A Heretic Economist whose time may have come, at last

The old joke about economists: If you laid all the economists in the world end-to-end ... they would still point in all directions.

So a corollary of this is that being a heretic to standard schools of economics isn't as much of an impossibility as it was for Jacques Benveniste with his proof of homeopathy to the scientific establishment.

Current schools of economics have, shall we say, a problem with the models they use matching reality. Just look at one of the major economic events of recent years:

• The 2008 "great recession" and subsequent events. Almost no mainstream economist predicted it, and many predicted rampant inflation after the "quantitative easing" the Federal Reserve used to try and fix the effects of the recession ... which of course did not occur.

Our "heretic" says she has a model of economic reality called Modern Monetary Theory that better matches the economic facts on the ground, and after reading her book, I believe her.

Here she is:

Dr. Stephanie Kelton

Her views diverge wildly from the mainstream:

• A balanced U.S. Federal budget is undesirable, as it does not fuel the economy sufficiently
• Deficit spending in any country with "monetary sovereignty" (like the U.S., Japan, the U.K., Australia, even China) is, within very large limits, a benefit to that country's citizens
• We have plenty of resources in the U.S. to achieve guaranteed full employment and fully funded health care for everyone, without necessarily raising taxes a whole lot
• Austerity in any country with monetary sovereignty is a preposterously self-limiting strategy
• "pay as you go" plans to make sure any new spending is "deficit neutral" are unnecessary and actively harmful to the economy

If this makes you want to know more, the book she's just published is very readable:

And if you're more of a Youtube person than a reader, here's a small example for you to enjoy.

The Universe is a conspiracy for my benefit; a visualization to keep this going

Is visualization the key?

Seems worth a try ...

Despite many mistakes I've made throughout life, I seem to be in much better shape than I could expect:

• I have degrees in computer science and started with Python in 2006, and now that's a hot job ticket

• So I've just started a w2 job which I can work from home doing for as long as the coronavirus shutdown lasts, making a good salary
  
• 
  
• I have a loving wife who's stuck with me through thick and thin

• (fingers crossed) I remain in excellent health, not even having a cold more than once every two or three years
  
• I didn't get to work in anything related to the 'gig economy' or the hospitality industry or the restaurant industry ...
  

But there are things I want and don't yet have:

• A net-zero-energy house on acreage

• A Tesla or similar electric car
  
• Enough money so that my lovely wife can travel to her heart's content
  

... and so forth. But this is kind of a busy bunch of stuff to visualize, so I think I am going to just focus on one number: my FICO score.

700

This is what I need to be able to do what I want (get construction funding to get a house built, etc.)

Right now my score is around 640 as I have way too much debt and no obvious way to pay it down quickly.

So what could happen to fix this? In order of likelihood:

• I could win the lottery (I'd have to buy a ticket more regularly than I have been, I guess)
  
• This blog could go viral and could get enough views for me to sell ads on it
• Our business venture(s) (Rain, DirtRich) could hit it big
• Something else I can't imagine, or some combination of these things, or both

So I'm going to spend 5 or 10 minutes lying in bed visualizing this number every day until I have it.

Here goes:

700

700

700

Any visualization help you can give is welcome!

Proof of Homeopathy's effectiveness (except on Wikipedia)

In the late 1980's this researcher, Jacques Benveniste:

made a remarkable discovery. His team had been studying the reaction of white blood cells to allergens. But due to a team member's error, the concentration of allergen being tested was too diluted to be effective ... but somehow still showed an effect.

"Go back and do the work over," he said.

She did, but also tried the same ultra-dilute solution and got the same "impossible" results.

"Looks like homeopathy", a tutor on the team with a background in this specialty said.

But homeopathy claims that ever more dilute "remedies" produce stronger and stronger effects:

Benveniste and his team decided to investigate this alleged property and found that it worked ... more dilute concentrations produced stronger effects, even to the extent that it was extremely unlikely that a single molecule of the subject under investigation would exist in the ultra-dilute solution.

From 1985 to 1989 Benveniste's lab and cooperating labs in France, Israel, Italy and Canada, all of which were able to replicate these results!

Unfortunately these results ran afoul of the dominant paradigm of the day: fundamentalist materialism.

John Maddox, editor of Nature, where the paper was published, acted as self-appointed priest of the materialist "church", using explicitly religious terminology in defending the faith:

"This book is the best candidate for burning in many years," on Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life in 1981. He otherwise was known to use the word "heresy" for work he didn't like.

Benveniste and 12 coauthors published their paper in Nature, nonetheless ...

And I submit that Benveniste's treatment thereafter was effectively his having been branded a heretic.

 a heretic being burned at the stake

By 1988, the high materialists priests were no longer allowed to burn heretics at the stake; instead they just got to shun and excommunicate them from the Scientific Materialist Church.

Not that shunning is much less painful; one former Mennonite referred to the Amish practice of "shunning" as a "living hell of torture".

The ensuing storm destroyed Benveniste's reputation as a mainstream scientist and caused him to leave the lab where he'd been working for decades ... instead, according to one report, he wound up working in a "shack" on the parking lot of his former lab.

He worked on related "too weird for the mainstream" experiments on the electromagnetic signaling between cells. He died in 2004.

I normally link to Wikipedia for some subjects I discuss, but the Wikipedia article on homeopathy looks to have been written and maintained by Maddox's heresy-busting heirs. They label it a "pseudoscience."

In fact there is a later researcher that also replicated the original results, Madeleine Ennis from Queen's University in Belfast.

References and Further Reading

Andrew Weil, M.D., Health and Healing (1983), chapter 1 "A Homeopathic Cure?"

Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe. The description above on Benveniste and his troubles comes from chapter 4 of this excellent book.

Shunning quote: Lynne McTaggart, The Bond, chapter 5.

Where the 'shack' note comes from https://q-mag.org/jacques-benveniste-and-the-memory-of-water.html

Bee stings are therapeutic, but do they actively seek out sick people?

Paradoxically, stings of the order hymenoptera have been shown to be generally therapeutic for humans. The colloquial expression of this: "beekeepers never get arthritis."

There is a specialty called apitherapy that uses bees and bee products for enhancing human health. There have been various standard medical studies showing that bee sting therapy in particular is effective, this one looks at its "adverse effects" (anaphylactic shock in the worst case).

So bee stings (and wasp and yellow jacket stings too, but these two are just harder to manage than are bees) have been used to treat arthritis and other conditions for millennia.

But this doesn't mean that bees actively seek out sick people to sting, does it?



Here's another story (possibly the origin of this Youtube story above?) by somebody saved from Lyme Disease by bee stings ...

Readers? Ever hear of any such story?

A mainstream article on Reiki

Venerable magazine The Atlantic magazine published a not-too-skeptical article on Reiki recently ...

No surprise; it turns out there is a bunch of scientific evidence that Reiki works, but no theory as to why it works.

One part of the Atlantic article that leapt out to me: veterans whose "body had forgotten how to sleep" were asleep on the Reiki table in minutes ...

My Lovely Wife is an insomniac:

But maybe after a few Reiki sessions she could learn to sleep more like this:

We'll have to give this a try!

A precognitive dream? Maybe ...

I have been interviewing for jobs lately and really need to go back to work as soon as possible as I have payments (including rent) coming up the first of next month.

This came up in my dreams, though, when I got a very clear message:

It won't happen until after the 18th

And in fact: I got the initial acceptance call on the 16th and the first actual paperwork acceptance ... on the 19th.

I'll have to watch for other messages carefully!

Crystal healing: nonsense? This doesn't fit my experience

There was a big flap a while back on Google searches for "crystal healing" having spiked ... and how that was such nonsense.

Let me tell you about an experience I had in the 1980's ...

I was a young kid from the South who had moved to Seattle and met a Sophisticated Older Woman who recommended I try massage. I had never heard of such a thing, but this woman had recommended various other activities that were generally fulfilling, so I decided to try it.

I can't find an image of the kind of massage I received ... there are a lot like this, but mine was different.

The therapist started working on my back and shoulders, where I carry most of the tension, and came across a knotted muscle. She stopped and instead of working on it with her hands, took some kind of crystal (I think quartz), somehow focussed her consciousness through it, and the knot in my shoulder dissolved.

I have no explanation for this and no theory of how it could work. The therapist moved away maybe a year after I started seeing her, and I haven't found anyone else doing this since.

But don't be so sure that crystals are "nonsense" ... I'd love to talk with anyone who's had an experience like this or can refer such a practitioner!