I was invited to be on the Murnaghan programme on Sky News this morning – which I always find a great deal more intelligent than the Andrew Marr alternative on the BBC. I declined because I did not want to get up and get a 7.30am train from Ramsgate on a Sunday morning. I had a meeting until 11.30pm last night planning a conference on human rights in Balochistan [I still tend to say Baluchistan], and I have a newly crowned tooth that seems not to want to settle down. But I am still worried by my own lack of energy, which is uncharacteristic. Is this old age?
I also have some serious work to do on my Burnes book, and next week I shall be staying in London to be in the British Library reading room for every second of its opening hours. So there may be a bit of a posting hiatus. I have in mind a short post on an important subject on which I suspect that 99% of my readership – including the regular dissident commenters – will strongly disagree with me.
This is a peculiarly introspective post, perhaps because my tooth is hurting, but I seem to have this curmudgeonly spirit which wishes to react to the huge popularity of this blog by posting something genuinely held but unpopular; a genuine view but one I don’t normally trumpet. The base thought seems to be “You wouldn’t like me if you really knew me”.
Similarly when I wrote Murder in Samarkand I was being hailed as a hero by quite a lot of people for my refusal to go along with the whole neo-con disaster of illegal wars, extraordinary rendition and severe attacks on civil liberties, sacrificing my fast track diplomatic career as a result. My reaction to putative hero worship was to publish in Murder in Samarkand not just the political facts, but an exposure of my own worst and most unpleasant behaviour in my private life.
I am in a very poor position to judge, but I believe the result rather by accident turned out artistically compelling, if you don’t want to read the book you can get a good idea of that by clicking on David Tennant in the top right of this blog and listening to him playing me in David Hare’s radio adaptation.
Anyway, that’s enough musing. You won’t like my next post, whenever it comes. Promise.
Chris Jones: Thank you for your honest reply, and may I follow up on your caveat? A manual override is not always even possible any more. The control of such complex structures is so overwhelming, that no person is capable of functioning to the required level if it were all put on “manual”.
The Stealth bomber, for instance, is inherently unstable – keeping it in the air can only be managed by a very indirect control. The pilot indicates the preferred route, the systems perform the necessary to make it happen. Were full manual operation given to the world’s best pilot, it would be utterly out of control a mere instant later.
Systems which are designed by systems, for their functionality or efficiency, are not always designed with the human as the primary operator, for the simple reason that we’re not particularly functional or efficient when it comes to things the jungle didn’t design _us_ for.
I share your concerns to some degree… but don’t you like the ABS on cars/bikes, which take away some of your control, but only the sort of control you’re likely to mess up? My big bike (an FJR1300) has a very fancy braking system, whereby if you hit the back brake only, it’ll also activate two out of five pistons on the front brake (if memory serves). It’s also got full ABS, and a fly-by-wire throttle like most things these days. I like it. But on my much more racy sports bike, it’s all manual (apart from the electronic engine mapping), brakes are unlinked and direct. Much prefer _that_ bike that way.
Upshot is, we pretty much have given over manual control now, for the sake of improved performance. try putting the “Internets” on manual – very, very few people have got much of a clue about how any of it works any more.
Ben Franklin, thank you so much for reminding me of the teachings of Don Juan Matus.
Glenn – “we pretty much have given over manual control now” – it certainly seems like it but that in itself isn’t a good thing,we all know where that will end unless we find a healthy balance.
I can’t argue the many merits of technology though – especially in terms of engineering. I had one kick start Honda 600 that literally almost broke my foot a few times with kick back when trying to start it on cold days. When i traded it in, a new 850 with electric start was a heavenly luxury…
Scouse Billy, I’m just over half an hour into the Thrive Movement video that you linked to.
Billy, I’m having serious problems here. I’d really like you to have a chat with me about your political beliefs. I’m quite worried about the Thrive website and film. Both look very well funded; someone has the resources to make this message very desirable, rather like junk food tends to be packed with oils and sugars. The Thrive website is constructed with Javascript, which makes it very difficult for a user like me to navigate it without being tracked.
That inventor, Adam Trombly, doesn’t even have a page on Wikipedia. I really can’t work out what is going on.
Scouse Billy, can you find me any evidence that Trombly really was going to present his generator to the UN and the US Senate?
Clark; You’re welcome. Hope things are going well.
Sunflower, I said I’d post my essay about how corporations come to be so uncaring. It’s now up on my web space, here:
Corporate Behaviour and Lack of Responsibility
A True Story and Some Speculations
http://www.killick1.plus.com/corporate-behaviour.html
I’m intrigued by your comment of 28 Sep, 3:46 pm:
Is this some specific religion? I don’t recognise it. If it is, could you supply a link or something, please?
Ben, my repairs went well and my madras and chapatis were delicious. When I got home, I found six brief e-mails from my friend. I suspect that she has indeed been reading this thread. She sent me links to various book reviews and sites, all “alternative”. They all need looking at from different viewpoints. I’ll try to live as a Warrior (in Don Juan’s sense) but I’m finding it exceedingly difficult.
Scouse Billy, I found this very worrying post about the Thrive Movement:
http://thrivedebunked.wordpress.com/tag/adam-trombly/
I’m still struggling through this lot, and the contradictory opinions about Tesla, who seems central to a lot of these claims.
But the good news is that this is science. If these generators are real, they can be reproduced. If not, it is exposed as fraud or misunderstanding.
Ben, thanks for your concern. How are you doing?
Excerpt from the thrivedebunked post linked above:
Scouse Billy, does Thrive really advocate this, and if so, is this your political stance too?
“I’m finding it exceedingly difficult.” Letting go is one of the hardest, but email works better for our discussion on this, as you have suggested.
Glad you are well, as am I.
Cheers.
Clark, it’s from the Vedanta. The Puranas and Mahabharata.
I will check the link after the matches are over, judging from how Europe play, it will not take long.
The specific branch is called Vaisnavism. Vaisanava=devotee of Lord Vishnu.
Sunflower; For the God-gene., you might want to look at Zechariah Sitchin’s works (12th Planet et al) Sumerians predominate, but the battles found in the Gita and Mahabharata are truly cited.
I have read those Ben. Interesting stuff, especially since we are in 2012 🙂
You DO know another Mayan calendar was unearthed recently? It seems the end of one epoch leads to another.:)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=xultun-mayan-calendar
Clark, “Sunflower, I said I’d post my essay about how corporations come to be so uncaring. It’s now up on my web space, here:”
My impression is that you are too good-hearted, you lack the cynicism required to understand how large corporations work 🙂 Being good hearted is a fantastic human quality but not very useful when trying to understand evil people.
A reading tip: People of the Lie by Scott Peck.
Interesting, Ben. T.y.
Sunflower, my example illustrates how a third-party rip-off could be exploited to a corporation’s advantage without a corporate perpetrator, or indeed any corporate intent to exploit the rip-off. Do you regard it as valid?
It is not intended to be a general description, and I don’t doubt that there are evil people, and that other abuses are deliberately perpetrated. However, if exploitation is to be overcome, my example illustrates that our task is greater than rooting out some rich, powerful crooks. My example illustrates a systemic problem that would also need to be tackled.
Yes, of course the example is valid. And I agree that your point is valid as well. I’m the cynical type so I tend to focus on that part. I think you are touching on the processes of internal and external auditing and those are as you conclude often lacking or of bad quality. Horrible situation your friend ended up in, in your example.
Sunflower, you seem to accept the existence of both an international cancer treatment deception, and a global heating deception. I have great difficulty with this, as both are in the domain of science.
Much science is public. Concealment in science is an increasing problem; as Ben Goldacre often highlights, this proceeds through corporate non-disclosure agreements and in-house corporate research, but there are just so many holes, and the scientific community is so large.
Of course, there was the Manhattan Project, but it was only a few years, it was confined to the US, and people would have been more willing to conceal such an urgent project directly related to weaponry in a time of direct involvement in a world war. It’s very different when scientists, their families and their descendants will be directly affected by the outcome of research, in an international arena where scientists in different countries are subject to varying legal systems, and over a longer timescale where people retire or move to different fields.
Science is also adversarial. There are always at least as many scientists trying to knock down any given theory as there are scientists trying to hold it up.
There is also another huge body of professionals involved with cancer treatment, and this is the medical community. When I pressed you on this earlier by naming two individual doctors who frequent this blog, you laid responsibility with the “owners” of the corporations. Of course, many of these corporations are owned by shareholders. But besides that, I don’t see how owners, or a corrupt cabal of directors, could coerce so many people who chose to make their careers in the caring professions reverse their decisions and cover up malicious treatment and murder.
I know that corporate control or influence subverts a proportion of the commercially published literature, but there are other channels of communication; the Internet, word of mouth, preprints, self publishing, etc. It only took two people to overcome the drug companies’ resistance to treatment of stomach ulcers with antibiotics, for instance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliobacter_Pylori
Sunflower, at the risk of encouraging another psychological assault upon myself such as the one I suffered before from Nextus, I point you towards quantum physics as an area in which the physical and the spiritual can be reconciled within a scientific framework.
To facilitate a discussion about this, please tell me to what extent you understand complex maths, by which I mean mathematics in the complex or argand plane:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argand_diagram
Sunflower, thank you for naming the religious traditions you were drawing from. I have very little knowledge of these. I do know that many physicists have found parallels between Eastern religions and philosophies and modern quantum physics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritjof_Capra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dancing_Wu_Li_Masters
http://www.amitgoswami.org/
My own interest in science began with physics, whereas the recent rise of “fundamental atheism” seems to be driven mostly by biologists, notably Dawkins, of course. There are also strong arguments for a fundamental role of consciousness by the mathematician Roger Penrose:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_penrose
Popping in to say hello to the thread.
Phew, that blog on debunking “Thrive” is heavy stuff. Clark, worth a watch, do you think? I’ve given up on the Race To Zero Point – I didn’t think it was suddenly go into a necessary scientific/sceptical mode – but do let me know if you watch the second half.
Sunflower, what do you make of my point about science being a disbelief system? I know that many non-scientific people do treat science as a belief system, but I assert that this does not make it so. Even though individual scientists treat their work as a belief system, they are still embedded in the world of research and the structure of the scientific method. To what extent do you accept science yourself?
Thank you for your endorsement of my speculations about corporate behaviour. My hope is that this kind of thinking can be used to determine, or at least narrow down, which parts of the current scientific landscape can be trusted and which not.
Jon, the more I see of this the more I find connections between this New Age stuff and the political Right. I’m finding it very worrying. The Hippy / New Age people are very good hearted; they universally reject exploitation, coercion, violence and war. But these high budget and very attractive films and websites threaten to subvert much of this goodness. New Agers have an instinctive revulsion for politics. A whole sector of decent humanity could be lost to the cause of making a better world. Global heating activism and cancer treatment seem to be areas of particular concern.
>Sunflower, you seem to accept the existence of both an international cancer treatment deception,
>and a global heating deception. I have great difficulty with this, as both are in the domain of science.
Not cancer treatment in particular, all conventional big-pharma medicine related areas. And man-made GW, yes definitely. And in the areas of science, education, politics, banking ofc. On the highest level our society is rotten to the core. Rotten is actually an understatement, I am convinced that society on the highest level is run by a group of devil worshiping mad-men whos goal is total and complete control of humankind.
This madness is going on right in from of peoples eyes and yet they cannot see it because the deception is very good. “It’s a prison for you mind, Neo”. People are in a stage of mass-hypnosis and no longer able to add one plus one and conclude it’s two.
Just look at the world, how can you not see that it completely totally crazy and that all the craziness is interconnected? Forget science, zoom out and look at the big picture. Apply your scientific mind to the hypothesis that there is a small elite group of people that have access to more or less the majority of all wealth in the world and they are using that power to enslave humanity. Cancer treatment is just one small dot on the map.
Clark, I have no formal education.