Wondering who will see the history if it is erased?

1. The Yes Men Change the World
2. War by Other Means - a prescient video about the IMF from 1993
3. Zeitgeist: Moving Forward
4. The Corporation
5. Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Politics
6. Capitalism IS the Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity
7. Inside Job
8. Capitalism: A Love Story
9. Lifting the Veil: Obama and the Failure of Capitalist Democracy
10. Rise Like Lions: O.W.S. and the Seeds of Revolution
11. The Secret of Oz

On MIRTH

Hugh Pickens writes:

"The sense of humor is a ubiquitous human trait, yet rare or non-existent in the rest of the animal kingdom. But why do humans have a sense of humor in the first place? Cognitive scientist (and former programmer) Matthew Hurley says humor (or mirth, in research-speak) is intimately linked to thinking and is a critical task in human cognition because a sense of humor keeps our brains alert for the gaps between our quick-fire assumptions and reality. 'We think the pleasure of humor, the emotion of mirth, is the brain's reward for discovering its mistaken inferences,' says Hurley, co-author of Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind. With humor, the brain doesn't just discover a false inference — it almost simultaneously recovers and corrects itself. For example, read the gag that's been voted the most consistently funny joke in the world by a global audience. So why is this joke funny? Because it is misleading, containing a small, faulty assumption that opens the door to a costly mistake.

Humor is 'when you catch yourself in an error, like looking for the glasses that happen to be on the top of your head. You've made an assumption about the state of the world, and you're behaving based on that assumption, but that assumption doesn't hold at all, and you get a little chuckle.'"

Solar Power Shines In San Antonio As Texas Green Movement Gains Momentum

Poor Al Ritter: "I expected I would've had a bill that was over $300 for the month for electric power," Ritter told The Huffington Post. Instead, he said, his most recent bill came to $252 -- a savings he attributes to the array of 24 solar panels the Ritters had installed on their roof in August.



Like all people in TX, Ritter is used to wasting cheap carbon energy - his home wastes about 7200 Kw per month just trying to cool the 100 degree air. He built an a $30,000 PV Array on his roof, without insulating and air sealing his home. Now he gets about $60 off his energy bill each month.



If someone honest had sold him the solar panels, they would have required a home energy audit first, and that independen­t auditor could have explained that energy efficiency measures could have saved half his energy bill for 1/10th the cost (over 20 years), so for about $10,000 he could have saved $150/month­.



$150/month X 12 = $1,800 / year on $10,000 -- >R.O.I. = 18% / year (FOREVER!)

$60/month X 12 = only $720 / year on $30,000 --> R.O.I. Just 2% / year (For 20-30 years)



Solar isn't a bad idea, but without first reducing you energy waste, it just doesn't work.



If Solar Installers keep doing this kind of bad business, they will kill their own industry as people wake up.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

A marshmallow for your thoughts?

Is "Self Control" at age four an indicator of intellect, the ability to reason, pattern recognition?

Read more at the New Yorker

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

The scientists are hoping to identify the particular brain regions that allow some people to delay gratification and control their temper. They’re also conducting a variety of genetic tests, as they search for the hereditary characteristics that influence the ability to wait for a second marshmallow.

“What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”

He lived in a part of the island that was evenly split between people of East Indian and of African descent; he noticed that each group defined the other in broad stereotypes. “The East Indians would describe the Africans as impulsive hedonists, who were always living for the moment and never thought about the future,” he says. “The Africans, meanwhile, would say that the East Indians didn’t know how to live and would stuff money in their mattress and never enjoy themselves.”

Mischel took young children from both ethnic groups and offered them a simple choice: they could have a miniature chocolate bar right away or, if they waited a few days, they could get a much bigger chocolate bar. Mischel’s results failed to justify the stereotypes—other variables, such as whether or not the children lived with their father, turned out to be much more important—but they did get him interested in the question of delayed gratification. Why did some children wait and not others?

Volunteers were tested for standard personality traits, and Mischel compared the results with ratings of how well the volunteers performed in the field. He found no correlation; the time-consuming tests predicted nothing. At this point, Mischel realized that the problem wasn’t the tests—it was their premise. Psychologists had spent decades searching for traits that exist independently of circumstance, but what if personality can’t be separated from context?
“I’ve always believed there are consistencies in a person that can be looked at,” he says. “We just have to look in the right way.” One of Mischel’s classic studies documented the aggressive behavior of children in a variety of situations at a summer camp in New Hampshire. Most psychologists assumed that aggression was a stable trait, but Mischel found that children’s responses depended on the details of the interaction.

“Young kids are pure id,” Mischel says. “They start off unable to wait for anything—whatever they want they need. But then, as I watched my own kids, I marvelled at how they gradually learned how to delay and how that made so many other things possible.”

Winters isn’t sure that Mischel’s marshmallow task could be replicated today. “We recently tried to do a version of it, and the kids were very excited about having food in the game room,” she says. “There are so many allergies and peculiar diets today that we don’t do many things with food.”

Mischel perfected his protocol by testing his daughters at the kitchen table. “When you’re investigating will power in a four-year-old, little things make a big difference,” he says. “How big should the marshmallows be? What kind of cookies work best?” After several months of patient tinkering, Mischel came up with an experimental design that closely simulated the difficulty of delayed gratification. In the spring of 1968, he conducted the first trials of his experiment at the Bing. “I knew we’d designed it well when a few kids wanted to quit as soon as we explained the conditions to them,” he says. “They knew this was going to be very difficult.”

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.

In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it’s what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings. (When Odysseus had himself tied to the ship’s mast, he was using some of the skills of metacognition: knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist the Sirens’ song, he made it impossible to give in.) Mischel’s large data set from various studies allowed him to see that children with a more accurate understanding of the workings of self-control were better able to delay gratification. “What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”

Subsequent work by Mischel and his colleagues found that these differences were observable in subjects as young as nineteen months. Looking at how toddlers responded when briefly separated from their mothers, they found that some immediately burst into tears, or clung to the door, but others were able to overcome their anxiety by distracting themselves, often by playing with toys. When the scientists set the same children the marshmallow task at the age of five, they found that the kids who had cried also struggled to resist the tempting treat.

The early appearance of the ability to delay suggests that it has a genetic origin, an example of personality at its most predetermined. Mischel resists such an easy conclusion. “In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation,” he says. “The two influences are completely interrelated.” For instance, when Mischel gave delay-of-gratification tasks to children from low-income families in the Bronx, he noticed that their ability to delay was below average, at least compared with that of children in Palo Alto. “When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,” he says. “And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself. You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.” In other words, people learn how to use their mind just as they learn how to use a computer: through trial and error.

But Mischel has found a shortcut. When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. “All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

 Operating on the premise that the ability to delay eating the marshmallow had depended on a child’s ability to banish thoughts of it, they decided on a series of tasks that measure the ability of subjects to control the contents of working memory—the relatively limited amount of information we’re able to consciously consider at any given moment.

According to Jonides, this is how self-control “cashes out” in the real world: as an ability to direct the spotlight of attention so that our decisions aren’t determined by the wrong thoughts. A graph of the data shows that as the delay time of the four-year-olds decreases, the number of mistakes made by the adults sharply rises.

“These tasks have been studied so many times that we pretty much know where to look and what we’re going to find,” Jonides says. He rattles off a short list of relevant brain regions, which his lab has already identified as being responsible for working-memory exercises. For the most part, the regions are in the frontal cortex—the overhang of brain behind the eyes—and include the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the anterior prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, and the right and left inferior frontal gyri. While these cortical folds have long been associated with self-control, they’re also essential for working memory and directed attention. According to the scientists, that’s not an accident. “These are powerful instincts telling us to reach for the marshmallow or press the space bar,” Jonides says. “The only way to defeat them is to avoid them, and that means paying attention to something else. We call that will power, but it’s got nothing to do with the will.” 

Mischel is particularly excited by the example of the substantial subset of people who failed the marshmallow task as four-year-olds but ended up becoming high-delaying adults.

Mischel is also preparing a large-scale study involving hundreds of schoolchildren in Philadelphia, Seattle, and New York City to see if self-control skills can be taught. Although he previously showed that children did much better on the marshmallow task after being taught a few simple “mental transformations,” such as pretending the marshmallow was a cloud, it remains unclear if these new skills persist over the long term. In other words, do the tricks work only during the experiment or do the children learn to apply them at home, when deciding between homework and television?

Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is leading the program. She first grew interested in the subject after working as a high-school math teacher. “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.” And so, at the age of thirty-two, Duckworth decided to become a psychologist. One of her main research projects looked at the relationship between self-control and grade-point average. She found that the ability to delay gratification—eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week—was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. She said that her study shows that “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”

Last year, Duckworth and Mischel were approached by David Levin, the co-founder of KIPP, an organization of sixty-six public charter schools across the country. KIPP schools are known for their long workday—students are in class from 7:25 A.M. to 5 P.M.—and for dramatic improvement of inner-city students’ test scores. (More than eighty per cent of eighth graders at the KIPP academy in the South Bronx scored at or above grade level in reading and math, which was nearly twice the New York City average.) “The core feature of the KIPP approach is that character matters for success,” Levin says. “Educators like to talk about character skills when kids are in kindergarten—we send young kids home with a report card about ‘working well with others’ or ‘not talking out of turn.’ But then, just when these skills start to matter, we stop trying to improve them. We just throw up our hands and complain.”

Self-control is one of the fundamental “character strengths” emphasized by KIPP—the KIPP academy in Philadelphia, for instance, gives its students a shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow.” Levin, however, remained unsure about how well the program was working—“We know how to teach math skills, but it’s harder to measure character strengths,” he says—so he contacted Duckworth and Mischel, promising them unfettered access to KIPP students. Levin also helped bring together additional schools willing to take part in the experiment, including Riverdale Country School, a private school in the Bronx; the Evergreen School for gifted children, in Shoreline, Washington; and the Mastery Charter Schools, in Philadelphia

Mischel’s main worry is that, even if his lesson plan proves to be effective, it might still be overwhelmed by variables the scientists can’t control, such as the home environment. He knows that it’s not enough just to teach kids mental tricks—the real challenge is turning those tricks into habits, and that requires years of diligent practice. “This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?” According to Mischel, even the most mundane routines of childhood—such as not snacking before dinner, or saving up your allowance, or holding out until Christmas morning—are really sly exercises in cognitive training: we’re teaching ourselves how to think so that we can outsmart our desires. But Mischel isn’t satisfied with such an informal approach. “We should give marshmallows to every kindergartner,” he says. “We should say, ‘You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.’ ”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1Yp4XjMT2

Brain Imaging

Gallant Lab website, with more details about the study

It seems via computer analysis and study of individual brain response to visual stimuli we can reconstruct a proximity of what the is in the minds eye. Many hurdles stand in the way of mind reading, not the least of which is that success requires years of brain scans while watching known video sources, and the tracking is done by blood volume rather than neuro-electrical signals, but the concept is still cool.
Read the Article from Berkley

The Morality of Liberals Vs. Conservatives

Question: Blue-Pill or Red-Pill? Can you escape the matrix?

The Myth of Violence

It is my understanding that our brains ability to reason evolved quickly over the last 100,000 years because of constant culling of people through the process of WAR. We are the animal that, like most top predators, has evolved through competition with our own kind. Everyone alive today owes their mental ability to the violence of our ancestors. The question, then, is not why are people violent, but why not?

• Hobbes - The Laviathen - Anarchy = Violence :: Government = Peace; Mutually Assured Destruction: Shoot him before he shoots me.
• Payne - Life is cheap - Technology = Life
• Robert Right - Non-Zero Sum Games - Win-Win = Value
• Peter Singer - Empathy : Friends and Family - Expanding Circle, village, clan, tribe, nation, sexes, species ...

The Golden Rule should always be stated in the NEGATIVE: "Do NOT do unto others, that which you would NOT have them do unto you."

Listening

This is not trivial...
Most people are entirely unconscious to these filters, they don't recognize that they hold bias when they listen.

• Culture
• Language
• Values
• Beliefs
• Attitudes
• Expectations
• Intentions

We need conscious listening.
A world where we don't listen to each other at all is a very scary place indeed.

5 -tools:
1) Silence (3-minutes/day)
2) Mixer (go to a noisy place, and figure out how many channels)
3) Savoring (pick a mundane sound and really listen to it)
4) Listening Positions (active/passive, reductive/expansive, CRITICAL/Empathic)
5) RASA - Receive, Appreciate, Summarize, Ask

Every Human Being has to Listen Consciously,
Listening needs to be taught in schools as a skill.

If Corporations are People, then People are Corporations

"Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e. PROFIT)"

Zeitgeist Movement Activist and Orientation Guide

Join the Zeitgeist Movement
Download PDF document of the Zeitgeist Movement Guide.

PREFACE:

The Zeitgeist Movement is the activist arm of The Venus Project, which constitutes the life long work

of industrial designer and social engineer, Jacque Fresco. Jacque currently lives in Venus, Florida,

working closely with his associate, Roxanne Meadows. Now, let it be understood that Mr. Fresco will

be the first to tell you that his perspectives and developments are not entirely his own, but rather

uniquely derived from the evolution of scientific inquiry which has persevered since the dawn of

antiquity. Simply put, what The Venus Project represents and what The Zeitgeist Movement hence

condones, could be summarized as: ‘The application of The Scientific Method for social concern.’

Through the humane application of Science and Technology to social design and decision-making,

we have the means to transform our tribalistic, scarcity driven, corruption filled environment into

something exceedingly more organized, balanced, humane, sustainable and productive. To do so, we

have to understand who we are, where we are, what we have, what we want, and how we are going to

obtain our goals. Given the current state of affairs, many of which will be addressed in the first part

of this book, the reader should find that we not only need to move in another direction...we have to.

The current economic system is falling apart at an accelerating rate, with the prospect of worldwide

unemployment occurring on the largest scale ever seen. Simultaneously, we are courting the “point of

no return” in regard to the destruction of the environment.

Our current methods of social conduct have proven to have no chance in resolving the problems of

environmental destruction, human conflict, poverty, corruption and any other issue that reduces the

possibility of collective human sustainability on our planet. It is time we grow up as a species and

really examine what the true problems and solutions are, as uncomfortable, untraditional and foreign

as they might seem.

This work will first present the current economic problems we face, recognizing root causes,

consequences and inevitabilities, while then presenting solutions derived from an assessment of what

is actually relevant to life and society. Additionally, information will be provided as to how each one

of us can help in this challenge, presenting methods of communication and activism that will

hopefully speed up the process of transformation.

It is very important that those who begin this work pause for a moment and think about the

windows of perspective they have been indoctrinated into. Considering the current vastness of human

values and ideologies, coupled with the identification that grows over time with associations to a

particular train of thought, tradition or notion of reality, it can be difficult and even painful for a

person to revise or remove the cherished understandings which they have considered true for long

periods of time. This ‘ego’ association, coupled with the perpetual state of ‘limited knowledge’ each

one of us has, will be the biggest hurdle many will face when reading the information presented here.

It is time to broaden our loyalties and affiliations beyond the narrow confines of the marketplace,

tradition, and the nation-state to encompass the human species as a whole, along with the planetary

environment that supports us all. It is time we view the earth as an indivisible organic whole, a living

entity composed of countless forms of life, all brought together in a single community.

If nature has taught us only one thing, it is that the only constant is change. There is no such thing

as a Utopia. Therefore, in order for us to grow productively as a species, we need to become experts

at “changing our minds” about anything and everything. If you choose to approach this material with

a conscious attempt at being open minded and objective, we feel the ideas expressed here will realign

your vision of the world, yourself, and the future of our human family in a way that is the most

productive, humane and effective.

"Zero Point" - Free Energy

Free-energy devices  (from Wikipedia)- a new twist on a long list of perpetual motion machines

As a scientific concept, the existence of zero-point energy is not controversial although the ability to harness it is. In particular, perpetual motion machines and other power generating devices supposedly based on zero-point energy are highly controversial and, in many cases, in violation of some of the fundamental laws of physics.^{[citation needed]} No device claimed to operate using zero-point energy has been demonstrated to operate as claimed. No plausible description of a device drawing useful power from a source of zero-point energy has been given. Thus, current claims to zero-point-energy-based power generation systems have the status of pseudoscience.^[9]
The discovery of zero-point energy did not alter the implausibility of perpetual motion machines. Much attention has been given to reputable science suggesting that zero-point-energy density is infinite, but in quantum theory, zero-point energy is a minimum energy below which a thermodynamic system can never go. Thus according to the standard quantum-theoretic viewpoint, none of this energy can be withdrawn without altering the system to a different form in which the system has a lower zero-point energy. However, in Stochastic Electrodynamics, the zero-point field is viewed as simply a classical background isotropic noise wave field which excites all systems present in the vacuum and thus is responsible for their minimum-energy or "ground" states. The requirement of Lorentz invariance at a statistical level then implies that the energy density spectrum must increase with the third power of frequency, implying infinite energy density when integrated over all frequencies.^[10] In this viewpoint, there is no theoretical reason that energy, or for that matter, momentum, could not be extracted, and would of course still leave infinite energy density and infinite momentum density, isotropic in all directions simultaneously, remaining in the wave field.
The calculation that underlies the Casimir experiment, a calculation based on the formula predicting infinite vacuum energy, shows the zero-point energy of a system consisting of a vacuum between two plates will decrease at a finite rate as the two plates are drawn together. The vacuum energies are predicted to be infinite, but the changes are predicted to be finite. Casimir combined the projected rate of change in zero-point energy with the principle of conservation of energy to predict a force on the plates. The predicted force, which is very small and was experimentally measured to be within 5% of its predicted value, is finite.^[11] Even though the zero-point energy is theoretically infinite, there is as yet no practical evidence to suggest that infinite amounts of zero-point energy are available for use, that zero-point energy can be withdrawn for free, or that zero-point energy can be used in violation of conservation of energy.^[12]

CNN & Michio Kaku Report : Japanese officials lie about Fukushima Meltdown

How long until we accept that we need clean, safe, renewable energy?
Pay attention, Fukushima is FUBAR! Watch world rebound Japanese-American Physicist, Michio Kaku, embarrass the Japanese Utilities and Government, on CNN Reports.
Perhaps it is time we stopped building nuclear power plants on fault lines, along the coast, in populated areas? If you live in the Northwest United Sates, pay close attention to your radiation levels in foods like dairy and fish. Why waste a whole Continent because greedy power companies will not use renewable energy? Why don't we see more media coverage of this event? (hint: GE owns the media)

For the next generation

FOR THE NEXT GENERATION (2011) from Dominoes Falling Productions on Vimeo.

Damon Horowitz calls for a "moral operating system" | Video on TED.com

Damon Horowitz calls for a "moral operating system" | Video on TED.com

Changing Education Paradigms

Check out this short video from the United Kingdom, RSA from Cognitive Media.

Holding two opposing thoughts in your mind is genius, or crazy.

The Daily Show - Exclusive - William Cohan Extended Interview Pt. 2
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

How to Play both ends against the middle.

Gravity may not exist any more than matter.

One of my greatest failures, is my inability to communicate the basic concepts about the nature of reality without loosing people who are less educated or more prone to mystical beliefs. Gravity is not a 'force', it is an apparent curvature in space-time, and according to this string-theorist may be an illusion, or a marriage. The concept is that, similar to temperature, the appearance of gravitational effects may come from the averaging of subatomic effects of the uncertainty-principal at the macroscopic level. This is a fundamental shift from the description of a phenomenon to an understanding of how or why it exists. This doesn't reject our traditional understanding or science, it simply deepens our knowledge about the nature of reality and energy. Similar to how we now know that matter is just patterns of energy and force fields in essentially empty space.

Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

How do you get someone to be self-sufficient? Teach them to fish, farm, or work. Independence comes from interdependence, not codependency. Open source hardware from Marcin Jakubowski, Polish Nuclear Fusion Expert and 21st Century Organic Farmer.

New Bicycle Discovery

TMS Bicycle, front mass falls "more quickly" thus steering into the fall. The front wheel gyro-effect, and wheel caster are not as important as we thought.

New Bike Stability Discovery! No Gyro, No Castor. Bicycles steer into their fall. (To prove try pushing a bike backwards, or locking handlebars)

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution = LAUSD

Watch this clip and you'll never eat "Processed" meat again.
NEVER EAT GROUND BEEF UNLESS YOU GRIND IT YOURSELF!

Caroline Casey: Looking past limits

Born with Ocular Albinism which limits what she can see beyond 1-meter, Caroline Casey was never told she couldn't see. Irrational Faith in oneself may be necessary to reach your full potential. Such belief in oneself inspires actions that one would not attempt from an attitude of self-pity. Society may be artificially limiting the potential of physically disabled people (1-billion world wide) via labeling. Solution: expect the same level of accomplishment from everyone, regardless of any 'dis-ability', and don't discriminate. (my question here is if everyone had Ocular Albinism would we create technology to adapt our eyes, just as elephants have larger ears and noses, or would we evolve better eyes?)

The Primary Dealer Credit Facility = $9-Trillion+

The Primary Dealer Credit Facility - according to CNN Money and ProPublica, the total extent of this UNDISCLOSED Federal Reserve 'Emergency' (no-interest) Loan program between May 2008 & 2009, was $9-Trillion, and although $7-trillion of the PRINCIPAL has been 'repaid', this represents an increase in the money supply of ~$90-T. Meaning the US$ is worth 1/3 less today than in '08. Has your salary, home equity, or the value of investments risen by 33% in the last three years? If so, you are a winner of this game. Also, the Banks gave bonuses as a result of this 'increase' in capital and lend the money to corporations at interest, creating debt of nothing, and that expense is passed on to the consumer as a cost of business. If they had failed to pay back these 'loans' the US Taxpayer would have been responsible, via an increase in US National Debt. (so much for pocket change of the $700-B TARP, and $800-B 'Stimulus')

http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/01/news/economy/fed_reserve_data_release/index.htm
http://projects.propublica.org/tables/treasury-facilities-loans

Coldfusion, The Nuclear Effect

For 20 years people have been claiming to have 'solved the energy problem' with various 'cold-fusion' experiments and yet we are still using carbon-fuels to move mountains and destroying our planet's environment. I want to see the evidence, perform the experiments, and test these claims. So, let's begin a catalog of the most famous and infamous reports:

• Cold Fusion - Bologna - "journal of nuclear physics" (i.e. real or false journalism) - The nuclear effect
• Zero-Point - Motionless EM Generator - Electric Multiplier
• Perpetual Motion - Scalar Energy Device - Radiant-Energy Fractionation (static electric charge) - Mechanical Heater - resonant frequency electrolysis - implosion/vortex engines - permanent magnet powered motors -
• Batteries - 
• greedy con men, and "hermit scientists" - name the game
• Transportation Solutions - 

(Please use the comments section to add your own comments, suggestions, and links. Thanks.)

Global Classroom

I don't do this often, but this is a special case. When someone states the obvious truth, it cuts across all lines, and I must post it everywhere.

"If Issac Newton had done calculus videos on YouTube, I wouldn't have to. (assuming he was any good) - Salman Khan"

Why do good students fail in our public schools?

FLIP THE CLASSROOM!

Traditional Classroom Model penalizes you for experimentation and failure, "DO YOU UNDERSTAND THIS?". Kids COMPETE with each other, but does not expect mastery.

Assign the lectures as homework, and do the homework in the classroom.

Pause, work at your own pace. Stay on that bicycle, experiment, failure is OK. Reward success, don't penalize failure. Allow students to COOPERATE, and you will see that your 'slow' students are just as smart as the 'gifted' kids.

But expect mastery.

Watch this video twice.

Build a Global, One World Classroom.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: "I Have a Dream...to Go to War?!"

Why is it that Citizen Activists from Robert Greenwald's BRAVE NEW FILMS are the only people making media against the Afghanistan War? (pissst ... DO SOMETHING!)

Each Citizen Activists has the ability to:

- Challenge corporate media with TRUTH.
- Share the latest videos from Brave New Films.
- Give input on projects that are in development.
- MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

Please "LIKE" them on FaceBook

Practical Philosophy: Aristotle's Telos

How do you build "Character"?
Practical Wisdom is the will and the skill.
You must have the Value and the Creativity.
If you want to do right, and you are creative enough to find a way, then you have practical wisdom.

Barry Schwartz studies the link between economics and psychology, offering startling insights into modern life. Lately, working with Ken Sharpe, he's studying wisdom. In an intimate talk, Barry Schwartz dives into the question "How do we do the right thing?" With help from collaborator Kenneth Sharpe, he shares stories that illustrate the difference between following the rules and truly choosing wisely.



Right Action - Requires Experience
Right Way - Requires Empathy
Right Aims (or Reasons) - Requires Failure

"You do not need to be brilliant to be wise, but brilliance without wisdom is dangerous."

There are "Canny Outlaws" who can work within the system that seeks to destroy them, but we need "System Changers", who can step outside the system and change the game with Practical Wisdom. All social interaction is moral action.

Practical Philosophy: Aristotle's Telos