After over a year without our own computer, we were able to afford the purchase of a used laptop and can now work at home with it. A couple of technical questions if anyone can offer feedback. Our speed is very slow. The RAM is 1.5GB and we are on broadband service which seems fast enough for everyone else in the household. Some feeling that it could be the Microsoft Vista operating program instead of XP. Any suggestions on improving the speed? The speed is especially a challenge when trying to download any movies or the buffering on streaming videos. We used to be able to order nice variety of films from Netflix but as wel learned when we left the US, such companies do not send dvds out. I have tried torrents but seems very complicated and takes too long to
download. Any suggestions on any pay services that we could have films come in faster? Or if anyone is not too busy to burn us about 500 selections I still have on my want list from netflix? In any case, all is well here. Being in the southern hemisphere, autumn is all around us. Crisp evenings with dazzling star scenery Lots of links this week with my twice monthly new format, so if not enough time, at least some interest hopefuly in strolling through the headlines. Crisp evenings with dazzling star scenery. George LIFESTYLE/ ARTS/ CULTURE/
ETC: Mark Whitewell has been a highly regarded yoga teacher for many yearrs. Among his many round the world workshops, he will be very near us in the beautiful Marahau area of New Zealand's South Island on April 25-27 Hosting Mark on his New Zealand tour is Anna de Zeeuw who also is an excellent yoga The RAINBOW GATHERING in POLAND about the full Moon in may, 13 - 27 May 2008 http://www.teczowyk rag.prv.pl/ rozd1024. html April 26-27 Shamanism Conference,
Glastonbury Our friends Robert Venosa and Martina Hoffmann's visionary art workshop at the Omega Institute, NY on June 27 to July 4 Czechs to Decriminalize Marijuana Possession, Growing Up to Three Plants http://www.nisnews.nl/public/020408_2.htm "Court: Dutch Cannabis Bars Not Allowed to Exclude Foreigners" "NEW ANTI-DRUG CAMPAIGN EQUATES SMOKING MARIJUANA WITH TERRORISM " "Rep. Frank says he'll file bill to legalize marijuana" "Moses Was Very, Very High:" Paul Krassner On Drug Use In The Old Testament http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/arthur/183/moses-was-very-very-high-paul-krassner-on-drug-use-in-the-old-testament "How Shamans Dream the World into
Being" Alberto Villoldo http://www.realitysandwich.com/how_shamans_dream_world_being "Shadows in the Sun" by Wade Davis- preserving the diversity of culture and spiritual beliefs
"4th Edition of The Invisible College" Luc Sala's report on the Basel Psychedelic Conference LSD Helped Forge Alex Grey's Spiritual, Artistic and Love Lives David Ian Miller <mailto:miller@sfgate.com> Monday, March 24, 2008 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/03/24/findrelig.DTL "LSD, Ketamine and Cannabis could treat conditions from headache to diabetes" "Cluster headaches feature for Nature Medicine" "OCD and psilocybin" Pastor David dicusses the Amanita Fleece Psychedelic Science video "Former Surgeon General: Mainstream Medicine Has Endorsed Medical Marijuana" "Cannabis vaporizers" "Decreased respiratory symptoms in cannabis users who vaporize" Smoking Ban Does Not Apply to Cannabis http://www.nisnews.nl/public/270308_3.htm http://www.youtube.com/chrychek "Hemp oil and hemp seed oil differences" video Nimbin April Fools Police Raid A Nimbin town video "Few traces remain of Kesey's Mexican trip" "Professor films past, present of hippie life" "Brave New World for Hollywood as Aldous Huxley feud ends' Wanderlust," A New Music Video by Bjork Comics writer/JFK figure T. Casey Brennan on youtube... http://groups.google.com/group/1960s/browse_thread/thread/4667bbc57f043ceb "SEARCHING FOR WOODSTOCK '69 PHOTOS" My Woodstock memories essay appearing in the Woodstock Preservation Org. (Thanks Joanne) Richie Havens interview
One of our favorite musicians, Shawn Phillips "British families still happy to live hippie dream as Goa's lustre dims" The Gospel of Thomas Discordia "Salvador Dali expounds on his 'Paranoiac Critical Method' philosophy An association of Czech psychologists offering help for spiritual emergencies. The English language part is under construction. "The Hub of Humanitarian Change" Parabola-an eclectic blend of many religious traditions Green Goddess Tree-walking and other grass roots active and productive action schedule in New Zealand "The adventures of Raw Man and Green Girl! "The Future of Farming" "Torresol to Build 3 Solar Thermal Power Plants in Spain for $1.24 Billion" http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/032708EA.shtml "New Record: Wind Powers 40 Percent of Spain" "Subaru Tests R1e Electric Car in New York City, Previews G4e" "19.9%: New Thin Film Solar Efficiency Record" "Building affordable homes from discarded materials" "New documentary on Cohousing communities" "Upon the Shoulders of Communitarian Giants" by Allen Butcher "Why Mobile Phone Masts are more dangerous than Phones " * Daily caffeine 'protects brain' * Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/2/hi/health/7326839.stm "Treating Cancer -- With Herbs" "Neuropsychiatric Genetics fails to find cause of mental illness'' "U.S. Government Concedes That Mercury Causes Autism " "Sedatives and Sex Hormones in Our Water Supply" Will Wheat-Killer Fungus be used to spread GMO wheat? "Science Has Hijacked Our Meals" "Are You Full of Toxic Sludge?" "Watchdog Group Names Top Corporate Abusers" http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/24/7865/ "8 Skin Moisturizer Ingredients You'd Best Avoid" "Cities around the world switch off lights for 'Earth Hour,' Gore group to launch climate marketing campaign http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/033108EA.shtml The Clean Energy Scam "U.S. West warming fast" "Walker's World: Farewell free markets" "Vansihing Prayer" (destruction of Mother Earth video) "US government genocide of Native Americans continues" Today is the 50th Anniversary Of The Peace Symbol! http://www.cbsnews. com/stories/ 2008/03/23/ sunday/main39603 90.shtml "Defying China's Blackmail on Tibet" "Tribal peoples' water being destroyed by industry and governments" "Mass die-off of
bats in U.S. Northeast worries researchers" "Death of the Bees: GMO Crops and the Decline of Bee Colonies in North America" http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080325/sc_livescience/vastantarcticiceshelfonvergeofcollapse "Vast Antarctic Ice Shelf on Verge of Collapse" "Plastic toxins in the oceans" "Nigeria's forests to disappear by 2020: expert'' "Bush admin appeals mercury ruling" "End Exploitation and Modern-day Slavery in the Florida Fields " "INTERVIEW WITH CANADIAN FAMILY FARMER WHO DEFEATED GOLIATH MONSANTO" "QUICK FACTS OF THE WEEK: A NATION BUILT ON UNSUSTAINABILITY - FUEL, FOOD, AND DEBT" "Land swap would allow drilling in Alaska wildlife refuge" "Reaarranging stars to communicate with aliens" "UAF archaeologist strikes it big in Norway; uncovers new species of ancient monster?" "Tuatara - The Fastest Evolving Animal" The Neanderthal-Human Split: (Very) Ancient History Hobbit Skull suggests seperate species Early Americans Arrived Thousands of Years Earlier Than Previously Believed "How the Battle of Actium Changed the World" Oldest human on Balkan's unearthed in Macedonia Ancient, pre-historic of Jamaica Ithaca was Homeric land of Odysseus?/span> Inside the amazing cave city that housed 25,000 Allied troops under German noses in WWI "The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups: The 100 Most Terrifying Conspiracies of All Time (Paperback)" "Money as debt" "Money Masters" video "The Hypocrisy Gospel: Get Rich for Jesus?" "The Crucifixion of Christ, American
Style" By Jerry Ghinelli Lower Manhattan was virtually shut down as millions of the faithful and curious flooded the streets to get a glimpse of the second coming of their lord and savior. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19583.htm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnq6cD5jk1Q One day of war in Iraq costs 720 million dollars. This video shows how much could be done with this money instead of killing people
"How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives": The Military-Industrial Complex "How Bad Can Prisons Get?" "Patriot Act vs. German Enabling Act: The Decrees of 1933" Howard Zinn's "A People's History of American Empire" Illustrated Edition Global Gridlock: How the US Military-Industrial Complex Seeks to Contain and Control the Earth and it’s Eco-System "The 'Chosen Ones' Are Coming" The "Please Jesus
Protect Me From Your Followers" Metallic Magnet Hypothetical Bush shooting video "'Russian cult members emerge' http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=7210520 "Scientology’s Origins Exposed?" Guru Rasa video American school incident "An indictment of the profit system High school drop-out rate in major US cities at nearly 50 percent" http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/apr2008/scho-a03.shtml "Lust In Translation" GLOBAL: "China blasts Dalai Lama, Pelosi on Tibet " Elite Chinese PLA units enter Lhasa "Kadhafi warns US allies could suffer Saddam's fate" "Is an International Financial Conspiracy Driving World Events?" "Former Australian prime minister feted by US Republican right" http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/mar2008/aei-m25.shtml Andrés Izarra | Letter from Venezuela's Communications Minister to the Washington Post http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/28/7956/ NATIONAL: Anti-Empire Report, March 29, 2008 http://killinghope.org/aer56.htm "Hundreds Arrested in War Protests" http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032108B.shtml "MORE Courageous Resistance Across U.S." Iraq Veterans Against the War "Repeated US air strikes in Basra and Baghdad" http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/mar2008/iraq-m31.shtml "Worried Yet? Saudis Prep For 'Sudden Nuclear Hazards'" "US Document Confirms Iraq Dungeon" "Gorbachev slams
US anti-missile plans in eastern Europe" "Today, I Weep For My Country" The speech given by Sen. Robert Byrd Exactly five years ago, on the afternoon of March 19, 2003, mere hours before bombs began falling in Baghdad, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., gave a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate condemning the use of military force in Iraq. As soon as Byrd was finished speaking, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., delivered a response defending the Bush administration's decision to go to war. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19577.htm http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19596.htm "Happy Anniversary, America!How Lethally Stupid Can One Country Be?" By David Michael Green "A Little Sugar Makes the Medicine Go Down America's Next 9/11" By Paul Craig Roberts There is so
much that Americans do not know about secret schemes serving undeclared agendas. Those who have attempted to clue in fellow citizens are invariably frustrated, because Americans have been trained to dismiss the messenger who brings news of "false flag" events as a "conspiracy theorist." http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19598.htm http://www.911blogger.com/node/14154 "Rep. Dana Rohrabacher links WTC 1993 bombing to OKC bombing and 9/11 in 15th anniversary speech - February 26, 2008" "Stanley, Citigroup provide and process passports for US State Department" 'April Fools: The Fox To Guard The Banking Henhouse' More Than Half of US Doctors Favor National Health Plan http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/01/8018/ "Howard Zinn: The End of Empire?" "Obama eyeing Gore for climate post," "Obama Speech Brings Out Right Wing's Worst" "Clinton Campaign Embraces Vast Right Wing Conspiracy to Launch Attacks on Obama" "Republicans Plan Double-Whammy" "Why we should fear a McCain presidency" "Michael Moore Attacks Cheney" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/21/AR2008032102739.html "White House:Computer Hard Drives Tossed" By PETE YOST The Associated Press "The Republican Right's Moonie Problem" "Spitzer Linked to Second Prostitution Ring" "Breaking Point: Cheney says he doesn't care what American people want" Howard Zinn: The End of
Empire? "Search For ‘Suitcase Nuke’ In US Grounds Hundreds Of Planes" "Katrina coverup" QUOTES: A sobering quote from the Dalai Lama: "We must be careful not to idealize the old ways of life. The high level of cooperation we find in undeveloped rural communities may be based more on necessity than on goodwill... And the contentment we perceive may actually have more to do with ignorance. These people may not realize or imagine that any other way of life is possible. If they did, very likely they would embrace it eagerly. The challenge we face is, therefore, to find some means of enjoying the same degree of harmony and tranquility as those more traditional communities, while benefiting fully from the material developments of the world as we find it." That understood, it is hard to imagine anywhere else that remains, however tentatively, what the Himalayan folksongs call a Beyul - a magical land visible only to those of pure heart. "Why do you want a reason for being? You are here. And because you are here and you don't understand yourself, you want to invent a reason."
J.Krishnamurti "I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally. ---Archbishop Oscar Romero, September 23, 1979. "Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.": Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) German Dramatist = "Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.": Henry Miller -(1891-1980) American writer = The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a "pet" notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different: John Dewey "We've never seen anything like this before with our bats, much less any other mammals, with a very large regional die-off...It’s very scary and a little overwhelming from a biologist’s perspective. If we can’t contain it, we’re going to see extinctions of listed species,
and some of species that are not even listed.” Susi von Oettingen of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service speaking to the New York Times this week about as many as a half million bats mysteriously dying in the U.S. Northeast. Experts have no idea what the cause is. "The limits of tyrants are imposed by those whom tyrants would oppress." Frederick Douglass (paraphr?) "Oppressor and oppressed are co-operators in ignorance." - James Allen (Martin L King Jr?) "God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.": Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President - Source: November 13, 1787,
letter to William S. Smith, quoted in Padover's Jefferson On Democracy = 19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society: Rocco Galati = The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny: Michael Parenti It is foolish in the extreme not only to resort to force before necessity compels, but especially to madly create the conditions that will lead to this necessity." : Benjamin Tucker, Liberty, May 22, 1886 = The feeling of patriotism - It is an immoral feeling because, instead of confessing himself a son of God . . . or even a free man guided by his own reason, each man under the influence of patriotism confesses himself the son of his fatherland and the slave of his government, and commits actions contrary to his reason and conscience." : Leo Tolstoy, Patriotism and Government = "A modern gentleman is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner." : George Bernard Shaw = "It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificually induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear." - General Douglas MacArthur, Speech, May 15, 1951 =
"Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends." Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." Galileo Galilei = All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) = Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, "War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.": Immanuel Kant = If a war be undertaken for the most righteous end, before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime: Charles Eliot Norton "Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge.": Felix Frankfurter - (1882-1965)
U.S. Supreme Court Justice - Source: Concurring Opinion, Dennis et al. v. U.S. (1951) = "Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order." : Justice Robert H. Jackson - (1892-1954), U. S. Supreme Court Justice Source: West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 1943 = There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgement. When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom- freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement: Eric Hoffer = He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...: Samuel Adams "The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men.": Robert G. Ingersoll - (1833-1899) = "Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.": William Godwin - (1756-1836) = "Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution.": W. Lance Bennett - Author, professor at University of Washington Source: News: The Politics of Illusion, 1983 MUSIC VIDEOS: Shawn Phillips - Moonshine live Shawn Phillips - Early Morning Hours 3/8/08 Donovan, Shawn Phillips, Rev. Gary Davis, and Pete Seeger Guenevire (from the above show) |