Sedition and Satyagraha

 

"As many of you may know I consider Mahatma Gandhi to be one of the greatest and most influential humans that ever walked on this Earth. His non violent approach to not only battle but defeat oppression, slavery and injustice on two different continents has inspired many great people to follow in his foot steps. His ideas of peaceful resistance and non cooperation, as innocent as they may sound, where enough to unite the hearts and minds of people all across the globe to the suffering and struggles of the Indian people and then shame the British empire enough to give up their illegal occupation of their home land. I bring this up today because it is my opinion that our world is in desperate need for another Mahatma (great soul) to once again unite the people of the world.

In Gandhi's writings he used two very powerful words quiet often and they were "sedition" and "Satyagraha". Sedition is defined as conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch, because Gandhi knew that just as there were unjust men, there are also unjust laws that they force upon their people. He believed that it was every ones duty and obligation to stand up against tyranny and oppression. That people were all the same in the eyes of the supreme being and that no one individual or group individuals should be mistreated or brutalized. And he also believed that no matter what, truth and Love would always be victorious in the end. And that brings me to his second favorite word, Satyagraha is a sanskrit word that translates to "insistence on truth".

You see Gandhi's level of thinking transcended religion and politics, he was a student of what the true human nature of man was. He knew that only by bridging the gaps between religions, nationalities and ethnicities would man ever be able to coexist Peacefully and truthfully. I think the truth that Gandhi showed to us is that it takes no intelligence or bravery to harm or kill another human being. That real strength and wisdom comes from elevating our consciousness to a level that realizes that we are all connected in this life and that only by having open hearts and open minds will we ever be able to stop resorting to barbaric and animalistic violence towards one another. Yes our world is teetering on a fine edge and we are in desperate need for each and every one of us to find our own Mahatma that resides inside of each of us. Will you join the fight? Blessings and Love to you all. Namaste _/|\_ "

~ Guru Bubba McLovin

Are Identical Twins "Bonded" in a Mysterious Way?

(from Smithsonian, 1980)

Jim Lewis and Jim Springer first met February 9, 1979, after 39 years of being separated. Both were very nervous at first, but now consider the reunion "the most important day of my life." Amid the euphoria over their rediscovery of each other, they came across astonishing similarities in their lives and behavior. Both had been adopted by separate families in Ohio, and had grown up within 45 miles of each other. Both had been named James by their adoptive parents, both had married twice; first to women named Linda and second to women named Betty. Both had children, including sons named James Allan. Both had at one time owned dogs named Toy.

These parallels made them perfect candidates for behavioral research, as did their only short aquaintence with one another before they were inducted into a study of reunited twins. The parallels were only the first in a series of similarities which would go to the heart of the influence of heredity and environment on human behavior. Dr. Thomas Bouchard of University of Minnesota studied the personalities and attitudes of the twin Jims, and the resulting similarities were again astonishing. In one test which measured personality variables (tolorance, conformity, flexibility), the twins' scores were so close that they approximated the averaging of the totals of one person taking the test twice. Brain wave tests produced skyline-like graphs looking like 2 views of the same city. Intelligence tests, mental abilities, gestures, voice tones, likes and dislikes, were similar as well. So were medical histories: both had high blood pressure, both had experienced what they thought were heart attacks, both had undergone vasectomies, and both suffered from migrane headaches. They even used the same words to describe these headaches. To read more about the conclusions of studies on twins reunited later in life, click here.

The twins discovered they shared alike habits too. Both chain-smoked, both liked beer, both had woodworking workshops in their garages. Both drove Chevys, both had served as Sheriff's deputies in nearby Ohio counties. They had even vacationed on the same beach in the Florida Gulf Coast. Both lived in the only house on their block. The same patterns shared by the Jim Twins occurred time and time again. Their differences, more apparent now since some time has passed, are more subtle. According to Jim Springer, "the differences between Jim and me may be the differences between living in the city and country."

Lewis was responsible for their reunion. Both of the twins had been told as youngsters that they had a twin brother, but Springer's mother told him his twin had died. Lewis wasn't interested in finding his missing brother until later in his life, but "didn't do anything about it" until 2 years before they eventually met. He went to the courthouse and found Jim Springer's name. It was only a short time later that Lewis had Springer on the phone and their families agreed to meet. "We were both nervous wrecks on the phone." Their genetic similarities and environmental differences aside, their twin bond is now restored.

Source: http://www.longwood.k12.ny.us/lhs/science/mos/twins/jimtwins.html

Back Again...

The Contemplation of Stars - 2010

by NiraneDenn

Hello my friends. It's been almost exactly a year since my last post. I initially just wanted to take a short break for a few days, but those days turned into months as I went through my own personal journey of addiction, depression and anxiety. I began to separate myself from everything I once loved: music, friends and learning about this multidimensional Universe and our role on this planet. I became isolated, separated and distant. The same Source, or Creator, I once felt a part of was no longer there, or at least that's what I thought.

Over the months, this went on, I was escaping from myself. I had fantasies of getting into my car and just driving, to disappear from my current life and live out the rest of my years in seclusion. I felt like I didn't belong here, that this current reality was not something I was supposed to experience. All I wanted to do was go home, back to the Source.

Finally, over the winter, in two short months, I went to residential treatment and got the help I needed. Three weeks later, we had a baby boy. In the midst of the chaos and uncertainty of adjusting to a new way of living, I began reaching out to a lot of supportive people, and built back my sense of community, my sense of belonging.

Although there were times I didn't think I could go on anymore, I am grateful for those experiences. I wasn't at the time, but because of them I faced my suppressed memories. I cleaned my heart and mind, and began to live more in the present moment, the eternal now. I am still figuring things out as I go but feel a renewed sense of wonder and awe for the Universe, the macro as well as the micro. The mystery of looking out into an eternal Universe is only half the equation. Inside we go on forever. For every exhale there is an inhale.

I hope now, while taking care of a newborn, working my recovery and everything else in life, that I will begin writing more. I've enjoyed posting news stories by other writers and still plan on doing that. But the awakening process never ends, and it means different things to different people. That is the beauty of who we are.

What’s Really Going on in Ukraine?

Source: http://www.thrivemovement.com/whats-really-going-on-ukraine.blog

How do oil pipelines, the IMF and the Western banking cabal all meet in Ukraine?

To unpack any international event requires an ever-expanding awareness of the history, economics, resource and trade dynamics of the countries involved. Knowing where to look for clues helps reveal the similarities in seemingly unrelated events. The lens that THRIVE offers can be helpful in understanding the history of the global banking system, which is relevant no matter what country or issue you are trying to unravel.

In the case of Ukraine, Kimberly and I were recently in an informal Q&A where someone asked our perspective. The following short video is a first-level overview of some of the issues we think are operative. It is neither in-depth nor comprehensive, but it does include broken promises, the petrodollar, pipelines, the IMF and the Western banking cabal. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have been collaborating in forming their own international bank, an alternative non-NSA infected Internet and their own alternative financial rating agency — that relies on asset-backed valuation. These are key to further understanding, and we will be addressing them in future blogs.

For now, we offer this spontaneous, short video with hopes that it is helpful for your own critical thinking about this momentous and precarious global dynamic.

I believe that our awareness and vocal demand that there be no aggression can have significant influence, as has been demonstrated with Iran and Syria in recent months.

What if the people of the region of Ukraine were forgiven their predatory fiat debts and then actually left alone — free of “super-power” bullying and grabbing?

Please add your comments so that we can all better understand what’s going on in order to be most effective in our actions for peace.

Foster

Snail Venom Inspires Powerful Pain Reliever

The new drug could be the most promising painkiller since morphine was introduced.

THE GIST

Cone snail venom is inspiring a new generation of painkillers. The newest drug is 100 times more potent than existing pain medications. It also works at much lower doses and without risk of addiction.

Snail venom in a pill could offer powerful relief for people who suffer from severe and chronic pain.
It may seem an unlikely source of pharmaceutical inspiration, but the chemicals that some snails produce have potent effects on the human nervous system. This makes them promising sources of drugs that could dull the pain of cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, HIV/AIDS, car accidents and other conditions.

In the latest advance, researchers have designed a venom-inspired medication that can be taken orally -- a leap forward from previous forms that needed to be injected directly into the spinal cord.
In rodent studies, the drug appears to work better than existing drugs, including morphine, at lower doses and without risks of addiction.

"Since we started getting some publicity, I've received dozens of e-mails from people all over the world asking me if they can get into clinical trials," said David Craik, a chemist at the University of Queensland in Australia, adding that he's still seeking funding and government approval before trials can begin.

"I've really been overwhelmed with some of the sad stories people have e-mailed," he said. "There's a great need for new treatments."

The new work involves cone snails, ocean-dwelling carnivorous predators that live in tropical waters around the world. A hungry cone snail uses a long, flexible proboscis as a lure and then as a harpoon.

Like a hypodermic needle, the proboscis injects fish, worms and other snails with venom that instantly paralyzes the prey. The venom's power comes from hundreds of thousands of short proteins, called peptides.

Since the 1990s, scientists have studied a few hundred of those peptides, called conotoxins, with the hope of tapping into their powers. So far, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved one synthetic conotoxin, called Prialt, for the treatment of severe and chronic pain. Others are currently in clinical trials.

While these treatments work well, their biggest limitation is that they need to be injected directly into the spinal cord, often through a surgically implanted pump. That's because the body quickly breaks down swallowed conotoxins before they can reach the receptors they need to reach.

To develop a snail-inspired painkiller stable enough to be taken orally, Craik and colleagues drew inspiration from an African plant that's long been used by witchdoctors as a tea to speed up labor and childbirth. Chemical analyses showed that the active ingredient in the plant was a peptide with the unusual shape: a circle. That shape, it turned out, made it more stable than most peptides.

Based on those findings, Craik's team engineered a synthetic conotoxin. Then, they added a few extra amino acids in order to turn the peptide into a circle.

"The advance is an elegant example of taking two lessons from nature, combining them, and making something that's even better," said Michael McIntosh, a professor of biology and psychiatry at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City.

When swallowed by rats with injured legs, the scientists reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the molecule relieved pain for more than four hours at doses more than 100 times smaller than typical doses of gabapentin, the main drug used to treat nervous system pain. Gabapentin works for just 30 to 60 percent of patients, Craik added, and it has unpleasant side effects. The new drug was also 100 times more powerful than morphine.

Because the new molecule works so well in such small concentrations, it would probably cause fewer side effects. People with pain would be less likely to need increasingly large doses of it to keep getting relief. That, and the receptors it acts on reduce the likelihood of addiction.

Scientists have only begun to explore the pharmaceutical possibilities of a tiny fraction of compounds in cone snail venom, Craik said, let alone in all of nature. There are probably many more yet to be found.

"This points out that nature has a lot to teach us," McIntosh said. "It's essential that we preserve the sources of these natural compounds to enable further similar discoveries."

Source: news.discovery.com/human/snail-venom-painkiller.htm

Have physicists finally detected gravitational waves?

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has news so big it announced that it would announce something. The press conference will stream live tomorrow at noon, but cosmologists everywhere are gossiping about what that news could be. The leading theory: Scientists have detected gravitational waves, in what would be a landmark discovery for the field of physics.

Gravitational waves are the last chunk of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity that was predicted but not yet observed. If gravitational waves have been observed, it most likely was done by the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (Bicep) telescope at the south pole. It stared at the cosmic microwave background radiation from 2003 to 2008, but it takes a long time to process and analyze the data when looking for a faint signal in a lot of noise.

2007 photograph of telescopes at the Dark Center at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. From top to bottom, the partly-buried AST/RO, QUaD, Viper, and finally BICEP and SPT at the bottom. Image credit: Robert Schwarz

The Bicep mission page describes anticipated gravitational waves as faint, polarized, and distorted by gravitational lensing of objects between us and the cosmic microwave background radiation. They released a video of their observations in 2008. The colour scale adjusts throughout the movie to highlight temperature fluctuations of both the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the galactic plane:

Why look at the cosmic microwave background radiation for signs of gravitational waves? Because an infinitesimal moment after the universe started — 10^-34 seconds after the big bang — we think it went through an inflationary period. If it did, that inflation could have amplified gravitational waves to such an extent that we can actually detect them. This would not only fill in that last missing chunk of things predicted by General Relativity that we haven't seen yet, but also offer a glimpse into the primeval universe. They won't be insta-proof that inflationary theory is correct, but they would rule out some cyclic theories for the origin of the universe.

Some pre-announcement articles are already mixing up very common gravity waves with gravitational waves. To differentiate, I'll pass things off to an exasperated Dr. Katherine Mack:

Gravity waves are common phenomena in both the ocean and the sky, as seen in this MODIS image. Read more about them at the Earth Observatory.

As for the press conference, I'm already bracing for disappointment. "Breaking news! We'll have breaking news for you on Monday!" announcements produce so much hype that the actual discovery probably won't live up to expectations. I'm not the only one feeling that way — the Guardian ran an entire piece interviewing cautiously excited cosmologists warning that the observations would need to be highly robust if they're going to be momentous.

Update: What, you can't wait until Monday to confirm that this is all about gravitational waves before learning about them? Preposterous Universe has a detailed, lovely write-up on the topic with enough math to satisfy even pernickety cosmologists.

Source: http://space.io9.com/breaking-well-have-cosmology-news-for-you-later-1544665418/@rtgonzalez?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Uruguay’s president nominated for Nobel Peace Prize for legalizing marijuana

Jose Mujica (AFP Photo / Miguel Rojo)

The president of Uruguay has been nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize. According to his advocates, José “Pepe” Mujica's much talked-about marijuana legalization is in fact "a tool for peace and understanding."

For the second year in a row, the Drugs Peace Institute, which has supported Mujica’s marijuana legalization drive since 2012, insisting that the consumption of marijuana should be protected as a human right, has endorsed his candidacy, along with members of Mujica's leftwing political party the Frente Amplio, the PlantaTuPlanta (Collective of Uruguayan growers) and the Latin American Coalition of Cannabis Activists (CLAC).

Despite an avalanche of global criticism, in late December Uruguay became the first country in the world to fully legalize the production and sale of the popular herbal drug. Under the new law, which comes into full effect in early April, Uruguayans will have several options to gain access to it.
The Drugs Peace Institute said that Mujica’s stand against the UN-led prohibition of mind-altering substances is a "symbol of a hand outstretched, of a new era in a divided world."
 
"It is a promise to bridge the gap between defiant marijuana consumers and the prohibiting society. Hopefully, the start of the acceptance of this consumption by society and the concomitant development of understanding of its use as a natural medicine, historically used for spiritual liberation, might initiate a process of healing in a world, very confused and deeply divided, over its religious legacy," the Dutch NGO stated on its website.

People take part in a demo for the legalization of marijuana in front of the Legislative Palace in Montevideo, on December 10, 2013, as the Senate discuss a law on the legalization of marijuana's cultivation and consumption. (AFP Photo / Pablo Porciuncula)

The institute pointed out that, unlike coca-based products that reinforce the ego and individual self-esteem, marijuana has the "peculiar quality of diminishing the consumer’s ego." It pointed out that so far only one government leader has succeeded in challenging the prohibition: "the World’s Poorest President” - Mujica - dubbed so due to his modest lifestyle.

"Jose Mujica once said that he’s been looking for god but [hasn’t] found him yet. By legalizing marijuana and opening the doors of spiritual happiness to the young, he might not have found the god of other nations…, but he certainly has followed in the footsteps of Jesus when he said ‘Let the children come to me. Don't stop them! For the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who are like these,’" the NGO noted.


“I’m very thankful to these people for honoring me,” Uruguay’s president responded in Havana, as quoted by La Nación Argentine daily. “We are only proposing the right to try another path because the path of repression doesn’t work. We don’t know if we’ll succeed. We ask for support, scientific spirit and to understand that no addiction is a good thing. But our efforts go beyond marijuana - we're taking aim at the drug traffic," Uruguay's 78-year-old guerrilla-turned president said.

The leader of the South American state has championed the controversial legislation as a way to snuff out the illegal drugs trade in Uruguay, noting that both Washington and Colorado had legalized marijuana. He signed the bill into law on December 25. The Uruguayan government has until April 9 to finalize the regulations that will govern the sale and cultivation of marijuana.

Marijuana aficionados will be given carte blanche to grow cannabis. However, the law forbids having more than six hives per person. There will be a cap on the amount that can be bought every month, initially set at 40 grams. Residents aged over 18 will have to register in a special nationwide database that keeps track of how much marijuana was purchased in the past month. The law will forbid foreigners to buy it, and in an attempt to undercut the illegal market price of $1.40, the market price for the drug will be set at a dollar a gram.

Late last month, Uruguay's National Cannabis Federation launched special training courses on the cultivation of the popular plant. The training courses are also put forward as one of the measures taken by the authorities to control the trafficking and consumption of marijuana.

The international community lashed out at Uruguay's leader, with the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board chief, Raymond Yans, saying that Uruguay "knowingly decided to break the universally agreed and internationally endorsed treaty." Mr Yans argued in a statement that claims that the law would help reduce crime were based on "rather precarious and unsubstantiated assumptions."
 
Uruguay's president made it into the top 10 finalists for the award last year. However, the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Mujica has been president of Uruguay since 2010. He was a member of an armed political group inspired by the Cuban revolution, the Tupamaros, in the 1960s and ‘70s. After the military coup in 1973, during the dictatorship, he spent 14 years in prison. This included being confined to the bottom of a well for more than two years.

When democracy was restored in 1985, Mujica was freed under an amnesty law. He was Minister of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries from 2005 to 2008 and a senator afterwards. When he became president, he pledged to give away 90 percent of his monthly salary to charities that benefit poor people and small entrepreneurs. Much to everybody's surprise, the unpretentious leader has also shunned the grandeur of the presidential residence in favor of his humble farmhouse.