I Chose To Believe

Virtual Reality and the Holocaust

A "virtual Holocaust survivor" who lived through an extermination camp and a death march will now be educating children by "upsetting the viewer’s sense of comfort." 

The interactive hologram and associated artificial intelligence answers questions with selections from 25 hours of footage of Pinchas Gutter, creating a vivid and convincing testimony intended to "jolt another world into your own." 

Historical investigation of the event remains verboten.

The Penultimate Frontier

Scientists have better data to suggest the absence of intelligent life on the planet Mars than they do in our own oceans.  Even without this tantalising possibility, any possible threats or opportunities down there are a lot closer to us, and so perhaps more pressing to discover than the shape of rocks on dead worlds.  There is now an initiative to rectify this at last by properly mapping the seafloor.

Neil deGrasse Tyson Fucking Loves Science

‘Science’ here has very little to do with the scientific method itself; it means ontological physicalism, not believing in our Lord Jesus Christ, hating the spectrally stupid, and, more than anything, pretty pictures of nebulae and tree frogs.

TV Worse Than Nothing For Learning, Parents Don't Care

Television time in early childhood has been found to decrease motor, vocabulary, math, and social skills, as well as "physical prowess at kindergarten."

Sun Ra: Showman or Shaman?

Dreams come true, I know they do
If you believe in love
Mine came true and yours will too
I swear by the stars above

Dreams come true, they just have to
True as the Sun above
Mine came true and yours will too 
If you believe in love

Dream of romance
Strolling down Lover's Lane
In a trance
And dream it over again

Dreams come true, they just have to
To prove they're so supreme
Mine came true and yours will too 
All you have to do is dream

-"Dreams Come True," Sun Ra 

~~~

Sonny had a vision.  His body was transfigured.  Up he went, and down to a stage on Saturn.  They told him to leave school, to speak through his music.  The world was due to become a more chaotic place, and there would be trouble in the schools, but music was a language that would be heard.

Ten years later, in 1947, people began to talk about flying saucers.  Sonny was always ahead of the curve, but now his private epiphany had some kind of cultural currency.

~~~

Ten years after that, Herman Poole Blount had become Le Sony'r Ra.  He had an independent music label, El Saturn Records, and a big band, the Arkestra.  With his manager and various associates and pen pals, he traded books and ideas about symbols and religion, ancient times and extraterrestrial encounters.  Strange packages would arrive from corners unknown, holding secrets and clues.  Long before the Internet, the esoterica of the day all got funneled through Sun Ra, listening to Long John Nebel on the radio when he wasn't writing and rehearsing.

His band were affordably dressed as Egyptians and space men, a silly expression of serious preoccupations of the bandleader. The costumes also helped to undercut the self-conscious rigour of the music.

Sonny was intense about discipline.  When his band moved to New York and the music moved further into the avant-garde, he rejected the label of "free jazz."  There was nothing free about it; this was music about mind and cosmos.  This was space jazz.

~~~

It would be another twenty years before the zeitgeist was ready, and George Clinton produced a flying saucer funk that approximated Sun Ra's aesthetic.  Outside of a rewarding cross-pollination that resulted in a series of approachable fusion albums, Ra's music remained a more dangerous, uncanny animal.  It was not uncommon for a show to begin with a twenty-minute expression of the creation of the universe as explained by a wall of horns, or end with Ra snaking through the crowd and shouting in people's faces.  This was music to change minds.

~~~

He is said to be a pioneer of Afrofuturism, and early on he closely identified with Black struggles.  As time went on, he came to see blacks and whites alike as subject to the lies and illusions of a nefarious archontic power using us as pawns for its own amusement.

In some combination of inspired revelation, divine disclosure, informed intuition, and self-mythologising bullshit, Sonny told people that he was a member of the angel race.

~~~

He never changed his story about the time he went to Saturn, but no one saw him dissolve.  The historicity of his prehistoric alien abduction is a moot point.  It can be judged only in its possible effects.

Sun Ra pioneered the use of electronic keyboards and free improvisation in jazz, but that proves nothing.  He was one of the most prolific recording artists of his century, but that proves nothing.  He lived and breathed his music, living in a big house with his band and catnapping at the piano, but that proves nothing.

What might actually mean something is that today, twenty-three years after the man's transition, the Sun Ra Arkestra still tours in his name.  Ninety-something Marshall Allen dresses as a wizard, blows an electronic whistle, and the band sings the old songs.  The crowd and the performers enter a magical space in which a dead man is still alive.  They dream of the future, of the boundlessness of infinity, of love in outer space.  This is perhaps the greatest proof that Sonny was touched by something, reaching down to make a prophet of a man.

He warned of doom in the grand old tradition, but he used his every day on Earth to wake people up where he could.  That he did so without arousing much recognition from the jazz or the flying saucer communities suggests he was right about that evil unseen force of injustice in the world.

~~~

They plan to leave this world one day
In sundry rocket ships to sail away

They plan to go to somewhere there
In splendid ships of models rare

They plan to find another place in the sky
Without saying farewell, without saying goodbye

They plan to put the White House on the Moon, soon
And the Kremlin on a satellite

-"They Plan to Leave," Sun Ra

~~~

Further reading

Is Science Kind of a Scam?

The way scientists do think makes us aware of how we can think. Samuel Johnson said that a performer riding on three horses may not accomplish anything, but he increases our respect for the faculties of man. The scientists who show that nature rides three horses at once—or even two horses, on opposite sides of the universe—also widen our respect for what we are capable of imagining, and it is this action, at its own spooky distance, that really entangles our minds.

Have humans made dogs stupid?

'These results suggest dogs' heightened social response may, in turn, interfere with independent problem-solving behaviour.'

Creativity And The Unremarkable Cerebellum: Motor Region Found To Play Surprising Role

"The effort required to produce a creative outcome definitely involves more activity in the prefrontal cortex, but, as the highest scores for creativity showed, too much activity in those regions did not achieve the most imaginative results."

Hallucinations and delusions more common than thought

"'We used to think that only people with psychosis heard voices or had delusions, but now we know that otherwise healthy, high-functioning people also report these experiences,' Professor McGrath said."

Secret files reveal police feared that Trekkies could turn on society

"It has emerged that Scotland Yard kept a secret dossier on Star Trek, The X-Files, and other US sci fi shows amid fears that British fans would go mad and kill themselves, turn against society or start a weird cult."

Why Rod Serling Still Matters

"'We're developing a new kind of citizenry,' Serling said in 1957, 'one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think.'"

The Strange Phenomenon of Fictional Characters Turning Up in Real Life

"'All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine,' Moore revealed. 'He looked exactly like John Constantine. He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar.'"

When Things Happen That You Can't Explain

"I’ve talked to hundreds of people who have had remarkable, unexpected experiences that startled them profoundly. Some see them as clear evidence of the supernatural and others do not. And there are those who come to a conclusive view of what these events mean, and those who hold them as evidence of the mystery of the human imagination itself."

'Fairy control' to halt tiny doors in Somerset woods

"We've got little doors everywhere. We're not anti-fairies but it's in danger of getting out of control."

The Psychology of Wonder

"Arguably one of the most significant contributions of psychology is that our understanding of ourselves is more defined by what we believe in our heads than by the actual external world that we experience.  If you imagine you are the center of the universe, then you experience yourself as a different person than one who imagines they live on a speck of dust.  However, even better, if you can imagine living in different kinds of universes, then who you are becomes a fantastic landscape of possibilities."

How extreme isolation warps the mind

"But the most alarming effects were the hallucinations. They would start with points of light, lines or shapes, eventually evolving into bizarre scenes, such as squirrels marching with sacks over their shoulders or processions of eyeglasses filing down a street. They had no control over what they saw: one man saw only dogs; another, babies."

Why Near-Death Experiencers and Their Critics Keep Getting Science Wrong

"First, there’s a long and rich history of the very concept of objectivity and its evolution.  This is constantly ignored by skeptics like Harris in favor of pretending objectivity has a fixed definition without history or context.  Second, in the course of its conceptual development, we were warned against the dangers of our current form of objectivity (one that was supposed to be divorced from experience)."

How to Live with Mystery in a Culture Obsessed with Certainty and Definitive Answers

"Learning more about the world doesn’t lead to a point closer to a final destination — whose existence is nothing but a hopeful assumption anyway — but to more questions and mysteries. The more we know, the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask."

School Suspends 9-Year-Old For Pretending He Had Hobbit ‘Ring of Power’

"Aiden also got in trouble earlier this school year by bringing a copy of 'The Big Book of Knowledge' to school."