Michael Prescott's Blog

Rock around the clock

I don't know what to think of this article on a surprising new theory in the field of mineralogy, but I did find it interesting.

If rocks have been, in some sense, "evolving," does this lend support to the idea that the whole physical cosmos is dynamic and engaged in a process of constant change?

I dunno. But I am feeling a newfound respect for gravel.

Suffering

One of my favorite quotes is Edith Hamilton's translation of some lines from Agamemnon, the first play in Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy:

He who learns must suffer
And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despite, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

I think this is profoundly true, but of course it raises a question. Why must we so often suffer in order to learn? What is it that makes suffering necessary?

An answer is suggested in Martin Lings' worthwhile book, Shakespeare's Window into the Soul (which, in its long publishing history since 1966, has also appeared under the titles Shakespeare in the Light of Sacred Art, The Secret of Shakespeare, and The Sacred Art of Shakespeare). Lings was an erudite British scholar specializing in religion and spirituality. In his book on Shakespeare he explores the mystical elements of the playwright's work, finding in the mature tragedies a symbolic reenactment of man's redemption from his imperfections (characterized in the Christian tradition as Original Sin).

He makes his case most clearly with regard to Measure for Measure. Lings writes:

At the beginning of the play Angelo appears to be by certain standards almost perfect, but as yet he is merely a human fragment....

But by the beginning of the last scene ... Angelo was no longer merely a human fragment: his soul was a chaos of warring virtue and vice, with vice momentarily in the ascendant, but it was at least a complete soul; and it is because the fallen soul in quest of perfection has first of all to be made complete by the addition of faults, which are only subsequently purified and transformed into virtues, that Mariana says: "They say best men are moulded out of faults."

This is a theme that Lings expands on at some length. His basic point is that, in the mystical tradition, it is required to confront the darker aspects of oneself - what Jung called the "shadow." Only by facing and transcending these elements of darkness, and then integrating them into one's whole personality, can a person be spiritually perfected.

Angelo, the proud moralist of Measure for Measure, must come face to face with his own immoralities - his lust, deceitfulness, and pride -- in order to finally overcome these vices and become a whole person, "moulded out of faults."

Lings explains:

Now the descent into Hell for the discovery of the soul's worst possibilities is only necessary because these possibilities are an integral part of the psychic substance and need to be recovered, purified, and reintegrated, for in order to be perfect the soul must be complete.... The lost and perverted elements have first to be found and then redeemed, and ... the interval between finding and redemption is likely to be fraught with danger.

The soul cannot be made perfect until it is complete. In order to reverse the process of the Fall by which part of man's soul came under the domination of the devil, it is necessary first of all to regain consciousness of the lost psychic elements that lie in dormant or semidormant perversion in the nethermost depths of the soul. Thus it is that in some traditional stories the descent into Hell is represented by a journey into the depths of the earth in search of hidden treasure: the lost psychic elements are symbolized by precious stones that have been stolen and hidden by diabolically cunning dwarfs. The second part of the spiritual path is concerned with the winning back of the lost jewels, that is, the freeing of the rediscovered psychic substance from the devil's domination....

What is traditionally known as "the descent into Hell" is termed so because through it the lower possibilities of the soul are revealed.... Initiation, followed up by the devotional and ascetic practices that are implicit in it, opens the door to contact with the perfecting and unifying power of the Spirit, whose presence demands that the psychic substance shall once again become a single whole. The more or less scattered elements of this substance are thus compelled to come together; and some of them come in anger, from dark and remote hiding-places, with the infernal powers still attached to them. From this point of view it is truer to say that Hell rises than that the mystic descends; and the result of this rising is a battle between "mighty opposites," with the soul as battleground....

At the outset of the play the perverted psychic elements are more or less dormant and remote from the center of consciousness. They must first of all be woken and then redeemed, for they cannot be purified in their sleep; and it is when they wake in a state of raging perversion that there is always the risk that they will overpower the whole soul. This is what happens with Angelo ...

The "descent into Hell," then, is a necessary but risky procedure - necessary in order to activate the latent qualities of the "shadow," but risky because these traits, once awakened, may take over the personality and trap it in a net of negative influences.

Getting back to the Aeschylus quotation, we can see that "suffering" - through which, "by the awful grace of God," we learn what we need to learn - is just another term for the "descent into Hell." We suffer in order to exhume and reanimate the neglected or suppressed parts of ourselves that must be reintegrated into our total personality in order for spiritual growth to take place.

Thus, "he who learns must suffer" - because the integration of the psyche cannot take place otherwise.

This leaves one more question: How exactly do we manage the reintegration? How do we learn by suffering?

Here I think it is useful to recall the old adage, "The wheel turns." The idea is that everything in this life is temporary. A person may be powerful today and powerless tomorrow - rich today and poor tomorrow - happy today and sad tomorrow. In this world of flux, this "sensual world" (as Buddhists call it), nothing is permanent but change.

Some of the sayings of Jesus reflect this truth, especially his multiple variations on the theme that the last shall be first. (A page of such variations is here; the list includes the famous Beatitudes, which promise that those who are in a low condition today will rise tomorrow. While this may be, in part, a promise of ultimate divine redemption, it is also a simple acknowledgment that throughout the course of life the wheel keeps on turning.)  

I think that the negative, "shadow" character traits that come to fullest life when we are suffering can be understood and overcome by keeping in mind that "the wheel turns." If we feel that things are rotten and hopeless, we can remember that the wheel turns, and that things will be better down the line. If we feel envious of people who seem to be doing better than we are, we can remember that the wheel turns, and that the people we envy will not always be on top. If we feel a lust for power, we can remember that the wheel turns, and that people who wield power often end up on the receiving end of someone else's power. ("He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.")

To bear in mind the turning wheel and the ceaseless fluctuations of life and fortune that it represents is to know a certain kind of calming and healing wisdom. And from this perspective it is possible (though not always easy) to master our baser feelings and accept them, tamed, as part of ourselves.

The steps in this account of spiritual progress, then, would be:

First, the advent of suffering and the arousal of the negative, "shadow" thoughts and feelings that suffering excites.

Second, full awareness of these thoughts and feelings, and even a partial surrender to them in order that they be felt completely. 

Third, the adoption of a wider perspective - "the wheel turns" - in which the present troubles are seen as temporary and tolerable, and the "shadow" emotions are seen as mistaken, grounded in ignorance of the true nature of life. (In effect, the negative emotions are attempts to grab and hold on to things like power, success, and wealth, when in the flux of the sensual world it is impossible to hold on.)

If we go through this proves, we may with luck emerge at the end of it like Prince Hamlet of Act V, who can say with sublime assurance:

There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.  If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.  The readiness is all.  Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what isn't to leave betimes?  Let be. 

The uptick rule

Is there a simple explanation for why the stock market is plunging so rapidly and inexorably?

There may be. Meet the uptick rule.

A Reuters blog makes the introductions:

The “uptick rule” or “tick test” required short sellers to sell at a price above the last price paid for a stock, or at the price of the stock’s last trade if it was higher than the previous price. The rule had been in effect since 1938, but the SEC removed the rule last year, on July 6, 2007, after saying it was “obsolete.” 

The SEC studied its removal, running a pilot program on 1,000 stocks starting in May 2005 through April 2006, a year when the bull market was just getting going and the Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose about 13 percent on its way to record highs.  Now that the S&P is down more than 14 percent since the beginning of this year,  getting rid of the rule has been blamed for increased volatility, and calls for its return could get louder as the process of market re-regulation gathers pace.

“The SEC did one of the dumb things that has been done to hurt this market, doing away with the uptick rule,” said Don Hodges, president of Hodges Capital Management.  

The uptick rule was removed just as subprime mortgages started their meltdown in August last year, which would have been a great time for investors to get short. They did, and short interest has risen to record highs this year.  

The uptick rule was designed to discourage speculators from selling short. What is selling short? Basically, a short seller borrows stock from a broker and sells it. When the stock falls, the borrower buys back the shares at a lower price, then returns the shares to the lender and pockets the profit - which can be considerable.

In order for this to work, the stock's price must fall; if it goes up, the borrower will have to buy back the shares at a higher price, and will lose money (sometimes a lot of money). How can the borrower improve the chances that the stock will fall? By spreading malicious rumors about the company (or sector) in question - something that, in the age of the Internet, is easier to do than ever. In some cases the short seller may not need to start nasty rumors, because he has inside information that the stock is going to tank. But in other cases his strategy is to deliberately undermine confidence in a company or a whole group of companies so he can make a quick buck. A concerted attack on a firm is called a raid. For a dramatic depiction, see James Clavell's novel Noble House, which concerns predatory business practices in Hong Kong.

There was no uptick rule in Clavell's Hong Kong - and now there is none in the United States, either.

With no uptick rule in place, selling short is easy, and there is nothing to prevent speculators from systematically raiding one company after another - and, in the process, driving down the whole stock market by creating a climate of panic.  

No, short selling isn't the only reason for the market's decline. But it does appear to be a factor, as indicated by an August 9 Reuters article:

A rule change that has made it easier for short-sellers to execute trades may be partially responsible for wild swings in the stock market over the last several weeks.

While the market is also facing considerable headwind from uncertainty over the housing market and the economy, the removal of the restrictive “uptick rule” for short sellers, may be accelerating market declines, analysts say.

“The market move was not caused by the rule change, but there is little doubt that it made the slide occur faster than it might otherwise,” Gregory M. Drahuschak, vice president of Janney Montgomery Scott Inc, wrote in a note to clients this week. “Increased volatility is here to stay as long as the new regulation remains.”

Just yesterday, a prominent corporate law firm issued a call for the return of the uptick rule. 

The worldwide securities and credit markets continue to experience unprecedented meltdowns and volatility. Millions of investors are losing their life savings and retirement assets. There continues to be widespread manipulative short-selling and bear raids. The investing public is losing confidence in the integrity of our markets.

For the past five months, we have called on the S.E.C. to reinstate the “Uptick Rule,” which helps limit downward spirals by allowing a stock to be sold short only after a rise from its immediately prior price. Despite widespread market participants’ calls to do so, the S.E.C. has failed to act. The S.E.C. must reinstate the Uptick Rule now to address the short-selling, bear raids, and the spreading of false rumors. Nearly all the reasons that the S.E.C. gave for repealing the Uptick Rule in July 2007 are not valid in today’s turbulent markets. In fact, the very same conditions that led to the adoption of the Rule in 1938 exist today.

Some of the comments appended to the article linked immediately above are worth reading. Consider this one:

The sharks are circling and I am one of them. Until the SEC re-instills the ‘uptick’ rule, guys like me…and there are LOTS of us…will continue to short stocks INTO THE GROUND. It doesn’t even matter what the fundamentals are. Everyone just jumps on board. C and GE today, JNJ and MRK tomorrow. There is no other way to make money in this market.

Whoever wrote this is little better than a domestic terrorist, a conscienceless sociopath willing to destroy the economy and wipe out the life savings of all Americans (and many others around the globe)  just to pocket a few dollars for himself. The lapse of the uptick rule has opened the door to such people.

Even the very free-market-oriented Investors Business Daily wants revival of the rule:

Our equity and credit markets are justifiably suffering from a crisis of confidence that touches all securities. The uptick rule was designed to function best in this environment. The Securities and Exchange Commission, one of our most responsible regulating agencies, is weighing re-enactment. It should move promptly.

Note that they were calling for prompt action on September 18. It’s now two months later - and still the SEC , under the "leadership" of Chris Cox, has done nothing.

And the market continues to plunge.

Would the uptick rule reverse the nosedive? Probably not, but it would afford a measure of stability to an increasingly volatile situation.

Restore the uptick rule - today!

---

This post was adapted from several comments I left at Dirty Harry's Place.

Darklore Vol. II

Greg Taylor's nonfiction anthology Darklore Volume II has just come out. Greg runs the much-trafficked Web site The Daily Grail and sometimes participates in comment threads on this blog.

Like Volume I, the second volume in the series is a collection of essays on various topics of interest to paranormal enthusiasts. One of the essays in Volume II is my own "R-101," about the loss of the R-101 airship and some highly evidential mediumistic communications that followed. (This article is adapted from one that I posted online at my author Web site.)

Here are the other highlights, according to Greg's writeup:

Professor Stephen Braude writes about the 'Fear of Psi', Theo Paijmans shares some of his groundbreaking new research into UFO/ET reports from the 19th century, Nick Redfern discusses the mysteries of Loch Ness (besides that well-known beastie), Jon Downes looks at the history of Japanese soldiers who fought on after the official end of World War II, Paul Devereux teaches some little known history about European witchcraft and psychedelics, Mike Jay provides some startling new insights into the beginnings of Illuminati lore, and I write about the occult underpinnings of modern rock music. ... Also: Michael Tymn tells the fascinating story of an early 'near death experience', Mac Tonnies ponders on whether UFOs are the vanguards of a post-biological intelligence, Neil Arnold reveals the chilling history of the 'Bennington Triangle', ... Filip Coppens has the inside story of the discovery of the crystal skull, Regan Lee discusses Mothman, Blair MacKenzie Blake shares his thoughts on the possible role of DMT in magick, and The Emperor points out the links between paranormal events and strange fogs and mists.

Order yours today!

Hot stuff

I'm skeptical of global warming. Yes, there was a recent period of warming for about three decades, but it ended around the year 2000, and since then temperatures have been stable or even declining. The warming and cooling of the planet is cyclical and has been going on for thousands of years. Solar activity is probably the main factor; lately there has been a marked decrease in sunspots, leading some climatologists to forecast a prolonged cooling trend.

Even so, many experts continue to sound the alarm about global warming. One of them is NASA's James Hansen, probably the foremost global warming proponent in the world. A man with an international reputation, working for America's best-known science agency, Hansen surely can be trusted to get his facts right.

Or so you might think.

From today's  Telegraph (with my emphases in bold):

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running....

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change...

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

To put it in plain English, Hansen is either an incompetent or a fraud. Those who put their faith in him are asking to be deceived.

New thingy

I've added a Google search button to this blog. It's found on the left side of the page, below the Archives. You can search for any term that's been used on the blog, or (by clicking the WWW button) you can search the Web.

It's a Zen thing

I haven't read too far in it yet, but so far I'm really enjoying the writings at this Web site devoted to Buddhism.  

The site offers this description:

This small booklet was compiled and edited from talks given by Venerable Ajahn Sumedho on the central teaching of the Buddha: that the unhappiness of humanity can be overcome through spiritual means.

The teaching is conveyed through the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, first expounded in 528 BC in the Deer Park at Sarnath near Varanasi and kept alive in the Buddhist world ever since.

Venerable Ajahn Sumedho is a bhikkhu (mendicant monk) of the Theravada tradition of Buddhism. He was ordained in Thailand in 1966 and trained there for ten years. He is currently the Abbot of Amaravati Buddhist Centre as well as teacher and spiritual guide to many bhikkhus, Buddhist nuns and lay people.

The material seems to have been written about twenty years ago, judging from occasional references to the Thatcher administration. But of course, the subject matter is timeless.

I will say, in reference to a point the author makes about insects, that even if I do recognize an ant's right to life, I still intend to squish any ants I find in my house.

Doomsday postponed?

In a September post, I pointed to a claim by a futurist outfit called the Arlington Institute that "something very substantial and disruptive is going to happen to the U.S. within the next 60 days or so."

Well, the 60 days are up, and happily the catastrophe - whatever it was supposed to be - did not occur.

Some people might say the credit crunch was the crisis in question. But it seems that something even bigger was anticipated. Here are some excerpts from Arlington's report on the matter, dated October 10, 2008 (PDF format). These are predictions made by various individuals:

The majority of people I have heard from, been in discussion with, or have read, all talk about an "October Surprise," something that will impact the Election in November and may derail it. There is inconsistency as to what, but these people see it as a tragedy that will be a serious setback for our country. The astrologers I read are scratching their heads to try to understand the aspects they see before and during the Election - it's not quite like anything they have observed before. The majority of these people feel this setback will involve one of our candidates or their running mate.

....

The Web Bots see September 22-27, 2008 as precursor dates to the main turning point date of October 7, 2008. Closely watch events during September 22-27, 2008 for hints as to what to expect on October 7, 2008.

Cliff said whenever "it" happens, and whatever "it" turns out to be, "it" will be a date in history you remember like 9/11, we will remember 10/7.

The Web Bots foresee that October 7, 2008 to February 19, 2009 will be filled with emotional intensity, and the length of the release period will be extraordinary. The Web Bots have never picked up any event lasting this long. In comparison, 9/11 length lasted about 10 days. This event will be four months of high emotion.

The Web Bots foresee consumer society collapsing by mid November 2008.

Hmmm. Well, it's not quite mid-November, but society doesn't appear to be collapsing. And I don't remember anything dramatic happening on October 7, nor were there any stunning developments regarding the presidential candidates and their running mates. In fact, the biggest surprise in this election season was that there was no "October surprise" at all.

The Arlington report includes a table summarizing the various predictions. These run the gamut from natural disasters to terrorist attacks to UFO arrivals. All appear to be wrong (or too vague to be meaningful).

One prediction is of an "EMP device detonated in WashDC/NYC. Inside job. Martial Law. Election put on Hold. Holy war starts."  This was to have happened on October 13.

Another prediction: "Martial law, FEMA camps" in Texas and the Southwest on October 8. 

Also on October 8: "Large terrorist attack in the US. Dirty bomb in LA or SFO. Want to stop elections. President declares martial law." 

Luckily, we have escaped all these mishaps and continue to muddle through in our usual way.

Prophecies are easy. Getting them right - well, that's another story.

Four errors

In a letter to the editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies (Vol. 26, No. 3; Spring 2008), University of Illinois philosophy professor Neal Grossman makes some cogent points about skepticism. Unfortunately the letter is not available online, but below I'll provide excerpts. I've omitted the citations.

Grossman's letter is titled "Four Errors Commonly Made by Professional Debunkers." It's a reply to Keith Augustine, who published three articles in the Journal arguing against the view that near-death experiences are paranormal. Again, the Journal issue is not online, but a collection of Augustine's writings can be found here.  His Journal articles appear to be similar, at least in part, to this long online essay.

Grossman begins,

Augustine committed the first fallacy in his very first sentence, when he claimed that ‘‘a survivalist interpretation of the phenomena … is severely undermined by the overwhelming evidence for the dependence of consciousness on the brain.’’ But that is nonsense. William James showed, more than a hundred years ago, that (1) the most that the facts of neurology can establish is a correlation between mental states and brain states and (2) correlation is not causation. The data of neuroscience will always be neutral with respect to the hypotheses of (1) causation or materialism and (2) what James called ‘‘transmission,’’ the hypothesis that the brain merely transmits an already existing consciousness into the particular form that is us. Neuroscience cannot in principle distinguish between these two hypotheses.

A second kind of error that Augustine and his fellow materialist ideologues frequently commit is to believe that a hypothesis of the form ‘‘some As are Bs’’ is refuted by producing many As that are not Bs. Survival researchers have amassed considerable empirical evidence to suggest that the hypothesis ‘‘Some NDEs involve veridical perception’’ is true. Augustine’s counterargument appeared to consist of little more than producing examples of NDEs with nonveridical perception. But the fact that some NDEs have hallucinatory features does not argue against the hypothesis that other NDEs do involve veridical perceptions....

 The third fallacy involves a deep confusion between the concept of evidence and the concept of proof. Science deals with evidence, not proof. The concept of proof, of ‘‘proving’’ something with 100 percent certainty, is a concept of mathematics and logic, and has no place in empirical science....  [A]ll of science is a matter of inference, and an empirically based belief in survival is every bit as ‘‘scientific’’ as any other belief inferred from empirical evidence.

The fourth kind of logical fallacy, which I will go into in greater length, involves an equivocation between two very different meanings of the word ‘‘possible.’’

After distinguishing between a logically possible proposition - which can be any statement that is not self-contradictory - and an empirically possible proposition - which requires at least some evidential support - Grossman argues that many skeptical objections are based purely on logical possibilities. For instance, the assertion that fraud took place in a given experiment is logically possible - it is not self-contradictory - but unless there is specific evidence of fraud, or at least a clear and detailed exposition of how it could have been accomplished, there is no empirical reason to believe it.

He goes on:

Science is concerned with real possibilities only, not with mere logical possibilities, that is, not with hypotheses whose sole virtue is that they can be stated without self-contradiction....

[But the debunker] wants real scientists, who are trying to account for real data, to take as a real possibility what he himself takes as only a logical possibility, or in other words, merely imagines. The debunker wants us to refute mere logical possibilities before we can legitimately make the inference from the data to survival.

And if the fundamaterialist [Grossman's term for a "fundamentalist materialist"] says that the hypothesis of an afterlife is so extraordinary that we should prefer any other hypothesis, so long that it is consistent with materialism and not self-contradictory, my reply is as follows: There is absolutely nothing extraordinary about the hypothesis of an afterlife. The overwhelming majority of people in the world believe it, and have always believed it. I grant, however, that there exists a rather peculiar subgroup of human beings for whom the survival hypothesis is extraordinary. This subgroup consists of people who have been university-educated into accepting materialist dogma on faith.... [W]e have internalized the academy’s materialist worldview, and we call anything that falls outside that worldview ‘‘extraordinary.’’ But it is the materialists’ worldview that is truly extraordinary, especially when one considers the ridiculous hypotheses that that worldview advances in order to save itself, such as ‘‘superpsi’’ ... and nonfunctioning brains still somehow producing conscious experience.

Survival researchers are under no obligation to refute every, or even any, logically possible alternative hypothesis. Such ‘‘hypotheses’’ are nothing more than the imaginings of the fundamaterialists; the burden is on them to provide non-ideological empirical support for their hypotheses before scientists should take them seriously.

-----

Hat tip: Chris Carter, author of Parapsychology and the Skeptics, sent me a copy of Neal Grossman's letter.

Incidentally, in 2006 I wrote my own critique of Keith Augustine's online article; it can be read here.  

Don't let the door hit you

Today I woke up to the welcome news that Oprah Winfrey may be ending her TV show before long.

It may surprise you that I would react favorably to this development, inasmuch as Oprah has had good things to say about paranormal phenomena, and has sometimes used her show to spotlight books on the subject. And it's true that in this regard, she has probably played a positive role.

But to my way of thinking, any praise she's earned for being open to psi is more than outweighed by the dim-witted New Agery that is too often on display on her program.

There is a difference between having an interest in psi and being a New Ager. To me, the New Age movement (with some exceptions) is intellectually vacuous, empty of critical thinking, stupidly conformist, and, at times, dangerously naive. The whole cult of self-esteem - the encouragement to feel good about yourself just because you're you - leaves me cold. Self-esteem can be a good thing, but unchecked it can easily metastasize into narcissism. New Agery is grossly narcissistic, and for years Oprah has been the narcissist in chief.

The dumbness of New Agery is summed up by the stunning success of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, a pulpish action novel dressed up with pseudo-scholarly "revelations" about the secret history of Christianity. Though Brown's claims have been thoroughly debunked and his sources are no more reliable than Graham Hancock's "alternate history" tomes, millions of readers ate up Da Vinci, treating it as a religious experience in its own right. When something that silly can be taken seriously by so many people, we see clear evidence of the debilitating effects of New Agery on our culture.

One reason I'm drawn mainly to psi research from the late 19th and early 20th centuries is that investigators of that era were less likely to be infected with New Agery, and accordingly more likely to retain their critical reasoning skills. Today we have too many writers like P.M.H. Atwater, who seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff.  In 2005 I posted a reader review of Atwater's book Children of the New Millennium on the Amazon sales page. I titled my review "Deteriorates into Nonsense." An excerpt:

Atwater blends UFOs, alien abductions, genetic modification, folklore, channeling, and wacky predictions in a fruity melange of New Age craziness. Here's a typical quote:

"A contemporary voice on the subject of the new race aborning in our time is Gordon-Michael Scallion. He is known as an intuitive futurist and modern-day prophet ... It was he who several years ago affirmed that the fifth root race [i.e., the alleged next phase of human evolution] is the blue race and linked it with the then soon-to-appear blue star, which he later identified as the comet Hale-Bopp. He associated the manifestation of both of these developments with Christian beliefs about the Second Coming of Christ, and also with the Native American prophesy of the White Buffalo and the portentous 1994 birth, in Jamesville, Wisconsin, of an all-white female buffalo calf ..." (pp. 211-212)

... Atwater's silly book cheapens the field and undercuts the serious work done by others. Read it for amusement only.  

Another Amazon customer, writing in 2001, felt the same way:

Essentially, the author contends that in order to bring on the next stage in human evolution, aliens are abducting children who have had near-death experiences and altering their DNA in order to create a human super-race....

[S]he asserts that globally, children born after 1982 are the most educated, smartest ever. And to support this she offers the following quote from a "Mexican Pediatrician": "The new crop of infants are coming in more aware...eyes focused and alert, necks strong, lying in bassinets no bigger than chickens and with a knowingness I can not describe. They are very special babies this new crop." ...

Later she describes this "crop" of children as the "Blue Race", because they represent the 5th of 7 (why did I know there were going to be 7?) stages in human evolution.... To lend support here she quotes another author as follows: "All children born after '98 shall be telepathic at birth. The physical body shall change to reflect the vibrational changes of Earth under the influence of the Blue Star...All races of people shall have a bluish tint to the skin as a result." She goes on to say these children will have mastered multiple languages by age 2 and will live 200 years....

Ultimately this is just a terrible, terrible, jumbled discombobulated amalgamation of loony metaphysical yammerings - masquerading as research. The only thing "near-death" in this book is the author's reasoning ability!

Bingo.

Atwater is hardly alone. There is a plethora of dumb books aimed at the New Age audience - everything from Sylvia Browne to Erich von Daniken. Oprah may not have endorsed every nutty, scatterbrained New Age celebrity-author and would-be pop guru, but it's not for lack of trying. Instead of encouraging serious, intellectually rigorous investigation of the paranormal, she has promoted airy-fairy, feel-good emotionalism.

Bye-bye, Oprah. Like Shirley MacLaine, you've done enough damage for one lifetime.