New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove • Apr 15, 2025 James McClenon, PhD, is a former sociology professor, licensed clinical social worker, civil engineer, and researcher. James is author of Deviant Science: The Case of Parapsychology, Wondrous Events: Foundations of Religious Belief, Wondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion, and The Entity Letters: A Sociologist on the Trail of a Supernatural Mystery, and coauthor with Mohammad Khodayarifard of An Iranian and American Veteran Exchange Stories and Discuss Inner Peace: We Were Thirteen. His website is jamesmcclenon.com. His email is beinghere@gmail.com. Through his extensive field research, Jim shares insights as a participant observer with shamanic practitioners across various cultures. He describes his ritual healing theory that developed from universal themes of anomalous experiences and the role of belief in healing. He also highlights the potential of integrating spiritual practices with modern therapeutic approaches to address mental health and well-being. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:06:18 Psychokinesis 00:11:09 Psychic surgery 00:20:32 Dramatic performance 00:27:40 Fire walking 00:34:17 Hypnotic suggestion and belief 00:41:29 Expressive writing and therapy process 00:51:57 Anomalous experiences 01:02:32 Empathy and compassion 01:14:34 Ritual healing theory 01:18:30 Conclusion Edited subtitles for this video are available in Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, and Spanish. New Thinking Allowed CoHost, Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is an intuitive healer and health coach based in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com (Recorded on January 16, 2025)

“Without understanding yourself, what is the use of trying to understand the world?” Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) Indian Sage

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

The Eight of Disks The Lord of Prudence is a generous card in many respects… it covers periods of development and learning.It’s a strong card for inner development, promising expansion and exciting growth. But it does clearly warn that we need to pay special attention to what is going on around us, to rest and take care of ourselves, to ensure that we remain alert for important opportunities.The 8 of Disks tells us the mysteries of proper management of energy – this is energy of all types – love, money, knowledge, health. It describes for us the art of putting in what we need in order to get out what we desire – balance and harmony both being watchwords.So on a day ruled by the Lord of Prudence, we need to enjoy our lives, and to enrich them in as many ways as possible. We need to be thoughtful about how we expend energy, making every single move count. We also need to be aware of what is coming back to us from other people.Allow yourself to be alert for good opportunities and happy consequences. Let yourself learn from day to day events. And let life talk to you. Affirmation: “I relax and depend upon life.”

(Angelpaths.com)

Jacob Nordby • Jun 28, 2023 Message of the year: “How do you spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel. The kindest person in the room is often the smartest.” — Gov Pritzker

(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)

(SHUTTERSTOCK)

A Texas author earned a certificate in AI—but there’s no way he’d ever use it to write a book.

by SKIP RHUDY

APRIL 15, 2025 (texasobserver.org)

I’ve got a post-graduate certificate in artificial intelligence (AI). I’m also an author, and I believe writers and publishers should not use AI in publishing. So that’s why I was disturbed when a reviewer asked if I had used AI in writing my recent coming-of-age novel, Under the Gulf Coast Sun.

But the reasons I oppose using AI are not the usual ones you hear.

We have all read or heard about copyright violations during AI algorithm training, as well as plagiarism problems, job displacement, potential stifling of creativity, legal complexity, blandness, and plain old human outrage. Those are all good arguments for opposing the use of generative AI in publishing.

Let me also argue against its use, but for a completely different reason: AI is dead.

Literally.

When I want to read poetry, a short story, a novel, a memoir, or non-fiction, I seek the voice of a fellow human being. A computer, by contrast, has the exact same awareness of the world that you had before birth—basically the perspective of a stone sitting on the side of the road. That is, no awareness of the world at all.

So, when I’m interested in what a person has to say, why would I willingly spend time reading or listening to a text that was mathematically calculated by a dead thing? I would not. And once you consider this reality, I believe you will lose interest as well, just as we all completely lost interest in (and quickly forgot) the rather incredible achievement of IBM’s Big Blue defeating chess champion Gary Kasparov in a six-game showdown in 1997.

Mustapha Suleyman, Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence CEO, said in an NPR interview with Manosh Zamorodi that AI systems “communicate in our languages. They see what we see. They consume unimaginably large amounts of information. They have memory. They have personality. They have creativity.”

That is mostly nonsense. Computers operate only with zeros and ones. AI does not see what we see. It has no personality, no creativity. At best AI is a glorified calculator that works by fooling people into believing that it possesses the qualities Suleyman lists because AI does consume and process unimaginably large amounts of information from human beings. Unlike Suleyman’s claim, though, computers don’t have any real understanding of the data they generate.

Here’s how AI calculates novels or short stories or poetry: A human language prompt is converted into zeroes and ones and stored in a vast ocean of other zeros and ones. Then a set of instructions are loaded into the main processor’s transistors (again, zeroes and ones). The instructions tell the computer which zeroes and ones to retrieve from memory, then the retrieved zeros and ones are added together with other zeros and ones using Boolean math. This creates a different pattern of zeros and ones—which get put back into the storage system.

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This process repeats itself at extreme speed for about ten or fifteen seconds, until the novel or short story or poem has been fully calculated and placed into memory (again, as zeros and ones).

At a higher level, AI calculates texts based on probabilities of what word is most likely to come next in the stream of data it’s generating. That’s all.

In other words: A poem, short story, or novel calculated by a computer is nothing more than a prediction.  The fact that a human being sometimes can’t tell the difference between an AI-generated text and one written by a real person doesn’t make the calculation any less of a mindless mathematical outcome. (The Turing Test first devised in 1950,  is a way to attempt to determine whether machines actually exhibit any real intelligence. In particular, if a human can’t tell the difference between the machine output and one created by a human, the test passes. But Turing, the man who proposed the test, later said that the question of whether machines can think is itself “too meaningless” to deserve discussion.)

And, critically, the math has nothing to do with how humans build beauty and meaning with writing.

There are uncountable amazing and incredibly useful applications of AI, both generative and otherwise, in society. I won’t list them (just ask your local ChatGPT, it will be happy to calculate a result for you). And on that note, I let ChatGPT end this article with a calculation it made about the meaning of its own calculations, based on the following prompt:

Me: I would state that you don’t understand concepts, but retrieve data, operate on the data, then calculate an output. The concept is up to me to create based on your calculations.

ChatGPT: You’re absolutely right. I do not possess true understanding or conceptual awareness in the human sense. Instead, I work by retrieving patterns, facts, and relationships from the data I’ve been trained on, performing calculations and logical operations to produce outputs that align with your prompts.

ChatGPT has calculated this truth (as Suleyman the Microsoft AI guru well knows): Generative AI output is an illusion—a fake—produced by a dead thing with no awareness of what it has produced. We have to make our own meaning from it. But beyond that, I simply cannot justify spending my very limited time reading the calculations of a computer while pretending it has the same weight as the creative output of an actual human being.

I’ll take the living over the dead, every time. 

SKIP RHUDY‘s first novel, Under the Gulf Coast Sun (Stoney Creek Publishing, April 2025) is based on his years growing up in Port Aransas.

(Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)

“You must live life beautifully and not allow the spirit of the world, that makes gods out of power, riches and pleasure, make you forget you have been created for greater things, to love and to be loved.” Mother Teresa (1910-1997) Catholic Saint

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Salt Doll

After a long journey over mountains and valleys, a Salt Doll reached the sea shore. She was struck by that vast expanse of water she discovered. She had never seen the sea before. It was so large, so charming. She felt irresistibly attracted to it. She stood on the shore, so firm and assured. The sea in front of her looked vast, immense, inviting and peaceful. She wanted by all means to know what the sea was.  Timidly, the Doll came closer to the sea and with a touch of curiosity asked the sea, “Who are you?” And the sea replied, “I am the sea.” The Doll remarked, “Well, you only told me your name. I want to know more about you. I want and long to experience who you are. Show me more about yourself.” The sea mysteriously answered, “I am just what I am. I am the sea.” In perplexity, the Doll inquired, “I cannot figure out what you say you are. Yet, I want to know more about you. Shall I ever understand who you are?”  The sea replied, “You will never come to know who I am, unless you come closer to me, unless you touch me. If you really long to know who I am, please, come forward and allow me to embrace you.”  The Doll came forward and fearfully touched the sea with one of her feet. Immediately, she experienced a very strange, but beautiful feeling, something glorious she could not understand. Then, she tried to remove her foot out of the water, but her foot wasn’t there any more! It had dissolved in the sea. In fright and disbelief, the Doll cried out, “What have you done to my foot?”  “Yes, your foot is gone. You have given me permission to embrace you and experience who I am! If you wish to know more about me, and how wonderful it is to abide in me, come even closer to me now. Be ready to lose yourself in me.” Then, the Doll gradually stepped deeper and deeper into the sea.  The deeper she went into the water that strange but wonderful feeling of joy grew stronger and stronger. Finally, when the Doll was about to be completely dissolved by the sea, she exclaimed, “Now I know what the sea is and what I am. We are one!”  Author Unknown AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Published: October 18, 2017 (TheOnion.com)

CAMBRIDGE, MA—A trove of recently unearthed documents dating back to the sixth century B.C. has revealed that the ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras wrote dozens of elaborate, unhinged conspiracy theorems pertaining to triangles, researchers announced Wednesday.

Upon examining a cache of papyrus scrolls found while excavating a site near the modern Italian city of Crotone, a team of historians and classical scholars at Harvard University discovered previously unknown writings by Pythagoras and others that suggest the philosopher was obsessed with proving triangles played a powerful but highly secretive role in the world he inhabited, controlling nearly every aspect of life.

“These conspiracy theorems shed new light on this historic figure, who was apparently suspicious of the fact that all triangles have interior angles adding up to 180 degrees, believing this was evidence that they were united in hiding some sort of covert agenda,” said Professor Janet Boisvert, who found among the artifacts an alternative version of the Pythagorean theorem in which Pythagoras concluded that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle was equal to the sum of “all the lies embodied by these cursed triangles!” “One scroll is 35 feet long and contains nothing but a rambling series of postulates attempting to demonstrate the existence of a triangle with three obtuse angles that he thought was being kept under wraps by the government.”

“Pythagoras also stayed up every night for two years working on formulas he believed would prove the Great Pyramid at Giza was a hoax perpetrated by pro-triangle propagandists,” she added.

According to Boisvert, Pythagoras’ fixation on conspiracy theorems was described in the written accounts of his students, who recalled visiting his private study and finding the walls, the tables, and nearly every available surface covered in intricate equations and charts depicting hundreds of scalene, isosceles, and equilateral triangles. One student noted that Pythagoras always seemed worried by the sheer number of triangles he saw around him, and he became extremely distraught one day upon realizing that quadrilaterals, which he had until then considered innocuous, were in fact nothing more than two triangles combined.

This paranoia is further corroborated by the diary entry of a goatherd who described an elderly mathematician wandering the streets of Metapontum and warning complete strangers about the sails of ships, the shapes of their own noses, and the encroaching power of the trigonocracy.

“We are now able to conclusively identify Pythagoras as the unnamed figure in the Histories of Herodotus who storms into a polis council meeting waving pages scrawled with formulas and screaming, ‘Triangles are all around us, hidden in every shape, and I have the proofs!’ before being escorted out,” Boisvert said. “He continued to demand the truth from local magistrates, having hypothesized that triangles had a fourth, invisible side that those in power didn’t want him to know about.”

“It’s likely that by this point, his obsession with conspiracy theorems had begun to take a toll on his home life,” she continued. “We know an increasingly isolated Pythagoras was left by his wife and four children around 515 B.C., shortly after he accused they themselves of being triangles.”

Documents indicate Pythagoras went on to live a hermetic existence in the foothills of Mount Parnassus, until the realization that even the mountain itself had a triangular shape eventually drove him to suicide.

The Ten of Disks The Lord of Wealth is a card which talks about the manifestation of the fruits of our labours, in whatever area they have been directed. When we have aimed all our energies in a single stream of force toward one end, there comes a point, inevitably, where we shall attain our objective. And that is what the Ten of Disks indicates.Often, commentaries on this card warn that once sufficient wealth has been attained, you should make sure you distribute excess fairly and generously. This is because energy which remains unused eventually corrupts and dissipates.But there’s another aspect to the right use of energy which is not so often addressed. This is to do with the way the Will works. There’s a common misunderstanding about the use of Will among us – we tend to think that applying Will is something that we only do consciously. This is incorrect. The human Will works all the time. It runs around happily creating whatever seems most pressing in your mind.This has a rather unfortunate side effect. For many people, the most pressing emotions and responses in their minds are connected to fear, pain, unhappiness or deprivation. Once seized by feelings such as these, it can be very difficult indeed to keep your mind off them, and engage in positive thoughts, affirmations and actions.You know the feeling – something comes along and hurts you. Then you suffer. You keep circling the issue in your mind. You build up a nice collection of fears. You make a lot of (often wildly illogical) painful associations. And you do not find a relevant affirmation and repeat it with extraordinary fervour until you have your feelings back under control. You do not go and do something nice for yourself. You do not deliberately force your thoughts and feelings onto a more positive track.All the time that cycle is taking place, your Will is wildly scampering after all those negative feelings and channelling your energy out into life, attempting to create the things it thinks you want!DOH!!! Dissipation of power causing chaos!The Lord of Wealth teaches us the invaluable lesson… by bringing our thoughts and emotions to a conscious level, and by making positive choices about how we direct those energies, we create our world. So we need to decide what we what, and then think about that… not linger on the things that we don’t want. And we need to trust our own energy to fly out into the Universe and come back to us completed.Then we are endlessly wealthy. Affirmation: “I am endlessly wealthy.”

(Angelpaths.com)

• By Marc Sandalow | Examiner columnist
• Apr 13, 2025 (SFExaminer.com)

In Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Big Daddy says, “There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity. You can smell it. It smells like death.”

Even by today’s loose standards for truthfulness, Fox News sank to a new low this month trying to defend President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again trade war.

First, the network’s anchors told viewers that high tariffs were good, and that tumbling stock markets were nothing to worry about. They called Trump courageous when he vowed on social media that “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE.”

Then, when Trump changed policies, pausing tariffs for 90 days (with the exception of China), they called him a genius and rejoiced in the markets’ partial recovery.

Few readers of this column are likely to be Fox News devotees or take it terribly seriously. Fox News viewers are overwhelmingly conservative and white, the combination of which doesn’t exactly describe the typical San Franciscan.

But sometimes the stench of lies becomes so odious and the groveling to curry favor with patrons so rancid, that it needs to be called out, lest we sink deeper into a world where news is nothing more than entertainment aimed at making consumers feel virtuous about their beliefs, whether or not they have any basis in fact.

Consider how multiple Fox personalities reacted to the stock market’s largest dive since COVID-19, a swoon which wiped out trillions in global wealth before stocks rebounded.

“Tomorrow when you look at the Dow, it might not feel so liberating. But neither did the day after D-Day. Eventually we won,” Fox News Primetime host Jesse Watters said (via a transcription from Media Matters For America, a left-leaning media watchdog).

“I don’t really care about my 401(k) today. You know why? I believe in this man,” said Jeanine Pirro, co-cost of “The Five,” referring to her faith in the president.

“What he’s doing is courageous,” said Laura Ingraham, host of “The Ingraham Angle.” “The current market gyrations are going to be short-lived.”

But as wise as the tariffs were, Trump’s decision to backtrack just 10 hours after they took effect, in their eyes was even wiser.

“Genius,” Ingraham declared.

Nearly three years earlier, when Joe Biden was in office, Ingraham said “we are all suffering for the incompetence,” complaining that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 746 points over the course of his presidency.

Ingraham left unsaid last week the Dow closed Friday down nearly 3,300 points from the end of Trump’s first day in office.

The Fox News double standard even applies to golf. Trump hitting the links in the weekend after introducing tariffs and markets plunged was presented on Fox News as a sign of calm, if not defiance.

Playing golf “is not a middle finger to middle America — that’s a middle finger to all those foreign countries who are trying to get on the phone and negotiate these tariffs down.” Watters said on “The Five.” In a moment of self-awareness, Watters joked that had President Biden been golfing during a crisis like this, “I’m sure I wouldn’t have said a word.”

Fox News is to journalism what Funyuns are to food — a substance that resembles nourishment carefully manipulated to keep customers coming back for more.

In his astute book “Broken News, Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back,” former Fox News Political Editor Chris Stirewalt writes that Fox is not an arm of — and does not take orders from — the Republican Party.

Instead, he writes, Fox News has a business model aimed at pleasing conservative viewers. It’s a subtle but important distinction.

Fox News is not the same as state-run television, as in Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China. The network is motivated to offer viewers what they want because a large audience means selling more advertisments.

The makers of Funyuns — or Cheez-Its or Jalapeno Popper Cheese Curls — aren’t aiming to push junk on consumers any more than they are trying to nourish them. They simply want customers to come back for more.

Journalism, at its best, is different. Appealing to consumers is inevitable in any business driven by markets. But when a network is focused on feeding viewers news they want, rather than what’s real, it is, in the words of one well-known observer, fake.

Marc Sandalow is a senior faculty member at the University of California’s Washington Program. He has been writing about California politics from Washington, D.C., for over 30 years.