|
|
31 Mar 2005 @ 05:13, by swanny. Death & Dying
This may itself be to late but there is no
way of knowing. Hang in there girl.
According to my research the removal of the tube
while solicited by the husband came as the result
of a judges determination that according to the
evidence, facts and witnesses, "he" ruled that
Terri would not want to live in her current state.
Yet "time" has shown otherwise.
There is such a thing as "will" and the will
to live. To live in spite of the probablity of death.
It has now been thirteen days since she has received
water. Now conventional wisdom says that people usually
die after three days without water. The doctors progronosis
was between 10 and 12 days but thirteen days. Is this not a
definitive and "clear" affirmation of Terri's "WILL TO LIVE".
It seems so to me even though "will" is not normally
measureable, generally there is only such will with
strong hope and passion. I must post now though so
may God have mercy and grace on us if she dies.
|
|
|
|
 31 Mar 2005 @ 02:22, by jmarc. Ideas, Creativity
If wishes were dishes More >
|
|
|
|
 29 Mar 2005 @ 17:57, by ming. Communities
One of my standards for evaluating how free a society would be would be the inverse of the degree to which it suppresses various kinds of "vices" and "indecent" or "immoral" behavior.
Sex and drugs and free communication, primarily. You know, is nudity illegal? Or saying "bad" words. Or smoking or hallucinogenics. Or prostitution. Or odd sexual fetishes.
Personal choices and life styles and modes of expression. The degree to which a society feels it needs to use force to control those is closely related to the degree it is being oppressive.
When a lot of people share a society, it can be quite practical to have laws that regulate the interaction between them and protect their health and liberty. Driving in the same side of the street really makes things much easier. Having somebody to call when your house gets burglarized makes you safer. But for a public authority to try to control your personal habits, for no other reason than that somebody doesn't like them, is a totally different matter.
Victimless crimes, essentially. Which generally aren't really crimes, but manifestations of the existence of slavery and mind control, enforced by physical or economic violence.
A society where you aren't allowed to say "fuck" or show your breasts on TV is kind of sick. It indicates there are some perverts in charge who have a big hangup on sex, thinking they have to control everybody else, because they're afraid of their own thoughts, probably.
The view that sex or nudity is somehow bad or evil or indecent or offensive is at best a little strange. Certainly has nothing to do with what we find in nature. We're all born naked, and remain so under our clothes. We all got here by some people having sex and enjoying it greatly. There can hardly be anything more natural. That it is an evil thing comes out of a twisted religious mindset, which itself is the cause of much evil in the world.
"But we need to protect the children!" many people would say. From what? From the knowledge of how they came about? The idea that sex and children have to be kept far apart, or some kind of disaster happens, is in itself rather weird. From nature's hand, things tend to progress by themselves in a healthy way, if you don't mess with it. Little kids just don't have much interest in sexual subjects. But at some point they reach adolescence, and they certainly do. But then they run into oppressive laws that tell them they have to be children in that regard until they're 18, and that they have no right to choose to be sexual. Depends on the society. The age of consent is higher in the more oppressive societies.
So, what in some places is a healthy expression of sexuality, at a natural stage of one's life, will in other places be considered child pornography and molestation, and something one will lock people up for life for. You know, the topless girls in a Danish tabloid newspaper might just be 15 or 16. Which would be unthinkable in the United States, where there certainly wouldn't be any nudity in a newspaper, and it certainly wouldn't be teenagers.
Now, I've lived in the U.S. for so long that even a couple of years later I still instinctively get the american moral reactions some of the time. Even if I never believed in them. It is more a matter of looking over your shoulders for the police coming to arrest you because you did something unthinkably horribly bad, like serve alcohol to somebody under 21, or take a photo of some naked kids running through the sprinkler in the summer.
Now I'm in France, where even the gas company uses nude people in their commercials on TV. Which is absolutely non-controversial. People here would have a hard time understanding how there possibly could be any kind of issue with that.
And "bad" words? Most French try hard to be very polite, and expect others to be polite, so there are certain things one would tend not to say when one is in that mode. But that has absolutely nothing to do with whether it is illegal to say certain words in a public medium. You can say fuck all you want, or the equivalent, if that's somehow fits the mode of communication you're using. And a lot of the time it doesn't fit. See, it is your choice.
Here they serve wine in the cafeteria in high school. Zero issue with that. If you want water, you take a water carafe; if you want wine, you take a wine carafe. So, are the kids drunk all the time? Stupid question. On the contrary. Everybody has a very relaxed relationship to alcohol, so it isn't a problem. Oppressive and unnecessary regulation only makes things worse.
Smoking. Well, the cigarette packs in all of Europe by law have forceful hypnotic commands on them. Essentially: You're going to die!! Horribly, painfully, slowly! I could say a lot about the pitiful lack of understanding of the human mind that goes into producing such a campaign, as a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that's another story. Anyways, it is quite likely most of Europe would end up with similar control of smoking as in the U.S.
Am I saying that's bad? I'm saying that lack of choice is bad. And lack of good, balanced information is bad. "Smoking Kills!!" is propaganda. It is probably illegal in many places to provide any more balanced information. Smoking is a drug addiction. There are many drugs with various pros and cons and things to say about them. Coffee, sugar, heroin, nicotine. They're not all the same. But generally nobody is taking them for their harmful effects.
So, drug use. I'd say a society that leaves it up to the individual to choose, but which provides good information and support, is way more healthy than one that just makes it all illegal. The statistics show quite clearly that Holland has way fewer problems with drugs and drug related criminality than places that try to outlaw it. Lower rate of drug use, fewer fatalities, fewer health issues, less crime. Making the use of certain drugs illegal merely fuels a huge multi-billion dollar criminal drug industry, and puts a lot of people under serious health risks, because they don't know what they're getting, and there's no help available for them. And, as always, making a whole bunch of different things all the same in the eye of the law or in education brings all sorts of nasty problems. Heroin is not the same as marihuana. Neither is the same as most hallucinogenics, which typically aren't addictive. Making those illegal is probably mostly a matter of trying to stop people from stumbling into thinking out of the box. And, again, the negative effects are much greater when it is illegal, and you buy some unknown substance from some guy on a street corner, rather than from a pharmacy. Quite likely it is because somebody in power actually desire the population to have the negative effects, rather than any more balanced and healthy experience. Or because they benefit from the big money is the criminal drug industry.
Prostitution. I think women (or men) should be free to choose who they'll have sex with, as long as all parties agree. And if one of them earns money from it, so what. Making money from providing a service is an empowering thing. Prostitution is a valuable service, which relieves all sorts of pressures that otherwise could be let out in harmful ways. Making it illegal will only create a criminal industry around it, with pimps and violence. Making it illegal will ensure all sorts of health issues, and make it hazardous for both prostitutes and their customers. Again, countries that have legalized prostitution, like Holland or Germany, can clearly show the beneficial effects in their statistics. People who're trying to outlaw prostitution will usually do it out of some religious or moral belief, for some reason believing that women should not be free to choose where and when to apply their sexuality.
The question is who comes up with the "shoulds" and why, and the degree to which they succeed in getting government power to enforce their particular view. Somebody's personal choice gets elevated to law, so that everybody will be forced to make the same choice. A society that lets that happen has problems.
Real life is full of nuances. Everything has degrees and pros and cons. Some things are fun, but dangerous. Some things are risky and enjoyable at the same time. A free society needs to allow people to make choices that fit their nature, particularly when it is personal choices that don't harm others. That others might take offense is not a good enough reason to outlaw something. It just isn't good enough that there are groups that think that certain behaviors are bad. They're free to make their own choice, but not to enforce it on everybody else. If they don't feel like being gay or engaging in S&M or taking ecstasy or smoking or drinking or appearing nude in a magazine, no problem. But some people do, and feel like a whole lot of things that might be horrifying to others. That's what choice is about. It is up to you what you choose. It is not up to you to rule that all traces of those things you don't choose get weeded out of society. There needs to be room for all of us here.
So, again, a good test of the freedom of a society is how it deals with all those personal behaviors that might be considered by some to be immoral, bizarre, dangerous, perverted, unhealthy, indecent. And the funny thing is that if such choices are freely allowed, they right away become a lot less unhealthy and dangerous and strange. Because oppression and repression and suppression are the real dangers. More >
|
|
|
|
 28 Mar 2005 @ 20:27, by freo7. Communities
Personal & Spiritual INTRODUCTION 4
Brenda McCann,aka Freo'7 [link]
My name is Brenda - I live in Idaho/EE DA HO (Light Shining in These Mountains) USA and I have never had a prayer that was not answered nor dream not come true WHEN ITS TIME HAD COME.
Since I was 12 years old this saying is TRUE 4 me: "WE are NOT subject to time & space" - but - here and now through our physical emotional mental & causal bodies of Earth as adults, I guess maybe we are subject a tad bit if you consider HOW WE GENERATE our individualized vibrational frequencies as That Time & That Space. LOL
20 years ago I had just ONE prayer of longing in my heart and it went like this: "Dear God The ONE whom we all are, please bring me into contact and co-creative association with JUST ONE OTHER person *who is paralleling perfectly with me now* on this path and is as wildly passionate about it as I am."
Not to much to ask of the whole population of Earth and this universe, right? LOL
Well, I focused and focused on the above prayer request and although I watched with eager anticipation.... no one seemed to come along that really clicked in my spiritual work area so by and by I just forgot about the prayer while telling myself, "OK OK it wasn't time yet."
A long long time went by and I FORGOT that it wasn't time yet. LOL
Then Lo and Behold ~ right out of the INDIGO BLUE, another person responded with KNOWING to a little ditty I posted to a yahoo group and *Allah Be Praised* the Earth Mouse and the Cosmic Adventurer connected on this line: "We don't have to die to experience heaven right here & right now."
Instantly we formed a unit; a buddy-hood, and our new relationship began supporting each other's (process and direction =) missions! WHY?
*Because we could* be THAT mission TOGETHER!!
We have both come from the LONG HOT DESERTS of forgetfulness and longing. We got to Be "Where 2 or more are gathered together agreeing!" We got to AWAKEN together almost immediately after our first exchange and have been pushing our consciousness envelopes - pulling each other through - balancing and stabilizing together - facilitating releases instantaneously and thrilling to the breakthroughs with one an other ever since.
*What we have discovered as our mutually supported experience of this GLOBAL HEART TRANSFORMATION is what we hope to share with all others we can possibly link up with & thereby facilitate a HEART CENTER BUDDY system with whom we can in turn coach and support IN THEIR Heart Center Transformations also...
*May The God Self of each & every ONE OF US PLEASE MAKE CONTACT NOW* => click here: [link] by placing your pin on our *Global Guest-Map* just click the LOUNGE TAB on the upper left nav-button menu then click the "pin the map" link in the left frame that follows. Just delete the 'about blank' page that will pop up 4 behind it is the Global Map awaiting your pin.
Oh yes, and my most favorite in all eternity quote is:
"To have THE LOVE OF GOD (THE ONE whom we all are already) you must first give it away", by Jeshua, also known as Jesus The Christed ONE and as Sananda to others on this planet but who simply calls himself BROTHER...with us.
For me this above quote be the true meaning of "giving for" or "being in" service to others... and I have accepted, am learning to BE, and have dedicated the rest of my time to this very service here on Earth throughout all her dimensions of US.
Mah Gii Kah Oui, "Our R E L A T I O N S H I P speaks"
Brenda McCann...
Spirit Name: Ahanda KAH Sii AHA ~ meaning in English: "We are ALL ONE BEING throughout ALL Cosmos (consciousness) INCLUDING this Earth Gaia of course!!" [link] More >
|
|
|
|
 27 Mar 2005 @ 23:12, by ming. Broadcasting, Media
As to where the news is..
What would be good news sources for a networked society that has different priorities than the old fashioned media?
An oldfashioned newspaper or TV station would have a line in with the frontline for various kinds of news. There'll be somebody listening to the police radio channels. There'll be somebody at the government capitol, or the local town hall, trying to keep up with the issues that pass through. Somebody watches and analyzes the stock market. Somebody will be monitoring the major cases in the court house. There will be a helicopter that can go where some action is reported and get video from the air. There will be reporters sent out to war zones, catastrophe areas, and that kind of thing. Plus if that particular news organization doesn't have the resources itself, it will get wires from bigger news organizations that do it.
But even with all of that, journalists are busy, and they often need to have a story today or tomorrow. So very often they're merely passing on what somebody else said or wrote. Their story might simply be the summary of some report somebody did. It might be a rewrite of somebody's press release. The key points of somebody's book. An interview with somebody who seems to know what is going on. Probably only rarely is there time or interest in actually getting to the bottom of what is going on, or double-checking everything. So the mosaic of a certain general image is being presented, even though it might not really be the truth, or the most important things to know. Just because everybody's flocking to roughly the same sources.
So, say you were a blogger, who wanted to write about interesting things going on, and you wanted more primary sources, to maybe discover a different picture than what you were fed, where would you go? Do you know the difference between primary sources and secondary and tertiary?
Let's say there is something going on somewhere. A tsunami, a war. You'd want to hear from the local people who're there. The locals, the people on the ground, the people who're plugged into the action. And, indeed, if people like that have blogs, that's some of the most interesting stuff. Salam Pax, an Iraqi inside Iraq before the invasion. Kevin Sites, photo journalist in Iraq.
Back when NATO was bombing Yugoslavia it made a big impression on me that I could chat online with a friend in Beograd, in-between the bombing raids and power failures. You usually get a very different story than what appears in the normal media.
But how do you find these people when you're looking? Maybe there will just be enough bloggers that you'll always be able to get the real story from the ground, I don't know. Or maybe others will find such stories interesting enough that they'll be passed on to you somehow. But it might be nice with a more organized way of finding a local voice in some particular area.
A problem with a lot of news is that it is a little haphazard what you'll hear, and you might not get any follow-up at all. Like, somebody might write an article about some promising new discovery or invention. And very often, that's all you'll ever hear about it. Nobody wrote an article as a follow-up, a year later, telling you what actually happened. Somebody invented super-cheap solar cells, discovered the ruins of Atlantis, or whatever. Sounds very interesting. And then you never hear about it again. I want to hear what didn't work out about it. They were mistaken, they didn't get funding - what happened? And the trouble is that that's very hard to find out if nobody wrote an article about it. Or unless I had a lot of time on my hand to research it and call people and try to find out. I certainly couldn't do that with everything I might be interested in. But a network of people could, if there were an organized way of remembering open issues.
Statistical data can be a source of news, if you have enough of it. You could find out what is better, what is worse, which trends seem to be related to each other, etc. That is, if you had access to the data in a fairly consistent and timely manner. It shouldn't be hard for you to check for yourself how it is going with global warming, whether the economy is better or worse, how different parts of the world are doing. But it is, for some reason. I don't know anybody doing that. We seem content just reading an article about some several year old statistical report, telling us what it means. I'm sure there are all sorts of issues involved in gathering and normalizing data, but it really shouldn't be unthinkable that I could look for myself. Maybe I can and I just haven't plugged into the right places. I mean, people who're into stock markets will watch all sorts of stats continually. Consumer price indexes, unemployment rates, from month to month. They just don't seem to produce the kind of data I'd find interesting.
There are all sorts of people who're at the forefront of something interesting happening. Scientists, explorers, activists, aid workers, government officials. Should I hope for that they'll all have blogs and that they'll give us the straight dope about what is going on? Maybe. Blogging gives a lot of reasons to hope for hearing the truth more often. But, still, a lot of people who do important things are too busy to chat about it. Or they're in organizations that don't believe in sharing it freely. Or they're in a system where what they're doing will have to be peer reviewed and published before it is mentioned publically.
Really, I'm just looking for what channels I should be listening on, to get what's really worth knowing, that's new and enlightening and constructive. It is still a bit of a toss up, whether I'll miss it or not. The possibilities for accessing more primary sources are advancing. But so are the possibilities for painting phoney virtual realities.
Or maybe the answer is to make one's own news. Instead of flipping through the channels, trying to figure out what is going on, make your own channel. Make something worthwhile happen, and report on it. The best way of predicting the future is to create it. The world is waiting for you and I to do our part. More >
|
|
|
|
 27 Mar 2005 @ 15:17, by jmarc. Religion
I'd first learned of these things in an area studies course on Russia.
Later, i read about them in the book "Hammer" an autobiography of Armand Hammer,
the American millionaire who was a friend of many Soviet leaders,
starting with Lenin. More >
|
|
|
|
 27 Mar 2005 @ 07:19, by sprtskr. Shared Purpose
My world peace tree. I love you guys! If you believe theres peace, so it is.
PEACE OF MIND
All living beings have the same basic wish to be happy and avoid suffering, but very few people understand the real causes of happiness and suffering. We generally believe that external conditions such as food, friends, cars, and money are the real causes of happiness, and as a result we devote nearly all our time and energy to acquiring these. Superficially it seems that these things can make us happy, but if we look more deeply we shall see that they also bring us a lot of suffering and problems.
Happiness and suffering are opposites, so if something is a real cause of happiness it cannot give rise to suffering. If food, money, and so forth really are causes of happiness, they can never be causes of suffering; yet we know from our own experience that they often do cause suffering. For example, one of our main interests is food, but the food we eat is also the principal cause of most of our ill health and sickness. In the process of producing the things we feel will make us happy we have polluted our environment to such an extent that the very air we breathe and the water we drink now threaten our health and well-being. We love the freedom and independence a car can give us, but the cost in accidents and environmental destruction is enormous. We feel that money is essential for us to enjoy life, but the pursuit of money also causes immense problems and anxiety. Even our family and friends, with whom we enjoy so many happy moments, can also bring us a lot of worry and heartache.
In recent years our understanding and control of the exter- nal world have increased considerably, and as a result we have witnessed remarkable material progress; but there has not been a corresponding increase in human happiness. There is no less suffering in the world today, and there are no fewer problems. Indeed, it could be said that there are now more problems and greater unhappiness than ever before. This shows that the solution to our problems, and to those of society as a whole, does not lie in knowledge or control of the external world.
Why is this? Happiness and suffering are states of mind, and so their main causes cannot be found outside the mind. The real source of happiness is inner peace. If our mind is peaceful, we shall be happy all the time, regardless of external conditions, but if it is disturbed or troubled in any way, we shall never be happy, no matter how good our external con- ditions may be. External conditions can only make us happy if our mind is peaceful.
[link] More >
|
|
|
|
 27 Mar 2005 @ 02:49, by ming. Broadcasting, Media
I'm somewhat addicted to news. The trouble is just that there never is any.
Oh, I don't watch the TV news or read newspapers all that much, although I sometimes enjoy both. I mostly read online news. I check various major news sites, even though there usually isn't much new. More interesting are various major blogs and bookmark aggregation sites. I'm currently feeling a little too busy to check through all the blogs in my blog aggregator, so most days I just check a few key places. Which often have a few things of interest. Even if the same stories often appear in several places. You know, Boing Boing is great, but they obviously read Metafilter too. Or vice versa. Loads of blogs and bookmark sites end up mentioning the same stuff. Which is part of how the blogosphere works, so it is not a bad thing.
But there's not much news. Or a lot of it is old. I get various newsletters in e-mail, people who gather together the most unique or interesting stories in the news. And by the time they get around to sending it out, I've heard all of them before. And it is not that I really spend a lot of time looking everywhere. It is just that the available stories move around so fast, and get automatically filtered through the selections of many bloggers, that they're yesterday's news when somebody does their weekly newsletter.
It is also that I usually don't consider news news. Oh, I do try to pay some attention to what various governments are doing, and where there's a war, and what the latest disasters are. But it is not all that interesting. The better news is usually when somebody finds a new twist on something, or writes something inspiring, or discovers something new and creative one can do. I almost find it more fruitful to search for completely random things in Google than I do trying to read news.
Likewise, I find it more interesting when somebody else does the same, and discovers something interesting. Doesn't have to be google, any source is fine. I'd rather hear what you surprisingly found in your attic or some off the wall idea you had in the bus than to read the same recooked news of the same old things happening a little more.
We too easily end up going in circles. Probably some kind of design problem in the brain or something. The real interesting stuff is the unexpected angles. Lateral thinking. Creative lightning strikes.
New input. Where does it come from? So much is recooked that it can be hard to see where the new stuff is. Most news infrastructure is broken. Blogging is a ray of hope at least, even if a lot of it just is about quoting each other. It is at least a medium for interesting stuff to propagate, even when it doesn't just support the status quo world view of people in power. Bloggers typically prefer reporting something different. Real news does have a substrate to grow in.
But it is sort of odd. The world is moving faster and faster, and there's more and more information, and new things are being developed every day. How can there be a scarcity of things to report on? There probably isn't. But there might be some disconnects there, so it is difficult to see what is really going on, because there's too much, and lots of information travels in old ways that haven't caught up with our accelerating evolution.
What's new today? Where do I look to find out? Who do I ask? Where's the pulse?
I'm looking for signs of life. More >
|
|
|
|
 26 Mar 2005 @ 07:19, by nemue. Medicine, Healthcare
Believe or not…
“Once upon a time there was a little Green monkey who lived in Africa. There was nothing unusual about this monkey except it had AIDS. One day a native was walking in the forest and the AIDS infected monkey bit him on the butt. As a result of the bite, the native also contracted AIDS. Now this native when he next went into town slept with a prostitute and as a result the prostitute was infected with AIDS. The prostitute slept with a Banker and in doing so passed the AIDS virus onto the Banker. The banker slept with his wife and three girlfriends and so on and so on.
As a result of this one little monkey biting a native on the butt 75 million people in Africa became infected with AIDS.” More >
|
|
|
|
 25 Mar 2005 @ 17:00, by ming. Technology
Yahoo has a new search feature, for materials with Creative Commons licenses. I.e. typically stuff you can use freely if you just mention where they come from, or maybe that you can only use non-commercially.
Wait, how do they know? I search for my own blog, and it came up with a page here where indeed I mentioned that I consider what I write here to be in the public domain. Really, what I should do should be to put a proper CC image and link here that says so. I've so far labeled it as Primarily Public Domain which really fits best. But I like the idea that a formalized piece of xml will be allow various services to automatically find content with a certain license or dedication. So, I've added the public domain code from CC in my sidebar now.
Anyway, there's a growing number of ways one can search for liberally licensed content.
America Free TV gives you online streaming video programming like that.
OurMedia offers free hosting for CC licensed media.
Of course Creative Commons itself has a search.
Flickr lets you search for pictures based on their licenses. Flickr who btw was bought by Yahoo this week, who promises to let them keep doing what they're doing.
I'm sure there are others. More >
|
|
<< Newer entries Page: 1 ... 147 148 149 150 151 ... 279 Older entries >> |
|
These are news items gathered or contributed by NCN members
|
Categories
Activism (97)
Altered States (32)
Alternative Money Systems (17)
Broadcasting, Media (20)
Business (19)
Children, Parenting (28)
Communication (63)
Communities (71)
Conspiracy (34)
Counseling, Psychology (23)
Crime, Policing (7)
Death & Dying (14)
Developing World (19)
Economics, Financing, Banking (51)
Education (34)
Energy Sources (19)
Engineering (1)
Entrepreneurs, Money Making (19)
Environment, Ecology (123)
Exercise, Fitness (1)
Extraterrestrials (27)
Farming (14)
Futurism (13)
Globalization (29)
Government, Public Sector (46)
History, Ancient World (38)
Housing, Building, Architecture (10)
Ideas, Creativity (318)
Internet (49)
Inventions (6)
Investigation, Intelligence (23)
Knowledge Management (21)
Legal, Justice (24)
Liberty, Sovereignty (14)
Medicine, Healthcare (46)
Music (30)
Natural Health & Healing (27)
Neighborhood (12)
Networking (19)
Nutrition, Cooking (7)
Old Age, Retirement (4)
Organizational Development (12)
Paranormal (12)
Peace (35)
Performing Arts (9)
Personal Development (80)
Philosophy (94)
Politics (120)
Poverty (4)
Preparedness, Self-Reliance (12)
Privacy, Security (1)
Publishing (3)
Recreation, Fun (59)
Relationships (19)
Religion (40)
Science (48)
Sexuality (16)
Shared Purpose (30)
Social System Design (47)
Space Exploration (23)
Spirituality (391)
Systems Thinking (31)
Technology (37)
Transportation (9)
Travel (22)
Violence, War (103)
Visual Arts, Graphics (63)
|
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|
|
|
|
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
| 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
| 11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
| 18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
| 25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
|
Members can post news items and comments in the member area.
Information and opinions are the responsibility of the posters and do not represent any official position of NCN. Please do your own verification and make up your own mind.
Syndication
|
|
