1/31/10
1/28/10
REST IN PEACE HOWARD
The 'largest lie,' wrote hisorian Howard Zinn who died yesterday at age 87, is that 'everything the United States does is to be pardoned because we are engaged in a ‘war on terrorism.’
“This ignores the fact that war is itself terrorism, that the barging into people’s homes and taking away family members and subjecting them to torture, that is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less security.”
In an article published previously in “The Long Term View” magazine of the Massachusetts School of Law, Zinn said that in the Fallujah area of Iraq Knight Ridder reporters found there was no Ba’athist or Sunni conspiracy against the U.S., “only people ready to fight because their relatives had been hurt or killed, or they themselves had been humiliated by home searches and road stops.”
Zinn, popularly known as the people’s historian, pointed out that the U.S. may have liberated Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein but afterwards it became Iraq’s occupier. He noted this is the same fate that befell Cuba after the U.S. liberated it from Spain in 1898. In both nations, the U.S. established military bases and U.S. corporations moved in to profit from the upheaval.
Zinn recalled the words of then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld before the NATO ministers in Brussels in June, 2002, “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” of weapons of mass destruction. “That explains why this government, not knowing exactly where to find the criminals of September 11, will just go ahead and invade and bomb Afghanistan, killing thousands of people, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes, and still not know where the criminals are,” Zinn wrote.
“This explains why the government, not really knowing what weapons Saddam Hussein is hiding, will invade and bomb Iraq, to the horror of most of the world, killing thousands of civilians and soldiers and terrorizing the population,” he continued.
The historian pointed out that even if the U.S. experienced few battle casualties in its invasion of Iraq, casualties would mount afterwards in the occupying army from sickness and trauma, which took a high toll both in Viet Nam and after the Gulf War. In the 10 years after the Gulf War, 8,000 veterans died and 200,000 veterans filed complaints about illnesses incurred “from the weapons our government used in the war.”
Zinn predicted accurately that once the American public realized President Bush had lied to them about Iraq they would turn against the government. “When it loses its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, its days are numbered,” he said of the Bush administration.
Writing of his personal feelings, Zinn said, “I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has taken over… I wake up thinking this country is in the grip of a President (George W. Bush) who was not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth, the water, the air. And I wonder what kind of world our children and grandchildren will inherit.”
Zinn called on his readers “to engage in whatever nonviolent actions appeal to us. There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress. We find ourselves today at one of those critical points.”
The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover is a non-profit law school purposefully dedicated to the education of students from minority, immigrant, and low-income households who would otherwise not have the opportunity to obtain a legal education. Zinn’s article in The Long Term View first appeared in The Progressive magazine.
-Sherwood Ross
1/27/10
1/25/10
1/24/10
EXAMPLE OF ADVANCED OPTICAL PROWESS
The visible spectrum is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to (can be detected by) the human eye. Electromagnetic radiation in this range of wavelengths is called visible light or simply light. A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from about 380 to 750 nm. In terms of frequency, this corresponds to a band in the vicinity of 790–400 terahertz. A light-adapted eye generally has its maximum sensitivity at around 555 nm (540 THz), in the green region of the optical spectrum (see: luminosity function). The spectrum does not, however, contain all the colors that the human eyes and brain can distinguish. Unsaturated colors such as pink, or purple variations such as magenta, are absent, for example, because they can only be made by a mix of multiple wavelengths.
Visible wavelengths also pass through the "optical window", the region of the electromagnetic spectrum that passes largely unattenuated through the Earth's atmosphere. Clean air scatters blue light more than wavelengths toward the red, which is why the mid-day sky appears blue. The human eye's response is defined by subjective testing (see CIE), but atmospheric windows are defined by physical measurement.
The "visible window" is so called because it overlaps the human visible response spectrum. The near infrared (NIR) windows lie just out of human response window, and the Medium Wavelength IR (MWIR) and Long Wavelength or Far Infrared (LWIR or FIR) are far beyond the human response region.
Many species can see wavelengths that fall outside the "visible spectrum". Bees and many other insects can see light in the ultraviolet, which helps them find nectar in flowers. Plant species that depend on insect pollination may owe reproductive success to their appearance in ultraviolet light, rather than how colorful they appear to us. Birds too can see into the ultraviolet (300–400 nm), and some have sex-dependent markings on their plumage, which are only visible in the ultraviolet range.
1/19/10
PARADIGM SHIFT
I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justic for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black -- considering the evidence their evidently is that there were white people who were responsible -- you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization -- black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rathe difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love -- a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we've had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.
Let us dedicate to ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
Robert F. Kennedy
1/14/10
1/13/10
A MESH OF TECHNOLOGY AND MYSTICISM
There is a continuum of practice and belief going back in time more than two thousand years that runs parallel to the mainstream histories of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the West, a continuum of magic and sorcery: a belief in the possibility of the manipulation of hidden powers by ordinary mortals, provided that they only have the technological information at hand, and the right equipment. It is actually a very scientific attitude towards understanding and working with cosmic principles, contrary to the opinions of skeptics and historians. It is a technology that was designed to extend the capability of a person's five normal senses into a sixth realm: a technology that acted as a machine to fine tune the powers of the mind. This technology is so consistent in its general terms and practices that a magician of today can look upon the texts and instruments of his or her counterpart of two thousand years ago and figure out what they were up to. Furthermore, the systems are so internally consistent that we can duplicate these rituals exactly in every way and gradually come to an understanding probably far in excess of what Joseph Smith could be expected to have, as the studies of psychology, psychobiology, and biochemistry were nowhere near as advanced then as they are today. Whereas modern histories of science grudgingly and somewhat sarcastically give credit to the alchemists of old for having created the fundamentals of chemistry, no one credits the ceremonial magicians for their contribution (however, accidental) to modern knowledge concerning psychology and psychobiology.
-PL
1/11/10
1/7/10
1/6/10
KENTUCKY: THE DARK AND BLOODY GROUND
This is a book about evil. Evil ordinary and extraordinary. Evil vigilant. Evil militant. Evil triumphant. Evil ancient and evil modern, violent and discrete, beautiful and obscene. Evil in the face of God, of man and woman, of children. The evil of vainglorious men and their hollow minions. Evil unseen and fierce. The evil of bodybags and spent cartridges. Of mass graves and crematoria. Of crimes against nature and against heaven. The evil of death and derangement, of murder and madness, of suicide and satanism. This is the evil that is older than humanity, but reflected in our children's eyes. The evil we can't grasp, cannot punish, cannot destroy. The evil that contaminates souls as well as bodies, nations as well as people. This is a book about the evil spirits that haunt America. About the sinister forces that rule the world of our dreams, our nightmares, and our sober, trembling, waking reality.
1/4/10
1/2/10
A REAL PEOPLE PERSON VOL. 1
Donald Rumsfeld was CEO of Searle, a conglomerate that manufactured aspartame. For sixteen years the FDA refused to approve it, not only because it's not safe but because they wanted the company indicted for fraud. Both U.S. prosecutors hired on with the defense team and the statute of limitations expired. They were Sam Skinner and William Conlon. Skinner went on to become secretary of transportation, squelching the cries of the people who were now having seizures on this seizure triggering drug, aspartame, and then chief of staff under President Bush's father. Some of these people reached high places. Even Supreme Justice Clarence Thomas is a former Monsanto attorney. Monsanto bought Searle in 1985, and sold it a few years ago. When John Ashcroft became attorney general in 2001, Larry Thompson from King and Spalding Attorneys which was another former Monsanto attorney became deputy under Ashcroft. However, the FDA still refused to allow NutraSweet on the market. It is a deadly neurotoxic drug masquerading as an additive. It interacts with all antidepressants, L-dopa, Coumadin, hormones, insulin, all cardiac medication, and many others. It also is a chemical hypersensitization drug, so it interacts with vaccines, other toxins, other unsafe sweeteners, like Splenda that has a chlorinated base like DDT and can cause autoimmune disease. It has a syenergistic and additive effect with MSG. Both being excitotoxins, the aspartic acid aspartame, and MSG, the glutamate, people were found using aspartame as the placebo for MSG studies, even before it was approved. The FDA has known this for a quarter of a century and done nothing even though it's against the law. Searle went on to build a Nutrasweet factory and had $9 million worth of inventory. Donald Rumsfeld was on President Reagan's transition team and the day after Reagan took office he appointed an FDA commissioner who could and would approve aspartame.
