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November 14, 2007
Filtering the Fortean Storm
A friend who manages a list asked us think about the kind of foundation we might establish had we the means.
This may not be quite that, but it's what I submitted as a shot in the dark when I saw the Knight Foundation's invitation, below. My offbeat proposal made the first cut but was not confined to a defined community ("the earth" is not sufficiently constrained) and that was that.
But the essence of it is, addressing the need for education in critical thinking, deeper thinking, learning how to do research (beyond clicking something on the first google page or accepting at face value a wikipedia article), learnng how to turn context into content for reflection, turning concusions into premises, in short, thinking.
I asked for a million dollars over three years, BTW. I mean, why not?
My friend wrote:
> Assume that you win the lottry, cash in your stock options, or otherwise are fotrunate enough to have some extra cash and you want to set up a foundation to use your wealth to "do something". What would the purpose of The
and the Knight Foundation published this teaser ...
KNIGHT FOUNDATION SEEKS INNOVATIVE IDEAS FOR NEWS
If you have a bold new idea for improving the production and delivery
of news and information, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
wants to hear about it.
The Knight Foundation, a backbone of American philanthropy in
journalism and First Amendment causes (and a supporter of Secrecy
News), has millions of dollars to give to help nurture new ideas for
the future of news.
"Whether you're a high school student, a college professor, a truck
driver, a brain surgeon, a stay-at-home parent, a journalist, an
entrepreneur, a nonprofit organizer or anything else, anywhere in the
world: If we like your idea, we will give you money to make it
happen."
and I proposed ...
Filtering the Fortean Storm
Mining Masses of Anomalous Data in Pursuit of the Bigger Picture
The history of science brims with papers not published, papers published but ignored, and anomalous data that remains invisible or is discarded for lack of a pattern in which to integrate it, e.g. Lawrence Morley’s paper on spreading seafloors and plate tectonics, rejected by the /Journal of Geophysical Research /as more appropriate for cocktail party speculation but later described as “the most significant paper in the earth sciences ever to be denied publication.”
Other critical breakthroughs, ridiculed by the thought police of a mainstream consensus, never got into a paper at all. Because those transformational insights conflicted with the consensus reality of the majority, they were literally unthinkable, unheard at the edges of society’s conversation with itself.
The information revolution, while resulting in a storm of anomalous data derived from random observations and ideas, has accelerated the flow of information, but has not generated the means for discerning meaning and patterns in that flow not taught citizens how to search for meaning.
The information revolution has also accelerated the speed with which new paradigms or consensus realities replace former ones. As constructions of society, new ideas move from the edges where they are not heard, then rejected or ridiculed, then accepted as the core of a new consensus, by which time newer ideas are emerging at the edges. Because the flow of information is accelerated by current technologies, this is happening faster and faster. The rate of change is itself changing.
Yet cultural and societal filters as well as the conservative nature of scientific progress removes anomalous data and unusual observations and reports from the mainstream. Significant insights, especially ones which might turn out to be revolutionary, are not allowed into the light.
Paradigms determine the questions that can be asked. Once one determines the questions that can be asked or even thought, one does not have to worry about answers. Answers to unasked questions remain forever implicit in unknown and unthinkable notions beyond the edges.
Current political and social realities filter out even more data because secrecy in the name of security obsessively excludes much data that would inform people about ... the Real. Scientific and social scientific research, often weaponized or hidden in covert budgetary sleeves, is increasingly done out of sight.
Areas in which this dynamic is rife include - weapons development, biotechnology, research in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, credible observer reports of unconventional events and objects, pharmaceutical and medical research, political and economic events, and much more.
It is not complexity or massive amounts of data that prevents the average person from seeing the real. No one is overwhelmed when they enter a university library with millions of volumes when they know how to use a card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System. No, it is not the mass of information, but whether or not it is indexed in a useful scalable way, that matters.
When it is, we can do what we call “research” rather than merely googling random items arranged according to predetermined or accidental patterns. Then we can aggregate data into meaningful patterns. Then we can aggregate the anomalous and make it meaningful. Then we can critique current models of reality and discover new ones.
The tools to filter large masses of data already exist. They are used by the numerous components of the intelligence community, think tanks, research facilities, and corporate R&D groups to identify relationships and patterns. From time to time, insights derived from this enterprise leads to a hierarchical restructuring of the models and habits of thought that make sense of our lives. Then new possibilities are disclosed that transform the very definition of what it means to be human.
This project suggests means by which to put these tools and knowledge of how to use them into the hands of ordinary people. Invoking the name of Charles Forte, who spent his days searching through periodicals from all over the world and aggregating anomalies which suggested new insights (such as panspermia (the seeding of planets with organic molecules from interstellar space, now an accepted fact but ridiculed when we wrote it), I call this enterprise “filtering the Fortean storm.”
This project has two components: mining the Fortean Storm AND educating the citizenry in how to derive value from thinking critically about the results.
(1) Create and make available on the Internet an inviting interface that would enable people to input observations and anomalous data.
(2) Simultaneously adapt the means of mining large aggregates of data to this enterprise. Public/private government/corporate/NGO partnerships would assist in this phase, porting their expertise to the body politic at large.
(3) Educate and train people online through tutorials and mentoring how to think critically and remain agnostic about anomalous data, how to hold things tentatively while entertaining new models, how to curtail ridicule as a primary means of filtering. The simple tools and techniques of doing research – the marks of rational and critical thinking, openness to heresy (“all great truths begin as blasphemy,” said George Bernard Shaw), and the use of research tools – will be taught online interactively as well as in communities through public venues. Organizational structures will scale. The use of volunteers will be essential.
(4) Use the expertise of classification analysts, that is, librarians, retired intelligence analysts, project managers on both a volunteer and paid basis to develop these meaningful structures so users are not overwhelmed but encounter a scalable, useable interface which fractal-like enables individuals and communities alike to move up the ladder of abstraction to the bigger pictures that currently elude us.
Posted by Thieme at 04:33 PM | Comments (0)
November 13, 2007
What is it About UFOs?
This is a cross post from The Second Edition, a new newsletter. The newsletter won't always be about UFOs, of course, but sometimes it will. I have been keenly interested as opposed to merely interested ever since an Air Force officer told his Episcopal priest, who was me, then, that "we chase the things and we can't catch them." That was thirty years ago, and like most people who really take a look at this subject, I have become more and more convinced that real vehicles have been flying around our planet for a long long time and we did not always make them. The subject with its many detours into psychological operations, deception, black budget research in some very interesting areas like materials science, perception management, and propulsion systems, the cottage industry and its folkways - it's all worth exploring, isn't it?
This is a polemic, written after Chris Matthews made a real fool of himself. I just couldn't help it. The sentences are long and rant-like and I was told by a reader that it just doesn't work for a digital format. True enough. People click away from a You Tube video in fifteen seconds if it does not grab them, after all. One thought just led to another ("It's no wonder how complicated things get," wrote E. B. White, "what with one thing leading to another.") So I will write simple and short ... when I can. If I can. Maybe.
Anyway, this flashed up in response to a scene that belonged in Idiocracy that the cable station had the balls to call "news and commentary."
What is it About UFOs?
When you think about it – I mean, really step back and think about it – the reaction, I mean, to Dennis Kucinich’s statement the other night during the Democratic debate, about seeing an aerial vehicle, a large dark triangle, something reported by many people in this and other countries and probably one of our own, one of our new stealthy inventions, but one he couldn’t identify – the fact that it was brought up as it was, to ridicule a man whose candidacy has already been made to seem silly, a waste of time and money – and then more ridicule and disdain, after the debate, the thigh-slapping laughter of a loud shouter like Chris Matthews who hooted and hollered and asked other candidates like Joe Biden did they “believe” in UFOs as if this alone of all domains is not a question of evidence, thinking about it all, but a belief like leprechauns or Santa Claus or God - and then, when Governor Richardson of New Mexico stated the obvious, that there is a documented record that our government has withheld information about the subject for decades – not months, not years, but decades – his quiet statement caused the already wildly raving Matthews to get even louder and wilder, demanding to know, my god man, do you think there was a cover-up? a cover-up? And all this said not simply with confidence, but with arrogance fused with ignorance, as if we do not live in a secrecy-shrouded world in which millions and millions of government documents, even when they have been declassified, will not emerge into the light of day for years – years! – a world in which statesmen like the late Senator Patrick Moynihan wrote an entire book about the negative impact of obsessive secrecy (and that was before the Cheney-Bush regime took it up another notch) and how unnecessary secrecy eroded the fabric of a once-open society – I mean, when you think about all that, while the rest of us live our lives downwind in the bluster of the loud shouters screaming their beliefs as if they were part of a civil discourse or a civilized debate – well, all a member of the hidden crowd can do is laugh or weep or perhaps wonder what in the name of God is going on?
I mean, think about it. Mention the silly distractions used to draw the scent into the bushes, nonsense like Britney Spears or the Hilton woman or the dead one, what was her name, now, Anna Nicole, just bring them up, I say, and you’ll get hours of silly discourse, pundits and news anchors and bloggers taking the silly nothings so seriously, playing hand-in-glove games with their publicists, as if such trivia has anything to do with anything real or anything that matters at all, making the silly film Idiocracy seem like a pretty good forecast of things to come, no, things already here.
You understand, it did not just happen. UFOs were not ridiculed when they were covered as news, years ago. As well they ought to have been. Anomalous vehicles having their way and will with our skies, showing up as Look Magazine documented over nuclear plants like Hanford and air force bases all over the country – that’s news, or ought to be. Vehicles behaving in ways that led Life Magazine to conclude, with an in-depth article using official quotes, that the vehicles which had been photographed and documented by official USAF cameras, were in all likelihood extraterrestrial.
Because, given what they did and how they did it, what else could they be?
But you wouldn’t know that, would you? You wouldn’t know that there exists a voluminous amount of data, an immense historical documentation going back into the nineteen thirties, long before the so-called “modern UFO era” had begun, filled with credible observers who were flying fighters or commercial planes or simply looking up or straight ahead, sometimes, at something landing, something alive coming out, then taking off again and disappearing so quickly it made their hair stand up. To observe that this history exists and is well-documented by serious researchers, that historical studies like Keith Chester’s Strange Company, a book that compiles reports mostly from Europe before the second world war and then, during and after the war, or historical articles by Michael Swords, a retired professor from the University of Western Michigan, documenting for example the Robertson Panel, a group that established CIA-supported debunking and ridicule of reports, keeping them out of the mainstream news, or the Condon Committee, a “scientific” panel intended to settle the matter once and for all, the conclusions of which however contradicted the data in its own report, as if the committee did not even read its own work, and indeed, the chair had declared his conclusion with a chuckle and a wink long before the committee had done its work – one could go on and on, there are many serious well-researched works that document the phenomena, and the obviously successful campaign by the US government to use ridicule above all to make the whole domain a matter of jokes and precisely the kind of silliness for which we can thank Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, and their pals, who have never seen much less read any of this serious work, or the other accounts that accurately describe the cottage industry of useful idiots, pathological liars, con artists and flimflam men (and women, of course), making multiple points about the real serious research, as well as the ways that psychological operations and propaganda have been carried out for many years, addressed to the people of this country of necessity in addition to “enemies,” the stated targets of deception, it now being impossible to distinguish one from the other in a world of ubiquitous information.
The subject, in short, is complex, vast, and worthy of study.
So I ask, once again – what is it about UFOs that makes them such a subject of ridicule when patently ridiculous subjects like Hilton and Spears are treated with respect and amplified by the loud shouters?
A friend who spent his life at the National Security Agency doing analysis said to me once, speaking of the practice of deception – “Illusion, misdirection, and ridicule, these three. But the greatest of these is ridicule.”
His echo of the Apostle Paul was deliberate. This was the Gospel according to the IC, the world of professional intelligence.
Ridicule. The greatest of these is ridicule.
Indeed, people fear ridicule more than death, it seems. The dismemberment of their reputations, careers, and self-images is a grave threat. The thought police know this, of course. The art and science of the intentional destruction of troublesome human beings is alive and well.
The blow-back, however, as our intel friends call the unintended consequences of a sanctioned campaign, is the destruction of civil discourse, the undermining of a public space in which serious subjects receive the attention they deserve. Because so many people do not believe the official truth but don’t know what the truth might be. They know they are lied to much of the time, but don’t know what’s so, so they fill the empty space with projections, confabulations, nightmares and dreams.
There is more to it than that, of course. There is also a threat to the unspoken compacts that keep society hanging together, the ones that get people out of bed in the morning to go to work, not money or other rewards, but how a society functions at its deepest levels. The threat is that a superior civilization exists not “out there” where SETI serenely searches for distant signals, officially sanctioned and signifying nothing, but right here, up close, where thousands of credible witnesses have testified to the presence of anomalous vehicles obviously directed remotely or on the spot by intelligent agents, right here on our very own planet, not the isolated little blue marble in space that we collectively imagine, but one of many inhabited planets, where our society has against all evidence been built on a cornerstone of key beliefs, say them how you will – for religious, that we are the apple of God’s eye, not one apple among many, but the most favored nation, and for non-religious, that our species is the top of the food chain, the obviously smartest and best of all species, kings of the kingdom and queens of the realm. The threat is to the threads that stitch together our particular ways of being a self-conscious collective entity into a cultural myth of priority, invincibility, being the favored children of God. Now, this is a serious threat, along with the other lesser threats, to our dominance of other countries, scientific prowess, and other key pieces of the way we perceive ourselves in this nation. ... and so we come back to UFOs, which have been well-documented, as I said, noted all over the world, in most countries, not just here, for sixty, seventy years, or more, behaving in the same ways, doing similar things, all reported by diverse peoples of all cultures and tribes and ages noting the same small details – that’s not the stuff of insanity, is it? That is something serious, something real, something worthy of scientific study and discussion in the public domain, not only behind closed doors where the masters of deception do indeed practice their dark arts on behalf of multiple agendas which have neither been floated nor voted upon by we, the people, the impotent watchers in the wings, we who ought to know better when the shouters do their job, we who know we have listened for years to lies yet still, like children, believe them because we must, so when they ridicule their victims, pumping up the abuse to effective levels, we must jump on the wagon at once, lest we be ridiculed too by Official Truth. We choose to believe the illusions, to look away from the real, knowing what we are doing, but so afraid of what they’ll say and do if we don’t.
The greatest of these is ridicule. Ridicule is King. And we, good subjects and loyal, obey the King.
The Second Edition is a periodic reflection by author and speaker Richard Thieme. Subscribe (or unsubscribe) by writing to rthieme@thiemeworks.com and stating subscribe (or subsubscribe).
Richard Thieme (www.thiemeworks.com) speaks and writes about the issues of our times, with an emphasis on technology, media, security, intelligence, and spirituality in all of their human and cultural dimensions.
Posted by Thieme at 06:27 PM | Comments (0)