Self Evolving Minds & Machines

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had ever supposed (William James).

Monday, May 12, 2008

The 100,000-Man Strong Private Army is Setting up Shop in California

A 100,000+ privately contracted company has been operating beyond any rule of law for several years now in Iraq. Their dead (perhaps around 800+ people) aren't counted. And when they kill innocents and "friendlies" they are not adjudicated, so they pay no penance and are thus awarded more contacts. This inevitably leads to more deaths of harmless women and children that incite the hatred which breeds new insurgents. And so, you can see, the cycle is fecklessly perpetuated, a cycle mind you, that pays some in spades.

No one even knew half of the war was being fought by companies that are essentially corporate mercenaries whose primary obligation is to their shareholders. That is, until Blackwater showed up on the news all the sudden because one of these wrongful deaths got out on tape to the world media at large. Since then, they have been under fire in US courts and under long senate investigations related to wrongful deaths, gang rape and other such horrors. Yet, few know more about them and these wrongful death incidents now, than a year ago - and they are opening a "training camp" facility in the hills of North California.

The immunity and elusiveness of gun-for-hire like entities such as Blackwater begs all sorts of ominous questions.

Is this the army of the future? And if so, will America be safer, held of higher esteem abroad, and make new friends and new ground in the so-called "war on terror" as a result?

I don't think so. When the government dubs massive, cutting edge weapon-equipped, ex-Navy Seal-stocked super-armies immune to law, the more violent - and more deadly - the places they operate in become, for friend and foe, at home and abroad. For, who has control over them?

If you assess this analysis as overstating important truths and facts - please let me know. But, at least watch this video first:

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Paul Wesson

...there is a way for you to live inside a black hole: find one that has five dimensions. Life inside a 5D black hole is known to be rather more sustainable than it is in the 4D version. In the 4D case, you would experience 'tidal' forces that vary so vastly over short distances that your body would be pulled apart. But in the 5D case, there is no physical plughole, and the tidal forces are negligible, so you could happily explore without fear of dismemberment. And, according to the results of my research, you may be doing that right now. A mathematical analysis says that our universe may well be a 5D black hole...So next time you stare up at the night sky, stop and consider the fact that you may actually be surveying the star-speckled interior of a five-dimensional
black hole.

V.S. Ramachandran

The human brain, it has been said, is the most complexly organized structure in the universe and to appreciate this you just have to look at some numbers. The brain is made up of one hundred billion nerve cells or "neurons" which are the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system. Each neuron makes something like a thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons and these points of contact are called synapses where exchange of information occurs. And based on this information, someone has calculated that the number of possible permutations and combinations of brain activity, in other words the numbers of brain states, exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe.

Sourish Dutta

The model associates dark energy with something called vacuum energy. Like a number of existing theories, it proposes that space itself is the source of the repulsive energy that is pushing the universe apart. For many years, scientists thought that the energy of empty space averaged zero. But the discovery of quantum mechanics changed this view. According to quantum theory, empty space is filled with pairs of "virtual” particles that spontaneously pop into and out of existence too quickly to be detected.

Stephen Cass

Love letters, business contracts, holiday snaps, spam, petitions, emergency bulletins, pornography, wedding announcements, TV shows, news articles, vacation plans, home movies, press releases, celebrity Web pages, home movies, secrets of every stripe, military orders, music, newsletters, confessions, congratulations—every shade and aspect of human life encoded as 1s and 0s. Taken together, they weigh roughly the same as the smallest possible sand grain, one measuring just two-thousandths of an inch across.

The weight of the Internet adds up to just about 0.2 millionths of an ounce.

Charles Bukowski

If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs. And maybe your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance. Of how much you really want to do it. And you'll do it, despite rejection in the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. You will be alone with the gods. And the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.

Jack Kerouac

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify them, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Becasue the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

Philip Roth

What was astonishing was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. It was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup.

Jill Bolte Taylor

Philip Roth