Books I'd like to read .

The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic
Phenomena by Dean Radin, Ph.D.
It seems to me that one of the most important discoveries of our time
has gone basically unnoticed. Dean Radin has managed to pull it all
together into one book, and still it’s been ignored by society at large. A t
the time The Conscious Universe was published, Radin was the director
of the Consciousness Research Laboratory at the University of
Nevada, Las Vegas. As such, he led one of the three most important
parapsychology programs in academia (Princeton and the University
of Edinburgh house the other two). He has also done parapsychological
research for corporations and the US government. Radin’s message
is this: Psi phenomena have been scientifically proven to exist.
Addressing each aspect of psi separately, he shows that decades’
worth of controlled, replicable scientific experiments have yielded
positive, significant results for telepathy, perception at a distance,
perception through time, mind-matter interaction, mental interactions
with living organisms, and field consciousness (which is basically
mind-matter interaction on a large scale). For each phenomenon,
he carefully shows how the experiments have been constantly
redesigned, often ingeniously, to control for confounding factors and
otherwise make them as rigorous and unassailable as possible. He
then reviews the meta-analyses and performs his own meta-analyanalyses
on these experiments, boiling all the results from thousands and
thousands of trials down to the bottom line.
For example, to analyze the results of people trying to mentally influence
a random number generator, Radin crunched the results of
832 studies performed over almost 30 years. He found that for the
controls (i.e. people who weren’t trying to influence the numbers),
the results were right at the chance level of 50 percent. But when
people tried to influence the numbers, the numbers did indeed
change. So much so, in fact, that the odds of those results happening
by chance are more than a trillion to one.
S i m i l a r l y, Radin crunched the numbers from 148 experiments in which
people tried to influence the toss of dice. These experiments were
done over a 50-year period and involved more than 2,500 people trying
to influence 2.6 million dice throws. Overall, the dice throws in the
control group matched chance (specifically, 50.02 percent). However,
among people trying to influence the dice, the hit rate was 51.2 per cent. As Radin says, “This does not look like much, but statistically it
results in odds against chance of more than a billion to one.”
Radin also addresses and refutes the criticisms that have been leveled
against the experiments and meta-analyses, including charges
of selective reporting. He goes on to discuss some theoretical
aspects of psi phenomena and what all this implies for biology, psychology,
medicine, business, and other areas. Interestingly, he looks
at all the corporate research that’s being directed toward parapsychology.
Such giants as Sony, Bell Labs, AT&T, and the gambling
industry have poured money into it, not to mention the research of
governmental entities, including the CIA, FBI, the US military, the
British Army, and Japan’s Science and Technology Agency.
Q u o t e: “The evidence for these basic phenomena is so well established
that most psi researchers today no longer conduct ‘proof-orie
n t e d ’ experiments. Instead, they focus largely on ‘process-oriente
d ’ questions like, What influences psi performance? and How
does it work?” [p 6]
Quote: “Honorton and Ferrari surveyed the English-language scientific
literature to retrieve all experiments reporting forced-choice precognition
tests. They found 309 studies, reported in 113 articles published
from 1935 to 1987, and contributed by sixty-two different
investigators. The database consisted of nearly two million individual
trials by more than fifty thousand subjects. The methods used in
these studies ranged from the use of ESP cards to fully automated,
computer-generated, randomly presented symbols...“The combined result of the 309 studies produced odds against
chance of 1025 to one—that is, ten million billion billion to one. This
eliminated chance as a viable explanation.... Further analyses
showed that twenty-three of the sixty-two investigators (37 percent)
had reported successful studies, so the overall results were not due
to one or two wildly successful experiments. In other words, the precognition
effect had been successfully replicated across many different
experimenters.” [p 114]
HarperSanFrancisco (HarperCollins) • 1997 • 366 pp • hardcover •
$25 • ISBN 0-06-251502-0 • <www.harpercollins.com>

 

Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women
by Christina Hoff Sommers
Almost all attacks against feminism, not surprisingly, come from the
right. But Christina Hoff Sommers is herself a feminist, which
makes her a spy in the house of estrogen. Sommers draws some
crucial distinctions within feminism, though. The feminists of the
1800s and early 1900s were the admirable “classically liberal feminists,”
who based their ideas on the principles of the Enlightenment
and fought to get women the rights men took for granted. The New
feminists, or “gender feminists,” as Sommers calls them, are “divisive,”
“gynocentric,” and “chronically offended.” They don’t think of
women and men as equal members of the human race working for
the same goals; rather, women are a constantly attacked, suppressed
class who must be hostile to the brutal, selfish patriarchal
system that victimizes them.
Although several chapters show how intolerant the gender feminists
are and how they’ve taken over academia to the detriment of all
other viewpoints, the book’s most powerful parts are the ones that
utterly destroy the supposed facts that are touted by mainstream
feminism. In fact, Sommers opens the book by immediately showing
one claim to be outright false. The statistic that 150,000 women and
girls die of anorexia each year in the US has become accepted wisdom
after being trumpeted by Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf, and Ann
Landers, among others. Sommers decided to do what none of them
did—actually check the facts behind this “hidden holocaust” against
females. She finally traced it back to the American Anorexia and
Bulimia Association. She personally talked to the group’s president,
who flatly said that they had been misquoted. The statistic came
from a newsletter they published in 1985 which said that 150,000 to
200,000 females suffer from the disorder. Government stats show
that, in reality, around 100 females die each year from anorexia. Of
course even one death from self-starvation is upsetting, but something
that causes 100 deaths annually is hardly comparable to
something that cause 150,000 deaths annually.
From there, Sommers plows through the other commonly-quoted
“facts” and “figures” that mainstream feminism uses. She eviscerates
the two heavily-flawed, hard-to-find studies that are the source
for the idea that girls have their self-esteem crushed at school.
Among the other things she reveals regarding the claims of feminism:
Domestic abuse of pregnant women is not responsible for
more birth defects than all other causes combined; Super Bowl
Sunday is not “the biggest day of the year for violence against
women;” the phrase “rule of thumb” did not originate because of an
English law that allowed men to beat their wives with a stick no bigger
around than their thumb; the claim that one of four women will
be raped is undoubtedly way too high; the idea of a “backlash” (as
espoused by Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf) is unfounded; and 40
percent of women do not suffer from severe depression.
Sommers looks at the claims of domestic abuse, noting that the
guesstimates range from the Department of Justice’s figure of
626,000 women (married and single) per year to 18 million married women per year (cited by the National Coalition Against Domestic
Violence). Furthermore, few outlets are willing to relay the fact that
women are physically abusive (in minor and major ways) towards
their partners at a rate equal to men. And when it comes to rates of psychological abuse against women, some statistics include heated
exchanges between couples. (For more of Sommers’ work, be sure
to read her second book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided
Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Simon & Schuster, 2000).)
Quote: “The Wellesley study [on self-esteem] gives lots of attention
to how girls are behind in math and science, though the math and
science test differentials are small compared to large differentials
favoring girls in reading and writing....
“Almost twice as many girls as boys participate in student government,
band and orchestra, and drama or service clubs. More girls
work on the school newspapers and yearbooks. More are members
of honor and service societies. Boys far outnumber girls in sports,
but that gap is narrowing each year.” Boys are also more likely to cut
classes, not do homework, and drop out of high school. Although
girls are more likely to attempt suicide, boys are equally more likely
to actually kill themselves. [pp 160-1]
Q u o t e: “Recently several male students at Vassar were falsely
accused of date rape. After their innocence was established, the
assistant dean of students, Catherine Comins, said of their ordeal:
‘They have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would have necessarily
spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration.
“How do I see women?” “If I did not violate her, could I have?”
“Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?” These are
good questions.’ Dean Comins clearly feels justified in trumping the
common law principle ‘presumed innocent until proven guilty’ by a
new feminist principle, ‘guilty even if proven innocent.’” [p 44]
Touchstone (Simon & Schuster) • 1994 • 320 pp • softcover • $13 •
ISBN 0-684-80156-6 • <www.simonandschuster.com>