Letters from Scientology

Back when I was 16 (this was in 1972), I was playing in a band that had just hooked up with a new lead singer. During one band practice, he asked me whether I had ever heard of "Scientology." I said that I hadn't. He asked whether he could arrange to send me some literature on the organization and I said "sure." A few weeks later I received a brochure from Scientology. It claimed that the organization was scientific. I remember the literature containing photos of people being tested or trained using electronic meters with electrodes that were attached to their skin. I didn't know what to think of all of this at the time, but I didn't respond to the brochure's invitation to call a phone number to learn more. A week later, I received another piece of literature, and then another and another. Sometimes these were postcards, sometimes booklets. Sometimes they described various aspects of the organization. Sometimes they invited me to lectures, open houses and other events. I began to think of Scientologists as being a bit over the top; somehow, they reminded me of UFO believers (I don't actually like that term; I'm referring to the people who believe that sentient beings from other planets have visited Earth). The Scientology literature kept streaming in, week after week. Sometimes I received 4 or 5 pieces of mail in a week. I almost always received at least 3 mailings every week. I was living at my parents' house in Overland Missouri at that time, and I would glance at this stuff and throw it away. But it kept coming, month after month and then year after year. I never responded to any of this literature. I never made a phone call to anyone at Scientology and no one from Scientology ever called me. I did go to one open house at the St. Louis Scientology center, but I merely looked around for less than an hour, then left. I never signed anything or asked to stay on the mailing list. I moved away from home in 1978 to go to law school. The mailings continued to come, though, at least two per week. Even after I graduated from law school (three years later) the literature was still coming, at least one per week. To the best of my recollection, an occasional piece of Scientology literature was still being sent to my former house in Overland, even as I approached 30 years of age. This will be a wild guess, but I would bet that I received an average of 2 pieces of mail per week from Scientology from 1972 until 1985. that would mean that I received well over 1,000 pieces of mail from Scientology, even though I never responded. When I visited home and saw the piles of stuff waiting for me on the mail table, I felt sorry for the members of Scientology who were paying to send me all of that mail. I assumed (based on stories I read) that many young adults were handing over almost all of the disposable income to Scientology so that the organization could send me mail that I would throw away. Like many things I've experienced, there is no lesson I can draw from this experience, merely this anecdote regarding the endless mailings I received from Scientology.

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On eating three meals per day

Who created the "rule" that we need to eat three meals per day? At Alternet, Anneli Rufus looks at the history of how we eat. Here's an excerpt:

"There is no biological reason for eating three meals a day," says Yale University history professor Paul Freedman, editor of Food: The History of Taste (University of California Press, 2007). The number of meals eaten per day, along with the standard hour and fare for each, "are cultural patterns no different from how close you stand when talking to people or what you do with your body as you speak. Human beings are comfortable with patterns because they're predictable. We've become comfortable with the idea of three meals. On the other hand, our schedules and our desires are subverting that idea more and more every day," Freedman says.
But there do seem to be benefits to a family eating meals together:
"American parents have a particular kind of guilt about the disappearance of family meals," Freedman says. Perhaps for good reason: A recent University of Minnesota study found that habitual shared family meals improve nutrition, academic performance and interpersonal skills and reduce the risk of eating disorders.

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The growing global warming gap . . . psychoanalyzed

MSNBC offers the following on the global warming gap, based on a recent Gallop poll:

On the question of whether they believed the effects of global warming were already happening, the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering "yes" plummeted from almost 50 percent in 2007-2008 to 30 percent or less in 2010, while liberals and Democrats remained at 70 percent or more, according to the study in this spring's Sociological Quarterly.
Notice that the question wasn't about causation. It did not ask the cause of the warming (human caused versus natural fluctuation), but merely whether the Earth was warming. Perhaps Gallop should have coupled its question with these just to get at the root of this insanity (and see here):  A) Do you trust thermometers? B) When your mother used a thermometer, did you trust her? and C)   When scientists announce the following data, are these highly credentialed professionals actually acting as conniving scam artists who are out to try to somehow make a bunch of money? Caveat:  I know that I've betrayed my beliefs that the earth is, indeed warming.  This is not to suggest that I ever advocated any sort of cap and trade approach to the problem, which I consider to be a fraud in general and riddled with corruption wherever it has been allegedly implemented (based, for example, on this Harper's Magazine article titled "Conning the Climate," (October 2007). Rather, I believe that we need to have the intelligence and courage to directly regulate our production of CO2.   I'm not confident that we'll be able to do that.  Why?  Because America has an extremely long track record of failing to do what intelligence and self-restraint would require.   We are a nation steeped in ignorance, as demonstrated by the large numbers of people who refused to believe basic thermometer data. People don't engage in climate denialism because they are "stupid."   Most evidence deniers are quite capable of considering evidence and making rational decisions, but there is a lot more going on in humans than rational thought.  There is also our emotional/social side. To describe human animals, psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of a lawyer riding an elephant.  Public assertions that contradict clear evidence are public displays of group loyalty, and sometimes people are more compelled to display loyalty than to crunch data to a logical conclusion that conflicts with tenets embraced by the group.  For the most part, this decision to choose loyalty over evidence is not a fully conscious one, but it can often result in a compelling display of loyalty to the extent that it is an expensive display.  Amotz Zahavi has written extensively on this topic of expensive and therefore reliable displays.  I discuss this urge to display as a badge of group belonging in my five-part series called "Mending Fences."  See also, this post on the work of Richard Sosis. I would describe the process like this: It's as though the felt compulsion to show loyalty to the ingroup erects an electrified fence in the mind of the group member protecting the group's creed of beliefs from serious critical inquiry.  If humans were really heating up the planet, it could call for humans (to the extent that they acted as good-hearted moral beings) to make dramatic coordinated changes in the way we run our society.  But if this could be done at all, it could only be done by government fiat.  But modern conservatives hold it as a religious belief that government is feckless and wasteful.  Although it seems pointedly absurd for those of us who trust the readings of thermometers, it is much easier to deny rising temperatures than to admit this evidence but then explain why one is not doing anything meaningful about the problem. Especially given the fact that conservatives tend to live inland (coastal areas tend to have more liberal inhabitants--Jonathan Haidt explains this geographical dispersion).

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Was 9/11 a crime or a war?

At Huffpo, George Lakoff discusses the consequences for the way in which Americans have framed the 9/11 attacks.

Colin Powell recommended calling the attack a crime. But Cheney understood that if it were framed as an act of war, then Bush and Cheney would be given war powers. So war it was, a metaphorical "war" on terror. The American people, intimidated by the vision of the towers falling, accepted the framing. Democrats, seeing the reaction of their constituents, went along with the framing. Except for my congresswoman, Barbara Lee. I ran to my computer to be the first to congratulate her on her no vote. Terror meant everyone should be afraid of terrorists. Throughout the Midwest the predictable happened. A highly memorable event raises one's judgment of the probability that it will happen to them. All over America people started being afraid of terrorists. Bush asked for and got unlimited war powers and the Patriot Act.
I discussed this same issue in this earlier post on the frame of war.

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