• At http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/lecky.html

• At http://www.americansouthwest.net/

• At http://www.nla.gov.au/oz/histsite.html

• At http://spamcop.net/

• At http://www.guardiansoftware.com/

• At http://www.pfaw.org/

• "This online rhetoric, provided by Dr. Gideon Burton of Brigham Young University, is a guide to the terms of classical and renaissance rhetoric."
• At http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm

• At http://stdatu.stsci.edu/dss/
• At http://stdatu.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_form
• Other sites - http://stdatu.stsci.edu/dss/other_sites.html

• At http://www.oanda.com
• At http://www.oanda.com/converter/classic
• Currency Converter by OANDA.com, The Currency Site.

• Dynamind Currency Converter
  • At http://www3.dynamind-llc.com/currency/input.cfm

• Bear-Market Portfolio Design
  • At http://www.zealllc.com/2002/bearport.htm

• Bears and bear foot prints / bear paw prints
  • At http://www.sierrafoot.org/waterford/wildlife/bears.html

• Revolt of the Long Bond - investment bonds
  • At http://www.zealllc.com/commentary/revolt.htm

• To Crash or Not to Crash
  • At http://www.zealllc.com/commentary/crash.htm

• Quicken.com
  • Allows you to generate stock market performance charts of companies.
  • At http://www.quicken.com

• Yahoo Finance
  • Allows you to generate stock market performance charts of companies. (Log scale plotting which is useful for tracking .com companies)
  • At http://finance.yahoo.com/
  • Example of Yahoo Insider Trades - Onvia.com Inc (NasdaqNM:ONVI): http://biz.yahoo.com/t/O/ONVI.html

• 1901 census online : UK Public Record Office's (PRO) containing details of the 1901 census
  • At http://www.census.pro.gov.uk/

• Mormon genealogical site
  • At http://www.familysearch.org

• American Family Immigration History Center at ellisislandrecords.org
  • At http://www.ellisislandrecords.org

• The Ultimate Warrior - Wrestling Hero Site
  • At http://www.ultimatewarrior.com/
  • At http://www.ultimatewarrior.com/menu.html
  • The Ultimate Warrior Comic: http://www.ultimatewarrior.com/comic.html

• Darwin Awards and Internet/Net Myths
  • At http://www.officialdarwinawards.com/
  • Rocket Car Myth
    • http://www.officialdarwinawards.com/uls/impala.html
    • http://www.dps.state.az.us/news/nr96006.htm
  • Stolen Kidneys Myth
    • http://urbanlegends.tqn.com/library/weekly/aa062997.htm.

• Urban Legend Zeitgeist: Giant Atomic Mutant Cat from Canada
  • "A giant cat - 87 pounds and 69 inches from nose to tail - was raised by a Canadian man.
    See the picture and accompanying story here."
  • At http://www.urbanlegends.com/ulz/xbigcat.html
  • At http://www.urbanlegends.com/ulz/bigcat.html
  • At http://www.snopes2.com/spoons/photos/bigcat.htm
  • At http://www.weirdpics.com/pastpics/pastpics2000/giantcat.html
  • At http://www.weirdpics.com/pastpics/pastpics2000/giantcat.html

• E-mail reply to Spammer Stories
  • At http://www.sunworld.com/sunworldonline/swol-07-1999/swol-07-security.html#Stop the insanity

• Internet retail store featuring Frog-themed items
  • At http://www.frognirvana.com/

• UNESCO Memory of the World Register
  • At http://www.unesco.org/webworld/memory/Abid.htm#MemoryoftheWorldRegister
  • IFLA Core Programme for Universal Availability of Publications - www.ifla.org/VI/2/uap.htm
  • IFLA Core Programme for Preservation and Conservation - http://www.ifla.org/VI/4/pac.htm

• On-line Dictionaries
  • At http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rbeard/diction.html

• Doug’s Archaeology site
  • Archaeological/Skeptical Resources, Critiques of cult archaeology, Roman Britain links
  • At http://www.ramtops.demon.co.uk/

• Frank Doernenburg's Homepage
  • The Pyramid Sceptic page
  • At http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/FDoernenburg/entry.htm

• Junk Science Homepage
  • At http://www.junkscience.com/

• Numbers Watch
  • At http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/

• Australian aborigines
  • At http://looksmart.infoplease.com/ce6/society/A0805377.html

• History and Ancient Britain - Caratacus, Caractacus - Celtic Earth
  • "Caratacus/Caractacus addressing his men before the battle by the River Severn "This day, decides the fate of Britain! Your liberty, or your eternal slavery, dates from this hour. Remember your brave ancestors, who drove the great Caesar himself across the sea!'"
  • At http://members.aol.com/BRBlast/caratacus.html

• Stonehenge History
  • At http://home.earthlink.net/~shadowfax/sfstone.htm

• CRC against Wolfram Research Court Case - October 2000
  • The perils of converting a web site to a book.
  • At http://mathworld.wolfram.com/
  • Frequently Asked Questions: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/docs/faq.html
  • At http://www.crcpress.com/us/

• Article on Open Source Scientific Publication
  • At http://slashdot.org/features/99/07/28/0219237.shtml

  • A comment following on from this:

    "Peer review often doesn't work (Score:3, Interesting)
    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 28, @09:17PM EDT (#107)
    Back when I was in grad school, my research happened to make a notable contribution to a hot topic at the time. I was (usually with other authors) submitting papers to IEEE journals at a rate of about 1 per 3-6 months. I also attended several conferences and got to know a lot of the major contributors in my research area.
    Typically, every submission got sent to 3 experts for review. My professor (and one of his collegues) even forwarded to me several papers they were asked to review. I noticed a couple of things regarding peer review:

    1. For every submission, there was a 50/50 chance that none of the three reviewers would know what the paper is really about. Part of this problem is that the IEEE journal editors simply can't know about all the topics being researched in their area and would often pass the submission to the wrong experts. These "experts" (in the wrong subject matter) often wouldn't give a shit about trying to learn about the topic at hand and would just give it a bad review. You could tell this was happening when you got your submission back with comments and criticisms that simply made no sense. I was asked to review a couple of papers that were out of my research area, and I did my best to research the prior literature on the subject and give a fair review, but many professors didn't have the time and would slam the paper rather than pass it on to somebody who would understand it.
    2. There is an "old boys" network present in every field of research. Most of these operate like an old fashioned closed businessman's club. Once you are accepted into the fold, everyone else kisses your ass and gives great reviews to any paper with your name on it, regardless of whether it is worthy of publication. The people who make it to this stage rarely make useful research contributions anymore, but they get their names on lots and lots of papers. All of the lesser known researchers practically beg the big boys to co-author their paper, thus virtually guaranteeing its publication. Some of the members of the "old boys" network have unbelievable egos that require constant stroking if you plan on ever making a name for yourself in the field.
    3. There are some researchers who will go to great lengths to stab you in the back. I remember the case of one little known French researcher who wrote a landmark paper in our field. In the review process, it was sent to one SOB who was a big player in the field but was notorious for being a backstabber and had questionable intelligence (I never knew how he got so well known in the first place). The SOB managed sit on the review and delay the paper's publication for over a year while he attemped to figure out what the French guy had done and duplicate his results. He sat on it so long in fact that he got his own paper published on the subject before the French guy's and stole all the credit. This dickhead, and several others like him, were also notorious for attacking their peers (and especially their peer's grad students) at any conference where one of their sponsors or potential sponsors were present.
    I left grad school thoroughly disgusted with the whole research community. Your status was measured by how many papers you published, not how many real contributions you made. There were too many people who capitalized on the original research of others by pumping out lots of papers covering slight variations in the application of the aformentioned original research. To keep up, you had to sell out and produce lots of junk papers with the right names on them. I managed to get published in IEEE journals 6 times in 2 years, but I'm only proud of two. "

• What We Don't Know About the Ancient Celts
  • At http://www.conjure.com/whocelts.html

• The Sanctum of Cathbad (Or, the homepage of Brendan Myers)
  • Including "What is a consulting philosopher?"
  • At http://www.uoguelph.ca/~bmyers/sanctum.html

• Ogham, Ancient Alphabet of the Celts
  • At http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_18/b3679001.htm

• A Linguistic Analysis of Some West Virginia Petroglyphs - By Monroe Oppenheimer and Willard Wirtz (The West Virginia Archeologist Volume 41, Number 1, Spring 1989)
  • At http://cwva.org/ogam_rebutal/wirtz.html

  • It is equally sobering to discover on investigation that Barry Fell's connection with Harvard is as a retired professor of marine biology. His profession had nothing to do with archaeology or linguistics or ancient inscriptions, and he is in fact an extremely controversial figure whose previous decipherments of this same kind have been seriously challenged, after careful study, by American, Irish, English and Scottish archaeologists and linguists.

  • This strains credulity past the breaking point. It isn't just that Fell offers only the flimsiest basis for his conclusion that an early form of Ogam was what linguists call "consaine," a form of writing, that is, which includes only consonants. He ignores, in making this announcement, the fact that the Irish language has been authoritatively identified as not of a nature consistent with the use of a consaine alphabet (Carey, personal communication, 1987, and Fitzhugh, 1978: 167).

  • Among these commentators, Dr. John Carey of the Department of Celtic Languages and Literature at Harvard University, analyzes a series of questions of grammar and spelling that arise in connection with Fell's purported translation of the West Virginia petroglyphs. He points out that Fell "finds" in them sentence structures and spelling that in fact developed in the Irish language many centuries later than the time - the 6th to 8th centuries A.D. - to which Fell attributes these wall carvings (Carey, personal communication, 1987).

  • Professor Gillies concludes, however, "I suspect there may be more valuable things to be said about these carvings than the preposterous constructions you have had to put up with so far" (Gillies, personal communication). It would be unfortunate if the continuing search for whatever may be these petroglyph's explanation were deterred or obstructed by what turns out to be a demeaning fraud

• The Fall of a Dot-Com (''friction-free capitalism.'' )
  • At http://members.aol.com/plieadesqu/ogham.htm

• Boadicea/Boudica's last battle - introduction
  • At http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/boudica1.htm
  • Summary of Tacitus from Encyclopaedia Romana WWW site: http://www.ancientsites.com/as/er/boudicanrevolt.html | http://www.ancientsites.com/~Lucius_Aelius/boudica/boudicanrevolt.html
  • At http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/boudica2.htm

• Recovering the lost religious place-names of England
  • At http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/religpns.htm

• Australian Real Estate Agents and Property Sales Directory - Search over $ 5,173,411,377 worth of Australian Real Estate for sale.
  • At http://www.real-estate-australia.com.au/

• Camera store - Digital Cameras - Australia's largest online camera store. Digital cameras, Video and SLR's
  • At http://www.camerastore.com.au/

• The Green Man Variations on a theme
  • At http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/greenmen.htm
  • GREEN MEN AND FOLIATE FACES : http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/albion/ggcgm.htm

• Surgical instruments, THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATION AT STANWAY, COLCHESTER, UK
  • At http://peipa.essex.ac.uk/CAT/instruments.html
  • "The surgical instruments from Stanway, Colchester" by Ralph Jackson : http://peipa.essex.ac.uk/CAT/jackson.html

• Papyrus of Ani; Egyptian Book of the Dead [Budge]
  • At http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/Books/Papyrus_Ani.html

• Jack Frost scenes: Indiana University Molecular Structure Center, Bloomington, USA
  • At http://www.iumsc.indiana.edu/docs/seasons_greetings.htm
  • Bentley's famous snowflake images: http://snowflakebentley.com/
  • For information on photographing snowflakes: http://www.micscape.simplenet.com/mag/artfeb00/eksnow.html
  • Source on snowflakes: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/
  • Designer Snowflakes: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/designer/designer.htm
  • The World's Largest Stellar Dendrite?: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/gallery00/snow00.htm
  • A Snow Crystal Primer: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/primer/primer.htm
  • Natural Snowflakes: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/natural/natural.htm

• Forging the Pharaoh's name?
  • At http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~martins/Pyramid/index.html

• Campion Bond
  • At http://www.dogonfire.net/smarts/bond.htm
  • 
    Source: The mind of Alan Moore, probably inspired by Ian Fleming's creation, James Bond
    Full Name: Mr. Campion Bond
    Allies: M and Colonel Sebastian Moran. One wonders if he hasn't a friend named Q...
    Special Skills and Abilities: His pompous manner.
    History: Nothing is known of Campion Bond's history, other than that his family, according to Broad Arrow Jack, has a bad reputation.
    Character: Campion Bond is Moriarty's flunky. Based on his reactions to Moriarty's revelation of his complete plan, Bond is in way over his head.
    A Quote: "We live in troubled times, where fretful dreams settle upon the Empire's brow." (Issue #1)
    

• Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer - Leda Cosmides & John Tooby
  • At http://www.clark.net/pub/ogas/evolution/EVPSYCH_primer.htm
  • At http://www.clark.net/pub/ogas/evolution/EVPSYCH_immoral_animal.htm
  • At http://www.clark.net/pub/ogas/evolution/EVPSYCH_dawkins_on_ev_future.htm
  • "The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life": by Robert Wright http://www.clark.net/pub/wright/index.htm

• Historical King Arthur
  • At http://freespace.virgin.net/david.ford2/arthur.html
  • At http://members.tripod.com/~cushmanj/

• King Arthur Pendragon - THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING - In Which King Arthur Uther Pendragon Grants An Interview
  • Including link to "Exploding the myths - will the real King Arthur please stand up"
  • At http://arthurpendragon.ukonline.co.uk/arthur.html

• Professor Plum's Relentless Rants on Eduquackery
  • Proctological Corps - won't knuckle under to Hitler
  • At http://professorplum.typepad.com/my_weblog/

• Interested in Sheep? - Click Here! (Stuart's Sheep Page)
  • At http://www.yorvic.york.ac.uk/~priest/sheep/
  • Invisible Films - http://manor.york.ac.uk/htdocs/films.html
  • Peter's Dragon: Young Peter is befriended by a lovable animated dragon that nobody else can see. This heartwarming story deals with his attempts to wean himself off dangerous addicting hallucinogenics.
  • Food of the Gods (A scientifically accurate rerendering of the classic novel): Brilliant maverick scientist Patrick Stewart creates a foodstuff that will cause anything to grow to enormous size. In a thousand to one accident, despite rigorous safety procedures, some of it gets left in a field somewhere and all manner of insects eat it. The insects grow to enormous size but, due to lack of internal skeletal structure and the fact that insects have no lungs and breathe by a process of molecula diffusion, they simultaneously suffocate and are crushed by their own weight before they have a chance to rampage through the city creating havoc and terror.
  • Airport 1997: When flight 49 set off from Manchester airport, everybody expected it to be a normal flight and sure enough it was. Stars Donald Pleasance as the nervous sweaty passenger who says things like "I hate flying", "I have a bad feeling about this", "We're all going to die aren't we" and "What do you mean you don't have any decent malt whisky, what kind of plane is this? Well I suppose I'll have the Glenfiddich then.".
  • Tatman: Val Kilmer stars as an accountant who finds it difficult to throw things away, even when they're patently without value. Thrills and excitement abount as he struggles to find space in his cupboards and loft for the junk he accumulates through his humdrum life.
  • Dave's Dragon: Young David is befriended by a lovable 1980s 32-bit personal computer that everyone else can see but nobody believes in. Hillarity ensues as he spends hours reading badly structured manuals and dealing with the lack of software.
  • Food of the Mods: Brilliant maverick scientist Colm Meaney creates a foodstuff that will cause anything to grow to enormous size. In a thousand to one accident, despite rigorous safety procedures, some of it gets left in Brighton in the early seventies and is consummed by some disaffected youths who grow to enormous size and terrorise the city on huge Lambrettas while wearing snorkel parkas and looking faintly ludicrous.
  • Silence of the Clams: A heartwarming tale of love and hope. Beautiful, young marine-biologist Meryl Streep meets a group of clams who are tragically blind, deaf and dumb. As she struggles to understand them and help them over their disabilities she realises that, beneath it all, they are as human as any other bivalve mollusc and romance blossoms (although eventually she realises it's pretty normal for clams to be blind, deaf and dumb but accepts them for it).
  • The Terminator: Doc-u-drama about the enthralling lo-tech bit of electronic gagetry that prevents reflected electric currents from stray ends of co-axial cables.
  • Star Talks: When two gigantic space-going democracies finally meet and clash, long negotiations, trade treaties, common currency negotiations and cultural exchange programs are inevitable. Stars John Major as the charismatic president.
  • Food of the Todds: Brilliant maverick scientist Burt Reynolds creates a foodstuff that will cause anything to grow to enormous size. In a thousand to one accident, despite rigorous safety procedures, some of it gets left in Fleet Street, London in the nineneenth century and some other bits get left in the Electronics Department of the University of York. They are consumed by the demon barber Sweeney Todd and popular, York-based, electronics lecturer Ken Todd respectively both of whom grow to enormous size and terrorize their respective cities and time zones.
  • Fantastic Journey/Incredible voyage: The heroic tale of two dogs and a cat miniaturised and injected inside a brilliant scientist. Meanwhile, in a related incident, a team of surgeons equiped with a submarine make a thousand mile over-land journey to get back home to the little boy that loves them.
  • Food of the Dogs: Brilliant maverick scientist Rolf Harris creates a foodstuff that will cause anything to grow to enormous size. In a thousand to one accident, despite rigorous safety procedures, some of it gets left in the city dog pound where the hungry animals consume it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work but the dogs rather enjoy it.
  • Born Free Willy: The true-life story of a young high-school drop-out, his friend a gigantic Killer Whale and his struggle to return the animal to its natural habitat which, due to his poor education he believes to be the African Savannah.
  • Invisible Films - http://manor.york.ac.uk/htdocs/films2.html
  • "The Remains of the Data: A poignant character study, based on one person's struggle to recover an accidentally deleted file on their computer. "
  • "The Municipal Seven Yul Brynner stars as the foreman of a small group of Local Council manual workers."
  • The Undergraduate: Played to an intrusive musical backdrop by the Spice Girls which sounds very modern now but will be recognised for the tat it is in five years' time, Dustin Hoffman is an undergraduate who develops a crush on a married woman almost twice his age. Unfortunately for Dustin Hoffman, her relationship with her husband is very important to her and she doesn't find feckless youth attractive anyway, so she's just not interested.
  • Thermite and Louise: Hard-hitting tale about two women who set out for a happy weekend away together. However, circumstances overtake them and their plans soon change: they discover the attractions of highly-exothemic metal redox reactions and take up careers as welding engineers instead.
  • Duck Hunt - Find the Fowl - http://kipper.york.ac.uk/ducks.html

• Space Pictures and Images
  • At http://www.space.com/

• Salvador Dali Art Gallery
  • At http://www.dali-gallery.com/
  • Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being Salvador Dalí — and I ask myself in rapture, ‘What wonderful things this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?’" — Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí

• Accumulated Wisdom
  • "On keeping a good laboratory notebook" and "The rules from Carr, the floor-walker."
  • At http://Antinode.org/wisdom/index.html

• AER Redundancy
  • "AER is an acronym for Acronym Expansion Redundancy. AER redundancy occurs when an acronym is used with part of its own expansion. Some examples from real life are listed below"
  • At http://Antinode.org/complaints/aer.html

• the pyongyang metro
  • At http://www.pyongyang-metro.com/

• Pyongyang and Its People (Notes of a Soviet Student)
  • At http://www.fortunecity.com/meltingpot/champion/65/pyongyang_lankov.htm

  • Pyongyang rose early. Work at most factories started at 7 o'clock while offices were opened around at 8 o'clock. At 8 am classes also began at schools and colleges, so by 7 in the morning the streets were full of people. Perhaps, the most remarkable among these were children who marched to school singing songs. It was considered “too individualistic” and, hence, improper for children to walk to school alone, so they had to gather at a certain place and from there, march under supervision of a specially appointed commander (also a student of the same school). This was said to improve their spirit of collectivism. While marching, they also had to sing. Without exception, they sang about the Great Leader (Kim Il Song) and the Dear Ruler (Kim Chông Il), about their boundless modesty and great care for the people. To a Russian ear, these "masterpieces of the unique chuch’e music school" sounded virtually indistinguishable from the Soviet tunes of the 1950s. Such marching and singing exercises were supposed to bring up children in the spirit of "socialist collectivism". One has to admit that as a result of these daily marching drills, groups of Pyongyang schoolgirls normally had much better bearing than, say, the soldiers of an average Soviet Army unit.

• The Oxford Pub Index
  • At http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~chrisw/pubindex.html

• Oxford Pub Guide
  • At http://physchem.ox.ac.uk/~michael/pubs.html
  • At http://physchem.ox.ac.uk/~michael/central_oxford.html

• Oxford Drinking Establishment Guide
  • At http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scug/handbook/Pubs/

• The Aliens' Guide to Oxford
  • At http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oxinfo/guide/PRG-TR-12-90.html

• UK RAE Tables (Research Accessment Tables)
  • Joint Funding Councils of the United Kingdom: 1996 Research Assessment Exercise: The Outcome http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/hefc/rae96/c1_96.html

  • Chemistry Departments: Joint Funding Councils of the United Kingdom: 1996 Research Assessment Exercise: The Outcome http://www.niss.ac.uk/education/hefc/rae96/1_96/t18.html

• Jorvik Viking Centre
  • At http://www.jorvik-viking-centre.co.uk/

• Studsvik Neutron Research Laboratory
  • At http://www.studsvik.uu.se/

• History: Medieval Law Links
  • At http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook-law.html
  • The Questioning of John Rykener, A Male Cross-Dressing Prostitute, 1395, - http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1395rykener.html
  • Internet Medieval Sourcebook - http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html
  • Medieval Heresy (Including original documents from The Inquisition - http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1s.html#Medieval Heresy
  • How to Cite Internet and World Wide Web Documents - http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/cite.html
  • Catholic Encyclopedia - "The Inquisition" - http://www.knight.org/advent/cathen/08026a.htm
  • The Donation of Constantine (c.750-800) - http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/donatconst.html
  • Social and Cultural History in the Middle Ages - http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/subjects/social/social.html

• NIGMS - NIH - Science Education/General Public
  • Pamphlets - "Why Do Basic Research?", "The Structures of Life", etc
  • At http://www.nigms.nih.gov/news/publist.html

• St Paul's Cathedral, London, UK
  • At http://www.stpauls.co.uk

• Spot the Ball
  • At http://manor.york.ac.uk/htdocs/football.html

• The Quest for a Real Robin Hood
  • At http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/4198/realrob.html

• iLeads.com: Instant Insurance, Mortgage and Home Loans quotes.
  • At http://www.ileads.com/

• Mortgage-leads.com: mortgage leads and insurance leadsInstant Insurance, Mortgage and Home Loans quotes.
  • At http://www.mortgage-leads.com/

• Preferential Travel Insurance - London
  • At http://www.preferential.co.uk/
  • Annual Travel Insurance, single trip travel insurance.

• The British Council
  • At http://www.britcoun.org/

• BBC PROMS concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, London, UK
  • At http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/
  • Booking: http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/booking/index.shtml
  • "Up to 1,000 standing places in the Arena and Gallery are available at the door for every Prom (except the Last Night) for just Ł3!"
  • Booking for the BBC Proms will open in mid-May.
    Full details on booking seats will be published in early-May

• Nella Last: Mass Observation diarist - WWII
  • At http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/homefront/nellalast/nella_1.shtml

• Vintage Audio: Your King and Country Want You by Paul Rubens - WWII
  • At http://www.firstworldwar.com/audio/yourkingandcountrywantyou.htm

• Puck/Robin Goodfellow
  • At http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/4198/puck.html

• "Mountain Gate, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia"
  • At http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ncas/multimedia/gazetteer/list/mountaingate.html

• "Upwey High School, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia"
  • At http://www.upweyhs.vic.edu.au/

• "Harry S. Anchan's Memory-Making 50's to 80's Music Machine!"
  • At http://www.geocities.com/rarepop3/

• "Harry S. Anchan's Favorite Songs From The 90's"
  • At http://www.geocities.com/ninetiespop/

• The SFU Evolutionary Psychology Research Group Home Page
  • At http://www.sfu.ca/~janicki/

• "Kennewick Man" - found in July, 1996, below the surface of Lake Wallula
  • At http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/kennewick/

• The Thousand-Mile Front - The Civil War in the Lower Mississippi Valley
  • At http://www.cr.nps.gov/delta/cwindex.htm

• Battle of Gettysburg - American Civil War
  • At http://www.cr.nps.gov/features/gett/
  • Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln - http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/gadd/4403.html

• Mississippian Mound Builders
  • At http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/feature/
  • At http://www.cast.uark.edu/npsweb/PINSON/
  • At http://www.cr.nps.gov/delta/index.htm

• Christof Koch's Home Page : exploring the neuronal basis of visual consciousness and awareness, etc
  • At http://klab.caltech.edu/~koch/
  • Biophysics of Computation: Information Processing in Single Neurons by Christof Koch: http://klab.caltech.edu/~koch/biophysics-book/

• Consciousness and Neuroscience Francis Crick The Salk Institute and Christof Koch Computation and Neural Systems Program California Institute of Technology (as appeared in Cerebral Cortex, 8:97-107, 1998)
  • At http://klab.caltech.edu/~koch/crick-koch-cc-97.html

• Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
  • At http://assc.caltech.edu/

• Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC Santa Barbara
  • At http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/

• Psychology, Culture, and Evolution
  • At http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/

  • "The Prehistory of Postmodernism 
      
       "In 'Star Trek,' every story is the same. There they are, the crew, working,
      working, working. Then somebody says,'Captain! I've lost control of the ship.'
      The rest of the episode is about gaining control of the ship."   
    
      "Compare that to 'Moby Dick.' Everybody's working, doing their job too. But
      the captain goes insane, the ship snaps in two, the crew drowns and the captain
      gets dragged to the bottom of the sea."  
    
      Laurie Anderson   
    
      -from The Netly News, Dec 2, 1996

  • Dedicated to the clear-eyed Pierre Menard who faced down  the tail-eating dragon of life and produced: 
      
    A technical article on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by
    means of eliminating one of the rook's pawns. Menard proposes,
    recommends, disputes, and ends by rejecting this innnovation.  
    
    Jorge Luis Borges (1939)

• Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct
  • At http://www.bkstore.com/mit/fac/pinker.html

• Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct
  • At http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/tli.html

• Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct
  • At http://www-ctp.mit.edu/~alford/pinker.html

• Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct
  • At http://www.2think.org/hii/tli.shtml

• Educating Eve - Opposition to Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct
  • At http://www.grsampson.net/CAmazon.html
  • At http://www.grsampson.net/BEve.html

• Sociobiology Sanitized: the Evolutionary Psychology and Genic Selectionism Debates - by Val Dusek
  • At http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/rmy/dusek.html

• Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont - "Intellectual Impostures" - Disrobing Postmoderism - related links.
  • Alan Sokal Homepage - http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/
  • Some thoughts on the Alan Sokal / Social Text affair - http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~bweiner/sokal.html
    • "A parody paper in solid state physics, published in 1931" - by by G. Beck, H. Bethe, and W. Riezler - http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~bweiner/bethespoof.html
  • Sokal Affair page - http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/stt/stt/sokal.htm

• A Richard Dawkins homepage
  • At http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/
• "Snake Oil and Holy Water" by Richard Dawkins, Forbes ASAP, 10.04.99
  • At http://www.forbes.com/asap/1999/1004/235.html
• "The Improbability of God" by Richard Dawkins, Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 18, Number 3
  • "By definition, explanations that build on simple premises are more plausible and more satisfying than explanations that have to postulate complex and statistically improbable beginnings. And you can't get much more complex than an Almighty God!"
    
  • "There is a temptation to argue that, although God may not be needed to explain the evolution of complex order once the universe, with its fundamental laws of physics, had begun, we do need a God to explain the origin of all things. This idea doesn't leave God with very much to do: just set off the big bang, then sit back and wait for everything to happen. The physical chemist Peter Atkins, in his beautifully written book The Creation, postulates a lazy God who strove to do as little as possible in order to initiate everything. Atkins explains how each step in the history of the universe followed, by simple physical law, from its predecessor. He thus pares down the amount of work that the lazy creator would need to do and eventually concludes that he would in fact have needed to do nothing at all! "
  • At http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_18_3.html
• Chemistry and Industry comment: "Religion - the antithesis to science" by Peter Atkins
  • "My conclusion is stark and uncompromising. Religion is the antithesis of science; science is competent to illuminate all the deep questions of existence, and does so in a manner that makes full use of, and respects the human intellect. I see neither need nor sign of any future reconciliation. "
  • At http://www.forbes.com/asap/1999/1004/235.html
• "The "know-nothings", the "know-alls", and the "no-contests"" by Richard Dawkins
  • "Richard Dawkins, well-known for his books on evolution, took part in a debate with the Archbishop of York, Dr John Habgood, on the existence of God at the Edinburgh science festival last Easter. [Easter '92 ed.] The science correspondent of The Observer reported that the "withering" Richard Dawkins clearly believed the "God should be spoken of in the same way as Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy". He [the correspondent] overheard a gloomy cleric comment on the debate: "That was easy to sum up. Lions 10, Christians nil". "
  • At http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/religion.htm
• "Talking about Evolution with Richard Dawkins" with Richard Dawkins
  • "MR. DAWKINS: That's right. Now, in the modern world, which is now so different from the world in which our ancestors lived, what we actually strive for, the goals we set up, are very different. The goal-seeking mechanisms in our brains were originally put there totry to achieve goals such as finding a herd of bison to hunt. And wewould have set out to find a herd of bison, and we'd have used all sorts of flexible goal-seeking mechanisms and we'd have persisted and we'd have gone on and on and on for days and days and days trying toachieve that goal.
    Natural selection favored persistence in seeking goals. Nowadays we no longer hunt bisons. Nowadays we hunt money or a nice new house or we try to finish a novel or whatever it is that we do."
  • "MR. DAWKINS: Darwin, if I may say so, had better things to dothan talk about why we are here in that sense. It's not a sensible sense in which to ask the question. There is no reason why, just because it's possible to ask the question, it's necessarily a sensible question to ask."
  • MR. DAWKINS: Yes, it's not a very satisfying explanation. It's a very unparsimonious, very uneconomical explanation. The beauty of the Darwinian explanation itself is that it's exceedingly powerful. It's a very simple principle, and using this one simple principle, you can bootstrap your way up from essentially nothing to the world of complexity and diversity we have today. Now, that's a powerful explanation.
    MR. WATTENBERG: It's not any simpler. In fact, it's more complex than the -- than Genesis. I mean, 'And God created the heavens and the earth.' That --
    MR. DAWKINS: You have to be joking.
    MR. WATTENBERG: Well, I mean, 'God created the heavens and the earth' -- I can say that pretty quickly. I mean --
    MR. DAWKINS: You can say it, but think what lies behind it. What lies behind it is a complicated, intelligent being -- God, who must have come from somewhere. You have simply smuggled in at the beginning of your book the very thing that we're trying to explain. What we're trying to explain is where organized complexity and intelligence came from. We have now got an explanation. You start from nothing and you work up gradually in easily explainable steps.
  • "MR. DAWKINS: Yeah, okay. I mean, these are fascinating hypothetical questions and I suppose there would come a trade-off point. I mean, there'd probably come a point when -- but I do think it's important, since this is a very academic discussion we're having, I think it would be positively irresponsible to let listeners to this program go away with the idea that this is a major effect. If it's an effect at all, it's an elusive statistical effect."
  • At http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript410.html
• "IS SCIENCE KILLING THE SOUL?" with Richard Dawkins
  • "While The Guardian-Dillons series is characterized as a "debate", Dawkins and Pinker, who are in general agreement across broad areas, presented what I would characterize as a "a high level seminar." As Dawkins pointed out: "The adversarial approach to truth isn't necessarily always the best one. On the contrary, when two people disagree strongly, a great deal of time may be wasted. It's been well said that when two opposite points of view are advocated with equal vigor, the truth does not necessarily lie mid-way between them. And in the same way, when two people agree about something, it's just possible that the reason they agree is that they're both right. There's also I suppose the hope that in a dialogue of this sort each speaker may manage to achieve a joint understanding with the other one, better than he would have done on his own.""
  • "So Soul One refers to a particular theory of life. It's the theory that there is something non-material about life, some non-physical vital principle. It's the theory according to which a body has to be animated by some anima. Vitalized by a vital force. Energized by some mysterious energy. Spiritualized by some mysterious spirit. Made conscious by some mysterious thing or substance called consciousness. You'll notice that all those definitions of Soul One are circular and non-productive. It's no accident. Julian Huxley once satirically likened vitalism to the theory that a railway engine works by "force-locomotif." I don't always agree with Julian Huxley, but here he hit the nail beautifully. In the sense of Soul One, science has either killed the soul or is in the process of doing so.
    But there is a second sense of soul, Soul Two, which takes off from another one of the Oxford dictionary's definitions:
    Intellectual or spiritual power. High development of the mental faculties. Also, in somewhat weakened sense, deep feeling, sensitivity."
  • Turning back to Soul One -- in the first chapter of Steve Pinker's book How the Mind Works he says, "I want to convince you that our minds are not animated by some godly vapor or single wonder-principle. The mind, like the Apollo spacecraft, is designed to solve many engineering problems, and thus is packed with high-tech systems, each contrived to overcome its own obstacles." In the same paragraph, he moves on to Soul Two when he says, " . . . I believe that the discovery by cognitive science and artificial intelligence of the technical challenges overcome by our mundane mental activity is one of the great revelations of science, an awakening of the imagination comparable to learning that the universe is made up of billions of galaxies or that a drop of pond water teems with microscopic life." Well, awakening of the imagination is a pretty good definition of Soul Two. And in that sense, far from killing the soul, science may prove to be its greatest awakener.
    Carl Sagan wrote, shortly before he died,
    "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
    Well it's common enough for people to agree that religions have got the facts all wrong, but "Nevertheless," they go on to say, "you have to admit that religions do provide something that people need. We crave a deeper meaning to life, a deeper, more imaginative understanding of the mystery of existence." Well, in the passage I've just quoted, Sagan seems to be criticizing religions not just for getting it wrong, which many people would accept, but for their deficiencies precisely in the sphere in which they are supposed to retain some residual virtue. Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous."
  • STEVEN PINKER: I'm going to discuss an idea that elicits wildly opposite reactions. Some people find it a shocking claim with radical implications for morals and every value that we hold dear. Other people think that it's a claim that was established a hundred years ago, that the excitement is only in how we work out the details, and that it has few if any implications for our values and ethics. That is the idea that the mind is the physiological activity of the brain, in particular the information processing activity of the brain; that the brain, like other organs, is shaped by the genes; and that in turn, the genome was shaped by natural selection and other evolutionary processes. I am among those who think that this should no longer be a shocking claim, and that the excitement is in fleshing out the details, and showing exactly how our perception, decision-making, and emotions can be tied to the activity of the brain.
    Three new sciences are now vividly rooting our mental processes in our biology. Cognitive neuroscience, the attempt to relate thought, perception and emotion to the functioning of the brain, has pretty much killed Soul One, in Richard's sense. It should now be clear to any scientifically literate person that we don't have any need for a ghost in the machine, as Gilbert Ryle memorably put it. Many kinds of evidence show that the mind is an entity in the physical world, part of a causal chain of physical events. If you send an electric current through the brain, you cause the person to have a vivid experience. If a part of the brain dies because of a blood clot or a burst artery or a bullet wound, a part of the person is gone -- the person may lose an ability to see, think, or feel in a certain way, and the entire personality may change. The same thing happens gradually when the brain accumulates a protein called beta-amyloid in the tragic disease known as Alzheimer's. The person -- the soul, if you want -- gradually disappears as the brain decays from this physical process.
    We know that every form of mental activity -- every emotion, every thought, every percept -- gives off electrical, magnetic, or metabolic signals that can be recorded with increasing precision by Positron Emission Tomography, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Magnetoencephalography, and other techniques. We know that if you take a knife and section the corpus callosum (which joins the two cerebral hemispheres) you have the equivalent of two minds -- perhaps even two souls -- in the same skull. We know that if you look at the brain under a microscope it has a breathtaking degree of complexity -- on the order of a trillion synapses -- that's fully commensurate with the breathtaking complexity of human thought and experience. We know that when the brain dies, the person goes out of existence. I consider it to be a significant empirical discovery that one cannot communicate with the dead, and excellent evidence that Soul One, in Richard's sense, does not exist."
  • "STEVEN PINKER: The third science that's connecting mind to biology is evolutionary psychology, which takes an approach to understanding the mind that has long been fruitful in understanding the organs of the body. We can't make sense of an organ like the eye without considering it to have a function, or a purpose - not in a mystical, teleological sense, but in the sense of an illusion of engineering. That illusion, we now know, is a consequence of Darwin's process of natural selection. Everyone agrees that the eye is a remarkable bit of natural "engineering," and that may now be explained as a product of natural selection rather than as the handiwork of a cosmic eye-designer or as a massive coincidence in tissue formation. But the eye by itself is useless -- unless it's connected to a brain. The eye does not carry out its function by dumping optical information into a yawning chasm. Rather, the eye is hooked up to parts of the brain -- anatomically speaking, the eye is an extension of the brain -- and those parts contain circuits for analyzing the incoming visual material, for recovering the shapes and colors and motions in the world that gave rise to the stimulation of the eye. The perception of a world of colored 3-D objects, in turn, feeds into a system of categorization, allowing us to make sense of our experience, to impute causes to events, and to remember things in terms of their significant categories. And in turn, those categories themselves would be useless unless they were organized in service of certain goals, goals set by our emotions. Beginning with the eye, we have a chain of causation that leads to the study of faculties of mind, or modules, or subsystems, each of which can be seen as an adaptation akin to the adaptations in the organs of the body. Recent research has shown that aspects of the psyche that were previously considered mysterious, quirky, and idiosyncratic -- such as phobias, an eye for beauty, the tendency to fall in love, a passionate desire for revenge in defense of honor -- turn out to have a subtle evolutionary logic when they are analyzed in the way in which we have always analyzed the organs of the body.
    I find these developments to be exhilarating; they are a fulfillment of the ancient imperative to know thyself. They also have important practical implications. Alzheimer's Disease, to cite just one example, will be one of the leading causes of human misery in the industrial world over the next several decades, as we live longer and stop dying of other things. Successful treatment of Alzheimer's will not come from prayer or wishful thinking or reasoning about soul one; it will come from treating memory and personality as biochemical phenomena."
  • "STEVEN PINKER: One reason I find the reaction strange is that I can't imagine how anything coming out of the laboratory, computer, or theoretician's notebook could possibly subtract from what is the meaning of life, or Richard's sense of Soul two. Why keep on living if our minds are the physiological activity of the brain? Well, for starters there's natural beauty, and works of great art, and ethical ideals, and love, and bringing up children, and enjoying friends, and discovering how the world works -- I could go on. Why should the worth of any of those activities depend on the existence of a ghost in the machine?"
  • "STEVEN PINKER: The other part of the explanation comes from a conclusion that anthropologists have drawn about what you find in common in all the world's religions -- not just the major proselytizing religions, but the animistic beliefs of hunter-gatherer tribes. Ruth Benedict put it succinctly: the common denominator of religions is that a religion is a recipe for success. She didn't necessarily mean this to apply to the most sophisticated theologies, but in general, what people do in common when they think of deities is to pray to them for recovery from illness, for recovery from an illness of a child, for success in love, for success on the battlefield, for good weather, for the crops coming up, and so on. I don't want to say that sophisticated theology can be reduced to praying for good weather, but if you look at what's common across cultures that's what you find."
  • "DAWKINS: Yes. G. K. Chesterton said when people stop believing, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything. I presume that's what the questioner has in mind. I am interested in cults. The so-called organized religions are of course just old cults. They started off as cults and they've acquired a respectability that's simply due to the long time that they've been with us. I'm interested in them. I don't know why the questioner thinks it's not an ESS. It's not to me obvious that a world in which nobody believed in Soul One is necessarily ripe for invasion by cults, except insofar as I think one of the main reasons why people do believe the things that they believe is somewhat analogous to viral infection. And the reason for this has a good Darwinian basis. When we are children it is very important that we should learn as quickly as possible certain extremely important things. The language of our society, the social rules of our society, various rules for how to stay alive in a hostile world. So it's very easy for a Darwinian to believe that children will be preprogrammed with a rule that says, Believe what your parents tell you, or believe what your society's elders tell you. And of course a rule like that is not going to be discriminating. It's going to work both for the sensible things -- rules for how not to die of snake bite or falling off of cliffs or how to learn the language of the society. But the self-same rule is also going to be a natural sponge, or a natural soaker-up of New Age nonsense, and nonsense of any other kind. So, a biologically sensible rule -- Believe what you're told when you're young, and when you grow up pass on the same stuff to your own children -- that is a recipe for the long-term survival for the beliefs themselves. Or the rule might be, Believe so-and-so, and spend as much time as possible persuading other people to believe it as well; that's a recipe for epidemics of infectious beliefs. So I think that in that sense I agree with the questioner."
  • "PINKER: I think that evolution and genetics and neuroscience are essential parts of an explanation of human behavior, but that doesn't mean that people are sealed in a barrel, oblivious to the standards of behavior set by other people, and unable to make decisions based on them. Quite the contrary -- one of the things our brains are designed to do is learn the contingencies of the social world we find ourselves in. Obviously there is variation among cultures, which is made possible by the fact that people innovate and people learn other people's innovations. Also, the optimal way to behave in a given situation depends on how other people behave and react to one's own behavior, and those contingencies vary from place to place and have to be learned. There are large differences, orders of magnitude, in rates of violent encounters across different countries, although the psychology of the violent encounters is strikingly similar. The rates differ because of differences in the cultures and social values, those values aren't like a gas that seeps out of the earth and that people merely breathe in. They emerge from a bunch of minds interacting in a group, exchanging ideas, assessing one another, making decisions. So culture itself, even though it's part of any explanation of behavior, itself has to be tied to the psychological and ultimately neurological mechanisms that allow cultures to arise to begin with."
  • At http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge53.html
• "The Dissent of Darwin" - Jaron Lanier and Richard Dawkins
  • JL: But if we hope to separate ourselves from the awful history of evolution that created us, we have a very difficult time defining exactly how we're different.
    RD: You can simply say that in humans there was a gradual emergence of certain qualities that no other species has.
    JL: Can you name those qualities?
    RD: One of them is language. Another is the ability to plan ahead using conscious, imagined foresight. Short-term benefit has always been the only thing that counts in evolution; long-term benefit has never counted. It has never been possible for something to evolve in spite of being bad for the immediate short-term good of the individual. For the first time ever, it's possible for at least some people to say, `Forget about the fact that you can make a short-term profit by chopping down this forest; what about the long-term benefit?' Now I think that's genuinely new and unique.
    JL: Is survivability the only principle that generated our attributes? What about the benefit for a phenomenon as odd as testicles? It's as if a heavily armored tank were being ridden by a driver in a balloon on the roof.
    RD: Why do we have them dangling outside ourselves, rather than safely cushioned inside?
    JL: I'm familiar with the conventional explanation, which is that it has to do with the management of heat. [Sperm cannot survive long at body temperature.]
    RD: And you understand the implausibility of that explanation?
    JL: The evolutionary process has produced such spectacular mechanisms for managing problems that would seem to be much more difficult than coping with heat. And we have astonishing regulatory mechanisms for heat in our body already. I mean, we protect ourselves from invading microorganisms and from extremes of heat and cold.
    If it just turned out that it was impossible to pass along genes at a particular body temperature, we could have evolved a different body temperature that was appropriate to that process. So overall, testicles do seem very strange to me.
    RD: That's what I would have said. But are you familiar with Zahavi's handicap principle? It sounds really way out, but I think the problem of the `vulnerable balls' is well suited to this particular explanation.
    Zahavi is an Israeli biologist whose idea was ridiculed when he first put it forward in 1975, but he has recently been vindicated by some clever mathematical modeling by Alan Grafen at Oxford University. Zahavi and Grafen state that in any encounter in animals where advertisement is important--and that's very, very often--an advertisement is only believed if it's validated by being costly. Translated into English, what the male is saying is, `Look how powerful a male I am, because I can afford to wear my balls outside my body, in the most vulnerable position. You'd better not mess with me because I am proving my strength and my ability as a fighter.'
  • JL: It's not just a conflict between creationists and Darwinists. There's a large group of people who simply are uncomfortable with accepting evolution because it leads to what they perceive as a moral vacuum, in which their best impulses have no basis in nature.
    RD: All I can say is, That's just tough. We have to face up to the truth.
    JL: That answer is not good enough anymore. People are reacting against science. People feel science is telling them they're less special, less responsible than they once believed.
  • At http://www.nyu.edu/classes/neimark/evolution.html

• Edward O. Wilson is On Top of the World The father of sociobiology and grandfather of evolutionary psychology sounds off on life, death, faith, free will, the 'self' - and his beloved ants.
  • PT: You’ve said that ants have given you everything, and it’s to them you always return. What have they taught you?
    EO: One thing is that natural selection is brutal. It is brutal to see strong, beautiful ant queens and males go forth and realize that they’re all going to be devastated, that one out of 10,000 queens will make it into the ground to start a new colony. Every little advantage that an organism has can make an enormous difference. The other thing is that natural selection grinds exceedingly small. Natural selection doesn’t allow for foul-ups in an ant colony any more than in a hunter-gatherer society. Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn’t prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution. And ants are very good for telling us about chemical communication. For instance, one ant may use a heptanone and another may use a methylheptanone as an alarm substance. What’s fascinating is that different species will not intermingle, even though they are so closely related that all that separates them is one isomer of one organic substance. Their gene pools are isolated.
    PT: Are there ever accidental spinoffs of evolution? Could there be some traits that really don’t seem to serve an obvious function, but persist anyway?
    EO: There are no accidental spinoffs, and there is very little probability that inferior traits will survive. If you told an arm-chair theorist about the tiny differences in chemical communication in ants their inclination would be to say, 'Well, it’s an accident, a spin-off. Evolution is full of accidents.' Not when you get down to the nitty-gritty and you find these tiny differences have a major function in separating species. This is the way biology has unfolded through natural history.
    PT: But what if one particular variation had such a huge benefit that it generated a huge number of spinoffs and those survived? Like the human brain. The benefit you get from a brain like ours is so large that maybe it can pay for all the spinoffs because of the gain. For instance, is the capacity to make music a spinoff?
    EO: Some scientists suggest that music is an accidental spinoff of rhythmicity and speech. But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture. It probably served then, as it does today, to bind the society together, and especially during rites of passage and reaffirmation of tribal communion.
  • PT: In Consilience you said that our essential spiritual dilemma is that we evolved to accept one truth "God" and discovered another "evolution".
    EO: And the struggle for men’s souls in the 21st century will be to choose between the two. The transcendentalist view was so powerfully advantageous in early paleolithic and agricultural societies. And if there’s anything disagreeable about secular humanism, it’s that its bloodless. Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn’t stack up against a two-millenium-old funeral high mass. I used a phrase called the evolutionary epic back in 1978 to try and convey the grandeur of biology, and it’s beginning to catch on. A colleague of mine speaks of 'the sacred depths of nature' to try and evoke that same reverence.
  • PT: You’ve said that the brain is really a kind of ever shifting network, a republic of responses to information. And yet we walk around with a sense of a core self. Isn’t that peculiar?
    EO: I’m aware of you, you’re aware of me. There’s a sense of self. But there is no transcendental center of the brain somewhere that is in control of the machinery, pulling the levers and possessed of the capacity to float free of our mortal coil when that moment comes.
    PT: But how does the brain even create that sense of self?
    EO: You’ll hear the voice of the neurobiologist emerging from me on this. It’s natural we feel there’s a self because of the body that we’re in. The brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input. The brain is organized heavily around sensations coming from the body, and that is so intense, so much at the center of conscious experience, including all the input coming from our body, and so it’s seen as the principal protagonist. That’s what the self is.
    PT: One of the most precious beliefs of the 'self' is that it has free will.
    EO: A lot of philosophers and thinkers have believed that the human mind was not based in material reality. They had a vague notion of angelic, transcendent activity that they never could define because, of course, they couldn’t translate it into any materialist terms and make sense. That’s really the basis of the notion of free will, that there is a whole different faculty, probably true for human beings only, a truly human quality that helps lift us up above the animals, somewhere between here and the angels.
    PT: But when you talk about free will, you describe it only in the sense that the brain is so complex, so constantly bombarded with input, that it’s able to cascade in any direction at any time. That’s freedom, but not self-determined free will.
    EO: There are really two meanings of free will. One we all agree on is that you have your own mind, you make your own decisions, your soul is your own. No matter what is done to you, that’s the one thing that cannot be surrended. Of course, now we know that with the right pharmaceutical or biochemical manipulation, you can get people to shift moods, attitudes and maybe even beliefs. So that view isn’t holding up quite so well anymore. But let’s say that’s what we mean by free will.
    The other kind of free will stops people cold in their attempt at self-understanding. We don’t know our own minds. We don’t know all the processes inside and we can’t predict what kind of responses and decisions we’ll make. And even if we believed we could, there is so much chaos in the mind brought about by tiny perturbations or external events. Not even with a gigantic computer could we predict what any of us sitting at this table will do precisely one hour from now.
    PT: So we’re free like the weather.
    EO: Or like the wind. We will get up when we are ready to get up. That will be our free will. And we will go out that door and events will happen and we will think about them and make decisions that we can’t predict right now. This thing we’re walking around in is not in complete control. It could do marvelous things. It could encounter disasters.
  • PT: You call yourself a deist. What do you mean by that?
    EO: A deist is a person who’s willing to buy the idea that some creative force determined the parameters of the universe when it began.
    PT: And a theist is someone who believes that God not only set the universe in motion, but is still actively involved.
    EO: But I’ve been doing a kind of Pascalian waffling as a deist. I think being an atheist is to claim knowledge you cannot have. And to say you’re agnostic is to arrogantly dismiss the whole thing by saying that it’s unknowable. But a provisional deist is someone like myself who leaves it open. You see, evolutionary biology leaves very little room for a theistic God. I’d like it to be otherwise. Nothing would delight me more than to have real proof of a transcendental plane.
  • EXCERPT FROM CONSILIENCE (check with publisher)
    For many the urge to believe in transcendental existence and immortality is overpowering. Transcendentalism, especially when reinforced by religious faith, is psychically full and rich; it feels somehow right. In comparison empiricism seems sterile and inadequate. That is why, even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart. Science has always defeated religious dogma point by point when the two have conflicted. But to no avail. In the United States there are fifteen million Southern Baptists, the largest denomination favoring literal interpretation of the Christian Bible, but only five thousand members of the American Humanist Association, the leading organization devoted to secular and deistic humanism . . . .
    Science has taken us very far from the personal God who once presided over Western civilization. It has done little to satisfy our instinctual hunger. . . The essence of humanity’s spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and empiricist world views? No, unfortunately, there is not. . . . For centuries the writ of empiricism has been spreading into the ancient domain of transcendentalist belief, slowly at the start but quickening in the scientific age. The spirits our ancestors knew intimately first fled the rocks and trees, then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars, where their final extinction is possible. But we cannot live without them. People need a sacred narrative . . . . The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic. Material reality discovered by science already possesses more content and grandeur than all the religious cosmologies combined.
  • At http://www.nyu.edu/classes/neimark/eow.html

• "A Designer Universe? - STEVEN WEINBERG"
  • "I have been asked to comment on whether the universe shows signs of having been designed.1 I don't see how it's possible to talk about this without having at least some vague idea of what a designer would be like. Any possible universe could be explained as the work of some sort of designer. Even a universe that is completely chaotic, without any laws or regularities at all, could be supposed to have been designed by an idiot."
  • "I have to admit that, even when physicists will have gone as far as they can go, when we have a final theory, we will not have a completely satisfying picture of the world, because we will still be left with the question "why?" Why this theory, rather than some other theory? For example, why is the world described by quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics is the one part of our present physics that is likely to survive intact in any future theory, but there is nothing logically inevitable about quantum mechanics; I can imagine a universe governed by Newtonian mechanics instead. So there seems to be an irreducible mystery that science will not eliminate.
    But religious theories of design have the same problem. Either you mean something definite by a God, a designer, or you don't. If you don't, then what are we talking about? If you do mean something definite by "God" or "design," if for instance you believe in a God who is jealous, or loving, or intelligent, or whimsical, then you still must confront the question "why?" A religion may assert that the universe is governed by that sort of God, rather than some other sort of God, and it may offer evidence for this belief, but it cannot explain why this should be so.
    In this respect, it seems to me that physics is in a better position to give us a partly satisfying explanation of the world than religion can ever be, because although physicists won't be able to explain why the laws of nature are what they are and not something completely different, at least we may be able to explain why they are not slightly different. For instance, no one has been able to think of a logically consistent alternative to quantum mechanics that is only slightly different. Once you start trying to make small changes in quantum mechanics, you get into theories with negative probabilities or other logical absurdities. When you combine quantum mechanics with relativity you increase its logical fragility. You find that unless you arrange the theory in just the right way you get nonsense, like effects preceding causes, or infinite probabilities. Religious theories, on the other hand, seem to be infinitely flexible, with nothing to prevent the invention of deities of any conceivable sort."
  • "Where religion did make a difference, it was more in support of slavery than in opposition to it. Arguments from scripture were used in Parliament to defend the slave trade. Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion."
  • At http://www.nyu.edu/classes/neimark/design.html
  • At http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~vincent/Cosmology/weinberg-designer-universe-reading.htm
  • At http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/korista/weinberg.html

• "Historical Misrepresentations, Misattributions and Fictions."
  • At http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/fakehist.htm
  • Links via Donald Simanek's Page - http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/
  • Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ v6.0 Jan 13, 1994 - http://cns-web.bu.edu/pub/dorman/trans_faq.html

• "rscal website presenting Weirdos on the Web"
  • A.S.D.W Approved: Association of SeriouslyDull Websites
  • A.S.W.W Approved: Association of Seriously Weird Websites
  • At http://www.rscal.demon.co.uk/

• "How To Deconstruct Almost Anything - My Postmodern Adventure"
  • At http://www.communities.com/paper/deconstr.html

• Counter Balance
  • Sceintific and Theological discussion and essays.
  • At http://www.counterbalance.org

• "Sterling Hill Mining Museum, 30 Plant Street, Ogdensburg, NJ 07439-1126 USA"
  • At http://sterlinghill.org/
• "Franklin and Sterling Hill, New Jersey, USA"
  • At http://simplethinking.com/franklinminerals/

• Excalibur Mineral Corporation
  • At http://users.bestweb.net/~excalmin/

• Broadstone Minerals
  • At http://www.broadstoneminerals.com/

• "The Dark Lady of DNA : A Portrait of Rosalind Franklin "
  • At http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s833226.htm

  • Leaving a palace for a slum (Kings College to Birkbeck)

• "The Fall of the Maya"
  • At http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s821598.htm

  • Summary: Three severe droughts over a one hundred year dry spell is most likely to have been the cause of the fall of the great Mayan civilisation in Central America.

• "Enterococcus Genome"
  • At http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s833225.htm

  • Summary: According to Ian Paulsen, there are more bacteria cells in the human body that human cells. The journal Science recently published his paper, which analyses the genome of a stubborn strain of Enterococcus faecalis, an organism that lives happily in the gut of every human being on the planet, but sometimes turns into a deadly pathogen, resistant to a wide range of drugs, even vancomycin, which is regarded as the drug of last resort.

• "The Cattle-Raid of Cooley (Táin Bó Cúalnge)"
  • "The Cattle-Raid of Cooley (Táin Bó Cúalnge) is the central epic of the Ulster cycle. Queen Medb of Connaught gathers an army in order to gain possession of the most famous bull in Ireland, which is the property of Daire, a chieftain of Ulster. Because the men of Ulster are afflicted by a debilitating curse, the seventeen-year-old Cuchulain must defend Ulster single-handedly."
  • At http://vassun.vassar.edu/~sttaylor/Cooley/

• Evolutionary Psychology Rant
  • At http://www.captain-justice.com/rants/essays.html
  • Including "Smoking Kills" - one man's justification of selling cigarettes to help rid the gene pool of stupid people - http://www.captain-justice.com/rants/essays.html
  • Link - The Skeptic's Dictionary - http://skepdic.com/
  • Link - Welcome to Crypt Newsletter - http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/

• eclectica, a weblog [stuff and nonsense]
  • At http://eclectica.pulp.nu/

• How Jedi are you?
  • At http://www.gaijindesign.com/lawriemalen/jedi/

• "truth in advertising" - vintage cigarette & tobacco ads
  • At http://www.chickenhead.com/truth/

• Interesting Microsoft links.
  • At http://i-want-a-website.com/about-microsoft/yamoo/antims.html
  • At http://torech-ungol.bgi.uni-bayreuth.de/~joku/microsuck.html

• Converting Pudding Labels into Mega Frequent Flier Points
  • At http://www.flyertalk.com/pudding.htm

• corpspeak: The Official SGI Corporate Press Release Generator
  • At http://reality.sgi.com/cpirazzi_esd/corpspeak.html

• Web Economy Bullshit Generator
  • At http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html

• White House .org
  • At http://www.whitehouse.org/
  • Welcome to the Virtual Tour of the White House : http://www.whitehouse.org/tours/virtual.asp
  • White House History : http://www.whitehouse.org/history/index.asp
  • White House Giftshop : http://www.whitehouse.org/giftshop/index.asp
  • United States Department of Faith Salvation Legislation Bill : http://www.whitehouse.org/DOF/salvation-act.asp
  • Attention American Citizens! You stand hereby directed to prove your patriotism by printing out hundreds of the wartime morale posters below, and distributing them widely throughout your community! : http://www.whitehouse.org/initiatives/posters/index.asp
  • Ten Commandments of Patriotism : http://www.whitehouse.org/policy/commandments.asp

• Patriotic Posters from whitehouse.org
  • At http://www.whitehouse.org/initiatives/posters/index.asp

  • "Fancy a Snort of Yank Bum?"

• The Complete Bushisms
  • At http://politics.slate.msn.com/Features/bushisms/bushisms.asp

• Gary Larsen Books
  • At http://www.freeyellow.com/members2/lit/far.html

• A Kurt Vonnegut Webpage
  • At http://www.duke.edu/~crh4/vonnegut/

• Marcus J. Ranum, President and CEO of Network Flight Recorder, Inc
  • At http://www.clark.net/pub/mjr/

• It's not news - it's FARK.com
  • At http://www.fark.com/

• Why Islam Hates Democracy
  • At http://frontpagemag.com/columnists/glazov/2002/glazov06-06-02.htm

• ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers)
  • At http://www.alpsp.org

• Learned Publishing On-line
  • At http://www.learned-publishing.org

• Searching the Deep Web: Directed Query Engine Applications at the Department of Energy
  • At http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january01/warnick/01warnick.html

• EnergyPortal Search: A distributed search of energy-related collections
  • At http://kratos.osti.gov:1999/

• Distributed Explorer (searching for information system on the internet)
  • At http://www.iwapps.com/products/distributed.shtml

• Postal Experiments - Testing the Limits of the US Postal System
  • At http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/postal-6-4.html

• Finding ZIP codes for US postal addresses
  • At http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/lookup_zip+4.html

• The Open Archives Initiative: Searching Across e-Print Services
  • At http://www.openarchives.org

• deep Web (Web search system)
  • At http://completeplanet.com/Tutorials/DeepWeb/index.as

• Storage system for 2000 years (Rosetta Disc): Information Storage of the Future
  • At http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s150901.htm
  • Long Now Foundation : http://www.longnow.org/

• Institute for the Future
  • At http://www.iftf.org/

• Nicolaus Steno - History of Geology
  • At http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/histgeol/steno/steno.htm

  • Steno was born into a wealthy Lutheran family in Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied medicine in Copenhagen, Leiden and Amsterdam, where he discovered the excretory duct of the parotid gland. After travels through France, Austria and Hungary, he became physician to the Grand Duke Ferdinand II in Florence, Tuscany. In 1666, he dissected the head of a large shark at the Duke's request and concluded that glossopetrae found in rocks are identical to shark teeth. He continued intensive geological observations, which culminated with his greatest work, De Solido Intra Solidium Naturaliter Contento Dissertationis Prodromus (Forerunner of a Dissertation on a Solid Naturally Contained within a Solid), often simply called the Prodromus. This was a bold statement of the organic origin of fossils and fundamental principles of stratigraphy, published in 1669. Although now regarded as a geological masterpiece, the conclusions of Prodromus were not generally accepted until the following century.

    His earlier conversion to Catholicism in 1667 began to produce personal conflict with his geological observations, and shortly after writing the Prodromus, Steno lost all interest in geology. His geological career, thus, spanned three short years. Although he returned to Denmark for a few years, he was not happy, and moved back to Florence, where he became a priest in 1675. In 1677 he was appointed titular Bishop and spent the rest of his life involved with missionary work in northern Germany.

• Public Service Commission of Canada
  • At http://www.psc-cfp.gc.ca/

• How to find the TRUTH
  • At http://physics.uwstout.edu/staff/larchez/miscel.htm
  • At http://wiscinfo.doit.wisc.edu/secfac/Images/sift_and_winnow_student_large.jpg

  • "Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquirey elsewhere, we believe that the great state of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found." (taken from a report of the board of regents in 1894)

• PubMed Central
  • "PubMed Central is a web-based archive of journal literature for all of the life sciences."
  • At http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/

• PubMed Central
  • "publiclibraryofscience.org was established to organize support within the scientific community for online public libraries of science, providing unrestricted free access to the archival record of scientific research."
  • At http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/

• On-line texts at the French National Library
  • At http://gallica.bnf.fr/

• Parliamentary Reports - on FAMIS Financial Accounting System
  • At http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199899/cmselect/cmpubacc/322/32202.htm

• Science and Technology - Minutes of Evidence
  • About putting Diamond/Zirconia Synchrotron at RAL, Oxford
  • At http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmsctech/uc82/uc8201.htm

• MoD scraps Ł120m computer project
  • At http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/33831.html
  • At http://www.computing.co.uk/News/1147382
  • At http://www.femail.co.uk/pages/standard/article.html?in_article_id=201440&in_page_id=2

• Cthulhu Links
  • At http://hjem.get2net.dk/abrehmc/links.htm
  • Cthulhu For President Home Page: http://www.minet.uni-jena.de/~mso/cthulhu.html
  • The Church of Cthulhu: http://www.cthulhusaves.com/
  • The Church of NOJ ( ]`-}<--- the horned one winks at you! ): http://www.noj.faithweb.com/

• First Church of Chumbawamba
  • At http://www.chumba.com/
  • Harriet Tubman - 1820 (approximately) - 1913: http://www.chumba.com/_troublemakers.htm
  • We have highlighted a selection of campaigns here, mostly centred around wrongful imprisonings and the subsequent campaigns for justice. These and many other miscarriages of justice can be found on the MOJO[UK] website.: http://www.chumba.com/_campaigns.htm

• Anarchist Soccer League
  • At http://www.infoshop.org/dc/asl.html

• The Hawksmoor Churches - London, UK
  • At http://www.darkshire.org/~jhkim/rpg/ripper/hawksmoor.html
  • "The eccentric architect Nicholas Hawksmoor designed a number of Baroque churches, which were built from 1710 to 1725. His designs were quite unusual, mixing pyramids and spires in a unique fashion."

• Disco Danger: Disco Stu
  • At http://www.digipen.edu/student-galleries/programs/projects/1998/Disco/DD/stu.htm

• The Tick Animated Movie
  • At http://www.comics2film.com/TickAniFlick.shtml

• The Drudge Report
  • At http://www.drudgereport.com/

• Sorel Blizzard Snowboots
  • At http://www.sonomaoutfitters.com/foot_winter/sorel_blizzard.html

• Sorel Blizzard Snowboots
  • At http://www.zappos.com/n/p/dp/2362379/c/9.html

• Sorel Men’s Blizzard Boot Replacement Liner
  • At http://www.sirmailorder.ca/show_prod.php?product_id=321878&cat_id=2&subcat_id=203&PHPSESSID=&PHPSESSID=

• Sorel Men’s Blizzard II Boot
  • At http://www.sirmailorder.ca/show_prod.php?product_id=321870&cat_id=2&subcat_id=203&PHPSESSID=&PHPSESSID=

• XTC FAQ (MDMA ;(extacy))
  • At http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/mdma/mdma_faq2.shtml
  • At http://www.ecstasy.org/
  • At http://mir.drugtext.org/ecstasy/links.html
  • At http://mir.drugtext.org/ecstasy/new.html
  • Ecstasy The new drug of choice? : http://www.peak.sfu.ca/the-peak/96-2/issue3/ecstasy.html
  • Ecstasy (MDMA) History : http://www.a1b2c3.com/drugs/x_01.htm

• New England Comics - The Tick
  • At http://www.newenglandcomics.com/

• Internet Movie Database
  • At http://www.imdb.com/

• Tattoo Assassins Page (vapourware) - Including an insider's programming perspective
  • At http://www.bunnyears.net/tattoo/
  • I've asked before and I'll try again. Does anyone know where I might find a Tattoo Assassins PCB (or even the full machine?) I know this thing never went into full production, and I know there are good reasons for that, but I'd like to get it anyway.
    Also, last time I posted about this, someone claimed to have a video of the making of the game. The return email was fake though. Does anyone have this? I'd at least like to see what the game looked like. Email me if you know anything.
  • "And this is my answer. :) I collect pictures and information on games that never came out--I write about them in GamePro every once in a rare while under the header "Vapor Trails"--and Tattoo Assassins is one that I'd tracked for a while. I have nine screenshots from Data East's aborted fighting games--some as 35mm slides, some as color photo printouts. Please excuse the quality--these were generated from photographs of a monitor, and the originals aren't exactly optimal, but hey, when you're chasing shadows, you take what you can get.
    Clearly, this was Data East's chance to cash in on the Mortal Kombat craze of violent video games. And, by all accounts, it sucked, so it was never fully produced. Mind you, I'm not a fan--I've never played it, I've never seen a cabinet in person (only on the flyer), and I probably never will. I only know what I know from what you see here and from what others have told me. However, that's just enough to make a web page for it (and I'm eager to hear yours), so, without further ado... "

  • The Tale of the Tester: Someone was nice enough to send in this recollection of a tester who had the displeasure of working on Tattoo Assassins. I've cleaned it up a bit, but whoever wrote this up, thank you! I'd love to give you credit if you want to come forward.

  • An Insider's Report: I am shocked, delighted, and a little embarassed to reveal that a person from the original programming team contacted me about Tattoo Assassins after seeing this site, and I am extremely grateful to that person for the anonymous info you're about to read. This person assures me that the source code still exists, and that only two machines are believed to exist featuring the final code. I think I can safely say that now we know EXACTLY what happened to Tattoo Assassins, and I hope you find this as fascinating an account as I do...

• PPI - Primate Programming Inc
  • At http://www.newtechusa.com/ppi/talent.asp

• Take that feeble emacs user - you are a vi man after all - cartoon
  • At http://www.cet.nau.edu/~mc8/index.html

• Kill Jar Jar Binks
  • At http://www.angelfire.com/tn/scottewen/killjarjar.html

• Jar Jar hate ring:
  • At http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=jarjarhate;list

• Exploding Whale
  • At http://www.explodingwhale.com

• News of the Weird
  • At http://www.newsoftheweird.com/

• For Sale by Mental Patient
  • "In the world of E-commerce, there is no one more STRONGLY COMMITTED then Mr. Mental Patient!!"
  • e.g., King Louis the Tooth Cracker
    • Beware!!!
    • "King Louis the Tooth Cracker" is NOT candy!!!
    • He is a Strong and Powerful Monarch who cracks teeth!!
    • Many call King Louis the Tooth Cracker "Cruel" and "Deceitful".
    • I call him "Hard Headed" and "Resilient"!!!
    • If you are looking for a Monarch that will crack your teeth when chewed, then I'd nudge you in the direction of acquiring King Louis the Tooth Cracker from me.
    • He's not only a Wise and Benevolent King, he also cracks Teeth!!!!
  • Opaque and moody, yet precocious and daring, my USA Today "Hot Site" Award is a sassy flirt that enjoys "flashing" itself at everyone it sees!
  • Grenwich Mean Time is the MEANEST Time there is!!!!
  • I recently discovered the Polynesian Island of Tofu while exploring the "Continental Shelf" of our Cafeteria!!!
  • In some countries he's known as "Mr. Pushy"!
    In others, he's called "El Strongo Diablo"!
    In my country, he's known simply as "The Man All Must Obey"!
    Don't be fooled by his lack of hands, feet, neck, and face!!
    This is one Powerful Man!
    Everyone on Earth must OBEY HIM!
    

  • In an agreement made with Father Time, I now own the worldwide rights to 12:17 p.m.!!

  • Over the years, little has been written about the "Forbidden City of Po".
    There are A FEW other things that are Forbidden in this Great Forbidden City!
    For Example:
    It is Forbidden to Live There!
    It is Forbidden to Visit!
    It is Forbidden to even Think About Visiting!
    Air is Forbidden!
    Plant Life is Forbidden!!
    All Mammals are Rigorously Forbidden!!
    Noise is Forbidden!
    Liquid is Forbidden!
    Touching ANYTHING is strictly Forbidden!
    That's because all writing about the "Forbidden City of Po" is Strictly Forbidden!!

  • I am currently selling "The Love That Can Not Speak It's Name"!!!
    It is a very Desirable type of Love.
    Love Experts have appraised it as being 6 TIMES more valuable than
    "The Love that can not STOP saying the word "Hiatus"!!!"
    That love can be irritating.
    This love is not.
    "The Love that can not speak it's name" is ALSO worth 12-15 times as much as
    "The Love that can not remember where it parked the car"!!!
    Unlike that love, this love knows exactly where the car is parked at all times!
    Think about it!!!
    It hardly matters if your Love "can" or "can't" speak it's name" when you need to know where your car is parked!!!
    Love Experts also say this love is far more valuable then the following types of love:
    "The Love that can not bathe itself!!!"
    "The Love that walks like a Raccoon"
    "The love that can not swallow solid foods!!!"

  • As you all know, Former U.S. President George Bush and his wife Barbara had 26 identical sons.
    Each one of them was given the first name "George" and a small country to run.
    What many people don't know is that George and Barbara Bush ranked their sons according to quality!
    

  • Dear Mr. Mental Patient: 
    
    I have thoroughly enjoyed your brilliance. Recently I ordered one of
    your mugs and I must say you certainly know how to treat your
    customers well.  I love the poem you wrote about me.  And the mug is
    made of fine quality.  It will make a lovely gift to a friend of
    mine. 
    
    I wish you all the best.  char clingman 

  • Thank You For Filling Out This Form
    Below is what you submitted to mrmentalpatient@hotmail.com on Tuesday, January 30, 2001 at 21:57:18
    Comment: Bidding for: "The Schism of Man's Dichotomy" I bid with following Non Competitive Scrabble words: exarsnif roath graviscondine knodobydian fojefroaph scofitregna cilyflopsis epaperematic ramegrapollotus
    submit: submit now
    opinion: stalk just a bit

  • At http://www.total.net/~fishnet/

• Church of the SubGenius
  • At http://www.subgenius.com/

Much of the following links relating to concerts and lectures in London are now being updated in Resources relating to free classical concerts, historical Concerts, Lectures, Debates and Talks in London, UK

• National Portrait Gallery London - Education - daytime and nighttime lectures
  • At http://www.npg.org.uk/live/lecindex.asp

  • 23rd October 2001
    Tuesday 1.10pm *
    Royal Society Lecture Series
    B. Free Franklin - the Enlightenment in America
    Sir Alan Cook FRS

  • "Daytime lectures are free, but some indicated by the symbol * require tickets."
  • "Tickets for all lectures can be obtained from the Gallery's Ticket Desk or by sending a s.a.e. to the Education Department, enclosing a cheque made payable to the National Portrait Gallery for the appropriate amount."
  • "All lectures take place in the Ondaatje Wing Theatre, unless otherwise indicated. "

  • October 26th 2001: Friday 6.30pm Free : The Arnold Ensemble : Brass ensemble perform music by British composers including Arnold and Handel
  • November 2nd 2001: Friday 6.30pm Free (The Regency Room - Room 20 - 2nd Floor) : 'Songs of Innocence and Experience' A journey through English song and poetry performed by Gary Tushaw (Bass-Baritone) and Andrew Charity (Piano)
  • November 11th 2001: Sunday Lecture - 3pm Free : Behind the Lines. For Remembrance Day, Gabriel Woolf, with Anne Harvey presents his moving programme of WW1 poetry and prose.
  • November 16th 2001: Friday 6.30pm Free : Czardas Duo : Matthew Forbes (cello) and Ian Watson (accordian) perform a diverse programme including the London premiere of John Webb's "Into a Several World"
  • November 23rd 2001: Friday 6.30pm Free (The Regency Room - Room 20 - 2nd Floor) : Flute Recital : Ian Mullen (Flute) and Juliet Allen (Piano) performs a programme of mainly French music for flute including Bach, Debussy and Poulenc
  • November 25th 2001: Sunday Lecture - 1:10pm or 3:00pm Free: William Hogarth in Words: his own and others - Alfred Bradley and Susan Morris
  • November 30th 2001: Friday 6.30pm Free : William Chen, Piano - playing Robert Shumann (Carnaval, Op. 9), Percy Grainger and Franz Liszt
  • December 9th 2001 : Sunday 3pm Free A Thousand Years of Christmas : Music and readings presented by Timothy West with singer Sally Bradshaw, accompanied on the piano by Michael Haslam
  • December 15th 2001 : Saturday 3pm Free : Oppressed with Sin and Woe? Readings from the diaries and letters of Victorian parsons with music by women hymn-writers and composers. Presented by ARION: Brian Davis (harp) and Andrée Back (soprano)
  • December 16th 2001 : Sunday 3pm Free : The Poisoned Chalice: The Policies of Elizabeth I and the Problems of James I : Justin Nolan
  • December 22nd 2001 : Saturday 3pm Free : Lord George Gordon and the Gordon Riots : Peter Street's talk marks the 250th anniversary of Gordon's birth

• St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London
  • At http://www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/
  • St Martin-in-the-Fields Mission Statement (St Martin-in-the-Fields exists to honour God, and to enable questioning, open-minded people to discover for themselves the significance of Jesus Christ.): http://207.228.254.57/jserv/belief/index.jsp
  • "St Martin-in-the-Fields strives to be the 'Church of the Ever-Open Door'. Dick Sheppard, who was Vicar from 1914-27, was the first to express this hope. It is still our vision today."
  • Free Lunchtime concerts: http://207.228.254.57/jserv/concerts/index.jsp
  • Getting to St Martin-in-the-Fields Church, Trafalgar Square, London: http://207.228.254.57/jserv/findus/index.jsp
  • Café in the Crypt at St Martin-in-the-Fields Church, Trafalgar Square, London: http://207.228.254.57/jserv/cafe/index.jsp
  • "Whilst steeped in history, St Martin-in-the-Fields has always been much more than a place of tradition, unashamedly breaking traditions as fast as establishing them. From the lending library of 1680 to the Social Care Unit of recent years, St Martin's continually reaches out to its community in diverse ways. During the First World War troops on their way to and from the Front slept overnight in the church, paving the way for the establishment of the Social Care Unit, which provides support to homeless people in London. "
  • "Whilst people are no longer buried at the church, the internment here of the controversial concubine, Nell Gwynn, and notorious highwayman, Jack Sheppard, reinforces the mission statement that St Martin's is a church for "open-minded" and "questioning" Christians."

  • Concerts: http://207.228.254.57/jserv/concerts/index.jsp
    • Tuesday 20th November - 1:05pm : Royal College of Music Series (free). Zaira Castro (soprano) and Silvia Fraser (Piano). Songs including: Rodrigo - Cuatro Madrigales Amatorios - De los Alamos vengo, madre; Donizetti - Norina's Cavatina (from Don Pascuale)
    • Monday 26th November - 1:05pm : North London Piano Series (free). Dharshini Tambiah performs Bach, Chopin and Beethoven
    • Tuesday 27th November - 1:05pm : Trinity College of Music Series (Free) Trinity Chamber Choir - Madrigals by John Bennett, Thomas Hunt and John Milton : Michael Tippett, Richard Rodney Bennett and John Joubert.
    • Friday 30th November - 1:05pm : Trinity College of Music Series (Free) : Bedford School Chapel Choir (Free) - Programme includes: Gibbons - Almighty and Everlasting God; Carter - I wonder as I wander
    • Tuesday 4 December 1:05pm Sweelinck Ensemble (Free) : Debbie Diamond (violin) and Martin Knizia (organ/harpsichord)
    • Friday 7 December 1:05pm Norwegian Girls' Choir - Conductor Barbro Grenerson : BIT 20 Ensemble : Ellen Sejersted Bodtker (Harp) (Free) : Including:
      • Choir entering while singing Britten's From a "Ceremony of Carols" - "Procession"
      • BIT 20 Ensemble playing Gorecki - Harpsichord Concerto op 40. (Jarle Rotevatn on Harpsichord)
      • Górecki (Concerto for harpsichord (piano) and string orchestra Op. 40 (1980)) - http://www.usc.edu/dept/polish_music/composer/gorecki.html
      • Norwegian Girls' Choir singing carols including Die Engel und die Hurten
      • Norwegian Girls' Choir leaving while singing "Deilig er jorden" (traditional Silesian folk tune)

• St James' Church Picadilly - London, UK
  • At http://www.st-james-piccadilly.org/
  • St James' Church is positioned between Picadilly and Jermyn Street (go down Church St) about 200 yards from Picadilly Circus.
  • Events : http://www.st-james-piccadilly.org/page2.html
  • ACTIVITIES AND GROUPS : http://www.st-james-piccadilly.org/page6.html
    • Includes: BLAKE SOCIETY - William Blake was baptised at St James' and is celebrated by the Society through lectures, discussion and visits to Blake sites. Enquiries Membership Secretary 020 7733 3060
    • Includes: GOD'S GARDEN A sanctuary in the middle of London, with biblical plants, herbs and wild flowers.
  • Getting Started : http://www.st-james-piccadilly.org/page9.html
  • Lunchtime recitals - Free Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 1.10pm (suggested donation Ł2) and have a duration of approximately 50 minutes.
  • CONCERT PROGRAMME Details : http://stjamesconcerts.musicwise.net/

• The Friends of The City Churches - London, UK
  • At http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mothersole/walk.htm
  • Map of London City churches: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mothersole/mainmap.htm

• Timeout - London City lunchtime concerts
  • At http://www.timeout.com/london/ent/city_lunchtime_concerts.html

• London City Churches and Guild Churches lunchtime concerts and lunchtime events
  • At http://www.london.anglican.org/Churches/
  • At http://www.london.anglican.org/cityevents/
  • The City's parish churches together with 11 Guild churches offer a unique ministry. The City has few inhabitants but thousands visit and work there each day.
    Workers are encouraged to pause in the day and attend one of the numerous talks, concerts and services during the lunchtime and early evening.

  • St. Mary Le Bow Church; Cheapside ; London EC2V 6AU ; Tube: St Pauls or Bank ; Tel: 020 7248 5139 ; Lunchtime Concerts: 1.05pm Thur. ; MAP via YELL.COM
    • Thursday 6th December 2001 - Peter Martin - Lute (music of the 1500's - Spain and Italy)
    • Peter Martin's website: http://www.silvius.co.uk
    • The Lute Society: http://www.lutesoc.co.uk

  • St Margaret Lothbury; Lothbury, London EC2 ; Tube: Bank ; Tel: 020 7606 8330 ; Lunchtime Concerts: 1.10pm Thur ; MAP via YELL.COM
  • St. Olave's Church ; 8 Hart St London EC3R 7NB ; Tube: Tower ; Tel: 020 7488 4318 ; Lunchtime Concerts: 1.05pm Wed, Thur. ; MAP via YELL.COM
  • Church of St. Stephen Walbrook ; 39, Walbrook London EC4N 8BN ; Tube: Bank ; Tel: 020 7283 4444 ; Lunchtime Concerts: 12.30pm Fri. ; MAP via YELL.COM
  • Church of St.Martin-within-Ludgate ; Ludgate Hill London EC4M 7DE ; Tube: St Pauls ; Tel: 020 7248 6054 ; Lunchtime Concerts: 1.15pm Wed. ; MAP via YELL.COM
  • St. Bride's Church ; St. Bride's Avenue London EC4Y 8AU ; Tube: Blackfriars or St Pauls ; Tel: 020 7427 0133 ; Lunchtime Concerts: 1.15pm Tue, Wed, Fri ; MAP via YELL.COM
  • Temple Church ; Inner Temple, Fleet St London EC4Y 7HL ; Tube: Temple ; Tel: 020 7353 3470 ; Lunchtime Concerts: lunchtime organ concerts ; MAP via YELL.COM

  • The Parish Church of St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate
    • At http://www.st-michaels.org.uk/sepulchre/
    • Contact address: The Watch House, 10 Giltspur Street, London EC1A 9DF (Corner of Giltspur Street and Holborn Viaduct, opposite the Old Bailey); Tube: Temple ; Tel: 0207 248 3826 ; Lunchtime Concerts: varies - 1pm to 1.05pm Wed ;
    • MAP via YELL.COM
    • "The Royal School of Church Music was founded at St. Sepulchre's and the historic tower holds the twelve bells of the Old Bailey made famous by the nursery rhyme 'Oranges and Lemons'."

  • The Parish Church of St. Michael, Cornhill
    • At http://www.st-michaels.org.uk/information.html
    • St. Michael's Church, St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, London, EC3V 9DS (Tel. 0171 626 8841) : Tube: Temple ; Lunchtime Concerts: varies - 1pm to 1.05pm Wed ;
    • Monday 1pm: Organ Recital
    • Some Tuesdays: 1pm lectures

• Guildhall School of Music and Drama
  • At http://www.gsmd.ac.uk
  • Music Events : http://www.gsmd.ac.uk/pages/node0014

• Royal College of Music - London, UK
  • At http://www.rcm.ac.uk
  • Events : http://www.rcm.ac.uk/events/events.html
  • Events : Lectures : http://www.rcm.ac.uk/events/eventtype.asp?sendtype=4
  • Events : Chamber Music : http://www.rcm.ac.uk/events/eventtype.asp?sendtype=5

• St John's, Smith Square - London, UK
  • At http://www.sjss.org.uk/sjss.html
  • Friends of St. John's : http://www.sjss.org.uk/friends/index.html
  • "Thursday Lunchtime concerts featuring chamber and organ concerts."

• Wigmore Hall
  • At http://www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/
  • Concert Information : http://www.wigmore-hall.org.uk/asp/masterframeliteralie.asp

• Royal Opera House - Covent Garden - London, UK
  • At http://www.royalopera.org/
  • What's On : Performances : http://www.royalopera.org/PerformingSpaces/Index.cfm
  • What's On : Performances : Linbury Studio Theatre : http://www.royalopera.org/PerformingSpaces/Index.cfm?ccs=119

• Los Alamos LANL: The Real Story
  • At http://lanl-the-real-story.blogspot.com/

  • LANL Director George P. Nanos shut down the entire laboratory in July, 2004, citing "egregious" security and safety violations. The results of the shutdown include a cost to the taxpayer of approximately $850 million, an exodus of highly talented staff members, and the loss of untold millions of dollars of funding from customers who have taken their business elsewhere. This blog provides an uncensored LANL forum. See the link named "Posting Guidelines" below for posting instructions.

  • Saturday, March 26, 2005

    As a manager today I keep asking myself

    From Anonymous:

    Every manager of complex facilities, especially ones that have exceeded their design life by a decade or more, knows that he or she has problems in maintenance and operations. These problems are found in inspections and self-assessments and are appropriately documented. Every manager I know submits this list for funding and is told to prioritize them. In medicine this would be comparable to triage. Coming up with this prioritized list obviously involves a great deal of conjecture. The manager submits his or her prioritized list up the management chain and, in almost 100% of the time, even some of the prioritized items are not funded. Yet when something happens like the laser injury, only the parties that denied funding to cover identified shortfalls escape reprimands and punishment. (Chemistry Division managers had requested and been denied funding by the Laboratory Director for a person to help oversee and enforce safety compliance.)

    On the other hand, a division manager threatened to lock down TA-18 a few years ago and have his people abandon the site if money to operate the site safely was not promptly provided. Strangely, the money came post haste from DOE/NNSA and the facility continued to operate safely (and securely) in spite of the fact that it was one of oldest facilities on site.

    However, hardball tactics can only be used sparingly and in healthy organizations driven by principle and not "inane arbitrariness to reduce overheads" they are needed even less. Worrying about overheads seems particularly inane considering that our senior management seems to have wasted $1B by some estimates on overhead processes of dubious long term value.

    As a manager today I keep asking myself, where would my facilities and those in the rest of Laboratory be if that same $IB had been used to correct specific things that we already knew about and had documented instead wasting hours finding out what we already knew and creating mountains of useless SYA paperwork?

  • LMC-SNL noninterference letter

    From an Anonymous Sandian:

    This is from a Sandian who thinks that LANL staff might be interested in the following letter. It was recently reissued to SNL management and staff when Tom Hunter took over from Paul Robinson. LMC has been issuing this letter periodically for several years. My earliest version goes back to 1998. Here's the text of the latest version:

    Dear Tom,

    I am writing to reaffirm the promise made by Lockheed Martin to the Department of Energy regarding how our Corporation conducts its management responsibility for Sandia National Laboratories. Lockheed Martin has long respected Sandia's maxim of "exceptional service in the national interest." Accordingly, we recognize that for Sandia to fulfill the extraordinary mission requirements of the Laboratories, complete objectivity and independence of judgment must be assured. Lockeed Martin also recognizes that at no time should Corporate interest be placed above the national interest. Even the appearance of this circumstance would be unacceptable.

    Be assured that Lockheed Martin will continue to uphold the integrity and independent objectivity that has enabled Sandia to advise the US government on sensitive matters and to fulfill its responsibilities in certifying the safety and reliability of the US nuclear stockpile. Should you ever be confronted with a situation that has the potential to compromise Sandia's independence, you are to contact the undersigned immediately. Appropriate action will be taken to ensure Sandia's ability to provide objective advice to the government at all times. Our corporate culture promotes the highest sense of ethics and integrity.

    This Corporate wide commitment to ethical business practice permits us to confidently undertake the tremendous responsibilty associated with the management and operation of Sandia. We are proud of Sandia and greatly value our relationship.

    We look forward to many more years of close association with Sandia and we are committed to sustain our excellent record of performance.

    Sincerely, Robert J. Stevens, President, Lockheed Martin Corporation.

    # posted by Doug Roberts : 6/17/2005 04:58:00 PM 37 comments

• Los Alamos Study Group - anti-nuclear pacifist site
  • At http://www.lasg.org/

• St Martin in the Fields, Trafalgar Square, London WC2 and Dick Sheppard (vicar from 1914-1927)
  • At http://www.infed.org/walking/wa-stmar.htm
  • "The church became well known for its work with homeless people from just after the First World War when Dick Sheppard (the vicar from 1914-1927) established a relief centre in the crypt (Northcott 1937). Sheppard was a popular preacher and pioneer of religious broadcasting. He was also a pacifist and founded the Peace Pledge Union in 1936."
  • Northcott, R. J. (1937) Dick Sheppard and St. Martin's, London: Longmans Green and Co.

• The founder of the Peace Pledge Union was Hugh Richard Lawrie Sheppard, popularly known as Dick Sheppard.
  • At http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/people/pst_dick.html
  • "On recovery Dick served at various churches in the West End of London until in July 1914 he accepted the post of Vicar of St Martin-in-the Fields, Trafalgar Square. Before he could take it up, however, the First World War had been declared, and Dick accepted an invitation to be chaplain of a military hospital in France. Less than a week after arriving, the one time would-be soldier was writing home, "War is awful. More awful than I supposed possible". One of the doctors described how Dick "would identify himself with every dying man...sit there, just because he had promised the dying man that he would, just because he thought it might somehow comfort the poor fellow, who was long past any comfort really... "
    After two months Dick's health broke again, and he returned to London to be inducted to St Martin's in November, before a congregation of eleven people - so far removed from mainstream church life had St Martin's become. In his twelve years as Vicar, Dick not only filled the Church for Sunday services but made it a centre for social care which survives to this day. He opened up the crypt (cellar) for down-and-outs and played scratch games of cricket with young people in the courtyard. The church itself was kept open all night for soldiers waiting for trains and anyone else in need of spiritual or physical shelter. One human story relates how one night Dick found a young woman crying in the church. She had been turned out of her home in a northern town, after a quarrel with her parents, but was desperately homesick. Dick sensed the possibility of reconciliation, and there and then took her to the station and travelled home with her, returning to London wearily but happily after seeing the family reunited.
    Another pioneering venture came in 1924, when the BBC decided to experiment with broadcasting a religious service and chose St Martin's as the venue. This soon became a regular monthly feature, with Dick, 'the radio parson', sharing his pulpit with other clergy. Through such broadcasting Dick's increasing popularity in London spread throughout the country.
    Meanwhile, Dick's direct experience of war had not been without effect. In 1937 he mentioned that he had become a pacifist eighteen years before, that is in 1919, although he left no overt record at that time. He had, however, allowed his pulpit to be used for sermons critical of the war, and had mentioned conscientious objectors alongside soldiers and sailors in public prayers.-
    On Armistice Day in 1923 Dick organised a mass meeting in Trafalgar Square as a National Call to Righteousness, which, although without official sanction, was broadcast. In 1925 he famously wrote to The Times in protest against a Victory Ball in the Albert Hall planned for the evening of Armistice Day: "A fancy dress ball on a vast scale as a tribute to the Great Deliverance which followed on the unspeakable agony of 1914-1918 seems to me not so much irreligious as indecent". Such a stir was created that the Ball was postponed for a day and Dick was asked in its stead to lead a simple service, In Memory, at the Hall, in the presence of the King, the Prime Minister and other national figures. Later he scribbled on his own copy of the programme, "Of course Pacifism must be written into this". That is the origin of the Festival of Remembrance now held on the evening before Remembrance Sunday but, with its drills and displays, it regrettably seems to have more of militarism than pacifism written into it.
    Ill-health having necessitated Dick's resignation from St Martin's in 1926, he turned to completing a book on what he felt was wrong with the Church of England. Amongst many other points, The Impatience of a Parson (1927) argued that the Church should be "obliged to outlaw all war and to demand from its members that they should refuse to kill their brethren". The controversial nature of the best-selling book, together with his radio fame, led to writing columns in popular newspapers. On the recommendation of the Prime Minister, the King had already made him a Companion of Honour. Along with the down-and-outs, George V was actually a parishioner of St Martin's and came to a few services. Dick had been an Honorary Chaplain to the King since 1916.
    In 1929 Dick acknowledged in a letter to the writer Laurence Housman, "I am now a pacifist. I do not think a Christian can take part in any work of killing, or do anything he cannot believe that Christ would have done". He was, nevertheless, "a trifle reluctant to make pacifism my only love". So it was that Dick's next appointment came later in the year, as Dean of Canterbury, heading the staff of the Cathedral, the mother church of the Anglican Communion, where Cosmo Lang had recently become the Archbishop.
    Dick had just begun to make his mark in this influential post when ill-health once again forced a resignation in 1931. From this time on, Dick showed himself more and more as an active pacifist. On the night before Armistice Day 1931 he spoke at a No More War Movement meeting in the Albert Hall, along with the new Leader of the Labour Party, George Lansbury, who had campaigned against the Boer War whilst Dick was trying to join it. Dick made one of his best speeches and then, as was to happen frequently, collapsed on the platform.
    By February 1932 he was anxious about the war raging in China after the Japanese invasion. He joined with Maude Royden and Herbert Gray, both ministers in the Congregational Church, in writing a letter to the Press inviting volunteers to stand between the enemy firing lines and calling upon the League of Nations to make use of such a 'Peace Army'. Dick privately acknowledged that, "Most of those who read it will laugh at us", but felt compelled by the urgency of the time.
    Although there were a number of volunteers, including the Methodist minister Donald Soper, nothing substantive came of this venture. Aware that the Great 'War to end war' had far from ended war, and that the vaunted world Disarmament Conference in Geneva was breaking up in failure whilst states rapidly rearmed, Dick searched and searched for a real peace initiative. He went to The Hague in the Netherlands to hear the famous scientist Albert Einstein "appeal to all men and women that they will refuse to give any further assistance to war or the preparations for war. I ask them to tell their governments this in writing".
    As the international situation worsened, with the coming to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933, Dick heard of a sermon preached on Armistice Sunday that year in Riverside Church, New York, by Harry Emerson Fosdick, a Free Church minister who, like Dick, had served as a military chaplain in the First World War. Dr Fosdick ended by pledging to "do the best I can to settle my account with the Unknown Soldier.
    "I renounce war. I renounce war because of what it does to our own men...I renounce war because of what it compels us to do to our enemies...I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another."
    This text so moved Dick that, after much thought and consultation, he decided to use it as the basis for yet one more letter to the Press. In this letter, which the Times refused to publish, but which did appear in the (then Manchester) Guardian and other papers on 16 October 1934, Dick wrote of "the almost universally acknowledged lunacy of the manner in which nations are pursuing peace...It seems essential to discover whether or not it be true, as we are told, that the majority of thoughtful men in this country are convinced that war of any kind or for any cause, is not only a denial of Christianity, but a crime against humanity which is not to be permitted by civilised people". He invited those who would be willing to join a public demonstration renouncing war, in the terms of the last sentence quoted from Dr Fosdick's sermon, to send him a postcard.
    For the first few days there was nothing. Then the local postmaster rang to inquire whether someone would be at home to receive sacks full of postcards. In a few weeks there were thirty thousand replies, and still they came. Dick called his demonstration in the Albert Hall on 14 July 1935, which inaugurated the Sheppard Peace Movement. In September Dick published We Say "NO" - The Plain Man's Guide to Pacifism. In May 1936, with the help of other notable figures such as George Lansbury and Donald Soper, the organisation became The Peace Pledge Union. The fuller story of it is told in a companion information sheet, but it should be emphasised here that, although Dick never made a speech or wrote an article without mentioning his own strongly Christian motivation, the PPU was to be open to "men and women of very divergent philosophic, religious and political opinions".
    In the meantime, Dick had accepted his final Church appointment, as a Canon of St Paul's Cathedral, London, in the autumn of 1934. He devoted all his spare time to the pacifist movement, and travelled the country speaking at meetings organised by the thousand local PPU groups springing up. He contemplated resigning his canonry to go full-time for peace, being ever more critical of "the attempts made at the Church Assembly to reconcile the teaching of Christ with the practice of war". In April 1937 he led a deputation in torchlit procession to hand in a statement of pacifist conviction by clergy and laity at Lambeth Palace, home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, still a dearly loved friend, but the closer the friend, the more freely he should speak. That demonstration led to the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, still the main witness for pacifism within the Church of England.
    Also in 1937 Dick planned with others the first ceremony as a direct alternative to the official Armistice Day event at the Cenotaph. He invited those "who do not care to be present at the military parades now generally associated with that day" to go to Regent's Park for simple readings and singing as well as a solemn silence.
    The event was held, but without Dick. The last week of October was a period of high elation followed by deep sadness. On 23 October, after a hectic campaign, Dick had been elected by the students of Glasgow University as their Rector (an honorary post), in preference to Winston Churchill and other notables of the time. "This definitely puts pacifism on the map", said Dick; "I'm almost weeping with happiness".
    A week later his many friends wept. On 31 October Dick was found dead at his desk, having finally succumbed to perennial illness. The news made the headlines the next day, queues formed to pass his coffin as he lay in his beloved St Martin's, and crowds lined the streets to watch the funeral procession from there to St Paul's. Afterwards he was buried in the comparative quietness of Canterbury, where a memorial window shows him with St Martin, the soldier turned bishop, commemorated always on Armistice Day. There is also a Dick Sheppard Chapel in the crypt of St Martin's."

• Peace and Pacifist Organistion links
  • At http://www.gn.apc.org/fore/links/links.htm

• International Peace Bureau - Le Bureau International de la Paix
  • At http://www.ipb.org/
  • "The IPB is the world's oldest and most comprehensive international peace federation, bringing together people working for peace in many different sectors: not only pacifists but also women's, youth, labour, religious and professional bodies. IPB was founded in 1892 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1910. It has 210 member organizations, both internationals and national/local groups in over 50 countries."

• Case Studies in Process Plant Accidents
  • At http://www.cheresources.com/procacc.shtml
  • Including: Nypro Factory, Flixborough, United Kingdom in 1974 - 28 dead
  • "After reviewing these incidents, its easy to see how knowing what caused past accidents can prevent future accidents from happening. With that in mind, I would urge everyone to read the reference cited below. Mr. Trevor Kletz assembled a well-written compilation of process plant accidents in his book. It's a fantastic resource!"
  • Kletz, Trevor, What Went Wrong: Case Histories in Process Plant Disasters, 4th Ed., Gulf Publishing Company, 1998, ISBN 0-88415-920-5: http://www.gulfpub.com/books.html
  • Trevor A. Kletz: "Lessons From Disasters : How organisations have no memory and accidents recur", 1993, ISBN 0 85295 307 0

• parishes related news, books and web resources
  • At http://www.qozi.com/parishes/

• Texas
  • At http://www.neosoft.com/texas/default.html

• Gresham College, London: Lectures Webpage (Providing free public lectures since 1597)
  • At http://www.gresham.ac.uk/special/lectures.html

  • December 15, 2007

    So there's a minor problem with a little nuclear reactor in Eastern Ontario, and half a world away, a doctor must tell a man she can't run a test to diagnose what's wrong with the guy's heart. A medical crisis erupts. Parliament is forced to pass emergency legislation to get the reactor restarted. It's stunning - who knew such a thing could happen?

    People who've been reading the business pages, that's who. The fiasco in Chalk River, Ont., is no surprise to anyone who has followed MDS, which distributes isotopes used in treating disease, or Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), which supplies them. Eleven years ago, the two companies said they'd join forces to build two new reactors, Maple 1 and 2. The Maples were meant to replace the ancient NRU reactor that produces half of the world's medical isotopes.

    If they were operating today, there would have been no crisis. AECL chief executive officer Michael Burns might still have his job; he quit yesterday. And those who still think it's a swell idea for taxpayers to back a bungling seller of nukes might still have a leg to stand on. They don't. The case for privatization has never been stronger.

    The Maples were supposed to be running by 2000. We're still waiting. They were supposed to cost $140-million. By early last year, the costs were some $400-million and AECL had to pay tens of millions to MDS in an arbitration settlement. Understand, please, that these are not monster nuclear generating plants. The Maples are small and simple - as much as any nuke can be called simple - designed to do only one task. If AECL can screw that up, what good is it?

    The situation reached a critical point when the feds' nuclear safety watchdog, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, shut down the 50-year-old NRU plant because AECL had failed to follow orders to install new backup power systems. The government balanced the risks - a minuscule chance of a nuclear meltdown, versus thousands of angry and upset sick people - and decided to fire up the reactor again. But as Mr. Burns' resignation makes clear, it was no victory for AECL.

    If anything, the saga is a window on why the Crown Corp. should be carved up and sold. This isn't the first time Parliament has had to come to its rescue, after all. AECL, thanks in part to disasters like the Maple cost overruns, doesn't pay for itself, never has, and probably never will, as long as it's under Ottawa's wing. Energy Probe, a Toronto-based research group on energy issues, last year calculated that taxpayers have put $21-billion into the old beast since 1953, contributing about $75-billion to the national debt. "I would love an outcome where I [as a taxpayer] stop owning AECL," said Norm Rubin, the organization's director of nuclear research.

    Energy Probe has an anti-nuke bias, so perhaps that's what you'd expect him to say. But he's right when he says there's no sign of an end to the subsidies. Crown status also can make it awkward when there are safety concerns. AECL reports to Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn. The nuclear safety watchdog is independent, but technically, it also reports to Parliament through the same minister. Can Ottawa properly regulate a company that it also owns? "All of Parliament was in a conflict [on the NRU legislation]," Mr. Rubin claims, "because Parliament owns the reactor."

    The Conservatives are launching a formal review of AECL. And while that's the right move, the Tories would be wise not to let it linger too long. Nuclear power is back in vogue. Some predict the U.S., which hasn't approved a new nuclear site since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, might build a dozen or more new reactors in the coming years. Energy-rich Alberta is talking about nukes; Ontario will be building new nuclear power as well, to replace old plants and the coal-fired electricity the province wants to shut down by 2014.

    Ontario already relies on nukes for about half of its power, and all of them were built with AECL's Candu technology. What about in the future? A nuke is a marriage to last a lifetime. It's a 50-year commitment, at least. No one's going to buy from a company that might not exist in five years' time. The uncertainty surrounding AECL's future is one thing keeping the province from getting moving, which it desperately needs to do, because it takes at least a decade to get a new nuclear generator approved and built.

    AECL once served a useful purpose. It got a domestic nuclear industry off the ground. But there's no reason to believe that selling it to General Electric or France's Areva would mean the end of employment for thousands of engineers and scientists in AECL's employ. A private company would need those people, too. It just wouldn't need - we hope, at least - the billions of tax dollars that AECL consumes. Time to sell it.

• Why I Am Opposed to Imperialism By Ernest Crosby (US Anti-Imperialist) (The Arena 28 (July 1902))
  • At http://www.boondocksnet.com/crosby/opposed.html

  • I am opposed to the modern imperialistic course of our Government:
  • (1) Because it is based upon physical force. The real history of the world is a history of ideas, and true leadership of mankind is in the realm of thought and character. The dream of wide influence is a grand dream, but it must be an influence on a higher plane than that of arms. The idea of political equality that we championed in the eighteenth century gave us for a time the right kind of leadership, and if now we could solve the problem of industrial democracy we might again have the world following in our train. To substitute a big navy for big ideas is stupid and puerile. When we really have a message worth delivering, we shall instinctively feel that the methods of Caesar and Mohammed are not adapted to its delivery.
  • (2) Because expansion by force fills the world with hatred. We have already made the Filipinos hate us as much in four years as the Spaniards did in four hundred, and our troops had hardly entered Manila and Santiago before they began to call the natives "niggers" and "monkeys." What hate, jealousy, wounded pride, and sullen misery on the one hand, and cruelty, disdain, and oppression on the other, that word "Imperialism" has denoted ever since the dawn of history! We have two complicated race problems on our hands already, both of which have led us into a disgraceful and still continuing course of crime and sin. Are we lightly to sow the seeds of new race-hatreds, and, under the pretense of uniting the world, insure its lasting division?
  • (3) Because it is founded on a false pride of race. The "chosen people" idea is a silly one, and out of place in the twentieth century. All races have their place, and attempts at subjection should give way to a generous rivalry. We have a wide enough field for influence in the exercise of persuasion and example. Other peoples must develop naturally. Some have preceeded us and appear to be on the wane; others follow in our wake and may be expected to surpass us in the future. In either case the effort to superimpose our ideas and customs by force must be disastrous.
  • (4) Because it is steeped in cant and hypocrisy. There is something fine in the unsimulated strength of a wild beast, but when a nation steals the soil from under your feet and enslaves you to its own uses, and in the meantime prates of Christianity and civilization and benevolent intentions, it turns the stomach of an honest man. We have lied to Cuba point-blank and misled the Filipinos, and our warfare has been distinguished by the most astounding cruelties ("conducted with marked severity" is the eupemistic expression of General Miles); yet we go on boasting of our philanthropic work as if falsehood were bred in our bones. Why cannot a nation behave like a gentleman?
  • (5) Because it distracts our attention and our material resources from the problems that beset us at home. We should reform ourselves before we undertake to preach a crusade. How can we to-day, with our slums, our lynchings, our race and labor questions -- how can we decently assume the right to teach mankind? We are the only civilized people who practise burning at the stake at the present time, and we wish to soften the manners of the isles of the sea!

• Plutarch on Lacus Curtius
  • At http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/home.html

• Plutarch, Moralia - Sayings of Spartans
  • At http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Sayings_of_Spartans*/main.html

  • Brasidas caught a mouse among some figs, and, when he got bitten, let it go. Then, turning to those who were present, he said, "There is nothing so small that it does not save its life if it has the courage to defend itself against those who would lay hand on it."

• The Strategemata of Sextus Julius Frontinus
  • At http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Frontinus/Strategemata/home.html

  • I neither ignore nor deny the fact that historians have included in the compass of their works this feature also, nor that authors have already recorded in some fashion all famous examples. But I ought, I think, out of consideration for busy men, to have regard to brevity. For it is a tedious business to hunt out separate examples scattered over the vast body of history; and those who have made selections of notable deeds have overwhelmed the reader by the very mass of material. My effort will be devoted to the task of setting forth, as if in response to questions, and as occasion shall demand, the illustration applicable to the case in point. For having examined the categories, I have in advance mapped out my campaign, so to speak, for the presentation of illustrative examples. Moreover, in order that these may be sifted and properly classified according to the variety of subject-matter, I have divided them into three books. In the first are illustrations of stratagems for use before the battle begins; in the second, those that relate to the battle itself and tend to effect the complete subjugation of the enemy; the third contains stratagems connected with sieges and the raising of sieges. Under these successive classes I have grouped the illustrations appropriate to each.

    It is not without justice that I shall claim indulgence for this work, and I beg that no one will charge me with negligence, if he finds that I have passed over some illustration. For who could prove equal to the task of examining all the records which have come down to us in both languages! And so I have purposely allowed myself to skip many things. That I have not done this without reason, those will realize who read the books of others treating of the same subjects; but it will be easy for the reader to supply those examples under each category. For since this work, like my preceding ones, has been undertaken for the benefit of others, rather than for the sake of my own renown, I shall feel that I am being aided, rather than criticized, by those who will make additions to it.

• Greek and Roman Authors on LacusCurtius
  • At http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/home.html

• National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy
  • At http://www.ncrp.org/

• James Allen and the troubles he had finding a location for the exhibit
  • At http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~aflury/english1101webprojects/12sectiongroup3/james_allen.html

• The exhibit "Without Sanctuary: Lynching in America" at the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Center demonstrates a dark era in American history.
  • At http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~aflury/english1101webprojects/12sectiongroup3/mitchell.html

• James Allen and Without Sanctuary
  • At http://www.journale.com/withoutsanctuary/
  • At http://www.journale.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html
  • At http://www.journale.com/withoutsanctuary/movie1.html

• Lynchings in the American South. March 20, 2000.
  • At http://archives.theconnection.org/archive/2000/03/0320b.shtml

  • "May Lynch: 3 to 6 Negroes This Evening" is the headline from the Memphis Press, Jan. 26 1921.

    Public lynchings were common in America for much of the 20th Century. At its height at the turn of the century, two to three people, mostly southern blacks, were lynched every week.

    Railroads ran special excursion trains to lynching sites, and thousands gathered to watch the beating, hanging, and burning of human beings. Spectators brought cameras and vendors printed photographs on the spot, minting a small fortune by turning the prints into souvenir postcards.

    Some of those photographs are now part of a new exhibit at the New York Historical Society, and what they show is the shameless, festive carnival of lynching: Women with parasols, children lifted onto shoulders for the view, and large groups of men, all expectant and exultant.

    Lynching in America in the second hour of The Connection, with Leon Litwack and James Allen.

    The Exhibit can be seen at The New York Historical Society until July 9, 2000.

• Introduction to First World War Poetry
  • At http://info.ox.ac.uk/jtap/tutorials/intro/trench/

• "WHERE DEATH BECOMES ABSURD AND LIFE ABSURDER": LITERARY VIEWS OF THE GREAT WAR 1914-1918
  • At http://www.ph-erfurt.de/~neumann/eese/artic99/less3/Sources/HTML-Pages/HTML-Pages/thegr68.htm

• Travelling light
  • At http://weatherman.blogspot.com/2001_12_01_weatherman_archive.html
  • "I spent most of Saturday in the University of London's Senate House Library (the building, I've been told, was Hitler's planned English headquarters). "

• Richard III Society--McKellen Shakespeare Film, Production Notes
  • At http://www.r3.org/onstage/FILM/notes.html
  • At http://www.mckellen.com/cinema/richard/notes.htm
  • "The scenes at Richard's headquarters were filmed at the Senate House, the chancellery of London University with its large expanses of marble. Although designed and built for the University in the thirties, Senate House was occupied by the Ministry of Information throughout the second world war and information about Dunkirk and the 'D' Day landings was broadcast from Beveridge Hall."

• About the *real* Room 101
  • At http://www.angelfire.com/de/adrichome/101stuff.html

• George Orwell London Photographs
  • At http://www.zardoz.net/orwell/london.html
  • At http://www.zardoz.net/orwell/SenateHouse.html
  • "Senate House : The Senate House on Malet Street is the headquarters of the University of London. The structure is surprisingly large for the neighborhood, rising in tiers above the surrounding buildings. With its imposing white facade, it is thought to be the inspiration for architecture of the four ministries in Nineteen Eighty-Four. More... "

• The Convocation Office, Room 101, Senate House, University of London
  • At http://www.lon.ac.uk/convocation/convoc_trust.htm

• From 1984 by George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)

  • page 265
    
    The first thing you have to understand is that in this place
    there are no martyrdoms.  You have read of the religious
    persecution of the past.  In the Middle Ages there was the
    Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy,
    and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at
    the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that?
    Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and
    killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it
    killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were
    dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs.
    Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the
    shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the
    twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were
    called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian
    Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more
    cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined
    that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they
    knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before
    they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately
    set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them
    down by torture and solitude until they were despicable,
    cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their
    mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and
    sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy.
    And yet after only a few years the same thing had 
    happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and
    their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it?
    In the first place, because the confessions that they had
    made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not
    make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are
    uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all
    we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must
    stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston.
    Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean
    out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas
    and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain
    of you; not a name in a register, not a memory in a living
    brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the
    future. You will never have existed.'
    
    Then why bother to torture me? thought Winston, with
    a momentary bitterness. O'Brien checked his step as
    though Winston had uttered the thought aloud. His large
    ugly face came nearer, with the eyes a little narrowed.
    
    'You are thinking,' he said, 'that since we intend to
    destroy you utterly, so that nothing that you say or do can
    make the smallest difference in that case, why do we go
    to the trouble ofinterrogating you first? That is what you
    were thinking, was it not?'
    
    'Yes,' said Winston.
    
    O'Brien subiled slightly. 'You are a flaw in the pattern,
    Winston. You are a stain that must be wiped out. Did I not
    tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors
    of the past? We are not content with negative obedience,
    nor even with the most abject submission. When finally
    you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We
    do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he
    resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we
    capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and
    all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not
    in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him
    one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us
    that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the
    world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the
    instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old
    days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, 
    proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian
    purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he
    walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we
    make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The 
    command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not". The
    command of the totalitarians was "Thou shalt". Our
    command is " Thou art". No one whom we bring to this
     place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean.
    Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you
    once believed-Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford - in the
    end we broke them down. I took part in their interrogation
    myself I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering,
    grovelling, weeping - and in the end it was not with pain
    or fear, only with penitence. By the time we had finished
    with them they were only the shells of men. There was
    nothing left in them except sorrow for what they had
    done, and love of Big Brother. It was touching to see how
    they loved him. They begged to be shot quickly, so that
    they could die while their minds were still clean.'
    
    His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the
    lunatic enthusiasm, was still in his Face. He is not pretend-
    ing, thought Winston; he is not a hypocrite; he believes
    every word he says. What most oppressed him was the
    consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He
    watched the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in
    and out of the range of his vision. O'Brien was a being in all
    ways larger than himself There was no idea that he had
    ever had, or could have, that O'Brien had not long ago
    known, examined and rejected. His mind contained
    Winston's mind. But in that case how could it be true that
    O'Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad.
    O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had
    grown stern again.
    
    'Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston,
    however completely you surrender to us. No one who has
    once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let
    you live out the natural term of your life, still you would
    never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever.
    Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to
    the point from which there is no coming back. Things will
    happen to you from which you could not recover, if you
    lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of
    ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside
    you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship,
    or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or
    integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you
    empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.'
    
    page 269
    

  • page 275
    
    'Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this.
    The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not
    interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in
    power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness
    only power, pure power. What pure power means you
    will understand presently. We are different from all the
    oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing
    All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were
    cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the
    Russian Communists came very close to us in their
    methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their
    own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed,
    that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited
    time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise
    where human beings would be free and equal. We are not
    like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the
    intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an
    end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to
    safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order
    to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is
    persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of
    power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'
    

• Movies of George Orwell's 1984
  • At http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=6034

  • In the 1950s, there were two versions of this tale. A 1954 BBC television production was written by Nigel Kneale (of Quatermass fame) and starred Peter Cushing. It was a huge success and gave both talents a big lift. A 1956 film version directed by Michael Anderson became unavailable in the 1970s because the Orwell estate disapproved of it - an ironic echo of the historical revisionism done by Winston Smith in the story itself. Starring Edmond O'Brien and Jan Sterling, it had the gall to be released with two endings - one of which showed Smith and Julia rebelling against Big Brother and being shot down for their trouble. Of yet, critics haven't demanded its revival.

• John Heartfield's art (1891 - 1968)
  • At http://www.towson.edu/heartfield/artarchive.html

• John Heartfield's art (1891 - 1968)
  • At http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2554/john_heartfield.html

• John Heartfield's art (1891 - 1968) - art against fascism
  • At http://www.lineargirl.com/heartfield/art_against.html

• John Heartfield's art (1891 - 1968)
  • At http://www.towson.edu/heartfield/art/art.html

• John Heartfield (1891 - 1968)
  • At http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWheartfield.htm

• John Heartfield and Goering, Executioner of the Third Reich
  • At http://www.abc.net.au/arts/visual/stories/montage/page3.htm
  • At http://www.abc.net.au/arts/visual/stories/montage/pg3_img3.htm

• Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens
  • At http://www.flakmag.com/books/whyorwell.html

• As I Please : Tribune, 31 December, 1943 - Goerge Orwell
  • At http://mural.uv.es/esamon/asIplease.html
  • At http://mural.uv.es/esamon/hitler.html
  • "Reading the discussion of "war guilt" which reverberates in the correspondence columns of the newspapers, I note the surprise with which many people seem to discover that war is not a crime. Hitler, it appears, has not done anything actionable. He has not raped anybody, nor carried off any pieces of loot with his own hands, nor personally flogged any prisoners, buried any wounded men alive, thrown any babies into the air and spitted them on his bayonet, dipped any nuns in petrol and touched them off with church tapers -- in fact he has not done any of the things which enemy nationals are usually credited with doing in war-time. He has merely precipitated a world war which will perhaps have cost twenty-million lives before it ends. And there is nothing illegal in that. How could there be, when legality implies authority and there is no authority with the power to transcend national frontiers?

    At the recent trials in Kharkov some attempt was made to fix on Hitler, Himmler and the rest the responsibility for their subordinates' crimes, but the mere fact that this had to be done shows that Hitlers's guilt is not self-evident. His crime, it is implied, was not to build up an army for the purpose of aggressive war, but to instruct that army to torture its prisoners. So far as it goes, the distinction between an atrocity and an act of war is valid. An atrocity means an act of terrorism which has no genuine military purpose. One must accept such distinctions if one accepts war at all, which in practice everyone does.

    Nevertheless, a world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet. "

• As I Please : Tribune, 2 February 1945 - Goerge Orwell
  • At http://mural.uv.es/esamon/asIplease.html
  • At http://mural.uv.es/esamon/war.html
  • "Some months ago, in this column, I pointed out that modern scientific inventions have tended to prevent rather than increase international communication. This brought me several angry letters from readers, but none of them were able to show that what I had said was false. They merely retorted that if we had Socialism, the aeroplane, the radio etc. would not be perverted to wrong uses. Very true, but then we haven't Socialism. As it is, the aeroplane is primarily a thing for dropping bombs and the radio primarily a thing for whipping up nationalism. Even before the war there was enormously less contact between the peoples of the earth than there had been thirty years earlier, and education was perverted, history re-written and freedom of thought suppressed to an extent undreamed of in earlier ages. And there is no sign whatever of these tendencies being reversed.
    Maybe I am pessimistic. But at any rate those are the thoughts that cross my mind (and a lot of other people's too, I believe) every time the explosion of a V bomb booms through the mist. "

• A nice cup of tea: George Orwell's prescription for post-nineteen eighty-four survival by MARTIN PARKER
  • At http://www.network.poznan.pl/pdf/martin.pdf

• What is scrimshaw?
  • At : http://www.scrimshaw.net/info.htm

• 1943
  • At http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/events/1943.html

• Re: why do people yawn, and are yawns contagus
  • At http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/934846431.Gb.r.html

• Internet Flame Warriors page
  • At http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html

• Relativity FAQ
  • At http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/relativity.html
  • Inlcudes "Is Faster Than Light Travel or Communication Possible?" - http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/FTL.html

• Who Will Tell The People lyrics by David Rovics (often misattributed to Willie Nelson)
  • At http://www.davidrovics.com/
  • At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rovics
  • At http://davidrovics.prognet.dk/files/David_Rovics_Songbook_3.pdf

  • 1. The CIA is pushing crack in the ghettoes of LA
    While the food crops in Colombia get sprayed by the DEA
    The FBI is reading your email with something called the carnivore
    And the rich are getting richer while the poor are staying poor
    They're launching nuclear-powered ships up into space
    One little accident could wipe out half the human race
    And they're putting radioactive waste into your silverware
    Or maybe your toaster or perhaps your wheelchair
    
    2. The Air Force is bombing people in Iraq every other day
    They don't like the government so the children have to pay
    The ozone hole is spreading and the sheep are going blind
    While the US spends more on arms than the rest of the world combined
    Journalists are getting fired from San Jose to Atlanta
    When they write about reality, not a fluff piece for Fanta
    A death threat every week and sometimes life is short
    When the truth is too dangerous for someone to report
    
    Who will tell the people that free speech is a ruse
    The corporations run the country and then they make the news
    Is it media or mind control, heroic victories or crimes
    Who will tell the people that we're living in these times
    
    3. The cancer rates are skyrocketing though people are smoking less
    If you live near a nuke your life is bound to be a mess
    Clean water's almost gone all over the earth
    And what's left they want to privatize and see how much it's worth
    Chevron is gunning down the students of Nigeria
    Turning the land to waste while the babies die of dyptheria
    And the weather's getting hotter, the world's forests are on fire
    Pretty soon Brazil will be one giant funeral pyre
    
    Who will tell the people that free speech is a ruse
    The corporations run the country and then they make the news
    Is it media or mind control, heroic victories or crimes
    Who will tell the people that we're living in these times
    
    
    4. One in three adult Americans cannot read or write
    And their children go to bed hungry every night
    And two million US citizens are rotting behind bars
    And while they're there they're working hard building parts for cars
    And the Army's running torture schools to keep the earth under control
    And they're relocating Navajos so they can mine some extra coal
    Our taxes pay McDonald's to sell tumors in Shanghai
    While a hundred thousand poisoned vets are just about to die
    
    Who will tell the people that free speech is a ruse
    The corporations run the country and then they make the news
    Is it media or mind control, heroic victories or crimes
    Who will tell the people that we're living in these times
    
    5. And the people are resisting wherever you may go
    And this is the single biggest fact they don't want you to know
    From New Delhi to New Mexico there are battles going on
    And the darkest hour is just before the dawn
    And in Berkeley and New York they're raiding radio stations
    Trying to turn the voice of the people into the voice of the corporations
    Will we seize the airwaves, wipe the sweat off of our brow
    Stand and face the beast and shout, "Democracy Now!"
    
    Who will tell the people that free speech is a ruse
    The corporations run the country and then they make the news
    Is it media or mind control, heroic victories or crimes
    Who will tell the people that we're living in these times
    

• Douglas Scott's Cosmic Microwave Background FAQ
  • At http://www.astro.ubc.ca/people/scott/faq_basic.html

• VHEMT (Pronounced vehement)
  • The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement ("May we live long and die out")
  • "It's going to take all of us going"
  • "Visualize Voluntary Human Extinction"
  • At http://www.vhemt.org
  • Refer: http://www.vhemt.org/aboutvhemt.html

• GAIA LIBERATION FRONT
  • At http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/resources/glf/glf.html

• The Samaritans
  • UK based: "The Samaritans are a non-religious charity that have been offering emotional support to the suicidal and despairing for over 40 years by phone, visit and letter. Callers are guaranteed absolute confidentiality and retain the right to make their own decisions including the decision to end their life. The Samaritans have nearly 200 branches. A call to 0345 909090 will reach them anywhere in the UK and is charged at "local" rates. UK phone books generally list direct numbers for local branches on the inside of the front cover."
  • At http://www.samaritans.org/

• Newsgroup: alt.suicide.holiday
  • alt.suicide.holiday FAQ: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/suicide_methods/
  • At http://www.cs.uu.nl/wais/html/na-bng/alt.suicide.holiday.html
  • Poetry and writings based around alt.suicide.holiday: http://ash.xanthia.com/ | http://ash.xanthia.com/nazgsoul.html#Poetry from ashspace | http://ash.xanthia.com/gb-debbie.html

• The Guilt, Folly, and Sources of Suicide by Samuel Miller (Samuel Miller first preached these two sermons on suicide in New York City in February 1805, and subsequently published them as a pamphlet, The Guilt, Folly and Sources of Suicide: Two Discourses (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1805). The text has been edited to bring it into greater conformity with contemporary spelling, punctuation, and grammar. )
  • At http://www.swrb.com/newslett/actualnls/Suicides.htm

• Samuel Miller (1769-1850)
  • At http://ichthustref.nl/hoofdmap_links/lexikontheologen/theologen/Miller,%20Samuel.htm

• Yellow Ribbon Suicide Prevention Program
  • At http://www.yellowribbon.org/

• Suicide and Suicide Prevention
  • At http://www.psycom.net/depression.central.suicide.html

• Suicide prevention links
  • At http://hugecrush.com/Suicide/

• Suicide prevention resources
  • At http://www.athealth.com/Practitioner/Newsletter/FPN_3_14.html

  • "Today's newsletter contains Web resources about suicide, obviously an important topic. In the U.S. alone, there are over 30,000 deaths by suicide each year. Because high risk age groups include adolescents and the elderly, we have cited resources specific to those ages in this newsletter.

    Because a major factor in the prevention of suicide is the early detection of depression, on May 4, 1999, sixteen national organizations, including the National Mental Health Association, and a multitude of local groups will sponsor Childhood Depression Awareness Day. You will find additional information about Childhood Depression Awareness Day in the materials below."

• American Association of Suicidology
  • At http://www.suicidology.org/index.html

  • "Why is there a need for the American Association of Suicidology?

    Official statistics show that more that 30,000 Americans kill themselves every year. The true figure is probably higher. The number of non-fatal suicide attempts is considerably greater, often resulting in serious injuries, trauma to families and friends, and economic loss to our society.

    Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people ages 15-24, and is the ninth leading cause of death among all persons.

    Suicide cuts across all ages, economic, social and ethnic boundaries. "

• What can I do to help someone who may be suicidal?
  • At http://www.metanoia.org/suicide/whattodo.htm

• Voluntary Euthanasia Society: The law - prosecutions of doctors
  • At http://www.ves.org.uk/DpLaw_doctl.html

• Voluntary Euthanasia Society: Factsheets - Euthanasia in the USA
  • At http://www.ves.org.uk/DpFS_USA.html

• Voluntary Euthanasia Society: Factsheets - voluntary euthanasia in Australia
  • At http://www.ves.org.uk/DpFS_Aust.html

• Comparing Suicide rates between western nations
  • At http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/171_3_020899/cantor/cantor.html

• Australian Bureau of Statistics - Health - Special Article - Suicide (Year Book Australia, 2000)
  • At http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/BE00331A0C387533CA2569DE0024ED5B?Open&Highlight=0,suicide

  • The number of deaths in Australia attributed to suicide rose from 2,197 in 1988 to 2,723 in 1997, an increase of 24% over the 10 year period (table 9.3). In 1988, suicide accounted for about 12.8% of all deaths and ranked as the sixth leading cause of all deaths. In 1997, suicide ranked as the seventh leading cause of all deaths, but it ranked fourth in terms of the years of potential life lost before the age of 76 years.

    Suicides, for statistical purposes, are defined as those deaths classified to 'suicide and self-inflicted injuries' by the Supplementary Classification of the Ninth Revision of the International Classification of Diseases. The actual number of suicides is thought to be higher than the number of registered suicides, because the true intention of some deaths is difficult to determine. When there is a doubt about the intention of death, suicides could be misclassified to other causes of death categories (i.e. natural cause, accident or undetermined whether accidentally or intentionally inflicted). The coroners may be reluctant to give a verdict of suicide because of the social stigma attached to suicides and the socioeconomic and emotional implications it could have on families of the victims. The extent of under-reporting of suicide is, however, difficult to assess accurately.

    The age-standardised death rate for suicide rose from 13.4 deaths per 100,000 population in 1988 to 14.6 per 100,000 population in 1997, a 9% increase over the 10-year period. Between 1988 and 1996 the overall suicide death rate was relatively stable at 12 to 13 deaths per 100,000 population, but it then increased by 12% to 14.6 in 1997.

    The trend in the overall death rate from suicide reflects the underlying trend in male suicide deaths, which generally account for over three-quarters of the total number of suicides each year.

  • --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Australian Suicides   Age-standardised death rate per 100,000 population(a)
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      
          Males Females Total  Males   Females Persons   Sex ratio
                                                         (male death rate/ female death rate) 
    Year   no.    no.     no.    rate    rate   rate     ratio 
    
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     
    1988  1,730    467   2,197   21.5    5.6    13.4     3.8 
    1989  1,658    438   2,096   20.1    5.2    12.5     3.6 
    1990  1,735    426   2,161   20.7    4.9    12.7     4.0 
    1991  1,847    513   2,360   21.7    5.9    13.7     4.4 
    1992  1,820    474   2,294   21.1    5.3    13.1     3.6 
    1993  1,687    394   2,081   19.3    4.3    11.7     3.6 
    1994  1,830    428   2,258   20.7    4.7    12.6     4.8 
    1995  1,873    495   2,368   20.9    5.4    13.0     4.4 
    1996  1,931    462   2,393   21.3    4.9    13.0     3.9 
    1997  2,146    577   2,723   23.4    6.1    14.6     3.8 
    
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    9.4 AGE-SPECIFIC Australian SUICIDE RATES PER 100,000 POPULATION(a), By Sex - 1988-97
     Age group (years)
    Australian MALES
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
         15-24  25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65+   All ages(b) 
         rate   rate  rate  rate  rate  rate  rate 
    
    1988  27.9  28.3  26.0  24.4  23.8  31.9  21.0 
    1989  23.9  30.0  22.4  23.9  22.8  29.5  19.8 
    1990  27.0  29.1  25.4  21.4  24.8  28.2  20.4 
    1991  26.7  29.9  30.3  26.1  21.3  28.1  21.4 
    1992  27.0  30.4  24.9  25.8  23.1  28.4  20.9 
    1993  24.7  28.7  21.4  23.5  22.9  25.8  19.2 
    1994  27.0  29.2  26.1  24.7  23.1  26.6  20.6 
    1995  25.4  33.4  27.8  23.9  23.3  22.9  20.8 
    1996  25.7  32.5  29.4  22.7  23.4  25.9  21.2 
    1997  30.6  37.5  30.2  24.4  22.6  28.3  23.3 
    

• America's Children 2000 - Health Indicators
  • At http://www.childstats.gov/ac2000/hlthtxt.asp

  • "In 1997, the death rate for adolescents ages 15 to 19 was 75 deaths per 100,000. After increasing to 89 per 100,000 in 1991, the rate declined again and continues to be substantially lower than the rate in 1980. Injury, which includes homicide, suicide, and unintentional injuries, continues to account for nearly 4 out of 5 deaths among adolescents."

  • "Most of the increase in firearm injury deaths between 1985 and 1992 resulted from an increase in homicides. The firearm homicide rate among 15- to 19-year-olds more than tripled from 5 to 18 per 100,000 between 1983 and 1993. At the same time, the firearm suicide rate rose from 5 to 7 per 100,000. From 1994 to 1997, the firearm homicide rate declined by nearly one-third and the firearm suicide rate declined by about one-fourth. "

  • "Deaths from firearm suicides were more common than deaths from firearm homicides among white, non-Hispanic adolescents. Deaths from firearm homicides were more common than deaths from firearm suicides among black, non-Hispanic and Hispanic adolescents."

  • "Indicator HEALTH7.B Injury death rate among adolescents ages 15 to 19 by gender, race, Hispanic origin, and type of injury, 1997"

• UK StatBase - UK National Statistics data and references
  • At http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/

  • UK - "Death rates from suicide: by gender and age, 1974-2000: Social Trends 32 - ST32715
    "Trends in suicide rates by age group and gender have shown some marked differences in the last 25 years. For men aged 15 to 24, there were 16 suicides per 100,000 population in 2000,compared with a rate of 9 per 100,000 in 1974 and 10 per 100,000 a decade later (Chart 7.15).Suicide is now the cause of 22 per cent of deaths of men in this age group.The suicide rate for men aged 25 to 44 has increased considerably since the mid-1970s reaching a peak of almost 25.6 per 100,000 population in 1998;in 2000 the rate for that age group was 23.4 per 100,000. Conversely, the suicide rate for men aged 45 and over has fallen since the mid-1980s.Suicide rates among women are significantly lower than among men.The rate for 15 -24 year old women has remained relatively stable, at around 4 per 100,000 population since the mid-1970s, while the rates for older age groups have fallen. In the case of women aged 45 and over the rates have more than halved."

  • UK - "Death rates from suicide among men: by age: Social Focus on Men - SFM504
    One notable trend has been the rise in suicide rates among younger men. For men aged 15 to 24, there were 16 suicides per 100,000 population in 1999, compared with a rate of only seven per 100,000 in 1971. The suicide rate for men aged 25 to 44 almost doubled over the same period, to reach a peak of almost 26 per 100,000 population in 1998. In contrast, the suicide rate for males older than this peaked in the mid-1980s and has fallen since, although the suicide rate for men aged 65 and over rose again between 1998 and 1999.

    There are also very large differences in male suicide rates by marital status. In 1995 the suicide rate for widowed and divorced men aged 15 to 44 was 35 per 100,000 population, more than double the rate for married men. The rate for single men has risen markedly since 1983, from 15 per 100,000 population to 22 per 100,000 population in 1995.

  • Data for Chart 7.15                           
    
    Death rates from suicide1: by gender and age                           
                               
    United Kingdom    - Rates per 100,000 population(2)   
                               
                           Males                         Females            
                               
                                    65 and                        65 and   
            15-24   25-44   45-64   over   15-24   25-44   45-64   over   
                               
    1974    8.6     14.1    19.8    23.6    3.8    8.4    15.0    15.0    
    1975    10.1    14.3    19.7    22.0    4.4    8.3    14.7    14.9    
    1976    9.8     15.1    20.9    24.0    4.6    9.1    14.1    15.1    
    1977    9.5     16.5    20.0    24.1    5.5    8.6    14.9    15.1    
    1978    10.5    16.8    20.7    24.7    4.4    9.0    14.5    16.1    
    1979    10.3    18.0    20.5    24.8    4.0    8.5    17.1    15.1    
    1980    9.7     18.8    21.3    24.8    4.2    8.2    15.6    16.5    
    1981    10.8    19.6    23.0    24.1    3.4    7.9    14.9    15.7    
    1982    9.7     18.9    23.0    25.1    3.4    7.9    14.0    15.1    
    1983    9.7     19.2    22.6    24.4    3.1    7.3    13.0    14.5    
    1984    10.1    19.6    22.4    23.9    2.6    7.2    13.6    13.6    
    1985    11.6    20.8    23.2    24.6    3.0    6.8    14.0    15.3    
    1986    12.5    20.3    22.6    26.3    3.3    6.6    11.8    13.6    
    1987    13.7    20.1    21.3    23.8    3.8    6.7    10.7    11.2    
    1988    16.2    23.0    21.4    26.1    4.1    7.0    10.1    12.2    
    1989    14.7    21.1    19.9    21.2    3.8    6.2     9.3     9.4    
    1990    16.2    23.2    20.7    21.6    3.3    6.5     8.4     9.6    
    1991    15.4    24.3    20.4    18.6    3.9    5.9     8.3     8.5    
    1992    16.2    23.7    20.7    19.2    3.7    6.3     8.2     8.2    
    1993    17.0    22.8    20.0    17.7    3.6    6.5     7.3     8.1    
    1994    16.0    22.8    18.1    18.6    3.4    6.2     6.9     7.7    
    1995    15.4    24.2    18.6    16.7    3.6    6.3     6.9     6.9    
    1996    14.3    22.8    17.3    17.2    4.2    6.2     6.4     6.7    
    1997    16.3    21.7    17.5    15.4    4.0    6.3     6.9     6.3    
    1998    17.2    25.6    19.1    14.9    4.5    6.6     6.5     7.1    
    1999    15.7    24.6    19.2    17.0    3.7    6.4     6.1     6.7    
    2000    15.9    23.4    18.0    15.7    4.4    6.4     6.3     6.0  
        
    1  Figures are based on suicides registered in the year. Includes  
    deaths undetermined whether accidentally or purposely inflicted.  
    2 Directly age-standardised to the European standard population.  
    All data are based on ICD9 apart from the Scotland data for 2000,  
    which are based on ICD10. See Appendix, Part 7: International  
    Classification of Diseases.  
      
    Source: Office for National Statistics; General Register Office   
    for Scotland; Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency  

• Suicide - Internet & International Crisis Resources and Information
  • At http://www.cs.uu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/suicide/resources.html

• The Legality Of Suicide
  • At http://www.users.nac.net/tberendt/suicide.html

• Suicide And Reason - Tom W Day
  • At http://ash.xanthia.com/phil-sar.html

• Japan's internet 'suicide clubs'
  • At http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4071805.stm

  • In Japan, the internet has been blamed for a spate of group suicides which appear to have been arranged in online chat rooms.

  • But others see the sites very differently.

    "There's nothing bad about suicide," said Wataru Tsurumi, author of a graphic, and best-selling handbook on the subject. "We have no religion or laws here in Japan telling us otherwise. As for group suicides - before the internet people would write letters, or make phone calls... it's always been part of our culture."

• The Complete Manual of Suicide
  • At http://www.aarrgghh.com/no_way/handbook.htm

  • The Complete Manual of Suicide, which has sold 1.2 million copies, promises its readers "the peace of mind of knowing you can leave this troubled world whenever you choose."

    It details 10 methods of self-slaughter, including hanging, electrocution and immolation, and compares them in terms of pain, speed and disfigurement.

    Illustrated with charts, maps and manga comics, the 200 pages contain recommendations about the best spots to die, tips about avoiding detection and descriptions of celebrity suicides.

    Parents' groups complain that the book glamorises suicide, but only a handful of local authorities have introduced restrictions on its sale since it was published six years ago. This tolerance reflects liberal publishing laws and a traditional view of suicide as an act that is honourable rather than criminal.

    But attitudes have hardened this year after an alarming 35% rise in the number of suicides has given Japan one of the highest rates in the world. Record unemployment, intense exam pressure and a rapidly ageing population are the main causes of the rise, but the finger is also being pointed at the manual.

    The book has been blamed for the rising body count in Aokigahara, a dense wood at the foot of Mount Fuji that is described in the manual as "the perfect place to die". Last year a record 74 corpses were found among the trees.

    In Tokyo the book was found beside two young suicide victims this year, prompting police to demand that sales be limited to people over 18.

    In the wake of an 85% increase in the number of young people who killed themselves in the capital last year, suicide prevention groups agree that action is necessary.

    "We have had calls from people in great pain because they followed the book's instructions, but failed to kill themselves," said Yukiko Nishihara, founder of a Tokyo helpline.

    Under existing bylaws, which cover only publications of a sexual or violent nature, the Tokyo metropolitan government cannot prohibit the manual. But officials have begun looking at whether to change the rules.

    "Clearly, there are growing public concerns about this book that we have to address, if necessary by enacting new regulations," said Shigemitsu Sekiguchi, who is heading the study. He said the new regulations, if approved, could be in place by the end of next year.

    The book's author, Turumi Wataru, says he is being made a scapegoat. "No one ever killed themselves just because of my book," he said. "The authorities are blaming me because they are unwilling to take responsibility for the economic, political and social problems that are the real cause of suicides."

    But his publishers are feeling the pressure: the Tokyo market accounts for 70% of the book's sales. To pre-empt a decision, they have slapped a warning on the book's cover saying that it is not suitable for under-18s.

    This has infuriated Mr Wataru, who has vowed to find a new publisher. "I want people under the age of 18 to read this book," he said. "They need it more than anyone.

    "It is important that people realise that suicide is not wrong. It is the right of every individual to kill themselves and, no matter what laws you enact, you cannot stop it."

    Copyright © Guardian Unlimited, Dec 10, 1999

• Aint no way to go: Seppuku.com
  • At http://www.aarrgghh.com/no_way/seppukuDotCom.htm

  • TOKYO, JAPAN — Glued to a computer screen in his north Tokyo apartment, the stocky, part-time sushi delivery man spent weeks searching the recesses of the Internet. Going simply by the handle "Murata," the 28-year-old surfed for online companions harboring his same dark interest: the desire to die.

    He found what he was looking for on a host of new Japanese-language Web sites such as "Underground Suicide" and "Deadline." Promising to supply most of the materials, he made arrangements to kill himself with two anonymous Internet friends on a mid-May afternoon. Face to face for the first time, the three young men drove to a tranquil mountain pass six hours north of Tokyo. They shared sleeping pills, and then — following detailed instructions posted on a Web site — set charcoal alight inside their car and died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

    "Maybe he didn't have high hopes for the future, but it is still so hard to understand how he could have done it," said Murata's 35-year-old brother, who shared their apartment. He spoke on condition that both their names be withheld. "I've disconnected the Internet at home, at least while our family comes to terms with this."

    The deaths of the three men marked only one incident in an extraordinary string of Internet suicides to hit Japan. Over the past six months, police investigators say at least 32 people — mostly in their teens and twenties — have killed themselves nationwide after meeting strangers online. Many more young Japanese have entered into online suicide pacts, but either failed in their attempts or backed out at the last minute.

    Psychiatrists and suicide experts are linking the phenomenon to a profound national identity crisis during Japan's 13-year economic funk. Indeed, the Internet deaths come at a time when Japan is undergoing an alarming surge in its overall suicide rate — with financial problems cited as the fastest growing reason for despair.

    The culture of suicide, encapsulated by the honorable hara-kiri rite of the ancient samurai, is nothing new here. But even by Japanese standards, there has been a staggering jump in suicides, to 32,143 last year, compared with 21,346 in 1990, the beginning of Japan's economic slide. The current suicide rate — 25.2 suicides per 100,000 people — is about double that of the United States.

    Though Western, religion-based stigmas of suicide do not exist here, the Internet deaths have nevertheless dismayed this island nation, becoming a dominant topic in chat rooms and the subject of a new play.

    The deaths have drawn attention to a deadly mix between Japanese traditions of suicide and its mega-tech society, which have now melded into a proliferation of "how-to-die" Web sites accessible from schools, offices, subways, trains and cars through wireless connections on most Japanese cell phones. They have become a source of morbid fascination for a growing subculture of troubled, mostly younger Japanese.

    The majority of the 20 males and 12 females who killed themselves after linking up on these sites came from Japan's "lost generation" — people in their teens and twenties who have come of age in a less secure, less confident society. Japan today is [a] nation where unemployment and homelessness have soared, and companies — long the pillars of society — no longer offer workers the promise of a job for life. The new realties have put added stress on families, sending the divorce rate steadily higher.

    Given the changes, experts say, many young adults in the world's second-largest economy have become dangerously cynical about their futures.

    "They are lost and confused. The long-held direction and goals of Japanese society are collapsing around them," said Rika Kayama, a Tokyo psychiatrist who has studied the Internet suicide phenomenon. "Japanese adults used to be able to say to their children that if you try very hard at school or at work, you'll see the rewards. But adults can no longer say that, because in many ways, it is no longer true."

    That confusion has manifested itself in a number of new societal ills. As many as 1 million Japanese, mostly young men in their twenties, have withdrawn from society altogether, becoming "shut-ins" inside their parents' homes for six months to several years.

    The news media are also decrying an increase in kireru, or the "snapping" of youths. Last month, several middle-class high school boys murdered a mutual friend after a minor disagreement. There seemed to be little real hate in the act — the boys even stopped to share a refreshment with their friend before dealing him the killing blows.

    With the wave of Internet deaths, experts say, young Japanese are turning those instincts on themselves.

    Police investigators have tracked the beginning of the Net death trend to a Feb. 11 tableau in a vacant apartment near Tokyo. One man and two women, all in their twenties, were found dead inside.

    A 17-year-old girl who had originally agreed to join them but backed out at the last minute, told police that the three were jobless and worried about the future. They had met after Michio Sakai, a 26-year-old unemployed magazine salesman from just north of Tokyo, posted a "death ad" on an underground suicide site: "I am looking for suicide partners," it said. "If you join me, I will give you sleeping pills. ... It is lonely to die alone."

    The suicides made headlines across Japan and became the inspiration for a series of copycat pacts over the Web, authorities say. The individuals find each other on bulletin boards and chat rooms in any one of dozens of suicide Web sites, including one that proudly displays gothic skulls and crossbones as readers scan tips and best methods for ending their lives.

    Citing freedom of expression, Japanese authorities have been loath to clamp down on the sites, instead asking content providers to police themselves. The Internet deaths are especially shocking, however, because police say those individuals who killed themselves appeared to make relatively snap decisions to end their lives, sometimes over seemingly minor problems. One young man, for instance, wrote in e-mails that he was merely upset over a minor traffic accident.

    "Their reasons were unclear. These were not obviously desperate people with unbearable problems," said Naoki Miyagi, a director with Japan's National Police Agency.

    Experts say this reflects a disturbing trend: A July poll of 100 teenagers by the Japanese weekly magazine Aera found that 30 percent of respondents had considered suicide, with a majority citing "trivial matters" as reasons.

    Taken alone, such feelings are unlikely to rise to the level of suicide. But through the Internet troubled Japanese are finding support from one another to die.

    In a society that spends extraordinary amounts of time online, the Internet's ability to influence people has grown exponentially. It has given people with only moderately suicidal tendencies a medium to find each other — and feed off each other's depression.

    Hana, the cyber handle of a 30-year-old Tokyo computer saleswoman who frequented suicide chat rooms before receiving counseling, said in an interview that she once did a live online broadcast of slitting her wrist.

    "I wrote on the chat site, 'I'm cutting now' — and then I had to go to the emergency room and get seven stitches," she said. "Several hours later, I found out someone online who was reading my words also decided to slit her wrist, and had to get 20 stitches."

    Murata, who killed himself with two strangers, did not appear clinically depressed, nor did he have a history of being suicidal, according to his family. He delivered sushi part-time, and liked to use his money to take long trips on his motorcycle into the countryside. Recently, however, he had less work, and was spending much of his time at home alone playing video games.

    After his death, his family found e-mails in which the three men had negotiated their ends, deciding who would bring what. "I'll get the sleeping pills and the charcoal," Murata wrote to one of his suicide companions. "I'll borrow my brother's car," came back a reply from one of the other two men on the day before they set off to die.

    "There was no discussion of why he was doing it, just an indication that maybe he was tired of living," said Murata's distraught father, a 67-year-old security guard. "But I don't think he could have done it alone. So he found others who were willing to do it with him. I suppose it made it less frightening for him. But I will never know for sure."

• Internet fuels epidemic of group suicides among young Japanese
  • At http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article344491.ece

  • Young Japanese people are still joining group-suicide pacts in record numbers despite efforts to crack down on the bizarre internet-led phenomenon.

    Japanese police said yesterday that a record 91 people had committed suicide together after meeting via the web in 2005, up from 55 people the previous year. The figure has tripled since the police began keeping records in 2003. Most of the victims were in their teens, twenties and thirties and sought each other out via websites that allow the suicidal to swap e-mail addresses, share stories and offer advice on the surest, least painful ways to die.

    Many opt for carbon monoxide poisoning in sealed vehicles, often in secluded or scenic areas, like four young men who died while watching the sun rise from a car at the foot of Mount Fuji. The men met for the first time just hours before their death.

    The latest statistics will likely lead to more demands for monitoring of cyberspace, including renewed calls to ban the word "suicide" from search engines. Net service providers already work with the police and there are signs the group-suicide phenomenon may have peaked. But Yukio Saito, who runs Japan's largest telephone helpline, cautions against complacency. "People will always find a way to end their lives if they want to. The wider issues must be tackled."

    In Japan, 94 people took their own lives every day in 2003, setting a record of 34,427 that broke the previous high of 33,048, in 1999. Since the Asian crash of 1997-8, when the statistics jumped 35 per cent, suicides have claimed more than 220,000 lives, approximately the population of Derby. A suicide manual that lists effective ways of ending it all - including hanging, electrocution and pills - has sold more than a million copies. In true Japanese style it rates these methods in terms of the pain and trouble they cause to others; predictably, jumping in front of a train is given a maximum rating of five.

    The dramatic rise in suicides forced the health ministry to bring out a package of proposals at the end of 2002, including a drastic boost in mental healthcare facilities. But Japan still has far fewer psychiatrists than other advanced countries, and family doctors routinely misdiagnose mental illness. A health ministry survey found that more than half of the workers recognised as having committed suicide due to work-related stress between 1999 and 2002 had been working at least 100 hours overtime a month. "This is a suicide epidemic," says Mr Saito. "We are not doing enough to help people who are suffering in silence."

    Japan is not unique. South Korea has also experienced a wave of suicide pacts, and Ireland has seen a 45 per cent increase in suicides over the past decade. But, at 24.1 per 100,000 people, Japan has the highest per-capita suicide rate in the developed world.

    Nearly 8,000 people in their twenties and thirties killed themselves in 2003, making suicide one of the leading causes of death for young Japanese. Many of these youngsters are drawn from the ranks of hikkikomori, social recluses who have locked themselves in their rooms, sometimes for years on end.

    Many are linked to the outside world only through the electronic umbilical cord of their computers, which they use to find like-minded folk. Dozens of young Japanese can be found every day discussing suicide on online chat rooms. A typical message reads: "If you are thinking about killing yourself, please reply." Another says: "I'm in my early twenties and I want to die easily. I can go anywhere in Japan." Fittingly, perhaps, one of the last acts of the suicidal is often to e-mail a friend or relative. Several times in the past two years the police have stumbled on semi- asphyxiated young people just in time, after similar messages were sent.

• Group suicides in Japan: a symptom of social malaise
  • At http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/oct2004/japa-o20.shtml

  • Two cases of group suicide in Japan have again highlighted the tragic consequences of the country’s sharpening social and economic tensions. All of those who killed themselves were young and appeared to have contacted each other through Internet suicide web sites.

    On the morning of October 12, Japanese police found seven people dead in a rented van on the outskirts of Tokyo. The van’s windows were sealed with vinyl tape and charcoal stoves were found inside. The seven, some of whom had taken sleeping pills, died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Police found the bodies after receiving a call from a friend of one of the victims, who hinted in an email about suicide.

    One of the dead was a 34-year-old mother who apparently posted a notice in early October on a web site seeking others who wanted to commit suicide. The rest were in their teens or early 20s, including a university student, a part-time worker and an unemployed woman—all from widely separated regions of Japan.

    On the same day, police discovered two women dead in a car parked near a temple at Yokosuka, about 60 km southeast of Tokyo. The methods used were similar. Police are still investigating the possibility that the two cases are related. The two women were believed to be in their 20s.

    These are not isolated instances. According to Japan’s National Police Agency, 45 people committed suicide in groups between January 2003 and June 2004 after meeting through Internet web sites.

    Public shock over the recent suicides has provoked calls for the government to close down suicide web sites, which provide information about methods and the means for contacting others. Yet, the causes of such suicides, which are a tiny fraction of the total number of suicide cases in Japan, do not arise from the Internet. They lie in the immense psychological pressures produced by the country’s growing economic and social uncertainties.

    Japan has one of the highest rates of suicide of industrialised countries. It has been rising throughout the 1990s—a decade of economic stagnation, failing businesses and growing levels of unemployment. Many of those who killed themselves were middle-aged men who had lost their jobs or faced financial problems for which they saw no solution.

    Last year, a record 34,427 people took their own lives. An article published by Asia Times Online entitled “Suicide also rising in land of rising sun” pointed out that Japan’s suicide rates of 40.2 per 100,000 for men and 14.9 per 100,000 for women were approaching levels “witnessed in countries suffering severe economic hardships such as Russia, Latvia and Lithuania”.

    Just over a quarter of the suicides were officially put down to financial problems. Asia Times commented: “Some of the dominant economic factors that have contributed to the current suicide crisis include large-scale bankruptcies, increased unemployment, a sluggish business climate, accumulated debts, lower incomes, inadequate bankruptcy laws, prolonged economic stagnation, an unregulated financial loan market and corporate restructuring.”

    The cases of Internet suicide have, however, highlighted a disturbing trend toward younger people taking their lives. The number of people in their 30s committing suicide jumped by 17 percent to 4,603 in 2003 as compared to the previous year. Among school and college students the percentage increases were much higher—the largest, 54 percent, being among elementary and middle school students.

    Hiroshi Sakamoto, a retired local government official and volunteer suicide counsellor, explained to Asia Times that the growing problem of youth suicide is barely addressed either by government or the media. “We only read about suicide in the press, it is never on TV. They say it is too gloomy, too dark, not a happy subject. I feel the whole country is in a state of denial. This is perhaps why we cannot solve this problem. We are trying to ignore it, but wishing it away gets us nowhere,” he said.

    The attempts by the media and government to ignore the problem are matched by a lack of services to cope with the growing number of people contemplating suicide. Lifeline, which was founded in 1971, now has 8,000 trained counsellors operating 50 call centres round-the-clock to handle a variety of emergency calls. In 2001, it received more than 700,000 calls, of which nearly 25,000 were suicide related. Lifeline, however, is one of the few such services.

    An article in Newsweek in June, highlighting an earlier group Internet suicide, pointed to the limited character of mental health services in Japan. “While mental health care is widely available in Japan, it is heavily centred in mental institutions. Newer medications, including most anti-depressants common in the United States, are not widely available. And out-patient counselling, where it exists, is still in its infancy.”

    In comments to Asia Times, former MP Keiko Yamauchi berated Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi for doing nothing. “How many children, young people, fathers or mothers have to die before our government takes any real action? Instead of wasting so much energy and national resources in assisting in the destruction of human life in Iraq, why doesn’t Koizumi declare war on suicide in Japan and save thousands of lives in this country?” he asked.

    But the lack of government action and preventative services, while significant, does not explain the rising number of youth contemplating taking their own lives. All the evidence points to a profound and growing alienation among young people who are under enormous pressure to succeed at school and university and to find and keep a job. Over the past decade, competition for the top schools and universities has become increasingly intense and unemployment among young people has risen sharply.

    These pressures are compounded by a culture in which relationships, even within the family, continue to be rather formal. As a result, young people often feel isolated and unable to discuss their personal problems.

    Yukio Saito, who founded Lifeline, explained to Newsweek: “Generally, they have a serious emotional problem, which is that they have difficulty dealing with others face-to-face, a kind of phobia or fear of talking about their feelings in front of others. Maybe this is quite a Japanese-type emotion. They have difficulty having personal relations, so they tend to use the Internet to communicate their feelings.”

    Saito noted what appears to be a related social phenomenon—“hikikomori”—young people who withdraw completely from society for months and even years and refuse to leave their homes, or even their rooms. According to some estimates, more than a million young Japanese have cut themselves off from the world and barely communicate.

    While such intense alienation may take particular forms in Japan, similar processes are occurring internationally. Confronted with a society that offers them no future and a world increasingly dominated by militarism and war, layers of young people, lacking any vision of a progressive alternative, retreat into a variety of destructive activities, including drug abuse, violent anti-social behaviour and in some cases suicide. Japanese capitalism is no more capable of dealing with these problems than its counterparts around the world.

• Notes from a suicide manual
  • At http://www.ussyorktown.com/yorktown/kamikaze.htm
  • At http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,778587,00.html

  • The introduction of Japanese kamikaze pilots was one of the most dramatic developments of the second world war. But what motivated these young men to fly their fatal missions? There are some clues in the manual they carried in their cockpits for inspiration, and which is now published in English for the first time. Here are some extracts.

    Albert Axell - Thursday August 22, 2002 - The Guardian

    The mission of to-go units

    Transcend life and death. When you eliminate all thoughts about life and death, you will be able to totally disregard your earthly life. This will also enable you to concentrate your attention on eradicating the enemy with unwavering determination, meanwhile reinforcing your excellence in flight skills.

    Exert the best in yourself

    Strike an enemy vessel that is either moored or at sea. Sink the enemy and thus pave the road for our people's victory.

    Take a walk around the airfield

    When you take this walk, be aware of your surroundings. This airstrip is the key to the success or failure of your mission. Devote all your attention to it. Look at the terrain. What are the characteristics of the ground? What are the length and width of the airstrip? In case you will take off at dusk, or early morning, or after sundown, what are the obstacles to be remembered: an electric pole, a tree, a house, a hill?

    How to pilot a fully dressed-up [heavily equipped] aircraft that you dearly love

    Before taking off. (After taxiing the plane from the camouflaged emplacement to the airstrip.) You can envision your target firmly in your mind as you bring your plane to a standstill.

    Breathe deeply three times. Say in your mind: "Yah" (field), "Kyu" (ball), "Joh" (all right) as you breathe deeply. Proceed straight ahead on the airstrip. Otherwise you may damage the landing gears.

    Circle above the airstrip right after take-off. Do so at the minimum height of 200m. Circle at an angle within five degrees and keep your nose pointed downwards.

    Principles you should know

    Keep your health in the very best condition. If you are not in top physical condition, you will not be able to achieve an ideal hit by tai-atari (body-crashing).

    Just as you cannot fight well on an empty stomach, you cannot deftly manipulate the control stick if you are suffering from diarrhoea, and cannot exert calm judgment if you are tormented by fever.

    Be always pure-hearted and cheerful

    A loyal fighting man is a pure-hearted and filial son.

    Attain a high level of spiritual training

    In order that you can exert the highest possible capability, you must prepare well your inner self. Some people say that spirit must come first before skill, but they are wrong. Spirit and skill are one. The two elements must be mastered together. Spirit supports skill and skill supports spirit.

    Aborting your mission and returning to base

    In the event of poor weather conditions when you cannot locate the target, or under other adverse circumstances, you may decide to return to base. Don't be discouraged. Do not waste your life lightly. You should not be possessed by petty emotions. Think how you can best defend the motherland. Remember what the wing commander has told you. You should return to the base jovially and without remorse.

    When turning back and landing at the base

    Discard the bomb at the area designated by the commanding officer. Fly in circles over the airfield. Observe conditions of the airstrip carefully. If you feel nervous, piss. Next, ascertain the direction of the wind and wind speed. Do you see any holes in the runway? Take three deep breaths.

    The attack

    Single-plane attack. Upon sighting a target, remove the (bomb's) safety pin. Go full speed ahead towards the target. Dive! Surprise the enemy. Don't let the enemy take time to counter your attack. Charge! Remember: the enemy may change course but be prepared for the enemy's evasive action. Be alert and avoid enemy fighters and flak fire.

    Dive attack

    This varies depending on the type of the aircraft. If you are approaching the enemy from a height of 6,000m, adjust your speed twice; or from a lower height of 4,000m, adjust speed once.

    When you begin your dive, you must harmonise the height at which you commence the final attack with your speed. Beware of over-speeding and a too-steep angle of dive that will make the controls harder to respond to your touch. But an angle of dive that is too small will result in reduced speed and not enough impact on crashing.

    Where to crash (the enemy's fatal spots)

    Where should you aim? When diving and crashing on to a ship, aim for a point between the bridge tower and the smoke stack(s). Entering the stack is also effective.

    Avoid hitting the bridge tower or a gun turret. In the case of an aircraft carrier, aim at the elevators. Or if that is difficult, hit the flight deck at the ship's stern.

    For a low-altitude horizontal attack, aim at the middle of the vessel, slightly higher than the waterline. If that is difficult, in the case of an aircraft carrier, aim at the entrance to the aircraft hangar, or the bottom of the stack. For other vessels, aim close to the aft engine room.

    Just before the crash

    Your speed is at maximum. The plane tends to lift. But you can prevent this by pushing the elevator control forward sufficiently to allow for the increase in speed. Do your best. Push forward with all your might.

    You have lived for 20 years or more. You must exert your full might for the last time in your life. Exert supernatural strength.

    At the very moment of impact: do your best. Every deity and the spirits of your dead comrades are watching you intently. Just before the collision it is essential that you do not shut your eyes for a moment so as not to miss the target. Many have crashed into the targets with wide-open eyes. They will tell you what fun they had.

    You are now 30m from the target

    You will sense that your speed has suddenly and abruptly increased. You feel that the speed has increased by a few thousand-fold. It is like a long shot in a movie suddenly turning into a close-up, and the scene expands in your face.

    The moment of the crash

    You are two or three metres from the target. You can see clearly the muzzles of the enemy's guns. You feel that you are suddenly floating in the air. At that moment, you see your mother's face. She is not smiling or crying. It is her usual face.

    All the happy memories

    You won't precisely remember them but they are like a dream or a fantasy. You are relaxed and a smile creases your face. The sweet atmosphere of your boyhood days returns.

    You view all that you experienced in your 20-odd years of life in rapid succession. But these things are not very clear.

    In any event, only delightful memories come back to you. You cannot see your own face at that moment. But because of a succession of pleasant memories flashing through your mind, you feel that you smiled at the last moment. You may nod then, or wonder what happened. You may even hear a final sound like the breaking of crystal. Then you are no more.

    Points to remember when making your last dive

    Crashing bodily into a target is not easy. It causes the enemy great damage. Therefore the enemy will exert every means to avoid a hit.

    Suddenly, you may become confused. You are liable to make an error. But hold on to the unshakeable conviction to the last moment that you will sink the enemy ship.

    Remember when diving into the enemy to shout at the top of your lungs: "Hissatsu!" ("Sink without fail!") At that moment, all the cherry blossoms at Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo will smile brightly at you.

• Suicide rate takes a worrisome jump
  • At http://www.atimes.com/japan-econ/AH04Dh01.html

  • TOKYO - Japan is perhaps one of the few countries left in the world where suicide is considered an honorable act, but even the Japanese are becoming alarmed at the steep rise in the number of people taking their own lives in their country.

    Official statistics show that last year, a record 32,863 Japanese and foreigners committed suicide in Japan, or a huge 35 percent increase over the 1997 figure.

    Many of them were failed businessmen or jobless workers who could no longer cope with doing nothing, while some killed themselves because of work-related stress. In a disturbing trend, however, about 339 students committed suicide last year, largely because they were being bullied by classmates. Observers say the youngsters may have been taking their cues from adults, many of whom are being driven by the recession to choose death instead of facing reality or trying to figure a way out of an oppressive situation.

    Many Japanese regard suicide as a show of sincerity to expiate their shortcomings, and view it as an act that would restore honor to their name, their family, or organization.

    Such an attitude has made it possible for the macabre book, ''The Perfect Suicide Manual'', to consistently land in the local bestseller lists even five years after it first came out. The book, written by Wataru Tsurumi, a sociology graduate of Tokyo University, gives explicit instructions on how to commit suicide by hanging, self-immolation, electrocution, drug overdose and other gruesome means.

    Lawmakers have apparently become so worried at the rising suicide rates that they recently designated the book a ''harmful publication.'' This designation was given last month, shortly after a 12-year-old girl used the manual prior to hanging herself.

    Meanwhile, the Japanese public and the media are now up in arms over those perceived to be pushing people to take their own lives during these hard economic times - financial institutions and prosecutors who interrogate suspects in financial scandals too roughly.

    Commented crime expert Akira Fukushima of Tokyo's Sophia University: ''Whenever prosecutors investigate a bribery case, someone ends up committing suicide.'' According to Fukushima, suspects - who are subjected to intensive grilling by prosecutors in an effort to break their will - resort to suicide to protect their superiors and to save themselves from shame.

    At the same time, banks and financial institutions are getting harsh criticism for granting reckless and unrecoverable loans of several billions of dollars during Japan's so-called bubble economy - and then today refusing to extend credit to needy small and medium enterprises.

    Last year, the suicide of three Tokyo business partners facing bankruptcy and who were unable to secure a new loan became the subject of much public discussion and dismay. Checking into a hotel, the three friends took a last drink before retreating to their respective rooms and hanging themselves.

    In another incident, the president of a picture-frame manufacturing firm and his wife hanged themselves because they could no longer pay their nine workers.

    At times, despondent parents have been known to take not only their own lives, but that of their children as well. Known as ''oyaku-shinju,'' the parent-child suicide is considered an act of mercy and the last demonstration of the parents' wish that their children do not become burdens to society.

    But despite the current uproar over the mounting deaths, some observers fear that there will be no let-up in the suicides until the recession ends, or the Japanese begin viewing the act in a different manner.

    As it is, there is a 2,400 hectare dense forest at the foot of Mt. Fuji that has become infamous for being a favorite suicide spot, after mystery writer Seichi Matsumoto described the woodland as ideal for the perfect death. In 1998 alone, the bodies of about 70 people were found in the notorious forest. Some of the victims were discovered hanging from tree branches, while others apparently swallowed sleeping pills or bled to death after having slashed their wrists.

    Then there is the railway system, which has been the site of a rash of suicides as well. Close to 100 people jumped in front of trains last year. Ironically, though, Japanese Railways is now seeking compensation from the families of the dead - because of the delays caused by the suicides. Railway officials say they expect as much as $70,000 from each jumper's family.

• Doctor-Assisted Suicide --a guide to WEB Sites and the Literature
  • At http://www.lwc.edu/administrative/library/suic.htm

• Death With Dignity
  • At http://www.growthhouse.org/dignity.html
  • At http://www.growthhouse.org/educate/flash/mortals/layouts/frameset1.html

• Peaceful Dying: The step-by-step guide to preserving your dignity, your choice, and your inner peace at the end of life
  • At http://www.growthhouse.org/books/tobin.htm

• Choice In Dying
  • At http://www.choices.org/

• Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul: The Complete 1783 Edition by David Hume
  • At http://www.utm.edu/research/hume/wri/suicide.htm
  • At http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/david_hume/suicide.html
  • At http://www.ets.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Hume%20-%20Suicide.txt
  • At http://eserver.org/18th/hume-suicide.txt

• "The Morality of Taking Life"
  • At http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/160/6/index.html

• "Is Suicide a sin?" by Robert Green Ingersoll
  • At http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/

• "Peuchet: On Suicide" by Karl Marx
  • At http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/marx/works/1845/09/suicide.html

• Euthanasia World Directory
  • At http://www.FinalExit.org/

• UK: Woman fights for right to die
  • At http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_1499000/1499875.stm
  • Euthanasia and the law: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/background_briefings/euthanasia/newsid_1044000/1044740.stm
  • Lessons from Down Under: "> http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/background_briefings/euthanasia/newsid_1044000/1044740.stm">

• Voluntary Euthanasia Society of Tasmania
  • At http://www.tased.edu.au/tasonline/vest/vest.htm
  • At http://www.tased.edu.au/tasonline/vest/links.html

• A Modest, Not Satirical, Proposal For Assisted-Suicide Decisions
  • At http://www.managedcaremag.com/archives/0012/0012.ethics.html

• Top: Society: Death: Suicide: Law
  • At http://dmoz.org/Society/Death/Suicide/Law/

• The law on managing patients who deliberately harm themselves and refuse treatment.(Education and debate)
  • "The Mental Health Act 1983 may not be used to detain a person against their will "merely because [their] thinking process is unusual, even apparently bizarre and irrational, and contrary to the views of the overwhelming majority of the community at large.""
  • At http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0999/7214_319/56982121/p1/article.jhtml

• 'Happy' student killed himself after logging on to suicide website
  • At http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health/story.jsp?story=466404

  • When Phillip Cranmer killed himself nearly three months ago, his family were at a loss to understand why he had taken his own life. The 20-year-old had no history of mental illness and had been laughing and joking the day before. But it emerged that Phillip had been secretly planning his death for months, logging on to internet chatrooms and surfing the net for tips on committing suicide.

    His father, Roy Boffey, has written to the Home Office demanding an urgent investigation into suicide chat rooms. He wants people who run them to face prosecution.

    "The website played a significant part [in Phillip's death]," said the retired teacher and hospital chaplain who, lives in Solihull in the West Midlands. "He wasn't suffering in any way. He wasn't having medication or suffering from depression."

    There is no official regulation of suicide website chatrooms. Experts believe they are dangerous because they may lead vulnerable young people to encourage one another to end their lives.

    Last year 35-year-old Michael Gooden jumped to his death from Beachy Head after entering into a death pact with fellow chatroom user Louis Gillies. Mr Gillies, 36, hanged himself on the day he was set to stand trial for assisting his friend's suicide.

    Under existing laws, anyone who helps another person to commit suicide faces a maximum prison term of 14 years. A Home Office spokeswoman said: "If anyone has evidence of a website that is encouraging anyone to commit suicide, we urge them to report this to the police." The Government has already drawn up a national suicide prevention strategy.

    However, providing information that enables someone to kill themselves is not necessarily illegal. Charities which support families of suicide victims said more research is needed. "There may be situations where people are encouraged to take their lives," said John Peters, spokesman for Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide. "These sites are not likely to stress the effect that suicide will have on those who are left behind."

    The Samaritans said there were benefits in people being able to share suicidal thoughts with others who can empathise with them but said there were "better places" to find such support.

    "There was one incident when a guy not interested in suicide was encouraging others," said a spokeswoman. "He was part of a cult who think the world is over-populated.

    "It's impossible to know who is using [a chatroom] and if people really are who they say they are. If someone is feeling vulnerable, there are other places that would be more constructive to visit. These sites can be very negative sites to visit."

    After Phillip's death, his family learned that he had been logging on to internet suicide sites for more than eight months. His diary entry a couple of days before he died on 8 September read: "The one thing that must not happen is for this to go wrong. I do not want to be saved."

    Yet Mr Boffey said there was no indication that Phillip was in emotional distress. Having passed his A-levels, he was looking forward to a gap year before taking a film studies course.Mr Boffey said: "He was perfectly normal nine-tenths of the time, but with the website he had a secret obsession on the subject of death. For reasons we will never know, he chose to take his life.It's not a healthy society that tolerates instructions on how to do this. It's not something to ignore."

• Physician assisted suicide: The Law
  • At http://web.bma.org.uk/public/ethics.nsf/39f32339ff78cd6b802566a6003f3311/e7754d2377f042ea802567a000375db6?OpenDocument

• Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: PART III: A CLOSER LOOK AT THE CONSENSUAL CRIMES SUICIDE AND ASSISTED SUICIDE
  • "THERE CAN BE NO MORE fundamental statement concerning individual freedom and responsibility than this: Our bodies and our lives belong to ourselves. Our bodies do not belong to the state, to our relatives, or to our friends. The laws against suicide and assisted suicide run directly counter to this concept. "
  • "Suicidal thoughts are a symptom of emotional depression. Our culture's taboo against suicide often keeps people who are thinking about suicide from talking about it. By talking about it, people can often get the emotional and psychological support they need to see them through a rough time. When people are afraid to talk about it, the pressures can increase to the point that they actually do something about it."
  • As Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote in her suicide note:
    Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune or "broken heart" is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.

  •    Who knows?
     Maybe my life belongs to God.
        Maybe it belongs to me.
       But I do know one thing:
       I'm damned if it belongs
          to the government.
    
            ARTHUR HOPPE

  • At http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/aint/312.htm

• suicide
  • "In a famous rebuttal of such traditional views, David Hume identified with a handful of pre-Christian classical writers who considered suicide an honourable and sometimes praiseworthy act. An autonomous suicide, from Hume's perspective, is permissible (and on occasion laudable) if, on balance, more value is produced for the individual or more value is produced for society than would be produced by not performing the act of taking one's life ('Of Suicide', posthumously published, suppressed in 1757).
    Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780), in his codification of English law, used arguments similar to Aquinas's to explain the state's right to prevent and punish suicide. Blackstone categorized suicide as 'self-murder' and a grave felony (Blackstone's Commentaries, ch. 14). But when laws against suicide progressively fell, it was largely Hume's premisses and style of argument that led to the repeal, both in Britain and in North America."
  • At http://www.xrefer.com/entry/553638

• Quebec Canada's suicide hot spot
  • At http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040504.wstif0504/BNStory/National/

  • Montreal — Quebec men were nearly twice as likely to commit suicide as males in other provinces surveyed, suggests a public health report released Tuesday.

    The rate of suicide among Quebec males was 30.7 per 100,000 people in 1999-2001. The rate among men in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia was 16.1 per 100,000.

    “It's not just men, the real problem is among middle-aged men 30-49 years old who have the highest rate and largest increase in rates of suicide in the past few years,” said Danielle St-Laurent, one of the authors of a report by the National Public Health Institute of Quebec.

    A similar, but less forceful, trend existed among women.

    Only 7.7 per 100,000 females took their own lives in Quebec, about a quarter the suicide rate among men in the province. However, the rate among women in the rest of Canada was 4.6 per 100,000 people.

    The suicide gap between Quebec and English Canada has widened annually since the late 1970s. In prior years, suicide in Quebec was less common than elsewhere.

    Ontario, Alberta and B.C. were selected for the report because of the size of their populations. The western provinces were also included because they used the same process to track suicides as Quebec.

    The disparity in provincial rates can be partly attributed to a better reporting system for suicides in Quebec and an underestimation in other parts of the country, said the study, released Tuesday during an international suicide conference.

    But the rates in Quebec would still be high even if the reporting discrepancies were factored, Ms. St-Laurent said in an interview.

    “The phenomenon of suicide is very complicated,” she said. “We don't know exactly why.”

    Among the theories are cultural and social differences between Quebeckers and other Canadians.

    In New Brunswick, suicide rates among francophones were higher than among anglophones, said a provincial government report.

    Quebec's rates mirror those in western Europe while those in the rest of Canada compare with Anglo-Saxon countries, Ms. St-Laurent said.

    “There is a cultural dimension that is present, but it is difficult to explain why Quebec has increased while it has decreased elsewhere in Canada.”

    Suicides have continued to rise in Quebec despite prevention efforts over the past 20 years.

    The number of Quebec men who killed themselves had increased by nearly 40 per cent between the late 1970s and late 1990s.

    Rates among women, however, remained relatively stable over the same period.

    In 2001, 1,334 Quebecers — 1,055 men and 279 women — took their own lives. Suicide represented 2.4 per cent of all provincial deaths.

    About half the deaths were the result of hanging. Nearly 30 per cent of women overdosed, while 18.7 per cent of men shot themselves. Weapons were used more frequently outside Quebec.

    The suicide gap between men and women isn't unique to Quebec. Similar trends have been experienced in such industrialized countries as Austria and Finland, which have the highest rate of suicide.

• A Starter Course on G.K. Chesterton
  • At http://www.river.org/~dhawk/chesterton.html

• The Man Who Was Thursday by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
  • At http://www.bartleby.com/158/

  • "At first read, G.K. Chesterton’s the Man Who Was Thursday is a zany mystery story filled with often surreal twists that turn more traditional thrillers on their ear. Set in a fantastic London where the ridiculous never nears the sublime, our hero, Gabriel Syme revolts against the status quo and breaks out as - normal. Yet Syme’s normalcy provides the perfect foil to illustrate the insanity around him - and for Chesterton to illustrate the insanity he saw in turn-of-the-century London."

• Lots of quotes
  • At http://members.limitless.org/~fisherman/quotes.html
  • "A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extrordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion." -H. L. Mencken
  • "Systems die; instincts remain." -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
  • "What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?" -George Carlin
  • "It's the friends you can call up at 4 A. M. that matter." -Marlene Dietrich
  • "You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there." -Yogi Berra
  • "Don't use the conduct of a fool as a precedent." -Talmud
  • "Statistics are no substitute for judgment." -Henry Clay
  • "I always find that statistics are hard to follow and impossible to digest. The only one I can ever remember is that if all the people who go to sleep in church were laid end to end they would be a lot more comfortable." -Mrs. Robert A. Taft
  • "Fate loves the fearless." -James Russell Lowell
  • "Give me a man who sings at his work." -Thomas Carlyle
  • "We are just statistics, born to consume resources." -Horace
  • "Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life." -Brooke Shields
  • "How come if we can send a man to the Moon, we can't send a man to the Moon anymore?" -Commander Rick in Prisoners Of Gravity
  • "Truth is rarely pure, and never simple." -Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest"
  • "Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies." -Honore de Balzac
  • "I've been rich and I've been poor; rich is better." -Sophie Tucker
  • "You learn a lot about a culture through its pornography." -Dr. Gordon MacLachlan
  • "If I owned both Hell and Texas, I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell." -William T. Sherman
  • "Nobody roots for Goliath." -Wilt Chamberlain
  • "Trust in allah, but tie your camel." -Arabian proverb
  • "There is amazing strength in weakness." -Loa Tza
  • "Silence is argument carried on by other means." -Ernesto "Che" Guevara
  • "Never mistake motion for action." -Ernest Hemmingway
  • "Ronald Reagan is not a typical politician because he doesn't know how to lie, cheat, and steal. He's always had an agent for that." -Bob Hope
  • "One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time." -Nancy, Lady Astor
  • "Nixon is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar... He's one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides. " -Harry S. Truman
  • "I don't know [what my mother's thinking], I'm only related to her." -Francesca Smith
  • "The reverse side also has a reverse side." -Japanese proverb
  • "Tell the truth and run." -Yugoslavian proverb
  • "There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money, either." -Robert Graves
  • "I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown." -Woody Allen
  • "If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints." -Alfonso the Wise
  • "Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape." -Michael McGriff
  • "The smurfs were Commies, you know..." -Ms. Celeste Mahabir, World History class
  • "Alcohol kills thousands of people a year. Marijuana makes people want to order pizza." -Dr. Gordon MacLachlan
  • "Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen." -Sir Compton Mackenzie, 1883-1972
  • "The fruits of philosophy [are the important thing], not the philosophy itself. When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are constructed." -Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, 1792-1799
  • "You keep losing and getting spanked badly!" -Dr. Gordon Machlachlan
  • "There are good fumes, and we like good fumes... but these fumes are evil!" -Dr. Gordon MacLachlan
  • "In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences." -Robert Greene Ingersoll
  • "God does not pay weekly, but he pays at the end." -Dutch proverb
  • "Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited." -Ambrose Bierce, "Devil's Dictionary"
  • "A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic." -George Bernard Shaw
  • "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read a book of quotations." -Winston Churchill
  • "A man with God is always in the majority." -John Knox
  • "A guest sees more in an hour than the host in a year." -Polish proverb
  • "The truth knocks at the door and we say, "go away, I'm searching for the truth" and so it goes away." -Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
  • "Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable." -Laurence Peter
  • "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -Carl Sagan

• Quotations: Francis Bacon
  • At http://www.sirbacon.org/links/baconquotes.html
  • Knowledge is power. {Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est} Meditationes Sacrae 1597.
  • If we do not maintain Justice, Justice will not maintain us.
  • My Very Good Lord,--This day I have made even with the business of the kingdom for common justice. Not one cause unheard. The lawyers drawn dry of all the motions they were to make. Not one petition unanswered. And this, I think, could not be said in our age before. This I speak not out of ostentation, but out of gladness when I have done my duty. I know men think I cannot continue if I should thus oppress myself of business. But that account is made. The duties of life are more than life. And if I die now I shall die before the world be weary of me, which in our times is somewhat rare.
    {Bacon in his first four terms in the Court of Chancery made 8,798 orders and decrees, and freed more than 35,000 suitors in his court from the law's uncertainty. One of his sayings was,"Fresh justice is sweetist." Scarcely one of Bacon's decisions was ever reversed.}
  • If a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she is blind, she is not invisible.--Essays OF Fortune {Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind.--Shakespeare, Henry V, act III, sc.vi,}
  • It is an immense ocean that surrounds the island of Truth.
  • Read not to contradict and confute,nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse but to weigh and consider.
  • My story is proud...The entry of truth with chalk to mark those minds which are capable to lodge and harbour it.
  • Whether it be curiosity, or vain glory, or nature, Philanthropy is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed.
  • Light is God's first creature.
  • For all color is the broken image of light.
  • Tragedies and Comedies are made of one Alphabet.
  • Discovery sooner emerges from error than from confusion.
  • Laws are made to guard the rights of the people, not to feed the lawyers. The laws should be read by all, known to all. Put them into shape, inform them with philosophy, reduce them in bulk, give them into every man's hand.
  • Men believe what they prefer.
  • The souls of the living are the beauty of the world.
  • Money is like muck, best when it is spread out.
  • Our sorrows are our schoolmasters.
  • Nothing is terrible except fear itself.--De Augmentis Scientarum Book II,Fortitudo 1623.
  • Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.
  • My soul hath been a stranger in the course of my pilgrimage. Be merciful unto me, O Lord, for my savior's sake, and receive me into thy bosom, or guide me in thy ways.
  • If we have spoken the truth, the voice of nature will cry it up, though the voice of man should cry it down.
  • There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
  • The world's a bubble, and the life of man less than a span.
  • Beggars should not be choosers.
  • All is not gold that glisters.
  • Conscience is worth a thousand witnesses.
  • It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.
  • Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.
  • To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.
  • If money be not they servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.
  • A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
  • All colors will agree in the dark
  • Prosperity discovers vice, adversity discovers virtue.
  • Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
  • Silence is the virtue of fools.
  • The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

• Quotations: Francis Bacon
  • At http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/f/francis_bacon.html

  • A bachelor's life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner. Francis Bacon
  • A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. Francis Bacon
  • A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it. Francis Bacon
  • A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green. Francis Bacon
  • A prudent question is one-half of wisdom. Francis Bacon
  • A sudden bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open. Francis Bacon
  • A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. Francis Bacon
  • Acorns were good until bread was found. Francis Bacon
  • All rising to great place is by a winding stair. Francis Bacon
  • Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor. Francis Bacon
  • Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time. Francis Bacon
  • As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time. Francis Bacon
  • Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Francis Bacon
  • Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution. Francis Bacon
  • Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch. Francis Bacon
  • But men must know, that in this theatre of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on. Francis Bacon
  • By indignities men come to dignities. Francis Bacon
  • Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men. Francis Bacon
  • Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter. Francis Bacon
  • Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable. Francis Bacon
  • Cure the disease and kill the patient. Francis Bacon
  • Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order. Francis Bacon
  • Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid. Francis Bacon
  • Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse. Francis Bacon
  • For my name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages. Francis Bacon
  • Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason. Francis Bacon
  • Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall. Francis Bacon
  • Friends are thieves of time. Francis Bacon
  • Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom. Francis Bacon
  • God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires. Francis Bacon
  • God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave. Francis Bacon
  • God's first creature, which was light. Francis Bacon
  • Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again. Francis Bacon
  • He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other. Francis Bacon
  • He that hath knowledge spareth his words. Francis Bacon
  • He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Francis Bacon
  • He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator. Francis Bacon
  • Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper. Francis Bacon
  • I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death. Francis Bacon
  • I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind. Francis Bacon
  • I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am. Francis Bacon
  • If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world. Francis Bacon
  • If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. Francis Bacon
  • If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics. Francis Bacon
  • If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us. Francis Bacon
  • Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sens