Bibliography of Fighting misinformation, populism, and propaganda

Dual State Theory: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, 1941 Ernst Fraenkel

The War on Science, Shawn Otto  2020

Witches, A Tale of Terror, Sam Harris narrates the audio and has commented on how, once you accept a few basic principles as if they are factual, the men who prosecuted witches proceeded in a scientific manner. They were the "evil" ones, the men, but the managed to get others to believe the witches were working with Satan. 

Calling In - It took years for this to come out but it's finally available. Just got the eBook. 

I Never Thought of it That Way

Misguided, Matthew Facciani 2024

    Which has a massive bibliography and footnotes of studies

Karl Popper 

The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt

Politics of Meaning

The Ideological Brain

https://www.youtube.com/embed/P6KTCjwmdzs

Daryl Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis

Fiction

The Brothers K - David James Duncan

Quotes 

Dalai Lama Art of Joy

Why Philosophy Matters - Introduction

 Welcome to another blog series. Sometimes, I don’t complete the series that I start, but in all cases, something along the way is worth it. Thanks for reading this far. To keep this from being 100,000 words, I will need to refer to other existing discussions, like the title itself. Bigger thinkers than me have questioned the usefulness of philosophy in an age of science. People like Lawrence Krauss and E.O. Wilson. I won’t recreate their arguments here and may not specifically reference them as I address their concerns. It’s a big question. I’m not out to win the debate.

Succinctly, for me, it matters because in this age of science, we have people with uniforms, authorized by their government, to cut off the breath of life of another, in public, until they are dead. This is debated. In some countries, if you try to debate it, you will join the dead. In industrialized democracies, you still need lawyers and new legal precedents to win the case that such actions are wrong. That is a debate I am out to win.

Very recently, I purchased a beverage, legally, publicly, that was made by a company owned by women. The beverage contained some THC. A half of a lifetime ago, there were very few companies owned by women, and buying, selling, and imbibing THC was illegal. Because of that, I lived outside the law for a couple decades, risking a felony offense almost every day. I had a lot of time to think about what is moral and right. For this one example, the state I live in finally caught up to me.

When a rich and powerful person claims they can act in ways that others can’t, that is an expression of a philosophy. It’s a statement that human nature and some imagined natural laws justify oppressing others, taking what isn’t theirs, and invading others bodily autonomy. To me, it shows that powerful person did not spend much time reflecting on what it is to be human and how we develop society to match natural laws, or if there are any. It shows that anyone can jumble words and have them appear to have a basis in logic and reason. I want to talk about how we can examine if those words are reasonable.

A most excellent New Year

There was a new Bill and Ted excellent Adventure movie this year, gotta give a nod to that. It was about the fulfillment of their original mission, to bring the whole world together with their music, which keeps seeming to happen and then not happen in each of the movies. I've followed a similar pattern through the years. You could review last year's New Year's post for example.

In February, I almost got a local chapter of Braver Angels off the ground, then, that thing that 2020 will be most remembered for happened. Braver Angels has continued online, so that's good, but getting people together in living rooms has not been happening so much. 

I'm sliding toward a "year in review" blog here. That's not I want but I did come across an excellent review of the last 100 years of the Conservative vs. Liberal battle. It's a short summary but covers a lot. If you haven't read any Heather Cox Richardson, this is a good start. 

The article marks this year as the year that we will probably stop referencing the "Reagan legacy" and start using "Trump legacy". Before Reagan, we were very much under the influence of the "Roosevelt legacy", The New Deal. Today, we have people who are confused about all of this, who are afraid of "socialism" but don't want "the government" to take away Medicare or Social Security. The details of this battle between the social safety net and big business are in the article. 

Photo: Race and Reagan

It also describes how racism has been used as a weapon in this battle. That legacy goes back to the Civil War and the years that followed; Reconstruction. It mixes our identity as strong individuals who have high morals and ethics with a focus on vague enemies, like "communism" or "terrorists". It leverages these tools and uses legal maneuvers to selectively apply votes so it appears to be democratic and patriotic. It draws lines, and sets up each side to believe they are the "real" America. I'm using tons of scare quotes because all of these definitions are in flux.       Photo: Deconstructing Reconstruction

Many genies have been released from their bottles lately and they don't like being put back in. They will continue to impress us with their magic tricks. But as everyone knows, you have to be very careful what you wish for because genies can be so literal in their interpretations of your words and the trick is then played on you. 

As the article notes, we are at a point where millions of people are openly asking for votes to not be counted and questioning the entire system and willing to overturn the results of our duly run democratic process. It is not logical, but it is the inevitable result of playing on people's righteous belief in their ideology. 

The tendency to be blinded by ideology and forget that the person in front of you is a loving human being is not limited to Republicans. Righteousness can bind us and it can blind us. Moral indignation can override our reasoning skills. 

https://righteousmind.com/

There are scenarios where the same righteousness could have resulted in a Left Wing disaster. But don't confuse the danger of government that is too liberal with the reality of one that was captured by and run by conservative big business. Both can lead to oligarchy; rule by a rich elite. The "liberal" and "conservative" labels lose their meaning when you look at who makes the rules, that is, the ones with the gold.

You're Right

You’re right. Of course you are right. Everyone wants to be right. If you are doing something or saying something that you know is wrong that’s antisocial personality disorder.  You are only wrong for as long as it takes to correct yourself, then everything is right again. You are right, but you are not always right. If you think you are always right, then you would be arrogant and obnoxious. Being right includes admitting that you might be wrong. Right?

If you want to check if you’re right, surround yourself with people who are willing to tell you when you are wrong. This is what you do when you seek an education. They could be wrong too but you can’t both be right if you disagree. Knowing what’s true is a different conversation. If everyone around you is agreeing with you and telling you that you are right, you might be surrounded by people with antisocial personality disorder or at least people who want something from you. It’s good to have friends who support you no matter what but real friends will let you know if you are wrong when it matters.

Truth

Just a few quick notes on this topic. I might refine it later.

Knowing what is true turns out to be kind of complicated. You can avoid all the philosophy and just remember the last time you stubbed your toe or hit your head. It doesn’t get much more real than that.

Otherwise you have to start with definitions, and they won’t answer “why” and they will leave us with more questions. That’s the human experience. First, truth is that which comports with reality. Great start huh? Reality is that which we can demonstrate is true. That’s circular. I did warn you. Truth is demonstrated by collecting empirical evidence. That is done using our senses, and extending our senses with instruments, and extrapolating from those results with reason and logic. All of this can fail at any point along the way.

We can’t be certain about anything. Not even what I just said. We still say things like “settled science” or “that’s a fact”, but technically, we are always speaking of probabilities. A “proof” is something you do in mathematics. You define rules about numbers and prove that equations will always have certain results. You can’t do that with people, or history, or psychology, or pretty much any animal behavior.

However, not being able to prove anything is different than not being able to know anything with a high probability of being accurate. People didn’t know about the shape of the earth at one time, and they were way off on the shape of the universe. But their being wrong then says very little about how accurate we think we are now. Truth may always be elusive, but we know how much evidence we have, how well we have checked it, and how consistently our experiments have verified it.

We use evidence and reason naturally every time we take a step or hear something new. We may not use formulas or check every fact, but there is nothing we can use to reason away reason. As soon as you try to explain whatever else might replace it, you are using reason to do it. The best we have to extend our knowledge and our experiences, is each other. Together, we’ve done some pretty amazing things.

All models are wrong, some are useful - George Box

The amazing chart of everything

I’m a little embarrassed about how much of this chart I’m familiar with, but I’ve had to look up these things when seemingly intelligent people bring them up and tell me I should be concerned about them. I admit at one time I thought there might be something to the Nostradamus prophecies, but then I simply read what they said. The actual words don’t match the theories about how he predicted the Kennedy assassination. But the guy who made this chart seems to be serious about it, and I’m sure you all know someone who is very serious about at least one of the items found here.

My obsession with this is partially just curiosity, partially the human tendency to gawk at disaster, but it is also rooted in academics. I was in an African American Studies course in my freshman year in college when the people following Jim Jones all killed themselves rather than disband their group and reconsider their life choices. The professor asked us to think about how this happened, particularly why middle class black people joined this group.

Part of it is mind control, making them repeat the ritual without using real poison and barraging them with long speeches about his view of the world over a loud speaker all day long. But cults almost always begin with some reasonable ideas that seem intuitively good. Those roots are usually not well documented and get swept under the longer story that is easily found once the group has some fame. It seems obviously wacko to outsiders at that point, but those who accept it have a history that has altered their intuitions about what is right, so they can justify the wackiness.

Each one of these nodes has a story like that behind it. A story of how it began as someone asking questions that seemed reasonable. They become conspiracy theories when answers are provided that aren’t based on facts, evidence, and logic that is interpreted by people familiar with the full context. People choose the simple answers of the complex inclusive data. This could remain a small group of gossipy neighbors or grow into a political party with actual power.

In this chart, most of it is real names of people, corporations, and organizations, but the connections and the arrows are almost always a stretch. “THX 1138” was really a movie by Steven Spielberg about a guy who escaped a domed city where the government controlled everything with lies and kept people sedated by prescribing drugs. Why that is right next to the “Birth of the Internet”, I don’t know. Further up, in the historical section, the Rockfellers really did monopolize oil in the USA and they did it with nepotism and corruption. Why that is right next to “Ritual Magick” on the chart, who knows?

Harder to miss, the big arcing arrow from scientific discoveries of the modern world to “DEPOPULATION”. You would need to read a lot of stuff that would challenge your credulity of the authors belief in what they were writing to know why Monsanto and Flouridation are on this chart. You might feel like brain cells were trying to escape as you read it, hoping to find a place where reason and logic still exist. What this chart shows is evidence is not needed once you’ve decided to live in a world of fear where you have no power. In that world, it’s better to give up your powers of reason and, according to the logic of that opposite world, then you’ll see what is obvious.

In the world of facts, people do horrible things to each other in plain sight. I couldn’t find “Organized Crime” on here, but we know the names. They walked around in major cities and people loved and adored them. They were treated like the ones who were fixing the problems that the government and police were causing. Meanwhile, they were building their private armies and throwing bodies in the river. Pablo Escobar appears. He financed social programs while also bankrolling corrupt politicians, guaranteeing that those social programs would not have democratic oversight. They got the blame for what was wrong, he got the credit for doing what was right and the power that comes with it.

When you decide that what you see is not real, that you were taught nothing but lies, and that anything that comes from a respected source is actually designed to control you, then everything is part of the giant conspiracy and your best strategy is to do nothing except tell everyone else about how you figured it out. By saying you are questioning everything, you get to feel powerful, but by not using your powers of logic and reason, by claiming your theory is beyond question, you’ve relinquished the power you actually have.

There are of course bad things in the world. Caligula, near the top in the Antiquity section, was a vicious narcissistic ruler. That’s why we say Rome was “falling” at the time he ruled. Democracy was conceived, then faded and came to light again over a thousand years later. This chart seems to connect that re-emergence more to the Illuminati than to the formation of nation states full of free people. No explanation is provided.

Alchemy was a waste of time but as the chart notes, it led to gunpowder. There are good and bad uses for gunpowder but you could say it would be a more brutal world without it. Many items appear on the chart without comment, so it’s hard to say what judgment QAnon is passing on them.

The paradox of “conspiracy theorists” is they will use real conspiracies like Nixon and Watergate, The Gulf of Tonkin incident, Bush lying about weapons of mass destruction, and Jeffrey Epstein as their evidence that governments and rich people are really corrupt, but it’s not “conspiracy theorists” who uncover those conspiracies! The mainstream information sources that are supposedly covering up the conspiracies are the ones that brought those to light.

Conspiracies that actually happen like a President lying on a daily basis or a small family getting rich off of a Pharmaceutical company selling pain medicine, are not included in this chart. Epstein is being investigated even after he died because living people conspired with him, but this chart only has “Pizzagate”. The same people that missed the Epstein conspiracy are now making up stories about how he was killed by the Clintons. This chart was made in 2018, before the Epstein and Sackler stories broke and the QAnon writers are now catching up with them.

There is a big difference between conspiracies where powerful people are lying and hiding information and working for themselves while saying they work for us, and decisions made in the regular course of people trying to figure out how to make a living in a decent and ethical manner. We use toxic chemicals and precious resources to make life better for most people on earth. Billions of people sleep soundly knowing their taxes are supporting a military operation somewhere on the other side of the world that they would never consider participating in. We do our best to discuss decisions like this, requiring layers of oversight and regulating whatever industry gets to profit from the lesser of evils that we eventually choose. We hope that we get the chance to work on the new problems that we caused by implementing the solutions to the original ones. None of this belongs in the same category, on the same chart, as lizard people using the Denver Airport as their secret base.

This chart is the modern version of Greek mythology; mixing historical figures with imagined monsters and giving them all personalities and character traits that attempt to reflect human traits and failings. But the words and actions of the stories didn’t happen in the real world . It’s done in an attempt to try to explain the crazy world we live in, to reconcile what we know is right with all the wrong that we see. It skips over the hard work we need to do to uncover those wrongs. I hope this type of thinking fades and the methods of science prevail and continue to be improved but there is no guarantee. The record of civilizations is not that great, they kind of come and go. Fortunately, even when the powerful and the structures they built fail, we still have each other.

String Asymmetry

I’ve had one blog about TV, and that was Star Trek. The Big Bang Theory is a show about some sci-fi nerds who also happen to know a lot about actual science. But really, it’s a show about relationships and they tied it all together brilliantly in the season 11 finale with Sheldon and Amy’s wedding.

It takes a few scenes for it to be laid out. It starts with, well, it starts with years of developing the characters, but if you don’t know them, I think it still works. It starts with Sheldon attempting to tie his bow tie perfectly. His fiancé, Amy asks what he’s doing. She says maybe it’s not supposed to be perfect. Maybe it’s supposed to be a little uneven. No one can ever tell Sheldon he’s not doing something right, but he seems to relent a little this time.

Later he is getting dressed for the wedding with his best man and they have their moment, then Sheldon’s mother comes in and asks for privacy. They talk about his late father and the subject of the uneven tie comes up again. His mother waxes philosophic about how sometimes it’s the imperfect things that happen that cause a moment to be perfect. Sheldon notes that Amy said something similar, then gets that look on his face he sometimes does, the far off look towards a corner of the room that is focused somewhere further off into a distant galaxy. He says, “I gotta go.” His mother is left standing there alone, a perfect demonstration of something imperfect happening, and she says out loud to no one, “like that.”

Where he goes is to his bride’s dressing room. She is standing alone in her gown looking at a mirror. His first reaction is to be stunned by her beauty. This is unusual for Sheldon. Normally if he has something important on his mind, other people don’t matter. He does do what he normally does when he rambles and stumbles and goes on tangents as he explains why he’s there. Amy is one of the few people who can pull him back into focus and when she does he explains that the bow tie discussion has led him to a breakthrough in his ideas on String Theory. Instead of super-symmetry, it could be super-A-symmetry. The two begin writing out equations on the mirror, using lipstick. In an abnormal moment for Sheldon, he does not mention that he wants credit for this discovery. He says they will publish it together.

The show has science advisers who helped them come up with the super-asymmetry idea. They checked, and as mentioned in the show, no one has published something like this yet. The brilliance of the moment to me is that string theory is an attempt to find equations that unify all of our knowledge of the universe, to find symmetry in everything. Sheldon has believed he could do this since he was a little boy. He makes rules for everything, including relationships, and stresses the importance of sticking to them. The show has traced a long slow realization on his part that people don’t always function as a set of rules. To demonstrate that he is really finally getting this he is taking these lessons for life from his wife and his mother and applying them to his lifelong goal of understanding how the universe works through mathematical formulas. He is seeing the language of love in the language of the universe.

The equations of course are a metaphor. They are not suggesting that you can write a formula for the meaning of life. The science advisers make sure that the math that appears on the show is accurate in some sense, but accuracy is not the point. They know people will freeze the frames and scrutinize them. Sometimes they put math jokes on the white boards. I wouldn’t know. The metaphor is the search for meaning. Sheldon’s very Christian mother thinks she knows the answers and that it’s cute that her son is so smart. She also sees all the problems that it has caused for him. Sheldon sees nothing but problems coming out of his caricatured Texan family. The others on the show have their own approaches and philosophies that all get their time and place. What we saw at the wedding was that all of them are reaching for the same thing, and together, sometimes finding it.

New Year 2018

I know some of you might find this surprising coming from me, but looking back over this last year, the world is actually pretty awesome. I know about the bad things, you know I do. I argue for change all the time. I want things to be better. That’s why I speak up. I considered moving to a cabin in the woods a long time ago, but I decided it’s better to stay engaged with the world.

I fight because I can. I have accumulated advantages from previous generations and I paid my dues to show that I return value for what I have. Life isn’t fair so that formula doesn’t work for everyone. As we found out this year, a lot of women didn’t have that choice. If they had spoken up, their careers would have been over and we would have never heard of them. Some of them lived long enough to see justice. They are preceded by many who did not.

I know the word “divided” has come up a lot this year. As if generations were always on the same page before, or North/South and East/West are some never before known demographics that have been discovered. But we don’t fight the same kind of wars over these like we use to. We respect boundaries and cultures. We don’t pillage. We vote. We don’t conquer. Not everywhere in the world of course, but a least in the US that means no matter where you are, you’re going to bump into someone who didn’t vote the way you did. You can argue with them if you want, or you could celebrate that our children are healthy and are getting an education despite those differences. Maybe we should make sure that happens first, then get back to arguing about a policy that only affects people who have more than 10 million dollars in the bank.

This idea that people with slightly different values than us are tearing apart the fabric of society is very old. It used to be that you were sacrificing the wrong things on the wrong altar. More recently it’s about how wealth is distributed and how ownership is claimed. It has become less of an academic exercise and more of a spectacle. As it becomes more of a farce, the easier it is for the looters to walk off with whatever they want. It’s not a secret conspiracy, they do it right out in the open.

Meanwhile, we keep making progress. We see farther into space which means seeing back in time. We understand our bodies and minds better. We can read things from thousands of years ago that very few people, even those from the time they were written, have ever read. We see connections between keeping our hair in place and ripping a hole in the protective layer on the edge of space. We take corrective actions before we kill ourselves. Hopefully.

In case you didn’t get the reference:https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/antarctic-ozone-hole-healing-fingerprints/

Truth Pledge

People say I argue a lot on facebook. I’m not going to argue about that. But most of the time, I’m trying to just get the discussion on to an honest track. I try to find agreement about basic facts, like pain hurts, and people die, and life is risky, and there are things we don’t know, and love is better than hate. Okay that last one is not a fact, but you get the idea.

With that in mind, here’s someone who has thought about this, and is organized enough to get people thinking about it.  

 I Pledge My Earnest Efforts To:

 Share truth

• Verify: fact-check information to confirm it is true before accepting and sharing it
• Balance: share the whole truth, even if some aspects do not support my opinion
• Cite: share my sources so that others can verify my information
• Clarify: distinguish between my opinion and the facts

 Honor truth

• Acknowledge: acknowledge when others share true information, even when we disagree otherwise
• Reevaluate: reevaluate if my information is challenged, retract it if I cannot verify it
• Defend: defend others when they come under attack for sharing true information, even when we disagree otherwise
• Align: align my opinions and my actions with true information

 Encourage truth

• Fix: ask people to retract information that reliable sources have disproved even if they are my allies
• Educate: compassionately inform those around me to stop using unreliable sources even if these sources support my opinion
• Defer: recognize the opinions of experts as more likely to be accurate when the facts are disputed
• Celebrate: celebrate those who retract incorrect statements and update their beliefs toward the truth

I heard about this through Bart Campolo’s podcast where he pointed out the people who sign this are going to be the people you already trust. Maybe. Or they are going to be those “others” that you don’t trust and you see as people who sign pledges and don’t understand them. Yep. But it’s a start. If enough people, important people, people who are in positions that are supposed to be trustworthy, sign it, it will begin to carry some weight.

It’s very short and all you do is click the orange button. Email is required, which I know will scare a few people off. It’s not for everyone.

Meanwhile, we can actually start doing this with each other. It’s like recycling. We can shake our fists at the big polluters of the world, but if we aren’t reducing our plastic consumption and separating our garbage, nothing is going to change. As Bart says, “Science can’t proceed unless people agree to be honest with each other about their results. Everything has to be verifiable. When people lie about their results, it slows down the whole process. Science is a conversation and this conversation can only go forward if we agree to these ground rules. In the same way, collective governance, the social contract, social cooperation can only really do well if we agree to have the conversation where we all use the same facts. If we are going to live together, have a community, large or small, we’ve gotta agree to some rules of conversation. The first of those is everybody’s gotta tell the truth about physical things, money that can be accouted for, etc. Without that, we can’t make any decisions, we can’t even argue.”

Oddly enough, I’m now going to cite a study on Buzzfeed. It was also mentioned in the podcast. Usually I don’t trust Buzzfeed, but this one has been reviewed and cited by more reputable sources. It compares the top 20 fake news items on facebook in the last election cycle to the top 20 real news stories. The fake news engaged 8 million people, while real news only had 7 million shares. That’s you. That’s every time you share something and say, “I’m not sure about this, but I’m sharing it anyway.” Or even when you say, “This is dumb.”

I know that’s hard not to do sometimes, but it’s something I’m trying to do lessof myself. There are ways to avoid it and still engage the issues.Share an article that discusses the bad science or “alternative facts” and provides the facts that were left out, or explains the bad analysis. Sometimes, in the case of bad science, the counter argument is to simply show the actual scientific study underlying the discussion. Often, the summary of the study tells you the opposite of what the fake news story says. If we do that we’ll have a facebook full of actual data instead of the interpretation of someone who knows little or nothing about the field. With politics, link the full speech, or to a chapter from Adam Smith, or the Supreme Court decision that is being claimed as supporting evidence, or a longer story of the historical event in question, or a Pew poll,anything but the fake news. You can refer to the fake article by giving the source, title, author and date if you want. I can usually determine fakeness just by examining those four things.

There is also a menu item in facebook to report fake news. This of course requires that you read it and do a little fact checking, but it’s the tool we have for now. Some of you have already figured out to just not join facebook, but I’m assuming you aren’t reading this, so I’m not talking to you. This is for all of my online relationships.

One little story before you go. I participated in my first online discussion group back in 1993. It was a computer group supporting getting technology into the community. In the middle of some other discussion, someone popped in and said we should all be concerned about congress wanting to tax email. He included a number identifying the bill. I dismissed it. This urban legend continued to make the rounds on the Internet for years, making it all the way to the 2000 presidential debate between Al Gore and George W Bush. Neither of them knew how to answer the question or had heard of this bill, because it never existed.

Back then, I learned about Snopes.com and started educating people about this and other stories that only existed in emails and discussion forums. It took over a decade to get rid of that one story. It would have been great if Al had known about fake news, but the term wasn’t on anyone’s radar at the time.It sure is now, but it is already out of control and it played a yuge part in the 2016 election. We owe it to ourselves to create a public square filled with honest discussion.

Fake News

I have an ongoing "discussion" with a local columnist in the free rag in Duluth. He writes about every conspiracy under the sun, his favorite being "Big Pharma". I write to the editor, and get published most of the time. This one is about where fake news comes in general, and how to spot it:

As Gary moves on to the next conspiracy theory, let’s look at his strategy in general. I showed Gary these steps. He says this is what Big Pharma and mainstream media and whoever else he rails against does. I’ll show how you can tell fake from real after showing this 7 step method of phony science.

This system starts with an industry that is somehow threatened by established science facts. It funds and creates information that looks scientific, but isn’t. You can see where the Duluth Reader begins to play a role in this, somewhere around step 5. Whether the Reader or Gary Kohls are unwitting participants or willing supporters of these industries is known only to them.

1 – Create uncertainty about accepted views of science. Not with new science, but by cherry picking papers or experiments that were never confirmed or were proven false. Any isolated article will do.

2 – Spoon feed the press with this disinformation through non-profits and bloggers.

3 – Build and finance industry-aligned front groups that appear to be grassroots efforts.

4 – Recruit professionals into the campaign.

5 – Talk-radio and cable news and more from the earlier steps should pick up the story at this point. They might not realize the source.

6 – The political support is now there. Votes can be had by supporting the ideas. Questioning these unscientific sources can get you labeled as the one who hasn’t read the latest research.

7 – The industry behind the phony science can now step out of the shadows, supported by every aspect of mainstream society. They can appear to be neutral and positive voices in the debate. Maybe even play the victim.

How can we recognize this is happening? It’s not as hard as you think. You need to compare the stories that are published through all the steps with the actual science. You don’t need a degree in every possible science, but you need to learn what actual science looks like. It looks like the articles printed in accepted journals like Nature or Scientific American. It looks like what is being taught in Universities around the world.

You may not be able to evaluate every study but you can evaluate the methodology. You can see who did the study and see if they have knowledge and experience and if they are respected by others with similar knowledge and experience. You can see if something was predicted based on their knowledge that was later shown to be true. You can evaluate where they say their knowledge came from. Did it come from institutions of learning where you would send your children or are they someplace you’ve never heard of? If a study is quoted, get the name of it and who wrote it. Look it up and look up if it has been refuted or even retracted. Often, you need look no further than whatever article you are reading. Does it have a byline saying who wrote it? If there are sources, check a couple of them with the above tests. I have seen citations that actually don’t lead anywhere, or lead to studies that don’t say what the article says it does.

Try this test. There is probably something that comes from universities and science journals that you accept, like the earth is 4.5 billion years old, we went to the moon, climate change is being caused by human action, or germs make you sick. Look at how you were convinced of whatever you accept as true. Look at all the things that would need to be explained if they were not true. Now, apply those standards to vaccines or chemtrails or whatever else is being questioned. If you apply standards of logic and evidence honestly and equally, you will arrive at the best conclusions that humans are currently capable of. If you want to align yourself with the real world, you should at least give it a shot.

If you want more, and I know you are dying for it, click here. My comments are signed with various versions of John W. They go back 3 weeks. I have ones for June 14 and May 25th somewhere, I'll try to get them online. The one with the graphs is a doozy. May 17th is probably my favorite. That's where I started. 

Accidental Courtesy

http://accidentalcourtesy.com/

Available on Netflix and elsewhere. To say this movie is controversial or provocative would be an understatement. A jazz musician, and would-be diplomat is the star. You see his successes; a couple dozen KKK robes that men have given to him when they quit the Klan. Later, you see how difficult it is when he sits down with a couple of young men from Black Lives Matter.

Unfortunately, whatever it is he does, is not easily taught. He does speak publicly, we'll see if his ideas grow in the future. I like his basic premise, that sitting in a room full of people who agree with your point of view and discussing how to be more "diverse", is not going to solve anything. We need to sit down at tables with the people with whom we disagree.

There are a few of those conversations throughout the movie. I suspect they are like nothing you've ever seen.

I've tried to have these myself. I've tried to understand the racist mind or the libertarian ideas. I do some of the things I see Daryl doing. I ask why they think government should not provide services to all people equally. If they think services are provided unequally, I ask why they think that. I ask what it takes to create a free and open society at all. To me it means accepting, even embracing ideas from other cultures while finding common ground. To them there is something dangerous about that. They cite failures in the past when cultures were mixed. But if I cite historical precedents of success, they say they don't apply.

I try to talk about values, because "free and open" does not mean anything goes. Some libertarians will actually say anarchy is possible, as long anyone is free to leave a given boundary. Within the defined boundaries, the rules can be that there are no rules, except for the rule that if you want to leave you can. Somehow, that rule has to apply to everyone. If this sounds like a science fiction premise, I think you're right. There are too many problems with it for me to even begin.

If it's not anything goes, then what should everyone agree to? Fire departments? Police? Libraries? Defending of borders? Food safety? This leads to a discussion of legal agreements, which leads to a need for agreements about what a law is and how they can be enforced. Things break down around that time because they are starting to define governments, not agreements between individuals, but they still think they are talking about a system where if they want to say white people rule, it can work.

I like to talk about when the modern idea of nations was created. I know, I'm using that history that doesn't count as evidence, and in conversation, you usually don't get to do this. In 1638 in Westphalia, the treaty called The Peace of Westphalia was signed, ending decades of religious war. A few years later, Isaac Newton was born and the science that was used to get us to the moon was created. I kind of see those two things as related. When we can stop arguing about how our cultural beliefs are more important than some other culture's belief's and start looking at the problems of survival themselves, we can begin to work together and build that peaceful world we all say we want. When I try to talk about love, that's when things really tend to get out of control.

They tell me that their opinion is sharing of their views and my opinions indicate I am closed minded and that I am not listening. That the values that the government supports that they agree with are the right ones, and the ones they don't agree with are the equivalent of them being forced to do something at gun point. They tell me their evidence, even if they can't show it to me is correct, and my scientific studies are the fallacy of an argument from authority. Eventually, we get to where there is no way to demonstrate truth, no one can prove anything, we don't know if we exist and it's just everyone for themselves. Basically a return to the stone age.

People observing these conversations tend to focus on the emotional argument. The person getting upset often gets the benefit of the doubt that the upset was caused by how the argument was presented. This ignores anything about the logic or reasoning of the argument itself. There is no excuse for presenting an argument poorly or for shaming someone who lacks background information or berating them for failing to understand. But someone's failure to understand is not always the fault of the person making the argument. It's good to remember Bertrand Russel's rule of allowing others time to absorb new information when these conflicts arise.

Some of this is basic ignorance. Not stupidity, just not knowing. In the documentary, Daryl goes to the Lincoln Memorial, with the big statue of Lincoln in a chair. He walks around and asks a couple people to please take a step or two from where they are standing, because that is where Martin Luther King Jr. stood when he gave his famous speech. He knows it's the spot because it is engraved in the marble they are standing on. That's it. No statue, No plaque. It's not even in color. If it's not pointed out to you, you miss it. A lot of history of non-white European men in America is like that. Daryl calls this "standing on the dream". We do it all the time, without thinking about, without knowing what we are missing.

Critical Thinking

Someone asked me how we can know if something we see on the internet is true.
This is just some notes I threw together. It starts with deciding how much effort you want to put in to it, then figuring out if there are expert opinions you can rely on.

I’ve gathered facts and I’ve determined that I have most of the information available on this topic.

                Great, you’re done.

I have some information, but I don’t have all of it. Acquiring more data would require months or years of study.

                Decide if you want to do that study. Or, use the listed items below.

The issue may not be settled. The people who are the best minds on this issue do not agree. They might even say they don’t know enough to make a judgment. Or it is settled, but you just don't have all the information yet. You can become an expert or you can rely on experts:

1)     How do you know who the experts are?

a.       Degrees from accredited institutions

b.      Honors, awards

c.       Appearances to the public, intended to help the uneducated understand the issue

d.      Participation in setting public policies that can be evaluated

e.      Publications that provide real world, understandable examples and illustrations

f.        Historical precedence

2)      When those experts disagree, do they do it respectfully, or are they claiming bad motivations or hidden agendas?

a.       Do both sides have a body of evidence they refer to, or does one concentrate mostly on pointing the flaws in the other?

b.      Can you at least follow a logical flow to the arguments?

c.       Are the two sides willing to debate?
d.   If there is an article or book, check for response articles, redactions and retraction.
e.   If refuted, did the original author respond, either with more facts, or did they admit they were wrong in light of the new data? 

3)      Can you identify any other facts behind those motivations or agendas?

a.       Are they pointing to anything written or recorded, can you verify their data?

b.      Are they using words like “some” or “always” or “stupid” or “commie”?

In the best case, you have a friend or acquaintance in the field in question. Someone you can trust to clarify anything specific.

Second best is to attend a public lecture and ask your question face to face. Sometimes you can find very intimate settings for these types of discussions. For example, a farmer might be willing to show you their operations, a lab worker might take you on a tour, or someone good with numbers could show you where to find data and how to interpret it.

Unsealed documents

I haven’t written a Monsanto blog in a while, but it seems things are heating up, and this article came through my feed. I’ve heard people being accused of being paid trolls in online discussions and unscientific sites like Natural News, but this site has an appearance of being a legitimate news site. They accuse people of being tools of the pesticide industry, and specifically mention the Genetic Literacy Project.

I had a little trouble identifying the source of the article, but Quora did not have answers that settled me at all. https://www.quora.com/Journalistic-Ethics-and-Norms-How-legitimate-is-The-Centre-for-Global-Research Other debunking type websites did not give it nice reviews either. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Globalresearch . http://fakenewswatch.com/ lists it as a “Clickbait Website”.

Here’s the article. Please limit your clicks on it, it just encourages them.

May 3, 2017
http://www.globalresearch.ca/monsanto-accused-of-hiring-army-of-trolls-to-silence-online-dissent-court-papers/5588396

This article is almost devoid of facts, except the ones presented by the Monsanto quotes. It almost seems like someone disguised a pro-Monsanto article as an anti. It uses a facebook quote as evidence and notes that earlier evidence says a “single comment” was taken out of context, but now they have more. I couldn't find that much "more".

It linked to a website of court documents that were recently unsealed.
https://usrtk.org/pesticides/mdl-monsanto-glyphosate-cancer-case-key-documents-analysis/

Clicking on it gives a long list that looks impressive. This is a tactic of using a bibliography as if it is evidence itself. Many people will see that and accept it as legit and move on.

The first one I looked at (4th in the list) was “Order denying Monsanto motion to increase page limit”. It was 4 sentences long, saying “FURTHER ORDERED that Monsanto Company shall be permitted …. in opposition of up to 25 pages in response to Plaintiff’s Rem..” I couldn’t read it all because there was a big “DENIED” stamp over it.

So, I started going through them. The first was a motion to keep some notes sealed, saying, “Compelling reasons and good cause exist to redact portions the Motion to Compel and the Rowland Rough Transcript”. There was no scientific information and no specific evidence of anything.

The next was a lengthy answer from Monsanto of allegations and amounts to nothing more than a legal denial. Studies are cited, but the document could not be used to determine truth of either side.

The third is about a 1996 case of false advertising. You can look that history up anywhere.

The 5th one says they can question a guy. I skipped a couple because they looked like more of same.

Then “Monsanto’s motion to strike plaintiffs’ reply exhibit 1…” is interesting. They are accusing their accusers of making a frivolous and illegal filing of an irrelevant document. It would be interesting to see how that one turns out.

I skipped the back and forth about Rowland.

In the request for the production of all original re-cut slides in study BDN-77-420, something is redacted. I don’t know if the request is reasonable or not, so I’ll withhold judgment on that one.

“Monsanto discovery dispute” is a long discussion about the IARC ruling on cancer risk. That could be interesting if you haven’t already read up on it.

I thought maybe I finally found the evidence discussed in the article at “Jess Rowland documents unsealed”, but this was 100 pages about the review by IARC that led to the cancer ruling, and other studies that conclude glyphosate is not carcinogenic.

Documents “unsealed” (227 pages) looks like a general declaration of what the IARC is about. That entry also says “key documents on pp. 203-4”. The words “involving experts” and “ghost-write” are used in that memo. That was the only remark I found that was relevant to the article.

I found nothing to indicate Monsanto concealed anything, or any evidence of pseudo-science. The article correctly states that “plaintiffs allege”, but I didn’t see the links to their studies. There were over a thousand pages, so I might have missed something. It seemed a bit misleading to me to mention 50 lawsuits, and that court documents have been unsealed, but then find those documents are mostly very common legal wrangling. The article states the papers are “being gathered” on a whistleblower website, but that site is run by RTK, which is affiliated with this globalresearch.ca, which looks shady. This is “guilt by association”; create an accusation, create a group that documents accusations, document it there. The documents themselves don’t contain much as far as I can tell.

None of this helps me make any decisions about what I should eat or what I should buy, or who I should believe. My opinion; eat whatever you want, but don’t use articles like this to help you decide. 

Grain of Sand

You are as insignificant as a grain of sand. It takes so many grains of sand to make a desert, each grain is insignificant. Even if that grain is taken up by an oyster and makes a pearl, then the pearl is insignificant. It's merely a reaction to an irritation.  It doesn't matter to the desert. It doesn't matter to the ocean. It doesn't matter that the ocean gives life or that it is lined with beautiful coral reefs. Those reefs are just there to be eaten by the fish and excreted as sand to be washed up on a beach and blown back into the desert. 

All of that is part of something so large that it is beyond comprehension, rendering each part insignificant. It is a vast, incomprehensible collection of insignificant things, rendering the whole just as insignificant. It could be nothing else. There is nothing against which we can judge significance. 

Your statements, your thoughts about the "is" that it is, are meaningless to all the interactions of all the galaxies and all the waves on the all the shores. Your thoughts are just that, yours. You think them. You write them down.
You speak them. You live with them.

Pray

If you are trying to follow the lectionary series in order, I just skipped a few weeks. I will have a website up in the next couple months that follows the schedule.

Hosea

This week's text

Explanation of the series

For Old Testament help, I frequently turn to John C. Holbert. This week, he lays it out pretty clearly. After discussing the odd behaviors of other prophets, he says, “…, but the use of a woman of the evening for an object lesson is quite something else. For those of us who are feminists—and I hope all you readers consider yourselves feminists, too—it is deeply offensive to use a woman as a metaphor for human idolatry. Such literary effects do nothing but demean women and hold men up for the crude and misogynist beasts that they too often are.”

So, yes, this is saying what you think it is on the first read. We don't get any details about just what they did wrong here, but God is obviously fed up with it. Depending on where you want to go with your sermon, you may need to do some more research into the context.

The names obviously have some symbolic meaning, so I'll cover those quickly. “Jezreel” is “God Sows”, in this case it will the bad kind of sowing. “Lo-ruhamah” is “not pitied”, that's followed by God's words about not pitying Israel. “Lo-ammi” is “not my people”. God is going back on his promise that Israel is his chosen people. It does get better, but scholars speculate that the verses about having pity on the house of Judah and how things are going to turn around, were added later, much in the way modern preachers would like to turn this whole passage around and make it something it's not.

Psalm

The Psalm goes perfectly with the Hosea passage. It accepts the idea that God can be vengeful and angry if he wants. It's saying its our job to let him know we are here for him and that we are certain he has a plan that we can all trust.

Colossians

I'm spending extra time on the parable this week, so I'm going to focus on only one aspect of the New Testament reading.

2:8 See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.

Putting “philosophy” and “empty deceit” next to each other like that implies philosophy is deceitful. Bill O'Reilly now says Christianity IS a philosophy, so I guess he sees it different. Neither Bill nor the Bible discuss the details of this. Greek philosophy would have been known, certainly in the 1^st century, although we can't know how well versed in it the authors of the Bible were. There is no direct philosophical debate in the Bible. Here it is described as “according to human tradition”, so they are acknowledging that there is a distinction between Biblical teachings and some sort of secular school of thought. It also says, “elemental spirits of the universe”.

Rather than try to understand the mind of a 1^st century Palestinian who couldn't have heard of the word “science” since it hadn't been invented yet, I'll just make an observation. While Protestants and Catholics were killing each other for the right to worship differently, while thousands of new denominations were being created because new information about the Bible was coming to light and as people began to understand how the brain worked and that mental illness was not demon possession, we were also discovering that we are a small planet on the edge of a vast galaxy with galactic neighbors and all that took billions of years to come into being. We are gaining this knowledge so fast, the language is not keeping up. We are going to have to come up with a new word for “universe”. It's supposed to mean all that exists, but we are finding there is something before time and outside the boundaries of everything we know.

These discoveries, that the very fabric of our being was cooked in the first stars then blown apart only to come back together to form more stars and planets and atmospheres and creatures that could then reflect on all of this and ponder the mystery of it and experiment against that universe to discover why it is here and why we are here, none of this is covered in any part of the Bible or in any theology. We have discovered where we came from and evolution gave us a theory of how we came to care about each other. We found out that we were not put here as stewards of someone's creation with some unknown purpose, instead we are completely interconnected to that creation. We are part of its cycles on a biological level and if you get down to the smallest physical level, we are exchanging particles with everything around us. It is difficult to even find the boundaries.

These are profound discoveries that have altered the relationship of human beings to the planet, but religion refuses to integrate them. A few tepid attempts are made and they usually involve getting the science wrong. The Pope closed the universities in 1277 because he was afraid of anyone attempting to reach God using reason. If they had succeeded, why would we need a Pope, and if they failed, people would have to choose between thinking for themselves or not. He had to reopen the schools, but the world had already begun to move on.

There are references in this passage to pagan worship and other warnings to stay away from other religions. One of the few phrases I find agreeable is the one about not getting “puffed up”. That's wrong even if you happen to be technically correct. But I can't salvage much else from this passage. If someone has found a way to integrate all of our modern knowledge into their services, I would love to hear about it.

Luke

This passage starts with the Lord's Prayer, then tells us the parable of the Friend at Midnight, then tells us more about prayer. A basic reading might just see it as a suggestion to pray often. I will spend a little extra time on this parable because it is included in William R. Herzog III's Parables as Subversive Speech. This is a rare book that covers many modern interpretations and offers conclusions based on all data available to the modern reader. It considers the parables in light of Paulo Freire's work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It covers 9 parables, and is an invaluable tool for anyone serious about Bible study. Thankfully, it also accessible to the non-scholar.

Herzog spends 11 pages on this passage, going into great detail on the Greek word anaideian, which appears in verse 8 as “persistence” or possibly “importunity” in some translations. Translators have had trouble determining if this applies to the neighbor being awakened, or the friend at the door. Applied the wrong way, it can appear that Jesus is portraying God as the neighbor, who is reluctant to bother with the petitioner at his door. This could be a parable about being persistent with your prayers, something Luke definitely advocates.

To unravel this, Herzog spends almost a page just on how the community that Jesus is preaching to would handle its bread making; small loaves or large, community oven or not, everyone baking on Monday or a system of rotation. If this is not interesting to you, serious Bible study may not be your thing. If you want to have “our daily bread” mean anything other than a vague analogy to eating, these are important details.

Herzog doesn't just jump around wildly speculating, he sights theological, archaeological and textual evidence and how they support the different interpretations they have published. Without this information, we would be left trying to apply this story to our own experience. Would you even answer the door at midnight, even if it was a friend? Do you expect friends to make appointments? This is a family with children, is the friend being inconsiderate? Almost every word needs to be carefully considered to get the correct interpretation.

Herzog considers one theologian that he, and many others, think got it wrong. Herzog only gives us the name Levison, who says anaideian should be applied to the sleeping neighbor. If it doesn't it would lead to the view that prayer is nothing more than badgering God into submission. Levison needed to translate the word to “strengthen” to make this work. Herzog calls this “theological slight of hand”.

Preachers often do this, but rarely will they tell you they are doing it. Your only clue will be if you have not heard it before. If you haven't, you can check with your favorite source or a more familiar preacher, but even then, you are limiting your sources. This is the problem with theology, there is nowhere you can go to get a consensus answer. There is no code book like there is for electricians. It's not a science where some things are still speculation and others are well established theories based on empirical evidence, and data that has been verified as factual after repeated experimentation. This citing of many sources and discussing them is what makes a work like Herzog's so valuable.

To help us understand the irony in this parable, Herzog spends a few pages on the idea of “The Moral Economy of the Peasant”. They had to deal with the reality of a subsistence lifestyle, where they felt that any gain of their own was done at the expense of their neighbors. They felt powerless to deal with the ways they were being exploited, so they looked for how those means resulted in something left over for them. It is hard to understand for anyone living in a society where much is provided. They knew there was an elite status that they could never obtain, but they expected those elites to draw a moral line at limiting their exploitation in a way that left them with their subsistence living.

In this system, reciprocity was a norm. You helped others when they needed it and they understood the obligation to reciprocate. Also important, as was discussed two weeks ago earlier in this same chapter, there was a tradition of itinerant preaching. This tradition of receiving a traveler is included in the Holiness Code of Leviticus. This is not simple utilitarianism. It is friendships developed to alleviate the increasing pressures of those elite patrons. This act of giving mere sustenance, bread, is a participation in the hospitality of Abraham. As Herzog says, “every time they place their meager resources at the disposal of the village, they participate in some small way in the continual redistribution of wealth for the sake of protecting and caring for the vulnerable, as envisioned in the Torah.”

I've left out a lot of the details, but Herzog concludes that the parable is breaking a boundary. Modern readers can recognize this, but they have a very different set of boundaries. Boundaries were set by the Torah in 1^st century Palestine, but the elites had rewritten those boundaries with an oral Torah. They used that to continue to pursue their acquisitive greed at the expense of peasants and rural poor and still be Torah-clean. To them, extending hospitality to a stranger was shameless, using the “importunity” interpretation of that difficult Greek word. They were fools.

The parable delivers the punchline in verse 8 with irony. Jesus turns that judgment into an affirmation of village hospitality. By doing so, they created a messianic banquet, making a mockery of the lavish banquets of the elite that were done to promote themselves, not the community. This was a system of justice by the impure that those practicing the purity laws couldn't comprehend. The villagers didn't cave in to the desire to hoard and accumulate. This ordinary action of sharing bread was no small matter.