Archive for November, 2011
The First Large Global Conflict Where People Are Aligned by Consciousness and Not Nation State or Religion
Naomi Wolf. Photo: David Shankbone (CC)
Interesting take on Occupy by Naomi Wolf, at Alternet:
America’s politicians, it seems, have had their fill of democracy. Across the country, police, acting under orders from local officials, are breaking up protest encampments set up by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement – sometimes with shocking and utterly gratuitous violence.
In the worst incident so far, hundreds of police, dressed in riot gear, surrounded Occupy Oakland’s encampment and fired rubber bullets (which can be fatal), flash grenades and tear-gas canisters – with some officers taking aim directly at demonstrators. The Occupy Oakland Twitter feed read like a report from Cairo’s Tahrir Square: “they are surrounding us”; “hundreds and hundreds of police”; “there are armoured vehicles and Hummers”. There were 170 arrests.
My own recent arrest, while obeying the terms of a permit and standing peacefully on a street in lower Manhattan, brought the reality of…
Schizophrenia Experiment Produces First Repeatable Out-of-Body Experience in the Laboratory
Via ScienceDaily:
A study using a procedure called the rubber hand illusion has found striking new evidence that people experiencing schizophrenia have a weakened sense of body ownership and has produced the first case of a spontaneous, out-of-body experience in the laboratory.
These findings suggest that movement therapy, which trains people to be focused and centered on their own bodies, including some forms of yoga and dance, could be helpful for many of the 2.2 million people in the United States who suffer from this mental disorder.
The study, which appears in the Oct. 31 issue of the scientific journal Public Library of Science One, measured the strength of body ownership of 24 schizophrenia patients and 21 matched control subjects by testing their susceptibility to the “rubber hand illusion” or RHI. This tactile illusion, which was discovered in 1998, is induced by simultaneously stroking a visible rubber hand and the subject’s hidden hand.
Who Will Protect the Protectors?
“What bullsh*t, Liam. If your lot really thought they [i.e., the police] were part of the “99%”, you’d be doing something to protect them, too,” Sorcha Nic Congail
Well, it has to be admitted that my cousin Sorcha has a point. A powerful point. Not the sort of thing that I would have been inclined to explore on my own unbidden. But that’s what friends are for, I guess. To prod you along some paths you would never have even considered, left to your own devices.
Here’s where the hole ugly mess began:
Photo, allegedly of the dog Parrot moments before being shot to death by police.
I received a copy of this photo last weekend from an FB friend and as a dog lover was immediately horrified. As a kid I grew up with dogs — lots of dogs. Probably the best, most loving and loyal animals on earth. I’d long ago come to…
Gnosis: The Not-So-Secret History of Jesus
This article, which discusses the Mystery School origins of Christianity, comes from my new memoir, The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic through Evolver Editions/North Atlantic Books.
In December 1945, during the tail end of the most devastating war in human history, a peasant named Mohammed Ali of the al-Samman clan stumbled upon an earthenware jar near limestone caves in the deserts of Upper Egypt. He feared an evil djin (genie) resided inside, but hoping for lost riches, he still opened the jar. To his disappointment, twelve ragged leather-bound codices fell onto the ground. He didn’t realize these 1,200 weathered pages contained a priceless treasure with dozens of lost Christian gospels that had been hidden away for 1,600 years. Mohammed carried them home to his mother, who kept warm throughout the night by feeding pages of what we now call The Nag Hammadi Library to her fireplace.
These fifty-two texts, with…
Solipsistic Nation:Tim Sköld, Ogre, Karsh Kale and Hoodoo Engine
Listen to the interview now! (download/direct link) from Solipsistic Nation featuring an interview with a crazy lineup:
In the last couple of weeks I learned that Karsh Kale, Tim Sköld, Ogre and HoodooEngine had released or were about to release new albums. I dig them all so I do what I do sent out the emails and made the phone calls. There were other musicians, labels and festivals I wanted to feature on the show as well but they didn’t happen due to availability and time constraints and before I knew it, this week’s show had been distilled into a gem of greatness.
I discovered Karsh Kale right about the same time I discovered the Asian Massive (or Asian Underground) scene. Over the years I watched the careers of Karsh Kale, Asian Dub Foundation and others grow over the years and it’s a wonder that I haven’t had someone like Karsh on the show earlier. Karsh has released…
Occupy Wall Street: Protesting Taxation Without Representation?
John Atcheson writes on CommonDreams:
When government gives banks and Wall Street some $12.8 trillion of the taxpayer’s hard-earned money in direct funds, guarantees and near zero interest loans, and the fat cats turn around and spend it on bonuses and high-risk investments rather than fixing the real economy for the 99% who have been affected, don’t ask why people are angry. Especially when not a single bankster or speculator has been busted for a plethora of real crimes, while people lose their homes to improperly documented foreclosures.When the one-percenters and their bought-and-paid-for government pass a faux financial reform bill that doesn’t actually change the way things are done in the Banks’ boardrooms or on Wall Street and people take to the streets, how can that be a mystery?
And yes, that means you, too, Clinton, Obama and the Democratic Party. Your abject collusion with the one-percenters, while spouting populist rhetoric every four…
Travel Back In Time With Yahoo! Maps
Long-term decay on the internet can be a fascinating thing. Google Maps’ not-quite-as-popular sister site Yahoo! Maps hasn’t updated some of its street images since the nineties, giving you the ability to virtually explore a pre-millennial London which some people prefer to the city today, Londonist writes:
Remember the days when Arsenal still played at Highbury? Those halcyon times when Heathrow was content with four terminals, when you could catch a train to Paris from Waterloo, and when Westfield was, if you had to guess, the latest boyband off of that new Popstars show on ITV.
In Yahoo! Maps, London is stuck in a new-Millennial timewarp. The satellite view still shows the old Wembley Stadium, complete with twin towers. Demolition of the landmark was completed in 2003, but hasn’t even started here. Over at St Pancras, work on the mammoth new Eurostar terminal has barely begun, while Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is a giant building site.…
Huge Lego Man Washes Up On Florida Beach
Wired writes that for the third time in recent years, a gigantic Lego figure has washed ashore on a coastline in the Northern Hemisphere. Artist is unknown. Below, video of a similar occurrence in Holland. Damn you, Lego man, for making me confront my own emptiness!
A larger-than-life Lego man bearing the cryptic phrase “no real than you are” has washed ashore on the Florida coast. Beachcombers in Siesta Key found the roughly 8-foot-tall Lego man just before dawn Tuesday. The figure had “Ego Leonard” and the number 8 on its back.
In 2007, an almost-identical creation was found in the Netherlands. Another turned up in England the next year.
Keep Wall Street Occupied From Your Mailbox
Presenting a subversive way to strike back at the banking behemoths and credit card junk mailers clogging your physical mailbox, and to generally excise your daily stress and aggression, via a few small stuffed postal packets:
The Golden Age Of Female Computer Programmers
Via the blog of software developers Fog Creek, a look at the forgotten history of women programmers, and the strange ways in which different work fields are labeled as “male” or female”:
Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? Wrong.
In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to computer science in the mid-1960s, during the early days of computing, when men were already dominating other technical professions but had yet to dominate the world of computing. For about two decades, the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984.
In fact, for a hot second back in the mid-sixties, computer programming was actually portrayed as women’s work by the mass media. Check out “The Computer Girls” from the April 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. It…
How To Start A Dance Kult
Let’s start with what God is: the Father, Son & Holy Spirit.
The confusion about the nature of God starts with the idea God is separate from Existence. Also, there seems to be a tendency to treat the Father as God itself and the Son & Holy Spirit as a part of, but not equal to the Father. From these simple misunderstandings comes the logical paradoxes we’re all familiar with.
So here’s where we begin to clear things up. God is the single thing, but there are three aspects that make up the totality of God. Here’s the analogy: we take a piece of cheese. The cheese is one thing; however, there are aspects to the cheese that make up the whole thing: we have the shape, color & taste of the cheese. So where does the cheese end and its aspects begin? Well obviously that’s an impossible question.
So now the issue…
