As I travel around the country, something that continues to be a hot topic for my supporters is the idea that the United States needs a Department of Peace. (Watch below!)
That we should play peace games as well as war games, that we should have a Peace Academy as well as a Military Academy, that we should imagine a world without war in 100 years and then reverse engineer from there. While some would say that imagining the world without war is naïve, I believe what’s naïve is considering our future on the planet guaranteed for another hundred years if we don’t at least try. That idea gets a tremendous reaction every time, because people realize it’s time to usher in a new paradigm of international collaboration. In order to give birth to a new world, we must articulate new concepts and solutions. People all over the world are rising up to do that. Despite the problems and conflicts in the world today, you can feel tiny sparkles of hope emerging everywhere. We can course-correct this country as other generations have done in their time, repudiating ideas that would take us backwards and giving birth to new beginnings. People are responding to the very idea that the world could be at peace.
My mind sometimes gets caught on certain topics or ideas and cannot let them go. Does this happen to you? And, if so, what topics tangle you up? Please let me know in the comments.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this tendency. It is part of what makes my thinking “weird,” in a positive sense. I want to explore “weirdness” — interestingly, etymologically the old English word “wyrd” meant fate or predestination — with a bit more intensity. Later, “weird” became associated with the supernatural, the eerie and uncanny.
In The Self Aware Universe, physicist Amit Goswami proposes that thoughts are, themselves, quantum phenomenon. Thoughts obey the uncertainty principle. We can follow the directionality of a thought (wave-form) or the thought itself (particle), but not both at the same time: “You can never simultaneously keep track of both the content of a thought and where the thought is going, the direction of thought.”
Goswami proposed that “mental substance”—thought—is made out of the same intangible elements that build up the “macro objects” of the physical world, but “mental substance is always subtle; it does not form gross conglomerates.” This makes sense to me. I often get caught up in the “particles” of a particular group of thoughts. Eventually I have to force myself to pull back to observe the wave-like patterning, the overall movement and directionality.
As I prepare for our upcoming seminar on what’s coming (please join us), my thinking has gotten tangled up, yet again, in the particulate matter of the global ecological emergency or what some call the “polycrisis.” Right now, I find it difficult to free my thinking from this insidious imbroglio. I honestly feel about the geopolitical polycrisis the same way I felt about psychedelics in 1999: The topic is one of the most interesting — and most important — things we need to focus on. But most people can’t focus on it. As with psychedelics twenty years ago, an unspoken cultural taboo, a subliminal shared suppression, holds us back.
How do we break this taboo? I have ideas on this too — but they are, I must admit, weird.
In my mind, the ongoing psychedelic renaissance and the possible “resolution” of the polycrisis or ecological emergency remain linked, on a level that few people realize and no institution studies, even as funding for psychedelics explodes (Harvard, apparently, just received a $17 million grant to create a division around “psychedelics and the humanities,” which sounds interesting). In what follows, I want to explore why and how this is so — why I feel we need to dive deeper, into the maelstrom.
My ongoing research into where we are at now with the polycrisis/emergency reveals that things are far more dire than the mainstream media tells us. I basically agree with the doomer-ish analysis of Jem Bendell (Breaking Together), climate scientist Kevin Anderson, John Michael Greer (Dark Age America), Chris Martenson, and Nate Hagens that we are spiraling inexorably into a period of decline as energy, food, and materials become more expensive and less accessible. This just isn’t going away — there won’t be a “return to normal.” The deepening strangeness is the new normal.
Of course, some regions of the Global South already undergo collapse (hence the refugee crisis in the US as dispossessed people stream north), and even subsets within the developed world have collapsed (one in four Americans experience some level of “food insecurity”). However, collapse hasn’t yet become a universal condition, as of yet. Many millions of us still live quite comfortable lives. Many still can’t quite believe such a disintegration could happen to people like us.
The goal of the establishment — represented by New York Times editorials as well as books like Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World — is to keep us from collectively freaking out or panicking about accelerated warming, species extinction, peak oil, industrial pollution such as microplastics, or the near-exhaustion of the Earth’s mineral resources (because then we all might want to do nasty things like sit-down in front of corporate HQs, interrupt Broadway shows, or fling Campbell’s soup at museum masterpieces). They want us to believe that the current system — Capitalism, Neoliberalism, nationalism, liberal democracy — has the flexibility to adjust and hold things together, as it has done until now. We must maintain faith that we will keep enjoying the benefits of ongoing technological “progress,” as conditions keep mutating.
I find it fascinating to observe our contemporary discourse swivel and twist, while I try to tease out the underlying directionality. For instance, what does Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter — with its bizarrely dark rebranding as “X” and its amplification of White supremacist, Trump-ian, anti-woke tropes — tell us about where we are drifting? Or, at least, where certain forces seek to direct us? Instagram just silently toggled a switch which means that people do not see political content unless they have the wherewithal and care to change that obscure setting. What a sneaky, underhanded way to exert control over the public discourse!
It took ten or fifteen years (give or take) for the Internet — which the US government built with taxpayer funds and then simply handed over to private corporations without any public input — to mutate from a seemingly positive and helpful technology (Facebook promised to make the world “more open and connected;” Google would “do no evil”) to an insidious and manipulative Capitalist blob. Artificial Intelligence made this same mutation in around six months. Increasingly, AI seems programmed to crush humanity’s creative industries willy nilly, making more money for the already obscenely wealthy while removing millions if not billions of jobs to increase profit margins.
Anyway, I start to digress, sort of. Here is the point I wanted to make:
What’s most interesting and important about psychedelics is not their potential to heal depression, trauma, cluster headaches, anxiety, or anything else. Also, we seem to have disproved the notion that psychedelics inevitably make people more holistic, integral, Leftist/ecological in their thinking. It turns out they can make people more susceptible to ungrounded conspiracy theories or lead them into delusions like the one in which a former reality TV series and pretend plutocrat is a prophetic redeemer and “Deep State” dragon slayer. At the very least, psychedelic libertarianism is a normal thing now.
What’s most interesting and important about psychedelics is that, as “nonspecific amplifiers” of the Psyche, they help to induce psychic and paranormal phenomena, from telepathy to synchronicity, to even more extreme stuff such as telekinesis or the mysterious manifestation of physical objects.
I am thrilled to present the third Salon for 2024. Video’s and Conversation on a Book by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse, whose work is known as inspired writings, whose style grows in boldness and penetration, exemplifies the classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of writing style. Join me for one of the most life-questioning books that Thane of Hawaii ever suggested I read. It was a book by Hesse, the author of The Glass Bead Game and Steppenwolf. Yet this book is little talked about because it is not neatly tied up in the end, nor does it come with answers but instead with questions.
Goldmund and Narcissus are about us being a conscious thinker and a conscious feeler, looking at that as duality, except in the form of two separate characters. One is a thinker, the other a feeler, one values rationality and reason, and the other values intuition but both are in life seeking the same destination. One lives in the world of abstract ideas and the other in the world of sensuality and the senses. Living in dangerous times speaks to us today about – who am I ? and how do I live my life authentically in recognition of my conscious beingness.
Narcissus and Goldmund (also first published in English as Death and the Lover), was first published in 1930. At its publication, Narcissus and Goldmund was considered Hesse’s literary triumph; chronologically, it follows Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and before the Glass Bead Game.
I know some students who came to the Prosperos because of Hesse’s other books, but I believe their lives came to mirror Narcissus and Goldmund in the hall of mirrors called the Prosperos.
Event: Salon* Calvin evening
Date: Saturday, April 27, 2024
Time: 4:00 pm to about 7 pm Pacific Time
Where: Over Zoom
More info to follow stay tuned.
Calvin
*Salon – A salon is a gathering of people with the aim “either to please or to educate”. Calvin’s Salons are in the tradition of the French literary and philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries. An intimate gathering of diverse people hosted by a salonnière who moderates conversation in the pursuit of cognitive growth and artistic experience. Salon Calvin’s Updated method involves videos, movies, and books as cultural entertainment and insightful commentary and analysis for Salon participants to discuss, exchange ideas, and enjoy.
New Thinking • Apr 5, 2024 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1988. It will remain public for only one week. At the dawn of modern civilization, says Riane Eisler, humanity shifted from a partnership model of social interaction to a dominator model. In a partnership model men and women treat each other as equals. Ms. Eisler details the archeological findings suggesting that neolithic and Cretan societies had a significantly different social organization from that of modern times. Fertility goddesses were the major objects of religious worship, suggesting a reverence for the creative principle of nature. Cities were unfortified and yet survived peaceably for thousands of years. As the civilizations of the fertile crescent arose, warfare and male domination became established social institutions. Since that time they have been such an integral part of our culture that we rarely imagine things could be otherwise. Riane Eisler’s book, The Chalice and the Blade, has been described by anthropologist Ashley Montague as “the most important book since Darwin’s Origin of Species.” Ms. Eisler is an attorney and legal scholar. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
The Chalice and the Blade tells a new story of our cultural origins. It shows that warfare and the war of the sexes are neither divinely nor biologically ordained. It provides verification that a better future is possible—and is in fact firmly rooted in the haunting dramas of what happened in our past.
Riane Eisler is internationally known for her bestseller The Chalice and The Blade, now in 26 foreign editions and celebrating its 30th anniversary with a new 2017 epilogue in its 57th US printing, as well as for other award-winning books. She keynotes conferences worldwide, with venues including the United Nations General Assembly and the US Department of State. She is President of the Center for Partnership Studies and has received many honors, including honorary Ph.D. degrees, the Alice Paul ERA Education Award, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2009 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award, and is featured in the award-winning book Great Peacemakers as one of 20 leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King.
noun: 1. The condition or quality of being complete or whole. 2. An aggregate amount or sum. 3. The phase of an eclipse when an obscuring body completely blocks the light source, e.g., when the moon completely blocks the view of the sun.
ETYMOLOGY:
From total, from Latin totus (entire). Earliest documented use: 1598.
Totality, France, Aug 11, 1999. Only the Sun’s corona and prominences are visible. Photo: Luc Viatour / Wikimedia
On Friday, Trump posted a video featuring an image of President Biden hog-tied —with hands and feet bound together.
Trump has previously posted doctored photos and videos depicting him physically attacking Biden, such as hitting Mr. Biden with golf balls.
It’s all part of Trump’s 5-step fascist plan.
In a previous post, I laid out the defining traits of fascism and how MAGA Republicans embody them, and I suggested that Trump and his lackeys shouldn’t be seen as simply “authoritarian.” They need to be understood as fascist.
But how could Trump actually turn America into a fascist state?
In five steps, which he’s already signaled he plans to take. Here they are:
Step 1: Use threats of violence to gain power.
Hitler and Mussolinirelied on their vigilante militias to intimidate voters and local officials. We watched Trump try to do the same in 2020. Even before he incited the attack on the U.S. Capitol, he said on national television: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”
After Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg requested a gag order, providing some 300 pages of exhibits documenting the real-world consequences of Trump’s attacks, Judge Juan Merchanfound the filing persuasive. He said Trump’s statements:
“were threatening, inflammatory, denigrating, and the targets of his statements ranged from local and federal officials, court and court staff, prosecutors and staff assigned to the cases, and private individuals including grand jurors performing their civic duty,” citing Bragg’s filing, [and had caused] “the assignment of increased security resources to investigate threats and protect the individuals and family members” of those Trump targeted.
After the gag order was issued, Trump attacked Judge Merchan’s daughter for running a political consulting firm that’s worked with Democrats, saying it should disqualify Merchan from his case. On Friday night, Bragg asked the judge to “clarify or confirm” that the order applies to family members and order Trump to “immediately desist from attacks on family members.”
“We do these jobs because we’re committed to the rule of law and we believe in the rule of law. And the rule of law can only function effectively when we have judges who are prepared to carry out their duties without the threat of potential physical harm.”
Meanwhile, Republican election officials have testified to the threats they faced when they refused Trump’s demands to falsify the 2020 election results.
Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who refused Trump’s demand to “find” the votes needed to flip the state into Trump’s hands, said “my email, my cell phone was doxxed.”
Rusty Bowers, the Arizona state speaker and a pro-Trump Republican who resisted pressure from Trump and Rudy Giuliani and refused to go along with an illegal scheme to replace Arizona’s legal slate of electors, remains a target of pro-Trump partisans. As he said, “They have had video panel trucks with videos of me proclaiming me to be a pedophile.”
Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state who helped manage the 2020 presidential election and recount in Georgia that found no widespread fraud, has faced death threats. Sterling admonished Trump:
“Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. … This has to stop. Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed.”
Step 2: Consolidate power.
After taking office, a would-be fascist turns every arm of government into a tool of his will. One of Hitler’s first steps was to take over the civil service, purging it of non-Nazis.
Now Trump is using the same language to claim he needs similar powers to deal with immigrants. Trump says they’re “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Recently, Trump warned that the country would face a “blood bath” if he lost the election (he then walked back the claim, saying he was referring to losing the auto industry). A few days later, he attacked Jewish Democrats in a radio interview, saying that Jews who vote for Democrats hate their religion and Israel.
At a rally on March 16, Trump baselessly claimed that other countries were sending gang members and other undesirables to the United States: “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” He then referred to them as “animals.”
With promises to pardon January 6 criminals and stop prosecutions of right-wing domestic terrorists, Trump would empower groups like the Proud Boys to act as MAGA enforcers.
Trump has not hidden his plans. You’ve heard him promise to “be a dictator for one day.” History shows there are no “one-day” dictatorships.
We must take Trump’s 5-step fascist plan seriously and do everything in our power to stop it.
One thing you can do right now is to share the following video, which my colleagues and I made recently about Trump’s planned steps toward a fascist dictatorship:
Widely celebrated for his skepticism, stage magician and psychic-buster James Randi (1928–2020) was, in my estimation, less a crusading debunker of woo than a culture warrior for materialist thought. Over the course of his nearly four-decade career, Randi degraded our ability to discuss and consider contentious issues in science, and to bring measured thinking to questions of the extra-physical. Written amid a flood of otherwise heroizing obituaries, this 2020 article questioned Randi’s legacy. It met with a good deal of support — and a chorus of vituperative and, in some cases, coordinated pushback, a Randian tactic that I expected. In the end, the United States has probably lost more than a generation of progress in clinical research of ESP due to the efforts of Randi and his supporters. We as a culture will pick up the pieces; I hope starting here. This article originally appeared at Boing Boing on October 26, 2020.
Several years ago I was preparing a talk on the life of occult journeyer Madame H.P. Blavatsky (1831–1891) for the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. Someone on Facebook asked sardonically: “Will James Randi be there?” My interlocutor was referencing the man known worldwide as a debunker of psychical and paranormal claims. (That my online critic was outspoken about his own religious beliefs posed no apparent irony for him.)
Last week marked the death at age 92 of James “The Amazing” Randi, a stage magician who became internationally famous as a skeptic — indeed Randi rebooted the term “skepticism” as a response to the boom in psychical claims and research in the post-Woodstock era. Today, thousands of journalists, bloggers and the occasional scientist call themselves skeptics in the mold set by Randi. Over the past decade, the investigator himself was heroized in documentaries, profiles, and, now, obituaries. A Guardian columnist eulogized him as the “prince of reason.”
I mourn Randi’s passing for those who loved him, and there were many. But his elevation to the Mount Rushmore of skepticism obfuscates a basic truth. In the end, the feted researcher was no skeptic. He was to skepticism what Senator Joseph McCarthy was to anticommunism — a showman, a bully, and, ultimately, the very thing he claimed to fight against: a fraud. This has corroded our intellectual culture — in a Trumpian age when true skepticism is desperately needed.
Born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge in Toronto in 1928, Randi became a celebrated stage magician and escape artist who appeared in prestigious venues and on television shows, including Happy Days. His stage aesthetics and devices were often brilliant and original. Randi toured with rock icon Alice Cooper in 1973, designing a mock beheading-by-guillotine for the proto-metal star. When claiming the garland of skepticism in the early 1970s, the MacArthur-winning Randi announced his intention of exposing phony faith healers and grifter psychics.
Today, many people know Randi from the award-winning 2014 documentaryAn Honest Liar. But the laudatory and engaging profile tells its story in a fashion that skeptics traditionally decry: including only the magician’s successful exposes (some of which were more questionable than the film allows) and obfuscating his darker and more lasting impact: making it more difficult for serious university-based and academically trained researchers to study ESP and mental anomalies, and to receive a fair hearing in the news media. Indeed, Randi ultimately cheapened an important debate over how or whether extra-physical mentality can be studied under scientifically rigorous conditions and evaluated by serious people.
In a typical example, The New York Times ran a 2015 piece about a wave of fraudulent and flawed psychology studies; its lead paragraph cited a precognition study by Cornell University psychologist Daryl J. Bem — without justifying why it was grouped with polluted research or even further referencing Bem’s study in the article. (I wrote to the Times to object. The paper has used several of my letters and op-eds, often on controversial subjects — this time, crickets.)
In the pioneering days of scholarly psychical research in the United States, roughly between the 1930s and 1960s, Duke University housed a highly regarded center for the study of ESP, founded by researchers J.B. and Louisa Rhine. Yet today the Rhine Research Center functions off-campus as a nonprofit organization and, while individual researchers and a handful of university labs soldier on, many college textbooks brand ESP research a pseudoscience, often citing Randi’s work as the source of that opinion, so the topic is shunned by most academics and journalists who cover them.
Asa historian and writer on metaphysical topics, I have spent time among fraudulent mediums, and I share Randi’s outrage at their manipulations. I have no issue with his or others’ targeting of stage psychics and woo-woo con artists — I join in it.
But Randi made his name, and influenced today’s professional skeptics, by smearing the work of serious researchers, such as Rhine, who, in founding the original parapsychological lab at Duke with his wife and co-researcher Louisa, labored intensively — and in a scientifically conservative manner that reverse-mirrored Randi’s work — to devise research protocols for testing psychical phenomena.
In one of Randi’s freely distributed classroom guides, he misleadingly stated that Rhine had reported only positive results in his ESP trials. In fact, in the early 1930s, when Rhine’s lab opened, it was standard practice in the behavioral and life sciences to discount experiments with null or negative results. But Rhine was one of the first academic researchers to recognize this common practice as a problem, and then to explicitly reject it. By 1940, with the publication of Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years, Rhine’s lab took a leading role in reporting all results, positive and negative, ahead of the curve of other researchers.
Randi’s contemporaneous parapsychology skeptics, including science writer Martin Gardner and University of Oregon psychologist Ray Hyman, differed from Randi’s uncritical dismissals by offering qualified respect to Rhine and his protégé Charles Honorton, with whom Hyman co-authored a paper validating Honorton’s research methods. In a moment of intellectual probity, the skeptic Gardner wrote of Rhine in his 1952 book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science: “It should be stated immediately that Rhine is clearly not a pseudoscientist to a degree even remotely comparable to that of most of the men discussed in this book. He is an intensely sincere man, whose work has been undertaken with a care and competence that cannot be dismissed easily, and which deserves a far more serious treatment.” (Another notable contemporary was sociologist Marcello Truzzi — a self-described “constructive skeptic” — who criticized Randi’s methods in the paper linked earlier. Truzzi coined the maxim popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”)
To Randi, such moderate tones were alien. When criticizing the parapsychological research of University of Arizona psychology professor Gary E. Schwartz, for example, Randi repeatedly accused the researcher of believing in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, and taunted him with the Trump-worthy sobriquet “Gullible Gary.” Randi showed no compunction about brutalizing reputations and ignoring complexities.
Indeed, Randi showed willingness to mislead the public about testing certain paranormal claims — while simultaneously touting his “results” and trashing reputations. Such was the case with his public rebuttal to Cambridge University biologist Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake’s theory of “morphic resonance” proposes that “memory is inherent in nature.” The biologist has written that “morphic fields of social groups connect together members of the group even when they are many miles apart, and provide channels of communication through which organisms can stay in touch at a distance. They help provide an explanation for telepathy.” To this Randi retorted: “We at JREF [James Randi Educational Foundation] have tested these claims. They fail.”
Yet Sheldrake complained that Randi ignored his requests to see the test data. Reporter Will Storr of Britain’s The Telegraph followed up with Randi and received a series of dog-ate-my-homework excuses — until the reporter realized that the Amazing Randi was either misleading him about the existence of tests, or was proffering an incredibly byzantine (and inconsistent) backstory that the results “got washed away in a flood.” Unbelievable as Randi’s responses were, he continued running down the biologist in public. This is what sociologist Truzzi dubbed “pseudoskepticism”: rejection absent investigation.
Amid Randi’s persistent and questionable media dings, academics began to recoil. John G. Kruth, executive director of the Rhine lab, experienced the chill firsthand in the 1980s. “As the old guard began to age out of the field,” he said, “there were very few opportunities for new researchers to study parapsychology … younger students typically had to travel abroad or design their own study programs.”
Beyond scholarly circles, Randi set the template for a zealous band of professional skeptics, many of whom are science journalists or bloggers who focus on niche takedown pieces of people who study any form of ESP, mediumship, or anomalies. Even more damaging over the last decade has been a group of self-described “Guerrilla Skeptics” — winners of the 2017 James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) Award — who wage a kind of freewheeling digital jihad on Wikipedia, tendentiously revising or trolling pages about scientific parapsychology and the lives of its key players.
“While there are lots of anonymous trolls that have worked hard to trash any Wikipedia pages related to psi, including bios of parapsychologists,” said Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in northern California, one of a few remaining scholarly parapsychology labs, “this group of extreme skeptics is proudly open that they are rewriting history … any attempt to edit those pages, even fixing individual words, is blocked or reverted almost instantly.”
Another case was Randi’s yearly “million-dollar challenge,” often held in Las Vegas, in which he tempted psychics with a cash prize. For years it was an annual charade to which virtually no serious observer or claimant would venture near. Journalist and NPR producer Stacy Horn, who wrote about Rhine’s lab at Duke University in her 2009 book Unbelievable, queried Randi in June 2008 about his million-dollar prize. She told me:
I had an exchange with Randi because I was going to have the following sentences about his million-dollar prize in my book:
“To date, Randi’s million-dollar prize has not been awarded, but according to Chris Carter, author of Parapsychology and the Skeptics, Randi backs off from any serious challenge. ‘I always have an out,’ he has been quoted as saying.”
I sent that to Randi to ask him if he really said that. …He wrote back saying that the quote was true, but incomplete. What he really said was, “I always have an ‘out’ — I’m right!”
It seemed like he thought he was being amusing, but I didn’t really know a lot about him yet. But it also seemed to indicate that the million-dollar prize might not really be a serious offer. So I asked him how a decision was made, was there a committee and who was on it? …He replied, “If someone claims they can fly by flapping their arms, the results don’t need any ‘decision.’ What ‘committee’? Why would a committee be required? I don’t understand the question.”
At that point I wrote him off and decided to not mention his prize in my book since it just seemed like a publicity stunt for Randi.
The Telegraph’s Storr wondered what — besides organizing the yearly Vegas conference (discontinued in 2015) — Randi’s nonprofit JREF actually does:
More recently I’ve begun to wonder about his educational foundation, the JREF, which claims tax exempt status in the US and is partly dependant on public donations. I wondered what actual educative work the organisation — which between 2011 and 2013 had an average revenue of $1.2 million per year — did. Financial documents reveal just $5,100, on average, being spent on grants.
There are some e-books, videos and lesson plans on subjects such as fairies on their website. They organise an annual fan convention. James Randi, over that period, has been paid an average annual salary of $195,000. My requests for details of the educational foundation’s educational activities, over the last 12 months, were dodged and then ignored.
The two years that follow, according to public filings, show executive compensation at an average of over $197,000, more than 20% of the Foundation’s total yearly revenue. According to a contemporaneous analysis of 100,000 nonprofit CEO salaries, this figure nearly triples the average compensation in JREF’s revenue class.
Randi proved hugely adept at sound bites. Most researchers and scientists do poorly with sound bites. Such devices contributed to his being lionized in news coverage by observers who seemed genuinely unaware of his unwillingness to distinguish between parapsychologists who perform juried and meticulous work, such as scientists Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake, versus the average storefront psychic. The “broad smear” and polarized thinking typify most professional skepticism today.
Indeed, when encountering the efforts of clinicians, such as Rhine and Radin, Randi often played “move the goalpost.” Physicists Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner made this pertinent historical observation in their book Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness: “Greek science had a fatal flaw. It had no mechanism to compel consensus. The Greeks saw experimental tests of scientific conclusions as no more relevant than were experimental tests of political or aesthetic positions. Conflicting views could be argued indefinitely.” Randi and his admirers embraced this flaw as a polemical device, often wearing down scientists and winning over journalists with perpetual, repeat-loop disparagement of ESP research and other science they disfavored, no matter how valid the methods.
Weurgently need good skeptics today. We are living under the cloud of a president who spreads QAnon conspiracy theories and 5 a.m. Twitter smears, while questioning the gravity of Covid, the reality of climate change (as Randi did, too — along with a proclivity for eugenics), and the facts of responsible news coverage. Even in our truth-challenged times, however, Randi never stopped baiting researchers and punching down at eccentrics who may have been self-deluded about their psychical abilities.
Yes, Randi may have bagged some con artists along the way. Senator McCarthy may have caught a few authentic Soviet sympathizers or spies. But at what cost? Each man laid tracks for future demagogues who proved less interested in defending facts than in promulgating smears and half-truths for personal benefit.
I sympathize with those who want to challenge credulity and generalized references to psychical phenomena — and all the more with researchers and investigators who expose frauds. I sympathize, too, with those who have lost a man, a friend, and a spouse. But to the intellectual community, and anyone concerned with critical inquiry in general, Randi’s legacy should serve as a cautionary tale and a call to restore sound practices when discussing or writing about contentious topics in science or any field. These are things that a showman can deter but never erase.
Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract.” The first step is an ontological statement of being beginning with the syllogism: “Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is all there is.” The second step is the sense testimony (what the senses tell us about anything). The third step is the argument between the absolute abstract nature of truth from the first step and the relative specific truth of experience from the second step. The fourth step is filtering out the conclusions you have arrived at in the third step. The fifth step is your overall conclusion.
The claims in a Translation may seem outrageous, but they are always (or should always) be based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is one Translation from this week.
1) Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is al that is. Truth being all is therefore total, therefore whole, therefore one, therefore otherless. Truth being true is therefore correct, therefore right, therefore moral, therefore lawful, therefore perfect. I think therefore I am. Since I am and since Truth is all that is, therefore I am Truth. Since I, being, am Truth therefore I, being, have all the attributes of Truth. Therefore I, being, am total, whole, one, otherless, true, correct, right, moral, lawful. perfect. Since I, being, am Truth and since I am mind/consciousness, therefore Truth is Mind/Consciousness.
2) Only love can overcome sexual humiliation.
Word-tracking: overcome: to overpower pain: payment, penalty love: to leave, to permit, to allow, belief, libido, affection, affect, to move sexual: sex, to cut, to divide, reproductive organs orgasm: to swell or be excited humiliate: dishonor, embarrass, shame, to lesson somebody’s dignity or pride, painfully self-conscious self: personality, self-identity
3) Truth being one cannot at the same time have many selves, therefore Truth is one Self. Truth being one Self and Truth being whole, cannot be painfully Self-conscious since there is no pain in wholeness. Therefore Truth is painless Self-awareness. Since there is no pain in wholeness, there is no humiliation, diminishing or Self-abasing in wholeness. Therefore Truth is undeflatable OR Truth is that which is undeflatable. Truth being one cannot at the same time be divided by sex, therefore Truth is pansexual excitement. Potent meaning the ability to be and Truth being all that is, therefore Truth is all-potent, all-powerful. Since Truth is all-powerful, there can be no force, no affect, no movement, no emotion, no love other than Truth. Therefore Love is the only power.
4) Truth is one Self. Truth is painless Self-awareness Truth is undeflatable OR Truth is that which is undeflatable. Truth is pansexual excitement. Truth is all-potent, all-powerful. Love is the only power.
VATICAN CITY—Stressing that His good moods never tended to last long, Pope Francis encouraged Catholics on Thursday to ask for what they wanted now while God Almighty, Our Lord and Heavenly Father, was in high spirits. “Whether you’re praying to Him for a promotion at work or to help shepherd a loved one through a difficult illness, my suggestion to the faithful is to get in while the getting’s good,” said the pontiff, who in an address to the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics indicated that the Creator of Heaven and Earth was clearly in one of the rare moods that once garnered Him a reputation as a just, loving, and merciful God. “I got a nice new window for St. Peter’s Basilica, some beautiful bespoke vestments to wear at Easter mass, and several antiabortion laws passed in the United States. He even threw in this stylish newsboy hat that I’ve always wanted. Isn’t that funny? I didn’t ask for it—He just knew! Anyway, act quickly, because a mood this good might not come around again for another millennium.” At press time, Vatican officials said the Lord’s temper had clearly soured and He should just be left alone, part of an apparent effort to walk back the pope’s remarks after God smote 3 million of His followers for no discernible reason.
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