Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

This, friends, is very big news indeed, via the Schwartzreport. My own experience convinces me that the biggest obstacle to our performing miracles with our own health –and ultimately helping others to heal — is our persistent but incorrect sense of limitation. We are vastly more powerful beings than we give ourselves credit for. Regrowing a chicken embryo’s wing is nothing; the only importance is to give people the courage to assume — and act upon the assumption — that their health is under their control

Scientists Regrow Chicken Embryo’s Wing

BILL CHRISTENSEN - LiveScience

According to a study published in Genes and Development last week, a research team at the Salk Institute for Biological studies has been able to regenerate a wing in a chick embryo. This new study adds to the evidence that mammals can also regrow limbs (see Lab Mice Unexpectedly Regenerate Limbs, Organs), an ability once thought to be restricted to certain amphibians and lizards.

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So true! And so important. From the San Francisco Chronicle. sent by a friend. The interesting thing — the hopeful thing — is toward the bottom of the article, where it says “Research by UC Berkeley psychology Professor Serena Chen suggests that people who are naturally selfish grow even more selfish if they attain power, while people who are naturally selfless and giving become more so with power.”

Which indicates to me that one of the most important things about power is knowing ahead of time the traps that it may set before you…

Power is not only an aphrodisiac, it does weird things to some of us
Vicki Haddock, Insight Staff Writer

There was no mistaking the balance of power in academia when one local professor recently convened a session with lowly graduate students: they listened reverentially, while he hoisted his feet onto the conference table and commenced clipping his toenails.

So, too, are the privileges of power self-evident in the business world. Hollywood film producer Scott Rudin is such a powerhouse that at last count he had fired 119 personal assistants, not including those who didn’t make it past their initial probation.

Nor could anyone miss the symptoms of power exhibited by the person considered the most powerful person on Earth: the president of the United States. Lyndon Johnson relished summoning underlings in to confer with him while he sat on the toilet. Richard Nixon authorized illegal wiretaps on perceived enemies because, as he later told an interviewer, “when the president does it, it’s not illegal.” Bill Clinton wantonly had sex with intern Monica Lewinsky near the Oval Office.

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Via a senior-citizen friend, a World War II veteran. Don’t know if it’s a joke, a real incident, a made-up incident, or what, but the point is the same.

A self-important college freshman at a football game took it upon himself to explain to a senior citizen sitting next to him why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his generation.

“You grew up in a different world, actually an almost primitive one,” the student said, loud enough for many of those nearby to hear. “The young people of today grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man walking on the moon, our spaceships have visited Mars. We have nuclear energy, electric and hydrogen cars, computers with light-speed processing …and,” pausing to take another drink of beer…

The senior took advantage of the break in the litany to say, “You’re right, son. We didn’t have those things when we were young … so we invented them. Now, you arrogant little know-it-all, what are you doing for the next generation?”

(AP Photo/Martin Mejia)
Peruvian workers clean graves containing a trove of pre-Inca artifacts in Ferrenafe, Peru, Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2006. Archaeologists in northern Peru said Tuesday they have unearthed 22 artifact-rich graves containing a trove of pre-Inca artifacts, including the first “tumi” ceremonial knives ever excavated scientifically. The more than 900-year-old tombs were found next to a pyramid in the Pomac Forest Historical Sanctuary, about 680 kilometers (420 miles) northwest of the capital, Lima. They are from the Sican culture, which flourished on Peru’s northern desert coast from A.D. 750 to 1375.

Peruvian Archaeologists Excavate Tombs

FERRENAFE, Peru - Archaeologists said Tuesday they have unearthed 22 graves in northern Peru containing a trove of pre-Inca artifacts, including the first “tumi” ceremonial knives ever discovered by archaeologists rather than looted by thieves.

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An interesting look at a new and overdue phenomenon: Veterans banding together to get some political clout. From Doug Thompson’s Capitol Hill Blue website.

Vets PAC: From nowhere to a political player
By GARY ROTSTEIN
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Nov 21, 2006, 7:07:41 AM

The political advertisement depicting a mannequin in U.S. military wear being shredded by small-arms fire began showing up in August against U.S. Sen. George Allen of Virginia.

The powerful, bullet-blazing ad, claiming the senator failed to support sufficient funding for body armor to protect troops in Iraq, made its way into races against three other incumbent Republican senators who were defeated Nov. 7: Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Jim Talent of Missouri and Conrad Burns of Montana.

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As always with stories like this, who knows? But if the technique is accurate, it ought to obviate some of the theories that have been floated from time to time. From http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/display.var.1031556.0.face_of_jack_the_ripper_revealed.php

Face of Jack the Ripper revealed

The first e-fit of Jack the Ripper (Pic: Atlantic Productions)

THIS is the first picture of the man detectives believed was Jack the Ripper, whose identity has remained a mystery for 118 years.

The e-fit has been produced using the latest police forensic techniques and original witness statements from the 19th century investigation.

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This is a news item from a while ago that I have been holding — other stories got in the way. This is not a high-powered item, as international stories go, but at least it has a happy ending, or at least is moving that way. About time. It has only been going on 300 years….

Spain, Britain reach accord on Gibraltar

By HAROLD HECKLE
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

CORDOBA, Spain — Spain and Britain have reached a historic deal to resolve side issues stemming from their 300-year-old dispute over Gibraltar, but sidestepped the main one - their claims to the Rock’s sovereignty.

Gibraltar itself - the quirky, multicultural British colony of 30,000 people at Spain’s southern tip - was also represented as an equal partner by its Chief Minister Peter Caruana at a ceremony Monday.

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Colin Wilson as novelist. A very intelligent discussion, from http://web.mac.com/philco1/iWeb/Colin%20Wilson/Fiction.html which is the Fiction subdivision of http://web.mac.com/philco1/iWeb/Colin%20Wilson/News.html

At the end of his unjustly neglected 1975 tome on literary criticism, Wilson describes his use of Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’ in his own novels. This famous theatrical idea is a suspension of the illusion of realism on stage: “The audience is told: ‘This is a play, an entertainment. It is not supposed to be real.’ After that, the author can do what he likes: introduce songs or dances, acrobatics, political lectures, even fragments of documentary film.” (The Craft of the Novel p. 238.)

With novels such as Necessary Doubt, The Glass Cage, The Mind Parasites, and The Black Room, Wilson describes how he was instinctively making use of Brecht’s principle in that he was using popular forms (detective, sci-fi and spy stories) as parody to disguise his philosophical message.

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Below is the intro blurb for the following website: http://web.mac.com/philco1/iWeb/Colin%20Wilson/News.html

I don’t know who runs this site, but he knows what he is talking about, unlike the author of the hatchet-job I posted a few minutes ago.

COLIN WILSON

He is the author of Muammar Al Qaddafi’s favourite book. Groucho Marx was an admirer. Mark E. Smith credits him as an influence on his seminal underground band: “if you know what Wilson does…he’ll write a science fiction book but it’s not really about science fiction…which I think is amazing. Or he’ll write a detective novel and tell you who the murderer is on the second page, you know, and then just go off to describe his own theories all the way through the book (chuckling)…it’s very similar to what The Fall do.”

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By searching for “Colin Wilson” just to see what’s new on the web, I just now found this thoroughly irritating review of my friend Colin Wilson’s work. Although it is three months old, it deserves to be preserved somewhere as an example of the sort of trash that gets printed in newspapers just as if the author knew what he was talking about.

It is easy enough for the novelist who wrote this little hatchet-job to dismiss Wilson’s ideas and insights as being “just far too daft to be taken seriously.” That merely shows his own blindness. For in fact Wilson knows that humans as we know them are not what humans can become. He calls the font of our mostly undiscovered abilities Faculty X, and he shows very convincingly that this is our future. Unfortunately, this is all fantasy if you are a herd animal — as apparently this Harry Ritchie is. (I have no idea what he has written or what credentials he brings to his would-be demolition job.)

Wilson knows that we are not the stunted, accidental by-product of chemicals, nor neurosis-ridden animals that have gotten above ourselves. Instead, we are gods in the making. If that is a meaningless sentence to you, then either anything Colin Wilson has to say is closed to you, or he will serve as your doorway into better things. (You may find most accessible his Spider World series, which Hampton Roads published. This series gives many of his ideas is a science-fiction format.)

The Outsider (and, earlier, his science fiction novel, The Mind Parasites) marked a turning point in my life — and in many another life, too. It may for you, as well.

Look back in wonder

Fifty years ago, critics turned The Outsider into an overnight sensation and hailed its author a genius - then they changed their minds. Harry Ritchie charts the rise and fall of Colin Wilson

Saturday August 12, 2006
The Guardian

This year marks the golden anniversary of one of the most sensational debuts in English literary history. Not Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which was greeted on opening night with dutiful applause and ho-hummish reviews, but the work of an even younger writer, the 24-year-old Colin Wilson, whose first book, The Outsider, was an overnight sensation.
The Outsider hardly seemed to be the stuff of even modest success. It was a bizarre concoction of philosophy and literary criticism, purporting to be about existentialism, and packed full of quotes and references to Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Gurdjieff. Even garlanded with the dust-jacket praise of Edith Sitwell (whose 137-line blurb claimed that The Outsider was an “astonishing” book and that Colin Wilson would be “a truly great writer”), Gollancz’s initial print run of 5,000 copies seemed wildly optimistic.

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