In the spirit of my friends and I regularly watching Paranormal State on A&E on Mondays, here is a gooder from YouTube. Some good quality ghost stories, which always send shivers up my spine. Which is why I like them:
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I scored as a Transhumanist: Biotech, but I wish there was more room for “maybe” or “unsure.”
In a small airport office, the agents asked about drugs and prostitutes. It’s all in my book, Horsley said, offering them a promotional flier that quotes English musician Bryan Ferry calling it “a masterpiece of filth.”
“If I had to live my life again,” he told them, “I would take the same drugs, only sooner and more often.”
They asked about his criminal record. Again, in the book: 25 years ago, when he was 20 and walking around London with his hair dyed bright orange, he was arrested and fined 100 British pounds for possession of a gram of amphetamines.
“Describe your relationship with Kate Moss,” they said. Not in the book this time. Horsley said he’d never met the supermodel, who was questioned by police last year over newspaper photographs that appeared to show her snorting cocaine. Silently, he wondered to himself where on earth that question had come from.
He said they made him raise his right hand and “swear on the Bible” that he was telling the truth.
Then Sebastian Alexander Horsley was handed a document telling him he was being refused entry to the United States of America under the provisions of “Section 212 (a) (2) (A) (i) (I) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended.”
He was being run out of America for “moral turpitude.”
(via Hit and Run).
The term ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ (CAM) is relatively new, but the treatments it encompasses are not. Before we had science, all we had to rely on was testimonials and beliefs. And even today, for most people who believe CAM works, belief is enough. But at some level, the public has now recognized that science matters and people are looking for evidence to support those beliefs. Advocates claim that recent research validates CAM therapies. Does it really? Does the evidence show that any CAM therapy actually works better than placebos? R. Barker Bausell asks that question, does a compellingly thorough investigation, and comes up with a resounding ‘NO’ for an answer.
Bausell is the ideal person to ask such a question. He is a research methodologist: he designs and analyzes research studies for a living. Not only that: he was intimately involved with acupuncture research for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). So when he talks about what can go wrong in research and why much of the research on CAM is suspect, he is well worth listening to.
(via Daily Grail).
Though the score is most probably much higher in atheism and science’s favour, I’d like to take this opportunity for all the believers in magic out there to take a look at a recently publicised event in India (link):
On 3 March 2008, in a popular TV show, Sanal Edamaruku, the president of Rationalist International, challenged India’s most ‘powerful’ tantrik (black magician) to demonstrate his powers on him. That was the beginning of an unprecedented experiment. After all his chanting of mantra (magic words) and ceremonies of tantra failed, the tantrik decided to kill Sanal Edamaruku with the ‘ultimate destruction ceremony’ on live TV. Sanal Edamaruku agreed and sat in the altar of the black magic ritual. India TV observed skyrocketing viewership rates.
Definitely worth the read.
Not to say I’ve not had my own peculiar results, but I attribute it more to a level of “reality hacking” I’ve learned over the years via my interest in chaos magic, rather than so-called magick in the (traditional?) sense of the word.
Two interesting reads to follow-up the above with are on Psychology Today, dealing with magic:
On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a God
I had a good talk about this with Erik Davis, the author of TechGnosis. He told me, “In the magical worldview, the world is kind of like a language. If you know the spells or the signs or the symbols you can effect change.” Hard physics has discredited that soft outlook, “but with cyberspace and technology and the Internet it’s a human space, or it’s all a constructed space. And on its most basic level, it’s constructed of language.” Maybe not English, but computer code.
Magical thinking springs up everywhere. Some irrational beliefs (Santa Claus?) are passed on to us. But others we find on our own. Survival requires recognizing patterns-night follows day, berries that color will make you ill. And because missing the obvious often hurts more than seeing the imaginary, our skills at inferring connections are overtuned. No one told Wade Boggs that eating chicken before every single game would help his batting average; he decided that on his own, and no one can argue with his success. We look for patterns because we hate surprises and because we love being in control.
(via A Day in the Life).
Kevin Annett is a former United Church minister in Vancouver, Canada, who was fired without cause in 1995, and then expelled from the same church without due process, after he had unearthed evidence of the theft of native land by church officers, and of the murder of native children at the United Church residential school in Port Alberni, British Columbia, where Kevin ministered.
Since his firing and blacklisting by the United Church, Reverend Annett has worked as an advocate and counsellor in aboriginal healing circles on the west coast. He organized the first international Tribunal into Canadian residential schools in Vancouver in June, 1998, at which a United Nations affiliate, IHRAAM, presided.
Reverend Annett is working with aboriginal and human rights groups around the world in an effort to bring charges of complicity in Genocide against the government of Canada, the Anglican, United and Roman Catholic churches, and the RCMP. He is serving as the secretary of the recently-established Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada, has authored a book about his experiences, “Love and Death in the Valley”, and co-produced the documentary “Unrepentent” about the church’s coverup in the genocide of 50,000 Native Americans.
“John LeKay: When you first arrived at your new parish and were invited to conduct a wedding ceremony at the native reserve; you asked a native man by the name of Danny Gus – why there were no natives showing up for mass on Sunday. He turned around and said “because they killed my friend, he is buried up in the hills behind the church”. What was your initial reaction when you heard this?
Kevin Annett: Disbelief. I wanted proof but didn’t know where to look for it.”
(via Heyoka Magazine)
(Related: the documentary “Unrepentant” via Google video. Hidden From History website. Hidden From History: The Canadian Holocaust)
“Born without legs, Kevin Connolly snaps photos of people staring at him — turning the watchers into the watched. When Kevin Connolly was ten years old his family took him to Disney World, but for some theme park visitors that day, it was Connolly who quickly became the main attraction.
“I remember distinctly being surrounded by Japanese tourists trying to take my photograph without talking to me or asking me,” he says from his apartment in Bozeman, Montana. “My dad was right behind me, and I remember him getting pretty frustrated with the whole process, because it was something that was happening every single day.” Born without legs, Connolly was already used to the stares of strangers — but that moment would help him start to understand that the lens could work in both directions.
On a solo trip to Europe, more than a decade later, he was riding his skateboard down a Vienna street when he felt a man staring at him. Connolly lifted his camera to his hip, pointed it toward the man and without even looking through the viewfinder, clicked off five or six shots. Connolly would repeat that action 32,000 more times during his travels, creating a diverse portfolio of individuals from a broad assortment of countries. He posted some of these images online, under the title “The Rolling Exhibition.”
(via Yahoo News)
“Our capacity for self control may be running on empty.
Every day, we pressure ourselves to control our impulses-to work harder rather than go home early, to avoid sugar, carbohydrates, and transfats; to save instead of spend; and to exercise courtesy rather than snap at the barista who flubbed our order. Meanwhile, we can’t ride the subway, turn on the TV, or open a magazine without finding an ad urging us to self-indulge. Balancing these two competing forces sometimes seems impossible. A new report from two Canadian researchers suggests why: Our capacity for self-control is far shallower than we realize.
“People have a limited amount of self-control, and tasks requiring controlled, willful action quickly deplete this central resource. Exerting self-control on one task impairs performance on subsequent tasks requiring the same resource,” write Michael Inzlicht and Jennifer N. Gutsell in their article in the journal Psychological Science. In their experiment, Inzlicht and Gutsell separated 40 individuals into two groups. In both groups, participants were fitted with EEG monitoring equipment and made to watch a disturbing wildlife documentary.
One group was asked not to display any reaction to the gruesome subject matter; the other group was instructed simply to watch the footage and not proscribed a reaction. Afterwards, both groups completed a rapid-fire color-matching test requiring a controlled response. The test showed that people who had suppressed their reaction to the documentary (measurable via the EEG readout) performed less well on the color-matching test.
According to the authors, the study “suggests a neuroscientifically informed account of how self-control is constrained by previous acts of control [and] that mental fatigue can occur relatively quickly and affect tasks unrelated to the depleting activity.” In other words, exercising control on one task makes it harder to exercise control on the task immediately following.”
(via The Futurist)
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