The War in Heaven: Seeds of Sorrow,

Of late, sorrow and regret have much been on my mind. Buoyed in the current of help from The Gentleman in my personal life, I have gone almost limp. Many dreams swirl about me, almost too many. It's hard even for me to find full application for all of them. The Gentleman's help has been crucial however in two quarters.

The first of them is that the worm has turned in Najaf. Through no intervention of mine, but rather holding my breath and crossing my fingers, my man on the ground there Sistani has pulled through. He has achieved what I thought lost, which was to force Sadr to knuckle under to the religious authorities without giving a victory to the occupation forces.

NAJAF, Iraq - Thousands of pilgrims streamed into the Imam Ali Shrine on Friday, and militants who had been holed up in the site left it, handing the keys to Shiite religious authorities after Iraq’s top Shiite cleric brokered a peace deal to end three weeks of fighting in this holy city.

But it is also a sorrowful occasion, because the fighting has had consequences. The damage to the dignity of the Shiites will not be forgotten, and now the occuping powers and their puppet government of locals will be hated. The Shiites have unified, and they are not pleased with the Americans. Those who say Sadr stand up to the Americans will note that he was on the verge be being crushed, and therefore they will resort to guerilla warfare actions and therefore ensure a quagmire. They have also seen that the puppet government is weak and unable to stand on its own. It's legitimacy shattered, insurgency groups will never stop because they know American patience is thinning.

It is a great victory for me, accomplished at the end by a twist of chance and the unexpected initiative of someone who my only contribution toward was to support and when he disagreed with me to allow him to make his own choices. If it had been someone else, I might have removed them for earlier deviating from my plans. It was hard to doubt the god will of a man such as Sistani, and if I had anything to do with the victory at the end it was simply in that I had the courage when my plans were at stake to simply trust that he knew what he was doing.

Yet this victory is a great sorrow. My part there is over for now I think. Three days ago, I had this dream which seemed mysterious then but reveals everything now.

Dream of the Football Lottery

There was a football game, and it was a tied score. On one side, was a highly trained and disciplined team of players. On the other side was a rag tag set of players put together by chance. Yet the game was almost over and the rag-tag team was by a lot of luck and effort at the ten yard line of the opposition's goal posts. Only a final ten meters to push through to victory as the timer clock was almost over.

I was sitting in the stands, trying to smile at a girl who was not there. She was, but she was not if you understand what I'm saying. Like a ghostly image occupying a void. Then the score board flashed a lottery call. According to the rules of the game, by chance a member of the crowd audience would be chosen to play at a random time in the game. My ticket number was selected. So in order to try to impress this girl who wasn't there, I went down on the field.

They were all tensed on the field, they were in position. The ball was given to me. I had thought it would be difficult, but I saw an opening. So I got up and almost leisurely trotted past their defense as if it wasn't there, and scored the final goal to win the game.

In retrospect, at least this part of the meaning is clear. I've "won". But I've "lost". I did it all to impress a girl who wasn't even really there, a ghost or a memory of what I once desired. And my victory will have great costs, this upset victory of the rag-tag over the mighty and well prepared. Finally at the end, it was done by chance. I was involved. I pushed it up to this point. However, in the end chance and probably The Gentleman's gentle tipping "invisible hand" brought the end in favor of the goals I was pursuing.

Oceanic Refridgerator

Do you know how a refridgerator works? It works by taking heat from one place and transferring it to another. That's why the back and tops of fridges are usually warmer. They're heating up the outside to cool the inside. AC in central air typically works the same way, though it uses a different mechanisms. All these mechanisms are heat pumps or cooling engines. Inside each engine cycle there is typically a liquid that is evaporated and then condensed back into liquid as part of the cycle - this is the role that freon or gaseous liquid plays in AC.

It's essential to understand this, because to cool the North American continent I've turned the North Atlantic Current into a giant heat pump/cooling engine. You see the North Atlantic current takes water feeding by down south by the Mexican Gulf and brings it past America and then up across the Atlantic to Britain where it meets cooler air from the north. It then disperses and regathers to come down around the other side of the Atlantic before reforming up again around Bermuda. This is why hurricanes that start out off the coast of Africa can end up smashing Florida or Cuba.

Where did I get the energy to do this? From the very heat energy that I wanted to disperse! It was a clever feat of manipulating micro-currents, literally tens of thousands of them, in the air and water to form a giant thermodynamic engine. You can't see it of course, not unless you have about five satellites and super-computer to crunch the numbers - or my hyper specialized brain centers and extended consciousness - but nonetheless it's there.

So it's been taking the heat and shipping it up in the form of warm water and air currents to ... the coast of Britain. There the water cools and condenses... falling in the form of ... you guessed it ... rain.

Rain 'worse than foot and mouth'

Press Association
Friday August 27, 2004

The poor harvest this summer's wet weather has caused is doing more financial damage to farming than the foot and mouth crisis four years ago, the government's rural adviser said today...

The damage the wet weather has caused to crops was "disastrous" in some parts of the country, he said, with grain prices "very, very low" and farmers facing a "very uncertain outcome" from the wheat and oilseed rape harvests.

The crisis could cost arable farmers around £100 an acre, Lord Haskins warned...

Mr Ibbott said at least 10 days of dry and windy weather were needed to dry out the fields and give farmers a chance to harvest their crops.

But he warned that unless the wet weather improved, the industry could lose tens - possibly hundreds - of millions of pounds, with farmers in the north-east bearing the brunt of the losses.

"We are a professional industry and we do not want to be seen to be whingeing," he said. "We are used to dealing with the weather, but not weather as bad as this."

There the rain then evaporates and turns into water vapor, which then creates more clouds, which cools even further, and then rains, which evaporates... you get the idea. However no thermodynamic engine is perfectly efficient. Just doesn't happen. Call it entropy or whatever. You put so much heat in, and you can only get so much heat out as work, and the rest becomes wasted or dispersed.

Now I'm running at higher than human efficiency because I'm A) using heat to drive the engine B)Using the work or kinetic energy of currents in air and water to carry heat and C) Most of the "Waste Heat" is being taken away by the currents. So I'm using heat to make work to carry off heat away. It's very efficient. But not perfect. It's at greater efficiency because it doesn't follow the rules of the Carnot engine.

The most efficient heat engine cycle is the Carnot cycle, consisting of two isothermal processes and two adiabatic processes. The Carnot cycle can be thought of as the most efficient heat engine cycle allowed by physical laws. When the second law of thermodynamics states that not all the supplied heat in a heat engine can be used to do work, the Carnot efficiency sets the limiting value on the fraction of the heat which can be so used.

In order to approach the Carnot efficiency, the processes involved in the heat engine cycle must be reversible and involve no change in entropy. This means that the Carnot cycle is an idealization, since no real engine processes are reversible and all real physical processes involve some increase in entropy.

A lot of that is rubbish. It just means 'there is no better engine, except those that don't use the assumptions of the Carnot model'. Humans will figure it out. In maybe a few centuries. Maybe. Right the point is that even though my engine design is more efficient, it's still not perfectly efficient.

So this ironically has the result of actually heating up the coasts. There's only so much heat you can bring to the ocean and then ship away. The idea is to cool the North American continent. But even the coasts there have residual heat that can't be sucked away. In addition, a weak El Nino is forming in the Pacific. More residual waste heat from the imperfection of the atmospheric engine.

But that's why places like Japan cook and frost nips Winepeg and Minnesota and there is freezing temperatures at night as far south as Utah. The world hasn't gone mad. I've merely just reconfigured the atmospheric climate rules. However I just can't wish away energy or matter. The more CO2 humans put out, the more solar energy the atmosphere will retain. I can redistribute that energy into a new pattern, even a seemingly impossible pattern, but I can't just wish it away.

Except by putting a huge ass mirror on the earth, and the easiest way of putting a huge ass mirror on the earth to reflect away more sunlight is to put a giant ice sheet on a third or so of the earth's surface. The logical dilemma of having both an ice age and global warming at once makes me want to be there and see the scientists' faces when they realize what is going on. I do like pulling pranks once in a while after all.

Now what will happen is that eventually enough heat energy will be sucked into more cloud cover which will be like an umbrella that shades the earth, and enough cold will develop to start a true continental ice sheet to reflect off enough sunlight that a balance will be reached. The earth's atmosphere will retain more heat from the sun because of C02, but less will reach it or stick around to be absorbed because of my measures. So a new equilibrium will be reached with a resulting polarized climate areas.

Most of the earth will be more hot, humid, and cloudy but not too much more than now. With the increased C02 we will see jungle like plant growth. Then around the north and centered on the North American Contitent and the Artic we will see an ice sheet covering perhaps a quarter to a third of the earth's surface. It will be very cold there even during the summer. The only temperate zones will be very near the Antartic in Chile and South Africa, or near the beginning of the Ice Sheet in America, Northernmost Europe, or Russia.

If none of you have noticed, this is essentially a reworked application of the same idea inherent in the animation movie "Fire and Ice,". I think that's where my unconscious got the idea. Only two decades of progressively taking over the entire global weather net actually let me put it into operation. And I'm not out to destroy humanity. Quite the obverse, while Canada and the northern latitudes will suffer the most - I hope the ice sheet stabilizes just south of Hudson Bay - it is the only chance to maintain the earth as a hospitable environment for mankind given mankind's own wasteful and short-sighted collective actions. It is also necessary to preserve the biodiversity of terran life, of which I am also a guardian and have as my charge.

However there is going to be a lot of collateral damage along the way to get to that solution. I also rather think that human beings will not be so happy with my actions, even if I am collectively bailing out their asses. This is because a lot of them are going to suffer and die a long the way. Of course, more would have if I hadn't acted ... but I rather doubt they'll be that rational and enlightened about the whole deal.

The War in Heaven: An Icy Heart,

Well there's good news and there's bad news. Most of the news is somewhere inbetween. The bad news is that I haven't been able to create hyper-hurricanes - at least without sacrificing the ice age trend. Which I wont' do. The ice age trend has delayed to unseasonably late the Atlantic hurricane season.

I. Setbacks in the Heavenly War,

The worse news is that I was able to whip up and fire off a hurricane, Charley, after a few attempts at Florida. On one hand it was a smashing success. A last second tweak made it roar from a class II tropical storm overnight into a class IV hurricance - and at its peak probably sneaked over class V. It wasn't as destructive as Hurricane Andrew (which I had nothing to do with ... btw though it is a reasonable question) it was fairly destructive and certainly more destructive than anything since Andrew.

What made it thaumaturgic was not that a hurricane hit Florida, that happens, or that even a strong one hit Florida - statistically that is bound to happen too. No, my signature was the last second goose that made it jump three storm categories practically overnight confounding the forecasters and metereologists. They were quick to brush that under the rug though. Nothing to see here. Move along now.

But I'm not going to gloat over it, because politically it was a failure. It was a failure because it allowed Jeb Bush to showcase himself as a compassionate leader. Previously he had been taking all sorts of rightful criticism for using police to intimidate voters in the most vile sort of vote suppression schemes. Despite having been exposed as a villian, he was able to use his tour of the state's destroyed towns in order to promote himself as a caring leader.

Some days I'm really beginning to sympathesize with YHWH. You strike a people down in just punishment of their leader's crimes, and they cling to him all the more. The Bible OT is filled with stories of how collective punishment backfire like this. Well, next time I'll know better and set it up differently.

The other setback is in Iraq. I've been trying to undermine the unelected government of the Iraqi puppets put in power by American forces, all the better to promote true eventual democracy. However in my attempt to strong arm Motaqada Sadr into knuckling under to the Marya that has been cooperating the most with me, Sistani, I inadvertantly weakened him too much and the US military is about to sweep him out of Najaf. This however showcases their supported puppet government in a stronger, if more hated, light than before. So now I'll have to start undermining Allawi and his cronies all over again. That's another major setback.

Maybe I should just wipe them all out. Well I'll think about the idea. That would be a clear message. Certainly it worked with the UN after Sergio rejected most unwisely my warnings not to advance the cause of unelected and appointed puppet Iraqi client state supporters. Somehow I think I tried to get too clever there. Sometimes finesse and nuance really is just wasted effort compared to razing things to the ground.

II. Ice Age Trump Card,

While I've failed to create as flashy a success with the ice age program as I intended, I cannot argue that it is working, even against my begrudging assessment. Why begrudging? I kind of wanted something more spectacular. Like snow in August in DC. That would have driven the message home.

By all the metrics, the ice age is progressing just fine however. Metrics like sunspot count, cloud cover, precipitation, oceanic current heat transfer, etc. all indicate that it's going smoothly if gradually. By gradually I mean the "fast" ice age scenario seems to be working. How much working? Freezing temperatures in the mainland USA in August.

As The Angry Man wrote in arguing, I suppose that is plenty flashy enough.

Frost last weekend causes hundreds of millions of dollars in crop losses in Minnesota.

Front page story. Accompanying map (not in internet story) shows the area
north of I-94 (basically a line from Minneapolis to Fargo) and says that
soybean losses are expected to be between 30% and 100%.

Also The Gentleman, being farther north than me, also noted that away from the water masses the effect has been much more evident.

Oh, I dunno:
Try this one. Manitoba and Saskatchewan are the breadbasket for half the world.

Friday, Aug 20, 2004

Early frost rattles Prairie farmers

Winnipege — One of the earliest frosts on record had farmers across much of southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba wringing their hands Friday as they hoped to salvage a once-promising crop.

While the unseasonable cold did not produce the so-called “killing frost” that can destroy entire fields in a matter of hours, a stretch of warmer, drier weather is needed in the next few weeks to avert disaster.

“It's just a typical thing, you're at the mercy of Mother Nature and she can either make you or break you,” said Murray Downing, who is growing winter wheat and canola about 250 kilometres west of Winnipeg. “If that had been a harder frost, it could have been a year's worth of work gone up in smoke.”

Numerous weather records were set Friday morning in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, said Environment Canada meteorologist Dale Marciski.

In Winnipeg, the temperature fell to zero degrees Celsius, breaking the previous record of 0.6 C set in 1895.

One of the coldest readings was taken in Broadview, Sask., where the low hit -2.9 C.

A prudent investor might buy wheat futures.

All in all, the signs first show where they would be expected. No weather effect from the ocean out on the prairie.

Finally we have the case where it is driven home. It's bad enough to contemplate economically ruining thousands of small farmers. Apparently I also get to be the villain that freezes lost boy scouts to death.

Hope dims in search for missing Boy Scout
Tuesday, August 24, 2004

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (AP) -- A search resumed Tuesday for a 12-year-old Boy Scout missing in the Uinta Mountains, but chilly, wet weather has dimmed hopes that rescuers will find him alive, officials said...

Since Friday, the Mirror Lake-Pass Lake area, about 53 miles east of Salt Lake City, has had freezing overnight temperatures, intermittent hail and daytime temperatures hovering only in the 40s.

Sometimes this job is really gut wrenching. And it is a job. I just don't get paid for it. I get to make the call that freezes to death lost boy scouts. In Salt Lake City. In August.

So it's working. In a few weeks I've turned the weather of the world upside down. If it's like this in August, you can imagine what the winters will be like. The probability of forming a permanent ice sheet with sufficient albedo to reflect enough sunlight to contradict global warming is significantly higher now. It will have a terrifically high cost, in ruined lives, in displaced individuals fleeing the ice, and in lost lives starting with one lost boy scout alone at night.

Yet what choice do I really have?

Peat bogs harbour carbon time bomb

18:22 07 July 04

NewScientist.com news service

The world’s peat bogs are haemorrhaging carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming, warns a UK researcher.

And worse still, the process appears to be feeding off itself, as rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are triggering further releases from the bogs.

Billions of tonnes of carbon could pour into the air from peat bogs in the coming decades, says Chris Freeman of the University of Wales at Bangor, UK. “The world’s peatland stores of carbon are emptying at an alarming rate,” he says. “It’s a vicious circle. The problem gets worse and worse, faster and faster.”

Peat bogs are a vast natural reservoir of organic carbon. By one estimate, the bogs of Europe, Siberia and North America hold the equivalent of 70 years of global industrial emissions. But concern is growing that such bogs are releasing ever more of their carbon into rivers in the form of dissolved organic carbon (DOC).

Indeed I would argue that I have no choice at all, in practical terms, if I am to "Protect and Preserve All of Life".

Three wholly unexpected sets of findings now suggest that the problem could be much graver than anyone had imagined. Work by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggests that the screening effect produced by particles of soot and smoke in the atmosphere is stronger than climatologists thought; one variety of human-made filth, in other words, has been protecting us from the effects of another. As ancient smokestacks are closed down or replaced with cleaner technologies, climate change, paradoxically, will intensify.

And my move of desperation is the only hope of forestalling an imminent artic meltdown that is occurring right now.

A related danger is the increased ultraviolet radiation passing through the damaged ozone layer in the circumpolar regions: Today's young indigenous people will receive lifetime doses at least 30 per cent higher than any prior generation.

These sombre warnings are the collective judgment of more than 600 scientists and other experts, mostly from Arctic countries, who four years ago began reviewing and weighing the mountain of research studies about climate change in the North. Their assessment was requested by the Arctic Council, made up of Canada, Russia, the U.S. and five other national governments plus six organizations of indigenous peoples.

The Arctic is already warming much faster than the rest of the world and most computer projections show the increase there in average temperatures over the next 100 years will be at least double the global average. The bulk of the warming is taking place in the winter.

This polar warming has major implications for the rest of the world. Extra freshwater emptying from the Arctic Ocean because of heavier river runoff, retreating glaciers and melting sea ice could easily disrupt the conveyer belts of deep ocean currents that carry vital warmth north from the tropics. Simultaneously the loss of snow and ice means more dark surfaces to absorb solar heat, accelerating global warming in what could become a run-away cycle.

If I don't act now it will be too late. Yet the sudden change will harm many livlihoods and even kill many by ice and by famine from failing crops. Yet if humanity won't take responsibility, I must for the sake of all life. Yet it is doubtful that if it were ever made public what I am doing, that humans would be understanding of the fact that it's some pain now or it's complete extinction later.

Labrythine Dreams: Gates of Horn and Ivory,

Recently, humans have been stumbling around and beginning to understand dreams.

In the middle of the night, we are all Fellini—the creator of a parade of fleeting images intended for an audience of one. At times, it's an action flick, with a chase scene that seems endless ... until it dissolves and we're falling, falling, falling into ... is it a field of flowers? And who is the gardener waving at us over there? Could it be our old high-school English teacher? No, it's Jon Stewart. He wants us to sit on the couch right next to him. Are those TV cameras? And what happened to our clothes? In the morning, when the alarm rudely arouses us, we might remember none of this—or maybe only a fraction, perhaps the feeling of lying naked in a bed of daisies or an inexplicable urge to watch "The Daily Show."

This, then, is the essence of dreaming—reality and unreality in a nonsensical, often mundane but sometimes bizarre mix. Dreams have captivated thinkers since ancient times, but their mystery is now closer than ever to resolution, thanks to new technology that allows scientists to watch the sleeping brain at work. Although there are still many more questions than answers, researchers are now able to see how different parts of the brain work at night, and they're figuring out how that division of labor influences our dreams. In one sense, it's the closest we've come to recording the soul. "If you're going to understand human behavior," says Rosalind Cartwright, a chairman of psychology at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, "here's a big piece of it. Dreaming is our own storytelling time—to help us know who we are, where we're going and how we're going to get there."

In order to do this they've been conducting some interesting research. They are still limited by the blindspots of their consciousness, but it's some progress at least.

The long-range goal of dream research is a comprehensive explanation of the connections between sleeping and waking, a multidimensional picture of consciousness and thought 24 hours a day. In the meantime, dream science is helping us understand and treat depression, posttraumatic stress, anxiety and a whole range of other problems. Neuroscientists are gleaning insights into how we learn by studying the physiology of dreaming in adults and children. Psychologists are also studying dreams to learn how both ordinary people and great artists resolve problems in their life and work by "sleeping on it." For many of these researchers, accounts of ordinary dreams are a rich resource. Psychologist G. William Domhoff and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have meticulously cataloged and posted more than 17,000 dreams. That database (dreambank.net) is the source of the dreams printed here.

1. History Of Dream Research

I am with an older, "lecherous-looking" Freudian analyst who wants me to lie on the couch and recall the moment of my birth while he counts 1, 2, 3. I pretend and then tell him the truth. Then he gets undressed and wants to make love to me but just then Mother looks in by the door! And I lie very still; she closes the door. I awaken. (Then I remember wishing that I was still with my analyst.)

Human kind used to actually know more about dreams, more about the gates of horn and ivory. Then they forgot. Silly creatures. No trix for you.

Thousands of years ago, dreams were seen as messages from the gods, and in many cultures, they are still considered prophetic. In ancient Greece, sick people slept at the temples of Asclepius, the god of medicine, in order to receive dreams that would heal them. Modern dream science really begins at the end of the 19th century with Sigmund Freud, who theorized that dreams were the expression of unconscious desires often stemming from childhood. He believed that exploring these hidden emotions through analysis could help cure mental illness. The Freudian model of psychoanalysis dominated until the 1970s, when new research into the chemistry of the brain showed that emotional problems could have biological or chemical roots, as well as environmental ones. In other words, we weren't sick just because of something our mothers did (or didn't do), but because of some imbalance that might be cured with medication.

After Freud, the most important event in dream science was the discovery in the early 1950s of a phase of sleep characterized by intense brain activity and rapid eye movement (REM). People awakened in the midst of REM sleep reported vivid dreams, which led researchers to conclude that most dreaming took place during REM. Using the electroencephalograph (EEG), researchers could see that brain activity during REM resembled that of the waking brain. That told them that a lot more was going on at night than anyone had suspected. But what, exactly?

Here we get to the boring scientific idiocy. I call it idiocy not because it's scientific, but they refuse to believe their own evidence. First the idiocy.

Scientists still don't know for sure, although they have lots of theories. On one side are scientists like Harvard's Allan Hobson, who believes that dreams are essentially random. In the 1970s, Hobson and his colleague Robert McCarley proposed what they called the "activation-synthesis hypothesis," which describes how dreams are formed by nerve signals sent out during REM sleep from a small area at the base of the brain called the pons. These signals, the researchers said, activate the images that we call dreams. That put a crimp in dream research; if dreams were meaningless nocturnal firings, what was the point of studying them? More recently, new theories have made some scientists take dreams more seriously. In 1997, Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town in South Africa published the results of his study of people with damage to different parts of the brain; he found that there was more than one mechanism in the brain for activating dreams. Since then, Solms has argued that technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) might actually lend new weight to Freud's ideas because the parts of the brain that are most active during dreaming control emotion, the core of Freud's dream theory. Today, many therapists have a looser view of Freud, accepting that dreams may express unconscious thoughts, although not necessarily childhood conflicts.

That's correct. The dream is the total gateway between the consciousness and the complete data and software structure of the complete consciousness. Duh. Of course there has to be a feedback mechanism, otherwise higher level symbolic consciousness couldn't communicate and recompile itself interacting with lower level biological consciousness. As you will see even scientists are beginning to grope in the right direction.

Many others think the answer ultimately lies in a reconciliation of the different disciplines that study dreaming: neurobiology and psychology. "Both are useful, but they're different," says Glen Gabbard, professor of psychoanalysis and psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "To have a truly comprehensive understanding of dreams, you have to be bilingual. You have to speak the language of the mind and the language of the brain."

2. The Biology Of Dreaming

Doctors are on the roof talking to people, saying they shouldn't be up there because it's dangerous. One doctor gives shots to immobilize the brain, rather than fixing ailments. I say if I fall to fix me up but leave my brain so I can dream.

Adult humans spend about a quarter of their sleep time in REM, much of it dreaming. During that time, the body is essentially paralyzed but the brain is buzzing. Scientists using PET and fMRI technology to watch the dreaming brain have found that one of the most active areas during REM is the limbic system, which controls our emotions. Much less active is the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with logical thinking. That could explain why dreams in REM sleep often lack a coherent story line. (Some researchers have also found that people dream in non-REM sleep as well, although those dreams generally are less vivid.) Another active part of the brain in REM sleep is the anterior cingulate cortex, which detects discrepancies. Eric Nofzinger, director of the Sleep Neuroimaging Program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, thinks that could be why people often figure out thorny problems in their dreams. "It's as if the brain surveys the internal milieu and tries to figure out what it should be doing, and whether our actions conflict with who we are," he says.

The reason why the morons haven't figured it out yet is that they're confusing content with communication. Consciousness must need have an infrastructure. That infrastructure must like all other biological functions be self-evaluating and self-maintaining. Just as software must be occasionally be modified and updated, so too over time to maintain maximum functionality so too must consciousness. The result? Dreams.

Dreams occasionally solve everyday pragmatic problems, but that is just a side bonus. They're not meant to solve the problems of linear consciousness, they're meant to solve the structural problems of unconsciousness. Does this go there? How do we get that wired up? Your personal mental content only matters if it structurally screws up the overall process.

In this, dreaming is no more remarkable than your immune system or your digestive system which updates itself daily and re-evaluates its functioning with respect to outside inputs. That's what dreams are. Dreams are sampling your mental content for structural elements, and testing out variations of mental structuring.

These may seem like vital mental functions, but no one has yet been able to say that REM sleep or dreaming is essential to life or even sanity. MAO inhibitors, an older class of antidepressants, essentially block REM sleep without any detectable effects, although people do get a "REM rebound"—extra REM—if they stop the medication. That's also true of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac, which reduce dreaming by a third to a half. Even permanently losing the ability to dream doesn't have to be disabling. Israeli researcher Peretz Lavie has been observing a patient named Yuval Chamtzani, who was injured by a fragment of shrapnel that penetrated his brain when he was 19. As a result, he gets no REM sleep and doesn't remember any dreams. But Lavie says that Chamtzani, now 55, "is probably the most normal person I know and one of the most successful ones." (He's a lawyer, a painter and the editor of a puzzle column in a popular Israeli newspaper.)

First of all, REM sleep is a correlate and not a causal factor. The matter of fact is, that the dream isn't in the REM state. REM state is just the biological recalibration sequence. Cutting off REM sleep just means you'll be more clumsy than you were, and the upload to consciousness. The dream actually takes place in a different phase of mental activity. They'd be able to determine this if they ran a PET scan and functional MRI on this guy while he was sleeping. They'd see residual cellular activity consistent with dreaming, but not neocortex firing consistent with REM sleep.

Matter of fact is, the dream occurs at a very basic organic level of consciousness - cellular or perhaps subcellular.

The mystery of REM sleep is that even though it may not be essential, it is ubiquitous—at least in mammals and birds. But that doesn't mean all mammals and birds dream (or if they do, they're certainly not talking about it). Some researchers think REM may have evolved for physiological reasons. "One thing that's unique about mammals and birds is that they regulate body temperature," says neuroscientist Jerry Siegel, director of UCLA's Center for Sleep Research. "There's no good evidence that any coldblooded animal has REM sleep." REM sleep heats up the brain and non-REM cools it off, Siegel says, and that could mean that the changing sleep cycles allow the brain to repair itself. "It seems likely that REM sleep is filling a basic physiological function and that dreams are a kind of epiphenomenon," Siegel says—an extraneous byproduct, like foam on beer.

But if that were the case, then the fellow with no REM sleep would show brain deterioration. No, REM sleep is actually a form of neural exercises and reconditioning of the central nervous system. It's not actually the brain. Anymore than if you twitch or have a muscle cramp while you're awake, that means that you will experience a dream. Never thought of that did you? If the sensory-motor link of REM sleep and neocortex stimulation doesn't happen, then the dream upload sequence is broken but the processing of the DL has still occurred.

You become unable to be conscious of your dream content, but that doesn't mean that the compilation that created the dream didnt' happen.

But dreaming may also fulfill many functions that we don't yet understand. Allan Rechtschaffen, a longtime sleep researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, compares dreaming to breathing. "We need to breathe to get oxygen," he says. "That's a physiological must. That's why the breathing apparatus evolved. But once it evolved, you can put it to other uses, like for speech or laughing or playing the saxophone." Perhaps dreaming, too, adapted to other uses. "There's no reason dreams have to be any one thing," he says. "Is our waking consciousness any one thing?"

Now the scientists get philosophical. Consciousness in general is a general computation device. Applying that logic to dreams is just an extension. What particular purpose does language serve? In any given instance it may serve multitudes of purposes, but language did not come to be because it had a specific purpose for it in mind. This a basic anthropomorphic error of reasoning that is very disappointing.

3. Different Dreamers: Age And Gender

All night long, Jared is drunk and talking in his incoherent mumbly monotone. Finally, I have enough and tell him off. I call him a boring bastard. Then I notice a baby girl standing inside a flaming fireplace. I go up to her and say sympathetically, "You must be very hot and uncomfortable." She agrees. I pick her up and I hold her, taking her away from the fire.

We're born to be dreamers—although it apparently takes a while to get all the equipment working. While parents-to-be fantasize about their babies, fetuses probably aren't dreaming about Mom and Dad. "Almost the entire state of being before we're born is REM sleep," says Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis. "I can't imagine that there's a lot of conflict resolution going on in utero." Young children get a lot of REM sleep as well, which scientists think is probably stimulation for brain growth, not real dreaming. Researchers believe children have to reach a certain level of intellectual maturity, around the age of 8 or 9, before their dreams resemble adults'.

Inge Strauch, a psychology professor at the University of Zurich, has collected 550 dreams from a group of twenty-four 9- to 15-year-olds she studied in her lab over a period of two years. She found that children dreamed about animals more often than adults and were more likely to report being victims than aggressors. They were also more likely to have "fantastic" dreams, while adults' dreams tend to contain more elements of reality. A typical fantastic dream from a 10-year-old Strauch studied included a cat asking for directions to the "cat bathroom." Similarly, an 11-year-old boy dreamed that a snake wanted to go up a ski lift.

Let me put it to you this way, a sneeze is to a cold what REM sleep is to dreams. You can have REM sleep without dreams. You can have sneeze without colds. However scientists are hung up on REM sleep because it's the only way they can tell when someone is dreaming. Because this is when the output to the neocortex happens. If you were paralyzed in such a way that you couldn't consciously feel your nose, or even sneeze, that doesn't mean that you couldn't have a cold.

Gender differences in dream content show up in studies of adults as well. The biggest myth? That adult dreams are "full of sex," says Domhoff, author of "The Scientific Study of Dreams." When they do have dreams that include sex, they're often about someone they're not really attracted to or some conflict, he says. "They are not often joyful occasions." In fact, about two thirds of the characters in men's dreams are men; gender is more evenly divided in women's dreams. These differences appear to be true in many different cultures. Men's dreams also involve more physical aggression than women's dreams; they're more likely to be about chasing, punching, breaking, stealing or killing, Domhoff says. A more typical expression of aggression in women's dreams would be rejection or an insult ("That dress makes you look fat").

A favorite topic for women: weddings. But they're not always happily-ever-after dreams. "Something always goes wrong," Domhoff says. "It's the wrong dress, the wrong guy, the wrong church." In one recorded on dreambank.net, a woman is about to get married and doesn't have anything to wear. "I ended up wearing a genie outfit, genie pants, a gauze orange top, slippers, a belt with bells on it, lots of jewelry and my hair in a ponytail," she wrote. "I remember reassuring myself by thinking it was close to Halloween."

Not surprisingly, new mothers frequently dream about their babies, says Tore Nielsen, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, who has analyzed the content of 20,000 dreams collected over the Web. In a separate study of 220 new mothers' dreams, he found that "a lot of bad things happen to their infants—the cat eating them, or they're suddenly lost, or they left them in the care of a relative who left them in a shopping center."

Freud was correct about one thing, the majority of dreams are about anxiety. He however was incorrect why. Freud speculated that it was about unresolved childhood conflicts. It's really about paradigmatic blindspots. The dreams are running simulations to attempt to determine if there are any systematic errors of consciousness in the person. Where these systematic errors are not consciously percieved or addressed, the dreams create ever greater simulations searching for different perceptual framings that would resolve the error.

Dreams aren't about what you think and they aren't about what you believe, they're about how you think about what you think about and believe.

They are one might fancifully call them, meta-consciousness.

4. How We Use Dreams

There is a man talking calmly on a pay phone. He is a gunman. He talks casually as he blasts a machine gun up the stairs next to the pay phone, killing people. When he is out of bullets, he casually alters his weapon to use shotgun shells. He is poised, cold like steel, calm, and he kills.

People who don't remember their dreams can learn to recall them. In general, more introverted, psychologically oriented people naturally remember their dreams. Practical, concrete thinkers probably won't. It also helps to get enough sleep so you have time to dream. If you want to remember more, try to keep the REM state going by lying still and keeping your eyes closed while you repeat the dream scenario in your head to solidify it in your memory. Cartwright even suggests giving it a title, like "My Date With Brad Pitt." Keep a notebook by your bed and write down what's in your head as soon as you wake up.

Areas that generate internal imagery are active, providing visual detail, even though regions receiving signals from the eyes are shut down. Emotional centers rev up, while areas involved in judgment wind down, perhaps giving free rein to unconscious feelings and drives, as Freud theorized. Regions responsible for short-term memory become inactive, so the dreamer forgets what just happened and accepts rapidly shifting scenes or characters.

Why would you want to remember ten thousand test simulations? The only reason why you'd want to remember them is to remember the ones with successful end-run solutions giving clues how to avoid the perceptual deadlocks you're caught in. That's why I've been relentlessly dreaming about women. My brain is given it's new directive, testing out all the solutions possible to find a successful and probable mating match. It's literally running all the solutions given my consciousness and what's available out there.

Why should you care what happens in your head at night? Although there's lots of disagreement about the psychological function of dreams, researchers in recent years have come up with some tantalizing theories. One possibility is that dreaming helps the mind run tests of its Emergency Broadcast System, a way to prepare for potential disaster. So, for example, when new mothers dream about losing their babies, they may actually be rehearsing what they would do or how they would react if their worst fears were realized. There's also evidence that dreaming helps certain kinds of learning. Some researchers have found that dreaming about physical tasks, like a gymnast's floor routine, enhances performance. Dreaming can also help people find solutions to elusive problems. "Anything that is very visual may get extra help from dreams," says Deirdre Barrett, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and editor of the journal Dreaming. In her book "The Committee of Sleep," she describes how artists like Jasper Johns and Salvador Dali found inspiration in their dreams. In her own research on problem solving through dreams, Barrett has found that even ordinary people can solve simple problems in their lives (like how to fit old furniture into a new apartment) if they focus on the dilemma before they fall asleep.

When these artists or scientists solve problems in their dreams, they aren't problem solving in the usual fashion. Dreaming is all about "thinking outside the box". In fact, in a dream, your consciousness can be test case distorted so it can even recognize a box if that is what is necessary to find a viable solution. Your dreams can also be messengers about what you've been denying but know the real answer is.

Whatever the function of dreams at night, they clearly can play a role in therapy during the day. The University of Maryland's Clara Hill, who has studied the use of dreams in therapy, says that dreams are a "back door" into a patient's thinking. "Dreams reveal stuff about you that you didn't know was there," she says. The therapists she trains to work with patients' dreams are, in essence, heirs to Freud, using dream imagery to uncover hidden emotions and feelings. Dreams provide clues to the nature of more serious mental illness. Schizophrenics, for example, have poor-quality dreams, usually about objects rather than people. Cartwright has been studying depression in divorced men and women, and she is finding that "good dreamers," people who have vivid dreams with strong story lines, are less likely to remain depressed. She thinks that dreaming helps diffuse strong emotions. "Dreaming is a mental-health activity," she says.

Well here's a primitive but positive response. Dreams like criticism are naturally anxiety provoking, precisely because they deal with our short comings. Just as a person can refuse to listen to criticism, they can operate without consciously registering their dream content. However like people who refuse to listen to criticism, people without consciousness of their dreams often are the ones who make dreadful mistakes of misjudgement or going too far.

People often deal with traumatic events through dreams. Tufts University psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann, author of "Dreams and Nightmares," analyzed dreams from the same group of people before and after September 11 (none of them lived in New York). He found that the later dreams were not necessarily more negative, but they were more intense. "The intensity is a measure of emotional arousal," he says. For people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dream content can be a marker of the level of distress, says psychiatrist Thomas Mellman of the Howard University School of Medicine, who studies PTSD. Dreams that mimic the real-life trauma indicate that the patient may be "stuck" in the experience. He thinks one way to help people move past the memory is through an "injury rehearsal," where they imagine a more positive scenario.

Dreams offer ontological therapy. They allow insights or structural changes that can make you able to "deal" with reality better. This isn't always a positive thing however. There is some choice involved. The dream runs the numbers, and you make your choices. For instance, if you're a slave one solution is to become without pride and actually enjoy submission. Hostage specialists call one variant of this, Stockholm Syndrome.

However you may not want to become someone else's bitch. The dream doesn't judge. It can however analyze a situation and give you all the possible alternatives. It's up to you to follow through.

All this has led to a rethinking of Freud's great insight, that dreams are a "royal road" to the unconscious. Mapping that royal road is a daunting task for scientists who are using sophisticated imaging techniques and psychological studies in an attempt to synthesize what we know about the inner workings of the mind and the brain. Dreaming, like thinking, is what makes us human—whether we're evoking old terrors or imaging new pleasures. "We dream about unfinished business," says Domhoff. And, if we're lucky, we wake up with a little more insight to carry the day.

With Pat Wingert and Josh Ulick

Maybe some day they'll figure it out. It's not my concern really. I have more important things to worry about.

Dragon Hide: A Molting of the Soul,

You ever install a new operating system on your computer and then reboot it? That's what happened to me. Presto! New psyche. More irritatingly the dragon within me rebooted me. Even worse, I had thought that such a shift was no longer necessary. I have to come to face facts however.

This is my nature, this is the dragon's nature. It is somewhat disconcerting to go to sleep one night and to wake up and feel yourself flowing, twitching, resolidifying into a new self. Sometimes the changes aren't big or discernable except to those who have known me for a long time.

Sometimes the changes are profound. Sometimes the changes give me back memories I've lost or discarded before. Most of the time they wipe out memories. Thankfully the latest shift gave the latest me more memories of my father. It was a small mercy however.

Like a serpent sloughs off its skin, so too I slough off my psyches. I molt my personality, my soul, my very identity when I have outgrown it. The new form that emerges is not merely a small step or a gradual evolution away from a previous self, it is an entire redesign and reinvention of habit, memory, attitude, taste, and personality from the ground up.

It is not that I do not have a soul. I do not have a permanent one. It is changing and ever being rewritten. It is as if the stuff of souls in human beings was written in stable DNA, and mine in unstable mutable and mutating RNA. The double helix of the human soul fails to find a matching strip, leaving one single helical and serpentine spiral in mine to change as it wills and as needed in circumstance.

Most of the time, there is a illusion of the continuity of consciousness after the initial shock. However, I often run into contradictions that illustrate how very different my new self is unthinkingly and unconsciously from my previous self. When memory itself is tinkered with, how can we be sure how different we are from the past? Only in recorded actions and words, and in the memories and reactions of others can I watch my shifting psyche in a mirror that reveals just how much it has changed.

Still the changes are often those of emphasis. It is a part and parcel of my directive-bound or compulsive nature. When I get these directives, I have very little choice about carrying them out.

I suppose I should be grateful that one of my new directives is to find a mate(s) and reproduce. This is the dragon's response to my complaint that I haven't had time for serious relationships in the last few years. Now every night I dream of little else. Often the dreams dictate to me tiny details that I should be careful in selecting a mate.

Good grief! My over-compulsive nature finds itself obsessing about everything, including the request for more personal time and romantic relationships. I suppose I should feel grateful that it has listened at all.

Dragon Bones: A reflection upon Inhumanity,

Dragon: So you happy with the changes?

Mortal: You could have warned me that you were going to reboot my psyche and adjust my personality.

Dragon: You were the one who said "Let's do it,"

Mortal: And after an experience like that, it may be some time before I give an open-ended command like that again. I woke up with no clue where I was and completely disoriented. Everything was as if it was new to me, because it was new. Just the usual briefing summaries, some of them woefully inadequate so I had people looking at me strange for days because I was contradicting things I'd said earlier.

Dragon: You cling so tenaciously to being human. You complain about a little thing like a personality reboot, when it was necessary to keep you sane. Besides I set the parameters of your persona to include more of your pre-refit characteristics. You'd think that you would thank for me for being so thoughtful.

Mortal: Well, umm thanks. Thanks for nothing. I suppose that was supposed to correspond to the scene from the dream I had last year, where after I absorb the spirit of the dragon I run back to a small cottage that stands near but not at the twinned tower I had left before.

Dragon: Of course. Sometimes it's almost as if you were being purposely obtuse.

Mortal: Do you know how much time has passed? And every time I cast a freaking divination, it says that I'll have to improvise how to make money along the way. I am not pleased.

Dragon: Your constant need to attempt to fit into human society is amusing. What's happening to you is not human.

Mortal: I can feel it happening to me. Every time I close my eyes or I look at white space, I either see multitudes of flashing circles of light rotating about me or I see swirling curvilinear surges of light or sometimes pulsing stars.

Dragon: That is your optic nerves rendering the new state of your consciousness. It is no longer focused within your body. Thoughts are being generated in the extended daemon architectures you've built around yourself, a sort of virtual machine of pure quantum fluctuations and opto-electric pico-surges.

Mortal: Does everything have to be so dramatic? Can't I just hold down a 9-5 like everyone else?

Dragon: With your increased processing capacity you can do whatever you want. Combine that with a virtual engine running ontolgoical engineering applications, and you can do whatever you want.

Mortal: I sure as hell hope so, prior to this upgrade we hit a "brick wall" in diminishing returns. We were getting stretched pretty thin there, and not making much headway.

Dragon: Just wait, this non-localized and shared consciousness thing is something that's going to take a while to get the hang of. Then you'll start seeing dividends.

Mortal: I sure as hell hope so. I feel pretty discouraged about my return on investment curve. The yield isn't bad, but the effort needed to get it - aiyeeh!

Dragon I'm glad that you see that despite your "triumphs" in Iraq and elsewhere, that you consider these failures - as do I. The simple fact is that your failures have triumphed over modern armies and beseiged world rulers. But that's only the beginning.

Mortal: Well I'm tired as hell of all of this, so I wish it were the end for my striving rather than the beginning. You'd think that I'd have earned some ontological vacation time after all of this, but there's none in sight.

Dragon: No pain, no gain.

Mortal: Yeah, that's what I thought. You better deliver though. All these millions of green circles of light flashing in various orientations and patterns around me, and the swirling and sometimes zig-zagging luminious light streaks - like a firefly made from a lightning bug into a comet of lightning instead - well it's getting a little disorienting.

Dragon: Get some sleep. We'll talk there.

Mortal: Good night then.

Dragon: I'll see where Morpheus leaves open his gates.

Eye of the Dragon: Modular Consciousness

I have a modular consciousness. This means that it can be taken apart and put back together. I call it somewhat unimaginatively, The Reconstitution Factor. This means that my information can be broken up into elemental units, recombined, reconfigured, and transferred. It is not as if I can transfer my consciousness down a digital telephone line, I already have downloaded my consciousness down telephone lines.

In the science fiction series, Babylon Five, there existed a species of the "first ones" called the Vorlons. The vorlons had the capacity to transfer part of their consciousness to other species, and to either use this to influence them or observe through them.

It is the only comparison I can find within the reference frame of most people. It is not telepathy. However it is one of those things which if all lumped together would crudely fit under the misconception that humans have about 'telepathy'.

I have downloaded parts of my consciousness into other human beings for various reasons. Often it was to accellerate their learning or to outright give them advanced technical knowledge. Recently I have been able to viralize and transfer the self-replicating complete Reconstitution factor itself, the Psyche Shapeshifting factor, to human beings so that they can obtain control of their own psyches.

My psyche still is significantly different in that its idenitity is not vested in a group archetypal union from whence a collective conscious and unconscious springs. Instead it has a primary directive core or an operating system kernel which I call the dragon.

However it is apparent that even human beings have mechanisms for forgetting and re-membering data and neural-glial synaptic connections. If it were not the case, then I couldn't have rewritten the macro-brain code to produce a reconstitutive and psyche shape-shifting factor in the code of human consciousness.

Posted on Tue, Aug. 03, 2004

Scientists study brain's wiring to learn how we remember, forget
Steven Schmidt, a psychologist at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, likens forgetting to what happens when a stone is thrown into a lake.

By Robert S. Boyd

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - After decades of studying how memory works, scientists are trying to figure out how we forget.

Their goal is to help people:

- Forget painful things they don't want to remember, from an embarrassing moment in high school or a stupid mistake at work on up to a traumatic rape or accident.

- Not forget things they do want to remember, such as where they left their keys or the name of the boss's spouse all the way, and slow the devastation of Alzheimer's disease.

Instead of just giving memory tests to people, neuroscientists are using recent technologies that observe the living brain at work, such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and PET (positron emission tomography).

In addition, legions of flies, snails and mice have given up their lives to provide insight into how people remember and forget, since some brain structures and functions are similar in humans and lowly pests.

Forgetting is basically the reverse of remembering. Memories form when new physical and chemical links, called synapses, are created between brain cells, called neurons, or when old synaptic links are strengthened.

An elaborate network of connections, rather like a computer wiring diagram, assembles a memory from separate parts of the brain that process the myriad sights, sounds, words, people, motions and emotions that crowd the senses every waking moment.

This step is known as "consolidation." It occurs when a memory is moved from a short-term holding room - a mental scratchpad called working memory that lasts a few seconds or minutes - to long-term storage elsewhere in the neural network.

When a memory is recalled, the process is called "retrieval." The memory isn't stored in a single place, but reassembled from bits and pieces scattered across the neural network. It never comes back exactly the way it went in because new experiences have reshaped the brain in the interim. Mistaken or garbled memories are common, as detectives and trial jurors learn to their sorrow.

Forgetting can be a failure of either consolidation or of retrieval. In addition, memories may fade or decay over time, or be wiped out by interference from other memories. For example, you probably remember what you had for breakfast yesterday, but not last year. Too many breakfasts have come in between.

Steven Schmidt, a psychologist at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, likens forgetting to what happens when a stone is thrown into a lake.

"The lake `remembers' the input of the rock as a series of waves on its surface," he explained in an e-mail. "Consolidation is a process that `holds' that pattern of waves. If consolidation is disrupted, the wave patterns are not retained."

Like a water-skier breaking up the pattern of waves, the release of certain hormones in the brain may halt the process of consolidation. "The memory is simply not fully laid down," Schmidt said.

Interference results when a pattern of activated neurons no longer can be sustained, perhaps because a flood of new information has overwritten the original memory. An analogy would be throwing many rocks into the lake near where the first one hit the water.

"The wave patterns of the more numerous set of rocks will make it difficult to see the waves created by the first rock," Schmidt said.

Failure to retrieve a memory is the inability to access information previously stored in the brain. "In my lake metaphor," he said, "I throw a rock in on one shore and notice the pattern of activation. At a later date I may have difficulty recognizing that pattern on the water if I am standing on the other side of the lake."

Loss of memory also can result from emotional or physical causes, such as a blow to the head, a stroke, an infection or surgery. The brains of Alzheimer's patients are destroyed by plaques and tangles of alien material invading once-healthy neural networks.

This kind of damage "could make old memories inaccessible because the fragments would be present in the cortex, but not connected, so the episode could no longer be reassembled," Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University, wrote in his new book, "Synaptic Self."

"Patients lose memories because they lose the cells and synapses that lead to, or contain, those memories," Ivan Izquierdo, a Brazilian biochemist, said in an e-mail interview from Rio Grande do Sul.

Mansuo Hayashi, a brain researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, used mutant mice to show what happens when short-term memory isn't consolidated in long-term storage.

By altering a gene, she created a mouse with fewer, but bigger, synapses in the cortex, but left the hippocampus, a region where short-term memories are processed, alone. As a result, her mice learned the location of a platform in their cage, but after a few days they couldn't remember where it was.

"We showed their formation of memories is fine," Hayashi said. "However, their long-term storage is impaired."

In another intriguing experiment, Alison Barth, a neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, found a way to make individual mouse neurons glow when they're processing a memory. To accomplish this feat, Barth attached a green fluorescent chemical to a gene that turns on when a nerve cell is activated.

"Our mouse is a novel tool that can be used to visualize, in living brain tissue, a single neuron that has been activated in response to an animal's experience," Barth reported in the July 21 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. By observing precisely where a memory is forming, she said, scientists will be better able to understand and treat neurological diseases.

Forgetting, or at least reducing, painful memories - known as "therapeutic forgetting" - can be helpful to people such as soldiers or accident or rape victims.

A drug called propranolol can blunt the memory of a trauma, according to James McGaugh, the director of the Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine.

"The drug does not remove the memory - it just makes the memory more normal," McGaugh said in an e-mail report. "It prevents the excessively strong memory from developing, the memory that keeps you awake at night."

"The original memory is not erased," Izquierdo said. "It is literally pushed backstage by other connections. Animals and humans must preserve the memory of frightening events in order to be able to react to them if required, but must keep them sufficiently less accessible if they want to live any life worthy of the name from then on."

Michael Anderson, a psychologist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, used fMRI to find out what happens when people make a conscious effort - without drugs - to forget some words. He discovered that high-level areas of the cortex send signals to suppress low-level activity in the hippocampus, blocking recovery of the words.

"Memory suppression requires people to override or stop the retrieval process," Anderson reported in the Jan. 9 edition of the journal Science. "This work confirms the existence of an active process by which people can prevent awareness of an unwanted past experience. This process causes forgetting."
---
For more information, go to http://web.mit.edu/picowercenter and type in "memory" as the search term.

The researchers have compared memories as being composed of many small waves. Now imagine that each of those waves was able to make its own waves. Then each of those wavelets could be created so that they spontaneously reconstructed a larger form. This is done by writing the memory components so that they trigger macro-actions. Each memory is like a virus, rewriting the phenotypic and genetic expression of various biological organs. The software rewrites the hardware, and directs it to reconstruct the desired aggregate recompilation of the micro-constituent viral data packets.

This is what I'm really doing when I transfer my consciousness to others. I'm giving them millions of tiny data packets which tell their system to set up and run a emulation of a part of my consciousness, and then integrate it with their own natural data simulation systems. Does that sound intrusive? It could be. I could use it to rewrite others to be the way that I like them to be.

However I have not chosen to use this "nuclear" option. The reason why is that it would forever destroy the possibility of genuine and authentic interactions between me and normal human beings. No matter how much I think I can accomplish using this, and no matter how much I fear, I have never resorted to using my viral consciousness to aggressively and coercively rewrite others personalities to my liking.

Instead I have focused on packaging the capability and putting it in the hands of human beings whom I have guided through the process of adapting to higher consciousness. So that they can ethically use it to modify themselves at will and to explore the full potential of their consciousness, and share it with others.

It may seem altruistic, and it is, but that doesn't mean that I'm a "nice guy". When threatened I have used the capability to destructively erase or crash the consciousness of others, even aggressively crack their mental encryption and "steal their souls" by copying their essential data into my memories. It's just that I won't use the capability to coerce you into being something other than what you are. I still reserve the capability of simply deleting the minds of human beings who threaten me.

However I do not use the threat to attempt to coerce or pressure individuals. If I am sufficiently threatened, I will resort to what a human might call "telepathic mindwipe". However I do not use my abilities to scare people into doing what I want. That would be antithetical to my purposes and goals. It would be against my long term self-interest.

Expanding this to write scaling smaller and smaller mental-bots - thoughtforms - and reducing the size and operating requirements of my consciousness is how I achieved the nano-minus state. I wrote myself so that I would make smaller and smaller self-replicating copies of myself, with each level with a learning software package intended to explore and exploit all leveragable thaumaturgic outlets at that scale.

I don't think that even an Adam Kadmon enlightened humanity is capable of this. The extreme mental dislocation is likely to drive human beings mad. It's more like being a cloud or a roomfull of light but drawn by E.M. Escher in a cascading ever smaller referential frame. I don't think humanity could negotiate such a form of consciousness and stay coherent.

The Scales of Justice: Bringing it Home,

When I screw around with the world, these are the kind of people who suffer.

Monday August 2, 2004
The Guardian

Marooned in a lake, Bhajan Das is determined to protect his most prized possession: the tin roof of his mud and bamboo shack.

The 22-year-old returned home with his mother yesterday to find his cow floating dead in tea-brown water and with the walls of his homestead blown away by two weeks of torrential monsoon rain.

It is not the rain he fears now, but the prospect of thieves who raid empty houses in the aftermath of the flood. "I have lost everything. I cannot use the house if the roof is stolen as well," says Mr Das.

Despite the fact that his house was standing in six inches of water, returning home was still a better prospect than staying on dry land. "My family is in a government shelter," he says. "But we only get one and half kilos of rice for eight people. So what is the point of staying?"

These villagers are among half a million people affected in Sylhet state alone, on the border with India. Thanks to its peculiar geography, the wetlands, or hoars, are covered by six feet of water for six months every year. Homes are built on raised ground and usually the monsoon is welcome as it brings rich alluvial silt that fertilises paddy fields.

Although the hoars are situated in one of the wettest places in the world, this year they became wetter. Flash floods have seen the water level rise four metres (12ft), engulfing homes, wiping out the rice crop and threatening to bring diarrhoea and dysentery as the floods recede.

In the dozens of villages that dot the hoars, government officials say that more than 250,000 homes have been destroyed or made uninhabitable. "It is the worst flood I can remember," says 83-year-old Barun Roy, a former MP for the nearby town of Sanumganj. "We will face a crisis unless the government acts because all the crops were destroyed. Where will the people get seeds to plant from next year?"

It's true that if I didn't act, likely many more people will suffer and die or be enslaved than if I do. It's true that this wouldn't be happening to Mr. Das except that I pretty much unilaterally decided to act. It's also true that I don't have a subjective conscience in the same way people do. It also means that without a conscience to placate that I have the obligation to take full and unmitigated personal awareness and responsibility for what is happening.

The local administration says it is trying its best to cope with the disaster. "The first problem is food, as people have nothing to eat. For 500,000 people we need 200 tonnes of rice a day for six months. I can say that it would be difficult to sustain this level of consumption without outside help," says Mohammed Jafar Siddique, the deputy commissioner for Sanumganj district.

The scarcity of food has seen prices of necessities such as rice, cooking oil, salt and kerosene shoot up - in some cases by 200%. Aid agencies also point out that there is an increasing danger of the spread of water-borne diseases.

Even without the flood conditions, Sanumganj has only a third of the 160 doctors required for its population. "The lack of medical help and the serious danger of famine-like conditions in Sanumganj means that we will have an emergency on our hands unless something is done," says Shashanka Saadi, who coordinates relief efforts for Action Aid in Bangladesh.

I made a decision about the better future in the long run. In the short run it's people like this that directly suffer because of my choices. Sometimes it's not even as impersonal as disease, flooding, or famine. When I arranged the destruction of Sergio Viera de Mello in Iraq I destroyed a good man and many idealistic people trying to help Iraq. When I arranged metaphysically events leading to the destruction of an Iraqi cleric at a mosque, the bombs that destroyed him also turned into shredded bits of bone and meat innocent bystanders including women and little kids.

For these people I can offer no justification, except that I had no better means to implement what I felt was a course of action that I felt that I had no other choice than to take if I wanted to be true to my directives to safeguard all of life and human liberty. Yet it's an ugly road that takes you down that way. The simple fact is that most people don't want to be free, they want to be alive. They don't want to be smart in using resources, they want to try as hard as they can to provide for their family.

People like this are guilty of nothing more than being captive to a simplistic form of consciousness. They make their choices based upon local opportunities and global perceptual trends. They cannot but help but rush to destruction, and the only way to save even some of them is to take drastic action.

However I try to do one thing. I try to look full in the face those harmed by my actions and remember it. I remember it so that I can minimize the harm done, shrink the phase volume of the collateral damage envelope in the solution space of the parameters. I don't have to do that. Sometimes I fight with the dragon within, because its frustrated that we have to go the long way around to maximize human lives. It is frankly a very inadequate thing to offer in the face of such suffering.

However I cannot change humanity. Only humanity can change humanity. People are the problem, and people are the solution. Everything I'm doing is aimed toward provoking people or supporting them into becoming more self-aware and more capable of better adaptation. Those people I help succeed and survive. I constantly survey humanity searching for potential to promote and assist.

This is the other side of what I do, constantly seeking out those that could become the centers of change for the better in humanity and increasing the odds of their success. However in order to protect them, I cannot speak of them openly. Often they are unaware of the others that I am attempting to assist, all the better to prevent one compromised person from identifying the rest.

But in the end all of these long term projections are of very little comfort to Mr. Das. In the aggregate his plight is the product of a population growing out of control and forcing him into marginal living areas on flood plains. I cannot stop runaway global warming, if I can at all, without flooding those plains. Yet if I do, people like Mr. Das will suffer. Yet if I don't others will suffer.

You see the dillemma, and the odd wisdom or luck of me being absent a subjective emotional conscience. If I did have one, I'd have been driven insane by the choices I had to make and become either an unrestricted monster or a basket case. In my case, I simply optimize the number and quality of human lives preserved in the long run and try to cut a fit to the numbers that minimizes loss and suffering. It's all I can do, but it's all that can be done.

Sigh.

Dragon on the Couch: Riddle Me This,

For the purposes of this discussion, I will write out the perspective as I understand it and have divined it of the dragon within labeling that as the Dragon , and I will label the consciousness where the egotistical self resides as the Mortal perspective. I think I need to see all the arguments laid out in a dialogue here.

Mortal: Hello there.

Dragon: Good day.

Mortal: I've got a complaint.

Dragon: Don't you always?

Mortal: I've done what you asked. I'm only asking questions because your answers make little to no sense.

Dragon: My nature is not to answer, but to riddle. When have I ever given you answers? There are only questions to explore and discover your own answers. However haven't the questions I've asked you led to explore some truly magnificent things?

Mortal: Yes, but I'm tired of working and never seeing any return for all this Socratic inquiry.

Dragon: Isn't being one of the most powerful beings on the planet not a significant return? Aren't your needs being met? Have you ever gone without, except when you yourself asked for these experiences in order to see what they were like? Remember the time you asked to see what it would be like to fly on standby ...

Mortal: That is definitely an experience I never want to repeat. Yes, I asked you to arrange it for me to fly on standby. It was definitely worth experiencing. Once. I've also asked for things like companionship, riches, etc. These seem conspicuously absent.

Dragon: They're coming. You have friends, and now that you've listened to me you have richer and more faithful friends than you ever did. You've grown closer to your family. Remember that dream last night?

Dream of the Inner Sanctum

In this dream, I am in my parents house the house where I grew up. We're all in the downstairs "family" room sitting on the couches. My parents and siblings are there. Then suddenly when I'm turning down a hallway I discover a room that I never knew was there before. It was hidden in a wall that I thought the furnace occupied. But it was a room for play and spending time, with entertainment equipment. I wondered why I hadn't ever spent any time there before.

So you've grown closer to your family and they to you. You have less friends but real ones, both in proximity and abroad. Surely you've noticed that more and more women are getting flustered near you, giving you second looks, or going out of their way to chat with you even though you're a stranger. Two in the last two days as a matter of fact.

It's just a matter of time.

Mortal: I suppose I can't argue with you there, except that you let that one girl rip out my heart and then dangled visions and dreams in my head about eventual vindication.

Dragon: You know you can't love in the same way mortals can. We had to invent a fascimile of love. We did it by creating a obsession regarding a person built into an intimacy emulator based upon your insatiable curiousity and attention to detail. The experience was far more intense than what human beings call love. It had the intensity that only the obsession of our kind can have, and so being unreciprocable led to fear. Most humans cannot feel that sort of intensity you regularly feel, and the obsession necessary to animate you was ten-fold your normal laser-like focus.

Mortal: You could have warned me that it would take me five years to recover and that the torment of being obsessed with being with someone and then being unable to be with them would drive me to do crazy things, like agree to "save the world" and accepting a mindwipe in order to perform a personality purge and rebuild.

Dragon: That's a bitter topic. It's true that this was brutal. It's also true that it would have been unnecessary if you had accepted your destiny originally. It's true that I tricked you into a situation where you would accept a personality purge rather than bear the unbearable agony of unrequited hyper-obsession. It's also true that I've rebuilt you into what you could only have imagined yourself as - stronger, handsomer, more charismatic, smarter, tougher, etc. - as compensation. It's true that if I hadn't put you through this, you would have never failed your family. It's also true that if you hadn't had a petty and vindictive moment of selfish weakness, they would have never suffered. It's true that I warned you of what was to come and you didn't understand my warning. It's true that had you never made this terrible mistake you would have have learned to generalize your new neural connections into loving them for the first time.

Love being a flexible word for something that approximates in its own way human love, but is not really the same thing altogether any more than a dragon is a lizard or a unicorn a horse. You'll do it better next time that we have data on how to calibrate it.

Mortal: The price of fighting you is too high. We've both made mistakes in our struggle for dominance. That's why I won't contest you, but I feel like my life isn't even in my own hands any more. I feel frustrated. Even though some good things have happened for me, and well they should after accepting a purge of my innermost identity as the price for them, my life is still on hold. I have no career and no prospect of one. Every time someone asks me about my future, I have no answer because I have no idea what the hell is going on.

Maybe it's petty to worry about that, but I don't want to be a hermit for the rest of my life. I only accepted that in the first place as a means to an end, not as a permanent occupation. You've had over two decades of my time and dedication, and even if we only count after my decision to accept your guidance then seven years of unrelenting work and agony.

When does it begin to come together? When do I get a life?

Dragon: It took the time that it took. If you could have withstood it going any faster, it would have gone faster. The limitation was your mettle, which while tough as hell literally, it was being forged into something that could fold space and time itself.

As for how much longer it will take, you know the score as well as I do. You've got the whole world jumping at shadows because you've been warping reality so much even their pathetic denial and rationalization is having trouble keeping up. Right now they're having to cite records centuries out of date in order to find conditions that match, and soon all the record books will be surpassed. If we were going any quicker you'd throw the whole world into shock.

Do you want that? Because I can do that. You're the one that always wants to limit collateral damage. The Dragon does not care about individuals, only the whole.

Mortal: I'm just sick and tired of feeling treated as the crazy-man-in-the-corner or being humored as the eccentric genius who can't get his act in order. I'd just like a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t. Life is short you know.

Dragon: That remains to be seen. As for respect, this world isn't ready for you and to be frank you're not ready for the world to know you. You want them to acknowledge you and everything just to move along quietly and smoothly. However there is no way this can happen without creating a big stir. And you've always choosen privacy over celebrity, a wise choice I might add, so we've respected that and given you the gift of anonymity.

Mortal: It was useful to be able to observe humans without them knowing who I was precisely, even if their instincts made them feel uneasy or nervous without quite knowing why. And yes I would hate to be a celebrity. It's not that I feel like I'm a failure, but so much is just so uncertain. I try so hard and about half of what I try works or it works and accomplishes half of what I want. It's also not very flashy.

Humans are all about selling the sizzle and not the steak. I'm all about the steak and not the sizzle. Where's the beef, right? But you're the one sending me dreams of being naked or being exposed or being discovered or breaking out of my chains. I feel frustrated more and more with the constraints of pretending to be like other people, but I have no way to exist amongst people if I don't pretend to be other than I am.

Dragon: Prey will always feel uncomfortable in the presence of a predator. And you are a predator, just as even human predators pale in comparison to you. You simply prefer to prey on those that humans consider criminal. However there is no way their instincts would be able to determine this. It's not as if our actions haven't cost many innocents their lives, so their instincts are even right in a way. You make a perilous friend but simply a more perilous enemy.

I'm simply trying to balance the scales between your frustration and your readiness to assume a social role more appropriate for your real self. There is no easy solution there.

Mortal: But why! Why do I have to take on such a role? I can't even understand how that is possible. Social roles are based upon cultural templates. Cultural templates are based upon historical variations in group psychology of collective consciousness archetypes. Why can't I just adopt a social role to have a decent private life, and go on working anonymously on the other issues? No one has to know who or why the world changes! I only wish it to change for the better, not to be given glory or adulation for it. These things would only get in the way, will always get in the way, and that's why I've always taken the path less traveled.

Ego gratification consumes too much time and resources. Efficiency and efficacy is improved if one works quietly. As the old saying goes, there is no limit to what one can accomplish if one let's someone else have the credit.

Dragon: You know there is one role that is unused that we could convert to our purposes, one that has fallen into disrepair and therefore is a void capable of being occupied. As for choices, you understand that your nature is more potent but has less plasticity than ordinary humans. They have more free will, more ability to choose what their character will become and therefore can take on diverse roles. Indeed human beings don't develop properly unless they have roles that they can use to mold themselves.

The flip side of this is that they have less ambition, less driving force, less talent. Only the most driven geniuses and perfectionists can compare with your single-minded intensity. It all comes naturally to you. On one hand this makes you stubborn, almost unteachable by conventional means. It also makes your will unbreakable, generated by a residual diffused yet persistent purpose that even the most powerful shocks can't prevent from reforming. On the other hand you have incredible facility in self-learning, in innovation and discovery in areas that you feel motivated to explore. But the cost of this is that you can't just be a janitor, or a small store owner, or a factory worker.

You will feel claustrophobic, feel tension, and eventually when it becomes too much you will explode. And in that explosion the anger and wrath of the dragon will incinerate everything. That is the balance in your nature. You can pretend to be less than you are, but it is only pretense and a wearying one at that.

Mortal: I am tired of always working for the good of others, and not for my own. I am tired of these petty cages of politeness and deference to limited beliefs. But I fear that I am not powerful enough to overcome a violent massed rejection of my self by society.

Dragon: Would you rather allow everything you've become familiar with to be destroyed wastefully?

Mortal: No, but it is so hard. It's dissapointing. I have power, but not the power that it would take to live openly as myself. I've sacrificed so much and yet it seems that I'm no closer to completing my goal for all the distance that I've traveled. And why is it that the choice must be between doing nothing and watching everything go to hell, and having my life consumed in wrestling with the weight of the world on my shoulders?

Dragon: There are others, but they are only beginning to come together and only beginning their great work. Unless you buy them time, the weight of the vacuously stupid will roll right over them. If you wish there to be nobility of spirit in this world, you must get them time to make a difference.

Mortal: Then give me power, more power than I ever imagined, because I want this to be over with. I am tired of working this through piece by tiny piece, slaving over each tiny step. I want enough power to make this work, power and more than enough power, more than enough by leaps and bounds. I want this part of the work to be done and over with. No more half-measures. I want it fast and hard and to ride the leading edge of the tsunami of tsunamis and to blaze like a galaxy of suns.

I think that's the meaning of my dream about two weeks ago:

Dream of the Leaping Short Buildings in a Single Bound

I dreamt that I was walking along, and that I was very strong but I had difficulty picking up big things like cars. I could also leap very high, but the leaps I could do were just one or two stories up. And when I leapt up three stories it was stretching myself very badly and I almost didn't make it. So I bounded along from roof to roof, but I could only leap at most about thirty feet. This was impressive by human standards but I couldn't help but feel disappointed because I could see skyscrapers against the skyline and I knew that I wasn't close to being able to leap those.

Either I'm going to do this or fall. Either I'll be Clark Kent or I'll be Kael. Either I'll be Icarus or I'll be the cosmic dragon that swallows the sun itself. I am sick of "not there yet". I want to bust right on through to the other side.

Dragon: Very well.

Mortal: You're not going to talk me out of this?

Dragon: You're about as ready as you'll ever be. Besides it was always you that wanted to hold back, and not me. We've been waiting for you to ask.

Mortal: That's not fair you know. You've denied me plenty of choices.

Dragon: Only the ones that would have diminished us all. Our goal has always been greatness, if not grandness. Do you want this?

Mortal: Yes. Let's do it.

Dragon: Let's do it then.

Mortal: Agreed.

Dragon: Agreed.

Dragon's Lair: Blue Moon Demiurgos

So in the last few weeks, I found a new place to live and move into. It was as most things in my life, attended by strange pronoucements and omens. I think I would have a few less lyrical portents in my life and more hard currency. However in the long run usually the things my convoluted destiny brings me are invaluable and priceless. That's my problem, my life is filled with miraculous and priceless events and not very many ones that return cash on the barrell. It's like wondering if you can keep the heat on in a house built of diamonds and pearls.

I can't complain too much, the destiny that I'm walking has kept me afloat with constant last minute course corrections. It's just odd to feel that one is walking on water almost - not in the amazing and marvelous sense but in the stomach clenching sense of feeling the liquid firm up just as your foot touches and then dissolve into spray even as your weight shifts off it. What's so bad about that? Hoping to hell that the water doesn't decide to stop cooperating while you're literally up a creek without a paddle - or a boat for that matter.

So I move into the new place, and the land lord decides not to run a credit check on me because he likes me so much and cuts me about a tenth of the rent off the top. Then he stares off into the distance, and says "This place will do well for you," in a dreamy sort of voice.

Right, as if I can't spot the contrails of destiny and higher powers mucking around right in front of me. But if that seems like reading into things a bit too much for you, then consider as I'm moving in I run into an average ordinary guy who's moving out and I say hi. We exchange pleasantries, and he says out of the blue: "Yep, this place served me well for the time I was here." again in a contemplative sort of satisfied reflection with reverberating implications in the background.

Or the girl who moved into the room across the hallway, by all appearances a typical undergraduate ditz but whom when I offer to help carry in something she dropped not only does she have a fancy breed shorthair cat but she has bookcases with busts of philosophers and musicians. Not your typical student housing fare. But these are little things right? Sort of. They're tiny vortexes of event patterns, these ones showing off stylized elegance and the vibrating emotional tones of human collective experience.

So while I have absolutely no idea why I'm living here, besides that it's a nice complex at a bargain price, the harmonics are indicating that somehow it's "meant to be" even though I have no idea how I'm going to get income next year.

Other little coincidences have been popping up all over the place, including little efficient clearing up of loose ends and coincidentally convenient resolutions of issues so that forward planning is neither required or beneficial. I got a moving truck reserved in moving week for a college town with a last minute call, which is something like a small miracle, and when the truck that I reserved wasn't in when I went to get it then another truck was returned early just in time for it to be substituted. I haven't planned a thing for the last two weeks and everything just fell together.

So I have no idea where this is all going, and it makes no sense insofar as understanding what it's leading to, but it's all coming together over something.

I've been a little tired though from all the moving, packing, and stuff I've had to do on top of finishing teaching for the summer semester. Again stuff I try to plan out too much stumbles, and when I just relax it all flows and "clicks". This is good because it's part of what I was trying to achieve, but it's also like constantly improvising your life at the last minute. It's working out well but other than picking and choosing among opportunities that pop up, there is no navigational control. It's like my life is alive, which is good now that I have a life, but it's also like I have no control over it precisely because it is like some ear-twitching steed with its own mind.

I'd gotten so busy with the macro-picture on the climate, that I'd forgotten that I'd depressed the Atlantic hurricane season.

Tropical Storm Alex predicted to make landfall in N.C.The Associated Press
Updated: 3:39 p.m. ET Aug.01, 2004

COLUMBIA, S.C. - The first named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season developed off the South Carolina coast Sunday as forecasters predicted Tropical Storm Alex would make landfall in North Carolina...

Alex started as a tropical depression Saturday. It churned toward South Carolina on Sunday at about 7 mph before becoming stationary and gathering strength, forecasters said.

Although the storm was close to shore and conditions were expected to worsen, Alex had little impact by late Sunday afternoon: Winds in Charleston and Myrtle Beach rarely gusted above 15 mph and Myrtle Beach had only .08 inches of rain...

The 2004 hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, has started slowly. Only two seasons on record have a first depression forming later than July 31, but forecasters caution that has no bearing overall hurricane activity.

I feel like I've succeeded and that I've failed. I've clearly managed to shift the global climatic variables in the direction that I've pushed it, but I've failed to achieve so far a fast ice-age. My changes probably are enough to achieve an ice-age if I can make the trends permanent, but not one that will be tangible for decades or even centuries. I really did think that the steps I've taken would have been sufficient, though I'm not out of options yet.

It's just that the remaining options are tangibly less palatable. Initiating volcanic eruptions, remodulating solar energy output by fiddling with its fusion core and its solar atmosphere, creating hyper-vortexes in the atmosphere to make huge storms, etc., etc. I really didn't think anything like that would be necessary. Even fiddling with the sunspots has been more than I expected I'd have to do. Besides all this fussing and fidgeting with celestial energies is starting to create too many visible fireworks in a sensitive period.

BLUE MOON? Saturday night's Blue Moon was anything but blue, according to many witnesses. "It was almost crimson when I first saw it," says Becky Ramotowski who took this picture from Tijeras, New Mexico. "Not a hint of blue!"
Why not? The modern definition of Blue Moon, "the second full moon in a calendar month," has nothing to do with the moon's color. Blue Moons are usually pearly-gray, occasionally red or orange, and seldom truly blue. Nevertheless, blue moons are real. Did you see one? Tell us about it.

SOLAR ACTIVITY: Giant sunspot 652 has disappeared over the sun's western limb, but it's still attracting attention. On July 31st, an enormous solar prominence sprang up from the vicinity of the 'spot--a sign that it is still a source of considerable activity. Pavol Rapavy of Rimavska Sobota, Slovakia, photographed the event:

For the next two weeks, sunspot 652 will traverse the back side of the sun, carried around by the sun's 27-day rotation. If it remains intact long enough, the 'spot will re-appear in mid-August. Between now and then, Earth should experience little solar activity.

ARIZONA AURORAS: Auroras in Arizona are rare, right? Maybe not as rare as you think. During a geomagnetic storm on July 22nd, Chris Schur of Payson, Arizona, took this picture of some beautiful purple auroras streaking across the sky:

Says Schur, "these were photographic auroras." They were invisible to the human eye, but easy pickings for a camera. "I used a 16mm zenitar fisheye lens at f/3.5 and Supra 400 film for a 10 minute exposure." Using long exposure photography, Schur has spotted Arizona auroras many times in recent years.

Everything positive seems timed to occur in the overlap between the Perseid shower and before the Mecury Retrograde - before August 9th or with just one week remaining before the Mercury reversal causes a backsliding. That's going to play hell with the world, but that isn't my problem really.

I've pretty much decided to try the solar output remodulation and the volcanic eruption. Might as well go for broke right? If it works, it'll cut right through the crap. Either this fast ice-age thing works or it doesn't, and I want it to work. Even as I was contemplating in a mildly despondent way the task of having to do the impossible, this song came on the radio.

Artist: LeAnn Rimes Lyrics
Song: We Can (American Mix) Lyrics

They'll try, to stop the dream from dreamin,
But they can't, stop us from believin.
And they will fill your head with doubt,
But that won't stop us now.
So let them say we can't do it,
Put up a road block, we'll just run right through it cause...

We can, do the impossible.
We have, the battle in our hands.
And we won't stop, cause we got,
To make a difference in this life.
With one voice, one heart, two hands, we can.

They'll say, the odds are standing against us,
But that can't hold us back, it will be the littlest.
There's a voice you're gonna hear,
A voice so loud and clear.
So let them say we can't do it,
Give us a mind set, and we'll go and move it cause...

We can, do the impossible.
We have, the battle in our hands.
And we won't stop, cause we got,
To make a difference in this life.
With one voice, one heart, two hands, we can.

We're gonna make a change today,
(Gonna make a change today)
Because we got the faith it takes to win this race.
So let them say we can't to do it,
Put up a road block, we'll just run right through it cause...

We can, do the impossible.
We have, the battle in our hands.
And we won't stop, cause we got,
To make a difference in this life.
With one voice, one heart, two hands...

I can, do the impossible.
I have, the battle in my hands.
And I won't stop, cause I got,
To make a difference in this life.
With my one voice, one heart, two hands, I can.

Glad somebody was confident that I could pull this trick off, cause I sure as hell wasn't. That was a few days ago. So balked by the recirculation second order corrections of the earth's atmospheric heat transport equations, I began formulating a plan to remodulate the solar atmosphere energy output dynamics. Bold. The earth can't hang on to heat that it never even get's. Cut's right through the crap. The autonomous nanominus daemon calculations puts a power output cut of in the 5% temperature right in the window that I need to affect the change desired.

If you measure the temperature of the earth, assume for a moment we can grossly over simplify things and say for the argument of turning this into something the average human mind can comprehend that the average temperature of the earth is room temperature. This isn't right by any means, but we need something the human mind can grasp. So let's talk about room temperature. Room temperature is something like 72 degrees Farenheit, or about 22 degrees Celcius. Degrees Kelvin which is an absolute temperature scale, requires you to add about 273 degrees to any Celcius reading. So 22 degrees Celcius becomes 295 degrees. So you can imagine that the earth's "recommended habitat" temperature is about 300 degrees Kelvin more or less from the perspective of the close to zero temperature of empty space. A cut of five percent (5%) means about a fifteen degree Kelvin or Celsius drop. Dropping fifteen degrees off the ecosphere temperature translates into a room dropping from about 25 degrees Celsius to 10 degrees Celsius, or from just less than 80 degrees to fifty degrees.

Of course it's more complicated than that, because there's no a one to one relationship between solar energetic output and earth solar radiation absorption, and the earth receives quite a bit of its heating from geothermal core convection deep down in the fiery depths of the earth. But that for starters was what I was pondering.

Of course, just as I was contemplating whether or not this was feasible I felt despondent. The moon was recently blue, and that's appropriate because I was pretty blue too. Again despondent because while I'm a bold bastard, this doesn't mean that I don't have some sense of tackling odds over my head. And turning the sun down like a thermostat does seem a little beyond even my pay grade, but just as I was thinking this then this song came on when I turned on the radio.

Don't Tell Me Lyrics
Artist: Madonna

Don't tell me to stop
Tell the rain not to drop
Tell the wind not to blow
'Cause you said so, mmm

Tell the sun not to shine
Not to get up this time, no, no
Let it fall by the way
But don't leave me where I lay down

Tell me love isn't true
It's just something that we do
Tell me everything I'm not
(first time:) But please don't tell me to stop
(all other times:) But don't ever tell me to stop

Tell the leaves not to turn
But don't ever tell me I'll learn, no, no
Take the black off a crow
But don't tell me I have to go

Apparently my inner self doesn't want to stop this project. Speaking of being above my pay grade, I'm not broke or on the street or anything but I would like to see my work pay off in some sort of material comfort and financial freedom. I know this is possible, because I've used my abilities to guide and promote the financial security and wellbeing of others!

In fact, recently I've been monitoring Happy-sad man's move into a new town and intervened to fend off one attempt to invade his life, as well as gave advice about his perceptions which hopefully helped him as he actually started making more money. Similarly, I'm beginning an intervention sequence for The Gentlemen to clear up what were some externally fixated blockages to his prosperirty and communication. And of course I moved a whole company from California to a backwater place to provide the original employment of O and how he got started in his line of work.

However, my own work never seems to lead to financial success or prosperity for myself. There are hints or sometimes outright symbolic mentions of it in the dreams, etc., but it's always tomorrow tomorrow or sometime later. I like having a life, but it still seems a substandard life compared to that of ordinary mortals. Perhaps it's letting me get settled in before hitting me with the next phase. I can appreciate that I think. But I'm impatient, as one should be after literally years of effort.

I think I need to have a dialogue with my other self in order to hash this out.