Report from the S.M.A.R.T. Ritual Abuse/Mind-Control Conference 2009, Part 1
The crude sales booth at the far end of the conference room marketing a more advanced species of tin-foil hat does nothing to allay the suspicion that this is to be a congregation of raving delusional paranoiacs. The hats – an aged, slightly hunched, and shifty-eyed woman quietly explains – are made from a type of metallic fiber weave. They are effective in blocking the transmissions that They use to get inside your mind. … Continue reading
Marked as: Abnormal Sociology • Belief Systems • Bunco • Law — 1 comment (RSS)
… and Six Thousand Steps Back
The most recent act of scared-pigmy-ism in Texas is really wearing thinly upon me; it evokes feelings akin to what i feel due to those people who don’t really want to work, but would like to receive all sorts of benefits derived from the income tax system. So, in the category of “it only seems fair and consistent”, i would like to point out a short list of things these people should give up on if they’re going to turn their backs on the science which dictates the age of the Earth, and the age of the cosmos. … Continue reading
Marked as: Governmental Policies • Science — No comments yet (RSS)
Love Sex Fear Death
I’ve just arrived in Langzhou China. I’ll be spending a week here and I’m glad to see process.org hasn’t been blocked in this part of the world. As some of you know Doug and I have been slowly gearing up to create a full blown documentary on “The Process, Church of The Final Judgement”. As we’ve been ramping up, Adam Parfrey and Timothy Wyllie have finished a book which tells the gripping story of the Church from Timothy’s perspective. Timothy was one of the original members (“Luminaries”) of the Process’ inner circle. Here’s a little viral trailer I created using logo’s and some images from the book. The audio is cut up from a sound file that I created with Ken Marshall back in ’93 during the making of the “Process” Skinny Puppy record. The background sound collage is from the infamous “Puppy Gristle” jam that happened one night in the Malibu Studio…
Marked as: Abnormal Sociology • Belief Systems • subversion — 2 comments (RSS)
CFP: 2010 NSK Congress
This is a short notice to say that the first NSK Congress is being planned for a yet-to-be-finalized window in October 2010, taking place in a yet-to-be-finalized major city of Germany.
If you have had interest in the NSK, feel that you’d like to participate in the Congress, and would be able to travel to, and spend time in, Germany in October 2010, please visit the main page for the Congress and then proceed to submit a delegate questionnaire.
Marked as: Collective Efforts — No comments yet (RSS)
Neurocreationism
Appended with author reply April 22.
The following book review, originally published in Skeptic Magazine volume 14, no. 2, gives my rather unflattering overview of the assertions made in The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary. The book distresses me in that I see in it an 
early Creationist assault on the Cognitive Sciences, and the formation of the false scientific arguments that may be brought to the stem cell debate in years to come. After the review was published, I found myself wondering what the authors of the book must have thought of my review – if they had read it at all. I wondered if they would be able to rebut my dissection of their work. It was my feeling that the questions I had posed would have to be confronted if anybody was to take their “evidence” seriously at all. With that in mind, I contacted co-author Denyse O’Leary by email and asked that she review my review and, if she would be so kind, explain to me where I might have gone wrong. She agreed to do so once the review was posted online. Her reply follows my review below…
The Ghost In The Machine
The Spiritual Brain by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary reviewed by Doug
Marked as: Belief Systems • Bunco • Science — 4 comments (RSS)
Comfortable Delusions: An Interview with Ray Comfort
The banana, Ray Comfort famously declared, is “the atheist’s nightmare”. Observe, if you will, the compelling evidence for God’s Creative Hand at work. A banana:
- Is shaped for the human hand
- Has a non-slip surface
- Has outward indicators of inward content: Green — not ripe enough; Yellow — just right for eating; Black — too ripe
- Has a tab for easy removal of its wrapper
- Is perforated on the wrapper for easy peeling
- Has a biodegradable wrapper
- Is shaped for the human mouth
- Is pleasing to the taste buds
- Is curved towards the face to make the eating process easy
The public then craned their necks to observe this brilliant satirist of the Creationist position, only to find an earnest, adamant, evangelical. (With this in mind, I must say it is to my credit that I made none of the obvious jokes when interviewing him following his comment that his wife is “made for Comfort”.) … Continue reading
Marked as: Belief Systems • Bunco • Reality Frames — 3 comments (RSS)
Reading, Writing, Transcendent Levitation
Friday 3 April, 2009: David Lynch’s press conference is poorly managed and uninformative but well-planned enough – it seems – to achieve its intended effect. The attending Press are either convinced, or confused and cowed – by the PowerPoint presentation of statistical graphs and PhD presented data.
Nobody seems capable of a sensible question by the end. For a full hour, a presentation designed to publicize Lynch’s plan to bring Transcendental Meditation [TM] to “one million children” in public schools across America failed to approach the question of how this ambitious plan would be executed, and nobody thought to ask.
Marked as: Abnormal Sociology • Belief Systems • Bunco • Societal Policies — 1 comment (RSS)
The Negative Mutation of Social Networks
One of the great things about the internet is that it brings people together.
One of the unbelievably awful things about the internet is that it mates that ‘bringing together of people’ with the double curse of the average human: (1) the difficulty to discriminate in choice and (2) the propensity to hoard and believe that more is better. What results from this Fly like merging is lived out daily by tens of millions on sites like Facebook. Multiplying the penalty of living this out on such sites is that, unlike some night in 1992 that faded out to muted shades as time went by, massive farms of servers are busy replicating and archiving your mistakes right now, so that the future you, the future friends, the future employers, perhaps the future children, can see it as clearly as though it just happened.
Welcome to the end of valuable friendships: a modern tragic play in four parts. … Continue reading
Marked as: Introspection • Technology — 2 comments (RSS)