Todays Intel Report: Corpse-Eating Killer Robots

"Because Television News Sucks So Bad"

Let's take a quick look at a few of the goodies in the news that aught to scare the shit out of us:
1. Bush-era spying may have been blackmailing Democrats
The secret spy program may have been why the Dems appeared so spineless against Darth Cheney; it has been revealed that both former President Bill Clinton and Rep. Jane Harman were among those wiretapped. In Clinton's case it has been passed off as a one-time accident. In Harman's case, far more serious, the wiretap suggests that she was cutting deals with people connected to an Israeli spy ring in Washinton.
The fact she may have negotiated a "go easy" case on the spy ring shows how powerful the Israeli lobby is in the U.S. Government. The fact that Harman, Clinton and you and me were spied on by our own government should really piss you off. And you know it goes way deeper than this.
2. The CIA Put $400 Million Into Instigating A Revolution In Iran
Democracy, Schmoceracy. Sure, we overthrew Iran in 1953, (and now tried again, after the current election) but we are clearly still involved in various "color revolutions" all around the world. Dangerous stuff, considering it blew back on us when WE CREATED THE TALIBAN to fight the Russians...
3. Dick Cheney Ran Assassination Squads Without Knowledge Of CIA Or Congress
Oh Duh. Still more proof that Bush was a puppet.
But here's the kicker: Bush had already informed Congress in 2001 about a program to kill AlQueda leaders, which has been ongoing. It was actually something else.
So what the hell was this alternative program run by Cheney, which was so abhorrent that it stunned Congress when current CIA Director Panetta exposed it?
Let's see; How about the CIA killing people in the United States, against their charter? How about revealing the existance of Space-based laser platforms? How about killing people who knew there was a cover-up regarding the events of 9-11?
4. Military Developing Corpse-Eating Robots
"R2, Speak to me, R2!"
Yes, soon C3po will be equipped with weapons and a fuel burner that can process grass, wood, dead (or live?) animal and HUMAN corpses, which would be plentiful on the battlefield. Real Zombie Wars. This should put a smile on the face of our favorite Zombie, Bobbe Edmonds at "Thick As Thieves"...

Yes, Chinese Swords CAN Cut

Jose sent us a link to this video of Scott Rodell at the Huanuo sword factory. Here, he uses the "Jian" first, I love the rolling cut he uses -- then the bigger and heavier "Dao". Here is the link to his website at The Great River Taoist Center.

Rick also sent us this link to a cool Blog "The Wu Sword Project", their mission statement is "This site chronicles our project to find the best authentic dao (sabre), jian (sword) and qiang (spear) for traditional Wu Style Tai Chi Chuan".

Thanks guys!

Review: The Complete Taiji Dao

Now here is a book that arrived on my desk at exactly the right time!
"The Complete Taiji Dao - The Art of the Chinese Saber" by Zhang Yun is the most complete book on swordsmanship that I have seen yet. At a hefty 429 pages, this comprehensive study of the Chinese Saber is my new study material as I prepare to go to a weekend-long Wudang saber seminar with our Taiji instructor Michael Gilman.
While I have had training in the Japanese sword in Aikido, the Chinese sword is still new to me. Unlike the "Jian", the more delicate double-edged sword most often seen in Taiji practice, the Dao or saber is a large single-edged blade handled with powerful slashing motions.
In "The Complete Dao", Zhang Yun provides us with his background, and then procedes to explore the history of this weapon from crude jade and bronze models to the beautiful "Yao Dao", or slender waistcoat swords of the Royalty. As implied, there are many types of Dao, from heavy chopping cleavers to longer and narrower Dao's such as the ones used in Taiji practice. Zhang Yun explains this type allows him to more readily project his Chi to the end of the sabre, and is more nimble. Most Dao's are used single-handed, but Yun also demonstrates with a beautiful double-handed model with a ring pommel. (I want one!)
Zhang Yun provides very clear photos of all form work in the book, something that is usually difficult to read and put into practice. As the saber and spear were both the soldier's battlefield weapons, the applications from the form are against an opponent with a spear. Further in the book, the application work against both a heavier chopping broadsword and the slender "Jian" sword are demonstrated.
For me, this book arrived at a time when my interest in learning the Chinese sword is really growing. The book explains in great detail how Taiji principles are extended to weapon use as well as how the Taiji Dao is unique and different than conventional broadsword use. This book will stay with my collection forever.

You can read more about "The Complete Dao" at this link for Blue Snake Books, along with hundreds of other martial arts titles, please check it out!

How Psychedelics Shaped The Internet And Our Future

Fear not, Goody-Two-Shoes out there; this post will not send you to the street corner looking for Meth.
This is about our look at Brain activity regarding meditation, non-linear thinking and the search for higher consciousness.
From This article in the Huffington Post, Author Ryan Grim provides an adaptation of his book "This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History Of Getting High In America".
Specifically, Grim details how some of the most important advances in science, medicine and technology have been influenced by the use of psychedelic drugs.
From the article, which centers around Apple computer and i-product founder Steve Jobs:

That Jobs used LSD and values the contribution it made to his thinking is far from unusual in the world of computer technology. Psychedelic drugs have influenced some of America's foremost computer scientists. The history of this connection is well documented in a number of books, the best probably being What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, by New York Times technology reporter John Markoff.
Psychedelic drugs, Markoff argues, pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas Engelbart is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped invent the mouse. Apple's Jobs has said that Microsoft's Bill Gates, would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." In a 1994 interview with Playboy, however, Gates coyly didn't deny having dosed as a young man.
(snip)
John Gilmore was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems and registered the domain name Toad.com in 1987. A Burner and well-known psychonaut, he's certainly one of the mind-blown rich. Today a civil-liberties activist, he's perhaps best known for Gilmore's Law, his observation that "[t]he Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." He told me that most of his colleagues in the sixties and seventies used psychedelic drugs. "What psychedelics taught me is that life is not rational. IBM was a very rational company," he said, explaining why the corporate behemoth was overtaken by upstarts such as Apple. Mark Pesce, the coinventor of virtual reality's coding language, VRML, and a dedicated Burner, agreed that there's some relationship between chemical mind expansion and advances in computer technology: "To a man and a woman, the people behind [virtual reality] were acidheads," he said.
(snip)
And perhaps in other scientific areas, too. According to Gilmore, the maverick surfer/chemist Kary Mullis, a well-known LSD enthusiast, told him that acid helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction, a crucial breakthrough for biochemistry. The advance won him the Nobel Prize in 1993. And according to reporter Alun Reese, Francis Crick, who discovered DNA along with James Watson, told friends that he first saw the double-helix structure while tripping on LSD.

(D.R.)-- LSD Guru Timothy Leary belived this too, that psychedelics trigger changes in DNA, causing the human species to actually evolve.
Now, I'm not advocating everybody go on out and get dosed, but this is an example of our look at non-linear thinking and the possibilities in spirituality and innate knowledge that we can achieve through mind expanding experiances.
By this, I mean to include prayer, contemplation, and meditation in non-dogmatic, non-religious framework.

Washington Post: Meditation "Grows" Your Brain

Meditation Gives Brain a Charge, Study Finds

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 3, 2005; Page A05

Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.
Those transformed states have traditionally been understood in transcendent terms, as something outside the world of physical measurement and objective evaluation. But over the past few years, researchers at the University of Wisconsin working with Tibetan monks have been able to translate those mental experiences into the scientific language of high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony, or coordination. And they have pinpointed the left prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the left forehead, as the place where brain activity associated with meditation is especially intense.
"What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before," said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university's new $10 million W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. "Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance." It demonstrates, he said, that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine.
(snip)
In previous studies, mental activities such as focus, memory, learning and consciousness were associated with the kind of enhanced neural coordination found in the monks. The intense gamma waves found in the monks have also been associated with knitting together disparate brain circuits, and so are connected to higher mental activity and heightened awareness, as well.
(snip)
Davidson concludes from the research that meditation not only changes the workings of the brain in the short term, but also quite possibly produces permanent changes. That finding, he said, is based on the fact that the monks had considerably more gamma wave activity than the control group even before they started meditating. A researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Jon Kabat-Zinn, came to a similar conclusion several years ago.
Researchers at Harvard and Princeton universities are now testing some of the same monks on different aspects of their meditation practice: their ability to visualize images and control their thinking. Davidson is also planning further research.
"What we found is that the trained mind, or brain, is physically different from the untrained one," he said. In time, "we'll be able to better understand the potential importance of this kind of mental training and increase the likelihood that it will be taken seriously."

(D.R.)- Still more evidence that meditation, prayer, and ancient Shamanic practices can now be proven to re-wire the brain and create a higher state of consciousness. I think this says a lot about seemingly slow, introspective internal arts such as Tai Chi Chuan...

LINK To Article

L.A. Riots: Footage Of Korean Gunfights Removed

I find this very interesting;
On the heels of the last post on ethnic riots and streetfighting in China, I decided to assemble a parallel story about the Los Angeles riots in 1992.
If there is one convincing moment in recent American history that proves The Second Amendment Right to Keep and Bear Arms, it is the fight to save Koreatown.
Frustrated by the apparant lack of police protection, Korean storeowners took maters in their own hands and provided armed self-defense. There was clear video available which showed Korean snipers on the roofs of their stores, the cars and SUV's circled wagon-train-style around the perimeters.
Those videos, a few of which I had bookmarked over a year ago for future use, have been stripped from the web.

Above is a still picture I was able to print from the thumbnail of the original YouTube video I had saved long ago.
The video at the top of this post is one of two that still exist on both YouTube and Google video, the second being a longer version with scenes of looting and a news anchor. There was a video, which I can not find again, that merely showed emotional testimony about what happened and why the Koreans defended themselves in this way.
Now why would nearly every video of the Koreatown gunfights have been stripped from the web? The one from the still photo above was a 2008 YouTube post.
1. Are there still existing lawsuits against the Korean storeowners?
2. Is Koreatown simply trying to clean up the image of the armed battle and move on?
3. Is there government influence, such as a U.S. Attourney leaning on someone to remove the videos? Is the spectre of armed American citizens defending themselves just a little too much for the country as we enter The Second Republican Great Depression?

Hand-To-Hand Combat In Chinese City

The above news report comes from CCTV, which I am guessing is an English version of State-run TV in China.
For those who don't know, ethnic trouble in China is at a recent all-time high. While the broadcast above appears to blame the ethnic minority Muslim Uighurs for instigating the violence, This BBC report provides contrary information:

Groups of ethnic Han Chinese have marched through the city of Urumqi carrying clubs and machetes, as tension grows between ethnic groups and police.
Security forces imposed a curfew and fired tear gas to disperse the crowds, who said they were angry at violence carried out by ethnic Muslim Uighurs.
Earlier, Uighur women had rallied against the arrest of more than 1,400 people over deadly clashes on Sunday.
The two sides blame each other for the outbreak of violence.

AT THE SCENE
Quentin Sommerville, Urumqi
There are many armed military police standing around, also a few remnants of those Han Chinese demonstrators, still people wandering around the city carrying poles and batons and some carrying knives.
There's a great air of trepidation here as to how this night will play out.
I wouldn't have thought today that I would have seen Uighur men and women acting so defiantly in the face of Han Chinese authority, but they did.
I wouldn't have thought that thousands of Han Chinese would be able to walk freely through a Chinese city and march and shout slogans.
Xinjiang is one of the most tightly-controlled parts of the country. Those controls seem to have slipped quite considerably.

Officials say 156 people - mostly ethnic Han Chinese - died in Sunday's violence. Uighur groups say many more have died, claiming 90% of the dead were Uighurs.
The unrest erupted when Uighur protesters attacked vehicles before turning on local Han Chinese and battling security forces in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province.

****(D.R.)- The Chinese government has had trouble dealing with the Muslim Uighurs, and would surely like to put most of the blame on them. The Uighurs, however, are very much a minority that is dealing with a monolithic oppressive State machine.
This is a very dangerous situation...