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This pack belongs to J.J.

A picture of the newest little Pomeranian.

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]]> http://markosun.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/a-couple-friends-entertaining-dogs/feed/ 0 markosun baby1 http://markosun.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/trying-to-find-a-lighter-side-to-u-s-politics/ http://markosun.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/trying-to-find-a-lighter-side-to-u-s-politics/#comments Wed, 19 Jun 2013 03:26:14 +0000 markosun http://markosun.wordpress.com/?p=19715 ]]>  

Especially with all this domestic spying going on in the U.S.A. by the N.S.A. who is in cahoots with the C.I.A and F.B.I., not to forget the D.E.A. which is chasing producers of L.S.D., who sell to athletes in the N.F.L, U.F.C. and N.B.A.

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In 2008 a couple with the last name Sigler built a dome house in Pensacola, Florida.  It was built with the intention of surviving the frequent hurricanes that blast in from the Gulf of Mexico into the Florida panhandle.  And in 2004 the house was tested by Hurricane Ivan.  The dome house won.  But not many of the conventional homes near the dome fared as well. Major damage to those houses.  It just shows that if ingenuity is utilized many big natural hazards can be neutralized.

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Right after Hurricane Ivan

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Nice interior design

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Dangerous Minds

As an introduction to Martin Witz’s outstanding documentary on Albert Hoffman, The Substance, I thought I’d share my experience of ingesting 20,000 mics or so of White Lightening acid when I was 16 years old – my first religious experience and one that reverberates through my being still to this day.  It was a typically hot and humid Washington D.C. afternoon in 1967 and John and I were packing what was reputed to be Owsley’s latest batch of White Lightening acid into gelatin caps. The source was close to Owsley and the quality was certainly of Owsley’s caliber. We had no reason to believe it was anything less. John was my high school English teacher and he had good connections in San Francisco. He’d fly there regularly to purchase the latest batch of acid from Owsley’s people: Licorice-flavored Batman acid, purple tabs, orange tabs, white tabs, window pane, blotter, white powder…Was it all certified Owsley. We liked to think so.

Filling double 0 caps with fine LSD-laced powder was tricky business. We wore surgical gloves and masks so the acid wouldn’t get into our mouths or the pores of our skin. White Lightening was extremely pure and powerful LSD and the pile we were working with contained several thousand doses (at approx. 500 mics per dose). It wasn’t a precise system but we were careful. Packing the caps just so, not too tight, not too loose.

At one point, we stopped to take a break. There was a fan in the room that kept the humid air circulating and relatively dry. It was cautiously pointed away from the table. I had taken off my mask to get some air and was feeling slightly high from being exposed to some of the powder. John was feeling higher and did something stupid or, depending on how look at it, divine. He got up and absent-mindedly turned the fan in the direction of the table and the pile of acid. The White Lightening immediately became a psychedelic dust storm spinning toward my face and into my mouth and eyes. I ran to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked Marcel Marceau. But this wasn’t clown makeup. This was several thousand micrograms of high grade LSD. I blurted  out “oh shit” and it was punctuated by a puff of white dust.

I started splashing my face with water, irrigating my eyes and washing out my mouth. But, it didn’t help. The acid was kicking in and I began the ultimate ego death trip.

Timothy Leary said if you didn’t go through a death trip experience on LSD you hadn’t taken enough. Well, I had. I sat on John’s living room floor and for what seemed like an eternity (and it was, relatively speaking) I died, was reborn, died again, born again, flipping the metaphysical television dial from cosmic station to cosmic station, whipping through the Bardo planes while hungry ghosts growled and laughed and mocked and danced and poked at me with their long ancient galactic fingers, chakras opening/closing, kundalini doing the serpent power mambo up my spinal cord, heart unfolding like a giant pulsing red lotus. I was passing through dimensions not even Rod Serling could imagine. Walls shimmered and breathed, rainbows everywhere, mandalas spinning like heavenly roulette wheels…I was so fucking high!  And as far OUT and IN as I went, I remained calm. I was so overwhelmed that my ego made no attempt to resist. I was without fear. I felt at one with everything: huge, expansive, complete and unbounded, totally absorbed by the entirety of the Universe. GOD, or whatever you want to call it, wasn’t somewhere out there, it was suffusing me, penetrating me and I was dissolving into its essence. I was in that moment of complete union with all things. I was no longer functioning as a separate entity; there was no fear because the one who did the fearing no longer existed. I was complete in my absolute non-existence. This was the white light experience where the ego is absorbed into the infinite molecular dance of absolute reality.

Enlightenment doesn’t happen to you because there’s no “you” for it to happen to. Enlightenment is there always. It’s that door of perception you walk through and suddenly disappear into. One moment you’re on the diving board. The next, you’re in the ocean.

12 hours later as I started to “come down”, I felt exhausted but refreshed, renewed and reborn. Within a matter of days, I returned to being my usual egocentric little self. But, I had had a genuine religious experience, one that has lingered throughout the years and one I often return to in small ways to put things into their proper perspective. LSD was wonderful. I tremble still in awe of its magic and often dream of finding some really pure acid out there…if it still exists. The Church of My Brain could use a nice house-cleaning.

I tried the old acid back in the eighties.  Never had a bad trip, it was all good, actually very good.  Music for one was 20 times better.  When high on the psychedelic I appreciated the essence of everything, nothing was unimportant. Everything, from flowers to a brick wall, had a deep intrinsic value.  And all problems and stress disappeared, it is like they say, you were only in the immediate moment, the past or the future didn’t matter.  We would pop a few hits and go to punk gigs, the ensuing experience was exhilarating.  The roaring dynamic punk rock would go right through you.

But it wasn’t for everyone.  Some people would rekindle old negative baggage and get depressed.  Being depressed on acid is a potentially harmful state to be in. When taking acid a person has to be in a positive mood and in a friendly and safe setting. I had very interesting experiences on the stuff.

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By Kaushik

Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti is always traveling the world in search of adventure, good stories, and interesting people. For his latest project entitled “Toy Stories”, Galimberti photographed children from around the world with their most prized possesion. He did not expect to uncover much we did not already know. “At their age, they are pretty all much the same,” is his conclusion after 18 months working on the project. “They just want to play.”

But it’s how they play that seemed to differ from country to country. Galimberti found that children in richer countries were more possessive with their toys. “At the beginning, they wouldn’t want me to touch their toys, and I would need more time before they would let me play with them,” says the Italian photographer. “In poor countries, it was much easier. Even if they only had two or three toys, they didn’t really care. In Africa, the kids would mostly play with their friends outside.”

However, there are many similarities in which the kids regard their toys, especially when it comes to their function. Galimberti met a six-year-old boy in Texas and a four-year-old girl in Malawi who both maintained their plastic dinosaurs would protect them from the dangers that await them at night. More common was how the toys reflected the world each child was born into – the girl from an affluent Mumbai family loves Monopoly, because she likes the idea of building houses and hotels, while the boy from rural Mexico loves trucks, because he sees them rumbling through his village to the nearby sugar plantation every day. A Lativian kid plays with miniature cars because his mother drove a taxi, while the daughter of an Italian farmer has an assortment of plastic rakes, hoes and spades.

Working for Toy Stories, Galimberti learned as much about the parents as he learned about the children. Parents from the Middle East and Asia, he found, would push their children to be photographed even if they were initially nervous or upset, while South American parents were “really relaxed, and said I could do whatever I wanted as long as their child didn’t mind”.

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Watcharapom – Bangkok, Thailand

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Stella – Montecchio, Italy

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Ralf – Riga, Latvia

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Botlhe – Maun, Botswana

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Orly – Brownsville, Texas

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Noel – Dallas, Texas

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Maudy – Kalulushi, Zambia

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Li Yi Chen – Shenyang, China

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Chiwa – Mchinji, Malawi

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Davide – La Valletta, Malta

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Cun Zi Yi – Chongqing, China

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Arafa & Aisha – Bububu, Zanzibar

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Jaqueline – Manila, Philippines

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Tyra – Stockholm, Sweden

]]> http://markosun.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/kids-from-around-the-world-with-their-favourite-toys/feed/ 0 markosun atoy atoy1 atoy2 atoy3 atoy4 atoy5 atoy6 atoy7 atoy8 atoy9 atoy10 atoy11 atoy12 atoy13 http://markosun.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/amazing-photos-from-national-geographic/ http://markosun.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/amazing-photos-from-national-geographic/#comments Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:46:11 +0000 markosun http://markosun.wordpress.com/?p=19663 ]]>

Baseball in Cuba

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Bixby Bridge, Big Sur, California

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Booth Island, Antarctica

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Café in Paris

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Chicken farm in Pennsylvania

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Fishing in Indonesia

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Beach in New Jersey

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Shelf cloud in Saskatchewan

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Skating in Sweden.  The saying goes that there was a hockey game being played here a while back, one guy got a break away and was never heard from again.

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Badlands, South Dakota

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Waves, Iceland

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New housing development outskirts of Mexico City.  This really reminds me of the old song Rise Against – Little Boxes.

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Forbes

We’ve come along way looks-wise from our homo sapien ancestors. Between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago, for instance, rapid changes in Earth climate coincided with a tripling in the size of the human brain and skull, leading to a flattening of the face. But how might the physiological features of human beings change in the future, especially as new, wearable technology like Google Glass change the way we use our bodies and faces? Artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm has partnered with a computational geneticist to research and illustrate what we might look like 20,000 years in the future, as well as 60,000 years and 100,000 years out. His full, eye-popping illustrations are at the bottom of this post.

Lamm says this is “one possible timeline,” where, thanks to zygotic genome engineering technology, our future selves would have the ability to control human biology and human evolution in much the same way we control electrons to power our world today. (For a critique of the scientific proposals behind Lamm’s hypothesis, see this post by Forbes reporter Matthew Herper.)

Lamm speaks of “wresting control” of the human form from natural evolution and bending human biology to suit our needs.  The illustrations were inspired by conversations with Dr. Alan Kwan, who holds a PhD in computational genomics from Washington University, UPDATE: Lamm’s project was also sponsored by the website MyVoucherCodes.co.uk, where he has a blog.

Kwan based his predictions on what living environments might look like in the future, climate and technological advancements. One of the big changes will be a larger forehead, Kwan predicts – a feature that has already expanding since the 14th and 16th centuries. Scientists writing in the British Dental Journal have suggested that skull-measurement comparisons from that time show modern-day people have less prominent facial features but higher foreheads, and Kwan expects the human head to trend larger to accommodate a larger brain.

Today: A typical-looking man and woman.

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In 20,000 years: Humans have a larger head with a forehead that is subtly too large. A future “communications lens” is represented by the yellow ring around their eyes. These lenses will be the ‘Google Glass’ of the future.

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In 60,000 years: Human beings have even larger heads, larger eyes and pigmented skin. A pronounced superciliary arch makes for a darker area below eyebrows. Miniature bone-conduction devices may be implanted above the ear now to work with communications lenses.

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In 100,000 years: The human face is proportioned to the ‘golden ratio,’ though it features unnervingly large eyes. There is green “eye shine” from the tapetum lucidum, and a more pronounced superciliary arch. A sideways blink of the reintroduced plica semilunaris seen in the light gray areas of the eyes, while miniature bone-conduction devices implanted above the ear work with the communications lenses on the eyes.

The American National Security Agency (NSA) has been all over the news the past couple weeks.  A program the NSA was using named Prism was monitoring the telephone calls and emails of Americans.  The NSA is not mandated to do domestic spying.  The argument put forward by the President and the NSA is they are doing this to prevent another terrorist attack.  And that makes sense to me.  But unknown to many Canadians is that Canada has its own version of the NSA.  This organization is top secret and is almost never in the media.

This is their own blurb on what they do:

Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) is  Canada’s national cryptologic, the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties (called adversaries) agency. We provide the Government of Canada with two key services: foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) in support of defence and foreign policy, and the protection of electronic information and  communication (Information Technology (IT) Security). Additionally, CSEC provides technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies.

CSEC’s SIGINT services support government decision-making in the fields of national security, national defence and foreign policy. The Establishment’s SIGINT activities relate exclusively to foreign intelligence and are directed by the Government of Canada’s intelligence priorities.

The role of CSEC’s IT Security services is to enable government departments and agencies to effectively secure their electronic information systems and networks. CSEC is the technical lead for information technology security to safeguard Government of Canada electronic  information.

CSEC headquarters in Ottawa

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Wiki

The CSEC is accountable to the Minister of National Defence through its deputy head, the Chief of CSEC. The Minister of National Defence is in turn accountable to the Cabinet and Parliament.

Unique within Canada’s security and intelligence community, the Communications Security Establishment Canada employs code-makers and code-breakers (cryptanalysis) to provide the Government of Canada with information technology security (IT Security) and foreign signals intelligence services. CSEC also provides technical and operational assistance to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and federal law enforcement and security agencies, including the Canada Border Services Agency and the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority.

CSEC’s SIGINT program produces intelligence that responds to Canadian government requirements. At CFS Leitrim, the main military SIGINT facility in the south end of Ottawa, the establishment collects foreign intelligence that can be used by the government for strategic warning, policy formulation, decision-making in the fields of national security and national defence, and day-to-day assessment of foreign capabilities and intentions. The station at Leitrim specializes in intercepting electronic communications to and from embassies in Ottawa. Other Canadian military SIGINT facilities are located at: CFB Gander Newfoundland with a detachment from CFS Leitrim, CFS Masset, BC (under remote control from CFS Leitrim) and CFS Alert, Nunavut.

Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Leitrum

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CSEC code breaking capabilities degraded substantially in the 1960s and 1970s but were upgraded with the acquisition of a Cray X-MP/11 (modified) supercomputer delivered to the Sir Leonard Tilley building in March 1985 and the hiring of code breaking analysts. It was, at the time, the most powerful computer in Canada. In the early 1990s, the Establishment purchased a Floating Point Systems FPS 522-EA supercomputer at a cost of $1,620,371. This machine was upgraded to a Cray S-MP superserver after Cray acquired Floating Point Systems in December in 1991 and used the Folklore Operating System supplied by the NSA in the US. These machines are now retired. Little information is available on the types of computers used by the CSEC since then. However, Cray in the US has produced a number of improved supercomputers since then. These include the Cray SX-6, early 2000s, the Cray X1, 2003 (development funded in part by the NSA), Cray XD1, 2004, Cray XT3, Cray XT4, 2006, Cray XMt, 2006 and Cray CX1, 2008. It is possible that some of these models have been used by the CSEC and are in use today. -note: Distinctions should be made between Cray Research, Inc (acquired by SGI) and Cray Computer (a different company founded by Seymour Cray after he left Cray Research).

Cray X-MP/11 Supercomputer

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Formerly known as communications security (COMSEC), the CSEC’s IT Security Program grew out of a need to protect sensitive information transmitted by various agencies of the government, especially the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), DND, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). As a result of this critical and urgent need, the IT Security program’s strategic stance has made possible a shift to that of a predictive nature allowing the program to provide relevant knowledge based upon sound practices and forward looking solutions.

CSEC’s IT Security Program has earned highly valued global respect and a reputation of technical excellence. It now extends its expertise past its traditional technical clients to those within the Government of Canada who are responsible for the formulation and implementation of policy and program managers, and is committed to ensuring cyber networks and critical infrastructures are trustworthy and secure. CSEC also conducts research and development on behalf of the Government of Canada in fields related to communications security.

With the rapid expansion in the number of CSEC personnel since the 9/11 attack in the US, the existing CSEC facilities are no longer sufficiently large. A new C$880 million, 72,000 sq. m. facility is being built in SE Ottawa, immediately west of the headquarters building for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Construction began in early 2011 and it is expected that it will be completed in 2015. Plans indicate that there will be a secure physical connection between the two buildings allowing for the passage of personnel between them.

Canadian Forces Station Alert, also CFS Alert, is a Canadian Forces signals intelligence intercept facility located in Alert, Nunavut on the northeastern tip of Ellesmere Island.

Located in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada, it is the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world.  It takes its name from HMS Alert, which wintered 10 km (6.2 mi) east of the present station off what is now Cape Sheridan, Nunavut in 1875-1876.

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There are currently around 70 personnel at Alert.  However, not many are Canadian military, the Conservative government has been contracting out many positions to the private sector.

Another plane coming in for a landing.

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Golden Boy’s Backside

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Down at the old Ballpark

Forks map and the Museum

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There is going to be a really good observation deck up in that tower it has been said.

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Winnipeg’s medium height Skyscrapers.

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Times Change Bar and High and Lonesome Club at Main and St. Mary.  I have been in there once or twice. The place is so small that the capacity is maybe 20-25 people.  So to make any profit they have to get the lonesome clientele really high.

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