discern. Instead, one has to swim through the arguments with a jaundiced eye. After spending lots of time over the years entertaining myself by perusing this sort of thing, I've yet to come to any conclusions about any of them. They persist in my thoughts, however, as possibilities. Many are plausible, even the most outrageous. But the bottom line is that hard evidence is difficult to find.

12-28-05 EGO theory

I'd like to suggest an alternate theory to Intelligent Design, and call it Effectively Growing Organization, or "EGO" for short. EGO, as opposed to ID, doesn't attempt to explain how life started or why different species came to exist. Instead, it suggests that the basic principle behind life is organization.

The central idea behind EGO is that the physical universe is considered to be composed of space, time, and all the forms of matter that exist, but within this framework life exists in opposition to the physical universe's natural tendency to "run downhill". It's very easy to see this. Where there's no life, things are chaotic, random, or running downhill, so to speak, and obeying the laws of motion. Life interacts in some way, and introduces change, modification, order, or organization of some kind.

For instance, a beaver builds a dam. As long as the beaver continues to use the dam and keep it repaired, it keeps on imposing some level of organization. Once the beaver goes away, the dam then deteriorates over time.
EGO is a very simple theory. It says that life is the ONE THING within this universe that doesn't behave the same as everything else. This is certainly an observable phenomenon. It suggests that calling life a RESULT of the physical universe may not be the way that could lead to an understanding of what life actually is.

Now, the reader may well be wondering if I'm joking around, because I did come up with the name for this theory only because Intelligent Design is referred to lately by its initials which, coincidentally, spell the word Id, which, of course, is the most primitive part of the psychoanalytical tripartite structure of consciousness. Therefore, in keeping with that wordplay, I wanted to come up with something that EGO would stand for...

The fact is, this theory is something I've been improvising for the past ten minutes as I write this. But the basic idea behind it is something I've been thinking about for quite some time. The only reason I've been thinking about it is because of Quantum theory.

http://www.vision.net.au/~apaterson/science/observer_effect.htm

The above link is probably sufficient to explain why Quantum theory would lead me into this whole thing, whether you're a nobel prize-winning physicist or completely unaware of what this branch of science might be about.

The "observer effect" leads one irretrievably toward the question, "What, exactly, is the observer?"

Well, one attribute of "the observer" would be in line with what the EGO theory holds concerning life, that it runs counter to the rest of the physical universe and all of its phenomena.

In Quantum theory, nothing really exists until it's observed. This is quite fantastic! It means that nothing is real, or exists at all until it's observed. Does this mean that anything and everything in the physical universe that WE ON EARTH haven't yet observed only exists because it was previously observed by OTHER life forms somewhere?

Who knows? It's all very incredible to consider that THIS is where science is bringing us lately.

But it IS where science is headed.

So, it might be interesting to see if the EGO theory can be of any use to us in our quest for understanding.

As a general idea, the following differentiations might have some usefulness...
Life organizes while the universe dis-organizes.
Life evolves while the universe de-volves.
Life pushes "up-hill" while the universe pushes "down-hill".
Life initiates actions while the universe is only comprised of reactions.

As an alternate to Intelligent Design theory, EGO theory doesn't really enter into the arena as a contender against the theory of Evolution. Instead, it attempts to ignore the theory of Evolution entirely, while remaining a viable alternative to Intelligent Design. Why? Because EGO theory is based in the same utter lack of scientific grounding, that's why! Also, it addresses the main area of why Intelligent Design arose into the roiling sea of politics, in the first place... the questions of LIFE, itself. When the theory of Evolution is perceived by religious people to assert that life began "by chance", they get upset. And well they should be upset, since asserting that life began on this planet "by chance" at this stage of the game is really just a pipedream of humanists.

Nobody knows how life began on this planet, and until we find that out, asserting any ideas about it in publicly funded classrooms seems a bit premature to me.

I tend to doubt that life began on Earth "by chance", partly because it's become such a dogmatic assumption in various circles. Circles that I certainly feel very comfortable in, otherwise.

But I digress...

In attempting to render down to basics, another idea behind EGO theory is that it would not only apply to life as we think we know it, but also to life in forms that we might not even be able to imagine. For instance, the quality of organizing and growing can be seen in crystals of all kinds. The idea of a life form based in some element other than carbon has been dealt with in science fiction, but not yet observed in the real world. For instance, in the film, "The Andromeda Strain" the alien life form had a crystalline structure. Should we ever find the effects of life that "go against the grain" of otherwise natural processes out there on the other planets, their moons, or elsewhere, it would make more sense to me to be deciding whether it's actually evidence of life on terms other than the dogmatically restrictive "by chance" paradigm.

In other words, EGO theory undercuts to a simpler level of consideration about life. I mean, what's the point of assuming HOW life began when we're failing to differentiate what life IS from what life ISN'T? When we've been failing utterly to notice that life is profoundly and fundamentally opposed to everything else in the universe, as regards its observable behavior, what's the point of continuing to assert that it's a product of something that goes entirely in the opposite direction?

I think it would be more rational to doubt that assertion, at this point.

Such a doubt would arise directly out of repeatable experiments that verify the "observer effect" and anything that this demonstrative, objective scientific evidence might lead us to.

12-27-05 (2) On the Big Bang

Here are some links to sites offering information that doesn't support the Big Bang theory...

http://cosmologystatement.org/

http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Cosmology-Big-Bang-Theory.htm

http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/hydrogen/index.html

http://www.bigbangneverhappened.org/

These are just a few, and I'll admit that there's a lot of reading. But I've been following the mounting dissent amongst scientists regarding the continued viability of the Big Bang theory for over a decade, and these four sites do tend to be fairly well focused on the science involved. The first one, however, gets right to the point.

My sense of the Big Bang theory is that I feel I was indoctrinated to believe it in gradeschool. And I have to admit that the theory was good science back in the 1950's and 1960's, during my "formative years". Today, however, it's beginning to look a little less like science, and a bit more like politics and dogma.

What has always bothered me most about the Big Bang theory is how similar it is to Judeo-Christian dogma. The bible says the heavens were suddenly created, and the scientists say that the universe was suddenly created. Neither side seems to have a problem with this concept of every aspect of our existence being suddenly created.... and out of NOTHING, no less!

Out here in the non-scientific world that I live in, however, I can only garner whatever second-hand information I can from sources that may or may not be credible. Over the past decade or so, I've found the same objections and dissenting views coming up, over and over again, along with mounting evidence from new discoveries that all end up eroding the validitiy of the Big Bang theory more and more, as time goes on. As an admitted tyro in such matters, I nevertheless have to say that the foundations of my somewhat humanist sympathies have been slowly eroding away over the past several years.

I'm beginning to sense that I will probably have to consider the humanist viewpoint to be an increasingly religious one, in that the bases of this viewpoint are becoming more articles of faith than solid science.

12-27-05 Baker, Bruce, Clapton and PBS

After all these years, seeing these guys perform the old Cream songs again on PBS was very exciting for me. Of course, the local PBS station was airing this concert as a draw for pledge week... or is it pledge month? Perhaps it's pledge year.

Consulting my cable guide, I found that it was going to be re-broadcast again, so I set up my recording gear and got the whole two hours into the can. Then I ran it through my editing program to cut out the begging breaks, of which there were three or four. To my utter amazement, the two hours of air time had now been pared down to only one hour and fifteen minutes!

Now, I've never donated money to the local PBS station, despite occasional twinges of considering it during what used to be a once a year pledge drive, and due to their increasing acumen at marketing techniques. But I've never gotten to the point where I made a decision to write them a check. Never. Besides, my wife had been contributing to the local PBS station for years.

It's been my view that PBS, funded by public money for "educational TV" purposes, has been divurging from that original purpose quite a bit lately. The change has been gradual, but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Where programs used to quickly list big contributors to specific programs, they'd just show that list at the beginning of the show. Now they get to run little commercials, as if this is still within the bounds of propriety. They run their little commercials at the beginning, they run their little commercials as interruptions in the middle of the program, and they run their little commercials at the end of the program.

How is this different from what we refer to as "commercial TV"?

Well, judging by the over ONE THIRD air time swallowed up begging for money, along with the running "iinfo-mercial" style for pushing the Cream concert DVD and CD during breaks in the airing of the Cream reunion concert, I'd have to point out that there's absolutely NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL.

I mean, the WHOLE POINT of donating money to the local PBS station was because they DIDN'T HAVE COMMERCIAL BREAKS, fer cryin' out loud!

And the really irksome part of all this for me was the fact that they were offering the DVD for a "donation" price of ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS!

I'm really sorry, PBS, but this kind of thing is really out of my reach. It's not that I'm poor, but paying that kind of money for a DVD is just plain beyond comprehension. If the station ran the whole concert, uninterrupted and without those long info-mercial style breaks, then it might make sense to "support" the station. But now that it's just like all the other commercial stations, what's the point?

Later on, my wife found the two DVD Cream concert set on Amazon.com for $15. It arrived via UPS a couple of days later.

I've watched it several times, and I'm still struck by the performances of these three guys. Jack Bruce looks like Trevor Howard now, but he's still the guy who always knocked my socks off with his singing and bass playing. Ginger Baker looks too old to be playing drums as incredibly as he did in this series of concerts, especially in the song "Toad", where the drum solo was beyond belief! And Eric Clapton? Well, Eric's been in the limelight all these years, and we're all very accustomed to seeing him perform.

A friend of mine was disappointed with the performances, saying that it just wasn't up to the head spinning level that it used to be. But I told him that those old performances and studio pieces ran up the pole of drug-induced complex rhythms and levels beyond the realms of musicianship, and out there onto the branches of "Holy shit, Man! I can't believe they can play that same thing over and over so long! Oh, wow, Man! They're still playing the break! Sheesh! How long can they keep that up???"

...know what I mean? I mean, there were lots of bands around in those days of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll that ran out there during instrumental breaks for long, long periods of time. And the strain was really something! I mean, when they finally came down out of the clouds and actually ended the song, we all stood up and gave them thunderous applause because, really, we were just glad they finally ended the song! We just couldn't have taken it any more!

Now, all these years later, Cream finally got back together and made this thing happen. Of course it's different now. Bruce and Baker have been jazz musicians all along, and Clapton is a blues musician. Now that the technology has caught up to the musicianship, we don't have the distortion of Marshall amplifier stacks being driven beyond the point of no return. Instead we have electronic accessories that recreate whatever level of distortion the musician wants. And in order to get that particular sound, they don't have to risk destroying everyone's eardrums. Most importantly, the guys on the stage don't feel they have to stick needles into their arms and get high on heroin before they start the concert now...

I'm really glad these guys stopped back there, got healthy, and managed to live this long so that we can enjoy what they did this past May at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Now we can know that it wasn't the drugs that gave us this band, it was the incredible talent those three guys had then, and still have now.

12-26-05 (2) On Evolution

Now that the exmus holy day has been dispensed with, I can return to one of the topics that has captured my imagination over the past couple of years, namely, the debate between religious types and non-religious types over the theory of Evolution.

My position on the matter is that I doubt the theory of Evolution is an adequate explanation for the fossil record, but I more strongly doubt that the biblically related explanations of how life (and the universe) came to be are adequate, either. This makes me an agnostic, I suppose... But noticing the lines of dissent (against Evolution) within scientifically oriented circles is an interestingly time consuming activity. Also, noticing the dismissive attitudes of dissent FROM the more or less scientifically oriented circles (in response to the proposition of including the Creation story or Intelligent Design in school curricula) is an almost as interesting activity.

As regards the former, I won't burden this blog with any arguments since there's more than enough information to wade through from a google or yahoo search on the word "evolution". Do your own research if you're really that interested in finding the credible dissent. Suffice to say here that the dissent is voluminous enough to easily find.

My take on the dissenting views is that the theory of Evolution has been chugging along for so long that it has transformed into a cultural dogma, and that this inertial drag has made it difficult for rational people to feel comfortable with the dissenting views at first blush. This phenomenon of simply dismissing the idea that the theory of Evolution could possibly be wrong has quite a large potential for demonstration. One merely has to suggest it might be wrong to witness the phenomenon first hand.

Part of the problem is the dogmatic nature of the concept(s) behind anyone's acceptance of the theory of Evolution. Most people don't actually study the fossil record or spend much time in scholarly pursuits along these lines. Instead, we tend to fall into, essentially, a blind acceptance of the idea because it "fits", or an outright rejection of the idea because it doesn't "fit". As part of one's general world view, the evolutionary concept is, therefore, merely a belief for the overwhelming majority of people who support it. But this view includes a tendency in non-religious types to include a sense that one's view is based in rationality, scientific validity, and so forth. So there's a whole "package" of beliefs that tend to go along with it.

It's a very difficult thing to present any dissent against, because the general acceptance of it isn't really based in science, or any scientifically based work. It is, instead, based upon personal preference and belief. When you assail anyone's beliefs, they tend to react, rather than respond.

Another part of the problem is that within our cultural boundaries, any dissent against the theory of Evolution, or any of the concepts attached to it, is "pegged" for its "meaning". That meaning is quite simple, ie- if you don't support Evolution, then you support a religious view. There's no room for any other meaning at the outset. If one has doubts about the theory of Evolution, THEN one is obviously pushing the Creation story or, more recently, Intelligent Design.

Consequently, any demonstration of the cultural inertia attached to the theory of Evolution will be quite striking, but only if you're prepared to see it and have some clue what you're actually up against.

As regards the latter (the dismissive attitudes), this is something that I had been doing most of my life. Having been brought up in a relatively liberal environment, and having ended up believing that I'm a rational, science oriented type, I've tended to behave toward religious types with a sense of crypto-smugness. Proselytic door-knocking was something that I would tend to make my point of "drawing a line in the sand" and stop being polite about it, however.

Somewhere along the line, it occured to me that one of our most basic cultural dogmas included this thing called "freedom of religion" which, to be honest, I've never been able to work out in my mind. I mean, it's okay in my view that people all believe different things, and this is a passive "don't ask, don't tell" sort of concept. But it's abundantly clear to just about anybody who cares to look that beliefs include many examples of very active concepts. These active concepts include proselytizing, jihad, and marketing, to name a few. So, when it comes to the active concepts of beliefs and belief systems, how does this "freedom of religion" dogma actually work?

Well, I've never been able to figure that out.

The concept of "religious tolerance" enters in at this point. My sense of having always espoused religious tolerance is just fine when we're dealing with passive concepts of beliefs and belief systems. But it's most definitely at odds with various manifestations of the active concepts.

Interestingly enough, this whole line of reasoning began several years ago when a very religious co-worker at a previous workplace of mine did a little "button-pushing" on the subject of evolution. Now, I have to say at the outset that I found this guy very interesting because he was scholarly, a very competent engineer, and erudite. Most importantly, he was apparently very secure in his religious beliefs, since his interactions with me were not the typical proselytizing manifestations of a new convert, looking for some validation or support to keep him going. Instead, he was a friendly "player" and willing debater, far removed from any clever salesmanship. In other words, it was at the level of rational debate based in references to credible sources.

He succeeded in re-characterizing my former sense of holding that Evolution was based in "science", into a willingness to question it. And this was a very revealing interaction for me. In the first place, it strained my sense of being tolerant of other's beliefs, since I began with a "belief in" Evolution, and simply reacted to his not going along with it. This revealed my own behavior in the matter as being more proselytic, defensive, and similar to the new convert who's only looking for support! In fact, I came away from our interactions (over several months) with a renewed sense of my own leanings toward what "scientific" really means, and a growing sense of curiosity about not only the theory of Evolution, but much of our culture's other areas of ostensibly "scientifically" based ideas.

The bottom line on this subject is that I tend to be more interested in the cultural phenomena and behavioral phenomena behind any debates concerning the theory of Evolution. Meanwhile, within the scholarly circles of those scientists who have made geology and evolutionary theory their life's work, it's become clear to me that dissent is mounting over the validity and/or continued viability of the theory.

12-26-05 Why the Blog

I've found over the course of the past few years that my (generally) unwanted dance with the muse has made my e-mails to various people too long... Someone will mention a topic and I'm off on a roll, swimming through a pot of coffee, cranking up on the caffiene, digressing into supportive back stories related to the topic, blundering my way back to the point, and ending up with an e-mail message longer than anybody would want to read. This has happened over and over again.

Posting to a blog has been something I've avoided, however, because it's not a dialogue.

But, in view of the volume of crap that I tend to generate on various subjects, and the simple fact that my fingers find their way to the keyboard of their own accord, anyway (whether I plan on it or not), this blog will serve as a repository for the effluvium that crowds my thoughts whenever any single point analysis pops into view... like an epiphany of such minor proportions that it will make you wish you'd never started reading here.