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January 30 Another gem of a programme!
Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/horizon/
What on Earth is Wrong with Gravity?
Particle physicist and ex D:Ream keyboard player Dr Brian Cox wants to know why the Universe is built the way it is. He believes the answers lie in the force of gravity. But Newton thought gravity was powered by God, and even Einstein failed to completely solve it.
Heading out with his film crew on a road trip across the USA, Brian fires lasers at the moon in Texas, goes mad in the desert in Arizona, encounters the bending of space and time at a maximum security military base, tries to detect ripples in our reality in the swamps of Louisiana and searches for hidden dimensions just outside Chicago.
Ref, 'Lots of archive material to add to the rewarding march of science and knowledge. The Gutter Or The Stars. January 27
Saturday 26 January
11:00pm - 12:00am
UKTV History
VIDEO Plus+: 31337978
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/learnthink.shtml
No man can be free (from the opinions, imagination and passion of others) until he seeks objective answers to three questions - namely - Where am I? What am I? Why am I? For it is the ability to frame these questions that separates us from the rest of the animal world and little else! January 26
SACRE. NASACRE. Ofsted. Department for Children, Schools and Families.
The transient and comparatively very short nature of parenthood within a lifetime.
The short and fleeting years of parenting in the school years, the great difficulties and economic hardships that these years bring to all parents *versus primitive historical facts and the backward ideology of a cultural heritage UK, mostly rated as barbaric or primitive to fairly appalling and muddled. See, Darlington - below. Religion and short term faddy media orientated politics and reporting. The educational indoctrination, which is *against the majority of parents wishes, as their own modern belief's and faith's and personal ideologies are bordering on secular or atheist. See, 'In Search of Mr Average'. I.e., total present disconnection of Parents to School Ethos's and Curriculum's (Tests UK 'reduce children to widgets' http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6626277.stm)
The 'usurpation's' (infliction of State Ideology) and 'powerlessness' of Parents as *against the established and longer-term dinosaurian dictatorial nature of (our) UK Educational Institutions. Schools - Government, Religious, Private-ideological, Business financed Education. The indoctrination of an appalling multiculturalism (who wants - most of ancient Christian 'dogma' or forced/arranged marriage, female circumcision, death penalties, burkha's, sharia laws and so on...?). A culture of (simple) multi-racialism; surely being, the much better answer for us all in the UK!
Salisbury Diocesan Board Of Education (my area) SALED.
Do you know - "What is going on in your area? Who is in the (unelected - by secret session) 'positions of power'? What does it cost you and are they paying any 'Council Tax' or do they have some (secret) well-hidden exemptions"?
Professor Amartya Sen. Nobel Prize Winner. (Power of the ‘Guardians’ -
“never has so much power been in the hands of so few”)
RealPlayer:
http://switchboard.real.com/player/email.html?PV=6.0.12&&title=Today&link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fradio4%2Ftoday%2Flistenagain%2Fram%2Ftoday5%5Fsen%5F20060816.ram
Junior Education, "The sort of book that surfaces only once in a while, ultimately to establish itself as a classic".
"Ever since Pope John Calvin had moved the seat of the Papacy to Geneva and set up the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the Church's power over every aspect of life had been absolute. The Papacy itself had been abolished after Calvin's death, and a tangle of courts, colleges, and councils, collectively known as the Magisterium, had grown up in its place. These agencies were not always united; sometimes a bitter rivalry grew up between them. For a large part of the previous century, the most powerful had been the College of Bishops, but in recent years the Consistorial Court of Discipline had taken its place as the most active and the most feared of all the Church's bodies". 'Northern Lights' Philip Pullman. Ref, relevant quotation - Church Schools, Faith Schools. UK. 87% don't want Church or Faith Schools!
"There remains, however, a vast field, traditionally included in philosophy, where scientific methods are inadequate. This field includes ultimate questions of value, science alone for example, cannot prove that it is bad to enjoy the infliction of cruelty. Whatever can be known, can be known by means of science, but things which are legitimately matters of feeling lie outside its province".
"Philosophy, throughout its history, has consisted of two parts in-harmoniously blended".
"On the one hand, a theory as to the nature of the world, on the other, an ethical or political doctrine as to the best way of living. The failure to separate these two with sufficient clarity has been a source of much confused thinking. Philosophers from Plato to William James, have allowed their opinions as to the constitution of the universe to be influenced by the desire for edification, knowing, as they supposed, what beliefs would make men virtuous they have invented arguments, often very sophistical to prove that these beliefs are true". www.ekklesia.co.uk Russell. Ref, "Our modern muddle" with 'popular sophistry'.
"So we may fairly call them lovers of belief rather than of wisdom--not philosophical, in fact, but philodoxical. Will they be seriously annoyed by that description?
Not if they will listen to my advice. No one ought to take offence at the truth". 'The Republic Of Plato' Cornford, Chapter XIX, 'The Worlds of Knowledge and Belief'.
"To do evil, a human being must first believe that what he is doing is good or else that it is a well-considered act, in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short of a dozen corpses, because they had no ideology.
Ideology, that is what gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.
That is the social theory, which helps to make his own acts seem good, instead of bad, in his own and others eyes so that he will not hear any reproaches and curses, but will receive praise and honours.
That was how the Agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills by evoking Christianity, the Conquerors of Foreign Lands by extolling the 'grandeur of their Motherland'. The Colonisers by 'Civilization', the Nazis' by 'race', and the Jacobins (early and late) by 'equality', 'brotherhood', and the 'happiness of future generations'". Ref, Evil and Ideology. The appalling, inexcusable and indoctrinational idea in the belief of "Original Sin".
Bronowski summarised his scientific humanism in his monumental television series, "The Ascent of Man". Speaking in Auschwitz he said, "When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of the gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible…We have to curve ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people".
Theology: or, Philosophy of Bronowski? The Educators must choose!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22472790/
"Generally, the state of mind of a believer in Revelation is the awful arrogance of saying, "I know, and those who do not agree with my belief are wrong". In no other field is such arrogance so widespread, in no other field do people feel so utterly certain of their knowledge. It is to me quite disgusting that anybody should feel so superior, so selected, and chosen, against all the many who differ in their beliefs or unbelief’s.
This would be bad enough, but so many believers do their best to propagate their faith at the very least to their children, but often to others and historically, there are of course, plenty of examples of doing this by force and a ruthless brutality. The fact that stares one in the face is that is that people of the greatest sincerity and at all levels of intelligence differ, and have always differed, in their religious beliefs.
Since at most, one faith can be true, it follows that human beings are extremely liable to believe firmly and honestly, in something untrue in the field of revealed religion. One would of expected this obvious fact to lead to some humility, to some thought that however deep ones faith one may conceivably be mistaken.
Nothing is further from the believer, any believer, than this elementary humility. All in his power, which nowadays in a developed country tends to be confined to his children, must have his faith rammed down their throats. In many cases, children are indeed indoctrinated with the disgraceful thought that they belong to the one group with superior knowledge, who alone have a private wire to the office of the Almighty, all others being less fortunate than they themselves." Sir Herman Bondi, (past) Master of Churchill College Cambridge.
"Civilization, we may say, has advanced only at the cost of a struggle between science and superstition, working on the intelligence of the participants, a struggle of whose progress the legal status of torture and the social status of astrology, might serve as indicators.
Advanced societies, therefore, are so stratified as to keep the primitive mind (N.B. equivalent: Reflex, and 'the rational mind' - Bronowski) in a subordinate position. In this way individual responsibility and the rules of evidence, allow with fluctuating success: the development of law and the organisation of knowledge and all that follows from these practices". 'The Little Universe of Man' Professor C.D.Darlington. January 21
Not a 'real man' until you have been divorced!
I found that my three weeks and more, within the 'internal desert of life', and with the good company of science a personal Revelation. It takes all sorts to make a world. Ref, medicine and 'Medicine Man' Geza Roheim 'The Infantile Situation'. A good dose of Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, being the cure for the 'Dark Night's of The Soul'. Carl Sagan 'The Demon Haunted World' and 'Science as a Candle in the Dark'. To Tonio, My Grandson, "I wish you a world free of Demons and full of light"." Great programme and very touching commentary. It is very interesting, in our modern scientific and technological age that so many of us can live their lives surrounded by the roots of a past - or even, some futuristic mode, which is immersed in such basic and myriad forms of supreme ignorance, superstition, and pervasive total preposterous-ness.
Age, also, has something to do with it! Why fifty years of age? 'Becoming human is a process not some event'.
"Eventually, my rejection of authority spilled into self self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in College, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy". Barack Obama 'The Audacity of Hope'.
"Then, when they are fifty, those who have come safely through and proved the best at all points in action and in study must be brought at last to the goal. They must lift up the eye of the soul to gaze on that which sheds light on all things; and when they have seen the Good itself, take it as a pattern for the right ordering of the state of the individual, themselves included. You must have seen how youngsters, when they get their first taste of it, treat argument as a form of sport solely for the purpose of contradiction. When someone has proved them wrong, they copy his methods to confute others, delighting like puppies in tugging and tearing at anyone who comes near them. And so, after a long course of proving others wrong and being proved wrong themselves, they rush to the conclusion that all they once believed is false; and the result is that in the eyes of the world they discredit, not themselves only, but the whole business of philosophy. An older man will not share this craze for making sport of contradiction. He will prefer to take for his model the conversation of one who is bent on seeking truth, and his own reasonableness will bring credit on the pursuit." Plato.
"In every primitive (anthropological anomie/anomy - anomic, bricoleurs or Bricolage and pre-logical) tribe we find the medicine man in the centre of society and it is easy to show that the medicine man (sometimes, a leader, politician, doctor, priest... celebrity or royal i.e., one who knows what is best for all others) is either a neurotic or a psychotic or at least that his art is based on the same mechanisms as a neurosis or a psychosis. Human groups are actuated by their group ideals, and these are always based on the infantile situation. The infancy situation is modified or inverted by the process of maturation, again modified by the necessary adjustment to reality, yet it is there and supplies those unseen libidinal ties without which no human groups could exist. The medicine men are the leaders in this infantile game and the lightning conductors of common anxiety. They fight the demons so that others can hunt the pray and in general fight reality." ('fight reality', as reality (science) could be most unpalatable to most, or some people, depending on culture and education i.e., knowledge of reality, not - myth or theology...) Geza Roheim, 'The Origin and Function of Culture'.
Ref, 'necessary adjustment to reality', "What was once thought to be real (faiths and beliefs) without, on evidence, (has now/had to) turned within" - into the Citadel of Self or the Nuclear Self - which is a, "The Process of Maturation". Example, and very personally a more interesting programme - amongst the many:
Professor Brian Cox takes a global journey in search of the energy source of the future. Called nuclear fusion, it is the process that fuels the sun and every other star in the universe. Yet despite over five decades of effort, scientists have been unable to get even a single watt of fusion electricity onto the grid.
Brian returns to Horizon to find out why. Granted extraordinary access to the biggest and most ambitious fusion experiments on the planet, Brian travels to the USA to see a high security fusion bomb testing facility in action and is given a tour of the world's most powerful laser. In South Korea, he clambers inside the reaction chamber of K-Star, the world's first super-cooled, super-conducting fusion reactor where the fate of future fusion research will be decided.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hr6bk
Evolution’s Bumper Sticker War Against Intelligent Design
There's a growing menagerie of creatures and beliefs vying for a place on your car bumper (monsters of the deep) "The Poll Dance"
January 18
UK - Cut the 'red tape' and trade with China!
Why we could be such good partners.
1) Geographically half way around the world. Britain could be the 'largest' Chinese Hub.
2) Independent currencies.
3) Political. Both of us: independent nations - UK in EEC (has useful ties with Europe, with no referendum). Ties with Asia - not as destructive as in the USA's relationship. Not as volatile as the USA's, with it's; Christian Neo Con potentially unstable, world outlook. Britain is a mostly 'secular' country in nature as is China. However, as much as the BBC would like to portray or proselytise the right wing Christian neo con ideology, which is fairly disconnected from the average population in its beliefs and attitudes: UK - thank goodness - not USA! The USA has pretty well 'blown it' in Asia and the Middle East by its ignorance or forceful and indiscriminate domination. American Elections and the Republican vote could be going to a candidate who believes (word-view) that the 'Garden of Eden', exactly as in the Bible, was created in the State of Missouri. Another, who thinks (world-view) that we are created, 'exactly as we are' 6,000 years ago! I don't think that enough time by the media in the UK, and Europe, can be spent reporting these elections in this quite extraordinary scenario, which is going on within the most powerful nation on Earth.
4) Britain's financial services sector - the best regulated, experienced, and secure, in the world!
5) With the matter of Human Rights, Britain likes to 'feel' that it is much more advanced. Ref, Opium Wars...Secret Rendition...Iraq...Affiliation with USA...so on... January 17
I am on the PTFA commitee for an Independent School. Independent or Private School Teachers. Parent Teachers and Friends Association.
All parents; however, rich or poor, contribute a great deal of time and money to School! I am sure that all Schools (public or private or state) do the same, but the Private School Parent has the enormous burden of compulsory fees to pay (not all can afford the fees or should, but they do for many varied reasons - half the class size being one). Independent Schools Inspectorate and Independent Schools Council. Charity Commissioners. Government, and its use, and its fascination, as some source of a 'blind' to justify their lack of foresight and investment in their own sector, combined with the 'politics of envy': not getting to the basic routes of inequality and making all our lives worse, not far better, as they reasonably should!
"There is a two-way relationship between charities and society - registered charities enjoy considerable benefits in terms of their reputation and the tax advantages that go with their status," said the Charity Commission's chairman, Suzi Leather.
I would say that the Parents who send their children to Independent or Private Schools (Preparatory Schools and Public Schools) saving the rest of the population £2 bn in revenue are doing more than their bit' in the first place!
I wonder what action we will be talking about at the next PTFA meeting.
I have suggested booking all our kids into State Schools...
Withdrawing our present and future enormous commitments to Charity...
Wake up: Government and Charity Commissioners. Nice jobs if you can get one, but your jobs might be the next on the list. And, especially, as how badly the economy is doing so far this year! Devaluing our fees and our teachers is not acceptable - we all are not Eton's or Harrow's or Wellington's with millions of pounds in bursaries. We all know which type of school is causing 'social exclusion' and ours is not one of those, so please, get to the route of the problems!
Ref, William Williams Charity. January 15
The very expensive designs, and designers, feather-bed'd authorities who would let us think for ourselves in this 'Health and Safety' gone mad culture: not very likely!
Unless, we refuse to pay them, or even refuse to obey the (silly) rules. Unlikely, as most of us humans, not only want to obey rules, and also; the ones that make little sense, but will vigorously seek them out. Ref, as in 'faiths and beliefs' and 'Domesticated Man' 'fending off of reality' as unpalatable. Wolves to (domesticated) Dogs. Hunter Gatherer to Herder and Cultivator to Domestication. Eras of Human Psychological Time - mostly, which go unnoticed by the majority of the participants. Ref, Professor Richard Dawkins.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7187165.stm January 14
Just, put this one on order!
I may find some of the things that I rattle on about on this blog and much more? Fascinating!
Cognitive Archaeology
"Today, some people still think this has been a step too far; my own view is that it isn't. I feel strongly that we must make the effort, if only to understand why we (and our political leaders) think in the often weird and seemingly irrational, ways that they do. "This excellent book is fully referenced, jargon free and clearly written. I recommend it without reservation." Francis Pryor is a Presenter of Time Team.
My note, NB, 'Knowledge is Power' 'The Boy Scientist' 1926. "Anything for me, must be better than an "Alpha Course". "Knowledge of 'no religion' is the best training for those who are religious in nature". A Catholic Priest. January 09
More hits on this blog, with 'intellectual enquiries' from China - than from anywhere else.
We maybe somewhat alike in thinking, with the (modern) advantages of understanding fully 'secularism and humanism'.
No doubt, the many outstanding 'Human Rights' questions in China will be solved by 'International Pressure' over time, which may not be possible with the 'more entrenched' (psychologically) abuses that exist in (some) Western Countries. I hope the Chinese can forgive us for our appalling conduct of the opium trade and wars.
A sore point, "How primitive is your culture (country)"? 50% of Americans think that they were 'created' as they are now and 87% believe in God.
"In every primitive (anthropological anomie/anomy - anomic, bricoleurs or Bricolage and pre-logical) tribe we find the medicine man in the centre of society and it is easy to show that the medicine man (sometimes: a leader, politician, doctor, celebrity or royal - one who knows what is best for all others) is either a neurotic or a psychotic or at least that his art is based on the same mechanisms as a neurosis or a psychosis. Human groups are actuated by their group ideals, and these are always based on the infantile situation. The infancy situation is modified or inverted by the process of maturation, again modified by the necessary adjustment to reality, yet it is there and supplies those unseen libidinal ties without which no human groups could exist. The medicine men are the leaders in this infantile game and the lightning conductors of common anxiety. They fight the demons so that others can hunt the pray and in general fight reality." Geza Roheim, 'The Origin and Function of Culture'.
"Through time... there emerges a power, held and manipulated perhaps by a priest, a warrior, a manager, or a charismatic madman who just happens to be the genealogical leader of the largest kin group in the now heterogenous social fabric. The power itself represents a quantum leap over anything previosly weilded, but it is a long time before the weilders of the new power realize its full extent and possibilities. Far from being a conscious creation of naturally power hungry psychological types, it is at least as probable that the power developes more rapidly than the abilities of its handlers". 'The Evolution of Political Society' Morton Fried - Ref, 'The Domestication Of The Human Species' Peter Wilson.
Three-quarters of the teachers felt they had an obligation to alert their pupils to the dangers of patriotic sentiments.
"Global interconnectedness is lethal against mass religion and ideologies". Ref, see, Memes and Memetics.
Or, "Global interconnectedness is lethal against mass religions, nationalism, racism and other 'destructive memeplexes".
Oh, "What we could of had if the silly buggers had not taken us to war"?
Conducted in such an appalling manner, mostly by the sit at home authorities, Foreign Office UK. Ref, Secret Rendition. Public Hero, Derek Pasquill. "Derek is an extremely brave individual. At huge risk he got government policy out, it was legitimate to put it in the public domain. There is an argument that this was a debate which should have been heard in public." The decision to charge Mr Pasquill led to accusations authorities acted because they were more worried about embarrassing revelations than protecting state secrets. He had to wait 20 months for a resolution! http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7179247.stm
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