byArlington Institute1.2k ViewsComments Off on Volume 25, Number 24 – 12/16/22
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Volume 25, Number 24 – 12/16/2022
FUTURE FACTS – FROM THINK LINKS
Musk’s release of internal emails highlights Twitter’s 2020 intentional suppression of news unfavorable to Biden.
Scientists have now revived a number of “zombie viruses” from Siberian permafrost, including one thought to be nearly 50,000 years old.
As far as is currently known, the Earth is the only place in the solar system — past or present — with plate tectonics and active subduction.
Russia and Ukraine are fighting the world’s first full-scale drone war.
China has the world’s most ambitious cloud-seeding program, with the aims of stimulating rain, halting hail across half the country, and trying to force clouds to rain over the Yangtze River, which is running dry in some spots.
Hello my friends,
I have a prediction: Next year is going to be an interesting one. All of the indications that we watch here at TAI suggest that 2023 will be extraordinary.
For two decades now I have been writing and speaking about the unprecedented convergence of events that will launch humanity into a completely new era of life on this planet. Now it’s here. One would have to be completely out of touch to not realize that huge changes are in the works. The magnitude of what we are all going to experience cannot be overstated. It is literally lining up to be the most unprecedented period in recorded history.
Trying to navigate our way through the rest of this decade is going to be more than a full time job. In conventional terms, forecasters like Martin Armstrong, for example, are making the rather compelling case for a looming global civil war next year followed by the end of the United States and the European Union within the next seven years.
But like the birth of a child, the process we’re experiencing will literally engender the emergence of the next evolutionary stage of homosapiens will, in turn, provide the basis for the whole new world. It is obvious that none of us from our personal experience can fully determine what we need to do — and become — in order to effectively make this transition. Being open, engaged, and focused enough to rise to the necessity of becoming someone much different than who each of us has been, is the key to navigating the disrupted waters that are sending warnings from the near horizon.
Here at The Arlington Institute we have been thinking about 2023 and 2024 for the last 20 years. We didn’t know when this time would come, but it’s obvious that it’s here now. All of our programs at TAI are specifically aimed at identifying what is inbound from the horizon, exploring the potential new worlds that may emerge and, most importantly, helping us all personally prepare for the coming shift.
You’re certainly familiar with some of what we do here: FUTUREdition, TransitionTalks, PostScript, Quartet, What’s Up!. I can show you how each of these is curated and produced specifically to focus on the above objectives. We are here specifically to facilitate the transition to this new world and we are forever grateful that you have chosen to be part of this process.
We have wonderful friends in the TAI community, both those who join us virtually and as the familiar faces that keep coming here to Berkeley Springs. We even have a new contingent of friends who have moved to our little resort town specifically to participate more intimately with the special community we have here. All of this excites us and motivates our small team to continue to offer to you all of these programs as best we can.
I don’t know of any other organization in the world that is focused on this transition the way we are. We try to look to the horizon in both conventional and unconventional terms. We’re interested, for example, in your finances, your health, how you support yourself, and how you anticipate what is headed this way. We’ve had a number of very interesting TransitionTalks on new discoveries that will shape the new world.
But we are also laser focused on the metaphysical – spiritual – aspects of this epochal shift. How each of us engages with the ephemeral aspects of our reality turns out to be the key to being able to forge ahead with confidence in the face of a very fluid, emerging environment. We believe you need to be informed about the possibilities ahead and aware of the constantly changing options that emerge and present themselves. It is far better to have thoughtfully considered as much as possible about what is headed this way so that whatever arrives is not a complete surprise. We’d like for you to be prepared for who you need to become and what you need to do.
We get many warm communications from our TAI family about the value they place on the programs we produce. We very much appreciate that and are always open to any ideas and suggestions that you might have about how we can be even more helpful in the future. This kind of communication will become critical as we all move forward into the new space.
We appreciate your involvement very much and hope that you will continue to partner with us going forward. Many of our programs are free. That’s important, I think, to make much of what we do available to anyone who wants and needs to have access to it.
But like anyone pushing ahead in this changing environment we need to generate enough revenue to take care of the wonderful people who are part of our small team. I take nothing financially out of the operations of The Arlington Institute – all of the revenue that we generate goes to support our team and our programs.
One benefit of the last two years is that we’ve been fortunate to be “forced” into livestreaming some of our events, particularly TransitionTalks. This has dramatically increased the reach of our programs and exposed us to a lot of new people who aren’t able to personally come to Berkeley Springs. In the case of well-known speakers like Gregg Braden and David Martin, we’ve had as much as three times the participation online as in the Berkeley Springs audience.
Nevertheless, what we generate from our operations is not quite enough to cover all of our ongoing obligations, and so every year we come to you just once during the holiday season and offer you the option of helping us financially with a gift. Your gift – of whatever size – is very important at this time and literally keeps FUTUREdition and TransitionTalks going.
Consider if you will whether what you receive from The Arlington Institute is worth two cups of coffee a month from someplace like Starbucks. It’s like two dollars for each issue of FUTUREdition . . . and everything else you receive from us. That adds up to be roughly $49 a year, which seems like a pretty good deal to many of our friends who help us out in this way.
So I’d ask you to consider sending along $49 – or whatever you can or want to send – to help keep our little operation going forward. Every year we have friends who are more generous than that – we even had one wonderful woman give us $5,000 once – but whatever you can do will be very much appreciated and very well used.
You can click here to send along your contribution.
Thank you so very much for considering this – and especially for being part of the TAI family. We look forward to being even more helpful to you in the coming year as we all – like explorers – push ahead into this extraordinary new time.
Warmest wishes for the holidays.
John L. Petersen
Founder and President
The Arlington Institute
Joey Korn is one of the most accomplished dousers in the world. For decades he has explored the outer edges of what can be done with dousing — far more than finding water or underground electrical cables. He comes to TransitionTALKS in January, with his most important discovery, what he calls Interference Energy and, ultimately, how to clear it. After conducting many thousands of space clearings — eliminating all forms of negative energy in a specific area — Joey has identified the energy that is the primary and most common cause of problems in people’s lives, homes, and offices. You have not learned about this unless you’ve heard it from Joey. His approach eliminates interference energy, which greatly increases negatively in all who attract it — and everyone around that person, especially their families, and pets.
Joey first found and learned to clear or remove Interference Energy from people and their homes about 16 years ago, and he has helped thousands of people by removing this energy from them, their families, and their homes in his Remote Personal Energy and Space Clearing Sessions. There are two ways to attract Interference Energy:
We can attract it directly by entering intense negative states of mind and emotion, in our reactions to difficult and traumatic times in our lives. Until Covid, this was the most common way to attract this energy.
Once someone attracts Interference Energy, others in their family and elsewhere can “catch” it, like an energetic virus. Since Covid, this has become the most common way to attract it.
With the world governments’ reactions to Covid, spreading fear around the world, and the political dichotomies in this country and many others, including the war in Ukraine, Interference Energy has become what Joey calls a Global Silent Pandemic. It’s affecting more people and wreaking more havoc in the world than Covid is, but nobody knows about this energy or that it can be easily removed from people and their homes.
In addition to leaving our energy pattern imprints around our bed, we also leave our energy pattern imprints for a period of time everywhere we sleep like hotels, vacation rentals, etc., so Interference Energy is also very common in those places, and it can spread to others who stay and leave imprints of their energy patterns there. And the same happens when we lie down on a therapy table for a massage, acupuncture, a doctor’s examination, etc. Joey feels certain that well more than half the people on the planet are either directly or indirectly affected by Interference Energy, yet again, no one knows about it unless they learned about it from Joey.
For 14 years, Joey knew only one way to remove this energy from people, as well as their homes and offices, and it would help his clients greatly, but he had a very difficult time teaching anyone else to do it. However, Joey has recently developed what he now calls his Miracle Blessing Process, which just about anyone can use to remove Interference Energy from themselves, from all in their families, and from many others, with no dowsing experience needed. Joey will share this blessing process with us, and you will be able to clear Interference Energy from all who may have it affecting you, your family, and it will do much more than that. His goal now is to spread his Miracle Blessing Process to millions of people around the world in the coming year, and you will be part of that process.
Joey Korn is a mystic and a global leader in the world of dowsing, with a primary interest in personal energy clearing and space clearing. Joey had a powerful mystical experience in 1974, when he was 21 years old, that put him very soundly on his spiritual Path. After that fateful night, Joey has had an unquenchable thirst to learn as much as he could about the powers of mind, about energy, light, healing, and about Life itself. Nothing has helped Joey accomplish this more than dowsing combined with the blessing process.
Joey learned to dowse in 1986 and has been a passionate dowser ever since. By 1997, he was teaching dowsing, combined with the blessing process, as well as offering on-site and remote space clearing services as his full-time profession, traveling extensively for many years. Joey no longer travels to teach, as conducting his Remote Personal and Space Clearing Services over the phone is his full-time work. However, he has made an exemption for our group, as we have become quite special to him after he spoke for us several years ago. Joey teaches now through Zoom-type sessions and in retreats that he and his wife of 45 years, Jill, conduct in their home near Augusta, Georgia, USA. Joey couldn’t do all that he does without his partnership with Jill, who will join him in his talk. Joey also shares his understandings in the revised edition of his book, “Dowsing: A Path to Enlightenment,” his videos, and through his Web site at www.dowsers.com. Joey and Jill can be reached at Jill@dowsers.com and 1-706-733-0204.
Brian Shilhavy, the editor of Health Impact News, queried the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) discovered a 10,661.4% increase in cancer reports as a result of experimental Covid-19 gene-base vaccines as compared with all FDA-approved vaccines over the last 30 years. Having first queried the cases of ‘the most common cancers [that] had been reported following Covid-19 vaccines,’ he found “837 cases of cancer, including 88 deaths, 66 permanent disabilities, and 104 life threatening events. He emphasized that even these numbers were not exhaustive, and the VAERS database could not handle the larger search of ‘ALL cancers listed in VAERS’ under this category of Covid inoculations. ‘Using the exact same search terms for cancer,’ he wrote, ‘I then searched ALL FDA-approved vaccines for the previous 30 years and found only 140 cases of cancer reported.’ Last October, a Swedish lab study found that the spike protein associated with the Covid-19 illness, and its experimental vaccines, enters the nucleus of cells and significantly interferes with DNA damage-repair functions, compromising a person’s adaptive immunity and perhaps encouraging the formation of cancer cells. In January, data leaks given by three ‘decorated high-ranking soldiers who are doctors and public health officials,’ in sworn declarations under penalty of perjury, showed enormous spikes in dozens of diseases following Covid vaccine uptake in the U.S. military. These included: miscarriages — 279% increase, hypertension (high blood pressure): 2,281% increase, diseases of the nervous system: 1,048% increase, and cancer: 296% increase.
Since shortly after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese citizens in the course of everyday life have routinely used mobile apps tied to their health records to produce QR codes that act as a passport—for movement around town or between localities. Residents of most big cities are now accustomed to registering their personal information or showing digital badges of their health status and travel history before entering public buildings. In early 2020, Chinese cyberspace authorities had already emphasized that digital responses to the nascent pandemic should not use personal information for other purposes. Last month, however, authorities in Henan province reportedly manipulated a health app system to immobilize potential protesters who feared teetering banks could lose their savings; more than a thousand people’s health codes turned red, apparently to keep them off the streets. However they are used or abused, the health apps are a constant new presence in Chinese daily life. This article details some basics on how they work, the functions they serve, and how they make it easy for officials to track literally every single individual’s location.
OpenAI last week opened up access to ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that interacts with users in an eerily convincing and conversational way. Its ability to provide lengthy, thoughtful and thorough responses to questions and prompts – even if inaccurate – has stunned users, including academics and some in the tech industry. The tool quickly went viral. Open AI’s co-founder Sam Altman, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, said on Twitter that ChatGPT has crossed one million users. It also captured the attention of some prominent tech leaders, such as Box CEO Aaron Levie. “There’s a certain feeling that happens when a new technology adjusts your thinking about computing. Google did it. Firefox did it. AWS did it. iPhone did it. OpenAI is doing it with ChatGPT,” Levie said on Twitter. But as with other AI-powered tools, it also poses possible concerns, including for how it could disrupt creative industries, perpetuate biases and spread misinformation. ChatGPT is a large language model trained on a massive trove of information online to create its responses. It comes from the same company behind DALL-E, which generates a seemingly limitless range of images in response to prompts from users. It’s also the next iteration of text-generator GPT-3. How people are using it: One person asked the chatbot to rewrite the 90s hit song, “Baby Got Back,” in the Style of “The Canterbury Tales;” another wrote a letter to remove a bad account from a credit report (rather than using a credit repair lawyer). Other colorful examples including asking for fairy-tale inspired home décor tips and giving it an AP English exam question. It responded with a 5 paragraph essay about Wuthering Heights. (Links to ChatGPT’s responses in the article.) In a blog post last week, OpenAI said the “format makes it possible for the tool to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.” However, while ChatGPT successfully fielded a variety of questions submitted by CNN, some responses were noticeably off. While the DALL-E tool is free, it does put a limit on the number of prompts a user can do before having to pay. When Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI, recently asked Altman on Twitter about the average cost per ChatGPT chat, Altman said: “We will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering.”
This article builds on the one above: A machine that talks like a person has long been a science fiction fantasy, and in the decades since the first chatbot was created, in 1966, developers have worked to build an AI that normal people could use to communicate with and understand the world. Now, with the explosion of text-generating systems like GPT-3 and a newer version released last week, ChatGPT, the idea is closer than ever to reality. For people like the landscaper featured in this article and uncertain of the written word, the AI is already fueling new possibilities about a technology that could one day reshape lives. The tool has captivated the internet, attracting more than a million users with writing that can seem surprisingly creative. In viral social media posts, ChatGPT has been shown describing complex physics concepts, completing history homework and crafting stylish poetry. ChatGPT has become a viral sensation due in large part to OpenAI’s marketing and the uncanny inventiveness of its prose. OpenAI has suggested that not only can the AI answer questions but it can also help plan a 10-year-old’s birthday party. Some tech executives and venture capitalists contend that these systems could form the foundation for the next phase of the web, perhaps even rendering Google’s search engine obsolete by answering questions directly, rather than returning a list of links. Paul Buchheit, an early Google employee who led the development of Gmail, tweeted an example in which he asked both tools the same question about computer programming: On Google, he was given a top result that was relatively unintelligible, while on ChatGPT he was offered a step-by-step guide created on the fly. The search engine, he said, “may be only a year or two from total disruption.” But its use has also fueled worries that the AI could deceive listeners, feed old prejudices and undermine trust in what we see and read. ChatGPT and other “generative text” systems mimic human language, but they do not check facts, making it hard for humans to tell when they are sharing good information or just spouting eloquently written gobbledygook. See also: How Google Got Smoked by ChatGPT.
Vast tranches of permafrost are melting, releasing material that’s been trapped in its icy grip for years. This includes a slew of microbes that have lain dormant for hundreds of millennia in some cases. To study the emerging microbes, scientists have now revived a number of these “zombie viruses” from Siberian permafrost, including one thought to be nearly 50,000 years old – a record age for a frozen virus returning to a state capable of infecting other organisms. The team behind the work, led by microbiologist Jean-Marie Alempic from the French National Centre for Scientific Research, says these reanimating viruses are potentially a significant threat to public health, and further study needs to be done to assess the danger that these infectious agents could pose as they awake from their icy slumber. The 48,500-year-old amoeba virus is actually one of 13 outlined in a new study currently in preprint, with nine of them thought to be tens of thousands of years old. The researchers established that each one was distinct from all other known viruses in terms of their genome. While the record-breaking virus was found beneath a lake, other extraction locations included mammoth wool and the intestines of a Siberian wolf – all buried beneath permafrost. Using live single-cell amoeba cultures, the team proved that the viruses still had the potential to be infectious pathogens. This team has previously detailed the discovery of a 30,000-year-old virus. It remains to be seen how infectious these viruses will be once they’re exposed to the light, heat and oxygen of the outdoor environment.
To prepare for the depths of winter when food is scarce, many animals slow down, sleep through the cold or migrate to warmer locales. Not the common shrew. To survive the colder months, the animal eats away at its own brain, reducing the organ by as much as a fourth, only to regrow much of brain matter in the spring. The process of shrinking and expanding the brain and other organs with seasons — dubbed Dehnel’s phenomenon — allows animals to reduce calorie-consuming tissue when temperatures drop. Researchers have discovered seasonal shrinkage in the skulls of other small, high-metabolism mammals, including weasels and, most recently, moles. The shrew’s incredible shrinking brain is more than just a biological curiosity. Understanding how these animals are able to restore their brain power may help doctors treat Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases in humans. “In the beginning, I couldn’t quite grasp it,” said John Dirk Nieland, an associate professor of health science and technology who is now researching drugs designed to mimic shrews’ brain-altering chemistry in humans. Shrews’ unorthodox strategy of reducing their brain power may help them save on energy during the winter, but it comes at a cost. In a series of experiments involving finding food in a sandbox, larger-brained shrews in the summer outperformed their smaller-brained counterparts in the winter, Dina Dechmann, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, and her team found. “It’s a compromise,” she said. “You make your brain smaller, you save energy, but you become — I don’t want to say stupid, but you become less good at solving certain learning tasks.” But it’s what happens next that’s remarkable: In the spring, their brains grow back, and their ability to solve lab puzzles appears to return, too. Figuring out how exactly shrews pull this off is the next step. For one, the shrew’s brain doesn’t regrow uniformly. The hippocampus expands back to normal, for instance, while the neocortex does not. Both of those parts of the brain help with memory. And it’s the lipid-rich white matter strewn throughout the brain that appears to be disappearing, suggesting the tiny mammal’s body may be consuming portions of its own brain to make it through the winter. (Paywall waived.)
Each year, approximately 3,000 children are born in the UK with a treatable rare condition that could be detected using genome sequencing. Although newborn babies are currently offered a heel-prick test to screen their blood for signs of nine rare but serious conditions, such as sickle cell disease and cystic fibrosis, whole genome sequencing could enable hundreds more such conditions to be diagnosed at birth. Now, Genomics England is going to test whether sequencing babies’ genomes at birth could help speed up the diagnosis of about 200 rare genetic diseases, and ensure faster access to treatment. The study, which will sequence the genomes of 100,000 babies over the next two years, will explore the cost-effectiveness of the approach, as well as how willing new parents are to accept it. Although researchers will only search babies’ genomes for genetic conditions that surface during early childhood, and for which an effective treatment already exists, their sequences will be held on file. This could open the door to further tests that could identify untreatable adult onset conditions, or other genetically determined traits, in the future. “One challenging thing with newborn genomes is that they will potentially accompany people from cradle to grave,” said Sarah Norcross, director of the Progress Educational Trust (PET), an independent charity that improves choices for people affected by infertility and genetic conditions. Ensuring the privacy of this data is therefore essential. “People must be able to trust that any data collected will only be used in the agreed way, and for the stated purpose,” Norcross said.
This 8 minute video clip is sponsored by Business Insider in their “World Wide Waste” series. It showcases a California startup called Sway that focuses on regenerative design solutions for plastic pollution. Sway makes compostable replacements for thin-film plastic out of seaweed. The company sources raw materials from seaweed farms, which can provide habitat for sea life, combat ocean acidification, and create jobs. For more the World Wide Waste series, see: Turning Tofu Waste Into Cooking Gas Helps Clean Rivers In Indonesia and How Bricks Made From Milk Cartons Can Help Typhoon Victims. If you’re looking for reasons for hope, check these out.
When I (author of this article) opened Twitter one day a couple of weeks ago, the first piece of “news” I read was that Sam Bankman-Fried had killed Jeffrey Epstein. I was never a super-user, but my feed used to feel more relevant and coherent than that. Things are falling apart. Teams of engineers and moderators have been eroded to nubs. Bugs have begun to multiply as software rot spreads: On Sunday, a tool gone rogue began blocking 4,000 accounts per second. On Tuesday, fleets of influential professors mysteriously lost all their followers. Sewage from newly unbanned, hateful accounts is bubbling out of Twitter’s drains. Twitter, everyone notes, is far from the biggest social network. But if we judge Twitter’s influence by its active users, we underestimate it massively. It has no peer as a forge of public opinion. In political analysis, publishing, public health, foreign policy, economics, history, the study of race, even in business and finance, Twitter has come to drive who gets quoted in the press. Who opines on TV. Who gets a podcast. In foreign affairs and political analysis, especially, it often determines whom we consider an authority. Almost every academic and journalist I know has come to read Twitter, even if they don’t have accounts. Twitter’s economic value as a company is roughly $4.51 billion. But there’s a far, far vaster value beyond that, what an economist might call the secondary value of Twitter. That encompasses the cash people make out of connections or prestige they develop on Twitter, but also the intangible wealth now vested in its communities and in the sense it offers to people of having a place in the world. That human currency cannot just be ported over, unchanged, to Mastodon. There are whole nations whose political discourse occurs mainly on Twitter. The amount of reputational and social wealth that stands to be lost if Twitter collapses is astounding. Twitter currently functions as perhaps the world’s biggest status bank, and the investments stored in it are terrifyingly unsecured. People giddy to see Musk fall on his face might not fully know what role Twitter plays day to day in many other countries. We’ve heard about Twitter’s role in the Arab Spring but less about how the political life of, for instance, Zimbabwe—run by a repressive government that cracks down ruthlessly on physical protests and political speech—now takes place on Twitter. (Editor’s note: We recommend this article, particularly if you are not a Twitter user, for the ways in which it showcases what Twitter has become and how the world uses it.)
New AI image-generation technology allows anyone to save a handful of photos (or video frames) of you, then train AI to create realistic fake photos that show you doing embarrassing or illegal things. Not everyone may be at risk, but everyone should know about it. Photographs have always been subject to falsifications—first in darkrooms with scissors and paste and then via Adobe Photoshop through pixels. But it took a great deal of skill to pull off convincingly. Today, creating convincing photorealistic fakes has become almost trivial. Once an AI model learns how to render someone, their image becomes a software plaything. The AI can create images of them in infinite quantities. And the AI model can be shared, allowing other people to create images of that person as well. When we started writing this article, we asked a brave volunteer if we could use their social media images to attempt to train an AI model to create fakes. They agreed, but the results were too convincing, and the reputational risk proved too great. So instead, we used AI to create a set of seven simulated social media photos of a fictitious person we’ll call “John.” That way, we can safely show you the results. For now, let’s pretend John is a real guy. The outcome is exactly the same, as you’ll see in the article. In our pretend scenario, “John” is an elementary school teacher. Like many of us, over the past 12 years, John has posted photos of himself on Facebook at his job, relaxing at home, or while going places. Using nothing but those seven images, someone could train AI to generate images that make it seem like John has a secret life. For example, he might like to take nude selfies in his classroom. At night, John might go to bars dressed like a clown. On weekends, he could be part of an extremist paramilitary group. And maybe he served prison time for an illegal drug charge but has hidden that from his employer. And here’s the photographic “proof”. Basically, computer scientists have figured out how to generate new photorealistic images of anything you can imagine by teaching AI using real photos, and the technology has accelerated rapidly over the past year. The tech has been controversial because, aside from photos, it has also allowed people to generate new artwork that imitates existing artists’ work without their permission. One of the most impactful AI image generators is called Stable Diffusion. It’s a deep-learning image synthesis model (a fancy term for AI software) that can generate completely new images from text descriptions. It can run locally on a Windows or Linux PC with a beefy GPU, on a Mac, or in the cloud on rented computer hardware. Stability AI released Stable Diffusion as open source software on August 22, 2022, meaning anyone can use it for free, and it has become integrated into a growing number of commercial products. If you’re one of the billions of people who have posted pictures of themselves on social media over the past decade, it may be time to rethink that behavior.
Mighty Buildings has delivered what it claims is the world’s first 3D-printed net-zero home as part of a 40-unit community in Desert Hot Springs that explores environmental and economic development strategies. The Oakland-based technology company completed the 1,171-square-foot home in September 2022. Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects (EYRC) designed the two-bedroom, two-bath home, known as the Quatro, which the team says will produce as much energy as it consumes using Mighty Buildings’ flexible, panelized kit of parts. The exterior composite stone wall panels were 3D printed in a factory in Oakland. The proprietary material – known as Light Stone – is a concrete alternative with four times more tensile and flexural strength, 30% less weight and less carbon dioxide, according to the company. The home’s light-gauge steel roof cassettes and plumbing/mechanical core module were also prefabricated off-site, allowing the home’s components to be installed on its concrete slab foundation in less than a day. Vertical floor-to-ceiling windows fit between the wall panels, while black metal flashing caps the embedded parapet and conceals the foundation connection. The entire home can be constructed within 4-5 months, significantly accelerating onsite completion and resulting in more productive onsite workers and higher returns for developers.
US Department of Energy officials have announced a history-making accomplishment in nuclear fusion: A team of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in California produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy they used to power the experiment. The so-called “net energy gain” is a major milestone in a decades-long attempt to source clean, limitless energy from nuclear fusion – the reaction that happens when two or more atoms are fused together. The experiment put in 2.05 megajoules of energy to the target and resulted in 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy output – generating more than 50% more energy than was put in. It’s the first time an experiment resulted in a meaningful gain of energy. We are still a very long way from having nuclear fusion power the electric grid, experts caution. The project, while groundbreaking, only produced enough energy to boil about 2.5 gallons of water, said Tony Roulstone, a fusion expert from the engineering department at the University of Cambridge. That may not seem like much, but the experiment is still hugely significant because scientists demonstrated that they can create more energy than they started with.
After five years, Tesla’s first heavy-duty Semi had been delivered to PepsiCo. The Semi, Tesla announced, would go into production in 2023 and feature an updated version of Tesla’s Supercharger, which uses liquid-cooling technology in its charging cable and is capable of charging the large electric vehicle at 1 megawatt. However, Musk failed to clarify key details like how much the Semis can haul, how much they will cost, and when Tesla will start producing hundreds of Semis for companies that pre-ordered them as early as 2017. Analysts were especially disappointed that Tesla did not disclose the weight of an unloaded Semi, which would have helped them calculate efficiency on the road. The Semi’s powertrain technology relies on three motors to generate “crazy power,” Musk said, by engaging one at highway speed and reserving two for acceleration. Five years ago, when Tesla offered the world its first look at the Semi in 2017, Pepsi promptly ordered 100 trucks. But production of the heavy-duty truck became stalled while competitors beat Tesla to market with rival fully electric Class 8 vehicles. Before this week, the only glimpse that the public got suggesting that the Semi could soon be hitting roads was a prototype spotted in 2018. At the reveal, Musk also teased a new “robotaxi” in development at Tesla and suggested that the fast-charging technology propelling the updated Supercharger would also be used to power the Tesla pickup truck.
A pair of Japanese researchers have launched a startup that turns food waste into cement with 4-times better bending resistance than conventional cement. The potential applications are endless, and as well as being potential building material, the material can be used to produce any kind of simple object like tea cups or chairs; but it’s also edible, and aromatic, and biodegradable. Tokyo University’s Kota Machida and Yuya Sakai are the brains behind Fabula Inc, a project to reduce food waste, help curb global warming, reduce pressure on landfills, and offer a new way of looking at production with their method of turning common types of food waste into a material that’s edible and strong. It took years of development but the method is simple. Food waste is dried, turned into a powder, and then heat-pressed into a mold. The difficulties originally arose from the fact that every food item needed different temperatures and pressures to correctly solidify. Now they can make concrete from Chinese cabbage, coffee grounds, orange rinds, squash and pumpkin waste, banana peels, seaweed, and onion scraps. They’ve turned this into tiles and panels for emergency shelter building, cups, plates, and other things as proof-of-concepts. Chinese cabbage produces the strongest cement, oddly enough, with a 5 millimeter plate capable of supporting over 60 pounds of weight. Fabula is currently working with firms to produce various products like cup sets and furniture, but that Sakai’s aspirations are higher—that of edible emergency shelters in disaster zones. “For example, if food cannot be delivered to evacuees, they could eat makeshift beds made out of food cement,” he said. Indeed the food waste cement is edible, if it is broken into pieces and boiled. For this reason, Fabula say that different mixes of materials, such as spices, can produce different flavors, colors, and even aromas in the cement.
The war began with Russian tanks rolling across Ukraine’s borders, World War I-style trenches carved into the earth, and Soviet-made artillery pounding the landscape. It has been transformed into a digital-age competition for technological superiority in the skies — one military annals will mark as a turning point. In past conflicts, drones were typically used by one side over largely uncontested airspace to locate and hit targets — for example, in U.S. operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East. In the battle between Russia and Ukraine, drones are integrated into every phase of fighting, with extensive fleets, air defenses and jamming systems on each side. It is a war fought at a distance — the enemy is often miles away — and nothing bridges the gap more than drones, giving Russia and Ukraine the ability to see, and attack, each other without ever getting close. Drones have become so critical to battlefield success that at times they are used to take out other drones. In early September, just days before Ukraine launched an offensive to expel Russian forces from its northeastern Kharkiv region, a Ukrainian reconnaissance drone flew through a gap between two jamming systems near the Russian border. It crossed into Russia and turned north across the Belgorod region, where Russia bases equipment to support its war in eastern Ukraine. The drone spotted a base for Moscow’s own unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), according to overhead images captured by the Ukrainians. In one frame, a Russian Orlan-10, with a trademark propeller on its nose, could be seen sitting in the field beside a house. Then in an “after” photo, the house had a hole in its roof, and an ambulance could be seen driving up. A Ukrainian attack drone had followed the same route as the reconnaissance drone — and delivered a strike on the fleet of enemy “eyes.” The attack dealt a blow to the Russian forces’ ability to see the Ukrainian offensive coming and to counterattack. Article includes information about various specific types of drones and how they are being used by Russian and Ukrainian forces. The most popular drone used by each side can fit in your hand — more a bug than a bird. The small Mavic quadcopter, which like the Matrice 300 is produced by Chinese manufacturer DJI, costs less than $4,000 online. Yuri Baluyevsky, a retired general who served as chief of Russia’s armed forces, called it “a true symbol of modern warfare,” in a book on advanced military strategies published this year. “Two main developments are going to impact future war,” said Samuel Bendett, a military analyst at the Virginia-based research group CNA. “The proliferation and availability of combat drones for longer-ranged, more-sophisticated operations, and the absolute necessity to have cheap tactical drones for close-support operations.” In Ukraine, that future is now. (Paywall waived.)
The Transportation Security Administration has been quietly testing controversial facial recognition technology for passenger screening at 16 major domestic airports — from Washington to Los Angeles — and hopes to expand it across the United States as soon as next year. Kiosks with cameras are doing a job that used to be completed by humans: checking the photos on travelers’ IDs to make sure they’re not impostors. The TSA says facial recognition, which has been banned by cities such as San Francisco, helps improve security and possibly also efficiency. But it’s also bringing an unproven tech, with civil rights ramifications we still just don’t understand, to one of the most stressful parts of travel. Everybody wants better safety, but is this really safer — and what are its real costs? For this article, TSA’s Jason Lim, who helps run the program formally known as Credential Authentication Technology with Camera (CAT-2) and Albert Fox Cahn, the founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or STOP, and one of the biggest critics of facial recognition, were interviewed. Currently the TSA has put some important constraints on its use of facial recognition — but its current programs are just the beginning. The TSA is also running a pilot of a second system at a few airports where you don’t even have to present your physical ID for inspection. Your face is your ID. No, you don’t have to participate in facial recognition at the airport. Whether you’ll feel like you have a real choice is a separate question. (Paywall waived.)
For months before the actual consummation of the sale that gave him ownership, Elon Musk vowed to return free speech to the massive social media platform that is Twitter. And there have been some discoveries that are as stunning as they are unnerving. The release by Musk of internal emails highlights Twitter’s 2020 censorship and suppression of the New York Post story a month before the 2020 presidential election. These revelations make undeniable the blatant conflicts of interest, influence peddling and likely crimes of Hunter Biden and the incestuous complicity of his business partner, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. Who persuaded the Twitter brass of 2020—not to mention the corrupt and highly partisan national media—to suppress the story? Two former Democratic intelligence officials, James Clapper and John Brennan. How did they manage this? By deceitfully issuing a press release that they believed the laptop may have been hacked and its content was “Russian disinformation.” This matters because the revelation of influence-peddling by Hunter Biden just prior to the election was obviously newsworthy given that former VP Biden had repeatedly said he had “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” The emails effectively proved that Joe Biden was not only aware of his son’s business dealings but actually participated in meetings in support of this lucrative, international scheme to sell access to the U.S. Government. Thus, it is demonstrable that Joe Biden lied directly to the American people throughout the 2020 campaign and in the Presidential Debates. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials have authority by dint of access to information that isn’t confirmable by the press, which takes their spin as gospel. As the Wall St. Journal notes, “This is a form of political corruption that needs to be exposed, and perhaps the Twitter documents will help to unlock the story.”
Tennessee, Alabama, Oregon, and Vermont voted in the November elections to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime, while Louisiana did not. The votes had to do with the hundreds of thousands of incarcerated Americans forced to work for pennies an hour – and sometimes no wage at all. The four approved initiatives won’t bring about any immediate changes in the states’ prisons, but they could remove some barriers to legal challenges over the brutal treatment of prisoners. There are reasons to doubt much change will come from the votes. Colorado voters made slavery and involuntary servitude unconstitutional in 2018, but the state’s court of appeals just recently decided that the people did not mean to abolish the state Department of Corrections’ prison labor program. There are also rules in place from the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996 that make it nearly impossible for prisoners to enforce what little rights they have in court. The law requires that incarcerated people exhaust purposefully burdensome and opaque administrative avenues within correctional facilities before they can bring a suit in court. As expected, this leads to retaliation from correctional officers. Forced prison labor allows the system to grow without becoming too much of a strain on tax dollars, and it helps private companies maximize profits. Incarcerated workers earn little pay that is often garnished and in seven states they are paid nothing at all for most jobs. Nationally, incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion a year in goods and commodities and over $9 billion a year in services for the maintenance of the prisons where they are warehoused. The ACLU research found that the average minimum hourly wage for non-industry work is 13 cents with an average maximum of 52 cents. And because incarcerated workers’ wages are so low, families already struggling from the loss of income when a family member is incarcerated and removed from household wage earning must step in to financially support an incarcerated loved one. Families with an incarcerated loved one spend an estimated $2.9 billion a year on commissary accounts and phone calls – which is additional revenue for the prisons.
This article is a thread of Tweets written by Matt Taibbi on Dec. 2 about Twitter’s content moderation practices—specifically dealing with the Hunter Biden laptop story—after being given internal documents by Elon Musk. Outlets like USA Today have reported they have not been able to verify the authenticity of the emails. The thread was promoted by Musk stating “The public deserves to know what really happened …” In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters. Then slowly, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”
Iranian officials have worried for years that other nations have been depriving them of one of their vital water sources. But it was not an upstream dam that they were worrying about, or an aquifer being bled dry. In 2018, amid a searing drought and rising temperatures, some senior officials concluded that someone was stealing their water from the clouds. “Both Israel and another country are working to make Iranian clouds not rain,” Brig. Gen. Gholam Reza Jalali, a senior official in the country’s powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps, said in a 2018 speech. The unnamed country was the United Arab Emirates, which had begun an ambitious cloud-seeding program, injecting chemicals into clouds to try to force precipitation. As the Middle East and North Africa dry up, countries in the region have embarked on a race to develop the chemicals and techniques that they hope will enable them to squeeze rain drops out of clouds that would otherwise float fruitlessly overhead. With 12 of the 19 regional countries averaging less than 10 inches of rainfall a year, a decline of 20% over the past 30 years, their governments are desperate for any increment of fresh water, and cloud seeding is seen by many as a quick way to tackle the problem. And as wealthy countries like the emirates pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort, other nations are joining the race, trying to ensure that they do not miss out on their fair share of rainfall before others drain the heavens dry — despite serious questions about whether the technique generates enough rainfall to be worth the effort and expense. Morocco and Ethiopia have cloud-seeding programs, as does Iran. Saudi Arabia just started a large-scale program, and a half-dozen other Middle Eastern and North African countries are considering it. However, China has the most ambitious program worldwide, with the aim of either stimulating rain or halting hail across half the country. It is trying to force clouds to rain over the Yangtze River, which is running dry in some spots. While cloud seeding has been around for 75 years, experts say the science has yet to be proven. And they are especially dismissive of worries about one country draining clouds dry at the expense of others downwind. (Paywall waived.)
San Francisco officials have voted against a controversial measure that would have allowed police to deploy robots to use lethal force in extreme situations, reversing course after public outcry against the policy. The about-face from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors comes a week after the board voted to approve the policy in an initial first reading vote, which prompted a protest at City Hall Monday, with some holding signs that said, “NO KILLER ROBOTS!” In the second vote, the board voted to remove text pertaining to robots and use of lethal force, according to Natalie Gee, the chief of staff for the board’s president. The text was initially included as part of a larger ordinance aiming to approve San Francisco Police Department funding and use of certain law enforcement equipment, Gee said. The mayor still has to approve the general ordinance before it goes into effect. Supervisor Hillary Ronen said, “The public outcry helped six Supervisors fully appreciate the gravity of last week’s vote and the numerous unanswered questions about both the ethics and practical implications of allowing police to use machines to kill human beings.”
Late last year, scientists spotted a 50-second-long blast of energy coming towards Earth, known as a gamma-ray burst or GRB, which are the most powerful explosions in the universe. Immediately, researchers started looking for the afterglow that such blasts leave behind, with that visible light being useful to find where the blast has come from. But those researchers instead found something else entirely: that the blast appeared to have come from a kilonova. Those rare events only happen when a neutron star merges with another very compact object – either another neutron star or a black hole. The study challenges our understanding of where such long-lasting GRBs come from. But it could also provide an exciting way to answer other questions about the universe, such as where its heaviest elements come from, which still remains a mystery. And the galaxy from which the GRB came from is also strange. It is young and still forming stars – the opposite of the only other known nearby galaxy that has played host to such an event. “This event looks unlike anything else we have seen before from a long gamma-ray burst,” said Jillian Rastinejad, from Northwestern University, who led the study. “Its gamma rays resemble those of bursts produced by the collapse of massive stars. Among other findings, the study showed that the one event produced heavy elements that amounted to roughly 1,000 times the mass of our Earth. That suggests that kilonovae are the main place that gold is produced in the universe. And because the galaxy from which the GRB came from is relatively nearby, scientists were able to get an unusually good look at it. What’s more, that could help explain other gamma-ray bursts that do not seem to fit with our understanding of where they come from.
A few days ago, NASA’s uncrewed Orion spacecraft reached its farthest distance from Earth at nearly 270,000 miles away as part of the agency’s Artemis I mission. It’s the farthest a spacecraft capable of carrying human passengers has ever traveled, in fact, at about 20,000 miles clear of the previous record set by the crewed Apollo 13 mission in 1970. At its journey’s zenith, the Orion spacecraft took a moment to gaze back towards its home planet, and captured a photo (shown in article) for the ages, showing both the Moon and the Earth, each half shrouded in shadow and perfectly in line with each other, resting in the unyielding black of space, while part of the capsule and its NASA logos are proudly in view ahead of them. The Moon appears larger than Earth, but neither could be described as large overall. It’s the ultimate, space-spanning exercise in perspective, where an entire world is reduced to a mere marble, looking no more significant than a plastic Earth you’d find hanging in a toy solar system over a child’s bed at night. Unlike that plastic imitation, however, there’s about eight billion of us inhabiting the real one. But from Orion’s lofty vantage point, you’d never be able to tell. No buildings, no cities, and no, not even the Great Wall — only patches of blue ocean effaced by swirls of cloud. Mission lead flight director Rick LaBrode at a NASA news conference said, “It’s really hard to articulate what the feeling is. It’s really amazing to be here, and see that.” That ineffable mix of emotions, full of awe at the sublime beauty, but also of a humbling insignificance, has been described as the Overview Effect, in which many astronauts have reported similar evocations after seeing the Earth from space in person. The fact that this was taken by a craft designed to carry people implies that one day, humans, too, will be able to travel that far, and perhaps beyond, where the Earth may be no more than, yes, a Pale Blue Dot, or not even a dot at all.
A deep learning model that uses a single chest X-ray to predict the 10-year risk of death from a heart attack or stroke, stemming from atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease has been developed by researchers. “Our deep learning model offers a potential solution for population-based opportunistic screening of cardiovascular disease risk using existing chest X-ray images,” said the study’s lead author, Jakob Weiss, M.D., a radiologist affiliated with the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and the AI in Medicine program at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “This type of screening could be used to identify individuals who would benefit from statin medication but are currently untreated.” The team built the model to predict the risk of death from cardiovascular disease using 147,497 chest X-rays from 40,643 participants in the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal, and Ovarian Cancer Screening Trial, a multi-center, randomized controlled trial designed and sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. “We’ve long recognized that X-rays capture information beyond traditional diagnostic findings, but we haven’t used this data because we haven’t had robust, reliable methods,” Dr. Weiss said. “Advances in AI are making it possible now.”
This article focuses on 10 significant breakthroughs that occurred in 2022. The accomplishments span every station of life, from birth to death, and every component, from our cells to the stars. They include a drug that revives the organs of dead animals; an embryo created without sperm or egg; a telescope to see the universe’s first moments; and an AI that conjures award-winning art. One theme of this year’s list is the principle of “twin ideas”—the tendency for major breakthroughs to have more than one author. The telegraph was invented by Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse in the same year, 1837, and patents for the telephone were filed by Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell on the same day in 1876. Accordingly, many of this year’s breakthroughs are group efforts rather than individual awards. We didn’t just get one mind-blowing generative AI app this year; we got several in the span of a few months. We didn’t just get one “unheard-of” cancer breakthrough; we got several in one year. These breakthroughs are just the beginning of a long story called progress. Some of these promising discoveries might never yield a product that’s cheap and widely available. Others may take years or even decades to realize their potential. Capable companies, fair policies, and wise regulations will be necessary to coax real flourishing from these seedlings. During the year, many of these were covered individually in FUTUREdition, but it can be hard to see a trajectory when you are looking at separate dots. So here is a panoramic look at a whole sweep of breakthroughs.
For decades starry-eyed technologists have claimed that AI will upend the business world, creating enormous benefits for firms and customers. A survey by McKinsey Global Institute, the consultancy’s in-house think-tank, found that this year 50% of firms across the world had tried to use AI in some way, up from 20% in 2017. In 2006 Nick Bostrom of Oxford University observed that “once something becomes useful enough and common enough it’s not labelled AI any more”. Ali Ghodsi, boss of Databricks, a company that helps customers manage data for AI applications, see an explosion of such “boring AI”. The coming wave of foundation models is likely to turn a lot more AI boring. These algorithms hold two big promises for business. The first is that foundation models are capable of generating new content. Stability AI and Midjourney, two startups, build generative models which create new images for a given prompt. Request a dog on a unicycle in the style of Picasso—or, less frivolously, a logo for a new startup—and the algorithm conjures it up in a minute or so. Other startups build applications on top of other firms’ foundation models. The second advantage is that, once trained, foundation AIs are good at performing a variety of tasks rather than a single specialized one. Take GPT3, a natural-language model developed by OpenAI, which forms the basis for ChatGPT. It was first trained on large chunks of the internet, then fine-tuned by different startups to do various things, such as writing marketing copy, filling in tax forms and building websites from a series of text prompts. Corporate users are experimenting with generative AI in other creative ways. Mr. Sanchez of John Deere says his firm is looking into AI-generated “synthetic” data, which would help train other AI models. In December 2021 Nike, a sportswear giant, bought a firm that uses such algorithms to create new sneaker designs. Since last month Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, has been able to invent stories to tell children. Nestlé, a Swiss food company, is using images created by DALLE-2, another OpenAI model, to help sell its yogurts. Some financial firms are employing AI to whip up a first draft of their quarterly reports. You may not see it, but these days AI is everywhere.
When shoppers have been massacred in the aisles or workers gunned down in the break room, how soon is too soon to reopen a store? How much carnage on a nightclub’s dance floor is too much to ever restart the music? What can new drywall and carpeting do to exorcise the horror of mass murder from an office building or high school? As shootings devastate one setting after another around the country, the people who run or own them face a grim calculation they don’t (yet) teach in management school: When, whether and how to resume business in places of mass death. Atrocities create numerous constituencies, and business owners find themselves considering the wishes of survivors, displaced workers, grieving families, customers and local officials. In city after city, institutions have struggled to balance commerce and grief, respect and resilience, weighing the sometimes-conflicting views of survivors, victims’ families, displaced workers and local officials. “What I’ve learned is that every community does it differently,” said Barbara Poma, the owner of Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, where a domestic terrorist attack killed 49 people one June night in 2016. “You have to do a lot of listening.” On mass killing sites — including Colorado’s Columbine High School (13 victims in 1999) and Buffalo’s Tops Market (10 victims in May) resumed operations after top-to-bottom renovations. The El Paso Walmart reopened three months after 23 people were shot to death there in the summer of 2019. The city of Virginia Beach spent more than $500,000 to clean part of its municipal center after a rampage left 13 dead inside of Building 2. As Nic Grzecka, the co-owner the owner of the Club Q in Colorado Springs said, “There are no playbooks for this.” In fact, now there are. Within hours of the Walmart shooting, West, Chesapeake’s mayor, was emailed a copy of a “Mass Shooting Playbook” by the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. It draws on the experience of mayors around the country to guide local leaders through the first 24 hours and then weeks of response and recovery. The bleak trend of tragedies is also expanding the portfolios of crisis management firms. Allan Koenig, a partner at Dallas-based LDWW, has helped dozens of institutions deal with workplace violence, some after the fact and, increasingly, some in advance. He recently provided a medium-sized manufacturer with a just-in-case response kit that includes pre-written, pre-lawyered press releases ready to be topped with a date and a body count, statements for social media and locations to park the media satellite trucks. “It’s a very strange niche,” said Koenig. “It went from being a fringe part of the practice to a pillar of the practice.” (Paywall waived.)
Decoupling from China-based supply chains is everywhere. The reasons for these shifts range from anti-government protests and factory disruptions in China, to national security and domestic labor concerns, to the cost of fuel or the emissions from a long transport route, to avoiding IP theft, and to capturing the benefits of faster innovation or quicker time to market by producing “local for local”. But the bottom line is that the diversification, regionalization and localization of global supply chains has only just begun, and will probably broaden and deepen in the coming years. This is not only because lawmakers are increasingly incentivizing or insisting on it, but also because there is a burgeoning group of companies providing the services and data to make it possible. Large multinationals have done so much complex outsourcing that they literally may have no idea how to make their own products by themselves anymore. Indeed, they may not even know who is making those products now (or investing in them), because of the sheer magnitude of corporate globalization over the past half century, particularly between the US and China. Business leaders need detailed maps to begin to understand their own supply chains beyond the most surface level. This is where data entrepreneurs are stepping in. One of the most interesting is WireScreen, part of The Wire Digital Inc, a US-based news and data platform focused on China and global supply chains. It tracks 10mn companies registered to do business in China, and what it reveals speaks volumes. The Wire uses open source data from China’s own state registry of corporations to create a 360-degree map of every major public and private company operating in the country. The results are shocking. It is quite common, for example, to find evidence of companies under sanctions partnering with US firms, or blacklisted companies controlling multiple non-blacklisted affiliates, meaning that they could legally import goods and services for their sanctioned investor or parent. While the Wire can’t “see” violations because it doesn’t have trading records, it does regularly demo the platform to government officials.
Without this debate, there can be no understanding of what will be needed for a lasting peace. Russia mounted a military invasion of a sovereign country in an attempt to bend it forcibly to its will. It has broken every rule of the international order; it is the aggressor. What more is there to say? Quite a lot, the author of this article would submit. For while there is general agreement about what has happened, and how, there are two quite different, even opposite, views about why. The first is the view that has dominated what might be called the Western political and media mainstream since the Russians invaded Ukraine on 24 February this year. According to this, the war is a war of aggression. Russia is by its very nature an imperialist power, and its objective is to restore if not the Soviet Union, then the Russia empire. The other view is almost the mirror image, but it has been heard far less than the first. According to this, Russia’s war on Ukraine is at its root defensive and was launched against what Moscow saw as a growing – and mortal – threat to its security. Russia felt weakened after the 1991 Soviet collapse. It had stood by through the 1990s and early 2000s, as the former Warsaw Pact countries and the Baltic states joined the Western alliance. But now Ukraine was being groomed by the US (and the UK) to the point where it was de facto, if not – yet – de jure, a NATO member, too. Fearful for its own security, Russia judged it had to pounce before intent became fact. This second view, which sees actions by the West as a major, even decisive, factor pushing Russia to war has recently found expression in a concise and elegant little book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022). What Abelow does, in a succinct 70 pages, is set the war in its wider historical context, enumerate the actions on the Western side that preceded Russia’s invasion, and explain how they might have been seen in Moscow. The remainder of this article is a précis of the book. (Editor’s note: We recommend this article for its exposition of a perspective that is seldom offered by the western media.)
Penrose tilings are a form of aperiodic pattern. Like other aperiodic patterns, this means they don’t repeat themselves. Part of what makes Penrose tiling so beautiful is that it can have rotational symmetry and reflection symmetry, even though it doesn’t have translational symmetry. But if those words don’t do much for you, no problem. The 6 ½ minute video clip will show you how those words describe the math underpinning some of the world’s most beautiful geometric patterns and then give you a link where you can create some of those patterns for yourself.
If you make a dismal prediction and it comes true,
it means you’ve failed to have utility.
– Jaron Lanier
A special thanks to: Abby Porter, Bobbie Rohn, Bill Sanda, Steve Ujvarosy and all of you who have sent us interesting links in the past. If you see something we should know about, do send it along – thanks.
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Joni Patry
Joni Patry is one of the most recognized teachers and Vedic astrologers in the world. She was a faculty member for ACVA, CVA and Instructor for online certification programs, published many books, journals and appeared on national and international television shows. As the keynote speaker for international conferences, she has a Japanese website, and teaches in Austria, Turkey and India. She has been awarded the 2015 Jyotish Star of the year and Dr B. V. Raman’s Janma Shatamanothsava Award Jyotisha Choodamani. She publishes an online astrological magazine, Astrologic Magazine http://astrologicmagazine.com/ and has an online University for certification, the University of Vedic Astrology. http://universityofvedicastrology.com
Joey Korn is one of the most accomplished dowsers in the world. Known internationally for an extraordinary ability to change and manipulate energy at all levels, he brings a deep, practical understanding of how to balance these energies . . . and change the way that they influence humans and their lives.
Robert David Steele, former spy, former Marine Corps officer, a proponent of Open Source Everything, Presidential candidate in 2012 and perhaps again in 2024, recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 will integrate his life’s experience with his lessons from the works of others to explore love versus fear as a foundation for politics; liberty under natural law versus predatory fascism as we now have in the USA; and the possibilities for cosmic awakening very soon, in a full-on defeat of the Deep State and its Archon masters.
Lee Carrol a.k.a. Kryon
Lee Carroll, Ph.D. has channeled Kryon for 25 years worldwide and is the author of the Kryon Series of 16 books in 24 languages. Well known in metaphysics, Kryon books have made the top seller’s list within months of their release. Having presented seven times at the United Nations in New York, as well as in 33 different countries overseas, Lee attracts audiences in the thousands.
Good health is dependent on the appropriate transfer of information within and between cells. The informational and molecular disharmonies associated with disease can be reversed using appropriate therapeutic signals that stimulate the return to the normal state without adverse effects. One such signal molecule, SLO, has demonstrated clinical utility in a broad spectrum of indications that would at first glance appear to be unrelated. The underlying common thread that links these disorders is representative of the targets to which resonant molecular signals are directed.
Dennis McKenna’s research has focused on the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. His doctoral research (University of British Columbia, 1984) focused on the ethnopharmacology of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, two tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. Dr. McKenna is author or co-author of 4 books and over 50 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Paul H. Smith is the longest-serving controlled remote viewing (CRV) teacher active today, having begun his career as an instructor in 1984. He served for seven years in the government’s Star Gate remote viewing program at Ft. Meade, MD (from September 1983 to August 1990). Starting 1984, he became one of only five Star Gate personnel to be personally trained as remote viewers by the legendary founders of remote viewing, Ingo Swann and Dr. Harold E. Puthoff at SRI-International.
Raymon Grace, one of the world’s most extraordinary dowsers, travels the world teaching and demonstrating how dowsing can be used by most anyone to change themselves and the world around them. His down-home, direct approach is sought out by many thousands of searchers who are looking for bettering their lives and dealing with the extraordinary change that the world is experiencing.
Charles Eisenstein is a teacher, speaker, and writer focusing on themes of civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution. His on-line writings have generated a vast following; he speaks frequently at conferences and other events and gives numerous interviews on radio and podcasts.
In 1980, Jim McCarty joined L/L Research where Don Elkins and Carla L. Rueckert were researching the field of the paranormal in general, and contact with extraterrestrial intelligence in particular. Soon later the Ra Contact began, producing 106 sessions with the social memory complex of Ra. Five books of The Law of One series were published documenting this contact.
Michael Waters is an advanced technology consultant, researcher, inventor, and sustainable recovery strategist. His automated disaster recovery and library preservation systems are used worldwide. Michael has researched cutting edge science and technologies that redefine current understandings in mainstream physics. He is currently on the board of a number of organizations involved in advanced energy, mining, agriculture, and finance.
Chris Robinson
Chris Robinson’s amazing ability to dream about the future in terms that can be reliably translated into people, times, places, and activities has been the subject of books, major university scientific studies, films, articles, TV shows, and just about all forms of media. He has taught many people how to dream about the future and, through his advanced intuitive capabilities, helped thousands to understand how to deal with seemingly impossible personal situations. He is also a healer, having on numerous occasions led people with supposedly terminal conditions to eliminate those issues and return to a healthy life. There is no one else in the world that has Chris’s fascinating background (undercover police work, etc.), coupled with these amazing personal gifts.
Las Vegas headliner, Alain Nu – “The Man Who Knows”, brings us his mind-bending mental and metaphysical abilities. His highly entertaining and most provocative show intermingles feats of mind-reading and spoon bending with other baffling demonstrations that defy explanation.
Joni Patry
Joni Patry is one of the most recognized teachers and Vedic astrologers in the world. She was a faculty member for ACVA, CVA and Instructor for online certification programs, published many books, journals and appeared on national and international television shows. As the keynote speaker for international conferences, she has a Japanese website, and teaches in Austria, Turkey and India. She has been awarded the 2015 Jyotish Star of the year and Dr B. V. Raman’s Janma Shatamanothsava Award Jyotisha Choodamani. She publishes an online astrological magazine, Astrologic Magazine http://astrologicmagazine.com/ and has an online University for certification, the University of Vedic Astrology. http://universityofvedicastrology.com
As Regina’s career progressed, so did her decades long exploration into the world of esoteric and hidden sciences – the reality beyond the 5 sense world. Guidance from these realms suggested it was time to bring her skill set to the world of video/televised media, so in late 2004, along with her husband Scott, she co-created ‘Conscious Media Network’, the first online network to feature full length original video interviews with authors and experts in the realms of the meta-physical, healing arts and alternative theories, opening up a world that many had experienced but never had access to on this scale.
Gaia: In 2012, Conscious Media Network merged with Gaiam TV in 2012, with Regina serving as anchor in their new media division on Open Minds and Healing Matrix. The demand for Regina’s unique perspective on a variety of subjects has drawn attention from conference organizers, moving her into the public as a presenter at conferences. In addition, Regina offers retreats and workshops for those who wish to ‘Dive Deep’ into a new understanding of the nature of reality and life itself. In this venue she shares her exclusive approach to meditation and regression work for a greater understanding of life’s challenges and identifying the innate joys.
Although nominated for a Nobel Prize in physics for his breakthrough theoretical work on zero-point energy, Dr. Harold Puthoff, is most recognized for having been a co-founder of the secret US government “remote viewing” program that successfully used psychics to spy on the Soviet Union and China.
Now a principal and science advisor in a leading-edge effort by former senior military and intelligence managers to disclose the many decades of interest that the US has had in UFOs, he comes to Berkeley Springs on the 8th of February to give a TransitionTalk about his work in making sense out of the UFO phenomena.
Dr. Puthoff’s presentation will include a summary of his current activities with To The Stars Academy, which is on the forefront of bringing into the open formerly highly classified efforts by the government to track, record and understand the meaning of hundreds of encounters that the military has had with UFOs over the past years.
This is an extraordinary opportunity to learn from and question one of the foremost thinkers and leaders of the rapidly accelerating global effort to both make the public aware of what was previously unacknowledged about UFO and alien interaction with humans and also to address the deep questions about what is happening and what it might mean for the future of humanity.
Gregg Braden is a five-time New York Times best-selling author, and is internationally renowned as a pioneer in bridging science, spirituality and human potential! His discoveries have led to 12 award-winning books now published in over 40 languages. The UK’s Watkins Journal lists Gregg among the top 100 of “the world’s most spiritually influential living people” for the 5th consecutive year, and he is a 2017 nominee for the prestigious Templeton Award.
Rosemary Ellen Guiley is a leading expert on the paranormal and supernatural. With more than 50 books – including 10 encyclopedias – and hundreds of articles in print on a wide range of paranormal, spiritual and mystical topics, she possesses exceptional knowledge of the field. Her present work focuses on inter-dimensional entity contact experiences and communication.
John L. Petersen is considered by many to be one of the most informed futurists in the world. He is best-known for writing and thinking about high impact surprises (wild cards) and the process of surprise anticipation. His current professional involvements include the development of sophisticated tools for anticipatory analysis and surprise anticipation, long-range strategic planning and helping leadership design new approaches for dealing with the future.
He has led national non-profit organizations, worked in sales, manufacturing, real estate development, and marketing and advertising, mostly for companies he founded. A graduate electrical engineer, he has also promoted rock concerts; produced conventions; and worked as a disc jockey, among other things.
Mr. Petersens government and political experience include stints at the National War College, the Institute for National Security Studies, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council staff at the White House. He was a naval flight officer in the U.S. Navy and Navy Reserve and is a decorated veteran of both the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. He has served in senior positions for a number of presidential political campaigns and was an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1984. He was twice the runner-up to be Secretary of the Navy.
In 1989, Petersen founded The Arlington Institute (TAI), a non-profit, future-oriented research institute. TAI operates on the premise that effective thinking about the future is impossible without casting a very wide net. The “think tank” serves as a global agent for change by developing new concepts, processes and tools for anticipating the future and translating that knowledge into better present-day decisions. Using advanced information technology, a core group of bright thinkers and an international network of exceptionally curious people along with simulations, modeling, scenario building, polling and analysis, Arlington helps equip leaders and organizations from many disciplines with tools and actionable perspectives for dealing with uncertain times.
An award-winning writer, Petersens first book, The Road to 2015: Profiles of the Future was awarded Outstanding Academic Book of 1995 by CHOICE Academic Review, and remained on The World Future Societys best-seller list for more than a year. His Out of the Blue: How to Anticipate Wild Cards and Big Future Surprises book was also a WFS best-seller. His latest book is a Vision of 2012: Planning for Extraordinary Change. His coauthored article, (The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation?) was one of the most highly acclaimed writings on Y2K. His 1988 book-length report (The Diffusion of Power: An Era of Realignment) was used at the highest levels of American government as a basis for strategic planning. He has also written papers on the future of national security and the military, the future of energy and the future of the media.
Petersen is a past board member of the World Future Society, writes on the future of aviation for Professional Pilot magazine and is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation. He is a former network member of the Global Business Network and a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. A provocative public speaker, he addresses a wide array of audiences around the world on a variety of future subjects. When he is not writing or speaking, Petersen invests in and develops resources for large, international projects and advanced technology start-up companies. He lives in the Washington, D.C. area in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. Speaking Inquiries: Email johnp@arlingtoninstitute.org
Thomas Drake is a former senior executive at the National Security Agency where he blew the whistle on massive multi-billion dollar fraud, waste and abuse; the widespread violations of the rights of citizens through secret mass surveillance programs after 9/11; and critical 9/11 intelligence failures. He is the recipient of the 2011 Ridenhour Truth Telling Prize, a joint recipient with Jesselyn Radack of the 2011 Sam Adams Associates Integrity in Intelligence Award and the 2012 Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award. He is now dedicated to the defense of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
John McMichael, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Beach Tree Labs, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and early development of new therapeutic agents targeting unmet medical needs. These disorders range from herpes infections to chronic fatigue syndrome to urinary incontinence. His PhD is in virology and immunology from Oregon State University. He headed up the labs at one of the largest private veterinary research practices in the country, was a college professor for more than a decade, and now works out of a small lab on his form in New York state and a larger, more sophisticated lab in Providence, Rhode Island. He holds over 200 patents, has published in books and peer-reviewed journals, and is currently working with his team to begin formal FDA trials for product candidates for chronic traumatic brain injury and Ehlers-Danlos syndromes.
Good health is dependent on the appropriate transfer of information within and between cells. The informational and molecular disharmonies associated with disease can be reversed using appropriate therapeutic signals that stimulate the return to the normal state without adverse effects. One such signal molecule, SLO, has demonstrated clinical utility in a broad spectrum of indications that would at first glance appear to be unrelated. The underlying common thread that links these disorders is representative of the targets to which resonant molecular signals are directed.
William Henry
William Henry is a Nashville-based author, investigative mythologist, art historian, and TV presenter. He is an internationally recognized authority on human spiritual potential, transformation and ascension. He has a unique ability to incorporate historical, religious, spiritual, scientific, archaeological and other forms of such knowledge into factually-based theories and conclusions that provide the layperson with a more in-depth understanding of the profound shift we are actually experiencing in our lifetime.
The spiritual voice and Consulting Producer of the global hit History Channel program, Ancient Aliens, and host of the Gaia TV series The Awakened Soul: The Lost Science of Ascension, and Arcanum, along with his wife, Clare, William Henry is your guide into the transformative sacred science of human ascension. By bringing to life the ancient stories of ascension through art and gnostic texts, he teaches the secrets of soul transfiguration or metamorphosis and connects people to one another across cultures, time and space. With over 30 years of research distilled into 18 books and numerous video presentations, William’s work will guide you to next level of human consciousness and our expanding reality.
William’s present work has taken him into the area of transhumanism, which he first began writing about in his 2002 bestseller, Cloak of the Illuminati. His latest book, The Singularity Is Near: The Next Human, the Perfect Rainbow Light Body and the Technology of Human Transcendence is a primer and a warning for the looming potential transformation of humanity as we speed closer to meshing computer technology with human flesh. William discusses transhumanism as the fulfillment of an ancient impulse to transcend our human bodies. His work has propelled him into the role of human rights activist and advisor on the biopolitics of human enhancement as he informs audiences of the unparalleled perils and potentials of Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism.
Freddy Silva
Freddy Silva is a best-selling author, and leading researcher of ancient civilizations, restricted history, sacred sites and their interaction with consciousness. He has published six books in six languages, and produced eleven documentaries. Described by one CEO as “perhaps the best metaphysical speaker in the world right now,” for two decades he has been an international keynote speaker, with notable appearances at the International Science and Consciousness Conference, the International Society For The Study Of Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine, and the Association for Research and Enlightenment, in addition to appearances on Gaia TV, History Channel, BBC, and radio shows such as Coast To Coast. He also leads private sell-out tours to ancient temples worldwide. www.invisibletemple.com
Pierre Dubois
Pierre Richard Dubois is Registered Architect and holds two advanced degrees from Columbia University. He has been on a life quest to satisfy his inner and intuitive knowing about consciousness-expanding technologies and wisdom. He is an author, life coach, healer, ascension teacher, and a minister. Pierre has travelled the world and studied many religions and belief systems and found that we are all seeking the same thing: merger back with the uncreated Source of all. An insightful listener and counselor, Pierre deeply aspires to share with others his wisdom and has helped countless people on their journey of healing, expansion, and ascension over the past 20 years.
Frank DeMarco
FRANK DeMARCO has been reporting on his conversations with non-physical beings for more than two decades, in magazine articles, talks, and in a dozen non-fiction books and two novels.
FRANK DeMARCO is the author of 14 books rooted in more than 25 years of psychic exploration, including It’s All One World, Awakening from the 3D World, Rita’s World (two volumes), The Cosmic Internet, The Sphere and the Hologram, and Imagine Yourself Well. Since 2005, he has been actively engaged in an on-going series of conversations with various non-physical beings, including historical individuals, “past lives,” aspects of personal guidance, and a generalized group he calls “the guys upstairs.”
He is also the author of three novels, Messenger, That Phenomenal Background (originally published as Babe in the Woods) and Dark Fire.
William Buhlman
William Buhlman is a recognized expert on the subject of out-of-body experiences. The author’s forty years of extensive personal out-of-body explorations give him a unique and thought provoking insight into this subject. His first book, Adventures beyond the Body chronicles his personal journey of self-discovery through out-of-body travel, and provides the reader with the preparation and techniques that can be used for their own adventure. He has conducted an international out-of-body experience survey that includes over 16,000 participants from forty-two countries. The provocative results of this survey are presented in his book, The Secret of the Soul. This cutting edge book explores the unique opportunities for personal growth and profound spiritual awakenings that are reported during out-of-body experiences.
Over the past two decades William has developed an effective system to experience safe, self initiated out-of-body adventures. He conducts an in-depth six-day workshop titled, Out-of-Body Exploration Intensive at the renowned Monroe Institute in Virginia. As a certified hypnotherapist, William incorporates various methods, including hypnosis, visualization and meditation techniques in his workshops to explore the profound nature of out-of-body experiences and the benefits of accelerated personal development. Through lectures, workshops and his books the author teaches the preparation and techniques of astral projection and spiritual exploration.
The author brings a refreshing look to how we can use out-of-body experiences to explore our spiritual identity and enhance our intellectual and physical lives. William is best known for his ability to teach people how to have profound spiritual adventures through the use of out-of-body experiences. In addition, he has developed an extensive series of audio programs that are designed to expand awareness and assist in the exploration of consciousness. William has appeared on numerous television and radio shows worldwide. William’s books are currently available in twelve languages. The author lives in Delaware, USA. For more information visit his web site, www.astralinfo.org.
Joe McMoneagle
Joe was the longest operational psychic spy in the US government’s very highly classified Stargate program where they used psychics and intuitives to look into installations and people around the world that were of interest to government intelligence agencies. They called the process remote viewing.
As it turned out, the remote viewers discovered that they were – not limited by either time or space and produced drawings and assessments that could not have been obtained in any other way. The Soviets had an active remote viewing program at the same time and it is rumored that Russia, China and the U.S. still have initiatives of this kind that are operational.
Joe’s stories are fascinating, like the time he mentally got inside a Chinese nuclear weapon and saw how the triggering mechanism worked . . . and then went out and bought the parts at Radio Shack to show the scientists in the intelligence agency exactly how it was done. The remote viewers could find submarines at the bottom of the ocean and crashed aircraft in the middle of African jungles.
Dr. Joe Dispenza
Dr Joe Dispenza is an international lecturer, researcher, corporate consultant, author, and educator who has been invited to speak in more than 33 countries on six continents. As a lecturer and educator, he is driven by the conviction that each of us has the potential for greatness and unlimited abilities. In his easy-to-understand, encouraging, and compassionate style, he has educated thousands of people, detailing how they can rewire their brains and recondition their bodies to make lasting changes.
Dr. Joe is also a faculty member at Quantum University in Honolulu, Hawaii; the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, New York; and Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He’s also an invited chair of the research committee at Life University in Atlanta, Georgia.
As a researcher, Dr. Joe’s passion can be found at the intersection of the latest findings from the fields of neuroscience, epigenetics, and quantum physics to explore the science behind spontaneous remissions. He uses that knowledge to help people heal themselves of illnesses, chronic conditions, and even terminal diseases so they can enjoy a more fulfilled and happy life, as well as evolve their consciousness. At his advanced workshops around the world, he has partnered with other scientists to perform extensive research on the effects of meditation, including epigenetic testing, brain mapping with electroencephalograms (EEGs), and individual energy field testing with a gas discharge visualization (GDV) machine. His research also includes measuring both heart coherence with HeartMath monitors and the energy present in the workshop environment before, during, and after events with a GDV Sputnik sensor.
As a NY Times best-selling author, Dr. Joe has written Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon(Hay House, 2017), which draws on research conducted at his advanced workshops since 2012 to explore how common people are doing the uncommon to transform themselves and their lives; You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter (Hay House, 2014), which explores our ability to heal without drugs or surgery, but rather by thought alone; Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One (Hay House, 2012) and Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind (2007), both of which detail the neuroscience of change and epigenetics. His film appearances include Transcendence: Live Life Beyond the Ordinary (2018); HEAL (2017); E-Motion (2014); Sacred Journey of the Heart (2012); People v. the State of Illusion (2011); What IF – The Movie (2010); Unleashing Creativity (2009); and What the #$*! Do We Know? & Down the Rabbit Hole, extended DVD version (2005).
Dr. Todd Ovokaitys
After two years at Northwestern, he was accepted into an accelerated combined graduate/undergraduate program at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, which conferred both B.A. and M.D. degrees. Advanced training was at Georgetown University Hospital, with a Residency and Chief Residency in Internal Medicine followed by a Fellowship in Pulmonary and Intensive Care Medicine.
During his Pulmonary Fellowship, the specialty that concerns the lungs, Dr. Todd began his research with cells of the immune system. Many procedures were done on AIDS patients to diagnose their lung problems. Observing this dire disease firsthand and the toxic results of early medical treatments, Dr. Todd developed a passion for finding better solutions. Towards the end of his Fellowship, he became aware of the benefits of Holistic Medicine for improving the function of the immune system while building rather than impairing the function of other systems.
Inspired to learn more, he moved to Southern California to study with practitioners of Complementary Medicine. In the context of these studies, he had an experience so radical that the course of his life and work were forever transformed.
During a meditation class in the summer of 1989, Dr. Todd paired with another student for an exercise. The process was profound and they took turns, one in the process while the other scribed to record any breakthroughs of awareness. Much as in the Jodie Foster movie “Contact,” the usual anchor points dissolved with the feeling of instant transport to a different dimension of being. There was a doorway or portal to traverse, with a message of the responsibility taken on through the choice to go further.
Instantly upon walking through this doorway, a living form was seen that filled a room – and had the shape of a DNA strand enlarged millions of times. This form communicated that science only partly understood how DNA worked. The linear understanding of DNA as an enormous data string was correct but incomplete. In addition, DNA was a structure of coils within coils in an environment of moving charges that permitted DNA to send electromagnetic signals much as a radio transmitter. Further, DNA could receive and be conditioned by electromagnetic signals. Most significantly, if it were possible to determine and transmit the correct resonant signals, that it was possible to switch the activity of a sick cell to that of a healthy cell, an old cell to that of a young cell.
This experience brought with it a certainty that solutions were possible. After intensive review of the previous work showing the effects of electromagnetic energy patterns on cellular health and function, Dr. Todd located a colleague with the technical expertise to build the desired invention.
Mary Rodwell is a professional counsellor, hypnotherapist, researcher, metaphysician, and founder and principal of ACERN (Australian Close Encounter Resource Network). She is internationally known for her work with ET experiencers and star children. She offers regressions and support for contactees and has organized a buddy system to help those who have had close encounters. Mary has spoken at conferences in Australia, USA, UK, Scandinavia, Hawaii and New Zealand. She is a regular guest on international radio and online shows and writes article for international publications like the UFO Truth Magazine. Mary is co-founder of FREE, a non-profit organization aimed at researching close encounters.
She is the author of, Awakening – How extra-terrestrial contact can transform your life. Mary is working on her second book, The New Human, due for release this year.
Dr. Larry Dossey
Dr. Larry Dossey is a physician of internal medicine and former Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital. He received his M. D. degree from Southwestern Medical School (Dallas), and trained in internal medicine at Parkland and the VA hospitals in Dallas. Dossey has lectured at medical schools and hospitals throughout the United States and abroad. In 1988 he delivered the annual Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, India, the only physician ever invited to do so. He is the author of twelve books dealing with consciousness, spirituality, and healing, including the New York Times bestseller HEALING WORDS: THE POWER OF PRAYER AND THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE, and most recently One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters. His books have been translated into languages around the world. Dr. Dossey is the former co-chairman of the Panel on Mind/Body Interventions, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health. He is the executive editor of the peer-reviewed journal EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing. Dr. Dossey lectures around the world. He lives in Santa Fe with his wife Barbara, a nurse-consultant and the author of several award-winning books.
Kingsley L. Dennis, PhD, is a sociologist, researcher, and writer. He previously worked in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, UK. Kingsley is the author of numerous articles on social futures; technology and new media communications; global affairs; and conscious evolution. He is the author of several critically acclaimed books including Healing the Wounded Mind, The Sacred Revival, The Phoenix Generation, New Consciousness for a New World, Struggle for Your Mind, After the Car, and the celebrated Dawn of the Akashic Age (with Ervin Laszlo). He has traveled extensively and lived in various countries. He currently lives in Andalusia, Spain.
His homepage is www.kingsleydennis.com
Sharry Edwards
Sharry Edwards has been accused of being too scientific by some, too esoteric by others. In actuality, she is a bridge between both fields of inquiry. Sharry is the acknowledged pioneer in the emerging field of Vocal Profiling using BioAcoustic Biology. For many years she has provided the leading-edge research to show the voice as a holographic representation of the body that can be used to change the face of medicine.
Sharry asks that we imagine a future in which we can be individually identified and maintained through the use of frequency based biomarkers that keep us healthy and emotionally balanced. Her work at the Institute of BioAcoustic Biology has shown that we can each have dominion over those frequencies by individual mind management or a simple remote control that is completely programmable. Using the unique techniques of Vocal Profiling and evaluation, emotional as well as physiological issues can be revealed and addressed.
Her work with the human voice reveals that people who share similar traumas, stresses, diseases, toxicities…share similar, if not identical, vocal anomalies. She brings together ancient knowledge with modern ideas of harmonics and frequency relationship theories to show that math can be used as a form of predictive, diagnostic and curative foundation for wellness. Through entrainment of the frequency grids of the brain, the body can be programmed to support its own optimal form and function.
Integrative Physician Dr. Carrie Hempel and Holistic Pharmacist Brian Sanderoffare both experts in the medicinal use of cannabis in Maryland.
Dr. Hempel is a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 2002. As an Osteopathic Physician, she has embraced a holistic approach to patient care, providing loving attention to the relationship between mind, body, and spirit. For the past 11 years she has received specialist training, Board Certification and expertise in several fields including Internal Medicine, Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, and Hospice & Palliative Medicine, along with many Integrative modalities. She is a member of the Society of Cannabis Clinicians, the Association of Cannabis Specialists, and is registered with the Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission.
Over the course of her career she has seen the consistent struggle of patients dealing with chronic, progressive, debilitating illness, and witnessed the challenges and limitations of the current pharmaceutical options for pain and symptom managment. Her passion for this population has grown, along with her desire to advocate for patients to have access to non-opioid, holistic options to enhance quality of life and optimize function.
Trained as a pharmacist, Brian Sanderoff has integrated 25 years of experience with his traditional medical training and herbalism, nutrition and numerous other holistic modalities to help clients devise practical, common-sense, safe solutions to most any health issue.
His clients appreciate how he embraces a complementary approach to health and how his holistic “compass” brings them new solutions to their unique health concerns – especially chronic diseases.
Mary Rodwell is a professional counsellor, hypnotherapist, researcher, metaphysician, and founder and principal of ACERN (Australian Close Encounter Resource Network). She is internationally known for her work with ET experiencers and star children. She offers regressions and support for contactees and has organised a buddy system to help those who have had close encounters. Mary has spoken at conferences in Australia, USA, UK, Scandinavia, Hawaii and New Zealand. She is a regular guest on international radio and online shows and writes article for international publications like the UFO Truth Magazine. Mary is co-founder of FREE, a non-profit organisation aimed at researching close encounters.
Steve McDonald is an extraordinary Australian thinker and researcher who arguably knows as much about the structure of the global planetary transition that we are experiencing as anyone on the planet. He draws coherent pictures from the deep insights of Clair W. Graves and paints clear, explanatory images of not only how humanity has evolved to this point, but what is inevitably on our horizon . . . and how this epic transition will continue to play out.
He is currently writing a book about the global paradigm shift that’s taking us beyond the scientific-industrial era. Steve served with the Australian Army for 15 years, including war service as an infantry company commander in Somalia, 1993. He is also a qualified military helicopter pilot and on leaving the army he flew a rescue helicopter in the tropical Mackay-Whitsunday region of Queensland. Building upon his extensive experience in unpredictable environments, after retiring from flying Steve specialized as a change management consultant. He consequently studied the developmental psychology research of Dr Clare W Graves and became one of the first Australians qualified to teach Dr Graves’ theory under the banner of Spiral Dynamics Integral. A long-term struggle with posttraumatic stress has driven Steve’s deep interest in human nature and consciousness. He is a founder of Psychedelic Research in Science & Medicine, an Australian non-profit association. He is also a founder of AADII, a non-profit company created to support worldwide transformational change.
Although Robert Coxon had been studying and composing music for many years, it was after taking the Silva Mind Control course that he realized how powerful sound could be in relaxing the body and opening the consciousness. He then decided to write his first album.
Cristal Silence quickly became a major hit throughout Canada, staying on top of the charts for many years. This was the beginning of his continuing phenomenal success as composer and solo artist. For the last 29 years he has performed only his original compositions in concert. Robert has been nominated four times for the prestigious “Felix” award (French Canada equivalent to the Grammy), and became Canada’s best-selling New Age artist. His international breakthrough came after composing The Silent Path in 1995. This album was an instant hit in Canada, the USA and France. After hearing The Silent Path, Lee Carroll, internationally renowned author of 15 bestselling Kryon and Indigo books, contacted Robert and asked him to join his team on tour. Through the years this has given Robert the opportunity to experience different cultures and inspires him to write music honoring these many countries he performs in.
Robert offers us nine albums, the latest three being The Infinite, essence of life, Goddess -The Power of Woman and Passion Compassion Alegeria.
Gary Sycalik has been described as an entrepreneur, businessman, project developer/manager, consultant/advisor, organizational troubleshooter, strategic planner, facilitator, futurist, business and social architect, complex problematic game designer (policy, strategic, tactic levels) and writer. Gary brings a robust horizontal and vertical functional capability to any project from the conceptual to operational stage.
Penny Kelly is an author, teacher, speaker, publisher, personal and spiritual consultant, and Naturopathic physician. She travels, lectures, and teaches a variety of classes and workshops, and maintains a large consulting practice. She has been involved in scientific research and investigations into consciousness at Pinelandia Laboratory near Ann Arbor, MI.
