this is just breaking news now on Fox...I'll find some reference in a minute... Assad better use the nerve gas right away, I think it's going to burn his ass if he's bluffing...
Now I'm not posting this because I am against solar power itself...solar power does not piss me off or excite me thrillingly under current conditions, either one... I just like his analogy, hmmm...
the link is to seekingalpha.com, writer is Lou Basenese, dated 5 December 2012...
In early October, I wrote: “The time to invest in solar stocks is not now.” Well, it’s still not time. And I say that based on the technicals and the fundamentals. The Bloomberg Global Large Solar Index ((BISOLAR)) continues to trade sideways, after plummeting more than 60% from its early February high.
And solar power’s still way too expensive. Even if we factor in steep government subsidies and falling panel costs.
Nevertheless, solar power startup, SolarCity (SCTY) is determined to test the IPO waters this week. Is it a smart move and, more important, a smart investment?
Not according to this guy. And over the next two days, I’m going to share why. So let’s get to it…
The Trend is Not Our Friend
When it comes to any investment, and particularly IPOs, the trend is supposed to be our friend. But in this case, it’s not.
Countless cleantech companies have already postponed or withdrawn IPO plans, as Greentech Media’s Senior Analyst, Eric Wesoff, points out. Like BrightSource Energy, Elevance Renewable Sciences, Genomatica, Fallbrook Technologies and the now defunct Solyndra.
Plus, as I shared before, the price performance for solar companies hardly smacks of a trend worth embracing in 2012, either. Major solar power companies First Solar (FSLR) and SunPower Corp. (SPWR) are still down by more than 20% this year. And China-based LDK Solar (LDK) and Yingli Green Energy (YGE) are off by more than 55%. We can’t even use recent IPO performance for cleantech companies to build optimism.
Enphase Energy (ENPH), which makes microinverter systems for residential and commercial solar system owners, is down 59% since its IPO in March. And biofuel companies KIOR Inc. (KIOR) and Gevo Inc. (GEVO) are off 57.4% and 90.6%, respectively, since their IPOs last year.
Like I said, the trend is not our friend. And SolarCity’s underwriters must be smarting from all the negativity, too.
When the company originally filed for an IPO, it planned to raise $201 million. Based on the current pricing range of $13 to $15 per share, though, the maximum raise is down to $151 million. That’s a decline of 24.8%.
The only hope for SolarCity’s IPO to buck the trend is for it to boast stellar fundamentals. But based on my proven screening system for Hot IPOs – which helped us avoid Facebook (FB), Groupon (GRPN), Zipcar (ZIP) and Zynga (ZNGA) - that’s hardly the case.
Zero Hallmarks of a Hot IPO
As I’ve spelled out before, the best IPOs boast an operating history of at least five years, trailing 12-month revenue of more than $50 million, increasing profitability and of course, an attractive valuation.
Founded in the summer of 2006, SolarCity barely passes muster on our age requirement. Or does it? If we actually evaluate the company based on when it secured its first paying customers under a solar power operating lease, which accounts for 90% of its business, the company’s only four years old. (Strike 1.)
In terms of revenue, the company reported total sales of $59 million in 2011 and about $103 million in the first nine months of 2012. That’s great, until we dig into how the company recognizes revenue. And if we focus on revenue from its core business – operating leases, not sales of solar power systems – SolarCity might (just barely) cross the $50 million threshold this year. (Strike 2.)
Moving on to our profitability and valuation requirements, SolarCity doesn’t even come close. Losses keep increasing. In fact, for the first nine months of 2012, the company’s already reported $4 million more in losses than it did for all of last year. (Strike 3.)
And even if we assume that its IPO prices at the low end of the range, shares come to market at a price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of about 8.5. By comparison, the average stock in the S&P 500 Index trades at a P/S ratio of 1.5. And the best-performing IPOs of 2012, Michael Kors Holdings (KORS) and Guidewire Software (GWRE), only trade at a P/S ratio of about 6.5. (Strike 4.)
Another Financial Crisis in the Making?
Despite possessing zero hallmarks of a hot IPO, investors are bound to be interested in the deal, simply because of the popularity and religious-like fervor for all things related to alternative energy.
Don’t be similarly misguided.
The truth is, SolarCity isn’t really an alternative energy company. It’s more of a financing company. It sells solar panel systems to residential customers for no money down. In return, the customers sign a 20-year lease. And then SolarCity packages these future cash flows with other contracts to sell to investors seeking tax-advantaged and above-average income.
Such a business model should sound vaguely familiar. In its simplest form, it’s how we got into the subprime mortgage mess. Expected cash flows on long-term real estate contracts, in many cases with no money down, were packaged into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) to sell to investors searching for higher yields.
So what could possibly go wrong with a business model that resembles the one employed by Wall Street to market CDOs? Gee, I don’t know. Maybe another massive implosion?
Tomorrow, we’ll take a closer look at why that (and more) is exactly the risk that investors face with SolarCity’s IPO. So stay tuned.
What's his face (who hates my guts) the atheist, ( not Set, he's a thinking, intelligent chap) should go waste his money on the lotto, being a believer in ridiculous odds. The lotto, after all, could provide some entertainment to an otherwise pointless life.
Sorry "What's Your Face", I can't remember your name.
Good old Fred, if only I had half his ability to express himself.
"But when people refuse to believe in answers, however specious, they must at least have evasions. Thus the modern creation myth which has no gods and ignores death. We come from nowhere, have no reason for being here, and go nowhere. The Big Bang, if such there was, threw out vast numbers of subatomic particles which swirled about and, whoops, accidentally formed Manhattan. Life became what it is through biochemical inadvertence. We are just here, pointlessly."
"The Big Bang of course is susceptible to the four-year-old’s inevitable question, “Mommy, where did God come from?” (“Well, the Big Bang…it’s, you know, like science or something, and the scientists know all about it.” Except they don’t.) And since the brain is an electrochemical mechanism, all of what we imagine to be thoughts are predetermined by the prior states of the mechanism. All creation myths fail if examined, so we don’t examine them."
"And of course our rigorous materialism leaves no room for Good and Evil, or even kindness and decency. Why should I not torture old women to death? From an evolutionist’s point of view they are beyond reproduction and constitute an evolutionary burden on the rest. A materialist must concede that burning an aged woman at the stake is merely the substitution of certain chemical reactions for others. Of course no scientist not actually mad could react to such burnings except with horror. Neither could he give a scientific reason for his horror."
New Zealand shelter teaches dogs to drive An animal shelter in New Zealand is teaching dogs how to drive by building a special training vehicle and letting the canines jump behind the wheel. NBC’s Natalie Morales reports.
Mars: Over 100 NASA Scientists Quit Or Retire Early Over ‘Security Obsession’ With Mars Rover – What Are ‘They’ So ‘Obsessed’ About? Monday, December 3, 2012 19:12
Is something HUGE going on with Mars that NASA and the Department of Homeland Security DO NOT want the public to know about? Due to NASA’s new found ‘security obsession’ with the Mars Rover, over 100 NASA scientists and engineers have recently either quit their jobs or retired early. What in the world are NASA and the Department of Homeland Security so obsessed about with Mars and the Mars Rover? According to this story at This Can’t Be Happening:
“Thanks to the zealous wackos at the Department of Homeland Security, back in 2007 during the latter part of the Bush administration an order went out that all workers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena–an organization that is run under contract to NASA by the California Institute of Technology, had to be vetted for high security clearance in order to continue doing their jobs. Never mind that not one of them was or is engaged in secret activities (NASA is a rigorously non-military, scientific agency which not only publishes all its findings, but which invites the active participation of scientists from around the world). In order to continue working at JPL, even scientists who had been with NASA for decades were told they would need a high-level security badge just to enter the premises. To be issued that badge, they were told they would need to agree undergo an intensive FBI check that would look into their prior life history, right back to college.”
Now, who would blame the many scientists and engineers at JPL who took this as an extreme invasion of their privacy? To get their clearance, TPTB were going to contact their neighbors and old colleagues to be interrogated about their drug-use, drinking habits, arrest records as kids, all the countless things that are looked into when doing a high-security background check. Why would NASA scientists be subject to the same prying invasion of their privacy that they would get if they were applying for jobs in the CIA or the Secret Service?
More from This Can’t Be Happening:
“Everyone who wanted to continue doing space science at JPL was told they had to submit to a security investigation.
The cost of this idiocy, which was aggressively pursued to a final pyrrhic victory in the High Court by the Obama Department of Justice (sic), has been grievous, as some 100 veteran scientists at JPL have quit or taken early retirement, rather than open their lives to the FBI.”
im just going to get gift certificates or put some cash in a card this year......fuck it........its crazy trying to shop this time of year around here......in texarkana right now, it takes about an hour to get from one exit to the next anywhere near the mall.........i guess because its the only mall within 50 miles...lol
anyway....im not going to texarkana for shit until after january.
i will buy the grandkids some toys and stuff but my adult family is getting cash.
and i have a question for you guys.....my husband and i have een arguing about this......... my sister is kind of a selfish bitch from hell and has pretty much screwed us over for 20 years, but i still want to give her something for christmas.........my husband says "fuck the bitch" and im saying "shes my sis and its christmas"......so what do you guys think? im only wanting to give her $20 so i dont see the problem....idk. my husband says i have to stop letting her fuck me over, but i dont have much family left other than my kids.
well.....merry christmas.....i hate shopping........i love this time of year because of family more than anything.....and that whole "good will toward men" and all :)
Texas millionaire charged with child molestation Published November 28, 2012 Associated Press LUBBOCK, Texas – An arrest warrant was issued Wednesday for Amarillo millionaire and eccentric artist Stanley Marsh 3, who is being charged with 11 felony counts of child molestation. Special prosecutor Matt Powell said Marsh faces six counts of child sexual assault and five counts of sexual performance by a child that involve two alleged victims. He said he did not know whether Marsh had been taken into custody. "This is the beginning of the process," Powell said. "This is what we felt like we needed to do." He said the charges against Marsh could go before a grand jury in the next few weeks or soon after the first of the year. Several lawsuits filed in the past few months claimed that Marsh paid at several teenage boys ranging in age from 15 to 16 for sexual acts. The teens weren't named in the suits. One said Marsh gave him drugs and alcohol. Marsh is probably best known for planting 10 brightly painted Cadillacs nose down along a Panhandle highway in the 1970s. His attorney, Kelly Utsinger, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
My #1 Celebrity Birthday Person for December 5th is Walt Disney (Would have been 111) 1901 – Died age 65 Date of Birth 5 December 1901 - Chicago, Illinois. Date of Death 15 December 1966 - Los Angeles, California. (cardiac arrest/lung cancer) Birth name: Walter Elias Disney / Nickname: Uncle Walt / Height: 5' 10" (1.78 m) As a teenager, Walt Disney was a member of the Order of DeMolay, a youth organization affiliated with Free Masons. Spouse: Lillian Disney (13 July 1925 - 15 December 1966) (his death) 2 children Spouse, Lillian, died. [16 December 1997] Father of Diane Disney (born December 18, 1933). Death caused by circulatory failure due to complications from lung cancer Interred at Forest Lawn, Glendale, California. Facing the Freedom Mausoleum, to your left hand side are two small private gardens. His is the one farthest back. Plaque is on the wall behind the trees (to your left standing at the gate). Is rumored to be cryogenetically preserved. Holds the record of winning the most Academy Awards (32). Most Oscars Actor/Actress: Katharine Hepburn 1932/33 - Actress - Morning Glory {"Eva Lovelace"} [statuette] 1967 - Actress - Guess Who's Coming to Dinner {"Christina Drayton"} [statuette] 1968 - Actress - The Lion in Winter {"Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine"} [statuette] 1981 - Actress in a Leading Role - On Golden Pond {"Ethel Thayer"} [statuette]. http://www.oscars.org/79academyawards/index.html Walt today was also the #1 picture on http://www.imdb.com/
LeGarrette Blount (26) 1986 - Born: Madison, Florida / Birth Name: LeGarrette Montez Blount / Height: 6-2 - Parents: Gary and Barbara Blount. Family: One brother, one sister. - High School (Coach): Taylor County (Dennis Kizziah) 2005. - Junior College (Coach): East Mississippi CC (Roger Carr) 2008. - Major: Political Science. - Boise State head coach Chris Petersen restrains Bryon Hout (94) - after he was sucker punched by Oregons LeGarrette Blount (9) - following the end of the game. BSU won 19-8. - As the Broncos began celebrating on their famous blue turf, - Hout yelled in Blount's face and tapped him on the shoulder pad. - That drew an immediate scream from Boise State head coach Chris Petersen, - but before Petersen could pull Hout away, - Blount landed a right hand to the defensive end's jaw. - Blount was sususpended for the whole 2009 season and this being his - senior season probably ends any chance at a NFL career thou there - is the new USFL league which starts in February 2010. - Baltimore Bob added LeGarrette on Friday September 4th 2009.
Frankie Muniz (27) 1985 -- Born: Wood Ridge, NJ / Birth Name: Francisco James Muniz IV / Height: 5' 4" (1.63 m) -- Father, Frank, is a restaurant manager. His mother, Denise, is a former nurse. -- Has an older sister, Cristina. -- Frankie's ethnic heritage is 1/4 Italian, 1/4 Irish (his mother) -- and 1/2 Puerto Rican (his father's heritage). -- Landed his first major role at age 8 playing Tiny Tim in "A Christmas Carol" -- at the Theater in the Park Raleigh. (Owned by Evan Rachel Wood's father). -- Owns the VW Jetta from The Fast and the Furious (2001). -- "Spin City" as Derek (2 episodes, 1998): -- - Three Men and a Little Lady (1998) TV episode as Derek, -- - The Kidney's All Right (1998) TV episode as Derek. -- Movie debut (not I) at age 15 in ‘My Dog Skip’ (2000) as Willie Morris. -- 2008: Latest movie role at age 24 in ‘Division III’ (2009) (in production) as Allen.
Being absent from a federal no-fly list might not mean you won’t be hassled the next time you enter an US airport. The Transportation and Security Administration is constructing a new list of known “low risk” passengers.
According to the November 19 Federal Register newsletter put out by the US government, the TSA is trying to put together a new roster of airport patrons who may be a cause for concern but not necessarily dangerous enough to be added to the no-fly list that contains suspected terrorists and other persons of interest.
The news comes as the TSA is still trying to figure out how to operate its PreCheck program, a project that lets frequent-flyers bypass the stringent security screenings that other passengers who put through while boarding flights in the US.
“As part of the effort to identify individuals that are low risk, TSA also is creating and maintaining a watch list of individuals who are disqualified from eligibility from TSA Pre[check]TM, for some period of time or permanently, because they have been involved in violations of security regulations of sufficient severity or frequency,” reads an excerpt from the Federal Register.
“Disqualifying violations of aviation security regulations may involve violations at the airport or on board aircraft, such as a loaded firearm that is discovered in carry-on baggage at the checkpoint, or a threat to use a destructive device against a transportation conveyance, facilities or personnel,” the bulletin continues, noting that the TSA Pre[check]TM Disqualification List “will be generated by TSA’s Performance and Results Information System (PARIS).”
In February, the Associated Press revealed that the number of names included on the federal no-fly list created after the September 11 terrorist attacks has doubled in size in just 12 months. While around 10,000 individuals were barred from flying in 2011, information made available to the AP in February of this year suggested that the number of persons unable to board planes now amounts to roughly 21,000. “The news that the list is growing tells us that more people's rights are being violated,” Nusrat Choudhury of the American Civil Liberties Union told the AP for their report. “It’s a secret list, and the government puts people on it without any explanation. Citizens have been stranded abroad.”
In October, a Louisiana man was told he was added to the federal no-fly list while awaiting a connecting flight in Hawaii. He had managed to fly from the mainland US to the Pacific island with no problem, but once arriving in Oahu was told he would be prohibited from boarding another plane.
"I was very, very vocal about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and I did contact my representative” about it, Wade E. Hicks, Jr told radio host Doug Hamann of the incident. "I do believe that this is tied in some way to my free speech and my political view."
While criticism of the government was never fully considered a good enough reason to remove someone’s air travel privileges, the development of a new “low risk” roster could classify a whole new group of persons who would have otherwise been left off the no-fly list.
There are a few core philosophical thought experiments at the center of our most popular movies, like ancient cheat codes that filmmakers know we'll pay to see depicted on the big screen over and over again. So while you may think that you're just watching an entertaining movie, you might be pondering big, heavy ideas that have been vexing humanity's deepest thinkers for millennia. For instance ...
#5. The State of Nature and the Social Contract Why aren't we running around trying to kill each other right now? That's the question all the greatest thinkers were trying to answer during the Age of Enlightenment. The world was just waking up from the Dark Ages, and the best and brightest looked around and wondered who turned off the witch burnings and how to make sure nobody turned them back on. It was around this time that the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes came up with a thought experiment. First, he described a version of the world before laws and society, which he called the state of nature. Hobbes' state of nature looks like one big rugby scrum, with everyone fighting and killing and trying to have sex with each other before their reproductive organs are rendered useless from blunt trauma (we're not overly familiar with the rules of rugby). While that version of existence might have been objectively awful, it was the only time in human existence when everyone was totally and completely free. Without laws, everyone had the right to everything. To get from that version of existence to the one we're all familiar with, Hobbes speculated that those people must have agreed to what he called the social contract -- you give up your right to drop an anvil on your neighbor and take his stuff in exchange for things like personal safety and the expectation that people will follow a reasonable moral code. This process seems like a foregone conclusion to us today. Of course life got better when we decided to live together as one big happy society! Only Branch Davidians and the Unabomber would doubt such a thing. But when you look at the movies that we go to see each year, it starts to seem like we secretly regret the hell out of signing the social contract and long to return to the rugby scrum. For instance, every post-apocalyptic movie from zombie flicks to Mad Max takes place in Hobbes' state of nature. The apocalypse is just an excuse to destroy the social contract before the movie even starts. One common thread in three of the most popular movies of 2012 is an obsession with the question of whether the social contract is necessary, or worth it. The heroes in The Avengers battle a villain who represents the social contract on steroids. After rounding up a bunch of classical music fans on the street and forcing them to kneel before him, Loki unleashes the following academic lecture: "It's the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power. For identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel." In addition to being the speech that Barack Obama gives in the nightmares of the most paranoid, anti-government militia member, that's basically a really poorly worded argument for why we need the social contract. Left to their own devices, people don't know how to act. If you asked Hobbes to make the creepiest case for the social contract he possibly could, he would have written that speech. The villain in The Dark Knight Rises, like the Joker before him, thinks that the social contract is a sham. Bane removes the people and institutions that enforce the social contract from the equation, and Gotham immediately descends into a citywide prison riot. This is a city that's mostly populated by people who went to school and held jobs and had access to reason for their entire lives, but without anything to enforce the contract, it's back to life in the scrum. As one of the old prisoners in the underground prison put it, "Without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in a condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man." OK, that's actually a direct quote from Hobbes, but you wouldn't have thought twice if it had shown up in the movie (which also says a lot about the quality of dialogue in that movie, unfortunately). Then there's The Hunger Games, which explicitly raises the question "Is the social contract worth it?" and then sort of stacks the deck by adding that "By signing the social contract, you consent to having you or your loved ones randomly killed for the entertainment of rich people." That seems less like a movie plot than a piece of propaganda created by people who opposed the first social contract. And Hollywood doesn't need to create a fictional universe to question whether society is worth it. They can shoehorn the debate between the social contract and the state of nature into pretty much any type of movie, because that shit is apparently like catnip to our brains.
Three of the greatest lines ever delivered in a movie, and every single one is basically saying, "Fuck a social contract, I will literally go medieval on your ass," which is also a great movie line that also specifically brings up the very thing Hobbes was writing about back during the Enlightenment. We may play nice and help each other out in our daily lives, but turn down the lights in the movie theater and all we want is to get rid of society and its stupid, asshole rules against killing our neighbors and taking their stuff. #4. The Prisoner's Dilemma So you're on the ferry home from work, minding your own business, when a crazy clown comes over the ferry intercom and explains that you and a boat full of prisoners (or if you're a prisoner, a boat full of squares) have access to a detonator that controls the explosives on the other boat. The first boat to blow up the other one's detonator gets to live. If neither boat uses it, everyone dies in an hour. What do you do? Well, the first thing you do is probably curse your luck for having been born in Gotham. After all, people in the real world don't have to deal with convoluted screw-or-get-screwed mind games, right? Actually, the Joker's scheme in The Dark Knight is a textbook example of "the prisoner's dilemma," a thought experiment that academics use to explain most of modern history, or at least the parts that matter. The prize behind door numbers 1 through 3 may not always be a crazy clown with a detonator, but the risk and reward for cooperation or assuming the worst about the other people is the same. Think about the problem of pollution. Let's say you're the king of America, and you and the kings of all the other countries agree that you need to stop polluting the planet. So you all go to a conference and agree to stop using fossil fuels, even though it's going to hurt your economies in the short term. You all sign an agreement, you go home and suffer through gasoline withdrawals together, and everyone gets to keep living on this planet for another thousand years. Best possible outcome, right? Nope! The best possible outcome is that all the other countries stick to their promise to stop using fossil fuels except for you. If you keep using gasoline to power your coffee maker and all those other countries do the hard work of developing cars with stupid little windmills all over them, everyone gets to keep living here, and your country has a huge economic advantage over the rest of them. So, assuming that everyone else holds up their end of the bargain, the best possible outcome for your country is to screw them all over. The worst possible outcome overall is that you do the right thing and nobody else does. You stick to the agreement and take the economic hit of weaning your country off of fossil fuels, but all the other countries are secretly making a bunch of jerk-off hand motions to each other during your conference calls. You get poorer and the Earth keeps dying. That's an F- for you. You can't risk that, and neither can they, which is why nobody is going to stick to the agreement, nobody is going to take the economic hit, and your grandkids are going to have to deal with this shit. That's the prisoner's dilemma: a situation where you have to decide whether or not to screw over a partner you can't trust. The dilemma is that everyone is always better off screwing the other guy. If they act for the collective good, your best option is to act in your own self-interest (economic win + environmental win = A+), since if you both act for the collective good, everyone wins but nobody has the advantage (economic wash + environmental win = A). But if you assume that they won't cooperate, you're better off not cooperating (economic wash + environmental loss - 1 = F), since if you cooperate and nobody else does, you lose on both fronts (economic loss + environmental loss = F-). The Joker's plot might seem convoluted, but economists think that this model is responsible for the Cold War arms race, the psychology of addiction (in which you're in a prisoner's dilemma with yourself in the future) and basically every war that's ever been fought (war is hell, but losing a war means that the future is hell, too). And The Dark Knight isn't the only movie that's obsessed with this idea. There's a much more common and simpler dramatization of the prisoner's dilemma that comes up constantly in movies. There's a reason that 90 percent of the conversations in action movies take place between people who have guns trained on one another. While that's a fairly counterproductive way to have a conversation in the real world, it's the perfect way to dramatize the prisoner's dilemma. From an outsider's perspective, the best possible outcome is that nobody pulls the trigger and everyone goes on living. But put yourself in the shoes of the guy who has a gun trained on him, and you realize that the best possible option is whatever gets that guy to stop pointing a gun at your head the fastest. Which is why the most likely outcome is the third option: both guys pull the trigger as soon as they have a second to think through the behavior modeling. Of course, at the end of The Dark Knight and Mexican standoffs not directed by Quentin Tarantino, cooler heads prevail, and nobody pulls the trigger or presses the button. The Mexican standoff is a chance for us to set up and defuse the trap that we all find ourselves living inside of every day. Hell, even Quentin Tarantino learned his lesson. His first movie ends with a room full of mobsters doing exactly what the prisoner's dilemma tells us we all would, and his second, much more successful movie ends with Jules Winnfield philosophizing his way out of a Mexican standoff. The truth is too painful. #3. The Ship of Theseus Have you ever wondered why movies are so obsessed with clones? Sometimes it's the only technology that will let you tell the story you have in mind -- an evil corporation needs to farm spare body parts, or the Alien franchise needs to clone Ripley back to life. But other times, like with the clone armies of the Star Wars prequels or the Jurassic Park scientists going out of their way to say that they're cloning the dinosaurs, it's almost like blockbuster movies are just looking for an excuse to get the concept of cloning into the mix. In real life, clones are pretty boring. Cloned sheep are the same as regular sheep, and on its surface, even human cloning is only as interesting as identical twins. But clones are actually great at illustrating an ancient thought experiment called the ship of Theseus that movies have been using and reusing to blow minds for years now. It was first posed by Plutarch, an ancient Greek philosopher who asked his audience to imagine that the ship sailed by the Greek hero Theseus was repaired so much over the generations that eventually none of the original wood remained. Is that still the ship of Theseus? If you're failing to see the implications of that question outside of the world of boat naming, consider this: Science has determined that our cells are shed and replaced approximately every decade. So when that happens, are you still the same you, or is that person dead, and you're the replacement? Keep in mind that 10 years ago you were masturbating with a totally different set of junk. Every movie about cloning is raising that same question in one way or another. Probably the most successful version of the question is in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, in which Nikola Tesla builds a machine that spits out an exact double of whatever is inside of it and also teleports one of them across the room, like a Xerox/fax machine combo. A magician (Hugh Jackman) uses the machine to make it appear as though he's teleported across the room, but since there are now two of them, he's forced to drown the version of himself that started out in the machine. In the final scene of the movie, Jackman explains that each time he copies himself, he has no way of knowing if he's going to be the guy in the tank or the guy who pulled off the trick. The movie leaves us with the haunting question of which one is the original, or if there is an original. Is Jackman getting teleported every night with the double being some waste product, or is he essentially committing suicide and being reborn every night? The same question could be asked by every single member of George Lucas' clone army, and also by every Star Trek character who steps into the transporter. After all, the transporter can't just move people from place to place. It would have to break apart their atoms and rebuild them elsewhere. So when Kirk uses the transporter, does that mean that the real Kirk is now dead and the new Kirk is just an imposter? #2. Quantum Immortality Movie protagonists tend to be improbably lucky. No one wants to shell out money for a Die Hard movie just to see Bruce Willis get killed five minutes in. That'd be super boring. Action movies are about one thing: watching a guy beat the odds and kill a bunch of dudes without getting killed himself. James Bond has made it through 23 movies despite facing odds that seemed improbable at best. And it's not just the superhuman action heroes. In the sequence in Back to the Future in which Marty McFly first travels back in time, he is staring down certain death from a machine-gun-wielding Libyan terrorist, and then he finds himself in the sights of a farmer with a shotgun (the farmer manages to miss him three times at close range). It's almost like movies are about a bunch of people whose superpowers are just extraordinarily good luck. As it happens, there's a thought experiment in quantum physics called quantum suicide that might explain why every one of those movies is illustrating how reality actually works. The theory arose when scientists were poking around inside the atom and noticed that certain particles appeared to move in two different directions at the same moment. To understand why that should be impossible, imagine that you balanced a perfectly sharpened pencil on a tip occupied by one of these particles that spins left and right at the same moment. If the particle actually did move in both directions, the pencil wouldn't know whether to tip left or right. Or more specifically, it should tip in both directions at the same time. Now obviously, if you actually balanced the pencil in this way, you'd see the pencil tip in one of the two directions, because that's how reality works. What science hasn't been able to figure out is how reality chooses which of the two directions to make the pencil tip. The most interesting theory they've come up with states that reality doesn't choose, and instead branches off into separate parallel universes. Now imagine if, instead of a pencil balanced on one of these particles, there are 10 of these particles connected to a contraption that fires a gun at your head if they move right and lets you live if they move left. After the first test, reality branches into two parallel universes, one in which you're alive and another where you're dead. After the second test, you're dead in three universes, still alive in one. After 10 tests, there are 999 parallel universes where a bunch of scientists are cleaning your brain matter off the wall behind you, and one universe where you're still alive. According to the "many worlds" theory, the scientists have a 99.9 percent chance of existing in one of the realities where they're about to have a lot of explaining to do. But since you no longer exist in any of those realities, from your point of view, you have a 100 percent chance of existing in the one universe where the gun never fired. You are guaranteed to continue living in one of the 1,000 universes that you just created, which is, of course, the one that you're going to be aware of. If you take the many worlds theory of quantum physics to its logical conclusion and apply it to the thousands of tiny particles bouncing around in the human brain, and in every object you encounter on a daily basis (or any gun that gets fired at you), you get what's known as quantum immortality. Basically, in any given situation in which it's theoretically conceivable that you survive, there is a timeline in which you actually survive. You're living in one of the infinite different versions of the world in which you survived. There are countless thousands of other universes in which you didn't survive, but you no longer exist in any of those. So the universe that you're aware of is one of an infinite number of universes in which you're just naturally, inexplicably luckier when it comes to not dying. When we're watching an action movie, we might think that we're watching a protagonist slaloming through a bunch of explosions to an improbable happy ending, but it's just as accurate to say that we're watching the theory of quantum immortality illustrated over and over again. If there's even the remotest probability that the gun will jam, that's what will happen in the universe that the protagonist perceives. According to the many worlds theory, an action hero is the perfect metaphor for how we experience the world around us: He gets in a car wreck and just happens to be thrown clear. Bullets fly all around him, but none hit. Aliens attack, and crazy old Randy Quaid flies his crop duster into the mother ship. There's a nuclear explosion, and he jumps into a handy refrigerator. Regardless of the dangerous situation, the action hero will always survive. And we love watching action movies because the action hero's version of reality is the closest the movies come to our own version of reality, in which we keep getting insanely, improbably lucky. #1. The Allegory of the Cave Lots of epic movie sagas have a scene where the main character discovers a whole other layer to his world that he never knew existed. Harry Potter discovers the wizarding world. Special Agent J in Men in Black discovers that aliens are totally real. Neo takes the red pill and is shown the Matrix. It's a common and wildly successful movie trope that can be traced back to one man. Three thousand years ago, Plato created what he called the allegory of the cave, in which he described a group of men who had been chained up their entire lives facing the wall at the bottom of a cave (because it's not a classic thought experiment without a bunch of people being creepily mistreated). The only thing they ever see are shadows cast on the wall by people passing in front of fires farther up in the cave. Since this is all they know, Plato suggested that they would regard the shadows on the wall as reality, and would gauge intelligence based on who could guess which shape would pass in front of the wall next. In movies like Men in Black, Harry Potter and The Matrix, the shadows on the cave wall are replaced by what we think of as daily life. Wealth, high test scores and sports victories seem like pointless diversions once you know what Neo, Harry and Agent J find out. Of course, that was totally Plato's point as well. Plato believed that most of us go through life with only an incidental acquaintance with certain byproducts and half-truths of existence, and what reality truly means. In act two of the cave allegory (and act two of the aforementioned franchises, every movie about superheroes, the Star Wars trilogy or the Star Trek reboot), one of these mere mortals is freed from his chains to see the truth about existence. He has a tough time adjusting at first (think Will Smith quitting before returning to take the Men in Black oath), but soon he realizes that he can't go back to the version of the world he was stuck in. Act three of the allegory, and of most of the hugely successful movies based on it, sees our newly enlightened former cave dweller return to the men at the bottom of the cave and try to explain the truth to them. Plato came to the conclusion that the men down there not only wouldn't understand what the hell he was talking about, but they would think that he was an idiot because he was no better at guessing what shadow would be cast on the wall next. The movies based on his allegory are usually all over the place on the question of how the masses react. Men in Black and Harry Potter are with Plato. People either won't believe you or they won't be able to deal with the truth, and they should be allowed to stay praying to shadow puppets. The Matrix is the one movie that insists on dragging everyone to the surface of the cave to show them the sky. For a cool real-life example, a 17th century philosopher named William Molyneux wondered if someone blind from birth would be able to recognize familiar shapes on sight if their vision was restored. We actually have the technology to answer him now, and it turns out that the answer is nope, they sure can't. They have to relearn the world by sight and tie that in with the senses they already know, just like the Force. One thing each franchise's creator probably agrees on is that they're glad that more people don't read old philosophers, since otherwise there's no way they'd be able to get away with this shit over and over again.
THE FREEDOM ROAD: In "Road to Freedom" David Icke gives a keynote lecture reveals many secrets where hidden by those who govern us and manipulate. Among other things, talks about the Freemasons and the Illuminati and its relationship with many of the U.S. Presidents.
En "Camino a la Libertad" David Icke nos ofrece una magistral conferencia donde desvela numerosos secretos ocultos por aquellos que nos gobiernan y manipulan. Entre otras cosas, nos habla sobre la masonería y los iluminatis y su relación con muchos de los presidentes de EE.UU.
Special music for relaxation, meditation and healing.
Special music for relaxation, meditation and healing. Are frequencies that affect the balance and harmony of the body, restoring energy patterns. Among other tunes are Ahu Saglam, Arnica Montana and music with dolphins and whales.
Música especial para relajarse, meditar y sanar. Son frecuencias que inciden en el equilibrio y la armonía del cuerpo, restableciendo los patrones energéticos. Entre otras, se encuentran melodías de Ahu Saglam, Arnica Montana y música con delfines y ballenas.
RELAJACIÓN MÚSICA, MÚSICA RELAX, MÚSICA MEDITACIÓN, MEDITATION MUSIC, FRECUENCIAS SANADORAS, MUSICA ALTERNATIVA, MUSICA SANADORA, MUSICA PARA SANAR EL ALMA, HEALING MUSIC, MUSIC FOR HEALING,healing frequency, FREQUENCY TO HEAL, MUSICA ESPIRITUAL, SPIRITUAL MUSIC, MUSICA DELFINES, DOLPHIN MUSIC, MUSICA NEW AGE, MUSICA REIKI, MUSICA YOGA, MUSICA DE BALLENAS, RELAX MUSIC FRECUENCIAS SAGRADAS SOLFEGGIO
