Thought for today...

Is an historical point of departure possible for an eternal consicious: how can such a point of departure have any other than a mere historical interest: is it poss to base an eternal happiness upon historical knowledge? Fragments Of Philosophy-Soren Kierkengaard 1844 Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

My window seat...

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From RMStringer

Last week...Cheer contest

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From RMStringer

Breakfast...Pecans!

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From RMStringer

The Captian...

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From RMStringer

Morality Play?

I live in America. It used to be at one time the greatest place on earth to live. Now Rape, Robbery, and Violence like Pastor John C. Hagee in San Antonio said one day; they are the norm on the TV and the Evening News. Is America the fabled Babylon? I think so. With the evening news being about Brittany Spears and her latest romp; where is the real news? We have a whole generation of little girls that want to be like her. We have a whole generation of boys dressing like they are from prison with the saggy pants that do not fit them. Urban music is the programming media for the next generation. The media is owned by corporations and they filter what we hear and see, only letting out what is in their best interest. The declining morals of our society have been occurring for many years but I think it can be traced to a critical point when Madalyn Murray O'Hair filed suit to stop prayer in school.

We used to be a God fearing society, that is no longer the case. The United Stated was founded on Biblical Principals and we have gotten away from them; it is expressed in the moral decay that we are experiencing in our society. With our nation being flooded by illegal immigrants and the business relocating to foreign countries, what will keep us afloat? Where else in the whole world can you go and have a baby and it become a citizen with all the benefits of a true American? Nowhere ELSE! I would go back to the isolationist principals of the early 1920s through the 1940s that lead us to another war. For if we do not look out for ourselves, then who will?

We were once the shining star in the world. Now no country, save a very small few, are our friends. We try to stand for all that is good and right but clearly fall on our faces. The level of decay we are facing is in my opinion paralleled only by Rome before its fall and decay. Where else in the world will more people vote for a singer on TV than will vote for the Presidential Elections? Only in a culture, so decadent as ours can that luxury be had. People use TV as a way to escape from their real duties. People use TV as a baby sitter instead of raising their children like in days past. TV is not the answer.

Do I claim to be any better? No, I struggle each and every day to make myself better and to try to rise above the quagmire of moral morass and decay that infest the country that we live in. I am no crusader like in the days of old. I am just one voice against the ever increasing wash of white-noise generated in cyberspace.

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Before a cold front...

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Neil deGrasse Tyson...Another Essay

The Perimeter of Ignorance
A boundary where scientists face a choice: invoke a deity or continue the quest for knowledge
by Neil deGrasse Tyson
From Natural History magazine — November 2005

Writing in centuries past, many scientists felt compelled to wax poetic about cosmic mysteries and God's handiwork. Perhaps one should not be surprised at this: most scientists back then, as well as many scientists today, identify themselves as spiritually devout.

But a careful reading of older texts, particularly those concerned with the universe itself, shows that the authors invoke divinity only when they reach the boundaries of their understanding. They appeal to a higher power only when staring into the ocean of their own ignorance. They call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.

Let's start at the top. Isaac Newton was one of the greatest intellects the world has ever seen. His laws of motion and his universal law of gravitation, conceived in the mid-seventeenth century, account for cosmic phenomena that had eluded philosophers for millennia. Through those laws, one could understand the gravitational attraction of bodies in a system, and thus come to understand orbits.

Newton's law of gravity enables you to calculate the force of attraction between any two objects. If you introduce a third object, then each one attracts the other two, and the orbits they trace become much harder to compute. Add another object, and another, and another, and soon you have the planets in our solar system. Earth and the Sun pull on each other, but Jupiter also pulls on Earth, Saturn pulls on Earth, Mars pulls on Earth, Jupiter pulls on Saturn, Saturn pulls on Mars, and on and on.

Newton feared that all this pulling would render the orbits in the solar system unstable. His equations indicated that the planets should long ago have either fallen into the Sun or flown the coop-leaving the Sun, in either case, devoid of planets. Yet the solar system, as well as the larger cosmos, appeared to be the very model of order and durability. So Newton, in his greatest work, the Principia, concludes that God must occasionally step in and make things right:

The six primary Planets are revolved about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

In the Principia, Newton distinguishes between hypotheses and experimental philosophy, and declares, "Hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy." What he wants is data, "inferr'd from the ph¾nomena." But in the absence of data, at the border between what he could explain and what he could only honor-the causes he could identify and those he could not-Newton rapturously invokes God:

Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; . . . he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. . . . We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion.

A century later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton's dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece, Mécanique Céleste, the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces. According to an oft-repeated but probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. "Sire," Laplace replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis."

* * *

Laplace notwithstanding, plenty of scientists besides Newton have called on God-or the gods-wherever their comprehension fades to ignorance. Consider the second-century a.d. Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. Armed with a description, but no real understanding, of what the planets were doing up there, he could not contain his religious fervor:

I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace, at my pleasure, the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.

Or consider the seventeenth-century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, whose achievements include constructing the first working pendulum clock and discovering the rings of Saturn. In his charming book The Celestial Worlds Discover'd, posthumously published in 1696, most of the opening chapter celebrates all that was then known of planetary orbits, shapes, and sizes, as well as the planets' relative brightness and presumed rockiness. The book even includes foldout charts illustrating the structure of the solar system. God is absent from this discussion-even though a mere century earlier, before Newton's achievements, planetary orbits were supreme mysteries.

Celestial Worlds also brims with speculations about life in the solar system, and that's where Huygens raises questions to which he has no answer. That's where he mentions the biological conundrums of the day, such as the origin of life's complexity. And sure enough, because seventeenth-century physics was more advanced than seventeenth-century biology, Huygens invokes the hand of God only when he talks about biology:

I suppose no body will deny but that there's somewhat more of Contrivance, somewhat more of Miracle in the production and growth of Plants and Animals than in lifeless heaps of inanimate Bodies. . . . For the finger of God, and the Wisdom of Divine Providence, is in them much more clearly manifested than in the other.

Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation "God of the gaps"-which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people's knowledge.

* * *

As reverent as Newton, Huygens, and other great scientists of earlier centuries may have been, they were also empiricists. They did not retreat from the conclusions their evidence forced them to draw, and when their discoveries conflicted with prevailing articles of faith, they upheld the discoveries. That doesn't mean it was easy: sometimes they met fierce opposition, as did Galileo, who had to defend his telescopic evidence against formidable objections drawn from both scripture and "common" sense.

Galileo clearly distinguished the role of religion from the role of science. To him, religion was the service of God and the salvation of souls, whereas science was the source of exact observations and demonstrated truths. In a long, famous, bristly letter written in the summer of 1615 to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany (but, like so many epistles of the day, circulated among the literati), he quotes, in his own defense, an unnamed yet sympathetic church official saying that the Bible "tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."

The letter to the duchess leaves no doubt about where Galileo stood on the literal word of the Holy Writ:


In expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. . . .
Nothing physical which . . . demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. . . .
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

A rare exception among scientists, Galileo saw the unknown as a place to explore rather than as an eternal mystery controlled by the hand of God.

As long as the celestial sphere was generally regarded as the domain of the divine, the fact that mere mortals could not explain its workings could safely be cited as proof of the higher wisdom and power of God. But beginning in the sixteenth century, the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton-not to mention Maxwell, Heisenberg, Einstein, and everybody else who discovered fundamental laws of physics-provided rational explanations for an increasing range of phenomena. Little by little, the universe was subjected to the methods and tools of science, and became a demonstrably knowable place.

* * *

Then, in what amounts to a stunning yet unheralded philosophical inversion, throngs of ecclesiastics and scholars began to declare that it was the laws of physics themselves that served as proof of the wisdom and power of God.

One popular theme of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the "clockwork universe"-an ordered, rational, predictable mechanism fashioned and run by God and his physical laws. The early telescopes, which all relied on visible light, did little to undercut that image of an ordered system. The Moon revolved around Earth. Earth and other planets rotated on their axes and revolved around the Sun. The stars shone. The nebulae floated freely in space.

Not until the nineteenth century was it evident that visible light is just one band of a broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation-the band that human beings just happen to see. Infrared was discovered in 1800, ultraviolet in 1801, radio waves in 1888, X rays in 1895, and gamma rays in 1900. Decade by decade in the following century, new kinds of telescopes came into use, fitted with detectors that could "see" these formerly invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Now astrophysicists began to unmask the true character of the universe.

Turns out that some celestial bodies give off more light in the invisible bands of the spectrum than in the visible. And the invisible light picked up by the new telescopes showed that mayhem abounds in the cosmos: monstrous gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, matter-crushing gravitational fields, matter-hungry black holes that flay their bloated stellar neighbors, newborn stars igniting within pockets of collapsing gas. And as our ordinary, optical telescopes got bigger and better, more mayhem emerged: galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other, explosions of supermassive stars, chaotic stellar and planetary orbits. Our own cosmic neighborhood-the inner solar system-turned out to be a shooting gallery, full of rogue asteroids and comets that collide with planets from time to time. Occasionally they've even wiped out stupendous masses of Earth's flora and fauna. The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo.

Of course, Earth can be bad for your health too. On land, grizzly bears want to maul you; in the oceans, sharks want to eat you. Snowdrifts can freeze you, deserts dehydrate you, earthquakes bury you, volcanoes incinerate you. Viruses can infect you, parasites suck your vital fluids, cancers take over your body, congenital diseases force an early death. And even if you have the good luck to be healthy, a swarm of locusts could devour your crops, a tsunami could wash away your family, or a hurricane could blow apart your town.

* * *

So the universe wants to kill us all. But let's ignore that complication for the moment.

Many, perhaps countless, questions hover at the front lines of science. In some cases, answers have eluded the best minds of our species for decades or even centuries. And in contemporary America, the notion that a higher intelligence is the single answer to all enigmas has been enjoying a resurgence. This present-day version of God of the gaps goes by a fresh name: "intelligent design." The term suggests that some entity, endowed with a mental capacity far greater than the human mind can muster, created or enabled all the things in the physical world that we cannot explain through scientific methods.

An interesting hypothesis.

But why confine ourselves to things too wondrous or intricate for us to understand, whose existence and attributes we then credit to a superintelligence? Instead, why not tally all those things whose design is so clunky, goofy, impractical, or unworkable that they reflect the absence of intelligence?

Take the human form. We eat, drink, and breathe through the same hole in the head, and so, despite Henry J. Heimlich's eponymous maneuver, choking is the fourth leading cause of "unintentional injury death" in the United States. How about drowning, the fifth leading cause? Water covers almost three-quarters of Earth's surface, yet we are land creatures-submerge your head for just a few minutes, and you die.

Or take our collection of useless body parts. What good is the pinky toenail? How about the appendix, which stops functioning after childhood and thereafter serves only as the source of appendicitis? Useful parts, too, can be problematic. I happen to like my knees, but nobody ever accused them of being well protected from bumps and bangs. These days, people with problem knees can get them surgically replaced. As for our pain-prone spine, it may be a while before someone finds a way to swap that out.

How about the silent killers? High blood pressure, colon cancer, and diabetes each cause tens of thousands of deaths in the U.S. every year, but it's possible not to know you're afflicted until your coroner tells you so. Wouldn't it be nice if we had built-in biogauges to warn us of such dangers well in advance? Even cheap cars, after all, have engine gauges.

And what comedian designer configured the region between our legs-an entertainment complex built around a sewage system?

The eye is often held up as a marvel of biological engineering. To the astrophysicist, though, it's only a so-so detector. A better one would be much more sensitive to dark things in the sky and to all the invisible parts of the spectrum. How much more breathtaking sunsets would be if we could see ultraviolet and infrared. How useful it would be if, at a glance, we could see every source of microwaves in the environment, or know which radio station transmitters were active. How helpful it would be if we could spot police radar detectors at night.

Think how easy it would be to navigate an unfamiliar city if we, like birds, could always tell which way was north because of the magnetite in our heads. Think how much better off we'd be if we had gills as well as lungs, how much more productive if we had six arms instead of two. And if we had eight, we could safely drive a car while simultaneously talking on a cell phone, changing the radio station, applying makeup, sipping a drink, and scratching our left ear.
Stupid design could fuel a movement unto itself. It may not be nature's default, but it's ubiquitous. Yet people seem to enjoy thinking that our bodies, our minds, and even our universe represent pinnacles of form and reason. Maybe it's a good antidepressant to think so. But it's not science-not now, not in the past, not ever.

* * *

Another practice that isn't science is embracing ignorance. Yet it's fundamental to the philosophy of intelligent design: I don't know what this is. I don't know how it works. It's too complicated for me to figure out. It's too complicated for any human being to figure out. So it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

What do you do with that line of reasoning? Do you just cede the solving of problems to someone smarter than you, someone who's not even human? Do you tell students to pursue only questions with easy answers?

There may be a limit to what the human mind can figure out about our universe. But how presumptuous it would be for me to claim that if I can't solve a problem, neither can any other person who has ever lived or who will ever be born. Suppose Galileo and Laplace had felt that way? Better yet, what if Newton had not? He might then have solved Laplace's problem a century earlier, making it possible for Laplace to cross the next frontier of ignorance.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem. Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes. We know when and where they start. We know what drives them. We know what mitigates their destructive power. And anyone who has studied global warming can tell you what makes them worse. The only people who still call hurricanes "acts of God" are the people who write insurance forms.

* * *

To deny or erase the rich, colorful history of scientists and other thinkers who have invoked divinity in their work would be intellectually dishonest. Surely there's an appropriate place for intelligent design to live in the academic landscape. How about the history of religion? How about philosophy or psychology? The one place it doesn't belong is the science classroom.

If you're not swayed by academic arguments, consider the financial consequences. Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery-the frontier that drives the economies of the future-would be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. An anthology of his "Universe" columns will be published in 2006 by W.W. Norton.


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Another Quote...

Preliminary Expectoration

"Faith therefore is not an aesthetic emotion but something far higher, precisely because it has resignation as its presupposition; it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence."

"A purely human courage is required to renounce the whole of the temporal to gain the eternal; but this I gain, and to all eternity"

Fear and Trembling by Sören Kierkegaard 1843

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Thought for today...

Spirituality speaking, everything is possible, but in the world of the finite there is much which is not possible. Fear and Trembling 1843: Soren Kierkengaard Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

Emigrate - New York City

I just heard this on the radio down in Charlotte North Carolina. The station was New Rock 106.5FM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigrate
Emigrate is the name of a band led by Richard Z. Kruspe, guitarist and founder of Rammstein.

Thought Of The Day...

Walter Kaufmann described Existentialism as, "The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life.



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Cold Water....

We were in Charlotte North Carolina all weekend for a Cheer leading contest called The Spirit of Hope National Championship. We stayed at the Hilton Charlotte that was downtown. It was across the street from the Convention Center where the contest was held. It is a 20 story hotel and they are doing some remodeling to the place as well. The elevators took forever to get up and down to the different floors. Also, when we woke up on Sunday morning expecting to take a shower, the water was COLD! No one in all of the 20 floors had hot water, No One!! That sucked!!


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Hellraiser in Charlotte NC...

Taken with my LGVX8600 phone.
From RMStringer

Neat Light...

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From RMStringer

Yesterday...

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From RMStringer

Snowing Today!

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From RMStringer

Help, My House Is To COLD!!! BURRRR

What are we? Are we a bunch of robots? Help me please i don't know if it is to cold for my children in here. Can we not control the temperature in our own home? I DAMM SURE DON'T NEED SOMEONE TELLING ME WHAT TEMP TO SET MY thermostat to! What will be next? Will the State of California install a arm to wipe our asses in the bathroom? Those liberal no good dumbasses in California need to grow a brain and stop being such a bunch of little girls. We don't not need the state or country to regulate the thermostats in our homes. The Governator is sounding more like a NAZI(Kennedy) every day!

We are heading straight to the "Big Brother" country like in Fahrenheit 451. Grow a single cell and adjust your own damm temp in YOUR HOUSE!! Get a life!! I can tell if my home is too cold or hot; YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO AS WELL!! If the state of California was not so damm tight on its EPA regulations you could have had more power/light generation facilities 20 years ago. You would not be in the state that you are in now with not enough power to go around. Plan ahead! Many states have upgraded their power grid and do not suffer the same fate of your "Rolling Black-Outs"

Grow Up, Act and Think For yourself. Be Adults and regulate your on damm air conditioners. The other 49 stated do it! We do not need any more governmental regulation in the USA.

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TollBooth Users...

I was on my way to work this morning and was driving my usually way, down the toll road (Powhite 76), and i was coming to the first set of tolls. I was slowing down and i picked my booth to pay at. There are two on the northbound lanes. I picked the left one. I was about a car-length from the cement walls when out a NOWHERE cam this Jeep Cherokee and cut in front of me. IF i had been any closer; the lady and i use that term very loosely, she would have hit me! What was even more funny was the fact that she had to pay just like me and when she came out the other side, she was only two cars ahead of me. What an asshole! We all have some where to be in the morning and there are two pay lanes, two EasyTagg lanes, and two coin lanes, more than enough to accommodate all of the traffic. It only takes a turd to make the punch go bad!


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Thought for today...

In spite of the fact that love is essentially based upon the sensuous, it is ennobled by reason of the consciousness of eternity which it embodies: for what distinguishes all love from lust is the fact that it bears an impress of eternity. Either-Or Vol II Soren Kierkengaard Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

Deal Or No Deal...Dumbass!

As you, like me and 50 million other Americans are gathered around their Television Sets to watch NBC's Deal Or No Deal. One has to wonder...

We have watched the show since it came to NBC. With Howie Mandel as the host of the show and lots of pretty women to handle the cases it is fun. The participants always give a good show, some more than other with their theatrics and weirdness coupled along with Mandel's seriousness and his germ-a-phobia makes for good TV.

One central theme that i witness on this show is GREED! I like to gamble on the occasion and it is fun taken in context of what it is, a passing fancy. People come to this show and try to strike it rich be playing the odds and betting that the case they pick holds the 1million dollars. They are playing against the odds and they are not in their favor. I have never witnessed a person win the big prize, NEVER. Also when they get greedy by not taking the bankers best and final offer when they have exhausted all of the big prizes and they deiced to go for it, they loose! I saw it tonight. A girl was offered $283,000 and did not take it. She cleared all of the $1,000,000 prizes and was left with $100,000 as the top prize. she left with $55,000, a far cry away from 283. With taxes in California, she would be lucky to get about $20,000.

She took a chance and crapped out like most of the people do. Some get smart and take the Deal with a less substantial offer than the 1,000,000 and have something. They come with lofty goals and bet for the big bucks only to leave with little or no money. DO they not realize that taking the lesser offer, they still come out ahead? Remember it takes money to get there...

They should have made a deal and not taken the "No Deal".

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Thought for today...

People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for example, freedom of thought-instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation:1838 Soren Kierkengaard Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

Bike Stuff...

As i told everyone a while ago, my wife, Sondra, bought me a set of Kenda Tires for my Mountain Bike. I had a set of 2.2inch tires on the bike and the back tire was worn smooth. I went to a set of Kenda 2.35s Much bigger! I feel that they are more stable when i go over obstacles on the trails and they are about as big of a tire as i can go on my bike. The back tire started to rub on part of the frame when i would put a lot of pressure when ridding and the back tire was a little out of true. By true i mean that the rim was not round anymore due to being bent from jumping stuff. I went to Performance Bike yesterday evening and they were able to true the rim of the bike so it is not rubbing anymore. I would have hated for the bakc tire to get destroyed from the rubbing. The Kenda Nevegal tires are great to ride on and they corner very well in my opinion but dont take my word for it, go and get a set for yourself!


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New VXC (VXcasuality) Music!!

Several months ago i posted a few album links from this artist. I just went back to his site and i found several new albums. Here are the links:

Spore - Voyage

VXC - States Of Matter(2007)

Enjoy the music, i have!


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Charlie Wilson's War...A Commentary on the current state of affairs.

“Synopsis  Charlie Wilson's War

Urged on by his staunchly anti-communist friend and romantic interest, Joanne Herring, Wilson leads the effort to provide United States funds indirectly to the Afghan Mujahideen. In the process, the film also reveals Wilson as a Congressman with a gregarious social life of women and partying, which results in a federal investigation into his alleged cocaine use that never resulted in any charges.

Herring persuades Wilson to visit the Pakistani leadership who complains about the inadequate support to oppose the Soviets and insists he visits a major Afghan refugee camp. Deeply moved by their misery and determination to fight, Wilson is frustrated by the regional CIA personnel's insistence on a low key approach against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Wilson leads an effort to substantially increase funding to the mujahedeen in his role as a member of two major Congressional defense committees. As part of this effort, Wilson befriends the maverick CIA operative Gust Avrakotos and his understaffed Afghanistan group to find a better strategy, especially including a means to counter the Soviets' formidable gunship helicopter air support. As a result, Wilson's deft political bargaining for the necessary funding and Avrakotos' group's careful planning using those resources, such as supplying the guerrillas with FIM-92 Stinger missile launchers, turns the Soviet occupation into a deadly quagmire with their heavy fighting vehicles being destroyed at a crippling rate. This effort by Wilson ultimately evolves into a major portion of the U.S. foreign policy known as the Reagan Doctrine, under which the U.S. expanded assistance beyond just the mujahideen and began also supporting other anti-communist resistance movements around the world. The policy was controversial, although some now credit the policy with contributing to the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union and global communism, bringing about the end of the Cold War.."^[2]

Despite the victory, Avrakotos warns that unless there is a serious effort to help Afghanistan rebuild back into a stable society, there could be dire and unpredictable repercussions for both that nation and the U.S. Unfortunately, Wilson finds exceptionally little enthusiasm in the government for even the modest measures he proposes to heed this warning. The film ends with Wilson receiving a major commendation for the support of the U.S. clandestine services, but his pride is sadly tempered by his fears of what unintended consequences his secret efforts could yield in the future and the implications of U.S. disengagement from Afghanistan. The implied warning involves both the rise of the extremist Taliban regime and the September 11th terrorist attacks, though this is never specifically mentioned.”

 

 

Well we saw the movie last night.  I remember as a  child seeing him talk at Kirbyville Elementary when I was about 9 years old.   I totally agree with the synopsis give in Wikipedia.  Had America given just a modicum of interest after they covertly funded 500 million to the Mujahedeen to defeat the Soviet Union, which they did, we would not be having to look over our shoulders at the airports and worry about a building exploding in a major US city.   There was roughly ½ the population under the age of 14 after the war and they were looking for something to follow and the Radical Extremist got their attention.  During the war, we trained Osama Bin Laden and with this training, he was able to grab a major portion of power.  Compared to the 500 million, 1 million or more to help rebuild the infrastructure of Afghanistan would have secured our interests in the Middle East and our security at home.  The USA would have looked as a hero and not imperialists to the Extremists only serving our own interests.  We could have been saviors, not just happy that the USSR was defeated and that we were the big boys on the block.  Their government would have been PRO-US, not  ANTI-US as it was when the Taliban  and Al-Qaeda came to power filing in the vacuum that was created by America’s non-involvement.  To put it bluntly, The USA screwed the pooch and botched their opportunity all to hell! Our non-involvement in this country eventually lead the bombing of the USS Cole in which Clinton did nothing and to 9/11.  At one point, Bin Laden was offered to the USA and Clinton said we do not want him.  Another feather in his (Clinton) inept hat. 

 

Radical Islam can be traced back throughout the centuries, but a great turning point against the USA was fronted  by a man named Sayyid Qutb.  From 1948 to 1950, he went to the United States on a scholarship to study the educational system, receiving a master's degree from the Colorado State College of Education (now the University of Northern Colorado) in Greeley, Colorado. ( I helped build a Dining Hall there in 2004) “Qutb was extremely critical of many things in the United States: its materialism, individual freedom, economic system, racism, brutal boxing matches, poor haircuts, triviality, restrictions on divorce, enthusiasm for sports, "animal-like" mixing of the sexes (which went on even in churches),^[11] and lack of support for the Palestinian struggle^[12] In an article published in Egypt after his travels, he noted with disapproval the sexuality of Americans:

the American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs — and she shows all this and does not hide it.

And their taste in music:

Jazz is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires...^[14]

Qutb concluded that major aspects of American life were primitive and "shocking". His experiences in the U.S. is believed to have formed in part the impetus for his rejection of Western values and his move towards radicalism upon returning to Egypt. Resigning from the civil service, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1950s”

He helped to “stir the pot” so to speak and started the views on America as Imperialists only worrying about ourselves. Well, this is enough about this subject from me.   Have a good night!

 

 

 

RMStringer

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced

equation inherent to the programming of the matrix.

You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite

my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate

from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision.

While it remains a burden assiduously avoided, it is not

unexpected, and thus not beyond a measure of control.

Which has led you, inexorably, here." - The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded

 

Painted evening sky...

Taken with my LGVX8600 phone.
From RMStringer

My Youtube Page

I have a YouTube Page that i started to keep all the mountain biking videos on plus some of my favorite music vids as well. GO and let em know what you think.


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mORNING mOUNTAIN bIKE rIDE...

We ahd a big group today, 10 people to be exact. We rode the Green Trail first then we went to the Blue Trail so we would have access to the Double Red Trail and all of the new stunts that are on it.

Here are a few of the videos that i took today:

Mark:


Rob:


Another Seesaw Ride:



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Faith No More - We Care A Lot

1987 at its best! No Mike Patton on vocals. he joined the band after this album.

Faith No More - Stripsearch

IMO, One of their better songs. Great voice and style...

It's over today
The heat is gone, time is gone
F for fake
I feel no wrong, hide no wrong
I love this place, the lights
Under this face, so dry
Only way to change, give yourself away
Don't be ashamed, next in line
Close one eye, just walk by
In these days
I'm breathing stone, crying is done
I'll win this race
I'll leave alone, arrive alone
Love this place, the lights
Under this face, so dry
Stripped to the bone
I did no wrong
Truth is my name
Give yourself away
F for fake [4 times]
Give yourself away [3 times]

Faith No More/Boo-Ya Tribe - Another Body Murdered

Judgment Night Soundtrack. It is a good paring of bands!!

I'm makin' deals for deals that make a kill
And anyone looking gonna' get that ass killed
I'm livin' like a criminal and criminal I be
And I'm respected in the hood like a 'G'

Faith no More - Everything's Ruined

Things worked out better than we had planned
Capital from boy, woman and man
We were like ink and paper
Numbers on a calculator
Knew arithmetic so well
Working overtime completed what was assigned
We had to multiply ourselves
A bouncing little baby
A shiny copper penny
And he spent himself
Would not listen to us
But when he lost his appetite
He lost his weight in friends
Baby became a fat nickel so fast
Then came puberty
Exponentially
Soon our boy became a million
People loved him so
And helped him to grow
Everyone knew the thing that was best
Of course, he must invest
A penny won't do
But he made us proud
He made us rich
But how were we to know
He's counterfeit
Now everything's ruined

Faith No More - Evidence

King For A Day, Fool For A Lifetime...

Faith No More - Midlife Crisis

Classic FNM!! Angel Dust album.

Linkin Park - Bleed It Out?

Why is it that the guy singing in the urban voice sounds so smooth and the other dude sounds like he is MAJORLY CONSTIPATED?? He always sound so pissed off at everyone. I do not really like this song and it sounds rather sophomoric for them. Most if not all of their songs sound the same. The lyrics are really unimaginative and sound like a 3rd rate rap-metal act like Limp Bizket sounded later in their career. That genre is really played out and has been for years...

"Here we go for the hundredth time,
Hand grenade pins in every line,
Throw 'em up and let something shine.
Going out of my f**king mind.
Filthy mouth, no excuse.
Find a new place to hang this noose.
String me up from atop these roofs.
Knot it tight so I won't get loose.
Truth is you can stop and stare,
Bled myself out and no one cares.
Dug a trench out, laid down there
With a shovel up out to reach somewhere.
Yeah someone pour it in,
Make it a dirt dance floor again.
Say your prayers and stomp it out,
When they bring that chorus in...

I always joke with my daughter and sing for the chorus this: Im sitting on the pot just wanting to flush it away!

They should take my advice...





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Soren Kierkegaard "Quoets"

I am just starting to read a book about S.K. Here are a few quotes from him:

1. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

2. Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

3. People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

4. Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

There are many others and i will be posting them as i read more of his work.

From Wikipedia:

Thought:

Kierkegaard has been called a philosopher, a theologian,the Father of Existentialism, a literary critic, a humorist, a psychologist, and a poet. Two of his popular ideas are "subjectivity",and the "leap to faith," popularly referred to as the "leap of faith." The leap of faith is his conception of how an individual would believe in God, or how a person would act in love. It is not a rational decision, as it is transcending rationality in favor of something more uncanny, that is, faith. As such he thought that to have faith is at the same time to have doubt. So, for example, for one to truly have faith in God, one would also have to doubt that God exists; the doubt is the rational part of a person's thought, without which the faith would have no real substance. Doubt is an essential element of faith, an underpinning. In plain words, to believe or have faith that God exists, without ever having doubted God's existence or goodness, would not be a faith worth having. For example, it takes no faith to believe that a pencil or a table exists, when one is looking at it and touching it. In the same way, to believe or have faith in God is to know that one has no perceptual or any other access to God, and yet still has faith in God.

Kierkegaard also stressed the importance of the self, and the self's relation to the world as being grounded in self-reflection and introspection. He argued in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments that "subjectivity is truth" and "truth is subjectivity." This has to do with a distinction between what is objectively true and an individual's subjective relation (such as indifference or commitment) to that truth. People who in some sense believe the same things may relate to those beliefs quite differently. Two individuals may both believe that many of those around them are poor and deserve help, but this knowledge may lead only one of them to decide to actually help the poor.

Kierkegaard primarily discusses subjectivity with regard to religious matters, however. As already noted, he argues that doubt is an element of faith and that it is impossible to gain any objective certainty about religious doctrines such as the existence of God or the life of Christ. The most one could hope for would be the conclusion that it is probable that the Christian doctrines are true, but if a person were to believe such doctrines only to the degree they seemed likely to be true, he or she would not be genuinely religious at all. Faith consists in a subjective relation of absolute commitment to these doctrines.



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What I'm reading...

Taken with my LGVX8600 phone.
From RMStringer

Thought for today...

My whole life is an epigram calculated to make people aware-The Journals:1848: Soren Kierkengaard




Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

USB 3.0, SuperSpeed!

You will need a new card for this because most MOBOs are USB 2.0, not 3.0 at the moment.

Revealed: USB 3.0 jacks and sockets

By Tony Smith in Las Vegas [More by this author]

9th January 2008 18:37 GMT

CES USB 3.0, the upcoming version of the universal add-on standard re-engineered for the HD era, made a small appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It wasn't demonstrated in operation, but we did get to see what the new connectors look like.

Not, alas, the optical one, we have to report, but the electrical connectors. On show in public for – we believe – the first time, we got to see the new full-size connector, the socket it slips into and the new mini-socket. You can see the optical port here.

The USB 3 connector...

...and in close-up...

...and in diagrammatic detail

Here's the socket:

The standard USB 3 socket...

...which you can see more clearly in this diagram

And, finally, the mini-socket:

Dubbed SuperSpeed USB, the third major incarnation of the serial bus standard is set to deliver data transfer speeds of around 4.7Gb/s - ten times today's 480Mb/s limit.

The new spec will be compatible with older USB 1.1 and 2.0 products, cables and connectors, and you can see from the diagram of the standard connector how that's achieved: the extra pins are placed behind the USB 1.1/2.0 ones. USB 3.0 connectors and receptacles will be deeper than the current ones.

An initial USB 3.0 spec is due to be reviewed later this month. The full USB 3.0 specification is expected to be completed by the end of June 2008.

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Stupid Celebritie "Quotes"

The Daily Telegraph provides examples of celebrities' fad gaffes and what the experts say.

Scientists warn on celebrities promoting fads "I am challenging these evil genes by natural means. I am convinced that by eating biological foods it is possible to avoid tumours." Gwyneth Paltrow, actress "Diet cannot prevent cancer. The risks of some of them can be reduced with certain diets, but some cancers, alas, show no link to dietary factors." Ursula Arens, dietician "If you suffer from joint pain it is a good idea to cut out or reduce the amount of tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, white potatoes and paprika that you eat." Gillian McKeith, author "Some rheumatoid patients may improve by omitting certain foods from their diets, but this must be determined on an individual basis and a blanket prohibition is totally unjustified." Margaret Rayman, professor of nutritional medicine "Lots of skin products use the same petrochemicals as the antifreeze in your car." Stella McCartney, fashion designer "Propylene glycol is a very versatile chemical which is used primarily as a base in moisturisers, a solvent in food colouring, a carrier solvent in fragrances and in many anti-bacterial lotions. So it might sound scary, but it isn't." Dr Dominic Williams, pharmacologist "There is no conclusive evidence showing that the continued use of these devices is linked to any measurable and general improvements in cognition. Practice at any task should lead to some form of improvement for that specific task." Dr Jason Braithwaite, cognitive neuroscientist While presenting How toxic are you? on Channel 4, she talked of "lovely make-up and moisturisers which don't have any chemicals in them". Sarah Beeny, television presenter "Chemicals are everywhere and everything. To be chemical free you have to experience a total vacuum." Ian Mabbett, chemist

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FCC to Probe Comcast Data Discrimination

I was waiting for this to happen and i am GLAD that it is going to!

By PETER SVENSSON – 1 day ago

LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Federal Communications Commission will investigate complaints that Comcast Corp. actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday.

A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data. Two groups also asked the FCC to fine the nation's No. 2 Internet provider $195,000 for every affected subscriber.

"Sure, we're going to investigate and make sure that no consumer is going to be blocked," Martin told an audience at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

In an investigation last year, The Associated Press found that Comcast in some cases hindered file sharing by subscribers who used BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing program. The findings, first reported Oct. 19, confirmed claims by users who also noticed interference with other file-sharing applications.

Comcast denies that it blocks file sharing, but acknowledged after the AP story that it was "delaying" some of the traffic between computers that share files. The company said the intervention was necessary to improve the surfing experience for the majority of its subscribers.

Peer-to-peer file sharing is a common way to illegally exchange copyright files, but companies are also rushing to utilize it for legal distribution of video and game content. If ISPs hinder or control that traffic, it makes them important gatekeepers of Internet content.

The FCC's response will be an important test of its willingness to enforce "Net Neutrality," the principle that Internet traffic be treated equally by carriers. The agency has a broadly stated policy supporting the concept, but its position hasn't been tested in a real-world case.

The FCC's policy statement makes an exception for "reasonable traffic management." Comcast has said its practices fall under that exception.

"The question is going to arise: Are they reasonable network practices?" Martin said Tuesday. "When they have reasonable network practices, they should disclose those and make those public."

Comcast subscribers who asked the company about interference on their connections before the AP story ran were met with flat denials.

A Comcast spokesman did not have an immediate comment.

Martin also said the commission was looking at complaints that wireless carriers denied text-messaging "short codes" to some applicants. The five-digit numbers are a popular way to sign up for updates on everything from sports to politics to entertainment news.

Verizon Wireless in late September denied a request by Naral Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights group, to use its mobile network for a sign-up text messaging program.

The company reversed course just a day later, calling it a mistake and an "isolated incident."

Verizon Wireless has also denied a short code to a Swedish company, Rebtel Networks AB, that operates a service similar to a virtual calling card, allowing users to avoid paying the carrier's international rates on their cell-phone calls. Verizon Wireless has stuck to that denial, saying it does want to provide an advertising venue to a competitor.

"I tell the staff that they should act on all of those complaints and investigate all of them," Martin said.

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Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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Thought for today...

when the pope kises the feet of the laity he looks like an old toe-queen to some people 'The Illuminatus Trilogy' pg 560 Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

Southeast morning...

Taken with my LGVX8600 phone.
From RMStringer

The Sisters Of Mercy - Custom DVD

Several years ago I did a “custom” DVD by the Sisters Of Mercy.  It took me a long time to get it the way I wanted to and I also did a custom cover using some of their symbols and old album cover. It is encoded in AC3 5.1   with all of their music videos and their concert at Royal Albert Hall back from 1985.  I was think about placing it on the web in an .ISO format and using Bit Torrent to distribute the video. I have shown it to people that really liked it. I am just wondering how some of you feel about this?   Let me know…

 

RMStringer

********************

IMBA Member: Dec 2007

 

The Illuminatus! Trilogy Stuff...

"Current Structure of the Bavarian
Illuminati Conspiracy and the Law of Fives"

The Law of Fives

The Law of Fives is summarized in the Principia Discordia:

The Law of Fives states simply that: all phenomena are directly or indirectly related to the number five, and this relationship can always be demonstrated given enough ingenuity on the part of the demonstrator.
The Law of Fives is never wrong. – Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia, Page 00016

The Law of Fives as quoted uses the word "Five" five times.

Like most of Discordianism, the Law of Fives appears on the surface to be either some sort of weird joke, or bizarre supernaturalism; but under this, it may help clarify the Discordian view of how the human mind works; Lord Omar is quoted later on the same page as having written, "I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."

Appendix Beth of Robert Shea's and Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy considers some of the numerology of Discordianism, and the question of what would happen to the Law of Fives if everyone had six fingers on each hand. The authors suggest that the real Law of Fives may be that everything can be related to the number five if you try hard enough. Sometimes the steps required may be highly convoluted.

Another way of looking at the Law of Fives is as a symbol for the observation of reality changing that which is being observed in the observer's mind. Just as how when one looks for fives in reality, one finds them, so will one find conspiracies, ways to determine when the apocalypse will come, and so on and so forth when one decides to look for them. It cannot be wrong, because it proves itself reflexively when looked at through this lens.

The Bavarian Illuminati

History

Adam Weishaupt

This movement was founded on May 1, 1776, in Ingolstadt (Upper Bavaria), by Jesuit-taught Adam Weishaupt (d. 1830),^[2] who was the first lay professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt.^[3] The movement was made up of freethinkers, as an offshoot of the Enlightenment^[4], which some believe was a conspiracy to infiltrate and overthrow the governments of many European states^[5]. The group's adherents were given the name Illuminati, although they called themselves "Perfectibilists". The group has also been called the Illuminati Order, and the Bavarian Illuminati, and the movement itself has been referred to as Illuminism. In 1777, Karl Theodor, Elector Palatine, succeeded as ruler of Bavaria. He was a proponent of Enlightened Despotism and in 1784, his government banned all secret societies, including the Illuminati.

While it was not legally allowed to operate, many influential intellectuals and progressive politicians counted themselves as members, including Ferdinand of Brunswick and the diplomat Xavier von Zwack.^[6] The Illuminati's members pledged obedience to their superiors, and were divided into three main classes: the first, known as the Nursery, encompassed the ascending degrees or offices of Preparation, Novice, Minerval and Illuminatus Minor. The second, known as the Masonry, consists of the ascending degrees of Illuminatus Major and Illuminatus dirigens. It was also sometimes called Scotch Knight. The third, designated the Mysteries, was subdivided into the degrees of the Lesser Mysteries (Presbyter and Regent) and those of the Greater Mysteries (Magus and Rex).

The order had its branches in most countries of the European continent; it reportedly had around 2,000 members over the span of 10 years.^[7] The scheme had its attraction for literary men, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder, and even for the reigning dukes of Gotha and Weimar. Internal rupture and panic over succession preceded its downfall, which was effected by The Secular Edict made by the Bavarian government in 1785.^{[citation needed]}

Illuminati after 1790

Conspiracy theorists such as Ryan Burke and Morgan Gricar, have argued that the Bavarian Illuminati survived, possibly to this day, though very little reliable evidence can be found to support that Weishaupt's group survived into the 19th century. However, several groups have used the name Illuminati since to found their own rites, claiming to be the Illuminati, including the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) founded by Theodor Reuss and Aleister Crowley (England),^[8] Grand Lodge Rockefeller founded by David Goldman (USA), Orden Illuminati^[9] founded by Gabriel López de Rojas (Spain), The Illuminati Order^[10] and others.

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Thought for today...

Tim Leary - 'People have to go out of their minds before they can come to their senses. 'The Illuminatus Trilogy' pg 113 Posted via my LGVX8600 phone.

Clear morning drive...

Taken with my LGVX8600 phone.
From RMStringer

Evening Sky 4.46pm EST

Taken with my LGVX8600 phone.
From RMStringer

The Timelords / The KLF - Doctorin' The TARDIS feat Glitter

The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu...Doctor Who HEY!! The Tradis...

The KLF - 3AM Eternal(Live At The SSL)

I used to want a phone like the one in the video.

**********************************************

Sample city, through Trancentral
Basic face kick, elemental
Swings, brings new technology
With K the L the F an' the ology
The force comin' down with mayhem
Lookin at my watch, time 3 A.M.
Got to see that everywhere I turn will
Point to the fact that time is Eternal