[FairfieldLife] Global warming alarmist recants
I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train By David Evans Posted on 5/28/2007 [Subscribe or Tell Others] [A version of tihs article was previously blogged on Mises.org here, and inspired a spirited debate. The author reworked the piece for the Mises.org front page. The blog item remains the same.] I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened that case. I am now skeptical. In the late 1990s, this was the evidence suggesting that carbon emissions caused global warming: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, proved in a laboratory a century ago. Global warming has been occurring for a century and concentrations of atmospheric carbon have been rising for a century. Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit. Ice core data, starting with the first cores from Vostok in 1985, allowed us to measure temperature and atmospheric carbon going back hundreds of thousands of years, through several dramatic global warming and cooling events. To the temporal resolution then available (data points more than a thousand years apart), atmospheric carbon and temperature moved in lockstep: they rose and fell together. Talk about a smoking gun! There were no other credible causes of global warming. This evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb carbon emissions. Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit. The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; there were international conferences full of such people. We had political support, the ear of government, big budgets. We felt fairly important and useful (I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet! But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence above fell away. Using the same point numbers as above: Better data shows that from 1940 to 1975 the earth cooled while atmospheric carbon increased. That 35 year non-correlation might eventually be explained by global dimming, only discovered in about 2003. The temporal resolution of the ice core data improved. By 2004 we knew that in past warming events, the temperature increases generally started about 800 years before the rises in atmospheric carbon. Causality does not run in the direction I had assumed in 1999 it runs the opposite way! It took several hundred years of warming for the oceans to give off more of their carbon. This proves that there is a cause of global warming other than atmospheric carbon. And while it is possible that rising atmospheric carbon in these past warmings then went on to cause more warming (amplification of the initial warming), the ice core data neither proves nor disproves this hypothesis. There is now a credible alternative suspect. In October 2006 Henrik Svensmark showed experimentally that cosmic rays cause cloud formation. Clouds have a net cooling effect, but for the last three decades there have been fewer clouds than normal because the sun's magnetic field, which shields us from cosmic rays, has been stronger than usual. So the earth heated up. It's too early to judge what fraction of global warming is caused by cosmic rays. There is now no observational evidence that global warming is caused by carbon emissions. You would think that in over 20 years of intense investigation we would have found something. For example, greenhouse warming due to carbon emissions should warm the upper atmosphere faster than the lower atmosphere but until 2006 the data showed the opposite, and thus that the greenhouse effect was not occurring! In 2006 better data allowed that the effect might be occurring, except in the tropics. The only current evidence for blaming carbon emissions are scientific models (and the fact that there are few contradictory observations). Historically, science has not progressed by calculations and models, but by repeatable observations. Some theories held by science authorities have turned out to be spectacularly wrong:
[FairfieldLife] Re: Giant Skeletons Found in India
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://fourwinds10.com/NewsServer/ArticleFunctions/ArticleDetails.php?ArticleID=15307 Click on the photos for a larger view, then click on the article again to return to it. Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: For the experiment to be a success, all of the body parts must be enlarged. Inga: His veins, his feet, his hands, his organs vould all have to be increased in size. Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Exactly. Inga: He vould have an enormous schwanzstucke. Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: That goes without saying. Inga: Voof. Igor: He's going to be very popular.
[FairfieldLife] Scientific validation of Yagyas, a beginning
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, qntmpkt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Has a Jyotish and Yagya program. CD's and DVD's available too. http://www.expertvedicastrology.com As a US headquarters base in Hawaii, you can send US $ to their HQ and not bother with converting $ to rupees. As to where your US $ go and your expected Return On Investment, I offer a crude start at validating the effect of Yagyas (as per the announced effect of the Yagya) vs. some kind of objective measure of its actual effect. The first link documents the announced intention of one Yagya offered by this fellow, and its cost ($11,000). http://www.expertvedicastrology.com/index.php?pr=Yagya_for_World_Peace The second link documents the ongoing conflicts in the world during 2006: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0904550.html It would seem that the benefactors who donated to this Yagya, other than the feel good benefit of contributing to a supposedly noble cause, got at least 20 continuing significant armed conflicts for their money. That's less than $500 US per war, which some would consider a bargain. One of the conflicts (the one in Sri Lanka, fairly close to the broadcast tower for the Yagya's Woo Woo Rays) actually had a four-year cease fire fall apart and revert to armed conflict again shortly after the Yagya was performed. T'would seem that either the gods aren't listening, or perhaps the 121 pundits got the pronunciation of one of the verses slightly wrong. Either that, or the Yagya was a total success, and accomplished its intended effect (bringing in $11,000) perfectly.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Giant Skeletons Found in India
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://fourwinds10.com/NewsServer/ArticleFunctions/ArticleDetails.php? Articl eID=15307 Click on the photos for a larger view, then click on the article again to return to it. The first of april sure comes round quick these days!
[FairfieldLife] Chacun son cinema
For the film freaks on this forum (and I know that there are a few of you out there), I can highly recommend a fun compilation that was done for the recent 60th Cannes Film Festival. It's currently showing on the Canal+ channels here, and it consists of 35 short (2-4 minutes) films created by invited by the festival to celebrate cinema and their feel- ings about it, as suggested by the title -- To Each His Own Cinema. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0973844/ We're talking about shorts by directors like Lars von Trier (a dark but hilarious piece about what many film viewers have fantasized doing to those who talk in cinemas), David Lynch (as you might expect, surrealistic and incomprehensible to the max), David Cronenberg (pseudo news coverage of the last Jew in the world committing suicide in the last cinema in the world), Roman Polanski (Cinéma Erotique), Gus van Sant, Claude Lelouch, Billie August, Jane Campion, Michael Cimino, the Coen brothers, Andrei Konchalovsky, Ken Loach, Wim Wenders, Kar Wai Wong, and others. Great fun! People who just *love* the cinema, and have devoted their lives to their love affair with the cinema, taking a few moments from their busy schedules to create short love letters to their beloved. I don't know whether it'll ever be released on DVD or in theaters in the US, but if it is, and you share these directors' love of movies, you might want to join in the fun. As for the token FFL TM content rule, the David Lynch segment does not seem to be contained in the version of the film they're showing on Canal+. It was shown during the opening ceremonies of the festival, and I saw it then. Suffice it to say that it was weird. If you weren't in the business of making excuses for Lynch because he's a TMer, you might suspect that it had been made by a psychopath. The reaction of the audience at the ceremony was stunned silence, followed by sporadic polite applause. This might have something to do with why it's not in the version being shown on Canal+. My favorite is by Chen Kaing, and starts with a flashback to kids in a backwater village in China, trying to watch a movie in an improvised theater by pedaling their bikes to generate enough power to run the projector. They're watching a silent Charlie Chaplin film, and laughing to beat all because of course it's universal. A night watchman arrives and chases off the kids before they can see the end of the film. All of the kids but one. He's still sitting there because he's blind, and can't run away. Instead he says to the watchman, Can't we finish the film? Flash forward to 2007, and the blind kid is now grown, and is using his cane to tap his way into a movie theater. He's still in love with the movies, even though he's never been able to see even one of them. Those who love film understand. These directors all understand.
[FairfieldLife] 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
09 F9: A Simple Way to Stand Up Against the Latest Assault on Digital Rights By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet Posted on May 22, 2007 I have a number, and therefore I am a free person. That's the message more than a million protesters across the Internet have been broadcasting throughout the month of May as they publish 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, the 128-bit number familiarly known as 09 F9. Why would so many people create MySpace accounts using this number, devote a Wikipedia entry to it, post it thousands of times on news-finding site Digg, share pictures of it on photo site Flickr, and emblazon it on T-shirts? They're doing it to protest kids being threatened with jail by entertainment companies. They're doing it to protest bad art, bad business, and bad uses of good technology. They're doing it because they want to watch Spider-Man 3 on their Linux machines. In case you don't know, 09 F9 is part of a key that unlocks the encryption codes on HD-DVD and Blu-ray DVDs. Only a handful of DVD players are authorized to play these discs, and if you don't own one of them, you can't watch Spidey in high definition -- even if you purchase the DVD lawfully and aren't doing any copying. For many in the tech community, this encryption scheme, known as the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), felt like a final slap in the face from an entertainment industry whose recording branch sues kids for downloading music and whose movie branch makes crappy sequels that you can't even watch on your good Linux computer (you guessed it -- not authorized). When a person going by the screen name arnezami managed to uncover and publish the AACS key in February, other people immediately began reposting it. They did it because they're media consumers angry about the AACS and they wanted Hollywood and the world to know that they don't need no stinkin' authorized players. That's when the Motion Picture Association of America and the AACS Licensing Administrator (AACS LA) started sending out the cease and desist letters. Lawyers for the AACS LA argued that the number could be used to circumvent copy protection measures on DVDs and posting it was therefore a violation of the anticircumvention clauses in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They targeted blogs and social networks with cease and desists, even sending notice to Google that the search engine should stop returning results for people searching for the AACS key (as of this writing, Google returns nearly 1.5 million pages containing it). While some individuals complied with the AACS LA, in many cases community sentiment was so overwhelming that it was impossible to quell the tide of hexadecimal madness. Popular news site Digg tried to take down articles containing the number, and for a while it appeased the AACS LA. But Digg is a social network whose content is determined by millions of people, and as soon as Digg staffers took down one number, it would pop up in hundreds of other places. At last Digg's founder, Kevin Rose, gave up and told the community that if Digg got sued, it'd go down fighting. Many other sites, such as Wikipedia and Wired.com, deliberately published the number in articles, daring the AACS LA to sue them. Sites like MySpace and LiveJournal are also rife with the number -- like Digg, these sites are made up entirely of user content, and it would be practically impossible for administrators to scrub the number out. The AACS key protests have become so popular because they reach far beyond the usual debates over copyright infringement. This isn't about my right to copy movies -- it's about my right to play movies on whatever machine I want to. The AACS scheme is the perfect planned obsolescence generator. It will absolutely force people to upgrade their existing DVD players because soon they won't be authorized to play new DVDs. Even worse, the AACS scheme allows movie companies to revoke authorized status for players. Already, the AACS LA has revoked the authorized status of the WinDVD media player, so anybody who invested in WinDVD will have to reinvest in a new player -- at least, until that player's authorized status is revoked too. The AACS, more than any other digital rights management scheme, has revealed that the Hollywood studios have formed a cartel with electronics manufacturers who will do anything to suck more money out of the public. If you want to watch lawfully purchased movies, the only sane thing to do is post the number. Stand up and be counted. http://www.alternet.org/story/52242/
Re: [FairfieldLife] Vaidya Mishra pulse diagnosis course and consultations in July
I was wondering if it is Vaidya Ramakant Mishra or someone else. Is it TM movement organised? at_man_and_brahman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The esteemed Raj Vaidya Mishra, whose lineage extends through 5000 years, will be offering a three-day course on pulse diagnosis in July in Indianapolis. This course is intended primarily for health-care professionals, but others are invited to attend. Indianapolis is about a six-hour drive from Fairfield. Vaidya Mishra's approach to Ayurveda is much deeper than most other vaidyas, based on the traditional training he received from his father during seven years following his graduation from an Ayurvedic college. If you are interested in attending or want more information, contact me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Vaidya Mishra will also do three days of pulse consultations following the course. - Finding fabulous fares is fun. Let Yahoo! FareChase search your favorite travel sites to find flight and hotel bargains.
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Giant Skeletons Found in India
In a message dated 5/28/07 10:24:22 P.M. Central Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: They must have been very popular with they ladies. Its a hoax, first reported in 2004. Du! ** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
[FairfieldLife] Re: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Great article, great protest. This pandering to the copyright barons is also the thing that has crippled Windows Vista, because Microsoft capitulated to it. From what I hear, the moment you launch any of its multimedia utilities, the memory requirements of the operating system double, and sometimes triple if you're trying to play HD. I read one review/test of Vista in which the tester was unable to run more than two other programs (for example, Microsoft Word and Outlook) in 2 Mb of memory (Microsoft's claimed minimum memory requirement for Vista) when the OS went into its protect Microsoft from copyright infringement suits mode. They have effectively crippled their OS and passed the cost of the crippling (in the form of more memory being required) by giving in to the lawyers. When are the copyright owners going to learn that they're dealing with a frontier situation, and outlaws, and that heavy-handed attempts to intimidate the outlaws Just Aren't Going To Work? The outlaws understand the tech, and the entertainment industry lawyers do not. The outlaws are going to win every time, because they've got Righteous Indignation on their side. That and being 17 and having no assets that can be effectively seized. :-) My favorite attempt-at-copy-protection story is the short-lived scheme used by Sony corp. on its CDs. They spent several million bucks coming up with a copy-protection algorhythm that would prevent users from copying their CDs. The only trouble with it was that it actually *crashed* the users' computers when they tried to play the CDs on them. Big no-no, one that put the Righteous Indignation reaction into hyperdrive. Within a week, someone had figured out that the multi-million-dollar copy protection scheme could be defeated using a 49-cent Magic Marker pen. Simply use it to paint over the outside edge of the CD, and it played (and copied) just fine on any computer. No more crashes, no more copy protection. Sony abandoned the scheme. That's the way that all such copy protection schemes are going to be dealt with in the future. The hackers are smarter than the people creating the protection devices, and they're more motivated. The employees of the entertainment industry companies who invent these things are rewarded with (and thus motivated by) an industry-standard salary and a Dilbert cube that they can't even put up any of their photos of Elle Macpherson in. The hackers are motivated by Righteous Indignation, which doesn't pay as well in dollars, but pays off Big-Time in terms of satis- faction and peer approval. :-) Having worked on the peripheries of the music and film industry at one point in my life, I have to admit that I don't have a lot of compassion for the companies who are screaming about being ripped off by pirates. They've been Long John Silver to their artists for decades now, ripping off the very people who create their product every way they can possibly imagine. And now the karma has come home to roost. And about bloody time, in my opinion. I've known musicians who sold over a million dollars worth of product and who got a *bill* from their record companies for the album. The smarmy lawyers of the record companies had found a way to pass all of *their* expenses onto the band, and make them pay the company for the privilege of having made money for them. Same with some small films. So do I feel bad about these entertainment industry remoras losing a few bucks from pirates who take advantage of this authorization code being spread around on the Internet? I do not. When they start treating the talent that pays for their Porsches with a little more respect, I'll have more respect for them. Until then, I'm siding with the pirates. Ho ho ho, pass the bottle of rum, and plop that HD copy of Pirates Of The Caribbean At World's End into that Linux machine. Party time. :-) --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, vajradhatu108 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 09 F9: A Simple Way to Stand Up Against the Latest Assault on Digital Rights By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet Posted on May 22, 2007 I have a number, and therefore I am a free person. That's the message more than a million protesters across the Internet have been broadcasting throughout the month of May as they publish 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, the 128-bit number familiarly known as 09 F9. Why would so many people create MySpace accounts using this number, devote a Wikipedia entry to it, post it thousands of times on news-finding site Digg, share pictures of it on photo site Flickr, and emblazon it on T-shirts? They're doing it to protest kids being threatened with jail by entertainment companies. They're doing it to protest bad art, bad business, and bad uses of good technology. They're doing it because they want to watch Spider-Man 3 on their Linux machines. In case you don't know, 09 F9 is part of a key that unlocks the encryption codes on HD-DVD and Blu-ray DVDs. Only a
[FairfieldLife] Re: Scientific validation of Yagyas, a beginning
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, qntmpkt qntmpkt@ wrote: Has a Jyotish and Yagya program. CD's and DVD's available too. http://www.expertvedicastrology.com As a US headquarters base in Hawaii, you can send US $ to their HQ and not bother with converting $ to rupees. As to where your US $ go and your expected Return On Investment, I offer a crude start at validating the effect of Yagyas (as per the announced effect of the Yagya) vs. some kind of objective measure of its actual effect. The first link documents the announced intention of one Yagya offered by this fellow, and its cost ($11,000). http://www.expertvedicastrology.com/index.php? pr=Yagya_for_World_Peace The second link documents the ongoing conflicts in the world during 2006: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0904550.html It would seem that the benefactors who donated to this Yagya, other than the feel good benefit of contributing to a supposedly noble cause, got at least 20 continuing significant armed conflicts for their money. That's less than $500 US per war, which some would consider a bargain. One of the conflicts (the one in Sri Lanka, fairly close to the broadcast tower for the Yagya's Woo Woo Rays) actually had a four-year cease fire fall apart and revert to armed conflict again shortly after the Yagya was performed. T'would seem that either the gods aren't listening, or perhaps the 121 pundits got the pronunciation of one of the verses slightly wrong. Either that, or the Yagya was a total success, and accomplished its intended effect (bringing in $11,000) perfectly. Even if the Yagya brings less than what you have defined as total success, is that justification for not doing it at all? I don't get that logic. It is not a black and white world, imo. Your comment is like finding out from the physician that to attempt to cure your total inability to walk will result in walking with a pronounced limp, so you then declare to the doctor, well then, forget it, I'll continue in my wheelchair. ??? I would add that like any endeavor, large or small, intution and common sense are the best guides on whether or not to proceed. :-)
[FairfieldLife] Re: A different explanation of stress release
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip Karma is what tradition would state, not stress. Actually, stress in MMY's lingo refers to samskaras, [restoring snipped portion] impressions left in the mind of past experiences (in this or previous lives). In the yogic tradition, they're said to be the imprints of past karmas (actions) that compel new actions/reactions in the present. Note that stress can be eustress (from positive experiences) or distress (from negative experiences), per Hans Selye; the same is true of samskaras. The parallel between Selye's stress and samskaras isn't perfect, although there are many common elements. MMY uses stress simply as a translation of samskaras, rather than strictly in the Selyean sense. MMY believes, of course, that everything mental has a physical (or neurophysiological) correlate (including the subtle nervous system). TM is said to allow the release of the physical/neurophysiological correlates of mental impressions (samskaras), which results in the dissolution of the mental impressions as well. Generally one would practice a technique to resolve the karmic eddies that still exist in the pranic body. Once practicing such a technique, then one can follow various signs to see how that's working. MMY's position is a marketable one, that's all, otherwise it's utterly fallacious and misleading. Of course, it's neither. It's *simplified*, but conceptually it's pretty straight yogic theory a la Patanjali. snip If this is indeed what he's referring to, then please quote a source showing the equivalency in MMB's own words. Who's MMB? If you mean MMY, I don't have a quote, but none is needed. If you know what samskaras are, and you've ever heard MMY talking about stress, the equivalence is ridiculously obvious. I'm hardly the only person to have made this observation (and I made it independently, before learning that others had made it as well, just on the strength of the similarities). It seems rather strange, Vaj, that with all your vast knowledge of MMY's teaching and the yogic teaching, you wouldn't have made the association on your own. For that matter, MMY isn't the only one to have adopted the term stress to refer to samskaras. See, for instance, this from Swami Satyananda Saraswati (student of Sivananda): http://tinyurl.com/2gevpa If indeed it is, and I suspect you may be right, the mediator is indeed the pranic body and it's karmic eddies not the physical nervous system (as oft advertised in TMO tracts). There may indeed be a physical component in the nervous system, e.g. glia with an extremely short time span unmeasurable by current medical imaging technology or some short biological half- life fast neurotransmitters, but currently there is no tangible evidence to definitely arrive at such a conclusion. There are a lot of things in yogic theory for which there is no tangible evidence.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Scientific validation of Yagyas, a beginning
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, qntmpkt qntmpkt@ wrote: Has a Jyotish and Yagya program. CD's and DVD's available too. http://www.expertvedicastrology.com As a US headquarters base in Hawaii, you can send US $ to their HQ and not bother with converting $ to rupees. As to where your US $ go and your expected Return On Investment, I offer a crude start at validating the effect of Yagyas (as per the announced effect of the Yagya) vs. some kind of objective measure of its actual effect. The first link documents the announced intention of one Yagya offered by this fellow, and its cost ($11,000). http://www.expertvedicastrology.com/index.php?pr=Yagya_for_World_Peace The second link documents the ongoing conflicts in the world during 2006: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0904550.html It would seem that the benefactors who donated to this Yagya, other than the feel good benefit of contributing to a supposedly noble cause, got at least 20 continuing significant armed conflicts for their money. That's less than $500 US per war, which some would consider a bargain. One of the conflicts (the one in Sri Lanka, fairly close to the broadcast tower for the Yagya's Woo Woo Rays) actually had a four-year cease fire fall apart and revert to armed conflict again shortly after the Yagya was performed. T'would seem that either the gods aren't listening, or perhaps the 121 pundits got the pronunciation of one of the verses slightly wrong. Either that, or the Yagya was a total success, and accomplished its intended effect (bringing in $11,000) perfectly. Even if the Yagya brings less than what you have defined as total success, is that justification for not doing it at all? I don't get that logic. Did I suggest that? I think that people should do whatever they think that they should do. If someone gets off by paying $11,000 for a yagya, more power to them. If someone else gets off by taking that $11,000 and burning it in their fireplace, more power to them. All that I'm suggesting is that the *effect* of these two actions -- both of which bring a sense of satisfaction and pleasure to the person who is supplying the money for them -- may be exactly the same. :-) It is not a black and white world, imo. Your comment is like finding out from the physician that to attempt to cure your total inability to walk will result in walking with a pronounced limp, so you then declare to the doctor, well then, forget it, I'll continue in my wheelchair. Rather false analogy. What I am suggesting is that there is a possibility that the doctor who promises to cure you never attended med school, and has no knowledge that *could* improve you. If you improve as a result of his care, it's the result of your belief that you would improve -- in other words, the placebo effect. You are trying to make the case *for* yagyas because intuitively you believe they have some effect. I am merely saying that intuitively I suspect they have no effect at all, *except* on the level of the placebo effect. BUT, if it makes you happy to send your money off to Hawaii, and then you look at the world and see some positive results from your invest- ment in the yagyas, cool. The only point I'm making is that I'd be willing to bet that (as we have certainly seen with the selective vision with which the TMO tends to view world events to justify their fund-raising flying courses), the more you invest in the yagya, the more you might be tempted to *imagine* positive results. As you seem to be doing here, you could look at a year in which the number of wars possibly increased and say, Well, they might have increased *more* if I hadn't paid for the yagya. That's cool, too, but I think it's a tough sell to those who suspect that the real motivation for performing yagyas is to pay for the lives of those who perform yagyas. :-) ??? I would add that like any endeavor, large or small, intution and common sense are the best guides on whether or not to proceed. :-) That's what I'm suggesting, too. If someone claims to be able to bring about world peace by hiring 121 people to chant for 11 days, I'd expect to see some measure of world peace as a result. If I don't, I'd begin to think that I was ripped off. You seem to be wearing rose-colored glasses that enable you to see a year's worth of wars as world peace, so you can justify the investment in such a yagya. That seems to be your definition of intuition and common sense. Me, I have a slightly different definition, that's all. You have my full permission to send as much of your money as you want to these people. I don't have any problem with that at all. Or, if you want to cover *all* the bases, you can send some cash to me as well. I
[FairfieldLife] Re: A Challenge For Shemp
TurquoiseB wrote: The troll might just be lonely, and desperate for someone -- anyone -- to react to them and talk to them. (I honestly think that's why Richard Williams does his trolling.) Now, what exactly were those two simple questions for the bhakti supporters? From: Uncle Tantra Subject: Two simple questions for the bhakti supporters Newsgroups: alt.meditation.transcendental Date: 2003-03-16 http://tinyurl.com/38tsdh I studied with a guy who could turn huge rooms in convention centers gold, to the point where even the security guards saw it, but that never made me think he was enlightened, only that he could do cool things with light.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Ann Coulter on illegal immigrants
Tyson Foods Miller Brewing Honeywell Home Depot Ford Wells Fargo Bank Hormel IHOP Swift and Co. All hire illegals. So, they are illegals, but are you suggesting that the above companies employ 12 million of them, all with stolen or forged Social Security cards? What percentage of the illegals are employed by the above cited companies? 1%? Shemp wrote: It's far, far less than 1%. I know. I'm relying on the same source as Judy is (the Akasha). So, Judy was attempting to decieve. jstein wrote: No, that would be you and Shemp, of course. So, what percentage of illegal aliens work for the cited companies? More than 1%? It seemed like you were trying to say that most of the estimated 12 million illegals worked for them, but according to Shemp, far less than 1% did. My guess is that about two illegal aliens may have worked for Wells Fargo Bank on a clean-up crew. According to Shemp, most of the illegal aliens worked through sub-contractors and were not hired directly by the companies themselves. 'Wal-Mart Pays for Hiring Illegal Aliens' http://immigration.about.com/b/a/162521.htm An investigation by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uncovered that contractors providing cleaning services to Wal-Mart hired illegal aliens for the job.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Ann Coulter on illegal immigrants
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Richard J. Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Tyson Foods Miller Brewing Honeywell Home Depot Ford Wells Fargo Bank Hormel IHOP Swift and Co. All hire illegals. So, they are illegals, but are you suggesting that the above companies employ 12 million of them, all with stolen or forged Social Security cards? What percentage of the illegals are employed by the above cited companies? 1%? Shemp wrote: It's far, far less than 1%. I know. I'm relying on the same source as Judy is (the Akasha). So, Judy was attempting to decieve. jstein wrote: No, that would be you and Shemp, of course. So, what percentage of illegal aliens work for the cited companies? More than 1%? It seemed like you were trying to say that most of the estimated 12 million illegals worked for them Nowhere in my post does it say or suggest or hint at anything of the kind. You made that up, attributed it to me, then called me a liar.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Somewhere in the Akash
TurquoiseB wrote: Bingo. What you focus on, you become. From: Judy Stein Subject: Re: Good bye Newsgroups: alt.meditation.transcendental Date: 2003-11-07 07:00:34 PST http://tinyurl.com/ynv9bn Barry sent this post to me via email to make sure I wouldn't miss it. I responded briefly and politely, only to find that he had configured his account to block email from my address. That pretty much takes the cake for chickenshittery, in my book.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Global warming alarmist recants
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train By David Evans Posted on 5/28/2007 [Subscribe or Tell Others] [A version of tihs article was previously blogged on Mises.org here, and inspired a spirited debate. The author reworked the piece for the Mises.org front page. The blog item remains the same.] I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened that case. I am now skeptical. In the late 1990s, this was the evidence suggesting that carbon emissions caused global warming: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, proved in a laboratory a century ago. Global warming has been occurring for a century and concentrations of atmospheric carbon have been rising for a century. Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit. Ice core data, starting with the first cores from Vostok in 1985, allowed us to measure temperature and atmospheric carbon going back hundreds of thousands of years, through several dramatic global warming and cooling events. To the temporal resolution then available (data points more than a thousand years apart), atmospheric carbon and temperature moved in lockstep: they rose and fell together. Talk about a smoking gun! There were no other credible causes of global warming. This evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb carbon emissions. Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit. The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; there were international conferences full of such people. We had political support, the ear of government, big budgets. We felt fairly important and useful (I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet! But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence above fell away. Using the same point numbers as above: Better data shows that from 1940 to 1975 the earth cooled while atmospheric carbon increased. That 35 year non-correlation might eventually be explained by global dimming, only discovered in about 2003. The temporal resolution of the ice core data improved. By 2004 we knew that in past warming events, the temperature increases generally started about 800 years before the rises in atmospheric carbon. Causality does not run in the direction I had assumed in 1999 it runs the opposite way! It took several hundred years of warming for the oceans to give off more of their carbon. This proves that there is a cause of global warming other than atmospheric carbon. And while it is possible that rising atmospheric carbon in these past warmings then went on to cause more warming (amplification of the initial warming), the ice core data neither proves nor disproves this hypothesis. There is now a credible alternative suspect. In October 2006 Henrik Svensmark showed experimentally that cosmic rays cause cloud formation. Clouds have a net cooling effect, but for the last three decades there have been fewer clouds than normal because the sun's magnetic field, which shields us from cosmic rays, has been stronger than usual. So the earth heated up. It's too early to judge what fraction of global warming is caused by cosmic rays. There is now no observational evidence that global warming is caused by carbon emissions. You would think that in over 20 years of intense investigation we would have found something. For example, greenhouse warming due to carbon emissions should warm the upper atmosphere faster than the lower atmosphere but until 2006 the data showed the opposite, and thus that the greenhouse effect was not occurring! In 2006 better data allowed that the effect might be occurring, except in the tropics. The only current evidence for blaming carbon emissions are scientific models (and the fact that there are few contradictory
[FairfieldLife] Re: A different explanation of stress release
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm hardly the only person to have made this observation (and I made it independently, before learning that others had made it as well, just on the strength of the similarities). It seems rather strange, Vaj, that with all your vast knowledge of MMY's teaching ... Joke of the Day :-)
[FairfieldLife] Re: Ann Coulter on illegal immigrants
Nowhere in my post does it say or suggest or hint at anything of the kind. You made that up, attributed it to me, then called me a liar. What you wrote was very decieving - you attempted to decieve. In context, almost every single American company hires illegals through sub-contractors, since we all eat food harvested by illegal aliens. But a very small percentage of illegals are hired directly by the companies you cited. Shemp seems to be correct. You got caught decieving and posting a non sequitur in an attempt mislead due to the fact that you are an inveterate argumentative time-waster. Shemp wrote: The only time so-called big business has ever been caught hiring illegals is through sub-contractors, who do the direct hiring of illegals. jstein wrote: Tyson Foods Miller Brewing Honeywell Home Depot Ford Wells Fargo Bank Hormel IHOP Swift and Co. All hire illegals.
[FairfieldLife] Re: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I've copywritten many a piece, and it saved my ass bigtime in one instance when material of mine was wholly ripped off and used on a Web site -- for profit -- $54,000's worth as it turned out. Because I had a copyright, the thief incurred a risk of much larger penalties than he would have faced otherwise -- civil law allows for multiples of the profits as a proscribed penalty. That big penalty, once he finally grasped what risk he faced, forced him to reconsider his position in a three year long lawsuit, and he's now asking for an out of court settlement. Without that copyright clout, my civil suit against the guy would have much less of a penalty being possibly exacted against him, and he would have held out much longer before coming to the settlement table. Because of this experience, I'm grateful for the copyright laws. That said: here's a suggestion to all artists: give it all away for free until you have a following. If you can't get a following, then you don't have what the market wants, so keep your day job. If you do get a following, have those folks sign up to an opt-in list that gets them the privilege of being the first to get your fresh new stuff for a price. Yes, they can then give your new stuff away after purchase, but they will want your stuff fresh-as-possible, so much that, if they have the bucks, they'll buy it when it comes hot off the griddle just to get their fix. Those that can wait, will get your stuff from the buyers down the line when those buyers post your stuff on the Web. See? If one really has chops, there will be a paying audience who want that next blast from you NOW. And this can be done direct -- P2P -- with no agents or broadcasters or media vampires involved. The artist sells to his core audience, and the rest of the world gets it for free -- which is advertising for the next roll out of stuff. Providing your stuff for free in a degraded form (smaller file size) will give everyone a taste, and invite them to purchase the full pleasure. E.g., Put your stuff on youtube.com and cuz it's so crappy a display, folks will pay for the bigger files with the visual and audio details that youtube.com crunches out of existence. The opt-in list will grow. Yes, this means an artist must continually put out more, but that's what any artist would do for funzies if he/she is a true artist, right? Then, if one really has a following, a concert will be sold out, a gallery's display will be well visited, etc. Now, I do have a problem with the heirs of material. John Wayne's family is still making healthy buckzoids from licensing his image, and I cannot find myself wanting that to stop -- I have kids that I want to leave my creations to, ya see? So, the Duke's family have a legitimate gripe if someone is diluting the value of his image by over-use which will decrease how much is paid by a commercial interest in the material. I think that if anyone makes more than a few bucks off my stuff, they should pay a royalty at least. Maybe as a compromise, we could allow general use of all material, but if money is being made, then the copyright laws click in. If people get tired of seeing John Wayne in youtube vids, then so be it. John Wayne's family needs to make hay while the sun shines. On the other hand, I don't create anything, and I'm thieving from God, so who am I to try to control how the stuff that flows through me is used by God in the other nervous systems out there? Can't justify it on my good days, but when I finally get that lawsuit cleared up, I'll be sure to cash the check instead of, you know, giving to one of God's charities. SighI don't have clarity about all this. Edg --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Great article, great protest. This pandering to the copyright barons is also the thing that has crippled Windows Vista, because Microsoft capitulated to it. From what I hear, the moment you launch any of its multimedia utilities, the memory requirements of the operating system double, and sometimes triple if you're trying to play HD. I read one review/test of Vista in which the tester was unable to run more than two other programs (for example, Microsoft Word and Outlook) in 2 Mb of memory (Microsoft's claimed minimum memory requirement for Vista) when the OS went into its protect Microsoft from copyright infringement suits mode. They have effectively crippled their OS and passed the cost of the crippling (in the form of more memory being required) by giving in to the lawyers. When are the copyright owners going to learn that they're dealing with a frontier situation, and outlaws, and that heavy-handed attempts to intimidate the outlaws Just Aren't Going To Work? The outlaws understand the tech, and the entertainment industry lawyers do not. The outlaws are going to win every time, because they've got Righteous Indignation on their side. That and being 17 and
[FairfieldLife] Re: Somewhere in the Akash
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Richard J. Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: TurquoiseB wrote: Bingo. What you focus on, you become. From: Judy Stein Subject: Re: Good bye Newsgroups: alt.meditation.transcendental Date: 2003-11-07 07:00:34 PST http://tinyurl.com/ynv9bn Barry sent this post to me via email to make sure I wouldn't miss it. I responded briefly and politely, only to find that he had configured his account to block email from my address. That pretty much takes the cake for chickenshittery, in my book. LOL. T'would seem that my post yesterday about trolls has the resident troll here working overtime. :-) This particular tempest in a pisspot was resolved long ago. Judy stormed off of a.m.t. in a snit, so upset about Shemp's beliefs after years of TM that she expressed doubts about TM's overall effectiveness. I actually believed that she had done what she said, and left a.m.t., so I posted a note to the group and copied her on it in email suggesting that she might find some answers to her announced dilemma in Tibetan Buddhism, because of its emphasis on compassion. If you're silly enough to follow the tinyurl link above, Judy's I'm leaving post is #28. My reply, which is the one she refers to as chickenshittery, is #29. As for her claim of chickenshittery, that email account was blocked to ALL traffic. I used it *only* to post to a.m.t. and other such spamtraps on Google. As it turns out, Judy knew that, and had already made at least one post some time earlier acknowledging that she knew it. So this was Just Another Opportunity To Feign Indignation. This is documented in post #36. Her gracious apology is in post #37. She stayed gone from a.m.t. for less than 24 hours. And now, back to the ongoing attempts by the Troll From Texas to start more arguments. As I suggested yesterday, he's probably lonely, and this is what he *does* when he's lonely. Personally I think that masturbating would be more effective, but that's probably just me. And if Judy chooses to respond to this by trying to reopen the old argument, I might suggest the same practice to her. :-)
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Ann Coulter on illegal immigrants
In a message dated 5/29/2007 12:00:53 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Why doesn't America invest in Mexico's economy? That would take away the need for them to leave a country that is starving to death. Give it five years of investment and the problem will go away all by itself. After all, we built China's economy and now its India. Why not Mexico? Lsoma. Nowhere in my post does it say or suggest or hint at anything of the kind. You made that up, attributed it to me, then called me a liar. What you wrote was very deceiving - you attempted to decieve. In context, almost every single American company hires illegals through sub-contractors, since we all eat food harvested by illegal aliens. But a very small percentage of illegals are hired directly by the companies you cited. Shemp seems to be correct. You got caught deceiving and posting a non sequitur in an attempt mislead due to the fact that you are an inveterate argumentative time-waster. Shemp wrote: The only time so-called big business has ever been caught hiring illegal's is through sub-contractors, who do the direct hiring of illegals. jstein wrote: Tyson Foods Miller Brewing Honeywell Home Depot Ford Wells Fargo Bank Hormel IHOP Swift and Co. All hire illegals. ** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Ann Coulter on illegal immigrants
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Richard J. Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Nowhere in my post does it say or suggest or hint at anything of the kind. You made that up, attributed it to me, then called me a liar. What you wrote was very decieving - you attempted to decieve. No, again, that would be you.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Somewhere in the Akash
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Richard J. Williams willytex@ wrote: TurquoiseB wrote: Bingo. What you focus on, you become. From: Judy Stein Subject: Re: Good bye Newsgroups: alt.meditation.transcendental Date: 2003-11-07 07:00:34 PST http://tinyurl.com/ynv9bn Barry sent this post to me via email to make sure I wouldn't miss it. I responded briefly and politely, only to find that he had configured his account to block email from my address. That pretty much takes the cake for chickenshittery, in my book. LOL. T'would seem that my post yesterday about trolls has the resident troll here working overtime. :-) This particular tempest in a pisspot was resolved long ago. Needless to say, Barry's version of what happened is seriously misrepresentational. Among many other points, I did *not* know that his account blocked all email; and what I was referring to as chickenshittery was not the content of his email or his post, but the fact that my email to him was bounced with the message that *my* account specifically was being blocked. He also misrepresents how long I was gone from alt.m.t, both right after I left and longer term. I stayed out of all substantive discussions for well over a year and posted only in response to posts attacking me in absentia, which died down after awhile. And if anybody does read the posts, they'll note that it wasn't just Shemp I was upset with; they'll also most likely understand *why* I was upset. Barry obviously went back to review the posts in question, so he's well aware of what I've pointed out above. Judy stormed off of a.m.t. in a snit, so upset about Shemp's beliefs after years of TM that she expressed doubts about TM's overall effectiveness. I actually believed that she had done what she said, and left a.m.t., so I posted a note to the group and copied her on it in email suggesting that she might find some answers to her announced dilemma in Tibetan Buddhism, because of its emphasis on compassion. If you're silly enough to follow the tinyurl link above, Judy's I'm leaving post is #28. My reply, which is the one she refers to as chickenshittery, is #29. As for her claim of chickenshittery, that email account was blocked to ALL traffic. I used it *only* to post to a.m.t. and other such spamtraps on Google. As it turns out, Judy knew that, and had already made at least one post some time earlier acknowledging that she knew it. So this was Just Another Opportunity To Feign Indignation. This is documented in post #36. Her gracious apology is in post #37. She stayed gone from a.m.t. for less than 24 hours. And now, back to the ongoing attempts by the Troll From Texas to start more arguments. As I suggested yesterday, he's probably lonely, and this is what he *does* when he's lonely. Personally I think that masturbating would be more effective, but that's probably just me. And if Judy chooses to respond to this by trying to reopen the old argument, I might suggest the same practice to her. :-)
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Ann Coulter on illegal immigrants
Jesus Christ! Here we go again. What the hell is wrong with you people? Like a couple of 8 year olds on the play ground. Grow up! At least take your inane argument private so others don't have to read this asinine drivel. And don't bother telling me/us about how you are right because if you look at post #3645475 made in 1874 it proves how youblah, blah, blah... What a waste of a couple of good intellects. --- authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Richard J. Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Nowhere in my post does it say or suggest or hint at anything of the kind. You made that up, attributed it to me, then called me a liar. What you wrote was very decieving - you attempted to decieve. No, again, that would be you. To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Park yourself in front of a world of choices in alternative vehicles. Visit the Yahoo! Auto Green Center. http://autos.yahoo.com/green_center/
[FairfieldLife] Re: Ann Coulter on illegal immigrants
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Peter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jesus Christ! Here we go again. What the hell is wrong with you people? Like a couple of 8 year olds on the play ground. Grow up! At least take your inane argument private so others don't have to read this asinine drivel. And don't bother telling me/us about how you are right because if you look at post #3645475 made in 1874 it proves how youblah, blah, blah... What a waste of a couple of good intellects. F**k off, Peter. If somebody grossly misrepresented what you had said and then called you a liar for saying it, I don't imagine you'd let it go by. Further, your tendency to portray moral equivalence when one party is trying to pursue an argument and the other (me) is trying to end it doesn't speak so well for your own ethical compass. --- authfriend [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Richard J. Williams willytex@ wrote: Nowhere in my post does it say or suggest or hint at anything of the kind. You made that up, attributed it to me, then called me a liar. What you wrote was very decieving - you attempted to decieve. No, again, that would be you.
[FairfieldLife] Re: The discipline of letting go (of TM)
Bhairitu said In fact in other systems it's no great crime if you miss some meditations. Yes. I wonder if I would not be better served by going to a different practice. If for no other reason than after 30 years of this maybe its time to explore some other areas of the brain. I have really enjoyed reading Sally Kempton's Heart of Meditation where she suggests playing with meditation, trying different approaches. Not taking the darn thing so seriously. Her Guru, Swami Muktananda wrote a book on the importance of this playfulness. I wonder if this incessant need to eat, sleep and brush my teeth is healthy? Eating sleeping and brushing are not a great metaphor for meditation. Eating and sleeping are physiological necessities. We stop - we die. There is no choice involved here. Can we equate TM to toothbrushing? Both have benefits to their habitual practice. On the other hand those who don't brush their teeth face terrible dental problems eventually. What lies in store for the millions of people with out a meditation practice? Is it as bad as gingivitis? Does anybody else here feel this strong need to meditate after so many years of habitual practice? Its as if the neural networks have been redesigned to NEED meditation 2 x a day. Is this healthy? [EMAIL PROTECTED] For me, meditation does clear me out and center me. But its not about me after 30 years, its about the collective. I have been reading a lot of Andrew Cohen lately who has been experimenting with expanding group consciousness through intersubjectivity. It is a very interesting approach. Meditation is primarily narcissistic. The argument that somehow one has to first meditate before they can come into the world to help others is questionable. There are plenty of altruistic people out there making a positive mark without CC or GC. Atheists are capable of doing good. I am not sure of the relevence of your response to my question about the addictive nature of a 30 year practice. curtisdeltablues said, But I can also speak for the rest of the world in wondering what's up with the buttsplicer email Stu? I work as a film editor. It was the first name that stuck after trying a dozen or so in gmail. I reserve the gmail account for the internet because whenever it gets published it invites too much spam. s. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Stu buttsplicer@ wrote: Every so often this daily meditation practice feels like an addiction. I find myself structuring the events of my day so that I can get my afternoon session in, or changing plans to I will have time in the morning. If I miss a sitting, I feel lethargic and dull. Sometimes I have to sneek off to a staircase or a closet for my TM. I wonder if a habit so ingrained is healthy. So about three weeks ago I decided to stop for a while to see what would happen. The first week was very difficult. I have had headaches and had to battle the desire to sit. At one point I had a job interview and realized I needed to do my TM before the interview to keep my calm. At this point I still feel I am missing the practice. My consciousness is in a semi-fog. Is this the way the rest of the world feels? s.
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: The discipline of letting go (of TM)
On May 29, 2007, at 1:35 PM, Stu wrote: Bhairitu said In fact in other systems it's no great crime if you miss some meditations. Yes. I wonder if I would not be better served by going to a different practice. If for no other reason than after 30 years of this maybe its time to explore some other areas of the brain. I have really enjoyed reading Sally Kempton's Heart of Meditation where she suggests playing with meditation, trying different approaches. Not taking the darn thing so seriously. Her Guru, Swami Muktananda wrote a book on the importance of this playfulness. I agree. It's important to have familiarity with different styles of meditation experientially--and if you can keep that at the level of play you're already well on the way to success. Ideally there should be no special division between practicing and not practicing meditation. As the meditation master Dilgo Khyentse said: The everyday practice of the Great Perfection is simply to develop a complete carefree acceptance, an openness to all situations without limit. We should realize openness as the playground of our emotions and relate to people without artificiality, manipulation or strategy. We should experience everything totally, never withdrawing into ourselves as a marmot hides in its hole. This practice releases tremendous energy which is usually constricted by the process of maintaining fixed reference points. Referentiality is the process by which we retreat from the direct experience of everyday life. Being present in the moment may initially trigger fear. But by welcoming the sensation of fear with complete openness, we cut through the barriers created by habitual emotional patterns. When we engage in the practice of discovering space, we should develop the feeling of opening ourselves out completely to the entire universe. We should open ourselves with absolute simplicity and nakedness of mind. This is the powerful and ordinary practice of dropping the mask of self-protection. We shouldn't make a division in our meditation between perception and field of perception. We shouldn't become like a cat watching a mouse. We should realize that the purpose of meditation is not to go deeply into ourselves or withdraw from the world. Practice should be free and non-conceptual, unconstrained by introspection and concentration. Vast unoriginated self-luminous wisdom space is the ground of being - the beginning and the end of confusion. The presence of awareness in the primordeal state has no bias toward enlightenment or non- enlightenment. This ground of being which is known as pure or original mind is the source from which all phenomena arise. It is known as the great mother, as the womb of potentiality in which all things arise and dissolve in natural self-perfectedness and absolute spontaneity. I wonder if this incessant need to eat, sleep and brush my teeth is healthy? Eating sleeping and brushing are not a great metaphor for meditation. Eating and sleeping are physiological necessities. We stop - we die. There is no choice involved here. Can we equate TM to toothbrushing? Both have benefits to their habitual practice. On the other hand those who don't brush their teeth face terrible dental problems eventually. What lies in store for the millions of people with out a meditation practice? Is it as bad as gingivitis? Does anybody else here feel this strong need to meditate after so many years of habitual practice? Its as if the neural networks have been redesigned to NEED meditation 2 x a day. Is this healthy? When one reaches a calm state in meditation, this state, a state without thought content, can become very addicting. I would venture that most long-term TMers are in fact, addicted to this state and the neurotransmitters it triggers. Addiction, even to meditative states, is not healthy.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Giant Skeletons Found in IndiaWhere to find evidence of FRAUD?
Substantiate the evidence of FRAUD re: the skeletons? So we may know of this evidence of fraud please. ** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
[FairfieldLife] How accurate is the 'Swindle'...???
A mondo block of ice at the 'ass end' of the planet is melting..!! Shemp thinks it's not a problem at all..!! Does Rick and Turquoise have anything to say about it.?? - Sick sense of humor? Visit Yahoo! TV's Comedy with an Edge to see what's on, when.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Giant Skeletons Found in India Where to Locate FRAUD evidence .
I note in the Old testament some non: canonical books of the, OT the Giants of old are mentioned as well. ** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: The discipline of letting go (of TM)
In a message dated 5/29/2007 1:37:15 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Andrew Cohen, Ekhart Tolle and many others have had spontaneous experiences of enlightenment. They have forgotten what got them to that experience in the first place. After all if your in a state of CC or GC and you forget about the dualistic path that got you there in the first place why would you recommend it. I think MMY is correct. The nervous system needs to be cultured to reflect a specific state of cons. The regular practice helps culture the nervous system. Andrew and others should be focusing on the collective meditation and promoting it within their groups. All of these teachers seem to be more concerned about their own attention to what they want to teach. We need more teachers to reach out to others and start a network of practitioners regardless of the form of meditation. I don't think people are bored of the regular practice of meditation. I think everyone wants a more expanded version of the group experience. MMY tried to do it but he is so exclusive to not only others joining his TM or TM Sidhi's group and has even made it difficult for those who are TM-Sidhi practitioners to join. For this very reason he will not accomplish his goal of creating world peace. O-the bitter taste of judgement.Stick it out with your meditation. Don't stop doing it everyday. When the violence calms down in the world then we can relax our practice. Most people who do other forms of meditation never do it everyday or with some consistency. They brush their teeth everyday, take a shower, feed the body, go to work, exercise but god forbid we meditate everyday. Now we know why the world is so screwed up. Lsoma. Bhairitu said In fact in other systems it's no great crime if you miss some meditations. Yes. I wonder if I would not be better served by going to a different practice. If for no other reason than after 30 years of this maybe its time to explore some other areas of the brain. I have really enjoyed reading Sally Kempton's Heart of Meditation where she suggests playing with meditation, trying different approaches. Not taking the darn thing so seriously. Her Guru, Swami Muktananda wrote a book on the importance of this playfulness. I wonder if this incessant need to eat, sleep and brush my teeth is healthy? Eating sleeping and brushing are not a great metaphor for meditation. Eating and sleeping are physiological necessities. We stop - we die. There is no choice involved here. Can we equate TM to toothbrushing? Both have benefits to their habitual practice. On the other hand those who don't brush their teeth face terrible dental problems eventually. What lies in store for the millions of people with out a meditation practice? Is it as bad as gingivitis? Does anybody else here feel this strong need to meditate after so many years of habitual practice? Its as if the neural networks have been redesigned to NEED meditation 2 x a day. Is this healthy? [EMAIL PROTECTED] For me, meditation does clear me out and center me. But its not about me after 30 years, its about the collective. I have been reading a lot of Andrew Cohen lately who has been experimenting with expanding group consciousness through intersubjectivity. It is a very interesting approach. Meditation is primarily narcissistic. The argument that somehow one has to first meditate before they can come into the world to help others is questionable. There are plenty of altruistic people out there making a positive mark without CC or GC. Atheists are capable of doing good. I am not sure of the relevence of your response to my question about the addictive nature of a 30 year practice. curtisdeltablues said, But I can also speak for the rest of the world in wondering what's up with the buttsplicer email Stu? I work as a film editor. It was the first name that stuck after trying a dozen or so in gmail. I reserve the gmail account for the internet because whenever it gets published it invites too much spam. s. --- In FairfieldLife@ --- In Fair --- In FairfieldLife@WBRyahoogr Every so often this daily meditation practice feels like an addiction. I find myself structuring the events of my day so that I can get my afternoon session in, or changing plans to I will have time in the morning. If I miss a sitting, I feel lethargic and dull. Sometimes I have to sneek off to a staircase or a closet for my TM. I wonder if a habit so ingrained is healthy. So about three weeks ago I decided to stop for a while to see what would happen. The first week was very difficult. I have had headaches and had to battle the desire to sit. At one point I had a job interview and realized I needed to do my TM before the interview to keep my calm. At this point I still feel I am missing the
[FairfieldLife] Re: Scientific validation of Yagyas, a beginning
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin jflanegi@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: You have my full permission to send as much of your money as you want to these people. I don't have any problem with that at all. Or, if you want to cover *all* the bases, you can send some cash to me as well. I promise to burn it in my fireplace. :-) Ha-ha! Yeah, after I read my response I saw the issue with Yagyas the same as you do- either they work, or not. And you are right, I tend to believe they do, hence the MD analogy. Given that vibration manifests effects in the material world, the most obvious being music, why wouldn't a Yagya produce some effect? How can you without a shadow of a doubt say that Yagyas don't produce any effect? As for actually sending my money to Hawaii per the referenced web site, I don't think so. :-)
[FairfieldLife] Re: How accurate is the 'Swindle'...???
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Jason Spock [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A mondo block of ice at the 'ass end' of the planet is melting..!! Shemp thinks it's not a problem at all..!! Well, Shemp prolly doesn't live on the coast, YEE-HAW!
[FairfieldLife] Re: Vaidya Mishra pulse diagnosis course and consultations in July
AFAIK, Vaidya Mishra severed his ties with MAPI, and works independenly of the TMO now; but i dont know the details of why ... pratap Mahapatra wrote: I was wondering if it is Vaidya Ramakant Mishra or someone else. Is it TM movement organised? at_man_and_brahman wrote: The esteemed Raj Vaidya Mishra, whose lineage extends through 5000 years, will be offering a three-day course on pulse diagnosis in July in Indianapolis. This course is intended primarily for health-care professionals, but others are invited to attend. Indianapolis is about a six-hour drive from Fairfield. Vaidya Mishra's approach to Ayurveda is much deeper than most other vaidyas, based on the traditional training he received from his father during seven years following his graduation from an Ayurvedic college. If you are interested in attending or want more information, contact me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Vaidya Mishra will also do three days of pulse consultations following the course.
[FairfieldLife] Re: VM as TM, outside the TM.org
This is very interesting. Does anyone remember Thom Knoles from back in the day? I think he did TTC in Rishikesh in 68 or 69. Looks like a lot is going on... http://introtomeditation.com/photogallery.html --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, dhamiltony2k5 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This link is interesting trend. That court ruling, that Transcendental Meditation was not unique. Noteworthy link George, things to come? Moving on .org,on with teaching meditation, retreats, teacher training otherwise etc. vs. Selling 'peace bonds' support of an old TM the old way, with the gold robes and party hats and pomp of the old TM.org. -Doug in FF --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, george_deforest george.deforest@ wrote: from a friend: If you go to this link, you can see a whole bunch of photos taken just about 2 weeks ago of a group of TM students visiting Maharishi's ashram in Rishikesh. I had no idea it was abandoned and had become such a ruin! Jai guru deva TS http://www.introtomeditation.com/maharishi_ashram/ note: they call themselves TM students, but their TM is being taught outside the TMO as Vedic Meditation; nevertheless, they also read MMY's gita! Does anyone on FFLife recognize M's asram? (i was never there)
[FairfieldLife] Re: Scientific validation of Yagyas, a beginning
---Turq, your intuitions are faulty. You don't see the big picture. In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin jflanegi@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, qntmpkt qntmpkt@ wrote: Has a Jyotish and Yagya program. CD's and DVD's available too. http://www.expertvedicastrology.com As a US headquarters base in Hawaii, you can send US $ to their HQ and not bother with converting $ to rupees. As to where your US $ go and your expected Return On Investment, I offer a crude start at validating the effect of Yagyas (as per the announced effect of the Yagya) vs. some kind of objective measure of its actual effect. The first link documents the announced intention of one Yagya offered by this fellow, and its cost ($11,000). http://www.expertvedicastrology.com/index.php? pr=Yagya_for_World_Peace The second link documents the ongoing conflicts in the world during 2006: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0904550.html It would seem that the benefactors who donated to this Yagya, other than the feel good benefit of contributing to a supposedly noble cause, got at least 20 continuing significant armed conflicts for their money. That's less than $500 US per war, which some would consider a bargain. One of the conflicts (the one in Sri Lanka, fairly close to the broadcast tower for the Yagya's Woo Woo Rays) actually had a four-year cease fire fall apart and revert to armed conflict again shortly after the Yagya was performed. T'would seem that either the gods aren't listening, or perhaps the 121 pundits got the pronunciation of one of the verses slightly wrong. Either that, or the Yagya was a total success, and accomplished its intended effect (bringing in $11,000) perfectly. Even if the Yagya brings less than what you have defined as total success, is that justification for not doing it at all? I don't get that logic. Did I suggest that? I think that people should do whatever they think that they should do. If someone gets off by paying $11,000 for a yagya, more power to them. If someone else gets off by taking that $11,000 and burning it in their fireplace, more power to them. All that I'm suggesting is that the *effect* of these two actions -- both of which bring a sense of satisfaction and pleasure to the person who is supplying the money for them -- may be exactly the same. :-) It is not a black and white world, imo. Your comment is like finding out from the physician that to attempt to cure your total inability to walk will result in walking with a pronounced limp, so you then declare to the doctor, well then, forget it, I'll continue in my wheelchair. Rather false analogy. What I am suggesting is that there is a possibility that the doctor who promises to cure you never attended med school, and has no knowledge that *could* improve you. If you improve as a result of his care, it's the result of your belief that you would improve -- in other words, the placebo effect. You are trying to make the case *for* yagyas because intuitively you believe they have some effect. I am merely saying that intuitively I suspect they have no effect at all, *except* on the level of the placebo effect. BUT, if it makes you happy to send your money off to Hawaii, and then you look at the world and see some positive results from your invest- ment in the yagyas, cool. The only point I'm making is that I'd be willing to bet that (as we have certainly seen with the selective vision with which the TMO tends to view world events to justify their fund-raising flying courses), the more you invest in the yagya, the more you might be tempted to *imagine* positive results. As you seem to be doing here, you could look at a year in which the number of wars possibly increased and say, Well, they might have increased *more* if I hadn't paid for the yagya. That's cool, too, but I think it's a tough sell to those who suspect that the real motivation for performing yagyas is to pay for the lives of those who perform yagyas. :-) ??? I would add that like any endeavor, large or small, intution and common sense are the best guides on whether or not to proceed. :-) That's what I'm suggesting, too. If someone claims to be able to bring about world peace by hiring 121 people to chant for 11 days, I'd expect to see some measure of world peace as a result. If I don't, I'd begin to think that I was ripped off. You seem to be wearing rose-colored glasses that enable you to see a year's worth of wars as world peace, so you can justify the investment in such a yagya. That seems to be your definition of intuition and common sense. Me, I have a
[FairfieldLife] Re: The discipline of letting go (of TM)
---So, you're saying that this Rinpoche Dildo of yours recommends just being open and no practices at all? Interesting viewpoint!. I'll stick with TM, thanks. As to the other Gurus, I've tasted their offerings and crossed them off my list, including Muktananda. Norbu Rinpoche only has the Dance of the Vajra. In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Vaj [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On May 29, 2007, at 1:35 PM, Stu wrote: Bhairitu said In fact in other systems it's no great crime if you miss some meditations. Yes. I wonder if I would not be better served by going to a different practice. If for no other reason than after 30 years of this maybe its time to explore some other areas of the brain. I have really enjoyed reading Sally Kempton's Heart of Meditation where she suggests playing with meditation, trying different approaches. Not taking the darn thing so seriously. Her Guru, Swami Muktananda wrote a book on the importance of this playfulness. I agree. It's important to have familiarity with different styles of meditation experientially--and if you can keep that at the level of play you're already well on the way to success. Ideally there should be no special division between practicing and not practicing meditation. As the meditation master Dilgo Khyentse said: The everyday practice of the Great Perfection is simply to develop a complete carefree acceptance, an openness to all situations without limit. We should realize openness as the playground of our emotions and relate to people without artificiality, manipulation or strategy. We should experience everything totally, never withdrawing into ourselves as a marmot hides in its hole. This practice releases tremendous energy which is usually constricted by the process of maintaining fixed reference points. Referentiality is the process by which we retreat from the direct experience of everyday life. Being present in the moment may initially trigger fear. But by welcoming the sensation of fear with complete openness, we cut through the barriers created by habitual emotional patterns. When we engage in the practice of discovering space, we should develop the feeling of opening ourselves out completely to the entire universe. We should open ourselves with absolute simplicity and nakedness of mind. This is the powerful and ordinary practice of dropping the mask of self-protection. We shouldn't make a division in our meditation between perception and field of perception. We shouldn't become like a cat watching a mouse. We should realize that the purpose of meditation is not to go deeply into ourselves or withdraw from the world. Practice should be free and non-conceptual, unconstrained by introspection and concentration. Vast unoriginated self-luminous wisdom space is the ground of being - the beginning and the end of confusion. The presence of awareness in the primordeal state has no bias toward enlightenment or non- enlightenment. This ground of being which is known as pure or original mind is the source from which all phenomena arise. It is known as the great mother, as the womb of potentiality in which all things arise and dissolve in natural self-perfectedness and absolute spontaneity. I wonder if this incessant need to eat, sleep and brush my teeth is healthy? Eating sleeping and brushing are not a great metaphor for meditation. Eating and sleeping are physiological necessities. We stop - we die. There is no choice involved here. Can we equate TM to toothbrushing? Both have benefits to their habitual practice. On the other hand those who don't brush their teeth face terrible dental problems eventually. What lies in store for the millions of people with out a meditation practice? Is it as bad as gingivitis? Does anybody else here feel this strong need to meditate after so many years of habitual practice? Its as if the neural networks have been redesigned to NEED meditation 2 x a day. Is this healthy? When one reaches a calm state in meditation, this state, a state without thought content, can become very addicting. I would venture that most long-term TMers are in fact, addicted to this state and the neurotransmitters it triggers. Addiction, even to meditative states, is not healthy.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Vaidya Mishra pulse diagnosis course and consultations in July
Yes. It's old news. I could provide the reasons, but they're not particularly interesting. The good news is that the separation lets him practice Ayurveda according to his family's very pure tradition, including marma therapy. Mishra has incredibly deep knowledge, and taking an opportunity like this to learn from him is well worth the time and energy. The Movement's Ayurveda-trained docs are missing some key elements. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, george_deforest [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: AFAIK, Vaidya Mishra severed his ties with MAPI, and works independenly of the TMO now; but i dont know the details of why ... pratap Mahapatra wrote: I was wondering if it is Vaidya Ramakant Mishra or someone else. Is it TM movement organised? at_man_and_brahman wrote: The esteemed Raj Vaidya Mishra, whose lineage extends through 5000 years, will be offering a three-day course on pulse diagnosis in July in Indianapolis. This course is intended primarily for health-care professionals, but others are invited to attend. Indianapolis is about a six-hour drive from Fairfield. Vaidya Mishra's approach to Ayurveda is much deeper than most other vaidyas, based on the traditional training he received from his father during seven years following his graduation from an Ayurvedic college. If you are interested in attending or want more information, contact me at at_man_and_brahman@ Vaidya Mishra will also do three days of pulse consultations following the course.
[FairfieldLife] Re: The discipline of letting go (of TM)
Thanks, I agree totally. Andrew Cohen - in spite of his lip service to evolutionary Enlightenment, hasn't changed much over the years. He still supports his Utopian communes. They don't work. Such groups (as in the Israeli experiments); soon degenerate into a situation of total control over one's thoughts and actions, stiffling the incentive to embrace new ideas. Thus, your supposed prescription for expanding eclecticism is totally counterproductive. There are very serious downsides to living as a monk in commune-like settings, as in traditional Buddhism. I opt for libertarian Sadhanas that I can practice on my own without having some idiot leader tell me how to think. That's why I like TM. I've had many Gurus (or they have had me); but at least I have the freedom to change course on a dime if I choose to do so. In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In a message dated 5/29/2007 1:37:15 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Andrew Cohen, Ekhart Tolle and many others have had spontaneous experiences of enlightenment. They have forgotten what got them to that experience in the first place. After all if your in a state of CC or GC and you forget about the dualistic path that got you there in the first place why would you recommend it. I think MMY is correct. The nervous system needs to be cultured to reflect a specific state of cons. The regular practice helps culture the nervous system. Andrew and others should be focusing on the collective meditation and promoting it within their groups. All of these teachers seem to be more concerned about their own attention to what they want to teach. We need more teachers to reach out to others and start a network of practitioners regardless of the form of meditation. I don't think people are bored of the regular practice of meditation. I think everyone wants a more expanded version of the group experience. MMY tried to do it but he is so exclusive to not only others joining his TM or TM Sidhi's group and has even made it difficult for those who are TM-Sidhi practitioners to join. For this very reason he will not accomplish his goal of creating world peace. O-the bitter taste of judgement.Stick it out with your meditation. Don't stop doing it everyday. When the violence calms down in the world then we can relax our practice. Most people who do other forms of meditation never do it everyday or with some consistency. They brush their teeth everyday, take a shower, feed the body, go to work, exercise but god forbid we meditate everyday. Now we know why the world is so screwed up. Lsoma. Bhairitu said In fact in other systems it's no great crime if you miss some meditations. Yes. I wonder if I would not be better served by going to a different practice. If for no other reason than after 30 years of this maybe its time to explore some other areas of the brain. I have really enjoyed reading Sally Kempton's Heart of Meditation where she suggests playing with meditation, trying different approaches. Not taking the darn thing so seriously. Her Guru, Swami Muktananda wrote a book on the importance of this playfulness. I wonder if this incessant need to eat, sleep and brush my teeth is healthy? Eating sleeping and brushing are not a great metaphor for meditation. Eating and sleeping are physiological necessities. We stop - we die. There is no choice involved here. Can we equate TM to toothbrushing? Both have benefits to their habitual practice. On the other hand those who don't brush their teeth face terrible dental problems eventually. What lies in store for the millions of people with out a meditation practice? Is it as bad as gingivitis? Does anybody else here feel this strong need to meditate after so many years of habitual practice? Its as if the neural networks have been redesigned to NEED meditation 2 x a day. Is this healthy? [EMAIL PROTECTED] For me, meditation does clear me out and center me. But its not about me after 30 years, its about the collective. I have been reading a lot of Andrew Cohen lately who has been experimenting with expanding group consciousness through intersubjectivity. It is a very interesting approach. Meditation is primarily narcissistic. The argument that somehow one has to first meditate before they can come into the world to help others is questionable. There are plenty of altruistic people out there making a positive mark without CC or GC. Atheists are capable of doing good. I am not sure of the relevence of your response to my question about the addictive nature of a 30 year practice. curtisdeltablues said, But I can also speak for the rest of the world in wondering what's up with the buttsplicer email Stu? I work as a film
[FairfieldLife] East, north doors good for happiness
This was printed in the Fairfield Ledger as a letter to the editor a couple of months ago. I found it rather amusing and saved to scan and post when I got the chance: East, north doors good for happiness To the editor: In Katmandu, Nepal, ancient vastu temples with east doors have survived earthquakes while other buildings in the city have cracked and fallen down. In the movie Passion a temple is torn asunder by the earth opening up. This letter will discuss the explanations as to why vastu architecture with east and north doors is good for health, happiness, and enlightenment. Every building is made from a blue print. A seed contains the DNA which is in the sprout and in the plant. The DNA is like the blueprint of the plant. The blueprint of the cosmos is the unified field of superstring theoretic physics. From this blueprint are constructed atoms, solar systems, and galaxies by the laws of nature. Within the unified field, beyond time and space, are silent rotational symmetries. These are found to be expressed in the rotational symmetries of the architecture of the universe: atoms with revolving electrons, solar systems with revolving planets, and spinning galaxies, etc. The right hand rule in physics describes the rotational symmetries and directions of electromagnetism. In high school, we put our fist around a cord of an electric current: the thumb points in direction of the current, and the fingers curled show direction of revolving magnetic fields. Or if the fist is around a magnet, the thumb points north, for direction of magnetic field, and the fingers curl east for direction of electric currents. These rotational symmetries come from the unified field, like the sprout from the seed. By such quantum physics principles, Harvard physicist Dr. John Hagelin says homes with east and north doors are fortune-creating homes while homes with south aid west doors are misfortune creating homes. Hagelin says in east and north door homes there is orderly brain EEG, while in the south and west door homes there is disorderly brain EEG. EEG is the electrical activity between neurons in the brain. Orderly EEG is like the invincible superconductor current: cool, smooth, silent, eternally flowing, with memory. Disorderly EEG is like the room temperature electric cord: electrons are chaotic, hot, bumpy, with no memory. Again, Hagelin says, in a south door or west door home, the minds are as if spinning out of direction, and there are problems like confusion, arguments, indigestion, and sleep problems which create disease. In a north or east door home, on the other hand, the brain's orderly functioning creates smooth thinking and blissful feelings, with excellent memory, bright creative ideas and more loving behavior. Thus if a student wants to be valedictorian, capture the awards and scholarships, be a state championship athlete, be celibate, never get into any fights or arguments, honor his parents as scripture demands, get into an Ivy League school, and get into a noble career, science says he or she should move into an east door home. Musical instruments and singing is more harmonious in these homes. Sound vibrations can annihilate enemy's morale like Scottish bagpipes or as when the quark-lepton transformational vibration shatters to bits and pieces the indestructible invincible (?) iron proton which otherwise survives even nuclear blasts. EEG coherence (orderly brain) is correlated to higher intelligence, and higher moral reasoning (International Journal of Neuroscience 13, 1981,211-217 and 15,1981, 151-157. More orderly EEG is to decreased hospital admissions in all categories such as 55% less tumors, 87% less heart disease, 87% less neurological disease, 63% less injuries, 67% less musculoskeletal diseases, 65% less metabolic diseases (Journal of American Medical Association 1998: 279: 1200-1205, New England Journal of Medicine 1991: 324:370-376, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 1992:41:783-787). Thus east and north door homes with more orderly brain EEG have more invincibility to disease and problems. If you have any questions, you can please ask Harvard physicist, Dr. John Hagelin director©invincibledefence.org Dr. Veronica Butler's study to be published in Journal of Social behavior and Personality this fall, found increased mental illness in south door homes, http^/conference, vedicarchitecture.org/speak-ers.html Will Davis, Fairfield
[FairfieldLife] Coolest word of the week
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Richard J. Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [snip] Barry sent this post to me via email to make sure I wouldn't miss it. I responded briefly and politely, only to find that he had configured his account to block email from my address. That pretty much takes the cake for chickenshittery, in my book. Chickenshittery
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Windows Vista was built from the bottom up for DRM. It is a very bad mistake and will probably get a worse reputation than Windows ME. It doesn't even work the same way as previous versions of Windows. What the hell were they thinking? People will return new computers in droves. When on idle my notebook which granted only has the minimal 512 MB which is required to run Vista has only 7 MB free! I will be replacing that memory chip with a 1 GB chip instead. The machine slogs around due to constantly needing to use virtual memory that it runs as slow as a Linux Live CD will run (actually Linux Mint Bianca which is based on Ubuntu but includes the multimedia support that Ubuntu does not runs faster as a Live CD than Vista on the same notebook). The funny thing is this notebook, due to being dual core encodes HD files in Divx faster than my desktop with XP Pro and a 3.4 ghz CPU! Granted I've got a lot of data mining to do to get rid of so many things to make the notebook run sane. There is way too much hand-holding and I often get to see a cryptic insufficient quota message on it when I try to move large files across the network. I have never seen that one before on a Windows system. Microsoft deserves to loose big time for putting such a piece of crap on the market. I work and continue to work in the entertainment industry. I can vouch for the fact that most all the record companies and film companies are run by scum. Executives of either never actually understand how the technology they are delivering their goods with work. All they care about is making buttloads of money so they can by that new mansion in Tahiti or Boeing private jet. Compare that with the software industry that when the web started to break out embraced it as a new means of distribution. How many years has the DVD encryption system been broken and yet they are still making buttloads of money on their movies many of which are crap? Why should they worry about HD-DVD copy protection being broken? I have also published stuff that is copyrighted and have even had it pirated. But you'd think that most of the copies of stuff the entertainment stuffed shirts are concerned about make up the majority of the market instead a small insignificant number. Then we have the government which sucking up to these industries passes such draconian laws that if you made a copy of a TV show for a friend while they were on vacation that they want to give you more prison time than if you murdered somebody. Totally absurd. I guess they think they need some more inmates for these privatized prisons they are building. It's time for American Revolution II and I don't mean a Fox reality series. TurquoiseB wrote: Great article, great protest. This pandering to the copyright barons is also the thing that has crippled Windows Vista, because Microsoft capitulated to it. From what I hear, the moment you launch any of its multimedia utilities, the memory requirements of the operating system double, and sometimes triple if you're trying to play HD. I read one review/test of Vista in which the tester was unable to run more than two other programs (for example, Microsoft Word and Outlook) in 2 Mb of memory (Microsoft's claimed minimum memory requirement for Vista) when the OS went into its protect Microsoft from copyright infringement suits mode. They have effectively crippled their OS and passed the cost of the crippling (in the form of more memory being required) by giving in to the lawyers. When are the copyright owners going to learn that they're dealing with a frontier situation, and outlaws, and that heavy-handed attempts to intimidate the outlaws Just Aren't Going To Work? The outlaws understand the tech, and the entertainment industry lawyers do not. The outlaws are going to win every time, because they've got Righteous Indignation on their side. That and being 17 and having no assets that can be effectively seized. :-) My favorite attempt-at-copy-protection story is the short-lived scheme used by Sony corp. on its CDs. They spent several million bucks coming up with a copy-protection algorhythm that would prevent users from copying their CDs. The only trouble with it was that it actually *crashed* the users' computers when they tried to play the CDs on them. Big no-no, one that put the Righteous Indignation reaction into hyperdrive. Within a week, someone had figured out that the multi-million-dollar copy protection scheme could be defeated using a 49-cent Magic Marker pen. Simply use it to paint over the outside edge of the CD, and it played (and copied) just fine on any computer. No more crashes, no more copy protection. Sony abandoned the scheme. That's the way that all such copy protection schemes are going to be dealt with in the future. The hackers are smarter than the people creating the protection devices, and they're more
[FairfieldLife] Fwd: Fox alert
-- Original Message -- TO: ALL CAMPUS RESIDENTS FROM: JAMES BEDINGER, SAFETY DEPARTMENT mailto:jbedinger @ mum.edu RE: FOX ALERT There is a fox afoot through town gown who never goes to ground. No fear of man with scolding hand, No Sit, no Stay, no Antoine de Saint-Exupery. He seeks those treats of twilight -- A repast of rabbit, served cold, or the ever delightful Mouse Flambeau. Tasty comestibles, so digestible, fletched from overturned can? -- but not from an offering hand. There is an abundance of wildlife on campus, not usually seen during the daylight hours. These animals have been coexisting with the campus for over 100 years. At all times we should give the wildlife a full latitude of movement, because a gesture or word from us may be seen as threatening to a small animal protecting its young. The Department of Natural Resources is aware of the several foxes in town and on campus during daylight hours. Wildlife Services is doing their part by monitoring for disease. It is important that we keep our distance. If an animal appears to be sick, disoriented or aggressive, please call Campus Safety Director, 641-919-7992, and the Department of Natural Resources, 319-694-2430. James Bedinger *** DOME ANNOUNCEMENTS is a moderated list that distributes announcements to the Maharishi University of Management community. Send your announcements to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Encourage your friends to sign up for DOME ANNOUNCEMENTS. Send an e-mail message to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and put the word subscribe (without the quotation marks) in the body of the message.
[FairfieldLife] Another fake photo?
[pig.jpg] This photo has been shown on all legitimate websites and media outlets. It's of a wild pig killed by the 11-year-old in the picture. But it just seems too huge to be real. If those Indian skeletons aren't real, I have to ask myself whether this photo is accuarately depicting the size of the pig...I mean, look at the boy next to it! This pig would have to be bigger than a hippo! Now, excuse me...I've got to go eat...for some reason I feel like a BLT.
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: The discipline of letting go (of TM)
On May 29, 2007, at 3:52 PM, qntmpkt wrote: ---So, you're saying that this Rinpoche Dildo of yours recommends just being open and no practices at all? No, not at all. Interesting viewpoint!. If you understood the citation, yes. I'll stick with TM, thanks. ):- As to the other Gurus, I've tasted their offerings and crossed them off my list, including Muktananda. I didn't like Gurumayi that much, but I found her absolutely, stunningly gorgeous. I later got to hang with the other successor, Nityananda and his advaita guru and they were really down to earth. Nityananda was flat open honest about these huge ashram-hotel complexes they had inherited from Baba: he said they were counterproductive to any sort of life separate from worry over an empire of sadhana sales. Norbu Rinpoche only has the Dance of the Vajra. Oh?
[FairfieldLife] Re: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Great article, great protest. Having worked on the peripheries of the music and film industry at one point in my life, I have to admit that I don't have a lot of compassion for the companies who are screaming about being ripped off by pirates. They've been Long John Silver to their artists for decades now, ripping off the very people who create their product every way they can possibly imagine. And now the karma has come home to roost. And about bloody time, in my opinion. I've known musicians who sold over a million dollars worth of product and who got a *bill* from their record companies for the album. The smarmy lawyers of the record companies had found a way to pass all of *their* expenses onto the band, and make them pay the company for the privilege of having made money for them. I just saw a segment on TV about how popular bands are now doing all of their marketing, publishing and distribution by themselves because of the obvious economic benefit. The show featured a band, Wilco, who said that instead of a record company contract that would pay them $1 per CD, by outsourcing these functions and managing them themselves, they were now realizing $6 per CD. That's a big difference. :-)
[FairfieldLife] Turning off gene makes mice smarter
May 27, 2007 10:04:39 AM PST Turning off a gene that has been associated with Alzheimer's disease made mice smarter in the lab, researchers said on Sunday in a finding that lends new insight on learning and may lead to new drugs for memory problems. They said these mice were far more adept at sensing changes in their environment than their mouse brethren. quot;It's pretty rare when you can make an animal smarter,quot; said Dr. James Bibb, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who led the study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Bibb and colleagues used genetic engineering techniques to breed mice that could be manipulated to switch off Cdk5, a gene that controls production of a brain enzyme linked to diseases marked by the death of neurons in the brain, such as Alzheimer's. quot;Any time we're losing neurons, Cdk5 may be contributing to that process. That has made it an area of great interest,quot; Bibb said in a telephone interview. quot;We have shown that we can turn off a gene in an adult animal. That has never been done before,quot; he added. When they had tried to breed mice that completely lacked the gene, the pups died at birth. Bibb said they put the mice though a series of tests and found the altered mice did better than normal mice. quot;Everything is more meaningful to these mice,quot; he said. quot;The increase in sensitivity to their surroundings seems to have made them smarter.quot; Bibb said the mice were better at tasks based on associated learning, Bibb said. quot;It's the most important kind of learning in the animal kingdom. It's how we know where our car is and that is our wife or our husband and that's our kids. It's how we connect things,quot; he added. The smart mice were better at learning to navigate a water maze and remembering that they got a shock when they were in a certain cage. quot;It was very clear right off the bat that the loss of Cdk5 made them have a much stronger associative memory,quot; Bibb said. quot;What was really interesting is they not only remembered better, but the next day, if you put them back in those same circumstances, they noticed they were not getting shocked.quot; Bibb said his work was inspired by the 1999 discovery of quot;Doogiequot; mice, a smarter breed of mice developed at Princeton University that were named after the TV program quot;Doogie Houser,quot; a show that featured a child prodigy. Those mice were bred by manipulating NR2B, a gene that also plays a role in associative memory. quot;It turns out Cdk5 was controlling the regulation of NR2B,quot; Bibb said. quot;Maybe by finding these new mechanisms we can find new drugs that improve the cognitive performance of people who have deficits.quot; He and colleagues are working on developing drugs that could create the same effect without the need for genetic alteration. quot;There are other cases -- in post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and depression -- where we may want to modulate memory not so much to improve it, but to selectively modify it to remove the negative memories that are causing the problems. I think that has a lot of potential,quot; Bibb said. However, he said the long-term effects are not yet clear. quot;If all of your (brain) synapses were magically strengthened all the time, that might be good for the short term, but I'm not sure if it would be good all the time,quot; he said. http://health.yahoo.com/news/175614
[FairfieldLife] Re: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: Great article, great protest. Having worked on the peripheries of the music and film industry at one point in my life, I have to admit that I don't have a lot of compassion for the companies who are screaming about being ripped off by pirates. They've been Long John Silver to their artists for decades now, ripping off the very people who create their product every way they can possibly imagine. And now the karma has come home to roost. And about bloody time, in my opinion. I've known musicians who sold over a million dollars worth of product and who got a *bill* from their record companies for the album. The smarmy lawyers of the record companies had found a way to pass all of *their* expenses onto the band, and make them pay the company for the privilege of having made money for them. I just saw a segment on TV about how popular bands are now doing all of their marketing, publishing and distribution by themselves because of the obvious economic benefit. The show featured a band, Wilco, who said that instead of a record company contract that would pay them $1 per CD, by outsourcing these functions and managing them themselves, they were now realizing $6 per CD. That's a big difference. :-) ...and I don't understand why book authors aren't doing the same things as bands and self-publishing. A typical book at Barnes and Noble -- or online for that matter -- runs $19.95. Like the per CD residual paid to musicians as shown above, authors get about $1.00 per book sold. But if authors self-publish, they can do it EVEN IN SMALL QUANTITIES for about $1.25 per book (soft cover, of course). Sure, they'd have to market it themselves but they'd be getting about 15-20 times more profit per book than if they did it through a publishing house. Why aren't more doing it?
[FairfieldLife] Re: The discipline of letting go (of TM)
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Stu [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Bhairitu said In fact in other systems it's no great crime if you miss some meditations. Yes. I wonder if I would not be better served by going to a different practice. If for no other reason than after 30 years of this maybe its time to explore some other areas of the brain. Stu, you know where I'm comin' from in all of this. I've gotten to know you a little on a.m.t. and in email, and I honestly think that TM has done great things for you. If it really feels appropriate for you to check out alternatives to TM as replacements, go for it. But you also have the option of extending your TM practice by looking into other forms of meditation that you can do *in addition to* your TM practice, or in lieu of it from time to time. For example, I know that you are fortunate enough to make your living by performing an art. That's a rare and valuable thing, and makes you a great candidate for practices that involve mindfulness and paying more attention to the things that we do outside sitting meditation. *Every* occupation is an artform in my opinion, and allows equally rewarding payback from paying more attention to it as a mechanism for eyes-open, engaging-in-activity meditation, but if you happen to have an occupation that is a true calling, and actually rewards you for how much consciousness you can bring to the things you create, in my opinion you're Home Free in any practice that involves mindfulness. I have really enjoyed reading Sally Kempton's Heart of Meditation where she suggests playing with meditation, trying different approaches. Not taking the darn thing so seriously. Her Guru, Swami Muktananda wrote a book on the importance of this playfulness. I missed Muktananda entirely, and never had the opportunity to meet him or sit with him, but I have had a number of friends who studied with him for some time. I have a number of friends who studied with Rajneesh for some time. Both teachers are a tad controversial, but based on the intuitive hit I've gotten from people who studied with both teachers for years, even though I've never met them I suspect that both of them had somethin' goin' for them. They had phwam! And the other thing that Muktananda had in common with Rajneesh is that both of them were into FUN. A lot of teachers aren't. A lot of spiritual teachers and spiritual traditions *aren't* into having fun. They've never gotten the truth of the one-liner by Christian philosopher G.K. Chesterton, Seriousness is not a virtue. You know me from years of my silly-assed posts. I'm *rarely* completely serious. There is always this aspect of me that's stepped back a bit from the things I write, laughing at it, and at me for writing it. To quote another spiritual teacher, Charlie Chaplin, Life is a tragedy when seen in closeup, but a comedy in long shot. Being able to laugh at (and with) your practice of meditation, taking it less seriously, is like track- ing back and viewing it in long shot. It gives you a little distance on how seriously you've been taking your spiritual sadhana, and how absurdly FUNNY that is, and how absurdly FUNNY you are acting so serious about something (one's spiritual sadhana) that is taking you nowhere, from self to Self. Being a spiritual seeker in a world that does not value or appreciate spiritual seekers very much IS pretty damned FUNNY. For me personally, lightening up a little about my daily meditation was terribly liberating. Instead of feeling that I had to sit down and meditate twice a day, I started alternating the sitting meds with Zen walking meds, or with setting aside a few hours at work that I began to consider a meditation, focusing on every detail of my work, making it an exercise in attempting perfection. And that worked for me like gangbusters. I started experiencing (by my standards) *more* spiritual progress while doing sitting meditation irreguarly than I had while practicing it religiously. I learned to laugh at how dogmatic I'd been about it during my TM days. I wonder if this incessant need to eat, sleep and brush my teeth is healthy? Eating sleeping and brushing are not a great metaphor for meditation. Eating and sleeping are physiological necessities. We stop - we die. There is no choice involved here. Can we equate TM to toothbrushing? Both have benefits to their habitual practice. On the other hand those who don't brush their teeth face terrible dental problems eventually. What lies in store for the millions of people with out a meditation practice? Is it as bad as gingivitis? Does anybody else here feel this strong need to meditate after so many years of habitual practice? Absolutely. I felt it strongly for years after I left the TM movement. Lightening up about it, and finding that I could get the same energy boosts and epiphanies from practices that didn't involve me sitting down with my eyes closed, was a
[FairfieldLife] Re: Scientific validation of Yagyas, a beginning
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin jflanegi@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: You have my full permission to send as much of your money as you want to these people. I don't have any problem with that at all. Or, if you want to cover *all* the bases, you can send some cash to me as well. I promise to burn it in my fireplace. :-) Ha-ha! Yeah, after I read my response I saw the issue with Yagyas the same as you do- either they work, or not. And you are right, I tend to believe they do, hence the MD analogy. Given that vibration manifests effects in the material world, the most obvious being music, why wouldn't a Yagya produce some effect? How can you without a shadow of a doubt say that Yagyas don't produce any effect? I can't, and I don't. I don't know. They may work exactly as described. I just don't think they do, that's all. My thoughts on the matter and...what is it now in America? three bucks...will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
[FairfieldLife] Re: East, north doors good for happiness
Ya just gotta admit, this letter would never have been published in any other small town newspaper in America. You guys live in an interesting place. --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Rick Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This was printed in the Fairfield Ledger as a letter to the editor a couple of months ago. I found it rather amusing and saved to scan and post when I got the chance: East, north doors good for happiness To the editor: In Katmandu, Nepal, ancient vastu temples with east doors have survived earthquakes while other buildings in the city have cracked and fallen down. In the movie Passion a temple is torn asunder by the earth opening up. This letter will discuss the explanations as to why vastu architecture with east and north doors is good for health, happiness, and enlightenment. Every building is made from a blue print. A seed contains the DNA which is in the sprout and in the plant. The DNA is like the blueprint of the plant. The blueprint of the cosmos is the unified field of superstring theoretic physics. From this blueprint are constructed atoms, solar systems, and galaxies by the laws of nature. Within the unified field, beyond time and space, are silent rotational symmetries. These are found to be expressed in the rotational symmetries of the architecture of the universe: atoms with revolving electrons, solar systems with revolving planets, and spinning galaxies, etc. The right hand rule in physics describes the rotational symmetries and directions of electromagnetism. In high school, we put our fist around a cord of an electric current: the thumb points in direction of the current, and the fingers curled show direction of revolving magnetic fields. Or if the fist is around a magnet, the thumb points north, for direction of magnetic field, and the fingers curl east for direction of electric currents. These rotational symmetries come from the unified field, like the sprout from the seed. By such quantum physics principles, Harvard physicist Dr. John Hagelin says homes with east and north doors are fortune-creating homes while homes with south aid west doors are misfortune creating homes. Hagelin says in east and north door homes there is orderly brain EEG, while in the south and west door homes there is disorderly brain EEG. EEG is the electrical activity between neurons in the brain. Orderly EEG is like the invincible superconductor current: cool, smooth, silent, eternally flowing, with memory. Disorderly EEG is like the room temperature electric cord: electrons are chaotic, hot, bumpy, with no memory. Again, Hagelin says, in a south door or west door home, the minds are as if spinning out of direction, and there are problems like confusion, arguments, indigestion, and sleep problems which create disease. In a north or east door home, on the other hand, the brain's orderly functioning creates smooth thinking and blissful feelings, with excellent memory, bright creative ideas and more loving behavior. Thus if a student wants to be valedictorian, capture the awards and scholarships, be a state championship athlete, be celibate, never get into any fights or arguments, honor his parents as scripture demands, get into an Ivy League school, and get into a noble career, science says he or she should move into an east door home. Musical instruments and singing is more harmonious in these homes. Sound vibrations can annihilate enemy's morale like Scottish bagpipes or as when the quark-lepton transformational vibration shatters to bits and pieces the indestructible invincible (?) iron proton which otherwise survives even nuclear blasts. EEG coherence (orderly brain) is correlated to higher intelligence, and higher moral reasoning (International Journal of Neuroscience 13, 1981,211-217 and 15,1981, 151-157. More orderly EEG is to decreased hospital admissions in all categories such as 55% less tumors, 87% less heart disease, 87% less neurological disease, 63% less injuries, 67% less musculoskeletal diseases, 65% less metabolic diseases (Journal of American Medical Association 1998: 279: 1200-1205, New England Journal of Medicine 1991: 324:370-376, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 1992:41:783-787). Thus east and north door homes with more orderly brain EEG have more invincibility to disease and problems. If you have any questions, you can please ask Harvard physicist, Dr. John Hagelin director©invincibledefence.org Dr. Veronica Butler's study to be published in Journal of Social behavior and Personality this fall, found increased mental illness in south door homes, http^/conference, vedicarchitecture.org/speak-ers.html Will Davis, Fairfield
[FairfieldLife] Re: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin jflanegi@ wrote: snip I just saw a segment on TV about how popular bands are now doing all of their marketing, publishing and distribution by themselves because of the obvious economic benefit. The show featured a band, Wilco, who said that instead of a record company contract that would pay them $1 per CD, by outsourcing these functions and managing them themselves, they were now realizing $6 per CD. That's a big difference. :-) ...and I don't understand why book authors aren't doing the same things as bands and self-publishing. A typical book at Barnes and Noble -- or online for that matter -- runs $19.95. Like the per CD residual paid to musicians as shown above, authors get about $1.00 per book sold. But if authors self-publish, they can do it EVEN IN SMALL QUANTITIES for about $1.25 per book (soft cover, of course). Sure, they'd have to market it themselves but they'd be getting about 15-20 times more profit per book than if they did it through a publishing house. Why aren't more doing it? Marketing and distribution are both very difficult for self-published books. Many of the publications that still do book reviews won't consider self- published books (the vanity press stigma is still a factor). Plus which, it's a *huge* job to self- publish a book and do it right (as opposed to trusting a company like iUniverse), as well as a very substantial financial investment. And doing the marketing yourself is just about a full-time job. Despite the obstacles, however, self-publishing is very much on the rise. If you can make it work, the rewards are great.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Scientific validation of Yagyas, a beginning
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin jflanegi@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin jflanegi@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: You have my full permission to send as much of your money as you want to these people. I don't have any problem with that at all. Or, if you want to cover *all* the bases, you can send some cash to me as well. I promise to burn it in my fireplace. :-) Ha-ha! Yeah, after I read my response I saw the issue with Yagyas the same as you do- either they work, or not. And you are right, I tend to believe they do, hence the MD analogy. Given that vibration manifests effects in the material world, the most obvious being music, why wouldn't a Yagya produce some effect? How can you without a shadow of a doubt say that Yagyas don't produce any effect? I can't, and I don't. I don't know. They may work exactly as described. I just don't think they do, that's all. My thoughts on the matter and...what is it now in America? three bucks...will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Fair enough. Good area for some research- not the scientific kind, but just something I'll turn over in my mind for awhile and see what pops. At least 3 bucks for a cuppa joe at S-bux- wish their stock would go up too...bought some on a whim last Xmas and its done nothing but go down. :-)
[FairfieldLife] Re: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin jflanegi@ wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: Great article, great protest. Having worked on the peripheries of the music and film industry at one point in my life, I have to admit that I don't have a lot of compassion for the companies who are screaming about being ripped off by pirates. They've been Long John Silver to their artists for decades now, ripping off the very people who create their product every way they can possibly imagine. And now the karma has come home to roost. And about bloody time, in my opinion. I've known musicians who sold over a million dollars worth of product and who got a *bill* from their record companies for the album. The smarmy lawyers of the record companies had found a way to pass all of *their* expenses onto the band, and make them pay the company for the privilege of having made money for them. I just saw a segment on TV about how popular bands are now doing all of their marketing, publishing and distribution by themselves because of the obvious economic benefit. The show featured a band, Wilco, who said that instead of a record company contract that would pay them $1 per CD, by outsourcing these functions and managing them themselves, they were now realizing $6 per CD. That's a big difference. :-) ...and I don't understand why book authors aren't doing the same things as bands and self-publishing. A typical book at Barnes and Noble -- or online for that matter -- runs $19.95. Like the per CD residual paid to musicians as shown above, authors get about $1.00 per book sold. But if authors self-publish, they can do it EVEN IN SMALL QUANTITIES for about $1.25 per book (soft cover, of course). Sure, they'd have to market it themselves but they'd be getting about 15-20 times more profit per book than if they did it through a publishing house. Why aren't more doing it? Since books are still bought in brick and mortar stores, maybe its a matter of the big book sellers not buying indie published books...
Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
shempmcgurk wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, jim_flanegin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB no_reply@ wrote: Great article, great protest. Having worked on the peripheries of the music and film industry at one point in my life, I have to admit that I don't have a lot of compassion for the companies who are screaming about being ripped off by pirates. They've been Long John Silver to their artists for decades now, ripping off the very people who create their product every way they can possibly imagine. And now the karma has come home to roost. And about bloody time, in my opinion. I've known musicians who sold over a million dollars worth of product and who got a *bill* from their record companies for the album. The smarmy lawyers of the record companies had found a way to pass all of *their* expenses onto the band, and make them pay the company for the privilege of having made money for them. I just saw a segment on TV about how popular bands are now doing all of their marketing, publishing and distribution by themselves because of the obvious economic benefit. The show featured a band, Wilco, who said that instead of a record company contract that would pay them $1 per CD, by outsourcing these functions and managing them themselves, they were now realizing $6 per CD. That's a big difference. :-) ...and I don't understand why book authors aren't doing the same things as bands and self-publishing. A typical book at Barnes and Noble -- or online for that matter -- runs $19.95. Like the per CD residual paid to musicians as shown above, authors get about $1.00 per book sold. But if authors self-publish, they can do it EVEN IN SMALL QUANTITIES for about $1.25 per book (soft cover, of course). Sure, they'd have to market it themselves but they'd be getting about 15-20 times more profit per book than if they did it through a publishing house. Why aren't more doing it? I have a friend who did and wound up with a garage full of books. :) His mistake? Not taking it a book at a time. For some reason he felt he had to publish a whole line of books whereas I would have suggested starting with one and see how it goes then from the mistakes made in the first avoid those in the second for a better book. As for the marketing and distribution he had some good angles on that but the books needed to be better and more innovative (they were non-fiction).
[FairfieldLife] Re: VM as TM, outside the TM.org
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Michael [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is very interesting. Does anyone remember Thom Knoles from back in the day? I think he did TTC in Rishikesh in 68 or 69. Looks like a lot is going on... http://introtomeditation.com/photogallery.html I don't know Thom and don't know anything much about him or this organization, but I'll say this for them -- they know how to put together a good website. The secret is in the clean design and in the photos they've chosen of themselves and of their students and of the environment. It looks as if these people are happy and having fun. Yeah, that could just be a good PR job, but I suspect it isn't. My bet is that these people, whatever they're up to, ARE happy and having a lot of fun. And that will attract seekers to them who are interested in being more happy and having more fun. Such seekers don't care about scientific research. When did scientific research ever make them happy and enable them to have more fun, eh? :-) --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, dhamiltony2k5 dhamiltony2k5@ wrote: This link is interesting trend. That court ruling, that Transcendental Meditation was not unique. Noteworthy link George, things to come? Moving on .org,on with teaching meditation, retreats, teacher training otherwise etc. vs. Selling 'peace bonds' support of an old TM the old way, with the gold robes and party hats and pomp of the old TM.org. -Doug in FF --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, george_deforest george.deforest@ wrote: from a friend: If you go to this link, you can see a whole bunch of photos taken just about 2 weeks ago of a group of TM students visiting Maharishi's ashram in Rishikesh. I had no idea it was abandoned and had become such a ruin! Jai guru deva TS http://www.introtomeditation.com/maharishi_ashram/ note: they call themselves TM students, but their TM is being taught outside the TMO as Vedic Meditation; nevertheless, they also read MMY's gita! Does anyone on FFLife recognize M's asram? (i was never there)
[FairfieldLife] Extruded plastic dingus
One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies, The Hudsucker Proxy. In fact it isn't even a spoken line. When the blueprint for the extruded plastic dingus in question is drawn up (and I don't want to spoil it for you if you haven't yet seen the film by telling you what it is), the as-yet unnamed item is described on the blueprint as an Extruded plastic dingus. You know, for kids.
[FairfieldLife] Re: Extruded plastic dingus
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies, The Hudsucker Proxy. In fact it isn't even a spoken line. When the blueprint for the extruded plastic dingus in question is drawn up (and I don't want to spoil it for you if you haven't yet seen the film by telling you what it is), the as-yet unnamed item is described on the blueprint as an Extruded plastic dingus. You know, for kids. I saw that movie again just the other day. Because they had a new film they were showing at Cannes, one of my satellite channels had a Coen Brothers festival. So I got to see a lot of their films again. Cool guys, always with something to say. Didn't you have an extruded plastic dingus when you were a kid? I sure did. I was good with it, too. I was the block extruded plastic dingus champ. Sometimes I wish I still had one...you know...for adults. :-) [ After having written that, I realize that any- one out there who hasn't seen the film might get a slightly different impression of what I was doing when I was playing with my extruded plastic dingus than the one I intended. :-) T'ain't so. The preceding was a completely G-rated post. ]
[FairfieldLife] Re: Extruded plastic dingus
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, shempmcgurk shempmcgurk@ wrote: One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies, The Hudsucker Proxy. In fact it isn't even a spoken line. When the blueprint for the extruded plastic dingus in question is drawn up (and I don't want to spoil it for you if you haven't yet seen the film by telling you what it is), the as-yet unnamed item is described on the blueprint as an Extruded plastic dingus. You know, for kids. I saw that movie again just the other day. Because they had a new film they were showing at Cannes, one of my satellite channels had a Coen Brothers festival. So I got to see a lot of their films again. Cool guys, always with something to say. Didn't you have an extruded plastic dingus when you were a kid? I did, but I was horrible at it. My older brother could do it from the get go. But I had about as much luck with coordinating my body with it as I did in riding horses: that is, my ass never moved in rhythm with the horse. When it went up, the saddle went down and when my ass went down, the saddle went up. Ouch! I sure did. I was good with it, too. I was the block extruded plastic dingus champ. Sometimes I wish I still had one...you know...for adults. :-) [ After having written that, I realize that any- one out there who hasn't seen the film might get a slightly different impression of what I was doing when I was playing with my extruded plastic dingus than the one I intended. :-) T'ain't so. The preceding was a completely G-rated post. ] On the cover of one of the DVD versions of the film, Tim Robbins is shown with the extruded plastic dingus! If I was one of the Coen Brothers I would be quite angry at the marketing department of the studio. One of the fun parts of seeing the movie is the reveal; that is, when it is revealed to the viewer what it is. An example of movie marketing where the studio doesn't give a rat's ass whether they ruin the fun for the viewer. Another example of that is a wonderful documentary called Mail Order Wife. I don't want to spoil it for anyone but if you haven't seen the movie, just order it...don't read about it or look at the extras in the DVD...just put it on and see the documentary. On another subject: the Coen Brothers are wonderful with catch phrases, such as extruded plastic dingus. Now, they aren't mass- appeal catchphrases the way Mike Myers' catch phrases are (and Myers is probably the champion in this regard with a whole slew that have earned common use status in the English language like do I make you horny and Schwing!). The Coen Brothers' catch phrases are more on the esoteric side and are NOT likely to become part of the regular lexicon. My favorite of theirs is from the movie Miller's Crossing in which everyone in the movie greets everyone else with What's the Rumpus? instead of how are you?. After seeing that movie for the first time, I used it for about a month but people just thought I was nuts (except for the one or two who had actually seen the film). Anther one from Hudsucker Proxy is sure, sure; that is, at least the way that Paul Newman delivers the phrase numerous times throughout the movie. Another is the way Tim Robbins pronounces karma with the accept on the ma instead of the kar part.
[FairfieldLife] Lonely Atheists of the Global Village
Long, deeply thoughtful, but devastating review by theologian Michael Novak of the three current books by atheists Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett: http://tinyurl.com/2vqjwk
[FairfieldLife] Cheap Laptops on Ebay
Has anyone here ever purchased a cheap laptop on Ebay. I'm talking about the ones that sell for $1.09 up to about $50.00 (starting bid) with shipping, $40.00. These are usually refurbished, Pentium II 600H, 300+ Memory, 20HD. They claim that they work, have operating systems, etc. You have to bid for these computers so the starting bid price can be very low. I'm currently bidding for a computer now that started out at $15. Right now I'm at $20. The bid will finish tomorrow noon. There are plenty of laptops in this range. Mark
[FairfieldLife] Re: Ann Coulter on illegal immigrants
Peter wrote: Grow up! Peter wrote: Lurk, what the f**k is your problem, you a**hole! ;-) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/message/139281
[FairfieldLife] Speaking of Vastu
Any suggestions of whom to contact for vastu designs/architectural renderings? Some friends in Canada would like to build a vastu home and pay a reasonable price for the plans, and have the process go smoothly. I hear there are some good people available. You can send info to my email address if you don't want to take up air space. Thanks. p.s. If someone has woken up, then, does bad vastu still have the same bad effects?
Re: [FairfieldLife] Muslims should memorise such facts and be strong against ...
I stand by everything you said. It was a contest between Islam and Christendom as to who's god was great and how much violence they could visit upon each other. The crusades, the ottoman empire, etc. Now it seems it's a holy triumvirate. Jews defend themselves by bombing Arabs, Christians kick the crap out of Arab countries, Arabs kill each other, Christians kill Each other, Jews kill Arabs, Arabs kill JewsHuh. I wonder if Arabs, Christians and Jews care whether the rest of us want to be in their Drama? Who the hell, using the term very loosely, do you people thin you are? I'm not kidding here. Every single one of you think you have the God given right to do whatever Awful shit that makes a point that day, or year, or month. If you want to have a religious pissing match, could the three groups please have the courtesy to pick one continent and Go destroy yourselves? And while you, the big three, are doing that, the rest of us will Try to find better ways to live. Like living without oil. And a big ass military. and since a lot of people will be off having a religious experience, we might have good health care and fewer of us will have sleepless nights. We might even come up with bedtime stories For our children that don't have trolls under bridges or a prayer that includes a sentence: ...And if I die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take. Yawed, yeti, Allah Look where they have brought mankind. Or are they a single entity. And if it is all one God, is this a test? Are you going to kill each other off or have you All Missed the point? Namaste FeyLyla ** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
RE: [FairfieldLife] Speaking of Vastu
From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Anna Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 11:27 PM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] Speaking of Vastu Any suggestions of whom to contact for vastu designs/architectural renderings? Some friends in Canada would like to build a vastu home and pay a reasonable price for the plans, and have the process go smoothly. I hear there are some good people available. You can send info to my email address if you don't want to take up air space. Thanks. p.s. If someone has woken up, then, does bad vastu still have the same bad effects? Try Michael Borden: Michael Borden Vastuved International, Inc. Principal \ P.O. Box 2197 http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?Pyt=Tmapaddr=P.O.+Box+2197csz=Fairfield% 2C+IA+52556country=us Fairfield, IA 52556 USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] vastu-design.com
[FairfieldLife] Re: Speaking of Vastu
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Anna [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Any suggestions of whom to contact for vastu designs/architectural renderings? Some friends in Canada would like to build a vastu home and pay a reasonable price for the plans, and have the process go smoothly. I hear there are some good people available. You can send info to my email address if you don't want to take up air space. Thanks. p.s. If someone has woken up, then, does bad vastu still have the same bad effects? All things being relative, I recall when the straw that broke the camel's back arrived, waking me up, I was in my bedroom with a South facing door. My front door faces West. My back door faces East. I have three other structures on my property with North, South and West facing doors. None of that has made the slightest difference either before or after waking up. I now feel happy and successful, and bubbling over with creativity and silence. I support the idea of proper vastu for government buildings for example, and support the archetype that Maharishi is working to re- establish. However the other side of the coin is that I have a fun and full life to live, and cannot be slowed down by some linear track of thinking that says I should or should not do something because of spiritual blah blah blah. Life is complex, often contradictory-- why imprison ourselves on the way to eternal freedom?
