Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Review of Mike Bara on Coast to Coast AM, 25/26 April

        C2C gave Mike the dog watch last night—midnight-2am Pacific, 3-5 Eastern. It seemed particularly cruel to use the physicist Michio Kaku as opener—it was like "Here's this distinguished professor from CCNY, joint originator of string theory, rational but bold thinker, Ph.D. from Berkeley. AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT... Mike Bara."

        Mike is thoroughly confused about personal consciousness vs. collective will. To be sure, there is some evidence that intense application of mass human will can achieve surprising results—some of it from the C2C radio show itself—but Bara, while obviously very aware of this, also writes "We have, each of us, enough energy to make this world into anything we wish it to be." [The Choice, p.217.]

The Backster Effect

        He trotted out that same idea last night. YOU CAN PERSONALLY CHOOSE what the coming apocalypse means, he assured his audience. Did he provide any evidence to support the idea, or say how he comes by such knowledge? Well, no and no. He spoke of two "experiments" which we must assume he thinks are relevant. One was his former co-author's foolery with an Accutron watch, which apparently showed periodic anomalies. The other was Cleve Backster's "terrified plant" trick of 1968. What do these two hobby activities have in common? They were both done without controls, and are therefore trash science.

                Late into hour 2, Mike removed all possible doubt that he knows nothing about psychology by assuring us that "everything has consciousness." I waited for some follow-up that would show he was speaking metaphorically, but I got the converse of that. No, he really means everything. Tables, chairs, granite.... George Noory's comment was "Oh yes."

        If the contrast between Kaku and Bara was striking, another contrast also comes to mind—that between Bara and another very recent guest on C2C, Maurice Cotterell. He's the nutcase who said that we can oh-so-easily get all the energy we could ever want by simply lining up little containers of the elements in order. Start with hydrogen, helium, lithium.... keep going until you have 120, the last one presumably containing the purely theoretical element unbinilium.

        Cotterell's theories are entirely wrong but kind of hilarious. Bara's are entirely wrong and kind of boring.

11 comments:

Chris Lopes said...

Cruel comparison indeed. Kaku and Bara aren't even speaking the same language. To be fair though, Bara isn't really trying (well not very hard anyway) to be on the same level as Kaku. He seems quite happy to just play at being some kind of new age guru.

vonmazur said...

Gosh, Mike is nuttier than Richard!
And element 120 is Dilithium...Whazza matter with you, everyone knows that..:)

Dale in AL

Chris Lopes said...

vonmazur,
I thought element 120 was unobtainium. :)

expat said...

Cotterell's energy machine is unobtainio.

Chris Lopes said...

Expat, in case you missed it, Hoagland was on C2C last night for a couple of minutes. He wasn't on long enough to say anything REAL stupid, but he predicted Obama would announce (when, he never said) some "major" space initiative. He was vague enough about the whole thing that almost anything the administration does would qualify. The segment was both brief and meaningless.

expat said...

Ah, thanks. I missed it and now won't bother to follow up.

expat said...

Ah, thanks. I missed it and now won't bother to follow up.

Biological_Unit said...

Mars Revealer is exceptionally crazy of late! Get a load of his Word Salad here:

http://martianrevelationradioshow.blogspot.com/

Biological_Unit said...

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED BU & ALL ELSE!!

Just re-transmitting a warning from insane lunatic Mars Revealer, who is too crazy for RCH. That is some extreme depth of schizophrenia!

Chris Lopes said...

BU,
To be honest I found Mars Revealer to be even harder to follow than Sword. It's interesting though what he was trying to do with the whole symbolism thing. He isn't that far off from what Hoagland tries to do from time to time. It's really just a difference of degrees of insanity. :)

Biological_Unit said...

Mars Revealer should be trolled hard IRL for the lulz.