Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening: Phil Borges

Phil Borges, filmmaker and photographer, has been documenting indigenous and tribal cultures for over 25 years. His work is exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide and his award winning books have been published in four languages. Phil's recent project, Inner Worlds, explores cultural differences with respect to consciousness and mental illness.

Astroturf and manipulation of media messages

via The Arcane Front

In this eye-opening talk, veteran investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson shows how astroturf, or fake grassroots movements funded by political, corporate, or other special interests very effectively manipulate and distort media messages.

Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist based in Washington D.C. She is currently writing a book entitled Stonewalled (Harper Collins), which addresses the unseen influences of corporations and special interests on the information and images the public receives every day in the news and elsewhere. For twenty years (through March 2014), Attkisson was a correspondent for CBS News. In 2013, she received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for her reporting on “The Business of Congress,” which included an undercover investigation into fundraising by Republican freshmen. She also received Emmy nominations in 2013 for Benghazi: Dying for Security and Green Energy Going Red. Additionally, Attkisson received a 2013 Daytime Emmy Award as part of the CBS Sunday Morning team’s entry for Outstanding Morning Program for her report: “Washington Lobbying: K-Street Behind Closed Doors.” In September 2012, Attkisson also received an Emmy for Oustanding Investigative Journalism for the “Gunwalker: Fast and Furious” story. She received the RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting for the same story. Attkisson received an Investigative Emmy Award in 2009 for her exclusive investigations into TARP and the bank bailout. She received an Investigative Emmy Award in 2002 for her series of exclusive reports about mismanagement at the Red Cross.

“Hallmarks of astroturf include use of inflammatory language such as ‘crank’, ‘quack’, ‘nutty’, ‘lies’, ‘paranoid’, ‘pseudo-‘, and ‘conspiracy’. Astroturfers often claim to ‘debunk myths’ that aren’t myths at all. Use of the charged language tests well. People hear something’s a myth — maybe they find it on Snopes — and they instantly declare themselves too smart to fall for it. But what if the whole notion of the myth is itself a myth and you and Snopes fell for that? [Snopes ‘attempts’ to give accurate information about rumors and urban legends on a variety of topics, though its own credibility and reliability have and should be questioned.]”

Towards 0: Cognitive Dissonance and the Revolution

 A breakdown of life, the universe, and everything, this document is my attempt at a 'manifesto' for the 21st century. It covers such topics as cognitive dissonance, non-aristotelianism, critical rationalism, politics, religion, ufos, consciousness, ontology, and synchronicity in a concise 60-some pages. It's an amateur work but I'm proud of it. As of this date, this can pretty much be considered a summary of everything I know for sure... click on the link below to access the pdf.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1JMPTOXDYaLV2xtX2RRdXR3Vk0/view?usp=sharing

The scream, the shadow

via jungcurrents

This meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.

For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad.

It is the world of water…..where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.

The archtypes and the collective unconscious p. 21

Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are?

via Scientific American

One of the deepest problems in epistemology is how we know the nature of reality. Over the millennia philosophers have offered many theories, from solipsism (only one's mind is known to exist) to the theory that natural selection shaped our senses to give us an accurate, or verdical, model of the world. Now a new theory by University of California, Irvine, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is garnering attention. (Google his scholarly papers and TED talk with more than 1.4 million views.) Grounded in evolutionary psychology, it is called the interface theory of perception (ITP) and argues that percepts act as a species-specific user interface that directs behavior toward survival and reproduction, not truth.

Hoffman's computer analogy is that physical space is like the desktop and that objects in it are like desktop icons, which are produced by the graphical user interface (GUI). Our senses, he says, form a biological user interface—a gooey GUI—between our brain and the outside world, transducing physical stimuli such as photons of light into neural impulses processed by the visual cortex as things in the environment. GUIs are useful because you don't need to know what is inside computers and brains. You just need to know how to interact with the interface well enough to accomplish your task. Adaptive function, not veridical perception, is what is important.

Hoffman's holotype is the Australian jewel beetle Julodimorpha bakewelli. Females are large, shiny, brown and dimpled. So, too, are discarded beer bottles dubbed “stubbies,” and males will mount them until they die by heat, starvation or ants. The species was on the brink of extinction because its senses and brain were designed by natural selection not to perceive reality (it's a beer bottle, you idiot!) but to mate with anything big, brown, shiny and dimply.

To test his theory, Hoffman ran thousands of evolutionary computer simulations in which digital organisms whose perceptual systems are tuned exclusively for truth are outcompeted by those tuned solely for fitness. Because natural selection depends only on expected fitness, evolution shaped our sensory systems toward fitter behavior, not truthful representation.

ITP is well worth serious consideration and testing, but I have my doubts. First, how could a more accurate perception of reality not be adaptive? Hoffman's answer is that evolution gave us an interface to hide the underlying reality because, for example, you don't need to know how neurons create images of snakes; you just need to jump out of the way of the snake icon. But how did the icon come to look like a snake in the first place? Natural selection. And why did some nonpoisonous snakes evolve to mimic poisonous species? Because predators avoid real poisonous snakes. Mimicry works only if there is an objective reality to mimic.

Hoffman has claimed that “a rock is an interface icon, not a constituent of objective reality.” But a real rock chipped into an arrow point and thrown at a four-legged meal works even if you don't know physics and calculus. Is that not veridical perception with adaptive significance?
see also:

    Health: General Anesthesia Causes No Cognitive Deficit in Infants | Mind: Scientists Study Nomophobia — Fear of Being without a Mobile Phone | Sustainability: Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago | Tech: Back to the Future, Part II Predicted Techno-Marvels of October 21, 2015

As for jewel beetles, stubbies are what ethologists call supernormal stimuli, which mimic objects that organisms evolved to respond to and elicit a stronger response in doing so, such as (for some people) silicone breast implants in women and testosterone-enhanced bodybuilding in men. Supernormal stimuli operate only because evolution designed us to respond to normal stimuli, which must be accurately portrayed by our senses to our brain to work.

Hoffman says that perception is species-specific and that we should take predators seriously but not literally. Yes, a dolphin's icon for “shark” no doubt looks different than a human's, but there really are sharks, and they really do have powerful tails on one end and a mouthful of teeth on the other end, and that is true no matter how your sensory system works.

Also, computer simulations are useful for modeling how evolution might have happened, but a real-world test of ITP would be to determine if most biological sensory interfaces create icons that resemble reality or distort it. I'm betting on reality. Data will tell.

Finally, why present this problem as an either-or choice between fitness and truth? Adaptations depend in large part on a relatively accurate model of reality. The fact that science progresses toward, say, eradicating diseases and landing spacecraft on Mars must mean that our perceptions of reality are growing ever closer to the truth, even if it is with a small “t.”

The Order of Skull and Bones

via Arcane Front

Yale University is where three threads of American social history — espionage, drug smuggling, and secret societies — first entwined into one.

Elihu Yale was born near Boston, educated in London, and served with the British East India Company, eventually becoming governor of Fort St. George in the coastal city of Madras (modern-day Chennai, India), in 1687. Having amassed a great fortune from trade, he returned to England in 1699 and gained fame as a philanthropist. Upon receiving a request from the Collegiate School in Connecticut, Yale sent a donation and a gift of books. After subsequent bequests, the socially and politically influential New England Puritan minister Cotton Mather suggested the school be named Yale College, in 1718.

In 1832, William Huntington Russell (a founder and original trustee of Yale College) and Alphonso Taft (founder of an American political dynasty) first assembled the Order of Skull and Bones, a secret society for the elite children of the Anglo-American Wall Street banking establishment. At that time, William Huntington Russell’s stepbrother, Samuel Russell, oversaw Russell & Company, the world’s largest opium smuggling operation. And it was Alphonso Taft’s son, 27th U.S. President William Howard Taft, who would become a leading proponent of the League of Nations, a forerunner to the United Nations.

First, a concise introduction to the secretive order…

The ultimate intent of the Order of Skull and Bones and the means by which they aim to achieve this objective is astutely summarized by the late economist and historian Antony C. Sutton in his 1983 book, “America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones”:

“Historically, operations of The Order have concentrated on society, how to change society in a specific manner towards a specific goal: a New World Order. We know the elements in society that will have to be changed in order to bring about this New World Order…More or less these elements would have to be:

EDUCATION — how the population of the future will behave
 MONEY — the means of holding wealth and exchanging goods
LAW — the authority to enforce the will of the state, a world law and a world court is needed for a world state
POLITICS — the direction of the State
ECONOMY — the creation of wealth
HISTORY — what people believe happened in the past
PSYCHOLOGY — the means of controlling how people think
PHILANTHROPY — so that people think well of the controllers
MEDICINE — the power over health, life, and death
RELIGION — people’s spiritual beliefs, the spur to action for many
MEDIA — what people know and learn about current events
CONTINUITY — the power to appoint who follows in your footsteps…” Now, an in-depth exploration of the Order of Skull and Bones by Antony C. Sutton…

Now, an in-depth exploration of the Order of Skull and Bones by Antony C. Sutton…

No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning

 via phys.org

The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.

The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a "Big Bang" did the universe officially begin.

Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.

"The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org.

Ali and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, have shown in a paper published in Physics Letters B that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by their new model in which the universe has no beginning and no end.

Old ideas revisited

The physicists emphasize that their quantum correction terms are not applied ad hoc in an attempt to specifically eliminate the Big Bang singularity. Their work is based on ideas by the theoretical physicist David Bohm, who is also known for his contributions to the philosophy of physics. Starting in the 1950s, Bohm explored replacing classical geodesics (the shortest path between two points on a curved surface) with quantum trajectories.

In their paper, Ali and Das applied these Bohmian trajectories to an equation developed in the 1950s by physicist Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri at Presidency University in Kolkata, India. Raychaudhuri was also Das's teacher when he was an undergraduate student of that institution in the '90s.

Using the quantum-corrected Raychaudhuri equation, Ali and Das derived quantum-corrected Friedmann equations, which describe the expansion and evolution of universe (including the Big Bang) within the context of general relativity. Although it's not a true theory of quantum gravity, the model does contain elements from both quantum theory and general relativity. Ali and Das also expect their results to hold even if and when a full theory of quantum gravity is formulated.

No singularities nor dark stuff

In addition to not predicting a Big Bang singularity, the new model does not predict a "big crunch" singularity, either. In general relativity, one possible fate of the universe is that it starts to shrink until it collapses in on itself in a big crunch and becomes an infinitely dense point once again.

Ali and Das explain in their paper that their model avoids singularities because of a key difference between classical geodesics and Bohmian trajectories. Classical geodesics eventually cross each other, and the points at which they converge are singularities. In contrast, Bohmian trajectories never cross each other, so singularities do not appear in the equations.

In cosmological terms, the scientists explain that the quantum corrections can be thought of as a cosmological constant term (without the need for dark energy) and a radiation term. These terms keep the universe at a finite size, and therefore give it an infinite age. The terms also make predictions that agree closely with current observations of the cosmological constant and density of the universe.

New gravity particle

In physical terms, the model describes the universe as being filled with a quantum fluid. The scientists propose that this fluid might be composed of gravitons—hypothetical massless particles that mediate the force of gravity. If they exist, gravitons are thought to play a key role in a theory of quantum gravity.

In a related paper, Das and another collaborator, Rajat Bhaduri of McMaster University, Canada, have lent further credence to this model. They show that gravitons can form a Bose-Einstein condensate (named after Einstein and another Indian physicist, Satyendranath Bose) at temperatures that were present in the universe at all epochs.

Motivated by the model's potential to resolve the Big Bang singularity and account for dark matter and dark energy, the physicists plan to analyze their model more rigorously in the future. Their future work includes redoing their study while taking into account small inhomogeneous and anisotropic perturbations, but they do not expect small perturbations to significantly affect the results.

"It is satisfying to note that such straightforward corrections can potentially resolve so many issues at once," Das said.

The Universe Really Is Weird: A Landmark Quantum Experiment Has Finally Proved It So

via IFLScience

Only last year the world of physics celebrated the 50th anniversary of Bell’s theorem, a mathematical proof that certain predictions of quantum mechanics are incompatible with local causality. Local causality is a very natural scientific assumption and it holds in all modern scientific theories, except quantum mechanics.

Local causality is underpinned by two assumptions. The first is Albert Einstein’s principle of relativistic causality, that no causal influences travels faster than the speed of light. This is related to the “local” bit of local causality.

The second is a common-sense principle named after the philosopher Hans Reichenbach which says roughly that if you could know all the causes of a potential event, you would know everything that is relevant for predicting whether it will occur or not.

Although quantum mechanics is an immensely successful theory – it has been applied to describe the behaviour of systems from subatomic particles to neutron stars – it is still only a theory.

Thus, because local causality is such a natural hypothesis about the world, there have been decades of experiments looking for, and finding, the very particular predictions of quantum mechanics that John Bell discovered in 1964.

But none of these experiments definitively ruled out a locally causal explanation of the observations. They all had loopholes because they were not done quite in the way the theorem demanded.

No Loopholes

Now, the long wait for a loophole-free Bell test is over. In a paper published today in Nature, a consortium of European physicists has confirmed the predictions required for Bell’s theorem, with an experimental set-up without the imperfections that have marred all previous experiments.

A Bell experiment requires at least two different locations or laboratories (often personified as named fictional individuals such as Alice and Bob) where measurements are made on quantum particles. More specifically, at each location:

    a setting for the measurement is chosen randomly
    the measurement is performed with the chosen setting
    the result is recorded.

The experiment will only work if the particles in the different laboratories are in a so-called entangled state. This is a quantum state of two or more particles which is only defined for the whole system. It is simply not possible, in quantum theory, to disentangle the individual particles by ascribing each of them a state independent of the others.

The two big imperfections, or loopholes, in previous experiments were the separation and efficiency loophole.

To close the first loophole, it is necessary that the laboratories be far enough apart (well separated). The experimental procedures should also be fast enough so that the random choice of measurement in any one laboratory could not affect the outcome recorded in any other laboratory be any influence travelling at the speed of light or slower. This is challenging because light travels very fast.

To close the second, it is necessary that, once a setting is chosen, a result must be reported with high probability in the time allowed. This has been a problem with experiments using photons (quantum particles of light) because often a photon will not be detected at all.

The Experiment

Most previous Bell-experiments have used the simplest set up, with two laboratories, each with one photon and the two photons in an entangled state. Ronald Hanson and colleagues have succeeded in making their experiment loophole-free by using three laboratories, in a line of length 1.3km.

In the laboratories at either ends, Alice and Bob create an entangled state between a photon and an electron, keep their electron (in a diamond lattice) and send their photons to the laboratory in the middle (which I will personify as Juanita). Alice and Bob then each choose a setting and measure their electrons while Juanita performs a joint measurement on the two photons.

Alice and Bob’s measurements can be done efficiently, but Juanita’s, involving photons, is actually very inefficient. But it can be shown that this does not open a loophole, because Juanita does not make any measurement choice but rather always measures the two photons in the same way.

The experiment, performed in the Netherlands, was very technically demanding and only just managed to convincingly rule out local causality. This achievement could, in principle, be applied to enable certain very secure forms of secret key distribution. With continuing improvements in the technology one day this hopefully will become a reality.

For the moment, though, we should savour this result for its scientific significance. It finally proves that either causal influences propagate faster than light, or a common-sense notion about what the word “cause” signifies is wrong.

One thing this experiment has not resolved is which of these options we should choose. Physicists and philosophers remain as divided as ever on that question, and what it means for the nature of reality.

Elves, Aliens, Angels, Ayahuasca: Graham Hancock

via Disinformation

When we launched Graham Hancock’s first novel, Entangled, we took him to Dragon*Con Atlanta, where he presented his lecture “Elves, Aliens, Angels and Ayahuasca.” We videotaped the lecture and here it is in full, a classic packed full of Graham’s research and ideas:

The World Within - Carl Jung in his own words

"Al Qaeda Doesn't Exist"

via The Arcane Front

This film examines the global militant Islamist organization’s inception, its links to Western intelligence, the double agents and fictitious characters that populate its ranks, and the fraudulent ways in which the al-Qaeda myth has been propagated in the controlled corporate media, in addition to offering ways that citizens can become involved in helping to spread understanding about the true government-sponsored terror paradigm…

Rule from the Shadows

via The Arcane Front

“Crowds exhibit a docile respect for force, and are but slightly impressed by kindness, which for them is scarcely other than a form of weakness. Their sympathies have never been bestowed on easy-going masters, but on tyrants who vigorously oppressed them. It is to these latter that they always erect the loftiest statues. It is true that they willingly trample on the despot whom they have stripped of his power, but it is because, having lost his strength, he has resumed his place among the feeble, who are to be despised because they are not to be feared. The type of hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instills them with fear.”

—Gustave Le Bon

10 Ideas that Prove Nikola Tesla was the Greatest (Mad) Scientist in History

via Quarks to Quasars

Once in a century a genius of Nikola Tesla’s magnitude is born who ushers in a new age of consciousness, imagination, and creativity. Sometimes humanity is ready for such genius. Other times it is incapable of absorbing the paradigm shift—the new ideas that appear to be out of sync with established scientific truths.

Many believe that Tesla was born a century too early. Perhaps Tesla himself understood this. He wrote, “The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter—for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way.”

It’s impossible to list all of Tesla’s contributions to the study of electricity and magnetism, or to describe all of the devices and principles he developed.

But here are a few ideas that prove that he was one amazing (and interesting) scientist.

New Approach Advised to Treat Schizophrenia

 via the NYTimes

More than two million people in the United States have a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and the treatment for most of them mainly involves strong doses of antipsychotic drugs that blunt hallucinations and delusions but can come with unbearable side effects, like severe weight gain or debilitating tremors.

Now, results of a landmark government-funded study call that approach into question. The findings, from by far the most rigorous trial to date conducted in the United States, concluded that schizophrenia patients who received smaller doses of antipsychotic medication and a bigger emphasis on one-on-one talk therapy and family support made greater strides in recovery over the first two years of treatment than patients who got the usual drug-focused care.

The report, to be published on Tuesday in The American Journal of Psychiatry and funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, comes as Congress debates mental health reform and as interest in the effectiveness of treatments grows amid a debate over the possible role of mental illness in mass shootings.

Its findings have already trickled out to government agencies: On Friday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published in its influential guidelines a strong endorsement of the combined-therapy approach. Mental health reform bills now being circulated in Congress “mention the study by name,” said Dr. Robert K. Heinssen, the director of services and intervention research at the centers, who oversaw the research.

In 2014, Congress awarded $25 million in block grants to the states to be set aside for early-intervention mental health programs. So far, 32 states have begun using those grants to fund combined-treatment services, Dr. Heinssen said.

Experts said the findings could help set a new standard of care in an area of medicine that many consider woefully inadequate: the management of so-called first episode psychosis, that first break with reality in which patients (usually people in their late teens or early 20s) become afraid and deeply suspicious. The sooner people started the combined treatment after that first episode, the better they did, the study found. The average time between the first episode and receiving medical care — for those who do get it — is currently about a year and half.

The more holistic approach that the study tested is based in part on programs in Australia, Scandinavia and elsewhere that have improved patients’ lives in those countries for decades. This study is the first test of the approach in this country — in the “real world” as researchers described it, meaning delivered through the existing infrastructure, by community mental health centers.

The drugs used to treat schizophrenia, called antipsychotics, work extremely well for some people, eliminating psychosis with few side effects; but most who take them find that their bad effects, whether weight gain, extreme drowsiness, or emotional numbing, are hard to live with. Nearly three quarters of people prescribed medications for the disorder stop taking them within a year and a half, studies find.

“As for medications, I have had every side effect out there, from chills and shakes to lockjaw and lactation,” said a participant in the trial, Maggie, 20, who asked that her last name be omitted. She did well in the trial and is now attending nursing school.

Doctors praised the study results.

“I’m very favorably impressed they were able to pull this study off so successfully, and it clearly shows the importance of early intervention,” said Dr. William T. Carpenter, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.

Dr. Mary E. Olson, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, who has worked to promote approaches to psychosis that are less reliant on drugs, said the combined treatment had a lot in common with Open Dialogue, a Finnish program developed in the 1980s. “These are zeitgeist ideas, and I think it’s thrilling that this trial got such good results,” Dr. Olson said.

In the new study, doctors used the medications as part of a package of treatments and worked to keep the doses as low as possible — in some cases 50 percent lower — minimizing their bad effects. The sprawling research team, led by Dr. John M. Kane, chairman of the psychiatry department at Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine, randomly assigned 34 community care clinics in 21 states to provide either treatment as usual, or the combined package.

The team trained staff members at the selected clinics to deliver that package, and it included three elements in addition to the medication. First, help with work or school such as assistance in deciding which classes or opportunities are most appropriate, given a person’s symptoms. Second, education for family members to increase their understanding of the disorder. And finally, one-on-one talk therapy in which the person with the diagnosis learns tools to build social relationships, reduce substance use and help manage the symptoms, which include mood problems as well as hallucinations and delusions.

For example, some patients can learn to defuse the voices in their head — depending on the severity of the episode — by ignoring them or talking back. The team recruited 404 people with first-episode psychosis, mostly diagnosed in their late teens or 20s. About half got the combined approach and half received treatment as usual. Clinicians monitored both groups using standardized checklists that rate symptom severity and quality of life, like whether a person is working, and how well he or she is getting along with family members.

The group that started on the combined treatment scored, on average, more poorly on both measures at the beginning of the trial. Over two years, both groups showed steady improvement. But by the end, those who had been in the combined program had more symptom relief, and were functioning better as well. They had also been on drug doses that were 20 percent to 50 percent lower, Dr. Kane said.

“One way to think about it is, if you look at the people who did the best — those we caught earliest after their first episode — their improvement by the end was easily noticeable by friends and family,” Dr. Kane said. The gains for those in typical treatment were apparent to doctors, but much less obvious.

Dr. Kenneth Duckworth, medical director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group, called the findings “a game-changer for the field” in the way it combines multiple, individualized therapies, suited to the stage of the psychosis.

The study, begun in 2009, almost collapsed under the weight of its ambition. The original proposal called for two parallel trials, each including hundreds of first-episode patients. But recruiting was so slow for one of the trials that it was abandoned, said Dr. Heinssen.

“It’s been a long haul,” Dr. Heinssen added, “but it’s worth noting that it usually takes about 17 years for a new discovery to make it into clinical practice; or that’s the number people throw around. But this process only took seven years.”

Carl Jung - Approaching the Unconscious

Can these sensors scientifically prove UFOs exist?

via Mother Jones

A group of scientists and academics from around the world has launched a new effort called UFODATA, which stands for UFO Detection and Tracking, to apply some rigorous scientific research to the study of UFOs. This all-volunteer, nonprofit project that includes scientists from the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Chile intends to use scientific data and research methods to advance an issue that has largely been confined to the margins (at best) of the traditional scientific community.

"It's abundantly clear that we're not going to make progress in understanding whatever is causing the unknown UFO reports and sightings without getting the type of data we want to collect," says Mark Rodeghier, scientific director and president of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Chicago, and now a UFODATA board member. "More witness testimony, where they fill out a form and tell you what they saw, is not going to help us solve the problem," he says. The problem that Rodeghier is referring to is the frequent, inexplicable sightings of aerial phenomena.

The group of about 15 scientists, engineers, astronomers, professors, and a journalist intend to install a series of automated surveillance stations loaded with scientific research tools at various locations in known UFO hotspots such as those in the western United States and in Hessdalen, Norway. The stations will be used to photograph unidentified objects and analyze the light coming from them in order to learn more about the sources of energy powering them. People have done this sort of thing in the past, but never before in such a coordinated and scientifically rigorous way.

The sensors that the group hopes to build will include several high-resolution cameras fitted with spectrographic grating, which is a method for analyzing the type of light the camera is seeing, and the ways that energy might be affecting the atmosphere around the light source. Here is a video explaining the process. Other equipment includes a magnetometer, used to measure electromagnetic radiation, as well as a Geiger counter and a weather station.

"In this area of science (physics, astronomy, etc.) the best way to learn about something is to get its spectra," Rodeghier says. He compares it to a rainbow, which is a "spectra" of the sun's light. "You can see the elements it's composed of, you can also tell things about its temperature and pressure. There are many, many things that you can learn from a spectra and associated data."

These sensors aren't cheap. Each one will cost between $10,000 and $20,000, the group says, which they're hoping to raise through crowdfunding and other donations.

"UFODATA will rely on crowd funding to finance the stations, allowing the millions of people who take UFOs seriously to be involved in the effort, independent of the scientific establishment," wrote Leslie Kean, an American journalist and the author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record. After covering the issue for years, she's also now a board member for UFODATA. Kean announced the project  on her Huffington Post blog earlier this week.

The all-volunteer group hopes to raise enough money to build one prototype station, test it, and prove the concept. Next year they plan to raise additional funds, Rodeghier says, after the project is better known and a more robust volunteer staff is in place.

Rodeghier says more reliable and scientific data will not only advance understanding of UFOs, but might also serve to persuade the public at large that this issue merits more serious examination. Nonetheless, the organizers appreciate that "the UFO community and the UFO problem is something that is pretty much looked down upon by what I call the establishment," Rodeghier says. "That includes scientists, big media, and politicians, Washington. All those people—and I'm speaking broadly because there's always exceptions—think the UFO problem, they laugh at it, it's to be ridiculed, and certainly shouldn't be supported and funded. And so yes, this is part of an effort, is to say, 'This problem is serious. It's like any other scientific problem.'"

But even the new organization has had to grapple internally with the taboo of scientific discussion of UFOs. The initial UFODATA team includes four "silent advisors"—two full professors, an attorney, and an astronomer—who "are prepared to lend a hand, but because of the cultural stigma attached to UFOs—or because of a personal preference for anonymity—have chosen to keep their involvement private" according to the group's website.

What caused China's floating city in the sky?

via IFLScience

Thousands of residents from Jiangxi and Foshan in China reported seeing a "floating city" in the sky earlier this month. The images and grainy video footage appear to show towering skyscrapers poking out of the clouds and looming over the ground below.

Of course, the news has got people's imaginations turned up to overdrive when trying to figure out what was going on. Explanations for the event have ranged from a glitch in the matrix, alternate universes opening up and NASA attempting to establish a new world order through a plan called the "Blue Beam Project".

However, it appears the explanation is actually a rare type of mirage called Fata Morgana. It’s essentially an optical illusion caused by specific weather conditions bending light rays. As Wired explains, it occurs when the Sun heats up a layer of the atmosphere but the layer of air below it remains cool. When different layers of the atmosphere are different temperatures, a temperature gradient is generated. These different temperatures also mean differing densities between the layers.

When light hits a boundary between two layers of the atmosphere that are different temperatures and thus densities, it is bent, or refracted, and subsequently enters the next layer at a different angle. Our brain can't automatically account for this, so when light hits our eyes, our brain assumes that it traveled in a straight path. When it has been refracted, we therefore perceive the object is where it would be if the light had run straight – which is higher than it actually is.

Fata Morganas have been confusing people and messing with minds for centuries. They’re named after Morgan le Fay, a powerful enchantress from the tales of King Arthur. It’s believed they are the explanation behind the legendary ghost ship the Flying Dutchman and sailor’s stories of floating castles which lured men to their deaths.

So there you have it. Although, we’ve got our eye on you NASA…

The world economic order is collapsing and this time there seems no way out

via The Guardian

Europe has seen nothing like this for 70 years – the visible expression of a world where order is collapsing. The millions of refugees fleeing from ceaseless Middle Eastern war and barbarism are voting with their feet, despairing of their futures. The catalyst for their despair – the shredding of state structures and grip of Islamic fundamentalism on young Muslim minds – shows no sign of disappearing.

Yet there is a parallel collapse in the economic order that is less conspicuous: the hundreds of billions of dollars fleeing emerging economies, from Brazil to China, don’t come with images of women and children on capsizing boats. Nor do banks that have lent trillions that will never be repaid post gruesome videos. However, this collapse threatens our liberal universe as much as certain responses to the refugees. Capital flight and bank fragility are profound dysfunctions in the way the global economy is now organised that will surface as real-world economic dislocation.

The IMF is profoundly concerned, warning at last week’s annual meeting in Peru of $3tn (£1.95tn) of excess credit globally and weakening global economic growth. But while it knows there needs to be an international co-ordinated response, no progress is likely. The grip of libertarian, anti-state philosophies on the dominant Anglo-Saxon political right in the US and UK makes such intervention as probable as a Middle East settlement. Order is crumbling all around and the forces that might save it are politically weak and intellectually ineffective.

The heart of the economic disorder is a world financial system that has gone rogue. Global banks now make profits to a extraordinary degree from doing business with each other. As a result, banking’s power to create money out of nothing has been taken to a whole new level. That banks create credit is nothing new; the system depends on the truth that not all depositors will want their money back simultaneously. So there is a tendency for some of the cash banks lend in one month to be redeposited by borrowers the following month: a part of this cash can be re-lent, again, in a third month – on top of existing lending capacity. Each lending cycle creates more credit, which is why lending has always been carefully regulated by national central banks to ensure loans will, in general, be repaid and sufficient capital reserves are held. .

The emergence of a global banking system means central banks are much less able to monitor and control what is going on. And because few countries now limit capital flows, in part because they want access to potential credit, cash generated out of nothing can be lent in countries where the economic prospects look superficially good. This provokes floods of credit, rather like the movements of refugees.

The false boom that follows seems to justify the lending. Property prices rise. Companies and households grow overconfident about their prospects and borrow freely. Economies surge well above their trend growth rates and all seems well until something – a collapse in property or commodity prices – unravels the whole process. The money floods out as quickly as it flooded in, leaving bust banks and governments desperately picking up the pieces.

Andy Haldane, Bank of England chief economist, describes the unfolding pattern of events as a three-part crisis. Act one was in 2007-08 in Britain and the US. Buoyed for the previous decade by absurdly high inflows of globally generated credit that created false booms, they suddenly found their overconfident banks had wildly lent too much. Collateral behind newfangled derivatives was worthless. Money flooded out, leaving Britain’s banking system bust, to be bailed out by more than £1tn of liquidity and special injections of public capital.

Act two was in Europe in 2011-12, when it became obvious that the lending had been made on the incorrect assumption that all eurozone countries were equal. Again, money flooded out and Europe only just held the line with extraordinary printing of money by the European Central Bank and tough belt-tightening measures in overborrowed countries such as Portugal, Greece and Ireland. It might have been unfair, but it worked.

Now act three is beginning, but in countries much less able to devise measures to stop financial contagion and whose banks are more precarious. For global finance next flooded the so-called emerging market economies (EMEs), countries such as Turkey, Brazil, Malaysia, China, all riding high on sky-high commodity prices as the China boom, itself fuelled by wild lending, seemed never-ending. China manufactured more cement from 2010-13 than the US had produced over the entire 20th century. It could not last and so it is proving.

China’s banks are, in effect, bust: few of the vast loans they have made can ever be repaid, so they cannot now lend at the rate needed to sustain China’s once super-high but illusory growth rates. China’s real growth is now below that of the Mao years: the economic crisis will spawn a crisis of legitimacy for the deeply corrupt communist party. Commodity prices have crashed.

Money is flooding out of the EMEs, leaving overborrowed companies, indebted households and stricken banks, but EMEs do not have institutions such as the Federal Reserve or European Central Bank to knock up rescue packages. Yet these nations now account for more than half of global GDP. Small wonder the IMF is worried.

The world needs inventive responses. It needs a bigger, reinvigorated IMF whose constitution should reflect the global balance of economic power and that can rescue the EMEs. It needs proper surveillance of global finance. It needs western governments to launch massive economic stimuli, centred on infrastructure spending. It needs new smart monetary policies that allow negative interest rates.

None of that is in prospect, vetoed by an ideological right and not properly championed by the left. If there is no will to deal, collectively, with the refugee crisis, there is even less to reorder the global economy. We may muddle through, but don’t bet on it.

Return to Roswell

by Joe Nolan via disinformation

I think the J.F.K. assassination is probably the biggest conspiracy theory of all time, and it’s probably still the one that acts as the gateway for most folks who wander the mazes of the unexplained, the unknown, and the covered-up. The Roswell Incident is probably a close second contender overall and it remains the king of conspiracy theories where flying saucers and extraterrestrial visitors are concerned.

There is so much confusion about the alleged crash as well as the reports of discovered debris and rescued bodies that it’s hard to pin down the actual dates of the event itself. One thing is for sure: on June 24, 1997 the U.S. Air Force published it’s 231 page report Case Closed: Final Report on the Roswell Crash. Here’s The New York Times on the report, the incident and the conspiracy theory that won’t go away…

    On June 24, 1997, the Air Force released a 231-page report titled “Case Closed: Final Report on the Roswell Crash.” It suggested the alien bodies witnesses reported seeing in Roswell, N.M., in July 1947 were actually life-sized anthropomorphic test dummies.

    The Times article from the following day summarized the essence of the report: “No bodies. No bulbous heads. No secret autopsies. No spaceship. No crash. No extraterrestrials or alien artifacts of any sort. And most emphatically of all, no government cover-up.”

    The U.F.O. phenomenon, which had originated in mid-June 1947 when a recreational pilot reported seeing an object “flying like a saucer would” near Mount Rainier in Washington State. In early July, several witnesses reported seeing flying discs and strange debris on the ground in Roswell, N.M.

    Public interest in the reports was ignited on July 8, 1947, when The Roswell Daily Record reported “the intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today, that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer.”

    The United States government then began an effort, which lasted decades, to investigate and debunk the reports and thousands of similar reports from around the country. Public concern about U.F.O.’s waxed and waned over the next several decades, but never disappeared, fed in part by popular culture.

Here’s another mystery: Why does the BBC always make the best documentaries? Maybe it’s just the accents? Here’s their take on that thing that happened, or didn’t, in New Mexico in 1947…

Is Space Digital?

via Scientific American

The Nature of Space and Time...

    Space may not be smooth and continuous. Instead it may be digital, composed of tiny bits. Physicists have assumed that these bits are far too small to measure with current technology.

    Yet one scientist thinks that he has devised a way to detect the bitlike structure of space. His machine—at present under construction—will attempt to measure its grainy nature.

    The experiment is one of the first to investigate the principle that the universe emerges from information—specifically, information that is imprinted on two-dimensional sheets.

    If successful, the experiment will shift the foundations of what we know about space and time, providing a glimpse of a new physics that could supplant our existing understanding.

http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v23/n3s/full/scientificamericanuniverse0814-104.html

Is the world real, or is it just an illusion or hallucination?

via hopesandfears.com

Is this real life? How do we know that we are not hallucinating it all? What if we're plugged into a Matrix-style virtual reality simulator? Isn't the universe a giant hologram anyway? Is reality really real? What is reality?

We asked renowned neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists, technology theorists and hallucinogen researchers if we can ever tell whether the "reality" we are experiencing is "real" or not. Don't worry. You're going to be ok.

Jessica L. Nielson, Ph.D.

Department of Neurosurgery, Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Brain and Spinal Injury Center (BASIC)

"What is our metric for determining what is real?  That is probably different for each person. One could try and find a consensus state that most people would agree is "real" or a "hallucination" but from the recent literature using imaging techniques in people who are having a hallucinatory experience on psychedelics, it seems the brain is hyper-connected and perhaps just letting in more of the perceivable spectrum of reality.

When it comes to psychosis, things like auditory hallucinations can seem very real. Ultimately, our experiences are an interpretation of a set of electrical signals in our brains.  We do the best to condense all those signals into what we perceive to be the world around us (and within us), but who is to say that the auditory hallucinations that schizophrenics experience, or the amazing visual landscapes seen on psychedelics are not some kind of bleed through between different forms of reality? I don't think there is enough data to either confirm or deny whether what those people are experiencing is "real" or not."

Sean Carroll

Cosmologist and Physics professor specializing in dark energy and general relativity, research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology

"How do we know this is real life? The short answer is: we don't. We can never prove that we're not all hallucinating, or simply living in a computer simulation. But that doesn't mean that we believe that we are.

There are two aspects to the question. The first is, "How do we know that the stuff we see around us is the real stuff of which the universe is made?" That's the worry about the holographic principle, for example -- maybe the three-dimensional space we seem to live in is actually a projection of some underlying two-dimensional reality.

The answer to that is that the world we see with our senses is certainly not the "fundamental" world, whatever that is. In quantum mechanics, for example, we describe the world using wave functions, not objects and forces and spacetime. The world we see emerges out of some underlying description that might look completely different.

The good news is: that's okay. It doesn't mean that the world we see is an "illusion," any more than the air around us becomes an illusion when we first realize that it's made of atoms and molecules. Just because there is an underlying reality doesn't disqualify the immediate reality from being "real." In that sense, it just doesn't matter whether the world is, for example, a hologram; our evident world is still just as real.

The other aspect is, "How do we know we're not being completely fooled?" In other words, forgetting about whether there is a deeper level of reality, how do we know whether the world we see represents reality at all? How do we know, for example, that our memories of the past are accurate? Maybe we are just brains living in vats, or maybe the whole universe was created last Thursday.

We can never rule out such scenarios on the basis of experimental science. They are conceivably true! But so what? Believing in them doesn't help us understand any features of our universe, and puts us in a position where we have no right to rely on anything that we did think is true. There is, in short, no actual evidence for any of these hyper-skeptical scenarios. In that case, there's not too much reason to worry about them.

The smart thing to do is to take reality as basically real, and work hard to develop the best scientific theories we can muster in order to describe it."

Fredrick Barrett

Instructor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

"With psychedelics or "classical (serotonergic) hallucinogens", individuals can often distinguish between perceptual disturbances, visualized experiences (it feels as if I was in another place, or I had traveled to another time, but I realized my physical body was still "here"), and whatever is happening "outside" in the "real" world. However, in psychosis (for instance, in the midst of a psychotic break in a person who has schizophrenia), hallucinations are quite clearly defined as something that an individual believes is real, persistent, and seemingly independent and autonomous in the world.

The "hallucinations" of schizophrenia and psychosis are accepted as real, and individuals with schizophrenia often do not have insight into the nature of their hallucinations as being "not real" to the rest of us. This highlights a bit of a misnomer in the name of the drug class "hallucinogens", in that the experiences with these compounds are not taken as consensual reality in the same way that psychotic hallucinations are taken as "real".

How or Why can we tell the difference between reality and what is perceived during the acute effects of psychedelics? I'm not sure science has definitively answered that question ... but I think it may have to do with access to the insight that you've consumed a substance that can have these effects. It also may have to do with the transient effect of many perceptual disturbances and visualizations that can occur with hallucinogens. Maybe if the subjective effects of hallucinogens acted more like every-day perceptions (i.e. they weren't so extraordinary) or if they were more fixed or persistent (i.e. they didn't shift, warp, or morph so often) they would seem more real to the individual experiencing them."

George Musser Jr

Contributing editor for Scientific American magazine, Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT 2014–2015, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory and Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time--and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

"The holographic principle doesn’t mean the universe isn't real. It just means that the universe around us, existing within spacetime, is ​constructed​ out of more fundamental building blocks. "Real" is sometimes taken to mean "fundamental", but that's a very limited sense of the term. Life isn't fundamental, since living things are made from particles, but that doesn’t make it any less real. It’s a higher-level phenomenon. So is spacetime, if the holographic principle is right. I talk about the holographic principle at length in my book, and I discuss the distinction between fundamental and higher-level phenomena in a recent blog post.

The closest we come in science to "real" or "objective" is intersubjective agreement. If a large number of people agree that something is real, we can assume that it is. In physics, we say that something is an objective feature of nature if all observers will agree on it - in other words, if that thing doesn’t depend on our arbitrary labels or the vagaries of a given vantage point ("frame-independent" or "gauge-invariant", in the jargon). For instance, I'm ​not entitled to say that my kitchen has a left side and a right side, since the labels "left" and "right" depend on my vantage point; they are words that describe me more than the kitchen. This kind of reasoning is the heart of Einstein's theory of relativity and the theories it inspired.

Could we all be fooled? Yes, of course. But there's a practical argument for taking intersubjective agreement as the basis of reality. Even if everyone is being fooled, we still need to explain our impressions. An illusion, after all, is entirely real - it is the ​interpretation of the illusion that can lead us astray. If I see a smooth blue patch in the desert, I might misinterpret the blue patch as an oasis, but that doesn’t mean my impression isn't real. I'm seeing something real - not an oasis, but a refracted image of the sky. So, even if we're all just projections of a computer simulation, like The Matrix, the simulation itself has a structure that gives it a kind of reality, and it is ​our​ reality, the one we need to be able to navigate. (The philosopher Robert Nozick had a famous argument along these lines.)"

Karl Friston

Institute of Neurology, University College London, Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Scientific Director, Fellow of the Royal Society

"First, you pose an extremely interesting question about how do we know we are hallucinating. Strictly speaking, one never has insight into a true hallucination, if one does, these are generally referred to as pseudo-hallucinations, which are not unrelated to illusions. The very distinction between illusions and hallucinations is itself fascinating. This is because it suggests we have the capacity to represent our own representations – or representational validity. This speaks to all sorts of deep philosophical issues; for example, auto epistemic closure (in the sense of Thomas Metzinger), metacognition, self-awareness, lucid dreaming and so on.

The very fact that we can infer are perceptual influences are false speaks to a hierarchical composition of mind and perception; in which not only do we have perceptual influences but also inferences about those inferences (CF metacognition). The implications for self awareness are clear. This is why people like Allan Hobson are so fascinated by lucid dreaming. This provides a wonderful test bed to compare situations in which dream reality is perceived as real and when one becomes aware of the fact that it is a dream. Neurobiologically, this seems to rest on frontal lobe activity, suggesting, again, a hierarchical aspect to our fantastic organ (i.e. the brain – that generates fantasies that are checked against reality).

The usual notion that perception is just hallucination grounded by sensations is somewhat subverted by the fact that we can, on occasions, know that our perceptual inference is false."

Rich Oglesby

Creator and editor of Prosthetic Knowledge

"There is a well known phrase: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” (often associated with media theorist Marshall McLuhan, although it was actually a quote from Father John Culkin, a Professor of Communication at Fordham University in New York). This makes sense from an anthropological perspective - to put it crudely, whilst early humans evolved the ability to speak, the controlled sounds and utterances gained meaning to each other through localized consensus. Fast forward to the twentieth century and industrial nations, one can discover technologies that we can recognize their purpose yet have differences to our own, depending on our cultures and others - for example, the differences with electricial sockets or which side of the road you drive from one country to another. This was noted in William Gibson's book Pattern Recognition which he labelled 'mirror-world'. Technology alsocan become taken for granted and familiar over time unless we find ourselves taken out of our habituated situation - nothing so easily reminds ourselves of change as a power cut, taking us back a couple of centuries.

In the past twenty years or so in the industrial world, the biggest impact on our experiences has been from the field of computing. While many focus on the internet as the biggest game changer, it neglects developments and permutations which other computing tech has reached - how the computer monitor tech has crossed over into television displays, graphics cards have altered how we work with colours transforming Pantone, photography and printing, sound cards and music sequencers, mp3 and Flac. Personal computing technologies have radically changed the way we make, define and experience the world we exist in. To describe the last twenty years, the best term I can think of is the Recon-Naissance, combining the terms reconaissance (the practise of gathering, formulating or expressing information) and renaissance (both 'rebirth' and revival of interest), it is the widespread outcome of ideas and production of post-WW2 investment in computational and telecommunication technologies. The Renaissance Man polymath has been replaced with the Renaissance Machine - the personal computer. The same PC could be used by scientist or businessperson, coder or student, in the office or in the warehouse, in the studio or in the bedroom. This has been most advantageous to the modern creative.

With the development of the smartphone ten years ago, modern computing became pocketable. With it, computing components became smaller. Due to commercial popularity, upgrade cycles changed from a year and a half to just one. Information creation and reception became domesticated. It became mainstream and more conveniently portable. Music, photography and video could be captured and seen on the same device, replacing the personal media player and the portable camera. Life could be documented and experienced 'en plein Hertz'.

But the developments of the smartphone benefitted a once neglected but now up-and-coming field: Virtual Reality. With small displays and accelerometers now refined and cheaper, and gave the opportunity to start ups to produce a new experiences with a new computing medium. Initially produced to complement video games, other startups are producing other narratives, such as 360 documentaries, animations and first person tools for creativity and design. Whilst the consumer implementation of these ideas are not truly available yet, the technology is being used by scientists, architects, artists and gamers with current developer builds. It would appear how we engage and relate with information will change again - the Recon-Naissance is still going strong."

Brad Burge

Director of Communications and Marketing: MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies

"These aren't really scientific questions per se though they are fascinating and valuable to think about. I think it comes down to our definitions of both "hallucination" and "reality"—to what extent is any experience we have really "real"? That may be one the main things that hallucinations teach us, regardless of whether they're caused by drugs, neurological conditions, or intense meditation: to trust in our own experience, while always remembering that our experience is always our own."

Could all really come from nothing?

via NPR

The origin of the universe is one of the most difficult realities we ponder.

It bends our logic, straining the words we have to describe it. If one is to say the universe started at the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago, the immediate reaction is: "But what came before that? What caused the Big Bang?"

This is the issue of the "first cause" — the cause at the beginning of the causal chain that caused all else but was itself not caused — that has plagued and inspired philosophers for millennia.

Before philosophy, religions across the globe dealt with the same issue by positing the existence of deities that are beyond the laws of cause and effect. By existing beyond space and time, deities are, by definition, immune to the shortcomings of being human. They can be the first cause.

Scientists tend to prefer other kinds of explanation about the world, including those that deal with issues of origins. But when it comes to the Big Bang, our theories hit a hard wall. Readers may enjoy this video featured in Aeon magazine, where philosopher Tim Maudlin from New York University addresses some of the difficulties.

Despite what physicists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss say, we are far from understanding the physics of the Big Bang. In fact, it isn't even clear that we can provide a complete scientific explanation of the origin of the universe.

Every scientific theory is built upon a set of concepts. For example, we use what we call the laws of nature, which are statements of regularities that we find in the behavior of physical systems, such as the conservation of momentum and energy. It's hard to imagine how to construct a theory of the origin of everything that doesn't make use of such laws. Yet, a theory describing the origin of the universe should, as a matter of principle, also explain the origin of the laws of nature.

Can we conceive of a science capable of doing that? There is no a priori reason we can't. However, current ideas about there being a multiverse, a collection of universes of which ours is one, will not help on this front. They still use a conceptual structure derivative of present-day physics.

What seems to be needed is a new way of depicting the laws of nature not as static truths about the world but as emerging behaviors that unfold and take hold as time elapses. Physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Mangabeira Unger hint at this in their book, but don't offer a working approach. (Who can blame them?)

Still, any explanation needs to start from something. How can we explain everything without appealing to something? Why the universe? It may be one of those questions that will keep tying us in knots for a very long time.

Top 10 staged media events

via Arcane Front

“Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophesies come true, but they can lie and make their lies come true.” —Eric Hoffer

Fair and balanced and unbiased and impartial are just loaded words, spells cast on the unsuspecting by the magi of public relations. Whether it leans to the left or the right, a mainstream production or publication is ultimately a business that stands to lose much in the face of change. Thus, it deals not in change, but in the illusion of change, and serves not as a window to what is, but as a projector of the desires of its owners and sponsors.

Years ago, mainstream productions and publications set out to blur the line between reality and fantasy and consequently succeeded in making surveillance hip, saved millions transforming no-names into reality “stars”, and redefined entertainment as information. Contrary to popular belief, the masses have not relinquished worship altogether, they have only swapped idols.

Now more than ever, the image and the spectacle reign supreme, as does the spirit to root for opposing teams financed by the same promoter. We came for the show, but stayed for the show that became our lives. The circus came to town one day and never left… Fake news and reporters, staged events, blatant omissions, political spin, war propaganda, and more.

The balanced and unbiased corporate harlot media machine on the loose and at its most notorious…

Astronomers may have found giant alien 'megastructures' orbiting star near the Milky Way

via The Independent

A large cluster of objects in space look like something you would "expect an alien civilization to build", astronomers have said. 

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”, according to a new report.

"I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," Wright told The Atlantic. "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build."

The snappily named KIC 8462852 star lies just above the Milky Way between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It first attracted the attention of astronomers in 2009 when the Kepler Space Telescope identified it as a candidate for having orbiting Earth-like planets.

But KIC 8462852 was emitting a stranger light pattern than any of the other stars in Kepler’s search for habitable planets.

Kepler works by analysing light from distant places in the universe — looking for changes that take place when planets move in front of their stars. But the dip in starlight from KIC 8462852 doesn't seem to be the normal pattern for a planet.

Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale told The Atlantic: “We’d never seen anything like this star. It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

In 2011 the star was flagged up again by several members of Kepler’s “Planet Hunters” team – a group of ‘citizen scientists’ tasked with analysing the data from the 150,000 stars Kepler was watching.

The analysts tagged the star as “interesting “ and “bizarre” because it was surrounded by a mass of matter in tight formation.

This was consistent with the mass of debris that surrounds a young star just as it did with our sun before the planets formed. However this star wasn’t young and the debris must have been deposited around it fairly recently or it would have been clumped together by gravity – or swallowed by the star itself.

Boyajian, who oversees the Planet Hunters project, recently published a paper looking at all the possible natural explanations for the objects and found all of them wanting except one – that another star had pulled a string of comets close to KIC 8462852. But even this would involve an incredibly improbable coincidence.

That’s when Wright, the astronomer from Penn State University and his colleague Andrew Siemion, the Director of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) got involved. Now the possibility that the objects were created by intelligent creatures is being taken very seriously by the team.

As civilisations become more technologically advanced, they create new and better ways of collecting energy — with the end result being the harnessing of energy directly from their star. If the speculation about a megastructure being placed around the star system is correct, it could for instance be a huge set of solar panels placed around the star, scientists say.

The three astronomers want to point a radio dish at the star to look for wavelengths associated with technological civilisations. And the first observations could be ready to take place as early as January, with follow-up observations potentially coming even quicker.

“If things go really well, the follow-up could happen sooner,” Wright told The Atlantic. “If we saw something exciting… we’d be asking to go on right away.”

Scientists claim they can change your belief on immigrants and God – with MAGNETS

 via The Express:

ATTITUDES towards God and immigrants can be changed by beaming magnetic waves into the brain, scientists have claimed.

A bizarre experiment claims to be able to make Christians no longer believe in God and make Britons open their arms to migrants in experiments some may find a threat to their values.

Scientists looked at how the brain resolves abstract ideological problems.

Using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), researchers safely shut down certain groups of neurones in the brains of volunteers.

TMS, which is used to treat depression, involves placing a large electromagnetic coil against the scalp which creates electric currents that stimulate nerve cells in the region of the brain involved in mood control.

Researchers found the technique radically altered religious perceptions and prejudice.

Belief in God was reduced almost by a third, while participants became 28.5 per cent less bothered by immigration numbers.

Dr Keise Izuma, from the University of York, said: "People often turn to ideology when they are confronted by problems.

"We wanted to find out whether a brain region that is linked with solving concrete problems, like deciding how to move one's body to overcome an obstacle, is also involved in solving abstract problems addressed by ideology."

The scientists targeted the posterior medial frontal cortex, a brain region a few inches up from the forehead that is associated with detecting and responding to problems.

Volunteers were asked to rate their belief in God, heaven, the devil, and hell after undergoing pre-screening to ensure that they held religious convictions.

Dr Izuma said: "We decided to remind people of death because previous research has shown that people turn to religion for comfort in the face of death.

"As expected, we found that when we experimentally turned down the posterior medial frontal cortex, people were less inclined to reach for comforting religious ideas despite having been reminded of death."

The American participants were also shown two essays written by newly arrived immigrants - one highly complimentary of the US and the other extremely critical.

Dr Izuma said: "When we disrupted the brain region that usually helps detect and respond to threats, we saw a less negative, less ideologically motivated reaction to the critical author and his opinions."

The research, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, suggests our brains use the same basic mental pathways to solve practical problems such as following directions or ideological issues such as immigration and religion.

Lead author Dr Colin Holbrook, form the the University of California at Los Angeles, said: "These findings are very striking, and consistent with the idea that brain mechanisms that evolved for relatively basic threat-response functions are re-purposed to also produce ideological reactions."