Debt Slavery

Life in the industrialized world is predicated on debt. We buy our homes, our cars, our toys with money we do not have. Virtually everyone is in debt to one degree or another.

In poor area's of our communities we see all sorts of "lending institutions", all competing with each other for a slice of some poor schmoes debt. We have entire sectors of our economy built upon collecting debt from people, from Repo men, lawyers to the most hated of all debt collectors who literally drive people to suicide with their constant harassment.

Don't kid yourself and think that is where the problem of debt ends. Every middle class neighbourhood you see, or upper class area is full of debt. Those million dollar homes, giant SUV's pools etc, they don't pay for the themselves!

So we are all in debt, so what?!?! Debt robs the people of their power, you can't afford to take action, to protest, to be active in your community for fear of losing what little we actually own! Debt is fear, debt is what keeps the masses down, debt is the new opiate of the masses. Where religion was once the tool to keep the people passive, it is now debt.

We can't afford to do anything to fix our societies, we can't afford to stand up and say enough is enough, because we are all scared.

Drought Drives Decade-Long Decline in Plant Growth

Earth has done an ecological about-face: Global plant productivity that once flourished under warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline, struck by the stress of drought.

NASA-funded researchers Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running, of the University of Montana in Missoula, discovered the global shift during an analysis of NASA satellite data. Compared with a six-percent increase spanning two earlier decades, the recent ten-year decline is slight -- just one percent. The shift, however, could impact food security, biofuels, and the global carbon cycle.

"We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested that global warming might actually help plant growth around the world," Running said.

"These results are extraordinarily significant because they show that the global net effect of climatic warming on the productivity of terrestrial vegetation need not be positive -- as was documented for the 1980’s and 1990’s," said Diane Wickland, of NASA Headquarters and manager of NASA's Terrestrial Ecology research program.

Conventional wisdom based on previous research held that land plant productivity was on the rise. A 2003 paper in Science led by then University of Montana scientist Ramakrishna Nemani (now at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.) showed that global terrestrial plant productivity increased as much as six percent between 1982 and 1999. That's because for nearly two decades, temperature, solar radiation and water availability -- influenced by climate change -- were favorable for growth.

Setting out to update that analysis, Zhao and Running expected to see similar results as global average temperatures have continued to climb. Instead, they found that the impact of regional drought overwhelmed the positive influence of a longer growing season, driving down global plant productivity between 2000 and 2009. The team published their findings Aug. 20 in Science.

"This is a pretty serious warning that warmer temperatures are not going to endlessly improve plant growth," Running said.

The discovery comes from an analysis of plant productivity data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite, combined with growing season climate variables including temperature, solar radiation and water. The plant and climate data are factored into an algorithm that describes constraints on plant growth at different geographical locations.

For example, growth is generally limited in high latitudes by temperature and in deserts by water. But regional limitations can very in their degree of impact on growth throughout the growing season.

Zhao and Running's analysis showed that since 2000, high-latitude northern hemisphere ecosystems have continued to benefit from warmer temperatures and a longer growing season. But that effect was offset by warming-associated drought that limited growth in the southern hemisphere, resulting in a net global loss of land productivity.

"This past decade’s net decline in terrestrial productivity illustrates that a complex interplay between temperature, rainfall, cloudiness, and carbon dioxide, probably in combination with other factors such as nutrients and land management, will determine future patterns and trends in productivity," Wickland said.

Researchers are keen on maintaining a record of the trends into the future. For one reason, plants act as a carbon dioxide "sink," and shifting plant productivity is linked to shifting levels of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Also, stresses on plant growth could challenge food production.

"The potential that future warming would cause additional declines does not bode well for the ability of the biosphere to support multiple societal demands for agricultural production, fiber needs, and increasingly, biofuel production," Zhao said.

"Even if the declining trend of the past decade does not continue, managing forests and croplands for multiple benefits to include food production, biofuel harvest, and carbon storage may become exceedingly challenging in light of the possible impacts of such decadal-scale changes," Wickland said.

Originally posted by NASA

Man Arrested for Yard Sign

This is so retarded, I'm just going to post the story as is, free speech anyone!?

A Valley Center, Kansas man was arrested and charged with “criminal defamation” for placing a sign in his own front yard that was critical of the city and specifically the city administrator Joel Pile.

He was cuffed, fingerprinted, booked into the Sedgwick County Jail and released on bail. His crime: putting up a yard sign critical of the Valley Center city administrator.

Jarrod West is out on bail, facing criminal defamation charges for a sign he put in his front yard about persistent flooding issues he says cost him over $50,000 over the last three years. The sign says, “Dear Valley Center, I did not buy Lake Front Property! Fix this problem. This is what I pay taxes for. PS. Joel this means you!” Joel being City Administrator Joel Pile.

“They want me to shut up and go away,” said West. “I’ve got a home to protect. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s mine.”

When City Administrator Joel Pile saw the sign, West was arrested and booked into the Sedgwick County Jail on a criminal charge of defamation. He spent the night behind bars and is now free on a $10,000 bond.

When asked about the arrest, Joel Pile said, “People and individuals have an absolute right to free speech. “But however, when they do it and continue to do it within the realms of what we believe is actual malice for the purpose of holding me accountable to the public, we believe that crosses a line (emphasis added).”

While Mr. Pile is obviously a thin-skinned bureaucrat who dispatched the guns of local government to kidnap someone whose opinions differed from his, it is the officers who carried out the arrest that should feel the full weight of our rebuke. It takes a special kind of thug to carry out violence against someone simply because he wrote words on a sign that he himself owned. The foot soldiers of tyranny can easily put down their weapons and refuse to participate in the caging of innocent people, but they choose not to. Disgusting authoritarians such as Joel Pile would loose all their power if their thugs refused to do the dirty work.

by: Paula Parmeley Carter From this site http://www.copblock.org/744/man-arrested-for-yard-sign/

TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR A GLOBAL HUMANISM

1- Proclaim the natural dignity and inherent worth of all human beings.

2- Respect the life and property of others.

3- Practice tolerance and open-mindedness towards the choices and life styles of others.

4- Share with those who are less fortunate and mutually assist those who are in need of help.

5- Use neither lies, nor spiritual doctrine, nor temporal power to dominate and exploit others.

6- Rely on reason, logic and science to understand the Universe and to solve life's problems.

7- Conserve and improve the Earth's natural environment—land, soil, water, air and space—as humankind's common heritage.

8- Resolve differences and conflicts cooperatively without resorting to violence or to wars.

9- Organize public affairs according to individual freedom and responsibility, through political and economic democracy.

10- Develop one's intelligence and talents through education and effort.

The Con of the Decade

This is how it all works, laid out by Charles Hugh Smith and Alan Dover, Charles site can be found here: http://www.oftwominds.com/

1. Enable trillions of dollars in mortgages guaranteed to default by packaging unlimited quantities of them into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), creating umlimited demand for fraudulently originated loans.

2. Sell these MBS as "safe" to credulous investors, institutions, town councils in Norway, etc., i.e. "the bezzle" on a global scale.

3. Make huge "side bets" against these doomed mortgages so when they default then the short-side bets generate billions in profits.

4. Leverage each $1 of actual capital into $100 of high-risk bets.

5. Hide the utterly fraudulent bets offshore and/or off-balance sheet (not that the regulators you had muzzled would have noticed anyway).

6. When the longside bets go bad, transfer hundreds of billions of dollars in Federal guarantees, bailouts and backstops into the private hands which made the risky bets, either via direct payments or via proxies like AIG. Enable these private Power Elites to borrow hundreds of billions more from the Treasury/Fed at zero interest.

7. Deposit these funds at the Federal Reserve, where they earn 3-4%. Reap billions in guaranteed income by borrowing Federal money for free and getting paid interest by the Fed.

8. As profits pile up, start buying boatloads of short-term U.S. Treasuries. Now the taxpayers who absorbed the trillions in private losses and who transferred trillions in subsidies, backstops, guarantees, bailouts and loans to private banks and corporations, are now paying interest on the Treasuries their own money purchased for the banks/corporations.

9. Slowly acquire trillions of dollars in Treasuries--not difficult to do as the Federal government is borrowing $1.5 trillion a year.

10. Stop buying Treasuries and dump a boatload onto the market, forcing interest rates to rise as supply of new T-Bills exceeds demand (at least temporarily). Repeat as necessary to double and then triple interest rates paid on Treasuries.

11. Buy hundreds of billions in long-term Treasuries at high rates of interest. As interest rates rise, interest payments dwarf all other Federal spending, forcing extreme cuts in all other government spending.

12. Enjoy the hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments being paid by taxpayers on Treasuries that were purchased with their money but which are safely in private hands.

Since the Federal government could potentially inflate away these trillions in Treasuries, buy enough elected officials to force austerity so inflation remains tame. In essence, these private banks and corporations now own the revenue stream of the Federal government and its taxpayers. Neat con, and the marks will never understand how "saving our financial system" led to their servitude to the very interests they bailed out.

The circle is now complete: in "saving our financial system," the public borrowed trillions and transferred the money to private Power Elites, who then buy the public debt with the money swindled out of the taxpayer. Then the taxpayers transfer more wealth every year to the Power Elites/Plutocracy in the form of interest on the Treasury debt. The Power Elites will own the debt that was taken on to bail them out of bad private bets: this is the culmination of privatized gains, socialized risk.

In effect, it's a Third World/colonial scam on a gigantic scale: plunder the public treasury, then buy the debt which was borrowed and transferred to your pockets. You are buying the country with money you borrowed from its taxpayers. No despot could do better.

The Execution of Mata Hari

I have been reading about Mata Hari, who was a very interesting person who was probably wrongly executed. I wanted to post the account of the day of her execution as told by Henry Wales a British reporter.

"The first intimation she received that her plea had been denied was when she was led at daybreak from her cell in the Saint-Lazare prison to a waiting automobile and then rushed to the barracks where the firing squad awaited her.

Never once had the iron will of the beautiful woman failed her. Father Arbaux, accompanied by two sisters of charity, Captain Bouchardon, and Maitre Clunet, her lawyer, entered her cell, where she was still sleeping - a calm, untroubled sleep, it was remarked by the turnkeys and trusties.

The sisters gently shook her. She arose and was told that her hour had come.

'May I write two letters?' was all she asked.

Consent was given immediately by Captain Bouchardon, and pen, ink, paper, and envelopes were given to her.

She seated herself at the edge of the bed and wrote the letters with feverish haste. She handed them over to the custody of her lawyer.

Then she drew on her stockings, black, silken, filmy things, grotesque in the circumstances. She placed her high-heeled slippers on her feet and tied the silken ribbons over her insteps.

She arose and took the long black velvet cloak, edged around the bottom with fur and with a huge square fur collar hanging down the back, from a hook over the head of her bed. She placed this cloak over the heavy silk kimono which she had been wearing over her nightdress.

Her wealth of black hair was still coiled about her head in braids. She put on a large, flapping black felt hat with a black silk ribbon and bow. Slowly and indifferently, it seemed, she pulled on a pair of black kid gloves. Then she said calmly:

'I am ready.'

The party slowly filed out of her cell to the waiting automobile.

The car sped through the heart of the sleeping city. It was scarcely half-past five in the morning and the sun was not yet fully up.

Clear across Paris the car whirled to the Caserne de Vincennes, the barracks of the old fort which the Germans stormed in 1870.

The troops were already drawn up for the execution. The twelve Zouaves, forming the firing squad, stood in line, their rifles at ease. A subofficer stood behind them, sword drawn.

The automobile stopped, and the party descended, Mata Hari last. The party walked straight to the spot, where a little hummock of earth reared itself seven or eight feet high and afforded a background for such bullets as might miss the human target.

As Father Arbaux spoke with the condemned woman, a French officer approached, carrying a white cloth.

'The blindfold,' he whispered to the nuns who stood there and handed it to them.

'Must I wear that?' asked Mata Hari, turning to her lawyer, as her eyes glimpsed the blindfold.

Maitre Clunet turned interrogatively to the French officer.

'If Madame prefers not, it makes no difference,' replied the officer, hurriedly turning away. .

Mata Hari was not bound and she was not blindfolded. She stood gazing steadfastly at her executioners, when the priest, the nuns, and her lawyer stepped away from her.

The officer in command of the firing squad, who had been watching his men like a hawk that none might examine his rifle and try to find out whether he was destined to fire the blank cartridge which was in the breech of one rifle, seemed relieved that the business would soon be over.

A sharp, crackling command and the file of twelve men assumed rigid positions at attention. Another command, and their rifles were at their shoulders; each man gazed down his barrel at the breast of the women which was the target.

She did not move a muscle.

The underofficer in charge had moved to a position where from the corners of their eyes they could see him. His sword was extended in the air.

It dropped. The sun - by this time up - flashed on the burnished blade as it described an arc in falling. Simultaneously the sound of the volley rang out. Flame and a tiny puff of greyish smoke issued from the muzzle of each rifle. Automatically the men dropped their arms.

At the report Mata Hari fell. She did not die as actors and moving picture stars would have us believe that people die when they are shot. She did not throw up her hands nor did she plunge straight forward or straight back.

Instead she seemed to collapse. Slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head up always, and without the slightest change of expression on her face. For the fraction of a second it seemed she tottered there, on her knees, gazing directly at those who had taken her life. Then she fell backward, bending at the waist, with her legs doubled up beneath her. She lay prone, motionless, with her face turned towards the sky.

A non-commissioned officer, who accompanied a lieutenant, drew his revolver from the big, black holster strapped about his waist. Bending over, he placed the muzzle of the revolver almost - but not quite - against the left temple of the spy. He pulled the trigger, and the bullet tore into the brain of the woman.

Mata Hari was surely dead."

Ash celebrates Fumito Ueada's contributions to feminism.

Video Games | HAWP | Ico

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

How to remove ads from MSN

Notice anything about my MSN contacts list?

No ads!

I find the ads at the bottom of my MSN window to be really irritating, so I wanted to get rid of them, turns out there are plenty of programs you can download to stop these ads. I really don't feel like downloading a program which could contain viruses or trojans just to stop these ads, so I haven't bothered.

It turns out there is a quick and simple way to stop these ads from appearing. This is a trick which does not involve hacking MSN at all.

Add the following two lines to your host file (host file can be found here c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\host), you can edit this file with notepad:

127.0.0.1 rad.msn.com
127.0.0.1 rad.live.com

The two names listed above are the ad servers for MSN, so all you are doing is pointing that address at your own computer, so MSN doesnt pull any ads from the remote server!

iphone or ispy!

"The iPhone logs everything that you type in to learn autocorrect"




The iphone, people love it, so do the police!

From Amber Hunt,

A burgeoning field of forensic study deals with iPhones specifically because of their popularity, the demographics of those who own them and what the phone's technology records during its use.

Law-enforcement experts said iPhone technology records a wealth of information that can be tapped more easily than BlackBerry and Droid devices to help police learn where you've been, what you were doing there and whether you've got something to hide.

"Very, very few people have any idea how to actually remove data from their phone," said Sam Brothers, a cell-phone forensic researcher with U.S. Customs and Border Protection who teaches law-enforcement agents how to retrieve information from iPhones in criminal cases.

"It may look like everything's gone," he said. "But for anybody who's got a clue, retrieving that information is easy."

Clues lurk in deleted bins, screenshots

Two years ago, as iPhone sales skyrocketed, former hacker Jonathan Zdziarski decided law-enforcement agencies might need help retrieving data from the devices.

So he set out to write a 15-page, how-to manual that turned into a 144-page book ("iPhone Forensics," O'Reilly Media). That, in turn, led to Zdziarski being tapped by law-enforcement agencies nationwide to teach them just how much information is stored in iPhones - and how that data can be gathered for evidence in criminal cases.

"These devices are people's companions today," said Zdziarski, 34, who lives in Maine. "They're not mobile phones anymore. They organize people's lives. And if you're doing something criminal, something about it is probably going to go through that phone."

It's an area of forensic science that's just beginning to explode, law-enforcement and cell phone experts said. Zdziarski said the focus of forensics recovery has been on the iPhone over other smartphones in large part because of its popularity.

An estimated 1.7 million people rushed to buy the latest iPhone version released last month. Before that, Apple had sold more than 50 million iPhones, according to company figures.

Although some high-stakes criminal cases have used cell phone towers to estimate a suspect or victim's whereabouts, few have laid out the information that iPhones have to offer. For example:

- Every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it. Savvy law-enforcement agents armed with search warrants could use those snapshots to see if a suspect is lying about whereabouts during a crime.

- iPhone photos are embedded with GEO tags and identifying information, meaning that photos posted online might not only include GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken, but also the serial number of the phone that took it.

- Even more information is stored by the applications themselves, including the user's browser history. That data is meant in part to direct custom-tailored advertisements to the user, but experts said that some of it could prove useful to police.

Clearing out user histories isn't enough to clean the device of that data, said John B. Minor, a communications expert and member of the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners who has written articles for law enforcement about iPhone evidence.

"With the iPhone, even if it's in the deleted bin, it may still be in the database," Minor said. "Much is contained deep within the phone."

What users don't know

Some of that usable data is in screenshots.

Just as users can take and store a picture of their iPhone's screen, the phone itself automatically shoots and stores hundreds of such images as people close out one application to use another.

"Those screen snapshots can contain images of e-mails or proof of activities that might be inculpatory, or exculpatory," Minor said.

Most iPhone users agree to let the device locate them so they can use fully the phone's mapping functions, as well as various global positioning system applications.

The free application Urbanspoon is primarily designed to help users locate nearby restaurants. Yet the data stored there might not only help police pinpoint where a victim was shortly before dying, but it also might lead to the restaurant that served the victim's last meal.

"Most people enable the location services because they want the benefits of the applications," Minor said. "What they don't know is that it's recording your GPS coordinates."

A tremendous source

Bill Cataldo, an assistant Macomb County prosecutor who heads the office's homicide unit, said iPhones are treated more like small computers than mobile phones.

"People are keeping a tremendous amount of information on there," he said.

Cataldo said he has found phone call histories and text messages most useful in homicide cases. But Zdziarski, who has helped federal and state law-enforcement agencies gather evidence, said those elements are just scratching the surface when it comes to the information police and prosecutors soon will start pulling from iPhones.

"There are some terrorists out there who obtained some information about a network from an iPhone," he said.

Sam Brothers, who works for U.S. Customs and Border Protection and helps train law-enforcement agencies about cell phone forensics, said he also has testified in state and federal cases about data he has retrieved from iPhones.

Although he can't comment about specific cases, he provided a hypothetical:

"Let's say you have a gang and somebody's killed a gang member on the street," he said. "The killer takes a picture on his iPhone. . . . We as law enforcement may retrieve that image and might have proof not only of the death, but the time of death."

Even people who don't take pictures or leave GPS coordinates behind often unwittingly leave other trails, Zdziarski said.

"Like the keyboard cache," he said. "The iPhone logs everything that you type in to learn autocorrect" so that it can correct a user's typing mistakes.

Apple doesn't store that cache very securely, Zdziarski contended, so someone with know-how could recover months of typing in the order in which it was typed, even if the e-mail or text it was part of has long since been deleted.

Apple did not return phone calls or an e-mail seeking comment for this story.

Concerns about privacy

Adam Gershowitz, who teaches criminal procedure at the University of Houston Law Center, said the new technology brings with it concerns about privacy - especially when it comes to whether investigators have the right to search someone's iPhone after an arrest.

So far, the courts have treated mobile phones like a within-reach container that police can search the same way they can check items in a glove box or cigarette pack, Gershowitz said, though the Ohio Supreme Court in 2009 ruled to bar warrantless searches of cell phone data.

That case is being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Phones are regular tools of the drug trade," Gershowitz said. As police become more familiar with iPhones, they become more adept at flipping through photos, map searches and text messages as they look for evidence.

Zdziarski said some examiners are afraid to touch iPhones because of privacy concerns.

"I personally will never work on civil cases," he said, adding that when he advises law-enforcement agencies about obtaining search warrants for iPhones, he instructs them to add iPhone-specific language to the warrant.

But, he said, as iPhones appear to keep selling in record numbers, law enforcement appears poised to keep up.

"It's no longer about a list of phone numbers and maybe a couple of pictures," Zdziarski said. "You're talking about data that can travel back a year or longer. That's useful to law enforcement."

Tribal girl stripped over 'affair', molested by hundreds in Bengal

What the hell is wrong with people?

SURI: A 17-year-old tribalgirl was stripped, beaten and forced to walk nude for 8km across three villages with hundreds of men molesting her all the way and taking videos on their mobiles. It was a shocking reminder of the Guwahati incident in November 2007 when a teenager was stripped and molested by a mob during an ethnic clash. An MMS clipping of the Birbhum girls ordeal is now doing the rounds under the name 'Adibasi girl'. And it is this footage that is finally getting the victim some justice.

According to sources, the girls fault was that she loved a boy from another community. Police were shocked to learn that the panchayats and other local bodies knew of the incident but hadn't bothered to inform the administration. The incident happened four months ago but the girl was too traumatized to go to the authorities. It is only when the administration came to know of the MMS that police swung into action on their own and arrested five of the culprits on Sunday.

Some frames in the video are, too, horrific to watch. The girl has a dazed, dead look on her face as she staggers along dusty dirt tracks. A jeering crowd of tribals follows her, beating drums and thrashing her with sticks whenever she stops. Little boys throw stones at her. She takes the blows, defenceless, as she uses her arms in a futile attempt to protect her honour. Men pounce on her, pull her arms apart and molest her amid laughter as the drums beat up a frenzy.

This torture went on for hours in broad daylight, in the scorching heat of April. The footage shows just 11 minutes of it. On Saturday, some journalists showed the clipping to SP Humayun Kabir and DM Saumitra Mohan demanding why they were not taking any action.

Source: http://tiny.cc/y3xbc

The Big Bust?

Modern physics has always told us that the universe began with a bang! The idea of the universe starting with a giant explosion explained the red and blue shift we see when we look at the stars in our night sky. That is we see that many objects in space are moving away from us at an extremely high speed which causes light to change frequencies, ie. Red Shifting.

The other thing that the Big Bang explains is the microwave background noise we measure when looking to the sky. Scientists have always said this is residue (or an echo) of the Big Bang.

The one giant glaring problem with the Big Bang theory is that we need to do some mathematical gymnastics to make it work. You are asking, what do I mean? Well, have you heard of Dark Matter or Dark Energy? These are both tricks of the trade that physicists have used to make the Big Bang model work, and depending on the model this Dark Matter is supposed to make up as much as 75% of the universe.

Its kind of funny when you think about it, that serious scientists rely on something they have no proof of to explain the universe. The only proof that Dark Matter exists is that it helps make the theory work. This sounds as bad as religious folks pointing to the bible as proof of god.

Physicist Wun-Yi Shu of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan has a theory which explains the universe without a Big Bang, which has no need for "Dark Matter/Dark Energy" to explain our observations.

Shu's theory is essentially that time and space are not independent entities, rather they can be converted back and forth between each other. With the speed of light being the conversion factor between the two. Couple to this, mass and length are interchangeable in a relationship in which the conversion factor depends on both the gravitational constant and the speed of light (neither of which need be constant).

According to Shu, as the Universe expands, mass and time are converted to length and space and vice versa as it contracts. This leads to the conclusion that the universe has no beginning or end, just alternating periods of expansion and contraction.

You can download his full paper here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.1750

From that page:

In the late 1990s, observations of Type Ia supernovae led to the astounding discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. The explanation of this anomalous acceleration has been one of the great problems in physics since that discovery. In this article we propose cosmological models that can explain the cosmic acceleration without introducing a cosmological constant into the standard Einstein field equation, negating the necessity for the existence of dark energy. There are four distinguishing features of these models: 1) the speed of light and the gravitational "constant" are not constant, but vary with the evolution of the universe, 2) time has no beginning and no end, 3) the spatial section of the universe is a 3-sphere, and 4) the universe experiences phases of both acceleration and deceleration. One of these models is selected and tested against current cosmological observations of Type Ia supernovae, and is found to fit the redshift-luminosity distance data quite well.

I have always hated the notion of Dark Matter, anytime someone needs to pull a number out of the air to make their science work, I am very suspect. While Shu's theory may not be the last word on our model of the universe, I for one am thrilled that physicists are looking for new theories to explain the universe that don't rely on voodoo numbers to make them work.

The Egg

This is such a great short story, I thought I would share...why can't I write like this?!!

The Egg
By: Andy Weir

You were on your way home when you died.

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.

And that’s when you met me.

“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”

“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.

“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”

“Yup,” I said.

“I… I died?”

“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.

You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Are you god?” You asked.

“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”

“My kids… my wife,” you said.

“What about them?”

“Will they be all right?”

“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”

You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”

“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”

“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”

“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”

“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”

You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”

“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”

“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”

I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.

“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”

“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”

“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”

“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”

“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”

“Where you come from?” You said.

“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”

“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”

“So what’s the point of it all?”

“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”

“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.

I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”

“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”

“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”

“Just me? What about everyone else?”

“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”

You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”

“All you. Different incarnations of you.”

“Wait. I’m everyone!?”

“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.

“I’m every human being who ever lived?”

“Or who will ever live, yes.”

“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”

“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.

“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.

“And you’re the millions he killed.”

“I’m Jesus?”

“And you’re everyone who followed him.”

You fell silent.

“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”

You thought for a long time.

“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”

“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”

“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”

“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”

“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”

“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”

And I sent you on your way.

Originally posted here: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

Heavy Metal Baby

Reminds me of my son at that age, he use to rock out to Ozzy and Iron Maiden!