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zaji

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Everything posted by zaji

  1. This comment is to everyone. I want to ensure no one thinks I'm singling them out, because I'm not. Someone mentioned the elephant parable, which I learned about a bit over 18 years ago. I've pasted it below. It speaks to many discussions across most boards on AALBC that I've observed so far. This poem is the reason why, no matter what I think, believe, opine, I leave myself open to being wrong. Why? Because anything is possible in this here universe. And at the end of it all, no human on Earth is able to see what the other is seeing/experiencing and no human is able to see the entire "elephant" of anything we could possibly know. We ALL should consider that we ALL could be wrong about ANYTHING we discuss. Unless we have direct experience with most things, we are left to trust the "blind" experience of another who is only holding a single piece of an elephant. Even with direct experience without impairment, knowledge is so vast and so much is unknown in every area of human knowledge, that we should be humble and leave ourselves open to all possibilities in a discussion. I don't desperately need to be right about anything to the point of arguing people down and insulting them. I am far too interested in learning and knowledge and discovering and examining and experimenting. I want to incorporate all ideas on a subject. And while it is a curious thing to me why some have such a deep need to be right, I have gained a lot from the diverse views here and especially from those who seem to need to be right. I hold them all, those I agree with and disagree with. Particularly those I disagree with...I hold those close to me because they are the ideas that could house gems I am too shortsighted or lacking in knowledge to see at the moment. I keep those on close watch, even as I nurture the ideas I understand and agree with. I don't want to miss a thing. Blind Men and the Elephant – A Poem by John Godfrey Saxe Here is John Godfrey Saxe’s (1816-1887) version of Blind Men and the Elephant: It was six men of Indostan, To learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind), That each by observation Might satisfy his mind. The First approach'd the Elephant, And happening to fall Against his broad and sturdy side, At once began to bawl: "God bless me! but the Elephant Is very like a wall!" The Second, feeling of the tusk, Cried, -"Ho! what have we here So very round and smooth and sharp? To me 'tis mighty clear, This wonder of an Elephant Is very like a spear!" The Third approach'd the animal, And happening to take The squirming trunk within his hands, Thus boldly up and spake: "I see," -quoth he- "the Elephant Is very like a snake!" The Fourth reached out an eager hand, And felt about the knee: "What most this wondrous beast is like Is mighty plain," -quoth he,- "'Tis clear enough the Elephant Is very like a tree!" The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, Said- "E'en the blindest man Can tell what this resembles most; Deny the fact who can, This marvel of an Elephant Is very like a fan!" The Sixth no sooner had begun About the beast to grope, Then, seizing on the swinging tail That fell within his scope, "I see," -quoth he,- "the Elephant Is very like a rope!" And so these men of Indostan Disputed loud and long, Each in his own opinion Exceeding stiff and strong, Though each was partly in the right, And all were in the wrong! MORAL, So, oft in theologic wars The disputants, I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean; And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen!
  2. Cause and effect unpredictability is the most daunting and the very issue we are dealing with now. The cause of slavery, oppression and worldwide violence against melanin rich peoples has produced so many outcomes in black collective behavior. But there is one thing, a single outcome, that we all share...we are still under the power and control of white culture. The language we speak, the clothes we wear, our way of thinking and believing. Even our way of unfolding our thoughts in discourse. I've noticed even down to the combative way talking heads behave on news stations, many melanin rich people have adopted. Whether we become a street thug drug seller or the next Oprah Winfrey, it is all within the context of white cultural practices, social norms and economics. Both strive to get their money based on THIS culture's structure. Whether legal or illegal, the control is not ours in the end. Oprah has no children. So where do we think her billion will go? I guarantee it will be white owned or white controlled organization. Like you, not at all encouraging.
  3. @Kalexander2 I haven't seen the movie yet, as I wrote above. But I agree with @Delano, @Cynique and you. I think all points are valid depending on what action follows. I don't invalidate thoughts on something that can unfold in unpredictable ways. We are individual humans who react to things differently based on our perspective and life experiences. For some, this movie is an inspiration toward tangible change, and actions will follow that could have a ripple effect in time. For others, it's a pacifier meant to keep them inert. I see both sides. For me, it feels like another trick by Hollywood to keep us perpetually in hope mode, rather than action mode. There are aspects of the trailer that also ring false for me as far as black culture. I have yet to see a Hollywood film that has truly transformed white culture socially in positive, equitable, meaningful and permanent ways. I am not as drawn in by others to watch it immediately. I won't be giving a dollar to Hollywood to see this film. I stopped giving my money to Hollywood a long time ago. I will be watching it in other ways for free when the time comes. No hurry.
  4. I haven't seen it yet. But when I saw the trailer, my soul sank. Something felt off and didn't ring true. I wasn't as hyped as everyone else. I'm still not, even as the praise rolls in right behind the money. I will watch it soon, but the trailer turned me off a bit. Not that I didn't see the potential value in it, but it was a disturbing trailer. We'll see what I think once I get around to watching it. I'll be waiting though. I am not paying to watch it in the theater.
  5. The Akashic Records. I've always loved the idea of this.
  6. All of those in parallel universes. Or all of those in the here and now, depending on who is seeing it and their life experiences.
  7. It is a constant struggle, Cynique. I have a LONG way to go before I see myself as truly objective. What I try to do is not remain too attached to anything I believe. I know I am moving into a little bit of objectivity when I begin to black out when even those whom I believe are right, become egotistical and bombastic in their responses. Any attack, to me, causes me to back off and lose a tad bit of respect for those whose views I happen to agree with. I then sink into questioning all sides of a discussion, those I agree and disagree with. All becomes a question and suspect. I ultimately quiet myself and my spirit and just watch and listen. Why? Because I want to be a good listener. I want to be enlightened. I want to find truth. Again, I have a VERY long way to go. Too long. But I am working on it. When the words start to fly in here, I go quiet, sit, cross my legs, close my eyes, and let the sounds flow over me until they find truth.
  8. Exactly. Folks forget that there are/were African cultures where the woman has more than one man, not the man having more than one woman. Matriarchs.
  9. On Peer Review in the Sciences [nothing that follows are my words. i have copied and pasted all items you read below and researched all quotes.] Richard Horton, then editor of The Lancet, contributed a guest editorial for the Medical Journal of Australia (Genetically modified food: consternation, confusion and crack-up; MJA 2000; 172: 148-149) in which he wrote: "The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability - not the validity - of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong." — Today Science is up on a pedestal. A new god has appeared; his high priests conduct the rituals, with nuclear reactors, moon-probing rocket ships, cathode tubes and laser beams. And their territory is sacrosanct; laymen are denied entry.  – Bruce Cathie — In truth, the systemic failure of peer review is one of science’s major, embarrassing open secrets. As Dr David Kaplan tells us, “[P]eer review is known to engender bias, incompetence, excessive expense, ineffectiveness, and corruption. A surfeit of publications has documented the deficiencies of this system.” Australian physicist Brian Martin elaborates in his excellent article Strategies for Dissenting Scientists: Certain sorts of innovation are welcome in science, when they fall within established frameworks and do not threaten vested interests. But aside from this sort of routine innovation, science has many similarities to systems of dogma. Dissenters are not welcome. They are ignored, rejected, and sometimes attacked. — Electric universe researcher and Big Bang critic Wal Thornhill (a REAL scientist) stated plainly in our GFM Media interview that the peer review system amounts to censorship. Fellow independent scientist Gary Novak agrees scathingly: “Peer review is a form of censorship, which is tyranny over the mind. Censorship does not purify; it corrupts…There is a lot of junk science and trash that goes through the peer review process.” — Writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in May 2000, Canadian-based researcher, David Sackett, said that he would “never again lecture, write, or referee anything to do with evidence based clinical practice,” over his concern that “experts” are stifling new ideas. He wants the retirement of experts to be made compulsory and I think it’s a brilliant proposition. Sackett says that “…progress towards the truth is impaired in the presence of an expert.” — Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Marcia Angell is the former Editor-in-Chief at the New England Journal of Medicine, where she spent twenty years poring over scientific papers, saturated in the dubious practices that pervade the world of medical research. She states bluntly: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” — David Kaplan, a professor of pathology at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, has stated that, “Peer review is broken. It needs to be overhauled, not just tinkered with. The incentives should be changed so that: authors are more satisfied and more likely to produce better work, the reviewing is more transparent and honest, and journals do not have to manage an unwieldy and corrupt system that produces disaffection and misses out on innovation.” — Dr. Marc Girard, a mathematician and physician who serves on the editorial board of Medicine Veritas (The Journal of Medical Truth), has written, “The reason for this disaster is too clear: the power of money. In academic institutions, the current dynamics of research is more favourable to the ability of getting grants — collecting money and spending it — than to scientific imagination or creativity.” — In general, peer reviewers — generally not time-rich — don’t try to replicate experiments and rarely even request the raw data supporting a paper’s conclusions. Who has the time for all that? Thus, peer review is, according to Richard Smith writing in Peer Review in Health Sciences, “thought to be slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, prone to bias, easily abused, poor at detecting gross defects, and almost useless for detecting fraud.” 
— What about fake peer review? This is where the corrupt and abysmal becomes the theatre of the absurd. For example, Berlin-based Springer Nature, who publishes the aforementioned Nature journal announced the retraction of 64 articles in 10 journals in an August 18th statement in 2015. This followed an internal investigation which found fabricated peer-review write-ups linked to the articles. The purge followed “similar discoveries of “fake peer review” by several other major publishers, including London-based BioMed Central, an arm of Springer, which began retracting 43 articles in March citing “reviews from fabricated reviewers”. Yes, that means reviewers that don’t exist — recommended as “reviewers” by the people submitting their work for review. Imagine writing a paper and being able to nominate a non-existent person to review your work, and the contact email supplied to the publisher for this purpose is actually one you made up, which routes the paper back to you (unbeknownst to the publisher), so that you can then secretly carry out a (favourable) review of your own work under a pseudonym! — Recently two scientists performed a brilliant Sokal-style hoax on the journal Cogent Social Sciences. Under the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay wrote a deliberately absurd paper loosely composed in the style of “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” — what exactly that is they made no attempt to find out. The authors tell us: “The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions…We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.” And they did. After completing the paper, and being unable to identify what it was actually about, it was deemed a success and ready for submission, which went ahead in April 2017. It was published the next month after some editorial feedback and additional tweaking. To illustrate how deliberately absurd the paper is, a quote is in order: “We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations… and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.” In plain English, they (seemingly) argued here that a penis is not a male sexual organ but a social construct; the “conceptual penis” is problematic for “gender (and reproductive) identity,” as well as being the “conceptual” driver of climate change. No, really. How this ever got published is something to ponder. The paper is filled with meaningless jargon, arrant nonsense, and references to fake papers and authors. As part of the hoax, none of the sources that were cited were even read by the hoaxers. As Boghossian and Lindsay point out, it never should have been published. No one — not even Boghossian and Lindsay — knows what it is actually saying. Almost a third of the sources cited in the original version of the paper point to fake sources, such as created by Postmodern Generator, making mock of how absurdly easy it is to execute this kind of hoax, especially, the authors add, in “‘academic’ fields corrupted by postmodernism.” — In April 2010, Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, used a computer program called SCIgen to create 102 fake papers under the pseudonym of Ike Antkare. SCIgen was created in 2005 by researchers at MIT in Cambridge in order to demonstrate that conferences would accept such nonsense…as well as to amuse themselves. Labbé added the bogus papers to the Google Scholar database, which boosted Ike Antkare’s h-index, a measure of published output, to 94 — at the time, making Antkare the world’s 21st most highly cited scientist. So a non-existent scientist has achieved the distinction of being one of the world’s most highly cited authors — while “authoring” papers consisting of utter gibberish. Congratulations are certainly in order. In February 2014 it was reported that Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), were removing over 120 such bogus papers from their subscription services after Labbe identified them using his own software. Going back at least as far as 1996 journalists and researchers have been getting spoof papers published in conferences or journals to deliberately expose weaknesses in academic quality controls. “Physicist Alan Sokal (of the famous Sokal Affair) succeeded in the journal Social Text in 1996,” while Harvard science journalist John Bohannon revealed in a 2013 issue of Science that he had duped over 150 open-access journals into publishing “a deliberately flawed study.” Bohannon organized submission of the flawed study (technically, many different but very similar variations of the study) to 304 open access journals worldwide over a period of 10 months. 255 went through the whole editing process to the point of either acceptance or rejection. He wrote: “Any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper’s shortcomings immediately. Its experiments are so hopelessly flawed that the results are meaningless.” The hoax paper was accepted by a whopping 157 of the journals and rejected by only 98. Of the 106 journals that did conduct “peer review,” fully 70% accepted the paper. If peer review was a transparent and accountable process, according to Gary Novak, “there might be a small chance of correcting some of the corruptions through truth and criticism; but the process is cloaked in the darkness of anonymity…Due to the exploitive and corrupt process, nearly everything in science has official errors within it…[A] culture of protecting and exploiting the errors creates an official reality which cannot be opposed.” Returning specifically to the arena of (mainstream) medicine, a quote in PLoS Medicine, states: “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry”, wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, in March 2004. In the same year, Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, lambasted the industry for becoming “primarily a marketing machine” and co-opting “every institution that might stand in its way”…Jerry Kassirer, another former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, argues that the industry has deflected the moral compasses of many physicians, and the editors of PLoS Medicine have declared that they will not become “part of the cycle of dependency…between journals and the pharmaceutical industry”. In the words of John Ionnidis, “Most scientific studies are wrong, and they are wrong because scientists are interested in funding and careers rather than truth.” If most studies are wrong, and most scientists are more interested in their own careers and funding than getting at the truth — while journals daily allow bogus and flawed pharmaceutical research to be published and promoted — then why would anyone in their right mind believe the claims made by doctors about the efficacy of products based upon “peer review” or pharmaceutical “studies”? What does a term like “safe and effective” even mean in this world of deception and subterfuge? — “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. — Richard Horton, Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma? The Lancet, 11 April 2015, thelancet.com (Horton is editor of The Lancet) — All the above items, as stated, I had nothing to do with writing. I merely copied and pasted all the above items and researched the validity of the quotes. Below are links to some additional items I found, for your edification. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/04/fake_peer_review_scientific_journals_publish_fraudulent_plagiarized_or_nonsense.html https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798 (good read) A line from the NCBI piece: “People have a great many fantasies about peer review, and one of the most powerful is that it is a highly objective, reliable, and consistent process.” https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/science/science-journal-pulls-60-papers-in-peer-review-fraud.html https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/nov/08/fraud-revolution-scientific-publishing-peer-review http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/dozens-scientific-papers-withdrawn-probably-more-come http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full ADDED (Center for Accountability in Science article): https://www.accountablescience.com/peer-review-process-scientific-publications-trouble-paradise
  10. Info on BC/AD BCE/CE. http://www.religioustolerance.org/ce_info.htm
  11. I have always seen Buddhism as a way of life.
  12. Good read! Thanks for sharing.
  13. @Troy, I would need to go back and search TED's website where I found their commentary on it. When I have a moment, I will do so. Can't right now. In the middle of some things.
  14. @Troy. Actually, it seemed he was merely repeating the title of the video itself (but much later). When I first saw the post, I watched the video immediately and saw the title where it said it was banned. At that point, he had made no comment on whether it was banned. He didn't need to. The title of the video itself said it all. So I went about looking it up to see if it was banned and found the information about it being taken down on TED's own website. I did that research on my own. AFTER I read the information on TED's website about them banning it (or as they put it, removal from the main area), I saw him begin noting that it was censorship. At least for me, he did not state it was censorship PRIOR to ME finding the information on my own on TED's website. Once again, I researched because of the title of the video, NOT because of anything @Delano wrote.
  15. @Delano I went back to double check your original post (to make sure I didn't forget) and I see that you actually did not make the assertion that the video was banned. The video title made that assertion, which is why i went to research it on my own and had no need to challenge you or ask you to explain anything. Thanks again for sharing the video!!
  16. In your opinion, has science become a new religion? Why or why not?
  17. Nope, it is not possible. Which is why I stay open and latch on to nothing as the end of the conversation. Those first folks who learned how to fly had no initial proof that they could defy gravity, they couldn't verify the information beyond their own experiences. But they went forward and tried to find ways to defy it. This is how I see information I cannot verify. I don't take it as the end of the conversation just because I cannot verify it, nor do I dismiss it outright. I observe. I'm equally aware that I will die not knowing/understanding 99% of how this planet works, or seeing 99% of what exists on it. And that is fine and the lot of all humans on Earth. I move forward and stay open to the endless possibilities in this universe.
  18. I was crowned Queen of Think-For-Self. LOL.
  19. @Delano I hunted down the details and found them after I watched the video. I am all about verifying anything stated.
  20. I was in Florida. Came back to the Poconos in Oct 2017. As soon as this house sells, heading back to the Melbourne/Malabar area.
  21. I am not what you see or seek in the mirror. I am me, living inside my skin, carrying blood and bone through time.
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