"I of my own knowledge…"

It sounds like science-fiction, and perhaps ominous science-fiction at that. Sometimes it seems like every new technological advance (always termed “scientific advance”) is a new threat to privacy. Of course, that’s a pretty “glass half empty” way of looking at such things…. From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/3705790/Scientists-develop-software-that-can-map-dreams.html

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December 10, 1941. Thomas Merton entered a monastery, putting an end to his previous life and beginning another that was to prove more fulfilling in many ways.

December 10, 1968. Thomas Merton was accidentally electrocuted. See previous sentence.

That makes today a double anniversary for one of the more interesting and creative men of the 20th century. He was an Englishmen who became an American, a hedonist atheist who became a monk, an intellectual who became a mystic, a Catholic who met the Dalai Lama as one monk to another.

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In 1981 I was certain that Jaruzelski was wrong, indeed immoral. Over the past 27 years I have come to see things differently. He was in a difficult situation, motivated by patriotism quite as much as his opponents were, and indeed probably avoided a bloodbath and an incalculable prolongation of the Soviet system in response to the perceived threat of Satellite uprisings. But of course, who knows? The point it, he should be given credit for his probably motivation even if his reading of the situation was wrong. After all, all this time later we still can’t be sure!

This from http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1862527,00.html

Redemption for the Polish Leader Who Crushed Solidarity?

By BEATA PASEK/WARSAW Saturday, Nov. 29, 2008

In December of 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law on Poland, orchestrating a brutal crackdown on the pro-democracy Solidarity trade union movement that eventually saw some 90 people killed, and around 10,000 detained in internment camps. But as Jaruzelski and six other former top officials set out their defense in a criminal trial over their coup and crackdown, many of the former leaders of Solidarity have emerged among the general’s staunchest defenders. In a bizarre twist of history, the leaders of the very movement Jaruzelski sought to crush 27 years ago now say he was right, at the time, to curb Solidarity’s growing appetite for power.

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Republicans after the war charged that Roosevelt had deliberately suppressed advance awareness of the attack.

This is one controversy I don’t have any interest in pursuing beyond this elementary reasoning which you may or may not find persuasive.

Concede that FDR knew the likely consequences of his actions in the summer of 1941 (embargoing further fuel and steel shipments to Japan) would be war within a short time unless – improbably – Japan were to agree to withdraw from its decade-long invasion of China and Manchuria, and its year-long occupation of Indochina.

Concede that FDR felt it was vital that America defeat the Nazis, the Fascists and the militarist Japanese. It is well known that he had ordered US warships in the Atlantic to attack Nazi submarines in the summer of 1941.

Concede that an obvious attack upon US forces and territory would be more likely to unite the country behind war than abstract questions of statesmanship.

None of that adds up (in my mind) to a reason to suppress knowledge of an upcoming attack, for one simple reason.

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Larry-the-web-guy tells me that we now have four photo albums up, comprising 12 galleries — altogether, 133 photos.

Will probably do more after a while. I want to scan the photos I took in Peru in 1999 and get them put up too. (Some nice photos of Machu Picchu.)

But for the moment, I think it’s better to give Larry a rest!

Sooner or later, even Official Science “gets it,” and what had formerly been considered “merely anecdotal” becomes recognized as real. We are all one, in a very real if not always obvious way.

This, via Schwartzreport, from the Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/04/AR2008120403537.html?hpid=topnews

Happiness Can Spread Among People Like a Contagion, Study Indicates

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 5, 2008; Page A08
Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbors, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other.

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Years ago I read a very enlightening book by a man named Charles Hampden-Turner called Radical Man, in which he argued, from a psychological viewpoint, that when people spend enough time seeing things in a dualistic manner, they can lose the ability to perceive opportunities for cooperation across whatever lines separate them from their opponents. If this is true — and intuitively it seems to me that it must be true — what good end can political parties and ideological divisions come to?

You can already see it on AM talk radio, and political blogs, and any venue that clusters people of similar beliefs and emotional mind-sets. That way leads only downhill.

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Interesting “coincidence,” if you happen to believe in coincidence. I got an email from someone asking to see the 10 black box sessions from 2004 that I had offered readers some while ago. Took me a while to find them. Then, sending them off, I glanced at the material and found this, which seems very appropriate today.

This material features me in the black box at The Monroe Institute on May 4, 2004, with Skip Atwater acting as monitor from outside the booth. TGU means The Guys Upstairs, meaning whatever unidentified intelligences I was contacting.

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A thoughtful friend of mine responded to one of my political postings a while ago by saying (rightly) that our system was designed for a relatively small number of voters and a relatively short campaign, but today has become a “monster we know and dislike, where one’s vote counts one 200-millionth toward some outcome, where voters know that no matter how they vote, their entire state has been declared `safely’ in one camp or the other.”

He went on to say, “fortunately, each of us lives in an individual and not a mass world.”

I have thought about his comments for more than a month because on one level he’s absolutely right and on another level — well, I’m not so sure.

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