Friday, July 2, 2010
The Kalki Avatar Prophecy from the Vishnu Purana
“There will be rulers reigning over the Earth who will think of themselves as modern and superior; they shall rule through leaders of nations, and these leaders shall be men of vulgar, corrupt disposition, having a violent temper, and ever addicted to falsehood and evil. They will inflict death on women, children and animals (through their wars and plagues); they will seize upon the property of their subjects; they will be however of limited and temporary power only as they will for the most part rapidly rise and fall in meteoric short careers; the lives of these leaders will be short, they will be physically and mentally ill from their insatiable desires and habits; and they will display but little of spiritual conscience.”
“The peoples of various countries, influenced by propaganda of their leaders, will follow the example of their leaders, and the Barbarians of materialism (in America and Europe) will be powerful in their patronage of the leaders of the less materially advanced countries; the more pure-minded and spiritual tribes (and social groupings) of their peoples shall be neglected and exploited so that those peoples shall be enslaved, suffer and perish in great numbers.”
“In all nations, wealth and spirituality will decrease day by day until the entire world will be corrupt, crooked and depraved. Then property alone will confer rank or high reputation; money will be the only object of devotion and dedication in people; the vicissitudes of physical sexual desire will be the only and fleeting bond of union between the sexes; women will be regarded as nothing but objects of sexual gratification; and falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation.”
“The natural Earth will be venerated only for it's mineral treasures (such as oil); nothing but the Brahmanical thread in India will be said to make a person a Brahman; external clothing will be the only distinction of the level of evolution of human beings; dishonesty instead of genuine productive work will become the short-lived means of subsistence for people everywhere; weakness and irresponsibility will cause more and more people to depend on charity and the state wherever they can; political menace, conformity and intellectual presumption will be substituted for education; immorality and personal corruption will be the new false religion; mere external bathing and showering will be the substitute for internal purification; easily breakable mutual assent will be the only marriage vow of parents for rearing children and divorce with broken homes will ever increase; fine clothes and bodily physique will be the only human dignity; and only water in far-away holy places will be sacred, for the local water will be increasingly polluted.”
“Amidst all the natural castes (or levels of human evolution) the strongest in wealth and brute force shall rule over all principalities and everything will be done in a faulty way. The common people, unable to bear the heavy taxation and other burdens of their greedy and oppressive governors and leaders shall take refuge in the remote countryside; more and more people will try to avoid polluted food, preferring to live on wild honey, herbs, roots and flowers, as well as the hunting of wild animals, fish and birds; but their poverty will increase as they are exposed to increasing extremes of freezing cold or hot droughts and fires from chaotic wind, sun and rain. All this will become so severe that in most regions the average lifespan of life will be only twenty-three years from all the deaths taking place from various conditions. Thus during the Kali Yuga Climax Period (just before the solar system enters the Ascending Dwapara Yuga) the general degeneration and destruction will accelerate to the point that the entire human race on Earth will be near annihilation.”
“When the spiritual traditions of the past are no longer practiced and the institutions of law and justice have become falsified and dysfunctional, the final closure of the Kali Yuga shall be imminent. At that time, a Self of the Divine Being who exists in His own innate spiritual nature in oneness with Brahman, and who shall be both the beginning and the end of all spiritual ways, and who comprehends all the spiritual ways and philosophies and sciences, shall descend upon the Earth. He will be a true Brahman (by inner nature) from Shambhala. He will be known as Kalki, chalky (Caucasian), endowed with all eight superhuman faculties, siddhis. By an irresistible Cosmic Force he will destroy the Barbarian rulers and leaders who are nothing but conniving thieves whose minds are devoted to evil. He, Kalki, will then re-establish righteous harmony upon the Earth; and the minds of those who survive the end of the Kali Age shall be awakened into higher unprejudiced awareness and be clear as crystal. Those men and women of that peculiar time of transition shall be as seeds of the emergent human race that shall ascend and evolve through the Dwapara and Treta Ages into a new Krita Golden Age.”
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Executive Privilege
The removal of General Stanley McChrystal from command provided President Barack Obama with the perfect opportunity to review the entire Afghan war strategy and declare it a failure. That he did not do so means that the war now belongs fully to the president and he, in typical Washington fashion, will insist on something that he can describe as "mission accomplished." The fighting will continue until Washington runs out of money and soldiers and is forced to craft together a phony peace settlement before leaving with its tail between its legs. The whole world knows that United States foreign policy has become little more than a pathetic joke, a fact that is also becoming increasingly clear to many Americans who do not live inside the Washington beltway bubble.
Even if the long war finally ends some day, there will be no revival of the liberties enshrined in the United States constitution and the protections afforded by the rule of law. This will be the most enduring legacy of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It hasn't mattered which party has been in power, the objective of both has been to establish an all powerful executive that can operate without any constitutional restraints. Since 2001, the creation of just such a central authority, fueled by an exaggerated fear of terrorism, has led to the dismantling of many of the freedoms that Americans enjoyed for over two hundred years.
President Barack Obama promised more openness and accountability in government but he has not delivered. He has failed to abolish or significantly amend the Patriot Acts and the Military Commissions Act, which together make it possible to detain anyone indefinitely based only on suspicion. Obama's Justice Department has defended the government's use of the state secrets privilege to avoid having to deal with pesky lawsuits from civil libertarians and whistle blowers. The Obama White House is, as a result, just as secretive as that of his predecessor. And all indications are that it will only get worse as the Supreme Court slides to the right on the issue of executive authority.
New Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has described retired Israeli Judge Aharon Barak as her "judicial hero." Barak is sometimes described as a liberal, but a review of his decisions reveals that he has always sided with the Israeli government in cases where arbitrary behavior by the state was being challenged. He also established the legal guidelines that enabled torture by the Israeli authorities. Kagan herself is of a like mind, favoring government prerogatives, executive privilege and secrecy even when there is no clear legal reason to deny access to information. In one recent case Kagan successfully argued that the Supreme Court should overturn a New York appeals court ruling to permit the release of photographs of foreign prisoners being abused by their American captors. The American Civil Liberties Union argued for the release of the photos while Obama and the Pentagon against. Kagan, in her role as solicitor general, argued that US military personnel would be endangered if the photos were to become public.
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How rules of physics in quantum world change when applied to classical world
Dartmouth researchers have discovered a potentially important piece of the quantum/classical puzzle -- learning how the rules of physics in the quantum world (think smaller than microscopic) change when applied to the classical world (think every day items, like cars and trees).
In a study published in the July 1 issue of the journal Nature, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Alex Rimberg and his colleagues describe one example of the microscopic quantum world influencing, even dominating they say, the behavior of something in the macroscopic classical world. They used tiny semiconducting crystals that contain two separate reservoirs of electrons to explore the different influences of both classical and quantum physics.
"We found that the motion of the crystals is not dominated by something classical like thermal motion, but instead by random quantum fluctuations in the number of electrons tunneling through the barrier; the fluctuations were the size of about 10,000 electrons," says Rimberg. "But the macroscopic world in this study also influences the quantum world, in that the vibrations of the crystal caused the electrons to tunnel in big bunches, more or less in sync with the vibrations of the crystal."
One major question in quantum physics deals with the connection between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. Rimberg explains that scientists know that microscopic objects such as electrons obey the laws of quantum mechanics, while macroscopic objects obey Newton's laws. Researchers are still learning exactly how classical behavior emerges from quantum behavior as systems become larger and larger.
Rimberg says that the difference in size between the classical and quantum parts of thesystem described in this paper is really extreme. "To give a sense of perspective, we could imagine that the 10,000 electrons correspond to something small like a flea. To complete the analogy, the crystal would have to be the size of Mt. Everest. If we imagine the flea jumping on Mt. Everest to make it move, then the resulting vibrations would be on the order of meters."
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image from http://www.spitting-image.net
