Archaeologists have little doubt of the existence of persons practicing witchcraft in Salem. Official condemnation of such practices ensures practicioners, after all, if it wasn't effective then why would it be condemned in such harsh terms?
http://www.archaeology.org/online/featu ... ottle.html
As a writer in Brazil said about a black magic practicioner he met, "I don't believe in magic, but I DID NOT want this man sticking pins in a doll of me, with that gleefully maniac expression on his face". I quite agree with the sentiment.
Mather was an intelligent and educated man, who rationalized a great many things rather than simply saying he didn't understand them or stating that they simply didn't exist. These are exactly the sort of people who gather followers and create misery for those not in the ingroup. Why bother to test or analyze anything if you simply KNOW the answers?
I've always doubted the ergot explanation for the fits those girls had, while ergot can cause such things it should have been a good deal more widespread in the community as ergot infections commonly occur in the field, not after the grain is dried. I rather suspect the girls simply liked the attention and were all sociopaths who didn't care about the people who were hanged. (Well, one was pressed, but whatever.) The symptoms are far more congruent with PTSD or hysteria.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_ex ... ewitchment
Should there actually be a life after death, then Aristotle has a lot to answer for, as his philosophy made such "knowings" respectable. Even Einstein practiced what he liked to call thought experiments, and just what can you actually learn from that? There are obvious flaws in any such imagining, for instance, his gravity vs acceleration thought experiment is only applicable if you examine a mathematical point, due to the fact that gravity from any source must have closed surfaces on any equipotential, IOW, gravitational field equipotentials always form a curved gaussian surface. In any attempt to understand the universe, the human mind must be regarded as a flawed and very suspect instrument, requiring constant correction from reproducible physical data.
Going by the BDI, we have a crash due before the end of the year. Gold is in a fairly steady downward trend, Silver is much the same, the 200 day trend line has to be depressing for anyone in the metals trade. Those started dropping in April, but copper has a steady down line that started earlier. The trend line for tin is pretty rough. Everything shows a brief upwards motion for the last little while, but those are hardly enough to start a trend. If they persisted through May or June then there would be an upward trend, but right now it's just a bump. Even the futures are showing flat or nearly flat or even negative in some cases.
Unless there is another major round of stimulus, which is very unlikely IMHO, then we are not going to see consumption of metals undergo much change upwards, given that China isn't going to order that much more just to stockpile the goods. The market propping has gone on as long as it is practical for it to continue, the big players are exiting and the prices are going to bomb. While it is true that China could blow their foreign reserves to stockpile 1000 tons or so of gold, I'm putting that one in the wishful thinking pile. There's no real advantage to them to do that and no incentive, plus there isn't that much gold on the market in any event.
http://www.benzinga.com/news/12/01/2238 ... ing-volume
Re the last sentence on that page, right now I'm doing no business at all, does that mean I have infinite worth? Just a thought. Maybe I should incorporate and issue stock while guaranteeing I'll never take any action to increase the worth of said stock. Should trade well, given that bad news means higher stock prices nowadays. Can there be worse news than "I'LL NEVER CREATE VALUE"? On second thought, that's better news than Kodak gave their investors, so forget it, the Wall Streeters are ahead of me again. LOL.