I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

"Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken."
- Albert Camus
The Stranger by Albert Camus

“He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend - provided, of course, that he really is dead.” - Voltaire

I'll be honest, I've had this article bookmarked for a short time now. Not because I was waiting to post it or thinking of something to write. But because I wanted to keep it to myself. Then I remembered this is the internet and how my mom always taught me to share. I also believe deeply that if you have never pondered outlandish themes such as faking ones own death at least once in your life, for lack of a better word, you suck. I've presented said problem among others to people, and they look at me like I'm crazy. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Those who know how to think need no teachers.” It's not the subject of faking your death, it's using your brain. Enjoy and good luck.

Your debts are piling up; the job's getting on your nerves, and maybe your partner doesn't look as hot as he or she once did. It's that John Darwin canoe moment – when you think the unthinkable and wonder if life would be better if you ended it all for the old you and started over with a shiny new one. Not a real death, of course. But a phoney – staging, perhaps, your own personal Mary Celeste, with canoe or dinghy abandoned on the briny, or, like ex-minister John Stonehouse and television's immortal Reggie Perrin, a neat little pile of clothes left on the beach with their owner nowhere to be seen. Many are tempted, and a good few, like Mr Darwin of Seaton Carew and Panama fame, succumb. Faking death and having a second bite at life's cherry is a difficult area in which to give guidance, since we never, by definition, get to hear of the successful, only the failures. But their errors and weaknesses can be our instruction manual.

It can be done. An uplifting tale of success to buoy you all up at the outset. In 1975, New Zealander Ivan Manson, aged 44, with a wife and four children, never returned from a fishing trip. His boat was found, but he wasn't. Police were sceptical. No inquest was held. We might never have been any the wiser had not two cars collided in Queensland, Australia, 20 years later. One of the bodies was identified from fingerprints as Ivan Manson. He had lived as a pillar of the local bowls club in the town of Caboolture ever since his fishing trip. Let his example be your lodestar.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Think twice about using another body: The days when you could stick a corpse of the right gender and approximate height in a car, crash it, soak it with fuel, set it alight, and trust the charred remains will be mistaken for you are – for better or worse – gone. Dental records, DNA and the high price of petrol have put paid to that. No longer is anyone likely to imitate Captain Henry Cecil Dudgeon D'Arcy of the Frontier Light Horse, who, having been awarded the VC in the Zulu wars, turned to drink. Later, a body wearing his clothes was found in a cave and, this being the pathology of a century ago, presumed to be his. Only many decades later was it learnt that D'Arcy had found a dead man lying in the snow, changed clothes with him, and gone to Natal, and lived out the rest of his life under an assumed name. He was once recognised in 1925, but swore his discoverer to the secret, which the man kept until D'Arcy died.

Faking it: How to do a Reggie and get away with it

The Dragon In My Garage

An interesting parable about science, faith and skepticism by my bro Carl Sagan.

The Dragon In My Garage
by
Carl Sagan

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"
Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle--but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floates in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."

And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility.

Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative-- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons--to say nothing about invisible ones--you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages--but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence"--no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it--is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

Faux News sheds the light on the hate filled, unpatriotic Michelle Obama

If this compilation of Fox News clips doesn't make you a little upset, there is something seriously wrong with you.

Don't fuck this up America

Hillary Clinton in '08


Bill Clinton '04

Fox & Friends

I posted a little video a few days showing a comedian by the name of Lee Camp on Fox News. While his rant wasn't really tactful and he didn't really take the huge opportunity to say something mind blowing, you have to support him for taking a stab at Fox 'News'. He apparently has received a huge amount of emails about the video and went on to discuss the situation in the following article.

What happened after they cut to a commercial? Clayton Morris was visibly furious but didn't say a word. Neither did anyone in the main studio. I got up, took my microphone off, and walked silently back to the greenroom, itching to the get the fuck out of that sixth circle of hell. Back in the greenroom I saw the female co-host, who was wearing her normal business skirt that is only half an inch away from illegal in 23 states. Even though there are three TV's back there showing nothing but Fox "News" (and we act like water boarding is torture?) she apparently had not watched the segment. She looked at me and said, "GREAT JOB!! We need more humor on the show. It's all so serious!" She did not get to the natural conclusion of her thought, "Now excuse me. I have to go interview strippers wearing Star Trek outfits designed for three-year-olds."

I then left the building without speaking to anyone. Following the break, intrepid newshound Clayton Morris pretended on-air as if he had thrown me out of the building. Here's the clip: He says something like, "I had to get rid of that guy!" The other anchor then says something like, "Well, it shows we have both sides of the issues here at Fox News." They then go on to interview the naked Star Trek chicks. (...)

Everyone has been amused with the irony that after I said my remarks respectable journalist Clayton Morris hit back with, "You can get all the news you can at Fox," and then sends it over to a story about Captain Kirk's lovers, which would not have been a news story even if it had been covered during Star Trek's actual run 38 years ago. (...)

This helps answer the last question - Wasn't my tirade a little rude and lacking in class? A few people who agree with what I said have asked this. My own mother said I should have warned the nice news people that I was going to trash them. My view of a lack of class is knowing that nearly a million civilians have died in Iraq and yet then reporting that 80,000 have. My view of unrefined is calling peace activists "anti-American." My view of barbaric is being aware that genocide goes on in Darfur but refusing to speak about it on-air because the people funding it are your corporate friends. My view of disrespectful is calling the first probable African American nominee for president "Muslim" in hopes that it will inspire enough racism in your viewers to defeat him in November. My idea of vulgar is creating false "news" stories that have some relation to naked women so that you can show clips of those women while you discuss it in a "professional" manner.

I realize I'm a comedian, and I realize my job is not to tell the truth. But in a situation like this, I feel it's a crime not to. Plus, all the best comedians have spoken the truth - Bruce, Carlin, Pryor, Hicks. So I don't give a fuck if people say "that's not funny."

alternet.org | read article

A little comment from a fellow digg user:

Roger Ailes, the President of Fox News was former George H.W. Bush's campaign manager. He put Rush Limbaugh on the air, helped Reagan get re-elected, and is an openly conservative supporter of the GOP. Everyone has some political leaning, not all of us have HUGE NEWS NETWORKS to use to share our views.

News is not unbiased. By the power of human nature, all reporting is biased, if even subtly. Fox unfortunately goes to the other end of the spectrum however, featuring conservative rhetoric, themes, and news reporting, unfortunately.

Faux News

Comic
by luvnews

Everyday I come over and my mom has the tv on, even if she isn't sitting in front of it, she has Fox News on. I asked her once why she watches it, and she said because its entertaining. I'm sorry but when I want the hear what's going on around the world, thats just it... I don't want jazz hands or women reporters who in any other situation would be considered MILFS. Fox News is not a new channel, it's part of a network that airs Cops, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, and... American Idol. It is not "fair and balanced", it is meant to entertain. Let's not forget Bill O'Oreilly is also part of the Fox News crew and I may be going out on a limb here, but that guy is about as far off "balance" as you can get.

Indie docs speak out

Phil Donahue was so enraged by coverage of the Iraq War that he came out of retirement. But instead of heading back to a network studio, where he had spent more than 30 years building his name as a talk-show host, he followed the lead of some of the most talented storytellers in media: He made an independent documentary.

Donahue's Body of War, co-directed with Ellen Spiro, tells the harrowing story of an American soldier who, returning home from Iraq paralyzed, begins fighting the system that sent him there. It's one of a growing number of provocative, ambitious and impassioned indie docs born, in part, out of frustration with the perceived inadequacy of the mainstream press.

"I believe these documentaries fill the giant black hole left by corporate media," Donahue said. "These [independent filmmakers] don't report to boardrooms. They don't fear making people angry."

"The mainstream reportage of Iraq either has blindly sided with the party line from Washington or has not asked the tough questions these filmmakers are willing to ask," he said, adding that war docs relate stories "you aren't really seeing in your daily newspapers or evening news. They are thinking outside of the box, coming at things from a different point of view."

Fearless War Docs Fight the Good Fight at Oscars

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." -Albert Einstein

Wasn't that debate squashed in something like the 16th century?

I just came across this interesting article about Memri, the organization that who distributed the video. A bit lengthy, but an interesting read. And if you know your Israeli history, then you know they've been caught planting false evidence against the Arab world.

For some time now, I have been receiving small gifts from a generous institute in the United States. The gifts are high-quality translations of articles from Arabic newspapers which the institute sends to me by email every few days, entirely free-of-charge.
The emails also go to politicians and academics, as well as to lots of other journalists. The stories they contain are usually interesting. (...)

The organisation that makes these translations and sends them out is the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), based in Washington but with recently-opened offices in London, Berlin and Jerusalem.

Its work is subsidised by US taxpayers because as an "independent, non-partisan, non-profit" organisation, it has tax-deductible status under American law.

Memri's purpose, according to its website, is to bridge the language gap between the west - where few speak Arabic - and the Middle East, by "providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew media".

Despite these high-minded statements, several things make me uneasy whenever I'm asked to look at a story circulated by Memri. First of all, it's a rather mysterious organisation. Its website does not give the names of any people to contact, not even an office address. (...)

The second thing that makes me uneasy is that the stories selected by Memri for translation follow a familiar pattern: either they reflect badly on the character of Arabs or they in some way further the political agenda of Israel. I am not alone in this unease. (...)

Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Washington Times: "Memri's intent is to find the worst possible quotes from the Muslim world and disseminate them as widely as possible."

Memri might, of course, argue that it is seeking to encourage moderation by highlighting the blatant examples of intolerance and extremism. But if so, one would expect it - for the sake of non-partisanship - to publicise extremist articles in the Hebrew media too.

Although Memri claims that it does provide translations from Hebrew media, I can't recall receiving any.

Evidence from Memri's website also casts doubt on its non-partisan status. Besides supporting liberal democracy, civil society, and the free market, the institute also emphasises "the continuing relevance of Zionism to the Jewish people and to the state of Israel".

That is what its website used to say, but the words about Zionism have now been deleted. The original page, however, can still be found in internet archives.

The reason for Memri's air of secrecy becomes clearer when we look at the people behind it. The co-founder and president of Memri, and the registered owner of its website, is an Israeli called Yigal Carmon.

Mr - or rather, Colonel - Carmon spent 22 years in Israeli military intelligence and later served as counter-terrorism adviser to two Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.

Retrieving another now-deleted page from the archives of Memri's website also throws up a list of its staff. Of the six people named, three - including Col Carmon are described as having worked for Israeli intelligence

Selective Memri

Atlas Sunk

BioShock may have been conceived as a study in nuance, a place for gamers to discover and explore at their own pace, but its dip into the ethical morass of Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophies has brought her beliefs back into the mainstream spotlight and even piqued the interest of the Ayn Rand Institute's president, Yaron Brook.

Brook, a former member of the Israeli Army military intelligence and award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University, first took notice of the game when he discovered his 18-year-old son playing it. It's a fact that didn't bother Brook despite his son's objectivist beliefs and the game's not so positive take on the philosophy.

"My son has to find his own way in life," he said. "There are certain games I wouldn't want him to play, like Grand Theft Auto, games that celebrate criminality. But a game that might lead him to think and have him challenge his ideas, I'm fine with. "Luckily for me he doesn't agree with the game, he still seems to believe in objectivism."

kotaku.com | read article

"It's not that I'm stupid. I just don't think sometimes." -Colin Farrell

When Americans are asked to identify the country from which America gained its independence, 76% correctly name Great Britain. A handful, 2%, think America's freedom was won from France, 3% mention some other country (including Russia, China, and Mexico, among others named), while 19% are unsure. 85% of men compared to only 69% of women know that America's freedom was won from England. 80% of whites vs. 54% of blacks answered correctly.

Probing a more universal measure of knowledge, Gallup also asked the following basic science question, which has been used to indicate the level of public knowledge in two European countries in recent years: "As far as you know, does the earth revolve around the sun or does the sun revolve around the earth?" In the new poll, about four out of five Americans (79%) correctly respond that the earth revolves around the sun, while 18% say it is the other way around. These results are comparable to those found in Germany when a similar question was asked there in 1996; in response to that poll, 74% of Germans gave the correct answer, while 16% thought the sun revolved around the earth, and 10% said they didn't know. When the question was asked in Great Britain that same year, 67% answered correctly, 19% answered incorrectly, and 14% didn't know.

gallop.com | read artcile

Don't let Hillary go 19-0

With Mr Obama closing in on her steadily, it is essential for Mrs Clinton to defeat him decisively on Super Tuesday. Anything less than a crushing victory will allow the race to continue throughout February and well into March, and that will almost certainly prove fatal. After Super Tuesday, the race will shift back towards the sort of state-by-state retail politics that characterised the early primaries, allowing Mr Obama to play to his ability to fire up the crowds at huge rallies that resemble rock-concerts more than conventional politics. The buzz that surrounds him will grow, neutralising Mrs Clinton's greatest advantage, which is the fact that people feel they know a lot more about her.

economist.com | read article

New tricks are for kids

There’s an old story of a newlywed couple. The wife cooks turkey for dinner and every time just before it goes in the oven, she chops off the two ends. After a while the husband curiously asked why. She said, “I don’t know. It’s tradition. My mother always did it like this. And her mother too.” So they called the grandmother and asked her and she said, “I don’t know my mother always did it. It’s tradition.” Luckily the great-grandmother was still alive and when they asked her why she cut the two ends off the turkey, she replied, “It wouldn’t fit in my pan.” - Josh Wolfe

new shelton wet/dry

JUST DON'T CALL THEM A CULT

"There are only two answers for the handling of people from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale, neither one of which has anything to do with reasoning with them or listening to their justification of their acts. The first is to raise them on the Tone Scale by unenturbulating some of their theta by any of the three valid proceses. The other is to dispose of them quietly and without sorrow." - L. Ron Hubbard, Science of Survival p. 170

"Leukaemia is evidently psychosomatic in origin and at least eight cases of leukemia had been treated successfully by Dianetics after medicine had tradinaionally given up. The source of leukaemia has been reported to be an engram containing the phrase 'it turns my blood to water' " - L. Ron Hubbard, Journal of Scientology Issue 15 G. 1953

"Scientology is the only specific (cure) for radiation (atomic bomb) burns" - L. Ron Hubbard, All About Radiation p. 109"Scientology and all the other cults are one-dimensional and we live in a three-dimentional world. They commit the highest crime: the rape of the soul." -Ron DeWolfe eldest son of Hubbard (born L. Ron Hubbard Jr.) Penthouse, June 1983.

Of the many new religious movements to appear during the 20th century, the Church of Scientology has, from its inception, been one of the most controversial, coming into conflict with the governments and police forces of several countries (including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany) numerous times over the years. Reports and allegations have been made, by journalists, courts, and governmental bodies of several countries, that the Church of Scientology is an unscrupulous commercial enterprise that harasses its critics and brutally exploits its members[1]

Local news report


BBC Special: Scientology & Me (4 parts)

Beautiful

I am almost at a loss for words for how eloquently Jacob Bronowski presents his thoughts. "We have to touch people".



I also found this quite beautiful. Perhaps there are still free thinkers among us and in the media, who would have thought.

Outside the box

"A classroom full of 10-year-old students is asked to solve a problem with children crossing the street on the way to school. The children come up with ideas that have been used successfully in other places: traffic calming devices, overpasses, fluorescent jackets and speed limits. All these ideas are conventional, exactly what the teacher wants to hear.

Except for one. A student recommends that the school board sell the property and move the classroom online. This is not what the teacher was expecting.

This idea may not be practical, popular, or even possible, but when it’s ridiculed by the class it might be the last independent thought that the student dares to express — the death of another independent thinker."

5 ways to develop independent thought