The holographic transdimentional system you know as life

Via Marina's Masters:





http://www.disclose.tv/viewvideo/5275/
Featuring Noted Experts - Fred Alan Wolf, Peter Russell, Professor Al-Khalili, York Dobyns, Robert Anton Wilson, Dean Radin, Richard Alan Miller, Michael Talbot, Gregg Braden, Professor David Deutsch, David Wilcock, Khemp Yurmed Tinly, Nassim Naramein, John Hagelin, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, David Bohm, Bill Hicks Consciousness, Mind, Brain, Reality, Atoms, Quantum, Parallel Universe, Light, Particles, Space, Time, Hologram, Entanglement, Superposition, Duality, Observer Effect, Energy, Words, Illusion, Ego, Perception, Infinate, Senses, Science, Information, Digital, Vibration, Imagination
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Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh describes 'executive assassination ring'

Eric Black reports in the Minneapolis Post :

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn't written about yet.

In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event's moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.”

Hersh didn't take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective...that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical.”

The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America's Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government officials who had experience with many of the crises.

And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out. Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Viethnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.

At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven't written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven't been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it's called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us.

"It's complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It's a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you've heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

"I've had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: 'What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don't get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?'

"But they're not gonna get before a committee.”

Hersh, the best-known investigative reporter of his generation, writes about these kinds of issues for The New Yorker. He has written often about JSOC, including, last July that:

“Under the Bush Administration's interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference.”

(“Finding” refers to a special document that a president must issue, although not make public, to authorize covert CIA actions.)

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Baby boomers' future going bust

Mike Shedlock reports in The Market Oracle :

Millions of baby boomers born into the dawn of the most spectacular economic expansion in history are being forced to re-imagine their retirement futures. Few news outlets have failed to seize upon the low-hanging pun: the boomers have gone bust.

Among the adjustments forced by the new circumstances, perhaps the cruelest twist for many boomers is the need to join younger generations in the roommate queue. The housing crash has forced record numbers of late-middle age homeowners to take in boarders or risk becoming boarders themselves. From California to Vermont, home-share organizations founded to assist the elderly are scrambling to meet the demands of newly bust boomers.

“In the last few months we've experienced explosive growth in interest by homeowners age 50-plus to find rooms and roommates,” says Jacqueline Grossmann, Chicago coordinator for the National Shared Housing Resource Center. “The trend now is getting younger and younger. People in their 50s and 60s are losing their nest eggs and increasingly willing to give up their privacy in exchange for rents of $500, $600 a month.”

Boomers are maximizing room occupancy for the same reason that their kids in their 20s and 30s are still competing for the best group rentals on Craigslist: they're broke.

The extent to which boomer wealth was based on home values is highlighted by a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, entitled "The Wealth of the Baby Boom Cohorts After the Collapse of the Housing Bubble."

The report details how the collapse has left the majority of those around retirement-age almost completely reliant on entitlements. The net worth of median households in the 45 to 54 age bracket has dropped by more than 45 percent since 2004, to just over $80,000. Households headed by those aged 55 to 64, meanwhile, have lost 38 percent of net wealth.

The result is that many baby boomers will only have entitlements to rely on in their retirement.”

Make that entitlements, roommates, and each other.

As more and more boomers scale down their retirement plans and consider alternative living arrangements, it's worth asking: Is shared housing such a bad thing for aging boomers? Does a return to the Communal idea, borne of economic necessity, also have emotional, social, and environmental benefits? Why wait for the retirement home or hospice to live with other people? With the nation full of worthless, ridiculously large, and mostly empty houses, why not fill them with the newly penurious and like-minded boomers in need of housing?

Terry S., a 62-year-old self-employed divorced psychologist in Pittsburgh, is one boomer considering the cooperative housing route. Until the crisis hit last year, Terry planned to spend her retirement between Europe and New York City, living off her IRA and savings. But the crash saw her wealth plummet by 60 percent. “My friends and I feel betrayed because we are now in the same or worse position than those who never saved their money, but may have a pension,” she says. The crisis forced her to rethink retirement, and she now plans to buy a house with her friends. She explains the logic:

Some of my friends and I shared a communal house in the 70s. We first came up with this idea [of doing it again] when we were talking about the possibility of having to live in assisted living or nursing homes, and we decided it would be far better to all live together in a big house with friends we knew and loved and hire a nurse and a cook. One of my friends owns a construction firm and he says he can put an elevator in any home for less than $100,000. We have looked at several homes. One was a beautiful house that backed onto a huge city park and had a pool decks all around and could easily be converted into four private residences. It was $600,000, which would only be $150,000 per unit. Much less than the $4,000 a month to have half of a dingy room in a nursing home that smells like urine.

If the deepening economic crisis does lead the boomers back to Countercultural values, a generation will have come full circle. Whether they end up living in a group house, a shared apartment, or a full-on hippie-style commune, studies show that they will live longer and more fulfilling later lives. “The results here are truly amazing,” says Kirby Dunn, pointing to studies that gauge the effects of shared housing. “Across all programs and age-brackets, people say they feel safer, are less lonely, happier, and sleep better. They also call their family less often for help.”

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The diachronic Greek history of Macedonia is at the core of the current FYROM name dispute

'Tymphaios' writes in American Chronicle :

A cult of identification of the modern inhabitants of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) has grown since 1992, with the aim of portraying FYROM as an inheritor and indeed the single inheritor of all things Macedonian. This culture, aided by laws that forbid scientific research in FYROM on the origins of its inhabitants, strives to take away from Greece and especially from the Greek administrative district of Macedonia almost anything that forms part of its Macedonian heritage.

It is uncomfortable to me as a Greek to have to defend Hellenism, especially to a man as blinded with hatred as Risto Stefov. One hopes that by arguing something reasonably, the discourse will benefit everybody. The recent polemics of Risto Stefov (beginning with American Chronicle, 4 Jan 2009 http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/86762) might especially create the false impression to the unknowing public that Greeks have made connections to the ancients using some racial purity argument. Or even that foreigners made such racial links to the ancients on the Greeks´ behalf. Even that this happened unpredictably when no one considered the Greeks to be Greeks. He quotes much from his friend Gandeto, a man he describes as an eminent historian, but who swears a lot. He includes gossip from an Albanian friend of his as evidence about the existence of an allegedly unreported, concealed minority of 3,5 million Albanians in Greece, a country with a population of 11 million. Stefov carefully omits the vast majority of evidence which does not confirm his allegations. Often he does not give references to his sources but pulls accusations out of his hat as if it were an established fact and well known – perhaps it is well known to some of his friends.

The links of the Greeks with diachronic Greek history, language and culture are simply due to a historic continuity, a continuity of language and customs that has survived if altered down to our own time. Greeks are Greeks in the same sense that Italians regard themselves as Italian and the Spanish as Spanish. The language is sufficient without the need to justify their Italianness or Spanisheness by some genetic test, some new discovery or by historical revisionism. For that kind of practice, Mr Stefov ought to look closer at home. While the question of getting a certificate of genetic identity had never occurred to the ancients, the recent Skopjian claims of genetic purity and genetic links to the ancient Macedonians are well beyond the pail. Examples are (a) a highly vaulted in FYROM but otherwise widely discredited study of the HLA gene carried out by FYROM scientists which allegedly proves that the FYROMians are Macedonians while the Greeks and Japanese are Ethiopians, and (b) a recent video made by FYROM state TV where God appears saying among else: "Listen to me, children of the sun and flowers! I, God, created the Macedonoids from which the white race sprung, inhabiting the lands far to the Japan Sea. The other races are Mongoloids and Negroids. All other peoples are of a mixed race". (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ITEdiSBl3Y&feature=related)

If one looks carefully, the video also shows the Greek adminsitrative provinces of Macedonia and Thrace while the praying voice laments, claiming that many "Macedonians" (presumably FYROMian Slavs) have died for them.

Risto Stefov conveniently skips most of the Greek history of Macedonia to make some racial arguments about the modern Greeks. As that leaves the majority of the relevant facts aside, let us rather take the ancients first. We are primarily concerned about the identity of the Macedonians and they were ancient. It should be made clear from the outset that the ancient Macedonians had Greek names, their cities had Greek names and that they had temples and altars dedicated to the gods of the Greek pantheon as the other Greeks. The cult of the Olympian gods in Greece was a religion centered on Mount Olympus in Macedonia. The Macedonian coins had the names of their kings written in Greek. The currency was the drachma as in the rest of Greece as far back as records exist (5th C BC). They had theatres where it is known that plays written only in Greek were played and they spread the Greek language and culture to the lands in Asia conquered by Alexander. All inscriptions found in Macedonia before Roman times only had Greek writing on them – more than 5000 in number. Where hints of the spoken language and grammar survive, as in a katadesmos (magic curse) from Pella, it was in a form of Doric Greek.

"Macedonia, of course, is a part of Greece".

Strabo, VII, Frg. 9 (Loeb, H.L. Jones).

Macedonians participated in the Olympic Games, which at the time were open only to Greeks. Not only are the names of several Macedonian Olympic champions known, but dedications to Macedonian Olympic victors were erected in Olympia itself and were described by Pausanias. The Macedonians had athletic competitions of their own, such as the Olympics of Dion, taking place at the start of the Macedonian month of Dios (month of Zeus), which also marked the start of the Macedonian new year. The city of Dion (Dium), where the games took place, was located at the foothills of Mount Olympus and was suitably dedicated to Zeus. Dion had an important temple dedicated to Zeus, just as Athens was dedicated to Athena and the Parthenon was her best known temple in ancient Greece.

[ ... ]

It does not require a genetic test for a special gene for one to prove they are Greek, as seems to be the current mind frame in FYROM. Greece is not a genetic marker but a culture and an idea, the idea Alexander spread to Asia, that the Byzantines brought to Europe, the idea of freedom of expression, of free education and free enquiry. That is Greece. It does not matter if one is Albanian or American, but apparently it is to Skopjians an unacceptable idea. Risto Stefov, in his recent exposition of his racist views in the American Chronicle, attempts to surprise the world (but surprises only himself) with a view that Athens and the Peloponnesus were inhabited by large numbers of Albanians during Ottoman times. Nevertheless these Christian Albanians rose together with the Greeks elsewhere for the freedom of Greece. That the Greek language survived in those difficult times in folksong, in the language of the Orthodox liturgy, in the Greek schools under special privileges permitted in Istanbul (such as the Great School of the Genos – Megale tou Genous Schole), and in regions enjoying special autonomy in Mani, Zagori, in later periods indeed also in Macedonia, and in parts of Asia and Europe, where Greeks also lived, worked and studied, that is to Stefov of no consequence. It can be ignored through the exercise of free will.

Moreover, if some of those who fought for the freedom of Greece were speaking Albanian, that to Stefov means that the Macedonians were not Greeks. So Greece perhaps is not a country today or perhaps it became free out of Turkish courtesy and those who died for its freedom were not meaning to fight for Greece after all…

Indeed, people of Albanian and Slavic descent fought among the Greeks for the freedom of Greece from the Ottoman yoke. The issue is not race, as it appears to the Skopjian mind that seeks a national purity in undiscovered "Macedonian" genes. Racial considerations were not what has determined Greek identity through time but the allegiance to the idea of freedom, of political freedom, of free enquiry and of social equality and the use of the Greek language as a medium for social and political life. In fact, a key element of the Hellenic liberation of historic Macedonia and its union with Greece was the loyalty shown by those Orthodox Macedonians who spoke a language they called po nashi ("our own"). It was a unique combination of Greek and Slavic that existed only in oral form and which continues to be spoken in villages in western Macedonia (in Greece) today. Macedonians who spoke either 'po nashi', Greek or both were critical to the liberation of the Florina and Kastoria districts in western Macedonia (in Greece). Alarmed at the infiltration of agents provocateur sponsored by the Bulgarian Kingdom and by a lack of support from a Hellenic Kingdom devastated by the disastrous war of 1897, individual po nashi-speaking Macedonians took it upon themselves to resist both the Bulgarian efforts of Risto Stefov´s ancestors to assimilate them and also resisted the oppression of the Ottoman Empire. Their efforts are today honored with memorials and museums all over western Macedonia.

Once liberated, Macedonia became an administrative district of the Kingdom of Greece in 1912. That the affiliation of the Macedonians was a Greek one is obvious from the fact that other areas of the Ottoman empire that fell to the other Balkan nations were named Blagoevgrad district (in Bulgaria), South Serbia and Kosovo in Serbia and variously for the other Balkan nations – but no other region was named Macedonia until Tito had an afterthought in 1945. However, an ethnicity cannot jump from one people to another – indeed their erstwhile mortal enemies – as a pretext for the annexation of their land. Neither can ethnicity possibly be moved from one people to another as an act of self-determination. To be a Macedonian is to be Greek.

"I shall not indulge in a lecture on the ancient identity of the Macedonians and on Philip II of Macedon and Alexander the Great, but the Greeks were historically correct in the campaign that they launched in the early days of the dispute…"

"Nor shall I engage in a lecture on the falsification of the history of Slavo-Macedonia since 1944, although that, too, has much hard factual content. I simply remind the House that Tito´s renaming of Vardar Banovina as the Republic of Macedonia in 1944 was a political statement."

Mr. Edward O´Hara of the British Parliament

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Beat movement redux or what would Jack do?

Gloria Bailen reports in The Boston Globe :

In 1946, Herbert Huncke told Jack Kerouac that being "beat" is the condition of being beaten down, or poor. But apparently, Huncke, a street hustler and drug addict, was also the eternal optimist: "To be down and out is to increase one's ability to see oneself clearly."

Could today's doomsday economics, cultural bankruptcy, and "why they hate us" value system signal an end to this reality-show era and the beginning of a newfangled "beat movement?" Sort of a Zen, hipster version of "Change You Can Believe In"?

Who today isn't questioning and redefining how to live our lives? We all want change, need change, but how much are we truly willing to change our mind-set and recalibrate our priorities? I realize, I'm one of the lucky ones. I don't personally know anyone duped in a Ponzi scheme, I still own my home (at least this month), and (as of today) still have a job, but fear is in the air, and I find myself reevaluating what's really important. Sometimes I wonder, WWJD? Well, what would Jack do?

During an interview for a documentary about Keraouc's novel "Big Sur," writer Aram Saroyan told me Kerouac was ". . . just like a little kid exploring in nature, and who else dared to do that because you had to have the big study and the big literary career and everything, and he just - he just wasn't buying it."

He wasn't buying it alright. In fact, he flat-out rejected anything that reeked of the conformity of the post-war, consumer society of the Eisenhower years. He never owned a car, he bought his lumberjack shirts and dungarees at the Salvation Army, and he considered Jello a major food group. Perhaps Kerouac was a bit extreme at times (and a preponderance of alcohol could have made "doing without" a tad easier), but aren't we on to something here?

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