Author Archives: Merlin Silk

40 Years in Space

Originally Written November 2007:

I ran into a collection of imagery of space from the 50s and 60s of the 20th century. Isn’t that amazing how that sound, speaking of the 20th century as so long ago?

One of the images I seemed to remember was of an outpost on the moon created by Frank Tinsley.

Frank Tinsley - Outpost on the moon

But then there was an image of a very early Perry Rhodan novella – and THAT was fascinating. I had not quite started to read science fiction when this novella first came out, but some six years later I certainly read this novella when it came out in the second or third edition – so I knew…

Perry Rhodan - Venus in Danger

… “Venus in Danger” – novella #20!

For many years after coming to the wild west I had my family in Germany collect Perry Rhodans for me and then send them to me in batch, but this had stopped now about 20 years ago.

So I have to admit, I am not quite up-to-date any more.

A few month ago I had realized that and found out that I could actually subscribe to an electronic version of the newest issued and get them in my email in-box. I had not subscribed at that time as I did not think I would have enough time to read them, but at least I got myself a little fix in form of a free issue that was offered – novella #2300!

Can you believe this – 2300 – at 52 weekly booklets that is about 46 years.

Perry Rhodan - Harbingers of Chaos
Harbingers of Chaos

So – what has changed in the last forty to fifty years?

Certainly the cover design feels more modern, but I am sure that the next half century will eradicate that difference. Then there is the price – the old one about 20 cents (at the exchange rate at that time) and the new one weighting in at about $2.50 – with the inflation rate I guess the price has remained stable.

Then there is one noticeable difference. The subtitle of the series in 1962 was “The Great Space Series” but today it’s simply “The Greatest Science Fiction Series.”

OK, now to work – gotta finally read my free novella “Vorboten des Chaos” – and maybe, just maybe, it’s so good that I will indeed subscribe.

Update 2011: I actually never managed to read the free sample and only stumbled across this blog post because in a server crash I had lost many of the images used in this blog and I just noticed there was another blog post without its pictures. So, I set out to find them again and, in the process, ran into some new info…

  1. We are now in the last quarter of the cycle 2500…2599, the second cycle nearly done after I checked last – about right at 52 novellas per year;
  2. There is now an encyclopedia of Perry Rhodan;
  3. A bigger part of the series is now available electronically and if bought in bulk (50 or 100 novellas at a time) it’s rather inexpensive at Eu 1.25

I would not want to read Perry’s on the computer – maybe that was one of the reasons I never finished my free sample, but now that the Kindle is only $140, one hundred Perry’s plus the Kindle is about the same price as buying all the physical novellas.

hmmm…

A Blast from the Past – My First Maerklin Train Set

The holidays sometimes give us the opportunity to dig a bit into the past by looking into some old photo albums. In doing so I got reminded of my good old Maerklin trains that I had when I was a little kid. On my trip down memory lane I dug out those old pictures and came even up with some pre-Maerklin documents.

Doesn’t seem that long ago and now I have my successor already older than I was in these pictures. I guess I will have to equip him with some trains of his own. What would be even better – Hello Universe, this is a request! – if I would manage to get my old trains back over here from a friend – Hello Hermann – who has kept them faithfully for so many years but whom I don’t seem to be able to reach any more. But maybe this year he will answer our Christmas mail – just maybe.

The following images first show the pre-Maerklin era, then the early Maerklin and the nearly complete set. I am missing the last phase of the Maerklin era though. After the last image a train station had been added, but I only have the pictures of that in my mind and no mean (yet) to get it out on the internet.

Coldplay’s Violet Hill – the Brutal Version

Coldplay’s Violet Hill all by itself is already a very good piece of activist’s art, but with the following imagery it becomes even better. Maybe the original meaning of the lyrics shift a bit by becoming way more shocking, but I have to say, that only confirms that I must be an anarchist – I certainly don’t want anybody in a position to send me – or my son – into a war to be killed and just dumped into a hole in the ground – - and then dance about it…

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To make things more complete, so that you can sing along happily, here are the lyrics…

Was a long and dark December
From the rooftops I remember
There was snow
White snow

Clearly I remember
From the windows they were watching
While we froze
Down below

When the future’s architectured
By a carnival of idiots on show
You’d better lie low

If you love me
Won’t you let me know?

Was a long and dark December
When the banks became cathedrals
And the fog
Became God

Priests clutched onto bibles
Hollowed out to fit their rifles
And the cross was held aloft

Bury me in honor
When I’m dead and hit the ground
A love back home unfolds

If you love me
Won’t you let me know?

I don’t want to be a soldier
Who the captain of some sinking ship
Would stow, far below

So if you love me
Why’d you let me go?

I took my love down to Violet Hill
There we sat in snow
All that time she was silent still

So if you love me
Won’t you let me know?

If you love me,
Won’t you let me know?

We actually have anarchy already

AnarchyThere hasn’t been a forwarded article from Larken Rose for a while. It’s not that Larken was quiet, neither did I dislike what he had to say, I guess it was just that I did not really had to add anything to what he had to say.

But in his last newsletter he wrote something eye opening, at least for me. For you it might have been actually totally obvious. He argued that we are already living in an anarchy because there is no other way, it’s just that we have made the bully the boss.

When I read this, I had to pause, look over that and had to agree. If there was some higher authority, then some other form of living together might be possible, but as long it’s all humans that make up our rules and regulations, it makes no difference if one of the groups that has formed calls itself government or mafia. It is easy to see if we create an alternate reality in which the mafia of the 30s has grown in power and has just become so strong that it supplied all the politicians, had take over the press and staged propaganda to white-wash its actions and finally gotten into the position of making the laws of the land.

Today we would happily life in a society which would call the boss Godfather instead of president. There would be factions of the mafia competing to get the next Godfather into the godfather chair for a period that all the factions had agreed upon in an all-mafia meeting. With good propaganda on TV and in the press we would probably be gladly rallying behind one of the Godfathers in spe and make donations that our Godfather would be THE Godfather.

Do you see any difference to what we have today?

That’s what I had to think about when I read this article of Larken Rose…

Make Good Choices!

The idea behind “government” is that we need something to make sure everyone makes the right decisions. And wouldn’t that be a great thing? Don’t we need some entity which enforces moral, just laws on all of those flawed, careless, sometimes malicious human beings? Isn’t that a good and necessary thing to do?

Well, it might be, if something OTHER than human beings were going to run the thing. But guess who decides what the “laws” will say? Guess who decides what those “right decisions” are, which are going to be forced on all of us? That’s right: PEOPLE. In fact, usually the worst people around. So the question becomes, if we NEED something making us mere mortals make the right decisions, how do you make sure that IT makes the right decisions?

For example, lots of people say we need “government”–a big, powerful, authoritarian control machine–to stop those nasty people who might decide that MURDER is a good idea. Yes, it would be nice to have something that did that; something to protect us from all the sadistic thugs of the world. And has the “government” beast done that? Hardly. In fact, the number of murders committed in the name of “government” (NOT including wars) exceeds a HUNDRED MILLION in the last 100 years. Put another way, an average of over a million people every year, for the last CENTURY, were “legally” murdered. (See “Death by Government” by R.J. Rummel.)

But we neeeeeeeed “government” to protect us! Why? Because some people might choose to harm us! And when you build that big authoritarian “protection” machine, what happens when the very people who want to harm us get control of it? Open a history book and find out.

But we neeeed “government” to protect us from gangs of thugs! What do you think the IRS is? In the name of “government,” thieves steal around two TRILLION dollars a year now, in this country alone. That averages out to around $14,000 for every man, woman and child in this country, stolen in the name of “authority.” And people are STILL batty enough to say that we NEED “government” to protect us from thieves! Look how “legal” murder, theft, oppression, and assault compares to “illegal” crimes, and you’ll see how utterly insane it is to think that “government” is a PROTECTOR.

Furthermore, authoritarians don’t limit what kinds of “right decisions” it will foist upon everyone else. Yes, I’d like someone forcibly stopping murders, but both history and basic logic say that “government” is NOT the thing to use. But the “government” control freaks like to meddle in all manner of non-violent, non- fraudulent choices people make every day as well. As a sickening recent example, a bunch of federal fascists recently raided a business and swiped lots of property. Guess what the guy was selling. Crystal meth? Nope. Cocaine? Nope. Rocket launchers? Nope. Something far more sinister.

Milk.

I wish I was kidding. You see, some god-complex psychos imagining themselves to be “authority” decided that, for your own good (of course), THEY will decide what is best for you. And they decided that milk that just came out of a cow (aka “raw milk”) isn’t fit for human consumption. You might agree. The trouble is, they didn’t just make that decision for themselves, or for their kids, they made it for everyone in the country, and hired MEN WITH GUNS to go after anyone who makes a different decision. In case you think I’m making this up, here’s the story:

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=63225

I can’t think of a better example of why it’s profoundly IDIOTIC to think that it’s a good idea to let politicians choose and forcibly impose “good choices” on everyone. In the case of raw milk, I happen to agree with the farmer: it’s a lot more healthy than the usual processed kind. There are lots of other areas–most, in fact– in which I think the government “regulatory” commands are not just wrong, but dangerous. Vaccinations is another fine example of something authoritarians want to forcibly impose on everyone (Hillary has harped on it in the past), despite all the evidence showing that many vaccinations are far more dangerous than they are helpful.

But ultimately, whether the busy-body government regulators are right or wrong on any given subject, letting them forcibly impose THEIR decisions on everyone is utterly idiotic, not to mention evil. This is true even when they get something right. For example, I think snorting snuff that fries your brain is a pretty stupid thing to do. But it’s not nearly as idiotic, dangerous, evil, or destructive to society as putting two MILLION people in CAGES for possessing substances that politicians (who probably all drink alcohol) have decided count as the “wrong decision.”

The entire premise behind the “government” myth is that SOMEONE has to decide what is right, and then impose it on the rest of us. Otherwise, there will be chaos! Well, if you could find someone INCAPABLE of ever making the wrong decision, such logic might make sense (though it would still violate the right of every person to be free). But if you don’t trust your neighbor to make the right decisions, why on earth would you trust some crooked windbag in D.C. to make the decision, and then FORCE it on your neighbor? Where is there the slightest indication that those in “government” make better choices than anyone else?

And if your neighbor commits the unspeakable sin of drinking raw milk, or makes some equally heinous decision, and it ends up being unhealthy, he harms himself. He doesn’t harm you. But the “government” myth dictates that the politicians get to MAKE you comply with THEIR decisions, even if you know darn well that their decision is WRONG (as I believe it is in the case of the milk issue).

Individuals make decisions. Some of them are bad decisions. That’s called life. Deal with it. The idea that creating a big, powerful authoritarian machine–RUN BY PEOPLE–can eliminate, or even reduce wrong decisions, has no basis in logic or history. With every issue from murder to what kind of milk you can drink, “government” has shown time and time again that it will come down on the WRONG side of the issue, and then violently impose its stupidity on millions of people who would have made the right decision.

People say that anarchy “will never work” in the real world. So, in the real world, see for yourself whether the myth of “government” works, by taking the following quiz.

  1. Which occurs more, “illegal” murder, or “legal” murder? (Don’t forget that little thing called “war.”)
  2. Which occurs more, “illegal” theft, or “legal” theft? (Don’t forget the IRS, and state tax collectors.)
  3. Which occurs more, “illegal” fraud, or “legal” fraud? (Don’t forget the IRS and the Federal Reserve.)
  4. Which occurs more, “illegal” assault, or “legal” assault? (Don’t forget the military, the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the INS, beat cops–no pun intended, etc.)

As a bonus question, name ONE person in Congress who you think would make BETTER decisions about your safety, your health, your future, your finances, and your life than YOU would. Good luck.

Sincerely,
Larken Rose

(P.S. The one guy in Congress who might be almost on par with you is Ron Paul, who would also agree that YOU should be the one making such decisions, not “government”–not even himself. In other words, the one guy in Congress who is smart enough to make decisions worth respecting is the one guy who–with very rare exceptions–does NOT want to impose his decisions on you.)

(P.P.S. It would be the right decision for you to go buy and read my book, “How To Be a Successful Tyrant” (www.tyrantbook.com). Therefore, I intend to come to your house and make you do the right thing at gunpoint. Oh, I forgot, I believe in freedom, so I can’t do that. I guess I’ll just have to let you decide for yourself whether that’s the right thing to do. Darn.)

The Big Bang in your Backyard

What is the image you get when you think of a scientist?

I bet it’s usually a middle aged guy, most likely wearing a lab-coat, probably classes and definitely not cool.

But we all know by now that TED does not promote the ‘normal,’ so, when they have somebody on to talk about the Large Hedron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland we do not necessarily expect a guy in a lab-coat.

I still was positively surprised by Brian Cox’s talk. There is a cool guy who not only makes it interesting to show what the LHC does but also represents a new breed of scientist that seem to be in awe of creation and taken by its extent.

When I turned my back to physics after I was all done with my degree, the scientific scene was immensely more arrogant. So, listening to Brian Cox made me happy because I think that science will succeed when it develops the right amount of humility and recognized that it, itself, is part of that creation and is searching for itself.

You want to know where the LHC actually is? Glad you asked because it has a some fascinating facts about its location. CERN, which is also the mother of the World Wide Web, is located in two countries, Switzerland and France. The Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) is located close to Geneva, Switzerland and stretches across the Swiss-France border. So, you might cross the border between the two countries many times during the day while remaining in the CERN complex. Nowadays that has not much of a significance, but when I was there it was a fascinating fact, that you could go across the border without showing your papers.

So, here it is…


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What is Liberty and Taking your Money Back

Sometimes two email that first seem to be unrelated, turn up to create a 9 on the Richter scale of synchronicity.

Today I got first such a self-evident definition and explanation of a free society that I wonder why there are so many who don’t get this…

YouTube Preview Image

You may watch the full Flash Animation.

It might not be quite easy to follow in some areas of the text, but I think everybody must be able to get the gist of it!

The next on is a more practical application of the first…

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If you combine those two little clips and form an action item out of them, what would you get.

No, this is not a rhetoric question – I would really like to get some answers because I am not so sure what to do.

Paris, Texas versus Paris, France

I had heard about the Wim Wenders movie “Paris, Texas” but never attempted to see it. It came out at a time when I had been very busy moving my life around and there was just not time enough to sit down for two hours to spend on a movie. It took many years to sink in that the title actually referred to a town named Paris, located in Texas. I had never nurtured the idea before that there was any other than THE Paris, the capital of the country right over there.

But now that I have seen these two pictures…

Paris, Texas

Paris, Texas, and …

Paris, France

… maybe I should see the movie.

Joking! – Obviously the movie has nothing to do with the subjects of these images (just a cheap hook.) The movie it’s about Travis, an amnesiac who has been lost for four years and is taken in by his brother. He later tries to put his life back together and understand what happened between him, his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and his son Hunter – I mean, give me a break, it’s a Wim Wenders film!

If I were any better, I would be twins

I want to pass on a story I have heard/read before at least once but maybe more. I am sure that it is on the internet many time. As a matter of fact, just let me check…

… hmmm, it’s actually less than I thought, Google only found about 200 instances of the story. But then again, Google eliminates duplicates and so there will be more. I just checked Yahoo and then find about twenty thousand instances of a key phrase of the story I’m about to give you – that’s more like it.

But before I get into any ranting and philosophizing, here’s the story…

Jerry is the manager of a restaurant. He is always in a good mood.

When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would always reply, “If I were any better, I would be twins!”

Many of the waiters at his restaurant quit their jobs when he changed jobs, so they could follow him around from restaurant to restaurant.

Why?

Because Jerry was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Jerry was always there, telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Jerry and asked him: “I don’t get it! No one can be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?”

Jerry replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, I have two choices today. I can choose to be in a good mood or I can choose to be in a bad mood.

I always choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be victim or I can choose to learn from it. I always choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I always choose the positive side of life.”

“But it’s not always that easy,” I protested.

“Yes it is,” Jerry said. “Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk every situation is a choice.

You choose how you react to situations.
You choose how people will affect your mood.
You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood.
It’s your choice how you live your life.”

Several years later, I heard that Jerry accidentally did something you are never supposed to do in the restaurant business. He left the back door of his restaurant open.

And then ???

In the morning, he was robbed by three armed men.

They want?

#123*+!@$%&*~

While Jerry trying to open the safe box, his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked and shot him. Luckily, Jerry was found quickly and rushed to the hospital.

After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jerry was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body.

I saw Jerry about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied, “If I were any better, I’d be twins. Want to see my scars?”

I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place. “The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have locked the back door,” Jerry replied. “Then, after they shot me, as I lay on the floor, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live or could choose to die. I chose to live.”

“Weren’t you scared?” I asked.

Jerry continued, “The paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the Emergency Room and I saw the expression on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read ‘He’s a dead man.’ I knew I needed to take action.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, there was a big nurse shouting questions at me,” said Jerry. “She asked if I was allergic to anything. ‘Yes,’ I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Bullets!’

Over their laughter, I told them, ‘I am choosing to live. Please operate on me as if I am alive, not dead’.”

Jerry lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude.

I learned from him that every day you have the choice to either enjoy your life or to hate it. The only thing that is truly yours – that no one can control or take from you – is your attitude, so if you can take care of that, everything else in life becomes much easier.

OK, that’s the story! Obviously I like it, otherwise I would not have posted here on this site together with 20,000 other versions of it. The email in which I got it then continued on to indicate that now I had two choices as well, either to delete the message or pass it on. Mostly I don’t like to pass on email messages like this because, even though well intentioned, they add to the spam and interruption of my work flow. If I want to share I put it up on a blog and everybody interested in what I want to say is welcome to subscribe to the RSS feed for MerlinSilk.com.

If the unsolicited message is small and just contains a little story, then, in my eyes, it’s excusable to send, but many of the mails I get contain megabytes of video attached. It does not matter, time-wise, as I am lucky enough to be on a fast internet connection, but it is still wasted of band-width, as pretty much all those videos are on YouTube or any other video sharing site and a link to that video would suffice. All these extra bytes transferred just wear out the tubes of the internet and they might need replacing much earlier.

But now back to the subject at hand: why, if there are thousands of people posting this story on the internet (guess I am the 20,001st), are there so few practicing what this story suggest? I mean, I am throwing with stones here while sitting in a glass house. I was rather poopy with my loved once the other day. So this question is a real one, not rhetoric.

What do you do to keep up the good mood and don’t react to negativity in kind fashion?

Brian Greene explains Superstring Theory at TED

In 2005 Brian Greene explained superstring theory to the TED audience in laymen’s terms in a very engaging presentation.

Three years ago the Hadron collider at CERN, which has one if its goals to confirm string theory, was still a few year away from completion. But now we are nearly there. Interestingly the public is taking notice now as voices have been raised that this machine might be dangerous. Loud voices actually, so that the CERN website for the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) has to address these concerns and dispel them…

TGVs and mosquitoes

The total energy in each beam of protons in the LHC is equivalent to a 400 tonne train (like the French TGV) travelling at 150 km/h. However, only an infinitesimal part of this energy is released in each particle collision – roughly equivalent to the energy of a dozen flying mosquitoes. In fact, whenever you try to swat a mosquito by clapping your hands together, you create a collision energy much higher than the protons inside the LHC. The LHC’s speciality is its impressive ability to concentrate this collision energy into a minuscule area on a subatomic scale. But even this capability is just a pale shadow of what Nature achieves routinely in cosmic-ray collisions.

During part of its operation, the LHC will collide beams of lead nuclei, which have a greater collision energy, equivalent to just over a thousand mosquitoes. However, this will be much more spread out than the energy produced in the proton collisions, and also presents no risk.

Microscopic black holes will not eat you…

Massive black holes are created in the Universe by the collapse of massive stars, which contain enormous amounts of gravitational energy that pulls in surrounding matter. The gravitational pull of a black hole is related to the amount of matter or energy it contains – the less there is, the weaker the pull. Some physicists suggest that microscopic black holes could be produced in the collisions at the LHC. However, these would only be created with the energies of the colliding particles (equivalent to the energies of mosquitoes), so no microscopic black holes produced inside the LHC could generate a strong enough gravitational force to pull in surrounding matter.

If the LHC can produce microscopic black holes, cosmic rays of much higher energies would already have produced many more. Since the Earth is still here, there is no reason to believe that collisions inside the LHC are harmful.

By all probability these concerns are in the same category as the fears that people would die when going more than 50 miles an hour on this devil’s machine called train. But there have been experiments in the past that seemed rather harmless and turned out to be deadly. I am thinking of Pierre and Marie Curie,
who discovered radioactivity. They did not know that this new phenomenon they had discovered was poisoning them during their work and I remember the anecdote of demonstrating their discovery to friends at a party by circulating a vial with this new substance which you could see with your eyes closed.

So, there is a chance that this microscopic black hole that might be created by the LHC does indeed attract matter and energy from its surrounding, grows and swallows the universe as we know it.

I am actually sure that this will happen, at least in a number of parallel worlds. These parallel worlds are, as far as I know, also postulated by string theory, so we are really approaching the unified theory of life, the universe and everything, a theory that contains its own annihilation – cool!

I have worked at CERN for a little bit, being involved with the old myon-neutrino experiments and I have to admit that it would be a fascinating experience to be at CERN for the first activation of the LHC. I imagine a scene similar to the setting in Douglas Adam’s ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe‘ – everybody is seated in an exquisite restaurant expecting a great show watching the universe to end.

And, you know what – in one of the parallel worlds according to the string theory to be tested – that will be so!