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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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salla made a couple reports last year about the real reasons for our current, outrageous trade imbalance with communist china. it has nothing to do with ufos, ET or sci fi. it begins with a lot of stolen money during world war 2. it's the closest thing to real investigative reporting on that very important issue that i've seen anywhere.
And of course you buy it hook, line and sinker with no critical thought whatsoever because, of course, the fed and their minion central banks are all an evil conspiracy. Sigh.
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Don Paul
Big Wall climber
Colombia, South America
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moosedrool, my opinion on religion and evolution has always been that the idea of immortality of the soul, a divine protector, eternal paradise are so motivating that they give people a survival benefit compared to people who think their lives are insignificant and that death is the end. It doesnt matter if its true or not, believing it is beneficial. Sort of like believing that rp's and lowe-balls can protect you in a fall.
A second explanation could be that feelings of wonder and mystery about the world, which tend to ascribe everything to God, is a kind of scientific curiosity, and even if the conclusions arent right, its better than not thinking about the world at all. The most primitive spiritual thoughts, 50,000 years ago, led to progress, and we havent evolved much since then.
What did yo think about the Japanese researchers who claim to be able to program cells to go after cancer cells? It would be so amazing to see a cure for cancer in my lifetime.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A race of corn eaters
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dp, that's an insightful post, really.
Applicable to primitive man, but arguably less so for modern man. What's modern man esp with his science edu to do. Should he live with one foot in reality, the other in escapist fantasy - employing either (depending how one looks at it) cognitive dissonance or non-overlapping magisteria.
Perhaps one foot in and one foot out (toggling back n forth) is the best life strategy for going forward for the most nimble minds of the future. (??)
Moreover, insofar as "elements" of religion or theology are part of our makeup (having evolved together in symbiosis over thousands of generations) - in other words, insofar as they are part of our blood or our dna - does not this toggling strategy make the most sense? Would it not be the most "reasonable" to employ?
Just food for thought.
And then there's this: With all these new pressures set against modern man (due to his rapidly changing environment including rapidly changing awareness of his place in the cosmos) causing angst, depression, ennui - should he utilize pharmaceuticals (as umpteen millions have already begun to do esp in their later years) to deal with these pressures which would arguably screw with the scythe of natural selection (not unlike eyeglasses or hernia repair), and which would addict him (wed him) to this technology.
One argument could be: Why not just lean toward the traditional fantasy (thousands of generations in the making) to get yourself through your day and your life rather than the pills? What's the diff really?
On your last point, though such a cure (under the battle hymn: "Kill Cancer!") would be a great scientific achievement it would ultimately spell ecological disaster at unprecedented scales.
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 7, 2013 - 09:46pm PT
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On a climbing trip.....glad everyone is having so much fun!
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dirtbag
climber
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Just look at the mess you've started!
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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donini says he's gone climbing, but i'll bet he's lurking over on the boobs thread, where all the tits stay clear of the wringers.
hook-line-and-sinker, healyje, is your sloppy habit of thought, not mine. if you had spent a little time taking heat in real journalism instead of writing the worthless press releases reporters know to distrust, you would know that there's nothing to be "swallowed" at this stage of the china story.
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dogtown
Trad climber
Cheyenne, Wyoming and Marshall Islands atoll.
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Albert Einstein believed in god. This is well known, not exactly a Ignorant American.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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one of our respectable scientists on this forum recently reported going to a conference where most of the papers were not recognizable, to him, as science. what i recognized in terms of the general subject matter was an interest in areas rumored to involve back-engineering. yes, technology supposedly gained from alien contacts kept secret from the public. in certain circles, it would appear that respectability is being thrown to the wind.
gee Tony, you love to use the conspiratorial tone to make your posts sound so sexy...
...the stuff being reported was not science, it was not "back-engineering" (is that different from "reverse engineering"?) it was pretty much bullshit that hadn't resulted in anything and while one could say it was "speculative" or "revolutionary" or "daringly unconventional" it doesn't amount to anything at all.
It was pseudo-science.
It's ok to say "Ed Hartouni recently reported..." instead of your all too coy "one of our respectable scientists" (I doubt I get much respect from you... actually, and probably don't deserve any anyway).
If you'd like to wager a bit on any of those ideas at that conference I'm sure we could work something out.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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TB: if you had spent a little time taking heat in real journalism instead of writing the worthless press releases reporters know to distrust...
Brilliant! Just how is it you arrive at these gems? Hey, dude, my stuff - and that of other folks who actually got down in it and dirty - was the stuff name reporters, who by and large spent all their time in bars and whorehouses, were always trying to buy to pass off as their own (which I will admit was sometimes quite lucrative).
Look, Tony, this sort of thing is exactly the problem. You, and and all the other conspiracy and paranormal nodders, just make sh#t up as you go along and then believe each others' fantastical spews, rants, and conjectures. You've all clearly lost the ability to distinguish fact from fiction and so now dwell in an interconnected web of self-reinforcing fantasy where something either insanely great or horribly frightening lurks in every shadow and alley you pass. But check it out: 99.9999% of the time, they're just empty shadows and alleys. What's more, I suspect all you guys would walk right on by the real thing if ever you stumbled upon it in your illusory hazes.
The real world is not deterministic or controlled - it's random, chaotic, messy, and always lurching out of control. My take is you religious, conspiracy and paranormal folk just can't handle that fact and so desperately cling to a belief that someone - good or evil, human or alien, dead or alive, earthly or divine (it really makes no difference) - has a firm hand on the wheel when that's just not the case at all. And guess what? That's actually the best aspect of being alive, but you have to ease up on the fear and drama queen sliders a hair to enjoy it.
So overall I'm thinking Jim get's it half right with 'America the ignorant' - the other half is 'America the delusional'.
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drljefe
climber
El Presidio San Augustin del Tucson
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Huell Howser. Patron saint of Dingus Milktoast.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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haha, ed--was wondering if you'd be back. please don't call me sexy. you are an always cordial sparring partner, and you'd be surprised at the number of college graduate mathematics majors i've talked with who have never heard of david hilbert. likewise, i have spoken with one professor of physics (claremont) and a caltech/jpl materials scientist who don't know the first thing about the triple alpha process. alas, the scientific "we".
maybe you could link that conference agenda again for andrzej. he's the respect addict here.
healyje should know how little of it i have for "name reporters". they hang out in whorehouses mostly for like company.
the percentage is far worse than 99.9999 for your side, healyje. j. allen hynek discovered that right away when he got hired by the government to debunk it all for the public peanut gallery. and even if it's only 0.0001 for my side, such discrepancies, if they're solid, have been known to upset whole milieux in the fields of science. right, ed?
now if i could only get the OP re-involved. i wonder if he's done many routes on GPA. i wonder what bridwell would say.
a couple quotes for you, dingus:
"hates california
it's cold and it's damp
that's why the lady is a tramp."
and
"since i left plum tree
down in tennessee
it's the first time i've been warm."
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dirtbag
climber
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Dingus, my Dad lived in Stockton in the 30s.
In the 70s, my dad went through a nostalgia trip/mid-life crisis, so naturally, we visited his old neighborhood.
If he was alive today, I can't imagine what he would think of what has become of that once sleepy little city.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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geez you're up early, dirtbag. you must be one really old fart.
stockton is a tough town because of the maritime influence. that's what a good ship canal will do.
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dirtbag
climber
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Been up for nearly 2 hours now.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Look, no one is saying there aren't perceived aerial visual or radar 'sightings' we can't explain. But the 99.9999% thing comes into play here again, but in this case as the amount of evidence we don't have in all these cases. That no doubt frustrated Hynek to the point of bother and, in conjunction with dealing with Air Force culture over time, set his conjectural wheels spinning out of control to produce such gems as:
Hynek: I hypothesize an 'M&M' technology encompassing the mental and material realms. The psychic realms, so mysterious to us today, may be an ordinary part of an advanced technology.
He had to come up with that because he understood the astronomical distances involved are otherwise insurmountable in explaining any alien visitation at all. But that, however, is the very definition of a conjecture and a clear indicator that he had long since abandoned science for the realm of pseudo-science to explain the explainable. Unfortunately, it's no more or less than unprovable sci-fi.
My dad was an early radar specialist and military test pilot turned commercial pilot who retired from United 747's after a forty year career in the air. He and his friends and acquaintances in the pilot community saw lots of things they couldn't explain, but neither he nor any of his friends ever put the slightest stock in UFO's as anything more than just that - or, as he puts it: "it's all a crock."
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TWP
Trad climber
Mancos, CO
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By the content and "quality" of the discourse on this thread, the posters have collectively proven Mr. Donini's thesis: "America the ignorant." Congratulations Mr. Donini: sheer genius.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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i think your problem is likewise the scientific "we", healyje. there really isn't anything more out there than individual people with individual understandings. sometimes they coincide remarkably, sometimes not, but the shortcomings of "scientific" knowledge leaves a lot of solid information off your radar.
there's a lot more than "sightings" involved. as an example, looking at that salla link to the recent russian documentary, they report an identical experience to what our nuclear weapons handlers once had in north dakota: the presence of a ufo shutting them down completely, and then the immediate response of higher-ups to hush-hush everything.
logical people can't accept such reliable testimonies as "anomalies". there are only two logical scenarios to be induced. either there is a far superior, secret human technology and interest which is perversely being hidden from the public, or there are nonhuman entities and their cultures involved.
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dirtbag
climber
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You do realize that the "X-files" was fiction?
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