Underneath the illusory “normalcy of everyday living, it appears that Experts and Professionals outperform amateurs. However, if we are to look beyond the false reality of the “bell curve,” we find that Amateurs nearly always outperform “experts” in terms of breakthroughs, innovation, and societal evolution.

Home schooling parents have proven that the “experts” on Public Education are wrong.

The Wright Brothers, under funded “amateurs,” flew before the “government funded” expert, Samuel Langley. In 1904, The Scientific American (the same magazine touting “anthropocentric global warming”) wrote that it would be impossible to believe reports of successful flight by the Wright Brothers, since the government funded expert couldn’t get his plane to fly.

Some things never change. But what if things are getting worse? What if our growing reliance on “experts” is actually killing us?

One Doctor’s Lonely Quest To Heal Brain Injury

ATLANTA — As a young researcher in the 1960s, Donald G. Stein drilled through the skulls of anesthetized rats and vacuumed out sections of their brains to see the effect on their behavior. But he quickly became fascinated by something outside the scope of the research: Why did some female rats promptly recover from their injuries, while males remained impaired?

His supervisors told him the difference was inconsequential and urged him to move on to more important topics. But over his 40-year career as a brain researcher and university administrator, he never let go of the question.

40 Years!!!??

Here we have a man who discovered a break through (by accident – which is usual in these situations), and the scientific and medical establishment IGNORED and RIDICULED the data, and the man promoting the data!!!

Why do we hold “experts” in such high regard? Let us be clear here. I am not arguing that we should go to an auto mechanic for brain surgery. The brain surgeon is the expert on his domain. However, we should keep in mind that the brain surgeon is merely a “brain mechanic,” and given to no more special insight into new ideas or possible breakthroughs. As a matter of fact, a study of many large breakthroughs leads one to see that “experts” are often blinded by the “conventional wisdom” in their field.

It is often the amatuer, tinkering in his garage or lab, who finds the breakthrough that the experts ignore.

Dr. Stein was turned down for half a dozen or more grants from the National Institutes of Health during the 1970s and 1980s. Zaven S. Khachaturian, a leading scientist and former NIH official, says his ideas were “really creative but the NIH system never gave them the good scores they deserved.” At one point, he says, “I just told Don Stein that sometimes it doesn’t pay to keep hitting your head against the wall,” Dr. Khachaturian says.

Dr. Stein recalls feeling “shaken” by the denials, while at the same time growing more determined to prove his case. He kept up a steady drumbeat of research, published in a wide range of journals such as Science, Brain Research, Experimental Neurology and others.

During his time at Clark, Dr. Stein was given to jeans, long hair and shooting his mouth off in faculty meetings or challenging guest speakers, even eminent ones. “Eyebrows would go up whenever Don’s hand would go up,” recalls Julio Ramirez, a former student, now a professor of neuroscience at Davidson College.

…

Over the next three years, the study focused on 100 head-injured patients who had been brought into the emergency room at Grady Memorial Hospital in downtown Atlanta. Some patients received standard treatment to control bleeding and fevers along with state-of-the-art head-injury treatment. Others were also given intravenous progesterone, at triple the highest natural levels at the end of pregnancy.

One Saturday morning in 2005, Dr. Stein was driving north of Atlanta on a shopping trip with his wife when a stern-sounding Dr. Kellermann called him. Dr. Kellermann said he had just learned the study’s findings, adding, “Pull over to the side of the road.”

Dr. Stein froze, fearing that decades of research with animals would prove useless, that progesterone might have turned out to raise the death rate in humans for some unforeseen reason.

His heart was thumping as Dr. Kellermann told him the results: Patients on progesterone had a death rate of just 13% from their head injuries, less than half the 30% death rate of those on standard treatment. And progesterone showed no negative side effects. The 100-subject study was too small to prove that progesterone caused the lowered death rate, but the findings were consistent with animal research. Don Stein was so elated that he had to ask his wife to take over the driving.

In the respected journal “Annals of Emergency Medicine” this past April, Dr. Stein and his researchers summarized the study: “Moderate traumatic brain injury survivors who received progesterone were more likely to have a moderate to good outcome than those randomized to placebo.”

Imagine the number of people who suffered brain damage since 1960. Imagine that they were offered a shot at dramatically reduced debilitation from that damage. Imagine a world where we didn’t default to “expert worship” and listened to determined, intelligent, and driven amatuers instead.

Science Fiction writer William Gibson seems to be first to coin the phrase “The Future is Already Here, it Just Isn’t Evenly Distributed.” We live in a world where we can distribute the future very rapidly, but we have minds that default to giving “experts” too much say in what gets distributed, and who it is distributed to.

This is a function of YOUR mindset. YOU must change the default position in your own thinking. Render unto the expert the “due respect” for their mechanical expertise. Ignore them when the critique new and bold ideas. In that domain, “experts” are nearly always wedded to the dogma of their domain.

As I’ve posted various time across this blog, “Secular Humanism” is thin gruel compared to robust Islam or Christianity. Secular Humanists hate such comparisons, but then, they simply refuse to admit that they are as dogmatic and religious as any Christian or Muslim.

Take a child (or a culture) steeped in Secular Humanism, and expose it to a robust religion, and the chances of that person (or culture) embracing the newer, more cohesive thought pattern is quite likely.

Hence, Fritz the Terrorist.

Among the Believers

By the skin of their teeth, German security services, with the help of their U.S. colleagues, prevented earlier this month what might have been the worst terrorist attack in European history. The would-be bombers, though, aren’t some neglected immigrants on the margins of society. No, the danger came directly from its center, from children of good, solid homes. Fritz G.’s father was an engineer in Munich, his mother a doctor. When the two divorced in the 1990s, it’s been reported, the son found support in Islam. In the small Bavarian town of Neu-Ulm, he became a regular of the “Multi-Kulti-Haus,” a German center for fanatical Muslims. Daniel S. from Saarland converted from Catholicism to Islam in 2004, one year after dropping out from high school. German security services believe he visited a terror camp last year in Pakistan. Even the most alarmist German politician could hardly have imagined so much “home grown” terrorism at once.

Note how even the writer, trying to warn us of this phenomenon, says the kid comes from a “solid home” despite the fact that the parents are divorced. Note how he says he converted from “Catholicism” when it is likely that Fritz was a Secular Humanist whose “Catholicism” is merely a label.

Observe.

In contrast to most post-modern nation states, Islamic fundamentalism offers the kind of warm hearth for which many shaken Western souls might yearn: community instead of individualism. Moral certainty instead of moral arbitrariness. And hasn’t the fulfilling sense of fighting a “cold evil” always held great attraction for young idealists? Take the revolutionary companeros around Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The anti-globalization movement, which never ceases to denounce “unmerciful neo-liberalism,” is another example.

Thank God we aren’t a “post-modern” nation state! If you read the entire article, you will see that our dear German Journalist misses a more than a few points. He rails about the differences between “political Islam” and “cultural Islam”, forgetting that Islam never made a distiction between politics and culture.

Mohammed never said “Render unto Caesar….” Mohammed WAS a Ceasar.

Next, notice how our German friend ignores the glaring error in his own thought system. One can live in a free society and still have “moral certainty”. As a matter of fact, fans of the founding fathers (like me) point out that moral certainty and freedom go hand in hand. Absent a belief in something higher than one’s self, democracy devolves into the war of “all against all” that is becoming the hallmark of the Secular Humanist Welfare State.

Europe is dying. It’s young are foregoing children because living for future (or even creating one) isn’t in their interests. Get Laid, Get paid, get retired, Get a pension, and take an eternal dirt nap. Such a society has no chance against a society that actually wants to accomplish something.

Islam wants to accomplish something. (What that is will be determined by the outcome of it’s current turmoil.) So does the “Christian” United States. (to the extent that we aren’t thoroughly “Secular Humanized, we have been a force for world freedom) Compare those types of goals to a gaggle of whiners seeking to make the world safe for “big pensions” and “free health care.”

Like I said. Secular Humanim = Thin Gruel.

Fritz, meet Johnny Lind, your soul brother.