Saturday, April 12, 2008
Cornification
By CNu at April 12, 2008 1 comments
Labels: What IT DO Shawty...
Hellury Strikes!!!
But Clinton struck hard, calling Obama's comments "demeaning." The increased attack showed that Clinton is eager to hold on to her working class support and is looking to open new questions about Obama's judgment that would make voters and Democratic officials reconsider their support for the Illinois senator.On second thought, Big Don is right, and that folks, the fact that she could even go there with a straight face in light of all the skeleton bones that have come tumbling out of her closet the past couple of weeks, perfectly illustrates why America will get EXACTLY the leadership that it deserves.
"I was raised with Midwestern values and an unshakable faith in America and its policies," she said. "Now, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it's a matter of constitutional right. Americans who believe in God believe it's a matter of personal faith.
"I grew up in a church-going family, a family that believed in the importance of living out and expressing our faith. The people of faith I know don't 'cling' to religion because they're bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich.
"Our faith is the faith of our parents and our grandparents. It is a fundamental expression of who we are and what we believe."
By CNu at April 12, 2008 0 comments
Labels: elite , ethics , propaganda
Uppity Dr. Baraka
"But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."I wrote about this a couple years ago at Vision Circle. Baraka has spoken to and will now be compelled to fully engage around one of the most challenging bulwarks of reality evasion in America. Joe Bageant understood it and spoke to it very, very well.
I think working class anger is at a more fundamental level and that it is about this: rank and status as citizens in our society. I think it is about the daily insult working class people suffer from employers, government (national, state and local), and from their more educated fellow Americans, the doctors, lawyers, journalists, academicians, and others who quietly disdain working people and their uncultured ways. And I think working class anger is about some other things too:Good luck and godspeed. If he can successfully engage these folks, alay their anger and mistrust, he has a better than even chance of becoming president and potentially even functioning as a catalyst for constructive change. This is easily the most interesting moment thus far in the democrat primary.
By CNu at April 12, 2008 0 comments
Friday, April 11, 2008
The Road Not Taken....,
As early as 1957, Admiral Rickover began urging the development of alternate energy consumption paths to that of fossil fuels as their eventual depletion became evident, noting:Carter was the only president who attempted to take on the single greatest threat to our survival, and to this day, he remains maligned and ignored despite being a visionary many, many years ahead of his time. Not so far ahead as his mentor Admiral Rickover, who was noted for his intolerance of oxygen thievery;
"A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more primitive way of life...Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker strain at his heavily laden wheelbarrow, creaking along a cobblestone road, or who has flinched as he drives past an endless procession of human beasts of burden moving to market in Java - the slender women bent under mountainous loads heaped on their heads - anyone who has seen statistics translated into flesh and bone, realizes the degradation of man's stature when his muscle power becomes the only energy source he can afford. Civilization must wither when human beings are so degraded....High-energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever-smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which controls the largest energy resources will become dominant."
Moreover, he had "little tolerance for mediocrity, none for stupidity." "If a man is dumb," said a Chicago friend, "Rickover thinks he ought to be dead." Even while a Captain, Rickover did not conceal his opinions, and many of the officers he regarded as dumb eventually rose in rank to be admirals and were assigned to the Pentagon.Too bad these visionaries weren't able to wake up the masses in their time.
By CNu at April 11, 2008 0 comments
Labels: History's Mysteries
The Face of a Prophet
“I consider this the biggest financial crisis of my lifetime,” Mr. Soros said during an interview Monday in his office overlooking Central Park. A “superbubble” that has been swelling for a quarter of a century is finally bursting, he said[...]The market theory he has promoted for two decades and espoused most of his life — something he calls “reflexivity” — is still dismissed by many economists. The idea is that people’s biases and actions can affect the direction of the underlying economy, undermining the conventional theory that markets tend toward some sort of equilibrium.Soros is correct. "Reality" mirrors the contents of the collective unconscious. To change the former requires autonomous access to and some degree of control over the latter. Human beings have engendered a number of such cultures of psychological competence. The currently dominant dopamine hegemony is not such a culture. Instead, it is a culture in which the tendency toward unconscious behaviour is maximized and ruthlessly and habitually exploited. That's why it works. That's why it's universal, and that's why it will be our undoing.
Mr. Soros said all aspects of his life — finance, philanthropy, even politics — are driven by reflexivity, which has to do with the feedback loop between people’s understanding of reality and their own actions. Society as a whole could learn from his theory, he said. “To make a contribution to our understanding of reality would be my greatest accomplishment,” he said.
By CNu at April 11, 2008 0 comments
Peak Oil - The First Shortages?
No time like the present. As for trying to auger the timing of the clampdown, here is the one sure indicator by which you can ascertain when things will begin to tighten up in earnest.
Fuel prices alone are unlikely to bring America to its senses.
It clearly will take outright shortages with lines at the pumps, curtailed deliveries and many other misfortunes before serious measures to deal with declining oil supplies –- speed limits, rationing, mandatory car pools, improved mass transit -- are taken. Thus the question becomes: how soon?So watch what's going on in the diesel and distillates market. Diesel is the lifeblood of our current unsustainable level of consumption. As goes the diesel, so goes our way of life.
Gasoline and diesel are two different animals in America. Most gasoline is used for personal travel and much of that for convenience and, as we shall find out shortly, is not essential to the economy. Diesel in America is, for the most part, an essential fuel in that it is used to perform money-making work or, in its heating oil form, keep us from freezing. If diesel becomes too expensive, and those expenses cannot be passed on, then the consumption of diesel will be cut back. This in fact is already happening -- the government is reporting that distillate consumption of diesel and heating oil currently is down by 3.1 percent as compared to the same four week period last year. This is undoubtedly due to the price of diesel and heating oil which is now around $4 a gallon, an increase of $1.17 a gallon since last year.
The word “distillates” encompasses both diesel and heating oil which are about the same thing; except that the clean air rules in the U.S. require most of the sulfur be removed before burning it in a motor. Currently there is a world-wide shortage of distillates which is most severe in China where long lines of trucks waiting for fuel are appearing across the country.
By CNu at April 11, 2008 0 comments
Floating Arctic Nuclear Power Plants
The general concept of the plan is based on the same technology as the floating nuclear power plant currently under construction at the Sevmash plant in Severodvinsk in the Arkhangelsk region.
The plant will be built as a barge where the core of the nuclear power plant is its KLT-40 reactor. This kind of reactors is similar to the ones onboard Russia’s civilian fleet of nuclear powered icebreakers operated by the Murmansk Shipping Company. Given the speed with which the Artic ice is melting, there won't be much foward-looking use for a fleet of nuclear ice breakers....,
By CNu at April 11, 2008 0 comments
Sevmorput
The Murmansk Shipping Company will turn the nuclear-powered container carrier “Sevmorput“ into a drilling vessel for the oil industry. The vessel will be ready for drilling operations in the Arctic within 18 months, the company announced this week.
With the transformation, the world will see the first ever nuclear-powered oil and gas service vessel. The place of work for the vessel is likely to be the Arctic, and first of all the Barents Sea.
By CNu at April 11, 2008 97 comments
Subterrene
ABSTRACT A tunneling machine for producing large tunnels in rock by progressive detachment of the tunnel core by thermal melting a boundary kerf into the tunnel face and simultaneously forming an initial tunnel wall support by deflecting the molten materials against the tunnel walls to provide, when solidified, a continuous liner; and fragmenting the tunnel core circumscribed by the kerf by thermal stress fracturing and in which the heat required for such operations is supplied by a compact nuclear reactor.
DESCRIPTION OF THE PRIOR ART The utilization of the basic concept of melting earth materials to dig a hole or small tunnel is taught in the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,357,505 issued 15 to Armstrong et al. in 1967, disclosed an electrically heated rock drill. U.S. Pat. No. 3,396,806 issued August 1968 to Benson disclosed a unitized machine for thermal earth drilling utilizing a nuclear reactor for supplying the melting energy requirements. This patent 20 also suggests that the hole could be melted to a larger diameter than required for the finished hole so that melt material would provide the hole casing. U.S. Pat. No. 3,693,731 issued Sept. 1972 to Armstrong et al. also discloses a nuclear reactor pow- 25 ered earth boring machine and melt material is used as structural hole lining material. However, this patent, like others that disclose machines for drilling tunnels by melting the earth, is a solid front machine which creates an amount of melt equal to the tunnel cross sec- 30 tion. 3-* tion of such large tunnels requires large heat flow rates and creates excessive costs of the heat generating and supply system. The most economical method is for the machine to thermally melt just enough material to detach the core, and to provide adequate tunnel lining The machine of the present invention is particularly adapted to excavate large tunnels, that is, having a cross-sectional measurement in the range of 2 to 12 metres and larger. The melting of the entire cross sec- 40 material. The core materials can be mechanically fractured for disposal. However, in hard rock the disintegration of the core material is best done by heated thermal stress fracturing penetrators.
By CNu at April 11, 2008 0 comments
Thursday, April 10, 2008
The Bakken Formation
Thanks at least in part to these old heads, coupled with obscure information held over from the halcyon days of the Carter administration, during which a major initiative to jump start shale oil extraction came to a mysterious close, I've been aware of Bakken for some time. I mentioned it in passing a couple of weeks ago for the record, but didn't pursue it any further. This morning, I see it's gone mainstream.
Deep under the northern Badlands, trapped tightly in dense layers of shale, there is oil.Objectively speaking, that's not really the question at all. The state of the art of contemporary mining and tunnelling technologies would be the stuff of science fiction for decades if you actually knew what is possible. The question, as I see it, is whether or not TPTB elect to permit the current situation to continue to devolve on its unsustainable trajectory, or, whether they plan a major and fundamental reengineering of society down to Orthogenic levels. Of course, you know that such reengineering can only occur in the wake of tremendous social upheaval and trauma. Collective conscious shocks are the necessary and inevitable precursor to massive, collective lifestyle changes. Remember what old Ronald "Wilson" Reagan said about it?
Perhaps hundreds of billions of barrels of it.
A long-anticipated federal report to be released today will examine just how much might be squeezed out of a vast blanket of rock called the Bakken Formation.
Geologists have known about “the Bakken” for more than half a century. So the question isn’t whether high-quality crude really exists in a region not commonly associated with drilling rigs: North Dakota, eastern Montana and the southern parts of two Canadian provinces.
The question is, how tough is it to get at this oil?
By CNu at April 10, 2008 0 comments
Labels: elite , establishment , truth
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Seven Fat Cows, Seven Thin Cows
Now the difference between hoarding and stockpiling is this - once you are already in a crisis AND there is a meaningful and rational system for ensuring people have access to food, building up stores can disrupt the existing system and its fairness. This is hoarding, and it is problematic. That is, if there’s just enough rice to around, *and it is going around in a fairly just way* those who are wealthy enough to build up private stocks can disrupt the system, and shouldn’t. That, however is not the case now. First of all, there’s more than enough food to go around, and second of all, justice has not been the major concern.The predicament is strictly manmade, arising at the level of our cultural habits and choices. The hegemons who enriched Bill and Hillary Clinton to the tune of $110 Million over the last decade have constructed and proliferated a morally blind global monoculture.
How do we know this? Well, in 2007, the world produced enough calories to feed everyone in the world half again more calories in grain than they need. With 6.6 billion people, we could feed 1/3 more people, raising the world’s population up to 10 million on present agricultural yields of grain alone - this excludes all vegetables, fruits, grass fed meats and forageable plants. That is, right now we are not experiencing shortages of food in any absolute sense.
This, I think is a deeply important point. When I observe things like this, people usually not that there is no such thing as perfectly fair food distribution, and that is, of course true. It is also true that we are so far away from even a remotely just system of distribution that if we could even approximate a level of concern for the world’s populace that exeeded our concern for our cars, I’d be happy. The reality is that rich people eat three times - they eat some grain. Then they eat meat, fed on enough grain to feed an ordinary person many times over, and then they feed their cars, their pets, the birds and occasionally burn some grain and legumes in their stoves. We entirely lack a system that simply says “humans get the first products of agricultural labor” - that is, that people outrank the cars, dogs, and desire for steak of the average rich world denizen.
By CNu at April 09, 2008 0 comments
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Consciousness and the Cambrian Explosion?
Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.
"Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."
Craig Venter speculates;
We may be about to create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, where there is massive new speciation (the formation of new and distinct species) based on this digital design.Stuart Hameroff wonders;
When and where did consciousness emerge in the course of evolution? Did it happen as recently as the past million years, for example concomitant with language or tool making in humans or primates? Or did consciousness arrive somewhat earlier, with the advent of mammalian neocortex 200 million years ago (Eccles, 1992)? At the other extreme, is primitive consciousness a property of even simple unicellular organisms of several billion years ago (e.g. as suggested by Margulis and Sagan, 1995)? Or did consciousness appear at some intermediate point, and if so, where and why? Whenever it first occurred, did consciousness alter the course of evolution?Gaia-mother, Anthropos-father - necessity driving our desperate gambit to pass through an evolutionary narrow gate - should that potentiality come to pass....,
By CNu at April 08, 2008 0 comments
Labels: What IT DO Shawty...
The Race
"We've been digitizing biology, and now we're trying to go from that code to designing biology. We've tried various approaches, paring it down to basic components, digitizing it, now we're trying to ask: can we regenerate life or create new life out of this digital universe? The pace of digitizing life has been increasing exponentially. Our ability to write genetic code has been growing more slowly. Turns out synthesizing DNA is difficult. In a biological system the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate. How do we boot-up a synthetic chromosome? We can do a transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it. We may be about to create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, where there is massive new speciation (the formation of new and distinct species) based on this digital design. We have now a database with about 20 million genes, and we like to think of them as the design component of the life of the future. We now have techniques to do combinatorial genomics, to build a robot that can make a million chromosomes a day.I suspect that this memetically recursive path is the ONLY viable path out of the evolutionary bottleneck. Because of the choices made on large institutional and cultural scales, I begin to doubt whether or not this path will be explored hard enough and fast enough to make the difference that it could make. This is where the world should invest its space race fervor.
We're now focusing on fourth-generation designer fuels. Curent biofuels aren't the solution. The only way that biology can have an impact on fuel without increasing the price of food, it's to start with CO2 as the feed stock -- create new energy out of CO2, and we think we will have something within the next 18 months. Future uses of this technology: increase the basic understanding of life; replace the petro-chemical industry; become a major source of energy; enhance bioremediation. We're changing the evolutionary tree with new bacteria and species."
By CNu at April 08, 2008 0 comments
Choices?
"Cultural evolution is a dangerous child for every species to let loose on this planet. By the time you realize what's happening, it's too late to put it back into the box. We humans are the Earth's Pandoran species. Mimetics is founded on the principles of unversal Darwinism. His idea was so simple, and yet it explains all design in the universe. What Darwin said was something like this: if you have creatures that vary, and if there is a struggle for life such that nearly all of these species die, and if the very few that survive pass on to their offsprings whatever helped them survive, than these offsprings must be better adapted to these circumstances than their parents were. You just need those three principles: variation, selection and heredity. If you have those, you MUST get evolution, or "design out of chaos without the aid of mind". What's this to do with memes? Darwin didn't know about genes, but the principle of universal Darwinism is that everything that's copied with variation and selection will evolve. Information that's copied from person to person is information copied with variation and selection. That's a meme. A meme is not an idea, is "that which is imitated", information which is copied from person to person. If you copied an information from someone else, it's a meme. But why do they spread? They are copied if they can. Some because they're true, useful, beautiful. Some even if they're not. Here is a curious meme: you go to your hotel, check into your room, go to the bathroom, and what do you see? A folded end of the toilet paper. It's a meme that spread all over the world. What is that about? it's supposed to tell you that somebody cleaned the place. Think of it this way: imagine a world full of brains and memes using them (you and me) to propagate. Why is this important? it gives us a completely new wiew of what it means to be human. All these things that make us unique -- language etc -- are based on genes. But there are two replicators now on this planet: from the moment our ancestors began imitating, there was a new replicator, the meme, alongside the gene. And you get an arms race between the genes (which want a smaller, efficient brain) and the memes (which want a bigger brain). All other species on this planet are gene machines, we only are meme machines. We need a new word for technological memes, let's call them temes, because the processes are different. Our brains are becoming like temes, faster, etc. We are at this cusp now to have a third replicator in our planet. But it's dangerous: temes are selfish replicators, they use us to suck up more resources to produce more computers and more things. Don't think we created the Internet, that's how it seems to us. How to pull through? Two ways: one is that the temes turn us into teme-machines, with implants, merging of humans and machines, because we are self-replicators. The other: teme-machines will replicate by themselves. In that case, it would not matter if the planet would no longer be liveable for humans."Interesting and paradoxical line of imitating (not thinking) considering the cultural evolutionary bottleneck in which we presently find ourselves.....,
By CNu at April 08, 2008 0 comments
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Duck and Cover: It's the New Survivalism
The traditional face of survivalism is that of a shaggy loner in camouflage, holed up in a cabin in the wilderness and surrounded by cases of canned goods and ammunition.Duck and Cover: It's the New Survivalism in today's NYTimes..,
It is not that of Barton M. Biggs, the former chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley. Yet in Mr. Biggs’s new book, “Wealth, War and Wisdom,” he says people should “assume the possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure.”
“Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food,” Mr. Biggs writes. “It should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson. Even in America and Europe there could be moments of riot and rebellion when law and order temporarily completely breaks down.”
Survivalism, it seems, is not just for survivalists anymore. Faced with a confluence of diverse threats — a tanking economy, a housing crisis, looming environmental disasters, and a sharp spike in oil prices — people who do not consider themselves extremists are starting to discuss doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes.
By CNu at April 06, 2008 0 comments
Labels: elite , establishment , ethics
Moral Blindness
The most important point, however, is that the beginnings of social inequality were concurrent with the development of this stronger sense of ego. The same groups who developed the first class systems and hierarchical societies were the same groups who were affected by the Saharasian environmental catastrophe. And since, in addition, the native peoples who are apparently not as individuated as us are also egalitarian, there is a very strong case for suggesting that the ‘sharpened’ sense of ego is the root cause of social inequality.Prior to passing along the recommendation, however, I wanted to nail down Heinz Werner's Orthogenic Principle - so that I could better understand the depth of our predicament and the abject terror of the situation.
On the surface all of this might seem to offer as pessimistic a view of human nature as sociobiological or evolutionary psychological approaches. Selfishness and social inequality are clearly not ‘in our genes’ or our brains; but they are still inevitable, it might be argued, since they are in our psyche, and have existed since the ‘Ego Explosion’ took place around 6,000 years ago. In this sense, one might say, Marxism is as misguided as evolutionary psychology. A perfectly egalitarian human society with no private property or status differences is not feasible, since the drive for personal wealth and power is as natural to ‘Saharasian’ individuals as the drive for sex or food. These drives were not created by the ‘capitalist’ social system; they were generated by an intensification of ego-consciousness, and then themselves gave rise to capitalism.
By CNu at April 06, 2008 0 comments
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Why EROEI Matters (Part 1 of 5)
There is an implicit assumption, probably believed by most market analysts, that if they (collectively) make good financial decisions, based on market information, market projections and good hunches, then we collectively (i.e. society) will make the best investments possible. Although there are certainly good rationales that such analyses make considerable sense, in many cases it is not so clear to me that they are an effective guide to the future of energy supplies. This is because 1) few understand the degree to which most technologies today are principally a means of subsidizing whatever it is we do with still-cheap petroleum 2) today’s price signals are unlikely to be especially influenced by future conditions when today’s most abundant and cheapest fuels are likely to be much less available, for either geological (depletion) or political reasons 3) current prices of energy in the U.S. are greatly influenced by various subsidies 4) there is painfully little transfer of information from the (rather limited) scientific community that has examined the large picture of energy to the financial communities. We propose to improve the information flow on these issues from the scientific community to the general financial community as well as to the policy world more generally.
By CNu at April 05, 2008 0 comments
How Much Longer Will Saudi Arabia Support the US$?
The vice president’s itinerary for his nine-day tour, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey, was also designed for saber rattling with Tehran. Cheney’s hawkish threats over Iran’s nuclear weapons program keeps the Arab oil kingdoms wedded to the dollar, since the US military is the guarantor of the Arabian Gulf’s security. But the cost of sticking with the archaic dollar peg is intolerably high, and threatening social unrest in the kingdoms.
By CNu at April 05, 2008 0 comments
Labels: elite , establishment , truth
Friday, April 04, 2008
"Moral Blindness" - Does that Mean Not-See?
He was down in Memphis at the tribute today and had some words for John McCain who voted against Conyer's bill in 1983 to make MLK day a National holiday.
Conyers: When John McCain was my colleague in the House and I introduced the Holiday bill, he voted against it in 1983...Now I believe in forgiveness, but it's incredible that all he can do is show up on April 4th and think that everything is OK. We're not just African Americans, but we're most people.
Host: Rep. Conyers I think in all fairness we should say , perhaps you did not hear it but certainly John McCain did offer an apology for that first vote in 1983 when you did put forward that bill.
You had not heard that? He did make that apology sir so that he regretted voting that way back then.
Conyers: Yea, well look. I'm happy. That was in 1983, he didn't make any apology, he didn't make any apologies in 1987, so I guess I'm thrilled and forgiving that finally when he's running for President he remembers to apologize. No, that's great.
Host: Well, he has done so today and perhaps you'll take that as some sort of appeasement, but anyway...
This is a new one in my book. quoth McCain; "Moral blindness is not the same as moral badness"
By CNu at April 04, 2008 0 comments
Labels: deceiver , ethics , propaganda
The Hidden Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr
By CNu at April 04, 2008 0 comments
Labels: elite , establishment , History's Mysteries , truth
Policing Thought
The bill was introduced to the House on April 19 2007, and passed on Oct 23, 2007. It was introduced to the Senate on August 2, 2007 as S-1959. The bill defines some terms including "violent radicalization," "homegrown terrorism," and "ideologically based violence," which have provoked controversy from some quarters. Although Section 899F of HR 1955 specifically prohibits "the violation of Civil Rights and Liberties in the enforcement of the bill," critics claim its enactment would pave the way for violations of Civil Rights and Liberties.
Former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has said he believes the bill is "unconstitutional" and has referred to the bill as a "thought crime bill".
Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), addressed the bill in he House on Dec. 5, 2007 saying: "This seems to be an unwise and dangerous solution in search of a real problem. Previous acts of ideologically motivated violence, though rare, have been resolved successfully using law enforcement techniques, existing laws against violence, and our court system," despite the fact that this bill does not "solve" anything and enacts no new laws of or pertaining to speech in the United States.
By CNu at April 04, 2008 0 comments
Labels: establishment , ethics , propaganda
Thursday, April 03, 2008
BT and Phorm
Channel 4 News at Noon first reported this story a month ago after being contacted by a concerned consumer. The data protection watchdog is investigating this possible breach of the law which could have affected thousands of BT customers. Our Money Reporter, Bridgid Nzekwu reports
Stephen Mainwaring from Weston Super Mare is one very angry BT customer. Last year, after noticing strange goings-on on his computer he contacted his internet service provider BT, who told him he had a virus. But in fact it was nothing of the kind. He'd been part of a secret BT trial to track customers surfing behaviour.
"I ran a lot of virus scans, updates and things. I even bought new PC, but as soon as I plugged it in started coming up with problem. BT kept insisting it was a virus, and it's not. It turns out they were doing secret tests." - Stephen Mainwaring, BT customer
The technology used was developed by a company called Phorm. Their software uses anonymous data gleaned from surfing activity and matches relevant adverts to people's interests.
Phorm claims it's a major benefit both to consumers and advertisers. But BT is now accused of spying and has admitted it didn't tell its customers what it was doing.
"It was individuals who suspected that this was happening to them, who then confronted BT and BT prevaricated for a very long time. It is only now at the beginning of 2008 that BT has admitted that's what were doing."Frankly that was disgraceful by BT to have done it, it would be huge diminution of our rights as individuals if this whole system is allowed to go ahead without us all being given the opportunity to opt in or out" - Don Foster
By CNu at April 03, 2008 0 comments
Cannibalism 2040
CHARLIE ROSE: So what's wrong with the population?
TURNER: We're too many people. That's why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff. If there were less people, they'd be using less stuff.
By CNu at April 03, 2008 0 comments
Labels: truth
Uh Oh...,
The faux news attack dogs accuse him of preaching "the politics of racial resentment". Agitating for the cardinal to "sanction" this fiery priest.
Oh Lawd........,
By CNu at April 03, 2008 0 comments
Labels: truth
Reality Correction
That crunching sound you hear as you lie awake in the middle of the night worrying IS the sound of an ongoing reality correction, or maybe something else;
Shards of broken glass outside the basement window of 31 Vine Street hint at the destruction inside the three-story home.Don't believe it? Check out coinflation [ koin-fley-shuhn ]
Thieves smashed the window to break in and then gutted the property for its copper pipes -- a crime that has spread across the United States as the economy slows and foreclosed homes stand empty and vulnerable."They cut it here and then pulled it right out of the wall," real estate broker Marc Charney said, pointing to broken plaster near a wrecked baseboard heating system in the 2,774-sq-ft home in Brockton, Massachusetts, a working-class city of 94,304 people.
Similar stories are unfolding nationwide as a glut of home foreclosures coincides with record highs in the price of copper and other metals.
Real estate brokers and local authorities say once-proud homes coast-to-coast are being stripped for copper, aluminum, and brass by thieves. Much of it ends up with scrap metal traders who say nearly all copper gets shipped overseas, much of it to China and India.
In areas hit hardest by foreclosures, such as the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, copper and other metals used in plumbing, heating systems and telephone lines are now more valuable than some homes.
noun. 1. A persistent rise in the metal value of silver and base metal coins. 2. An inflationary effect on coins. 3. The difference between the metal value and face value in coins. where you can track its progressive progress on a daily basis.
By CNu at April 03, 2008 0 comments
Labels: truth
Soylent Green
Food as we know it today–including fruit, vegetables, and meat–is a rare and expensive commodity. Half of the world's population survives on processed rations produced by the massive Soylent Corporation (from soy(bean) + lent(il)), including Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow, which are advertised as "high-energy vegetable concentrates". The newest product is Soylent Green - a small green wafer which is advertised as being produced from "high-energy plankton". It is much more nutritious and palatable than the red and yellow varieties, but it is in short supply, which often leads to riots.
By CNu at April 03, 2008 0 comments
Labels: ethics
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Visual Hemispheric Dominance?
The enclosed is presented as an exercise for observing and reducing visual hemispheric dominance.
The spinning girl was an optical illusion illustrating something entirely different about the human visual system than what the newspaper article which popularized it advertised. The spinning girl is a form of the more general spinning silhouette illusion.
The image is not objectively “spinning” in one direction or the other. It is a two-dimensional image that is simply shifting back and forth. But our brains did not evolve to interpret two-dimensional representations of the world but the actual three-dimensional world. So our visual processing assumes we are looking at a 3-D image and is uses clues to interpret it as such. Or, without adequate clues it may just arbitrarily decide a best fit - spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. And once this fit is chosen, the illusion is complete - we see a 3-D spinning image.Keep all these things in mind as we view and study the unfolding political and economic spectacle.
By looking around the image, focusing on the shadow or some other part, you may force your visual system to reconstruct the image and it may choose the opposite direction, and suddenly the image will spin in the opposite direction.
By CNu at April 01, 2008 0 comments
Lou Dobb's Subreal Moment....,
On the Situation Room, Wolf Blitzer asked to pick Lou Dobbs brain on Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's description of racism in America as a "birth defect"
Dobbs passionately strode out into the tall cotton, but in the split second, somehow managed to catch himself.
Talk about a hemispheric tightrope walk, I would almost pay money to see an fMRI of Dobb's brain at the moment he stopped himself from cursing politicians giving voice to the issue of race as "cotton-picking".
By CNu at April 01, 2008 0 comments
Labels: truth , What IT DO Shawty...
Monday, March 31, 2008
Polarized America
With few exceptions, roll call voting throughout American history has been simply structured. Only two dimensions are required to account for the great bulk of roll call voting. The primary dimension is the basic issue of the role of the government in the economy, in modern terms liberal-moderate-conservative. The second dimension picked up regional differences with the United States -- first slavery, then bimetalism, and after 1937, Civil Rights for African-Americans. With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1967 Open Housing Act, this second dimension slowly declined in importance and is now almost totally absent. Race related issues - affirmative action, welfare, Medicaid, subsidized housing, etc. - are now questions of redistribution. Voting on race related issues now largely takes place along the liberal-conservative dimension and the old split in the Democratic Party between North and South has largely disappeared. Voting in Congress is now almost purely one-dimensional - a single dimension accounts for about 92 percent of roll call voting choices in the 109th House and Senate - and the two parties are increasingly polarized.
Polarization declined in both chambers from roughly the beginning of the 20th Century until World War II. It was then fairly stable until the late 1970s and has been increasing steadily over the past 20 years. Our (Poole and Rosenthal, 1997) original D-NOMINATE estimation ended with the 99th Congress. Interestingly, Congresses 100- 109, if anything, mark an acceleration of the trend (especially in the House). Note, however, that the acceleration is smooth and does not show a particular jump in polarization induced by the large Republican freshman class elected in 1994. Polarization in the Senate is now at the highest level since the end of Reconstruction. The level of Polarization in the 109th House is exceeded only by the Houses of 1895-96 and 1905-06.
By CNu at March 31, 2008 1 comments
Labels: establishment , truth
The Economist Has No Clothes
By CNu at March 31, 2008 0 comments
Labels: truth
City Subpoenas Creator of Text Messaging Code
the idea for TXTmob evolved from conversations about how police departments were adopting strategies to counter large-scale marches that converged at a single spot.Text is forever...,
While preparing for the 2004 political conventions in New York and Boston, some demonstrators decided to plan decentralized protests in which small, mobile groups held rallies and roamed the streets.
“The idea was to create a very dynamic, fluid environment,” Mr. Hirsch said. “We wanted to transform areas around the entire city into theaters of dissent.”
Organizers wanted to enable people in different areas to spread word of what they were seeing in each spot and to coordinate their movements. Mr. Hirsch said that he wrote the TXTmob code over about two weeks. After a trial run in Boston during the Democratic National Convention, the service was in wide use during the Republican convention in New York. Hundreds of people went to the TXTmob Web site and joined user groups at no charge.
As a result, when members of the War Resisters League were arrested after starting to march up Broadway, or when Republican delegates attended a performance of “The Lion King” on West 42nd Street, a server under a desk in Cambridge, Mass., transmitted messages detailing the action, often while scenes on the streets were still unfolding.
Messages were exchanged by self-organized first-aid volunteers, demonstrators urging each other on and even by people in far-flung cities who simply wanted to trade thoughts or opinions with those on the streets of New York. Reporters began monitoring the messages too, looking for word of breaking news and rushing to spots where mass arrests were said to be taking place.
And Mr. Hirsch said he thought it likely that police officers were among those receiving TXTmob messages on their phones.
It is difficult to know for sure who received messages, but an examination of police surveillance documents prepared in 2003 and 2004, and unsealed by a federal magistrate last year, makes it clear that the authorities were aware of TXTmob at least a month before the Republican convention began.
By CNu at March 31, 2008 0 comments
Labels: establishment , ethics , knowledge
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Sociometric Reality Mining
To create an accurate model of a person's social network, for example, Pentland's team combines a phone's call logs with information about its proximity to other people's devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships. Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings--for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network. In a paper published last May, Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.
By CNu at March 30, 2008 0 comments
The Journal of Social Structure
Social Network Analysis [1] is an approach to studying organisations focusing on analysing the networks of relationships between people and/or groups as the most important aspect. Going back at least to the 1950's, it is characterised by adopting mathematical techniques especially from graph theory [2, 3]. It has applications in organisational psychology, sociology, and anthropology. An excellent overview of the field is given by Wasserman and Faust [1].Table of Contents for the Journal in its entirety.
Social Network Analysis provides an avenue for analysing and comparing formal and informal information flows in an organisation, as well as comparing information flows with officially defined work processes. We are interested in applying Social Network Analysis to military organisations, and especially to military headquarters ranging from brigade to national strategic levels.
An important aspect of Social Network Analysis is the visualisation of communication and other relationships between people and/or groups, by means of diagrams. Visualisation of Social Networks has a long tradition, and an excellent historical survey is given by Freeman [4]. Visualisation of Social Networks is important because of the complexity of organisational structure, and the need for good visual representations of how an organisation functions.
A second aspect is the study of factors which influence relationships, for example the age, background, and training of the people involved. Studying the correlations between relationships is also important, since it offers insights into the reasons why relationships exists. These studies can be done using traditional statistical techniques such as correlation, analysis of variance, and factor analysis, but also require appropriate visualisation techniques.
The ultimate goal of Social Network Analysis is often to draw out implications of the relational data, in order to make recommendations to improve communication and workflow in an organisation. This is the major motivation for our Social Network Analysis programme. In previous work [5, 6, 7], we have applied Social Network Analysis to military organisations. In the course of this work, we have found conceptual distance to be the most useful construct in explaining relationships. This is partly because the human brain is skilled at thinking about and visually judging distances. In this paper we argue the benefits of using conceptual distance for analysing Social Networks, and demonstrate how to do so using a case study.
By CNu at March 30, 2008 0 comments
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Gurdjieff's Theory of Laughter
What It Do;
Gurdjieff offers us a theory of laughter, independent of any state of amusement (= humor), that nevertheless distinguishes between laughter as a physiological response and the organismic cause of it, which he also calls “laughter.” This organismic variable (O), though not necessarily the same as humor, is shown to be a complex structure that is radically different from the visible laughter that results from it. Since his conception of O, though outlined in a most rudimentary and concise form, provides us the basis of the most viable theory of humor that we have been able to elaborate and immediately brings into relief some of the most conspicuous features of this humor-theory, we find it both convenient and opportune to begin with his succinct formulation of the structure of the organismic variable responsible for both humor and laughter. The passage on laughter is reproduced below in full and much of this thesis may be considered to be a systematic interpretation of his theory of laughter, its integration into a general theory of humor, and a sustained exploration of its consequences in various domains. We shall ignore his references to other aspects of his system such as his theory of yawning, of accumulators, centers, and so on, except insofar as they are relevant to our proper understanding of humor.The framed web presentation is very cumbersome, but the analysis is on point and is the likes of which you will never encounter in the ordinary literature....,
Gurdjieff’s Theory of Laughter
1. Though only a theory of laughter, and not of humor, it distinguishes between the binary-structured organismic variable (O) and its physiological resolution (R). O provides the basis of the most viable theory of humor even while preserving its link with laughter (R).
2. R is the discarding of superfluous energy due to O: an unstable structural opposition between two sharply contrasting simultaneous impressions, positive and negative, of a single stimulus (S). It is not the particular contents—cognitive, affective or motor—but the binary structure of the mutual neutralization that determines O.
3. R is pleasurable due to relief from tension and not due to amusement (as in humor); O may nevertheless have a painful element.
4. Though the convulsion O may be unerringly registered by the subject, the constituents and even structure of O may remain unspecifiable.
5. This laughter mechanism releases possibly pre-existing negative emotions through the negative component of O. Thus, culturally it is a ‘luxury reflex,’ simultaneously valorized for the relative freedom from fundamental biological instincts it provides and also devalorized for its necessary dependence on the same. Marks the ambivalent threshold between nature and culture.
6. Laughter being infectious, R in another can act independently of S for one’s own laughter (parastha-hâsa). Similarly, another’s laughter induces one to perceive the real S in terms of O.
7. The possibility and frequency of O’s occurrence is doubly determined: both by the effectiveness of the stimulus (S) and the subjective state of the individual (also his psychic constitution).
8. [61] Gurdjieff’s ‘behaviorizing’ theory of the psychology of the ordinary modern man is perfectly compatible with the traditional ‘psychology’ underlying brahmanical philosophy; just as the reversal of the ‘behavioral circuit,’ the finality of his system, is the counterpart of the ‘autonomy’ (svâtantrya) of the Trika ‘metapsychology.’ It is within this combined theoretical framework that humor-and-laughter, hâsa-and-hâsya, will be investigated in their universality.
9. Hâsa classified as a pleasant emotion despite the neutral character of O, because the resulting laughter (R) is pleasant.
10. Reduction of Freud’s ‘comic of movement’ to Gurdjieff’s ‘laughter in the moving-instinctive center.’
By CNu at March 29, 2008 2 comments
Labels: knowledge , truth , What IT DO Shawty...
WHO Put The Hit On Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico?
Eyes on Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico who has just announced a Covid Inquiry that will investigate the vaccine, excess deaths, the EU...
-
theatlantic | The Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns. The Founding Fathers...
-
Video - John Marco Allegro in an interview with Van Kooten & De Bie. TSMATC | Describing the growth of the mushroom ( boletos), P...
-
Farmer Scrub | We've just completed one full year of weighing and recording everything we harvest from the yard. I've uploaded a s...