Dr, Ian Stevenson’s research into the paranormal at the University of Virginia has always interested me:

“Ian Stevenson is a man extraordinary in his intellectual and scientific accomplishments and even more extraordinary in his possession of a quality of mind which resists and never allows itself to be dominated by assumption. And so, against a powerful scientific ethos, which generally looks askance upon matters such as religions and more specifically the question of the soul, Stevenson has stood firm, recognizing that such issues are highly debatable issues and cannot be dismissed as trivial, irrelevant or devoid of value.

He is one of those remarkable men whose creativity and intelligence enable him to look beyond boundaries, instead of tempting him to contain his gaze within the pale of a single discipline. His early experiences in science, as a student of biochemistry, and as a young doctor, taught him that scientists are not always free of the prejudices and assumptions which as scientists they should be.

Indeed, Stevenson came to understand that the vanities, pride and jealousies, which historically have been the failings of politicians, philosophers, and theologians, can be, and often are, the same failings of scientists. Scientists, no matter how much they are taught to be wary of the personal and the subjective, are men, and as men they cannot be completely free of arrogance, pride, ambitions and other human failings. It is these human flaws which constrict and hinder that primal imagination of science, out of which come new possibilities from old impossibilities, and new considerations from old rejections. Stevenson’s mind is full of these transfiguring impulses of the imagination which are the source of his admirable resistance to those assumptions generated by the past accomplishment of science. Stevenson is remarkable for having been resistant to those vices of self to which science is loathe, vices which make error and shortsightedness among scientists…..

……And so even to this day, Stevenson submits to a vigorous scientific scrutiny an idea which for years has engaged his mind: the notion of survival after death and the possibility of reincarnation.

Stevenson has done more in the lecture than give us a brilliant paradigm of mind; he has returned to us something which has been too long absent from discussion in philosophical, religious and theological groups and in our intellectual life. I am referring to the argument for the immortality of the soul, a central idea in what we call the perennial philosophy. For centuries the possibility of survival after death has engaged the imagination of men; yet in the last hundred and fifty years, this conception has not fared well in a world in which Darwin, Freud and Marx have gained currency in the general culture….”

— from the Preface of Some of My Journeys, Ian Stevenson, 1989

For more on Dr. Stevenson’s research on reincarnation (his most famous research) visit the University of Virginia’s Department of Perceptual Studies.

More research along those lines has been done by another accomplished scientist, Dr. Satwant K. Pasricha, of the Department of Clinical Psychology of the National Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences in Bangalore, India.

By the pricking of my thumbs/Something wiki this way comes…”

The tinkering with my wiki page continues. The page was nominated for deletion after I made blog posts about – guess what? –  wiki manipulation, the Wall-Street- media nexus, social media attacks, my co-author’s company…

(I am eliminating this reference, since I’ve decided to put this whole business behind me)

In any case, to return to this petty saga: the page was nominated.

Then, after it became clear that the page would NOT be deleted, a new tack started

– delete the Getabstract award page, thereby reducing my claim to notability…

Why is the Getabstract award not notable? Because wiki says so…

Circular reasoning?

Was the Getabstract company informed about this? I don’t think so.

Now,  would it be unreasonable to infer from all this that wiki – an international source- can easily be manipulated in favor of US parochial interests?

And US news? and US viewpoints?

And if so, is it any surprise that Wall Street robbed the public under the very noses of the much vaunted US free media…and not a soul peeped up about it, except a very few voices in the alternative press – just that press that has been declared unilaterally non-notable…

What were the ‘notable ones’ doing at that time?

Trading favors, prizes, links, recommendations, bonuses, bribes…and probably wikis!

Here’s the notice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Lila_Rajiva_(3rd_nomination)

and here’s the latest comment at the bottom of that page.

Comment – I have put GetAbstract International Book Award up for deletion. I’m putting the notice here as that article is one of the significant anchors for this article being notable. –

No slur intended against individual editors. They might each have their own honorable motives…

Can you see, though, that in order to get visibility, you need a platform..in order to get the platform, you need visibility…if you have enough money, you can often get both..and then use that money and influence to determine how visible anyone else can be.

From Charles Hugh Smith, via James Kunstler’s blog:

“Everybody’s got an excuse in our current system, and perhaps that’s why it is morally and financially bankrupt. The U.S. (and certainly not Santa Monica) was not a Third World nation in 1952; people did not feel their healthcare was deficient or poor. There was simply no money to pursue marginal returns except perhaps for a few millionaires seeking exotic treatments. Fine, it’s their money; most died right along with the rest of us and at about the same lifespan.

As for “overall health” of the populace: what with the “diabesity” epidemic out of control due entirely to lifestyle changes, it’s hard to say we’ve gotten 50 times healthier as a result of our healthcare costs rising 50-fold.

When it comes right down to it, the current system is based on this premise: the average American is too dumb to figure out healthcare for themselves and so we need a gigantic structure of “experts” to figure out what should be done and what it should cost. It’s not even really “insurance” because everyone gets old, ill and then dies.

This has resulted in the most brutally inefficient and even cruel system possible, one in which the very elderly are milked for hundreds of thousands of dollars of “healthcare” in the last days or weeks of their lives while tens of millions get no care at all except at the emergency room. Since no one takes responsibility for their own health or healthcare costs, then people take poor care of themselves and thus many of our ills are self-inflicted. People save little to nothing for emergencies because they’ve learned to expect someone, somewhere, to pay for their healthcare. (It’s a “right.” Really? At whose expense? The Chinese who buy our debt?)

I know, I know–going to a market/cash system is “impossible.” But the irony is that’s where we’ll be in a few years, regardless of what anyone thinks or wants: “healthcare” in its present incarnation will bankrupt the nation just as surely as the sun rises.”

My Comment:

That’s been my opinion of American health care, for years. Despite all the rhetoric and the high technology and expensive medicine involved, it’s not “the best” in the world, by any means. For the amount of money spent, I have to believe it’s actually rather middling.

Why?

Because the whole thing is a racket between the insurance companies, the medical establishment (including the pharmaceutical companies), and the lawyers – in which the consumer of health (notice the peculiarity of making health a product you consume) is encouraged to go in for bigger and sloppier portions, which he doesn’t fully eat or throws away, while all around people starve in the gutters.

Hospital overbilling ($17 dollar cotton swabs, for example), unnecessary diagnostic tests, lack of preventive care, patients who abdicate all responsibility for their own health, control of the supply of doctors, the medical research boondoggle….

Take all this away. Pay in cash for what you want. It sounds radical…impossible.
But with no incentive to over-bill, doctors will lower costs dramatically.
What about poor people who can’t afford health care now? Lower costs should help them too.
But there are other things we can do to to make health care affordable.
Here are some:

1. Increase the supply of doctors by immigration and single licensing standards
2. Utilize/license alternative practitioners, instead of demonizing them
3. Allow non-generic drugs into the market-place
4. Encourage medical tourism and comparison-shopping across countries
5. Educate the public on nutrition and preventive health
6. Allow nurses and technicians to perform more procedures than they do now
7. Include nutrition as a required subject in high schools

I had to add these quotes cited in Bloomberg from Messrs. Geithner, Greenspan, and Summers, on the economy, because they make a pretty good illustration of the government’s spin on the economy and serve up a nice contrast to the not-so-pretty reality underneath:

Geithner (Treasury Secretary): “There are signs the recession is easing. The broad consensus of private forecasters is that you are going to see positive growth in the second half of this year and expect that to continue.” It is “not clear yet” how strong growth will be, he said.

Greenspan (former Federal Reserve Chairman): “Collapse, I think, is now off the table. I’m pretty sure we’ve already seen the bottom. In fact, if you look at the weekly production figures for various different industries, it’s clear that we’ve turned, perhaps in the middle of last month, the middle of July.”

Summers (Director of the White House National Economic Council): “While the economy will resume growth in the second half of the year, the job picture will be serious for some time to come.” [indirect quote until “the job picture…come”].

Meanwhile, outside the spin zone, Mark Hulbert at Market Watch notes that “Corporate insiders have recently been selling their companies’ shares at a greater pace than at any time since the top of the bull market in the fall of 2007.”

ORIGINAL POST
“Those “green shoots” were either marijuana plants (and were being smoked by the media) or worse, they have been running around with cans of green spray paint, “colorizing” the dead brown weeds, then pointing at them and screaming “green shoots!”

— Karl Denninger

Over at Market Ticker, (via 321gold) the estimable Karl Denninger has a good analysis of what the GDP figures this morning really mean.

The money part:

*Consumer debt peaked in January of 2009 and is on a decline. This means that spending is going to decline, and now we’re seeing it.  Durable goods orders were down (despite the pumping of “better” durables reported month after month on CNBC!) and non-durables – that is, consumed goods (in the short term) decreased as well.

*Both import and export demand has effectively collapsed! We are now anywhere from 40 to 60% below comparable levels on imports and exports.  Those who believe that “China will save us” are delusional; how is that going to work when half of their exports to us are gone?  Bluntly: The alleged “Chinese recovery” is a manipulated lie from the Chinese government.

* Personal current taxes decreased $113.1 billion in the second quarter, compared with a decrease of   $241.7 billion in the first. You only pay taxes on earned and unearned income.  It is collapsing.

My Comment:

Well, that explains the dollar index plunging below 78 this morning, for the first time this year. Look for more pressure on the dollar and some support for gold, keeping it at the higher end of the trading range it’s been in.

Meanwhile, other writers are hazarding a guess at how this cosmic effort to prop up Treasury bonds will all play out – an interesting one being future Yuan-bond issuance by the US government and/or the sale of US property and farmland to the Chinese….

I’m reading the reviews of “Bruno,” apparently a new and “shocking” movie that’s a take-down of the hetero world by homos… or a satire of the way heteros look at homos (shade of the “Obama jihadist” picture by the satirists at the New Yorker)…or a homo-hetero fable… or some such convoluted high-brow business, depending on whom you’re reading.

Whatever.

The idea that gross sexual displays or vulgar language or imagery is at all transgressive in the West…or East.. any more is a bit funny. Grossness is mainstream. It’s big business.

At best, Bruno, I imagine, is a toilet-brush scratching the nostrils of a few suburbanites who on all other counts embrace the ethos from which it rises – the worship of mass taste ….and the reflexive genuflection before the god of “art,” which now means practically anything in print or screen of any quality.

To be truly transgressive today, you’d have to adopt the persona of a nun, believe in the Holy Ghost and Resurrection day….oppose abortion….or cling to your guns…

Notice how in some of the panegyrics to the movie, the word “red-neck” gets thrown around. “White-trash” too.

Some transgressions it seems are a lot more respectable than others.

Censor Bruno? Never.

That would be giving a bit of money-making trivia far too much importance. I’d as soon censor the contents of an old, abandoned sewer. As much garbage circulates in the veins of modern culture, a break-out every now and then on its aging face is no more than a symptom. Bruno is a pimple for aging adolescents to pinch, poke, and rub anxiously, as they primp in front of the mirror.

The rest of us who aren’t nearly so self-absorbed can settle down to any number of real books and films…

Tim Wise at Counterpunch rebuts the notion being passed around (in the National Review, among others) in the aftermath of the Gates affair – that some degree of racial profiling might be unavoidable, and even appropriate, because disproportionate numbers of blacks commit violent crimes.

“For every 4.6 stops of whites, police are able to make an arrest, while they have to stop 7.3 blacks before finding evidence of criminality (4). What does this suggest? Nothing to Heather MacDonald, apparently, but to honest people it says this: police are more likely, on the basis of unjustifiable suspicion, to stop blacks than whites, and they are uniquely bad at predicting black criminality…….

But I doubt they would actually like where the underlying logic of their position leads. Indeed, if we are to use data to justify disparate treatment of this kind, we would need to go further than Charen or MacDonald would likely approve. For instance, whites have much higher rates, in all years, of drunk driving (5): so by the logic of Charen and MacDonald, police should put all their roadblocks and sobriety checkpoints in the suburbs and white rural areas, in order to catch the folks most likely to be guilty of a DWI. Likewise, whites have rates of child sexual molestation almost twice as high as the rates for blacks, according to the available data (6), so perhaps these two will soon call for rational discrimination against whites seeking to adopt? Or what about the corporate misconduct in which whites seem clearly to predominate? Will conservatives now call for affirmative action as a form of crime control in corporate America? After all, white men are demonstrating their ineptitude and even criminality repeatedly at the highest levels. Of course, they will do none of these things.”

My Comment

To Wise’s excellent points, I should add the following.

1. Psychological testing (tests by Banaji, Greenwald etc.) has shown that subconsciously even well-intentioned blacks tend to class random black faces displayed to them as less intelligent, less attractive, and less honest than white faces. That is, a high degree of color prejudice is simply built into current cultures – world over.

2. Psychological testing has also shown that groups naturally create an “outsider,” against whom they bond, during a polarized debate. And outsiders are created even among racially homogeneous groups, over trivial differences. The creation of outsiders thus seems coded into us.

Adding our assent to racial profiling as somehow rational and justified as a form of short-hand for genuine information-processing only tips the balance even more against innocent people. And then, factor in the rapid militarization of the state and its ever increasing belligerence to the population, white or black.

No. It’s one thing to argue that ordinary people are justified in making these sorts of rough calculations when they choose which neighborhood to walk through. Of course they are. It’s another to encourage state thuggery for the same reason.

Meanwhile, at least citizens get a choice about which neighborhood to walk through.
What choice do you have over financial crimes committed by the Treasury itself?

Yep. Them jihadis get bolder and bolder:

“A North Texas woman is asked to leave a Balch Springs Social Security office after a guard accused her of carrying dangerous weapons: her knitting needles.

“The armed guard came up to me and said I have to take that outside,” said Rachel Vines.”

Vines said the only thing she was trying to kill inside the waiting room was time.

Consumer Society: Massive amounts of packaging containing nothing. An invention of great scientific value that allows the suppression of real needs by the imposition of artificial ones. However, the Consumer Society meets certain resistance in backward areas. (Statement of Don Pampero Conde, native of Cardona, Uruguay: “What good is the cold if I don’t have an overcoat.”)

— Eduardo Galeano (Dictionary of the New World Order, 1991)

From the interesting blog, Surviving Argentina, by Fernando Ferfal:

“According to the very questionable INDEC, that favors the government:

*50% of the people under 18 years of age in Argentina are poor. This does not include the people that are indigent (people that lack the basic needs such as the minimum amount of calories per day to stay alive and a home)

*10% Of the Argentines are indigent. Back when the INDEC was a reliable source of information before Gillermo Moreno and his thugs took over it, the number was 20%

*The amount of shantytowns, camps made of shacks with pieces of cardboard wood and debris, tripled since 2001.(doesn’t add up with that 10% indigent number)

*46% of the indigent receive “some kind” of help from the government. (May be just a couple bags of food, usually a packet of formula for babies)

*17% of the poor receive “some kind” of help from the government (the social plans are usually 300 pesos, less than 100 dollars, and those mostly are used to pay the political foot soldiers that can be seen in campaign rallies)

*According to the INDEC’s own numbers, taking into consideration the amount of poor, indigents and the amount of money spent each year in social care, 50% of what is spent each year in social plans would be enough to give each poor family a yearly salary that would put them out of the poverty line.
Meaning, with the amount of money spent by the Argentine government in social plans (the ones you just don’t see anywhere), it would be enough to end poverty in Argentina… TWICE.

We have one of the largest tax in the world, 21% for everything, plus savage income taxes, taxes for services and luxury goods.

They take the money, they milk the middle class, they just don’t spend it where they say they do.”

My Comment:

Ferfal has been mentioned by a couple of readers, so I took the time to check out his blog. It’s very informative and disturbing. And it confirms what I’ve heard on the street, now, as well as a few years ago (2006), when I was previously in these parts. At the time, I was looking into whether Buenos Aires was a good place for an expat. I wrote then that it was a good option for someone young who wanted to get a foot-hold in the work-place, for the adventurous, and for telecom workers. That’s still pretty much true. I also wrote that apartment prices in Buenos Aires were probably nearing a peak, and that you’d have to look carefully, if you wanted your investment to be safe.

I was looking for an apartment for myself at the time and almost did buy. But eventually, the thought of the 12-hour plane flight from the US, the expense (round-trip tickets usually go for around a $1000 and can run as high as $3000-4000, if you’re in a hurry), and the logistics made me reconsider.

Buenos Aires is still not a bad investment, in my opinion. It just depends on where and for how much you buy, how long your time-frame is, and what sorts of costs you incur during that time.

But I didn’t consider the country the best place for investment for a foreigner in South America then. And I still don’t. Especially with the Kirchners at the helm

It’s a place for adventure and for risk-taking and for lone-wolf ventures of certain kinds. Business-wise, libertarians on the lam can do better elsewhere.