Ashes from Ebola victim's apartment in limbo

[freshwest]

20. Carl Sagan warned us:

Carl Sagan wrote The Demon Haunted World (© 1995) as “a personal statement, reflecting my love affair with science. But there’s a second reason:

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...”

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

From Amazon:

How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don't understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.

Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today's so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.

My own intrepretation of this is that it's developed through media. Those who loved Star Trek or whatever once caught their interest and inspired their view of the future, have changed their premises of how the world works, due to the changes in the media.

We've seen magical thinking grow and become accepted, some of it from science fiction which at times gave us a better view of the future, and other times warned us of bad trends. What were once benign fantasies have given a sense of inevitability to shockingly totalitarian visions presented where only the most brutal survive and people emulate this. Those who don't ascribe to it are termed weak and losers. It didn't have to be this way.

The other thread is the total disbelief of everything that has been installed in the mind which disdains not only science, but all democratic process. Those by nature are best handled by those of a less dramatic mindset, of clearer and humbler temperament, but are seen as weak by those whose mental landscape is encircled by extremes of fantasy and power.

There was an addiction built into Americans going home to relax with their television on in the evenings and having pleasure at the various ways reality was parsed for humor and sentimentality. Soon came the vicarious experience of watching Ted Turner's CNN non-stop news to build up a sense of being involved and seeing history made in real time. People also trusted the news to tell them the truth and not hold back.

Then media ownership changed hands as has the internet, to become the conservative entertainment news and opinion industry. And it's been swallowed up whole and they've been banging all of us on the head for over a score of years until it, not science, not observable human relations and reflection, is the shorthand by which many Americans view life.

So no surprise to me that such ignorance resulted in this circus, as the Ebola ashes have been imbued with a deadly spirit that can never be disproved to them. We are losing our lives and democracy as presidents feared we would, by not being educated. I think many took a decades long holiday, naively expecting bureaucrats to take care of all these details instead of being willing to join in with it to transform it from within and left the field

Now the baggers joined the system to loot it while denying others a step on the ladder upward, and they are a media creation. They're winning because they believe in government to do what they want, but they don't want the same things from it that we do.