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News Briefs 08-09-2009

By Jameskeon

Assorted fairy tales…

Quote of the Day:

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

H.L. Mencken

Jameske
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6 Comments

  1. Our current economics
    It was interesting to read the perspective on our current economics being a “game” created by kings in the late middle ages. It makes total sense. It was created to maintain power and control at the top. That’s not all a bad concept for a government however as always seems to be the case, greedy and nefarious people always seem to find their way to the top to abuse the system. Welcome to our situation today.

  2. Beware Enhancements
    As long as the media keeps throwing these dead horses around, I’ll keep beating them.

    The memory article focuses on two subjects: enhancement drugs and trace erasure. Yet again a supposedly knowledgeable neuroscientist claims memory enhancing drugs will be available soon. Yet again a professional in the field is totally unaware that the first such drug (hydergine) was invented (by Albert Hoffmann) so long ago (> 50 years) that its original patent (owned by Sandoz of Switzerland) has expired. Nobody has to license it, much less invent it, they can just make it and sell it.

    As for trace erasure, this is a bad idea with a bullet. Memories are stored in collections of neurons called together specifically for the function, each of which can participate in other collections/memories. If you hit an assembly with a memory, it attracts the erasure chemical. Fine. But every cell in the assembly has ALL of its connections weakened, not just those having to do with the one memory. You could potentially erase the memory of a PTSD causing incident (would that erase PTSD? Probably not.) but in so doing also erase the piano lessons, your mother’s maiden name, and how to perform your job, if those things make use of some of the same cells. Every such assembly has 1,000 to 10,000 neurons participating, each of those can participate in 100 more or other assemblies. This too is over 50 years old — it is the work of Donald O. Hebb. I can see a professional not knowing about hydergine, as even Eric Kandel, Nobel winner, claimed to want to start a company to discover the first nootropic, unaware that the problem child’s dad had a prodigal child thanks in large part to the FDA and BigPharma’s incestuous relationships. But not to know Hebb and how his work applied in this situation should scare anyone away from this guy’s work.

    1. I remind myself of that
      I remind myself of that phrase of Captain Kirk in Star Trek V/The Final Frontier (when Spock’s brother offers to erase the pain of his son’s death).

      “I want my pain. I need my pain!”

  3. Re: UFO filmed for 40 minutes by Chinese… during solar eclipse
    Re: UFO filmed for 40 minutes by Chinese…

    Unless you live in a dark vacuum, you know that someday… providing the human race should survive itself, someday there will be that event that confirms that we are not alone. When this happens, there will be no room for debunking, denial or de-skeptics. On that occasion, everything will change because, like a gang of hoodlums suddenly under the glare of the police cruiser headlights, we’ll know that we are being watched. Everything we do, from that point forward, will be considered far more carefully and with a lot more conscience.

    Of course, it might not happen for another thousand years but then again… it may have already happened. Each and every genuine UFO event has the potential to be ‘the one’ that finally breaks into the wild.

    This one from the Chinese observatory has that potential, perhaps more so than any since the Phoenix lights.

    …

  4. Chinese Food
    Chinese have a saying: “If you can kill it you can eat it”

    Eating dogs while more of a northern China thing I have seen ready to eat vacuumed packed dog meat snacks in Shanghai.

    Chinese traditional “medicine” also dictates if one is to eat Rover or Fluffy the cat…or bear bile and other things more gross.

    Of course now with Expo next year China needs to do the old “smoke and mirrors” like they did with the Olympics so everyone can marvel at the cultured and modern China. (yeah right)

    😉

    1. Hey man, would you mind
      There was a tradition of taming dogs for food here in Mesoamerica as well. But the interesting things is that the dog was also viewed as a companion to the after life; which I find interesting when compared with the dog/jackal deity of Egypt (Anubis) who was the lord of the underworld.

      Last month I saw the most beautiful zoomorphical vase of a dog sleeping, made by an artist of ancient Teotihuacan; a clear sign that dogs played an important social role in that culture, and were not viewed just as a snack 😉

      PS: Hey man, would you mind translating a bit of what the TV news men say in that clip about the UFO filmed by scientists? I’m sure all of us would appreciate it 🙂

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