News and Views assembled by Steven Lewis


"Why is there something instead of nothing?" Ask a meaningless question and you get meaningless answers.

Time -- our sense of change in our world, quantified in terms of before and after, start and finish.

Mitt Romney says he opposed democratic lobbying to lift the ban on Blacks in his Mormon faith in deference to God.

The subcallosal cingulate -- a subcortical bridge between thought and action.

Connectivity is not the same as a bond.

In the asylum for religious fanatics, the penalty for burning their 'holy' books is indiscriminate murder.

The 'Holy Land' continues to generate 'messiahs.'

Editing Wikipedia.

Symbols of capitalism.

Unholy books.

Honesty can get you executed in the medieval world of Islam.

Bound and gagged. The censorship of fear.

New statistical methods attempting to evaluate individual responses instead of group averages reveal few benefit from anti-depressant medications and many get worse.

Having painted themselves into a corner, Big Bang cosmologists look for a 'quantum time tunnel' to escape.

Drinking and dining with the master raconteur.

Another example of the continuing disinformation program to thwart health care reform in the United States.

Religion as a business model.

Salman Rushdie remembers the essayist who gave him sanctuary.

More cosmological epicycles to save the appearances.

Pfizer drug trial reveals one 'cause' can produce many effects, some predicted, others unexpected.

Paul Krugman on the different kinds of debt.

The flux of digital text.

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011, reflects on his last days and the Ten Commandments.

In the beginning, before 'space' and 'time,' was the Word, later called the Singularity, surrounded by Absolute Nothingness. The Supreme Cosmologist said "Let there be something!" and the Singularity exploded, creating the Universe and giving birth to creation myths.

The consequence of identifying economic ends with means? Failure of the massive infusion of money by the Federal Reserve into the banking system to create jobs, even menial ones.

The rise of Big Pharma and the decline of psychotherapy.

The science of irreproducible results.

Those who rule our symbols rule us. Mass media ownership, money creation, wealth distribution and justice in America. Whatever became of FDR's Economic Bill of Rights (1944)?

Sam Harris and Paul Krugman speak out on the widening economic inequality in America.

At last, a book-length biography of Korzybski.

How the interpetation of Hubble's galactic redshifts changed from distance to velocity and the redshifting effect of interstellar gravitational fields -- the Shapiro experiment.

The Rosenhan experiment demonstrated the power of initial labeling by psychiatrists in preventing reinterpretation based on later behavior.

The Amazon tribe whose language lacks an independent notion of 'time.'

News from the colloidal domain: Delaying normal colloidal protein coagulation extends life in C. elegans. In humans, coagulated proteins and mitochondria in nerve cells signal the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

Why we don't believe science.

Brain time.

The Bible -- more an anthology of questions than answers.

What's next for Dr. Maas -- Mein Kampf in e-prime?

The mysterious suicide by potassium cyanide of Nuremberg psychiatrist Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, a Korzybski colleague and general semantics educator.

Entropy and equilibrium in an infinite universe.

Freedom to offend.

Children's names and child abuse.

I swear.

Does religion make people nicer?

More than sheep get sacrificed in France.

The Great Hoax and the methods of science.

New study explores why more women don't pursue careers in science and engineering.

"Social contagion" -- waves in the semantic environment.

Dr. Watson discovers political correctness is more important than freedom of speech.

Is there a homeopathic cure for legal terrorism?

Bjorn Lomborg cools it.

How can 92% of the world's leading doctors be wrong?

The Intelligent Design school of Biblical archaeology.

The new New Testament: Jesus the environmental activist.

Is junk science contagious?

Gentlemen, the problem is not religion, but the confusion of the orders of abstraction, which can afflict atheists too.

All food organic, no industrial pollution, vigorous exercise routine and a life expectancy of 30.

Michael Behe's Lehigh colleagues beg to differ.

How should scientists approach religion?

We learn by building on our past knowledge and experiences .... aka by analogy.

The myths of the good old days.

Intelligent Design: The Faith that Dare not Speak Its Name.

Thirty years of the Selfish Gene.

String theory.

The media bias toward the sensational.

Einstein on quantum theory.

A breast by any other name implies a totally different context.

John Kenneth Galbraith -- Stuart Chase sans General Semantics.

The Da Vinci Code's pretentions to serious scholarship.

Humans tend to see what they believe.

Jesus and the cult of celebrity.

Intelligent Designers are like primitive tribes who view airplanes and ships for the first time and imagine gods.

The criminalization of free speech.

How to become a millionaire.

Refusing to deny the obvious.

The relativity of poverty.

Is sports fanaticism or Nazi fanaticism akin to religious 'metaphysical' experience?

Richard Dawkins on evolution and Intelligent Design.

Empirical foundations of God.

Physicists freed from the shackles of experimental proof.

Metaphor in science.

Manipulation through fear.

The search for a common morality.

Identification begins in childhood before language.

Sir Richard Doll was to cigarette smoking what Korzybski was to identification.

Environmentalism in context.

Your ticket to Creation Summer Camp.

The compound interest of human ingenuity.

Religion as art.

Some see wine bottles, mathematicians see circles and polyhedra.

If you think you've found Absolute Truth, but others disagree, then can it be Absolute Truth or is it your relative truth that you label absolute?

The art of visualization.

Humans are different in that we cooperate with strangers.

Global warming spawns a new religion.

Feynman on science.

What Rees does not appreciate is that science is a fusion of facts and assumptions. Einstein exposed and eliminated a false assumption.

The Trojan Horse of Intelligent Design.

Einstein, Cervantes and Korzybski -- they soared beyond their times and perhaps even ours.

Einstein broadened the perspectives of physics by rooting out some erroneous assumptions.

Killer earthquake -- another crack in the god facade. Humans come to the aid of their fellow humans. Apologists scramble to salvage their ancient anthropomorphisms.

Diversity in academia.

Pavlov's brother.

Personality.

The Trojan Horse of Intelligent Design.

You must remember this.

The great I Am.

The crusade against evolution.

School for scandal.

What equation is more important than that for time-binding, PR^T?

From creation myths to science.

Positive illusions.

A home-study course in trash culture.

The non-additive response of Christopher Hitchens to 9-11.

Uptown girl in a downtown world.

Time-binding -- still largely an illusion in ethics and politics.

If the ends don't justify the means, what does?

Don't call me a terrorist.

Turning the clock back 2000 years.

A consuming culture.

The power of words.

Absolute safety.

Reason and religion.

True, false and statistics.

The wages of appeasement.

The times they are a changing.

Change blindness.

Love and critical judgement.

Diversity without freedom of evaluation becomes mere conformity.

Daniel Dennett discovers multiordinality.

Hindsight bias.

DDT and profiling -- victims of our two-valued orientation.

The pursuit of happiness.

Islamic societies -- authoritarian, inflexible and underachieving.

Poetry or perspective?

Is physicist Greene the same as the light that reflects off his surface?

Forbidden words.

A neurophysiology of religious experience.

In search of Science and sanity in the Arab world.

A paradox of choice.

The most accomplished person who ever lived? Aristotle. Murray's statistical methods miss Korzybski altogether.

Neurochemical pathways of social attachment.

Mendel's quantum theory.

Political bias on campus.

The proof is in the pudding and other thoughtless uses of language.

The Lewis Doctrine.

Builders of delusion.

From "most hated woman in America" to champion of diversity.

Dealing with the poor without creating dependency and stifling their work ethic.

The demise of slavery in the British Empire.

Evolution of medicine from treatment to prevention to enhancement.

Neuroaesthetics.

Copyright or copyleft? Returning copyright laws to the Jeffersonian model.

The triumph of identity politics.

Robert Pula, 1928-2004. Bruce Kodish remembers.

An extensional analysis of "love."

Do ETC and the GS Bulletin need swimsuit issues?

A seduction of science.

You could cite Professor Greene's view of 'time' the next 'time' you miss your mortgage payment. Laughs and foreclosure will follow.

Meanings evolve.

A semantics of gifting.

Richard Dawkins learns that international laws appropriate for 1945 do not address the issues of the 21st century.

Noam Chomsky -- smoke without mirrors.

The environmental religion.

The chasm that separates the mathematically literate from the mathematically impotent.

The Spanish Journal of Psychology commemorates 100 years of Pavlov's dogs.

Signal reactions to words.

Neil Postman, former editor of ETC, is dead at 72.

New Age scholars and their confusion of science as a local cultural tool with science as a general method of evaluation.

With language we can lie and create verbal paradoxes that are then confused with the non-verbal world.

Word salads disguised as meaningful questions.

Science and humanism.

Forbidden words.

The rap on black success.

Will the 21st century be noted merely for technological change, or will we also experience extensionalization in our standards of evaluation?

Abstracting and selective perception.

The emperor's new clothes and other tales of political correctness.

Evolution of language.

The ballad of Chicken Little -- what a little inflammatory rhetoric can do.

Richard Dawkins uses language to raise consciousness.

The limitations of local ways of knowing. Indigenous knowledge or local gossip?

Does Asian orthography curb creativity?

Science and engineering without risk.

Placebo effect -- a physio-psycho-logical (organism-as-a-whole) effect of any treatment, whether it be intrinsically worthwhile or worthless.

Five former child orphans sue the University of Iowa over an experiment conducted by Wendell Johnson in 1939.

Stealth creationism.

The search for certainty in a world of probability.

Good intentions paved this road to hell.

The tunnel vision of dictators. The terror that keeps them in power restricts their view of reality.

The slippery slope of slippery slopes.

Confessions of an expert witness.

The methods of science aren't foolproof, but they are indefinitely perfectible.

The deadly race to appear green.

The French resistance to forcing down the gates of hell.

Confirmation bias, the tendency to notice and remember evidence that confirms our beliefs or decisions, and to ignore, dismiss, or forget evidence that is discrepant.

Seven warning signs of pseudoscience.

Merely reliving the past, without evaluating anew, reinforces the old reactions.

Fundamentalism and the confusion of the orders of abstraction.

How to care for your introvert.

Disabled -- overdefined by intension, underdefined by extension.

Aristotle may have called them "pathe," you may call them "affects" or "emotions" or "feelings," but for Korzybski they were only one aspect of our "semantic reactions."

Debates along the edge of the Third Culture.

Not cruel, but indifferent.

A general semantic view of the nature-nuture debate.

Increased toleration is a characteristic of increased consciousness of abstracting.

The brakes are applied to another infinite velocity in physics.

The land that evolution forgot.

Junk science Oscars.

Do you use only 10% of your brain?

If your personal experiences have made you neurotic, you'll need psychiatric care when you read what happened to your ancestors.

Chimps R Us? Overevaluating by similarities, underevaluating by differences.

It's not merely what you say, but how you say it. (free registration)

Semantic factors in the ascent of the West and the decline of Islam.

More cracks in the foundations of physics: quantum hoax.

Fashionable bigotry.

Sydney Hook.

Semantics of black inner-city life.

The author confuses causality with predictability. Even seemingly random events have causes.

Enemies of the open society.

Extensionalization in the retroactive evaluation of human behavior.

The power of magnets to empty the wallets of those unconscious of abstracting.

Normal to be different.

The latest speculations on the fate of the universe.

Stephen Pinker deconstructs some myths about human nature.

Future wars may be fought with designer bugs.

Rote learning of disconnected facts.

Contrary to the Aristotelian law of non-contradiction, Hitler demonstrated one could be good and bad.

Catholic agonistes.

Chimps R us?

Composer searches for, but cannot find, absolute silence.

The afterlife of Marshall McLuhan.

A history of an obscenity.

Charlotte Schuchardt Read, Korzybski's assistant from 1939 to 1950 and former director of the Institute of General Semantics, died July 25, 2002 at age 92.

The American civic religion.

Reckoning with risk.

Surprise, Uncertainty and Mental Structures. Note the author uses the term "semantic" in the sense that Korzybski uses the term "verbal"; he uses "schemata" in the sense Korzybski uses the term "semantic."

Verbal flatulence in the structure of evolutionary theory.

Extending risk assessment, cost-benefit analysis to our daily activities.

The decline of racial politics.

Mom, someone changed the definitions.

Candor from a doctor's office.

Risk.

Portrait of a tyrant.

The battle over Sigmund Freud.

Paul Kurtz won't talk with the dead. (free registration)

The genetic revolution.

Fifteen arguments against creationism.

The inevitability of human cloning.

A sense of history.

Stephen Jay Gould, 1941-2002, accidental creationist.

Unnatural selection or the confusion of the orders of abstraction in science.

The next revolution in science? Or does hype and secrecy have no disciplinary boundaries?

The merits of meritocracy.

Doctors resist treatment based on probabilities and race.

Debating pseudoscience. (free registration)

How to tell the truth and other self-serving lies.

British mathematician claims to have solved Poincare's Conjecture about 3-dimensional space.

Karl Popper, champion of extensional methods in science.

How the search for truth gets corrupted by politics.

Painting outside the lines.

History as a politico-economic weapon.

The blood lust of identity reactions.

Abe Lincoln was a woman, and other reasons to be conscious of abstracting.

More intensional speculations about the origins of the universe,

Two kinds of medicine or two kinds of standards for medicine?

A traveller's guide to Heaven.

Can we survive the threat of dihydrogen monoxide?

As our knowledge grows, so does our fear of uncertainty.

Nature worship.

Untouched by a nurse.

Facts and fictions about evolutionary psychology.

Apologizing for the West.

Words and rules for combining words.

Consumerism and the search for meaning.

The Holy Bible gets a gender-lift.

A tale of political correctness (confusion of the orders of abstraction).

The decline of marriage.

Paul Dirac, honorary poet laureate of modern physics.

The quest for a risk-free society.

A semantics of religion or blasphemy?

Fido barks again in the never-ending genes versus environment debate.

Sexual bliss in the Muslim hereafter? The deadly semantics of getting laid.

In World War II Americans were encouraged to conserve; in the latest war Americans are encouraged to consume. The vicious cycle of commercialism in America.

The global climate: change is the norm.

The application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to his role in the development of nuclear weapons for the Nazis.

The end of human evolution? Not if you realize that cultural evolution (time-binding) has superceded genetic evolution in humans.

The beauty of math.

The decline of the Muslim empire.

Clueless in the Middle East.

The campus diversity fraud.

Despite political correctness (a confusion of the orders of abstraction), sane police work, like science, must be built on statistics and probability theory.

A critique of intelligent design theory.

When religious zeal met reality.

English -- the universal tongue.

It may be the thought that counts, but liquor is quicker.

Did a complex God evolve "by chance" or was He created by "intelligent design"?

Those who control our mass media control us.

Interstellar molecular hydrogen may bring an abrupt halt to the expanding universe.

Ernst Mayr reflects on the future of Darwinism.

The bonfires of hysteria.

The dislike of the dissimilar.

The cultivation of tolerance and self-criticism (aspects of consciousness of abstracting) sets the West apart from cultures armed for "jihad" against "infidels."

The continuing Christian fundamentalist jihad against evolution.

A creationist 'scientist' who openly professes the reversed order of evaluation.

If you don't succeed, play the blame game.

The evolution of altruism. (Free registration required)

The afterlife-obsessed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power and danger.

Terrorists' acts depend on an unwillingness to relate to their victims.

Falling prey to the notion of Mother Africa as a continent of indistinguishable black people.

End of the Tower of Babel?

Sex and physics.

Corporate punishment.

Thomas Kuhn failed to see the human evaluational significance of science. (Free registration required.)

Mutiny on the bounty.

Not in MY backyard.

Modern cosmologists at work on their latest creation myths. Free registration required.

The evolution of political correctness.

Explanations in science.

Deepak Chopra.


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