OBAMA PROMISES AMERICA'S DAY!

I recall walking a memorial walk with many African-American students and youths the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated and how we felt and how far away the American Dream of equality and freedom felt on that day. I have been in tears more than once over the past months and days and hours as I witness America's reawakening. I feel, at age 71, as if the America of my youth has returned, those past days when with innocent and hopeful feelings, I believed in the American Way and its hope and promise for the world. These past 8 years I witnessed American leaders who thought nothing of torturing helpless captives, spying on Americans and acting in ways I've always associated with the worst of world leaders. Now those dark days are past, I hope for good.

SCIENCE: IT'S TRAGIC AND IT'S FUNNY

According to an article in the London Times...

"40% of coma patients in a ‘vegetative state’ may be misdiagnosed,
says a new report: Trapped inside their bodies, apparently switched off to the world, but still alive: they are the undead. Or so we thought. Forty per cent of patients in a ‘vegetative state’ are misdiagnosed. Now British scientists are leading the field in trying to put that right

"But here’s at least one mordantly amusing and true story told to me by a psychologist at Putney’s Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. "Young man with motorbike head injury in a coma. His mum, a keen evangelical, comes every day with friends to sing Onward, Christian Soldiers by his bedside. She’s hoping to stimulate his brain into action. It works: he comes round, but he can’t speak. So they fit him up with one of those Stephen Hawking-type laptops, and the first words he speaks are: For God’s sake, Mum, shut it!” That’s about as funny as it gets on a brain-injury ward, but there’s a serious take-home message. Even minimally aware patients can retain emotions, personality, a capacity to suffer—and, as the young biker showed, attitude."

Read more about PVS here.

According to another article in the Times of London, studies by evolutionary psychologists show that:

"Wealthy men give women more orgasms"

You don't believe it, read more here.

ATHEISM AND AGNOSTICISM DELINEATED

Atheists agree that the phenomenal identity named god does exist in the synapses of the brain and can, therefore, be discussed in abstract terms, but they claim no brain has contacted an identity in the material world outside the human synapse that correlates to the synaptic construct named god. Thus atheists conclude that god does not exist in the material world except as a synaptic pattern in the material human brain.

Atheists further maintain that “in synapsizing about the mental construct god”, the synapsizer or brain is, by necessity, restricted wholly to its own synaptic reality without reference to the real and material world by which human sensory organs interact with the phenomenal world outside the brain. Therefore, atheists are necessarily materialists, whereas agnostics, since their synapsized conclusions about the unprovability of a “god phenomenon” in the material world remains wholly a creation of the synapses of the human brain, are idealists.

The agnostic argument is a valid syllogism, but it has no implication for or reality in the material world. This discrepancy results because the agnostic has no evidence of the “phenomenon of god” in the material world which is as cogent as the synaptic phenomenon of “not-god” in the synapses of the brain. The two concepts are not equally evidenced to the synapses of the material brain. An agnostic, therefore, must ignore material reality in order to maintain the equality of the god/not-god evidentiary and syllogistic balance in the agnostic brain.

Agnostics are, I repeat, idealists while atheists are realists.

I have invented three terms in the foregoing discussion. Each term is based on the mental phenomenon of synapse, an evolved technique by which the material brain recognizes itself throughout its carcass and overhears itself communicating within its residence in the skull. Synapsizing is a more concrete and specific way of referring to the “activity of thinking”. Synapsized is the past tense of synapsizing, and, finally, the synapsizer refers to the brain/body which senses (feels) itself doing the synapsizing or thinking.

You may ask why I would invent terms. I do it to try and be more concrete or real about the processes that are happening within the human carcass when the brain idealizes or realizes the world it’s in contact with through evolved sensory equipment. I can see that if it were a philosopher/brain speaking here, “the brain that calls itself I” would need to invent and define a lot more terms in order to make itself understood to other brain/bodies. I have no training as a philosopher, and so this attempt seems silly and unrealistic even to me, though I sense that what I’m doing verges on an attempt to communicate what I think is a reality unique to this particular “brain that calls itself I”. However, this I-brain may not be unique at all.

“Ah, the humility! The humility!”

I'M GOING BANANAS

The following is a paragraph from a very interesting analysis of the interrelation of governments, monopolies and a bruised environment.

"Is there a parable for our times in this odd milkshake of banana, blood and fungus? For a hundred years, a handful of corporations were given a gorgeous fruit, set free from regulation, and allowed to do what they wanted with it. What happened? They had one good entrepreneurial idea—and to squeeze every tiny drop of profit from it, they destroyed democracies, burned down rainforests, and ended up killing the fruit itself." — Johann Hari

Read the whole banana here.