Crazy is a social definition.

Narcissism is so common today that they have stopped calling it a mental illness, proving that Psychology is not an objective science but a subjective language subject to the influence of political "correctness". This reminds me of 1994, when the DSM-IV came out and changed the diagnosis of people who believe in supernatural beings (like ghosts and angels, demons and gods) from Axis-I (psychotic disorder) to Axis-IV (psychosocial and environmental problems) i.e. "cultural dissassocition with reality". That was the same year that they added "Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome" and removed "Homosexuality" as mental disorders. Thus, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is nothing more than a strange mix of social values, political compromise, and material for insurance claims. Psychological Medicine is not a science. "Crazy" is a social definition.

Bill Gates- Question's Making Money

How we allocate intellectual resources matters to the survival of the species.

Three Albino Boys from China

Chosen ones from preston gannaway on Vimeo.

In China, children with albinism face a bleak future. Often abandoned and ostracized, most will never be educated, marry or find a job in their country. Adoption offers hope for a chosen few.

Kim Anderson was facing an empty nest and looking for a way to do more to serve God when a photo of a Chinese orphan caught her eye. "That's our child," she thought. Now eight years later, Kim and her husband, Steve, have adopted four special needs children. The three boys have albinism.

Ironically, the same rare condition that stigmatized the boys individually in China, reinforces their brotherhood in the United States. Elijah, Paul and Micah's snow white hair and pigmentless skin, create the appearance of a biological connection. Despite their age difference, people often mistake them for triplets. What may be shocking and novel on one child is normalizing on all three.

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

Patternicity: by Michael Shermer

Ever kissed a monkey? The patterns of SELF DECEPTION are necessary for survival and creativity.

Why we need Idealists

The Sleeper Awakens

For Sidhartha moving through the cycle of the wheel of life and death was suffering, and only finding the center, understanding the oneness of everything can lead to enlightenment.

Watch The PBS video.

Four Nobel Truths

1. Life is suffering
2. The origin of this suffering is our attachment
3. The cessation of suffering is attainable
4. The path to the cessation of suffering - is in finding balance through the 8 fold way:

• Right View - to understand things as they really are, in flux and temporary
• Right Intention - commit to positive change in oneself, ethical action, eternal curiosity and compassion
• Right Speech - tell the truth, be respectful, warm, and gentle and talk only when necessary
• Right Action - abstain from harming sentient beings
• Right Livelihood - one should earn one's living in a righteous way
• Right Effort - in order to gain anything you must first loose everything
• Right Mindfulness - consciousness, awareness anchored in clear perception: four foundations of mindfulness: 1. contemplation of the body, 2. contemplation of feeling (repulsive, attractive, or neutral), 3. contemplation of the state of mind, and 4. contemplation of the phenomena.
• Right Concentration - state where all mental faculties are unified and directed onto one particular object, emotion, action, concept, idea, or being. Living in the present moment.

The understanding of the way things are comes from within.

It is up to each of you to become the enlightened one.

Why was it necessary for the Buddha to demand that the 5 ascetics address him as one who is enlightened?

For California Citizens

This is not a complicated issue, there is not going to be any change in the TAX PROTECTION afforded home owners by Prop.13. It is not possible politically, homeowners vote.

However, Prop.13 affects ALL property, including second homes, investment property, and commercial property, and our state government is facing bankruptcy from underfunding. SHELL CORPORATIONS created as holding companies for commercial real-estate are responsible.

Homeowners sell their homes on average ever 5-7 years, even elderly homeowners die every 30-50 years, but CORPORATIONS NEVER DIE!

Under Prop.13, I can form a corporation, buy a property, live in that property, write off all costs of that property as "business expenses", and never have that property re-assessed for tax purposes.

When I'm tired of that property, or the property value has increased enough that I want to sell it and enjoy the equity, then I can simply sell the HOLDING CORPORATION. The property never technically changes hands, and is thus never re-assessed for tax purposes. The new owners simply keep the tax protection of Prop.13.

If I die, the corporation is passed to my heirs, without any loss of tax protection. And CORPORATIONS LIVE FOREVER.

Paying 1% on the value of Capital Investments is not extreme, it is the cost of government, the cost of schools, hospitals, libraries, roads, and other vital government services.

If your business can't afford to pay 1% property taxes, then it isn't a very good business, sell the property, and let someone else have the chance to make it work for them.

Split the Roll, stop the Property Tax Loophole for Corporations.
CORPORATIONS LIVE FOREVER AND SO THEY NEVER PAY TAXES.



Watch KPBS coverage about Prop.13, 9:00PM, Monday Night, March 29

Using Triplets in Quantum Cryptography

"[0]Quantum cryptography uses the quantum properties of
photons to guarantee perfect secrecy. But one of its lesser known
limitations is that it only works if Alice and Bob are perfectly aligned
so that they can carry out well-defined polarization measurements on the
photons as they arrive. Physicists say that Alice and Bob must share the
same reference frame. That's OK if Alice and Bob are in their own
ground-based labs, but it's a problem in many other applications, such as
ground-to-satellite communications or even in chip-to-chip
communications, because it's hard to keep chips still over distances of
the order of the wavelength of light. Now a group of UK physicists have
developed a way of doing quantum cryptography without sharing a reference
frame. The trick is to [1]use entangled triplets of photons, so-called
qutrits, rather than entangled pairs. This solves the problem by
embedding it in an extra abstract dimension, which is independent of
space. So, as long as both Alice and Bob know the way in which all these
abstract dimensions are related, the third provides a reference against
which measurements of the other two can be made. That allows Alice and
Bob to make any measurements they need without having to agree ahead of
time on a frame of reference. That could be an important advance enabling
the widespread use of quantum cryptography."

Solution: Information Overload

TIME TO START TAKING THE INTERNET SERIOUSLY
By David Gelernter
"But we won't be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis. ... 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool."

Beauty is deep.

I really wish that women who don't take care of their health would stop promoting the idea that looking good is an "impossible standard". Every healthy human being looks good without makeup or photoshop. Only the unhealthy look ugly to those who see real beauty. If you are perceived as ugly, revolting, shockingly unappealing, or just plain frightful, perhaps you should eat a balanced diet, exercise in the sun, bathe regularly, or see a psychological councilor. I firmly believe that inner beauty is reflected by outward appearance. (although outward appearance can be manipulated).

Make-up, Hair Removal, Hair Implants, Wigs, Colored Hair, Fake Eye Lashes, Tanning Booth, Fake Tits, Girdle, Panty Hose, High Heals, Support Garments, Perfume, Wonder Braw, Obesity, Bulimia and Anorexia. = Not healthy.

Are you complicit in poisoning the world?

A year or so ago, I gave seven of my old computer printers, all in working order to Goodwill. I believed that they would be properly recycled. This story shows the truth.

This is some of the best investigative reporting I've seen. It must have cost a lot of money to follow all the leads, and travel to China. It takes real courage to risk your life to expose this kind of evil. We should stop poisoning children, just because we can't pay the price of proper recycling. If I get an address on that 'small business' ass in Denver I'll pay him a personal visit, and feed him some CRT lead.




Good Work 60 Minutes!

Voting is Your Right and Duty

Information is power, access is everything, know your rights, do your duty.

The Number of the Beast

In this book Heinlein introduced the concept called "pantheistic solipsism" or "world-as-myth" — the theory that universes are created by the act of imagining them, so that somewhere even fictional worlds (Oz is one of the examples Heinlein uses) are real.

Rubick's Tessaract

Rubick's Cube was too easy.


We added some level of difficulty...




So, now we are working on something new..

Age of American Unreason

BILL MOYERS: When you wonder, as you do in the book, if any candidate has the will or courage to talk about ignorance as a political issue I find it hard to imagine a politician going very far, getting very far by telling his or her constituents--

SUSAN JACOBY: They're dopes.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. You're ignorant. By ignorant you mean lack of knowledge, unaware.

SUSAN JACOBY: Lack of knowledge, right.

BILL MOYERS: You don't mean stupid, which means--

SUSAN JACOBY: No.

BILL MOYERS: --unintelligent.

SUSAN JACOBY: No.

BILL MOYERS: Or dimwitted.

SUSAN JACOBY: No.

BILL MOYERS: But I can't imagine a politician succeeded by saying, "We're an ignorant culture and an ignorant people."

SUSAN JACOBY: No. But I can imagine a politician succeeding by saying, "We as a people have not lived up to our obligation to learn what we ought to learn to make informed decisions." I can imagine candidates saying, "And we in the Congress have been guilty of that too." Because it's not just the public that's ignorant. We get the government we deserve.

In other words, you wouldn't say to people, "You're a dope." You would say, "We have got to do better in-- about learning the things we need to know to make sound public policy." We can't learn the things we need to know from five-second sound bite commercials. We can't learn the things that we need to know from a quick hit on the Internet to see the latest person making a fool of themself on YouTube. We can only learn the things we need to know from talking to each other, from books. And we all need to do a lot more of that.

You know, what I don't see on the campaign trail-- if universal healthcare were one of my priorities as a candidate, first thing I'd be doing, I'd be having sessions all over the country with three groups of people, nurses, doctors, and patients. You don't need to know what the insurance industry thinks. Because you know what they think. They're going to oppose anything that they think will place any limits on medical spending and their ability to charge you higher health insurance premiums. But I'd be sitting down in unscripted sessions with people so that when-- if I was elected I could take that knowledge with me into the White House. So I could get my message across before Harry and Louise. That's what being an educator means.

And I think a candidate could say that to people. Not, "You're dopes." But, "We all need to know a lot more than we know." We've become satisfied with too little. We've become satisfied with the lowest common denominator. It is not good enough when 23 percent of our young people who have had some college, only 23 percent of them can find these countries on a map. We all need to be able to learn how to find these countries on a map.

BILL MOYERS: The book is THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, published by coincidence or providence on Darwin's birthday, right?

SUSAN JACOBY: 199th anniversary of Darwin's birth.

Waking Life

Existentialism


Dreams For Free


Free Will


Language (abstract meaning, metaphor, patterns of relationship, clowds of truth, what we live for)


Suffering (The gap between a man and a chimp < man and philosopher)


Where there is fire we will carry gasoline. (All Therory and no ACTION!)


Would you buy the Brooklin Bridge?


Self Destruction - I must be insane.


Death and Taxes


I don't want to be an Ant.


My Waking Life