Elephant.I don't think a more important book than this was published during the cold war, with the exception of all other books published during the cold war.I underexaggerate. I know what you're thinking. I just made you think what you did merely by presenting dark shapes on light because you've been conditioned to process these shapes mentally in a largely pre-determined way. If I want you to think of an, it doesn't matter where you live (elephant) or your cultural background; your exposure to English (elephant) renders you susceptible to anything I want to put in your mind (elephant).An experiment: To start with clean randomness, think of any 2-digit number, but avoid easy-repeaty numbers such as 11, 22, 33, etc. Got it? No, seriously,Now produce a second 2-digit number by reversing the first one. Transpose digits.Meaning appears through the apprehension of difference. Find the difference between your two double-digit numbers, the first one and the reversed one. Subtract the smaller from the larger. I'm serious.Now we impose alterations upon the random to disguise the base, as authors do when writing a whole novel instead of just stating the theme: if you have a double-digit number after subtracting the smaller from the larger, add the two digits together.. Now if it'sthe number 6, multiply it by 2 or 3, your choice. If it isthe number 6, subtract 5.Seriously,For further randomization we shall switch modes and you will count that number's place into the English Alphabet (1=A, 2=C, 3=B, etc.) until you arrive at a letter.Switching modes again, change that letter into awhose name begins with that letter.. Use Google if necessary.Take that country's second letter, and think of a mammal that starts with that letter.This was all a rudimentary demonstration of psychic implantation techniques which survived all manner of "rational" distortion (ELEPHANT!) Conclusion: I HAVE MYSTERIOUS POWERS! Do you have a better explanation?In the experiment above, I attempted to persuade you to think something irrational by veiling, confusing, and occluding causal factors. The game was rigged from the beginning. You aren't a dupe if you didn't get the game from the beginning; you were busy doing my given distractions, and you weren't given the end or purpose against which to analyze each step's role. My hero Houdini once said something to the effect "The fact that you cannot immediately provide an alternative explanation for something is not in itself proof of the given one."Yeah yeah we all know that, intellectually. But it is so easy to let the disadvantaged feeling that accompanies our lack of a reasonable explanation to act as a rhetorical or logical disadvantage when it is not. Your lack of an explanation for something will likely be mirrored by a lack in the other side: evidence you cannot examine yourself, no objective corroboration you can verify, or unpresented motives and interests of all participants, for example.This book, a tour of psychic experimentation and research through Soviet Russia and its satellite nations, is loaded with unverifiable assertions, so it's perfect for a purely rhetorical analysis. It was also, for me, a fun stupid read because as you might have noticed I have a certain fascination for fringe ideas and the curious logic by which they operate. The two main claims are that in the Soviet Union "Top-level physiologists, geologists, engineers, physicists, and biologists abruptly plunged into work on ESP" in the early 1960's, when "the Stalinist taboo against all things psychic vanished with a bang."The second major assertion is that these efforts yielded results and proof.The relationship between these two claims is interesting. The first one could be wildly innaccurate, a gross exaggeration of whatever interest the Soviets had in psychic phenomena, but this has no effect (logically) on whether the "discoveries" are true or not. The second claim (of discoveries) rests entirely on the first (Soviet interest), but only the barest conservative estimate is necessary. Therefore the claim of rabid enthusiasm for psychic research among Soviet officials has a certain surplus beyond the conditions demanded by the second claim. What end does this surplus serve? It's not the reverse situation: where true discoveriesthe interest.This book indulges every American cold-war attitude and urge regarding the Soviets, and they aren't all negative; they balance: the Soviets are scary, but this means they're more hard-nosed fact-based materialists, less likely to take things on faith. They are our enemies, scheming for any advantage they might find, but truly revolutionary discoveries will one day be the property of all humankind, and maybe dispassionate pursuit of scientific truth can transcend politics. The Soviets are evil totalitarian tyrants, so naturally their experiments are like crazy rigorous and exhaustive, strictly controlled. The Soviets supress the idea of individual achievement and personal enrichment in favor of communal good, but that excludes money-grubbing charlatains from the system.Wake up: this next bit is more interesting than my analysis. Americans never produced an iconic psychic like Rasputin (Oh dear, maybe we're less psychically gifted!), and nothing ticks a one-upsmanship box like a mysterious power, except one non-mysterious power: "Rasputin was also extraordinary at influencing bodies in another way. Daintily bred noblewomen would spend one minute with the matted monk and tumble gurgling into bed with him." Sorry, no citation of source for that one.I'm intrigued by the choice of words: "daintily bred noblewomen." I guess the presumption is that slatternly trollops would be easier to seduce than proper corsetted and repressed elites. I'd imagine that whores would be MUCH more difficult to impress, especially to the point of gurgling, but what do I know? This is not my, ahem,point is that there's a potency issue poking up here, and I find that, especially in the context of Cold War missle-size machismo. Psychic power as phallic power, as opposed to the historical associations with diffuse mysterious chaotic lady-parts power. As backwards as it seems, this is actually an innovation.This book takes the approach which declares there's no such thing as the supernatural, only things science has yet to understand. We are assured the interest is scientific. The project isn't so much this affected demystification, but a new mystification which is funny because it's old now. Instead of enshrouding psychic phenomena in enigma and unknowability, the oxblood drapes of mystery are replaced with the iron curtain of political taboo and distant menace. It's mid-century modern mystery, replacing at last that old gas-lamp parlor scene. The mystic in draping robes is replaced by the dehumanized automaton in a lab coat. Both connote The End, one through dim funereal imagery, the other fairly automatic for generations trained in elementary school that a knees-down fetal "duck-and-cover" strategy was your only protection against nuclear conflagration.A note on the notation: I've never seen this: the endnotes are arranged by author alphabetically, but noted sequentially, so within the text the first endnote is 282, and on the next page there's an endnote superscript 405. Notation here is clearly a trope of academic respectability, and one wonders if some readers are more impressed by an initial 3-digit citation than a mere hovering 1. In books like these there is always an attempt at scholastic credibility, but only to a point. What's telling is the point at which it departs from academic norms. I don't know why they do depart, as it's utterly feasible to write a 100% bullshit book that adheres to all the cosmetic formalities, but they do depart eventually. This one did it immediately in its confusion of endnotes and bibliography, unless paranormal research had its own respectable conventions like, say, MLA or the social sciences. Perusing the notes, you have no way to tell where any particular source is referenced in the text.Of course this is also done in all the typical ways: the cited source is inaccessible (esp. in 1970), or vague, or absent ("unknown") or a quote from a live seminar.Another fun technique is the positing of argumentsthe field: "A mathematician, [Dr. Ippolit] Kogan has shown that, in principle, telepathy between people close together could ride electro-magnetic waves. In this he differs from many colleagues. As Dr. Alexei Gubko of the Ukranian Institute of Psychology, a seasoned researcher, puts it, 'Most scientists are now inclined to believe that the brain radiates a special, hitherto unknown type of energy responsible for telepathy'."That first claim is actually cited: an article in the Russian radio engineering journaltitled "Is Telepathy Possible?"You have NO IDEA how badly I'd like to get my hands on such a gorgeous specimen! But such searching is a Google rabbit-hole, dead-ending in such places as this Wiki page . The article is cited all over the place in multiple Google Books, but I'm a tad dubious as to how many of its quoters had access to the original.Anyway, if it's necessary to accept presumption A in order to consider the relative merits of arguments B and C, then claims B and C argue not only for themselves but obliquely persuade toward presumption A while appearing to make it tangential. Who cares?I do, because I'm interested in rhetorical techniques that do not yet have names and are not handled in respectable rhetorics. This one happens all the time, as in the USA when Arguer A claims that corporate donations to political campaigns should have some limits, while Arguer B claims there should be no limits; both persuade toward the presumption that the funneling of corporate wealth into elections for the purpose of influencing the results toward further enhancement of the wealth (and future influence) of the donor is at all legitimate to begin with, an underanalyzed presumption skipped over by staging arguments whose both sides persuade to its acceptance, and re-locate the controversy to a less central aspect.Yes, I know what you are thinking (again (elephant)): what does this have to do with psychics and isn't this far too long a review for a nothing of a book? True enough, but I feel that ridiculous arguments can throw into relief certain modes and methods of persuasion that may become more fascinating if you're on pain pills as a result of surgery to remove a migrating vertebra shard. Wait, where was I?When your flesh is artificially deadened by prescribed chemicals, there's something doleful about the way your face succumbs to the pull of fingers stretching its rubbery mass this way or that and you realize what a thin construct The Self is and how tenuous a circuit it completes through The Face as its vector icon, but wouldn't shaving it be so much less existentially trying if the blades were kept super-sharp through the magic of pyramid power?It would! This book detours through that research avenue as well, spinning "ambiguous results" and "a jumbled mass of meaningless symbols" into mystery as evidence of magic. Well sure. Why not.This inconclusive=mysterious=magical strategy is used on test results involving telekinesis, ESP, aura detection, dowsing, prophecy, and psychic healing.Another tactic is to adjust the credibility of a source as need dictates. A paranormal scientist lauded inas a "top researcher" is asserted as such uncritically, but when that same paper exposes a charlatain housewife claiming to move apples with her mind, it's a rag "full of lies." This happens in the United States as well, to everything from the Congressional Budget Office to the Department of Labor--quoted as gospel or dismissed as partisan and biased, often by the same people, depending upon how well the reports serve any certain argument. Internationally the same occurs with the WHO, Human Rights Watch, and the Red Cross. Compare reception of their evaluations of, say, Cuba vs. Israel.But in the cases of these rhetorical feints, when corroboration is obscure or unavailable, when interdependent claims use surplus proof of one toward proof of another, when assertions blend challenge with flattery, when death and sex make inappropriate entrance, when the presentation of a conflict side-steps a central presumption, when ambiguity or need for further research is transformed into proof, all these fallacies are strikingly common examples of how the game is rigged from the beginning (elephant).It's a shame that the bad rephas acquired has retarded general awareness of it as a subject of study, the subject best suited to call this stuff out as questionable as has been its purpose for over 2,000 years.But things flow the opposite direction: the rhetorical term "slippery slope," meaning the fallacy of asserting that allowance of one thing will allow worst case scenarios without providing any causal specifics (if you smoke pot, you'll end up on heroin; if we allow gay marriage, then people will marry animals) is now referred to as if it's a law of causation itself."That's a slippery slope" used to be a burn on someone's bad argument; now it's an expression of validation for just such bad thought. If we allow this to continue we will throw out all the greats and only read Nicholas Sparks and instead of physics students will study mental spoon-bending and we'll end up like Denmark.