Jing-reed's Musings from Thailand

"An Enemy of the State"

The Secret Sharer  [The New Yorker]
Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?

"On June 13th [2011], a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state.  . . . . . .

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, says of the Drake case, “The government wants this to be about unlawfully retained information. The defense, meanwhile, is painting a picture of a public-interested whistle-blower who struggled to bring attention to what he saw as multibillion-dollar mismanagement.” Because Drake is not a spy, Aftergood says, the case will “test whether intelligence officers can be convicted of violating the Espionage Act even if their intent is pure.” He believes that the trial may also test whether the nation’s expanding secret intelligence bureaucracy is beyond meaningful accountability. “It’s a much larger debate than whether a piece of paper was at a certain place at a certain time,” he says."

Back in the early days of the 'Cold War' I worked for one of the many satellite organizetions which furnished the NSA with much of its classified communications information.  It was a fascinating job, but even back then I was aware of the possible excesses of this national security organization.

 

   U.S. v. Whistleblower Tom Drake [60 Minutes]

 

 

   C2CAM September 16 2012 - NSA Whistleblower

 

 

And it goes even deeper — when ANYONE who posts on the internet is a possible 'Enemy of the State'.

   Controlling the Web
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All the Time in the World

All the Time in the World  [Rachel Sussman]

"What a charred ancient tree can teach us about impermanence, deep time, and our place in the universe.

The tree had been on fire for over a week before anyone noticed. The Senator, one of the oldest Cypress trees in the world, was killed when a smoldering ignition from an errant lightning strike slowly transformed it into a towering chimney and fuel source in one. Or maybe it didn’t happen like that at all. Perhaps it was an errant cigarette, or a sinister match strategically placed in its hollow berth. The mystery endures, but the fact remains: on January 16, 2012 The Senator collapsed and died, engulfed in flames. It was 3,500 years old. . . . ."

Rachel Sussman Photographs

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The Mysterious Beetle Mandala

Several years ago a friend, knowing of my interest in the mandala art form, sent me an unusual image she had encountered on the internet [though she couldn't remember exactly where]. A 'mandala' composed of bugs, specifially 4 beetles and 2 moths with some Runic characters around the outside rim.  A handsome composition, but I always wanted to know more about who made it, and something about the significance. 

Yesterday I discovered a new feature of Google's Image Search - namely that you can paste an image into the search bar and find all instances of that image that occur on the internet.  Felt that perhaps I could finally get more information on this attractive, and mysterious image.

Including my own posting in 2007 there were  11 sites that had used this unusual image.  Only two in English, four in French, one each in Romanian, Russian, Chinese, Hindi and Greek.   And  with the exception of my site and the one in Russian [devoted to butterflies and moths], all of the various sites included the image primarily because of the Runic inscription.

  

So, despite my search, I still don't knowch more than I did before

Music, Music, Music . . .

What was your very first memory in this lifetime?  That very first thing that was so important that it became a permanent part of your life?

My first permanent memory was that of sitting on the piano bench next to my father and watching the piano keys as he produced the most incredible sounds imaginable on his treasured Bösendorfer Piano.  This was in Bratislava, Slovakia and I was around 4 years old.  I don't recall what he was playing, probably something by his beloved Mozart, but I do remember the wonderful sensation that the music produced and which has lasted until the present day, some 70+ years later. 

Currently more than half of my many gigabyte computer harddisk is filled with music, primarily classical but the musical genres that I enjoy, on a daily basis, are quite broad and far reaching with lots of traditional world music.  As an adolescent I became a pest in the only record store in the smallish California town where I lived.  As a university student I joined every record club which existed. 


Today I was at Unreasonable Faith, a web site that I occasionaly visit and it had two video versions of a beautiful timelapse view of the Swiss Alps.  The original video had as the background music some smaltzy contemporary European music, then a YouTuber had utilized the same images, but had substituted the second movement from Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5. 

We all know that enjoyment of any music is very subjective, but for my personal taste the Beethoven version was far superior.  I immediately went to my musical selections stored on my computer since I knew that I had a recording of Claudio Arrau playing this piano concerto, but soon discovered that it seemed to have disappeared. 

So I rushed over to BeeMP3, did a quick search, found it, and downloaded.  [For many years I belonged to eMusic, and spent untold hours borwsing their enormous catalog and downloading selectons, but we parted ways last year  .  .  . ]

Then, I happened to remember a record which I had been inordinately fond of as an adolescent, 'Tchaikovsky Songs', sung  by a Russian soprano, Galina Vishnevskya.   I had played one selection, 'None But The Lonely Heart' every day for weeks since it appealed to my melancholic Slavic soul,  and then the record had just disappeared.  Eventually found it in my mother's bedroom, and she tersely explained, "My ears needed a rest".

Was surprised today to discover that YouTube has posted the original Vishnevskaya. What Wikipedia is to knowledge, YouTube has over the years fulfilled the same purpose as a world depository of music.

Galina Vishnevskaya -Tchaikovsky,  None But the Lonely Heart - Нет, только тот, кто знал. . .  
    None but the lonely heart
    Can know my sadness
    Alone and parted
    Far from joy and gladness...

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Zombie Cockroaches

 

The Wisdom of Parasites

"I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book  with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa.

As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it’s time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg’s host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach’s mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach’s exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently uses sensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach’s brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it–in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex–like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp’s burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon–which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative. . . . . . "

Many comments on this Discovery Blog site:

3.   theo Says:

"Creationists are positively allergic to parasitism stories. Heck, they have a hard time dealing with predator-prey relationships.

Why? Because it raises the question of whether a loving God would create such arbitrary animal misery, when alternatives are clearly possible. In a perfect world, old sheep would lay down and die, for wolves to eat. Nothing, it’s safe to say, would be paralyzed, brain-hijacked, then eaten from inside out

The usual dodge when it comes to human misery is to wave hands and mutter something about free will being so good that it outweighs all the suffering. It’s terrible theology; but more importantly, it doesn’t apply at all to animals, who (theologically speaking) don’t have souls or free will."

2012, or Everybody Loves a Good Disaster

In case you weren't aware of all the advertising hype that has proceeded the opening of the film 2012, it did indeed screen on this last Friday [Nov. 13].  It had screenings world wide, raking in a ton of money, and opened here in Chiang Mai at the local cineplex, although I must admit that I haven't yet seen it. The director of the film, Roland Emmerich, has been called Hollywood’s “Master of Disaster”, and from the trailers it looks like he has a real winner this time.

In 2012, Woody Harrelson plays Charlie Frost, a wacky Cassandra howling that the end is near. This is wonderful casting since Woody Harrelson is often just as bizarre and wacked out as some of the characters he plays. 

Now in a stoke of genius Sony's marketing division preceeded the opening of the film by giving Charlie a fake blog "This Is The End" [actually quite fun to read, and even has a 'down home' recipe for pickles], complete with archives, and Charlie also has his own YouTube channel with something like 20 uploaded videos. Soren Ulfert, a scientist in the film, who is connected with the Institute for Human Continuity,  also has his own YouTube channel.  And of course they all have twitter and Facebook accounts.  The thin line between reality and fantasy is constantly being blurred....

     Welcome to the Apocalypse