Remember the scene in one Harry Potter film where the wizards in training are taught to face their biggest fear? The trick was to stand up to the fearsome thing and yell out “Ridiculous!” I try to teach this also to my son when he is afraid of something, for example in a dream, or if he accidentally sees something really scary on TV and any monsters follow him into his bedroom.

Now, politics, especially before an election, can be very scary - especially when you read and understand some of the things Larken Rose tries to tell us. But we can look beyond the scary part and actually see how ridiculous the whole business of campaigning is and I am glad to report that there are some out there who can still say a hearty RIDICULOUS!

Posted by Merlin - October 3rd, 2008

This is an amazing work of cinematrography. I can imagine the hours on hours of observations, waiting for just the right moment to get the high speed cameras rolling.

Fascinating also to be introduced to the totally different world, a world that to our eye seems to be so peaceful, but is in reality a jungle.

You really want to see this in the highest quality as possible - I found a good version on the water shrew website.

Posted by Merlin - September 22nd, 2008

I have to admit that I liked and enjoyed the - unfortunately only - two Microsoft ads featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. In case you have not seen them, here they are…

and

For me, Microsoft has redeemed itself for all the bad things it has done in the past. That might sound a bit strong, but these ads are so good that I admire Microsoft that it had the guts to run them. OK, it must have been so far beyond anything the usually confused participants in this game could understand that it was mostly rejected - and the ads have been pulled.

I think that the ads have nearly a Monty-Pythonishness and only a person well trained in Douglas-Adamishness can really appreciate them. This group is rather small, so it was drowned by the masses.

Compared to the Apple ads with John Hodgman as PC and Justin Long as Mac the Microsoft ads are so totally senseless that they have broken reality - and I can’t help it, but I like surreal. Forces you to look beyond the daily seriousness. OK, the Apple ads don’t appear serious, but they are, they are adversarial in nature by trying to put down the PC. (Funny side note that the PC character became the more lovable and better known, publishing books and being interviewed by Xeni Jardin of Boing-Boing fame.)

Now lets look at the MS ads - off-the-wall, surreal and imaginative - and, I forgot, weird. What MS shows me here is that they could be just as unusual as Apple as a company, but that they have decided not to go this route because there were too few people to understand what they would have been doing. Instead they went with that what is real to most people - confusion!

So, by catering to the reality of this majority of the population, they managed to dominate the world with their software and now they can come out of the closed - and they did.

Congratulations!

Posted by Merlin - September 19th, 2008

When I ran into this video of an interview of Billy Graham by Woody Allen I thought that this can be very interesting - and that turned out to be the case indeed.

From the introduction:

Woody Allen: “I don’t agree with him on a great many subjects. There are a few that we do agree on. But he is certainly the best in the world in what he does - Mr. Billy Graham!”

Billy Graham: “It’s very nice to be with you Woody, and I’d like to say that there is some things that I don’t agree with you on.”

Woody Allen: “The question is which one of us will be converted…”

But see for yourself…

and the second part…

I really liked Woody Allen’s little stab: “If you could have faith in me…”

or the little exchange…

Billy Graham: “O no, God is perfect!”

Woody Allen: “You know when I look in the mirror in the morning, it’s hard for me to believe that.”

Posted by Merlin - July 19th, 2008

Many years ago I watched a performance by David Copperfield on TV. We were sitting together in amazement watching Mr. Copperfield fly. It was a show he performed in Las Vegas in which he freely flew over the cuckoo’s nest - no wait - across the stage.

It was really impossible to fathom how he could do what he did with all the accepted laws of physics in full force. You could imagine strings - but then again - he flew through loops. There was just no way how all this could be possible - but still, we saw it with our own eyes. OK, not quite, there was a camera, lots of technology and a TV screen between us, but this was a life performance from a stage in Vegas and we all discounted the possibility that video tech was used to fool us.

I finally decided that the only possibility was that he was simply able to fly - and why not?

Should I be able to manage that feat now, I could imagine that I would create curiosity in form of a magic show to make some serious money (David Copperfield certainly did, and even managed the magic trick of convincing Claudia Schiffer to marry him.) Curiosity is, after all, the biggest magnet of attention, so if he would have gone around and demonstrated to everybody without a doubt that he could fly, he would have ended up in some government labs and he would have never been able to offer his island for rent for a mere 32,000 dollars a day. So, leaving it open to doubt that he could indeed fly was definitely a smart move.

But I am digressing a bit, I actually wanted to look at the possibility that something that’s not possible, IS possible - like flying! Douglas Adams gives us a simple recipe on how to learn. He teaches us that you just have to throw yourself to the ground - - and miss!

Sounds silly, but I actually believe, it’s true - honestly!

I remembered all this today when I watched another great magician who had demonstrated his abilities on the TED conference in 2004 - Keith Barry. He sampled some amazing tricks that probably keeps lots of people awake trying to figure out how he did it within the framework of accepted physics.

For me again the question was why accept the restriction of accepted physics? There are many things normal to us today that certainly appears to be magic to a person traveling on a time machine from 1500 AD. I am sure that physical laws have changed since then to allow for 400 ton chunks of metal hanging in the air for example. The first who bent and maybe broke the laws a little did it in a crude way, but they opened the floodgates for the changes.

Just take a look at what he amazes us with and tell me that this is NOT real magic…

Posted by Merlin - July 18th, 2008

This is the sign that a member of that very government has on his desk. If you ever read any other article from this block you know that I am supporting Ron Paul - the person with that sign on his desk as you can see in the picture to this article.

I sometimes wonder how this guy got so far up into government without being eliminated. I mean, look at all the ‘accidental’ death that people suffer when they are about to expose somebody high up in the power structure…

There is either of two possibilities that Ron Paul could maintain to be a pain in the butt of the tyrants - either he is not considered to be that dangerous and is used to get intelligence about all those people who are dissenters, or, and this is what I hope is the real reason, Ron Paul got so much into the spot light that it is now very difficult to eliminate him without creating a martyr and be even more damaging as such.

But whatever it is, it seems now time to remove our ‘Ron for President’ signs from the cars and yard and look into the future. Ron Paul himself had indicated that his run for the nomination would not necessarily be successful, but that it was the start of a campaign that would eventually lead for America to find back to its roots.

Now Dr. Paul has officially started this campaign and I certainly have joined and I want you all to do the same.

Our Mission

The mission of the Campaign for Liberty is to promote and defend the great American principles of individual liberty, constitutional government, sound money, free markets, and a noninterventionist foreign policy, by means of educational and political activity.

This from the new website Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty that I want you to go to, join, and think about the best way to contribute and get the word out - the word that there actually is an alternative, now that after his nomination “Barak Obama bin Laden” changed course from a peaceful warrior to just warrior, willing to continue the Middle Eastern policies.

Here is Dr. Paul’s announcement of his Campaign for Liberty…

Posted by Merlin - June 22nd, 2008

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…

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?

Posted by Merlin Silk - June 18th, 2008

About a year ago I wrote about my great wonder what our government, especially the federal one, has to do with regulating how much water we use to flush our toilets.

And things have gotten better and betters since then. Just listen to this speech…

Congress man Ted Poe addresses congress for five minutes explaining how ridiculous and unconstitutional it is to require all Americans to use fluorescent light bulbs exclusively soon. The bulbs might be more energy efficient but bring with them a whole lot of problems that make them environmentally very unfriendly to say the least.

There is a three page paper outlining the procedure that should be followed when such a light bulb is accidentally broken - these bulbs containing mercury, the procedure probably comes only a little bit short of calling the HazMat for the rescue.

Another interesting point made by congressman Poe is that all of those ‘energy saver’ light bulbs are made in China taking more jobs away from America and bringing them over-sees.

This appears to fool Americans into buying new things they believe are good for them and the environment while actually hurting them. Another example is the fact that more and more big chain super markets now started to offer ‘organic food.’ These foods might - or might not - be grown by the rules established by the FDA to be called ‘organic’ but if we tally in the fact that these ‘organic foods’ are mass produced in often far away farms and that lots of fuel need to be expended to bring those foods to the local super market, then most of the advantages of organic food are negated. The FDA just forgot the one rule that, in order to call a food ‘organic’ it needs to be grown locally. But when was the last time a big machine like our government did get such a complex issue right?

Posted by Merlin - June 15th, 2008

I watched a mini series about Merlin’s story on TV today. No, not my story, the story of the other Merlin you might have heard about. We all know the basics of the story, what was new to me was the underlying struggle between Merlin and Mab, the Queen of the Old Ways.

It appears that Mab is winning most of the time, giving Merlin a little success once in while, which is then soon lost. But what prompts me to write this post about it is the deep wisdom in Merlin final permanent victory over Mab - everybody forgets here and she ceases to exist.

This made me realize again the only real way to handle the problems with our politicians, who certainly have become the evil overlords.

Merlin and the people of Camelot turned the back to Mab and forgot about her. Attention-units seems to be the substance evil overlords feed on. If this is withdrawn they wither and die. So, why don’t we just start to handle the problems with our so-called ‘public servants’ in a similar fashion - turn around and take away any attention units. They try to tell us that we need to do this or that to ‘protect our children’ - but we know that this is not the real agenda and we just tune out those statements as white noise.

Found a very interesting little video that demonstrated how the news might look, when this behavior is implemented even on the level of the dominant media - which probably will be the most difficult level because this segment of the work force directly depends on those who get a lot of attention units and then hand some of them out to their minions, what’s laughingly called the ‘free press.’

Now, here the video

Posted by Merlin - May 18th, 2008

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…

View Larger Map

The LHC is to the top and right of the green arrow indicating the offical address of CERN.

Posted by Merlin Silk - April 29th, 2008

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