What do you make of this?

This material stretches our credulity, and clearly Dr. Wood doesn’t expect to be believed. Nazis landing on the moon in the 1930s? Races of lizard-like aliens maintaining earth bases in Antarctica to this day?

What he documents most convincingly is that there is a sophisticated CIA program of deceit to keep us from knowing the truth about an Alien presence on earth. Maybe Dr Wood is part of that program. Maybe much of what he reports is an elaborate fantasy designed to deceive. But he (and other sources) have convinced me that there is something there worth covering up, and this bare fact is astounding.

— JJM

 

Longyou Caves

80 miles southwest of Shanghai, fisherman at one of the small Bottomless Lakes discovered in 1992 fish of extraordinary size and age. They became curious enough to get a pump and lower the water table enough to see what was down there.

This was the beginning of a unique archaeological discovery. There is a chain of man-made caves, dug at least 2000 years ago, with ornate carvings on the walls, with stairs carved from the original sandstone, and pillars carved out to hold up the ceiling.

First discovered in 1992 by a local villager, 36 grottoes have now been discovered covering a massive 30,000 square metres. Carved into solid siltstone, each grotto descends around 30 metres underground and contains stone rooms, bridges, gutters and pools. There are pillars evenly distributed throughout the caves which are supporting the ceiling, and the walls, ceiling and stone columns are uniformly decorated with chisel marks in a series of parallel lines. Only one of the caves has been opened for tourism, chosen because of the stone carvings found inside which depict a horse, fish and bird.  The Longyou caves truly are an enigma and here we will explore ten mysteries that are still unexplained despite more than two decades of research. — Ancient Origins

The scale of the project and the quantity of stone tells us this project could not have been constructed with hand tools. Furthermore, there are markings on the walls that look as though they could have come from power tools. And yet, people 2,000 years ago are believed not to have had power tools (or energy sources to run them). Furthermore, the openings to the caves are so small and the caves so large that they would have been very dark without electricity. It’s hard to imagine thousands of workers digging in the dark, as it’s hard to imagine what people would do inside without light, once the caves had been built.

Wikipedia article

How old are the caves? How were they built? What were they for?

Singing praise of paradise

O Child beside the Waterfall
what songs without a word
rise from those waters like the call
only a heart has heard-
the Joy, the Joy in all things
rise whistling like a bird.

O Child beside the Waterfall
I hear them too, the brief
heavenly notes, the harp of dawn,
the nightingale on the leaf,
all, all dispel the darkness and
the silence of our grief.

O Child beside the Waterfall
I see you standing there
with waterdrops and fireflies
and hummingbirds in the air,
all singing praise of paradise,
paradise everywhere.

— George Barker was born 107 years ago today

We could be SOOO much healthier

Do you know that there’s not a pharmaceutical drug on earth that works for more than seventy percent of the population? Not one drug. Pharma companies consider a drug a success if it’s effective in a much smaller proportion of patients.
— Zia Haider Rahman

Thanks to Sanders and Warren, the Democratic debates are highlighting the huge inefficiencies and inequities in the way we pay for medicine in America. Health care in America costs twice as much per capita as other modern, industrialized countries, and our outcomes are worse than all of them [Harvard Gazette]

But even more important than changing the way we pay for medicine is changing the way we practice medicine, and this is a discussion that has been marginalized.

The gold standard for validating a treatment is the placebo-controlled double-blind study. If you practice medicine that is not based on PCDB studies, you can’t get third party payments and you can’t even get malpracctice insurance.

And yet, we know that PCDB studies are effective validation for only about half of a half of medicaal practice. We’re excluding ¾ of what we know to be effective.

“Placebo-controlled” means that we are focused on the body, not the mind. We are deliberately excluding anything that works through the mind from study, treating it as  an annoying artifact in our scientific study. Medicine that works with the mind as well as the body can be twice as effective. Yet, medical employers assure that doctors’ calendars are so crowded that they have no time to develop a caring relationship with their patients. We make sure our doctors function only as diagnosticians and prescribers, confining them to the part of job that computer algorithms can actually do better. We forbid them to function as healers, or to bring empathy, intuition, and caring to their practice.

And…

The structure of a PCDB study specifies uniformity. Every subject in the study receives the same treatment. We know that choosing the right treatment for each individual patient is half the story, and yet we are not even studying individualized medicine, let alone practicing it. Genetics, personality, and the microbiome make each patient unique; yet every medical intervention in use today has to be validated in a study that treats patients as if they were the same.

Medicine could be at least four times as effective for the same expense and effort, based on individualized medicine, and considering the mind together with the body. And this is in addition to the low-hanging opportunities to eliminate insurance overhead and administrative costs which are peculiarly American inefficiencies.

— JJM

Summerhill

This 1966 film interviews students and faculty at the British iconic free school.

Neill’s teaching methods and a rising countercultural movement inspired similar institutions to open around the world. Released in 1966, Summerhill explores the school’s educational philosophy by letting Neill and the many international pupils speak for themselves. Candid moments and scenes that evoke the rhythms of daily life at the school give a sense of the children’s lived experience. With an evenhanded approach, the film finds both potential pitfalls and benefits to a Summerhill education – including the results of letting children and teens run laissez-faire around the clock, and the possibilities for students who struggle in the rigid structures of traditional schools.

”Self-governance takes time to take root with the children. When they start school, they have little idea what social regulation is all about and why it might be useful, but by the time they graduate, they have a strong sense of citizenship and participatory democracy.”

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

— W. H. Auden, born this day in 1907

Love they reader as thyself

How often I have tried to tell writing students that the first thing a writer must do is love the reader and wish the reader well. The writer must trust the reader to be at least as intelligent as he is. Only in such well wishing and trust, only when the writer feels he is writing a letter to a good friend, only then will the magic happen.

— Ellen Gilchrist celebrates her 85th birthday today

All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.