revelation 17:4

Vanity Fair | It was a baking-hot Kansas afternoon, and from the lobby I watched as three slender, solemn young hairstylists and makeup artists approached a front-desk clerk at the Hyatt Regency hotel, in Wichita. The tallest of them said, “We’re here for North Star.” The desk clerk understood. He nodded and directed the three women to the Keeper of the Plains suite, on the 17th floor, where North Star herself awaited. The North Star is mentioned in Alaska’s state song and appears on its state flag. Fairbanks lies in a region called the North Star Borough. Palin is on the way to making North Star a personal brand. If she ever does run for president, it might well serve as her Secret Service code name.

Hours after the styling session, three bodyguards and one aide accompany Sarah, Todd, and Piper to a $1,000-a-plate V.I.P. dinner to raise money for Wichita’s Bethel Life School. Each guest has a photo taken with Palin and receives a “personally autographed bookplate copy” of Palin’s autobiography, Going Rogue. (The autographs are fake, made with an Autopen.) After dinner, Pat Boone, his skin a taut orange against the trademark white suit, leads the crowd in the singing of a spiritual. Congressman Todd Tiahrt, who will receive Palin’s endorsement in his race for the U.S. Senate, tells everyone to buy a copy of Palin’s book—“so Sarah can buy a Learjet!” (Learjet is based in Wichita.)

Palin delivers basically the same speech she gave 18 hours earlier to the Tea Party group in Independence. You could pretty much replace the word “constitution,” from yesterday’s remarks, with “Bible,” and be good to go. Then Palin departs from the script and speaks as if from the heart, describing her fear and confusion upon discovering that Trig would be born with Down syndrome. “I had never really been around a baby with special needs,” she tells her listeners. For what it’s worth, this statement is untrue. Depicting the same moment of discovery in her own book, Palin writes that she immediately thought of a special-needs child she knew very well: her autistic nephew. Such falsehoods never damage Palin’s credibility with her admirers, because information and ideology are incidental to this relationship. Palin owes her power to identity politics, pitched with moralistic topspin. She exploits the same populist impulse that fueled the career of William Jennings Bryan—an impulse described by one Bryan biographer as “the yearning for a society run by and for ordinary people who lead virtuous lives.”

chief rabbi "keeping it real".....,

Video - supreme shas rabbi ovadia yosef wishes death for all palestinians.

Haaretz | Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef denounced upcoming peace talks with the Palestinians, which are set to start September 2 in Washington, and called for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to "perish from this world," Army Radio reported overnight Saturday.

"Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this world," Rabbi Ovadia was quoted as saying during his weekly sermon at a synagogue near his Jerusalem home. "God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians."

The Shas spiritual leader also called the Palestinians "evil, bitter enemies of Israel" during his speech, which is not the rabbi's first sermon to spark controversy.

In 2001, the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox faction gave a speech in which he also called for Arabs' annihilation.

"It is forbidden to be merciful to them," he was quoted as saying. "You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable."

Bonus Video - Ovadia Yosef calls Obama a "slave" governing.

what are we?

organelle | This is not a primitive mind he is supposing, but instead a hyperconnective one. But I would also underline the principle that it is the mind of a planet, and a solar system — a galaxy and a universe — emerging reflectively as a connective consciousness in one of its children.

I believe that in the civilizations and cultures of the bicameral age what was happening in individual consciousness was not merely `hearing voices' as Jaynes consistently models it. I believe it was in fact a very different thing, more akin to having one's own mind regularly or spontaneously contained or directed by an apparently externally sourced mind. During such a circumstance, it is possible to have one's mind `conducted' like a musical orchestra — and this is very different from our common experience of linear consciousness, even during epiphanies. Nor is it hallucinogenic. It is also different from the common admonitory experiences of schizophrenics — who are in fact touching a something real, and ancient, in their struggle to live a life as a partially bicameral person in a time that cannot credential or explore these domains directly but instead functionally demonizes their experiencers.

This is not a primitive mind he is supposing, but instead a hyperconnective one. But I would also underline the principle that it is the mind of a planet, and a solar system — a galaxy and a universe — emerging reflectively as a connective consciousness in one of its children. As the animalian and human populations of Earth waxed and waned — an essential sentience was forming in the connectivities, rather than the individuals. And I believe this sentience to be at once terrestrial and extraterrestrial. What the bicameral peoples were 'listening' to was God. It was god with countless universes of living organs — even in a single animal or plant, each learning itself uniquely in the common quests for survival, elaboration, synthesis, and biocognitive uplift. It was speaking not to anyone, but within the constituents of its own cognitive person. Imagine a single cell hearing the cognitive maelstrom that is the simple thought 'I am thinking'. It would be as if the Sun had shouted the sound through every molecule of one's being. When the Gods were with and within us, this was, I believe our common experience. And more, it will be, again.

According to the bicameral hypothesis, our minds once housed what we can only really describe as an alien or celestially sourced intelligence — god(s). I believe firmly that regardless of the specific timeline we might speculatively craft, our species had a long sojourn with nothing but the personal and collectve experience of something like a god, or gods. This was not alike with our metaphors of deities today at all. It was much more similar to what we would term possession — however the sentience orchestrating the event was not `evil' or malevolent — but entirely the opposite in many cases. It was not mere hallucination, and when Jaynes compares it to the hallucinatory voices of the schizophrenic patient, he is examining something we've not seen the healthy version of.

The dominance of language over our mind has dimensions we've never explored — and we are obliged to use language to explore them. This essential problem must change its shape. We must be empowered to explore and authorize our explorations beyond language, into the domains from whence it arose. The sources and activities of the `inward voice' is likely to be something at once simpler and more profound than we imagine.

We can well recall in our recent and ancient histories the omnicidal chaos that results as gods inhabiting human forms compete for popularity and resources — cognitive and otherwise. Yet we may not be able to adequately imagine the power or unity inherent in a community that cohered through something akin to a limited version of group-telepathy. It is difficult to imagine a small society of people who are actively bicameral, and our records from the bible appear to be largely composed after this breakdown.

Even if we discard Jaynes as a radical iconoclast (which would be unfortunate for us), we must still examine the matter of gods, language, and the evolution of our consciousness in a vastly different light after encountering his library of related theses. It is perhaps in this function that his models and offerings of scholarship are most valuable. Not for their specificity, but for what they are pointing in general at.

The bicameral model is compelling for many reasons ranging from its complex musings on authorization and the origins of what we mean by consciousness to its incredibly insightful graphing of the changes in semantic spatialization over the course of the composition of the Illiad. As a structural place of departure, it is a fine inclusion in any library from which we may begin to experientially chart the terrains of the questions of what we are, as organisms and cognitive animals — alone and in connectivity. I do however intend to clearly and deeply explore the terrain related to what he calls auditory hallucinations and gods. I believe we must again open this domain to common exploration, for I feel that we do not yet understand what was, nor what was lost.

Many academics would likely consider Julian Jaynes to be a psuedoscientist — amongst the worst epithets a researcher can be burdened with. I would disagree — yet whether or not his specific timelines and theses are correct, his re-visioning of the human relationship with gods and, in turn, with metaphor, is something long overdue by any reasonable standard. His model of the emergence of the human consciousness from a more animalian precursor — however tentative in its formation — is striking for its congruence across many domains of evidence as well as for its inspiration and novel integrations of available data.

The majority of the academy appears in general agreement that we had our genesis-event with symbolic representation between 50,000 and 28,000 years ago, though some recent finds have positioned human graphic artifacts at 77,000 years. Dating methods are still in some general question. Yet Written (symbolic) language is generally suspected to have emerged 4000 to 5000 years ago, probably beginning as accounting. Most would levy this data against Jaynes' work, and rightfully so, from a scientific perspective. Again, it is not his timeline that interests me (though I find some of his theses compelling) but instead the broader strokes and details hidden in what he points toward like distant easter eggs, implied by a glorious basket containing an obvious clue.

not the first time this has been pointed out....,

Video - Old Google Tech Talk on Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors.

Telegraph | There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "It’s the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

"Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels," he said.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.

"They were really going after the weapons," said Professor Egil Lillestol, a world authority on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. "It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be worth trying." It emits too many high gamma rays.

we never imagined it would be like this...,

NYTimes | Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, imminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we’d bridle, then begin our next search.

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

hackers blind quantum cryptographers

Nature | Quantum hackers have performed the first 'invisible' attack on two commercial quantum cryptographic systems. By using lasers on the systems — which use quantum states of light to encrypt information for transmission — they have fully cracked their encryption keys, yet left no trace of the hack.

Quantum cryptography is often touted as being perfectly secure. It is based on the principle that you cannot make measurements of a quantum system without disturbing it. So, in theory, it is impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept a quantum encryption key without disrupting it in a noticeable way, triggering alarm bells.

Vadim Makarov at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and his colleagues have now cracked it. "Our hack gave 100% knowledge of the key, with zero disturbance to the system," he says.

In standard quantum cryptographic techniques, the sender — called 'Alice' for convenience — generates a secret key by encoding classical bit values of 0 and 1 using two different quantum states of photons, or particles of light. The receiver, 'Bob', reads off these bit values using a detector that measures the quantum state of incoming photons. In theory, an eavesdropper, 'Eve', will disturb the properties of these photons before they reach Bob, so that if Alice and Bob compare parts of their key, they will notice a mismatch.

In Makarov and colleagues' hack, Eve gets round this constraint by 'blinding' Bob's detector — shining a continuous, 1-milliwatt laser at it. While Bob's detector is thus disabled, Eve can then intercept Alice's signal. The research is published online in Nature Photonics today.

are humans naturally violent and monogamous?

Video - Thom Hartmann interviews Dr. Christopher Ryan.

physician's religion effects end-of-life care

Video - MD's discuss end-of-life care.

CNN | A new study finds that doctors who are not religious are more likely to take steps to help end a very sick patient's life, and to discuss these kinds of decisions, than doctors who are very religious.

The study, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, surveyed more than 8,500 doctors in the United Kingdom across a wide range of specialties such as neurology, palliative care, and general practice.

Researchers asked doctors about the last patient whom they had worked with who had died. The doctors answered questions about their own religious beliefs and ethnic background, as well as end of life care - did they give continuous deep sedation until death to the last patient who had died? Did they discuss decisions with the patient that would likely shorten the patient's life?

The study found that the strength of a doctor's religious faith is related to the incidence of continuous deep sedation until death, confirming findings of previous research. Researchers also found that a doctor who reported being "very or extremely non-religious" had an increased likelihood of taking these kinds of decisions to end a patient's life.

Doctors who said they were very religious were less willing to discuss decisions expected or partly intended to end life, the study found. This result corroborates what a 2007 New England Journal of Medicine study found: That more religious doctors are less likely to believe that they should give the patient information about procedures to which the doctors held moral objections. Fist tap Arnach.

ersatz christian warns about ersatz christianity...,

Video - Kenda Creasy Dean on bringing in the sheaves.

CNN | If you're the parent of a Christian teenager, Kenda Creasy Dean has this warning: Your child is following a "mutant" form of Christianity, and you may be responsible.

Dean says more American teenagers are embracing what she calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." Translation: It's a watered-down faith that portrays God as a "divine therapist" whose chief goal is to boost people's self-esteem. Dean drew her conclusions from what she calls one of the most depressing summers of her life. She interviewed teens about their faith after helping conduct research for a controversial study called the National Study of Youth and Religion.

The study, which included in-depth interviews with at least 3,300 American teenagers between 13 and 17, found that most American teens who called themselves Christian were indifferent and inarticulate about their faith.

The study included Christians of all stripes -- from Catholics to Protestants of both conservative and liberal denominations. Though three out of four American teenagers claim to be Christian, fewer than half practice their faith, only half deem it important, and most can't talk coherently about their beliefs, the study found.

Many teenagers thought that God simply wanted them to feel good and do good -- what the study's researchers called "moralistic therapeutic deism."

Some critics told Dean that most teenagers can't talk coherently about any deep subject, but Dean says abundant research shows that's not true.

"They have a lot to say," Dean says. "They can talk about money, sex and their family relationships with nuance. Most people who work with teenagers know that they are not naturally inarticulate."

In "Almost Christian," Dean talks to the teens who are articulate about their faith. Most come from Mormon and evangelical churches, which tend to do a better job of instilling religious passion in teens, she says.

No matter their background, Dean says committed Christian teens share four traits: They have a personal story about God they can share, a deep connection to a faith community, a sense of purpose and a sense of hope about their future.

psywar: the real battlefield is the mind

Video - trailer for new online documentary.

This film explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the “elitist theory of democracy” and the relationship between war, propaganda and class. Full length feature available here online.

Includes original interviews with a number of dissident scholars including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Peter Phillips (“Project Censored”), John Stauber (“PR Watch”), Christopher Simpson (“The Science of Coercion”) and others.

scan technology deployed in street roving vans

Video - AS&E's Z Backscatter Van.

Forbes | As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins to simmer, it’s worth noting that courthouses and airport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets.

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.

“This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” says Reiss.

bacon and butter?!?!? - oh hail gnaw!!!

Video - British Minister of Food talks on rationing in 1939.

Causabon's Book | The realities of climate change and energy depletion mean that at some point, we will encounter situations where there is not enough of an energy resource or one of the things it enables - whether food or transport or whatever, to go around. In fact, eventually we will enounter many of these shortages. Whether they arise initially from a situation in which there are actual shortages or whether the shortages are structural problems of transport or caused by inequity and dishonesty almost doesn't matter - we are going to run bang up against problems of access to resources.

When that happens, and assuming a functioning state, we are going to have to deal with questions of how to ration access to energy, food and other resources. This isn't really up for debate - whether we manage to put the problem of rationing off for a while or not, we know that climate change and peak oil mean we will have to confront limits of access - indeed, we confront them now, when we ration things like food and access to housing by price.

Whether regionally or nationally, rationing is one way, probably the best way, to ensure reasonably equitable distribution - so while presently people see rationing as unimaginable, I would argue that we need to be laying the groundwork for just rationing strategies, administered equitably now - and that this isn't actually as hard as we might think. No, it isn't politically possible right yet - but it could become possible very rapidly. So I present a lightly revised version of a piece I wrote more than three years ago - suggesting that we need to consider strategies for the eventual implementation of resource rationing, whether at the national, state or local levels.

rolling hemp

Video - electric automotive hemp fiber car body.

invisible hands....,

NYTimes | There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

j. edgar mormon's agenda...,

Salon | The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell. In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck's life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite "death panel" wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing "socialism." In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

Anyone who has followed Beck will recognize the book's title. Beck has been furiously promoting "The 5,000 Year Leap" for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of "The 5,000 Year Leap," complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. The book tops Beck's 912 Project "required reading" list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. At one 912 meet-up I attended in Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall, available for the 912 nice price of $15. "Don't bother trying to get it at the library," one 912er told me. "The wait list is 40 deep."

What has Beck been pushing on his legions? "Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).

But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

skrong mormonism meets the mainstream

WaPo | Let's dispense right away with the fiction, promoted by Glenn Beck himself, that his rally on Saturday wasn't a political event.

Let's also set aside the caricature, promoted by some critics on the left, that the demonstration was primarily a gathering of racists designed to dishonor the memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the same spot and on the same date as his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Instead, let's focus on this: A sizable chunk of the conservative movement is convinced that the nation is headed toward a kind of Marxist dictatorship. It doesn't just think the government was wrong to bail out Wall Street, or that the health-care program is too costly and unwieldy, or that schools should include more religious instruction.

Instead, these people think our morals have sunk so low and our political leaders have become so unresponsive that the rule of law is breaking down in America. In interviews with members of the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial, I found that many shared such an apocalyptic view of a country on the wrong track.

But when pressed for evidence of such severe deterioration, they didn't offer very compelling examples. Basically, the "tea party" thinks the moderately liberal social agenda pushed by the Obama administration is just a short step away from, say, Communist East Germany.

This kind of exaggerated thinking, encouraged by Beck, contributes to the toxic tone of contemporary political debate. It's hard to have a reasonable discussion about the proper size and role of government in a modern society with people who think 234 years of democracy is ending.

apocalyptic interaction?

Video - cops and neighbors.

note the pattern, take the lesson...,

For a gang of monkeys making their home at the Galta Temple in the Indian city of Jaipur, it was an easy life — lounge by the sacred pool, groom your friends and accept handouts from worshippers paying respect to the Hindu Monkey God Hanuman. But their happy days are numbered. When a lingering drought threatens local food supplies, the monkeys face an end to their easy gravy train.

There were 3 bathing pools in the temple and it was decided to close 2 down and drain them because of draught conditions. This meant that only one gate to the temple would remain open and there would be a dramatic reduction in the number of food-bearing visitors allowed in.

Within a couple of days of the visitor number and corresponding food-offering reduction for the monkeys - the troop of about 80 split into two equal sized groups. The first group lead by the original matriarch, her family and other monkeys of appropriate size and status forced the other group to split off by attacking them and then took up a position by the only open gate to aquisition the food that was still comming in.

The splinter group made up of mostly smaller monkeys were not allowed to come near the open gate and within a day were forced to move from the temple to the nearby town in search of food. This was a high risk strategy because danger of injury or being caught was increased.

Violently enforced dispersal strategies are common among social primate species when dealing with scarce resources and on an evolutionary level its an old solution to the problem.

say what you want..,

Video - Say what you want about Sarah, she raised a combat vet...,

tea party claims king mantle...,

NYTimes | It seems the ultimate thumb in the eye: that Glenn Beck would summon the Tea Party faithful to a rally on the anniversary of the March on Washington, and address them from the very place where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech 47 years ago. After all, the Tea Party and its critics have been facing off for months over accusations of racism.

But many of the busloads of Tea Party activists expected in Washington this weekend do not see any irony or offense. In fact, they have come to see the Tea Party as the aggrieved — its loosely affiliated members unfairly characterized, even persecuted, as extremists.

Eighteen months ago, many were moved to the streets by a belief that they had been not listened to by their representatives in Washington. (“How dare they ignore us?” reads a sign often seen at Tea Party rallies.) Now, encouraged by Tea Party leaders and people like Mr. Beck and Andrew Breitbart, whose BigGovernment.com is a source of news for many Tea Party supporters, they have adopted the language of the civil rights movement to describe their cause. Their sense of persecution has become a galvanizing force.

Consider the response last month when the N.A.A.C.P., the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, called on Tea Party leaders to denounce racist elements in their ranks — citing signs with racist slogans at Tea Party rallies.

Tea Party Patriots, the largest umbrella organization for thousands of local groups across the country, posted a petition on its Web site calling for the N.A.A.C.P. to revoke its resolution “condemning the Tea Party movement as ‘racist.’ ”

“It is nothing less than ‘hate speech’ for the N.A.A.C.P. to be smearing us as ‘racists’ and ‘bigots,’ ” the petition declared. “We believe, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in a colorblind, postracial society. And we believe that when an organization lies and resorts to desperate tactics of racial division and hatred, they should be publicly called on it.”

On his radio show, Mr. Beck said he had not intended to choose the anniversary for his “Restoring Honor” rally on Saturday but had since decided it was “divine providence.”

Dr. King’s dream, he told listeners, “has been so corrupted.”