10 Billion Beats is a Global Intention Event that will use drumming to send a wave of positive intention around the world. Starting in Central Kansas, it will follow the sun through the time zones at 7:00 PM on Sept. 17th, 2010. (Sept. 18th as it crosses the dateline) This project is for everyone who is crazy enough to change the world and everyone else for whom they want to change it. The idea--though admittedly grandiose--is not a commercial event. Really, it's a simple grassroots idea on a grand scale. If this resonates with you, please visit http://www.10billionbeats.com for more information and to get involved. Join in, and let's drum up a New World!
Saturday, September 4, 2010
10 Billion Beats - 2010: A Global Drumming for Unity
Answering Climate Change Skeptics, Naomi Oreskes
A presentation based off of her recent book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscure the Truth about Climate Change. Naomi Oreskes, author and professor of history and science studies, University of California, San Diego.
From the University of Rhode Island's Spring 2010 Vetlesen Lecture Series, People and Planet Global Environmental Change. March 2, 2010.
Your brain is a rain forest
... The trouble is that medical researchers generally have a disease-based perspective regarding the brain, not a view that is focused on health and well-being. Funding for brain research goes to the squeaky wheel. Studies abound, for example, about what's wrong with the left hemisphere of the brains of dyslexics. Little research, however, exists on an area in the right hemisphere that processes loose word associations and may be the source of poetic inspiration.
The concept of neurodiversity provides a more balanced perspective. Instead of regarding traditionally pathologized populations as disabled or disordered, the emphasis in neurodiversity is placed on differences. Dyslexics often have minds that visualize clearly in three dimensions. People with ADHD have a different, more diffused, attentional style. Autistic individuals relate better to objects than to people.
This is not, as some people might suspect, merely a new form of political correctness (e.g., “serial killers are differently assertive”). Instead, research from brain science, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, sociology and the humanities demonstrates that these differences are real and deserve serious consideration.
I recognize that they also involve tremendous hardship, suffering and pain. The importance of identifying mental illness, treating it appropriately and developing the means of preventing it in early childhood cannot be overstated.
However, one important ingredient in the alleviation of this suffering is an emphasis on the positive dimensions of people who have traditionally been stigmatized as less than normal. My own definition of neurodiversity concerns itself with an exploration of seven mental disorders of neurological origin, which may represent alternative forms of natural human difference: ADHD, autism, dyslexia, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, intellectual disabilities and schizophrenia. I have come up with eight principles of neurodiversity to serve as guideposts on this journey.
– 1 – The human brain works more like an ecosystem than a machine
The primary metaphor used to describe the workings of the brain for 400 years has been the machine. The problem with this kind of approach is the human brain is not a machine; it is a biological organism. It is not hardware or software. It is wetware. And it is messy. Millions of years of evolution have created hundreds of billions of brain cells organized and connected in unbelievably complex systems of organicity. The body of a neuron, or brain cell, looks like an exotic tropical tree with numerous branches. The electric crackling of neuronal networks mimics heat lightning in a forest. The undulations of neurotransmitters moving among neurons resemble the ocean tides.
Like an ecosystem, the brain has a tremendous ability to transform itself in response to change. Pennsylvania student Christina Santhouse was 8 years old when encephalitis and the seizures it caused resulted in the right hemisphere of her brain being removed. Nevertheless, she graduated with honors from high school and is attending college. Her left hemisphere was able to take up the slack, so to speak, and function virtually normally. ...
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Hurts so good -- neural clues to the calming effects of self-harm
The notion that cutting or burning oneself could provide relief from emotional distress is difficult to understand for most people, but it is an experience reported commonly among people who compulsively hurt themselves.
Individuals with borderline personality disorder experience intense emotions and often show a deficiency of emotion regulation skills. This group of people also displays high prevalence rates of self-injurious behavior, which may help them to reduce negative emotional states.
Niedtfeld and colleagues studied the effects of emotional stimuli and a thermal stimulus in people either with or without borderline personality disorder. They conducted an imaging study using picture stimuli to induce negative, positive, or neutral affect and thermal stimuli to induce heat pain or warmth perception. The painful heat stimuli were administered at an individually-set temperature threshold for each subject.
In patients with borderline personality disorder, they found evidence of heightened activation of limbic circuitry in response to pictures evocative of positive and negative emotions, consistent with their reported emotion regulation problems. Amygdala activation also correlated with self-reported deficits in emotion regulation. However, the thermal stimuli inhibited the activation of the amygdala in these patients and also in healthy controls, presumably suppressing emotional reactivity.
Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, commented, "These data are consistent with the hypothesis that physically painful stimuli provide some relief from emotional distress for some patients with borderline personality disorder because they paradoxically inhibit brain regions involved in emotion. This process may help them to compensate for deficient emotional regulation mechanisms."
The authors note that these results are in line with previous findings on emotional hyperactivity in borderline personality disorder and suggest that these individuals process pain stimuli differently depending on their arousal status.
More information: The article is "Affect Regulation and Pain in Borderline Personality Disorder: A Possible Link to the Understanding of Self-Injury" by Inga Niedtfeld, et al. The article appears in Biological Psychiatry, Volume 68, Issue 4 (August 15, 2010).
Provided by Elsevier
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Top Five Regrets of the Dying
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.
We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.
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Netherlands to close prisons for lack of criminals
The Dutch justice ministry has announced it will close eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system. A decline in crime has left many cells empty.
During the 1990s the Netherlands faced a shortage of prison cells, but a decline in crime has since led to overcapacity in the prison system. The country now has capacity for 14,000 prisoners but only 12,000 detainees.
Deputy justice minister Nebahat Albayrak announced on Tuesday that eight prisons will be closed, resulting in the loss of 1,200 jobs. Natural redundancy and other measures should prevent any forced lay-offs, the minister said.
The overcapacity is a result of the declining crime rate, which the ministry's research department expects to continue for some time.
Belgian prisoners
Some reprieve might come from a deal with Belgium, which is facing overpopulation in its prisons. The two countries are working out an agreement to house Belgian prisoners in Dutch prisons. Some five-hundred Belgian prisoners could be transferred to the Tilburg prison by 2010.
The Netherlands would get 30 million euros in the deal, and it will allow the closing of the prisons in Rotterdam and Veenhuizen to be postponed until 2012.
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Judge bashes warrantless cellphone tracking
A federal magistrate has ruled that information pulled from cellphone towers provides such an intimate portrait of a customer's life that government investigators must get a warrant before obtaining it.
The ruling by Magistrate Judge James Orenstein of the US District Court for Eastern New York is a major victory for civil liberties advocates, who have long warned that so-called historical cell-site information gives the government the ability to track users' location each time they make a call or send a text message. It follows an appeals court decision earlier this month that a drug trafficking suspect's constitutional rights were violated when the FBI surreptitiously attached a global positioning system to his car without a warrant.
The ruling in that case, known as US v. Maynard, weighed heavily in Orenstein's reasoning.
“The decision in Maynard is just one of several rulings in recent years reflecting a growing recognition, at least in some courts, that technology has progressed to a point where a person who wishes to partake in the social, cultural, and political affairs of our society has no realistic choice but to expose to others, if not to the public as a whole, a broad range of conduct and communications that would previously have been deemed unquestionably private,” he wrote.
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CIA/FBI WIKIPEDIA Pedophilia And Propaganda Ring Exposed
CIA AGENTS EXPOSED IN MURDEROUS WIKIPEDIA FRAUD: URGENT PUBLIC DECEPTION POPULATION POISONING & CHILD TRAFFICKING ALERT
by Sherri Kane and Leonard G. Horowitz
SUMMARY
A COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) is herein exposed, including a series of illegal projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The aim of this "black-op" is to investigate and disrupt dissident political organizations within the United States and abroad. This article exposes the CIA/FBI agents using Wikipedia for this agenda and COINTELPRO propaganda. The government's false rationale, "protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order," is shown deceptive by evidence exposing those involved engaging a satanic cult.
This report exposes agent-provocateurs who forge documents, edit Wikipedia biographies, revise histories to libel and discredit targeted opponents, and conspire to commit murder, including those of journalist/whistle-blowers, benefiting their CIA/FBI corporate handlers.
This article documents how propaganda is administered today by COINTELPRO agents using the Internet, Wikipedia, and a "mix-it-all-up" strategy (i.e., the "Hegelian dialectic"). The agents co-create their celebrity, instigate and justify terrorism by generating religious and racial conflicts, cross-promote their divisive beliefs to generate controversies and social unrest, and divert attention from their criminal actions by projecting, through the media, their malice upon their targets.
To effectively extend counter-intelligence and their PSYOPs (i.e., psychological operations), frightening truths are mixed with lies by these agent-provocateurs to undermine social and political activism.
Another common denominator among these operatives is their Church of Satan associations.
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Yossi Sarid: Fascism is already here
... But here we find a paradox: Those who fight against democracy in order to destroy it, to set up an alternative state in its place, are the very people who know how to exploit it to the full. The settlers know, as do the rabbis, who teach their students how their "Jewish state" will look. During the past few months it appears as if fascism has already arrived here and is waiting just behind the wall. And even the genius of our times - for whom everything has been turned inside out - knows, judging by his weekly hot-air emissions. They use democracy in order to toss it out.
Here and there a few, the few who were lost in the desert, renounce them, but then immediately pounce on them to scare them and shut them up - the government and the rabble alike. And what can a person who wants to protest do when his soul has despaired of those who kill and those who are killed? When his soul is fed up with the occupation, and all he wants is that it should not manage to occupy his desires? Someone seeking salvation for his soul and ours - what is left for him to do?
If he participates in the popular struggle against the separation fence, he will be buried outside the fence of the cemetery; if he demonstrates in Sheikh Jarrah, he will feel the heavy hand of the police; if he is a university lecturer, they'll send the watchdogs after him in the name of Zionism; if he belongs to a theater troupe, someone who can still see the Green Line in his mind's eye, they will threaten the source of his income; if he is a school principal who tries not just to support settlements but to inculcate them, they will look for a different institution for him because that is not how we do things; if he is a judge who dares deny that security is of the utmost importance, they will blame him for bloodshed; if he is a journalist who refuses to join in the chorus, there will be cries to boycott his newspaper; if he is a citizen who wishes to protect a child being threatened with expulsion from the country, he too will be blacklisted as an enemy of the people; and a long list remains. ...
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5 Jaw-Dropping Stories in Wikileaks' Archives Begging for National Attention
... One very different but no less interesting report is the “Marine Corps Midrange Threat Estimate: 2005-2015," which was prepared by Marine Corps Intelligence's Global Threats Branch. “Marine Corps forces will be challenged by emerging technical, military, and geopolitical threats; by thegrowing resourcefulness and the ingenuity of non-state actors and terrorist networks; and by natural disasters,” begins the report. “The U.S. military must develop more agile strategies and adaptive tactics if it is to succeed in this complex environment.” The Marines were changing, said the report, to do just that.
“The threat environment facing today's Marines can be defined in three words: unconventional, unforeseen, and unpredictable,” reads the document. Despite admitting that future threats were largely unforeseeable, Marine Intelligence still endeavored to forecast the likelihood of various intervention scenarios “based on an independent, data-driven methodology that assessed the conditions for possible Marine intervention or assistance in the selected countries,” more specifically, “20 states of interest that represent a wide range of potential future security challenges for the Marine Corps.”
For those interested in keeping score over the next five years, the Marine Corps' report forecasts that counterterrorism missions by U.S. Marines in Albania, Bangladesh, Colombia and Saudi Arabia are “possible” -- the mid-range on the three-point scale of likelihood -- as are COIN missions in Liberia, Syria and Uzbekistan. Countries that rated “high” on the scale, when it came to the chance of conducting counterterrorism operations, included Ethiopia, Georgia, Mauritania, and Nigeria, while Iran and North Korea were rated as “high” when it came “major regional contingencies” -- that is full-scale wars. ...
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Katrina and Rainbow Gathering aid remembered
From PRESS RELEASE: New Mexico Hosts White House Guests:
...Where were the governmental and mainstream relief agencies in all this? They were doing all they could, but it was obvious from day one that it wasn't enough. Jenka Soderberg is a freelance journalist and occasional Free Speech Radio News reporter who traveled to New Orleans post-Katrina. She explained that all of the shelters within three hours of New Orleans were either shut down or full. Only one FEMA center was open to the public. Blackwater Security forces staffing the center outnumbered the FEMA workers about 5 to 1. The remaining FEMA centers were solely for their workers and contractors. Each of these centers displayed a sign that read “No public services available at this site / Authorized personnel only.”
Volunteers from the Red Cross constantly defected and joined the ranks of the grassroots led efforts. http://photos1.blogger.com/photoInclude/blogger/566/1507/1600/Tent%20Raising%202.jpg
“In an April interview with NPR, acting Red Cross Director Jack McGuire admitted the organization had made major mistakes after Katrina, including not reaching out to community groups that were doing some of the best work in the area. The organization promises to implement a 'cultural shift' that includes working more closely with grassroots organizations, a tack the institution has historically shied away from. Kay Wilkins, CEO of Red Cross' Southeast Louisiana chapter, called Katrina 'the great equalizer' of relief organizations.” - Reason Magazine, Dec 2006.
Some governmental agencies harassed the cafes, saying they didn't have “permission” to be there. Nonetheless, individuals from various law enforcement agencies would occasionally lend a hand in the kitchen. A Mississippi state trooper in full uniform was spotted chopping celery. One volunteer said that various other “mutiny magic manifested.” Soderberg noted, “We've had National Guard soldiers sneak supplies out of their warehouses so we could distribute them directly to people, we've had Amtrak police sneak ice for our clinic from their stash….so many many examples of people trying to get supplies to the people who need them — even if they have to defy orders from above in order to do it.”
FEMA and the Red Cross continuously struggled to provide adequate aid to the desperate storm victims. Soderberg revealed that these agencies reached a point in which they began “turning people away, sending them to our tiny organization, common ground, for help. Let me repeat this, because I just find it so astounding: FEMA AND THE RED CROSS ARE SENDING PEOPLE TO _US_ (Common Ground) FOR HELP.” - Jenka's Journal, Nov 2, 2005.
The cafes' operations reached their peak on the first Thanksgiving after the hurricane when the Welcome Home Cafe shared a huge feast and the New Waveland Cafe held a parade for the town. A film entitled, “Rainbow Family & Christians Unite to Give Hope after Katrina” captured a parade watcher's heartfelt reaction: “All of these beautiful people from the Waveland Cafe and what they've given to us, we can never repay (tears up, happy tears). I know that Hancock County could not have made it without what they have done. And to give us this parade! (more joyous tears welling up)”. When asked if she'd ever had a parade like this before she rejoiced, “No and I think they're fabulous! They're the most beautiful people that there are!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3tT5F9ECpA ...
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