You may know her from HBO's Entourage. She makes me believe that there is a God, and he's a man! Just give me one hour... no, make that a half hour... wait no, one minute will do just fine!
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Emmanuelle Chriqui
You may know her from HBO's Entourage. She makes me believe that there is a God, and he's a man! Just give me one hour... no, make that a half hour... wait no, one minute will do just fine!
Monday, January 28, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Changing Channels
this article really spoke to me the other day when i stumbled upon it. in a somewhat basic way at times, the article address many of the thoughts, ideas and issues surrounding a shift in consciousness via many vehicles. while it is a somewhat short discourse, it really includes a lot of information to build from....
"With higher frequencies permeating the entire body-mind system, the carrier wave permits a higher density of information to be perceived. New layers of reality unfold, the imagination realizes its true creative potential and the harmonic hologram of life performs another exquisite symphony. The Spirit waits expectantly."
check it if you wish:
Changing Channels: Tuning into the REAL world
smile
Saturday, January 26, 2008
federal budget
this is a great visual/graphical representation of how the federal budget has been planned for the upcoming fiscal year. this spending plan is the one that the president proposed and is under debate in congress right now. it also includes the percent change from last years budget numbers...
yikes!!
there is a built in deficit of $239 billion
sorry EPA and higher ed, there is a war ya know...
DEATH and TAXES 2008
Friday, January 25, 2008
Anonymous War On Scientology
"The Internet-based group "Anonymous" has released statements on YouTube and via a press release, outlining what they call a "War on Scientology". Church of Scientology related websites, such as religiousfreedomwatch.org have been removed due to a suspected distributed denial-of-service-attack (DDoS) by a group calling themselves "Anonymous". On Friday, the same group allegedly brought down Scientology's main website, scientology.org, which was available sporadically throughout the weekend. Several websites relating to the Church of Scientology have been slowed down, brought to a complete halt or seemingly removed from the Internet completely in an attack which seems to be continuous. The scientology.org site was back online briefly on Monday, and is currently loading slowly.
On Monday, the group released a video titled: "Message to Scientology" on YouTube concerning their intentions to attack the Church of Scientology. A robotic voice on the video begins with "Hello leaders of Scientology. We are Anonymous," and continues by explaining their motivations: "Over the years we have been watching you, your campaigns of misinformation, your suppression of dissent and your litigious nature. All of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation the extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organisation should be destroyed." The message goes on to state that the group intends to "expel Scientology from the Internet". As of Wednesday, the video had been viewed 370,347 times, favorited 2,473 times, and is currently YouTube's top third video of the day..." -wiki
During the hack of the scientology website some sensitive documents were leaked.....ones that devotees pay thousands of dollars to see. Download them here if you wish. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.....
love love
On Monday, the group released a video titled: "Message to Scientology" on YouTube concerning their intentions to attack the Church of Scientology. A robotic voice on the video begins with "Hello leaders of Scientology. We are Anonymous," and continues by explaining their motivations: "Over the years we have been watching you, your campaigns of misinformation, your suppression of dissent and your litigious nature. All of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation the extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organisation should be destroyed." The message goes on to state that the group intends to "expel Scientology from the Internet". As of Wednesday, the video had been viewed 370,347 times, favorited 2,473 times, and is currently YouTube's top third video of the day..." -wiki
During the hack of the scientology website some sensitive documents were leaked.....ones that devotees pay thousands of dollars to see. Download them here if you wish. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.....
love love
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Hello friends
This is my first post, hooray! I finally have something worthwhile to add. I hope this works- this is an interview with author Paul Levy. I would try to explain what it's about, but I wouldn't do it justice. Let's just say it's a fascinating mix of Jungian psychology, synchronicity, reality as a collective dream, spiritual awakening and madness, apacolypse, and how George Bush fits into all of this. I strongly suggest giving it a listen. Okay have fun! Yay! :)
http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2007/01jan/RICR-070125-plevy.mp3
http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2007/01jan/RICR-070125-plevy.mp3
i will live forever as a memory on the internet
800 years of life:
researchers at USC have extended the life of yeast by 10 times. by using a similar gene manipulation, and a diet, they have begun to test a life extension plan on people in Ecuador.
"you know my father was in the tuskegee experiments..."
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
goodbye
the time has finally come for me to venture off to the southern hemisphere...(if you were ever wondering why it's called a hemisphere you should talk to my friend griff)
anyway I'd love to stay in touch with you all while I am gone so if you'd leave me your e-mail address that'd be great
love you
see you in a few months!
anyway I'd love to stay in touch with you all while I am gone so if you'd leave me your e-mail address that'd be great
love you
see you in a few months!
I Like Lou Dobbs
Two recent articles that made me feel so...
Our leaders have squandered our wealth
NEW YORK (CNN) -- President Bush's assurances that we'll all be "just fine" if he and Congress can work out an economic stimulus package seem a little hollow this morning.
Much like Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke's assurances last May that the subprime mortgage meltdown would be contained and not affect the broader economy. And it seems Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has spent most of the past year trying to influence Chinese economic policy rather than setting the direction of U.S. economic policy.
There is no question that Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will quickly come up with an economic stimulus package simply because they can no longer ignore our economic and financial crisis. That economic stimulus plan will amount to about 1 percent of our nation's gross domestic product, an estimated $150 billion.
But all of us should recognize that the stimulus package will be inadequate to drive sustainable growth in our $13 trillion economy. An emergency Fed rate cut and an economic stimulus plan are short-term responses to our complex economic problems, nothing more than bandages for a hemorrhaging economy.
Bush, Pelosi, Reid and the presidential candidates of both parties have an opportunity now, and I believe an obligation, to adjust the public policy mistakes of the past quarter-century that have led to this crisis. And only through courageous policy decisions will we be able to steer this nation's economy away from the brink of outright disaster.
We all have to acknowledge that our problems were in part brought on by the failure of our government to regulate the institutions and markets that are now in crisis. The irresponsible fiscal policies of the past decade have led to a national debt that amounts to $9 trillion. The irresponsible so-called free trade policies of Democratic and Republican administrations over the past three decades have produced a trade debt that now amounts to more than $6 trillion, and that debt is rising faster than our national debt. All of which is contributing to the plunge in the value of the U.S. dollar.
At precisely the point in our history in which this nation has become ever more dependent on foreign producers for everything from clothing to computers to technology to energy, our weakened dollar is making the price of an ever-increasing number of imported goods even more expensive.
All Americans will soon have to face a bitter and now obvious truth: Our national, political and economic leaders have squandered this nation's wealth, and the price of this profligacy is enormous, and the bill has just come due for all of us.
Bernanke endorsed the concept of a short-term economic stimulus package, but he cautioned that the money must be spent correctly: "You'd hope that [consumers] would spend it on things that are domestically produced so that the spending power doesn't go elsewhere."
Just what would you have us spend it on? The truth is that consumers spend most of their money on foreign imports, and any stimulus package probably would be stimulating foreign economies rather than our own. Imports, for example, account for 92 percent of our non-athletic footwear, 92 percent of audio video equipment, 89 percent of our luggage and 73 percent of power tools. In fact, between 1997 and 2006, only five of the 114 industries examined in a U.S. Business and Industry Council report gained market share against import competition.
And let's be honest and straightforward, as I hope our president and the candidates for president will be: This stimulus will not prevent a recession. It may ease the pain for millions of Americans, but a recession we will have. The question is how deep, how prolonged and how painful will it be. Unfortunately, we're about to find out how committed and capable our national leaders are at mitigating that pain and producing realistic policy decisions for this nation that now stands at the brink.
Campaign a lot of partisan nonsense
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Remember how excited everybody was just a short while ago that this presidential campaign was the first in 80 years to be wide open, without a president or vice president in the campaign?
Remember how excited we all were that American presidential politics had matured to the point that a woman and a black man were winning primary and caucus votes that allowed both to claim front-runner status?
Now Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are ensnared in petty racial and gender politics and that does neither of them credit.
But at least the ugly spectacle that Clinton and Obama created should serve as a reminder to all of us that group and identity politics have outlived their effectiveness and that pandering to socio-ethnocentric interest groups and special interests, whether as large as corporate America or as small as the construction company in a congressman's district, has no rightful place in 21st century American politics.
The Democratic and Republican candidates for president have done hardly better than President Bush and the Democratic-led Congress on the issue of the war in Iraq. The candidates trip over one another to bring more of our troops home faster than the other candidates, or refusing to withdraw our troops from Iraq until the job is done; policy choices not dissimilar to the simplistic White House's false choices in either staying the course or cutting and running.
But these presidential candidates, both Republican and Democrat, obviously would prefer not to discuss the war in Iraq in their campaigns, nor to state clearly whether they would secure our borders and ports as an absolute first condition before taking up the issue of immigration reform.
Both parties and nearly all of their candidates continue to drive false choices for the illegal immigration debate as well. The centrist and appropriate policy response to this crisis is to secure our borders and ports, and enforce current immigration laws.
Now that the economy has become the number-one issue for primary voters of both parties, we can expect the candidates to come up with new economic programs that will solve every problem in our society. Economic stimulus packages will soon be the order of the day, with more false choices: The Democrats will offer handouts to every man, woman and child and the Republicans will give drastic tax breaks to large corporations and the wealthy as the panacea for what ails us.
These candidates will not have addressed the causes of our economic malaise: The critical issue of the faith-based free trade policies of the past decade that have been devastating to working men and women and their families, policies that have enlarged our trade debt to more than $6 trillion.
And while presidential candidates of both political parties talk about our public education system in terms of globalism and American competitiveness, they fail to recognize the crisis in our public schools and they fail to prescribe urgently needed solutions.
This partisan nonsense and predictable platitudes of this presidential campaign does not augur well for the nation, and I fear none of the candidates of either party is capable of extricating us from the mess their partisan politics have created.
Our leaders have squandered our wealth
NEW YORK (CNN) -- President Bush's assurances that we'll all be "just fine" if he and Congress can work out an economic stimulus package seem a little hollow this morning.
Much like Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke's assurances last May that the subprime mortgage meltdown would be contained and not affect the broader economy. And it seems Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has spent most of the past year trying to influence Chinese economic policy rather than setting the direction of U.S. economic policy.
There is no question that Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will quickly come up with an economic stimulus package simply because they can no longer ignore our economic and financial crisis. That economic stimulus plan will amount to about 1 percent of our nation's gross domestic product, an estimated $150 billion.
But all of us should recognize that the stimulus package will be inadequate to drive sustainable growth in our $13 trillion economy. An emergency Fed rate cut and an economic stimulus plan are short-term responses to our complex economic problems, nothing more than bandages for a hemorrhaging economy.
Bush, Pelosi, Reid and the presidential candidates of both parties have an opportunity now, and I believe an obligation, to adjust the public policy mistakes of the past quarter-century that have led to this crisis. And only through courageous policy decisions will we be able to steer this nation's economy away from the brink of outright disaster.
We all have to acknowledge that our problems were in part brought on by the failure of our government to regulate the institutions and markets that are now in crisis. The irresponsible fiscal policies of the past decade have led to a national debt that amounts to $9 trillion. The irresponsible so-called free trade policies of Democratic and Republican administrations over the past three decades have produced a trade debt that now amounts to more than $6 trillion, and that debt is rising faster than our national debt. All of which is contributing to the plunge in the value of the U.S. dollar.
At precisely the point in our history in which this nation has become ever more dependent on foreign producers for everything from clothing to computers to technology to energy, our weakened dollar is making the price of an ever-increasing number of imported goods even more expensive.
All Americans will soon have to face a bitter and now obvious truth: Our national, political and economic leaders have squandered this nation's wealth, and the price of this profligacy is enormous, and the bill has just come due for all of us.
Bernanke endorsed the concept of a short-term economic stimulus package, but he cautioned that the money must be spent correctly: "You'd hope that [consumers] would spend it on things that are domestically produced so that the spending power doesn't go elsewhere."
Just what would you have us spend it on? The truth is that consumers spend most of their money on foreign imports, and any stimulus package probably would be stimulating foreign economies rather than our own. Imports, for example, account for 92 percent of our non-athletic footwear, 92 percent of audio video equipment, 89 percent of our luggage and 73 percent of power tools. In fact, between 1997 and 2006, only five of the 114 industries examined in a U.S. Business and Industry Council report gained market share against import competition.
And let's be honest and straightforward, as I hope our president and the candidates for president will be: This stimulus will not prevent a recession. It may ease the pain for millions of Americans, but a recession we will have. The question is how deep, how prolonged and how painful will it be. Unfortunately, we're about to find out how committed and capable our national leaders are at mitigating that pain and producing realistic policy decisions for this nation that now stands at the brink.
Campaign a lot of partisan nonsense
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Remember how excited everybody was just a short while ago that this presidential campaign was the first in 80 years to be wide open, without a president or vice president in the campaign?
Remember how excited we all were that American presidential politics had matured to the point that a woman and a black man were winning primary and caucus votes that allowed both to claim front-runner status?
Now Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are ensnared in petty racial and gender politics and that does neither of them credit.
But at least the ugly spectacle that Clinton and Obama created should serve as a reminder to all of us that group and identity politics have outlived their effectiveness and that pandering to socio-ethnocentric interest groups and special interests, whether as large as corporate America or as small as the construction company in a congressman's district, has no rightful place in 21st century American politics.
The Democratic and Republican candidates for president have done hardly better than President Bush and the Democratic-led Congress on the issue of the war in Iraq. The candidates trip over one another to bring more of our troops home faster than the other candidates, or refusing to withdraw our troops from Iraq until the job is done; policy choices not dissimilar to the simplistic White House's false choices in either staying the course or cutting and running.
But these presidential candidates, both Republican and Democrat, obviously would prefer not to discuss the war in Iraq in their campaigns, nor to state clearly whether they would secure our borders and ports as an absolute first condition before taking up the issue of immigration reform.
Both parties and nearly all of their candidates continue to drive false choices for the illegal immigration debate as well. The centrist and appropriate policy response to this crisis is to secure our borders and ports, and enforce current immigration laws.
Now that the economy has become the number-one issue for primary voters of both parties, we can expect the candidates to come up with new economic programs that will solve every problem in our society. Economic stimulus packages will soon be the order of the day, with more false choices: The Democrats will offer handouts to every man, woman and child and the Republicans will give drastic tax breaks to large corporations and the wealthy as the panacea for what ails us.
These candidates will not have addressed the causes of our economic malaise: The critical issue of the faith-based free trade policies of the past decade that have been devastating to working men and women and their families, policies that have enlarged our trade debt to more than $6 trillion.
And while presidential candidates of both political parties talk about our public education system in terms of globalism and American competitiveness, they fail to recognize the crisis in our public schools and they fail to prescribe urgently needed solutions.
This partisan nonsense and predictable platitudes of this presidential campaign does not augur well for the nation, and I fear none of the candidates of either party is capable of extricating us from the mess their partisan politics have created.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Monday, January 21, 2008
CORN!!!!
Corn is everywhere in the US. it makes up the bulk of our farming, is used in food, as food, as fuel, is animal feed and is always over produced and over-subsidised by our government. why so much corn?
high-fructose corn syrup is bad news and is everywhere....
this is a nice article giving some basics about corn and processed foods
biscuits...
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
:LKJ:LKJ:LKJ:LKJDKLDKLDJLKDLJK:
YES YES YES
4 Sets 0 stops true biscuits shrominate
GUMBO
01/16/08 Aggie Theater, Fort Collins, CO
I: Jigsaw Earth> And The Ladies Were The Rest Of The Night1> The Great Abyss> Astronaut2
II: Morph Dusseldorf> Cyclone> Munchkin Invasion1 3> Morph Dusseldorf> Alter Ego4> Jigsaw Earth
Encore: Rock Candy
1 inverted
2 ending only
3 with "The Thieving Magpie" tease
4 unfinished
01/17/08 Boulder Theater Boulder, CO
I: Jam > Run Like Hell > Crix1 > Spy2
II: Jam > Story of the World > Helix > Robots1 > Story, Dribble>Run Like Hell
Encore: Abraxis > Helix
1 inverted
2 ending only
This Is Really Fun
WOW
It's 2:23 AM
this is really fun
let's do it more
CHALLANGE:
drunk by 3
I'm Happy
Go Biscuits
untz
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Islamic or Republican Fascism?
Check it
"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power." Vice President Wallace, April 1944
"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power." Vice President Wallace, April 1944
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Lan-GO... ALL ABOARD!
I just booked my flight on American Airlines for $295 (total price) and will be landing in Ft. Lauderdale around 3:20pm on 3.06.08
Who else is hopping on this hovercraftbandwagon? Let's make this a Langerizzity to remember with the whole crew. Git yer shrage faces on.
In case you need any more incentive, the weather will be perfect and there's an unlimited supply of $10 nitrous balloons. Make that $20 nitrous balloons--wait, $3? Ok, fine here's two...
bp
Who else is hopping on this hovercraftbandwagon? Let's make this a Langerizzity to remember with the whole crew. Git yer shrage faces on.
In case you need any more incentive, the weather will be perfect and there's an unlimited supply of $10 nitrous balloons. Make that $20 nitrous balloons--wait, $3? Ok, fine here's two...
bp
Monday, January 14, 2008
Lighter Side
This woman from Portland named Wakeehna has some really dope stuff on the web...while i post the heavy shit to help remind what is at stake...this stuff is like the antonym....cheers, hope all biscuits fans have a memorable shred :)
http://lunaclipse.livejournal.com/
http://illumin.escens.org/
she contributes to RS as well
and also a movie i made...i'm sorry you can't see the text...i'll send a dvd back to CO after i go back to school
http://lunaclipse.livejournal.com/
http://illumin.escens.org/
she contributes to RS as well
and also a movie i made...i'm sorry you can't see the text...i'll send a dvd back to CO after i go back to school
UK uses RFID for Prisoners
Via: Independent:
Prisoners ‘to be chipped like dogs’
Hi-tech ’satellite’ tagging planned in order to create more space in jails
Civil rights groups and probation officers furious at ‘degrading’ scheme
By Brian Brady, Whitehall Editor
Published: 13 January 2008
Ministers are planning to implant “machine-readable” microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails.
Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.
But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record.
The tags, labelled “spychips” by privacy campaigners, are already used around the world to keep track of dogs, cats, cattle and airport luggage, but there is no record of the technology being used to monitor offenders in the community. The chips are also being considered as a method of helping to keep order within prisons.
A senior Ministry of Justice official last night confirmed that the department hoped to go even further, by extending the geographical range of the internal chips through a link-up with satellite-tracking similar to the system used to trace stolen vehicles. “All the options are on the table, and this is one we would like to pursue,” the source added.
The move is in line with a proposal from Ken Jones, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), that electronic chips should be surgically implanted into convicted paedophiles and sex offenders in order to track them more easily. Global Positioning System (GPS) technology is seen as the favoured method of monitoring such offenders to prevent them going near “forbidden” zones such as primary schools.
“We have wanted to take advantage of this technology for several years, because it seems a sensible solution to the problems we are facing in this area,” a senior minister said last night. “We have looked at it and gone back to it and worried about the practicalities and the ethics, but when you look at the challenges facing the criminal justice system, it’s time has come.”
The Government has been forced to review sentencing policy amid serious overcrowding in the nation’s jails, after the prison population soared from 60,000 in 1997 to 80,000 today. The crisis meant the number of prisoners held in police cells rose 13-fold last year, with police stations housing offenders more than 60,000 times in 2007, up from 4,617 the previous year. The UK has the highest prison population per capita in western Europe, and the Government is planning for an extra 20,000 places at a cost of £3.8bn – including three gigantic new “superjails” – in the next six years.
More than 17,000 individuals, including criminals and suspects released on bail, are subject to electronic monitoring at any one time, under curfews requiring them to stay at home up to 12 hours a day. But official figures reveal that almost 2,000 offenders a year escape monitoring by tampering with ankle tags or tearing them off. Curfew breaches rose from 11,435 in 2005 to 43,843 in 2006 – up 283 per cent. The monitoring system, which relies on mobile-phone technology, can fail if the network crashes.
A multimillion-pound pilot of satellite monitoring of offenders was shelved last year after a report revealed many criminals simply ditched the ankle tag and separate portable tracking unit issued to them. The “prison without bars” project also failed to track offenders when they were in the shadow of tall buildings.
The Independent on Sunday has now established that ministers have been assessing the merits of cutting-edge technology that would make it virtually impossible for individuals to remove their electronic tags.
The tags, injected into the back of the arm with a hypodermic needle, consist of a toughened glass capsule holding a computer chip, a copper antenna and a “capacitor” that transmits data stored on the chip when prompted by an electromagnetic reader.
But details of the dramatic option for tightening controls over Britain’s criminals provoked an angry response from probation officers and civil-rights groups. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: “If the Home Office doesn’t understand why implanting a chip in someone is worse than an ankle bracelet, they don’t need a human-rights lawyer; they need a common-sense bypass.
“Degrading offenders in this way will do nothing for their rehabilitation and nothing for our safety, as some will inevitably find a way round this new technology.”
Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, said the proposal would not make his members’ lives easier and would degrade their clients. He added: “I have heard about this suggestion, but we feel the system works well enough as it is. Knowing where offenders like paedophiles are does not mean you know what they are doing.
“This is the sort of daft idea that comes up from the department every now and then, but tagging people in the same way we tag our pets cannot be the way ahead. Treating people like pieces of meat does not seem to represent an improvement in the system to me.”
The US market leader VeriChip Corp, whose parent company has been selling radio tags for animals for more than a decade, has sold 7,000 RFID microchips worldwide, of which about 2,000 have been implanted in humans. The company claims its VeriChips are used in more than 5,000 installations, crossing healthcare, security, government and industrial markets, but they have also been used to verify VIP membership in nightclubs, automatically gaining the carrier entry – and deducting the price of their drinks from a pre-paid account.
The possible value of the technology to the UK’s justice system was first highlighted 18 months ago, when Acpo’s Mr Jones suggested the chips could be implanted into sex offenders. The implants would be tracked by satellite, enabling authorities to set up “zones”, including schools, playgrounds and former victims’ homes, from which individuals would be barred.
“If we are prepared to track cars, why don’t we track people?” Mr Jones said. “You could put surgical chips into those of the most dangerous sex offenders who are willing to be controlled.”
The case for: ‘We track cars, so why not people?’
The Government is struggling to keep track of thousands of offenders in the community and is troubled by an overcrowded prison system close to bursting. Internal tagging offers a solution that could impose curfews more effectively than at present, and extend the system by keeping sex offenders out of “forbidden areas”. “If we are prepared to track cars, why don’t we track people?” said Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo).
Prisoners ‘to be chipped like dogs’
Hi-tech ’satellite’ tagging planned in order to create more space in jails
Civil rights groups and probation officers furious at ‘degrading’ scheme
By Brian Brady, Whitehall Editor
Published: 13 January 2008
Ministers are planning to implant “machine-readable” microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails.
Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.
But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record.
The tags, labelled “spychips” by privacy campaigners, are already used around the world to keep track of dogs, cats, cattle and airport luggage, but there is no record of the technology being used to monitor offenders in the community. The chips are also being considered as a method of helping to keep order within prisons.
A senior Ministry of Justice official last night confirmed that the department hoped to go even further, by extending the geographical range of the internal chips through a link-up with satellite-tracking similar to the system used to trace stolen vehicles. “All the options are on the table, and this is one we would like to pursue,” the source added.
The move is in line with a proposal from Ken Jones, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), that electronic chips should be surgically implanted into convicted paedophiles and sex offenders in order to track them more easily. Global Positioning System (GPS) technology is seen as the favoured method of monitoring such offenders to prevent them going near “forbidden” zones such as primary schools.
“We have wanted to take advantage of this technology for several years, because it seems a sensible solution to the problems we are facing in this area,” a senior minister said last night. “We have looked at it and gone back to it and worried about the practicalities and the ethics, but when you look at the challenges facing the criminal justice system, it’s time has come.”
The Government has been forced to review sentencing policy amid serious overcrowding in the nation’s jails, after the prison population soared from 60,000 in 1997 to 80,000 today. The crisis meant the number of prisoners held in police cells rose 13-fold last year, with police stations housing offenders more than 60,000 times in 2007, up from 4,617 the previous year. The UK has the highest prison population per capita in western Europe, and the Government is planning for an extra 20,000 places at a cost of £3.8bn – including three gigantic new “superjails” – in the next six years.
More than 17,000 individuals, including criminals and suspects released on bail, are subject to electronic monitoring at any one time, under curfews requiring them to stay at home up to 12 hours a day. But official figures reveal that almost 2,000 offenders a year escape monitoring by tampering with ankle tags or tearing them off. Curfew breaches rose from 11,435 in 2005 to 43,843 in 2006 – up 283 per cent. The monitoring system, which relies on mobile-phone technology, can fail if the network crashes.
A multimillion-pound pilot of satellite monitoring of offenders was shelved last year after a report revealed many criminals simply ditched the ankle tag and separate portable tracking unit issued to them. The “prison without bars” project also failed to track offenders when they were in the shadow of tall buildings.
The Independent on Sunday has now established that ministers have been assessing the merits of cutting-edge technology that would make it virtually impossible for individuals to remove their electronic tags.
The tags, injected into the back of the arm with a hypodermic needle, consist of a toughened glass capsule holding a computer chip, a copper antenna and a “capacitor” that transmits data stored on the chip when prompted by an electromagnetic reader.
But details of the dramatic option for tightening controls over Britain’s criminals provoked an angry response from probation officers and civil-rights groups. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: “If the Home Office doesn’t understand why implanting a chip in someone is worse than an ankle bracelet, they don’t need a human-rights lawyer; they need a common-sense bypass.
“Degrading offenders in this way will do nothing for their rehabilitation and nothing for our safety, as some will inevitably find a way round this new technology.”
Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, said the proposal would not make his members’ lives easier and would degrade their clients. He added: “I have heard about this suggestion, but we feel the system works well enough as it is. Knowing where offenders like paedophiles are does not mean you know what they are doing.
“This is the sort of daft idea that comes up from the department every now and then, but tagging people in the same way we tag our pets cannot be the way ahead. Treating people like pieces of meat does not seem to represent an improvement in the system to me.”
The US market leader VeriChip Corp, whose parent company has been selling radio tags for animals for more than a decade, has sold 7,000 RFID microchips worldwide, of which about 2,000 have been implanted in humans. The company claims its VeriChips are used in more than 5,000 installations, crossing healthcare, security, government and industrial markets, but they have also been used to verify VIP membership in nightclubs, automatically gaining the carrier entry – and deducting the price of their drinks from a pre-paid account.
The possible value of the technology to the UK’s justice system was first highlighted 18 months ago, when Acpo’s Mr Jones suggested the chips could be implanted into sex offenders. The implants would be tracked by satellite, enabling authorities to set up “zones”, including schools, playgrounds and former victims’ homes, from which individuals would be barred.
“If we are prepared to track cars, why don’t we track people?” Mr Jones said. “You could put surgical chips into those of the most dangerous sex offenders who are willing to be controlled.”
The case for: ‘We track cars, so why not people?’
The Government is struggling to keep track of thousands of offenders in the community and is troubled by an overcrowded prison system close to bursting. Internal tagging offers a solution that could impose curfews more effectively than at present, and extend the system by keeping sex offenders out of “forbidden areas”. “If we are prepared to track cars, why don’t we track people?” said Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo).
Anarchy for the Economy
Via: Reuters:
U.S. chain stores, reeling from the slowest holiday shopping season in five years, got some more bad news on Sunday: 2008 will not be any better and could see changes that may shift the retail playing field forever.
As the National Retail Federation kicked off its annual convention in New York, two retail consultants offered negative outlooks for the U.S. retail industry, which has seen consumers pull back amid higher gasoline and food prices, a credit crunch and a prolonged housing market decline.
“It’s anarchy,” said Wendy Liebmann, chief executive of WSL Strategic Retail, frequently repeating the word she used to sum up the latest results of her company’s bi-annual shopper study.
“Americans cannot control the big things such as oil prices, falling home values, mortgage costs and rising property taxes, so they want to control the small things,” Liebmann said. “They are watching what they spend on everything.”
Liebmann said most shoppers were making fewer weekly shopping trips and spending significantly less on discretionary items such as home appliances and decor, fashion accessories, electronics, perfume, computers and software.
The only two categories getting a larger share of consumers’ wallets are food and pet supplies, Liebmann said, noting however, that food prices have increased.
U.S. chain stores, reeling from the slowest holiday shopping season in five years, got some more bad news on Sunday: 2008 will not be any better and could see changes that may shift the retail playing field forever.
As the National Retail Federation kicked off its annual convention in New York, two retail consultants offered negative outlooks for the U.S. retail industry, which has seen consumers pull back amid higher gasoline and food prices, a credit crunch and a prolonged housing market decline.
“It’s anarchy,” said Wendy Liebmann, chief executive of WSL Strategic Retail, frequently repeating the word she used to sum up the latest results of her company’s bi-annual shopper study.
“Americans cannot control the big things such as oil prices, falling home values, mortgage costs and rising property taxes, so they want to control the small things,” Liebmann said. “They are watching what they spend on everything.”
Liebmann said most shoppers were making fewer weekly shopping trips and spending significantly less on discretionary items such as home appliances and decor, fashion accessories, electronics, perfume, computers and software.
The only two categories getting a larger share of consumers’ wallets are food and pet supplies, Liebmann said, noting however, that food prices have increased.
War Games
Via: Telegraph:
Threats to US ships in the Strait of Hormuz heard at the end of a Pentagon-released recording of an incident between Iranian patrol boats and US Navy warships last week may have been the work of a local heckler known as the “Filipino Monkey”, The Navy Times has reported.
A video released on Friday showed several small Iranian boats approaching US ships in an incident that President Bush has described as “provocative”, while a previously-released audio recording included a threat to destroy the ships.
The Pentagon says the threat was received during the incident.
In accented English a voice is heard to say “I am coming to you … You will explode in a few minutes.” Pentagon officials had previously stated that the voice came from one of the boats, but they are now distancing themselves from that claim, saying instead that they do not know the source of the transmission.
The Navy Times said that the voice in the audio did not match that of an Iranian officer shown speaking to Navy cruiser USS Port Royal over the radio in a video released by the Iranian authorities.
This has led several Navy experts to raise the possibility that a heckler, known locally as the “Filipino Monkey” - or a copycat - could have made the threats.
“Filipino Monkey” is believed to be more than one person. Its modus operandi is to listen in to ship-to-ship radio traffic before jumping in with insults and threats.
According to The Navy Times, US Navy women come in for particularly harsh treatment.
A civilian mariner told the paper that the “Filipino Monkey” phenomenon is worldwide, but more common in areas of heavy shipping such as the Strait of Hormuz.
Despite the discovery that Iran may not have been behind the threats, US President George W Bush has not toned down his rhetoric against the Islamic state. Speaking during his eight-day tour of the Middle East, Mr Bush described Iran as “the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” which funds extremists, stirs up unrest in Lebanon, arms the Taliban, and threatens the stability of the entire Middle East with its refusal to fully disclose the facts surrounding its nuclear programme.
Threats to US ships in the Strait of Hormuz heard at the end of a Pentagon-released recording of an incident between Iranian patrol boats and US Navy warships last week may have been the work of a local heckler known as the “Filipino Monkey”, The Navy Times has reported.
A video released on Friday showed several small Iranian boats approaching US ships in an incident that President Bush has described as “provocative”, while a previously-released audio recording included a threat to destroy the ships.
The Pentagon says the threat was received during the incident.
In accented English a voice is heard to say “I am coming to you … You will explode in a few minutes.” Pentagon officials had previously stated that the voice came from one of the boats, but they are now distancing themselves from that claim, saying instead that they do not know the source of the transmission.
The Navy Times said that the voice in the audio did not match that of an Iranian officer shown speaking to Navy cruiser USS Port Royal over the radio in a video released by the Iranian authorities.
This has led several Navy experts to raise the possibility that a heckler, known locally as the “Filipino Monkey” - or a copycat - could have made the threats.
“Filipino Monkey” is believed to be more than one person. Its modus operandi is to listen in to ship-to-ship radio traffic before jumping in with insults and threats.
According to The Navy Times, US Navy women come in for particularly harsh treatment.
A civilian mariner told the paper that the “Filipino Monkey” phenomenon is worldwide, but more common in areas of heavy shipping such as the Strait of Hormuz.
Despite the discovery that Iran may not have been behind the threats, US President George W Bush has not toned down his rhetoric against the Islamic state. Speaking during his eight-day tour of the Middle East, Mr Bush described Iran as “the world’s leading state sponsor of terror,” which funds extremists, stirs up unrest in Lebanon, arms the Taliban, and threatens the stability of the entire Middle East with its refusal to fully disclose the facts surrounding its nuclear programme.
BISCUITS VAIL
So where the hell are we staying?
Should we hook up a limo ride from say Frisco? Its not that expensive if we all pitch.
Just random thoughts before the shred.
Im guessing know one has any idea thought I might just try to spur some thoughts...
Should we hook up a limo ride from say Frisco? Its not that expensive if we all pitch.
Just random thoughts before the shred.
Im guessing know one has any idea thought I might just try to spur some thoughts...
Sunday, January 13, 2008
awesome
Just a little quote that is pretty sweet in my opinion...
"One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am -- a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still there. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards."
--Edward Abbey
"One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am -- a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still there. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards."
--Edward Abbey
Friday, January 11, 2008
HUNTING - aka Projecting Faults One Sees Within Oneself Upon Others in Order to Ease the Perpetual Pain that is the inability to properly communicate
My life very well may have changed when I read what Alexis deTocqueville had to say about what kind of "despotism" Americans have to fear. I see and hear glimpses of talk regarding change, but I don't know what to place my chips in. We all dissent in our own little ways, but there are a few things, if you would let me, I would like to make clear.
American liberal democracy is one of the most interesting feats of mankind, but as we all should know, has a long, long way to go. Tocqueville's major concern was of a certain "tyranny of the majority" which could ensue in America due to a serious emergence of "equality". Of course many of us view this with ease when we take a look at some of our peers, but I see it among ourselves, especially myself. Those who are given much, I think should be expecting multitudes out of themselves, and we all are very well endowed. Even as I write I do not wish to step on anybody's toes, but I can't help that at this moment in time, I don't give a fuck how hard any one can shred, rage, and/or shrage. If you've got the message, hang up the phone. If you haven't gotten the message, step outside, look at the sky, and wonder why. If you're phone is dead or you don't get reception, find a way to recharge through your own power source and keep searching for higher ground.
If you wish to talk about politics, my best advice is don't take anything lightly. To me it is all a gentle piece of glass suspended over a bed of rocks. We are at a point where capitalist defeated the communist, democratic pushing out the monarchical, but now future of sustainable living, or the possibility of a human existing as a viable species hangs on a thread. We try and create peace with guns, while the media spreads darkness at the speed of light and I view all of this from the tip of the iceberg while many of my fellow citizens are drowning and freezing below. The election, I think, is to be taken into great consideration, but it is not to be seen as a popularity/american idol/MVP contest that the media often portrays it as. There is still plenty of shit that can happen between now and Jan 20, 2009 when Gdub supposedly leaves. My personal opinion, all three democrats will serve a relatively similar purpose, and who should really be running is Michelle Obama, just listen to the speech she gave to the campaign office in New Hampshire or this one in CO.
The way I see it these days is that revolution starts with each and every one of us, and is an act which casts the self into oblivion for the larger whole. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau critiqued the so-called "enlightened thought" of France and England in the 18th century, he noted that in the forest of the Iroquois, if you were hurt and lying helpless on the ground, one of those men would help you without question. But in the streets of Paris, men would step over you every single day. We have inherited this land from those people, but yet we have displayed the soul of the enlightened european. That, to me, should not be taken lightly. We are on shaky ground my friends, be good, or else it all might come crashing down.
"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars." walt whitman
I'm not saying drop everything you do to trip out in your head like me...It's not all always such a shrage...I don't want to sound like a condescending asshole either....I realize my faults in communication...That i resort to writing latenight rants when I feel everybody is sleeping with south park smiles on their faces....But please just don't step out of one box and into another, you can't afford it....3 billion heartbeats
Sincerely,
General Direction
Honoring the place in you in which the entire universe dwells since 1987 AD
"If travel is searching, and home is what we've found...I'm not stopping...I'm going hunting." bjork
"The suppression of the natural fascination with altered states of consciousness, and the current perilous situation of all life on earth, are intimately and casually connected." terrence mckenna
"Poetry is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate." w.h. auden
"We have art in order that we may not perish from truth." nietzsche
"Here's a thought for everyman who tried to understand what's in his hands....He walks along the open road of love and life, surviving if he can....Bound by all the weight of all the worlds he tried to save, chained to all the places that he never wished to stay...Bound with all the weight of all the worlds he tried to save, as he faced the sun he cast no shadow...........................When they took his soul, they stole his pride." noel gallagher
American liberal democracy is one of the most interesting feats of mankind, but as we all should know, has a long, long way to go. Tocqueville's major concern was of a certain "tyranny of the majority" which could ensue in America due to a serious emergence of "equality". Of course many of us view this with ease when we take a look at some of our peers, but I see it among ourselves, especially myself. Those who are given much, I think should be expecting multitudes out of themselves, and we all are very well endowed. Even as I write I do not wish to step on anybody's toes, but I can't help that at this moment in time, I don't give a fuck how hard any one can shred, rage, and/or shrage. If you've got the message, hang up the phone. If you haven't gotten the message, step outside, look at the sky, and wonder why. If you're phone is dead or you don't get reception, find a way to recharge through your own power source and keep searching for higher ground.
If you wish to talk about politics, my best advice is don't take anything lightly. To me it is all a gentle piece of glass suspended over a bed of rocks. We are at a point where capitalist defeated the communist, democratic pushing out the monarchical, but now future of sustainable living, or the possibility of a human existing as a viable species hangs on a thread. We try and create peace with guns, while the media spreads darkness at the speed of light and I view all of this from the tip of the iceberg while many of my fellow citizens are drowning and freezing below. The election, I think, is to be taken into great consideration, but it is not to be seen as a popularity/american idol/MVP contest that the media often portrays it as. There is still plenty of shit that can happen between now and Jan 20, 2009 when Gdub supposedly leaves. My personal opinion, all three democrats will serve a relatively similar purpose, and who should really be running is Michelle Obama, just listen to the speech she gave to the campaign office in New Hampshire or this one in CO.
The way I see it these days is that revolution starts with each and every one of us, and is an act which casts the self into oblivion for the larger whole. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau critiqued the so-called "enlightened thought" of France and England in the 18th century, he noted that in the forest of the Iroquois, if you were hurt and lying helpless on the ground, one of those men would help you without question. But in the streets of Paris, men would step over you every single day. We have inherited this land from those people, but yet we have displayed the soul of the enlightened european. That, to me, should not be taken lightly. We are on shaky ground my friends, be good, or else it all might come crashing down.
"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars." walt whitman
I'm not saying drop everything you do to trip out in your head like me...It's not all always such a shrage...I don't want to sound like a condescending asshole either....I realize my faults in communication...That i resort to writing latenight rants when I feel everybody is sleeping with south park smiles on their faces....But please just don't step out of one box and into another, you can't afford it....3 billion heartbeats
Sincerely,
General Direction
Honoring the place in you in which the entire universe dwells since 1987 AD
"If travel is searching, and home is what we've found...I'm not stopping...I'm going hunting." bjork
"The suppression of the natural fascination with altered states of consciousness, and the current perilous situation of all life on earth, are intimately and casually connected." terrence mckenna
"Poetry is not magic. In so far as poetry, or any other of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate." w.h. auden
"We have art in order that we may not perish from truth." nietzsche
"Here's a thought for everyman who tried to understand what's in his hands....He walks along the open road of love and life, surviving if he can....Bound by all the weight of all the worlds he tried to save, chained to all the places that he never wished to stay...Bound with all the weight of all the worlds he tried to save, as he faced the sun he cast no shadow...........................When they took his soul, they stole his pride." noel gallagher
Thursday, January 10, 2008
All I need is LOVE, not Luvs!!!
Is anyone else just disgusted with the overwhelming appearance of Beatles' music in current advertising campaigns and jingles. The other day, as I sat in front of the television being a product of a generation that indulges in media consumption and apparently endorses these sellouts, I was appalled at two commercials. Target's hello-goodbye, hello-goodBUY which was immediately followed by some bitch telling me "All you need is Luv's." Yeah that's right, Luv's the disposable diaper. Who said it was okay to turn a 1960's peace anthem into into a jingle that sells shit collectors (that probably aren't heady enough to biodegrade and therefore pollute our environment, haha) to young parents? It may make for a clever PR/Ad campaign, but I'm sure, or at least I hope i'm sure, that many consider this a disgrace.
"Elizabeth Freund, U.S. spokeswoman for Apple Corps Ltd., the London-based group formed by the Beatles that helps guard their legacy, said Sony/ATV Music Publishing (a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Michael Jackson) holds publishing rights for “All You Need Is Love.” Sony/ATV does not need permission from surviving Beatles or heirs to license the songs in its Beatles catalog." -International Herald Tribune
Thanks Michael. For pooping in the pants of righteous Beatles fan everywhere.
"Elizabeth Freund, U.S. spokeswoman for Apple Corps Ltd., the London-based group formed by the Beatles that helps guard their legacy, said Sony/ATV Music Publishing (a joint venture of Sony Corp. and Michael Jackson) holds publishing rights for “All You Need Is Love.” Sony/ATV does not need permission from surviving Beatles or heirs to license the songs in its Beatles catalog." -International Herald Tribune
Thanks Michael. For pooping in the pants of righteous Beatles fan everywhere.
Create the world in front of which you will kneel
Catachresis (from Greek κατάχρησις)- The incorrect or improper use of a word. Using or mispronouncing a word consciously to create new meanings. Using a word to denote something radically different from its normal meaning. Using a word to denote something for which, without the catachresis, there is no actual name. Using a word out of context. A harsh metaphor involving the use of a word beyond its strict sphere.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
CrazyJourney
I met these guys Fintan & Dave on a side trip they were taking near Bangkok...They had a sweet set up and camera filming for a documentary they were doing. As well as collecting funds for charity, they were having a blast
click the title link--crazy journey
talk about one massive road trip
click the title link--crazy journey
talk about one massive road trip
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Monday, January 7, 2008
recently i have been trying to stay away from "conspiracy theories" and para-normal readings in order to focus my energy more on positive and actionable issues. i feel that it is dangerous to keep my head in a space where everything that i concern myself with is skeptical and abstract. while those modes of thought are very necissary to keeping one's eyes open, it at times felt as though it was dragging me down. i felt the need to apply my knowledge in positive ways to keep my head up and point to the light for others.
today i encountered two major issues in trying to continue in this way of thinking:
the below article about super-delegates (last post)
and this article by pinchbeck
in getting excited about the promise of change to our white house via the democratic voices of obama and edwards, i was taken aback by the fact that they could garner enough populous support in the nation, but still lose out thanks to nameless party super-powers set in place to keep the status quo.
the pinchbeck article renwed by lack of faith in the power of emerging technologies and brought me back to a state of disbelief and fear.
it is tough to remain positive in light of the attrocities that we are surrounded with in this nation both blatently and covertly. the tough charge for me is to stay with my eyes to the sky and yet not let the underpinnings of our society go unnoticed or ultimately crush my will....
pooop
Tyranny
Published on Saturday, January 5, 2008 by The Nation
The Tyranny of Super-Delegates
by Katrina vanden Heuvel
Barack Obama’s stirring victory in Iowa was also a good night for our democracy. The turnout broke records and young people - who were mobilized and organized - participated in unprecedented numbers. And now that Iowans have spoken - the first citizens in the nation to do so - here’s the Democratic delegate count for the top three candidates (2,025 delegates are needed to secure the nomination):
Clinton - 169
Obama - 66
Edwards - 47
“Huh?” you say. “vanden Heuvel, you made a MAJOR typo.”
In fact, those numbers are correct: the third-place finishing Sen. Hillary Clinton now has over twice as many delegates as Sen. Obama, and more than three times as many delegates as the second-place candidate, Sen. John Edwards. Why? Because the Democratic Party uses an antiquated and anti-democratic nominating system that includes 842 “super-delegates” - un-pledged party leaders not chosen by the voters, free to support the candidate of their choice, and who comprise more than forty percent of the delegates needed to win the nomination. Many have already announced the candidate they will support.
In a clear attempt to protect the party establishment, this undemocratic infrastructure was created following George McGovern’s landslide defeat in 1972. It was designed to prevent a nominee who was “out of sync with the rest of the party,” Northeastern University political scientist William Mayer told MSNBC. Democratic National Committee member Elaine Kamarck called it a “sort of safety valve.”
In 1988, Reverend Jesse Jackson challenged the notion that these appointed delegates be permitted to vote for the candidate of their choosing rather than the winner of the state’s caucus or primary. He was right to do so. Twenty years later, when the word “change” is being bandied about, isn’t it time for the Democratic Party to give real meaning to the word? Strengthen our democracy by reforming the super-delegate system so that the people, not the party establishment, choose their candidate.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation.
© 2008 The Nation
Super-delegate in wiki
Thursday, January 3, 2008
obama wins Iowa primary
obama bested the other democrates by garnering 39% of the democratic caucus support last night in Iowa. John edwards finished second by edging out clinton by mere fractions of a percent.
obama is the man and this victory speech outlines why i think he should be the next president. he has the swager, ideas and eloquence to make change a reality and to restore confidence in the politics of our country.
my dad was comparing him to the the good Dr. and JFK as we listened to him.
obama is the man and this victory speech outlines why i think he should be the next president. he has the swager, ideas and eloquence to make change a reality and to restore confidence in the politics of our country.
my dad was comparing him to the the good Dr. and JFK as we listened to him.
Happy New Year
Here are two articles recently posted on Reality Sandwich that are engaging and positive.
Homo Luminus...consciousness and evolution
RS's discussion of Nassim Haramein's ideas
Hope everyone had a beautiful holiday...let's get ready to untz some faces.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
biscuits tix
havent got mine yet either...they will come remember you are dealing with the disco biscuits mgmt
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
biscuits tix???
has any1 who ordered from biscotix got their tickets for the colorado shows in the mail yet? i figured it would be a little while still, but some people on pt said they got theirs already and im starting to get worried.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Friday, December 21, 2007
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
the big O
global orgasm day is upon us. lets heal the world by giving a little focused energy explosion to the nooshere.
the plan this year is to have the world "do it" at the international solstice time which is December 22, 6:08 GMT universal time. for us in the mountain time zone that means 11:08 pm this friday. so if you are out at a party, bar, show or watchin a movie with your parents... sneak off and do the do at 11:08.
find a partner or be your own best friend, and think peace!
Princeton is monitoring the changes in the nooshere so make it count.
Globalorgasm.org
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
I LOST MY PHONE
hey every1 its g-rant and i lost my phone, so you should leave me your numbers so i can get ahold of you. I was able to activate an old one(with broken screen) i had sitting around so i can recieve calls i just dont know whos calling. shrage
Saturday, December 15, 2007
i am down with obama
"I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though. ..."
-from his book
NORML article from years ago
Friday, December 14, 2007
CSU MEAT JUDGERS DO IT AGAIN!
* Many of our competitive academic teams don’t make headlines for
their success, hard work, and landmark achievements—but they are
still deserving of acclaim.
o CSU’s 2007 Meat Judging Team, which competes nationally against
other university teams, continued its proud tradition and
represented CSU’s ongoing excellence in the Animal Sciences when it
won its 4th national championship at the International
Intercollegiate Meat Judging Contest in November. Congratulations to
team members Dominic DiSanti, Jerilyn Hergenreder, Lindsay Eurich,
Cheyenne Dixon, John Wood, David Jacobs, Micah Seyler, Brian Self,
and Coach Dale Woerner.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Prince NEWS
This album is the shit. I completely forgot I had it until Zabba put it on the other day. Four 14-minute songs depicting the cardinal directions....
Download Here
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Tis the season... the season to SHRAGE
Just trying to figure out what every1 has planned for NYE and what not. As of now im leaning towards motet at hodi's.
the weather underground... again
g-rant mentioned this docu in a post a while ago, and i just watched it. it was really well done and covers a great range of issues concerning revolutions, civil rights, ethics, FBI
it really gives some great perspectives on how things work and how people respond to psyche pressure. shows the good and the bad...
if you get a chance, check it...
check this too: Fred Hampton
his voice is at the end of the bassnectar track "laughter crescendo" and he is talked about in the weather underground
Cycle-Sexualist- Just when you thought perverts could no longer be original
This was a recent article published on bbc.com...
Bike sex man placed on probation
A man caught trying to have sex with his bicycle has been sentenced to three years on probation.
Robert Stewart, 51, admitted a sexually aggravated breach of the peace by conducting himself in a disorderly manner and simulating sex.
Sheriff Colin Miller also placed Stewart on the Sex Offenders Register for three years.
Mr Stewart was caught in the act with his bicycle by cleaners in his bedroom at the Aberley House Hostel in Ayr.
Gail Davidson, prosecuting, told Ayr Sheriff Court: "They knocked on the door several times and there was no reply.
"They used a master key to unlock the door and they then observed the accused wearing only a white t-shirt, naked from the waist down.
"The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex."
Both cleaners, who were "extremely shocked", told the hostel manager who called police.
Sheriff Colin Miller told Stewart: "In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind, but this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a 'cycle-sexualist'."
Stewart had denied the offence, claiming it was caused by a misunderstanding after he had too much to drink.
The bachelor had been living in the hostel since October 2006 after moving from his council house in Girvan.
He now lives in Ayr.
Sheriff Colin Miller also placed Stewart on the Sex Offenders Register for three years.
Mr Stewart was caught in the act with his bicycle by cleaners in his bedroom at the Aberley House Hostel in Ayr.
Gail Davidson, prosecuting, told Ayr Sheriff Court: "They knocked on the door several times and there was no reply.
"They used a master key to unlock the door and they then observed the accused wearing only a white t-shirt, naked from the waist down.
"The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex."
Both cleaners, who were "extremely shocked", told the hostel manager who called police.
Sheriff Colin Miller told Stewart: "In almost four decades in the law I thought I had come across every perversion known to mankind, but this is a new one on me. I have never heard of a 'cycle-sexualist'."
Stewart had denied the offence, claiming it was caused by a misunderstanding after he had too much to drink.
The bachelor had been living in the hostel since October 2006 after moving from his council house in Girvan.
He now lives in Ayr.
Primary Flight Miami, FL
This is a street art exhibition that the city of Miami has put together...some pretty sick stuff
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
The Need For Transcendence
In this postmodern world, cultural conflicts are becoming more dangerous than any time in history. A new model of coexistence is needed, based on man's transcending himself.
By Vaclav Havel-Former President of the Czech Republic (I highly recommend reading about this dude on Wikipedia)
There are thinkers who claim that, if the modern age began with the discovery of America, it also ended in America. This is said to have occurred in the year 1969, when America sent the first men to the moon. From this historical moment, they say, a new age in the life of humanity can be dated.
I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going thorough a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.
Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the ruins of the classical world the Middle Ages were gradually born. It happened during the Renaissance, which opened the way to the modern era. The distinguishing features of such transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.
Today, this state of mind or of the human world is called postmodernism. For me, a symbol of that state is a Bedouin mounted on a camel and clad in traditional robes under which he is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio in his hands and an ad for Coca-Cola on the camel's back. I am not ridiculing this, nor am I shedding an intellectual tear over the commercial expansion of the West that destroys alien cultures. I see it rather as a typical expression of this multicultural era, a signal that an amalgamation of cultures is taking place. I see it as proof that something is happening, something is being born, that we are in a phase when one age is succeeding another, when everything is possible. Yes, everything is possible, because our civilization does not have its own unified style, its own spirit, its own aesthetic.
Science and Modern Civilization
This is related to the crisis, or to the transformation, of science as the basis of the modern conception of the world.
The dizzying development of this science, with its unconditional faith in objective reality and its complete dependency on general and rationally knowable laws, led to the birth of modern technological civilization. It is the first civilization in the history of the human race that spans the entire globe and firmly binds together all human societies, submitting them to a common global destiny. It was this science that enabled man, for the first time, to see Earth from space with his own eyes; that is, to see it as another star in the sky.
At the same time, however, the relationship to the world that the modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia: Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.
Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us. The same thing is true of nature and of ourselves. The more thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their internal structure, and the biochemical reactions that take place within them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose, and meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as our unique "self".
And thus today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. We enjoy all the achievements of modern civilization that have made our physical existence on this earth easier so in many important ways. Yet we do not know exactly what to do with ourselves, where to turn. The world of our experiences seems chaotic, disconnected, confusing. There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.
When Nothing is Certain
This state of affairs has its social and political consequences. The single planetary civilization to which we all belong confronts us with global challenges. We stand helpless before them because our civilization has essentially globalized only the surfaces of our lives. But our inner self continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe. Because of this, individual cultures, increasingly lumped together by contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the inner differences of others.
Cultural conflicts are increasing and are understandably more dangerous today than at any other time in history. The end of the era of rationalism has been catastrophic. Armed with the same supermodern weapons, often from the same suppliers, and followed by television cameras, the members of various tribal cults are at war with one another. By day, we work with statistics; in the evening, we consult astrologers and frighten ourselves with thrillers about vampires. The abyss between rational and the spiritual, the external and the internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the unique, constantly grows deeper.
Politicians are rightly worried by the problem of finding the key to ensure the survival of a civilization that is global and at the same time clearly multicultural. How can generally respected mechanisms of peaceful coexistence be set up, and on what set of principles are they to be established?
These questions have been highlighted with particular urgency by the two most important political events in the second half of the twentieth century: the collapse of colonial hegemony and the fall of communism. The artificial world order of the past decades has collapsed, and a new, more-just order has not yet emerged. the central political task of the final years of this century, then, is the creation of a new model of coexistence among the various cultures, peoples, races, and religious spheres within a single interconnected civilization. This task is all the more urgent because other threats to contemporary humanity brought about by one-dimensional development of civilization are growing more serious all the time.
Many believe this task can be accomplished through technical means. That is, they believe it can be accomplished through the intervention of new organizational, political, and diplomatic instruments. Yes, it is clearly necessary to invent organizational structures appropriate to the present multicultural age. But such efforts are doomed to failure if they do not grow out of something deeper, out of generally held values.
This, too, is well known. And in searching for the most natural source for the creation of a new world order, we usually look to an area that is the traditional foundation of modern justice and a great achievement of the modern age: to a set of values that - among other things - were first declared in this building (Independence Hall). I am referring to respect for the unique human being and his or her liberties and inalienable rights and to the principle that all power derives from the people. I am, in short, referring to the fundamental ideas of modern democracy.
What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more and more strongly that even these ideas are not enough, that we must go farther and deeper. The point is that the solution they offer is still, as it were, modern, derived from the climate of the Enlightenment and from a view of man and his relation to the world that has been characteristic of the Euro-American sphere for the last two centuries. Today, however, we are in a different place and facing a different situation, one to which classical modern solutions in themselves do not give a satisfactory response. After all, the very principle of inalienable human rights, conferred on man by the Creator, grew out of the typically modern notion that man - as a being capable of knowing nature and the world - was the pinnacle of creation and lord of the world,
This modern anthropocentrism inevitably meant that He who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world: He was so far beyond the grasp of modern science that he was gradually pushed into a sphere of privacy of sorts, if not directly into a sphere of private fancy - that is, to a place where public obligations no longer apply. The existence of a higher authority than man himself simply began to get in the way of human aspirations.
Two Transcendent Ideas
The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any meaningful world order. Yet, I think it must be anchored in a different place, and in a different way, than has been the case so far. If it is to be more than just a slogan mocked by half the world, it cannot be expressed in the language of a departing era, and it must not be mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world.
Paradoxically, inspiration for the renewal of this lost integrity can once again be found in science, in a science that is new - let us say postmodern - a science producing ideas that in a certain sense allow it to transcend its own limits. I will give two examples:
The first is the Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Its authors and adherents have pointed out that from the countless possible courses of its evolution the universe took the only one that enabled life to emerge. This is not yet proof that the aim of the universe has always been that it should one day see itself through our eyes. But how else can this matter be explained?
I think the Anthropic Cosmological Principle brings to us an idea perhaps as old as humanity itself: that we are not at all just an accidental anomaly, the microscopic caprice of a tine particle whirling in the endless depth of the universe. Instead, we are mysteriously connected to the entire universe, we are mirrored in it, just as the entire evolution of the universe is mirrored in us.
Until recently, it might have seemed that we were an unhappy bit of mildew on a heavenly body whirling in space among many that have no mildew on them at all. this was something that classical science could explain. Yet, the moment it begins to appear that we are deeply connected to the entire universe, science reaches the outer limits of its powers. Because it is founded on the search for universal laws, it cannot deal with singularity, that is, with uniqueness. The universe is a unique event and a unique story, and so far we are the unique point of that story. But unique events and stories are the domain of poetry, not science. With the formulation of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, science has found itself on the border between formula and story, between science and myth. In that, however, science has paradoxically returned, in a roundabout way, to man, and offers him - in new clothing - his lost integrity. It does so by anchoring him once more in the cosmos.
The second example is the Gaia Hypothesis. This theory brings together proof that the dense network of mutual interactions between the organic and inorganic portions of the earth's surface form a single system, a kind of mega-organism, a living planet - Gaia - named after an ancient goddess who is recognizable as an archetype of the Earth Mother in perhaps all religions. According to the Gaia Hypothesis, we are parts of a greater whole. If we endanger her, she will dispense with us in the interest of a higher value - that is, life itself.
Toward Self-Transcendence
What makes the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis so inspiring? One simple thing: Both remind us, in modern language, of what we have long suspected, of what we have long projected into our forgotten myths and perhaps what has always lain dormant within us as archetypes. That is, the awareness of our being anchored in the earth and the universe, the awareness that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate it in various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man's understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world as such.
A modern philosopher once said: "Only a God can save us now."
Yes, the only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at the same time, in the cosmos. This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respects for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence. Only someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his neighbors, and thus honor their rights as well.
It logically follows that, in today's multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies - it must be rooted in self-transcendence:
* Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe.
* Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world.
* Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction.
The Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.
By Vaclav Havel-Former President of the Czech Republic (I highly recommend reading about this dude on Wikipedia)
There are thinkers who claim that, if the modern age began with the discovery of America, it also ended in America. This is said to have occurred in the year 1969, when America sent the first men to the moon. From this historical moment, they say, a new age in the life of humanity can be dated.
I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going thorough a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.
Periods of history when values undergo a fundamental shift are certainly not unprecedented. This happened in the Hellenistic period, when from the ruins of the classical world the Middle Ages were gradually born. It happened during the Renaissance, which opened the way to the modern era. The distinguishing features of such transitional periods are a mixing and blending of cultures and a plurality or parallelism of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered or rediscovered. They are periods when there is a tendency to quote, to imitate, and to amplify, rather than to state with authority or integrate. New meaning is gradually born from the encounter, or the intersection, of many different elements.
Today, this state of mind or of the human world is called postmodernism. For me, a symbol of that state is a Bedouin mounted on a camel and clad in traditional robes under which he is wearing jeans, with a transistor radio in his hands and an ad for Coca-Cola on the camel's back. I am not ridiculing this, nor am I shedding an intellectual tear over the commercial expansion of the West that destroys alien cultures. I see it rather as a typical expression of this multicultural era, a signal that an amalgamation of cultures is taking place. I see it as proof that something is happening, something is being born, that we are in a phase when one age is succeeding another, when everything is possible. Yes, everything is possible, because our civilization does not have its own unified style, its own spirit, its own aesthetic.
Science and Modern Civilization
This is related to the crisis, or to the transformation, of science as the basis of the modern conception of the world.
The dizzying development of this science, with its unconditional faith in objective reality and its complete dependency on general and rationally knowable laws, led to the birth of modern technological civilization. It is the first civilization in the history of the human race that spans the entire globe and firmly binds together all human societies, submitting them to a common global destiny. It was this science that enabled man, for the first time, to see Earth from space with his own eyes; that is, to see it as another star in the sky.
At the same time, however, the relationship to the world that the modern science fostered and shaped now appears to have exhausted its potential. It is increasingly clear that, strangely, the relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It is now more of a source of disintegration and doubt than a source of integration and meaning. It produces what amounts to a state of schizophrenia: Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.
Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us. The same thing is true of nature and of ourselves. The more thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their internal structure, and the biochemical reactions that take place within them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose, and meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as our unique "self".
And thus today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. We enjoy all the achievements of modern civilization that have made our physical existence on this earth easier so in many important ways. Yet we do not know exactly what to do with ourselves, where to turn. The world of our experiences seems chaotic, disconnected, confusing. There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.
When Nothing is Certain
This state of affairs has its social and political consequences. The single planetary civilization to which we all belong confronts us with global challenges. We stand helpless before them because our civilization has essentially globalized only the surfaces of our lives. But our inner self continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe. Because of this, individual cultures, increasingly lumped together by contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the inner differences of others.
Cultural conflicts are increasing and are understandably more dangerous today than at any other time in history. The end of the era of rationalism has been catastrophic. Armed with the same supermodern weapons, often from the same suppliers, and followed by television cameras, the members of various tribal cults are at war with one another. By day, we work with statistics; in the evening, we consult astrologers and frighten ourselves with thrillers about vampires. The abyss between rational and the spiritual, the external and the internal, the objective and the subjective, the technical and the moral, the universal and the unique, constantly grows deeper.
Politicians are rightly worried by the problem of finding the key to ensure the survival of a civilization that is global and at the same time clearly multicultural. How can generally respected mechanisms of peaceful coexistence be set up, and on what set of principles are they to be established?
These questions have been highlighted with particular urgency by the two most important political events in the second half of the twentieth century: the collapse of colonial hegemony and the fall of communism. The artificial world order of the past decades has collapsed, and a new, more-just order has not yet emerged. the central political task of the final years of this century, then, is the creation of a new model of coexistence among the various cultures, peoples, races, and religious spheres within a single interconnected civilization. This task is all the more urgent because other threats to contemporary humanity brought about by one-dimensional development of civilization are growing more serious all the time.
Many believe this task can be accomplished through technical means. That is, they believe it can be accomplished through the intervention of new organizational, political, and diplomatic instruments. Yes, it is clearly necessary to invent organizational structures appropriate to the present multicultural age. But such efforts are doomed to failure if they do not grow out of something deeper, out of generally held values.
This, too, is well known. And in searching for the most natural source for the creation of a new world order, we usually look to an area that is the traditional foundation of modern justice and a great achievement of the modern age: to a set of values that - among other things - were first declared in this building (Independence Hall). I am referring to respect for the unique human being and his or her liberties and inalienable rights and to the principle that all power derives from the people. I am, in short, referring to the fundamental ideas of modern democracy.
What I am about to say may sound provocative, but I feel more and more strongly that even these ideas are not enough, that we must go farther and deeper. The point is that the solution they offer is still, as it were, modern, derived from the climate of the Enlightenment and from a view of man and his relation to the world that has been characteristic of the Euro-American sphere for the last two centuries. Today, however, we are in a different place and facing a different situation, one to which classical modern solutions in themselves do not give a satisfactory response. After all, the very principle of inalienable human rights, conferred on man by the Creator, grew out of the typically modern notion that man - as a being capable of knowing nature and the world - was the pinnacle of creation and lord of the world,
This modern anthropocentrism inevitably meant that He who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world: He was so far beyond the grasp of modern science that he was gradually pushed into a sphere of privacy of sorts, if not directly into a sphere of private fancy - that is, to a place where public obligations no longer apply. The existence of a higher authority than man himself simply began to get in the way of human aspirations.
Two Transcendent Ideas
The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any meaningful world order. Yet, I think it must be anchored in a different place, and in a different way, than has been the case so far. If it is to be more than just a slogan mocked by half the world, it cannot be expressed in the language of a departing era, and it must not be mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world.
Paradoxically, inspiration for the renewal of this lost integrity can once again be found in science, in a science that is new - let us say postmodern - a science producing ideas that in a certain sense allow it to transcend its own limits. I will give two examples:
The first is the Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Its authors and adherents have pointed out that from the countless possible courses of its evolution the universe took the only one that enabled life to emerge. This is not yet proof that the aim of the universe has always been that it should one day see itself through our eyes. But how else can this matter be explained?
I think the Anthropic Cosmological Principle brings to us an idea perhaps as old as humanity itself: that we are not at all just an accidental anomaly, the microscopic caprice of a tine particle whirling in the endless depth of the universe. Instead, we are mysteriously connected to the entire universe, we are mirrored in it, just as the entire evolution of the universe is mirrored in us.
Until recently, it might have seemed that we were an unhappy bit of mildew on a heavenly body whirling in space among many that have no mildew on them at all. this was something that classical science could explain. Yet, the moment it begins to appear that we are deeply connected to the entire universe, science reaches the outer limits of its powers. Because it is founded on the search for universal laws, it cannot deal with singularity, that is, with uniqueness. The universe is a unique event and a unique story, and so far we are the unique point of that story. But unique events and stories are the domain of poetry, not science. With the formulation of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, science has found itself on the border between formula and story, between science and myth. In that, however, science has paradoxically returned, in a roundabout way, to man, and offers him - in new clothing - his lost integrity. It does so by anchoring him once more in the cosmos.
The second example is the Gaia Hypothesis. This theory brings together proof that the dense network of mutual interactions between the organic and inorganic portions of the earth's surface form a single system, a kind of mega-organism, a living planet - Gaia - named after an ancient goddess who is recognizable as an archetype of the Earth Mother in perhaps all religions. According to the Gaia Hypothesis, we are parts of a greater whole. If we endanger her, she will dispense with us in the interest of a higher value - that is, life itself.
Toward Self-Transcendence
What makes the Anthropic Principle and the Gaia Hypothesis so inspiring? One simple thing: Both remind us, in modern language, of what we have long suspected, of what we have long projected into our forgotten myths and perhaps what has always lain dormant within us as archetypes. That is, the awareness of our being anchored in the earth and the universe, the awareness that we are not here alone nor for ourselves alone, but that we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme. This forgotten awareness is encoded in all religions. All cultures anticipate it in various forms. It is one of the things that form the basis of man's understanding of himself, of his place in the world, and ultimately of the world as such.
A modern philosopher once said: "Only a God can save us now."
Yes, the only real hope of people today is probably a renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at the same time, in the cosmos. This awareness endows us with the capacity for self-transcendence. Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respects for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence. Only someone who submits to the authority of the universal order and of creation, who values the right to be a part of it and a participant in it, can genuinely value himself and his neighbors, and thus honor their rights as well.
It logically follows that, in today's multicultural world, the truly reliable path to coexistence, to peaceful coexistence and creative cooperation, must start from what is at the root of all cultures and what lies infinitely deeper in human hearts and minds than political opinion, convictions, antipathies, or sympathies - it must be rooted in self-transcendence:
* Transcendence as a hand reached out to those close to us, to foreigners, to the human community, to all living creatures, to nature, to the universe.
* Transcendence as a deeply and joyously experienced need to be in harmony even with what we ourselves are not, what we do not understand, what seems distant from us in time and space, but with which we are nevertheless mysteriously linked because, together with us, all this constitutes a single world.
* Transcendence as the only real alternative to extinction.
The Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man the right to liberty. It seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it.
TMK...
wtc7...nwo...bilderberg...i now say fuck it...who ever said there was security? no security, no security....:)
Monday, December 10, 2007
for tittyPOPpin only
heres that ARTICLE
i think it would be amazing if you got some of your art exhibited here!! it's really awesome how supportive they are of local artists. email them some pictures of your stuff and i guarantee they'll love it! how sick would it be if you could sell some pieces?
i think it would be amazing if you got some of your art exhibited here!! it's really awesome how supportive they are of local artists. email them some pictures of your stuff and i guarantee they'll love it! how sick would it be if you could sell some pieces?
Sunday, December 9, 2007
what about building 7?
This is a link to a pretty cool myspace page, check the top friends too, and get lost in the world of "conspiracy theories". "This profile contains an overwhelmingly large amount of evidence that directly refutes the official story regarding the attacks of September 11th, 2001. Much of this evidence comes in the form of news footage from the day itself. Upon viewing this footage, you will find that what was captured on that day paints a very different picture from what most people believe."
hope everybody had a lovely weekend.
hope everybody had a lovely weekend.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Learn About The Evils of Consumerism in 20 Minutes!
The Story of Stuff is an amazingly well-done video about the state of our consumer culture and how it's leading to the gory end of our planet. It takes 20 minutes to watch, and it's guaranteed to enlighten, enrage and empower you to make a change for the sustainability of our society. I know it's finals time for many of you and the last thing you want to watch is a depressing lecture about how we're slowly killing ourselves off, but it's very important that we keep climate change fresh in our minds as we move forward into a more crowded and corporate-dominated future.It's crucial that we take steps in our daily lives to limit the amount of goods and energy that we consume. Take a moment while you're eating a meal or getting ready in the morning. Open your mind to this incredible short film about the linear consumer system we've adopted and think about the ways we can put a stop to our wasteful habits before it's too late.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Time to Shred
............ 24hrs 72hrs
A basin 7" 7"
Breck 7" 14"
Copper 8" 14"
Keystone 9" 18"
Wint Prk 10" 22"
Vail 10" 14"
A basin 7" 7"
Breck 7" 14"
Copper 8" 14"
Keystone 9" 18"
Wint Prk 10" 22"
Vail 10" 14"
Thursday, December 6, 2007
our underwater allies
zabba says dolphins are our next evolutionary step and they have been mind controlling us to increase global warming so that they will have MORE DANCING ROOM in the ocean...
Dolphins Save Swimmers From Shark Attack
The Guardian - UK
A pod of dolphins saved a group of swimmers from a great white shark off the northern coast of New Zealand, it was reported today.
The incident happened when lifeguard Rob Howes took his 15-year-old daughter Niccy and two of her friends swimming near the town of Whangarei, according to the Northern Advocate newspaper.
Mr Howes told the newspaper that the dolphins "started to herd us up, they pushed all four of us together by doing tight circles around us". He explained that, when he had attempted to break away from the protective group, two of the bigger dolphins herded him back.
He then saw what he described as a three-metre great white shark cruising toward them - but it appeared to be repelled by the ring of dolphins and swam away.
"It was only about two metres away from me, the water was crystal clear, and it was as clear as the nose on my face," he said. At that point, he realised that the dolphins "had corralled us up to protect us".
Another lifeguard, Matt Fleet, who was on patrol in a lifeboat, saw the dolphins circling the swimmers and slapping their tails on the water to keep them in place. He told the newspaper he also had a clear sighting of the shark.
"Some of the people later on the beach tried to tell me it was just another dolphin - but I knew what I saw," he said.
Expert Ingrid Visser, who has been studying marine mammals for 14 years, told the Northern Advocate that there had been reports from around the world about dolphins protecting swimmers.
She said that, in this case, the dolphins probably sensed the humans were in danger and took action to protect them.
DR Visser, of the group Orca Research, said dolphins would attack sharks to protect themselves and their young.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
international/story/0,3604,1357888,00.html
Choose Love
The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question, is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, hey - don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride... And we... kill those people. Ha haShut him up.We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real. Just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter because: It's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love . The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace. =bill hicks=
GenGreen
some of you may know my friend julie de la la. she just started working at a new networking site in fort collins that is expanding daily and attempting to connect environmentally friendly people, businesses, organizations and events. they have jobs, ideas, products and connections. i think this is a really cool idea and is helpful in finding green stuff.
check it ya wanna:
GenGreen
20 Grams of LSD Seized
Thanks for keeping me informed PT....
Thanks for keeping me safe DEA......
Two Watsonville residents and a couple from Hawaii are in custody on drug charges after Drug Enforcement Administration agents found one of the largest caches of LSD in recent memory at a Watsonville home that had allegedly been converted into a drug lab. Taken into custody were John Lagace, 35, and Tara Bergstrand, 25, of Watsonville, and David Behar, 33, and Lindsay Hogue, 30, of Hawaii. All four were arraigned Friday in federal court in San Jose and charged with possession with intent to sell LSD and conspiracy to possess the drug with intent to sell. Agents seized about 20 grams of LSD - Lysergic Acid Diethylamide - enough to make 200,000 dosage. Also seized were five pounds of marijuana, three silver bars, nine gold coins and $13,000 in cash. The estimated street value of the LSD is $2 million. Street value of the marijuana is about $17,500.
Behar and Hogue allegedly tried to sell five grams of LSD to undercover agents at a pre-arranged location in Santa Cruz, where the two were arrested without incident. The investigation connected them to a house on the 800 block of Smith Road in Watsonville, where the large cache was uncovered. Agents began watching the home and zeroed in on Bergstrand and Lagace, whom they followed as they were leaving the house. The couple was stopped in their car and agents found records with "pay/owe" information and dollar amounts ranging from $2,500 to $11,200. Bergstrand had about $900 on her and Lagace was found with $1,300. The two were also taken into custody without incident. "LSD is a drug we have not seen for a while in the Bay Area, however, this sizable seizure proves there still is a market for the substance," said DEA Special Agent in Charge Javier F. Pena. "This alarming amount, for instance, could provide every citizen of Watsonville with four doses each." In addition to agents from the DEA office in San Jose, the Santa Cruz County Narcotics Enforcement Team and the Monterey County Sheriff's Office also took part in the investigation and arrests.
Here is another huge bust from March 2006....91 pounds of crystal! There's only one thing to say, "somebody for god's sakes dozemay."
Thanks for keeping me safe DEA......
Two Watsonville residents and a couple from Hawaii are in custody on drug charges after Drug Enforcement Administration agents found one of the largest caches of LSD in recent memory at a Watsonville home that had allegedly been converted into a drug lab. Taken into custody were John Lagace, 35, and Tara Bergstrand, 25, of Watsonville, and David Behar, 33, and Lindsay Hogue, 30, of Hawaii. All four were arraigned Friday in federal court in San Jose and charged with possession with intent to sell LSD and conspiracy to possess the drug with intent to sell. Agents seized about 20 grams of LSD - Lysergic Acid Diethylamide - enough to make 200,000 dosage. Also seized were five pounds of marijuana, three silver bars, nine gold coins and $13,000 in cash. The estimated street value of the LSD is $2 million. Street value of the marijuana is about $17,500.
Behar and Hogue allegedly tried to sell five grams of LSD to undercover agents at a pre-arranged location in Santa Cruz, where the two were arrested without incident. The investigation connected them to a house on the 800 block of Smith Road in Watsonville, where the large cache was uncovered. Agents began watching the home and zeroed in on Bergstrand and Lagace, whom they followed as they were leaving the house. The couple was stopped in their car and agents found records with "pay/owe" information and dollar amounts ranging from $2,500 to $11,200. Bergstrand had about $900 on her and Lagace was found with $1,300. The two were also taken into custody without incident. "LSD is a drug we have not seen for a while in the Bay Area, however, this sizable seizure proves there still is a market for the substance," said DEA Special Agent in Charge Javier F. Pena. "This alarming amount, for instance, could provide every citizen of Watsonville with four doses each." In addition to agents from the DEA office in San Jose, the Santa Cruz County Narcotics Enforcement Team and the Monterey County Sheriff's Office also took part in the investigation and arrests.
Here is another huge bust from March 2006....91 pounds of crystal! There's only one thing to say, "somebody for god's sakes dozemay."
RAGE!!!
found this picture of a minor leauge baseball team named the biscuits
i want one of their hats so bad i mean come on its got a cartoon biscuit on it
i want one of their hats so bad i mean come on its got a cartoon biscuit on it
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
The Wind of Peace
May the great revolutionary banner
Blow in the wind of peace.
May it blow in the wind of karma.
May it blow in the wind of fearlessness.
One's own mind is revolutionized:
There is no need to conquer others.
Like the warriors of ancient times
Going to way by imperial command,
Like seasoned masters of the martial arts,
We will destroy the fortress of erroneous thinking.
We will no longer tolerate the confused way of life
Controlled by the impersonal forces of materialism,
Since these forces may snatch away
The freedom of human dignity.
One must first give up the ego
And enter the way with one's mind.
That is the first step to freedom.
But we will never be free
By following the voice of desire.
Liberation is only gained
By treading the path of what is.
-Chogyam Trungpa
Blow in the wind of peace.
May it blow in the wind of karma.
May it blow in the wind of fearlessness.
One's own mind is revolutionized:
There is no need to conquer others.
Like the warriors of ancient times
Going to way by imperial command,
Like seasoned masters of the martial arts,
We will destroy the fortress of erroneous thinking.
We will no longer tolerate the confused way of life
Controlled by the impersonal forces of materialism,
Since these forces may snatch away
The freedom of human dignity.
One must first give up the ego
And enter the way with one's mind.
That is the first step to freedom.
But we will never be free
By following the voice of desire.
Liberation is only gained
By treading the path of what is.
-Chogyam Trungpa
New Belgium=Greenwash
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2007/nov/24/reuteman-colorado-rides-on-fat-tire-to-beer/
There's a guy who has been constantly contesting the validity of New Belgiums claims...He posted a comment on the bottom of a recent Rocky Mountain News article...For all you Fort Collins folk especially, this is something to consider.
How could a newspaper editor, let alone a business editor, provide erroneous information about New Belgium's energy use? Could it be that the company continues to mislead the public when they think the coast is clear? This seems to be the case. Mr. Reuteman is not the only recent vistor to the brewery to come away with a false impression.
Climate change and resource depletion are difficult, serious problems to deal with. Insincerity is not going to be effective.
Here are a few facts we wish Mr. Reuteman had considered in his hyperbolic editorializing.
- New Belgium uses more that just a "small amount" of natural gas as an energy source for the brewery. As much as 50%, although media disinformation experts like Mr. Simpson will not produce an accurate estimate.
- Only 15% of the electricity that the company purchases comes from renewable sources. Renewable Energy Credit (REC)purchases "offset" the remainder. Nothing speaks to the insincerity of the greenwashing like the contrived functional equivalencies that REC purchasers claim.
- The overwelming majority of the embodied energy in a six pack is in the packaging.
- New Beligium's largest competitor, Sierra Nevada Brewing of Chico, California, will actually be 100% self powered electrically as soon as they complete the last installment of their photovoltaic installation. Sierra Nevada does the real thing, and they don't greenwash.
http://www.denverpost.com/allewis/ci_619...
http://blogs.denverpost.com/lewis/2007/0...
education?
the US recently was ranked "below average" in the world scope of mathematics testing for 15 year olds and didn't make the list for Reading. we are ranked between Croatia and Azerbaijan.... is our education funding tied up in some other government department?
Langerado
Torrey and I purchased tickets and booked flights in hopes of motivating all our awesome friends to do the same. Getting out of Colorado in the beginning of March at the onset of spring fever is an amazingly rejuvinating breath of fresh tropical air. Not to mention we get to hang out at Big Cypress reservation where anything goes. Here is the flight info if you wanna book with us...
Frontier airlines:
March 6th
Departs Denver at 7 am
Flight #386
March 10th
Departs Fort Lauderdale at 1:29 pm
Flight #387
By the way: Tickets are $360. Yes that is a lot. But, jesus' birthday is right around the corner and we have four months to save money for the shred. Cmon you know you wanna.
Monday, December 3, 2007
look
My sister sent me this article. Try playing the game for just a minute, it's not very fun, but kind of interesting that rice gets donated to starving people for every answer you get correct.
From: Reuters
Published November 10, 2007 06:14 PM
Click a mouse, feed a mouth in U.N. campaign: http://www.freerice.com
LONDON (Reuters) - A food-linked word game put on the Internet a month ago has
proved a runaway success and has already generated enough rice to feed 50,000
people, the United Nations World Food Programme said on Friday.
FreeRice offers participants multiple choice definitions to the meaning of a
word, with each correct click generating 10 grains of rice for the WFP.
The brainchild of American online fundraising pioneer John Breen, the Web site
(www.freerice.com) relies on advertising revenue to underwrite its
rice campaign.
"FreeRice really hits home how the Web can be harnessed to raise awareness and
funds for the world's number one emergency," said Josette Sheeran, executive
director of the Rome-based WFP.
"The site is a viral marketing success story with more than one billion grains
of rice donated in just one month to help tackle hunger worldwide," she added.
The day it was launched on October 7 just 830 grains of rice were donated.
But the Internet community quickly caught on, and on November 8 alone 77 million
grains were donated -- equivalent to more than seven million correct clicks.
(Reporting by Jeremy Lovell; editing by Richard Williams)
(c) Reuters2007All rights reserved
From: Reuters
Published November 10, 2007 06:14 PM
Click a mouse, feed a mouth in U.N. campaign: http://www.freerice.com
LONDON (Reuters) - A food-linked word game put on the Internet a month ago has
proved a runaway success and has already generated enough rice to feed 50,000
people, the United Nations World Food Programme said on Friday.
FreeRice offers participants multiple choice definitions to the meaning of a
word, with each correct click generating 10 grains of rice for the WFP.
The brainchild of American online fundraising pioneer John Breen, the Web site
(www.freerice.com) relies on advertising revenue to underwrite its
rice campaign.
"FreeRice really hits home how the Web can be harnessed to raise awareness and
funds for the world's number one emergency," said Josette Sheeran, executive
director of the Rome-based WFP.
"The site is a viral marketing success story with more than one billion grains
of rice donated in just one month to help tackle hunger worldwide," she added.
The day it was launched on October 7 just 830 grains of rice were donated.
But the Internet community quickly caught on, and on November 8 alone 77 million
grains were donated -- equivalent to more than seven million correct clicks.
(Reporting by Jeremy Lovell; editing by Richard Williams)
(c) Reuters2007All rights reserved
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