Witness the Singularity

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

By Gary Wolf @ wired.com

Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, is trim, balding, and not very tall. With his perfect posture and narrow black glasses, he would look at home in an old documentary about Cape Canaveral, but his mission is bolder than any mere voyage into space. He is attempting to travel across a frontier in time, to pass through the border between our era and a future so different as to be unrecognizable. He calls this border the singularity. Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives.

Kurzweil's notion of a singularity is taken from cosmology, in which it signifies a border in spacetime beyond which normal rules of measurement do not apply (the edge of a black hole, for example). The word was first used to describe a crucial moment in the evolution of humanity by the great mathematician John von Neumann. One day in the 1950s, while talking with his colleague Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann began discussing the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, which, he said, "gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue."

Many years later, this idea was picked up by another mathematician, the professor and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who added an additional twist. Vinge linked the singularity directly with improvements in computer hardware. This put the future on a schedule. He could look at how quickly computers were improving and make an educated guess about when the singularity would arrive. "Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence," Vinge wrote at the beginning of his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. "Shortly after, the human era will be ended." According to Vinge, superintelligent machines will take charge of their own evolution, creating ever smarter successors. Humans will become bystanders in history, too dull in comparison with their devices to make any decisions that matter...

Orbs

Mysterious ghostly orbs perplex researchers

By Hazel Courteney -newsmonster.co.uk

Tens of thousands of ordinary people around the globe are reporting mysterious spheres of light known as ORBS, which have started appearing on their digital photographs. A few scientists are taking this phenomenon seriously and incredibly claim to have found evidence of beings from other dimensions..

The world’s first conference on the Orbs Phenomenon recently took place in Sedona, Arizona - where several scientists controversially stated that orbs, spherical or circular objects that are appearing on digital pictures - demonstrate good evidence of ‘other worldly’ life forms. Their conclusions, if correct, could have huge implications for the way we view our universe and our part in it.

-cont.

Unprecedented Secrecy

We'll Never Know: The Unprecedented Secrecy of the Bush Administration

by Brian Morton | March 27, 2008


If you think about it, it's amazing how completely and thoroughly information has been "managed" over the last seven years of the Bush administration. E-mails have been mishandled and then lost, information that regularly was disseminated to Americans about the workings of their government has been cut off, questions that normally were answered have simply been ignored, and no effort is made to ever find out those answers.

By itself, this is a mildly impressive feat, until you realize that to accomplish this it required an almost top-to-bottom infestation of political will in the entire system--to manage every bit of federal apparatus to make sure that the president and his accomplices would never look bad, no matter how small the news or how astonishing the effort made to conceal it.

It is also becoming clear that the Bushies made an effort right at the start to make sure that information would never see the light of day. As soon as they took office, they scrapped the Clinton administration's custom-made computer archiving system that, according to news reports, was installed after a court order. It would be one thing if the system was replaced by something newer or better, yet the one the Bush people put in could hardly be called an archive, as it simply recorded over previously recorded information that was supposed to be preserved as part of the Presidential Records Act.

At every juncture, when administration officials are questioned about the apparent losses, they respond first with delays, then denials, and then excuses.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/13719

The Tide Is Turning

~via: Bob Cesca @ HuffPo

JFK on Govt. Secrecy

Data Leaks

Data leaks: Forecasting the end of privacy?

Flowing Data ran an interesting post this week about leakage from large databases. It’s now almost a weekly event for us to report that the personal details of millions of private individuals have been compromised in some way by government or commercial institutions.

---

via: TimesOnline

Greatest Depression

A new Great Depression? It's different this time

The shadow of the '30s looms over every economic downturn or crisis. But unemployment reached 25% during the Depression; last month it was reported at 4.8%.

Fear is spreading with the financial system in disarray. But the global boom is ongoing, unemployment is low and the government has new tools to address the downturn.

By Michael A. Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 20, 2008

Dysfunctional capital markets, frantic central banks, stressed-out consumers, fear and uncertainty -- all are alarming echoes of the global economic cataclysm of the 1930s.

Which raises the inevitable question:

Could another Great Depression be lurking over the horizon?

Dream Manipulator

Brain-Computer Interfaces for Manipulating Dreams

Michael Anissimov

Accelerating Future

A first-generation commercial brain-computer interface (BCI) is being released by Emotiv Systems later this year. What does the future hold for BCI?

By 2050, and likely sooner, you will be able to buy a BCI device that records all your dreams in their entirety. This will be done in one of two ways. One method would be to use distributed nanobots less than a micrometer in diameter to spread throughout the brain and monitor the activation patterns of neurons.

Jack of Hearts

Photo by Sam Jones; Groomer: Kim Verbeck; Stylist: Samantha McMillen

Jack of Hearts By Nancy Griffin, AARP Has Hollywood’s original bad boy gone good? One-time rogue Jack Nicholson lives alone, tends to his teenagers, and yearns for one last great love

Happy Easter

Punk Science

Punk Science:
Inside the Mind of God

Amazon Customer Review By Stephen P. Smith Manjir Samanta-Laughton's "Punk Science" is worth five stars. I recommend her book because of its groundbreaking insights, and this is despite of the book's significant weaknesses that I will also point out. Samanta-Laughton (page 13) writes: "The frontiers of science are revealing that the universe behaves as the mystics have told us all along." That I agree with this remarkable observation explains why I am willing to forgive the weaknesses of "Punk Science". Samanta-Laughton tells us that it is consciousness that has been omitted from a scientific world-view that sees the world only as material interactions. She (page 24) writes that, "science has led us full circle: by eliminating all discussion of consciousness, it has found that consciousness is inevitable in our universe and is inherent in all." Consciousness is hard-wired into the fabric of space-time! Samanta-Laughton (page 38) writes: "Not only do reductionist biologists have difficulty explaining the self-organizing nature of the cell, they have also failed to find satisfactory answers to how life first began. This fact is not apparent from the public image of science, which gives the impression that we know how life began and can continue with cloning sheep." And while referring to Bruce Lipton's work and others, she (page 59) writes: "We used to think of ourselves as victims of our inherited genes and the luck of the draw. Now we are realizing that we can learn to manage our beliefs and perceptions and therefore our own biology." Perception has found an essential ingredient in our biology, and it is the perception horizon that connects directly with consciousness (as we will see). Samanta-Laughton (page 64) writes - "Every atom, molecule, bacteria and cell is inherently intelligent. The information deep within every subatomic particle shapes life: form embryos to evolution. It is consciousness itself that undergoes evolution and this is reflected in the increasing complexity of species. The information of the form already exists and what we call physical matter follows suit." Her reference to "form" will be a big point, as the topic will eventually turn to a mirror image aspect of our one universe (the provider of form), a topic that will emerge from physics and take us into cosmology. Samanta-Laughton (page 84) refers to Rupert Sheldrake's "morphic resonance," a conception closely related to form. Samanta-Laughton describes new views of the quantum vacuum (QV), and she treats David Bohm's "holographic universe," and including Karl Pribram's vision of brain function. She (page 109) writes: "Having searched for the exact location of memory in the brain and not found it, does memory exists in the QV?"

-cont.

~thanks to Jersey Cynic

Gigantic Financial Fraud

Leading Economic Writer:
Financial Meltdown A “Gigantic Fraud”

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, March 17, 2008

Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.

A leading economic journalist has described the current financial crisis as a "gigantic fraud", the fallout of a deliberate and preconceived profit agenda to enslave the middle classes in a debt bubble.

The economics editor of the London Guardian, Larry Elliott, has hit out at the global financial elite in a refreshing piece that marks a rare shift away from the establishment hackery we are used to from the corporate media.

In an article titled America was conned - who will pay? Elliot writes:

Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.

[…]

Business, of course, needs consumers to carry on spending in order to make money, so a way had to be found to persuade households to do their patriotic duty. The method chosen was simple. Whip up a colossal housing bubble, convince consumers that it makes sense to borrow money against the rising value of their homes to supplement their meagre real wage growth and watch the profits roll in.

As they did - for a while. Now it’s payback time and the mood could get very ugly. Americans, to put it bluntly, have been conned. They have been duped by a bunch of serpent-tongued hucksters who packed up the wagon and made it across the county line before a lynch mob could be formed.

Living Deeply

A Prescription For Living Deeply

Stacey Lawson -Huffington Post

"Transformation doesn't require going to the mountain top," shares Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Ph.D., author of Living Deeply and researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. "Something as mundane as road rage, for instance, is the seed for a moment of compassion."

Schlitz and her colleagues have spent the last 10 years investigating human consciousness and the nature of transformative experience. What is transformation? What are the common triggers? What barriers keep us from having transformative experiences more often? And how can we set the stage for these experiences as well as sustain their impact?

Their research project was inspired in part by Richard Gunther, a businessman and father, who had a significant transformative experience and wanted to understand if there were others like him. "I experienced a profound spiritual awakening...my awakening was this: we are all part of a single entity. I was part of all others and all others were part of me. I soared into this new awareness, losing all sense of myself as individual. There was no me alone, only a universal us."

Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy

Pope Slams Iraq War

Pope: Enough With Slaughters in Iraq

Mar 16, 9:58 AM (ET)By NICOLE WINFIELD

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI issued one of his strongest appeals for peace in Iraq on Sunday, days after the body of the kidnapped Chaldean Catholic archbishop was found near the northern city of Mosul.

The pope also denounced the 5-year-long Iraq war, saying it had provoked the complete breakup of Iraqi civilian life.

"Enough with the slaughters. Enough with the violence. Enough with the hatred in Iraq!" Benedict said to applause at the end of his Palm Sunday Mass in St. Peter's Square.

---

In his homily, Benedict urged the faithful to follow God with the innocence and purity of a child's heart.

"To recognize God, we must abandon the pride that dazzles us, that seeks to push us away from God," he said. To find God, he said, "we must learn to see with a young heart, one which isn't blocked by prejudice and dazzled by interests."

---

Fake Boobs

Fake Boobs, You Complete Me

by Jodi Lipper and Cerina Vincent

Kelly Rowland was interviewed in last week's People Magazine, where she explained that she finally feels complete after a long soul-searching journey. What exactly was that journey all about? Deciding to get breast implants.

This makes us so mad that we are seriously endangering our computer right now by pounding so hard on the keys. What message does this send to young women, who are Rowland's entire fan-base and undoubtedly look up to her? Obviously, it tells them that they should turn to plastic surgery if they feel insecure with their bodies, but it also goes deeper, telling them that if they feel incomplete as a woman, as a human being, that plastic surgery will remedy that, too.

This is ridiculous. Sure, Kelly might be feeling a bit sexier right now with her new curves, but that feeling won't last forever. Plastic surgeons and psychologists alike tell us that surgery is addictive, and it is for the same reason that some of the most beautiful women on the planet torture themselves with Botox and liquid fasts - because all women, no matter what size their boobs or their waist, share the exact same insecurities and "body issues." And most women who've been made over by plastic surgery still have the same issues as their former selves. Rowland is merely perpetuating the same myth that surgeons and diet companies want you to believe: that you can be made complete by a quick fix, whether it is a fad diet or botulism injected into your forehead or silicone stuffed into your chest.

But it's no wonder why so many women fall for this myth. Plastic surgeons have been preying on women's insecurities more and more by advertising their services. We just passed a billboard advertising tummy tucks for a mere $4,999 and we keep hearing those radio ads for bigger boobs, tummy tucks, and liposuction. Just as they finish singing along to Kelly's latest song, our innocent, pre-pubescent girls get to hear, "This summer, get the bikini body you've always wanted!" And now Rowland herself is making it even worse by telling these girls her own uniquely superficial reason for going under the knife.

read the rest @ the huffington post

Lhasa is Burning

Kite-Driven Ship

Kite-Driven Beluga Skysail Completes 12,000 Mile Journey and Proves Concept

“We can once again actually ‘sail’ with cargo ships, thus opening a new chapter in the history of commercial shipping”

Thus is the verdict from MV Beluga Skysails captain Lutz Heldt upon completion of the vessel’s 12,000 mile round-trip maiden voyage. The crew and vessel were at sea for nearly two months, giving the “skysail” concept ample opportunity for testing and tweaking.

The journey took the ship from Germany to Venezuela, the United States, and then to Norway, arriving on March 13.

We’ve been keeping an eye on the ship’s progress here at Triple Pundit, from initial concept, sea trials, and now the round-trip completion of her first commercial voyage using the hybrid auxiliary power kite system installed on the Beluga Skysails.

---

~read the rest @ triple pundit

Monsanto is Evil

The Monstrous Monsanto Universe

By Dominique Dhombres
Le Monde

Wednesday 12 March 2008

The charge sheet is horrifying, inexorable and convincing. The multinational firm Monsanto, which sells 90 percent of genetically modified organisms (GMO), massively lies to many people and even the whole planet with great success - the power that money and the - apparently unlimited - support of the United States government bestows. You already know all that if you watched Marie-Monique Robin's extraordinary documentary, "Le Monde selon Monsanto" ["The World According to Monsanto"], March 11 on the Arte channel.

The case is conducted as a personal investigation, and the director has herself filmed as she plays her computer keys to research, most often through Google, the information accessible to everyone, as long as one is willing to try to separate the wheat from the chaff in the mass of available documents. And there's an abundance of chaff, given how the company has proliferated effective advertising (intended for farmers in every country and in every language) and dubious scientific studies over the years. "On its Internet site, Monsanto presents itself as an agricultural company the mission of which is to help small farmers produce healthier food, while reducing agriculture's impact on the environment," the director explains. Neither assertion is true. Some of these foodstuffs are dangerous and their effect on nature is catastrophic in the long term. Founded in 1901 in Saint Louis (Missouri), the firm is a dangerous recidivist. It began as an industrial company manufacturing chemical products.

It has, notably, concocted impressive quantities of dioxin, the hyper-concentrated poison contained in the Agent Orange American airplanes dispersed over forests to destroy vegetation during the Vietnam War. Its consequences are still being felt today, with the births of deformed children and after-effects on a goodly number of American war veterans exposed to this frightening product. Is that nightmare in the process of resuming under a new form right under our eyes? There's this hormone injected into milk cows to increase their yield that invariably transforms them into Frankenstein animals.

We are now very familiar with - because José Bové has so often "prematurely" reaped it - the surprising corn that yields a bigger ear than the others. At the moment, no one knows whether it also has death-dealing properties. But we are certain that it is in the process of eliminating, little by little, all other corn species, even from the plant's original birthplace, Mexico...

-mirrored @ truthout.org

---

also:

Investors Behind Doomsday Seed Vault May Provide Clues to Its Purpose

(guess who?)


and Guess Who is also the maker of Bovine Growth Hormone and has been working hard going state to state to pass legislation that restrict dairy farmers from stating that BGH is in their milk?

Milk fight shows PR apparatus on steroids

_______________________

Athole Shearer

from the department of unfortunate names


Athole Shearer (November 20, 1900 – March 17, 1985) was an actress most noted as the sister of motion picture star Norma Shearer and film sound engineer Douglas Shearer.

Shearer was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. As a teenager, her divorced mother moved the two girls to New York City and then to Hollywood and in 1920 she obtained her first minor film role. In 1923, Athole Shearer married John Ward with whom she would have a son. Divorced, in 1928 she married again, this time to noted film director Howard Hawks (1896-1977). They divorced twelve years later in 1940 at a turbulent time for Hawks who had been fired by studio owner Howard Hughes as the director of the film The Outlaw.

Athole Shearer suffered from bipolar disorder that went unrecognized for years resulting in her suffering numerous problems. Her film career was limited to a few bit parts because of her personal difficulties. She spent many years in mental institutions until her illness was properly diagnosed.

Athole Shearer died in 1985 in Los Angeles, California, USA, and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

Filmography

• The Restless Sex (1920)
• Way Down East (1920)
• The Flapper (1920)

(-wiki)

Jagger vs Lennon

Jagger vs Lennon: London's riots of 1968 provided the backdrop to a rock'n'roll battle royale

Forty years ago, the world was on the brink of revolution. But while Mick was urging insurrection on the streets of London, John was preaching peace and love. In a series of incendiary, rediscovered interviews, Jagger and Lennon reveal themselves as never before or since: battling one another for the soul of rock'n'roll.

By Leo Burley
Sunday, 9 March 2008 -Independent.co.uk

Please allow me to introduce himself...

A Nation of Dunces

The Dumbing Of America
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces

By Susan Jacoby
Sunday, February 17, 2008; B01 -The Washington Post

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism. (more)

Environmental Philosophy

Essay

A Social Ecology

by John Clark

---

The article can be used if you note that it is forthcoming in M. Zimmerman et al., Environmental Philosophy, second edition (Prentice Hall, 1997)]

"Humanity is Nature achieving self-consciousness." --Elisée Reclus [1]

In its deepest and most authentic sense, a social ecology is the awakening earth community reflecting on itself, uncovering its history, exploring its present predicament, and contemplating its future. [2] One aspect of this awakening is a process of philosophical reflection. As a philosophical approach, a social ecology investigates the ontological, epistemological, ethical and political dimensions of the relationship between the social and the ecological, and seeks the practical wisdom that results from such reflection. It seeks to give us, as beings situated in the course of real human and natural history, guidance in facing specific challenges and opportunities. In doing so, it develops an analysis that is both holistic and dialectical, and a social practice that might best be described as an eco-communitarianism.

(snip)

No Nature [28]

So much for the truth of the whole. However, a dialectical holism refuses to objectify, reify or absolutize any whole, including the whole of nature. Just as our experience of objects or things points to the reality of that which escapes objectification and reification, our experience of the whole of nature points to the reality of that which which cannot be reduced to nature.

Since the beginnings of philosophical reflection, dialectical thinkers of both East and West have proposed that beneath all knowing and objects of knowledge there is a primordial continuum, the eternal one-becoming-many, the ground of being. It is what Lao Tzu described in the Tao Te Ching as the reality that precedes all conceptualization, or "naming," and all determination, or "carving of the block" :

"The Tao (Way) that can be told is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth . . . . " [29]

This reality is ontologically prior to ecological differentiation, and indeed, to "nature" itself--which is one reason that a mere "naturalism" can never be adequately dialectical. It is an apprehension of the conditional reality of all phenomena that drives dialectical thought to an affirmation of both the being and non-being of all objects, categories, and concepts. This ground is what social ecological theorist Joel Kovel refers to as the "plasma of being." It is also what mystical philosophers like Böhme have, quite dialectically, called "the groundless Ground," attempting to express the idea that it is a non-objectifiable grounding of being, rather than an objectified ground, or substance, on which anything can be thought to stand, or which "underlies" other realities. If we wish to attach any concept to this ultimate, it should perhaps be (following Whitehead) "creativity."

Kovel points out, contemporary science has shown that such a continuum underlies the diversity of beings.

"In the universe as a whole, there is no real separation between things; there are only, so far as the most advanced science can tell us, plasmatic quantum fields; one single, endlessly perturbed, endlessly becoming body. " [30]

Kovel's account of the our relation to this primordial ground is both phenomenological and psychoanalytic. It reveals the ways in which we are ecological beings, and indeed spiritual beings, because our being extends beyond the limits of the ego or socially constructed selfhood. Much of our experience reveals to us that this self is not sufficient, or primary,

"but is rather that ensemble of social relations which precipitates out of a primordium which comes before social causation--a core which, crucially, remains active throughout life. Before the self, there is being; and before being is the unconscious primordium. Society intersects with the individual through a set of cultural representations. It is a naming, a designation, an affixing from without. Without this naming, the stuff of a person would never take form. But the unconscious, in its core, is prerepresentational. " [31]

Thus, there are fundamental aspects of being that connect us, physically, psychologically and ontologically, with greater (or deeper) realities--with other living beings, with our species, with the earth, with the primordial ground of being.

This idea of connectedness leads us to the question of the place of the concept of spirit in a dialectical holism. The most radical "critical" and dialectical views after Hegel, beginning with the Young Hegelians -- Feuerbach, Stirner, Marx and their peers--were intent on banishing Hegel's central category from the philosophical realm. The post-Hegelian dialectical tradition has been dominated by a reductive materialism that has dogmatically rejected the possibility of dialectical inquiry into the most fundamental ontological questions. Some versions of social ecology have inherited this anti-spiritual tendency of Western materialism. Thus, while Bookchin has sometimes invoked the concept of "ecological spirituality" in his writings, it has usually been in the weak sense of a vague ecological or even ethical sensibility and he has increasingly sought to banish any strong conception of "spirit" from his social ecological orthodoxy.

It is becoming evident, however, that the most radically dialectical and holistic thinking restores the ontological and political significance of the concept of spirit. Without implying any of the dogmatic and one-sided idealist aspects of Hegel's conception of spirit, a social ecology can find in the concept an important means of expressing our relationship to the evolving, developing, unfolding whole and its deeper ontological matrix. Kovel begins his discussion of spirit with the statement that it concerns "what happens to us as the boundaries of the self give way." [32] The negation of ego identity that he intends by this concept takes place when we discover our relationship to the primordial continuum and to its expressions in the processes of life, growth, development, and the striving toward wholeness. A social ecology can give meaning to an ecological spirituality that will embody the truth of the religious consciousness, [33] which is a liberatory truth, however mystified and distorted it may have been for purposes of domination and social conformism. Such a spirituality is the synthesis and realization of the religion of nature and the religion of history. It consists of a response to the sacredness of the phenomena, of the multiplicity of creative expressions of being, and of the whole that encompasses all beings. It is also an expression of wonder and awe at the mystery of becoming, the unfolding of the universe's potentiality for realized being, goodness, truth and beauty.

| Next Part >>

Giant Creature Uncovered

Global Food Crisis

2008: The year of global food crisis

Special report
By Kate Smith and Rob Edwards -sundayherald

IT IS the new face of hunger. A perfect storm of food scarcity, global warming, rocketing oil prices and the world population explosion is plunging humanity into the biggest crisis of the 21st century by pushing up food prices and spreading hunger and poverty from rural areas into cities.

Millions more of the world's most vulnerable people are facing starvation as food shortages loom and crop prices spiral ever upwards.

And for the first time in history, say experts, the impact is spreading from the developing to the developed world.

2008

Indigobusiness said...

For some odd reason I just had a look at my profile, it said I had 2008 views.

I fear I might disappear up my own vortex.

Should that be the case, hasta luego.

Nature's Mind

(excerpted conclusion)

Nature's Mind: the Quantum Hologram

Edgar Mitchell

The fact that non-local correlations and non-local quantum information can now be seen as ubiquitous in nature leads to the conclusions that the quantum hologram can properly be labeled as "nature's mind" and that the intuitive function we label in humans as the "sixth sense" should properly be called the "first sense". The perception of non-local information certainly preceded and helped to shape, through learning feedback, the sensory systems that evolved in planetary environments, and which we currently label as the five normal senses.

We must conclude that evolved, complex organisms which can form an intent can produce and often do produce non-local causal effects associated with that intent. Further, that attention alone produces coherence in nature that in some measure reduces randomness.

Finally, I conclude that the cited experiments and current understanding of non-locality in nature is sufficient to postulate that non-locality is the antecedent attribute of energy and matter which permits perception and is the root of the consciousness which manifests in the evolved organisms existing in three dimensional reality.

---

Edgar's website is EdMitchellApollo14.com.

His foundation, the Institute for Noetic Sciences is found at Noetic.org.

A Brief History of Everything

Are the mystics and sages insane? Because they all tell variations on the same story, don't they? The story of awakening one morning and discovering you are one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and infinite fashion. Yes, maybe they are crazy, these divine fools. Maybe they are mumbling idiots in the face of the Abyss. Maybe they need a nice, understanding therapist. Yes, I'm sure that would help. But then, I wonder. Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace. And in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, just maybe, an individual's consciousness does indeed touch infinity—a total embrace of the entire Kosmos—a Kosmic consciousness that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature. It's at least plausible. And tell me: is that story, sung by mystics and sages the world over, any crazier than the scientific materialism story, which is that the entire sequence is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing? Listen very carefully: just which of those two stories actually sounds totally insane?

– Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything, 42-3

Adios

,
-video-

~thanks to paula daunt

Lucifer Effect

Abu Ghraib prison turned soldiers evil by design: researcher

by Glenn Chapman

MONTEREY, California (AFP) - The very design of Abu Ghraib in Iraq turned good soldiers into evil tormentors that humiliated and brutalized prisoners, a famed social psychologist said Thursday.

Stanford University professor Philip Zimbardo described a "Lucifer effect" as he flashed shocking images of Abu Ghraib horrors for those at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in California.

"If you give people power without oversight it is a formula for abuse," Zimbardo said to a stunned audience the included famous actors, entrepreneurs and politicians.

"Abu Ghraib abuses went on for three months ... Who was watching the store? Nobody, and it was on purpose."

AFP/SBS/File Photo: A 2006 photo shows a hooded prisoner allegedly being tortured at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib...

---

"Heroism is the antidote to evil," Zimbardo said. "Let's focus on justice and peace, which sadly our administration has not been doing."

---

Hexapus

The Emerging Cosmos

by Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet

"At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice of its destiny."

Sri Aurobindo

The malaise of our civilisation is not an inchoate or unpredictable development. Rather, it is the logical, foreseeable result of thousands of years of partial and ineffective spiritual visions and incomplete philosophical systems. These have always been the driving force behind the evolution of higher mental forms. Therefore, if our civilisation stands at a critical juncture at present, it is not in the secular and scientific domain that we must search for the cause of the decay. We must discover what has been lacking in the dimension of existence that moulds the more external and material patterns which condition life on this planet.

Once the root of the problem is located in its true area of causation, necessarily a change must be introduced in that sphere before the more external levels can be influenced. Thus if we can locate the root cause of the decay in that more essential domain, our task of bringing about a change in the individual and in society and of establishing a new world order on Earth is greatly facilitated.

Indeed, the crux of the problem lies here: for thousands of years sages, saints, yogis, philosophers, and men and women of wisdom have described the purpose of birth on this planet as simply a passage to a reality beyond not only our planetary home but entirely out of the cosmic dimension. The course our civilisation has taken can therefore be directly connected to this factor. The influence a vision of this nature has wielded has been devastating--for it has carried the planet and its multiple societies to the brink of total annihilation.

We may call this development a conspiracy of the spiritual elite which gradually influenced the whole tenure of life on Earth, spreading its tentacles of influence through religions and philosophical systems during the past several thousands of years, but now through scientific, political and socioeconomic systems. The latter can invariably trace their inspiration to some spiritual or philosophical source. For even our most material ideologies that apparently deny the higher realities of existence and focus entirely on the physical dimension, have done so by virtue of a reaction to those more metaphysical postulations.

read the rest @

SPIRITWEB ORG, PROMOTING SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS ON THE INTERNET.

__________________

OmegA

Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of a New Man

OmegA
Oh nothing, just the end of this world...

"The bottom line for our species is that because of population growth and the fivefold economic expansion since 1950, the environmental demands of our economic system now fill the available environmental space of the planet. This has brought us to a historic transitional point in the evolutionary development of our species from living in a world of open frontiers to living in a full world—in a mere historical instant. We now have the option of adjusting ourselves to this new reality or destroying our ecological niche and suffering the consequences.

Our problem results from acting like cowboys on a limitless frontier when in truth we inhabit a living spaceship with a finely balanced life-support system."—David C. Korton

---

~The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension