SPRING-CLEANING TIME
Those Nuremberg Meme Funnellers have a
lot to answer for –
There are not only my own memes needing scrutiny, but a
general vogue of meme reviews appears to be happening. Here is a more or less random selection that
recently gave me rise to reappraise some earlier adopted views, and some views
I see being scrutinised by others with suggestions for consideration, or which
also caused me to take note of what’s going on.
1. I
have adopted the concepts of Clean Energy
and Sustainability as my main areas
of study and would, therefore, like to begin with these connected selection of memes
as first in this listing. I have already
stated bluntly that I regard the fable of man-made global warming as the
biggest political and intellectual fraud ever, giving my reasons at http://tinyurl.com/naexuho.
1.1. Considering
Clean Energy it became apparent early
on that (similarly with Sustainability)
the energy under consideration is not only that measured in physical terms –
e.g. energy work = quantity of heat, measured in joule (J), or more familiarly
in kilowatt-hours (kWh – the units in which our energy bills are invoiced,
where 1 kWh = 3 600 000 or 3.6x10^6 joules), but also needs
consideration in terms of ‘social energy’
measured economically in terms of money
– say, US dollars, or in political clout through elected or usurped political
offices.
1.2. As
I had the privilege of meeting President Dwight D Eisenhower in the Oval Office
in July 1953 [as part of a small group of American Field Service sponsored
exchange students] he comes first to mind when US Presidents are
mentioned. Much so when quoting his Farewell
Address of 17 January 1961, quoted in http://tinyurl.com/pddpshy,
part of which bears repeating here: Two
warnings struck a chord:
" ..... threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. Of these, I mention two only.....
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment..... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. ...We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity". Full text at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwightdeisenhowerfarewell.html
" ..... threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. Of these, I mention two only.....
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment..... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. ...We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity". Full text at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwightdeisenhowerfarewell.html
In similar terms, former German Chancellor
Helmut Schmidt berated the Max Planck Gesellschaft with his lecture The
Responsibility of Research in the 21st Century, related at. http://tinyurl.com/p7p5tp6
1.3. The
last two items now appear inadequate when related also to ‘social’ energy (political clout and/or money power). President Eisenhower in his farewell address
could rightly blame the ‘military industrial complex’ for distorting science research
and teaching, but we now have President Obama as Chief Lysenkoist of the
biggest political and intellectual fraud ever – i.e. the UN/IMF/IPCC fairy-tale
of man-made global warming (now also declared through the EPA as virtual state
religion). And there is surprise that not all of the rest of the world no longer buys that dead horse trade? New Scientist reports in its 28 March 2015
issue under the heading Secret Science (p.17) “…The Secret Science
Reform Act…would prevent the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] from issuing
regulations of information that has not been made public – ‘secret science’…The
bill will need President Obama’s approval, though. His office said earlier this month that he
would be advised to veto it because the bill could ‘impede EPA’s reliance on
the best available science.’ “ And now another head of state – Pope Francis of
the Vatican – threatens to chime in along
similar Lysenkoist lines. Political
clout powered Nuremberg Meme Funnels in action, methinks.
1.4.
Not to forget that other ‘social energy’ which powers lysenkoist Nuremberg Meme Funnels – money. Substantial reference to such sources has
already been mentioned in http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/west-is-facing-new-severe-recession.html
. More recent estimates are staggering:
“The Small Business Administration estimates that compliance with such
regulations costs the U.S. economy more than $1.75 trillion per year — about 12%-14% of GDP, and half of the
$3.456 trillion Washington is currently spending. The Competitive Enterprise Institute believes the annual
cost is closer to $1.8 trillion when an estimated $55.4 billion regulatory
administration and policing budget is included. CEI further observes that those
regulation costs exceed 2008 corporate pretax profits of $1.436 trillion; tower
over estimated individual income taxes of $936 billion by 87%; and reveal a
federal government whose share of the entire economy reaches 35.5% when
combined with federal 2010 spending outlays.”
And that’s just the US – never mind the rest of the world wasting
similar amounts of money. Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/08/23/the-alarming-cost-of-climate-change-hysteria/
, or http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/07/on-global-warming-follow-the-money.php
or http://www.newsmax.com/Finance/MKTNews/Global-Warming-climate-change/2014/11/17/id/607827/
1.5.
Lysenkoism, Climate Models and Gleichschaltung
are referred to at the end of http://tinyurl.com/p9brr9e
2.
As it happens, the same issue of the New
Scientist already mentioned [28 March 2015, p.5] shouts in its top leader under
the headline “Thank god for civilisation – The idea that religion led to
modernity is gaining strength”: “About 10,000 years ago, our ancestors began
the greatest transformation in human history, abandoning the nomadic lifestyle
that had long served them well in favour of permanent villages… In recent years
this model has been challenged by archaeological discoveries. The most
important is Göbekli Tepe in Turkey: a cluster of 11,000-year-old buildings
with spectacular statues and other monumental architecture… a ‘cathedral on a
hill’, as one [archaeologist] put it. Yet the people who built them were
nomads, not farmers. So the radical suggestion now is that it was not
agriculture that drove the revolution, but religion… Now comes news that another
ancient civilisation – the Maya – may also have had spiritual roots… Some
secularists dislike the idea that spiritual needs drove the rise of
civilisation. They fret that it will reinforce or restore religion’s central
place in society. But just because spirituality may have led to civilisation,
it doesn’t follow that it should lead it now. If religion did have an early
founding role, we must acknowledge this, learn from it – and move on.”
2.1.
‘Learning from it – and moving on’, i.e.
grandiose reviews of ‘god memes’ and their multifarious religions which
sprouted from them, is in vogue on many fronts (though with many more in need
of similar Learning). In http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/brainology-101-midwives-hold-thenewborn.html
I already cited Sir Karl Popper’s account of god-meme ordained tribal genocide (Exodus 32:26-28). A long
distant past – best forgotten? No way –
thanks to Karlheinz Deschner’s 10-volume “Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums”
[The Criminal History of Christendom], Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei
Hamburg, 8. Auflage [eighth edition] 2013 – 1014 (incl the additional Index
volume). [in need of translation];
2.2.
Deschner’s English book GOD AND THE
FASCISTS has already been referred to in the bibliography of the link in 2.1.
above.
3.
Some quotations from the introduction to Zen
and Zen Classics by R.H. Blyth, The Hokuseido Press, Tokyo, 1960 appear
apposite not only in relation to Buddhism but to religions generally; short
memes without comment for consideration:
3.1.
“What was, is, and always will be wrong with
Buddhism is the –ism. A system of doctrine, rules of morality, and above all
the Sangha [order of monks] itself means religious mass suicide. The great mistake of Christ was to found a
Church, if indeed he did so." [he didn't - cf. Karlheinz Deschner: DER GEFÄLSCHTE GLAUBE (THE COUNTERFEIT FAITH), Knesebeck, Munich, 2004]
3.2.
“Asceticism,
found in every religion, is seen too often in people who were pretty bare and
empty from the beginning. The desire to be nothing is particularly common among
those who are already practically nothing.”
3.3.
“Christ
and Buddha were fanatical, pettifogging, women-hating, fig-tree destroying people.”
3.4.
“Zen
[or any form religion, for that matter] has not yet taught us how to be fathers
and mothers and citizens.”
4. I
have already referred to various cries for reform of Islam in the link already
referred to, be it Egyptian President Al-Sisi at Al-Azhar, or as summed up by Aayan Hirsi Ali: “We
have to acknowledge that today’s Islamists are driven by a political ideology,
an ideology embedded in the foundational texts of Islam. We can no longer
pretend that it is possible to divorce actions from the ideals that inspire
them.” e.g:
4.6. And here is Aayan Hirsi Ali’s new book: Harper Collins Publishers, New
York.
First Edition printed in the UK, 2015
5. Now
that the AGW fraud and its Lysenkoists, Gleichschaltung-machinery and finance are
in the open for all who care to look, we are – like China, India and other
countries with similar energy shortfalls – free to burn fossil fuels where economically
opportune. But Clean Air Acts and their
enforcement remain conditiones sine qua
non, of course, i.e. SOXs, NOXs, OBNOXs (everything else obnoxious) and
above all particulates need to be kept out of smokestacks or other discharges and made safe.
6. In regard to more CO2 reaching the atmosphere,
that can only be good to help plants to grow more vigorously or where they
otherwise wouldn’t. In essence – only
CO2 in the atmosphere fosters active regrowth not only of trees, but of all
Flora in order to produce enough oxygen on which we, and the whole of Fauna
depend.
6.1. To
wit, Vaclav Smil in his Energy at the
Crossroads: Global Perspecitves and Uncertainties [MIT Press, 2003]
provides this comment on CO2 :
“The
fundamental reason why carbon dioxide abundance in the atmosphere is critically
important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing
in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within
a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly
stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would not be able to grow.”
7. To
stay with Vaclav Smil, my often quoted TYGER reads provider, e.g. in http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/tyger-tygers.html
I offer two of his comments for consideration:
7.1. “Russia, too, is part of my Europe.
Arguments about Russia’s place in (or outside of) Europe have been going on for
centuries… I have never understood the Western reluctance or the Russian
hesitancy to place the country unequivocally in Europe… its history, music,
literature, engineering, and science make it quintessentially European.” p.93
7.2. “Russia has another strength in its
intellectual capacity. The country has always had many highly creative scientists
and engineers, whose fundamental contributions are generally unknown to the
Western public. How many people watching a scanner toting up their groceries know
that Russian physicists, together with their US colleagues, pioneered masers
and lasers. (Nobel prices in physics were awarded to Nikolai Gennadievich Basov
and Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov in 1964 and to Zhores Ivanovich Alferov in
2000.) How many people seeing the images of the US Air Force stealth planes
know that this class of aircraft began with Piotr Iakovlevich Ufimtse’s (1962)
equations for predicting the reflections of electromagnetic waves from surfaces?”
8. About
half-way through working on this blog post I needed some light relief from
Nuremberg-Meme-Funnel-stresses. What better than reading some A C Clarke or
Isaac Asimov (whose robotics are becoming topical again, too) SciFi? As it happens I picked Arthur C Clarke’s THE
SONGS OF DISTANT EARTH [Grafton Books, London, 1987] and not read again since
buying it that year. Looking at the
back-cover blurb, the note that A C Clarke took about twenty years to write
this novel – “a blend of sound scientific
speculation…” choosing it for a re-read seemed a fitting diversion:
8.1. And
so it turned out to be – except that far from being a diversion from Meme-Funnel immersion, I think it is probably the best overview of the importance of
meme cleansing – and first published in 1986 (nigh on thirty years ago) – and then
after a twenty-year gestation period! WOW!
8.2. Some quotes from this 230-page book may suffice to entice you to get hold of
this gem:
8.2.1. “ ‘I
think that’s the way we run Thalassa…’ ‘But you have been lucky; you’ve had no
real crisis for seven hundred years! Didn’t one of your own people once say –
Thalassa has no history, only statistics?’ ‘Oh, that’s not true! What about
Mount Krakan?’ ‘That was a natural disaster – and hardly a major one. I’m
referring to, ah, political crises: civil unrest, that sort of thing.’ ‘We can thank Earth for that. You gave us a
Jefferson Mark 3 Constitution – someone once called it utopia in two megabytes –
and it worked amazingly well. The program hasn’t been modified for three hundred
years. We’re still only on the Sixth Amendment.’ ‘And long may it stay there...
[Kaldor, a visitor to Thalassa said fervently]… ‘I should hate to think we were
responsible for a Seventh’ “. p.71
8.2.2. “Moses Kaldor was happy to be left alone,
for as many hours or days as he could be spared, in the cathedral calm of First
Landing. He felt like a young student again, confronted with all the art and
knowledge of mankind… And yet all this wealth of wisdom and culture was only a
tiny fraction of mankind’s heritage; much that Moses Kaldor knew and loved was
missing – not, he was well aware, by accident but by deliberate design. A
thousand years ago, men of genius and goodwill had rewritten history and gone
through the libraries of Earth deciding what should be saved and what should be
abandoned to the flames… Only if it would contribute to survival and social
stability on the new worlds would any work of literature, and record of the past,
be loaded into the memory of the seedships…. They could not be allowed to
reinfect virgin planets with the ancient poisons of religious hatred, belief in
the supernatural, and the pious gibberish with which countless billions of men
and women had once comforted themselves at the cost of addling their minds.” p.107f
8.2.3. “ ‘…and we have something to give you.’ ‘What,
may I ask?’ ‘From us, if you will accept
it, the final centuries of human art and science. But I should warn you –
consider what such a gift may do to your own culture. It might not be wise to
accept everything we can offer.’ “ p.46
8.2.4. “Alpha [the personal god] was inextricably entangled
with religion – and that was its downfall. It might still have been around up
to the destruction of the Earth if the myriads of competing religions had left
each other alone. But they couldn’t do
that, because each claimed to possess the One and Only Truth. So they had to
destroy their rivals – which means, in effect, not only every other religion
but dissenters inside their own faith… Fortunately for mankind, Alpha faded out
of the picture, more or less gracefully, in the early 2000s. It was killed by a
fascinating development called statistical theology… as had long been suspected,
the universe simply obeyed the laws of mathematical probability. Certainly there was no sign of any
supernatural intervention, either for good or for ill. So the problem of Evil
never really existed. To expect the universe to be benevolent was like
imagining one could always win at a game of pure chance….” p.187f
8.2.5. “Yet a few old faiths managed to survive,
though in drastically altered forms, right up to the end of the Earth. The
Latter Day Mormons and the Daughters of the Prophet even managed to build
seedships of their own. I often wonder what happened to them…” p.191
9.
Why bother?
I chose http://tinyurl.com/q8wqosa
– the Sisyphean reality of Life.
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POSTSCRIPT on 07 MAR 2016: For a summary of reasons why Islam, though not the only one amongst all those credo-isms, needs a Reformation, try
http://www.theeuroprobe.org/2014-075-quotes-from-the-koran/
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/oskar-freysinger-is-islam-threat.html
Religious freedom is, of course, a human right, and top of the list of inalienable freedoms stands the right to freedom from any religion.
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POSTSCRIPT on 10 AUG 2016:
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita describes the relationship between memes and rationality in his Predictioneer http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/lacuna-dive.html in these words:
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POSTSCRIPT on 07 MAR 2016: For a summary of reasons why Islam, though not the only one amongst all those credo-isms, needs a Reformation, try
http://www.theeuroprobe.org/2014-075-quotes-from-the-koran/
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/oskar-freysinger-is-islam-threat.html
Religious freedom is, of course, a human right, and top of the list of inalienable freedoms stands the right to freedom from any religion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTSCRIPT on 10 AUG 2016:
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita describes the relationship between memes and rationality in his Predictioneer http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/lacuna-dive.html in these words:
“Another way that people talk about rationality that has nothing to do with what ‘rational choice theorists’ have in mind is to discuss whether what someone wants is rational or not. Distasteful as the fact may be, people with crazy ideas can be perfectly rational. Rationality is about choosing actions that are consistent with advancing personal interests, whatever those interests may be. It has nothing to do with whether you or I think what someone wants is a good idea, shows good taste or judgement, or even makes sense to want. I certainly think what Adolf Hitler said he wanted and what he did to advance his heinous goals were evil, but I am reluctant to let him off the hook with an insanity plea by saying he was not rational. His actions were rational given his evil aims, and therefore it was perfectly right and proper to hold him and his henchmen accountable. The same holds for modern-day terrorists. They’re not nuts. They are desperate, calculating, disgruntled people who are looking for ways to force others to pay attention to their real or perceived woes. Dismissing them as irrational misses the point and leads us to make wrongheaded choices about how to handle their threat. We do ourselves no service by labelling people as insane or irrational simply because we can’t understand their goals. Our attention is better fixed on what they do, since we probably can change or impede their actions even when we can’t alter what they want.”--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
