Michael Prescott's Blog

Movie review: Salt

I picked up the Angelina Jolie spy thriller Salt at a Redbox machine this evening, not expecting much. But it turned out to be a lot of fun - a smart, fast-paced, action-packed movie loaded with amazing stunts, most of which seem to have been performed for real, not generated in the hard drive of a computer. 

People sometimes underestimate how hard it is to turn out a product like this. No, it's not Shakespeare and doesn't try to be, but a lot of skill goes into bringing the over-the-top story to life in a more-or-less believable way. (Emphasis on "more-or-less," since suspension of disbelief is definitely required.) The filmmakers show considerable ingenuity in advancing the plot mainly through action, and in providing essential exposition as briskly and painlessly as possible.

The movie underperformed at the box office, perhaps hurt by an uninspired title and the inherent difficulty of selling a female action hero. But if you're in the mood for a swift ninety minutes of chases, explosions, and plot twists, Salt is worth a rental. It captures much of the fun of the Die Hard series, doesn't talk down to the audience, and, thankfully, is not freighted with any social, political, or moral message.  

My only caveat is that Jolie herself, while excellent in the part, looks alarmingly thin. Angie, for God's sake, eat a cheeseburger or something. 

Shanti's NDE

I'm always interested in near-death experiences that were reported before NDEs became popularized in the media. Recently I came across one in an unexpected place -- a book about reincarnation by Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, titled Past Lives: An Investigation Into Reincarnation Memories.

In Chapter 1, the famous case of Shanti Deva is sketched out. When she was four years old, Shanti, a native of Delhi, India, began talking about a past life lived in a town eighty miles away. Though her parents did their best to discourage her, she eventually convinced them to take her seriously by naming her husband in her previous life and the address of their home. The husband had indeed lost his young life in childbirth shortly before Shanti was born. Alert to the possibility of fraud, the husband's family subjected Shanti to various tests, all of which she passed. Finally they accepted her story as true.

In contrast to many such cases, Shanti retained her reincarnation memories until her death in 1987 at age 61. The book observes, "To the end of her life she maintained her conviction that she had lived before as Lugdi. She remained in touch with Lugdi's family and was an honored guest at family occasions."

But what about the NDE? The authors continue:

There is an interesting postscript to this story. Four years after Shanti's initial reunion with her family, in 1939, the whole case was re-examined by Mr. Sushil Bose. He interviewed Shanti, and for the first time asked her detailed questions not just about her previous life as Lugdi but about her death. What she told him seemed at the time preposterous. Shanti described how just before death she felt a profound darkness and then saw a dazzling light. She knew then that she had come out of her body in a vaporous form. She described seeing four men in saffron robes who had come for her, a beautiful garden and a river. Now, half a century later, this is instantly recognizable as a typical near-death experience....

Before the 1970s, when Raymond Moody wrote his first book on the subject, Life After Life, little was known about near-death experience. Shanti's description has many of the typical features of near-death experience -- her awareness of her consciousness leaving her body, her meeting with a being of light and then entering a wonderful garden -- and also has cultural features (being collected by men in saffron robes) which are more typical of an Indian experience. It is highly unlikely that a young child could have invented this, and [there was] at that time no way she could have been told about it or read it. She believed she had the experience at the time of her death in childbirth in her previous life: we don't, unfortunately, know whether she had ever been seriously ill in her present life, and perhaps had a near-death experience that later surfaced as an apparent memory from a previous life.

Of course, if we take the story at face value, then technically it is not a near-death experience; it is a death experience. And in that case, we might be justified in thinking that NDEs do accurately capture at least the early stages of the true dying process.

P.S. A more detailed account of Shanti Deva's NDE, featuring quotations from interviews with her, is found here. 

Two news items

News item the first: 

Chris Carter has contributed an essay to the newly published book Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential or Human Illusion?, edited by Stanley C. Krippner and Harris L. Friedman. The book includes essays by well-known skeptics Ray Hyman, Christopher French, Michael Shermer, and James Alcock, and contrasting views offered by Dean Radin and Chris Carter. 

A Google Books preview, which includes the table of contents, can be found here. 

News item the second:

Brian Whitworth, who has written several fascinating essays exploring what he calls the "virtual reality conjecture," has submitted a paper to the Foundational Questions Essay Contest. The abstract reads:

We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time would just "be", but by relativity, our space can contract and our time can dilate. Likewise objective "things" should just inherently exist, but the entities of quantum theory are probability of existence smears, that spread, tunnel, superpose and entangle. Cosmology even tells us that our entire physical universe just "popped up", from nowhere, about 14 billion years ago. This is not how an objectively real world should behave! Yet the usual alternatives don't work much better. That the world is just an illusion of the mind doesn't explain its consistent realism and Descartes dualism, that another reality beyond the physical exists, just doubles the existential problem. It is time to consider an option we might normally dismiss out of hand. This essay explores the virtual reality conjecture, that the physical world arises from non-physical quantum processing. It finds it neither illogical, nor unscientific, nor incompatible with current physics. Its implications include that the world is digital at its core. 

More of Dr. Whitworth's papers can be found here. 

A tale of two deaths

I just finished reading John Wayne: American, by Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, an exhaustively researched and briskly written biography of a man who, for many, came to define traditional American values. The book reveals Wayne to have been a more complex and interesting figure than his on-screen persona might suggest. By the end I felt genuinely sorry for him as the book recounted his last, painful battle with stomach cancer.

But I also couldn't help thinking that the way he faced his death is the way most people face it these days -- as an issue they have never really confronted or even dared to think about, which takes them by surprise and knocks them for a loop.

Here are some excerpts from the book's last chapter:

Duke was up and walking around [in the hospital] on January 17, when the pathologists reported to Longmire that the gastric lymph nodes were full of microscopic tumor cells. Wayne displayed no outward reaction when Longmire gave him the news. It was almost as if he were not listening, or not hearing the feared fact that the disease was spreading....

He was relieved to get out of the hospital, but he lashed out at Pat Stacy when she asked him how soon the radiation treatments at Hoag would begin. Suddenly he denied ever hearing about radiation treatments from Longmire, claiming that the surgeon had told him that all of the tumor had been removed in the operation and that he was going to be just fine. Everyone else in the family, including Stacy, knew about the radiation, but he insisted emphatically and angrily that he had not been told, that he did not want any more surprises, that he was sick of hospitals and doctors and nurses and medicine and cancer.

He eventually agreed to undergo the treatments, although he insisted on absolute secrecy.... 

Everyone around him felt his wrath. Wayne's temper had always been somewhat unpredictable, but it was mitigated by his willingness to forgive and his omnipresent love for life. He hated pettiness, but with his body crumbling and his life slipping away, he found himself becoming just that -- angry, frustrated, irritable, and petty....

The weekend after the Oscar presentation [when he made his last public appearance], Wayne wanted to get out of the house and do something fun, maybe go out on the water for a weekend. He called Ralph and Marjorie Wingfield, his longtime friends from Nogales, Arizona, to fly out to Los Angeles and sail with him to Catalina Island on [his yacht] the Wild Goose. Marjorie was fighting her own battle against cancer. Still, he would not talk about his except to mention several times that he figured the doctors had gotten it all this time, just like they had back in 1964. They nodded their heads but knew better....

[Back in the hospital again, and suffering badly,] Duke asked his son Patrick to go home to Newport Beach and bring back the Smith & Wesson .38 he kept on the bedside table. When Patrick refused, he asked Pat Stacy to get it. "I want," he told her, "to blow my brains out." When she, too, refused, he exploded in frustration.... Wayne left Hoag a few days later and he had the Smith & Wesson at his disposal. But he couldn't do it. He was still hoping against hope for some kind of Hollywood miracle....

[He returned to the hospital and was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It was inoperable.] Still, John Wayne expected more treatment; he wanted to live. He was not ready to accept reality. Nor were his doctors....

[T]hey asked him if he was interested in an experimental program designed to stimulate his own immunological system. At the time there was a good deal of optimism among cancer specialists about the possibilities of a drug named interferon.... Wayne agreed to become part of the program.... Nobody even whispered to him that he was dying or how long he had to live because he still could not talk about it....

Experimental medicine is just that -- experimental -- and Wayne's cancer was growing too fast for the interferon to have any chance.... The doctors at UCLA knew it, but they were human beings, too. They had a famous patient on their hands who was still denying his own imminent death, refusing to talk about it, and willing to try something -- anything -- to preserve his life. To keep his hopes up and to maintain their own images as healers and scientists, they went ahead with the treatments, and Wayne dutifully submitted to the needles, tests, and examinations....

[T]he only possible comfort now could be religious. There was no doubt among any of his friends that he believed in God.... But Wayne never developed a denominational loyalty.... God, for Duke, was simply the "Big Man Upstairs" to whom you turned for problems you could not solve yourself.... 

He was not more or less afraid [of dying] than any other normal person. He said that much in his interview with Barbara Walters, when she asked him if he feared death. Three months after the January 1979 interview, when he turned to the Catholic Church, he was not having any apparitions of the Virgin Mary or going through deathbed repentance or trying, with one foot in the grave, to get the other foot into heaven.... He was just getting ready to meet his maker, as a man should, and the Catholic Church -- the church of his family and of his closest friends -- was as good a way as he knew to do it....

[As the disease progressed] he was also throwing up bilious fluids from down in the small intestine every few minutes, and he could not sleep. Life was quickly boiling down to mere survival, just hanging on until it got even tougher....    

Wayne refused to talk with anyone about his imminent death, but he symbolically acknowledged it by selling the Wild Goose early in June.... [H]e could never bring himself to do it, at least not until he was on his deathbed and realized he would never see the Goose again....

Mary St. John visited with him three days before he died.... He was searching for peace and asked Mary what she thought of death. She quoted a passage from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who

Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through,

Not one returns to tell us of the Road,

Which to discover we must travel too.

Wayne looked at her quizzically and asked her to repeat the passage, which Mary did. He quietly remarked: "You know, I never thought of it that way."...  

He took his last gasping breath at 5:23 p.m. on June 11, 1979.

Another excellent biography is Teller of Tales, by Daniel Stashower, a fascinating study of Arthur Conan Doyle, which treats his researches into spiritualism with evenhandedness and respect. Doyle was 71 years old -- just one year younger than John Wayne -- when he passed away. Like Wayne, he had been a vigorous public figure for decades, extroverted, sure of himself, ready and eager to jump into any debate. But unlike Wayne, he had spent years pondering the mystery of mortality and collecting evidence that convinced him, beyond doubt, of life after death.  

Here's how he met his end, as Stashower tells it:

Two months after the fire [that destroyed his home], Conan Doyle embarked on another round of travels. "I am off next week to do Holland, Denmark, Stockholm and Oslo," he told Harry Price. "My ambition is to speak in each European non-Catholic capital before I pass." Although the schedule was lighter and the reception more cordial than it had been in Africa, his health buckled under the strain. In Copenhagen, he suffered a bout of agonizing chest pains, but refused to curtail his speaking schedule. In near constant pain, he carried on with his slate of lectures, often clinging to the podium for balance. Returning to England on the Channel ferry in November, he had to be carried ashore.

Doctors were summoned to confirm what Conan Doyle already knew. "I write this in bed," he told a friend in America, "as I have broken down badly and have developed Angina Pectoris. So there is just a chance that I may talk it all over with [the deceased] Houdini himself before very long. I view the prospect with perfect equanimity. That is one thing that psychic knowledge does. It removes all fear of the future."

Against his doctors' orders, he struggled up to London to honor a speaking commitment at an Armistice Day spiritualist assembly. Riding to the Albert Hall in a cab, he suffered another attack. He leaned heavily on his sons as he staggered into the hall, and delivered his speech in a halting, weakened voice. Refusing to admit to his infirmity, he gave a second speech later in the day.

His doctors now ordered complete bed rest. A sickroom was established on the ground floor at Windlesham, as Conan Doyle now had difficulty climbing the stairs....

Through the early months of 1930, he showed brief periods of improved health. He took advantage of his renewed energy to revise his autobiography, adding a chapter entitled "Up to Date," and to write a modest paragraph of introduction for The Edge of the Unknown, a collection of spiritualist essays.

On July 1, he went to the battlements for the last time. For some months he had been lobbying against an ancient piece of legislation called the Witchcraft Act, dating to the reign of James I, which had been revived as a means of prosecuting mediums. A steady flow of letters brought about a meeting with the home Secretary, Mr. J.R. Clynes. Jean accompanied him to the Home Office and watched anxiously, clutching a vial of smelling salts, as her husband rose unsteadily to plead his case.... His voice faltering, Conan Doyle went ahead with his prepared statement, drumming his fingers against his chest as though to keep his heart beating.

He returned home badly weakened.... One cold spring morning, his son later recalled, he rose from his sickroom and stole out into the garden, unseen by anyone in the house. A few moments later, the butler heard a crash in the hallway. He found Conan Doyle lying on the floor, gasping for breath....

He told his family that he did not wish to die in bed. As the crisis neared, they helped him to a chair where he could look out at the Sussex countryside. He died there, surrounded by his family, on the morning of Monday, July 7, 1930. He was seventy-one years old. His last words were addressed to his wife. "You are wonderful," he said. 

"The reader will judge that I have had many adventures," he had written a few days earlier. "The greatest and most glorious of all awaits me now."

In comparing these two deaths, I don't mean to disparage Wayne or to suggest that Doyle's spiritualism was the only factor in his more positive attitude. One difference, of course, is that the successes of modern medicine have led people to expect and demand miraculous cures, while in older times people took a more fatalistic approach. But the major difference, I think, is that Doyle had thought long and hard about his own death, had researched the subject to the best of his ability, had come to certain conclusions that he found both logical and comforting, and was therefore ready to meet his earthly end without bitterness, rancor, denial, or fear.

Wayne, on the other hand, like most people today, simply refused to think about the subject at all, putting it out of his mind and distracting himself with work and travel and recreation and socializing, never pondering the deeper issues that mortality raises. At the end, he was unprepared to face this final challenge, because nothing in his previous life had allowed him to prepare for it. Instead of yielding gracefully to the inevitable, he put up an increasingly painful and pointless fight, denying the facts as long as possible, then belatedly seeking comfort wherever he could find it.

Cicero, as quoted by Montaigne, said, "To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare oneself to die." We moderns have forgotten this ancient wisdom. We ought to remember.  

Mediums rare

An interesting article appears in the January 2011 issue of The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (volume 199, number 1; article available for purchase here). Written by Emily Williams Kelly, one of the principal authors of Irreducible Mind, and Dianne Arcangel, author of  Afterlife Encounters, the article is entitled "an investigation of mediums who claim to give information about deceased persons." It was brought to my attention by Vitor Moura.

Kelly and Arcangel tested a total of 13 mediums in two separate studies. The first study, involving four mediums and 12 sitters, did not yield results above chance levels. The second, more extensive study, involving nine and mediums and 40 sitters, and using a different methodology, produced statistically significant results. Since the second study is more interesting, it's the one I'll focus on.

Each medium was sent a photograph of a deceased person but received no other information. The photographs were selected to be as neutral as possible; they "showed the person alone and not engaged in specific activities (such as playing tennis or reading) that might provide significant information about the deceased." The mediums were not told anything about the sitters, nor did the mediums and sitters ever come in contact with each other.

For each reading, either Kelly or Arcangel served as a proxy sitter. Arcangel knew nothing about the sitters or the deceased persons; Kelly did have some information about some of the sitters, but her knowledge of the deceased was limited at best, and, in some cases, nonexistent. As it turned out,  Arcangel's  sessions were slightly more successful than Kelly's, suggesting that cold reading did not play a role.

The article continues:

The 14 audio-taped readings were transcribed, and E.W.K. edited all of the transcripts to remove any references to the appearance of the person in the photograph or other such clues. She also removed any conversation unrelated to the reading, as well as unnecessary or often-repeated words (such as "um," "you know," and the like), to make the transcript less choppy (as spoken conversation often is) and thus easier to read. Otherwise, none of the medium's own wording was changed ...

Each sitter was sent 6 transcripts -- the real one, as well as 5 intended for other persons, all 6 selected from the same age and gender group. Readings were also distributed in such a way that each one served as a "control" an equal number of times. Sitters were instructed to read carefully through all 6 and then rate each on a scale of 0 to 10. They were also asked to comment on the readings and to explain why they chose the one that they rated the highest.

The scoring of the transcripts was handled in a "global" fashion. In the first study, sitters had been asked to score each item of information individually, but the authors say this proved problematic: "Itemizing statements is not a straightforward process, particularly because many statements are interrelated and not independent of each other." On the other hand, "a global evaluation allows for the likelihood that much of what a medium says in a sitting is in fact what we might call 'filler' material -- that is, general, vague, or interfering imagery and impressions coming from the medium's own mind and having nothing to do with the intended target, the deceased person." 

For the second study, the sitter was expected to assess the reading as a whole, though he or she was encouraged to go into detail in explaining why a given choice choice was made.

So what were the results? Although 40 sitters were used, only 38 returned their ratings. "14 of the 38 readings were correctly chosen, and 7 others were ranked second. Altogether, 30 of the 38 were ranked in the top half. Analysis of these results with the sum-of-ranks method ... gives a z score of -3.89 (p < 0.0001)."

One medium in particular enjoyed an unbroken run of success; all six of this medium's readings were correctly chosen by the sitters. (Neither this medium nor any of the others is identified in the article.) The other eight mediums showed more mixed results, but "even when the top-scoring medium's results are removed, analysis of the remaining readings, again using the sum-of-ranks method, gives a z score of -2.69, which is still highly significant (p < 0.0074)."

The article gives a few examples of specific "hits." In one case, the medium said that "there's something funny about black licorice.... Like there's a big joke about it ..." The sitter said that his wife and deceased son had a running joke about licorice. In another case, the medium said the deceased girl's hair, as seen in the photo, had "gone", and that "at some point she's kind of teasing [her hair], she tried many colors. I think she experimented with color a lot before her passing." This was correct; the girl, who lost her hair during chemotherapy, had colored her hair hot pink before her cancer surgery. In the same sitting, the medium made reference to Northampton, Massachusetts, citing its "college town beatnik kind of feel." The girl had intended to go to college in Northampton. 

In a third case, the medium made reference to "Mike, Mikey, Michael." The deceased person's son, according to the article, "was known as 'Mikey" when young, 'Michael' as he grew older, and finally 'Mike.'" The same medium referred to a mother or grandmother who "can strangle a chicken." The sitter's grandmother, who was the mother of the deceased, did kill chickens, and as the sitter reported, "It freaked me out the first time I saw her do this. I cried so hard that my parents had to take me home. So the chicken strangling is a big deal.... In fact I often referred to my sweet grandmother as the chicken killer."

One of the most encouraging aspects of the study is the authors' willingness to share their raw data with interested parties. After pointing out that Kelly's utterances during the readings were largely limited to "OK" and similar comments, the authors add: "Of course, readers can only take our word for this, but we would be glad to provide interested readers with unedited transcripts or audiotapes so that they can evaluate this for themselves." Earlier, in the same vein, they wrote: "We welcome comments from other persons about the editing of the transcripts, and will provide copies of unedited and edited transcripts to persons who wish to examine and evaluate them." The transparency of this approach is refreshing.

The authors characterize the study as merely a preliminary effort and do not come to any conclusion about its "broader implications." Perhaps the most significant finding was the discovery of one particular medium whose readings were consistently ranked number 1 by the appropriate sitters. "We hope to follow-up what this person in additional studies. We also hope that we, or other investigators, can identify more such persons. Truly gifted mediums may, like other gifted persons, be rare, and those who can perform under the kinds of conditions necessary for inadequate scientific evaluation rarer still."

Also rare are investigators willing to take the time to conduct this kind of cautious, disciplined examination of what most people would dismiss as a spurious "fringe" phenomenon. I hope they'll continue their work. The heyday of psychical research into the mediumship may be far behind us, but Kelly and Arcangel are keeping that tradition alive.

Richard Hodgson, F.W.H. Myers, and William James must be well pleased.

Dentures Man rides again!

In the never-ending debate over "Dentures Man" - the Dutch patient whose 1979 NDE included a startling veridical observation - there's some new data available for English-speaking readers.

Rudolf Smit informs me that Gerald Woerlee recently offered to translate the original interview with the male nurse who handled the case. The translation is now available at this site. There are also translations of the nurse's response to Woerlee's skeptical explanation, and of a paper by Titus Rivas. All the material is in PDF form. 

Happy reading, Dentures Man fans! 

Scammed by the light

The Onion is kind of hit-and-miss these days, but I got a chuckle out of this report about senior citizens scammed out of their life savings by con artists who convince them that they've died. 

The skit is basically a send-up of the kind of material posted in all seriousness on this blog. But it's still okay to laugh.  

Thought for the new year

Here's an interesting excerpt from Alson J. Smith's 1954 book Immortality: The Scientific Evidence. 

As the title suggests, the bulk of Smith's book is devoted to presenting evidence for postmortem survival and related issues as gathered by psychical researchers and parapsychologists over the previous 75 years. Smith cites many interesting cases, including Hodgson's work with Leonora Piper, Drayton Thomas's "book tests" with Gladys Leonard, the famous "Chaffin will" episode, the cross correspondences, Pearl Curran ("Patience Worth"), J.W. Dunne's precognitive dreams, and J.B. Rhine's lab work on ESP and PK. The book is a little dated in its treatment of anthropological material, but overall it's an intelligent, well-researched presentation that serves as a very good introduction to this subject.

Toward the end, Smith widens his focus to consider the existence of God. He offers a section on scientific arguments from design that were current at the time. Then he goes on:

But our subject here is immortality. We have shown that science, or at any rate many scientists, has come to believe in God through an awareness of design in the universe. But does this belief in God necessarily postulate a belief in immortality?

Yes. Human consciousness is too great an accomplishment to be snuffed out as though it had never been after less than one brief century of existence. As [physicist and Nobel laureate Pierre Lecomte] du Nouy has shown, the whole end of the evolutionary process to date, proceeding slowly through eons, has been the achievement of consciousness. And consciousness (spiritual component, soul, mind) is a singular of which there is no plural, as Dr. Erwin Schroedinger, of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, points out in his book What Is Life?

A God, who, having bestowed the gift of consciousness on His creation, should then capriciously limit it or make it subject to accident or happenstance, would certainly not be the God of the intricate and majestic design of nature. Even less would He be the God who is very name is a contraction of the word Good. 

Also, unless immortality is a fact, then God is in much the same position as the operator of a dog race, who entices the animals to run by keeping an electrically operated mechanical rabbit a few feet in front of them. In that case, the hope of eternity would be the deceptive gadget that keeps the human race plunging down its allotted three score years and ten. We may sometimes think (as many profess) that men would lead as good, honest, ethical lives without the hope of immortality as they do with it, but we would be guilty of overestimating man as a biological animal. Deprive him of his soul and his expectation, however faint, of its survival of bodily death, and you will have cut the nerve that gives meaning to life. Life would go on, but it would be an empty thing if we believed that there were no values that were not transitory and no morality that was not relative. The divine sanction that gives life significance would disappear with positive assurance that life ends in the grave or the crematorium.

I have pointed out earlier that most men do not believe in immortality merely on the basis of philosophical and religious affirmation of it, that they do not live actively as though it were a fact. This is true, but they do not live in disbelief of it either. If they do not believe it any longer because philosophers and theologians tell them it is so, neither have they given it up altogether as a vestigial remnant of an outmoded Age of Faith. What they (we) are doing is living in a sort of a state of suspended judgment about it, afraid to disbelieve and yet lacking the scientific knowledge (the only kind we have any faith in) to affirm. Thus we live at half-speed, failing to realize our spiritual potentialities, but keeping just ahead of bleak Nihilism.

Finally, also as indicated before, it is impossible to postulate a moral God without at the same time postulating another life beyond this one, a life in which there is some opportunity to correct the manifold injustices of this existence....

No, the immortality of the spiritual component, the individual human soul, is the inevitable corollary of a belief in God, no matter by what route we come to that belief. When Dr. J. B. Rhine made his memorable statement in Town Hall* that "The soul theory has been confirmed," he followed it with another statement. "In a similar speculative way, we can now at least rationally conceive of the existence of a universal spirit equivalent to the modern conception of God." [pp. 170--173]

----------

*The talk cited is "The Relation Between Psychology and Religion," broadcast from Town Hall, New York, on June 11, 1946.

What struck me as particularly interesting were Smith's comments on how modern people live in "a state of suspended judgment ... at half-speed, failing to realize our spiritual potentialities, but keeping just ahead of bleak Nihilism."

Something to ponder as the New Year begins ...