Another excellent piece from the ever reliable Dmitry Orlov that covers most things - including deceased felines - or are they?
Also sums up the propaganda that passes for journalism in the West and the scant relation it has to reality:
Dmitry Orlov wrote:Here, reality becomes fractured into parallel universes as soon as we make the realization that we are being lied to. Were there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? No, and the vial of white powder which Colin Powell menacingly held up at the UN was fake. The Iraqi mobile biological weapons factories did not exist. Was Al Qaeda active in Iraq prior to the US invasion? No, we know that it wasn't. These lies are now known to be factual—uncontested, commonplace knowledge. Next: do we make the arbitrary leap of judgment and declare that that's all the lies we will have ever been told, or do we admit the possibility that this is only the tip of an iceberg of lies, that lying is a modus operandi for the operatives behind them? If we do, then, to be conservative, for every official narrative we must construct one or more unofficial but also plausible (and perhaps much more plausible) narratives. Each of them constitutes a parallel universe, and we can't know which of them we inhabit until some happy accident—a leak, an investigation, a damning bit of physical evidence, or an outright admission of complicity or guilt—collapses the probability waveform, destroying all the parallel universes but the real one.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools - Douglas Adams.
If we do, then, to be conservative, for every official narrative we must construct one or more unofficial but also plausible (and perhaps much more plausible) narratives. Each of them constitutes a parallel universe, and we can't know which of them we inhabit until some happy accident—a leak, an investigation, a damning bit of physical evidence, or an outright admission of complicity or guilt—collapses the probability waveform, destroying all the parallel universes but the real one.
Heh heh. Very good.
We were listening to some radio broadcast or other recently and John Kerry came on. I said to the OH, "Every sentence he utters, reverse its apparent meaning. You're more likely to hear the truth".
It worked. It's not likely to provide the absolute truth but, as Orlov intimates, it's probably one of several narratives nearer to the actual truth.
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
I imagine to get at the actual truth, you need to examine all possible sources and be very clear about what possible biases, agendae etc. might be obscuring the real facts. Even then, how much is simply being kept from us?
As to the allusions to quantum and many-worlds theory- they are just that. Non-collapsed quantum wavefunctions don't really scale up as presumably any interference with a quantum object is in effect an observation. Presumably real parallel universes exist simultaneously and without interference. Though, far, far greater minds than I have wrestled with this issue to no avail, so...
Is there a parallel universe in which parallel universes don't exist?
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
When I saw this post I thought it referred to the sad death on the same day of Patrick Whitefield, the UK premier Permaculture guru, and Leonard Nimoi of Dr Spock fame.
