lemur

If this person decides that it makes sense to seek medical/psychiatric help to deal with his experiences, that may be a step toward relief. The advice I gave presumed that he was not planning to seek any such help because he is quite convinced that what he is experiencing is NOT due to his imagination but to actual telepathic espionage. In that case, it hardly helps to insist that he's crazy and needs to seek medical help. Would it help you to hear that the reason you were studying science is because you were having delusions of being a student or intellectual and you needed help to cure you of your belief that people were trying to teach you science? No, because you are fully convinced that this is what is actually happening in your life. I was just giving advice of how to deal with what seems to be happening to him on the assumption that what he is experiencing IS reality. There is nothing terrible about this because the coping strategy is the same whether it is psychosis or actual telepathic harassment. There's nothing particularly helpful about telling someone insistently that they're crazy and that they need to seek medical help. Doing that tends to cause distress to people who are uncomfortable with the prospect or fear stigmatization. As long as they can manage what they're going through without causing danger to themselves or others, why not let them decide how to deal with it. Anyone can give them advice and they're free to take it or leave it, just like anyone else. Nevertheless, I will agree with you that seeking medical/psychiatric help could be a constructive approach to dealing with the experience of telepathic harassment. Even if it's somehow real, psychiatry could help him deal with the trauma of it.

But relative to the high-gravity situation she is ascending from, the low-gravity observer's time is literally decelerating relative to those she observes below her. So what is it about lower-gravity that allows her time to elapse slower? It doesn't have to do with the speed of energy at the atomic level or something like that?

Ok, fine, but like I said I think you should practice letting go of your reaction to the torture. I would give the same advice to someone stuck as a prisoner of war getting tortured. If you can't stop it from happening, the best resistance is to practice mental discipline of allowing it to happen as it does without feeding it by reacting to it. I hope you understand what I mean because I don't think I can explain it any better than in the previous post with the stalker analogy. I can imagine it must be very frustrating to feel such a lack of control but try to realize that you have POWER even when you're not in control and that power has to do with the effect your will-power can have on your consciousness. Whether it's schizophrenia or actual telepathic harassment, if such a thing exists, is of little consequence. Whatever it is, it can be dealt with the same as though it were an actual person harassing him. In fact, if it is a psychosis I think he would be better off ignoring it as if it was something real just because real-things feel that much more clear and thus manageable. Plus, if somehow he is really being telepathically stalked by some kind of war interrogator, it's not like any police are going to be able to intervene so he's just going to have to deal with it by calming his nerves as much as possible and letting the provocations go. This disempowers EITHER a real stalker OR a psychosis, imo.

My understanding is that while the effect could be due to speed differences that are close to the speed of light, it can also be due to gravity, which is what I was describing. I don't know why the observer on the mountain sees the people in the valley moving in fast motion even though they experience themselves as moving at regular speed. Imo, it seems like it should have something to do with the effect of force on energy-motion relative to electron frequencies, but that is pure speculation as far as I know. The effect is even stranger when the observer's time is dilated relative to the observed-situation because observers in both positions observe the other's time as accelerated, I believe. I could be getting this wrong, though. I always get confused when I start trying to think about all the implications and whether they make sense.

Swanson explained it really well in another post, but let me see if I can put it in very tangible terms. Supposedly, if you were on a very tall mountain looking down at a very deep valley with gravity much higher than on the mountain, you would look through your telescope and see the people in the valley moving in fast motion. This is how I currently understand it anyway.

Since you can't really distinguish whether what you're experiencing is telepathy or just thoughts so realistic they seem like someone else's, I think you should consider just accepting it as normal. Just think of this person/people as a constant companion. Whether it is telepathy or your mind playing games with you, I think your stressing about it may feed into it. It is common knowledge that stalkers feed on the fear and irritation they cause their victims. So you may not be able to stop whatever this is with a tin-foil cap but maybe by making peace with it, you can reduce your reactions to it and that might cause it to give up harassing you, at least to some degree. Basically, I think you have to be prepared to endure its presence for the long term if necessary and learn to go on with your daily activities as if nothing is going on. Did you see "a Beautiful Mind?" In that movie, the person went crazy from espionage and ultimately couldn't distinguish between whether he was actually being harassed or if it was just his mind playing tricks. Eventually, he learned to function by ignoring the presence of his hallucinations. Of course I can't say whether what you are experiencing is hallucinatory or not, but even if it's not, it sounds like it could be enough to induce hallucinations, so I think you just have to come to terms with what you've had to go through and just try to function normally regardless. There is a Buddhist technique I've read about that can help you avoid reacting to these negative provocations. You basically visualize the provocation as a cloud passing overhead. You note the presence of the cloud but allow it to continue drifting by. This way, even if you can't eliminate the presence of the disturbance, at least you can practice not reacting to it as strongly. Just try to let it go and focus on more positive things. Good luck.

Lol. . . and if he's omnipotent, he is capable of falsifying his records and documentation; and since heaven doesn't have recognized credentials, there's no way to verify any claims he makes except by his word (on his honor). He'd probably end up getting persecuted or crucified or otherwise mistreated by the system.

I can't help but become extremely skeptical whenever I hear as much bad press about some individual as I'm hearing about Gaddafi now. Though a lot of violence is attributed to him, you can never really tell what the motivations were/are for the actual violence among the people who are directly committing it. There are a lot of factors that play into soldiers' decisions about when to strike and how, and when there are strong political-economic interests in toppling a regime, it makes good sense to strawman the leader as much as possible to stimulate popular disdain. Remember that global power is not stupid and people have been engineering propaganda for a long time. Granted this is all "conspiracy theory," so it is really neither here nor there - but that's just the point; it IS neither here nor there. So whenever I'm reading loads of bad press about some figure-head, I always try to find something said directly by the individual instead of basing everything I think about him based on what others are saying/writing. The speech I found by Gaddafi was given for the UN in 2009 and was poorly translated. One of the things he said was that medicine and vaccines should be given freely to dissuade the use of pathogen engineering to generate profit. Does that sounds like a statement designed to repress people to you? If ideas like that are unpopular, it is because they cut into corporate profit margins to protect the poorest of the poor from disease. Who stands to benefit from overthrowing Gaddafi economically and taking over the oil wealth? The masses of AU poor or the middle-class? I really don't know the whole situation, but it is striking to me that no one is analyzing these issues and instead all you hear is overwhelming support for the rebellion against the regime because it is "unpopular." Shouldn't people be questioning the complaints as well as the regime? Regardless of anyone's opinions about Gaddafi and the regime, however, I started this thread to invite people to consider whether the populism of this rebellion and the global populism that is rising in support of it could turn into a global power-shift to control oil-wealth in the interest of bolstering industry and trade with cheap fuel pumped and sold liberally to drive the prices very low. I presume this is what is needed to provide the rebels and others like them the world over with the economic prosperity they feel they can achieve and deserve if not obstructed by the likes of 'oppressors' like Gaddafi.

I know different yeasts are sold for different purposes. I was just wondering if anyone knew whether the bulk-food brewer's yeast I have can actually be activated. If nothing else, it could be used to ferment old carbs I have lying around and then distill the alcohol off using a pressure-cooker with a coiled piece of copper tubing sticking off the vent-pipe.

Bailing out the banks didn't make sense to me at first either, but I finally understood the logic. It has to do with the rise and fall of the real estate boom market. Once the over-funded real estate markets started collapsing, there was no way to keep them inflated/inflating without creating multi-generational balloon mortgages or something else ridiculous so they had to deflate. Once deflation starts, you don't want people to keep buying in to the market every time a house gets discounted 10% because that just slows down the depreciation process. Instead, it makes more sense to keep credit on a short leash, preferably only using it to stabilize existing mortgages by locking in the low interest rates for the long term. That way, deflation can proceed in an orderly fashion and, hopefully, the most vulnerable people will be able to get the credit they need to get by while the market resets. The Bush administration seemed to really know what it was doing by giving all the money to the banks since banks would have the strongest interest in withholding the money until prices had re-stabilized. Now, the question is just when prices will bottom out and buyers will become interested in investing again. It may still be a while though, since my impression is that many many people are still in the mode of trying to convince others that "now is the time to buy" in order to cash their properties out before they further depreciate. If anything, I would call this recession a "crisis in BS" insofar as people try to BS each other into buying into a deflationary market so that they themselves can cash in on the dupes. The question is what economic foundations will emerge that are strong enough to base housing prices on? My sense is that there's still a lot of other economic uncertainty that has to be worked out before this happens, though. Nor do you seem to permit yourself to suggest it here. The first part is true. Gigantic profit margins are demanded and if they aren't produced, investors do everything possible to obstruct deflation to ensure the wealthy and middle class are satiated before the lower classes are allowed to get access to capital to self-sustain. The second part, that luxuries for the rich (and middle class) will always be met is simply not true. For many, it may be true, but in a recessionary economy, the wealth and middle-class compete for scarce resources like everyone else and more so actually because they're at the top of the food chain. Look at it like a literal food chain. If plants at the bottom are less available, there's less food for the plant-eating fish. Then the medium sized fish have to compete to eat them, which results in the big fish and sharks competing for the medium fish and each other. Ironically, humans have the ability to go from shark-level consumption to lower-levels, but instead they argue for redistributing fat from the sharks to feed to the small fish to reinvigorate the food chain. But the point of the analogy is that when spending decreases at any level, revenue/profit losses trickle up to the middle-class and the wealthy. Great point. Who prevents poor individuals from cleaning themselves up and fixing up an old junk house to live in? Answer: property owners who would rather wait for stimulus money to revitalize the high-priced markets and then rent the houses for government subsidies. Of course, would you want to be the property owner who gives an old house away to a poor person when your neighbor owns commercial property that he's going to hold and rent for a profit once the poor person you gave your house to fixes it up and sells it for a profit?

How is the presence of evil inconsistent with the presence of infinite goodness? Aren't they both logically part of infinite everything? Also, what logic suggests that evil is governed by necessity if there is a God? You are making the old false assumption that if God is good and omnipotent S/He would control evil. My understanding of theology is that God has the capacity to intervene in evil-doing but resists doing so in the interest of preserving free-will. In other words, it may be better to intervene through advice/enlightenment instead of control. You are assuming that control of evil would be God's project if S/He was in fact omnipotent, but that's a strawman, imo. By overdramatizing the consequences of an unargued assumption, you are making it that much more difficult to discuss. Instead of insisting on your assumption in this way, why don't you just raise them for discussion and invite counterarguments? Don't you think that would make for better discussion?

Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I mean is that governments create restrictions as to who can make money within the regional economy controlled by the government. Then the goal is to increase "exports," meaning any means of getting revenue from sources that are not entitled/licensed to make money within the region. That way, a system of entitlements is created that benefits citizens by excluding non-citizens economically. Thus, global GDP is harnessed as a means of protecting privileged national/regional entitlements and/by restricting access to jobs and business opportunities of "migrant" workers and businesses. Economic recession and poverty cause people to want to migrate, along with other reasons. Economic prosperity or other forms of (perceived) prosperity, such as social and cultural 'prosperity' cause people to resist migration (i.e. they want to stay where they think it's better and they want to keep other people from coming there to share in what they consider to be good/better/superior. So, I think this creates great social-political pressure to raise global GDP to levels that maintain the status-quo of citizen-entitlements in controlled-structure regional economies. Since popular fear tends to have the effect of stimulating various kinds of spending, including military, consumption, social, etc., there is an economic incentive to procuring terrorism or other fear-inspiring propaganda. Thus, I think a good way to discourage this would be to respond to various global problems with population exchanges in the form of visa-printing (thus not forced). That way, no one would be able to think that relative pockets of sub-global prosperity could be protected by stimulating global GDP using various propaganda tactics. Of course, such tactics could still be used, but it would no longer be possible to use global GDP to maintain privileged regional strongholds. If governments wanted to maintain such strongholds against migration, they should do so by becoming economically independent of global trade (if at all). I'm not 100% sure this would work, but the fact that I think there would be enormous popular resistance to it suggests that regional protectionism is too strong a political force globally to be ignored. edit: if you offer visas to certain governments, they will welcome them as a chance to evict their least favored residents. But if you insist on a visa-exchange, where the same governments also have to accept and integrate the same number of non-citizens socially/economically/culturally, they will not like it as much. Ideally, they would see it as an opportunity to expand global multiculturalism, but I don't think many people hold this mentality (even though I suspect it will be the global cultural paradigm at some point, it's just a question of when).

Good idea for a thread. Does anyone know if the dry brewer's yeast sold as bulk food can be used for brewing and/or bread-baking? I assume it is made by collecting froth off of brewing beer but I don't know if it can be re-activated and how or if it is dead or what.

I didn't get the impression that the orbits of massive bodies was disputed but more that centripetal gravity was viewed as a weaker force. This made sense to me insofar as gravity supposedly cancels out other gravity within the body of matter but I don't see why this is reason to view it as a different type of gravity altogether. I'm not advocating the OP's ideas - just providing my understanding of them and my own critical assessment, for whatever that is worth.

Would it help the OP's case to note that objects reflected in a mirror have mass according to a scale reflected in the same mirror even though the scale itself would also be a massless reflection? Maybe this will lead to the conclusion that (C^2)M = E

Maybe my analysis is incorrect, but it seems like Ghadaffi is primarily hated because his regime controls oil wealth without widely distributing it to create a comfortable middle class to support him as a "benevolent provider for the 'national family.'" As the UN and various other regimes coordinate their support in favor of popular appropriation of the oil-wealth, it makes me wonder if this is the beginning of something more widespread globally. Are we about to see a new world order emerge in which the popular will to consume oil-wealth at a level that satisfies majoritarian consumerism completely eclipses the will to conserve (oil) wealth by restricting prosperity to the minimum necessary? Are we going to see widespread declines in fuel costs and growth in global GDP?

I don't see God as rejecting anyone/anything because of imperfection. In fact, the whole idea of using perfection as a basis for judgment doesn't make much sense in terms of theology, imo. The creation is the product of conflict between sin and virtue, good and evil. The two are not always mutually exclusive because they appropriate each other in various ways. Lucifer, for example, is God's greatest angel who "falls from grace" and becomes "perverted/opposed" to goodness for the sake of undermining God's power. Competition with God's power is construed as evil because of the egoism in competing with God, but who is to say that evil-doers don't sometimes accidentally act virtuously despite their malevolent intent? Either way, I don't think God would "reject" scriptures for being made by humans and therefore imperfect. S/he might criticize their faults in order to enlighten people as to better truths, but I don't think a true God would waste energy rejecting and putting down scripture for its faults. I think s/he would focus on disseminating the most enlightening helpful knowledge possible and only focus on criticizing scripture where it had really led people astray, etc. Honestly, though, I think that most scripture turns out to be virtuous or malevolent based on how it is interpreted; and that their are beneficial interpretations possible for practically all scripture. I think people who seek negative interpretations in it are bent on undermining scripture itself and thus the possibility of redeeming it for good, which in itself reeks of evil.

I can't point out that "proving God's existence" is inherently contradictory to the logic of God as a faith-based belief? You say "stuck" as if it has to be passive. People can actively exercise faith without being "stuck" in it. How many people are stuck in resistance against subjective experimentation with blind faith? My point is that you can't talk about God as anything EXCEPT a faith-based entity. God is a PROJECTION of faith, nothing more. It is a TOTAL PROJECTION, though, so you can't reduce it to a fiction because doing so would imply that faith is less than total. It's the only way you could understand how theology works, imo. I just gave you an example from my own experience. Don't take it personally. I don't think it's pointless - I think it raises interesting theological/psychological issues, which I'm raising. This is why the scriptures contain the story of Lucifer and his fallen angels. It is why people are supposed to have free will to choose between good and evil. Nevertheless, evil is still part of the creation. It is an inherent potential within free will. That's the way God works in the bible. Ever read the story of Job? Yes, why do you think the bible denies this? God disapproves of Adam and Eve covering themselves. He becomes angry and asks, "who told you that you were naked?" or something like that. It would pique my interest. I would want to know what was evil about the scriptures and why. I would want to know what would be better. how was that?

The problem is that everyone has settled into the economic model of increasing exports and limiting imports at the national level. This is why the US is prodded to stimulate global economic activity. The US government should start responding to all crises with population exchanges. That way, if people want to maintain national solidarity economies, they have to self-sustain. If they don't, they have to integrate by multi-ethnicizing their regions.

You're talking about evaluating the content of imagination. I am talking about the brain's unadulterated ability to imagine things that are objectively unsubstantiable. I don't understand what you mean exactly. But you have no way of verifying that the being claiming to be God is actually God without faith. How can you test for ultimate omnipotence, especially when Satan has supposedly almost the same power as God but uses it for evil instead of good? No, of course not. But I was trying to explain that faith works in the absence of proof. I don't think God's existence or that of an afterlife or reincarnation can be objectively tested, so that leaves answering such questions open to faith and faith alone, no? No, but if it makes you happy to believe that the dog loves you, why wouldn't you believe it on the basis of faith and your will for it to be true? This may sound strange, but maybe you haven't actually given up your belief in an afterlife yet. I was an atheist for a while, but then I realized that I was keeping my subjectivity separate from my materialism. Once I started to really reflect on subjectivity and what it would mean to lose everything meaningful to me, I felt sad and became concerned with life after death, at least as a subjective belief. I didn't say "higher" state of consciousness. I just said a universally available one. How could s/he claim such a thing if s/he created everything, and gave humans their ability to create religion(s)? Wouldn't religions be like her grandchildren then, if humans were her children? No. I don't get what you mean by this.

Can I give it a shot, even though it's not my theory? I can't see any "easily testable" prediction, but I would guess that his theory would predict slower acceleration into a gravity well than would be expected based on the standard formulas relating mass to radius. I don't know how he could test this easily, though, without having a very deep gravity well into which something could be dropped and timed.

If what is thought of as space-expansion actually just turns out to be incredibly old, red-shifted EM waves slowly pushing everything away from everything else, would people still continue to treat space as some kind of material substance that contains other things or could it just be accepted that EM waves interact with matter and neither requires a transcendent container concept?

Maybe this is overgeneralizing this topic, but why shouldn't private finance be allowed to constrain capital flows within free markets to a minimum? This seems like the only way for free markets to ever give the poorest of the poor a chance to participate. If government would control and thus insist on lending, wouldn't it just endless fund the investments that sustain class-stratification? My sense is that if banks lent very restrictively for a period of time, businesses and individuals would gradually have to make due with increasingly less revenues until the playing field was level with the poor. If this is what a free market does naturally, why shouldn't it be allowed to do so?

So you want him to show direct evidence that the gravitational force around a massive body (Fc) is weaker than the force that occurs in between such bodies (Fo)? That seems reasonable to me although the whole comparison is already causing problems in my mind considering that Newtonian gravity basically already takes into account gravitational cancellation within a massive body due to itself, no? At least I remember a discussion some time ago (on another forum I think) that the center of the planet would be weightless because of all the surrounding mass canceling out opposing gravity from the other direction. But at the surface, this canceling-out effect would be all but neutralized, I would think, and most gravity would be expressed as centripetal in the direction of the center. Maybe what he is saying is that as the canceling-out effect decreases with distance from the center, it becomes relatively stronger because it is "unified" and thus only the unified gravitation factors into attraction between planets, stars, etc. That all makes sense to me, but I'm not sure why that suggests that gravity is more than one force emerging from the same particles with different effects depending on where an object is located relative to the rest of the material/particles of "the body."