Is the Large Hadron Collider Un-Natural?

The world's most complex machine ever built, the powerful particle accelerator buried under French and Swiss soil has failed yet again.

Considering that the LHC has been built in order to detect a so-called god particle, it will be interesting to see whether or not it stands up to the principle laid out by Richard Buckminster Fuller:


Whatever nature permits is natural.
If nature does not permit it, it cannot and does not occur.

Is this perhaps the reason why the 6 billion dollar machine doesn't work!? Is it synchronicity that (this time) it was a bird, dropping a piece of bread that disturbed the super-conducting magnetic mandala?

Scientifically speaking, the unknown sub-atomic particle one is searching for is known as the Higgs boson, named after British physicist Peter Higgs - himself a staunch atheist and not at all happy with the more popular name.

Backround Info: Popular Science
Image: National Geographic
Richard Buckminster Fuller. Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975; item 1056.02)

UPDATE: The Beast is Working Again (21/11/2009)

Indiginous Energy ... in You and Me

The image at left is a design of mine for the film Modern Tribalism.
Alas, not every design one makes is being used, and low-fi filmworks
has used something else. Still, I do recommend the film.

Here's a bit of text spoken in the film:

There is indiginous energy in the modern person; an energy that has been sitting there for so long that it's really getting tired of being forgotten and left alone like that ...

And here's the official synopsis:
Journey into America's primitive soul in this "graphic, unflinching and startlingly touching" (L.A. Weekly) documentary about the resurgence of humanity's oldest and most intense rituals. From garden-variety tattooing, to frenzied effigy-burning festivals, to the disturbing extremes of body-piercing, Modern Tribalism explores the cultural context surrounding this underground movement.

And there's a trailer available right here.

Aung San Suu Kyi

The cover of her biography
PERFECT HOSTAGE
by Justin Wintle (2008)

In Memoriam George Orwell :: 1984 = 2009

The Quandary of the 21st Century

The reading that made me write this is concerned with two things: Climate Change and the possible necessity to reduce the breeding of livestock, which means that most of us should turn into vegetarians - unless you already are one.

However, becoming a vegetarian is not what I refer to as quandary, nor do I use quandary in order to imply that climate change presents such a situation. A quandary is nothing more than a difficult and unpleasant predicament, whereas human-made climate change is outright dangerous and possibly disastrous.

Perhaps it is best to read the few lines of text that got me into this philosophical mood:

A 2006 United Nations (UN) report revealed that the livestock sector generates more greenhouse gases than all the cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships in the world combined. The report attributed 18 per cent of annual worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions to cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens and other farmed animals, but new research from the Worldwatch Institute indicates that the figure actually could be much higher. According to Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, co-authors of “Livestock and Climate Change”, raising animals for food produces 51 per cent of all greenhouse-gas emissions.
[quote from Eagle Eye, a blog that is part of the English newspaper The Independent]

Photograph © CCRCC

It all sounds straightforward, doesn't it? A UN report, authors who publish data based on research by the Worldwatch Institute.

Now what I perceive as the quandary, is the fact that these days, we can't anymore believe anyone. It's a general disease that came with the information-explosion and the media-society, with corporations often employing scientists as PR manufacturers.

These days, it is possible that the driving force behind such a report are the industries running on selling oil and making cars. Feeling that they look bad - in environmental terms - they would be interested in telling us that eating meat is worse than driving cars.

On the other hand, the people behind the cited reports could be extremist PETA vegetarians who want to turn meat-eaters into outcasts, similar to what is happening to tobacco-smokers.

Now how can we decide if the data are true or a full blown lie, whether or not spin-doctors have twisted it - and who paid the spin doctors? Each of us would need an army of scientists, desk-clerks and secretaries to find out what's true and what not ... and we can't afford that.

Then again, governments do have such armies of aides, and we actually pay for them, yet to no avail. Watching the carousel of wrong decisions that's known as government ... these Ladies and Gentlemen seem to suffer from the very same quandary as you and I: How to detect a True Lie?

Goddesses of All Four Directions

Look what I found ... it's beautiful, even though this small image doesn't do justice to the detail of the original.
But go to the Goddess Timeline website and see a better version of this image, plus 3 others. Together, these 4 charts provide us with a well done visual timeline that shows many of the important and known Goddesses.
Seriously, I don't know the artist who made this, Constance Tippett, and I've no reason to promote her work ... but for the beauty of the idea and its execution.

Naturally, no one could prepare a chart with all the female deities that have been worshipped at one time or another by this or that culture ...
Even male Gods the world over number in the thousands, yet the number of Goddesses is even larger.
After all, the Goddess (and matriarchy) was there in the beginning, the Gods (and patriarchy) are a much later invention.

The Situation in Afghanistan

There is a superb article by Chris Hedges at Truth Dig.
It's bad news, yes, but it's good that this type of news is being published. It tells that the figures in Afghan government are exact clones of the Taliban - it's just that they have a different name: Democratically Elected Leaders (aided by the Western Empire). However, their atrocities and disregard for others - especially women - equals the Taliban in many ways.

And then there's this disturbing article at Slate, in which Christopher Hitchens clearly demonstrates that the West - specifically the United Nations - is in fact complicit to more or less all that's happening there!

I'm so glad to have been in that country when it still was quiet and beautiful - in 1974 - way before the Russians even. The majestic Buddha statues were still standing then, no Taliban was in sight, there were no mines to tread on. I rent a horse and went into the mountains, found surreal landscapes with a terrace of 7 lakes, and friendly people who told me that eating a piece of opium would help my stomach problems.
Photograph Copyright © CCRCC

WOMAN by Neneh Cherry

Neneh Cherry: Woman (1996)

W.O.M.A.N. by Gina Cloud

As the subtitle promises, Gina Cloud's W.O.M.A.N. presents the reader with a redefinition of what each and every Woman could be: a Wild, Open, Magical, Authentically-empowered Nectar being - if only women themselves, and the society they live in, would let and encourage them to be thus self-fulfilled.

The book is a remarkable manifesto, written by a sparkling personality with a passionate voice; a mixture of daring vision, personal experience and a sharp, critical eye for the many facets of our society that seem to conspire to keep woman confined to a very limited set of stereotypes.

The author shows how, if WOMAN would redefine herself according to this new vision, she would rather be dancing wildly than be a 'good girl', would love and nurture her own self as well as others, could liberate herself from the various straightjackets that have been imposed not only by patriarchy but also by feminism, by the medical profession as well as the mainstream media, by church, state, neighbors, mothers, fathers and - worst of all - by the very men who profess to love Her.

This book is a perfect gift ... for yourself and others. Read it once, read it twice, and then leave it someplace where it will be found by husbands, lovers, sons or daughters. W.O.M.A.N. is mainly written for women, of course, but there's much in it all genders should know ...

Look for the book on Amazon

Megalithic Temple of the Yoni

In a paper entitled Stonehenge: a view from medicine (Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, February 2003), Professor Anthony M. Perks has launched the theory that the megaliths have been build in order to represent the Yoni (female genitalia).

Viewed from above, Perks suggests, the inner bluestone circle is equivalent to the labia minora, and the giant outer sarsen circle to the labia majora. Last not least, the altar stone represents the clitoris … and so on.

As was to be expected, the theory has been criticized and made ridiculous in many newspaper articles and on many blogs. What most people do not realize - because hardly anyone reads the original paper - is that Mr. Perks himself has admitted that it’s just a theory; and one that can never be tested, never be proven right or wrong.

Naturally, everyone is free to see it this way or not, but the idea very well fits into the framework of many ancient religious beliefs in which an Earth Mother and other Goddesses had a central role.

One doesn’t have to believe it … but it certainly is good food for thought.

The original article from JRSM can be read in this PDF