quarta-feira, 13 de outubro de 2010

Veel Textielafval is Geschikt voor Hergebruik

11 oktober 2010


Wanneer niemand meer oude kleding zou weggooien bij het huisvuil, zou Nederland 425 miljoen kilo minder aan CO2 uitstoten. Die besparing is ongeveer gelijk aan 2.250 miljoen autokilometers, oftewel: bijna 56.000 keer de aarde rond. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van Eureco in opdracht van Vereniging Herwinning Textiel en Agentschap NL. Van de 124 miljoen kilo textiel die elk jaar in Nederland wordt vernietigd, is 65 procent nog geschikt voor recycling.

Vele instanties, waaronder het Ministerie van VROM, diverse modelabels, Texperium en Agentschap NL, werken aan het beter benutten van gebruikt textiel. Hetzij door gebruik te maken van duurzame materialen, hetzij door te onderzoeken hoe textiel gerecycled kan worden, hetzij door oude textiel in te zamelen.

Op dat laatste punt gaat het nog vaak mis, zo blijkt uit dit onderzoek: Dankzij de textielcontainers die in verschillende gemeenten staan en de inzamelingsacties die worden georganiseerd is de hoeveelheid textiel die wordt ingezameld weliswaar sterk gestegen, maar die bedraagt nog steeds minder dan de helft van de totale hoeveelheid textiel die wordt weggegooid. De hoeveelheid textiel die met het restafval wordt afgevoerd vertoont sinds 1993 een continue stijging. Gemiddeld bevat het huishoudelijk afval 3 tot 4 procent textiel. De onderzoekers vonden in 40 procent van de steekproeven zelfs vuilniszakken die helemaal vol zaten met bruikbare kleding.

De resultaten zijn afkomstig uit een onderzoek naar restafval. Met een sorteeranalyse is gekeken naar de kwaliteit van de textiel die mensen weggooien met het restafval. Uit de analyse blijkt dat 35 procent van het textiel geschikt is voor hergebruik als kleding. Een klein deel, 10 procent, is geschikt voor verwerking in linnengoed en 20 procent van het weggegooide textiel zou kunnen worden gerecycled, bijvoorbeeld door de textielvezels opnieuw te gebruiken in nieuwe producten.


Related


Source: http://www.fashionunited.nl

sexta-feira, 8 de outubro de 2010

Mental Muscle: Six Ways to Boost Your Brain

October 2010
by Helen Thomson

Magazine issue 2780


Brain training games won't make you smarter – but a dose of blue light or an electrical shock just might 

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. I crack open an eye. Everyone else has theirs closed. I shut it again. Breathe in, breathe out. Around me people are sitting crossed-legged, meditating. For some it's spiritual, for others an oasis of calm. Me? I'm building a better brain.

A few months ago I would probably have bought a brain-training game, but alas, it turns out they are probably useless. Although your performance on the games improves, that effect doesn't seem to translate into the real world (see "The rise and fall of brain training"). With that in mind, I wondered if there was anything else I could do to give my grey matter a boost.

Our brains are constantly adapting to information from the world around us. However, some activities make a bigger impression than others. In recent years, researchers have been probing how outside influences, from music to meditation, might change and enhance our brains.

One of the most promising is music - and not via the famous but controversial "Mozart effect", whereby merely listening to classical music is supposed to improve brain performance. Learning to play an instrument brings about dramatic brain changes that not only improve musical skills but can also spill over into other cognitive abilities, including speech, language, memory, attention, IQ and even empathy. Should I dust off my trumpet and get practising?

Read the full story at www.newscientist.com

Druidry recognised as religion in Britain for first time

October 2010
By Martin Beckford


Druidry has been recognised as an official religion in Britain for the first time, thousands of years after its adherents first worshipped in the country
 

The Druid Network has been given charitable status by the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the quango that decides what counts as a genuine faith as well as regulating fundraising bodies.

It guarantees the modern group, set up in 2003, valuable tax breaks but also grants the ancient religion equal status to more mainstream denominations. This could mean that Druids, the priestly caste in Celtic societies across Europe, are categorised separately in official surveys of religious believers.

Supporters say the Charity Commission’s move could also pave the way for other minority faiths to gain charitable status.

Phil Ryder, Chair of Trustees for The Druid Network, said it had taken four years for the group to be recognised by the regulator. “It was a long and at times frustrating process, exacerbated by the fact that the Charity Commissioners had no understanding of our beliefs and practices, and examined us on every aspect of them. Their final decision document runs to 21 pages, showing the extent to which we were questioned in order to finally get the recognition we have long argued for,” he said.

Emma Restall Orr, founder of The Druid Network, added: “The Charity Commission now has a much greater understanding of Pagan, animist, and polytheist religions, so other groups from these minority religions – provided they meet the financial and public benefit criteria for registration as charities - should find registering a much shorter process than the pioneering one we have been through.”

In its assessment of the Druid Network’s application, the Charity Commission accepts that Druids worship nature, in particular the sun and the earth but also believe in the spirits of places such as mountains and rivers as well as “divine guides” such as Brighid and Bran.

The document lists the “commonality of practice” in Druidry, including its eight major festivals each year; rituals at different phases of the moon; rites of passage and gatherings of bards on sacred hills, known as “gorsedd”.

All charities must now demonstrate their benefit to the public, and Druidry was said to qualify since its followers are keen to conserve Britain’s heritage as well as preserve the natural environment.

The document even addresses the claims made by the Romans about Druids committing human sacrifice, but finds “no evidence of any significant detriment or harm” arising from modern beliefs.


It notes that although there are only 350 members of the Druid Network, a BBC report in 2003 claimed as many as 10,000 people followed the ancient faith across the country.

Membership of the Network costs £10 a year but ritual ceremonies such as that marking the summer solstice at Stonehenge are open to all.

Article from: telegraph.co.uk


Related



Source: http://www.redicecreations.com  

Computers That Read Minds are Being Developed by Intel

August 2010
by Richard Gray

New technology could allow people to dictate letters and search the internet simply by thinking, according to researchers at Intel who are behind the project. 

Unlike current brain-controlled computers, which require users to imagine making physical movements to control a cursor on a screen, the new technology will be capable of directly interpreting words as they are thought.

Intel's scientists are creating detailed maps of the activity in the brain for individual words which can then be matched against the brain activity of someone using the computer, allowing the machine to determine the word they are thinking. 

Preliminary tests of the system have shown that the computer can work out words by looking at similar brain patterns and looking for key differences that suggest what the word might be.

Dean Pomerleau, a senior researcher at Intel Laboratories, said that currently, the devices required to get sufficient detail of brain activity were bulky, expensive magnetic resonance scanners, like those used in hospitals.

But he said work was under way to produce smaller pieces of equipment that can be worn as headsets and that can produce the same level of detail.

He said: "The computer uses a form of 20 questions to narrow down what the word is.

"So a noun with a physical property such as spade, which you dig with, produces activity in the motor cortex of the brain, as this is the area that controls physical movements.

"A food related word like apple, however, produces activity in those parts of the brain related to hunger. So the computer can infer attributes to each word being thought about and this lets the computer zero down on what the word is pretty quickly.

"We are currently mapping out the activity that an average brain produces when thinking about different words. It means you'll be able to write letters, open emails or do Google searches just by thinking".

Intel already have a working prototype that can detect words such as "screwdriver", "house" and "barn", by measuring around 20,000 points in the brain.

But as brain scanning technology becomes more sophisticated the computer's ability to distinguish thoughts will improve.

Justin Ratner, director of Intel Laboratories and the company's chief technology officer, said: "Mind reading is the ultimate user interface. There will be concerns about privacy with this sort of thing and we will have to overcome them.

"What is clear though is that humans are not restricted any more to just using keyboards and mice". 


Related


Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Hemp produces viable biodiesel, study finds

October 6, 2010 
by Christine Buckley


Industrial hemp, which grows in infertile soils, is attractive as a potential source of sustainable diesel fuel


Of all the various uses for Cannabis plants, add another, “green” one to the mix.

Researchers at UConn have found that the fiber crop Cannabis sativa, known as industrial hemp, has properties that make it viable and even attractive as a raw material, or feedstock, for producing biodiesel – sustainable made from renewable plant sources.

The plant’s ability to grow in infertile soils also reduces the need to grow it on primary croplands, which can then be reserved for growing food, says Richard Parnas, a professor of chemical, materials, and biomolecular engineering who led the study.

“For sustainable fuels, often it comes down to a question of food versus fuel,” says Parnas, noting that major current biodiesel plants include food crops such as soybeans, olives, peanuts, and rapeseed. “It’s equally important to make fuel from plants that are not food, but also won’t need the high-quality land.”
Industrial hemp is grown across the world, in many parts of Europe and Asia. Fiber from the plant’s stalk is strong, and until the development of synthetic fibers in the 1950s, it was a premier product used worldwide in making rope and clothing.

Today, there are still parts of the world that rely on Cannabis stalks as a primary fiber, mainly because of its ability to grow “like a weed,” without requiring lots of water, fertilizers, or high-grade inputs to flourish. But the seeds, which house the plant’s natural oils, are often discarded. Parnas points out that this apparent waste product could be put to good use by turning it into fuel.

“If someone is already growing hemp,” he says, “they might be able to produce enough fuel to power their whole farm with the oil from the seeds they produce.” The fact that a hemp industry already exists, he continues, means that a hemp biodiesel industry would need little additional investment.

With his graduate student Si-Yu Li and colleagues James Stuart of the Department of Chemistry and Yi Li of the Department of Plant Sciences, Parnas used virgin hemp seed oil to create biodiesel using a standardized process called transesterification. The group then tested the fuel for a suite of characteristics in the Biofuels Testing Laboratory at UConn’s Center for Environmental Science and Engineering. 

The hemp biodiesel showed a high efficiency of conversion – 97 percent of the hemp oil was converted to biodiesel – and it passed all the laboratory’s tests, even showing properties that suggest it could be used at lower temperatures than any biodiesel currently on the market.

Although growing hemp is not legal in the U.S., Parnas hopes that the team’s results will help to spur hemp biodiesel production in other parts of the world. UConn holds a patent on a biodiesel reactor system that could be customized to make biodiesel from a range of sustainable inputs, hemp included.
 
“Our research data could make buying a reactor system with our technology more attractive,” says Parnas. “If we have data for the production of many different feedstocks, we can tailor the system to meet the company’s needs.”
Parnas, Yi Li, and colleagues Steven Suib of the Department of Chemistry, Fred Carstensen of the Department of Economics, and Harrison Yang of the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment are preparing to build a pilot biodiesel production facility using a two-year, $1.8 million grant from the Department of Energy.

The reactor will be capable of producing up to 200,000 gallons of biodiesel per year, and while this production rate is small in comparison to commercial biodiesel reactors, the main use of the facility will be to test new ways to produce , including catalysts and feedstocks. Ultimately, the team will perform economic analyses on commercializing their methods.

As for other industries that utilize Cannabis plants, Parnas makes a clear distinction between industrial hemp, which contains less than 1 percent psychoactive chemicals in its flowers, and some of its cousins, which contain up to 22 percent. “This stuff,” he points out, “won’t get you high.”
Provided by University of Connecticut



Source: http://www.physorg.com 

Video: Explain the World's Most Important 6-sec Drum Loop


21 februari 2006 

 
This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music -- a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. 

Nate Harrison's 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.

 



Source: http://www.youtube.com

Twitter and Facebook cannot change the real world, says Malcolm Gladwell

October 2010
by Tim Adams


The bestselling author of The Tipping Point has enraged social network users by dismissing their impact on real issues

Social networks, those loose, busy and self-absorbing communities of Facebookers and Twitterers, have always invited analogies from the insect world. If we are to accept the most common of them, then in the past week, Malcolm Gladwell, provocateur-in-chief at the New Yorker magazine, has poked a sharp stick into the online ants' nest. The twitterers have responded to his provocation by swarming on to blogs and websites to protect their uniting belief: that the future belongs to them.

Gladwell is a spirited contrarian. His argument in the New Yorker was an attack on the prevalent idea that online social networks represent the future of campaigning and protest, and perhaps – in totalitarian states – of revolution. The bestselling author of The Tipping Point unpicked this notion with typical chutzpah, moving quickly from emotive and carefully selected individual case studies to sweeping universal principles.

Gladwell examined the most effective mass protest of modern times – the American civil rights movement. Using an account of the courageous coffee bar sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, he argued that such activism was based on the strength of intimate friendships and shared experience, and directed by hierarchical power, could never have arisen from the "weak ties" and "horizontal" associations that characterise the campaigning of online "friends" and "followers".

"Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that [Martin Luther] King's task in Birmingham, Alabama, would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail," Gladwell argued.

"But [online] networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterises Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where 98% of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed – discipline and strategy – were things that online social media cannot provide."

As an example of the comparative ineffectiveness of wiki-activism Gladwell cited the virtual support groups that arose at the height of the civil war in western Sudan. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition had 1,282,339 members, he noted, before detailing, with a flourish, the financial commitment of those "protesters" to their cause: an average of 15 cents each.

From this and other anecdotes Gladwell drew the following conclusion: that while social networks may be useful for some communication – to alert like-minded acquaintances to social events, or to solve a specific "weak tie" problem, such as the location of a bone marrow donor – they do not promote the passionate collective engagement that causes individuals to make commitments that result in social change. Facebook "likers", he argued, are not sitters-in or nonviolent activists, they are not even marchers or candle-wavers; they may wish to associate themselves with a protest app, but the nature of their medium means they do so with negligible risk and therefore negligible effect.

"The evangelists of social media," he concluded, "seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend. Social networks are effective at increasing participation – by lessening the motivation that participation requires. In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice."

To many of the anonymously outraged, this was fighting talk. "Cynic" in a long and vitriolic thread on the rival Atlantic Monthly website, argued that while "once a group of local activists might have placed notices in the local paper, today, it tweets. There are important changes implicit in this transition to be sure. Organisations have a much easier time in reaching broader publics… They can enlist a huge number of people to perform small tasks, that in aggregate add up to large accomplishments."

Gladwell had reserved much of his ire for Clay Shirky, the charismatic New York University evangelist of the power of online crowds, and author of the seminal social media text Here Comes Everybody. Shirky, Gladwell argued, had oversold the potential of wiki-activism as a tool for social transformation.

When I contacted Shirky to wonder what he made of the broadside, he suggested that his principle response was mystification. "What a weird article it was," Shirky said. "It started out with two unobjectionable observations: danger requires political activists to be strongly committed to each other, not just to the cause; and that people talked a lot of shit about Twitter during the green uprising [last year's demonstrations in Iran, which were claimed by some as evidence of the power of virtual communication]. That put him in a position to talk about how strong and weak ties, or hierarchies and networks, actually relate to each other in protest movements, but instead he seems to have committed himself to the idea that they don't, that social networks are useless for spreading the 'fever' he was talking about, or for recruiting those who had caught the 'fever'."

Oddest of all, Shirky suggested was that "the book that has done most to explain to the public how weak ties could spread the kind of political fever that Gladwell writes about is The Tipping Point". If this all sounds like an internecine battle in Manhattan media elites, there is a wider context. The New Yorker, for which Gladwell is a stellar correspondent, sees itself as the spiritual home of a kind of reading and writing and engagement that could seem threatened by the attention overload and surface concerns of online skimming. I spoke to Gladwell a while back about his use of computers: he never spent much time on the internet, he said: "I run out of things to look up really quickly." By making the apparently counter-intuitive argument that social media will be of little use in changing society, Gladwell seems to be advancing a more general scepticism about technological communication: the risk-free kinds of relationship that technology promotes are the antithesis of genuine complex human interaction.

New Yorker editor David Remnick argued recently that "as long as I'm there, we are not going to change who we are, no matter what the delivery systems are, no matter what the means of reading us. We are about reading. We're about long-form journalism… a sense of delight, a sense of seriousness when it's appropriate. [We will not] give away these core things because in the short term we think, 'Wow, you know, actually [the future is] three-paragraph long pieces, the hell with doing 15,000 words on American politics, or sending somebody to Afghanistan three times to get the story…'"

In an – ironic – online forum that followed the furore he had created, Gladwell argued last Thursday that what drove him crazy about "the digerati" was that they "refuse to accept the fact that there is a class of social problems for which there is no technological solution.

"Look, technology is going to solve the energy problem. I'm convinced of it. But technology does not and cannot change the underlying dynamics of 'human' problems: it does not make it easier to love or to motivate or to dream or convince."

In an argument that will run and run, he seemed to be inverting the wisdom of a social theorist from a previous age: the message is not only about the medium.



FOUNDED

Twitter: First tweet sent by co-founder Jack Dorsey, March 21, 2006.

New Yorker: First issue launched by founding editor Harold Ross in 1925.


READERSHIP

T: 106 million users and over 180m unique visits to the Twitter webpage each month.

NY: Sells just over 1m issues weekly. In US, website averages 1,130,000 unique visits monthly.


FAMOUS CONTRIBUTORS:

T: With 6.5m followers Lady Gaga, pictured, most popular tweeter. Others include Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Stephen Fry.

NY: Past contributors include Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, JD Salinger, John Updike and James Thurber.


LONGEST ARTICLE:

T: A maximum of 140 characters.

NY: John Hersey's 31,000-word-long 1946 article on Hiroshima took up an entire issue.


SOCIAL RELEVANCE:

T: The US Library of Congress catalogues every tweet.

NY: Has won 52 national magazine awards.


TOPICS:

T: Top news events of 2009 were the Iran election, swine flu and Gaza.

NY: Recent topics include the Tea Party, Tibet's future and prison camps in Siberia.


Xenia Rimmer


Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk

Dept. of Defense buys 9,500 copies of book - then burns them


September 2010
By Jake Pearson
NYDailyNews.com

 
 
Pentagon officials bought and destroyed thousands of copies of an Army reservist’s memoir about fighting in Afghanistan over fears it revealed military secrets, a spokeswoman confirmed Saturday.


The Department of Defense trashed 9,500 copies of Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer’s [left] "Operation Dark Heart" because it could harm national security, Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. April Cunningham told CNN.

"The whole premise smacks of retaliation," Shaffer, who won a Bronze Star medal while leading a black-ops team fighting the Taliban, told the network news station. "Someone buying 10,000 books to suppress a story in this digital age is ludicrous."

The Pentagon has already redacted large portions of Shaffer’s 299-page book, which is being published by St. Martin’s Press.

Pentagon officials said last month that Shaffer and his publisher didn’t get the okay to publish all the topics the soldier covers in "Dark Heart" - and took matters into their own hands last week.

Article from: nydailynews.com

Operation Dark Heart

Able Danger identified the 9/11 hijackers was picked up by the national media in August 2005. In addition to that Able Danger identified the 9/11 hijackers and was prevented from passing that information onto the FBI, the intelligence concerning Able Danger was provided to the 9/11 Commission and ignored.

Two 9/11 Commission members, Timothy J. Roemer and John F. Lehman, both claimed not to have received any information on Able Danger.

Lee H. Hamilton, former Vice Chair of the 9/11 Commission, and Al Felzenberg, a former spokesman for the 9/11 Commission, both denied that the 9/11 Commission had any information on the identification of Mohamed Atta prior to the attacks.

Hamilton told the media, "The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohamed Atta or of his cell.... Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

Anthony Shaffer is a U.S. Army Lt. Col who has alleged that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) failed to properly evaluate intelligence on 9/11 Mohammad Atta. Shaffer's allegations subsequently became known as the Able Danger controversy. In October 2003, according to his later statement to Congress, Shaffer told the 9/11 Commission staff director, Dr. Philip D. Zelikow, that in 2000 a DIA data-mining program known as Able Danger had uncovered two of the three terrorist cells eventually implicated in the 9/11 attacks. Shaffer reportedly told Zelikow that DIA leadership declined to share this information with the FBI because military lawyers expressed concerns about the legality of doing so. Shaffer also asserted that he briefed Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet on three separate occasions regarding his unit's activities. The 9/11 Commission Report did not mention Shaffer's allegations, but in 2005 and 2006 the Chairman of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Rep. Curt Weldon, publicized Shaffer's allegations in public statements and hearings.

He published his memoirs as the book Operation Dark Heart. There is a plan in the Pentagon to preserve secrecy of revelations made by the book, by buying up and destroying all 10,000 copies of the book's first run.


Resources

 

Book Burning by Obama Administration 

Book Burning is no longer the sole shame of Nazi Germany. On September 25, 2010, the Obama administration (through the Pentagon) burned all 9,500 first run copies of Anthony Shaffer's memoir "Operation Dark Heart".

**IF YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR FREEDOM, PLEASE PUT THIS VIDEO ON YOUR FACEBOOK WALL, EMAIL IT TO YOUR FRIENDS, DO EVERYTHING YOU CAN TO GET THIS STORY OUT. THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS TRYING TO SQUASH THE STORY AND THE AUTHOR IS LIMITED IN HOW MUCH HE CAN SAY BECAUSE HE IS STILL A MEMBER OF THE US MILITARY RESERVES.**

Based on his experience as a Lt. Col. in the US Armed Forces, Operation Dark Heart was deemed a threat to national security after it had already passed two separate Army reviews and had already been published.

Burning books that have already been published seems like an obvious affront to free speech and seems particularly dangerous coming from the Obama administration, which has sought access to nearly every piece of American personal lives through its massive expansion of government.

This is not a right or left issue. It is not a democrat or republican issue. It is an issue of free speech and the government burning published books. It happens to have been done by a Democratic administration. If it had been done by a Republican administration, I would have made the same video criticizing that person.

If you think this story is fake, please Google "Operation Dark Heart". I wish it was fake.

The NY Times also did a great article describing the absurdity of censoring this book. The article is entitled "Secrets in Plain Sight in Censored Book's Reprint" and is available on the NY Times website.

Please also see the videos I've favorited on my channel for news coverage of this event.

My video is commentary and analysis. I'm not a news organization and I have an obvious point of view about whether governments should be in the business of burning published books.

Note: For all you mental midgets who think the video says that Obama the man actually sat somewhere and burned the Operation Dark Heart books himself and therefore this video is fake, please watch the video again. Obviously Obama the man was not physically burning books in a warehouse somewhere. I can't believe that some people are so nuts that I actually need to point that out, but after receiving several comments indicating such, I felt it easier to make that clear.

The Operation Dark Heart books were burned by the DIA, which is part of the Executive Branch and serves at the pleasure of the Defense Secretary and the Commander in Chief. The Commander in Chief is Barack Obama and the DIA Directors/Secretary of Defense/Commander in Chief are part of the Obama administration.

And Barack Obama the man is aware of the symbolism involved in government book burning. If you think he, himself, was not aware of the book burning or at least tacitly approve it, then you need to start researching what is happening in this country. It's no joke.

 The New York Times reveals a few open secrets

At the New York Times, Scott Shane divulges a national security secret: the National Security Agency (shown in the Google Earth image above) is known by the nickname the Fort. I guess you’d call that the definition of hiding in plain sight since the NSA is located in Fort Meade.

Apparently anyone in the locality could tell you the NSA headquarters is known as the Fort and Shane would not know that that’s supposed to be a secret had he not obtained a copy of a banned book available on eBay.
That nickname is one of hundreds of supposed secrets Pentagon reviewers blacked out in the new, censored edition of an intelligence officer’s Afghan war memoir. The Defense Department is buying and destroying the entire uncensored first printing of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, in the name of protecting national security.
Another supposed secret removed from the second printing: the location of the Central Intelligence Agency’s training facility — Camp Peary, Va., a fact discoverable from Wikipedia. And the name and abbreviation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, routinely mentioned in news articles. And the fact that Sigint means “signals intelligence.”
Not only did the Pentagon black out Colonel Shaffer’s cover name in Afghanistan, Chris Stryker, it deleted the source of his pseudonym: the name of John Wayne’s character in the 1949 movie “The Sands of Iwo Jima.”
The redactions offer a rare glimpse behind the bureaucratic veil that cloaks information the government considers too important for public airing.
The New York Times is generous enough to provide a kind of Wikileaks teaser — a single page of the redacted and unredacted book.



Was it out of deference to St Martin’s Press or the Pentagon that the Times refrained from divulging more of the redactions?

And was the NSA so “liberal” in its use of redaction because they want to keep secret the criteria they use for defining secrecy, or because when it comes to secrecy, government officials in the post 9/11 era know that no one ever gets fired for over-classification?

Article from: warincontext.org



The few copies of the book that managed to evade the Pentagon’s dragnet are now being exchanged for up to $2,000 on the internet Photo: AP

"The author has said he has fallen victim to an increased sensitivity about inside information following the release by the Wikileaks website of thousands of military documents detailing the conduct of the war, and the resignation of Gen Stanley McChrystal as US commander in Afghanistan because of disparaging comments about the Barack Obama administration made by his aides to a magazine.

Lt Col Shaffer also said that the "Pentagon wanted to shut this off until after the election", because it was "more bad news". Major congressional elections are being held on Nov 2.

In a statement, the Pentagon said it "decided to purchase copies of the first printing because they contained information which could cause damage to national security". The books were destroyed on Sep 20."

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk
 

Able Danger - Webster Tarpley on the CIA Able Danger program

 

 

Related


Source: http://www.redicecreations.com

The Science of Creating Your Own Reality

Oktober 2010
By John Assaraf


In 1633, an aging Italian astronomer named Galileo Galilei was taken before the Roman Inquisition, tried, convicted of heresy, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Galileo’s crime? He endorsed the idea, proposed a century earlier by the great Catholic astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, that the earth is not the center of the solar system. In fact, said Galileo, it is the other way around: The sun sits at the center, and the earth is simply one of a handful of planets that revolve around it.

This idea was judged as being diametrically opposed to the position taken by Holy Scripture. Galileo was forced to publicly recant his views, and his book containing the offending idea, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was banned. The old man’s sentence was later commuted to house arrest, and he lived out the rest of his days confined to his villa outside Florence, where he eventually went blind.

Still, Galileo’s views persisted, and the meticulous experiments and mathematical models he used in his search to understand nature set the stage for all the developments of modern science that followed. Three centuries later, a German physicist named Albert Einstein called him “the father of modern science.”

From Galileo’s time onward, scientists’ precise observations contributed to a picture of the world that looked very much like a massive piece of mechanical clockwork; they had little practical use for such ideas as soul, spirit, or consciousness.

The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, a contemporary of Galileo’s who is today regarded as “the father of modern philosophy,” declared that the best way to understand how the world works would be to divide existence into two parts: the objective or material world, governed by the principles of science, and the subjective world of the mind and the soul, which would be the province of the church.

Descartes is especially famous for the statement I think, therefore I am. But the truth is, the think part of that declaration puzzled Descartes, much as it has puzzled scientists for centuries since. Just how is it that we think? Where do our thoughts come from? How do the bits of physical matter that constitute our brains generate consciousness? The answers to those questions open up a tremendous new world of possibility for what we can achieve in our lives, and they form a central part of The Answer.

A World Inside the Atom

In the generations following Galileo and Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton took the idea of nature-as-machine much further, detailing the precise laws that govern how that machine operates. All of classical physics, and in fact, all of modern science, has been built upon the foundation created by Newton. His laws of motion made possible the advance of modern technology, from simple steam engines to the space probes that have analyzed soil samples on Mars.

But scientists eventually reached the limits of the Newtonian worldview. As their tools grew more sophisticated, their explorations of the physical world took them deep into the heart of the atom, where the nature of reality proved to be something quite different from anything Descartes or Newton ever imagined.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, scientists began looking into the world within the atomic nucleus, and they were shocked to discover that on the subatomic level, the physical world did not behave at all the way Newton said it should. In fact, the “atom” itself turned out to be a sort of illusion: The closer scientists looked, the less it really appeared to be there.

And when our vision of the atom fractured, the foundation of classical physics fractured along with it. Our view of how the world works was in for a radical transformation.

Everything Is Energy

When we say the name Albert Einstein, what comes to mind? Perhaps you think of his wild mane of white hair, or that famous picture of the distinguished physicist sticking out his tongue. Or maybe you think simply, “Genius.” But whatever picture you have, you will also probably come up with “E=MC2.”
Why on earth would a mathematical equation for a sophisticated theory be so famous that even nonscientists recognize it immediately? Because with that simple equation, “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared,” Einstein shattered centuries of thinking and radically altered our view of how the world works.

One reason Einstein’s idea was so transformative was that for the first time ever, it described how energy and matter are not only related, but can be transformed back and forth into each other. Now the elegant, clear-cut world of classical, Newtonian physics would be forced to move over and make room for the fuzzy, strange, nearly unimaginable world of quantum physics.

Quantum physics is the study of how the world works on the smallest scale, at a level far smaller than the atom. And as scientists studied the nature of reality on a smaller and smaller scale, something strange began to happen: The deeper we went into reality, the more it seemed to dissolve from view. The search for the smallest known particle of matter had instead turned up distinct yet elusive little packets of energy, which physicists called quanta.

The Einstein breakthrough comes down to this: Everything is energy. A rock, a planet, a glass of water, your hand, everything you can touch, taste, or smell - it’s all made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of protons and electrons and neutrons, which are made of nothing but vibrating packets of energy.

This is where quantum physics intersects with what I found inside that cardboard box. What physicists found has everything to do with how you are going to create the life of your dreams by building your dream business. For once we know that everything is energy - that there is no absolute distinction between matter and energy - then the boundaries between the physical world and the world of our thoughts start to disappear as well.

Reading the Mind of God

In the decades that followed Einstein’s theory of relativity, the new quantum physics began to reveal some very strange things. The tiny packets of energy known as quanta exhibited some very peculiar behaviors, including an unexplainable ability to influence one another, a property called entanglement.
In his book Science and the Akashic Field, physicist Ervin Laszlo describes a series of experiments conducted by lie detector expert Cleve Backster. Backster took some white blood cells from the mouths of his subjects and cultured them in a test tube. He then moved the cultures to distant locations, more than seven miles away. He attached lie detectors to the cultures and then performed a series of experiments on his subjects.

In one of his tests, he showed his subject a television program depicting the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. This man was a former navy gunner who had actually been present at Pearl Harbor during the attack. When the face of a navy gunner appeared on the screen, the man’s face betrayed an emotional reaction—and at that precise moment, the lie detector’s needle seven and a half miles away jumped, exactly as it would have had it been attached to the man himself, and not just to a test tube of his cultured white blood cells miles away.

How is such a thing possible? In the language of quantum physics, the particles of the gunner’s body are still connected or “entangled” with one another, and no matter how far apart they are separated in space, they will continue to influence one another. In fact, this effect appears to occur at speeds faster than the speed of light, which violates one of Einstein’s basic rules.

Scientists dubbed this mind-boggling capacity for instantaneous interconnection nonlocality. Einstein had a somewhat less technical term for it. He called it spooky actionat a distance.

A Bizarre Discovery: Thought Influences Matter

Within twenty years of Einstein’s radical work, another revolution in worldview occurred, just as cataclysmic as Einstein’s. It started with two of the early pioneers of the quantum world, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his protégé Werner Heisenberg.

Bohr and Heisenberg studied the puzzling behaviors of these tiny subatomic particles and recognized that once you look deep within the heart of atoms, these “indivisible particles” are something like tiny packets of possibility.

Each subatomic particle appeared to exist not as a solid, stable “thing,” but as the potential of any one of its various possible selves. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle stated that it was not possible to measure all of a subatomic particle’s properties at the same time. For example, if you record information about the location of a proton, you cannot pin down its speed or trajectory; if you figure out its speed, now its precise location eludes you.

Bohr and Heisenberg’s work suggested that at its most basic level, physical matter isn’t exactly anything yet. At the subatomic scale, according to this new understanding, reality was made not of solid substance but of fields of potentiality - more like a set of possible sketches or ideas of a thing than the thing itself. A particle would take on the specific character of a material “thing” only when it was measured or observed.

In fact, even more bizarre, it was soon found that the mere intention of measuring particles, even without carrying out the actual act itself, would still affect the particles in question!

Suddenly subjectivity - the action of consciousness upon a piece of “matter” - had become an essential component in the very nature of reality.

The Zero-Point Field

As scientists continued pursuing their explorations on staggeringly small scales, they eventually found themselves staring at something truly confounding. They termed it the zero-point field (ZPF), because at this most infinitesimal of levels, some sort of force appears to be present even at a temperature of absolute zero, when all known forms of energy vanish.

Here, beneath the level of energy itself, exists a still more basic level. The field at this level is not exactly “energy” anymore, nor is it a field of empty space. It is best described, physicists realized, as a field of information.

To put it another way, the undifferentiated ocean out of which energy arises appears to be a sea of pure consciousness, from which matter emerges in clustered localities here and there. Consciousness is what the universe is made of; matter and energy are just two of the forms that consciousness takes. Ervin Laszlo calls this field that underlies and connects all things the A-field, in deference to the ancient Vedic concept of the Akashic record, a nonphysical repository of all knowledge in the universe, including all human experience.

The psychologist Carl Jung called it the collective unconscious. It has been intuited and described for thousands of years and in a multitude of terms and images throughout human history. Only in the last few decades has science caught up to what we always sensed but could never fully explain.

Says Laszlo: “The ancients knew that space is not empty; it is the origin and memory of all things that exist and have ever existed. . . .[This insight] is now being rediscovered at the cutting edge of the sciences [and is emerging] as a main pillar of the scientific world’s picture of the twenty-first century. This will profoundly change our concept of ourselves and of the world.”

In fact, it has already profoundly changed our picture of ourselves and our world—and it will radically change how you approach your life and your business.

Thought Creates Everything

So what are we saying here, that everything that is, is made of thought? That thought creates the physical world? Yes, that is exactly what we’re saying.

Your thoughts not only matter, they create matter. Thought is where everything comes from. And your thoughts are where your business comes from.

In the chapters that follow, we’re going to walk through the process, step by step, of building your dream business by first harnessing the most powerful force in the universe: your beliefs.

The Most Powerful Force In The Universe

If the idea that the universe is made of thought seems amazing, here is the truly amazing thing about it: The scale of power we’re talking about here is staggering beyond comprehension.

The universe appears to be structured as a series of layers or levels, much like an onion or Russian nesting dolls: Inside of organisms, we find cells; inside cells, molecules, then “indivisible” atoms, then electrons and protons, then quarks, bosons, mesons, photons, leptons . . . and the smaller the world, the greater the amount of force we find wrapped inside it.

The deeper in nature you go, the more dynamic nature becomes. In other words, the more fundamental the level to which you penetrate, the greater the power you’ll find.

For example, chemical power, the force of chemical interactions, operates at the level of molecules and atoms. Nuclear power operates at the level of the atomic nucleus, about a million times smaller - and it is a million times more powerful. Yet even the nuclear level pales in comparison to the deeper levels today’s quantum physics is exploring. According to Laszlo, the zero-point field has an energy density of 1094 ergs per cubic centimeter - that’s ten thousand billion, billion, billion, billion times more energy in a single cubic centimeter of “empty space” than you have in all the matter in the known universe.

And that’s just one cc of empty space. Imagine what you’d have in a quart.

How Quantum Science Helps You Build Your Dream Business

In 1902, two years after the physicist Max Planck first coined the term quantum to describe the core reality of light, a young British writer named James Allen penned a little book entitled As a Man Thinketh, which drew its title and its message from the biblical verse “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

At the time, few would have associated the two men and their work, but with the hindsight of a century’s discoveries, we can now see the connection. While scientists spent the rest of the century pursuing the horizon set by pioneers such as Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg, which would ultimately lead to the quantum vacuum, philosophers like Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale, and Bob Proctor worked to articulate its application to the practical world of human accomplishment.

This idea, that our thoughts have a direct, causal impact on our reality, has been observed, but it always seemed like something that rational people couldn’t buy into, an idea that created more questions than answers. Now science has given us that set of answers.

Remember the mind-boggling amount of power in that cubic centimeter of “empty space,” or consciousness? When Victor Hugo said, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come,” we now know that this was more than a metaphor. He may not have fully realized it at the time, but he was giving us a literal description of how reality works.

Thought is the most powerful force in the universe. Our thoughts are the controlling factor in what we manifest and create in our lives.

The idea precedes the thing.

That is at the heart of how my dream house showed up, as well as every business I’ve built, and the same thing happens to every businessperson who has a vision and applies these strategies and tactics. It started as a picture, an idea in my mind, and before I knew what had happened, I was living in it.

Science tells us that underlying what we know as the world is a field of pure consciousness, billions upon billions of times more powerful than any measurable energy, and that this field of absolute consciousness knows everything that happens, anywhere and everywhere in the universe, instantaneously and with absolute accuracy.

This is not so different from the kind of descriptions people have given for millennia in their efforts to grasp the ultimate nature of our universal source, what some of us call God. Whatever you call it, the picture that emerges is of a world bounded by an infinitely large, omnipotent, omniscient intelligence, which lies behind everything in the phenomenal world as its source, author, and ultimate destination.

This is the dream world we live in, you and I, and it is the clay from which you will shape and give life to your dream business.


Source: http://www.mindpowernews.com