This End Up

[uniface]

"Higher Education" used to presuppose critical thinking skills. Now it regards these as subversive. And nowhere else more clearly than in anything having to do with people and their actual pasts. As in the "Pre-Clovis" American which no one could find any acceptable evidence of five years ago, while evidence of him is commonly accepted today as having been "everywhere" all the time.

What's needed more than anything, in the case of a couple gadfly posters here in particular, is some remedial education.

Start with a quotation from A Study of History by Miles Mathis --

No, this isn't a study of all of history, so don't worry. This is a short non-standard study of the meaning of the word "history." As usual, I intend to twist this a little to make you think of it a different way.

As it now stands, history normally means a record of past events, as you would find in a book. But that isn't history, is it? That is a record of history, which may or may not be true. So what is history, really? Obviously, history is the events themselves. History is what actually happened in the past.

I say the governors don;t want you to remember that. They want you to think that history is the record of the events. They have spent inordinate amounts of time and energy in the past trying to make you think of history as the record of the events rather than the actual events. Why would they do that? Because if they can convince you history is the record, then they can control the record, and therefore history.

http://mileswmathis.com/history.pdf

If that isn't too great a conceptual leap, take it one step further and notice that, to many people, the concept of history (and the past in general) is not even a narrowly circumscribed as "what's in this month's journal articles" but has deteriorated even further into quibbling over the minutae of evidential bean counting.

But History is not bean counting. It is seeing the forest -- sometimes from the sketchy remains of what was once one -- not in posing objections to the evaluation of the evidence that points to it.

People may imagine that they are adopting the pose of the "rigorous" scholar in this, but in doing so they are placing themselves squarely in the company of the geologists who denied Continental Drift in the face of overwealming evidence for decades.

You do not need a PhD to see the nose in front of your face. That "education" should have been debased to the point where it is synonymous with inability to do so indicts both it and those who are willing dupes of it.

[kbs2244]

Well said.
By both of you.

[Minimalist]

Yeah...Mathis has a great track record.

https://milespantloadmathis.wordpress.c ... #more-1799

Abstract: When Mathis isn’t busy writing pseudoscience articles, he’s usually hard at work concocting far-fetched conspiracies. Here is a sample of his disturbed thinking:

The Boston Marathon
“The good thing about these recent events is that they are so poorly faked that a lot of people are catching on. If they can keep us talking about three fake people who were fake-killed in Boston or the 27 people who were fake-killed in Sandy Hook, they can keep our eyes off the real tragedies.”

[shawomet]

Uni wrote:

""Higher Education" used to presuppose critical thinking skills. Now it regards these as subversive."

I'll have to disagree. Higher education and critical thinking is under attack by unqualified researchers intent on entertainment over substance. Which would be somewhat OK, were it not for their insistence that their own research is somehow substantive and based on actual critical thinking. Nowhere is this attack clearer then in the works and infotainment promulgated by Scott Wolter. Aware that at this time in history, "conspiracy sells", Wolter has taken the modern infatuation with conspiracy theories and applied that mindset to American prehistory and the scholars who research that prehistory. The result is his outright attack on critical, objective approaches that he accuses of conspiring to hide "the truth". But, this is nothing less then an up swelling of the irrational, in an overt effort to swamp critical thinking and research. Clowns like that cherry pick "facts" to build their theories, hoping against hope, apparently, that the subjective and cherry picked nature of their "research" will not be as readily recognized for what it is by the "great unwashed masses", quite as easily as it is readily recognized as such by responsible researchers doing real work, as opposed to infotainment disguised as research.

Higher Education does promote critical thinking skills. Those attempting to be subversive of higher education itself have only poorly researched and poorly presented findings/theories to offer in the place of well researched substantive work. Consider Wolter again as a perfect example. Unable to get his work accepted in a peer review format, he describes at length how the peer review system itself is part of a generations long effort to prevent the truth from reaching the public.
His crap does not pass muster. He develops a theory, the existence of a secret biological bloodline of Christ, which can never be proven nor disproven. Therefore, it can never be tested. How can it pass peer review under those circumstances? Yet, somehow, because it cannot be published in a peer review venue, therefore peer review is a scam, a con. That is not my idea of critical thinking.

The baying hounds of irrationality are at the gates, attacking academia at every turn. And playing to the masses who love to be entertained, and are not as enamored with real education. I've used Wolter as an example of the promotion of uncritical thinking. But, obviously, he is only one of many. My professors taught me how to use the discriminating faculty of intelligence when approaching solving problems in any of the social sciences. Discriminating intelligence is the key ingredient. Lacking that, all kinds of utter nonsense takes it's turn trying to titillate the public with theories unsupported by real evidence. The History Channel fills the airways with. "Could it be? Might it be possible? What if...?". All open ended questions, and all are used to allow the introduction of utter unsupported nonsense in place of critical thinking skills.

Thank God for Higher Education and it's promotion of discriminating and critical thinking skills!

[uniface]

What's lacking in that is any awareness of the underlying agenda that has come to dominate intelligent discourse of substantive issues over the last hundred years.

Maybe you can see it more clearly in these admissions :

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."
-- Richard Salent, Former President CBS News.

"News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising".
former NBC news President Rubin Frank

The number of unexpected "suicides" (one guy in a bathtub with his throat slashed and no weapon found anywhere) of high-ranking bankers has reached a truly mind-boggling figure -- 71 the last time I heard. Just within the last day or two, four main stream investigative journalists covering middle-eastern issues have all died prematurely. It reminds you of the Clinton body count tallies. Or how about the CIA headquarters being on lockdown a couple days ago, with police tape around the perimeter of the grounds ?

But you don't see this on TV or read about it in the papers/magazines because stuff like that -- data bits from reality -- aren't "news" (see above).

It's always about maintaining control of the dialogue (and the information stream). Understand that that's the underlying motivation of the brain police and you're halfway home. Serve their interests by co-signing their talking point perspective and you're part of the problem, however unwittingly.

[kbs2244]

There are points to made on both sides.
And both side are being painted with real wide brushs.
Maybe half a hundred shades of gray?

[uniface]

Probably. But, IMO, I'm still hearing the ideal vs. reality doublethink that keeps the system humming along. As when the ideal is, say, a religious organisation and the reality is clerics taking sexual advantage of young/impressionable parishioners.

The impetus for this paper came to me, strangely enough, from reading leaked emails by Phil Jones. Before he quit in disgrace, Jones was the head of the Climate Research Unit in England, which has been responsible for controlling and publishing data on global warming. Jones is at the center of the recent “Climategate” scandal, in which leaked emails proved that data was being manipulated.

Phil Jones said, regarding peer review:

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is.

Despite being caught suppressing data, Jones' dishonesty is not abated one jot. After stepping down from his position at CRU, he went to Nature magazine and said this:

I don’t think we should be taking much notice of what’s on blogs because they seem to be hijacking the peer-review process.

http://milesmathis.com/phycor.html

Really, what "science" teaches is exactly what Megacorp profits from. In every field, with medicine being that absolute worst of all. E.g.,

It is not a Saturday Night Live skit. It is not an article by the satirical website The Onion. It is not a trick or a mistake. An article titled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs? The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.” has been accepted by not one, not two, but 17 medical journals. The article was authored by Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. And still it was accepted.

Harvard medical researcher Mark Shrime is the actual “brain” behind the article. Because he is inundated on a daily basis with solicitations by medical journals of all sorts, which invite him to submit an article for publication in their journal (for a nominal fee of around $500), Shrime decided to test out the validity and credibility of these journals. So he made up a ridiculous article and submitted it to 37 different journals over the course of 2 weeks. So far, 17 of the journals have accepted the article and are willing to publish it if he pays the $500 fee per journal.

http://www.theskepticsguide.org/cuckoo- ... l-journals

We automatically compare any announcement against the Received Version of "Reality." And if there's a discrepancy, we want to "debunk" the unsettling new data. But the received version (i.e., the Absolutely Established "truth" of History that changes every other year) (like that there was nobody here before Clovis was) is, in the immortal words of

Bunk.

[uniface]

Beating this over the head now, in the hope that it cracks some denial walls :

My first paper, a study about precipitation intensity over the U.S., was rejected by reviewers because it contradicted the climate model projections. Though they could find nothing wrong with the methodology, they decided observational data must be flawed because climate models couldn’t possibly be wrong. Thus the paper could not be published.

. . . my High School Days in which I won a small scholarship with a project studying Tektites.

Tektites are small glass objects found around the world. They clearly have come from outer space, melted by their passage through the Earth's atmosphere, and because they show almost no evidence of long-term interactions with cosmic rays, that made the Moon the likely origin. I was already getting involved with the people up at JPL and availed myself of some of their laboratory equipment to analyze samples of Tektites, which I found contained minute amounts of water. However, this was during the Apollo Mon flights and NASA had stated that the lunar samples returned by Apollo were totally anhydrous. On the basis of that mismatch, I was forced to conclude that wherever Tektites came from, it wasn't the Moon.

Fast forward about four decades, and scientists studying the Apollo rocks find water inside, held against the vacuum of space by capillary action. NASA then admits that their initial analysis of the Apollo samples did detect water (in the same percentage my analysis of Tektites had found) , but it was assumed (and we know what that means) to be a laboratory contaminant, because everyone at NASA KNEW the Moon could not hold water.

[Minimalist]

I hope that isn't this Mike Rivero.

http://whatreallyhappened.com/#axzz3S3fHjfDg

[Kalopin]

["...so I found that life is just a game..."]
Thanks Uniface,
So far the evidence concurs your belief. Current science has been taken over by religious fanatics, ignoring such strong and obvious truths that, in my opinion, are very easy to recognize. I hope you continue this line of questioning, as this pertains to some of my recent research- trying to understand the mentality of these certain individuals able to distort reality and teach this distortion to innocent minds.

Stepping back and taking a look- is it in the genetics to be such followers? one suggestion by someone in a position and with a strong belief, then find a couple more to convince and then it appears very easy to gather a crowd. Just take the 65 million year old bones scenario- the only backing is bad dating, where are the 60mya,50,40,30,20,10mya?, where are the 5,4,3,2mya?, so it goes from 65mya straight to 13k yrs ago? is it me? am I missing something? How was this dating process so convincing to so many? Way too many flaws...
This is what I want to find- why is this in human nature, to so blindly follow? [look at all the..., so many examples]

[uniface]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrezza/ ... nce-fraud/

[uniface]

No matter what junk science the global corporations are trying to push, there's always a long list of scientists, doctors and journalists ready to accept some payola money to spread their propaganda. The latest example comes from the Coca-Cola company, which paid "fitness and nutrition experts" to place pro-Coke articles in over 1,000 news websites (including major newspapers) to position Coca-Cola as a "healthy snack."

Yep. Guzzling a can full of high fructose corn syrup, phosphoric acid and chemical flavorings is being pawned off as "healthy" in America's corporate-run media circus.

Like most corporate lies, this is all being done under the banner of "SCIENCE!" As Coca-Cola explains, this effort is merely designed "...to help bring context to the latest facts and science around our products and ingredients," says Coca-Cola.

Yep, if you think drinking Coca-Cola with all its genetically modified high fructose corn syrup isn't incredibly healthy, then you're "anti-science" because you're opposed to the twisted quack science the corporations are pushing through payola schemes that place their propaganda on willing mainstream media websites.

http://www.naturalnews.com/049027_Coca- ... z3Uf4S0RCS

"Science" : You gotta love, admire and respect it !

[E.P. Grondine]

"He develops a theory, the existence of a secret biological bloodline of Christ, which can never be proven nor disproven."

No.

As I have told you repeatedly, and demonstrated for some of you, THE source for all of this is theosophist crap.

Selling it is one of the main industries in Kempton, Illinois.

In this case, Wolters just picked it up again.

As far as "The Hooked X" goes, when I visited Coshoctin I saw an earlier author, not Wolters, who speculated on this.

If David Morrison, who plays a key role in the Skeptic groups, did not think that cometary impact is nonsense, you would know this by now,

Its when the bodies start piling up that this nonsense is not "fun".

[E.P. Grondine]

"Tektites are small glass objects found around the world. They clearly have come from outer space, melted by their passage through the Earth's atmosphere, and because they show almost no evidence of long-term interactions with cosmic rays, that made the Moon the likely origin. I was already getting involved with the people up at JPL and availed myself of some of their laboratory equipment to analyze samples of Tektites, which I found contained minute amounts of water. However, this was during the Apollo Mon flights and NASA had stated that the lunar samples returned by Apollo were totally anhydrous. On the basis of that mismatch, I was forced to conclude that wherever Tektites came from, it wasn't the Moon."

It has been demonstrated that tektites are the product of some and asteroid impacts with the Earth, and not the result of lunar volcanism.

[Kalopin]

"Tektites are small glass objects found around the world. They clearly have come from outer space, melted by their passage through the Earth's atmosphere, and because they show almost no evidence of long-term interactions with cosmic rays, that made the Moon the likely origin. I was already getting involved with the people up at JPL and availed myself of some of their laboratory equipment to analyze samples of Tektites, which I found contained minute amounts of water. However, this was during the Apollo Mon flights and NASA had stated that the lunar samples returned by Apollo were totally anhydrous. On the basis of that mismatch, I was forced to conclude that wherever Tektites came from, it wasn't the Moon."

It has been demonstrated that tektites are the product of some and asteroid impacts with the Earth, and not the result of lunar volcanism.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3677428/