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20 April 2008
Blaring Discrepancies: Dread the day when 'experts' are clueless because the day is now...
Exploratory research is fabulous.
Knowledge gained through experiment is magnificent.
Expertise qua excellence is brilliant.
The problem arises when one study is conducted and based upon that, the end all, be all, final word of what has been studied is declared in the name of 'research expertise'. There is expertise and then there is nascence - and never should the two ever be confused. Unfortunately, our 'experts' are taking too many liberties in declaring their incipient research the final product.
Forget reckless, this is lethal.
I have stated this before but it is worth reiterating again:
Seldom are we given second chances. When it comes to potential risk of life, one chance is all we have. The sacrifice is too precious in the name of declaratory pride and unqualified expertise.
Cases in point:
1) In a struggle between public relations and complete scientific objectivity surrounding the impending use of the Large Hadron Collider this summer at the European Center for Nuclear Research outside of Geneva, 'experts' argue there is "too much hype and not enough candor on the part of scientists about the promises and perils" of their planned LHC experiments (Dennis Overbye, "Gauging a Collider's Odds of Creating a Black Hole," The New York Times, 15 April 2008). According to Nobel Peace Prize winning nuclear physicist Francesco Calogero, there is a "tendency among his colleagues to promulgate a 'leave it to the experts' attitude" in which they " 'seem to be more concerned with the public relations impact of what they...say and write, than in making sure that the facts are presented with complete scientific objectivity.' "
2) Along the same lines of the stark unknown is the case of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) speculated to be the "hypothetical elemantary particles left over from the Big Bang" that are also supposedly "immune to most forces of nature and so can pass through us and the Earth like ghosts" (Dennis Overbye, "Physicists Renew Claim, in New Experiment, of Detecting Dark Matter Particles," The New York Times, 17 April 2008). Surrounding this issue of WIMPs and DAMA, there are many camps arguing conflicting findings and conclusions - altogether signifying they are all still nothing more than absolutely clueless.
3) In the space of a single article, The New York Times reporter Kenneth Chang exposes how the same experiment is yielding opposite results. Rather than tests of global warming, a team of scientists concentrated on the effects of ocean acidification on coral reefs, and found that ocean acidification resulting in carbonic acid destroys coral skeletons and its critical coccolithosphores ("single-cell, carbonate-encased algae that area major link in the ocean food chain") while a second team concluded the exact opposite - that the coccolithosphores actually grow bigger from the carbonic acid - and have been growing at a rate of 40% over the past 220 years (Kenneth Chang, "Study Sees an Advantage for Algae Species in Changing Oceans," The New York Times, 18 April 2008).
The reason for the discrepancy?
Apparently, the first team did not take into consideration the twin effects of calcification and photosynthesis, as the second team did. The second experiment was tested to emulate more closely real ocean conditions.
The conclusion to be deduced from this?
Think people, think because our dedicated 'thinkers' are certainly failing to do so.
The 'scientists' - our 'experts' - are still clueless. They have no right to presume the penultimate authoritative voice of expertise when they are still in their nascent stages of research and experimentation - and are still honing their experimental methodologies.
Wait, it gets worse (and from Stanford, no less!):
4) In a recent report on VBLOC therapy (vagal blocking for weight loss), Stanford researchers are participating in this national study in which "a device inserted just beneath the skin emits electronic impulses that confuse signals sent on the vagal nerves from the brain to the stomach" (Erin Allday, "Stanford in study on new weight-loss therapy," San Francisco Chronicle, 16 April 2008). According to the Stanford lead researcher Dr. John Morton, " 'It starts in the brain, and works down to the stomach.' "
Ahem, attention to the phrase: "confuse signals sent on the vagal nerves from the brain..." - how about brain damage? nerve damage?
Confusing - euphemism for damaging - signals?!?
How about the long-term damage here? Excuse me, possible long-term confusion?
Think people, think.
You only have one life, one body, one chance...messing with the brain, the nerves, what's next?
The fear, the dread, the horror...
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20 April 2008
Common Sensibility - How about using some?
In what seems an historic effective move to combat the insidious cycle of eating disorders, French conservative lawmaker Valerie Boyer, backed by France's health minister Roselyne Bachelot, proposed a law to stifle the proliferation of web sites promoting, teaching, and tipping viewers to eating disorders (Doreen Carvajal, "French Bill Takes Chic Out of Being Too Thin," The New York Times, 16 April 2008).
As Carvajal reports, "the French legislators are seeking to tame a murky world of some 400 sites extolling 'ana' and 'mia', nicknames for anorexia and bulimia. Since 2000, such Web sites have multiplied in many languages, offering blunt tips on crash dieting, bingeing, vomiting, and hiding weight loss from concerned parents."
Unfortunately, opposition from the French Socialist Party argue the bill is too "vaguely worded". Michael Levine, psychology professor at Kenyon College, Ohio, agrees, stating " 'it's a mistake to ban them becuase...you're going to be hard pressed to demonstrate a very clear way that these sites have a direct negative affect.' "
Are you kidding?
How much more explicit can we make the connection?
Are academics like Levine and legislators like those in the FSP so far removed from common sense that they are blind to their present reality? What must we do - - shock them back to common sense?
This is a far stranger world than the bard ever could have imagined if the stark reality of truth via evidence only serves to blind rather than to act towards change, towards effecting a positive difference to help our fellow (wo)men...
...a cruel world, indeed.
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20 April 2008
Sense and Consequence - HIPAA (Redux)
In my 2 March 2008 entry, "III of X. Sense and Consequence - HIPAA," I wrote about HIPAA and the move by AT&T and the state of Tennessee to "provide the country's first statewide system to electronically exchange patient medical information" (Erik Schelzig, "AT&T, Tenn. Create Medical Info Exchange," Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle, 25 February 2008).
In that entry, I also pointed to my 7 October 2007 entry, "Accounting for the Fissures of this Disjointed Reality," where I first brough up the issue of HIPAA and the move by Microsoft to make a patient's medical information available online:
"Through HealthVault, Microsoft is planning to further this direction by providing "a secure, encrypted database" for the storage of an individual's "personal health record" (Steve Lohr, "Microsoft Rolls Out Heallth Records", The New York Times, 4 October 2007). Through its database, Microsoft "hopes that individuals will give doctors, clinics and hospitals permission to directly send into their HealthVault record information like medicines prescribed or...test results showing blood pressure and cholesterol levels." On this front, however, there is critical need for pause.
On 21 August 1996, the 104th Congress passed into public law the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to (among other things) "combat waste, fraud, and abuse in health insurance and health care delivery" and above all, "to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the information; to protect against any reasonably anticipated threats or hazards to the security or integrity of the information; and unauthorized uses or disclosures of the information" (Public Law 104-191).
If the need for privacy of personal information and the handling of such information by medical and healthcare professionals were identified as so crucially necessary that a law and protocols with that law had to be executed into effect with the threat of legal ramifications if so violated, why would a proposed database against that law be so quickly proposed?
Although Microsoft explains that the database will be secure and encrypted, have we not learned the lessons of the agile hacker mind? There are countless cases and a cornucopia of ocular proof that information - especially on the net - is a 'sitting duck' in hacker territory. To offset the possibility of data corruption, Peter Neupert, VP of Microsoft's health group, makes the analogy to online banking that initially met with privacy worries and is today mainstream. I beg to differ.
There are still many who are justifiably hesitant to disclose their financial information online - can we say, "identity theft"? So no, banking is NOT mainstream.
Banking aside, if financial information is hacked into, it can be reversed and corrected. Banks and credit card companies anticipate hackers and identity thieves so much so that they have swift and effective protocols in place to correct the fraudulent activity. However, when personal information - health or otherwise - is hacked into, there is no corrective reversal. The information is the key. To disclose that information to anyone other than the patient or medical/healthcare professional it is intended for is the irreversable violation and infringement that HIPAA sought so painstakingly to safeguard.
I wrote then and I reiterate again:
The direction and consequence of moving forward without respect to common sense is increasingly fatal compounded by the fact that it is occurring in every sector affecting the individual, his freedoms, his safety, and his right to life on this planet...take heed...
Now, it seems researchers are slowly realizing this to be a critical issue, as with the recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine where "two leading researchers warn that the entry of big companies like Microsoft and Google into the field of personal health records could drastically alter the practice of clinical research and raise new challenges to the privacy of patient records" because "Microsoft and Google, the authors note, are not bound by the privacy restrictions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act...that regulates personal data handling and patient privacy" (Steve Lohr, "Warning on Storage of Health Records," The New York Times, 17 April 2008).
I am the first to admit I am the leading researcher of nothing and an absolute nobody, but even I raised HIPAA as my immediate concern back in October 2007 and then again in March 2008. Only now this becomes an issue - raised by "leading researchers"?!?
What is going on with our academics? The supposed intelligent?
How about this:
How about introducing a little thinking now and then?
Maybe think before acting?
Maybe think before endangering and jeapordizing innocent lives and breaking oaths of confidentiality?
When will we regain our common sensibility?
Will we ever?
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20 April 2008
Blaring Catastrophes Redux
Recently, I wrote of the US Air Force's decision to use defective F-22 Raptor fighter jets, despite the fact that use of them will most likely lead to "a catastrophic failure in flight" that "could result in the loss of the aircraft" (Dominic Gates, "Boeing sues Alcoa over parts for F-22 Raptor fighters," The Seattle Times, 11 April 2008). The reason for the defect? Alcoa (subcontracted by Boeing to forge titanium parts to the jets) "failed to add a crucial extra 20 minutes in the furnace that was needed for proper forging."
I already wrote of my bewilderment that our Air Force would go ahead with using the jets despite the blaring evidence to the contrary.
Add to this the recent discovery by researchers that the builder of the Titanic "struggled for years to obtain enough good rivets and riveters and ultimately settled on faulty materials that doomed the ship" (William J. Broad, "In Weak Rivets, a Possible Key to Titanic's Doom," The New York Times, 15 April 2008). Interesting thing about this finding is the the fact that ten (10) years ago, the safety of the rivets was questioned and promptly dismissed by the builder, arguing that "it did not have an archivist who could address the issue" - so the sinking was left a "riddle".
Ahem, pause and step back please.
Researchers, investigators - are they not hired for their acumen, their shrewd abilities to uncover supposed mysteries? Is it not their code, their edict, to 'leave no stone unturned' and above all, not to take answers at face value - least of all from those most likely culpable?
How could they have listened to the builder, swallowed his (heap of garbage) dismissal, and just left it at that - for a decade?!?
We are seldom given second chances in life. When it comes to potential lives lost, we only have one instance to get it right. Is not the lesson of the Titanic enough?
So I pose to you again, why? Why is our Air Force making such a brazenly senseless decision to endanger their Airmen, especially when it is these very men we should cultivate and protect so they in turn can protect our nation?
Perhaps the warning blares too loudly, too defiantly, that the ears have been irreparably deafened...
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13 April 2008
Blaring Catastrophes
Imagine, if you will, a person tells you he genuinely wants to be your friend - and claims actually to be your friend - at the same time he says he does not trust you and believes you to be a sociopath. Of course, if you believe him, you are a complete fool. (Aside from the obvious, you would be partaking in a script you did not write and one that serves you no purpose.) At the worst, you may be in a position of great risk if you decided to believe him.
Now snap to reality because this one is a doozy:
It seems Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the US Air Force are in a rather briny pickle. Because Boeing subcontracted Alcoa to forge titanium parts on the US Air Force's F-22 Raptor fighter jets and because Alcoa did a sub-par job, using "shoddy manufacturing" techniques, the jets are flying with a "manufacturing defect in crucial titanium supports" with the very likely outcome of causing "a catastrophic failure in flight" that "could result in the loss of the aircraft" (Dominic Gates, "Boeing sues Alcoa over parts for F-22 Raptor fighters," The Seattle Times, 11 April 2008). Apparently, Alcoa "failed to add a crucial extra 20 minutes in the furnace that was needed for proper forging."
An extra twenty minutes!
Those twenty minutes just cost Alcoa more than $12 million and might just cost the US Air Force the airmen's lives they put at risk in using those jets.
There are a multitude of warning signs blaring a mile a minute here, but the most deafening is the Air Force's decision to use the jets at the same time they claim they "would never do anything that would compromise the safety of our airmen" according to the Air Force's public-affairs officer, Lt. Col. Jennifer Cassidy. How can they claim not to compromise their airmen at the same time they acknowledge that if they use the jets, "a catastrophic failure in flight" will (surely) occur? (This rather sounds like our person telling us he is our friend but does not trust you and labels you a sociopath in the process.)
This is a shot in the dark, but is it not their (moral) responsibility to avoid a catastrophe, especially one they have been fully warned about? Is there not a pride in maintaining our airmen's lives, rather than knowingly put them at risk that is 100% avoidable? Is it not the point to maintain (rather than jeapardize) an Air Force to protect our skies and fight for whatever it is we believe in?
Is it not a source of pride in the US that we claim to be the best, utilize the best equipment, and leverage the best technologies?
It seems the Air Force is choosing to be the fool, believing rather wrecklessly that it can be the best while utilizing defective equipment just waiting to cause a disaster. Continuing on this path, there is no purpose served except inevitable loss of cataclysmic proportions and even greater costs in the end.
There has to be a point when we call a spade a spade in pursuit of common sensibility and the (moral) responsibility to avoid disaster blaring so stridently in our face...
Of deception and self-deception, how about withdrawing altogether from this sordid game?
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13 April 2008
The Hazards of Judgments
Judgments are interesting. People think they can make them of others and they often do. Frankly, there is too much hypocrisy in it.
In the legal system, (mis)judgments are even more perilous - and lethal - for those accused wrongly, and more importantly, for those recidivists who are unwisely let free. When the facts are clearly laid before a jury and despite this, they make their unfortunate judgment, then there is a dangerous breakdown...for they have failed miserably in their duty to protect the public...and this, they do altogether too often.
Case in point:
A convicted Level III sex offendor and rapist with a history of stalking women and considered most likely to reoffend has been released free, despite the King County prosecutor's attempt to send him to the Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island (Sara Jean Green, "Jury rejects predator label for rapist," The Seattle Times, 11 April 2008). The reason for his release? He does not "fit the state's definition of a sexually violent predator because he does not have a legally recognized mental or personality disorder".
A couple of things leap to mind:
1) How about changing the definition!
2) The offendor was implicated in more than two dozen incidents of sexual misconduct and he was convicted as a rapist. What more does the legal system need to incarcerate him?
3) More importantly, what will it take to convince the jury to protect the public?
4) Moreover, what will it take for the jury to learn from its past? Case in point:
The last time the King County jury freed someone prosecutors wanted committed to the SCC, that person was again charged with rape and murder.
So much for the sound judgment of collective minds. Facts people, facts.
Suggestion:
Seek out the facts and listen to it. Learn the objective truth of the facts. Observe and observe wisely.
Truth is an interesting virtue. Objective, it remains intact. Manipulated in any way, and it no longer remains anything except false. So many falsities rest behind the flimsy veil of manipulated truth, but ultimately, it is a lie.
The many layers of truth - this is the cesspool, the very slippery cesspool.
Fact is fact. Fact is irrespective of group consensus.
So to those seeking to make judgments, however (mis)guided and (un)warranted, perhaps keep this in mind: semper fidelis ad sapientia et doctrina.
Case in point II:
In the past couple of years, deferred prosecution agreements are steadily replacing corporate criminal prosecutions, thus sanctioning corporate bribery, corruption, and criminal acts - in a decided shift away from transparency and accountability (Eric Lichtblau, "In Justice Shift, Corporate Deals Replace Trials," The New York Times, 9 April 2008). Over the last three years, the Justice Department has put off prosecuting more than fifty (50) companies suspected of wrongdoing.
The lesson in this?
Beware consumers. Beware public. The guardians of 'justice' are no longer guarding. Corporations can buy off their crimes. They have no fear or reason to maintain any sense of integrity or responsibility to the public. They are impervious to the 'rules' as long as they can pay.
Justice? Hardly.
Judgment? If you can pay, you are impervious.
Of slime, slander, and suspicions, walk away, walk far away lest you get mired in the web, tangled in an ersatz justice...
Judgments...there is too much hypocrisy in them...
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11 April 2008
Of Supermassive Black Holes and Presumptive Wisdoms
Imagine the harshest critic of the quality of American education and add an extra layer of criticism. Now snap back to present reality because we are at a level one hundred times worse - and then some. Case in point: the Discovery Channel's documentary, Supermassive Black Hole.
Briefly, the documentary explains the phenomenon of supermassive black holes (for the purpose of this blog, I will abbreviate this to: SmBH), in contradistinction to black holes (likewise: BH), and their relation to their respective galaxy. Naturally, the documentary begins with the Milky Way, describing it as a giant rotating disk two hundred thousand light years wide with over two hundred billion stars like the sun circling slowly around a center. It is just one in one hundred twenty-five billion galaxies circling in space.
Purportedly, the most puzzling question baffling physicists is: how do clouds of hydrogen gas become galaxies of stars?
One suggested answer is the SmBH. They are one million to one billion times the mass of BHs and can fill an entire solar system. The center of a SmBH is called a "singularity" that to solve mathematically would require a new physics. At the singularity, light can not escape and gravity, space, and time are so distorted that they are at their 'breaking point'. Because they 'swallow' light, SmBHs are 'invisible' and are thus detectible only through the immense gravity hurling stars at over thirty-one thousand miles per hour. As ferocious whirling masses of hot gas just about to fall into a SmBH, quazars are another telltale sign that one is around.
It seems the physicists studying SmBHs made a few (hasty, incorrect) presumptions in going into their research:
1) SmBHs as such, are negative phenomenons.
2) SmBHs signal violent destruction.
3) SmBHs do not exist in every galaxy.
Through research, they have found evidence to counter some of their presumptions. I would venture a step further to suggest:
1) SmBHs are very positive evidences of creation.
a) The umbilicus is to its creation what the SmBH is to its galaxy
b) From the depths of assumed emptiness is an explosion of pregnant potentiality
c) To counter Lear's rant - ex nihilo, nihil fit (from nothing, nothing comes) - SmBHs are ocular proof of the very opposite. From nothing, everything comes.
2) SmBHs signal absolute creation - creation from explosion.
3) SmBHs must exist in every galaxy, though in various stages. And this has been proven true, thus far:
a) NGC1068 has a very active SmBH
b) Andromeda has an inactive SmBH
c) The Milky Way is similar to Andromeda with an inactive SmBH
The physicists have also learned the following:
1) The size of a SmBH is directly proportional to the size of its galaxy.
2) The mass of a SmBH is directly proportional to the speed of its sigma.
Interesting note on sigma: it is assumed by physicists that it is unaffected by the gravity of its SmBH. However, upon closer inspection, they found a direct correlation between the mass of the SmBH and the speed of its sigma. I wonder when they will make a causal correlation, or if they will continue to identify the two as mutually exclusive.
On the whole, it seems they are 'batting zero' and declining.
Stubborn insistence on linear thinking with complete disregard to - at least the possibility of - interconnections and non-linear reasoning and effects is perhaps one of the greatest fallacies of Western thought. As with the SmBH research, the singularity, quazar, sigma, galaxy, and galaxial components are all treated as distinct and separate entities without concrete interconnections to each other.
As an alternative to the findings and theories bandied so far, I suggest the following:
1) Conceptually, if scientists can draw parallels between the galaxy and the human body, it might help in strengthening and guiding them in their research.
a) The SmBH is the umbilicus as well as the self-regulating mechanism within cells to activate cellular apoptosis.
b) The singularity is the pluripotent and multipotent blastocyst.
b) The sigma is the epidermis.
c) The stars are the cells.
d) The planets are the primary organs.
e) The moons are the supporting organs.
f) The quazar is fuel for the digestive organs, affecting the stage of activity.
2) Of course it baffles me how the very fact that SmBHs have been written about, studied, and captured in philosophy thousands of years ago could have ever escaped the collective memory. Ahem, Taoism.
a) The "T&C" symbol - darkness and light with a sphere of darkness in light and of light in darkness - is the force of the SmBH and its singularity.
b) Dyads and duality, opposing forces, the polarity of protons and electrons affecting the stars swirling in opposite directions around its SmBH - this is the Tao, and the Tao is so much more...
Postmodernists and Poststructuralists are so quick to do away with dualities. However persistent and convincing they may be in an ever-changing e-mediated world, the basic duality of oppposite forces will never diminish. Alas, the oldest philosphies of the East - the paragon of the metaphysical - are being rediscovered and proven true in the most scientific of methodologies and through the most non-metaphysical of minds. In other words, through science and physics, we ultimately return to metaphysics. Through positive you are lead to negative and then back to positive. In a word - cyclical - interconnection - interrelation - the linear follows the path that seems one-directional from a worm's eye view. Adopt a bird's eye view and realize the line has never left a circle.
The Eastern civilization is the oldest - and dare say, the wisest - despite the chutzpah and fanfaronade from the West. Just how long will it take before it is acknowledged as such, rather than as 'mysticism', 'ancient' and therefore, 'obsolete'? In all actuality, it is the West that has long been obsolete - 'off the mark' - and rather slow-witted to keep up the pace of the Eastern doxa and wisdoms...
Even if we replace the opposition between East and West with the encroaching universality of globalization today, disregard of our past, our ancients, our history...this is something that can not be replaced. So many lessons can be learned, and wisdom gained from our history - East, West, Ancient, Classic, Pre-Socratic - and yet, too often it is all overlooked.
Sometimes a clear step forward can only be gained through the prescience of a backwards glance...
potentiality
hyphenation
in readiness, in motion, in realization...
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23 March 2008
Nietzsche, Adorno, and Clarke v. Winfrey - Clarke Redux (Sci Fi v. Self-help)
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Disclaimer: Before you read the below, it is not my intention to offend just as it is far from my intention ever to follow a herd mentality. It is because I have been hyphenated all my life that I can come to create hyphenation thus overcoming marginalization by realizing inherent potentiality in all. Equally, from this perspective it is my natural proclivity to speak however ostracized and no matter how stridently...(If anything, take heart that I rant not against the person, but the mentality.)
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In my prior blog, I wrote of the possible last remaining significant dualities of postmodernism as those between authenticity and hypocrisy and between truth and (self) deception. I propose another: that between the genres of spiritual self-help and science fiction because in truth, they really boil down to a duality between fetishization (or a bastardization - of Eastern thought) and potentiality.
Indeed, the battle of genres is really a battle of truths where the fetishization in spiritual self-help books is a perpetration of the false and the potentiality of science fiction is more truth in reality as we mediate our own transcendence daily and effortlessly through our electronic technologies. This is perhaps the irony of science fiction: it is more applicable to the real and with greater precision to accuracy of our present than 'spirituality as genre' ever will be, and spirituality is supposedly prescribed for an everyday application in practice and for everybody...
In other words, in actuality and ocular semblance, the world of sci fi is 'spot on' whereas the world of spirituality is completely off the mark, actually flying in the opposite direction...
...and this is rather a tragedy, because the precepts and original texts that are bastardized in these fetishized versions are frameworks and paradigms of perspective and lives successfully lived for thousands of centuries...and with more pristine truth than ever acquired in the totality of our present...
Spirituality is not getting a 'fair shake' because in its defiled form today, it is a lie, it is incomplete, it is a transmogrified monster, a hideous and garrulous sham...and the herd is none the wiser...
An even more profound irony here is that scientists - quantum physicists to be exact - are a lot closer to the spirituality and metaphysics of the ancients, as they increasingly realize the same breakthroughs of great historical Eastern philosophers...
Hyphenation is, in a word: potentiality.
Potentiality is the infinite, limitless, omnipotent creativity open to all.
Potentiality of our future and the limitless imaginings of creativity - this is the playground of science fiction and this is where the late Arthur C. Clarke was so genius a player.
Indeed, his "extraterrestrial relays", his mastery of speculative thoughts and imaginings, and his indefatigable timing - his unparalleled prescience - will be a tough act to follow for the current and future generations of sci fi writers (Dave Itzkoff, "The Fuzzier Crystal Ball," The New York Times, 23 March 2008). However, the honesty of potentiality and the impression of hyphenation proper will reign proven...most assuredly...
In a duality between 'spirituality as genre' and science fiction, in truth - between fetishization and potentiality - the scoreboard points to the latter...
Of hope, truth, and potentiality - truly of hyphenation - reign on!
Perhaps we can be reassured in this - in truth, in potentiality, and in hope, this is the greater influence, far more powerful than the almighty herd leader of today...
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23 March 2008
Nietzsche, Adorno, and Clarke v. Winfrey - Herdism via the Cult of 'O'
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Disclaimer: Before you read the below, it is not my intention to offend just as it is far from my intention ever to follow a herd mentality. It is because I have been hyphenated all my life that I can come to create hyphenation thus overcoming marginalization by realizing inherent potentiality in all. Equally, from this perspective it is my natural proclivity to speak however ostracized and no matter how stridently...(If anything, take heart that I rant not against the person, but the mentality.)
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In Jesse McKinley's article, the problem lies with Winfrey's current choice of book and in a genre fetishizing primarily Eastern philosophies and transmogrifying a way of life into defilement as synthetic as PVC. A bookseller McKinley quotes speaks on the author of Winfrey's book choice, "...you don't have to read 20 books to get this wisdom. I'll give it to you in a $14 paperback" and so the fetishization of horrors ensues (Jesse McKinley, "The Wisdom of the Ages, for Now Anyway," The New York Times, 23 March 2008).
A further indication to Winfrey as a 'sell-out', comes unwittingly from a quote by a publishing marketing manager (ibid): "We have already published books with very similar messages...and we will continue to do so...We just need to slap a cover on it and get it into Oprah's hands."
The horror....
Couple this article with Mark Morford's on life as commodity, and the perpetration of our decline further unfolds. Indeed, Morford calls it "Carpe Diem Syndrome" and "life as commodity, your soul on a credit card, experience as the pinnacle of meaning" but the stark reality, "the truth is, you could eat at every restaurant in the world and see every exotic wonderland and read a million great works of art and still be quite a miserable spiritually vacant neoconservative jackass with a world-class photo album and the sould of a cockroach" (Mark Morford, "Read this column before you die: 1,000 sights, 1,000 books, a few hundred drugs, 397 kinky positions, one million blasphemies. Get busy, " San Francisco Chronicle, 7 March 2008).
The true horror is not just that Nietzsche and Adorno are being proven true in spades, but more so that we are collectively, with full force and unwavering passion, speeding towards our decay and the destruction of our future hope.
The true terror is thus, the reign of herdism veiled by the commodified, fetishized genre of spiritual self-help that is more a sham, defilement, and an ersatz version of their originating philosophers and the precepts they extolled and penned.
How about this for some advice worth heeding:
Why not look to the ancients, the classics, and the original philosophers for their texts, their truth, and in the context of their history...why not encourage that, Oprah, rather than perpetrate the sham bargain-basement falsities?
Today is a bastardized, defiled version of decay far worse than Nietzsche ever dare imagine...
...this is the true stuff of science fiction gone awry because it is the state of our presence and even worse, against the movement towards progress and transcendence mediated by potentiality still to become realized...
...as a true tragedy of potentiality is creativity defiled and imagination truncated in regressive submission via the cult of herdism...
How about this for a step towards self-improvement:
Why not get off your self-fixation and try an authenticity of creative potentiality to effect difference for the aggrandizement and improvement of your fellow man?
Why not give speech to the voiceless, bring the marginalized to center stage, and give of yourself rather than horde for yourself?
Why not get off your narcissistic tunnel-vision and acknowledge and help others in need - on a daily basis?
Authenticity v. Hypocrisy
Truth v. (Self) Deception
Perhaps these are the last significant vestiges of duality in a postmodern world...
Of power, influence, and reckless herdism, Oprah and Tolle - 'achtung!'
Hyphenation by all means...
...at the very least, Finland: please help!
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23 March 2008
Nietzsche, Adorno, and Clarke v. Winfrey - Nietzsche and Adorno Redux
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Disclaimer: Before you read the below, it is not my intention to offend just as it is far from my intention ever to follow a herd mentality. It is because I have been hyphenated all my life that I can come to create hyphenation thus overcoming marginalization by realizing inherent potentiality in all. Equally, from this perspective it is my natural proclivity to speak however ostracized and no matter how stridently...(If anything, take heart that I rant not against the person, but the mentality.)
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Oprah, how about a little less commodified-Hegel and a little more Nietzsche and Adorno? By the way, by transmogrifying and thus defiling Hegel, you are doing him a great disservice. Why not pick up one of his books before you decide to bastardize him, and maybe you will think twice about fetishizing his thoughts? (Has he not gone through enough already with Feuerbach and with Marx?)
Hegel notwithstanding, Winfrey - aka herdism via the cult of the almighty 'O' - is getting a little too careless and reckless with her power, influence, and fetishizing...
She is a sell-out and of the worst kind - that of the self-deceptive commodity that defiles unawares, thus perpetrating what Nietzsche railed so vehemently against: degeneration and decadence.
A little harsh? For the sake of our future, our culture, and any remaining claim to quality of life, not enough!
For someone with the power to make or break a writer and to influence impressionable minds by the millions, why can't she advise her followers to read a little more truth, at least now and then?
Truth as in facts and data,
truth as in the 'real' state of things,
truth in contradistinction to hypnotism and manipulation into a herdlike mentality.
Why not encourage a little individualism and authenticity of self through anti-narcissism and a little giving of the self in the everyday.
Why not encourage the quest for truth and accountability of our institutions, legislator, political leaders, and supposed 'watchdogs' by demanding disclosure, transparency, and the concrete?
A little too inconvenient, perhaps? Does not 'gel' with your advertisers? Not profitable, perhaps?
Sell-out aside, Winfrey would be wise to be reminded of not the Germany of Tolle, but rather the Germany of Adorno and the Frankfurt School:
In his essay, "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," Adorno states, "There is actually a neurotic mechanism of stupidity in listening, too; the arrogantly ignorant rejection of everything unfamiliar is its sure sign. Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served" (The Culture Industry, 1991, Routledge Classics, NY). Although he was writing about the fetishization of music, the exact same can be said of thinking - or the absence thereof...that can be re-written as:
There is actually a neurotic mechanism of stupidity in thinking, too; the arrogantly ignorant rejection of everything unfamiliar is its sure sign. Regressive thinkers or non-thinkers behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served - and that has been served to them bastardized by the media.
Adorno drives the point further by stating, "That it happens, that the music is listened to, this replaces the content itself. The ecstasy takes possession of its object by its own compulsive character. It is stylized like the ecstasies savages go into in beating the war-drums. It has convulsive aspects reminiscent of St. Vitus' dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals. Passion itself seems to be produced by defects. But the ecstatic ritual betrays itself as pseudo-activity by the moment of mimicry" (ibid). Similarly, I can easily apply this to the state of thinking today with 'spot-on' accuracy:
That it happens, that the writer as chosen by the herd-leader is listened to, this replaces the content of the writing itself. The ecstasy takes possession of its object by its own compulsive character. It is stylized like the ecstasies savages go into in beating the war-drums. It has convulsive aspects reminiscent of St. Vitus' dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals. Passion itself seems to be produced by defects and a paralyzing fear to go against the herd. But the ecstatic ritual betrays itself as pseudo-activity by the moment of mimicry, herdism, and the passionate zeal to follow with the crowd, and read the latest book - the symbolic tenet of brainwashing - as dictated by the herd leader.
Unfortunately, the problem today is exactly the problem Adorno identified in the mid-20th Century (from his essay, "The Schema of Mass Culture," ibid):
"The renunciation of resistance is ratified by regression."
And this is herd behavior - not to resist the crowd - and by so doing, regress into a defiled, degraded, ersatz and pseudo-life absent of any quality...and this is the mentality perpetrated today...
"Ecstasy is the motor of imitation. It is this rather than self-expression and individuality which forcibly produces the behavior of the victims which recalls...the motor reflex spasms of the maimed animal."
This can easily reworded and apply today:
"Unwavering zeal towards herdism fueled by fear to stand alone, whole in individuality and authentic originality, is the motor of imitation. It is this rather than self-expression and individuality which forcibly produces the behavior of the victims which recalls...the motor reflex spasms of the maimed animal."
And the truth, the root of the problem is thus:
"Participation in mass culture itself stands under the sign of terror. Enthusiasm...reveals the fear of disobedience."
Indeed, we must follow the herd leader with blind enthusiasm for fear of missing out on our chance of a success akin to hers...
So why my diatribe against Queen Oprah?
Read Jesse McKinley's article, "The Wisdom of the Ages, for Now Anyway," in today's issue of The New York Times, and you will learn of Winfrey's latest reckless perpetrations of herdism and literary cultural decay. Moreover, her influence robs from the common man:
hope of his greatness in potentiality,
potentiality of his individuality, creativity, and truth,
truth of his authentic voice, reason, and sense, and
sense of his effective impression upon his presence.
Marx railed against the (unnatural) fetishization of labor and the commodification of man. To this effect, he warned the bourgeoisie and reminded the proletariat that ultimately, society would 'circle/flip back' to truth in self-correction and unveil the illusions of self-deception:
"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind" (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1888).
Ah, to dare to hope this will come to be for us today...
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