Jing-reed's Musings from Thailand

The News Today

The news you don't/won't see at 6:00 on your TV.

 

.

Mayan Calendar Update

The first thing to notice is that the illustration above is a MAYAN, not Aztec representation.  The Aztec calendar stone, which is usually associtated with this date, wasn't even around when the Mayan civilization disappeared from Mesoamerica.  Many people, even though they have access to the internet and its phenomenal search capabilities, never bother to check out the facts before coming apart at the seams.  As the proposed date of the end of the Mayan calendar approaches many people will begin to quiver, quake and shake in their fear-filled boots over the end of the world. 

What will happen on 12-21-2012?

"Here are the possible scenarios for 2012.

1. 2012 is a cataclysmic event. In this scenario, there would be martial law imposed on us, total chaos, a lack of medical attention, the possibility of no electricity or clean water, etc... For those who survive this "cataclysmic" event, what would the quality of life be like? Dismal at best.

2. 2012 happens and we receivea DNA upgrade. In other words, your thoughts will equal manifestations. That sounds great. You could manifest a cold beverage by just thinking about it! That could also create "Hell on Earth". Imagine the person who lives in fear or constantly has negative thoughts. For example, let's imagine someone constantly thinks someone may shoot him on any given day, so he packs a gun when he leaves the house. If thoughts become manifestations, every time he thinks someone might shoot him, then guess what? They will be!

3. Nothing happens and we all have a good laugh.

Chances are scenario three is most likely where nothing happens, yet the 2012 mania is incredibly similar to the negative sensationalism we see on the 6 o'clock news regarding how 2012 is presented as a cataclysmic event.

What can I do now?

There are certain precautions one should consider, such as whether or not to live near a major fault line or coastline and stockpiling enough food and supplies, just in case.

The simplest everday answer is to live your life as if scenario two were to happen. All that takes is being one with yourself and the world, along with thinking positive thoughts and doing good deeds for others. Live for TODAY! Live for the NOW! If nothing happens, then you've helped to make this world a better place and you've probably gained a lot in the world of spirituality.

Life is about making choices. The best choices are made after fully researching an issue and making a sound and responsible decision based on fact and sensibility, not hysteria. Somewhere in between, there's a happy medium!"


.

"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
.

Muslim Riots

Below is a comment from Muslim Riots and 14th Century Christians on Unreasonable Faith and which, to me, makes more sense than ALL of noise put out by the countless journalists and polticians that have commented on the recent Muslim riots.

The Vicar says:
September 14, 2012 at 3:52 pm

"We’ve explicitly invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and we’ve been fighting (mostly bombing, and usually with unmanned drones) in Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. (We bomb children and weddings and farmers. We even send the drones back a few minutes later to bomb the people who come to help cope with the explosions of the initial bombs.) We stand with Israel even when they invade their neighbors and despite their treatment of the Palestinians. Our politicians are saber-rattling against Iran, and we’re already flying drones into their airspace and hacking their computers. Everywhere we go, we loot and destroy and prop up despicable dictators. We don’t invade North Korea, we don’t get into conflicts with China, when there are riots in the west we don’t send in troops, but we take every opportunity to send troops or drones or both to Islamic countries. The Muslims look at all that, and they conclude that we’re targeting Islam.

For the most part they’re wrong — although I have no doubt that there’s a fairly large segment of the U.S. which really does want to kill Muslims specifically. But our case that we aren’t deliberately targeting Muslims would be a lot stronger if we actually came out and told the truth: “we will do anything to make sure that a few large companies control natural resources, we’re racist against anyone who isn’t caucasian, and we want to keep poor and powerless people that way so they aren’t a challenge. Your countries have lots of resources and are largely filled with poor, brown-skinned people. Your religion is just a coincidence.”

Of course, we could also stop bombing, really pull our troops out of other countries (where they shouldn’t be in the first place), and in general stop trying to control the entire world. But I’m trying to stay realistic."

.

Jason Silva - "Turning into Gods"

Is it time to take a break from the bullshit of the current political conventions  [both sides] and exercise your brain?


"The Singularity Summit is the premiere futurist conference (it's happening in New York City on October 15 and 16).

Among the speakers is Current TV's Jason Silva, the director of the forthcoming documentary, Turning into Gods. Taking a page from Timothy Leary, the folks behind the Whole Earth Catalog, Ray Kurzweil, and other visionaries, Silva's work looks at the ways in technological progress is allowing humans to direct their own evolution. And the ways in which prohibitionists of all stripes push back on new ways of being human.

"People have always sort of been scared of new technologies," says Silva. "But in the end we assimilate them and they improve the quality of our lives."


Jason Silva on Awe

.

 

Jason Silva on "Turning Into Gods"

.

 

RADICAL OPENNESS with Jason Silva for TEDGlobal

 

Cloud Atlas

This week the New Yorker presents a lengthy profile of Lana and Andy Wachowski. those award winning filmmakers who produced the Matrix films, and the forthcoming 'Cloud Atlas'.


Beyond the Matrix

"The Wachowskis travel to even more mind-bending realms.

On the monitor screen, Tom Hanks’s eyes, in extreme closeup, flickered through a complicated sequence of emotions: hatred, fear, anger, doubt. “Cut!” Lana Wachowski shouted. The crew on Stage 9 at Babelsberg Studio, near Berlin, erupted in a din of professional efficacy, preparing for the next shot, while Hanks returned to his chair to sip coffee from an NPR cup. Lana and her brother, Andy, who are best known for writing and directing the “Matrix” trilogy, were shooting “Cloud Atlas,” an adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 best-selling novel of the same name.

The novel has six story lines, and the Wachowskis and their close friend the German director Tom Tykwer, with whom they’d written the script, had divided them up. They were shooting at Babelsberg, using the same actors, who shuttled between soundstages, but Tykwer had an unplanned day off. Halle Berry had broken her foot while on location in Mallorca and he needed to wait for her full recovery to shoot a chase scene. And now there was another problem: the actor Ralph Riach, who played a small but crucial role in one of the story lines that Tykwer was working on, had fallen ill and been hospitalized, and his state was progressively worsening. Tykwer had been on the phone with Riach, and the prognosis was, at best, unpredictable. Tykwer, with a bad cold and a large scarf around his neck which resembled a Renaissance millstone collar, had stopped by the Wachowskis’ set to discuss the situation. . . . . "

...“Cloud Atlas’ is a twenty-first-century novel,” Lana said. “It represents a midpoint between the future idea that everything is fragmented and the past idea that there is a beginning, a middle, and an end.” As she spoke, she was screwing and unscrewing two halves of some imaginary thing—its future and its past—in her hands. If the movie worked, she continued, it would allow the filmmakers to “reconnect to that feeling we had when we were younger, when we saw films that were complex and mysterious and ambiguous. You didn’t know everything instantly.”

The film opens on October 26.

.

Doomsday Preppers

Doomsday Has Its Day in the Sun

"...the National Geographic Channel introduced “Doomsday Preppers,” a reality series about people who are stockpiling, arming and otherwise preparing for some kind of apocalypse. Last week it was the Discovery Channel’s turn. Its new “Doomsday Bunkers,” on Wednesday nights, is about Deep Earth Bunker, a company that builds underground getaways for the types of people seen in “Doomsday Preppers.”

Watch either show for a short while and, unless you’re a prepper yourself, you might be moderately amused at the absurd excess on display and at what an easy target the prepper worldview is for ridicule. Watch a bit longer, though, and amusement may give way to annoyance at how offensively anti-life these shows are, full of contempt for humankind. . . . .

But then what is the attraction of continuing to live in a world that forces people to cower in an underground box and spend all their time fending off those who want their freeze-dried apricots?

Even more seriously, what is the attraction of continuing to live in a world that will almost certainly not have television or the Internet, depriving doomsday types of the shows and Web sites that fuel their paranoia and sell products exploiting it?

.

The 'GREAT ATHEIST SCHISM' of 2012

Is American atheism heading for a schism?

"A new movement, Atheism+, has prompted non-believers to spit venom at one another rather than at true believers

In the passionate world of American atheism, the venom usually directed at believers has now been turned against the wrong kind of atheists.

The cause of this freethinking furore? A new movement called Atheism+. According to its website, "Atheism+ is a safe space for people to discuss how religion affects everyone and to apply skepticism and critical thinking to everything, including social issues like sexism, racism, GLBT issues, politics, poverty, and crime."

A+ was born when Freethought blogger Jen McCreight (the mind behind Boobquake) made a passionate call for a "third wave" of atheism, one that extends atheist activism into progressive politics and calls for a part of the movement to be one where women can exist free from the harassment that has plagued women publicly involved in the atheist movement.

The founders of Atheism+ say clearly that "divisiveness" is not their aim, but looking through the blogs and voluminous comments in the two weeks since A+ was mooted, trenches have been dug, beliefs stated, positions staked out and abuse thrown. A dissenting tweeter is "full of shit", while, according to one supporter, daring to disagree with Atheism+'s definition of progressive issues and not picking their side makes you an "asshole and a douchebag".  "


Too funny for words, but perhaps inevitable. 
Personally I don't know how any 'American' can claim to be an atheist, since everytime an American uses any of their currency, from $ bills to coins, it boldly proclaims "In God We Trust".

And speaking of schisms....

.

A. Dvořák - Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95

Popularly known as the 'New World Symphony', this work was composed by Antonín Dvořák in 1893 during his visit to the United States from 1892 to 1895. It is by far his most popular symphony, and one of the most popular in the modern repertoire.

It is generally considered that, like other Dvořák pieces, this work has more in common with folk music of his native Bohemia than with that of the United States. Leonard Bernstein averred that the work was truly multinational in its foundations.

It never fails to remind me of the beautiful music and lovely folk tunes of my native Slovakia.


A. Dvořák - Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 "From the New World - Z nového světa" " - Sinfonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks     Lorin Maazel, conductor

     I.      Adagio -- Allegro molto
     II.     Largo
     III.  Scherzo. Molto vivace -- Poco sostenuto
     IV.   Allegro con fuoco

.