John Lennon - God

Jim Jefferies on religion

Memes have immune systems - guest post by Conor O'Higgins

Memetics is about modeling ideas as evolutionary critters – they breed, reproduce, survive and die. Unfit ideas join the dodo; those that successfully survive and replicate become influential.
In the struggle for survival, one thing that every beastie needs is a way to defend itself from infexion. Even pretty unsophisticated animals seem to have some sense of hygiene, an instinct to avoid infexious conditions. But avoidance only goes so far; living in a sterile plastic bubble is impractical. To roam free and breathe contaminated air, a critter needs to develop an immune system. It needs to come into contact with pathogens, but fend them off. To do this, animals carry around a system of antibodies, T-cells, lymphocytes etc. that attack any threats that get inside the body.
As it is with resilient organisms, so it is with resilient memeplexes. (A meme is a belief; a memeplex is a Belief System.) Without an immune system to reject ideas that contradict it or otherwise threaten it, a Belief System won't long survive the dirty information-environment of today. A memeplex's immune system consists of a bunch of counter-memes that attack threatening ideas. These defensive memes are often derogatory labels – Christians tag threats as 'blasphemy'.
Anything contrary to atheism-materialism is 'woo'.
Verboten experiences like UFO sightings can be dismissed as 'mass hallucination'.
Scientologists have an interesting way of installing an immune system in their Believers. They tell you that adherence to the Scientology Belief System will solve all your problems, but – be careful! – there are people out there called “suppressive personalities” who'll try to contradict and undermine Scientology. A biological robot receives this programming in a Scientology center, off he goes into the world, and it is not long before he talks to a friend who tells him to steer clear of Scientology. Alarm bells go off: “this is one of those suppressive personalities I've heard about; disregard whatever they say”. Any further advice from the friend falls on deaf ears. The immune-meme about suppressive personalities fends off the friend's memes about the dangers of Scientology, and the B.S. survives the threat. In a world generally pretty hostile to it, Scientology still manages to be influential enough to pull in a half-billion dollars a year; it couldn't do that without a strong immune system. I mentioned that critters avoid dirty conditions. Memeplexes also use avoidance to survive. The Catholic church maintains an index of prohibited books, infexious memes so dangerous to the Catholic B.S. that believers need to steer clear. Very totalistic Belief Sytems resort to the most extreme kind of memetic avoidance and isolate Believers on a ranch in Guyana or whatever, where they have no contact with foreign memes.

The most successful therapy for depression is cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy achieves its results by modeling depression as a Belief System and disproving it with logic and evidence. At the center of the B.S. are beliefs along the lines of “everything sucks”, “nothing is ever gonna get better” and "I'm worthless".
These beliefs should be easy to disprove; there's plenty of joy and fun out there and the person under the spell of this memeplex comes into contact with it every day. The depressive memeplex is under constant attack from happy memes. So how does it perpetuate its species enough to disable 121 million people? The same way we survive in a world full of influenza viruses; it develops immune responses to fight the fun. Psychologists' preferred term for the immune system of depression is “disqualification”. Depressed people disqualify joy and fun. If you make the obvious points to them: that lots of things are good, we don't know the future well enough to say that things won't get better, and they personally have good qualities, they'll disqualify it with a defense-meme – usually some variation on “it doesn't count because...”: If you point out a depressed person's accomplishments, they'll often tell you, “Anyone could've done it”, or disqualify it as a fluke, or say that it was no accomplishment on their part, that they were just doing what they had to do in the situation. If people praise them and show them affexion: “They're just doing it to be nice” or “they think well of me because they don't know the real me”. 100% of depressed people disqualify like this. This is what makes depression such a knotty problem that disables more of our brothers and sisters than nearly anything else.

A key feature of all these immune-memes is that they aren't really testable. You can't know whether people's praise is genuine or mere politeness, not unless you can read their mind. A report that proves a conspiracy theory wrong looks the same as disinformation put there by Nazi gremlins. You can't pee on a strip that detects blasphemy. If something really weird did appear in the skies, the reports would be identical to reports caused by 'mass hallucination'.
Therefore, the memetic immune reaxion can remain undisturbed by facts. (My last article on this blog discusses bla-bla: claims that are adrift from empirical evidence.) This is the source of both its resilience and its stupidity.

Domesticated primates find it easy to sneer at the B.S. of Others – but doing that just digs you deeper into your reality-trench. You can't see much from in there, and you rob yourself the creative play of Kaos.
This site exists to help you to evolve beyond your B.S., and my purpose in writing this article should be obvious. I want you to get aware of your own memetic immune responses. Identify them so you can start to dismantle them. Notice how you react to ideas you dislike, notice what labels you use. The next time you find yourself labeling something as 'nonsense' or 'right-wing propaganda' or using whatever defense-meme is installed in your nervous system – get excited, because this is your chance to expand your reality-tunnel. Let the foreign meme in. Some of the best innovations in evolution came from viral DNA being integrated into the body.

"Religion is a technology, it's just a primitive technology." Jason Silva

Hello, Fnord

I think it's funny, but also kind of sad.

Eric White after his latest arrest. (photo/Cumberland County Sheriff's Department)

Hello, Fnord 
Eric White comes clean about his two-year-plus graffiti spree

By Chris Busby

Eric White certainly isn’t the most dangerous criminal in Portland, but his crimes are among the most visible blights on this city. 

The scraggly 22-year-old from Newport, Maine, started writing the nonsense word “fnord” on buildings, signs and sidewalks around town in early 2003. He estimates there are now upwards of 1,000 such tags spray-painted and written in marker throughout Portland, and countless more in other parts of the United States, Canada and Mexico. 

According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the word fnord originally appeared in the Principia Discordia, a cult treatise written in 1965. The term was popularized in the Illuminatus! trilogy by sci-fi writers Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. In Shea and Wilson’s work, the word is said to appear in newspaper and magazine articles about current events, and to cause a vague sense of unease in readers who’ve been programmed not to consciously notice it. 

White’s done some of the tagging himself, but since he moved to town a few years ago, four or five others have taken up the tag, as well. One of them, 24-year-old Harry Bishop, is with White in the Cumberland County Jail. The pair were arrested on the night of Oct. 17, after a drunken fnord-scrawling spree on buildings and cars along Marginal Way. 

Last June, White was arrested, jailed for three days, and fined $150 for spray-painting the word on the Cumberland County Civic Center.

After this latest arrest, White was originally charged with a felony — aggravated criminal mischief — because the damage from the tags was estimated to cost over $2,000. That charge has since been changed to four separate counts of criminal mischief, a misdemeanor. He is being held in lieu of $5,000 cash bail, but during a recent interview, White said he expects that will be lowered to as little as $500 at the end of this month – a sum he can pay with some of the $6,000 he said he has saved in a bank account. 

In person, White is an easy-going, soft-spoken young man – a demeanor one might not expect from someone with the words “sick” and “fuck” crudely tattooed between his knuckes and finger joints. The Bollard interviewed him in jail on Oct. 21. An edited version of that interview follows. 

The Bollard: Why would you do something like this? Why write ‘fnord’ on a building?
White: I’ve read one of the books, and it just struck me as a really fascinating book. 

According to the books, ‘fnord’ is a word that people can’t consciously see. Do you think people can’t see it?
Originally I didn’t even think anybody would get the connection, besides, like, maybe one or two in a hundred people that might’ve read this book. Then thePortland Press Herald started publishing what it was.

But yeah, it is supposed to be a subliminal message. It’s supposed to cause anger, confusion, and all kinds of different stuff. And it seems to be working, ’cause it does piss a lot of people off. A lot of people around town hate me. 

Is this a form of ‘culture jamming’ [activities meant to force people to consider the negative effects of mass advertising]?
Yeah, like [culture jamming], like Ad Busters…. That’s what I would hope to get across, but I don’t think it would ever work…. I think maybe a few people may be inspired to go out and do something, but I really don’t think it’s going to affect many people at all. I don’t think society’s ready to change yet, which kind of sucks.

What angers you about society?
When I look in the newspaper and see 217 new laws passed this session in Congress. We don’t need that. The law originally started out as common law. It was basically a judge that decided whether you encroached on someone or their property. Like, ‘Did you hurt this man or did you hurt his property somehow?’ 
Just the way things are run, people – I’m at a loss of words right now. 

Do you have any other tags?
Just that.

How long have you been doing this?
When did the Iraq war start?

The invasion began in the spring of 2003.
I came to town the same day the Monument Square protests started, like the official start of the Iraq war. I’ve been doing it ever since then.

What brought you to Portland?
I was originally going to head down to Boston for a little bit because there was nothing to watch on TV. I got tired of playing games on my computer and tried turning on the TV, but there was nothing on TV, so I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll go to Boston.’ I gave up on my plans to run for [Palmyra] City Council. [A town near Newport, west of Bangor]

How many tags do you have up?
Probably close to a thousand, and it’s not just me. There’s a bunch of people that do it. There has been a bunch of people, but it’s down to about five different people actively writing it now. There’s people in Bangor doing it. It’s in Canada, it’s in Mexico, it’s from California to Maine. Every stop on the Greyhound from California to Maine has it. 

So this is an international thing?
No, the Canada thing was me, probably like five or six years ago when I was up there, before I even started doing it in Portland. Mexico would be another friend of mine. An ex-girlfriend got people started because she lives in Bangor. 

Where have you been living here in town? Do you have an apartment?
I was living with my ex-girlfriend at the time. Kind of. On and off. When I came in [to jail], I was actually working on getting an apartment. I’ve got like $6,000 in the bank and I get close to $600 a month, so I figured I could go in with a friend, but then the friend I went in with wrote a statement [to the police]. I don’t really blame her that much. She’s kind of slow in the head. 

How do you choose where to write ‘fnord’?
It depends on how drunk I am. That’s the only time I’ve been caught for it. This is my third time being caught.

What happened the first time?
I faked a seizure and went to the hospital. They treated me for an overdose that I didn’t have. I just started pretending to foam at the mouth, shaking all over the back of the cop car. I dropped some vitamins on his floor. 

I went to the hospital. They gave me a ticket. I went to court. I got like a $90 or $150 fine or something. 

The second time I got, I think, a $250 fine [it was $150]. But now they’re not offering me restitution or anything. I tried getting the lawyer to talk to the D.A. and say, ‘Hey, [White] can pay restitution.’ I can do whatever – clean up the tags. A lot of people are going around the city for community service cleaning up tags. They’re refusing to let me either do community service or pay fines. They just want me to do straight jail time.

I’m sure that’s what the victims would want – either me out doing community service or paying for their stuff to get cleaned up.

Do you target businesses owned by large corporations rather than mom-and-pop operations? 
Yeah, normally I do city and state property only, unless I’m really drunk.

Have you been working here in town?
I’m on disability right now, for lack of a want to work.

So what’s your disability?
Ergo phobia, fear of work. A bunch of mental stuff, basically.

Are you getting treatment?
I don’t really need treatment. It’s just not wanting to work. I have no problem with working if I’m working for myself. I’ve been considering running an ad in the newspaper for computer repair. I’d probably be less motivated to be walking around drinking five liters of wine everyday and writing on things. 

Did you graduate from high school up north?
Yeah, I got a G.E.D. and I’m gonna be starting college, hopefully the next semester or the one after.

Where?
SMCC [Southern Maine Community College] or wherever.

What do you want to study?
Chemistry and philosophy.

I think most of the public thinks the people who write graffiti tags are just idiots, but you’re not stupid, you’re preparing for college. Is the public’s perception true?
Depending on the people. It’s just like anything else. I’ve met really stupid people that do it and I’ve met some other people that do it. But a couple people are pretty smart and some of them do have, like, a message. Like there’s somebody named Learn.

Yeah, I’ve seen that around. Learn’s still around, huh?
[No answer]

Maybe?
He did part of the legal wall behind the Asylum. 

Have you ever hooked up with those kind of graffiti artists?
Nah, I really don’t have much skill. I don’t even really call it tagging.

What do you call it? 
Mindless vandalism.

Are you sorry for this latest spree?
Yeah. Like I said, I normally don’t tag private businesses, unless I’ve got a reason to, like I don’t like something they’re doing, or whatever. 

Whatever the result of these latest charges, will you stop doing this when you’re free again?
I’ll just leave my markers at home when I’m drinking. Cause this time and the last time I got caught I was drinking, and I’m pretty sure the one before it, too.

After you got caught the last time, did you just go right back at it?
Yeah.

Is there anything the city can do to stop this?
To stop me, money would probably be the best thing to take away from me. I don’t have much of it. But they are smartening up some to stop graffiti. All the articles in the Portland Press Herald get read a lot, and people start complaining about it.

They’re also, after they clean off a tag on heavily tagged things – those traffic-control boxes get tagged a lot – they spray this stuff over it that makes it easier to clean off with water and soap or whatever.

Hopefully taggers will just get more creative. Like, when I was arrested, they caught me with a bottle of hydrochloric acid. If you dump that on cement, it bubbles up green and smokes a little bit, but as soon as it rains, that one spot where you dumped it will be bleached white.

Chemistry.
Or hydrofluoric acid will etch into glass.

I saw a tag like that on the new bus shelter on Congress and Center streets.
I think they used glass cutters, ’cause I’ve seen a bunch of those around. Starbucks [the one on the corner of Middle and Exchange streets] is covered with ‘em. I heard those are like $900 windows. 

Was there a chase before this latest arrest?
Me and my friends were going into Arby’s to get something to eat, and as soon as we turned the corner around Arby’s there was a cop there, and then two other ones pulled up.

Do you think the cops are getting any better at catching people like you? 
No. They’re not that smart. [Reading from the police report]: ‘In most cases the males used the tag “fnord.” In one place, they wrote: “fuck yo cat.”‘ I don’t think either one of us wrote [that]. 

You didn’t write that? 
[Laughing.] No…. 

I know down in Boston, it’s a felony if you get caught. Somebody was arrested for it down there, got out on bail; a couple days later, just left the state. I believe he’s actually in here right now. I’m not sure if he’s been sent to rehab yet or somethin’. An ex-friend of mine.

Have you seen any tags here, in the jail?
Normally, yeah, there is usually one in whatever cell I go in.

Have you ever put yourself in life-threatening situations, climbing high building and such to do this?
I’ve climbed up ladders before, scaffolding. 

Last winter, someone stray-painted ‘fnord’ in big letters, with white paint, on the bricks in front of Longfellow’s statue. Did you do that?
Allegedly that was me. 

photo/The Fuge

Last year, someone wrote ‘fnord’ on a stop sign on Lewis Street, right by where I live, so it said ‘Stop Fnord.’ Do you remember that one? 
No, but for a while I was making stickers that said ‘stop writing,’ in tiny letters, then ‘fnord,’ in big letters. Occasionally I’ve written ‘ford.’ I’m guessing people either get the joke or think I’m an idiot.

I saw one on a candidate’s sign recently.
I was pulling those up for a little bit and bringing them up to my girlfriend’s; turning the signs around, the paper ones, and writing weird things like, ‘Vote Jesus for Savior.’ I really don’t think I can get into trouble for that, unless they’ve got some sort of permit to put those there. It’s basically the equivalent of littering.

Do you think having these arrests on your record will hurt your ability to find work in the future?
I don’t really want to work. I just want to go to college to learn. I’m not really looking for a career… I might be self-employed.

Do you want to be an artist, or a writer?
Art. I’m not really good at writing. Art, computers, chemistry, that’s my only interests.

You mentioned philosophy. What sort of philosophers are you into?
Nietzsche, random stuff.

Do you have any other charges on your record?
I got probably 20 charges, but they’re all really nothing. I got a disorderly conduct at the Monument Square protests, and I got a couple of thefts, drinking in public, carrying a concealed weapon – even though I don’t really think a flare gun’s a weapon.

A flare gun?
Me and my friends walked around town shooting off flare guns, probably about a year ago – just shooting them up into the air.

The police report says ‘fnord’ is like your religion.
Fnord isn’t a religion, but it comes from the Principia Discordia, which is a religion based around discord. It’s pretty interesting. 

It’s mainly a stupid religion. It’s not really something you take seriously-seriously, but it’s fun to take it semi-seriously. There’s only five rules: every Discordian must eat a hot dog, sans bun, on a Friday. That comes from like a variety of different religions… The last rule is a Discordian is prohibited from believing what he reads. You just get done reading these five rules that are supposed to be the things you run your life by, and you’re like, huh?

When will you stop doing this? Will you be 30, 40, 60 years old and still at it? 
I don’t know. I haven’t grown up much in my life. Probably someday it’ll stop. I’ll probably be 30 years old, still getting picked up for disorderly conduct, criminal mischief or something. 

Are you worried about that? 
Just as long as I keep my charges like nothing serious. I’m a pacifist actually. Never even had a violent crime.

Source: The Bollard

Guest Blog - General Semantics by Conor O'Higgins

Korzybski's Structural differential

Alfred Korzybski developed a system he called General Semantics. It was one of the biggest influences on Robert Anton Wilson, NLP and cognitive psychology. It's fallen out of popularity recently, maybe because Korzybski never was much good as communicating it to popular audiences. This article is part of an attempt to jazz up General Semantics a bit.

The diagram below is one of the key tools in General Semantics. Korzybski called it the “structural differential”, which shows Saint Alfred's knack for picking ugly terminology. (In this article, I use my own chosen terminology for most things, not Korzybski's.)
The structural differential is a simple map of different levels of Being. Students of General Semantics study this diagram over and over again until they stop muddling the levels.

(open the image in a new window)

Studying this diagram helps you become conscious of which level you're talking about. You don't stop abstracting; you just become aware of when you're doing it. It's ok to read a menu. Eating a menu is not such a good idea.

The map is not the territory, and the map always deletes information from the territory:

• Only one 25-quintillionth of the electromagnetic waves that exist at WIGO get picked up by the senses.
  (see comments)
• At the Perceivable level, visual images are comparable to two 576 megapixel cameras shooting video at 100 frames per second. Two layers down, at the Label level, nothing remains but: “I saw a cat. It was black.”
  

The map is not the territory, and the map adds to, generalizes and distorts the territory:

• A 590nm wave at the WIGO level gets turned into “orange”. “Orange” does not exist at the WIGO level.
  
• At Level 2.0, there's a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the retina. Somewhere in 2.5, the brain makes up some fictional content and puts it in there instead.
  
• Also in 2.5, traits get added in, so that the things that show up at 3.0 are sexy, frightening, gorgeous, stinky etc. (The Impressionist painters were obsessed with getting this point across.)
  

This is not illustrated in the diagram, but higher levels influence lower levels too. Influence runs in both directions. Words influence behavior, which is a level 1.0 thing. Interestingly, the labels and language we use at level 4.0 change the brain so much that the settings on the filters at 2.5 change. (There's a ton of psychology studies making this point, such as ow.ly/pLmIu and ow.ly/pLmRm.) Words can change your BS. Change your BS and you change your reality-tunnel. 

It's not uncommon to get up into really high levels of meta-meta-meta-comments. For example, this article is at least level 8.0; it is an article about a response to criticism about a book.

Some people mostly ignore levels 1-3, and live in a labyrinth of labels. An organism generates a description, another organism reads it and responds to it, another responds to that - this can go on for a lifetime, and there's sometimes pretty good money in it. There's no need for facts, for the body, for mindfulness, sensation, or the real world. You can get lost in symbols and call yourself an intellectual, but you'll get paid more if you call yourself a lawyer. Korzybski had a technical term for it; he called it 'bla-bla'.

Pragmatism saves us from bla-bla. Pragmatism means always judging Beliefs (which are Level 4.0 things) by whether they can successfully affect and predict happenings at levels 1, 2 and 3. Kaos Magick is also called Results Magick; it doesn't judge Beliefs by whether they are good Beliefs; it judges them by whether they get Results.

This is known as Keepin' It Real.

I have taken a vow to Keep It Real; I only write about things that get results. I am writing about General Semantics because it gets great results. It uses books, diagrams etc. (Level 4.0 things) to reprogram the filters at Level 2.5 to create a calmer, clearer, less confused, less unrealistic, saner, happier reality-tunnel at Level 3.0
Reprogram your filters, before they reprogram them for you!

By Conor O'Higgins (Thanks very much Conor!)

Tom Robbins on Robert Anton Wilson - Not believing in anything is the hallmark of a truly free man

via RAW fans

RAW - Religion for the Hell of it & the Disinfo talk

This is the talk from Disinfo Con 2000, watch it while it's still up. All the Disinfo Con talks keep getting removed from Youtube, I really wish they'd stop doing that.

More RAW goodies tomorrow, don't wanna overload you all at once! BTW if anyone knows a site that actually succeeds at downloading a youtube video please share. I tried eight that didn't work so far... update: Thanks to David for letting me know about the Firefox extension downloadhelper for anyone who wants to save vids too.

Matt Taibbi & Sam Seder on Alex Pareene Popping CNBC's Bubble

Matt Taibbi gives his play by play commentary of CNBC's demented interview with Alex Pareene and why anybody could do Jamie Dimon's job...

Via The Secret Soapbox

Forget it. Go forth.

"Leave it all behind you. Forget it. 
Go forth, unburdened with ideas and beliefs.
Abandon all verbal structures, 
all relative truth, all tangible objectives." 

Nisargadatta Maharaj

So that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning

“The idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your sets of experience so that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning.”

Terence McKenna

That. That is it. That is what all the interest and practice in psi research and the paranormal and forbidden history and entheology is about. Triangulating data points. To free oneself from prison.

Read more at Rune Soup - the Hole in the Roof

Our idea of relaxing...

Jacques Vallée - Messengers of Deception - hypnotic regression

Oh my god

Discordianism in writing: 

Ohoho!

Thanks Obama!

Psychedelic Salon 351 Terence McKenna - What is Truth?

You can listen to or download it here at the Psychedelic Salon

It starts with a bang!

What is truth?
"What one is sure of, very little. I would think. Well, I'm getting ready to say nothin'! I guess that's what it is, everything is provisional. As to what I believe in, is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience, the primary datum, I'm very aware that everything else is a construct moving out from that. And so the primary datum is the first level of being, but to say I believe in it..."

"If you're not thinking than you are no more than the onrush of your metabolism and not greatly different from your cat or your dog."

"And so I live by questions, I don't see how you can live any other way."

"I actually try to create a complete explanation, but I always call them models. Because you have to throw them away, you have to keep adding to the model and then throwing it away."

And the quotes listed at Psychedelic Salon:

“Why does mathematics describe nature. That’s a deeper question than most.”

“The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.”

“If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don’t. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don’t.”

“So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That’s why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.”

“I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.”

“I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.”

“Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.”

“The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we’ve all been hungering for.”

 

“The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don’t see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It’s beautiful.”

“Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness. . . . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities. . . . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.”

“In the Newtonian and print-created social space that we’re walking around in you are like a self-extracting archive that hasn’t self-extracted itself yet. And then you take psilocybin and you self-extract and unfold.”

Art by Spayce

Hero Muslim saves Jew from Christian Thugs on NY Subway

Yay for good people!

Hauntings, ESP and mystical visions: counselling after paranormal experiences

Counsellors have a duty of care to establish whether a link between reports of the paranormal and mental illness exists on a case-by-case basis. However, they should also keep their personal beliefs at bay when it comes to exploring client accounts of a paranormal nature. It is more important to explore a client’s personal experience with the paranormal, rather than attempting to judge the validity of their experience.

Attitudes in psychotherapy are slowly beginning to change with increased recognition of organisations such as the Association for Transpersonal Psychology. These organisations conduct much-needed research into humanistic approaches for working with mystical and paranormal experiences.

However, much work is still left to be done in this area as perspectives change and the stigma of the paranormal is lifted. In particular, therapists should be normalising, rather than critiquing, client accounts when it comes to paranormal experiences.
Regardless of the opinions one has about the potential existence of a paranormal reality, it is important to understand the subjective significance of altered states of consciousness.

Read the full article by Alexander De Foe. PhD Candidate, Psychological Studies at Monash University here.

"The fear that drives our alien belief" by hack Caitlin Dewey, Washington Post

Mike Clelland at Hidden Experience sums up what I think about this:

The Washington Post published an article not on the UFO phenomenon titled The fear that drives our alien belief (by Caitlin Dewey), but instead on the deluded people who believe in something so obviously silly. Well, that's my interpretation of her article. I am posting this because it comes on the heels of such an even-keeled article about John Mack (linked below), here's a quote:

Vanity Fair this month published a lengthy profile of Harvard psychiatrist John Edward Mack—a man who believed, implausibly, in alien abduction.

Then the author goes on to pose a question, and then answers it in a way that shows that she hadn't done any meaningful research:

What is it about UFOs that drive so many people to believe they exist despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

The idea that there is any evidence to the contrary, let alone overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is an assumption. Even a cursory glance at the literature reveals a superabundance of reports.

Anyway, this stuff really bothers me.

It bothers me too but at least the comments on this article also are overwhelmingly negative towards the ignorant author. Pretty soon all you'll see in the mainstream media is articles being ripped apart in the comments section until they start policing them or stop printing this bullshit. By the way, Caitlin Dewey covers social media, Internet culture, and other disparate topics for the Washington Post. What an expert on the topic then... lol. I hope she enjoyed that paycheck because I'm sure a few million people will remember her name.

Christopher Knowles from the Secret Sun sums it up perfectly:

This is exactly what I am talking about in my new essay. There are so many delusional people in the UFO field who think they can somehow make peace with the mainstream media, that somehow if they present enough evidence the media will see the light. They should know that the only people who get anywhere with alternative viewpoints are people who openly wage war on the media. That the public now holds the mainstream media to a slightly lower esteem than circus clowns and child molesters, though I realize that is a bit redundant. Bassett should have held a separate hearing kicking the the media's pointy heads in and holding particularly loathesome hacks up to ridicule and scorn. Stop trying to compromise with these idiots and set about putting them all out of business. 

If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness

Don't Believe In Anybody Else's BS - Robert Anton Wilson

Via Relaxed Focus