Box - what box?

Murdock madness...who gives a damn?

This whole Murdoch business is such a trivial drama. Sure, he's an excellent candidate for the "Most Hated Magnate" prize but should we really give a flying fu*k about phone hacking by newspapers? It's primarily prompted by OUR insatiable appetite for bullshit, whether it's about the private lives of personalities or that of famous victims like Millie, the murdered schoolgirl. And now it will stop (in the private sector, at least) and it hasn’t exactly scarred the progress of civilization. Nice to see the Murdocks sweating though, it must be said. 

Meanwhile:

The baseless concocted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan proceed with little public or media concern beyond reporting every death of 'one of ours.' The Afghans had nothing to do with the Twin Towers and Saddam Hussein was an enemy of Al-Qaeda.

Recent calculation show that drone strikes in Pakistan kill over 100 civilians for every targeted
combatant. In WWI one civilian died for every ten soldiers. In WWII it was one to one. Vietnam was seven to three. In Iraq it is ten of us killed for every one soldier. This is not good. And why is it that targeted domestic homes are always called "compounds?"

Depleted uranium weapons are at use in Libya, as they were in Iraq, where the consequence is a 10-15 fold increase in birth defects and a growing cancer rate from soil that will remain contaminated for over 100,000 years. Occupying an entire nation on false premises represents quite a high level of bad behaviour.

European and American economies are imploding as a result of borrowing by states that stake our future productivity as collateral against the loans. US Debt is 15 trillion dollars. Amongst much else, that borrowing provides funds for fighting unnecessary wars in foreign countries.

Thousand of us are dying every year as a result of continued inclusion of trans fats (hydrogenated oils) in our foodstuffs. It is acknowledged that there is no safe dose of these dangerous additives but they are still legally in use, and widely.

Three nuclear reactors are in an uncontained meltdown in Japan, continuing to release radioactive materials into the environment. They may stop the releases in ten years or so, maybe never. Much of northern Japan will remain uninhabitable for generations. Many millions throughout the world will suffer cancer for generations to come as a result of this catastrophe.

We are being denied the right to take responsibility for our own health by the suppression of our right to freely choose what route we take to healing.

What is a meltdown?

What is a meltdown?

Meltdown is hot news right now but what exactly is one, other than an event to be avoided at all costs? Some will remember the immense relief the world experienced when full meltdown was averted at Chernobyl and 3-Mile Island.

There has never been a full large-scale meltdown but this is the unknown situation that it describes: The overheated reactor fuel rods melt together and become as hot as the Sun's surface – enough to boil iron into steam. The hot metal melts down through
the concrete base of its containment vessel and then continues sinking into the earth below. Very little can stop the reaction at this point.

It doesn't sink downwards forever, because when the hot molten fuel reaches the natural water table it will quickly turn the underground water to steam. We don't know exactly what will happen then, having never experienced a meltdown or been crazy enough to test the idea out. But it is probable that the expansive steam would vent upwards with explosive force, carrying much of the radioactivity with it.

How high and far the radioactivity would disperse depends on the force of the blast from underground. It may settle in the surrounding area, or be carried by jet streams. Large amounts of radioactivity landing in the sea will eventually be carried by ocean currents throughout the world. If oceanic contamination continues through unchecked meltdown, it does not bode well for the world's oceans, harbouring most of the life on planet Earth. On the plus side, fish may become too radioactive to harvest and find their numbers rebounding, albeit with more mutants.

The averted meltdown at Chernobyl involved one reactor. Four reactors are currently in danger at Fukushima and two more could become involved. This is a potential disaster such as we have never faced before.

Nuclear power is an answer to nothing.

World's oldest indiginous peoples under threat

I saw a movie last week that both shocked and surprised me. It's called Our Generation and catalogues  the Australian government's ongoing effort to extinguish the last remnants of the 60,000 year old culture of Australia's first peoples. It is a shocking tale of racist suppression that is taking place here and now in cool, laid-back Australia. Many will remember Kevin Rudd's moving apology to the aborigines back in 2008. Well, it's since become worse and the world stands by, ignorant of blatant land-seizure for mining interests and removals to concentrated housing. While white Australians wantonly rape the land, it is stolen from its rightful owners under falsely righteous accusations of pedophilia.

Surely we should not be playing cricket in such places, nor traveling to holiday while this iniquity continues.

OUR GENERATION - revealing new documentary on Aboriginal rights in Australia

Modern war targets people, not soldiers.

War is getting worse, not better.

Used to mainly be soldiers killing soldiers.

Now it's mainly soldiers killing innocent civilians.

In WW I       civilian casualties were 10% of the total

In WW II      civilian casualties were 50% of the total

In Vietnam    civilian casualties were 70% of the total

In Iraq           civilian  casualties  are  90% of the total  

Why why why?

Perhaps the traditional 'objectives' of war have become less relevant. Used to be you fought a war to steal territory, plunder resources, impose religion, bring an ideology, or any combination thereof. The objective was to win the war and satisfy the objective. This usually involved trained militants in combat with each other, one eventually overcoming the other and doing/taking their thing. The war ends. William conquered and the fighting stopped.

Today, it looks like the prime objective of war is to maintain a 'healthy' Military Industrial Complex by expending weaponry. This is achieved through a state of perpetual war.
With an undefined and loosely knit enemy, and no large bases or troop concentrations to aim for it is inevitable that civilians will be the main victims when ordinance is exploded. Nobody bombs and attacks empty unpopulated space, except for once-off destruction of infrastructure.

Division was created between Muslims, and the resistance, trained by the USA to fight Russians, is more successful at killing civilians than armour-clad American fighting machines.

With some 750 - 1000 military bases located in over 150 countries worldwide, we can appreciate the USA's investment in conflict. Between them, the members of NATO account for another 200 bases worldwide. Russia keeps six bases in former Soviet states. China, the world's largest nation has, by contrast, no military bases located in other countries. India, the world's second largest population, has one base in Tajikistan. The Arab nations, the South, Central American and Canadian nations, the Africans, Far Eastern, and Antipodean nations have next to no bases and less combined military power than Israel.

The illegal Iraqi invasion could not have happened without that network of US and NATO bases. The bases serve to proliferate weapons, increase violence and undermine international instability. It's obvious really, as it is during war that soldiers rise through the ranks, and that personnel and weapons systems are tested by fire.

Yet is it any surprise that those economies 'investing' in military bases are the same ones sinking into economic collapse, whilst those who do not flush their wealth down the military toilet begin to boom? I dive right into this subject in the online chapter titled "The Arms Industry Toilet," from my first book Uncommon Sense, the State is Out of Date.

What to do? First and foremost, do not let them thrive on our fear. That is their power. Then get the book.

The modern EU - Napoleon and Hitler's failed dream.

   

Now that we see the looming likelihood of  collapse of the Euro, perhaps it is time to take a longer view. I was very happy, at the time, when Britain alone chose to stay outside the Eurozone. After witnessing first hand the appalling effect of the Common Agricultural Policy upon the diet and landscape of Europe (see below), it was scary to think that the same idiots were going to run the monetary system. 

Now that the entire edifice of a 'united' Europe is threatened by collapse of the Euro, I am reminded of my realization many years ago when Britain joined the community. This was that the European Union has finally managed to create that to which Napoleon and Hitler aspired. They have united us all under the rule of a group of unelected Commissioners who seem intent upon grinding us down under their bureaucracy.

One must wonder just how much irreparable economic damage will result from desperate and doomed attempts by the Commissioners to prop up their ill-planned currency?

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""I wished to found a European system, a European Code of Laws, a European judiciary: there would be but one people in Europe."  Napoleon in 1810, his dream now achieved.

In my first book, Uncommon Sense - the State is Out of Date, I list some of our harvest from the Common Agricultural Policy:

* It counters our evolutionary change to a healthier diet, by interfering with the essential and effective feedback loop supplying information from the consumer to the producer. Subsidizing farmers and producing according to central decision-making badly interferes with the natural information exchange. The Soviets tried to do it.

* It encourages the introduction of toxic chemicals to our ecosystem through supporting and subsidising food production beyond society's demands. Much of the use of toxic chemicals and treatments is, when not mandated, certainly encouraged by the state's guarantee to purchase, or subsidize the sale. This lowers the quality of our food.

* It is responsible for the surplus of cattle that were fed back to themselves, as a means of reducing the "beef mountain." This created the conditions for the growth and spread of BSE (mad cow disease). The original cause of this modern tragedy is the intervention of the state in our food chain. The main alternative theory, put forward by organic farmer Mark Purdey, points to the effects of a state-imposed painting of all British cattle with a highly toxic organo-chloride potion covering the head and spinal column.

* It has been cited by regular studies as unworkable, corruption-prone and grossly inefficient since the early 1980's. Literally billions of pounds, our pounds, are scammed and lost every year as this out-of-control creation of Brussels gets on with its regular job - which itself has little merit.

 

Why didn't the Shanghai skyscraper do a Twin Towers?

In the videos of that horrific fire in Shanghai we see the entire building engulfed in flames.

Has anybody noticed that it didn't  collapse like the WTC buildings with fires on one or two floors?

Nor did it collapse like WTC building 7, which had a few small fires on part of the lower floors, and was hit by nothing.

Not that that's telling us anything we don't already know.

 

Spare a thought for Sun at Samhain

As we respect this ancient tradition marking the waning of the Sun god's power spare a thought for the Sun itself. Once the most widespread most loved deity on the planet, and the actual source of the light of life, Sun has virtually disappeared from the pantheon of gods. Who convinced us it was not a living divine being? Not science, but the early Roman Church who saw solar religions as prime competition, systematically destroying them from the 4th century onwards.

Our body may process and express the energy of life, but the life itself is energy, not matter. The life itself is energy, not matter…think on that. The body of our local star creates organized and 
complex energy fields that appear to manage many solar features. One of them holds the entire solar system in its protective embrace.  A dead ball of gas? I think not.

The idea of stellar consciousness is explored, together with its far-reaching implications in my book Sun of gOd,  exploring the spirit of substance and the substance of spirit. And do forgive this shameless self-promotion of the book at this appropriate time and place. And, of course, if you haven't done so yet, lay your hands on a copy and enjoy a whole new world.

Multiverse not needed with bottom-up design

Stephen Hawking believes infinite multiverses dispense with the need for any intelligence in the process of this Universe. The other 'verses' are conceived to explain this one as just an accident of dumb matter. Is something being missed?

The multiverse story runs kind of like the old story with infinite monkeys, typewriters, time and bananas. Eventually one of them is supposed to crank out the complete works of William Shakespeare. In chronological order perhaps? If you really believe in this then by the same logic one of those monkeys would get it from the word go.

Since the existence of our Universe is so inexplicable, we are asked to believe in an infinite number of "multiverses," just so that one of them might accidentally have come up with the specific sequence of myriad events, forces and phenomenon needed for it to hold together and develop intelligent life (meaning us).

The multiverse route is an odd road for physicists to take considering the complete lack of evidence, measurements or even hints of anything other than the known Universe. Perhaps they take this road believing the only other option is an equally undetectable supernatural character who planned and designed it all - from somewhere else (like humans try to do). But an unsupportable theory in opposition does not prove the cloud cukoo land multiverse idea, heavens no!

There is another road to take and it doesn’t need a name (pantheism or animism come close).; it's just the way things are  Wherever we look in the world we see organization taking place from the bottom up. In the rainforest nobody plots the frog distribution, rainfall patterns and river routes; they self-organize. There is no one architect to the termite mound, with its buttressed walls, perfect ventilation, 'road' network, nurseries and even fungus farms. Entire weather systems self-organize out of water moisture, wind and solar power. Each human cell has 5-10 million inhabitants, functioning and  communicating with each other and other cells - doing life. The brain reading these lines has no central controller telling a hundred billion neurons what to do. 

There is intelligence within the system. It does not need an 'outside' agent to oversee it. We inhabit a living intelligent Universe that is the sum of its parts, not a dead and accidental accumulation of matter. Call it God if you like. Quantum physicists have noticed self-organization on the subatomic level, with the famed David Bohm describing electrons as taking on the qualities of living beings. We bandy about terms like Chi, Prana and the Holy Spirit without considering the implications of such a spirit being all-pervasive.

That this idea should seem strange is stranger than the idea itself.  Though unfamiliar at first, the concept of self-organizing bottom-up intelligence not only makes more sense than the logger-headed alternatives, it makes good sense.

Step into a Universe brimming with intelligence and design, which needs no Intelligent Designer.

Sun of gOd, Discover the Self Organizing Consciousness that Underlies Everything, the book by Gregory Sams, published by Weiser Books

 

Study finds child obesity due to overeating - who'd have thought?

Next thing they will find out that not eating makes us thin. 

Perhaps not eating might also be the cause of hunger? We need a proper study though, rather than be led by hearsay and conjecture.

The Daily Telegraph describes it as a controversial report . Apparently a debate has been raging "in the scientific communities" about whether obese children result from overeating or not exercising. Must it be one or the other - like they are not both connected and both causative factors? If you sit at a computer all day drinking coffee and smoking you will not get fat, but if you're drinking cola and eating burgers, chips and donuts then you just might. I wonder whether doing idiotic surveys contributes to some weird mental condition.

But now it has been decided - it is overeating and not under exercise to blame. 

Excuse me, I'm going to go beat my head against the nearest wall.

British Museum's surprise show

I'm just back from a great visit to the wonderful British Museum. It is always humbling to recognize  how civilized and sensitive people were thousands of years ago.

But the surprise "exhibit" that still has me smiling was experienced yesterday when I phoned to book a special disabled parking space. A real person answered the main phoneline after two rings and when I asked for the appropriate  department she said “I can do that, what time are you coming.” It was all over in two minutes – a beautiful exhibition of telecommunications history!