The Secrets Next Door

The occupants of these buildings are contractors, and in their more publicly known locations, they purposely understate their presence. But in the National Business Park, a place where only other contractors would have reason to go, their office signs are huge, glowing at night in bright red, yellow and blue: Booz Allen Hamilton, L-3 Communications, CSC, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, SAIC.

"These are some of the most brilliant people in the world," said Ken Ulman, executive of Howard County, one of six counties in NSA's geographic sphere of influence. "They demand good schools and a high quality of life."

The schools, indeed, are among the best, and some are adopting a curriculum this fall that will teach students as young as 10 what kind of lifestyle it takes to get a security clearance and what kind of behavior would disqualify them.

The buses deliver children to neighborhoods that are among the wealthiest in the country; affluence is another attribute of Top Secret America. Six of the 10 richest counties in the United States, according to Census Bureau data, are in these clusters.

Loudoun County, ranked as the wealthiest county in the country, helps supply the workforce of the nearby National Reconnaissance Office headquarters, which manages spy satellites. Fairfax County, the second-wealthiest, is home to the NRO, the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Arlington County, ranked ninth, hosts the Pentagon and major intelligence agencies. Montgomery County, ranked 10th, is home to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. And Howard County, ranked third, is home to 8,000 NSA employees.

The building, sealed off behind fencing and Jersey barriers, is larger than a football field. It has no identifying sign. It does have an address, but Google Maps doesn't recognize it. Type it in, and another address is displayed, every time. "6700," it says.

No street name.

Lane, senior vice president of Ryan Commercial real estate, has become something of a snoop himself when it comes to the NSA. At 55, he has lived and worked in its shadow all his life and has schooled himself on its growing presence in his community. He collects business intelligence using his own network of informants, executives like himself hoping to making a killing off an organization many of his neighbors don't know a thing about.

He notices when the NSA or a different secretive government organization leases another building, hires more contractors and expands its outreach to the local business community. He's been following construction projects, job migrations, corporate moves. He knows that local planners are estimating that 10,000 more jobs will come with an expanded NSA and an additional 52,000 from other intelligence units moving to the Fort Meade post.

Lane was up on all the gossip months before it was announced that the next giant military command, U.S. Cyber Command, would be run by the same four-star general who heads the NSA. "This whole cyber thing is going to be big," he says. "A cyber command could eat up all the building inventory out there."

"I can spot them," she says. The suit. The haircut. The demeanor. "They have a haunted look, like they're afraid someone is going to ask them something about themselves." Undercover agents come in here, too, she whispers, to watch the same people, "to make sure no one is saying too much."

Burns would know - she's been living with one of those secretive men for 20 years. He used to work at the NSA. Now he's one of its contractors. He's been to war. She doesn't know where. He does something important. She doesn't know what.

And inside the NSA, the mathematicians, the linguists, the techies and the crippies are flowing in and out. The ones leaving descend in elevators to the first floor. Each is carrying a plastic bar-coded box. Inside is a door key that rattles as they walk. To those who work here, it's the sound of a shift change.

It is nice to know that "Defense and Intelligence" contractors have access to 3D models of our nations capital cities for surveillance, to "keep us safe". When we have the "smart" people all locked up, unable to communicate with others, and a perpetual motion machine of hardened private corporations and government agencies, all competing for the unending stream of money, you begin to wonder, what the hell were they thinking? What kind of world are they making?

Inception, the danger of Lucid Dreaming, and effects on Reality

The New Movie Inception plays with reality via dreaming.

It is important to note that Lucid Dreaming is very dangerous. Most people don't remember most of their dreams, and there is good reason for this. While we sleep, our brains are not just resting, they are re-tooling, laying down new growth by expanding neurons, and eliminating unused paths that are taking space and energy. Chemicals are infused into our brain when we are asleep to detach our body, otherwise we would sleep walk, or worse. Imagine what would happen if you lived in a tenth floor apartment and had a lucid dream that you could defy gravity? But that's not the real danger. Dreams take real world experiences from our memories and re-run them over and over to strengthen our memory, and workout any problems or lapses in understanding. To do that the dreams go to the extremes of the possible, and beyond, to test every possible outcome of our real world experience. If you didn't forget your dream upon waking, you would remember these impossible scenarios as if they were real memories. This would lead to magical thinking, and what some call 'divine experience'. It is this creating of false memories that plagues some with sleep disorders, just as the sleep deprived have memory problems from forgetfulness, those who loose the ability to distinguish dreams and reality risk not just the accuracy of their memory, but their ability to make rational choices.

Practiced responsibly by a mature mind, Lucid Dreaming ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream ) can spur creativity and solutions to problems. Practiced without discipline and understanding it leads to the destruction of society via all forms of insanity.


It is my personal theory that the vast increase in psychotropic prescription drugs in the USA has lead to such mental breakdown in a large part of the society. When added to poor diet, alcohol, tobacco use, and illicit drug taking, this has hampered the ability of Americans to make rational decisions in the public political and economic areas.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Make a Point, Not a Profit

There are few honest jobs. All the good work is low pay, and anyone who claims otherwise is selling you something.

"It is NOT the business of The Progressive to stay in business, it is the business of The Progressive to Change the World" - Irwin Noel, Editor of 'The Progressive' Magazine 1968, after being threatened by the US Government for publishing an issue on how to create an Atomic Bomb, based entirely upon public sources.

How many modern media outlets would have that kind of courage? To print the truth, regardless of the effect upon your journal, even and up to its destruction (much less, its pocketbook), is the ultimate test of journalism.

If you believe these words, and live in San Diego, CA, then go to the San Diego Society for Media Justice, and send us a note.

Plato's hidden Music in the Republic

Q: Combine Math and Religion, and what do you get?
A: Music.

It sounds like something out of a Dan Brown novel, but a scholar in Manchester, England, claims to have found hidden code in the ancient writings of Plato. If true, the secret messages would have made the ancient philosopher and mathematician a heretic in his day.

Jay Kennedy tells NPR's Guy Raz that his discovery was partially luck. Looking at Plato's works in their original scroll form, he noticed that every 12 lines there was a passage that discussed music. "The regularity of that pattern was supposed to be noticed by Plato's readers," Kennedy says.

Music in ancient Greece was based on a 12-note scale, unlike the eight-note scale of modern Western music. Kennedy posits that Plato deliberately inserted discussions of music every 12 lines to send a secret, musical message.

What Plato couldn't tell people was that he was a closet Pythagorean. Pythagoras and his followers believed that mathematics and music were the key to the universe.

"The Pythagoreans realized that when we hear beauty and music, when we hear notes harmonizing, that's because the notes have simple ratios, like 1:2 or 3:4," Kennedy explains. "So the beauty of music is direct perception of the mathematical order underlying the world. They worshipped that mathematics."

But the Pythagoreans were a persecuted sect, Kennedy adds, sometimes violently persecuted. "They were a threat to traditional religion, like many new sects." Plato's own teacher, Socrates, was famously executed for religious heresy.

"Simply put, they were threatening to overthrow the gods on Olympus and put numbers and mathematics in its place. Prior to Socrates being executed, a number of other philosophers were banished or fled because of threats to themselves. It was dangerous in those days to be a philosopher."

As far as Kennedy can tell, Plato's message was one of solidarity simply by acknowledging the relationship between music and mathematics, but he suspects there's more to it. "Perhaps some scholar will find that — in The Republic, at least — that there is something like a melody or a score embedded in the text," he says.

If that's true, then we've read only half of Plato's writings. "There are all these hidden layers of meaning which will enrich our understanding of Plato," Kennedy says. And maybe what else Plato has to say could help us today.

"Plato's philosophy shows us one way to combine science and religion," Kennedy says. "The culture wars we're having today — about evolution for example — see science and religion as two polarized opposites. Plato's hidden philosophy shows us that he combined an emphasis on mathematics with an emphasis upon beauty, music, art and divinity. The founder of western culture, in fact wanted us to combine science and religion." - from NPR