No motive + no note = no suicide

No motive given, either for his 'suicide' (has anyone seen a suicide note? or read about one? I have not heard a thing-), or for the initial crime in which he's now being implicated. What does that tell us? He is (erm, was) a Patsy.

Cryptic post today: do the math yourself. I'm afraid of naming names and pointing too directly.

I'll tell you what's going on here: Certain powers-that-be want a President McCain, so certain "loose ends" are going to be tied up over the course of the next few months. This one's clearly first, but look for a captive Osama bin Laden soon. It's too bad they suicided the wrong guy though.

Anonymity and secrecy help no one. An attempt was made to erase this interesting article from history. Interesting.

Don't forget that George and Dick started taking Cipro (the anthrax vaccine) the night of 911. That's right: long before any anthrax threat had been sent, or any threats made public.

Some posit that it was a threatening gesture toward a counter-coup in Washington, as per this entry on a blog I read:

My take on the anthrax episode was that a certain faction felt left out and were kind of hurt by that. Sort of like, "hey, i thought when the coup went down i was going to get to be a part of it! waaah!!"
When a group pulls off a coup, the first thing they want to do after is restore order, their order , as soon as possible. It always felt like the anthrax episode was one group telling the coup group, "we know who you are, and we want in, now, otherwise chaos might continue for a while. and who really wants that?"

But maybe i have been watching too much "Sopranos"...

Last thing I'd say about this today: There is still no coherent chronology of the WTC disaster. That is NOT ok.

Secrets

FORMER NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell - a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission - makes a startling claim.

On August 1 in 1291, the Everlasting League was formed, later to become the Swiss Confederation.

And in 1972, the Washington Post published the first of Bernstein and Woodward’s stories about a break-in at Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. If you haven't seen "All the President's Men," I highly recommend it. Excellent film, and a very interesting version of What Happened. Follow that up with Oliver Stone's "Nixon" for a really interesting picture of American politics. Anthony Hopkins is nothing short of amazing as Nixon.

Spider mandala

Spider mandala.

Oh no, spiders don't have consciousness. Don't be silly. These items just arranged themselves on its web. Of course. Of course.

Not.

The extraordinary artist is the second 'unit' from the top. Kinda hard to see, because like most of us he's a bit shy and, naturally, afraid of creatures more than 100x his own size.

Consciousness. We humans believed for the longest time that we were the only ones with 'it,' but I disagree, and none too respectfully either. I see evidence of consciousness almost everywhere, and yeah, I'm prepared to argue with you about it if you don't. It is imperative that we treat the rest of the world -all of it-- as conscious. And consciousness deserves a little respect. It's not an easy ride, as you know.

What is consciousness? If you make a decision, you are experiencing it. If you're aware -of anything-- then you're experiencing it. Beyond that, it's difficult to define. That bug you see crawling around- it's making decisions about where to best find food, a mate, or shelter (just like you). Conscious, deliberate decisions. Sure, maybe they're bad decisions, maybe they don't get him anywhere, maybe he even forgets them ten milliseconds after he makes them, but I assure you, he is conscious. If he wasn't -if he was just crawling around randomly responding to random stimuli-- evolution simply would not favor his species' reproduction unless food and population density was so high that reproduction was inevitable (which is not the case for any species of any kind of which I am aware). And even if food and population density was that high, he'd still have to be aware enough not to eat his own kind (i.e. cause his own extinction) before mating (i.e. providing for his own replacement). He is here: he is conscious.

It seems funny to me that Scientific Materialists -those people who believe that Everything That Is, Can Be Measured-- are often the first to dismiss the idea of Consciousness in non-humans. They will assert that even we humans are nothing but the sum total of our physical parts + electricity generated by chemical reactions within us, and that our Consciousness is a special result of -or even a by-product of-- intelligence.

The Null Hypothesis here is illustrative: if Consciousness is the result of intelligence, then it follows that the unintelligent are not Conscious. Some humans, therefore, are not Conscious. This is an unacceptable conclusion in the international Scientific community, so their hypothesis, that Consciousness is the result or by-product of intelligence, is void. The narrowest possible conclusion to draw from this is that Consciousness is not solely a human experience.

So this being the case then, all living things share consciousness -not just us "higher" animals-- because all living things operate more or less the same way: on the basis of these electrochemical impulses. You see something funny, and you smile, though you don't know why or how it happened. In the exact same way, the sunflower experiences sunlight and turns to face it, though it doesn't know how, or why. It just "likes" the sun, in the same sense that you like to laugh or smile or eat donuts.

One conclusion is inescapable: Consciousness is everywhere, though nowhere quite the same. Embrace it -embrace yourself- in all its -all of your-- forms.

On this day in 1942, American musicians went on strike, in a struggle with record companies over royalties. Contractual obligations would keep the then-very-popular big bands off the road (and out of the studios) effectively stopping the Big Band era in its tracks, until Columbia and Victor records succumbed more than two years later. Musicians got around their band contracts by playing in small ensembles in small clubs. This intimacy encouraged self-expression, in contrast to a big band setting with a conductor, and thus be-bop was born.

GOP: rotten to the core.

Froggie went a-courtin'

Cascades Frog. Phil spotted him on the trail the other day. I stopped to take a pic, but Phil was in a better position, so he got this one. Amphibian population are in sharp decline all over the world, so I always get excited when I see one in the wild. I was never the frog-catching kind of kid, but I liked watching them whenever I was near a pond, creek or river, and now they're increasingly hard to find. Not too long ago, apparently, the tree frog population in this area was as loud on summer nights as the cicadas are in the midwest, but we've been here two years now and I have yet to hear one.

McCain on health care: Go to the doctor. Never mind how to pay for it, right Senator?

Orang-utans on health care: Do it yourself. Raises one of my favorite unanswered questions: How do we know what plants are good for us, and how to use them? Or maybe, "how did we know, in the first place?" If these orangs found this plant by trial and error, then that says a LOT about their ability to observe and reason (and that's pretty damn significant). If we found it first that way, and they found it by observing us using it, then we have even more questions: how did the humans know about the plant in the first place? How did the very reclusive and solitary orangs observe them? How did the orangs know that the humans were treating pain? And if the orangs knew that the humans were treating pain, then that implies that the orangs enjoy the knowledge that other things are sentient as well. And Established Science doesn't really accept that possibility, at this point. In other words: if the easy answer is right, then we have to answer the even-harder questions.

This tells me, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that we humans are not the only sentient critters on the planet. The only significant difference between us and anything else, is procedural: at a molecular level, we're all the same. The differences only appear as a result of following different instructions from the same DNA.

Me on health care: If my neighbor is sick with something contagious, then I am at risk too, no matter how good my doctor is. In a sense: if one of us is sick, we are all sick. The public health is as much an element of the Public Good as a police force, fire department, and usable roads. Medicare for all is essential.

Healthy individuals make a healthy society.