esotericvoyage.com

From the NY Times article “Turning Around the Idea of Student Loans“:

LAS VEGAS — Over sandwiches and pizza, a group of high school students here debated the pros and cons of combating poverty in five desperate nations. They scrolled through Web sites, analyzed statistics and considered how much they knew about the economy, language and culture of each country.

This was no mere academic exercise. The students, at the Meadows School, have real decisions to make and, they hope, real people to rescue. By the time they scattered after their lunch period, the group had deferred until next month the decision on where to spend the $25,000 they had raised, but seemed to be leaning toward Peru.

That may seem like a lot of money for a student group, but it was the entry fee for the school to become investors in Pro Mujer, a nonprofit lending institution based in New York that issues small loans to poor women in foreign countries to use for buying tools to start or expand small businesses.

In raising the money and investing it with Pro Mujer, the Meadows School is by all accounts the first high school to operate a microbank. “In all the contacts I have had, I’ve never seen a school do this in that particular way, so it’s definitely something extraordinary,” said Brad Hales, assistant director of the Economic Self-Reliance Center at Brigham Young University, widely seen as the academic backbone of the microfinance movement. “At most schools, a club may start and raise a couple of hundred of dollars and the larger microbanks will take their money as a donation, but it’s not enough money to have much say.”

The founder of the Meadows Microcredit Action Group, Justin Blau, 17, and its faculty adviser, Kirk Knutsen, have bigger plans for their endeavor.

Pro Mujer will mete out the $25,000 to recipients in the country the students select and return to the school both regular status reports as well as a modest amount of earned interest. The group plans to use that interest and other money raised locally to invest in smaller, more specific projects through Kiva, another microfinance lender, with no minimum entry requirement.

“We wanted to have a much larger impact and establish ourselves as the first high school microbank so we could make sure that it continues in an ongoing basis and so we could encourage other schools to do it,” said Justin, a senior who recently worked as a Congressional page for Representative Shelley Berkley, Democrat of Nevada. “This is a five-year loan, and that helps ensure a certain amount of longevity for this project.”

Justin said he first became interested in poverty issues while researching a debate team speech on problems in sub-Saharan Africa. His debate teacher, Mr. Knutsen, had recently become intrigued by what he had read on microfinance and its chief theorist, Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for promulgating the view that such lending creates work and income.

Here is an exercise from Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt that I thought was an interesting check of my understanding of good, evil, moral and immoral actions.

Philosophy involves standing back and thinking - intensely and rigorously - about aspects of our lives that are at once ordinary and fundamental.

And when the surface is scratched, what you find below is extraordinary - or, rather, extraordinarily difficult to make good, clear sense of. Lying in wait are arguments that lead to, if not sheer lunacy, then bullets we’re loathe to bite.

So, with World Philosophy Day upon us, here are some pesky arguments to apply your minds to:

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he’ll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you’re in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

After finding my own answers, I decided that this exercise needed an added level of difficulty.  So here they are:

1a.  What if the five people that Bill could save have diseases caused by their own actions?  i.e. cancer from smoking, liver damage from alcoholism, etc.

1b.  What if the five people worked at Bill’s company and were unknowingly exposed to harmful chemicals on Bill’s orders?

1c.  In the case of the runaway tram, what if the one person on the track fork is your best friend?

1d.  What if the one person on the track fork slept with your spouse?

Update to my previous post The Clouds of Saturn:

Our first intriguing glimse of Saturn’s North pole was from Voyager in 1980.  Last year, images from Cassini was the first time we got to view the entire North pole at one time.  Surprisingly there was 15,000 mile diameter hexagon made of clouds.

Scientist are again baffled because recent images show an aurora.  From Mysterious glowing aurora over Saturn confounds scientists.

A stunning light display over Saturn has stumped scientists who say it behaves unlike any other planetary aurora known in our solar system.

The blueish-green glow was found over the ringed planet’s north polar region just like Earth’s northern lights.

It was discovered by the infrared instruments on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

‘We’ve never seen an aurora like this elsewhere,’ said Tom Stallard, a scientist working with Cassini data at the University of Leicester.

‘This aurora covers an enormous area across the pole. Our current ideas on what forms Saturn’s aurora predict that this region should be empty, so finding such a bright aurora here is a fantastic surprise.’

Auroras are caused by charged particles streaming along the magnetic field lines of a planet into its atmosphere.

Particles from the sun cause Earth’s auroras. Many, but not all, of the auroras at Jupiter and Saturn are caused by particles trapped within the magnetic environments of those planets.

Jupiter’s main auroral ring is caused by interactions in Jupiter’s magnetic environment and remains constant in size. Saturn’s main aurora is caused by the solar wind, and changes size dramatically as the wind varies. However, the newly observed aurora at Saturn doesn’t fit into either category.

The new infrared aurora appears in a region hidden from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Cassini observed it when the spacecraft flew near Saturn’s polar region.

In infrared light, the aurora sometimes fills the region from around 82 degrees north all the way over the pole. This new aurora is also constantly changing, even disappearing within a 45 minute-period.

‘There is something special and unforeseen about this planet’s magnetosphere and the way it interacts with the solar wind and the planet’s atmosphere,’ Cassini scientist Nick Achilleos from the University College London said.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

The Circular Mill of Death

- James Surowiecki

Religion’s Circular Mill of Death

Western religion is following a circular mill of death while Eastern religions get many things right.  Eastern religions just haven’t put it all together in one complete package yet.  Here are some examples of things that are right. 

• meditation - Buddhism
• energy movements - Tai Chi
• there are positive aspects to destruction (Shiva) - Hinduism  (The Western equivalent is the Phoenix.)
• Life is an ongoing epic battle between good and evil.  Spiritually advanced beings sometimes intervene. - Krishna in the Mahābhārata  (Kudo’s to George Lucas.  He also gets this right.  {The Force/the Darkside/the Jedi/The Sith})

You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.

Another in my series of inspiration lyrics in music.  This song has a great “feels like” to it.  Nearly the same feeling as being an energy being, free to travel through space, time and dimension and then being born into a human body.

Viva La Vida from Coldplay:

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

I used to roll the dice
Feel the fear in my enemy’s eyes
Listen as the crowd would sing
“Now the old king is dead! Long live the king!”

One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me

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And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Catholic choirs are singing
Be my mirror, my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field

For some reason I can’t explain
Once you go there was never
Never an honest word
And that was when I ruled the world

It was the wicked and wild wind
Blew down the doors to let me in
Shattered windows and the sound of drums
People couldn’t believe what I’d become

Revolutionaries wait
For my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string
Oh who would ever want to be king?

I hear Jerusalem bells a ringing
Roman Catholic choirs are singing
Be my mirror, my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field

For some reason I can’t explain
I know Saint Peter won’t call my name
Never an honest word
But that was when I ruled the world

I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Catholic choirs are singing
Be my mirror, my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field

For some reason I can’t explain
I know Saint Peter won’t call my name
Never an honest word
But that was when I ruled the world

A cute article from Monique Fields at TheRoot.com called Waking Simone.

Seeing Obama, “the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas,” on television, giving a speech about where he plans to take this nation would be a memorable moment. I’d like to give my daughter, whose mother is black and whose father is white, the opportunity to tell others she was awake that night when history was made.

…

If Obama wins, it may take years, decades even to see the effect it will have on the generation that has yet to be bestowed a name. Simone may remember the evening of Nov. 4, 2008, or maybe she won’t, but she won’t have the opportunity if I let her sleep through it.