The Need to Grow is an excellent new documentary about solving the ecological problems with modern industrial agriculture. Here's an article about it:
It's available for a free viewing for the next few days. I watched it and recommend it. The link below takes you to a trailer, and from there you can view the entire film:
Most of us are probably unaware of this. If we weren't we'd be throwing rotten tomatoes at our flat screens that are playing more ads for prescription medications than the content we originally tuned in to see.
YouTube to the rescue, where truth is still being told. Well, at least most of the time. There has been a teeny weenie too much censorship of legitimate scientific debate lately. But there does seem to be less of that quite recently, let's hope that goog trend continues.
Speaking of YouTube, here's a recent interview of a carefully researched book by a PhD professor of philosophy and bio-ethics at California State University named Leemon McHenry, titled "The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research".
And quoting now from the introductory blurb for the interview, McHenry "guides us to the fraudulent core of ghostwritten studies, captured legislators, revolving-door regulatory agencies, pay-to-play medical journals, and the "key opinion leaders" who lend their academic credentials to giant corporations...for a price. With every stage in the process seemingly structured for corruption, we can only wonder along with Professor McHenry: "Who's looking out for scientific integrity?"
Gee I've been blogging about this for a long time in regards to the enormous disease reversing capacity of the SOS Free Whole Foods Plant Based Diet, which as you might imagine, Big P is not terribly fond of in light of the fact it's infinitely more effective than anything they have on offer, and 100% free of charge to boot (we have to buy food anyway).
Was that a run-on sentence?
Anyway, if you only watch the first 3min 15sec of this you'll have a very quick overview, which may peak your curiosity enough to hear the details presented in the rest of it.
We can imagine why there may be tremendous resistance to this story. For starters the idea that a scientific accident was the cause of the pandemic damages the pristine perspective many have on science as an unassailable source of truth and progress. And then there's the question what do we do if we find increasing evidence that the pandemic was caused by a scientific accident? And that is a double edged sword question: first is the incredibly complex and potentially dangerous political relationship the west has with China relative to it's increasingly aggressive behaviors. And second do we lose some of the faith we put in the scientific process? Both of these are exceedingly difficult questions to face...we'd much rather they just go away, thank you very much.
First up is an NPR Terry Gross interview with an investigative journalist who has done a deep dive on the question. It's long but thorough and relevant to those curious about the question. This link is to the aired audio interview, and a transcription of the interview:
And for a little levity on this uncomfortable question we have the initable Jon Stewart in a recent guest appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert:
Jon Stewart On Vaccine Science And The Wuhan Lab Theory
Humans are driven by forces that are beyond our conscious comprehension. Let's say also these forces are not beyond our un-conscious "comprehension", or we would not be driven by them.
Genius thinkers find mathematical structure within the unfolding of these forces, just as genius poets find mysticism and convergence within them. Mysticism is simply the conscious recognition of the fact these forces exist, but also that they are partially hidden from us by the unconscious, which is "one with" these structures (the convergence). The mystery of art and science is that these forces emerge as structure and take form in the work of art and science. In these works is the recognition that we did not create and control the cosmos, rather it, whatever it is, created and controls us.
The fact biology exists at all, on at least one planet of zillions, Mother Earth, is perhaps the most profound and beautiful mystery.
It is a common hubris that we humans think we are "The Crown of Creation". However the unconscious "proves" that we are constrained by the limits of biology, the same as the rest of biology. Biology operates within a structure, a container, if you will, of balancing forces. The crown of creation hubris is that we are not constrained thusly.
How do we come to this departure from reality on a mass scale? That is a fascinating question, answered at least partly by psychology (the study of the unconscious). Ernst Becker's classic work "The Denial of Death" may go some way toward the answer to that question. Here's the wiki page on that book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death
and one quote from that page: "we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality through heroism".
Within this mechanism of denial we also confuse progress and evolution. By progress I mean technological progress mostly, which has accelerated exponentially since the advent of fossil fuel use, and which has also concurrently accelerated human population growth exponentially. We find ourself in godlike control of nature, bending her to our will, but this I believe will prove to be a temporary delusion. We are already seeing the beginning of the end of that delusory state in the collapse of ecological health, and human health, and the mass destruction of biological species of all types.
So what then of the confusion of progress and evolution? Simply that evolution is biology, and proceeds at a snails pace. It is said that significant evolutionary changes take about 100,000 years.
As a species however we have the capacity for the evolution of knowledge to progress at a much faster pace than the evolution of biology. Theoretically we already have all the biological capacity needed for that to continue, and with it the "maturation" of our species. As it stands now we are proving to ourselves that as a species we do not yet have the maturity to handle technology. We are mesmerized by it, as it proceeds to destroy the ecology of the planet.
The answer to this, our most profound dilemma, is not the adolescent boy's fantasy of escape to another planet, or a newer and better technology, it is in the emotional and psychological maturation of our species.
We want to believe the problems caused by the mishandling of technology can be solved by newer better technologies. What is the one about the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?
Doesn't seem to be working, does it.
What Kahneman and Tversky (The Undoing Project, Thinking Fast and Slow) have essentially done is to statistically prove the essence of Freud's work, which is that we are primarily creatures of instinct not reason. Freud basically was saying the renaissance message of self determination based on reasoning gives a partially (or mostly) wrong message. Instinctual (unconscious) processes are fooled by a great variety of things. But not always! They are essentially designed by the creator of biology (whoever/whatever that is) to keep us from being killed. And they continue to function on that level, so we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The unconscious runs the autonomic systems, it keep the heart beating. It causes us to leap out of the way of an oncoming bus...without ever having a conscious thought about it in that moment.
