Camera's Eye

I got an email recently, reminding me about my old days when I took a lot of photos. I recently found a converter that make slides into digital photos and it made me want to go over some of the old slides that I took back in college and the ones that my father took when we were little. You tended to do slide photography in spurts. It was artsy. It also was a pain in the ass to set up the projector. I still remember what the hot little bulb in my father's projector smelled like.

My photographs have felt like more of a chore than a joy for a couple of months now. I like it when I'm really into it, and I use a blog called Animal Tales as a way to go back and make myself appreciate and connect with my own photography. Kind of like the old photo albums I used to make during college days and right after. My wife is trying to use this Publisher software she got for Christmas to make a book of our son's first year.

I remember what it was like to get into photography at first. I bought a camera when I first started making money, the summer I went to Army camp. I bought it in a little camera shop in Lawton Oklahoma, while I was down there for CTLT (Cadet Troop Leadership Training). Some of the first photos I took with it were the Wichita Mountains, which looked a lot like the big granite boulders in Elephant Rocks in the Missouri Ozarks.

We went out to Colorado after that, and I remember that I was willing to spend money on film and processing, so I took a lot of pictures. Part of that was wanting to get through a roll as fast as possible so I could see the pictures. I shot both black & white and color on that trip. I think I might have had an old Pentax K1000 camera that was my Dad's, or maybe I just switched back and forth with the one camera. I think people thought a lot more about what they were shooting when you took pictures with film. You spent a lot of time on composition, and you had complete control of the speed, etc. On the other hand, you take more risks with digital.

I had my first camera, a very nice Pentax ME Super stolen while I was in Panama and I didn't replace it. Partly, there was no access to good camera shops, and partly I was so pissed off at being in the military, and I was so disgusted with Panama and Panamanians, that I lost much of my love for taking pictures.

I'd have to say that I never really got back to that point. Having a bag full of camera equipment stolen has a freeing effect. You no longer have to lug around all the equipment. It's easier to pull a camera out of your pocket and shoot and then put it back.

I think the key to good photography is in the attitude of the photographer. If you have no stress and all the time in the world, it's easy to be a good photographer. If you are rushed, there doesn't seem to be time for it. You also have to be a noticer. You have to be aware of your surroundings in detail. You have to be able to crop with your mind, because no photograph captures what it felt like to be there. The eye of the camera limits your perspective. This might mean that the photograph is a fragment of what it was like to be there, but it can also mean that the camera pares off all the extraneous material and allows you to focus on something smaller and bring out all the details of some little microcosm that's right there next to you that you normally would not notice because it seemed insignificant.

This is an effect that I would get when I was riding my motorcycle. I could see every pebble on the road at 90 mph. The human brain can absorb a great deal of information, but mostly we are so distracted that we learn to ignore much of what we see.

The other thing that the camera does is that it freezes time. You don't experience life the way the camera shows it to you. In your life, the next thing happens to you, but there's no next thing in a picture, it's fixed in time. You can play with this in three ways. You can take more pictures after it to show a sequential series of events, you can play with the time - bulb photography - to put motion in the picture, or you can take pictures whose subject implies what's going to happen next. Sometimes freezing time is powerful. You can catch something being thrown or squirted, people right before they fall over, something that is moving fast is stopped, it's pretty cool. I like the way the National Geographic photographers will be in a forest looking at a small stream's waterfall and they will stretch the time out to a second and soften the flow of the water, that's always a cool effect.

I used to get National Geographic, Outside, and Photography and look to them for examples of the kinds of things you could do with photography.

I was recently sent a link for Flickr Hive Mind, which is a little like those magazines. I'm looking at the January 3, 2010 version, and I see several examples that would inspire me with their effects.

There's a cool landscape where ultra wide angle give the photo the effect you want, the photo looks tiny, but the subject within it is expansive. Those are the ones that really need to be blown up to be appreciated. I remember when I bought a good wide angle lens, it was 28mm or 23mm and it really expanded my ability to take landscapes and get up close to objects.

One of the pics has a bright backlight that causes a halo effect and silhouettes the rest of the photo. There's a soft focus photo, which evokes a mood for the photo in itself, and I remember learning about filters and hearing that you could get a clear one and smear it with vaseline all around the outside and leave a clear spot in the middle. I think I only did that a couple of times, but it's a really cool effect.

There's a picture of a girl who's almost pushing her hair back with a big handgun. She has a sad troubled look on her face, so it's easy to imagine what happens next. It looks like the moment before a suicide.

There's one where you get right down on the ground and it totally changes the perspective. I like that effect. Sometimes it's good to lower or raise your camera to get a different perspective. The adult human eye is almost always about 5' off the ground. If you raise that 3', your scope of vision expands surprisingly, if you lower it, you get the view of a pet or child. I like the fog and snow fog effects. It's also interesting sometimes to do things like chop someone's head off. You get the Rainman effect. The kinds of photos that a normal person would never take, but they force you to slow down and focus and look more carefully at the subject.

I like the effect of putting a mirror in the photo, there was one where I shot the rear view of a mirror looking out a window of a truck while I was going over a bridge over the Missouri River. You could see the waves on the surface of the river in the mirror, and it took me years to figure out that this was a reflection off the window.

One thing I've never been good at is staging photos. I like the redhead's hair stopped in motion, the man on the dock, woman lying in the snow covered road. I think you have to have a good relationship with the subject, and either have a subject with an ego that makes them want to be photographed, or someone that understands and appreciates what you are trying to achieve, with no ego or self consciousness about their looks.

While photography is powerful and interesting, it seems like there are too many distractions in today's life to fully appreciate the art. Then again, too many distractions and being rushed too much is also what stops you from taking good photographs in the first place. It's good to slow down and appreciate life.

Comic Conspiracy

Sometimes I wonder if the people that write comics have some kind of meetings where they all get together and decide to write about the same thing on the same day.

Actually, this has happened in the past, for certain causes. Veterans, Earth Day, and other causes sometimes get the concerted treatment by our Comic Authors.

Today was and example of when many of the writers come up with a similar idea, maybe not by agreement.

Today's comics had a common theme that nobody stays up until midnight for New Year's Eve.

Sometimes, it was the kids being allowed to celebrate at 8pm or 9pm, like little Billy from Family Circus, who thinks celebration is having a second chocolate milk. Other times, it was adults sheepishly admiting that they didn't even try to stay up.

This theme was as lame as Cathy's fake embarassment marks on her little comic face.

Weekends at Bellview

I heard a book review recently on Science Friday. The author was Dr. Julie Holland who wrote Weekends at Bellevue, Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psyche ER.

Somehow, this doctor lasted for a long time working one of the most bizarre environments a Psychologist or Psychiatrist could ever see.

I'm sure the book is full of specific strange and wacky stories, titillating anecdotes that fascinate the average "sane" person. However, the interesting part of the interview was the conclusions that she drew from her experience.

They discussed how some people would fake mental illness in order to get off the street. I've always heard that most of the homeless people you see out there are mentally ill.

She talked about how to maintain your personal mental health. There are three things she recommends to stay sane:
Go outside
Exercise
Meditate

This seems so common sense to me, that it makes mental health sound easy.

What was really interesting was when she started talking about drugs that could be used to enhance therapy. She just mentioned that she was interested in Medical Marijuana, but she did not really say what she thought the benefit to marijuana could be. She just talked about how the legal environment does not allow for any research.

She said that low levels of the drug MDMA (which is usually known as ecstasy) can be used to enhance psychotherapy. I found this very interesting, as you don't think of ecstasy as a drug with any medical purposes, given its club drug reputation. I have heard that it burns out the pleasure centers of the brain. She seemed to think that low levels of the drug lowered people's resistance to change and allowed them to be more receptive to suggestions.

She also said something else very interesting. She recommended that psychedelic mushrooms be used for people facing death. You always hear people say that if they knew they had a few days to live, they would take drugs or get really drunk or start smoking again, mainly because at that point, it just wouldn't matter. You don't think of the drugs as having any therapeutic effect.

All in all, it was a very interesting interview, but I have not yet checked into getting the book to read.

Ignorant Ignorance

I was talking to my wife the other day and complaining about people that I believed were being deliberately ignorant. My complaint was that people were proud of their lack of knowledge, they were bragging about not knowing anything about subjects. And when they were not, they seemed so self-assured and certain when they spouted off about subjects that they were not at all well-informed on. This did not seem to stop them from talking at length about it.

My wife's idea was that people that are stupid don't know it. She thinks that the people that you hear spouting ridiculous ideas (some of which are syndicated talk show hosts) have no idea how stupid they sound. She cited the often repeated idea that people liked George W. Bush because they thought he was a guy they could drink a beer with.

I see people being fed things that sound smart by talk radio, then parrot them back without checking to see if there is any basis of fact. They love to have sayings that sound like argument stoppers, something you couldn't possibly refute or contradict. Then they strut away like they just won a boxing match.

The problem with people with completely foolish ideas is that they can't be convinced otherwise. It does not good to argue or try to reason with someone when they have an idea in their head wrong. One of my favorite quotes is from Orson Scott Card's book Speaker for the Dead, "This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question."

The problem with realizing this problem of blindness is that it virtually assures you of being blind to your own stupidities as well as frustrated with others.

Liberal Bias

I get really tired of hearing people say that the news media has a liberal bias. These are usually people that watch Fox News. If they can't see that this news is so biased as to be inaccurate, you aren't going to convince them that news that they don't agree with or don't like to hear isn't "biased" as opposed to wrong. Actually, they aren't saying that news they don't like is wrong, they are saying it's being presented in an unfair way. So if it's correct, but we don't present it delicately, that's not a good thing?

In the "old days" newscasters worked by pulling information directly off the AP or UPI wire. I remember reading Bob Schieffer's autobiography, This Just In, and noting how he would read the AP and UPI wire for newscast material. They were directly wired in to the news at that time, reading the raw feed prior to reporting the news on the air. This is similar to what Walter Kronkite reported about his early career. I think that journalists as a group closer were to the source of knowledge back then. That they could easily study the raw material of news close to when it happened. I think this is something that has leaked out of news coverage over the years. I think what most newscasters are analyzing is opinion or speculation by the time they see it. That, plus the phenomenon of a short attention span means that no one really digs in depth to an event to the point where they can really understand it.

When you are closer to the source of information, you can't hide from reality. Raw data, without filtering or editing, will give a confused, yet complete picture of events. Sort of like looking at something giant from a few feet away, you can't see it clearly. A good newsperson crawls all over the giant subject, then puts it together in their mind by mentally stepping back from it. It takes time, and it's not easy, but you have to be hard working, persistent, and thorough.

Conservative talk radio and talk shows have always struck me as being fiery, but empty of real substance. Here, the goal is not to explain the truth with all its nuance and complexity, but to inflame passions and invoke a reaction. They are often deliberately ignorant, deliberately ignoring reality, both because they don't prefer it and because the truth is rarely satisfying in a simple, easy to swallow manner. The truth has contradictions and conflicting interests in it. People are not one dimensional, and neither are most news subjects. However, it is easier to pick a viewpoint, and crop the truth down until it fits neatly into this viewpoint.

It's not unlike recent interviews about how Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were said to come up with the justification to go to war in Iraq. They started with the idea that this is what they wanted to do. All of their efforts were to try to make reality bend to their ideals.

We're not asking individual newscasters to give up their viewpoints. Most people have opinions on everything from the big subjects of the day to the trivial news fillers like celebrity gossip. The real trick of a good newscaster is to explore a subject fully in a way that exposes the most relevant information about a subject, but leaves you ignorant of that newscaster's own opinion. Interestingly, Slate.com recently polled their reporters, around the time of the 2008 election and found that 90% of their reporters had liberal leanings. Yet I hear them criticizing Obama and other liberal politicians all the time and have heard defenses of everyone from Sarah Palin to most Israel supporters.

I don't think bias is the problem, I think it's reporting the facts that is the problem. When Stephen Colbert started the Colbert report, he admitted that he was spoofing conservative pundits in order to make fun of them. One of his most often repeated saying in his conservative Colbert Report persona is that reality has a liberal bias. If the facts don't fit your own pre-conceived ideas, they must have a liberal bias.

The Sinister Side of American's Boy Scout Ranger

I've always read the comic strip Mark Trail.

I'm not saying it's a high quality endeavor, and I'm not recommending it, I'm just saying it's funny because he tends to recycle plots and you can almost predict what's going to happen next.

My little brother used to be amused because I would deadpan very serious reports of what was going on with Mark, as if he was a real person of universal interest and appeal, meriting all of our respect and adoration. For some reason, he acted as if he rarely picked up on the irony of my little reports, which is what made them fun.

Now Mark has taken a serious turn to the dark side. It appears that Rusty, the orphaned son of an abusive alcoholic father that Mark adopted, has become stuck under their broken down station wagon (from 1973) on the beach with the tide coming in. That little dumbshit dog of Rusty's, named (appropriately) Sassy (or maybe it should be Sissy), managed to knock the massive station wagon off the jack, break the jack, trap Rusty, and not get squished himself. There is no justice in cartoon land.

With the tide coming in, Mark is racing against time to free Rusty and failing. This is a dark and disturbing storyline for the Mark Trail strip, especially with Christmas right around the corner.

Not interested in keeping things dark and dismal, he makes them more frustrating and forlorn when Mark breaks into a nearby building to get a jack to jack the station wagon off his poor soon to drown formerly abused adopted son. While breaking in, and promising out loud to come back and make the break-in right, the owner sneaks up on Mark and knocks him out with a massive cartoon wrench. Rusty is truly screwed, now. Sassy will probably run around in circles and yap annoyingly while Rusty desperately struggles to keep his mouth above water.

The strip at this time is moving toward a Cool Hand Luke kind of vibe where the hard core Sheriff can't wait to abuse Mark in prison. You just know that they will not believe Mark when he desperately tells them that his abused adopted son is going to die a horrible death, thus justifying his criminal endeavors.

How will it all turn out? That's easy, Mark, Rusty, Cherry, and Doc will be sitting around the cabin with happy smiles on their faces, eating a big Christmas turkey and shrugging off the intense danger they have just been in. No Post Traumatic Shock Disorders allowed! I would like to step in at this point and ghost write for them. I'm thinking that the dark and sinister vane could very well continue into the new year and beyond. Bwwwaaa Haaa Haaa!

Merry Christmas Mark Trail.

AGW "Scandal"

AGW is the acronym for Anthropogenic Global Warming, which means man-made global warming. Human induced climate change.

This is yet another scientifically observable phenomenon that is being disputed by people with no scientific background, but a lot of faith. In this case, it's faith in politics and the capitalistic system, but usually, it's religious faith that causes people to discount and disregard science.

This religious opposition to science has been going on for a long time. Galileo, after showing humanity the heavens with his spyglass, was rewarded with an investigation by the inquisition from the Catholic Church and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. This was because he proved that the Earth goes around the sun. The church may not have liked it, because they felt it contradicted the bible and would erode faith in religion, but their not liking it doesn't change the fact that the Earth goes around the sun.

The age of the Earth, Evolution, and the use of stem cells are other forms of science which have been under attack, (stem cells not so much because they didn't believe in them, but because they didn't like where they were getting them from).

There are many other examples of people disbelieving the science, such as when they first starting understanding germ theory and simply asked people to wash their hands before surgery and not use the streets as sewers. People believed that this could not possibly be true, and yet it was. In the case of sanitation, you wonder why people didn't just practice it for aesthetic reasons, and then find out by accident that it prevented disease. People were being willfully filthy as well as willfully ignorant.

Humans are influencing the climate. Of that, there is no doubt. Sometimes it's subtle, and some times it's profound, but our fingerprints are there to see. This time, it's political. In the name of protecting big business, while thinking they are protecting their "way of life" people are dragging their feet on making changes that we should be making for other reasons anyway.

Part of this movement to keep things the way they are is to try to discredit the scientists that are studying climate change. And in that vein, someone has hacked into the emails of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. Out of the billions of bytes of information pilfered from the accounts, they are holding up perhaps 3 or 4 emails and pointing to them and saying "See! They hold professional grudges and jealousies! They cannot be trusted! Every word they say is a lie and their entire professional body of work is in question!"

It just doesn't follow. First of all, what the hell is the University of East Anglia? I've never heard of them before, and if I was ever to walk around defending global warming, I wouldn't be quoting from the book of East Anglia. When chunks of ice the size of states are breaking off of Antarctica for the first time in recorded history, when the ice on Greenland is melting so fast that they project it will be gone in a few years, when the Glaciers in Glacier National Park disappear, I don't need some guy in England to tell me something's not right.

Go ahead and have a debate about the science, if you must. The Earth's climate is a huge system with many parts. How are we effecting it? What will be the magnitude of the impact? Is Methane more important than CO2? Go ahead and have that debate, but you better have a hard core science degree in your resume before I pay any attention to your arguments. We need oil is not the counter to increased CO2 emissions are warming the globe. Being a nationally syndicated radio host or television show host is not equal to even a 4 year degree in geology. The vast majority of scientists agree that we having an adverse effect on climate. That's somewhere around 99%, not 60% or 70%. The numbers are so overwhelming that it's no stretch to say "THERE IS NO DOUBT".

What's confusing is where this is going and what we are going to do about it. But if we can't get over listening to some ignorant crackpot defending capitalism and unable to see that his emperor has no clothes, we are truly in trouble.

Mensational

Now that some time has passed, it's not clear to me how I got into this mess.

My wife remembers it differently than I do. I thought she brought it up, she thinks I did. In any case, I was curious about what the test getting into Mensa entailed. I looked into it and got an email from the local chapter.

There are two parts to the test, the Wonderlic Personality test, which is used by recruiters and others screening job seekers. The NFL uses it extensively, apparently. They give you 12 minutes to answer 50 questions. Do the math (which I can't help but do) and you see that you have just over 14 seconds per question. It's a speed test, basically. The other half of the test is something that Mensa cooked up itself that is similar to the Standford Binet test that most people have heard about.

The top 2% are eligible for Mensa.

I put off doing anything for a long time. I thought that nothing good could come of this. If you fail, you feel like a failure, if you succeed, what if you get a big head and become arrogant? It seems like it would be better not to know. But I got very curious and the thought of taking the test would not go away.

I signed up and showed up for testing, paid my $40 and sat in the room at the local Junior College. There were two other people taking the test. It had occurred to me that if only 2% of the people taking the test are eligible, then my chances were 1 in 50 - not too good.

The people running the test were friendly and not as intimidating as I expected. They asked if we had any questions, and I asked mine about the 2%. They said that it's not 2% of the people taking the test, it's 2% of the general public. They said that 2 out of 3 people that take the test pass it. The comment was that you don't go take the test unless you already have a pretty good idea that you are qualified.

I took the test. The Wonderlic part was grueling. I only got about 35 or 40 questions done, and at one point, aware of the time on the clock, I kind of started to despair. It was a brief feeling, and passed quickly, but when they called time and I saw how much I did not finish, I figured that was it.

The rest of the test was interesting. He started by reading a story with no explanation as to why or what, then went into the test that was not related to the story. It ended up that the questions about the story came after the rest of the test. I had just heard something about this on a podcast, the test being how well you hold something in your mind after there is a stream of interrupting information that comes afterwards. Fortunately, I had just been reading about the subject of the story, so it was already fresh in my mind. Every time they threw a name into the story, I would flash a visual picture of it, sort of as a memory marker. I knew what was coming, so I almost feel like I was cheating. I knew all the questions an hour later when that part of the test came around.

The rest of the test consisted of a lot of comparison contrasts where you have a series of pictures and you have to pick the one that's best or doesn't fit with the others. The pictures were like illustrations taken from 1950's advertisements. Sometimes, you'd look at them and go "what the hell?" Other times it wasn't that hard.

After the test, they talked about what it was like to be in Mensa and go to the meetings. I wondered how political the people would be. Would they tend to think similarly, because they were too smart to be fooled by the spin? Politics comes and goes: are smart people just as divisive as the rest? I wasn't sure I wanted to know. They said they preferred to discuss books and movies and restaurants. That seems pretty smart to me.

It was a fun experience, taking the test, and I'm glad I did.

Did I pass? I told myself before I ever went that if I failed I would be too embarrassed to admit it, and if I passed I didn't want to brag. So I can't tell you. Sorry.

Live & Let Die

I've been thinking a lot lately about how death is a natural process.

It's one of those things that seems perfectly clear when you look dispassionately at people that you are not connected to, people that you do not know personally. We get very callous about death when it happens somewhere else to someone else.

But it's everybody's lot in life.

I've often thought that death is one of the things that makes life worth living. Knowing that your life is temporary makes it more precious and sweet. The only problem is that you appreciate this fact the most only when you are getting close to the time for yourself. If you're lucky, that will be because you're getting old. I've listened to older people complain about getting older and how bad it is, and I understand what they are saying, I just think there's something to be said for the alternative - it's much worse. Actually, I can't help but think that if you took care of your health, exercised your body and mind, and took the time to find pleasures in life and have some accomplishments you are proud of, then age isn't so much a time of defeat. Who isn't going to long for their bodies when they were at their peak of beauty and resilience in their youth?

I have ofter realized that while death is always mourned, it's also necessary to clear the population, make way for people born into the current age. Give the youth their chance. We humans have searched for the fountain of youth since the earliest records, back to the days of early pyramid builders. Perpetual youth is a bit of an oxymoron. What people want is a youthful body and a fresh perspective. With science, we might be able to give them the youthful bodies, but how do you restore innocence? After all, isn't innocence just another word for ignorance? Would you trade in all your experience for youth? I'm sure some people would. In a way, we do become more innocent as we age, for it seems certain that we don't store all our memories, some are destroyed or overwritten as more things happen to us. If you live long enough, you can read the books you read years ago, and it's almost as if you never read them before. Old acquaintances are that way too. Try going to your 20 year high school reunion and see how many people you don't remember at all.

Immortality would bring it's own problems. Would wealth concentrate into the oldest people's hands? Would they tend to get into positions of authority and never give them up? Would the population truly explode if people weren't dying? This would tend to make life cheap. If no one ever died naturally, you'd have to either stop having babies (a biological drive so strong, that I can't see how you could eradicate it) or let people murder without penalty.

I sometimes think that people feel that their life gets stale after a while. We don't seem as sharp, our senses are dulled and we become emotionally jaded. That might be natures way of making us want to die. In biology, there is a phenomenon called apotosis. Cellular suicide. It's used as a way to take a cell that is misbehaving, badly damaged, or developing incorrectly out of the game. The body or the cell itself sends a signal that makes the cell kill itself. You see parallels in human life. Some people commit suicide. It makes you wonder if some of them somehow know that they aren't met for life. If you knew that the people that commit suicide were destined for a horrible life of pain, you could understand why death might seem like a better alternative. Or, if you look at society as a body and people as individual cells in the body, it seems quite clear that society benefits from the removal of some individuals.

On an individual level, when it's someone you care about, it's a tragedy for a person to die. I wonder what it would have been like to live in an era where death was very common, like during the Civil War or the Bubonic Plague. Do you just get numb to all the death? If we lived in a world where people rarely died, would the occasional death seem that much worse?

Conflict Irresolution

Watching the news of the day and reading about history, you learn a few things about war and conflict.

Man seems to be an irredeemably warlike creature. If you look at it from a Darwinian standpoint, the group that is willing to be stronger and more aggressive will naturally win out over groups that want to be peaceful or be left alone. Evolutionary biologists would probably disagree with me, but natural selection and survival of the fittest seems to dictate that the most warlike people will probably prevail and pass on their genes. This is the thought that leads me to not be surprised that man can't seem to evolve past war.

History's examples of invasions and wars often follow a pattern. The winner tends to completely dominate or expel and sometimes wipe out the loser. The winner often moves in and occupies the territory of the loser. While history has many examples of the loser regrouping and rebuilding and challenging the winner again, there are also many examples of the loser being utterly destroyed. My favorite example is what the Romans did to the Carthaginians after the third Punic war. Although it is probably just a myth, it was said that the Romans sowed the ground with salt after defeating Carthage so that they could never even farm and support themselves in the future - they could never rise again. Another great example is what happened to the biblical era Assyrians. They had a brutal empire that wiped out anyone that opposed them. They made examples of their rivals in order to terrorize any other groups that might be thinking of rebellion. In the end, when they were finally defeated, the rebels wiped out all the Assyrians to a degree that 200 years later, the locals did not even know who used to live there. The Greek warrior Xenophon moved through and asked who used to live in the huge empty cities that were abandoned when the Assyrians were destroyed. The locals thought that it was the Meads, the memory of the Assyrians was so well destroyed. See Dan Carlin's Hardcore History about the fall of Ninevah.

The average defeated minor group could resent their losses all they wanted, but they were powerless to do anything about it. If they weren't killed, they were usually stripped of all their possessions, and often forced out of their homeland.

If you look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you see that this pattern was disrupted. The Palestinians were not allowed to lose completely. The peace plans after the various wars and armed conflicts usually ended in a "civilized" system that let the civilian population keep their lives and stay in their land. The problem with this is that the Palestinians are still around and still want to keep the conflict open. They will never be happy until the Jews are gone. The hatred has only grown through their defeat, giving a face to the cause and a people to be championed by other enemies of Israel.

Ironically, if the Israelis had been less civilized and more brutal, and wiped out or displaced the Palestinians completely, they would not have the population of people that sit in their midst, sowing discontent.

If you look at other examples, actually, I'm thinking of Germany and Japan after WWII. In that case, the central government was defeated completely and replaced with a foreign government to rule over them. So in a sense, what we Americans fought during the war, ceased to exist when the war was over. What was left was the people, and they were governed in a manner that let them understand and believe that their welfare was important to them. I wonder if that could have ever worked in the Arab-Israeli conflict?

Crystalline Memories

I was talking to a friend about memories. I find it interesting to think about how memory works, because it varies so much from person to person, and from memory to memory within one person.

I find that I access memory different that most people. Sometimes, when my brother asks me if I remember something, he describes it a certain way and it makes no sense to me. I find that he was focused on some aspect of what we were doing, and I was focused on something else. Often, if I can get a handle on how I would have looked at it, maybe where we were, when it was, or what happened before or after it, I can get a handle on the memory and draw it out.

Often, at that point, it still does not match my brother's memories, but I find that to be a separate issue. I believe that people often alter their memories, either from repeated retelling and embellishing, or from wishful thinking. We're all guilty of it.

I find that memories behave a little like an imperfection in a crystal. If you've ever held a natural crystal up to the light, you've noticed the internal fractures and imperfections in the crystal that are invisible from some directions and very clear from others. I think memories are like that, sometimes. They become clear if you approach them from one direction only, just like seeing those imperfections in a crystal.

I heard when I was little that all of your memories of everything you've ever done were still in your head. This begged the question of why you can't remember anything from the first 3 to 4 years of your life. Recently, I've heard that new memories overwrite the older memories, but I wonder if this is completely true. The science report I heard that said this also said that the brain is making new neurons throughout your life, which is something else that they did not used to believe, up until recently. I've also heard theories that memories are stored in a distributed fashion in the brain, like a holograph, which is an interesting notion. This means that individual neurons could be responsible for helping to build the image of many memories - a redundancy. It also means that a portion of the brain could be injured, but not knock out whole chunks of the memory, but just weaken the memories.

Regardless of how it physically works, I believe that sometimes capturing memories can only be done from a specific direction. I used to dabble in self-hypnosis when I was younger. I remember reading that you could use hypnosis to retrieve memories and to do age regression. Besides that, the books said that hypnosis could relax you and relieve stress. I think maybe there is a connection here. If you think of the memory as being most visible from one direction, the hypnosis acts as a way of shaking up your viewpoint. If you are not rigidly fixed in your viewpoint, if you relax and float around, you can let the memory matrix rotate until it lines up and lets you in. I think of it as freeing you up to see in all directions.

Another think I find to be interesting is the scope of memories. Sometimes we remember what we were doing or where we were over a long period of time. Then you get to zoom in to a particular event within that context, then looking closer, you may remember a particular instance. This is a nesting of memories. You have big groups of memories that are each loaded with many little memories. Going back to the crystal analogy, are you looking for a tiny fleck embedded in the crystal or a fracture that spans the entire crystal. Does it help to frame the memory in the bigger part it is embedded in, then zoom in and focus on a narrower and sharper portion of that megaevent?

I think this is a useful construct in thinking about how your memories are stored in order to help you recall things. I remember when I realized that memory could be as good or as bad as you wanted it to be. You can attempt to remember something and if it doesn't come immediately, you can say "I can't remember". This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you say you can't remember, you stop looking and it's true - you can't remember. If you say instead, "I can't think of it right now, wait a minute, it will come to me," that often works. I find that the memory is often there, I can feel its presence. Sometimes, it's a little like taming a skittish animal, when you relax or back away, it comes out and comes to you.

Devil in the White City

This book was recommended to me by my brother & wife. I must admit that their description was not what compelled me to read the book. It sounds like it would be boring.

The book is about how the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago was built and run with a concurrent thread about a serial killer that lived nearby.

There were not a whole lot of grisley details about how Dr. H. H. Holmes lured and killed young women into his strange hotel. There were enough to make it pretty clear what happened, but no gratuituous violence. It was not clear to me why he was doing the killings, but that's something I could say for most serial killers or sadists. The author speculates that the doctor simply enjoyed wielding power over his victims.

The more compelling story was the World's Fair itself. The strange mix of geniuses and hard driven individuals that worked on the design and oversaw the building of the fair was a compelling picture. On one hand, they struggled against a desire by government and the public to have an amazing fair, rivaling the recent one in Paris where the Eiffel tower was built. On the other hand, they could not get approvals and decisions from most of the major players until it was almost too late. An ambitious scope of building, coupled with a shortened time scale to get it done meant the project was a pressure cooker of stress for those responsible to get it built.

My favorite part of the story was the construction of the first Ferris Wheel, which was a real monster. It was so tall, it must have been horrifying to ride. Instead of chairs, the passengers were in cars the size of railroad freight cars.

The thought I'm left with, when I finished the book is that the Fair was kind of sad. Many of the people involved were ruined by it, and the country slipped into a depression by the time it launched. The entire site was burned down shortly afterward, and even the Ferris Wheel was cut up for scrap after a few years.

Most people don't even remember much about the 1893 World's Fair, but the book is peppered with all kinds of little details about firsts that the Fair brought on. This is the place that AC power finally beat out DC power, directly shaping the world we live in today. Smaller details, like the introduction of Juicy Fruit, Cracker Jacks, Quaker Oats, Cream of Wheat, and the hamburger are sprinkled through the book.

Mostly, there is the ghostlike picture in your mind of an entire artificial city painted white, with the knowledge that it was not going to last very long that makes the fairgrounds seem like a dream.

Camouflage by Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman wrote one of my most favorite books, The Forever War. This was one of the books that I borrowed from my Dad's stack of paperbacks when I was in Junior High or High School. He was a big science fiction fan, subscribing to Analog magazine in addition to reading lots of paperbacks. The Forever War was one of those books that really sticks in your mind.

When I saw the book Camouflage in the library, I picked it up without considering anything beyond the author's name. I started to read it and kept thinking that it was familiar. After the second chapter, I knew I had read it before, but it was vaguely different. I stopped worrying about the deja vu feeling and just enjoyed the reading.

The book is about two aliens that have been on earth for thousands of years. They were both shapeshifters. They could change their shape and appearance. The main character was followed from his background. Haldeman painted an image of a portion of a small cluster galaxy where the stars were close and orbits of planets were continuously disrupted. His speculation was that anything that survived and evolved in this environment would have to be supremely adaptable. They would have to be almost impervious to damage, able to survive on almost any kind of food, able to regenerate their bodies, and as such, immortal. In addition to all that, they would have to be able to go dormant for long periods of time. The main character had travelled through space for millenia and crashed into the earth a couple of million years ago. His ship was embedded under a volcanic flow on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and he had assumed the shape of a Great White Shark for most of that time. He emerged onto land right before WWII and took the shape of a man that he killed on the beach. While learning to be human, he acted very un-human. Eventually, he learned how to mimic human behavior and had some adventures, including being beheaded on the Baatan Death March.

While all this is going on, there is another shapeshifter who has been playing at being human much longer. He perpetually picks a bloodthirsty and powerful character to become, like a death camp guard in WWII. He suspects that there must be another being like him somewhere and sets out to find him so he can kill the competition.

The story comes to a strange climax, and I won't spoil it more than I already have. I liked the whole concept of how to sneak through society with the increasing use of fingerprints and retinal scans. It was also interesting how the main character had to follow to a certain extent the principle of conservation of mass. To be something bigger than he was, he had to absorb mass. To be something smaller, he had to shed mass.

Where did his consciousness reside? How do you retain memories over such a long period of time? These were questions that were not answered by the novel, but the fact that I am questioning the novel as if it was an actual account tells you something about the completeness of the worlds Joe Haldeman creates.

Flu Conspiracy Theory

Anti-Government paranoia and conspiracy theories are very common right now.

I got an email from a business acquaintence as follows:

Subj: Fw: Swine Flu Vaccine

[added message]
I have no intention of taking this crap. I don't like the idea of the gov't using me as a guinea pig to test out a totally unproven and untested vaccine.

[added message]
Hello Everyone,

This came to me from a co-worker of mine ...

The note below is from a nurse friend of mine -

[added message]
Hi Everyone,
I also know Dr. Llorente, and I respect her opinion and research. If you have any doubts about whether to get a Swine Flu shot or not, please take this to your own doctor and ask them about it. Be sure to read the preventative measures that you can take on your own to prevent or protect yourself from getting the flu.

Dear Friends,

The World Health Administration is planning to administer a new swine flu vaccination on. The vaccine is to be given by a series of three injections. The first injection will be for the purpose of turning off the recipient’s immune system. The second injection will be for the purpose of loading the subject’s bodies up with the re-conditioned deadly virus organisms. And the third injection will be to turn the immune system back on for the purpose of creating a cytokine storm, which unfortunately could lead to a likely lethal blow to some of the person’s bodies.

In 1915 the pertussis vaccine became available and was widely distributed. This bacterial poison from whopping cough, called pertussis coxon, so depresses the immune system that it is used in laboratories today to turn off nutrafils and reduce white blood cell counts. Then, in 1918, US soldiers who had received the pertussis vaccine were deployed to Europe, where they were given another publically unknown vaccine. And were then exposed to a Lucite gas, which is an arsenic compound, and phosgenegas, a chlorine compound. As a result, their immune systems kicked in with an expected cytokine storm, which unexpectedly killed many of the otherwise healthy young men. This is the 1,2,3 punch that may likely come again with the “swine flu” vaccinations.

We have been conditioned on a global level to think, during a time of influenza, external microbes are our enemy. But on the overall, we are not informed that our own immune systems are potentially more lethal than the flu itself. When the body detects foreign microorganisms indicating the presence of an infection, it can respond by overprotecting the site of that infection. In its hurry to get antibodies to the infection site, the body may release and manufacture too many cytokines, creating a cytokine storm that can be fatal. For example: during a lung infection, a cytokine storm can potentially block airways and result in suffocation. This is what is often referred to as a complications in a flu. Unfortunately this is rarely made clear to the unsuspecting public. In other words, it is not the flu that may be the killer, but complications that come about through the activation of a healthy immune system.

Virus infections make antibody and antigen complexes that the body uses to protect itself. Unfortunately these complexes can clog blood vessels or overload tissue, turning the body’s immune system against itself. In the past, during a W.H.O. Study, animals with immune system’s that had been turned off were infected with lethal viruses until every single cell in their bodies were in pregnated with the virus. These animals functioned like there was nothing wrong with them because their immune system’s were so depressed that they made no effort to fight the disease. In other words, there was no immune response. The W.H.O experimenters then took their lab animals and stimulated a cell-mediated immune response, and the animals died immediately from their bodies attacking themselves in the kind of cytokine storm associated with the 1918 Spanish flu. It should be noted, that the last time the flu vaccine was distributed for the swine flu, more people died of the vaccine response that from the actual flu.

Even if this described scenario isn’t fully copied in the current “swine flu”, the new vaccine is nevertheless made with an adjuvant that may contain a material poison, salmonella, or typhoid fever toxin, along with squalene. Squalene produces auto-immunity and eventually death or severe illness in a large number of people who take 20 it.

Squalene contributed to the cascade reactions known as Gulf War Syndrome that left many soldiers with severe arthritis, fibromyalgia, lymphadenopathy, photosensitive rashes, chronic fatigue, chronic headaches, ulcers, dizziness, weakness, memory loss, seizures, severe mood changes, psychiatric problems, multiple sclerosis, and lupus.

One has to ask the obvious question: Why would our world health organization (W.H.O) be willing to risk these potential conditions on the peoples of this world? This August over 12,000 children and pregnant women will become the first to receive this untested vaccine. It should be noted, that this is not even a test for safety, but a test for dose sizes. Directly thereafter the rest of the world will receive their intended doses. Unfortunately starting with the health care givers and the most vulnerable in our societies: the children in school. Already in the US, the governments have gone so far as to mandate a fund that will allow each state to go from home to home to distribute the vaccine if needed. This depending upon the degree of the outbreak.

It is vital that you are made aware, that it has been well documented that it is often that the virus is relatively benign in our populations until the flu vaccines come out. There seems to be growing evidence that the vaccines somehow contribute to the onset of our world pandemics. Could this be because not all of the virus is quelled in the vaccines. And that once it takes up residence in some bodies, it is to some extent contagious to others. In other world, the vaccine may actually responsible for creating a widespread exposure that would other wise have been minimal. This certainly conjures up suspicions of integrity, perhaps even indicating a premeditation of intent to expose the public. Perhaps the real issue we are all facing is; will we continue to allow the big Pharma industries and the health profiteers to inspire these kinds of illnesses, for what is obviously one of the largest financial boons of any known industry in the world today.

Perhaps the best thing for all of us to do is to simply stay steady with taking Vitamin C; at least 1000 mgs with every meal. Make sure this is a buffered form of C so not to disturb the digestive system. More than than !000 mgs of the more common forms of Vitamin C could cause digestive upsets. In addition, you should consider taking at least 5000iu of Vitamin D3 every day; D3 may be your best overall defense against the flu season. If you catch the flu you can even I crease your D3 inta ke to 12,0000 ius. Also, be sure to increase your omega 3, (1200 twice a day), through a high quality fish oil or krill oil. It is possible to take a flax omega oil, but it will effect your hormones, whaihc may not be as desireable in the overall influence of your bodies health maintanence as the other forms of omega 3. Avoid all other forms of oil as much as possible. It’s not possible to illiminat all other oils, just be careful to reduce them as much as needed for your boy to stay in balance. Selenium is also very helpful in fighting back viruses, and is oftn a primary deficiency in most people’s diets. Avoid refined carbohydrates and sugar as much as possible. Trans - Resveratrol (2000 Mgs) makes it very nearly impossible for flu cells to divide and replicate themselves in your bodies, so find a good source, from outside of Germany ay be best for those of y ou in Europe: take it daily. Green tea extracts are very helpful.

Wash your hands before eating, avoid contact with sick people and wash your foods. Keep your children at home during a flu outbreak and get plenty of rest. Avoid crowds during a flu outbreak as well. And stay away from other people if you have the flu.

So.. Once again...The main reason people die from the swine flu is not from the flu itself. It is from a cytokine storm that the body creates in defense its against the flu. Cytokines inflammations, known as storms or rushes, kill by filling the lungs with excessive fluids. Cytokines are the inflammatory defense messengers that may overwhelm healthy lung tissue. If it weren’t for this immune system response to the wine flu, it would be no more dangerous than any other ordinary flu.

If you feel you a re already exposed to the flu, then you should take curcumin, (2000 mgs) right away to avoid the cytokine storm, along with Quercetin, Resveratrol and Cat’s Claw (Uncaria tomentosa) All of which are both helpful in combating the flu, and decreasing the production of the cytokine

Avoid!!! - Elederberry, Kimchi, Kambucha, and Echenacia. Sweet cold lozenges may actually contribute in worsening the flu, because of the sweets or other ingredients. These my be helpful for ordinary low level flu’s but not for the swine flu, because they increase the chance of a cytokine storm.

Please be aware an pass this information on to others,
Love and light Aaravindha

Some of this information above can be also be researched for yourself in the internet. The above information is a co mbination of research from other articles written by aware health officials, as well as some of my own insights confirmed by my Saumedika practices. I have omitted actual sources because I have edited much of the information.

Elisa Zielinski
Regional Human Resources Manager
West Coast and Pacific Northwest Region
Mohawk Industries

Notice how the entry gets really wacky at the end, with the herbal remedy rift and the "Love & Light" reference. Here's my reply:

Here are the facts on the Swine Flu

This whole email about the troop vaccine from 1918 is bogus. Over 15 million people worldwide died of the flu, and only a small percentage were troops. Troops helped spread it through their travel, as WWI was ending and everyone was being shipped home.

They are only going to have enough vaccine for about 12% of the population. It won't be a matter of being forced to take the shot, most people won't have access to it. It will go to school aged kids mostly.

This strain is one of the most easily transmissible influenza strains there are. It takes very little to get it, mostly from hand contact. Mostly school children are getting it.

It's pretty mild, only kills about 1 in 10,000 (compared to 1 in 100 of the 1918 flu). They say it should kill about as many people as the annual flu kills. It seems to be displacing the annual flu for some reason. That is, people are getting this flu rather than the seasonal flu.

It doesn't mutate much, so far. The problem is that it's a completely new strain, so people have no immunity to it. They say it should be around for the next 10 years, and the scientists speculate that it should start mutating in the 2nd or 3rd year. Hopefully, by then, if it is nasty, a significant portion of the population will be immune. If they have already had it, that should render them at least partially immune. Some will already be vaccinated. By then production of the vaccines should be such that anyone that wants a shot can get one. Non-school aged children will probably never be forced to get it, but I could see them making it mandatory for school children, like the other inoculations. They say that if only half the school children get inoculated it really makes the flu harder to spread.

There are 2 shots. A second booster shot after a couple of weeks to give full immunity. There are no extra shots to shut down the immune system.

I figure if people believe immunizations are some kind of government conspiracy, they just don't take the shots. I wouldn't be against schools requiring parents to immunize their children, as the failure to do so puts everyone else's children at risk. My advice to people that are against childhood vaccines is to home school their children in their bunker.

Gulf War Syndrome was thought to be exposure to some stored nerve agent that was blown up in bomber raids that the troops were downwind from.

I rattled all this off the top of my head simply from listening to recent Nature and Science podcasts on the Flu. It’s not hard to stay informed, but it’s also easy to listen to nonsense and not double-check the facts.

When you get down to the point where the person is telling you to take herbal supplements, that should be a big red flag about the veracity of the rest of the information. Just remember that we never did really land on the moon, the mob assassinated JFK, the holocaust never happened, global warming is a government hoax, and there are aliens in area 54. Then crawl back into your bunker or leave incoherent comments on blogs and news postings. You are a proud patriotic American!

Taliban Office

Here's my idea for a new movie or TV show.

What would it look like if the terrorists were plagued with as much incompetence as an American Corporation.

Every time they tried to set up a hit, they'd end up in the wrong place without any bombs or explosives. There would be a leader that everyone secretly despised and a boot-licking jackass that everyone could barely put up with.

When their plots failed, they would put graffiti on a wall or something minimally destructive and equally lame and call it a major victory.

Feel free to use the idea, I just want to see it in video.