LRG is among Inc’s list of Top 10 Marketing & Advertising Companies as a result of a 3,000% three-year growth!

Huntington Beach, CA— Lead Research Group, a full-service direct marketing agency, is proud to announce that Inc. Magazine has ranked the company #78 on their 30th Annual INC 500 list of the fastest-growing privately held companies in the country, recognizing their success and potential for the future.

For the 3rd consecutive year, Lead Research Group (LRG) joins the rarified company of organizations that have appeared on the list multiple times.

“We’re honored to have been named to the INC 500 list three years in a row, which is not often achieved. This accomplishment is a testament to the dedication and innovation of our team in serving clients,” said Matthew Marsh , Co-Founder and President, Lead Research Group. “We’re excited for our future and plan to continue building our service capacity in delivering innovative advertising solutions and technology to support growth—No doubt about it, big things are ahead for LRG.”

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‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’: Mankind’s millenialong obligation

Four years after the mortgage meltdown capsized the market economy, leaving millions of Americans stuck in unthinkable debt, the U.S. government gridlocked over how to bring the nation’s mounting debt under control, and Europe wrestling with how to deal with its various sovereign-debt crisis, it takes not an economist or a politician but an anthropologist to ask, “Just what do we mean by ‘debt,’ anyway?”

“That’s the question David Graeber, a self-described anarchist and activist as well as academic (Yale notoriously declined to consider him for tenure in 2005, and he now teaches at the University of London), has set himself to answer in “Debt: The First 5,000 Years.” And the answers he comes up with will, it’s safe to say, set orthodox economic minds spinning.”  Debt, he argues convincingly, predates not only money but also the more primitive barter, saying that there’s “virtually no evidence” that ancient societies relied on barter in anything like the way our economics textbook assumes they did.”

Is debt is primary to money?

In “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” anarchist, academic and author David Graeber writes about debt, and how humans have both benefited from and been burdened by owing others for several millennia.

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Alice Clifford writes: “Maxims 4 Mavericks by Kent Healy tells us that the maverick of today is a free thinker, an individual living life on their own terms. He says to look toward growing upward and inward.  Kent Healy is ‘only’ 25 years old and already is well known by thousands of people young and old due to his writings.”

The Maverick

by Kent Healy

Beyond the constraints of a monotonous environment

Emerges a free mind choosing empowerment

Remaining free in spirit and in mind

The Maverick breaks through tiresome conventional binds…

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The Symphony of Science (SoS) is a musical project headed by John Boswell, designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form. The project owes its existence in large measure to the classic PBS Series Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steve Soter, as well as all the other featured figures and visuals.

For the past 18 months our Catalyst home page has been graced by the second music video in the series, We Are All Connected, produced by SoS, featuring Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman and other notables.  Today we have replaced it with one of John Boswell’s newest videos – The “Cresting Wave” of Evolutionary Spirituality – the first one themed around the quest to discover the source of spirituality and consciousness itself, and featuring so many luminaries that we will let you discover who they are.

From John Boswell –

Our first video’s highly positive reception provided motivation to elaborate on the theme of remixing scientists, which spawned the Symphony of Science project. The second video, “We Are All Connected”, was released in October 2009 on the heels of A Glorious Dawn with much success. Although the methods of remixing and tuning spoken word, combined with original electronic music and similarly themed footage, are unorthodox in the context of other science-themed music, the results have often been inspiring, humbling, and of course humorous.

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Western democracies proclaim that in politics they keep church and state separate but in reality this is not always true. How many of our nation’s policies and laws have religious overtones and are a result of the majority party’s religious affiliations?

It seems virtually impossible for any average politician to act contrary to his or her religious background.

ARUN GANDHI | WASHINGTON POST –

The same rule applies to terrorists. In reality terrorists are quite simply mass murders. But when an individual commits murder we don’t associate religion with the act because the murder is an act of passion and not an act motivated by religion.

Terrorism, like politics, has its roots in religious beliefs and individuals, or collectives, are motivated by their warped understanding of their religion. But, whether this justifies branding a nefarious act of terrorism as “Islamic” or “Christian” is debatable. We all know that religious scriptures are ambiguously written so that anyone can interpret them to mean whatever they want it to mean. This should not be construed to mean that the essence of any religion is evil. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, misinterpretation of religion is the act of an insane individual or a group.

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“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer” is a catchphrase and proverb, frequently used (with variations in wording) in discussing economic inequality. Its most common use is as a synopsis of socialist criticism of the free market system (or “Capitalism”), implying the inevitability of what Marx called the Law of Increasing Poverty.

Andrew Jackson, in his 1832 bank veto, said that

“When the laws undertake… to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society… have a right to complain of the injustice to their Government.”

William Henry Harrison said, in an October 1, 1840 speech,

“I believe and I say it is true Democratic feeling, that all the measures of the government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley argued, in A Defence of Poetry (not published until 1840), that in his England, “the promoters of utility” had managed

“To exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, “To him that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken away.” The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the State is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty.”

The phrase resembles the Bible verse

“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.”

Did you know? …

• 90% of the worlds wealth is held by 1% of the population

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

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July 16, 2011: With the release of the Summer 2011 newsletter The Catalyst! CAT turned 12 years old – July 16th, 1999, was the official launch of Catalyst House, when a small eclectic (and eccentric) group of visionaries and innovators decided to engage in a new business model that emphasized philanthropic entrepreneurship, social justice, and a bit of radical chic.

For the past 3-years, our CAT eNEWS has emphasized ‘small business intel’ – but our 12th birthday marks the return of our traditional editorial bent – mid market service and integration, strategic alliances, and more!  

No, we certainly haven’t abandoned our small business guidance role – Small Business Intelligence and Updates are alive and well at our Catalyst House Blog, the ADMAX Marketing Blog and the www.CatalystHouse.BIZ Blog.  

A bit of history –

The name Catalyst House was bestowed upon it by that marvelous name-smith and CAT Advisor Fred Lehrman

In nostalgia of the day, the very first newsletter issue of Catalyst eNews can be found here – 

Volume-1 Issue-1 September 1999 may be found here.

We initially started Catalyst House, Inc., summer of 1999, while I lived in Cambridge, Mass. shortly after I returned from Brazil, working on a very special project with officials of that country and the founder of AOL Clive Smith.

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In a world where bad news floods us, it’s great to see positive moves toward hemp legalization and cultivation, not only in the United States but also in various other places globally. Many countries, such as Hungary, France and Canada, have been years ahead of the U.S. in sensibly recognizing the value in growing the hemp plant for a wide variety of purposes, from fiber to oil to seed, food and medicine.

From Acharya S at FreeThought Nation –

I must make the usual disclaimer that by hemp, which comes from the cannabis genus but which contains insignificant amounts of the psychoactive chemical THC, I am not referring here to medical marijuana, which itself has merits on its own.

As a one-time denizen of Southern California who worked passionately as a hemp activist for a number of years, including faxing hemp information sheets to numerous law offices in the area, among other activities, I am delighted to see industrial hemp blooming into a potentially rich future harvest.

In 1994, I stood up at a Jerry-Brown-for-President press conference in Los Angeles and asked Brown – who was standing just a few feet away – whether or not it was time to look hemp as a means to solve many of the world’s resource problems. I’m told there’s a video of the exchange somewhere on Youtube.

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In Not-Two Is Peace, Adi Da has given humanity a remarkable gift: the explanation for our global human dilemma and its necessary remedy — through embrace of principles He elaborates in this book. These principles can be summarized as follows:

– Act on the basis of “everybody-all-at-once” — rather than on the basis of egoity and “tribalism”

– Engage a lifetime of ego-transcending schooling in what He calls “zero-point education”

– Establish a “Global Cooperative Forum”: a representative collective of “everybody-all-at-once”, acting in the best interests of humanity as a whole and the earth-world in its totality

Adi Da’s message in Not-Two Is Peace is not merely that human beings should resolve the world’s urgent crises, but that we must do so in a radically new way.

He speaks to many of the same global issues discussed by numerous contemporary authors, but His writing addresses these issues at the “root” level, thereby elucidating the fundamentally egoic forces behind humanity’s dangerous trajectory.

In so doing, Not-Two Is Peace proposes a profoundly new paradigm for world change and a cohesive program of solutions that reflect Adi Da’s comprehensive and penetrating understanding of the workings of the earth-world.

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… and stick it to Wall Street at the same time! Sounds like the best of both worlds to us!

In November 2009 Ellen Brown wrote at AlterNet that bailing out the banking system “…has only fixed the economy for bankers and the wealthy; it has not done much to address either the fundamental problem of unemployment or the debt trap so many Americans find themselves in.”

The Bank of North Dakota may seem like a sole-surviving relic of a bygone era.  As a “state-owned” bank, it offers discounted loans to farms and agriculture, students and education, andsmall companies.  It serves as an important  economic development agency and a “banker’s bank” that reduces the loan risks of private banks and assists the private banks to finance bigger business projects.

The Bank of North Dakota had over $5 billion in assets and a $4 billion loan portfolio at the end of 2009, and it made nearly $60 million in profits in that year, setting a record for the seventh straight year. This was at a time when the entire banking and financial sectors were reeling from the collapse.   Over the past 10 years, the bank channeled over $300 million in profits to North Dakota’s state treasury.

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Inside Google’s search quality group, Amit Singhal heads up the main search-ranking team, which is who creates those infamous algorithms that you hear so much about these days. Amit’s division ran some 16,000 experiments in 2010 that attempted to adjust those mathematical formulas, ultimately producing over 1000 greater and lesser changes in Google’s search formula.

Dr. Singhal, a former researcher at AT&T Labs (the former Bell Labs), joined Google in 2000 and now is a Google Fellow, a title reserved for its most accomplished engineers.Eleven years on, the search guru is still obsessed by information retrieval – the name by which search was known in academic circles until the advent of the internet in the late nineties.

“The big issue is semantics—the idea that sleep, sleeping, and running are all variations of the same fundemental word. This has been researched intently by academia for over five decades. In my academic life, I said, of course, apple means the same as apples,” reminisces Singhal in a 2009 Business Week interview.

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Sometime back author and new-paradigm-shift thinker William Brandon Shanley posted a well articulated blog addressing the paradox of scarcity in a universe that quantum scientists say is unlimited – infinitely unlimited.  All science is an awakening to what “always already is,” to paraphrase Beloved Adi Da Samraj.

William Brandon Shanley

Shanley is the organizing editor of a new work, which we reviewed in April. See: William Shanley’s Alice and the Quantum Cat

“A paradigm shift is underway, and a bright, bold new post-material, post-scarcity era called The Age of Infinity is rapidly emerging,” says Shanley.

From Shanley’s Age of Infinity blog –

How can I make such claims about the future? Simply because these technologies and sciences are characteristics of the nature of nature and we need only unfold what already is and “ride the horse in the direction its going” to make them tangible.

All science is an awakening to what already is. Our inventions and systems simply mimic what nature has already perfected with utmost efficiency through intelligent networks and least action principles. Through time, as our glasses become more and more refined, we’re able to see more deeply into the infinite fecundity, creativity, power, potential, and perfection of the cosmos and thereby create successively more successful theories, maps, metaphors and meanings to represent it.

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Cultural Creatives – The (R)evolution

Cultural Creatives are emerging without anybody organizing their presence, without anyone seeking to create political power from their existence, and without any group having any interest in them. They are emerging simply because in real historical development the growth of human consciousness can not be stopped, no matter how much today’s establishments and intellectual elites try to ignore and even hide their appearance.

So they are all here, among and around us: 80 million Cultural Creatives in the United States and 120 million in Europe, all with a similar mindset — the citizens of a new world. They are the ones who are really preparing the future and its new social structures for us, and are doing so right now. They are the ones who anticipate the future as an astonishing opportunity never before available to mankind throughout the whole course of its history here on earth. Their message: The time is ripe to take the shaping of social life into our own hands.

Frigyes Fogel
https://www.CulturalCreatives.CC

Image: DannyBrown.me

Source: Catalyst Enterprise Solutions

What do you have to say to your clients and prospects and what do they have to say about your business or company? You certainly do not need social media to reach out to your customers and clients but it doesn’t hurt to spread your name and brand in a way others looking for someone in your field can clearly see. Social media is about more than just marketing though. It’s about learning from those you engage with.

Karen Leland

The flip side, however, is that social media management for your small business can become maddening, due to the attention drain it requires. Social media attention-deficit is on the increase, but Karen Leland at Sterling Consulting Group provided a great 5-point primer, and a cute dog story to go with.

Source: Karen Leland | Huffington Post

Earlier this week, I came across a springy King Charles spaniel happily chewing on a tennis ball, when he suddenly became aware of his owner filling up his water bowl at the drinking fountain.

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Last month we politely called it a “Great Airwaves Giveaway” – how major telecoms had ripped off the system by gaming billions in airwave licenses without proper compensation, with a little help from the FCC dating all the way back to the early 90s FCC of then Chairman Reed Hundt.

Well, it gets worse, so now the gloves are off: AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon gamed the regulatory system and were able to garner over $8 billion worth of discounted spectrum by posing as “very small businesses.” It was a massive rip-off of wireless spectrum that blocked legitimate small competitors from offering services, as they were “out-bid” by deep-pocketed impostors.

Is this the legacy that past FCC Chairman Reed Hundt is so proud of? (see Reed Hundt’s latest and The Great Airwaves Robbery)

On May 11, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing astutely titled, “The AT&T/T-Mobile Merger: Is Humpty Dumpty Being Put Back Together Again?”

At the hearing, Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, raised a fundamental challenge: “At present, four companies control nearly 90 percent of the national wireless market. The proposed acquisition would further consolidate an already concentrated market for wireless communication.”

SOURCE:  David Rosen and Bruce Kushnick | AlterNet

The four companies that control the market (and their estimated market share) are: AT&T (26.8%), Verizon (26.0%), Sprint (22.9%) and T-Mobile (11.0%). With the merger of AT&T and T-Mobile, AT&T (44.0%) and Verizon (30.5%) will control nearly three-fourths of the market; Sprint’s share will increase to 16 percent; and the rest of the providers will drop to 6.3 percent.

If history is our guide, the FCC will approve the merger and come up with loosey-goosey voluntary commitments. And Verizon will most likely seek to acquire Sprint. This will return the U.S. to a wireless duopoly.

In 1984, when AT&T was broken up, only two wireless licenses were allowed per market. The local Bell Operating phone companies received one of the licenses for their entire territories and the second license was put up for bid.

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In 2006 Douglas Rushkoff, when asked The Edge Question, “What is the most dangerous idea?,” replied, “Open source currency, of course.”

Well now a new P2P digital currency, called Bitcoin, may provide the ideal medium to engage in commerce outside the official economy and  — it’s decentralized, anonymous, and its supply is moderated by a mathematical formula to automatically deflate it over time. A truly dangerous idea.

Eric Blair at Activist Post writes: “The masses are beginning to understand that the greatest threat to human freedom is the international banking cartel and their debt-based monetary system. Together with governments, they squash any manifestation of a free marketplace and personal freedom. Between runaway money printing, corporate cartel control, subsidies and taxes, and regulations and fees; the free market is nothing more than an ideology — for now.”

It would seem that the precise remedy to such a system would be decentralization of currency and banking, or functioning in an underground economy outside the system. There may be hope for accomplishing both with the new crypto-currency that is beginning to gain recognition, the Bitcoin. Can this decentralized barter currency free humanity from the grip of the slave masters and provide for a truly free-market economy?

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In the early 90s, we fought hard against the advent of high bid auction of commercial airwaves. (See USIMTA/USIPCA Lobbying History & Airwaves Auction Winner) We argued at the FCC and before Congress repeatedly, until we were hoarse and blue in the face, that auctions of communications spectrum, like cellular phone and wireless broadband frequencies would stifle competition and freeze out the several thousand small independent “wildcatters,” whom we represented … and who we were, as well.

But we always assumed that once an auction mechanism replaced the lotteries of construction permits (ie, FCC licenses) that the airwaves would in fact be sold to the big players.

But alas, since 1993 when spectrum auctions were mandated by Congress, the US Govt. has quietly given away well over a half trillion dollars in spectrum (90% of all licensing, in fact!) that was supposed to be auctioned to the highest bidder. A 2007 study demonstrates that the lotteries that were occurring prior to 1993 were much more honest and transparent.   Well duuhh.

“The third rail of spectrum policy is the rotten, special interest politics that has driven lawmakers to give away the public’s airwaves to private interests without public compensation. In the vast stream of government reports seeking to reform spectrum policy since 1993, one looks in vain for more than a token acknowledgement, let alone a serious and sustained discussion, of this giveaway.”

The Art of Spectrum Lobbying

America’s $480 Billion Spectrum Giveaway:

How it Happened, and How to Prevent it from Recurring

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This new mini-documentary by Mike Adams takes aim at what he calls “the false philosophy underpinning most of modern science.”  Adams attempts to explain why (he claims) “science is harming life on our planet”: (i.e., GMOs, vaccines, psychiatric drugs, nuclear weapons, etc.) — they’ve all been pursued and promoted under the brand of “science.” According to Adams, most modern scientists do not believe human beings are conscious beings, per’se.  “At its core, science perceives humans as  just ‘biological robots’ which “provides the philosophical pretext for genocide,” claims Adams

What is interesting is that Adams, a respected activist in the field of natural health, is not coming from an eschatological religious-type of mindset.  Rather, he builds upon “new-science” and core philosophy of consciousness theory.

From Mike Adams’ NaturalNews blog –

(NaturalNews) I have a timely and important message to share with you today. As explained in this important mini-documentary we’ve decided to release at this moment (link below), it is time that we tore away the false facade of “modern science” and exposed the core philosophical underpinnings that have enabled so much pain, suffering and destruction to be carried out in the name of “science.”

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I haven’t yet read Bill Shanley’s new compendium, Alice and the Quantum Cat, but I’m so excited to do so that I’ve mocked up a review from the publisher’s notes.  So many of our favorite philosophers and thinkers have contributed!

There is one thing, major in our opinion, that is suspiciously absent from Shanley’s book, it would appear – our late friend Marilyn Ferguson was not included in the contributing authors, content, or even an acknowledgement in the forward. William Brandon Shanley, as Ricky Ricardo used to say, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!”

Few works of fiction have inspired more reworkings than Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. From Disney’s 1951 animation, Tim Burton’s 2010 adaptation. Grace Slick’s White Rabbit, Alan Moore’s Lost Girls to the definitive Annotated Alice by Scientific American’s Martin Gardner, this little Victorian girl’s adventures in a world of fantasy have captured the imaginations of millions.

“Why shouldn’t Alice’s story be brought up to date and used to illustrate the bizarre nature of quantum reality?” reasoned William Shanley, an East-Coast media personality. So Shanley engaged myself and a number of others to refashion Alice’s adventures to explicate the mysterious world of quantum physics. Shanley’s passion to be all things to all people brought more and more writers into the project each with their own point of view. Every author invented their own new worlds for Alice to explore and the manuscript soon became a giant kaleidoscope of altered states.

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From Acharya S –

“When I first read this poem over 20 years ago, I immediately understood it. I “got” it both spiritually and anthropologically. I once shared it with a couple I encountered, but when I got to the part about Hitler, the woman snapped, “I don’t agree with that at all” and stormed away, followed sheepishly by her partner. I was flummoxed by her reaction, because I saw the poem as a statement of the human condition as a whole, whereby we human beings do possess the capacity for both good and evil.

 

Isaac Abrams
All Things are One Thing 1966
© Isaac Abrams. Photo: Alvan Meyerowitz

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Dr. Larry Dossey, Deepak Chopra and Dr. Rustum Roy, writing in Huffington Post, had some interesting insights on what they call the “Mythology Of Science-Based Medicine.”

The current healthcare debate has brought up basic questions about how medicine should work. On one hand we have the medical establishment with its enormous cadre of M.D.s, medical schools, big pharma, and incredibly expensive hospital care. On the other we have the semi-condoned field of alternative medicine that attracts millions of patients a year and embraces literally thousands of treatment modalities not taught in medical school.

Huffington | January 7, 2010 –

One side, mainstream medicine, promotes the notion that it alone should be considered “real” medicine, but more and more this claim is being exposed as an officially sanctioned myth. When scientific minds turn to tackling the complex business of healing the sick, they simultaneously warn us that it’s dangerous and foolish to look at integrative medicine, complementary and alternative medicine, or God forbid, indigenous medicine for answers. Because these other modalities are enormously popular, mainstream medicine has made a few grudging concessions to the placebo effect, natural herbal remedies, and acupuncture over the years. But M.D.s are still taught that other approaches are risky and inferior to their own training; they insist, year after year, that all we need are science-based procedures and the huge spectrum of drugs upon which modern medicine depends.

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Business owners often ask us what they should they be doing for social media their company. In our “expert” (LOL) opinion, this question cannot be glossed over, let alone without doing bonafide research. That being said, asking is the first step and so we will answer it with the help of social media expert Nicole Fletcher (follow her).

Here is Nicole’s quick list of what your company MUST first be doing to get into the swing of things – (source: Jacob Tyler)

1. Create a Facebook fan page and Twitter account and use them. Keep them updated with fresh, relevant content and bring in your personal network for growth. Ask your community what they want to hear about and then provide them with that information. Talk to them, respond to them and do it in a timely manner…not just today, but tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. Make time for these tools – you’ll be glad you did.

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Source: Lynnea Bylund | Catalyst QuickBooks

Its a new era for bargain seekers with a constant stream of strongly discounted coupon offers: 40% off a Princess Cruise ticket, 55% off a facial, or $125 worth of laundry and dry cleaning for $60.

Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and big corporations are gambling that the new discount coupon promotional services represent a tectonic shift in consumer trends, and a profound new way to pull in new customers. Last year, Groupon, one of the largest players, turned down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google, and LivingSocial, the Web site that distributes daily deals for restaurants, spas and retail outlets, added $400 million to its coffers last week as investors continued to funnel money into the fast-growing company.

Even the megalithic facebook is launching a Daily Deals program to test the waters. And Yahoo announced the launch of Local Offers program recently and is partnering with websites like Groupon, LivingSocial, Gilt City, and others to provide a wide selection of local deals and coupons from nearby restaurants and other local retailers.

So what’s the scoop here? Can these help or hurt a small business?

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The U.S government may be positioning to establish private currency barter of any sort as an unlawful transaction, pursuant to a recent criminal conviction of Liberty Dollar’s founder Bernard Von NotHaus for “counterfeiting” and “conspiracy,” supposedly intending to illegally mint and replace US currency with a private one using silver and gold-based coins and silver-backed paper dollars.

See – Liberty Dollars Creator Convicted of Federal Crimes

And the US Attorney in charge of von NotHaus’s successful prosecution, is now parlaying the conviction to say that this ruling sets forth a precedent against “…any private barter transactions that use any form of currency besides established Federal Reserve Notes and U.S. minted coins.”

The federal government also is seeking to take permenant receipt of eight tons of silver and gold ($7+ Million dollars) bullion and silver ‘Liberty Dollars’ that were minted and sold by von NotHaus.

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We’ve written a few times over the years about Bernard von NotHaus and his brave alternative currency scheme called Liberty

Bernard von NotHaus

Dollars (New Millenium Moolah, LV Tribune 2004 and Give Us Liberty And Give Us Silver! page-11 2006).  Backed entirely by gold and silver, the Liberty Dollars had grown to over $20 million in circulation, the most successful alternate currency of its day.

But alas, the federal government apparently didn’t like the plan and indicted von Nothaus and confiscated everything in sight, in a pre-dawn raid of the company’s Idaho and Indiana facilities, including 9 tons of silver and gold that back the currency.  The charge, you ask?  “Counterfeiting!”

And just last week von Nothaus had his day in court, but despite a very strong trial defense, was found guilty by jurors of multiple counts of criminal fraud and counterfeiting. Jurors came to the unanimous verdict after only two hours of deliberation.

“Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism,” U.S. Attorney Anne M. Tompkins said in a March 18 FBI press release boasting of the verdict.

Doug Hornig at Casey Dispatch writes –

Von Nothaus sees himself as a true patriot, offering a product that can function as a citizen’s defense against the ravages of inflation brought on by the systematic debasement of the greenback.

Thus was born his “money,” consisting of silver “rounds” – which are perfectly legal, as opposed to “coins,” which would not be – and certificates redeemable in silver. (There is a smaller number of gold dollars and certs, too.) I have a Liberty Dollar in my hand right now. (Does this make me a potential co-conspirator?) It was minted in 2006, has a face value of $20, and contains an ounce of .999 fine silver. A real bargain at today’s prices.

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The documentary “Good Food” spotlights organic farming in America’s Pacific Northwest, if you’ve been paying any attention to the mood of consumers across this nation who are weary of contaminated food and wary of what’s in the meat, produce, eggs, and other food items they purchase in supermarkets, you may have noticed a quiet but profound revolution. In their landmark film, Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin are not merely offering the viewer just a few more hundred facts about our food supply, but rather, sharing an intimate portrait of an emotional, perhaps even spiritual movement that is burgeoning in the United States in search of heartfelt connections around a fundamental human need: eating.

From Carolyn Baker at AxisOfLogic.com –

To examine the movie and the movement, consider that organic farming in the Pacific Northwest is increasing by 20-30% each year. Consider also that the number one cause of death among small farmers is suicide. Of course, the latter statistic is not unique to the United States. Physicist and activist, Vandana Shiva, has passionately pointed out the relationship between massive suicides among farmers in India and the amount of debt foisted on them by the influences of industrial agriculture in that nation. However, as David Suzuki in “Good Food” argues: The bill for large agriculture is coming due. I believe that it is coming due not only in terms of these suicides, but in a revolutionary demand for food that is grown locally and organically.

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The new Google Algorithm is live.  Just over a month ago, Google announced that they were changing their algorithm in order to weaken the search engine rankings of sites they deem to be “content farmers. Read Google’s announcement here

“Whereas most of Google’s algorithm changes are barely noticeable,” Eric Blair & Michael Edwards write at Activist Post. “The current change that they have been working on since last January will affect 12% of U.S. searches.”

There has been much debate about what “content farming” is, and Google has done little to offer a clear explanation, simply stating, “low quality” or “shallow” sites would be affected. This is similar to the vague definition of pornography — you’ll know it when you see it.

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‘Athene’ is known for crashing gaming servers, with the aid of his massive army of followers, who just love to be part of the controversy and trouble Athene is so well known for.

“Over the past year, we haven’t heard much from him,” blogs Evie at labspaces.net, “and it seemed as though he had fallen off the grid.”

Well recently Chiren broke his silence, and announced that his disappearance was due to being very busy, conducting new research in the fields of quantum mechanics, general and special relativity, and neuroscience. He continued to say that this research is culminating in significant new discoveries that will be presented in a documentary named ‘Athene’s Theory of Everything, posted here’.  This was definitely an unexpected turn, and caused quite a stir, and some confusion within his fan base.

“For the past year,” continues Evie at labspaces.ne, “Chiren had apparently been engaged in scientific research with the same dedication and out-of-the-box thinking that we’ve seen in his record-setting stunts in online gaming. He spent a lot of time gathering relevant scientific papers, and delving into them in depth.”

Using his newly acquired information and understanding, Chiren was able to come up with an “incredible amount of new correlations” that, as he puts it, “solve a huge list of current problems in physics”. If proven correct, his findings would not only have practical, but also deeply philosophical implications.

Whatever your take, we did enjoy the the 45-min video!

Did anyone catch the Watson Jeopardy man vs machine gameshow showdown last week?  The whole affair was a brilliantly “engineered” commercial for IBM. The company has already received contracts for its next-gen AI.

Fahmida Y. Rashid at eWEEK writes:  Watson handily defeated its human opponents during the two-game tournament that aired between Feb. 14 and Feb. 16 the real story is not about a computer smart enough to compete, and win, on a challenging game show, but rather, the advent of computers capable of understanding questions and coming up with relevant answers.  This is “just the beginning of a journey,” Katharine Frase, vice president of industry solutions and emerging business at IBM Research, told eWEEK.

IBM didn’t waste any time, announcing on Feb. 17 a collaboration with Columbia University, University of Maryland, and  Nuance  Communications to develop a physicans’ assistant service that can collect a patient’s health information and analyze it for medical diagnosis. Other health care applications include being able to automatically identify and flag anomalies on MRIs and other images that a radiologist may miss. The speech-recognition technology from Nuance will also help Watson hear people, a skill it could have used during the first game.

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Keri Salls posted to her blog about cool research project published by Saras Sarasvathy, a Professor at the University of Virginia, captures distinctions between entrepreneurs & corporate executives in how they think.

In her article in the new issue of  Inc Magazine, Leigh Buchanan says, “Saras Sarasvathy concluded that master entrepreneurs rely on what she calls effectual reasoning. Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don’t start out with concrete goals. Instead, they constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies.”

Entrepreneurs are known for possibility thinking. They “Do the doable, then push it”.

Here’s Buchanan’s nugget about goals:

“That is not to say entrepreneurs don’t have goals, only that those goals are broad and—like luggage—may shift during flight. Rather than meticulously segment customers according to potential return, they itch to get to market as quickly and cheaply as possible, a principle Sarasvathy calls affordable loss.”

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The concepts underlying a new documentary called Transcendent Man are known to sci-fi fans: artificial intelligence, nanobots, machine-against-man global wars, techno-imbibed immortality, and so on. What distinguishes this documentary is that Transcendent Man posits that all these concepts are only a 10 or 20 years away from actually occurring.

Scientific American writes: Against a kaleidescope of cosmic birth and destruction, and newsreel-style stills from his personal history, the celebrated inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil sits in silhouette, contemplating death. He broods over mortality’s toll in waste and pain, and the hopelessness and loss that people must experience in their last moments of life. “It’s such a profoundly sad, lonely feeling that I really can’t bear it,” he admits.

Then, cheerfully, he adds, “So I go back to thinking about how I’m not going to die.”

From the review by John Rennie | Scientific American –

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After viewing this film, Truth In Numbers, you will never look at Wikipedia the same way. The filmmakers engagingly explore the history and cultural implications of one of the most referenced sites on the Web.

A whole range of opinion is expressed about the impact of Wikipedia on the archiving of learning, from interviews with founder Jimmy Wales to commentators suspicious of the site’s supposed neutrality. Evenhandedly weaving multiple perspectives about the impact of Wikipedia, the film provokes a deeper conversation on how knowledge is formed and what future generations will learn about history and the world.

Documentary includes commentary by: Jimmy Wales, Noam Chomsky , Richard Branson , Lawrence Lessig , Howard Zinn , Bob Schieffer , Jaron Lanier , Stephen Colbert.

During my time in Brazil I had the opportunity to get to know Dr. Edgar Mitchell. We co-paneled the Nucleus Integration of Science (NIC) Conference with consciousness-revolution authors, Marilyn Ferguson, Elisabet Sahtouris and Peter Russell, and we traveled to meet industry leaders and the local press.  I was always impressed by Dr. Mitchell as unlike any “ex-military’ officer I have met, Ph.D or not. LOL!

Forty years ago, today, Navy Captain Dr. Edgar Mitchell returned from a journey into outer space that resulted in becoming the sixth man to walk on the moon. The Apollo 14 mission was NASA’s third manned lunar landing.  It was an audacious time in the history of mankind. For Mitchell, however, the most extraordinary journey was yet to come.

Scientist, test pilot, naval officer, astronaut, entrepreneur, author and lecturer, Dr. Mitchell’s extraordinary career personifies humankind’s eternal thrust to widen its horizons as well as its inner soul.

After retiring from the Navy in 1972, Dr. Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to sponsor research into the nature of consciousness as it relates to cosmology and causality. In 1984, he was a co-founder of the Association of Space Explorers, an international organization of those who have experienced space travel.

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