Thomas Ligotti:

Mental illness will remain taboo until it becomes universal. Not that it isn’t already universal from a certain perspective. But the very existence of the mentally and emotionally perturbed is a genuine threat to the socioeconomic system in which we are imprisoned. If you’re going to be crazy, your craziness better take the same form as that of your boss, the law-enforcement authorities, and the president of the United States. Otherwise, you are screwed.

Over on MeFi there’s a thread about this movie that’s an underground hit, called ‘What the bleep do we know?’

The movie is basically a bunch of folks telling you what you’ve already heard: That your state of mind makes your reality. But it says this in the language of quantum physics, which a lot of newage folks are doing in order to lend themselves legitimacy. Oh, and the movie is also produced by a bunch of the Ramtha cult folks. Ramtha is an entity being channeled by a woman here in Washington state, named J.Z. Knight. So goes the story, anyway.

What interests me about the thread on MeFi is that the commenters easily default to assuming it’s a piece of propaganda for the cult, and/or that it’s trying to trick the unsuspecting. Now, I haven’t seen the movie, but I’m familiar with the newage arguments about quantum mechanics, so I want to say this:

These newagers are using the scientific language they hear as a metaphor for another phenomenon. It’s like if I tell you that my blood runs cold, I’m not actually saying that my blood is literally cold, I’m conveying an idea through language and imagery that’s available to me. This is important because if these newagers, including the Bleep producers, were to have chosen a better metaphor than quantum mechanics, they might have a better chance of making some kind of sense.

However: 1) There isn’t a better metaphor out there at the moment, which is why so many newagers flock to this quantum mechanics explanation for their beliefs. QM points some strange and mysterious directions, and even scientists talk about it in those terms. And 2) They aren’t aware that they are using quantum mechanics as a metaphor for what they believe. In order to adopt a new metaphor, they’d have to throw away their own ignorance of the real science. And since their argument is that you should single-mindedly pursue only what you want in order to effect positive change in yourself and the world, it seems unlikely that these folks are going to become physicists any time soon.

It’s a certain kind of self-deception, but JZ Knight herself says in the film that you can’t know, so make up a good story. That seems reasonable if you accept the premise that you ‘can’t know.’

I used to keep up with the newage stuff. It’s a poor substitute for a workable culture-based non-religious spirituality, but it’s a valiant attempt at growing one. I gave up when I realized there was very little that any newage guru was going to be able to teach me. For instance, I’d love to get drunk with JZ Knight, but whatever I’d end up learning from her wouldn’t come from the fact that she channels a 35,000 year old being from Atlantis, or that she knows some terminology from the field of physics. What I’d learn would come from simply being two people getting drunk and hanging out. I wonder if she’s up to that challenge.

I’m wrestling with the question of meaning. And the reason I’m wrestling with it, is to fill my headspace with the question, and the doubt surrounding it, because I’m scared shitless of actually finding it.

See, I think I know where to find meaning in my life. At the moment, it’s pretty meaningless. It’s pretty well non-fulfilling. And there are things I could try, things I could do, that would likely enhance the upside of the question, rather than the doubt. But I’m terrified of those things.

Earlier today I was looking at volunteer opportunities on the web.

Now, I want to stop, and point out that when I typed as far as ‘looking at’ in the sentence above, I stopped and my mind drifted off. I started thinking about specifics involved in the various volunteer opportunities. I started thinking about all the hard stuff, all the easy stuff, and all the other stuff that’d be involved in any of it. My mind wants to fight itself on this, sending up these images of the specifics to keep me from thinking (and writing) about how deeply those images actually terrify me. The strategy works, too, because in addition to being distracted from writing about it, part of me is further terrified by those images. This is the kind of uphill battle I’m fighting all the time.

So the deal is that I was looking at these volunteer opportunities, and there are a lot of really interesting things going on around here.

The Seattle Audobon Society is just down the road, and they need help with data entry and mass mailings, and they need someone to maintain their web site. To maintain their site, I’d have to learn ASP and .NET, which I’d rather not, but the other things I could do.

They have a store where you can buy bird-related stuff, like seed and feeders to put it in, and binoculars, and so forth. But since it’s Seattle, they also sell shade-grown organic coffee imported from countries on the southern end of migratory patterns of birds that fly through western Washington. Which I thought was kind of cool.

There’s also an organization called the Institute for Responsible Consumerism, which seeks to be a clearinghouse for more information than you wanted to know about the products you buy. They need a web site architect. And if you look at their web site, you’d probably think you could do a better job, no matter what your level of expertise or political inclination.

There’s a project in the very early stages called Dog Town, that’s a dog-centric housing subdivision, except it’s for rescue dogs. One of those wild-eyed dreamer type things, but certainly an interesting proposition. They’re looking for planners, designers, and backers.

And there’s an animal rescue organization in Lynnwood that needs people to come out and walk dogs once a week. Which I think is the level of responsibility I’m capable of.

And this realization, that I don’t feel up to the other things, is a hard pill to swallow. I’m more than qualified to do just about anything as a volunteer, but it all seems so distant and impossible. In the realm of trying to find meaning, how much of the void could be filled by walking dogs?

GlobalRichList lets you put your own wealth in perspective. I’m in the top 5.99% of global population in terms of annual income. And I don’t have a job.

There’s a new Finn Brothers album out, and I’ve been listening to it in the background for the last little while. And these lyrics made me stop and laugh:

We’re all God’s children
And God is a woman
But we don’t know who the father is

And I can’t help thinking
There’s a fortune riding
On the answer to that question

Orcinus:

[..]
The key piece of illogic is one that has especially lodged itself in the media in recent years: The notion that a demonstrably true fact can be properly countered by a demonstrably false one — and that the two, placed side by side, represent a kind of “balance” in the national discourse. This is the Foxcist model of Newspeak, in which “fair and balanced” comes to mean its exact opposite.

[Linnaeus points out in comments that the logical fallacy at work here is the argumentum ad temperantiam: "If two groups are locked in argument, one maintaining that 2+2=4, and the other claiming that 2+2=6, sure enough, an Englishman will walk in and settle on 2+2=5, denouncing both groups as extremists."]

We’ve seen this dynamic play out constantly in the media over the past eight years or so: during the Clinton impeachment fiasco (when any kind of false rumor about Clinton got media play under these circumstances) to the 2000 election (from “Al Gore invented the Internet” to “machine counts are more accurate than hand counts”) to the 9/11 commission hearings (notably Condoleezza Rice’s testimony that the Aug. 11 Presidential Daily Briefing warning of pending Al Qaeda attacks contained just “historical information” and “did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks”) to the 2004 election (especially the way the media depicted the fact-driven reports on George W. Bush’s military record as the counterpart to the Swift Boat Veterans clearly specious claims’).

Now this model of illogic is being applied to our education system. Specifically, it’s being used to inject religion into our schools’ science education curriculum.
[..]

Through tribe.net I found this page which is a gallery of color photographs from the time of Czarist Russia. The process involves three exposures, one each for red, green, and blue, which are then projected through three filters to reassemble the color.

The photographer is Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who invented the process and took the pictures between 1909 and 1915, to create a teaching aid for school children.

These images ended up in the US Library of Congress, which has a web site devoted to them. The curious can find out how you start with three black and white exposures and end up with one color picture.

Be sure and check out the Architecture section. Especially this and this.

From Cabinet magazine (source of the hermit crab story below): A road trip across the USA photographed by a Russian journalist in 1935.

This picture should be captioned as follows: “Here, this is America!”And, indeed, when you close your eyes and try to rekindle memories of this country where you spent four months, you don’t imagine yourself in Washington with its gardens, columns, and full collection of monuments, nor in New York with its skyscrapers and its poor and rich, nor in San Francisco with its steep streets and suspension bridges, nor in the mountains, factories, or canyons, but at such an intersection of two roads and a gasoline station against a ground of wires and advertising signs.

70 years later, and the only thing that’s changed is gas prices.

Problem: Hermit crab populations decreasing because human pollution restricts the growth of the univalve cephalopods the crabs depend on for housing. There’s a housing shortage for hermit crabs.

Solution: Manufacture tiny plastic houses for hermit crabs. Cover the cost by selling advertising space on these little pseudo-shells.

The British National Museum’s Advice And Guidance On Digital Preservation.