An Invitation

When at last your bitter problems all ignore you
And you come out clean and everything is done
And you realize I've been through it all before you
Come down and walk beside me in the sun.

Bob Lind, Truly Julie's Blues

"Delta Victor Eight"

You

have

to

be

crazy...


to

live

in

an

insane

world


DV8! DV8! DV8! DV8! DV8!

The "Boob-Tube"

Polymers Are Forever

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has one of the highest levels known of plastic particulate suspended in the upper water column. As a result, it is one of several oceanic regions where researchers have studied the effects and impact of plastic photodegradation in the neustonic layer of water. Unlike debris, which biodegrades, the photodegraded plastic disintegrates into ever smaller pieces while remaining a polymer. This process continues down to the molecular level.

As the plastic flotsam photodegrades into smaller and smaller pieces, it concentrates in the upper water column. As it disintegrates, the plastic ultimately becomes small enough to be ingested by aquatic organisms which reside near the ocean's surface. Plastic waste thus enters the food chain through its concentration in the neuston.

Some plastics decompose within a year of entering the water, leaching potentially toxic chemicals such as bisphenol A, PCBs and derivatives of polystyrene. (read more)

The Starry Messenger

When Galileo turned his telescope to the heavens...

he opened our eyes to the truth of our universe...

we had no idea what was out there until we looked...

(video)

(video)

(video)

(video)

the truth is often met with resistance...

LBJ's Daisy Commercial

Pro-Life Hypocrisy

You say you are Pro-Life?

Then you'll march with me to Stop War!

And you'll protest with me to End Executions!

And you'll stand on street corners and Distribute Condoms!

And you'll do everything you can to Fight the Global Arms Trade!

nueva era

Un-done

The Travis Walton Experience

"If I had to do it over again I wouldn't get out of the truck."

The Travis Walton experience is unequivocally the best documented case of alien abduction ever recorded.


(excerpts from the book "Fire in the Sky")

"Stop!" John cried out. "Stop the truck!"

As the truck skidded to a dusty halt in the rocky road, I threw open the door for a clearer view of the dazzling sight.

"My God!" Allen yelled. "It's a flying saucer!"..............



............."I looked at the vague but reassuring forms of the doctors around me. Abruptly my vision cleared. The sudden horror of what I saw rocked me as I realized I was definitely not in a hospital. I was looking square into the face of a horrible creature . . . with huge, luminous brown eyes the size of quarters! I looked frantically around me. There were three of them! Hysteria overcame me instantly".......................................................



......................"I walked back to the chair and stood beside it, looking at the buttons. I was thinking about pushing some of them, when I heard a faint sound. I whirled around and looked at the door. There, standing in the open doorway, was a human being!

I stood frozen to the spot. He was a man about six feet two inches tall. His helmeted head barely cleared the doorway. He was extremely muscular and evenly proportioned. He appeared to weigh about two hundred pounds. He wore a tight-fitting bright blue suit of soft material like velour. His feet were covered with black boots, a black band or belt wrapped around his middle. He carried no tools or weapons on his belt or in his hands; no insignia marked his clothing.

I ran up to him, exclaiming, babbling all sorts of questions. The man remained silent throughout my verbal barrage. I was worried by his silence. He took me firmly but gently by the arm and gestured for me to go with him. He led me out of that room and hurried me down the narrow hallway, pulling me along behind him due to its narrowness.

He stopped in front of a closed doorway that slid open, into the wall. I did not see what caused it to open. The door opened into a bare room so small it was more like a foyer or section of hallway. The door slid shut quickly and silently behind us. Again I attempted to talk to the man as we stood there. No answer.

We spent approximately two minutes in the metal cubicle, no more than seven by five by twelve feet. Then a doorway, the same size as the other door and directly opposite it, slid open.

The brilliant warm light that came through the opening door into the airlock-like room was almost like daylight in color and brightness. Fresh, cool air wafted in, reminding me of springtime in the out-of-doors, making me realize just how dark and stifling that place had been. What relief that fresh air was! The air moved around me in a softly fluctuating current. I stood and inhaled deeply the clean, cool breeze. The last tinges of the ache in my head and chest almost completely disappeared. I had nearly forgotten the discomfort that had been with me constantly since I had regained consciousness.

I decended a short, steep ramp seven or eight feet to the floor. I looked around to discover that, although I was outside that dim, humid craft, I was not out-of-doors. I was in a huge room. The ceiling was sectioned into alternating rectangles of dark metal and those that gave off light. The ceiling itself curved down to form one of the larger walls in the room. The room was shaped like one-quarter of a cylinder laid on its side.

The outside of the craft we had just left was shaped like the one we had seen in the woods, but was very much larger, about sixty feet in diameter and sixteen feet high. It did not emit light; instead it had a surface of shiny brushed-metal luster. It seemed to radiate a faint heat from its hull. The craft either sat flat on its bottom or, if it had legs, they were only a few inches high. It sat nearly in the middle of the large room.

On my left, toward one end of the large room, there were two or three oval-shaped saucers, reflecting light like highly polished chrome. I could see two of them very clearly, and a silvery reflection that could have been another shiny, rounded craft. They were about forty or forty-five feet in diameter, quite a bit smaller than the angular vehicle I had just come out of. I saw no projections or breaks in the smooth, shiny, flattened spheres. They sat on very rounded bottoms and I could not see how they balanced that way.

The man escorted me across the open floor to a door that opened silently and quickly from the middle outward. We were in a hallway about six feet wide, illuminated from the eight-foot-high ceiling, which was one long panel of softly diffused light. The hallway was straight and perhaps eighty feet long. Closed double doors were distributed along the corridor.

At the end of the hallway, another pair of double doors. I watched closely this time. I did not see him touch anything, but again the doors slid silently back from the middle. We entered a white room approximately fifteen feet square, with another eight-foot-high ceiling. The room had a table and a chair in it. But my interest was immediately focused on the three other humans!

Two men and a woman were standing around the table. They were all wearing velvety blue uniforms like the first man's, except that they had no helmets. The two men had the same muscularity and the same masculine good looks as the first man. The woman also had a face and figure that was the epitome of her gender. They were smooth-skinned and blemishless. No moles, freckles, wrinkles, or scars marked their skin. The striking good looks of the man I had first met became more obvious on seeing them all together. They shared a family-like resemblance, although they were not identical.


"Would somebody please tell me where I am?" I implored. I was still utterly shaken from my encounter with those awful creatures. "What in hell is going on? What is this place?"

They didn't answer me. They only looked at me, though not unkindly. One man and the woman came around the table, approaching me. Silently they each took me by an arm and led me toward the table. I didn't know why I should cooperate with them. They wouldn't even tell me anything. But I was in no position to argue, so I went along at first.

They lifted me easily onto the edge of the table. I became wary and started protesting. "Wait a minute. Just tell me what you are going to do!"

I began to resist them, but all three began pushing me gently backward down onto the table. I looked up at the ceiling, covered with panels of softly glowing white light with a faint blue cast.

I saw that the woman suddenly had an object in her hand from out of nowhere — it looked like one of those clear, soft plastic oxygen masks, only there were no tubes connected to it. The only thing attached to it was a small black golfball-sized sphere.

She pressed the mask down over my mouth and nose. I started to reach up to pull it away. Before I could complete the motion, I rapidly became weak. Everything started turning gray. Then there was nothing at all but black oblivion"................Travis Walton.


Travis Walton saw humans on that alien ship..... (read more)

Ohmmmm.....

Ohmmmmmmmm..........

Ohmmmmmmmmmm............

Ohmmmmmmmmmmmm..............

(repeat)

(Take) A Moment to Breathe

Quiet the voice of the mind

without telling it what to do.



Understand the essential difference

between

your mind

and

You.





Learn

to listen to internal conversation

without contributing a sound.





Observe without analysis.





Consciously

and actively

shut down.









When blank becomes

Clear – clarity not commentated –





Oneness needs no explanation

Requires no additional discussion



Results in

deep soul e x h a l a t i o n .

The Day The Earth Stood Still

"Klaatu barada nikto"

(view trailer)

10,000 Monkeys

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces a random sequence of letters ad infinitum. The theorem illustrates the perils of reasoning about infinity by imagining a vast but finite number, and vice versa. The probability of a monkey exactly typing a complete work such as Shakespeare's Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time of the order of the age of the universe is minuscule, but not zero. (read more)

Increased Tension

The Limits Of Power

For the United States, the passing of the Cold War yielded neither a "peace dividend" nor anything remotely resembling peace. Instead, what was hailed as a historic victory gave way almost immediately to renewed unrest and conflict. By the time the East- West standoff that some historians had termed the "Long Peace" ended in 1991, the United States had already embarked upon a decade of unprecedented interventionism. In the years that followed, Americans became inured to reports of U.S. forces going into action — fighting in Panama and the Persian Gulf, occupying Bosnia and Haiti, lambasting Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Sudan from the air. Yet all of these turned out to be mere preliminaries. In 2001 came the main event, an open- ended global war on terror, soon known in some quarters as the "Long War." by Andrew Bacevich

(watch video)

Comfortably Numb

Spooky

The Lockheed AC-130 gunship is a heavily-armed ground-attack aircraft. The basic airframe is manufactured by Lockheed, and Boeing is responsible for the conversion into a gunship and for aircraft support. It is a variant of the C-130 Hercules transport plane. The AC-130A Gunship II superseded the AC-47 Gunship I in the Vietnam War.

The gunship's sole user is the United States Air Force, which uses AC-130H Spectre and AC-130U Spooky variants. The AC-130 is powered by four Rolls-Royce T56-A-15 turboprops and has an armament ranging from 25 mm Gatling-type cannons to 105 mm howitzers. It has a standard crew of twelve or thirteen airmen, including five officers (two pilots, a navigator, an electronic warfare officer and a fire control officer) and enlisted personnel (flight engineer, electronics operators, and aerial gunners).

The US Air Force uses the AC-130 gunships for close air support, air interdiction, and force protection. Close air support roles include supporting ground troops, escorting convoys, and flying urban operations. Air interdiction missions are conducted against planned targets and targets of opportunity. (read more)

Crazy Horse One-Eight

Everything Is A Miracle

There are only two ways to live your life.

One is as though nothing is a miracle.

The other is as though everything is a miracle.

...Albert Einstein...

Two Choices

You have two choices

as you live your life

you can be "happy" or

you can be un-"happy"

which will you choose?


"There is no way to happiness...happiness is the way"

Search for Meaning

Over the years, I have actively been engaged in a personal search for meaning. The extraordinarily bizarre beliefs of most formal religions has never really passed muster from the framework of my essentially empiricist viewpoint. I am a staunch believer in reality and the physical and biological laws that we are inextricably tied to. In spite of this, I have a thirst for finding meaning and purpose in my life. My experience has taught me that this hunger is bound up in all of humanity. I have asked myself where this need comes from. I can only conclude that it is a fundamental aspect of consciousness. Once the human brain had reached a certain level of complexity, ideas were spontaneously generated. An idea represents the process of combining two or more elements from memory or experience in a novel way. Ideas are the necessary components of the creative process. Curiosity about the natural world would be a logical outgrowth of the evolving intellect of the early humans as observers of the rich environment that surrounded them. In addition to the ordinary inquisitiveness about how things worked, the fundamental question that plagues us all must have arisen, namely, “What is life all about?” and “Why am I here?” The “I” word - that simple word that embodies the essence of consciousness. When humans began to see themselves as I and as separate from We, then is when the comic/tragic aspect of human existence and the human journey began in complete earnestness.

The human mind possesses a wondrous capacity to explore the many facets of existence. It is a great tragedy that collectively we have failed to live up to this awesome potential. Religious Fundamentalists, a classic example of True Believers, focus their attention not on the many man-made problems that confront humanity, but rather on a completely fabricated set of principles for which they are willing to give up their lives to protect, or at least that is what they propose. These principles vary among the various theological constructs, but what they share in common is a fervent belief in a magnificent Savior, imbued with all manner of supernatural powers, who will come to earth at some future time to rescue humans from their tragic choices. This is patent nonsense. Problems that have been created by human activity can only be solved by humans committed to reasoned judgment and not held hostage to crazed thinking.

The idea and reality of death is often is the motivational center of belief and belief systems. It is difficult for the human brain, blessed and cursed as it is with self-consciousness, to conceive of the reality of the termination of the personality. Death is, after all, the natural conclusion of life. It is an integral part of the cycle that delivers individuals back into the chaos of atoms from which we were all constructed. Humans are members of a distinct species on a planet that possesses many distinct species, all with a rightful place in the biosphere. Death cannot be avoided by the notion of an afterlife, or the idea that we have been specially crafted to possess immortal souls that will somehow shatter the barriers of space and time. Hope and imagine as we will, this will not change the ultimate truth of our individual demise. Demise means termination and not some brilliantly concocted and patently fabricated notion about a hereafter. We are transient creatures impaled on the irrepressible arrow of time. Eventually, the sun itself will suffer its own end and take the solar system with it. At that point in time, all life in the solar system will cease. That’s it. There is nothing terribly obscure or abstract about this ultimate truth.

It is within the providence of theology to employ abstraction and all manner of bizarre and circuitous logic in order to avoid this apparent reality. It is the claim of many religious precepts that individuals can conquer death and achieve eternal life if only they conform to the appropriate set of beliefs no matter how fictitious. “Join us and be Saved!” this is but one manifestation of the many artifacts of self delusion that permeate human conceptions of reality.

I have come to the conclusion that, for me, the meaning of life is quite simple; it is, in fact, life itself. Life is a brief and chaotic sojourn on a magnificent planet circling around a rather magnanimous star. We are made of the stuff of stars and it is to the joy molecular that we return. There is no grand repository where our individual consciousnesses are miraculously stored. There is no afterlife in which we are guaranteed an eternal residence. As members of a species and as individuals we are not that important. The laws of reality do not stop at our deathbed and make a grand exception for the sake of our own feelings of security and well being. Death delivers us from the world of the living; it is a molecular dance. Life is a continuum that involves the relentless assembling of the complex from the simple and the chaotic reversal of the process only to begin again. The measure of a successful life is the degree to which we surrender to it. It needs to be a joyous surrender not reluctant, half-hearted or nihilistic. Experiencing life is very much like the act of love; one cannot love without giving in completely to it. The same is true of living.

Sargeant Karl Wolf

Split-level head

It wasn’t long ago that psychologists considered memory to be a single-thread of stimulus-response associations; strengthened by repetition. What happened between the time information was entered and retrieved was terra incognito. Memory was commonly thought to be a passive record of events. Once information was stored, it became a reliable part of memory. It was always there; forgetting was blamed on a failure of retrieval. These principles of memory no longer apply. They fail to explain clinical reports of patients with aphasia or Alzheimer’s. Aphasia patients, for instance, can usually remember current events, but they forget long-term information such as the meaning of words or the names of familiar objects. On the other hand, Alzheimer’s patients can usually remember long-term information, such as the meaning of words, but they forget recent events such as a visit by a relative or their arrival at the clinic. These observations suggest different types of memory at work. Some temporarily hold events in our immediate surroundings while others preserve them on a more lasting basis.

Memory is now considered to be like a multi-level interchange. It has many locations, and each location has it’s own shelf-life. Instead of being a passive record of events, memory is more like an active participant constructing events. When listening to someone speak, for instance, sound enters sensory storage, which has finite capacity for registering immediate impressions, but decays within milliseconds ..allowing just enough time for the sound to be parsed into phonemes. Phonemes are transferred to short-term memory where sentences are constructed and their meaning identified. Meaning is then encoded and transferred to long-term memory based on its perceived informative-value (feelings, relevance, consequences, etc). Although long-term memory is what we traditionally think of as durable memory; it is not as reliable as once thought. Instead of being a passive record of things past, it is more like an active construction-site, integrating and revising things past, present and future (predicted). Dr. Elizabeth Loftus offers compelling evidence for this when she writes about the effect of interrogation and publicity on eyewitness testimony. She’s a good read on the state-of-the arts, if you’re interested.

Presented at a seminar in ~> Cognitive science

The Truth

If the Republicans will stop

telling lies about the Democrats,

we will stop telling the truth about them.

Adlai E. Stevenson

The Guardians ???

The Restore America Plan

The Restore America Plan is a bold achievable strategy for behind-the-scenes peaceful reconstruction of the de jure institutions of government without controversy, violence or civil war. After consultation with high ranking members of the United States armed forces, the Plan is in the process of assembling the Guardians of the Free Republics and reinhabiting the De jure Grand Juries to:

Restore and reinhabit the de jure institutions of lawful government.

Terminate illicit corporations posing as legitimate governments, in particular the territorial jurisdiction United States Federal Corporation (corp. ref. 28 U.S.C. 3002) posing as the de jure United States of America.

Terminate all presumed powers of attorney to such corporations.

End the foreclosure nightmare (for borrowing against one’s own credit).

End tax prosecutions for resisting the transfer of private wealth to foreign banking cartels such as I.R.S. (former Puerto Rico Bureau of Taxation).

End street assaults against the sovereign People for failing to exhibit a State-issued confession of subject-class citizenship.

End all prosecutions which lack an injured party.

End admiralty prosecutions for kidnapping and other heinous crimes against mankind as “commercial crimes” against the corporate State under a contrived corporate color-of-law venue (corp. ref. 27 C.F.R. 72.11).

Terminate the intrusion of corporations posing as the state into every aspect of the People’s lives.

End the use of covert contracts such as Form 1040, car registrations, birth certificate applications, and bank signature cards which confess the signer to be a legal fiction subject of the United States Federal Corporation (“U.S. person”) that has waved his/her rights in favor of state-issued privileges.

End the use of deeds which classify the People as “tenants” on their own land, thereby transferring control to incorporated County registrars and tax assessors.

End the perversion of marriage into a commercial system of state-issued privileges through the so-called “marriage license” whereby incorporated “courts” presume the “right” to trespass on families and kidnap children.

End the hijacking of automobile ownership through DMV registrations which covertly exchange the divine rights of travel and ownership for the state-issued “privileges” of “driving” and “title.”

In place of all of the above, substitute sovereign identification, diplomatic immunity and sovereign passports to facilitate safe passage throughout the world free from corporate State molestation and terror.

Restore the People’s money and wealth from the banking institutions, war profiteers, and international loan sharks.

Instantly vest all mortgages, auto loans and personal business loans “issued” by members of the Fed. The state shall hold no paper on, or debts against, the sovereign People, directly or through its agencies and licensed banking institutions.

Instantly end all non-consensual and unlawful taxation including all taxes on the sacred rights of labor and privacy.

Empower and inspire the sovereign People to righteousness through such renewed abundance.

Issue orders to the military and police powers to enforce the Peoples’ divine rights of birth.

Reabsorb all de facto actors into lawful de jure capacity.

End the perverse act of requiring the People to pray to “courts” as is now required under corporate rules and traditions.

Restore the de jure judicial institutions including the district court of the United States and the one supreme Court.

Quietly mirror the strategies of 1933 thereby using their (our) institutions, military and public officials to undo eighty years of subterfuge without provoking alarm, controversy or armed conflict.

Return the military and law enforcement institutions to proper and lawful de jure sovereign authority from the clutches of corporate actors.

Forgive all corporate actors who repent for their State-sponsored crimes against mankind. Remove the recidivists from office.

Do all of the above, and more, peacefully, discreetly, quietly and honorably, behind the scenes, without public proclamations or provocative actions against a general public that is mostly unaware of the hijacking of their free de jure American republics, and their hapless media.

(read more)

And I Began To Pray

The Future Is Now

Some people think there is a future

some people think there is a past

they are wrong

there is no "past"

there is no "future"

there is only the eternal NOW!!!!!

Thomas Robert Malthus

The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS (13 February 1766 – 23 December 1834), was a British scholar, influential in political economy and demography. Malthus popularised the economic theory of rent.

Malthus has become widely known for his theories concerning population, and its increase or decrease in response to various factors. The six editions of his Principles of Population, published from 1798 to 1826, observed that sooner or later population gets checked by famine, disease, and widespread mortality. He wrote in opposition to the popular view in 18th-century Europe that saw society as improving, and in principle as perfectible. William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, for example, believed in the possibility of almost limitless improvement of society. So, in a more complex way, did Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose notions centered on the goodness of man and the liberty of citizens bound only by the social contract, a form of popular sovereignty.

Malthus thought that the dangers of population growth would preclude endless progress towards a utopian society: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man". As an Anglican clergyman, Malthus saw this situation as divinely imposed to teach virtuous behaviour. Believing that one could not change human nature, Malthus wrote:

"Must it not then be acknowledged by an attentive examiner of the histories of mankind, that in every age and in every State in which man has existed, or does now exist, that the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence, that population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and, that the superior power of population it repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice."

Malthus placed the longer-term stability of the economy above short-term expediency. He criticised the Poor Laws, and (alone among important contemporary economists) supported the Corn Laws, which introduced a system of taxes on British imports of wheat. He thought these measures would encourage domestic production, and so promote long-term benefits.
Malthus became hugely influential, and controversial, in economic, political, social and scientific thought. Many of those whom subsequent centuries sometimes term "evolutionary biologists" also read him, notably Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, for each of whom Malthusianism became an intellectual stepping-stone to the idea of natural selection. Malthus remains a writer of great significance and controversy. (read more)

iPad

Today you can read from the NYT how people are buying iPads. I have a few thoughts I want to share with you here.

When I was in my twenties I refused to use computers to solve mathematical problems because I thought one lost control of the problem. Even if a solution was found with a machine, one wouldn't learn important lessons.

Now I think that position was wrong. Yes, one could walk to the Himalayas and gain wisdom, but give me a break, it is OK to use tools. Humans have been using tools since the beginning of time. After forty years these devices are all over the place, the only way they will disappear is if we experience a collapse of civilization. Even with the recent demolition of houses in Detroit, indicating some kind of collapse, there is hope that something will grow in those plots in Michigan. People die, but humanity keeps on trucking.

Now I want, that more poor children around the world can put their little fingers around any toy we can give them. Time and time again we have demonstrated our ability to appropriate our tools and grow to the potential we are capable of. Professor Nicholas Negroponte started a crusade several years ago, to put in the hands of all children of the world a one hundred dollar gizmo that allowed them to program computers. The iPad is not there yet, it is five times more expensive than Negroponte's goal; but you know how prices go. Today we are one step closer to the professor's dream.

Science for the People; good work Steve Jobs!
p.d. Steve Wozniak already has his toy.