Friday, November 5, 2010
ufo: seeing is believing
de.lude \di-lud\vb deluded; deluding:
MISLEAD, DECEIVE, TRICK
...who is being tricked ?...
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Quality of understanding
“The meaning of a sentence is derived from the original words by an active, interpretive process. The original sentence that is perceived is rapidly forgotten and memory is for the information (meaning) contained in the sentence.” [Link]
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
well, fair, productive
Maybe society has created a compliant insanity by majority rules.
There are many indicators that we don't live in a well or fair state.
Could responsibility address the fear of a Welfare State?
There are conceptual properties that are interfering with original rights to own material properties. Our Founding Fathers came from the era when monarchs owned all the property of a country (and it's empire) so They were attempting to design a proper property for individuals to manage. The ultimate private interest was confronted to create the best republic they could. This was a social movement as the first paragraph of Common Sense clearly implies. Protection of property is how government earns confidence. Does it seem like a majority of Americans would vote no-confidence in their government? How much should we think that is insane?
Their agrarian economy was at a pace with natural progression that was distorted by concepts allowed by an industrial revolution. Profit worked great when measured by production values. What seems to distort economic integrity is how information and service is sold for profit.
My parents were social workers who were pioneers of a social service era. The entitlement of a stable government inspired the creation of assurances like Social Security according to their standards.
The wealthy interpretation was to create an insurance market that is based on gambling. The perpetrators are proving the imbalance of values that became pervasive with the acceptance of governmental lotteries. So many pay every week with hope for something they will never experience. Insurance makes us pay every month for something we never hope to use. How rational is that?
The deficit is a result of gambling attitudes. But how can the future be held responsible for the behavior of the past, monetarily? How can the nonexistent account for a conceptual derivative? Maybe it doesn't exist!Doesn't it seem more like an admission of borrowing in order to gamble? This could be a value of (and owed to) those who were used.
Wealth seems to be a style of compulsive obsessive hoarding. The more I have (of anything powerful) the more I am removed from a balanced reality and the more defensive I become. Those with the most have the most to lose. Money has become a harsh demanding master monarch.
The new confidence could come from a credit game that doesn't create debt. Overthrow the monarch money with three branches of economy. Divide the deficit into potential credit that can be accessible by staying well and fairly well-balanced. Every patient is important for the practice of medicine so they should get paid to submit to compliant health goals. This credits care for our bodies as a national interest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of contentment.
The best liberty we have now is to indulge in education. Does the entitlement of education lack the values of observation and or recognition? Universities should financially credit students for completing stages of research and development. This could be the redistribution of interest to recreate the best American production behavior that proper investment deserves. If students came into society with credits to invest, those in the profit branch of economy could make products beyond reproach.
If the fastest growing job is collection agent, it is a symptom of inappropriate use of energy. I have implied that the insurance job market created a parasite that is a tumor in the system of banking that has derived the most harm to our well-being. It is easier to just live with a parasite than to treat it. The immediate problem with jobs is what limitations they have forced humanity to accept.
The job of regulator is a type of mediation that needs to relax the punishment of judgment and expedite educational and healthy observations as trustworthy. This could be the role of government if economics were removed, The Founding Fathers had the hint that lawmaking and enforcement was the cause of taxation. Regulate that burden by repealing the mistakes of the past. Forgive so we don't have to forget the lessons of mistakes. The deficit is a symptom that reparations are deserved if relative to three respectful styles of coexistence. Production, thought development, and health care.
Narrative space
Proceedings from the Symposium on Extraterrestrial Psychology
Dr. Latimer: Language is nothing more than a stream of symbols that signify nothing until we recognize something we might have either seen or heard before, and look up it's meaning in our mental dictionary. In a plurality of worlds, without a common store of experience that comes from shared culture, efforts at communication may be an exercise in incomprehensible gestures. Verbal communication is the manipulation of symbols to which meaning is assigned by culture. An important point to keep in mind my friends is that the events experienced by members of a culture over time are what make up the narrative thread of that culture.
Dr. Zhavern: When we look into space, we don’t see things as they are. What we see is a single narrative thread winding it’s way through the cosmos ..a cosmos that may be shared by narratives other than our own. However, to it’s participants ..each narrative looks like the only cosmic game in town. Like language, we skew space to resemble something we’ve either seen, or heard before. It’s the only way we can come to grips with it.
Dr. Orloff: I think human consciousness is a fragmented and unstable process. It creates rapid models of counterfactual worlds inside the brain for things it cannot observe ..but only infer. The brain keeps track of these different versions until only those that contribute to narrative coherence receive sufficient signal strength to survive while those leading nowhere dissolve into noise ..and disappear into non-narrative space .. in an instant.
Dr. Pangloss: I think consciousness is made up of searchlights, projected from different mental versions of the world we create. They eventually converge to form concentric circles in the brain that illuminate the focal points that contribute most to narrative events, and fade rapidly at the periphery with fewer contributing points until things go black somewhere around the edges of non-narrative space.
My feeble brain ( hasn’t got a clue ): Are you saying that the narrative threads of extraterrestrials aren’t likely to uncoil very closely to ours ..(?)
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
the clash - london calling
Now war is declared - and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard,you boys and girls
London calling, now don't look to us
Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain't got no swing
'Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing
CHORUS
The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
Cause London is drowning and I, live by the river
London calling to the imitation zone
Forget it, brother, you can go at it alone
London calling to the zombies of death
Quit holding out - and draw another breath
London calling - and I don't wanna shout
But while we were talking I saw you *running out
London calling, see we ain't got no high
Except for that one with the yellowy eyes
The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in
Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
Cause London is drowning and I, I live by the river
Now get this
London calling, yes, I was there, too
An' you know what they said? Well, some of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
And after all this, won't you give me a smile?
London Calling
I never felt so much alive, alive, alive...
Monday, November 1, 2010
Communion
Louis Whitley Strieber (born June 13, 1945) is an American writer best known for his horror novels The Wolfen and The Hunger and for Communion, a non-fiction account of his perceived experiences with non-human entities. Strieber also co-authored The Coming Global Superstorm with Art Bell, which inspired the film about sudden climate change, The Day After Tomorrow. He has persisted as a supporter of alternative concept advocates through the Unknown Country website.
On December 26, 1985, Strieber reportedly was abducted from his cabin in upstate New York by non-human beings. He wrote about these experiences in his first non-fiction book, Communion (1987). Although the book is perceived generally as an account of alien abduction, Strieber admittedly draws no conclusions about his experience. He refers to the beings as "the visitors," a name chosen to be as neutral as possible to entertain the possibility that they are not extraterrestrials and may instead exist in his mind. He has repeatedly expressed his frustration with what he feels are fantastic claims attributed incorrectly to him.
Strieber wrote three additional autobiographies detailing his experiences with the visitors, Transformation (1988), Breakthrough (1995) and The Secret School (1996).
Other visitor-themed books of Strieber's include Majestic (1989), a novel about the Roswell UFO incident and The Communion Letters (1997, reissued in 2003), a collection of letters from readers reporting experiences similar to Strieber's. Confirmation (1998), despite its title does not propose that there has been 'confirmation' of UFOs or abductions. It analyzes the evidence and discusses what would be required to provide 'confirmation'. A 2006 novel, The Grays, presented his impression of alien contact through a fictional narrative.
Strieber wrote the screenplay for the 1989 film Communion, directed by Philippe Mora and starring Christopher Walken as Strieber. The movie covers material from the novel Communion and a sequel Transformation and which has themes not present in the books. (read more)
Whispering Grass 1
“Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, his attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself. In our way the point of the angle is always toward ourselves.”
Shunryu Suzuki
Sunday, October 31, 2010
This Is Halloween
Halloween (or Hallowe'en) is an annual holiday observed on October 31, primarily in Canada, Ireland, the United States and the United Kingdom. It has roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Christian holiday All Saints' Day, but is today largely a secular celebration. (read more)
"That's All Folks"
Mel Blanc (May 30, 1908 – July 10, 1989) was an American voice actor and comedian. Although he began his nearly six-decade-long career performing in radio commercials, Blanc is best remembered for his work with Warner Bros. during the "Golden Age of American animation" (and later for Hanna-Barbera television productions) as the voice of such well-known characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat, Tweety Bird, Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam, Wile E. Coyote, Woody Woodpecker, Barney Rubble, Mr. Spacely, Speed Buggy, Captain Caveman, Heathcliff, and hundreds of others. Having earned the nickname "The Man of a Thousand Voices," Blanc is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice-acting industry. (read more)
Mother Hale
Hale remembers her mother advising her children, “I want you to hold your head up and be proud of yourself. We were brought over and we were enslaved all this time, but it’s over now. You’re supposed to be free, but you aren’t free. Remember that.” Her mother’s love, generosity and understanding of the African American experience had a profound influence on Hale and the direction her life would eventually take. Her father had died when she was a baby.
Hale had three children, Nathan, Lorraine and Kenneth, who were very young when their father died. As an African American widow her employment options were strictly limited to domestic service; she chose to become a foster parent and to take in other people’s children. Although the arrangement with the parents was to care for the children five days out of the week, many of the children didn’t want to go home. She came to an understanding with the parents of these children; they gave her an additional dollar each week and she kept them with her all the time. She raised forty children in this way. All of these children went on to college and graduated. They all ended up with meaningful careers and led successful lives. Hale was always supportive. As a result, some became singers, dancers, preachers and “…things like that.”
By 1969, at the age of 64, she decided to retire from foster care no longer love and nurture children. That determination would soon change when her daughter sent her the baby of an addict; her name was Amanda. Although she was reluctant, at first, to assume this new responsibility, within two months she had twenty-two babies living in a five room apartment. Hale’s viewpoint can best be described in her own words, “Angels must have him – the baby’s name was Tiny Ty – the night his mother pitched him in the dumpster. It was filled with broken wine bottles and splintered furniture. Yet he fell on the one soft thing in it; a piece of discarded carpet that smelled of wine. Fortunately, only a few mosquitoes and roaches had bothered him…
“It was truly a miracle that he had beaten the odds of dying from exposure those critical first hours of his young life.
“And now he needed us to help him beat a more determined foe: heroin, his birth companion, the monkey on his back.”
It is important to remember that 1969 was a terrible and ominous time in the nation’s history – Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been recently assassinated. To the people of Harlem it was a desperate time in which nascent hope were shattered and that at its nadir resulted in horrific riots that devastated the region.
In 1973, Mother Hale opened the Hale House and started the Center for the Promotion of Human Potential; it was a brownstone in Harlem with the purpose of providing a safe and nurturing environment for the babies of young drug-addicted mothers. The success of this operation has been spectacular – hundreds of babies have returned to health as a result of their stay in Hale House which is now administered by her daughter, Dr. Lorraine Hale.
According to Mother Hale, “It’s been over six hundred addicted babies. We hold them and rock them. They love you to tell them how great they are, how good they are. Somehow even at a young age, they understand that. They’re happy and they turn out well.”
Her philosophy may best be summarized in her own words, “Being black does not stop you. You can sit out in the world and say, ‘Well, white people kept me back, and I can’t do this.’ Not so. You can have anything you want if you make up your mind and you want it. You don’t have to crack nobody across the head, don’t have to steal or anything. Don’t have to be smart like the men up high stealing all the money. We’re good people and we try.”
She decided to open up a place for children with AIDS in the 1980s when she was in her mid seventies, knowing that these children were destined for an early death. AIDS had a crippling in Harlem, leaving many AIDS-infected children without parents. She hoped that, “… one day there will be no Hale House, that we won’t need anybody to look after these children, that the drugs will be gone. I’m not an American hero. I’m a person that loves children.”
She remained active and involved until her death. Clare McBride Hale died on December 18, 1992 – a remarkable woman. She lived a truly exemplary life filled with an abundance of love for the human kind. She exhibited an extraordinary kind of courage and a generosity of spirit that is difficult to fathom. He Hale House Center is still extant and continues to serve children as it has done for over forty years.
Houdini
Harry Houdini (born Erik Weisz; March 24, 1874 – October 31, 1926) was a Hungarian-born American magician and escapologist, stunt performer, actor and film producer noted for his sensational escape acts. Harry Houdini died on Halloween. (read more)
America and Obama Hit Bottom:
Pressuring Child Soldier to Plead Guilty to Murder Violates International Law and Basic Common Decency
Omar Khadr at age 15, the time of his capture by US forcesAs the author of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a president reach the depth of moral decay and depravity of President George W. Bush, but sad to say, our current president, Barack Obama, has managed to do it, and what makes it worse, as a former Constitutional law professor, he knows better.
This president’s moral nadir was hit yesterday, when he allowed a military tribunal based at Guantanamo to pressure Omar Khadr, a Canadian captured, gravely wounded, and arrested at the age of 15 in Afghanistan, and held at at Guantanamo now for nine years, to plead guilty to murder.
Khadr’s crime? He was in a house that was struck by a US air strike and then raided by US special forces during the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. The gravely wounded Khadr was accused of tossing a grenade at advancing US troops, which killed US Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, and caused another soldier to lose an eye
Although Khadr, after nine years of harsh confinement at Guantanamo, and facing a military tribunal, has pleaded guilty in a plea bargain, after insisting for nine years that he did not throw the grenade (there is no living witness to his having done so), one issue here is that even if he did toss it, that action would have been seen as that heroic act of a gravely-wounded young fighter facing a superior enemy force, but for the fact that the US is claiming Khadr was not a legitimate soldier, but rather a “terrorist.”
This is a rather spurious claim, since the US says it went to “war” in Afghanistan to go after Al Qaeda forces there, who had been set up with CIA assistance initially to help the Mujahadeen fight the Soviet occupiers. So the force that Khadr was supposedly fighting with was a legitimate fighting force once, but became not a fighting force when the enemy was the US. Clearly, such fine distinctions would have meant nothing to a 15-year-old boy who had been “drafted” into the war at 14 by his Al Qaeda-member father, who was later killed by US fire. Note too that the US can say its soldiers, who have been killing a prodigious number of civilians in Afghanistan, cannot be charged with murder or manslaughter because they are soldiers, but the enemy they are fighting can be charged with murder if they fight back, because they are supposedly not legitimate soldiers.
But Alice-in-Wonderland semantic games aside, in any case, the biggest outrage in this case is that Khadr was 15 when he was captured. Under the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty that was signed by the US and that is thus part of US law, all children under the age of 18 captured while fighting in wars are to be offered “special protection” and treated as victims, not as combatants. (more)
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
The Fall of Adam and Eve
The Fall (1467-68)
Hugo van der Goes
"You will not surely die,"
the serpent said to the woman.
"For God knows that when you eat
of it your eyes will be opened,
and you will be like God,
knowing good and evil."
Genesis 3:4-5
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
The Great Divergence
"All my life I've heard Latin America described as a failed society (or collection of failed societies) because of its grotesque maldistribution of wealth. Peasants in rags beg for food outside the high walls of opulent villas, and so on. But according to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic. The main difference is that the United States is big enough to maintain geographic distance between the villa-dweller and the beggar".....Timothy Noah.
(read more) (watch video)
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
Founded on March 16, 2002, LEAP is made up of current and former members of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities who are speaking out about the failures of our existing drug policies. Those policies have failed, and continue to fail, to effectively address the problems of drug abuse, especially the problems of juvenile drug use, the problems of addiction, and the problems of crime caused by the existence of a criminal black market in drugs.
Although those who speak publicly for LEAP are people from the law enforcement and criminal justice communities, a large number of our supporting members do not have such experience. You don't have to have law enforcement experience to join us.
By continuing to fight the so-called "War on Drugs", the US government has worsened these problems of society instead of alleviating them. A system of regulation and control of these substances (by the government, replacing the current system of control by the black market) would be a less harmful, less costly, more ethical and more effective public policy.
Please consider joining us and helping us to achieve our goals: 1) to educate the public, the media and policy makers about the failure of current policies, and 2) to restore the public's respect for police, which respect has been greatly diminished by law enforcement's involvement in enforcing drug prohibition. (read more)