as for alex jones, i agree, he does alot to provoke thoughts about topics otherwise not discussed but he does have a cult-like qualities. as was mentioned, we must adopt the take everything with a grain of salt attitude. I like how he explains the corrupt federal reserve bank. Also check out how he infiltrated Bohemian Grove, a gathering place for world leaders – pretty horifing stuff. Gives a new meaning to cult.

Also, I’ve always had a hard time with the dogma that says in order to be a good-little-doomer you have to yank your kids out of public school. As someone who used to be married to a Jehovah’s Witness where all information about the world was carefully filtered by their creationist/end-times reality-distortion-field, it smacks of cultish-ness.

I’m not afraid of my daughter receiving BAU-style messaging through public school because there is no way for her NOT to be influenced by BAU. She’s in the middle of a BAU world and there is no way to avoid this without locking her in the basement 24/7. To me, the responsibility of parents is to help kids make sense of this messaging, just as we had to do the hard way when we took the red pill, not to completely shield kids from it.

But to each his own.

A better approach/alternative to telling ourselves what we want to hear even though it’s not so, is to not let science get obscured by social/political/economic factors, and then once we have our head around that we can start to consider how to shape a new future that addresses the issues we face whilst trying to build truly democratic invisible structures that can progressively replace the illusion of democracy we see today, and that will otherwise inevitably collapse.

speaking about Alex Jones, doesn’t it make you wonder he comes up with things such as this…

http://www.infowars.com/articles/life/pianka_kill_90_percent_echos_un_elite_ngo_policies.htm

…and doesn’t do the checks one would expect a diligent citizen to do if he learns about serious concerns w.r.t. the validity of his story? In this Mims/Pianka thing, do a bit of research on Forrest Mims. It all boils down to a creationist launching a smear campaign against an academic biologist. When all this came out, did Alex Jones provide that additional info to shed a new light on the issue? No, because it soo nicely fits into his Universe of unshakeable beliefs in a big big conspiracy of the powerful to mass-cull the human population.

So, *please* do me a very big favour, and seriously ask yourself the question: what are the reasons for believing in what A.J. has to say on a particular issue? If you tell me that you think he may be right on quite a number of things – also(/in particular) issues that cannot be discussed openly – I am perfectly happy with this. But you must accept that someone who evidently does not check additional info as it comes up is practically bound to be very wrong a number of times as well.

So, while I am basically quite happy that Alex Jones is around, for a number of reasons, please, don’t blindly rush off to believe everything he said, just because he said it. Use your own head. One big problem with his way to read the world is that he found such a neat way to explain every conceivable observation in a way that it matches his beliefs. Evidence of a conspiracy? Great. No evidence? “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” – the conspiracy must run deeper than expected. Also great.

Can you give me a good answer to this question: Pick a particular issue Alex Jones talks a lot about. What sort of evidence would make him re-evaluate what he strongly believed in in the past?

Now?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg

And a post worth responding to (but only if you follow the guidelines for doing so…):

http://permaculture.org.au/2009/12/07/greenhouse-effect-in-a-bottle/

what I especially had in mind when I wrote about this lacking unawareness of the wider context was that, as an educator, you shape perceptions of what education is about to a much stronger degree than you are aware.

An anecdote: I once was invited to give a talk at a physics colloquium, where, having dinner with the physicists in the evening, I somehow mentioned that I got my in-laws an electric welding kit as a birthday present, as they can make good use of it. I immediately received a response “but one has to have a certificate first before one can weld”. I just thought to myself: “Oh-my-god. What sort of brain damage is this education business causing?” Granted, there is a place for certified welders. But for household use? To someone who grew up on a farm like me, that’s just so utterly outlandish an idea.

Another anecdote: Many years ago, when my cousin was little, I went to cinema with him. He just had started learning to read at school, and when the final credits scrolled through, he told me “Ah, that word starts with [such-and-such letters], and then there is a ‘v’, but I cannot read that because we haven’t had that yet at school.”

#@!&#%!& !!!

At University, I try to work against that sort of brain damage in my own courses (which is what some students hate — because they have to think). And I am ever so amazed by the amount of such thinking I see in a number of colleagues, who seemingly got so badly zombified by going through the formal education system themselves that they now pass on that rubbish to the next generation. Oh well…