SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
“A new scientific truth
does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but
rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that
is familiar with it.” Max Planck, taken from Robert
Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power, Penguin
Books, New York, 1998, p. 398. Whose
rules I gleefully disobey on every page of this book, probably at great price.
I run a risk when
I expose social scientists to the weapon/peace antinomy and the armchair
and threat deterrent formulas. Why? Because these hypotheses are elements of a
grand theory, one that dares to explain social life, history and human
experience taken as a whole.
Modern social science, like all science currently conceived, is based on empiricism and positivism: the conviction that knowledge is only possible by studying particular examples, habits and phenomena in isolation. As a result, our social sciences are a patchwork of wishful thinking more or less vague, tautological and contradictory, offering less predictive value than a sloppy weather forecast. This is what happens when human curiosity is repressed for whatever reason.
Modern social scientists would rather things remained that way indefinitely. They don’t seek the means, motive or opportunity to confront weapon mentality scientifically. Anyone who would offer them the tools to do so, presents a fearsome challenge.
Whether or not the weapon/peace antinomy has scientific value, they reject it by reflex, out of trepidation, tradition and torpor. They’d rather dismiss outright something new rather than study it. This dismissal is a professional skill and regular habit among scientific positivists. Failure to practice it, or doing so with less than enthusiasm, means professional banishment.
What difference is there between religious fanatics and
scientific dogmatists, apart from the scientifically enhanced firepower and
police states the latter can call upon to uphold their reactionary convictions
(soon aped by their religious equivalents, as in Iran)?
I submit that the
predictive value of this antinomy may outshine prior models. I challenge them to refute or validate it as
best they can. We shall see if their
‘scientific detachment’ is up to the task, or if they care about anything but
their next paycheck.
There is a major difference between Learner science and
current weapon science. Learner science
would embrace every new discovery and innovation; weapon science finds new ways
to enhance the threat
formula and suppress other discoveries
that might threaten this status quo.
Learner science will lead us into abundance, whereas the weapon version
leads nowhere but to poverty, pollution and mental stagnation.
As our prejudices grow more subtle, magnificent new discoveries may emerge. Learners may anticipate two breakthroughs in mathematics. The first will clarify chaos theory and perhaps help to determine the probability of unique events. The next, yet to be glimpsed, will reopen the Imperial Way: a total rewrite of mathematics to simplify its mastery.
As it stands, a
priestly math elite jams mighty computers and weighty academic tomes with reams
of formulae that only a token few can decipher.
Their best efforts at quantifying reality produce a caricature of
the natural world. The Imperial Way may
blaze a wider trail through this intellectual bramble, that Learners may follow
to new discoveries.
Knowledge-value transformed the world when sophisticated reformers replaced Latin Bibles with vernacular versions that laypeople could read. The Imperial Way may do as much for mathematics and popular science. Unprecedented discoveries could emerge.
Just as the printing press transformed human discourse;
cybernetics, virtual reality, voice recognition, abacus and micro-energy
technologies (powered by sunlight or the user’s pulse and body heat) may free
us from our inmost intellectual ruts.
In addition,
modern-day kids will enjoy a digital game that teaches mathematics
– as addictive as DOOM or its successor – that would subtly lure them to teach
themselves math, up to their highest level of competence. No more math drudgery, only games to play and
skills to boast about.
Despite weapon
technology’s downside, it immunized its medieval practitioners against their
worst superstitions. In the old
days, weapon technicians had to sidestep along sheer cliffs of ignorance, edge
their away along alarming ledges of science and technology while terrifying gargoyles
lurked below. Indeed, they went too
far. They twisted into mere fantasies
certain supernatural phenomena they could not make use of, right away, to make
more and better weapons.
Yet in our era
tyrannized by science, weapon technology takes leaps so far beyond our
understanding that they baffle even scientific managers like Robert
McNamara. Those quantum jumps
threaten us with annihilation. Can you
imagine what a megaton explosion would feel like or how industrial civilization
will react once there isn’t enough petroleum to go around (very soon)?
Biology is
mutating into a “hard” science because its researchers are beginning to make
horrific weapons from living matter, just as older engineers used to, with the
inanimate.
For this reason,
we should make our research more holistic and less reductive, refresh our
inspiration with intuition, instinct, personal insight and primal
memory. It is not a question of
abandoning one mode of thought for the other, but of merging both without doing
damage to either.
Elegant new technologies may emerge from intensive studies of spectral color lines, of noble gasses that should be in our skies but are not, of auroras, static electricity and lightning.
Lightning energy
is more abundant in the Tropics. Poor
nations could harness it as cheap energy for export and local
development. This technology would favor
the regrowth of their climax virgin forests to attract more cheap energy. Osmar
Pinto, Jr., of the Atmospheric Electricity Group, Brazilian Institute
for Space Studies, and other Learners of lightning should focus on this
study. Could these phenomena provide
power for future cities?
How dare we call
ourselves civilized when we make the air we breathe reek so industriously? Some obscure chemists will achieve
immortality by making diesel engines less fetid and by replacing
internal combustion technologies entirely.
In the future,
history mentors will demonstrate just how primitive we were, simply by warming up
a few drops of diesel fuel in their classroom and informing their disgusted
pupils that our cities stank this way all the time.
Poor Dr. Diesel cannot be blamed for the stink of his invention. He burned peanut oil in it during the 1900 World Fair in Paris. He wanted to motorize all the farmers on Earth, one hundred years ahead of time―the way Ford dreamed of selling them cheap cars a few years later.
In 1913, Dr. Diesel disappeared off a ferry from France to England. Foul play, most likely. It was settled by Churchill and his cronies that the new engines would burn toxic and expensive diesel petroleum. The stage was set for the motorization of armies, over his dead body. The major powers’ war fleets already needed fuel oil; now their armies would, too. Let serious death-dealing begin!
Also in 1913, an American engineer, Frank Shuman, gave a
field demonstration of solar-powered water pumps to Egypt’s colonial elite
including Lord Kitchener. His
sun-powered mechanism was remarkably similar to equivalents proposed
today. However, World War I curtailed
such developments for another hundred years.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/11/sahara-solar-panels-green-electricity
Future Learners
will devote whole semesters to the appraisal of our professed ‘sophistication,’
months longer to explain our homelessness, plagues, famines and
wars. Hopefully they’ll never find
satisfactory reasons for these sordid constants in weapon history. They will deduce, perhaps, that those were
bloody stepping-stones to Learner transformation.
Indian Vedic literature has left hints about antigravity machines constructed from copper spheres inside which gyroscopes churned mercury. Such hypothetical technologies might not be too farfetched. After all, copper/mercury batteries generate direct current, and copper coils are wrapped around a magnet for alternating current. Subtler interactions between copper and mercury may generate gravity waves. Could they result from the interaction of a strong, hydrophilic acid and a powerful hydrophobic base, spun up to colloidal suspension with a little pure water? Such research may prove significant in the near future.
We must beware lest misguided applications of
electrogravitational technology distort and pollute the very fabric of
space-time.
It might also be worthwhile to study super-sensitive orgone boxes whose walls are alternate layers of stone wool (fiberglass), steel wool and organic wool (cotton or lamb’s). For some reason, back during the 1950s, our science and justice hierarchs declared these experiments taboo. Backed by the full force of the law, they murdered the experimenter, Wilhelm Reich, in prison, destroyed his equipment, burned and banned his writings. Even in modern times, the Grand Inquisitor is only a phone call away.
Nikola Tesla’s research suffered pretty much the same fate at the hands of the same type of barbarian. After his death, a boxcar of his research papers was confiscated by the U.S. Government, consigned temporarily to oblivion and then to Top Secret classification after World War II (after review by ex-Nazi scientists collected during Project Paperclip). It has never seen the light of day, since. Without a doubt, WeaponWorld is rules by benighted savages.
Water is so mysterious that it seems truly miraculous. Its chemical properties confound the basic properties of other elements. It seems purpose-built to support life and absolutely necessary for its existence: the constant companion of life, if you will. What other properties could water hold, of which we have little idea? How many more ways could we use it?
Gerald H. Pollack, a University of Washington professor in biophysics, has released a new book: Water, Energy and Life. The findings of his research team could be groundbreaking.
From what little I understood (I heard a Research Channel lecture by him in 2008, but have not read his book), water is self-organizing at its interface with air or gelled acids; it turns into a much more highly organized form of liquid crystal (another physical state in addition to liquid, gas, solid and plasma) and retains a small electrical charge along this interface that can be several million molecules thick. This "exclusion zone" is free of dissolved chemicals which remain in solution with the water beyond the interface, and it is maintained and grows thicker under the influence of sunlight or another limited spectrum light source (infrared, I believe; I no longer recall).
Prof. Pollack has achieved a 200 to 1 purification of water merely by drawing pure water from within the interface and drawing off the solute suspension into another container; the whole thing powered by sunlight, without any water filters or solid barriers. He hypothesized that primitive life may have become self-organized within this liquid crystal interface. Some of you may have heard of other research of the microscopic sea-surface interface with air, which seethes with microbial life.
These are preliminary results, and I have probably not been clear. Google his name or check out his books for more details. Very exciting!
Other researchers (carefully suppressed) have studied water’s unconventional energy-storage and propagation properties as it spins and is driven through special turbines. Their results, so far, have been almost mythical—radiating anti-gravity waves and unfamiliar forms of radiation.
Some people have
studied the healing properties of mountain stream water that picks up
natural minerals as it dances down rocky slopes and suspends them in a milky,
colloidal solution. This liquid seems to
have promising nutritional qualities.
Others have
stirred batches of water repeatedly clockwise and counterclockwise, and
thus created elixirs (with nothing more added than a handful of aged manure)
that retained outstanding properties for fertilizing plants, attracting
beneficial insects and repelling destructive ones, for general soil and crop
health and perhaps the purification of tainted water.
In the early 1800s, electricity was a novel phenomenon, a plaything for a few highbrows, with no practical application. Today’s industries could not survive without electricity flowing across trillions of circuits. In the near future, novel forms of water energy may replace fossil fuels, nuclear reactors and other sources of electro-magnetic radiation that supply direct and indirect electrical current. This new energy source may be electro-gravitic, hydro-gravitic or some other hyphenated term beyond current understanding.
These new technologies will require intensive study. They are as unfamiliar to us, now, as electricity was to wise men during the 15th century. At least they knew something about lightning, static electricity and magnets. This is probably where we should begin to research again in earnest, starting from scratch and looking for the fundamentals that they missed.
We know nothing about new technologies that may save
human civilization by replacing the greediest and most reactionary leadership
in its history, compared to whom ancient despots were forward-thinking
progressives. It is going to take a series of technological miracles, miraculous
technologies and leadership turnovers to wean corporate industrial civilization
from fossil fuels, without starving and freezing millions, perhaps
billions of people to death in the process – as their lights and heat go out
and the supply trucks they take for granted quit rolling into town. All the technologies we’ve relied on in the
past will become secondary to these new ones we can barely imagine today, upon
which the survival of human civilization may depend.
It is time fossil fuel and nuke monopolists climbed off the back of the science community, quit dictating what kind of research is acceptable, and allowed it to come up with the next generation of technologies that will make fossil fuels obsolete—before those fuels run out rather than after.
We should have taken up this task fifty years ago, and come up with fully mature alternate technologies by now. It may be too late to bring them online before masses of people suffer from the failure of oil production, of fossil fuel technology and their timely replacement.
Those responsible
for this delay will answer in person for every future casualty humanity
may have endured from their profiteering.
A planetary civil war may be fought over this sole issue—to their
long-term grief, since the overwhelming majority will oppose them. They must change their minds radically and
soon, and spearhead new research in alternative energy sources to avoid the
traumatic fate that has befallen every grasping tyrant in the past.
The other
alternative – the Mad Max, Road Warrior one: cultural, technological and
societal collapse at the hands of a managerial class least worthy of that
privilege – does not bear contemplating.
As it stands,
we’re pushing the outer envelope of ecological stability and human
endurance. That which current
military-industrialists try to get away with reminds me of a joke I once
heard about a man who'd jumped off a tall building. Falling past the twentieth floor, he was
heard to mutter “So far, so good.”
“Wallace Broecker,
an ocean circulation researcher at New York’s Lamont-Doherty Earth observatory,
described the situation perfectly when he pointed out that ‘climate is an angry
beast and we are poking at it with sticks.’”
From Bill McGuire, “Will Global
Warming Trigger an Ice Age?” The
Guardian, 11/13/2003.
Another social experiment might plant the Olympics in countries where warfare threatens to erupt. Today, we stage it in richer, quieter, better-policed cities where its peace potential is obscured. Learners may use the Olympics to highlight and neutralize local violence, the way the ancient Greeks did.
During these new Olympics, local warlords will be
expected to uphold the peace under intense public scrutiny. They would become international stars if
their efforts bore fruit and pariahs if they did not. Athletes, sportscasters and spectators would
live heroically: from tent cities, under fire and dying as martyrs if
necessary. During these events,
reconstruction and reconciliation would be renewed with grim doggedness.
If these projects failed and violence persisted, a massive world embargo would follow. Locals would have to exhaust their taste for violence and then see reason, in isolation from the rest of the world. Mass violence might recede as world opinion frowned upon any interruption of these sacred games. Once again, the Olympics would become a worship service for peace—not the meaningless spectacle we’ve grown accustomed to, of empty sports statistics, national chauvinism and mindless advertising.
Detractors could point to the 1984 Winter Olympics in the city of Sarajevo, a few years prior to the bloody Yugoslav Civil War, during which that city was besieged and wrecked. Its famous cosmopolitanism has yet to recover.
We might conclude that such projects are worthless, based
on the failed model of Sarajevo’s tragic heroism. That model was flawed. Latent ethnic conflicts were not brought to
the light of day, and no public debate searched for conflict resolution
strategies before warfare flashed off.
All these troublesome details were drowned in buckets of sentimental
Olympic twaddle—only to emerge as inevitable genocide a few years later.
Learner Olympics
would aim for exactly the opposite. They
would pay much more attention to conflict resolution and less to mawkish
sentimentality, sports babble and tawdry advertising.
Humanity’s energy
manipulations increase through unforeseen new peace technologies, not just
putting more ground under the plow or blindly burning more fossil fuel.
Crop
yields from experimental, Stone Age freeholds have been found to match modern
agro-industry’s per-acre productivity without massive inputs of chemicals,
mechanical soil destruction and super-inbred seed stocks. The secret seems to be a loving manipulation
of soil, handful by handful. Have you
noticed how much more beautiful and fit a garden appears to be, after it’s been
gone over by hand, inch by inch? It
glows, almost as if it had been made love to.
Industrial crop
yields, however, exhaust the soil’s natural fertility. Only religious applications of
Findhorn-style, labor/psychic-intensive cultivation can sustain the soil with
increased productivity, yet require fewer artificial inputs. This form of farming is shunned by current
agro-business, most likely because it is only practicable on smaller, family
farms—so much the better.
Perhaps we’ll
relearn to consume wild game species in moderation. ‘Unimproved’ wilderness supports wild
herbivores much more readily than sickly, feed-dependent domestic
varieties. Their wastes return
fertility to the soil, instead of eroding it as an artificial pollutant that eutrophies waterways.
The native vegetation they feed on is fully adapted to local climes and
indestructible by local pests, without any need for genetic engineering. We could make this hardiness work for
us. New hunter-gatherer societies could
harvest wild resources within restored climax ecosystems; that might allow us
to stop penning food species in factory farms.
In the meantime,
modern science invites disaster by attempting to reduce natural species
into unique brand names. We can only
hope this tendency is reversed.
Long-suffering Ireland – one of the first and last of Britain’s abused colonies – endured its Great Famine during one of the first experiments in industrial monoculture. While British landlords exported Ireland’s diversified crops under armed guard, the sole sustenance of Irish peasants, their potato crop, rotted away. Mass starvation ensued. In the 1840s, Ireland’s population fell by half through famine, pestilence and desperate departures. By the way, in the 1830s, there were more Irish soldiers than English in the British Army.
By prioritizing industrial monoculture and dispossessing
farm families in the United States and elsewhere, we are setting ourselves up
for mindless acts of revenge and counter-terrorism. Corporate
consolidation is ruining freeholders across the planet. As a result, worse catastrophes loom:
crop-focused blights and pest pandemics, riots over unemployment, food
bottlenecks and mass starvation.
The bombing of
the Oklahoma City Federal Building occurred in part because massive bank credit
programs had ruined most family farmers.
Their lands were repossessed and absorbed into corporate holdings. Some desperate farmers turned to
extremist organizations for support. In
turn, those extremists roused people like the Oklahoma City bombers.
A new field of biomimicry could spearhead Vedic-guided biotechnologies. Genetic architects might adapt corals, plankton, seaweed, lichens and algae to construction and manufacturing requirements.
Ultimately, tailored tissue communities might be
cultivated into ready-made housing.
Contractors could pour pre-designed organisms and nutrient solutions
into forms. Those organisms would
metabolize nutrients, dry out and die off within a few days. The resulting ‘skeletal’ remnant (something
like the hard remains of coral, bone and bamboo) could provide:
·
construction
materials of exceptional strength and elasticity,
·
devices
with special optical, moisture control and other properties, and
·
electronic
circuitry of unheard-of complexity, delicacy and micro-miniaturization.
Several
properties could be layered in the same construct, using different organisms
and nutrient mixes. Silkworm and spider
clones might secrete optical cable, new textiles and microfilaments of
extraordinary utility. Accelerated
growth organisms may replace milled woods and inorganic insulation in
construction. Genetic architecture may
revolutionize communications, cold fusion, biopower, sunpower lighting, thermal
insulation and evaporative temperature regulation.
Future
innovations in molds, algae, lichens and fungi promise breakthroughs in
pharmacology and food production. The
serious study of lichens has just resumed; an in-depth research program in that
topic may be crucial. Research in
fungous/algid communities may produce house-sized accelerated growths whose
surfaces might be glazed with opaque chlorophyll layers self-protected from
ultraviolet and adaptable to nutrition and housing needs. Just imagine; the walls of your breakfast
nook might glow with bioluminescence and/or grow tasty edibles.
Tailored bivalves and other marine filter feeders can filter pollutants from streams and rivers, and in newly designed urban fountains. Pure water may flow almost everywhere. Specially bred trees and bushes could soak up long-lived pollutants for later extraction and disposal.
People with green thumbs shall earn their keep, in the future, the same way mechanical whizzes and computer puzzle-solvers earn theirs today.
We face unlimited
breakthroughs in the biological sciences, once we stop mistreating laboratory
animals as our primary mode of research.
Today, we distort nature to conform to the mechanistic, reductionist
prejudices we’ve cultivated in our labs.
These prejudices have led us to commit ecocide. We are just beginning to move those
experiments out of laboratories, and back into the forests and fields that our
lab-bred prejudices led us to destroy.
Willingly and
spontaneously, and despite many foolhardy delays, the richer countries
are reversing their population growth.
Weapon mentors abhor this rational act of self-restraint. Despite all their new growth projections, a
massive reduction in the human overburden – voluntary, traumatic or a ghastly
combination of both – is inevitable. The
only population controls Learners will discourage will be those favored today:
weapon mayhem, mass neglect and public health incompetence, those will no longer
be tolerated.
While Learners
will accept sexual abstinence on religious grounds, they will encourage other
zero-growth trends. In addition
to unlimited family planning, new Administrations will offer quality Learning,
dependable social security, full sexual equity and exquisite health care: far
more effective inducers of rational family planning than religious babble
peddled by sexual neurotics.
New public health
priorities might range from exhortations to wash hands more often, to the
cultivation of household and agricultural pests as food items, and the relief
of pandemic sleep disorders, to much more drastic alternatives. Weapon managers once sought to sterilize the
criminally insane, violent recidivists and carriers of inheritable diseases,
both genetic and sexually transmissible.
I hear you gasp
and share your distaste. In the future,
eugenic efforts will be much more precise, benign and effective. Specific gene clusters that control
unprovoked aggression, sociopathy and other behavioral diseases may be
targeted, but sexual viability and individual desires wouldn’t be jeopardized
in the process.
Critics of selective genetic programs point to the Nazis who carried them out first. Their historic practice proves that selective genetics is not moral. The eradication of genetic abnormalities has gone out of style.
Meanwhile, mechanical trash recycling is still trendy. Everyone praises the idea of recycling. No one points out that Nazis were among the first to experiment with economic recycling, in their concentration camps, among their victims' possessions.
Actually (as usual) every field army that ‘won’ a battle
practiced systematic recycling. The
primary criterion for victory was to hold on to the battlefield, no matter what
losses you took, and force the enemy to abandon it. The reward was more weapons and booty for the
victorious side to recycle.
Time is running
out for perpetual indecision. We
must clear many moral hurdles—and those soon.
At stake is not the soggy conscience achieved by passing the buck on
each new problem, nor the aphrodisiac moral rectitude weapon shadists achieve
when they torment chosen prey without opposition. At stake is human survival. Global pandemics, starvation and mass
ignorance are no longer ‘acceptable’ alternatives. It is our duty to force them to cease.
The wealth required to jump-start and sustain PeaceWorld will be at least ten times greater than that available today. Rich weapon states cannot amass enough wealth to improve some privileged minority’s Learning, much less that of their subordinates across the board. Only the global application of Learner Networks will obtain adequate results in time.
Admitted, many countries have achieved dramatic
improvements by subsidizing public education and other peace functions. Unfortunately, no home-grown effort will
generate enough wealth to meet humanity’s insatiable demand, allow us to leap
for the stars and still preserve the natural world. The sum of those tasks, the whole world may
accomplish in concert—or no one will.
If we get
everything exactly right, nothing will re-trigger our battle reflexes. If we fail to prevent them from flaring
up this one last time, global war will overtake us with all the fury of its
momentary frustration.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld