My
new scientist crush:
Oxford’s Nick Bostrom,
John Lilly’s ECCO Mission to Mankind, Movies This Week, Outsourcing Wombs, The
Rage in Russia: Selling Fetuses, The Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda, Lieutenant
Mark Alexander, Be Happy: The Rich Are Miserable, and more…
Uganda’s
Mean Female Gorillas.
From the New York Post’s Page Six: Animal Instinct. Kerry Washington won't
forget her encounter with a gorilla while filming "The Last King of Scotland" in
Uganda. Washington told Webster Hall's Baird Jones, "I got way too close to a
female gorilla, who started toward me. If you run, they run after you. So I did
my best gorilla imitation: chewing leaves, head scratch, kneeling. I remembered
watching animal behavior on TV and zoo trips."
If you run,
they run after you. So I did my best gorilla imitation: chewing leaves, head
scratch, kneeling. I remembered watching animal behavior on TV and zoo trips."
It worked. "I would not be having this interview now if that gorilla had
attacked me."
Perhaps
Kerry Washington was wandering around the mountain all alone. We seven tourists,
on the other hand, had a sanctuary guide, 3 armed guards, and several porters.
It cost $10 to have a porter carry your backpack. (The porters and top guide hit
the mother lode with me since I got special attention hiking up the mountain.)
The trackers were also on hand communicating with our guide by walkie-talkie.
There is a special sound that the guides and trackers made that constantly
communicated to the gorillas that we humans were friendly and would not harm
them. We also could look directly at the females since they were not hostile. We
were, of course, advised not to look into the eyes of the Silverback alpha male.
We visited
the mountain gorillas in Rwanda (photo of road leading to the mountain). There
are only 60 permits sold per day for $500 per ticket. There are strong rumors
that the cost will soon increase to $1,000.)
Photo of my
porters. I was not allowed to take a photo of the soldiers.
When asked
why there were three rifle-toting soldiers along with each of the seven groups,
we were told they were watching for poachers. Poachers should know that every
day at 11AM groups of tourists come to see the mountain gorillas for one hour.
That is exactly when poachers should be hiding out of sight. Or, considering how
the soldiers kept a military style perimeter watch over us, was it for our
protection?
In 1999,
a team of FBI agents landed in Kampala, Uganda to
investigate the brutal murder of eight tourists by Rwandan rebels during a
holiday vacation tracking rare mountain gorillas. As survivors of the massacre
prepared to fly home, the FBI agents arrived to help investigate how the ethnic
Hutu rebels abducted 31 tourists and executed eight of them.
The victims
were four Britons, two Americans and two New Zealanders -- four men and four
women. One survivor said the victims were bludgeoned and macheted to death and
that one of the women was apparently raped before she was killed. The hostage
crisis began at dawn when more than 100 ethnic Hutu rebels from Rwanda attacked
three tourist camps in the Bwindi National Park of southwest Uganda, famous as
one of the last remaining habitats of mountain gorillas.
Seventeen of
the 31 international tourists escaped or were freed shortly after, but 14 others
were frog-marched towards neighboring Congo and eight of them were murdered
before the end of the day. The remaining six were released with a grim warning
from the Hutu rebels to the West: Stop dealing with Rwanda's Tutsi-led
government or more tourists will die.
The rebels
slaughtered their victims in the same manner of the genocide of 800,000 Rwandan
Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994 -- with clubs and machetes. A handwritten note
given by the rebel’s leader to one released hostage said Uganda was now
considered a "war zone."
In 1999, the
rebels also kidnapped four international tourists and seven Congolese guides and
porters on a trek to observe the gorillas. They later released a Canadian
tourist and all the Congolese escorts. The three other tourists -- two Swedes
and one New Zealander -- have not been heard from since.
Dian Fossey's meeting
with Dr. Leakey at Olduvai Gorge inspired her to study mountain gorillas. In
1967 Dian moved to Rwanda where she established Karisoke, a research camp in the
Parc National des Volcans. In 1970, Peanuts, an adult male, touched her hand.
This was the first friendly gorilla-to-human contact ever recorded. To visit
Fossey’s grave, next to that of her beloved gorilla “Digit,” costs $100.
The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International: Saving gorillas and their habitats
in Africa
After we got
back from East Africa, the Animal Planet Network had a special called “Saving a
Species: Gorillas on the Brink” with Star Wars actress Natalie Portman and
wildlife guru Jack Hanna. They went to the same jungle, Rwanda’s Volcanoes
National Park, as we did.
Movies This Week.
“Control” (NO), “Love in the Time of Cholera” (NO), and “I’m Not There” (YES,
YES).
Are We Living in a
Computer Simulation?
Nick Bostrom is called a
Transhumanist Philosopher and teaches at Oxford University. Bostrom’s theory is
catching on: Maybe our universe is some PlaySkool toy that some kid, somewhere,
is assembling, disassembling, and through whimsy, controlling. If you ever
role-played online or created a personality in Dungeons and Dragons, you
understand the concept Bostrom is promoting.
For Dr.
Bostrom, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone
else’s computer simulation – just like we all saw in “The Matrix.” Dr. Bostrom
is the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford and he says that
technological advances will soon produce a computer with more processing power
than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,”
could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating
virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous
systems.
Computer experts say we will have such a
computer by the middle of this century and “post-humans” will be running lots of
simulations for research purposes or entertainment. The number of virtual
ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real
ancestors. There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure
whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d
experience would be indistinguishable. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more
than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a
computer simulation.”
Nick Bostrom's home page
I much
prefer John Lilly’s revelation concerning ECCO. Dr. Lilly believed he was being
watched over and guided by higher powers of an extraterrestrial origin. Lilly
referred to this network of sublime entities as ECCO ("Earth Coincidence Control
Office").
Dr. John Lilly is
renowned for his work communicating with dolphins and he invented the isolation
tank (pictured below) to understand how the brain works in sensory deprivation.
My husband John brought an isolation tank in the 1980s and says he “used it all
the time. It was in the basement.” Unfortunately, John never met anyone from
ECCO.
Dr. Lilly came to this
realization through the use of Ketamine.
I met some folks in
Peru who had recently injected Ketamine (called by U.S. users “Special K.”). You
can buy Ketamine in some very remote parts of Peru at pharmacies without a
doctor’s prescription!
As Dr. Lilly increased
his frequency of injecting himself with massive doses of Ketamine, he began
having contact with another alien intelligence agency, which he called SSI
(Solid State Intelligence). SSI was a supercomputer-like entity. SSI was of a
malevolent nature,
at odds with ECCO. SSI's apparent goal was to conquer and dominate all
biological life forms on Earth. To combat SSI, ECCO enlisted Lilly in this
archetypal battle of good against evil, charging him with the mission of
alerting the world to these solid state beings of evil intent. To further
confirm the dual existences of these two opposing alien intelligence networks,
Lilly was given a sign, and message, in the autumn of 1974. Flying into Los
Angeles International Airport (LAX), Dr. Lilly saw the Comet Kahoutek (pictured)
out of the southern sky. Momentarily the comet grew brighter. At this point a
message was laser-beamed into Lilly's mind, which said: "We are Solid State
Intelligence and we are going to demonstrate our power by shutting down all
solid state equipment to LAX."
Dr. Lilly shared
his foreboding message with his wife Toni, who was seated next to him. A few
minutes later, the pilot instructed the passengers that they were being diverted
to Burbank due to a plane that had crash-landed near the runway and had knocked
down power lines, causing a power failure at the airport.
Dr. Lilly’s
website explains ECCO and ECCO has a message for all humans. I think we should
pay attention to their conditions (However, I did fix all the ECCO misspellings.
English is apparently not their first language):
"There exists
a Cosmic Control Center (C.C.C.) with a Galactic substation called Galactic
Coincidence Control (G.C.C.). Within which is the Solar System Control Unit (S.S.C.U.),
within which is the Earth Coincidence Control Office (E.C.C.O.). The assignments
of responsibilities from the top to the bottom of this system of control is by a
set of regulations, which translated by E.C.C.O. for humans is somewhat as
follows:"
To all
humans: If you wish to control coincidences in your own life on the planet
Earth, we will cooperate and determine those coincidences for you under the
following conditions:
1) You must
know/assume/simulate our existence in ECCO.
2) You must be
willing to accept our responsibility for control of your coincidences.
3) You must exert
your best capabilities for your survival programs and your own development as an
advancing/advanced member of ECCO's Earth-side corps of controlled coincidence
workers. You are expected to use your best intelligence in this service.
4) You are
expected to expect the unexpected every minute, every hour of every day and of
every night.
5) You must be
able to maintain conscious/thinking/reasoning no matter what events we arrange
to happen to you. Some of these events will seem
cataclysmic/catastrophic/overwhelming: remember stay aware, no matter what
happens/apparently happens to you.
6) You are in our
training program for life: There is no escape from it. We (not you) control the
long-term coincidences; you (not we) control the shorter-term coincidences by
your own efforts.
7) Your major
mission on earth is to discover/create that which we do to control the long-term
coincidence patterns: You are being trained on Earth to do this job.
8) When your
mission on planet Earth is completed, you will no longer be required to
remain/return there.
9) Remember the
motto passed to us (from GCC via SSCU): "Cosmic Love is Absolutely Ruthless and
Highly Indifferent: It teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or
not."
John C. Lilly Homepage
Outsourcing Wombs
in India. The
future is here! And I want to be part of it! Whatever celebrities and
socialites want to call it, it’s “rent a womb for nine months” and it’s
catching on! Celebrities may call it having a “gestational carrier” or
that they are suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome and must use surrogates,
but its really womb renting.
India has become renowned
for outsourcing and now poor Indian women are renting out their wombs to
foreigners. Surrogate motherhood -- carrying to term and giving birth to another
woman's baby - once was limited in India to helping close relatives who couldn't
complete a pregnancy due to medical difficulties.
It is now becoming a regular "profession" in India, with more and more women
willing to carry babies for others, for a fee. India has for years been
providing foreigners with in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment at a cheaper
rate than the equivalent services in Western countries.
Surrogacy comes in when the biological mother is unable to carry the child.
Alternatively, a surrogate also provide eggs when the woman wanting a child is
unable to do so herself.
In
the Anand district in the western state of Gujarat, more than 50 economically
deprived women are reported to be presently carrying babies for foreigners and
non-resident Indians. While a couple in the U.S. will generally pay tens of
thousands of dollars to a surrogate mother and affiliated agencies, in India the
cost could be around $5,000, plus medical and attendant costs.
There is an increasing number of young, healthy, married working women unwilling
to put their careers on hold to have a baby, and will pay someone else to do so
on their behalf.
Stem cells are all the
rage in Russia and people are flocking to the country for stem cell therapy to
stop the aging process. And where are the stem cells coming from? Many believe
the stem cells are being smuggled in from neighboring Georgia and Ukraine, where
there’s a growing black market. Poverty-stricken women are often paid the
equivalent of $200 to carry fetuses for up to twelve weeks, before they are
aborted and sold to cosmetic clinics.
Lieutenant Mark Alexander.
Congratulations to Mark Alexander! On November 1st, John’s son (and
my stepson) was promoted to lieutenant on the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Department.
Competition for these positions was intense and he finished fourth out of over
60 applicants. Mark had been serving in a sensitive position as an investigator
in the Internal Affairs Division. Congratulations to Mark and his lovely wife
Isabel. (Photo of Sheriff Bradshaw and Mark (on left.)
Pity the
Prince.
He may be suffering from Wealth Fatigue Syndrome. Yes, it may even make it into
the
next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V),
due for publication in 2012. That nasty year once again!
Prince Alwaleed
bin Talal of Saudi Arabia (pictured), has
purchased a $300 million-plus "Flying Palace" plane. Is it a sign of his
psychological inadequacies? Alwaleed, who recently just
lost $2.5 billion
of his personal fortune due to the mortgage meltdown, but apparently decided to
buy a flying palace for $300 million and then customize it for another $150
million.
He could be suffering from
Wealth
Fatigue Syndrome – the poor thing!
According to therapists, being a
super-millionaire is a sure-fire recipe for unhappiness. It is called “Wealthy
Fatigue Syndrome.” Such excessive spending might not be a sign of conspicuous
consumption but of addiction. However, Bo Derek summed up most everybody’s
opinion on the subject of acquiring wealth: "Whoever said money can't buy
happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping."
Love in the Time of Cholera.
Beloved book,
lousy movie. He ages to 72, she stops aging at 35. He stays virile, she
crumbles. He cries a lot while having sex with 600 desperately horny Columbian
women. He’s the only potent man in the country.
Here’s the standard I go by. If I walk out of the theater and say, “I want to
read the book,” then the movie worked.
With “Cholera,” I walked out thankful I never read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's
novel whose appeal has to be the weepy premise that a woman could be loved (for
her beauty alone) the over 55 years, even if she doesn’t deserve it.
“Cholera” is the story of a man, Florentino (Javier Bardem), who uses women for
sex and keeps a list he brags about (seems the whole town knows the ongoing
tote) while flattering himself that he could never commit to a relationship
because he is in love with a pretty woman, Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), he
saw when he was 18 years old.
All “lifelong bachelors” should use this excuse. “Lifelong bachelors” say, “I’m
married to my work.” Now they should say, “I’m keeping myself a virgin for
[insert a female name here].”
“Cholera” shows every Columbian woman (strangers grab him as he walks down the
street) as desperate for sex and hungry for Florentino’s throbbing manhood. What
is wrong with all the other men in Columbia? Even at 72 years old, Florentino
has a hungry teenager lusting over him begging for seconds!
I know. I missed
the whole point of the novel: Selfless, everlasting love with plenty of tears.
But this weepy saga wants it both ways. Florentino cries while sleeping with
everything (but not young boys) that moves. He is praised for this achievement.
Other men want to know why he is so good with women. His answer goes something
like this: They know I am suffering from a love I cannot have. Women long to
fill my aching heart.
Young Florentino is a poor man infatuated with Fermina, the daughter of wealthy
Lorenzo who demands she marry well, instead of bothering with a lovesick puppy.
She eventually marries a dashing doctor.
Florentino waits for 53 years and finally her husband drops dead. He immediately
goes to Fermina. After again pursuing her with a stalker’s vengeance, she goes
off with him on a riverboat tour. He wants to make love but Fermina, looking all
of 35, tells him to stay away from her, she “smells like an old woman.”
Florentino, the old coot, smells like a freshly picked daisy. When he finally
talks her into bed, she does not want him to see her aged body. Florentino is
fine with his 72 year old body.
Women of a certain age are wise and know their physical attractiveness has
diminished with age, but this goes to prove men have no such hang-ups. Quite the
contrary.
I
kept hoping Florentino and Fermina would come down with cholera.
