"Joni Mitchell is one of the most beloved of folk singers from the 1960’s protest and 70’s hippie era. She endeared many fans to her simple and sincere form of “music with a conscience.” Therefore, it is no surprise that she would somehow be chosen to confer legitimacy to a skin-crawling disease known as Morgellons.
In addition to being known as the Plague of the 21st Century, Morgellons is also known by many other names, each of which misrepresents the true seriousness or causes of the syndrome. Morgellons is in fact a multi-infection syndrome which has a number of different causative factors as well as various pathogenic micro-organisms present.
Because it has never been formally recognized by the American medical establishment as a scientifically-proven disease process, proper diagnosis is rare. Effective treatment regimens are therefore even more unlikely to be formulated by doctors who refuse to acknowledge its existence. That’s where the advocacy of famous people like Joni Mitchell can be of invaluable assistance.
Mitchell has apparently suffered from Morgellons for many years now and displays many of the classic physical symptoms experienced by the vast majority of those who have been likewise afflicted. Her psychological profile, which has become quite well known by the general public, is also very consistent with a full-blown Morgellons syndrome..."===
EXCERPT: [...] Public opinion is moving against particular wars and the world’s spending of $2 trillion every year on war and preparations for war. We plan to announce the launching of a broad movement capable of ending war preparations and transitioning to a peaceful world. We are creating the tools necessary to communicate the facts about war and discard the myths. We are creating ways to assist organizations around the world that are working on partial steps in the direction of a war-free world — including developing peaceful means of achieving security and resolving conflict — and to increase widespread understanding of such steps as progress toward war’s complete elimination. [...] By organizing internationally, we will use progress made in one nation to encourage other nations to match or surpass it without fear. By educating people whose governments make war at a distance about the human costs of war (largely one-sided, civilian, and on a scale not widely understood) we will build a broad-based moral demand for an end to war. By presenting the case that militarism and wars make us all less safe and decrease our quality of life, we will strip war of much of its power. By creating awareness of the economic trade-offs, we will revive support for a peace dividend. By explaining the illegality, immorality, and terrible costs of war and the availability of legal, nonviolent and more effective means of defense and conflict resolution, we will build acceptance for what has only relatively recently been made into a radical proposal and ought to be viewed as a common sense initiative: the abolition of war.
While a global movement is needed, this movement cannot ignore or reverse the reality of where the greatest support for war originates. The United States builds, sells, buys, stockpiles, and uses the most weapons, engages in the most conflicts, stations the most troops in the most countries, and carries out the most deadly and destructive wars. By these and other measures, the U.S. government is the world’s leading war-maker, and — in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. — the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. Ending U.S. militarism would eliminate the pressure that is driving many other nations to increase their military spending. It would deprive NATO of its leading advocate for and greatest participant in wars. It would cut off the largest supply of weapons to the Middle East and other regions.
But war is not a U.S. or Western problem alone. This movement will focus on wars and militarism around the globe, helping to create examples of effective alternatives to violence and war, and examples of demilitarization as a path to greater, not lesser, security....
EXCERPT: [...] Old model #1 is materialism – also known as physicalism – which says that consciousness is a function of organised matter. The problem with materialism is that on any known view of what matter is, consciousness is palpably not a function of it. This is the lesson of the famous set of arguments about matter and consciousness in philosophy: the superscientist Mary, philosophical zombies, the inverted spectrum, etc.
Old model #2 is dualism, which says (negatively) that consciousness is not a function of organised matter, and (positively) that consciousness is a basic element of nature something like time, space, gravity, or indeed matter itself. The problem with dualism is that it can’t explain how consciousness is integrated into the rest of nature in the way it palpably is. That is the lesson of another set of arguments in philosophy that are famous but not quite as famous: the exclusion argument, the nomological dangler argument etc.
So both old models fail, and we need a new one. What would it be like? Well, don’t ask: is consciousness a function of matter? Ask instead: what is matter such that consciousness is a function of it? If no known property of matter can answer this question, the natural inference is that some unknown property does. So the new model says there are unknown properties of matter that, perhaps together with known properties, account for consciousness....
EXCERPT: It’s true most of us had a less than perfect childhood; after all, nobody can escape life without disappointments and hurt feelings. Yet in some families , you have such wild dysfunction that you begin to think jumping off airplanes or swimming with sharks might actually help calm your nerves. Below are five things only those who grew up with the truly crazy can understand....
EXCERPT: [...] To teach evolution at the University of Kentucky is to teach at an institution steeped in the history of defending evolution education. [...] I was originally reluctant to take my job at the university when offered it twenty years ago. [...] Moved by [E.O.] Wilson’s words, and with the knowledge that William Funkhouser once held the job I was now contemplating, I accepted the position.
I realized early on that many instructors teach introductory biology classes incorrectly. Too often evolution is the last section to be taught, an autonomous unit at the end of the semester. I quickly came to the conclusion that, since evolution is the foundation upon which all biology rests, it should be taught at the beginning of a course, and as a recurring theme throughout the semester. As the renowned geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky said: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”
[...] We live in a nation where public acceptance of evolution is the second lowest of thirty-four developed countries, just ahead of Turkey. Roughly half of Americans reject some aspect of evolution, believe the earth is less than ten thousand years old, and that humans coexisted with dinosaurs. Where I live, many believe evolution to be synonymous with atheism, and there are those who strongly feel I am teaching heresy to thousands of students.
[...] There are students who enroll in my courses and already accept evolution. [...] Then there are the students whose minds are already sealed shut to the possibility that evolution exists, but need to take my class to fulfill a college requirement. And then there are the students who have no opinion one way or the other but are open-minded. These are the students I most hope to reach by presenting them with convincing and overwhelming evidence without offending or alienating them.
[...] After semester filled with evidence of evolution, capped off with a dose of evolutionary medicine, one might expect that every last student would understand it and accept it as fact. Sadly, this is not the case. There are those who remain convinced that evolution is a threat to their religious beliefs. Knowing this, I feel an obligation to give my “social resistance to evolution” lecture as the final topic.
This lecture lays down the history of the antiscience and anti-evolution movements, the arguments made by those opposing evolution, and why these arguments are wrong. I make it clear that one can accept evolution and maintain their religious beliefs. They are not mutually exclusive. [...] In fact, 77 percent of all American Christians belong to a denomination that supports the teaching of evolution, and several high-profile evangelical Christians are ardent defenders of it, including former President Jimmy Carter and Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health. Even Pope John Paul II acknowledged the existence of evolution in an article he published in The Quarterly Review of Biology, in which he argued that the body evolved, but the soul was created. Pope Francis has made it clear that he accepts evolution as well.
This lecture should put students at ease knowing that religion and science need not be at odds. Of all the lectures I give, this one provokes the most discussion after class. And yet it often results in students expressing concern that I might not be saved. I never say anything about my personal religious beliefs, yet it is assumed I am an atheist. One student told me she hoped I could find God soon. When I again pointed out that John Paul accepted evolution—and he certainly wasn’t an atheist—the student countered that Catholics aren’t Christians. Several simply let me know they will be praying for me and praying hard.
[...] I’m occasionally told my life would be easier if I backed off from my relentless efforts to advance evolution education. Maybe so. But to shy away from emphasizing evolutionary biology is to fail as a biology teacher. I continue to teach biology as I do, because biology makes sense only in the light of evolution.
And it’s a message that sometimes gets through. There’s one student I can remember in particular, who took my freshman seminar on evolutionary medicine. He was an ardent evangelical Christian who believed in the literal truth of biblical creation. The seminar was very hard on him, and he struggled with the information, questioning and doubting everything we read. Several years later, our paths crossed, and we stopped for what turned out to be a long, easy chat. Now a doctor, he explained to me that, at the time, he was so upset with my seminar that he attended a number of Creationists’ public lectures for evidence I was wrong. He said he found himself embarrassed by how badly these individuals perverted Christian teachings, as well as known facts, to make their argument. He wanted me to know that he came to understand he could be a Christian and accept evolution. Then he did something that resonates with any teacher: he thanked me for opening his eyes, turning his world upside down, and blurring the line between black and white....
Shadow people? Djinn? Ghosts? UFOs? Are these just manifestations of our own dark matter biosphere?
"Computations in 2008 by Stephen Adler of Princeton University and Xu and Siegel from the University of Arizona, suggest that the dark matter density in the Solar System and around the Earth exceeds the galactic halo density significantly and is much higher than previously thought. According to Jay Alfred’s estimate, the visible Earth is gravitationally coupled to a Jupiter-sized dark matter halo. As dark matter clumped it created conditions for a dark biosphere to form. This dark biosphere gave rise to dark matter life forms and consciousness. The Theory argues that dark matter is largely in the form of plasmas of exotic particles (including super symmetric particles such as charginos and neutralinos). It has been shown in laboratory experiments over the past ten years that minimal ordinary plasma cell-systems can be generated in the laboratory.
The Theory therefore suggests that minimal dark plasma cell-systems were generated within this dark halo/biosphere in the early Earth and predicts the existence of terrestrial dark plasma life forms which evolved from these minimal plasma cell systems. Furthermore, unlike chemical-based life forms, dark plasma life forms are compatible with life in a super symmetric universe. Life forms would be as varied in scale, structure and intelligence as carbon-based life forms – as different as a microbe from a whale; a mosquito from a tiger; a giraffe from a crocodile; an ant from a human being. Their degrees of intelligence and awareness were as different as a centipede’s awareness to the awareness and intelligence of Homo sapiens.
The entities that we have loosely identified as ghosts, angels, jinns, demons, deities (for example the Marian apparitions in the atmosphere), aliens, biological UFOs, fairies and sightings of the recently deceased (on the surface of the Earth) are characteristic of these predicted exotic plasma life forms from interpenetrating dark plasma spheres or counterpart Earths. They constitute ecology of plasma life forms that evolved throughout Earth’s history and sometimes formed symbiotic relationships with the carbon-based life forms that we are more familiar with. Homo sapiens evolved carbon-based bodies that formed symbiotic relationships with some of these plasma life forms (indicating a type of symbio-genesis). When the carbon-based bodies died, the bioplasma bodies (resulting from the symbiosis) continue their existence in the counterpart Earths.”===https://alloya.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/...ma-beings/
"Dark DNA is the genetic code in the human genome that currently has no known original source.
We have traced 8% of the human genome to viruses. 1-2% of our genome comes from other animals. Believe it or not you share 55% of your genetic code with a banana – and that’s not just men.
However, 20% of our genome is completely unaccounted for. We have no idea where it came from.
Wolfe said, “As we started to look at this information, we would see that about 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn’t match anything that we’ve ever seen before — no plant, animal, fungus, virus or bacteria. Basically we have no clue what this is.”
“If you think 20 percent of genetic information in your nose is a lot of biological dark matter, if we looked at your gut, up to 40 or 50 percent of that information is biological dark matter. And even in the relatively sterile blood, around one to two percent of this information is dark matter — can’t be classified, can’t be typed or matched with anything we’ve seen before.”
“At first we thought that perhaps this was artifact. These deep sequencing tools are relatively new. But as they become more and more accurate, we’ve determined that this information is a form of life, or at least some of it is a form of life. And while the hypotheses for explaining the existence of biological dark matter are really only in their infancy, there’s a very, very exciting possibility that exists: that buried in this life, in this genetic information, are signatures of as of yet unidentified life.”
Some scientists have begun looking for patterns and structures in this “dark DNA” and have already made surprising discoveries, including sequencing unknown mircrobes that produce protein in new ways.
But will the BIG discovery happen? Will this dark DNA hold the secret to a form of life that we have never known before?"
Could machines that think someday pose an existential threat to humanity? Some big names in science and tech seem to think so--Stephen Hawking, for one--and they've issued grave warnings about the looming threat of artificial intelligence.
Other experts are less concerned, saying all we have to do to prevent a robot apocalypse is to unplug them.
And then there are those who take a middle position, calling for more research and development to ensure that we "reap the benefits" of A.I. while "avoiding potential pitfalls," as one group of scientists said recently in an open letter.
Interestin thouts from all them people but none of 'em seem to get it... an now for my corect opinion:::
Like it or not... AI is "here"... its queer... an it ant goin away.!!!
An thers nuthin to fear from AI unless humans goin extinct while evolvin into machines is scary to you.!!!
Anyhow... most of the people who fear this evolution will get to die a natural human death before AI gets 'em.!!!
![[Image: 600px-time_to_let_her_go.jpg]](https://julfeelme.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/600px-time_to_let_her_go.jpg)