陈凯博客： www.kaichenblog.blogspot.com

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Liu Xiaobo - Don't stop 'Ideas' having sex with each other
刘晓波所代表的是自由的头脑

陈凯一语： Kai Chen's Words:

在一个没有个体自由的、自我禁锢的文化心态中，思想的近亲乱伦有如在一个没有迁移自由的村庄里的生理的近亲乱伦一样，只会产生脑残畸形的怪胎。 中国专制的心理、生理与思维的近亲乱伦已持续了两千年。 从专制恶性循环转为自由良性循环，中文系的人们需要付出比任何其它文化更大的勇气，努力与代价。 “揪发助飞”的自我隔绝的病态心理是所有中文系人们要杜绝与摈弃的。

In a mindset that repels individual freedom and worships self-isolation/castration, the incest of thoughts/ideas, just like the incest of physical beings, will necessarily result distortion and perversion of perception of reality/truth. The Chinese incest of mind and body has been going on for two thousand years. Thus in order to reverse this vicious cycle of incestuous perversion of mind, the Chinese-speaking population will have to exert more energy with more willingness and courage than any other culture. They must abandon the pathological mindset of "pulling one's own hair to lift oneself off the ground" they have adhered since the beginning of the Chinese civilization.

陈凯博客： www.kaichenblog.blogspot.com

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Liu Xiaobo - Don't stop 'Ideas' having sex with each other
刘晓波所代表的是自由的头脑

News Type: Event — Sun Oct 10, 2010 8:52 AM

By iqbal.latif

(China has the most rigid censorship program in the world. Chinese media stay resolutely silent and exactly doing something opposite on Nobel winner and imprisoned Liu Xiaobo. He wins one of the world's highest honors, but most of his countrymen have no idea. Web search engines return error messages for his name. The few who try to celebrate are arrested.)

It counts with providers of services that filter searches, block sites, erase any "inconvenient" content and monitor email traffic. China blocks or filters Internet content relating to Tibetan independence, Taiwan independence, police brutality, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, pornography, some international news sources and propaganda outlets, certain religious movements, and many blogging websites.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great ... Russelland swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. -Bertrand Russell

From behind the iron veil of Burma's totalitarian terror comes the courageous voices of those untold stories of freedom - some remarkable people who risked it all for their love of freedom and to create a better life for people of their beloved country. Burma's Supreme Court issued a public notice on Thursday saying that it will hold a hearing on Oct. 18 for detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's latest appeal against her house arrest. The notice, which was posted at the Supreme Court, stated that the judges will decide whether to consider the "Special Appeal," according to Suu Kyi's lawyer Nyan Win.

It is a foolish man who grapples for certainty in this age of New Enlightenment. We strive to know only to realise how much we don't know and that our quest with every discovery becomes just a little bit more unending as we delve into the mysteries of eternity itself. The human mind has the ability to conceive the extraordinary; the biggest triumph that we have recently acquired is our limitless breadth of imagination and our thoughts. It is our thoughts that are real danger for the established clerics. Thought breeds freedom of mind and thinking that leads to new discoveries. Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great ... Russelland swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. -Bertrand Russell

Since life began on Earth, several major mass extinctions have appreciably exceeded the background extinction rate. The most latest, the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, occurred 65 million years ago. In the past 540 million years there have been five major events when over 50% of animal species died. There probably were mass extinctions in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons, but before the Phanerozoic there were no animals with hard body parts to leave a significant fossil record. Mankind by having some control over regular natural cycle of mass extinctions may have inadvertently helped Sir Rees argument on the way we will evolve in future.

Our forefathers brought to life from graves would be surprised with the evolution of today. We can visualize the progress that we will accomplish in the future and we can plan obstacles laying ahead charting our course clearly. We will not watch and let a stray asteroid obliterate our planet; we will not watch the skies with pathetic helplessness for incoming death in the form of a stray asteroid like the 'Tyrannosaurus' of the Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago; today we have the capacity to change the direction of the asteroid, the ability to conquer natural extinction which is part of nature is only possible due to our ability to think.

It is edict of nature that free thought cannot be chained; it will find freedom. No chains are strong enough to chain liberty and emancipation from totalitarianism.

The element of a bombshell surprise has died; this is the unique gift of a new level of consciousness. Religious miracles have lost all significance, religious philosophy requires to be subject to rigours of common sense and logic, life after death of a human being needs to tread the same path as the soul of a chimp who is 97% genetically close to us. Why should 'two souls' differ paths with 3% of genetic difference.

It is because of their collective perseverance that the galaxy has become our next frontier in our collective psyche where just a few centuries ago flying was an inconceivable idea and distance was the greatest barrier. However the human mind today thinks and visualizes travel through time, warp and subspace. Our dramas conceive of extraordinary situations where cyborgs and aliens travel through time in space operas. This new conception of time travel and sequels of journeys through space have left a child growing up in this new millennium very little to be stunned from.

This is why 'Thought' is so subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. That is why it is 'Thought' that is always in chains. Whenever I see a man in chains, whatever the power of oppression is, oppression fails and freedom survives, no chains are strong enough to arrest the urge for freedom. The course of human nature is such, this is how nature evolves. Where we are today is a result of liberty and free thought.

We are only 10,000 years old civilization until the Sun burns out, billions of years of intelligent and conscious life lays ahead of us; we are at the cusp of a new birth, no censorship, no religion, no ideology is big enough to capture that whole spectrum of development and evolutionary leap of a free mind.

''As believers in the literal truth of the Bible, they knew it was there. Even so, the explorers who say they found seven large wooden compartments beneath snow and volcanic debris near the peak of Mount Ararat can be forgiven their excitement.

'It's not 100 per cent that it is Noah's Ark, but we think it is 99.9 per cent that this is it,' said Yeung Wing-cheung, a filmmaker ''

But Mike Pitt, a British archaeologist, said the evangelical explorers had yet to produce compelling evidence. He added: 'If there had been a flood capable of lifting a huge ship 4km up the side of a mountain 4,800 years ago, I think there would be substantial geological evidence for this flood around the world. And there isn't.'

We humans as a result of tradition, authority and revelation are blinded by our limitations to discern the truth; we really know very little. We are standing at the edge of the ocean trying to grasp its limitless expanse. Indisputably though our efforts to interpret our existence and our consciousness and curiosity to describe our reality is what distinguishes us from other living species.

Scientists find new possibility for the crossing of Moses and Israelites.

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." -- Galileo Galilei

When the Pharaoh and his horsemen tried to follow the Israelites, the waters crashed back down, drowning the army, or so the story goes in the book of Exodus.

But now researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado have found a location in the Nile River's ancient delta where an east wind -- blowing at 63 mph for 12 hours -- could have pushed back the waters and exposed a muddy land bridge. When the wind died down, the water would have come rushing back, according to NCAR's Carl Drews, lead author of a paper published today in the journal PLoS ONE. CU oceanographer Weiqing Han was a co-author of the study.

But critics argue that a separation for few hours would leave at bottom of a big river like Nile lot of quicksand which is just not possible to cross.

My interest has always been charting the course of why some nations, some people and some societies falter where others keep going. My interest has been great on origins of why some are 'failing nations' versus other which are developed. One thing that distinguishes a great leap forward is about 'Ideas and thoughts' allowed to have sex with each other. Chinese media stay resolutely silent and doing something exactly opposite on Nobel winner and imprisoned Liu Xiaobo. He wins one of the world's highest honors, but most of his countrymen have no idea. Web search engines return error messages over his name. The few who try to celebrate are arrested.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has registered a list of the 10 top countries* where blogging activity is considered risky and in which you can get in serious trouble for doing so. Wherever free flow of thought is averted, draconian laws sway supreme and take hold; every one of these countries host prisoners of conscience that are globally renowned. Arresting freedom today is like arresting evolution of nature. This is the inconsistency of China: It's an economic superpower that is very much a part of the world and yet, on scale of freedom of thought it is divorced from it. The quiet was evident in China on Saturday. Dissident Liu Xiaobo languished in a prison cell, perhaps ignorant that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a day earlier. His wife was arrested after talking to a reporter and taken away by police. And the Chinese news media appeared resolute to make-believe that nothing had happened. Other 1.4 billion Chinese, they didn't have to act. Many of them don't know Liu exists, let alone that he has been honoured with the world's most coveted award.

Free flow of information is submitted to censorship by these governments. All these countries where thoughts are chained are dictatorships or totalitarian regimes that restrict access to this media and impose prison penalties for uploading any “misleading” information to personal web pages. Economic progress is nothing, like in the case of China material upliftment, without a free peaceful mind it is the biggest hell hole. It will all implode big time, those like Soros who think Chinese have taken the world hostage as a result of their huge FX reserves forget that the real leaders of China are prisoners of conscience like Liu Xiaobo. All these trillions of $'s of reserves built on 1.4 billion people entrapped in a closed society is a freedom revolution bound to happen. Freedom of mind cannot be entrapped for far too long, the chains will break. Aung San Suu Kyi's and Liu Xiaobo's are manifestations of a free mind; they will win.

This is why 'Thought' is so subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. That is why it is 'Thought' that is always in chains. Whenever I see a man in chains, whatever the power of oppression is, oppression fails and freedom survives, no chains are strong enough to arrest the urge for freedom. The course of human nature is such, this is how nature evolves. Where we are today is a result of liberty and free thought.

Let me take you through a tour de force of mankind's progress to date from our very inception to Liu Xiaobo.

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible. Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC)

We humans as a result of tradition, authority and revelation are blinded by our limitations to discern the truth; we really know very little. We are standing at the edge of the ocean trying to grasp its limitless expanse. Indisputably though our efforts to interpret our existence and our consciousness and curiosity to describe our reality is what distinguishes us from other living species. Great ideas came to light only because obstructions that stir human spirit, motivated people to do and discover things they otherwise would not have done. We are small and give very little credence to our own judgment but as Edmund Burke said 'Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.'

'Progress of science' and 'Freedom of Mind' are interrelated. Marcel Proust said 'As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.'

British author Matt Ridley argues that, through history, the engine of human progress and prosperity has been, and is, "ideas having sex with each other." Through history, the engine of human progress and prosperity has been, and is, the mating of ideas. The sophistication of the modern world, says Ridley, lies not in individual intelligence or imagination; it is a collective enterprise. In his recent book The Rational Optimist, Ridley (whose previous works include Genome and Nature via Nurture) sweeps the entire arc of human history to powerfully argue that "prosperity comes from everybody working for everybody else."

From behind the iron veil of Burma's totalitarian terror comes the courageous voices of those untold stories of freedom - some remarkable people who risked it all for their love of freedom and to create a better life for people of their beloved country. Burma's Supreme Court issued a public notice on Thursday saying that it will hold a hearing on Oct. 18 for detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's latest appeal against her house arrest. The notice, which was posted at the Supreme Court, stated that the judges will decide whether to consider the “Special Appeal,” according to Suu Kyi's lawyer Nyan Win.

It is a foolish man who grapples for certainty in this age of New Enlightenment. We strive to know only to realise how much we don't know and that our quest with every discovery becomes just a little bit more unending as we delve into the mysteries of eternity itself. The human mind has the ability to conceive the extraordinary; the biggest triumph that we have recently acquired is our limitless breadth of imagination and our thoughts. It is our thoughts that are the real danger for the established clerics. Thought breeds freedom of mind and thinking that leads to new discoveries. Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pits of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great ... and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. -Bertrand Russell

Thought and freedom of expression is a new development for this new age; since time immemorial intimidation of blasphemy and irreverence are common tools of dogma and orthodoxy. Bruno was burnt at the stake for publishing a treatise on the workings of the universe, based on the Copernican system. Tycho Brahe who plotted the positions of the stars was severely persecuted, but even so proposed a system of a fixed earth with the planets revolving around the sun. These great minds were persecuted but they did not relent nevertheless. “The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstruction in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought, so far, to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind” -David Hume

It is because of their collective perseverance that the galaxy has become our next frontier in our collective psyche where just a few centuries ago flying was an inconceivable idea and distance was the greatest barrier. However the human mind today thinks and visualizes travel through time, warp and subspace. Our dramas conceive of extraordinary situations where cyborgs and aliens travel through time in space operas. This new conception of time travel and sequels of journeys through space have left a child growing up in this new millennium very little to be stunned from.

One of the greatest French philosophers Descartes said, “it is no objection that I do not comprehend the infinite or that there are countless other things in God that I can in no way either comprehend or perhaps even touch with my thought.”

However now there is the relentless collective human grasp toward the unknown. The mind of Gods is being understood or at least sought to be understood. Such is the genius of human imagination that time travel is possible today instead of next few hundred years, a contemporary adult would not be very astonished. The progress of next few hundred years or thousands of years is already speculated on in the fiction of Star Trek. What is fiction and conceivable is something that is doable.

Our future and our past are can only be enlivened through our dynamic thoughts - that is the power of our questioning minds. Through imaginative sequels like fiction based Jurassic Park to Independence Day, nothing from our past or from the future is left to imagination.

The element of a bombshell surprise has died; this is the unique gift of a new level of consciousness. Religious miracles have lost all significance, religious philosophy requires to be subject to rigours of common sense and logic, life after death of a human being needs to tread the same path as the soul of a chimp who is 97% genetically close to us. Why should 'two souls' differ paths with 3% of genetic difference. Our forefathers brought to life from graves would be surprised with the evolution of today. We can visualize the progress that we will accomplish in the future and we can plan obstacles laying ahead charting our course clearly. We will not watch and let a stray asteroid obliterate our planet; we will not watch the skies with pathetic helplessness for incoming death in the form of a stray asteroid like the 'Tyrannosaurus' of the Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago; today we have the capacity to change the direction of the asteroid, the ability to conquer natural extinction which is part of nature is only possible due to our ability to think.

Craig Venter is set on trying to unfold the complexity of life. He led the private effort to sequence the human genome - the genetic code that creates life. For him the next big challenge is to create living, artificial organisms from a kit of genes, and says he is well on his way. He believes an artificial single cell organism is possible in two years.

To unravel the complexity of life on our planet in order to understand more about where humans come from, Dr Venter embarked on a round the world ocean voyage to take samples of seawater every 200 miles. At every stop he found new species. At one location, one barrelful contained 1.3 million new genes and 50,000 new species, he said. Microbes make up over a half of all Earth's biomass. A mouthful of seawater accidentally swallowed sends millions of different bacteria into your gut. But the aims of his mission are even wider than that. Future engineered species could be a source of food, energy, and could help regenerate damaged environments. To Dr Venter, his venture is crucial to understanding our future. "Almost every major religion requires humans to try to improve society," he says.

One certainty in an uncertain world is clear to Professor Rees: Whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate in the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth.

Since life began on Earth, several major mass extinctions have appreciably exceeded the background extinction rate. The most latest, the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, occurred 65 million years ago. In the past 540 million years there have been five major events when over 50% of animal species died. There probably were mass extinctions in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons, but before the Phanerozoic there were no animals with hard body parts to leave a significant fossil record. Mankind by having some control over regular natural cycle of mass extinctions may have inadvertently helped Sir Rees's argument on the way we will evolve in future.

Sir Martin Rees thinks that computer models can only go so far when we do not even fully understand how we came about on Earth in the first instance. We have only existed, as far as we know, for a few billion years.

"If you represent the Earth's lifetime in a single year, the 21st Century would be a quarter of a second in June," said Professor Rees.

We are only 10,000 years old civilization until the Sun burns out, billions of years of intelligent and conscious life lays ahead of us; we are at the cusp of a new birth, no censorship, no religion, no ideology is big enough to capture that whole spectrum of development and evolutionary leap of a free mind. As we are not even halfway through our allotted time on Earth before the Sun itself burns out. "Any life and intelligence that exists then will be as different from us as we are to bacteria," Rees explains. Our rate of population growth and our addiction to fossil fuels and consumption of resources only adds to the uncertainty about our future.

I would quote David Hume who summed up life of people like Craig Venter Rees “The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstruction in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought, so far, to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) followed by Benedetti and Stevin (1548-1620), experimented with falling bodies. Urban VIII imprisoned Galileo after ordering him to retract "damnable heresy" that earth revolves around sun. It is true when Anais Nin said that "When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow."

Aristotle said that the essential truth is that hope is a waking dream and poverty the parent of revolution. When hope dies, human endurance and fortitude comes to an end. It is then scarcity and deficiency rears its ugly head. Living with the hope of a better future keeps the passion of living alive and kicking, half the battle of survival. Nations and societies that are historically stuck in poverty and misery have one obsession in common, mania of dogma and false hopes. Hopes and dreams on which actions are based have to be pragmatic and real. It is poverty of thought that leads to material poverty.

Rewards in life are not founded on principles of gambling and chance. Planning life on chance and sweepstakes spoils is day dreaming. Dreams have to be real, and for most of us lies ahead the tough grind of mental and physical work. Any hope based on hard work, positive and optimist interpretations of events and a long walk towards the goals more often than not will hit a top prize. No neural dungeon of dogma or ideology is big enough to confine the expanse of human imagination; sceptics and pessimists rarely ever survive the long walks of inventive dreams; they habitually perish snared within their own set of complexities.

Inventions, discoveries and incessant progress of human philosophy and sciences owe their successes to winning combination of visionaries and optimists. Persecutions of inventors and realists by the orthodoxy and dogma are the hallmark of cynics. From Socrates, Plato and Aristotle who laid the foundations of science and philosophy in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, to Copernicus who produced his paper on the motion of the heavenly bodies (the heliocentric system) in 1514, the story of human civilisation is victory of visionaries over sceptics. Those who cannot find peace amongst themselves will never find peace anywhere, the nirvana begins within one's own self. Soren Kierkegaard beautifully caps it for me 'A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.'

It is edict of nature that free thought cannot be chained; it will find freedom. No chains are strong enough to chain liberty and emancipation from totalitarianism.