http://www.universetoday.com/116149/orio...st-flight/

EXCERPT: The huge rocket that will blast NASA’s first Orion spacecraft into orbit is ready to Rock ‘n’ Roll on a critical two orbit test flight scheduled for December. And Orion is so big and heavy that she’s not launching on just any old standard rocket. To blast the uncrewed Orion to orbit on its maiden mission requires the most powerful booster on Planet Earth – namely the United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket....

http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc...286&cn=390

EXCERPT: In American Psychosis: How The Federal Government Destroyed The Mental Illness Treatment System E. Fuller Torrey argues that the transfer of responsibility for individuals with serious mental illnesses from state to federal government destroyed the mental illness treatment system, through deinstitutionalization, and led to a disastrous change in how mentally ill individuals are treated today. Fuller Torrey argues that the change began in 1962 with plans for President Kennedy's Interagency Task Force on Mental Health and federally funded community mental health centers (CMHCs).

Fuller Torrey opens with a historical overview of how the mental health system worked at the time before the shift, focusing on the Kennedy family and the mental illness of Rosemary Kennedy before moving on to the politics of deinstitutionalization of state hospitals and the "death of asylums", while arguing that none of the experts called in to work on this shift had any experience with mental hospitals.

Fuller Torrey state that yes, the previous system with state responsibility was flawed but at least there was a system in place. The new shift in responsibility actually led to a lack of leadership, the closing of many hospitals and a severe lack of hospital beds and the move of individuals with severe mental illness from hospitals to prisons, jails, boarding homes and nursing homes, to name a few consequences.

The CMHCs put strong emphasis on the prevention of mental illness, without any studies demonstrating that the type of prevention they were advocating actually worked and without definite knowledge of how to prevent mental illness or what was causing mental illness. Fuller Torrey writes that: "Unfortunately, the mental health centers legislation passed by Congress was fatally flawed. It encouraged the closing of state mental hospitals without any realistic plan regarding what would happen to the discharged patients, especially those who refused to take medication they needed to remain well. It included no plan for the future funding of the mental health centers. It focused resources on prevention when nobody understood enough about mental illnesses to know how to prevent them" (p. 58).

The author, in the coming chapters, discusses the impact of deinstitutionalization on individuals with mental illnesses, the prison system and the public, providing plenty of examples on how dangerous and flawed the current system is. In the last chapters, Fuller Torrey mentions "good news", giving examples of some of the few upsides and successes of the mental health system. Thereafter the author provides a list of solutions and lessons to be learned....

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.” ― Henry David Thoreau

“Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?” ― D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture

“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.”― Oliver Sacks

“And so man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance. Only through the primordial distances he establishes toward all being in his transcendence does a true nearness to things flourish in him.” ― Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons

“Many of us ordinary folk have tasted these moments of "union" - on the ladder, in the pond, in the jungle, on the hospital bed. In the yogic view, it is in these moments that we know who we really are. We rest in our true nature and know beyond a doubt that everything is OK, and not just OK, but unutterably well. We know that there is nothing to accept and nothing to reject. Life just is as it is.” ― Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self

Have you ever had a transcendent experience? A moment in which you felt one with Being, or the Universe, or the All, or whatever? I would also count drug-induced experiences as such also.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-a...magination

A new British library exhibition is "a penumbral dungeon of the warped, the perverse and the compulsively page-turning"...

EXCERPT: It’s curious that a celebration of “the Gothic imagination” should take place in the modernist-orientalist terracotta fortress of the British Library. After all, just next door looms the St Pancras Hotel, complete with enough pointed arches and foliated window-frames to keep even the most jaded Gothic revivalist happy. And not far up the road is the churchyard where Thomas Hardy did work experience shifting gravestones to make way for the railway, and a young Mary Shelley whiled away the hours reading, propped up against her mother’s tombstone.

Still, the curators of “Terror and Wonder,” the British Library’s new exhibition of all things Gothic, have succeeded in pouring some of these local atmospherics into the Library’s Paccar galleries, transforming them into a penumbral dungeon of the warped, the perverse and the compulsively page-turning. The timing’s good too. The latest cinema adaptation of Dracula, Dracula Untold, opened on the same day as this exhibition. Not that this was a deliberate tie-in: such is the Gothic’s popularity that coincidences of this kind are almost inevitable.

“Gothic” itself is a slippery term—even to call it a “genre” might be to set foot on unsteady ground. The term suffers from its implicit pluralism: are we talking about novels, horror films, flying buttresses, Alice Cooper, black-painted fingernails or a specific period in North-European history? On the one hand, it seems fair to say that John Ruskin’s famous comments on the architecture—that most of us know Gothic when we see it, without being able to identify exactly what makes it so—still have something to say about the thing as a whole. On the other, the Gothic really does just mean the spooky and the titillating....

http://online.wsj.com/articles/no-offens...1414783663

[...] We knew soon enough that it was true. The literary, media and political worlds rallied in defense of Mr. [Salman] Rushdie. He became a hero of free speech and a symbol—even if a slightly ambivalent postcolonial one—of Western liberal traditions. But he also went, very sensibly, behind a curtain of security that was to last many years.

And by degrees—when it seemed that not only Mr. Rushdie’s life but the lives of his publishers, editors and translators might be threatened—his base of support in the literary world thinned out. Sensitive intellectuals discovered that, in a multicultural world, respect for the Other meant understanding his traditions too, and these often were, well, sterner than ours. Freedom of speech was only one value to be set against…ahem, several other values. Fear, cowardice and rationalization spread outward.

Twenty-five years later, we can look back on a long series of similar events, including: the 2002 anti-Christian riots in Nigeria, in which more than 200 people were killed because a local tabloid had facetiously suggested that Miss World contestants would make suitable brides for Muhammad; the 2004 murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for his movie “Submission,” in which passages from the Quran were printed on women’s bodies; the riots in Denmark and throughout the Middle East in 2005 in response to the publication of cartoons of Muhammad by a Danish magazine; the murder threats against Dutch politician Geert Wilders for his 2008 film “Fitna,” which interleaved passages from the Quran with clips of jihadist violence.

These events were threats to free speech, however, not only in themselves but also because they intimidated people and private organizations and gave governments an excuse to restrict free media. Over time, they encouraged others who had no interest in Islam whatsoever—from wealthy individuals to “dissident” minorities to democratic politicians—to try their hand at silencing opponents. Almost no newspapers published the Muhammad cartoons, for instance, though the story of them dominated the international media for weeks. Yale University Press especially distinguished itself by publishing a major study of the controversy in 2009—without the actual drawings.

Governments began to treat those threatened for their opinions almost as harshly as those attacking them...

[...] Admittedly, it is difficult to draw a clear line between criticism of an Islamic belief and an attack on Muslims who believe it. If you denounce a belief as absurd, you are implicitly criticizing the believers as credulous fools. Christians have to endure explicit denunciations of their faith all the time from such writers as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. And so they should. If you can’t stand the heat, don’t listen to hellfire sermons from atheists.

Hearing criticisms of your own convictions and learning the beliefs of others are training for life in a multifaith society. Preventing open debate means that all believers, including atheists, remain in the prison of unconsidered opinion. The right to be offended, which is the other side of free speech, is therefore a genuine right. True belief and honest doubt are both impossible without it.

It isn’t just some Muslims who want the false comfort of censoring disagreeable opinions. Far from it. Gays, Christians, feminists, patriots, foreign despots, ethnic activists—or organizations claiming to speak for them—are among the many groups seeking relief from the criticism of others through the courts, the legislatures and the public square.

England’s libel laws—long a scandalous system for enabling the rich to suppress their scandals—now have imitations in Europe and the U.S. In May 2014, the European Court of Justice created “the right to be forgotten,” enabling those with ugly pasts—a fraudster, a failed politician, an anti-Muslim bigot perhaps—to delete their crimes, misdemeanors and embarrassments from Internet records so that search engines cannot find them.

Surely such things can’t happen in the land of the First Amendment? Not in quite the same way, perhaps, but a libel suit brought by the climatologist Michael Mann against the opinion writer Mark Steyn, National Review magazine (with which I am affiliated) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for their criticism of his temperature projections still poses a chilling threat to free speech and scientific debate. Even if the case is ultimately resolved in favor of Mr. Mann’s critics, they will have suffered a considerable loss in time and money. “The process is the punishment,” Mr. Steyn has said of such trials. It is also a deterrent to future critics.

Nor are conservatives free from sin on this issue. In recent years, their attacks on free expression in the U.S. have generally been prompted by a philistine discomfort with provocative art, from the “Sensation” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 to the more recent flap over “The Death of Klinghoffer” at New York’s Metropolitan Opera....

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/rayfield_11_14.php

Stalin, Vol 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928; by Stephen Kotkin

Review by Donald Rayfield

EXCERPT: [...] Psychopaths of Stalin's order arise so rarely in history that forensic psychiatry has few insights to offer. There is now a general consensus about the death toll and the ghastly heritage of Stalinism. [...] Kotkin's book is so long because he sets Stalin against an extensive historical and social background [...] There are a few new facts and a little demolition of false assumptions. Kotkin's major surprise is his claim [...] that Lenin's famous testament, a sort of headmaster's report critically assessing the six candidates who might inherit the leadership, was probably not dictated by Lenin. It may instead have been fabricated by Lenin's wife, Krupskaya [...] But this forgery, if that was what it was, matters little. Krupskaya may merely have written what she had guessed the semi-paralysed Lenin was thinking; moreover, many party members wanted a rude and power-crazed leader who would stir things up. Such criticism did Stalin's chances of power no harm.

Kotkin's merit is that he grinds no axes and is polite to his predecessors. [...] He believes that great men shape events: had Stalin not existed, then history would have been very different; had Stalin died in the early 1920s (as he might have done when operated on for appendicitis, given that Russian chloroform killed many a distinguished patient), then the USSR might have prolonged and developed the relatively liberal New Economic Policy and avoided 'socialism in one country'. The evidence of Stalin's proactive micromanagement supports Kotkin's theory.

One might disagree, however, with Kotkin's assumption that Stalin's paranoid, vindictive nature was a product of, not a motive for, the pursuit of power and that it was slow to develop. Stalin's youthful sexual liaisons may have been normal ('Stalin had a penis, and he used it,' Kotkin remarks), but his impregnation of the thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Siberian orphan Lidia Pereprygina was, even by the standards of the most unbourgeois Bolshevik, the kind of behaviour to be condoned only in a male stoat.

Kotkin omits many of the acts of the young Stalin that mark him as a creature of exceptional turpitude among the thugs, bandits, fanatics and misguided adolescents of the Transcaucasian Social Democratic Party. For example, when General Griaznov was assassinated in Tbilisi in 1906 and a bystander, Joiashvili, was arrested, Stalin composed an incriminating pamphlet to ensure that Joiashvili and not the real assassin was hanged (Stalin admitted this with pride in the 1920s). Likewise, he tried to have fellow party members executed on false accusations of treachery. The best evidence for any semblance of humanity in the young Stalin is not in Kotkin's narrative but in the pictures.

The photograph of a dishevelled Stalin standing with his mother and his in-laws by the open coffin in which his first wife lies is the sole picture of Stalin showing anything like remorse, sorrow and embarrassment. Kotkin might also have cited some of the postcards Stalin sent back to Georgia from London, in which he appears as just a laddish adventurer out to have a good time, hoping not to shock his new bride.

Stalin's childhood injuries and illnesses are well catalogued by Kotkin, but he does not pursue them as a possible source of Stalin's sadism (as some have done, on the Dostoevskian principle that the primary desire of a man suffering from toothache is that everyone should share his agony)....

Gotta try this! Sounds great!

http://www.rachaelraymag.com/recipes/rac...n-and-rice

Simple actually. But I'd still rather drink it in my margarita.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4xTqXhHlqg