Summer movie watching: Bustin' Down the Door

Bustin' Down the Door ranks among the best surf movies ever made. It chronicles the journey of the surfers who changed the sport in the 1970s and created professional surfing.

The movie also details the backlash that took place from the local Hawaiians at the regrettable suggestion, published in an article in Surfer magazine, from one of the new generation, that "we seem to be able to push ourselves harder than the Hawaiians do. Our surfing, as a group, has improved outrageously; whereas theirs, as a group, has stagnated." This, and other episodes, led to an explosive situation which included escalating violence, which was finally defused by a traditional Hawaiian tribunal or ho'oponopono led by Hawaii's Aikau family.

The situation brings out some very important aspects of the "zero sum" fallacy, a mentality which extends far beyond surfing. Zero-sum thinking is often explained using the metaphor of a "fixed pie" view of the world: there is only so much wealth out there, and the more people there are competing for any given portion of it, the less there is for everyone else to squabble over.

Those who have a fixed-pie or zero-sum view of the world naturally see others as potential competitors for resources, and even support measures to reduce the addition of other people whom they view as making everyone's pie even smaller. There are plenty of examples of this erroneous view even at the highest levels of human government, including at the United Nations, which has a branch called the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) which promotes the idea of a "link between population and poverty" and supports goals of "lower fertility, smaller families, and slower population growth, thus reducing the burden on the environment."

This view is erroneous, because every single individual actually represents not only a potential consumer but also a potential producer -- every single human being can actually add to the size of the pie, and make the world better for others.

It is easy to see how a zero-sum mentality leads to resentment or active enmity between different peoples, tribes, nations, or groups, because the zero-sum view encourages people to see any wealth or achievement gained by someone else as taking away from the "fixed pie" available to everyone else. On the other hand, the opposite view that every individual and every culture is a contributor who can actually make the world a "bigger" place can lead to cooperation and progress.

In the surfing microcosm explored in the movie Bustin' Down the Door, it is clear that the achievements of the Hawaiians were essential to the achievements reached by newer surfers from other parts of the world, and that the contributions of surfers from other parts of the world in turn advanced the sport in new directions that could then benefit everyone else as well. This idea was actually present in Rabbit Bartholomew's notorious article of the same title, also published in Surfer magazine in 1977, in which he was generally respectful of the great Hawaiian surfers of his and the previous generation, but which was interpreted as being belligerent and disrespectful due to the photographs accompanying the article and those in other surf magazines, one of which featured him wearing an Everlast boxing robe. The text of the original article is reproduced here.

The reconciliation of the situation by the members of the Aikau family, who had the stature to bring about a peaceable solution to the conflict, can be seen as a triumph of the right of human beings to demand that their human dignity, worth and contribution to the human family receive their due respect, and a reversal of the escalating negative effects of zero-sum conflict between peoples or groups or tribes.

The movie even brings out some of the history of the annexation of Hawaii by the United States. In short, it touches on many levels of very deep issues, and thus intersects with the mysteries of mankind's ancient past, in that the Hawaiians may well be the proud descendents of the first Polynesians to venture into the mighty Pacific, and the residents of the traditional Polynesian homeland referred to as Hawaiki by legends found throughout the rest of Oceania.

It is also connected to the questions of mankind's ancient past because there is some evidence that the incredible achievements of ancient civilizations actually featured cooperation between very different families of man, and that those ancient civilizations collapsed into barbarism by the devolution of that cooperation into resentment and violence, as we have discussed here.

Bustin' Down the Door should definitely be featured on your list of movies to watch this summer (even if you've seen it a hundred times already)!

The Binary Model of Precession

If you have visited the interview of Mathisen Corollary author David Warner Mathisen at Red Ice Radio, you may have noticed that the producers of Red Ice linked several other previous Red Ice interviews on related topics among the links below the description area on the page.

Among these is a fascinating interview with Walter Cruttenden of the Binary Research Institute, from April, 2010. While Red Ice makes hour one of all interviews available to everyone for a full year after they are posted, after that time a subscription to Red Ice is necessary in order to listen to them, and a subscription is always required in order to hear hour two. However, most Red Ice interview hour ones are available as free podcasts in the iTunes store, and the first hour of Walter Cruttenden's Red Ice interview can be found as a free download in the iTunes store -- simply go to the iTunes store and conduct a search for the phrase "Red Ice Cruttenden."

The interview is fascinating and thought-provoking on several levels, and is well worth a listen, even if you do not agree with every conclusion or assertion proposed. Among the striking concepts that are discussed is the theory that the precession of the equinoxes is caused by an elliptical orbit of the sun through space around another star or stellar object -- the "binary model" of precession. This motion is described in the above video segment, along with animation.

Note the discussion of the changing rate of orbit that the sun would take if such a theory were true (due to Kepler's laws of motion). We discussed this very concept of faster and slower orbit with reference to the earth's orbit around the sun in this previous post, in which we compared it to the motion of a surfer speeding up and slowing down as he goes down and then back up the face of a wave (and not just any surfer and any wave, but the great Shaun Tomson surfing a long right at J-Bay). According to proponents of the binary theory, astronomers have measured just such a speeding up of the rate of precessional motion that would be consistent with the sun's orbit around a distant stellar object.

In his interview, Mr. Cruttenden points out that electromagnetic waves, including light waves as well as other forms of electromagnetism emitted by stars such as our sun, have powerful effects on virtually every lifeform on earth. When our portion of the globe faces away from the sun, we generally drop into an unconscious state until we are facing the light again, and the same is true of the seasons that are caused by earth's orbit and obliquity, which have a tremendous impact on the life cycles of countless plants and animals. If this is true for earth's daily spin and annual orbit, he argues, it might also be true of the electromagnetic radiation emitted by this proposed companion object, causing civilizational advance when we grow closer and civilizational decline and a rise of barbarism and violence when we draw further away from our companion star.

While one may or may not accept the binary theory, Mr. Cruttenden in his interview and the narrator in the video segment above (Darth Vader) point out that many theories that were once ridiculed later gain widespread acceptance: popularity is no measure of the truth of a theory. This is another theme we have discussed previously on this blog several times as well with regard to the theory of plate tectonics and the hydroplate theory, for example. It is also discussed in the new introduction to the Mathisen Corollary posted here (and in the older introduction as well).

For all these reasons, the interview with Walter Cruttenden is well worth careful attention, as are the arguments put forth by the Binary Research Institute. Check it out for yourself!

More evidence of recent dinosaur activity

In the previous post, we put forward some arguments backed with evidence that the layered strata found around the world and used by defenders of the conventional paradigm to back their theories may have been deposited rapidly rather than over the course of hundreds of millions of years.

If this theory is correct, it would undermine the widely-held belief that the giant reptiles whose fossils were first called "dinosaurs" in the 1800s must necessarily have perished at least 60 million years ago. As we noted in the previous post, the coelacanth was previously assumed to have lived between 400 million and 70 million years ago, and to have become extinct at the end of the so-called "Upper Cretaceous" period (66 million years ago) -- that is, until living coelacanths were discovered in ordinary modern settings.

We have also noted that soft tissues in recently-discovered Tyrannosaurus legbones are causing conventional theorists to rethink their paradigm. Unfortunately, they do not seem to be rethinking the paradigm that the strata that held the leg-bones can be confidently dated to 68 million years ago, but rather their previous assumptions that soft tissues such as red blood cells cannot survive for more than thousands of years (and certainly not millions of years).

We cannot help but point out that artifacts discovered in the Americas, where civilizations remained largely undisturbed by the aggressive Roman Empire and its descendants for many centuries, seem to depict examples of creatures that we would easily identify as dinosaurs. Some of these artifacts depicting strange creatures were apparently noticed by the European intruders who began interacting with the civilizations of the Americas in the 1500s -- long before fossils found in England began to be associated with ancient giant reptiles in the 1820s, or the term "dinosaur" was coined in the 1840s.

Some of the more infamous of these alleged artifacts include the Ica Stones of Peru and the Acambaro figurines of Mexico. These finds have been dismissed as hoaxes, and I am not personally prepared to "fall on my sword" (as we used to say in the Army) to declare their authenticity. However, we have already noted the very common tendency of the defenders of the conventional paradigm to dismiss any anomalous evidence as a hoax (see here and here), which may be warranted when there are only one or two outlying data points but which becomes a little hard to accept when it is resorted to over and over and over again.

Finally, note the photograph above, which appears to indicate that T. Rex was fond of surfboards (whether certain shapes or colors of board were particularly attractive is not yet known). This would appear to be conclusive evidence that current theories need to be reworked. It also suggests that one should always check the area for signs of any Tyrannosaurs prior to a session (I always do).

How earth's path around the sun is connected to surfing

The previous post discussed the connection between the motion of the earth around the sun and the ancient double spiral symbol.

We saw that the tilt of the earth's axis (the obliquity of the ecliptic) causes the sun's path to cross back and forth above and below the celestial equator throughout the year, and also that the eccentricity of earth's orbit around the sun causes the earth to move faster as it approaches perihelion each year, a fact largely responsible for the analemma or figure-eight pattern the sun will trace out in the sky if viewed at the same time on successive days for an entire year.

The perihelion is the point on earth's elliptical orbit where the earth comes closest to the sun, so-called because it is derived from the Greek peri- meaning "around" and Helios, the sun or the sun god (a "perimeter" is the meter or "measurement" around something, and the "pericardium" is the sac that is around the kardia or heart). The point of perihelion is opposed by the aphelion, or furthest point in earth's orbit from the sun.

This brilliant animated video from the excellent analemma explanation site of Bob Urschel of Indiana illustrates visually the reason that the earth travels faster as it approaches perihelion and slows down as it approaches aphelion, as opposed to the steady rate of orbit that would occur if the earth followed a perfectly circular path.

In the video, a green earth on a circular orbit is contrasted with a blue earth on an elliptical orbit, and the point of perihelion is placed at the bottom of the screen, so that the earth on the elliptical orbit speeds up as it falls "down" towards perihelion and then slows as it "rises" towards aphelion, only to begin to accelerate again as it passes aphelion and begins to fall again towards the sun and the bottom of the diagram. In reality, this is very much what is actually taking place. We think of the bottom of the diagram as being "down," because the earth's gravity pulls us downward towards it at all times, but in earth's orbit "down" is towards the sun, whose gravity pulls earth towards it, so that what is "down" in the diagram is actually "down" towards the sun and the point of perihelion, where earth travels fastest before it slingshots around the sun and begins to rise up again.

For the earth, perihelion occurs roughly fourteen days after winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, illustrating that winter is not caused by the earth being further from the sun (since perihelion is where earth is actually closest to the sun) but rather by the fact that the axis of that hemisphere is pointed away from the sun, creating shorter days with less direct sunlight and a lower path of the sun across the sky than during summer.

When I watched this video of earth's motion around the sun each year, I was struck by the parallel to the motion of surfing. The video at top shows the great Shaun Tomson surfing at Jeffreys Bay, South Africa. Notice that he initially plunges towards the bottom of the wave (perihelion) where he executes a bottom turn and then carves back up the face of the wave towards the lip (aphelion), where he then turns again downwards to pick up speed again.

Now watch this animated video from the same analemma site that shows the sun's motion across the celestial equator as seen from earth, while keeping in mind the motion of Shaun Tomson going up and down along the wave at J-Bay. Watching it, you can understand why the ancients came up with metaphors to encode in their myths such as the serpent that winds all the way around the earth (Midgard's Serpent), but you can also see that they could have equally well selected the metaphor of surfing along a very long right such as the kind found at Jeffreys.

The mysterious connections between the rhythms of the celestial motion and the act of surfing have not been sufficiently explored yet, but there is definitely something going on here that is worth investigating further. For other musings on this topic, check out this previous post as well.

For a more detailed explanation of the concepts of the ecliptic, the celestial equator, and the passage of the ecliptic back and forth across the celestial equator throughout the year, check out the lengthy third chapter of the Mathisen Corollary, which is designed to make sure you never feel intimidated by those terms ever again but instead find them completely comfortable and understandable.

Surf a Sojourner Surfboard

So far there is no direct evidence that members of the ancient lost civilization discussed on these pages (see here and here for example) were surfers.

However, it is somewhat suspicious that many of the areas where they were obviously active, including Peru, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) have excellent waves and are modern surf destinations. This could be a fruitful direction to explore for future research.

There are other connections between surfing and the study of the evidence for a global worldwide flood within human memory.

For one thing, surfing itself takes place at the boundary of the world's mighty oceans, which by their very presence should remind us to be grateful that mankind survived the worldwide flood that extensive evidence shows once covered the earth. In the first book of the Hebrew Scriptures we find the promise given to Noah: "And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth" (Genesis 9:11). In the Proverbs we also find that the limit of the waters is set by divine decree: "When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment" (Proverbs 8:29a). Standing on the shore observing the waves before a session can be a moment to reflect on the fact that the mighty waters are restrained to their place.

Also, surfers often rise early in the morning to take advantage of better wind conditions, which have an important impact on the waves. As the sun heats the land during the day, the lower air pressure over the land can result in onshore winds that are not desireable, while the early morning hours tend to have less wind or even offshore winds as the air flows from the relatively cooler land towards the realtively warmer ocean. This tendency to surf early in the morning provides the opportunity to observe the constellations before dawn, the heliacal rising of constellations, and the sunrise itself. The concept of heliacal rising is important for understanding the clues left by ancient mankind in myths and legends.

Finally, waves and tides are manifestations of the earth's energy and the influence of the earth's turning and the motion of the moon. Surfing is a way to participate in and interact with that energy.

Because such interaction is somewhat challenging, having the right surfboard for the waves at hand can be very important, and for this every surfer should talk to a human shaper who can actually shape the board to the surfer and the types of waves and surfing that he wants. While the author of this blog only surfs in secret, undisclosed locations, he unreservedly recommends the surfboard crafting skills of California shaper Paul Finley of Sojourner Surfboards for this important task.

Above is a photo of the author of the Mathisen Corollary after a surf session at a secret undisclosed location. While this particular board is one he shaped himself, it has a glassing job by Sojourner which has held up to years of abusive treatment by the author in the water. Not only that, but Sojourner glass seems to possess a special property which causes even choppy water conditions to become perfectly smooth, glassy and rideable (but only in the immediate vicinity of the board with the glassing in question).













Further, Sojourner has an awesome blog with images and videos of the sophisticated and forward-looking boards that Paul designs (and the classic boards he makes as well).

While Sojourner is located in Morro Bay, California, it is quite likely that Paul would be happy to craft a personal board for you even if you live in Rapa Nui.

You owe it to yourself to check out a Sojourner surfboard.