German physicists Jörg P. Rachen and Ute G. Gahlings have recently discovered evidence of a Universal Conspiracy and have just published their results in a brilliant exposé in the highly esteemed Journal of Comparative Irrelevance:
Abstract: "Based on the cosmological results of the Planck Mission, we show that all parameters describing our Universe within the ΛCDM model can be constructed from a small set of numbers known from conspiracy theory. Our finding is confirmed by recent data from high energy particle physics. This clearly demonstrates that our Universe is a plot initiated an unknown interest group or lodge. We analyse possible scenarios for this conspiracy, and conclude that the belief in the existence of our Universe is an illusion, as previously assumed by ancient philosophers, 20th century science fiction authors and contemporary film makers.
It's like this, only BIGGER
[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]
"If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Joseph Lykken said at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Monday. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out. This has to do with the Higgs energy field itself."
In his comment titled, “The Walking Dead”, Dave Hanson wrote:
Thanks, Brian. You describe well the end of the world. Margaret the therapist expresses the spirit of the times perfectly. Margaret says, "I just sort of accept the way the world is and then don't think about it a whole lot." She likes the notion of "a mature sense of autonomy." "No external demand should compel us to be answerable to the needs of others," etc. In other words, we can have a "good life" as alienated, terrified slaves to the machine of civilization. The Kogi, on the other hand (as one example of many) are responsible for the health of the world. They came down the mountain to tell us to grow up and begin caring for our planet. Throughout the indigenous world we find that our work, our intention, must be in part to sustain everything else. We must be compelled by that external demand.
You have accurately described a culture of domesticated animals using language and myth to fool themselves into thinking they will not be slaughtered. Words, words, words. Endless words. Unless we can reintegrate ourselves into the living, conscious, multidimensional web, we will annihilate ourselves and our planetary home. We either will, or we won't, and I'm betting on the latter.
When, 12,000 +/- years ago we decided on agriculture and religion, we sealed our fate. The end began. As it accelerates, what does one say? What does one suggest? As this bus careens off the cliff should we open the windows or leave them closed? Is it possible (this idea keeps cropping up in my head) that we should stop reading, writing and talking? Could we, in silence, be more agile travelers, more easily merge with our living brothers and sisters? Perhaps the only dialogue we should have is with our plant helpers and those beings who have been pushed aside and kept silent all these horrific generations. Let's try it!
There's no denying that Heidegger was a member of the National Socialist party. The controversy over Heidegger's association with the Nazis is now well-known and all too often used as an excuse, a shortcut, to dismiss his philosophy out of hand with the phrase “well, you know, he was a Nazi!” A recently published book (Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (2005), by Emmanuel Faye) has even made the utterly moronic argument that his philosophical work is so thoroughly contaminated by party ideology that his books ought not to be taught as philosophies but rather as “hate speech.” Look, I loathe Heidegger even more than I do Sartre, and I reject his philosophy as emphatically as anyone, but for various reasons and according to arguments more valid than merely calling him a Nazi. [1] The very existence of Godwin's law testifies to the fact that to do so amounts to little more than ad hominem and one that is widely taken to indicate the absence of a better argument, and in the case of Heidegger's “philosophy” there is no shortage of them.
The final section of the newly published English translation of Hans Blumenberg's Care Crosses The River (1987, English Translation 2010), “Dasein's Care,” contains several suggestive and compelling criticisms, including the following:
Perhaps no one has ever shuddered, as if before a yawning abyss, on being asked or asking themselves whether the world in which we live, experience, and gain knowledge really exists... In opposition to many opinions that want to view this question as the core of modern philosophy, it must be insisted that none of the imaginable answers had any consequences. In each case, everything remained the same. Indifference in the face of what looks to be such a hard problematic already sees that nothing will come of it, because nothing can come of it. (Blumenberg 141-2) [2]
Hans Blumenberg is Awesome
This refers, of course, primarily to Heidegger's lectures of the early to mid 1930s, “What is Metaphysics?” and even more to An Introduction to Metaphysics. In these lectures, Heidegger makes precisely the claim that the question “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” (Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics 1) is precisely the core of modern philosophy, concern for which differentiates it from science, for “the nothing is rejected precisely by science, given up as a nullity... The nothing – what else can it be fore science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then only one thing is sure: science wants to know nothing of the nothing.” (Heidegger, Pathmarks 84)
("The Vanguard of a Perpetual Revolution" is probably still a work in progress. I will be posting the current version in four sections over the next week or so.)
Preface
This essay is intended to be viewed as a kind of political/ cosmological landscape; I do not write about politics, as such, and have little interest in advocating a particular position. On the one hand, there has never been an election since 1972 in which I have not voted. For me, politics is the “art of the possible”—as reductive as this seems. On the other hand, my imagination must have room to move, and I believe that the future is—even now—being created far outside of the framework of contemporary debate.
I will, when all is said and done, most probably be voting for Obama—unless he is challenged by a more courageous Democrat in 2012. But this will be only one scene out of one act of a play that is being performed at the forefront of a microscopic stage—lit by arc lights that switch on and off—behind which stagehands move throughout the wings and passageways and catwalks of an inconceivably large theatre.
1
Full disclosure: During the last election season I was a Hillary supporter, and was none too pleased by the way Obama treated his opponent. Since he took the oath of office, I have been pleasantly surprised by his sense of presidential bearing. For the most part, however, he has followed the course—the course of happy-face “corporatism,” tweaked now and then by timid lip-service to ideals—that I foresaw in 2008.
In 2000, before the Supreme Court handed the election to George Bush, and the media chimed in to proclaim that the coronation was “inevitable,” I had the sense that I was watching a kind of time-lapse train wreck—whose first casualties would be unspeakable, and whose ring of disaster would continue to expand. In 2008, this sense of almost physical dread once again took over. Still, it is not for me to judge, since there is no way to determine what is actually going on, and the president, too, may be no more than a bystander.
He is the headlight that illuminates a prescribed cone on the tracks. It is not a job that I would wish upon anyone—not even my worst enemy, or a god.
Once, on the dark horizon, a light no bigger than a pinhead had appeared. That light called memories, like a force-field, from the past.
Mile after mile, past the freight-yards of abandoned factories, past the Quonset huts of those who dream of a new Ice Age, past hermetically sealed databanks and armed compounds of the superrich, past the silos where a way of life was murdered: the light from the horizon grew steadily larger as it came. It had promised to be all things to all people. Until, in the final act, the light that spilled from the pinhead was enormous—but it had no power to turn left or right.
Have alien bacteria fossils been discovered in a meteorite by a NASA scientist?
*drumroll please*
NO!
Recap: On Friday night the “Journal of Cosmology” published an article entitled “Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life on Comets, Europa, and Enceladus,” attributed to one Richard B. Hoover of the NASA/Marshall SFC [1], claiming such a discovery. Extraordinary claims, however, require extraordinary evidence, which is nowhere to be found in the paper. While I am trained in and have worked in scientific fields, I am admittedly not a scientist, so I refer you to the blogs of PZ Myers [2], David Dobbs [3], and Rosie Redfield [4] for detailed analysis/straight-up debunking. In sum, per Redfield: “Executive Summary: Move along folks, there's nothing to see here.”
Look, there's nothing wrong with alternative theories – and certainly nothing wrong with leveling a critique at the scientific establishment – provided that they are supported by data and arguments that meet the epistemic criteria for scientificity. Even then, to propose an alternate theory of the origin of life is to propose a new creation myth – and as such any denunciation of the mythic nature of the consensus theory/narrative also denounces itself. And the “journal” in which Hoover's paper appeared is rife with them – whether in articles or in press releases.
So. When the controversy erupted, I found myself less interested in this article and its claims than in the “journal” itself. First red flag: the “Journal of Cosmology” is only published online on amateurish site that looks like GeoCities circa 1997 – just like every kook and conspiracy theorist's site. Second red flag: they claim to be a legitimate, peer-reviewed academic journal – and yet they demand a $35 “processing fee” to “cover costs for processing and managing the peer review process” as well as a $150 “article publication fee.” [5] No legitimate journal charges ANY such fees. Furthermore, their submission guidelines require authors to list five scientists who would be qualified to review the submitted paper. Again, unheard-of – and even more suspicious. Need I go on?
Clearly, there is an agenda. A little research into the panspermia creation myth led to the discovery that its chief proponent, Fred Hoyle, rejected the Big Bang on the same logic as his rejection of abiogenesis. Which leads me to an essay (if it can be so called) on the “Big Bang myth,” or “Big Bang Theology” that argues for an eternal universe in which black holes, which the author prefers to call “gravity holes,” recycle the universe ad infinitum. [6] Sure, the Big Bang is a modern creation myth. Big deal. However, Occam's Razor dictates that Conformal Cyclic Cosmology or a Big Bang-Big Crunch cyclic model would be vastly preferable – as infinite time infinitely multiplies entities! There are so many misunderstandings and misinterpretations of relativity, physical cosmology and even fundamental physical concepts such as inertial frames, that one doubts that the author – one Rhawn Joseph, PhD (Emeritus of the “Brain Institute” - address: Northern California (can you be more vague?)) – had any credibility before reading this joke of an article.
Does this man look like he's about anything but self-aggrandizement?
Of course, our buddy Rhawn was the first to defend Hoover's argument in a “Commentary,” which concludes: “There is no evidence life began on Earth. Life was present on this planet from the very beginning. Life on Earth has a cosmic ancestry. The preponderance of evidence demonstrates life on Earth, came from other planets. Our ancient ancestors journeyed here, from the stars.”
Why is it no surprise that a simple google search turned up an intriguing connection between this debate, ostensibly over cosmic and biological beginnings, and the only apocalyptic scenario today that is at once both more absurd and more popular in our culture than the Zombie Apocalypse: the 2012 “end of the Mayan calendar” phenomenon. The following video appeared under the by-line of Rhawn Joseph, PhD and his "institute."
To be continued... (Also see this previous post on conspiracy thinking by James Curcio.)
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