Hi DK, here is something many of us have a problem with.

You ,and others, make these very reasonable and in some instances brilliant observation about the financial and/or political situations on our planet. You analyze, investigate and reason why things in the real world are the way they are.

But then you guys slide into the realm of science and religion, old age and new, and all of a sudden you don’t have a need for skepticism, critical thinking and newest information anymore. The great brains who, through their scientific discoveries and mathematical formulas, are conducting the choir of objective reality, seem of no use to you and others.

So in politics you encourage your followers to be skeptical and apply a healthy dose of critical thinking in everyday life, but when it comes to quantum mechanics and consciousness you seem to say that these common sense mental faculties are not needed.

Why is this?

Richard Feynman was deeply into Quantum electrodynamics, a theory for which he won his Nobel Prize in 1965. He said:
“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong”

V.S. Ramachandran’s “A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness” is a broad base of practical and necessary insights into the function of the brain and is also an immense intellectual stimulation.

Daniel C. Dennett's book “Consciousness Explained” does just that, it explains consciousness. Are you guys aware of today’s scientific facts and theories on quantum mechanics, string theory (Brian Greene) and consciousness (Steven Pinker)?

Are you, DK and others, helping anybody by promoting not to be doubtful, not to be skeptical and not do a little critical thinking of our own?

Couldn’t we make a connection between those naïve, gullible and ignorant (lacking general education or knowledge) churchgoers whose world is full of supernatural and paranormal Gods, and the present state of the world?

Why are not more of us capable of living in the real world? The one that really is, not the one we hope it to be?

"Why are not more of us capable of living in the real world? The one that really is, not the one we hope it to be?" #2

From a review of the collection of essays "Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time" by Michael Shermer.

"So, why do people believe weird things? "More than any other, the reason people believe weird things," says Shermer, "is because they want to. . . .It feels good. It is comforting. It is consoling." Secondly, weird beliefs offer "immediate gratification." People like weird beliefs because they are simple. Weird beliefs also satisfy the quest for significance: they satisfy our moral needs and our desire that life be meaningful. Finally, he says, people believe weird things because weird things give them hope."

http://tinyurl.com/62lb8y

'Many great scientists have attributed important ideas to insight, intuition, and other equally difficult-to-define concepts. Alfred Wallace said that the idea of natural selection “suddenly flashed upon” him during an attack of malaria. Timothy Ferris called Einstein, “the great intuitive artist of science.” But insightful and intuitive ideas do not gain acceptance until they are externally validated, as Richard Hardison explained (1988, p. 259-260):

"Mystical “truths,” by their nature, must be solely personal, and they can have no possible external validation. Each has equal claim to truth. Tea leaf reading and astrology and Buddhism; each is equally sound or unsound if we judge by the absence of related evidence. This is not intended to disparage any one of the faiths; merely to note the impossibility of verifying their correctness. The mystic is in a paradoxical position. When he seeks external support for his views he must turn to external arguments, and he denies mysticism in the process. External validation is, by definition, impossible for the mystic."

...

Carl Sagan said: "if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all."'

Excerpt from 'Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer.

Link:

http://tinyurl.com/5bbx9w

Ref. #3

"Shermer seems to have overlooked or underemphasized some fundamental reasons why people believe weird things. Ignorance, for example, seems to be the main reason many people believe weird things. "

"A great deal of New Age quackery about "energy" medicine depends upon people being ignorant of quantum physics. "

"Ignorance might explain why 90% of Deepak Chopra's followers believe him when he tells them that happy thoughts make happy molecules, but it doesn't explain why Chopra himself believes the mind can have a causal effect on the molecular level.

http://skepdic.com/chopra.html

He is a trained physician and knowledgeable of biology. It does not seem to be a very satisfactory explanation to say that he and other New Age gurus believe that disease can be controlled by thought because they "want" to believe so. The "will to believe" explanation seems too facile. Even William James, who has given us this expression from the title of an essay, did not try to explain most weird beliefs by claiming they were acts of will. James reserved using will alone to determine belief for those cases where (a) a decision must be made and (b) the evidence is equal on either side of the issue. Furthermore, he recognized that only some beliefs are "living options" for each individual. A devout Christian could no more accept the possibility that Mohammed is the Prophet of God than a devout Muslim could accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Not every claim is a living option for every person. Sheer willfulness should only be used to explain choosing one living option over another when the evidence for each is equal. Such a situation is definitely not the case for believing in the power of thought to control disease. The evidence is overwhelmingly against such a belief. What is of interest is why certain incredible and improbable claims are living options for some people and not for others."

...

http://skepdic.com/refuge/weird.html

NYT's Joe Nocera has the best explanation yet, on the AIG downgrade:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/business/16nocera.html?hp

Thanks, John, as always well researched and to the point!
Do you remember the following?

I wonder who the close minded Cynic is?

For a Cynic, a Skeptic is a Bigot

For a Cynic, Reason is Sarcasm

For a Cynic, Science is Fundamentalism

For a Cynic, Skeptics, Rationalist and Scientists are all Cynics!

For, a Cynic with spiritual inklings can cling proudly to his hypocrisy.

#7

Hey! I remember that!

(I also know the answer to "who?"

At least "he" acknowledged that Michael Shermer is a healthy skeptic, but 'may have' learned little from Shermer's criticism of his ideas.)

Sorry for being off topic, DK, so back to “AIG Downgrade, Wobble and General Confidence”.

In John’s link
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/business/16nocera.html?hp
the following paragraph sums it up nicely as one of the main reasons we find ourselves in the muck:

“Indeed, it is not all that different from what is going on in neighborhoods all over the country. Just as homeowners took out big loans and stretched themselves on the assumption that their chief asset — their home — could only go up, so did Wall Street firms borrow tens of billions of dollars to make subprime mortgage bets on the assumption that they were a sure thing”.

Who would have thought that lending money to people who may not be able to pay it back could be a bad thing?

As far as general confidence? The financial world may never be the same.

Hello DK,

What I think about all this is that in the near future our social greeting to one anothe on this planet will change from, Hi, how are you? to Brother, can you lend me a dime?

I'm checking my dimes and counting them twice, if only my sister-in-law had been in charge of Lehman's or Freddie and Fannie, or AIG...we would have been in good hands...she knows how to save a penny here and a dollar there...no, none of this funny stuff would have gotten by her...

have a great day everyone, ruth

As a mystic, I am extraordinarily skeptical. As a skeptic I go to my grave.

Ed,
We're on the same page. You make me laugh. But hurry and turn the page. I want more of the story.
Luv u, just me

“Everything is happening perfectly as planned regarding the destruction of the ego empire” ~Infinite Play

Game Plan: destroy confidence and restore confidence with new system and architecture.

The current corrupt, flawed, inadequate value exchange accounting system is what needs to be transformed. A new architecture for a comprehensive value exchange accounting system with integrity needs to be implemented. We now have the technical capability to do this; we simply need the will to execute the steps.

I have written a number of times in the distant past how the economy was like a barrel of apples. The barrel has a false bottom that has been continuously raised for decades giving the impression that the barrel was full. The false bottom has now reached the top of the barrel and the illusion can no longer be sustained. What we do not want to see is a massive transfer of the worlds tangible assets to those that control the intangible symbol which is created from nothing and is worthless except for it’s perceived value.

There will be no more illusionary artificial fixes the fundamental framework of the worlds financial and economic systems must be changed so that they maintain balance not create imbalance among the economic system participants.

The primary requirement of the new system is based on the New Economics 101.

Value consumed must equal value produced by all participating entities. The value exchange accounting system must properly measure and maintain this balance. The service providers hosting the system must be efficient in doing it at a very low cost, in a competitive environment, and there cannot be a monopoly by a few on the creation of monetary units. Where feasible each economic system participant would support part of the physical and technical infrastructure of the whole. Value is determined by the sum of the individual choices. Artificial value is vetted and removed from the system. Forced patronage of products or services especially those with artificial value or based on created need is eliminated. Inflated pricing / cost resulting from monopoly are also eliminated.

Our Collective needs did not change, and our ability to produce did not change. So how could there be an economic problem? There is no natural reason for economic down turns or slowdowns. There are only unnatural reasons mostly the result of flawed systems and policy guided by greed, and blinded by profit.

“Monetary system imbalance is the root of all evil.”
~me

The main reason for the economic system extreme fluctuations and failure is a flawed architecture and framework.

The question is how do we migrate to a new financial systems platform without bringing the world economy to a complete halt or sliding into irreversible chaos and anarchy? The answer is we need to run both systems in parallel so the other option is in reach, then one kills the old system by revealing the reality behind the illusion and everyone naturally embraces the new one. There would be a conversion of old money to new but with a cap of a million dollars which would effectively erase excessive illegitimate wealth and the power it provides those that control it.

http://coinage.me speaks of intelligent tangible intangibles currency with a brain.

#12 Did you already turn the page? What do you 'see?'
You 'heard' from John what Michael Shermer wrote:-
"The mystic is in a paradoxical position. When he seeks external support for his views he must turn to external arguments, and he denies mysticism in the process. External validation is, by definition, impossible for the mystic."

Mystic is a relative term, perhaps. Have you and I turned the corner rather than the page? Dare we be alone together where no one can see us? I haven't the foggiest.
Insurance is out of the question!

Why? Because imagination is what creates and there is no such thing as 'real' in our world.

Dear Ed and Char,
My two minds must seek each other out, otherwise there is schizophrenia.

However, like the Buddha says, when you get to the other shore, what need is there of the boat.

I don't know. Double yo.

Well, I tried for 15 minutes to get anyone of many websites to open to explain AIG and the downgrade, but none of them would open....strange. Anyway, in reading the captions, I think I get it. I wish there were links for these last two posts of DK, so at least I could read something or more like SCAN something quickly. But nonetheless I think I see what is going on.

No idea why I just said what I said.
Something you said I guess.

#16 .... pretty wise :-) thanks!

#18 You tickled me first :))

We should let these corrupt greedy firms (individuals) collapse, with the entire corrupt system, they tell you everything will collapse if they do and this is not true. What it means is the incumbent wealthy will lose all their wealth the corrupt industries will collapse. The producers will do just fine because the genuine economy does not go away. The artificial economy should be dissolved because it is how the wealth which is created by the producers is stolen by the managers of the system. If the systems do collapse it could be a very good thing because it will result in localization destroying centralized power and control over the people.

Government bailout is a bogus illusion.

Reality is the taxpayers; the producers are doing the bail out. Which leads us to ask why don’t we simply assign ownership to the taxpayers?

Why should some group of people that created a system imbalance keep ownership at the expense of the producers that they will later charge for services that the producers already in reality paid for?

The US citizens will go into debt at a price to create the money for the bail out. The citizens are forced to borrow money from the central bankers who simply control the symbol and the accounting system. The money is loaned based on the forced commitment of the US taxpayers to produce future value. The money loaned is at a price, it is called interest. Those monetary system managers charge trillions for the use of their accounting system.

Amazing isn’t it, a group of people make trillions because they control and maintain an accounting system. Not only that it has given this small group of people that have deceived the producers, power over the producers. Pure genius on their part isn’t it, who could blame them?

The masters that control the symbol then feed the producers monetary units as they labor to produce. The natural supply of monetary units is restricted forcing the producers to

They are not to blame it is the producers that allow it that are to blame. The only reason the producers are powerless to stop it is they are divided by fictions and labels rendering them impotent.

This is what is meant by the indentured servitude, those that extract their wealth from the system not by producing genuine value for other economic system participants but simply because they control and manipulate the system and the producers are just pawns and servants in the game. The natural systems have been perverted so that money is required to live and obtain sustenance.

What was once free to all direct from the source now has a middle man the controllers of the symbol?

The citizens must unite, see the reality behind the illusions and take collective control of the symbol of value exchange.

Is anybody out there getting this? Let me guess the slaves that sold out to the masters to gain privilege understand but they don’t want to give up the blood money.

Those monetary system managers charge trillions for the use of their accounting system.

Those monetary system managers charge trillions for the use of their accounting system.

Those monetary system managers charge trillions for the use of their accounting system.

Those monetary system managers charge trillions for the use of their accounting system.

I have a new one and I will only charge a few million actually it would be an economic system participant owned and maintained system.

Why pay trillions when you can pay a paltry few million?

To Anyone who would like to learn about the Bigger Picture:

Tonight David Icke will be interviewed by George Noory on the Coast to Coast radio program. David is highly intelligent and has been studying world governments for over twenty years. He is a well respected teacher and lecturer. He has many videos on Youtube as well. He is acknowledged by Michael Tsarion (a gifted teacher of spiritual truths and the underlying foundations of world religions and governments).

I cannot recommend David Icke highly enough.

Best Wishes,

"Betsy" S.

Dear Dr. Matai and others,

I cannot believe that someone actually has given credibility to Michael Shermer (postings 4 & 5).Shermer is one of the biggest "pooh-poohers" of all time. It was stated that the belief in thepower of thought to control disease has overwhelming evidence against it. This is most emphatically not the case!! If you've ever read any of Dr. Larry Dossey's material you will hear an entirely diferent belief. He has documented countless "miracle cures" that clinical medicine cannot explain.

He says,"I used to believe that we must choose between science and reason on one hand, and spirituality on the other. Now I consider this a false choice. We can recover the sense of sacredness in every area of life."

Best Wishes,

"Betsy" S.

Dear Dr. Matai and others,

I just can't believe that someone has actually tried to give some credibility to Michael Shermer who is one of the biggest "pooh-poohers" of all time (Postings Nos. 3,4,& 5).

John says that regarding the belief in the power of thought to control disease that the evidence is overwhelmingly against such a belief. This is most emphatically not the case!!!

Evidently, John has never read any of the books by Dr. Larry Dossey. Dr. Dossey has documented countless "miracle cures" that clinical medicine could not explain.

Dr. Dossey says, "I used to believe that we must choose between science and reason on one hand, and spirituality on the other, in how we lead our lives. Now I consider this a false choice. We can recover the sense of sacredness, not just in science, but in perhaps every area of life".

Best Wishes,

"Betsy" S.