"'We’ve got to do whatever it takes – if it takes sending SWAT teams into journalists’ homes – to stop these leaks,' admonished James B. Bruce, vice chairman of the CIA's Foreign Denial and Deception Committee."

AS Internet Graph: "The graph reflects 1,224,733 IP addresses and 2,093,194 IP links, (immediately adjacent addresses in a traceroute-like path) of skitter data from 16 monitors probing approximately 932,000 destinations spread across over 75,000 (70%) of globally routable network prefixes."

Francene Hart

"He who kills one is a murderer.
He who kills many is a hero.
He who kills all is a god." --Alphonso Lingis

Sloterdijk "seeks the answer in Gnosis. This is a path followed by many philosophers and artists before him: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Cioran, Beckett and Baudrillard. Without exaggerating, we may say that a discussion is underway regarding the dissidence potential of the language of Gnosis in the post-historical media age. Within this debate Sloterdijk's position is that a new `epoch-making' revolution is possible, and that, analogous to Gnosis in the past, it must come from an individual revolution of the soul. His study of Gnosis resulted in a massive work published in 1993 with T. H. Macho, entitled Weltrevolution der Seele, Ein Lese- und Arbeitsbuch der Gnosis. The book is not an attempt at a religious-historic consideration of a phenomenon of the past, but rather a collection of texts from past and present which offer a sense of what Gnosis could mean today. This meaning is more closely explained in a book published shortly afterward, Weltfremdheit. Sloterdijk's thesis on unworldliness is that, for the first time in history, Gnosis has formulated a dualistic principle which makes it possible to live in this world without being of this world.

The Gnosis investigation provides Sloterdijk with a set of instruments for making a diagnosis of our age which demonstrates that our culture displays signs of a sort of neo-Gnostic turn. After two hundred years of attachment to the world, many people are now turning away from it and thereby spontaneously following the second path of Gnosis."

New commenting system installed. Relevant thoughts welcome.

Theses/Dissertations on Philip K. Dick

An account of the creation of the Alchemical Tarot deck

The Cunningham Dax Collection of Psychiatric Art

"I see nothing but distress, disorder and madness everywhere; but justice mocked, but the right betrayed, but falsehood. And I wonder what life could bring me that matters, what does all this mean? What is it all going to lead to, and the rest? In what an absurd mess humanity is sinking, how and where to escape?" --Andre Gide (1936)

"The madness of one man is terrible enough, the madness of millions... is unbearable... one has to build private shelters against it not to be contaminated and maddened by it." --Anais Nin (1942)

"I loathe politics. Because of politics, all that I love is in danger; it is a menace to individual liberty, a menace to happiness, it disturbs my work. I wholeheartedly believe in works of literature and works of art. This belief is entirely foreign to political preoccupations." --Julien Green (1932)

"Singer studied 141 three- and four-year olds, and found that 65% reported having imaginary playmates. The children who reported having such companions were less aggressive, more cooperative, smiled more, were better able to concentrate, were less frequently bored, and were more linguistically advanced than their companionless cohorts. They were clearly cognizant of the difference between external reality and the worlds of their imagination..." from Invisible Guests by Mary Watkins

United States loses fight to block U.N. vote on torture convention (but the battle's not over yet)

"the Hermetic system was the earliest in the West to propose a mystical initiation, consisting of multiple experiences, that is simultaneously a journey through places and a series of changes in the ontology of the self. Its ascension to the sky compares with Jewish and Christian apocalypticism; but its division of ontological states compares with Neoplatonic distinctions among sensibles..." --Stages of Ascension in Hermetic Rebirth

Irlen Syndrome
(Thanks to Matt)

"If there's another terrorist attack, and if it's from a certain ethnic community or certain ethnicities that the terrorists are from, you can forget civil rights in this country." --Peter N. Kirsanow (member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights)

In a bioterrorism exercise "a Manhattan building was deliberately contaminated with anthrax by terrorists and a New York Police Department official was asked what he would do. 'And he said he would bring in the tank,' Perkins said. 'I said, 'The tank?' And he said, 'It's a show of force.'" --A Lack of Teamwork

Operation TIPS-TIPS: Report TIPS informants
(Thanks to Mike)

Americans are "happy to do some spying," for the government.

Second law of thermodynamics no longer applies

Imagine three different boxes. One is large, one is medium, and one is small.
Now, imagine seeing something different in each box.
Write down what you see in each size box, then click here