From the New Humanist:
Caspar Melville meets the man who thinks that spirituality is essential to consciousness, and science can tell us why
In his new book Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness, Nicholas Humphrey, a distinguished evolutionary psychologist and philosopher, claims to have solved two fairly large intellectual conundrums. One is something of a technical matter, about which you may have thought little or not at all, unless you happen to be a philosopher. This is the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness. The problem is how an entity which is apparently immaterial like the human consciousness – it exists, but you can’t locate it, much less measure it – can have arisen from something purely physical, like the arrangement of cells that make up the human body. The second problem Humphrey claims he has solved is a rather more everyday one, about which you may well have puzzled yourself. This is the problem of the soul. Does it exist? What sort of a thing might it be? Does everyone have one, even atheists?
His solution to both these problems is the same, because for him the strange properties of consciousness, the fact that for those of us that have it the world of dull matter is suffused with meaning, beauty, relevance and awe – means that it makes sense to think that we are permanent inhabitants of a “soul-niche” or “soul-world”. As the jacket blurb of his book has it, “consciousness paves the way for spirituality”, by creating a “self-made show” that “lights up the world for us, making us feel special and transcendent.” Consciousness and the soul are one and the same.
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Monday, April 4, 2011
Natural history of the soul
Secret Presidential Chemtrail Budget Uncovered, Congress Exceeds Billions To Spray Populous Like Roaches?
From The Budget Obama Didn’t Want You To Know About, The Intel Hub
Shepard Ambellas & Avalon
March 30, 2011
© 2011 All Rights Reserved
Geoengineering has now been defined as: “the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.” – The Royal Society 2009
Recently, the question has been asked, What In the World Are They Spraying? The documentary with the same name answers many of those questions. The question the world is now asking is “Who in the World Is Spraying Us?”
The World is Now Demanding Answers and Accountability…
As an introduction to this article, we will first cover information to familiarize the uninformed readers as to the core facts and information so that a more complete understanding is possible, given this complex issue.
A recent report by CBS Atlanta detailed how some local citizens are outraged that such “crimes against humanity” are being carried out right before our eyes in secret.
In the report Sen. Johnny Isakson was interviewed on the subject of chemtrails saying quote:
“That is a theory that some people have, but there is no evidence this is happening. This is not happening.”
It looks as if members of the government’s upper echelon and even members of the Senate will go to extreme lengths to suppress this vital information from reaching the American people.
Not to mention they signed off on the multi-billion dollar per year budgets in an economic crisis, with little to no transparency to the public.
In regards to aerosol spraying into the earth’s atmosphere, a recent update to data assembled by The Carnicom Institute reveals the chemicals used and their respective levels of concentration. The toxic levels that are being used in these aerosols goes beyond shocking – it would appear that these levels are indeed criminal by EPA Standards.
An Updated Look at Aerosol Toxins – Part 1
By Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri –
Copyright © 2011 – All Rights Reserved
February 3, 2011
(Excerpt from Report)
A new preliminary draft report by ArizonaSkyWatch shows dramatic increases in heavy metals that simply do not belong in our air. NOTE: The level of Manganese is so shockingly high that ArizonaSkyWatch also included additional information about it (see below). This report will be posted online shortly.
This is only a preliminary overview of Arizona Air Particulates.
2010 Air Particulates
These figures indicate how many times they are over the allowable toxic limit:
Aluminum: 15.8
Antimony: 63.3
Arsenic: 418
Barium: 5.3
Cadmium: 6.0
Chromium: 6.4
Copper: 9.0
Iron: 43.5
Lead: 15.7
Manganese: 513.8
Nickel: 10.7
Zinc: 7.5
Additional Research & Videos are at the CaliforniaSkyWatch.com & theAgricultureDefenseCoalition.org.
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'Unravelling the ultimate political conspiracy'
From A Murder Foretold by David Grann
Rodrigo Rosenberg knew that he was about to die. It wasn’t because he was approaching old age—he was only forty-eight. Nor had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness; an avid bike rider, he was in perfect health. Rather, Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, was certain that he was going to be assassinated.
Before he began, in the spring of 2009, to prophesy his own murder, there was little to suggest that he might meet a violent end. Rosenberg, who had four children, was an affectionate father. The head of his own flourishing practice, he had a reputation as an indefatigable and charismatic lawyer who had a gift for leading other people where he wanted them to go. He was lithe and handsome, though his shiny black hair had fallen out on top, leaving an immaculate ring on the sides. Words were his way of ordering the jostle of life. He spoke in eloquent bursts, using his voice like an instrument, his hands and eyebrows rising and falling to accentuate each note. (It didn’t matter if he was advocating the virtues of the Guatemalan constitution or of his favorite band, Santana.) Ferociously intelligent, he had earned master’s degrees in law from both Harvard University and Cambridge University.
Rosenberg had been born into Guatemala’s oligarchy—a term that still applies to the semi-feudal Central American nation, where more than half of its fourteen million people, many of them Mayan, live in severe poverty. His mother had inherited a small fortune, and his father had acquired several businesses, including a popular chain of cinemas. (As a boy, Rosenberg had spent hours in the plush seats, entranced by the latest American films.) Rosenberg was accustomed to privilege. A car enthusiast, he drove a Mercedes and made an annual pilgrimage to Indianapolis to watch Formula 1 races. He had been married twice but was now single, living in an elegant high-rise overlooking Guatemala City.
Though his wealth allowed him a desultory life, he was “driven and motivated by his goals,” as a relative put it. When he began his studies at Cambridge, he had spoken almost no English, so Rosenberg informed his professors that he had recently undergone surgery on his vocal cords, and could not yet talk in class; in the meantime, he bought a television and watched it each night with closed-captioning until, after three months, he spoke with confidence.
He was not a religious man, but he maintained a stark sense of good and evil, castigating others, as well as himself, for transgressions. When he was a child, his father had abandoned the family, a betrayal that Rosenberg had never forgiven; he even refused to accept an inheritance that his father had left him. One of Rosenberg’s closest friends noted that, if he thought you had crossed him, he could be brutal: “He was always very honest—sometimes, perhaps, too honest. He would say things that are true, but sometimes things that are true that you shouldn’t mention.” Though Guatemala’s judicial system was notoriously corrupt, Rosenberg was drawn to the clarity of the law, to its unflinching judgment. He argued, successfully, before the Constitutional Court, Guatemala’s equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1998 he became the vice-dean of a prominent law school. At the same time, he served as counsel for some of Guatemala’s most powerful élites—its coffee barons and corporate executives and government officials.
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Conspiracy Rock
Four and a half years later, Robert Smigel aired a similarly titled bit on SNL's "Saturday TV Funhouse." (The producers are content to view this coincidence as a high form of flattery.) A remixed version of the film also appeared as an Official Selection in the 2000 Sundance Film Festival.
This silly little film would never have been possible without the brilliance and talent of animator Jason Scott Sadofsky, and of co-writers Michael D'Alonzo, Stephen Johnson, and Eric Drysdale. Thanks also to vocalists Shannon Hart Cleary and Carolyn Forno, and to the cast members (past and present) and supportive audiences of This Is Pathetic.
-Scott Rosann
Director
January, 2009
Mainstream media journalists flunk high school physics when reporting on radiation
From Natural News:
Nuclear safety spokesman Hidehiko Nishiyama says the air above the leak contains 1,000 millisiverts of radioactivity.
Source:http://www.boston.com/news/world/as...
For starters, even the unit is spelled incorrectly. It's not "millisiverts" but rather "millisieverts." But that's a small issue compared to the bigger one.
Millisieverts describe a measured dose of received radiation. Exposure to millisieverts only makes sense in the context of this nuclear catastrophe when it is measuredover time. In other words, it makes no sense to say "the air has 500 millisieverts of radiation." That's a complete nonsense sentence. The correct statement is that a person standing in that area would be exposed to "500 millisieverts of radiation PER HOUR."
The American Connection?
The passing away of an influential figure in the history of the South-East Asian Golden Triangle is marked by conflicting memories of his contribution:
From the Consul General’s Corner, April 4, 2011
I found Mr. Young’s adventures described in several books on the CIA’s activities in Indochina, including Roger Warner’s Backfire: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam. Warner described Mr. Young as “a jungle boy with extraordinary family credentials,” noting his father’s and older brother’s involvement with intelligence activity in Northern Thailand and southern China. With his experiences growing up among hill tribes, Mr. Young could survive in the jungle and communicate with the locals. Warner wrote, “No other American had those skills, but people in the CIA always talked about Bill Young wistfully, in terms of his remarkable potential… For all his flaws, no other American was as gifted at collecting intelligence information.”
Mr. Young is also mentioned in Douglas Valentine’s The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs as putting his childhood Lahu friends into a strategic intelligence network in southern China to photograph Chinese engineers and soldiers building a road to Thailand. His connections to the tribesmen were clearly essential to his success as a CIA officer.
From Bill Young and the CIA in the Drug Industry
The importance of these CIA clients in the subsequent growth of the Golden Triangle's heroin trade was revealed inadvertently, by the Agency itself when it leaked a classified report on the Southeast Asian opium traffic to the New York Times. The CIA analysis identified twenty-one opium refineries in the tri-border area where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge and reported that seven were capable of producing 90 to 99 percent pure No. 4 heroin. Of these seven heroin refineries, "The most important are located in the areas around Tachilek, Burma; Ban Houei Sai and Nam Keung in Laos; and Mae Salong in Thailand."
Although the CIA did not see fit to mention it, many of those refineries were located in areas totally controlled by paramilitary groups closely identified with American military operations in the Golden Triangle. Mae Salong was headquarters of the Nationalist Chinese Fifth Army, which had been continuously involved in CIA intelligence and counterinsurgency operations since 1950. According to a former CIA operative who worked in the area for a number of years, the heroin laboratory at Na Kueng was protected by Major Chao La, commander of Yao mercenary troops for the CIA in northwestern Laos. One of the heroin laboratories near Ban Huay Sai reportedly belonged to General Ouane Rattikone, former commander in chief of the Royal Laotian Army—the only army in the world, except for the U.S. army itself, to be entirely financed by the U.S. government. The heroin factories near Tachilek were operated by rebel units from Burma and Shan rebel armies who even now control a large
percentage of the narcotics traffic out of Burma. Although few of these Shan groups still have any relation with the CIA, one of the most important chapters in the history of the Shan States' opium trade involves a Shan rebel army under Khun Sa, who is still receiving CIA support, either directly or indirectly.
Other sources have revealed the existence of an important heroin laboratory that operated near Vientiane under the protection of General Ouane Rattikone. And finally, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics had reports that General Vang Pao, commander of the CIA's 'secret army', had been operating a heroin factory at Long Tieng, headquarters for CIA sponsored operations in northern Laos.
In the fertile minds of the geopolitical strategists in the CIA's Special Operations division, potential infiltration routes stretched from the Shan hills of north-eastern Burma, through the rugged Laotian mountains, and then southward into the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. According to one retired CIA operative, Lt. Col. Lucien Conein, Agency personnel were sent to Laos in 1959 to supervise eight Green Beret teams who were then training Meo guerrillas on the Plain of Jars. In 1960 and 1961 the CIA recruited elements of Nationalist Chinese Paramilitary units based in northern Thailand to inf[i]ltrate into China-Burma border areas; they also sent Green Berets into South Vietnam's Central Highlands to organize hilltribe commando units for intelligence and sabotage patrols along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Finally, in 1962 one CIA operative based in northwestern Laos began sending trained Yao and Lahu tribesmen into the heart of China's Yunnan Province to monitor road traffic and tap telephones.
While the U.S. military required half a million troops to fight a conventional war in South Vietnam, the mountain war had needed only a handful of Americans. American paramilitary personnel in Laos tended to serve long tours of duty, some for a decade or more, and had been given an enormous amount of personal power. If the nature of the conventional war in South Vietnam is best analyzed in terms of the faceless bureaucracies that spewed out jargonized policies, the secret war in Laos is most readily understood through the men who fought it.
THE OPERATIVES
Three men, perhaps more than any of the others, have left their personal imprint on the conduct of the secret war: Edgar Buell, Anthony Poe, and William Young. And each in his own way illustrates a different aspect of America's conscious and unconscious complicity in the Laotian opium traffic.
William Young, perhaps one of the most effective agents ever, was born in the Burmese Shan States, where his grandfather had been a missionary to the hill tribes. A gifted linguist, Young spoke five of the local languages and probably knew more about mountain minorities than any other American in Laos; the ClA rightly regarded him as its "tribal expert." Because of his deep and sophisticated understanding of the hill tribes, he viewed the opium problem from the perspective of a hilltribe farmer. He felt nothing should be done to obstruct the opium traffic. Young explained his views: "As long as there is opium in Burma, somebody will market it." ...
Coalition "friendly fire" kills 13 Libyan rebels
(Reuters) – A NATO-led air strike killed 13 Libyan rebels, a rebel spokesman said on Saturday, but their leaders called for continued raids on Muammar Gaddafi's forces despite the "regrettable incident." In the rebel capital of Benghazi the anti-Gaddafi council also named a "crisis team," including the former Libyan interior minister as the armed forces chief of staff, to run parts of the country it holds in its struggle to topple Gaddafi. The 13 fighters died on Friday night in an increasingly chaotic battle over the oil town of Brega with Gaddafi's troops, who have reversed a rebel advance on the coastal road linking their eastern stronghold with western Libya. ~ more... ~
Remembering the Afghan coup of 1978
A too brief memoir excerpt:
Fear. That crisp, black moment when everything falls away but the pounding heart, blood rushing in the ears, and adrenaline so powerful the sour scent oozes from the pores. The body tenses, ready to flee or put up a fight. Every sound becomes sharper, every detail brighter. Every moment ticks by like an eternity. We whisper.
The Russian and Afghan soldiers are just outside, and I feel their crushing presence, choking my breath off. I stifle an irrational, irrepressible urge to cough.
I think back to the beginning of the coup, just two days after our school made the trip from Islamabad to Kabul for a convention. It was almost exciting. I did not worry because I knew, at age 17 in 1978, that I was indestructible. I knew this was just one more experience in my unique, weird life, and I accepted it. I set aside emotion as the other side of the city of Kabul was bombed. I watched, detached, as if I were enchanted.
image from http://www.spitting-image.net
