Our Indonesia Bureau is a little worried about going out at night by the sound of the note that accompanied a pointer to the article “Indonesian Migrants Killed in Malaysia Missing Organs, Family Members Say.”
The note wonder “Seen any livers on eBay lately?” This is one of those stories that makes the rounds every so often, including an urban legend about people going to a resort by themselves (often New Orleans), having something slipped in a drink and awaiting in a bathtub of cold water with a note that they should seek medical help – since they’ve unknowingly just donated a kidney (or other body part).
That urban legend ware pretty much debunked right after it started making the rounds via email in 1997, but it also popped up with Austin, Texas being named.
The story seems to recur every 6-months or so. I’ve noticed the locale claimed drifts around: Las Vegas, the Gaza Strip, and now Indonesia. It’s a very hot one emotionally but whether the events claimed in the local paper really happened….well, that’s a tough one to nail down.
Still, we’ve seen fiction precede real-life events often enough, and we know there has been a body parts trade with China, so nothing would surprise us much anymore. There’s a good bit of detail (including some organ prices cited here) but if it’s a little much over breakfast, can’t say I blame you.
Take a note: No traveling alone, no drinking alone. Both good bits of advice if you can arrange it, body parts trade, or not.
Speaking of which, there’s a story in the UK Mail this morning about “Outrage as Egypt plans ‘farewell intercourse law’ so husbands can have sex with DEAD wives up to six hours after their death.”
So there’s goes the excuse “Not tonight dear, I’m just dead…” Sheesh.
Friday at the WuJo
If you’re trying to make a quick buck writing Rod Serling/Twilight Zone-type scripts for Gollywood, take note of this reader report:
“i’ve been reading your column for many years and sent in some things occasionally, but never wujo. but every time i read others’ wujo, at least two specific events come to mind-..
the first item is from 1990 and i’m 25 years old. it was the tail end of may/beginning of june and i was embarking on a solo trip from chicago to the west coast–chicago to denver to beverly hills, then the whole coast from tijuana up to seattle. i gassed up in las vegas and am leaving as the sun is just about on the horizon, so i know i’m going to be near beverly hills in around 4 hours or so. it’s no more than 8 p.m. at this time so i’m thinking i’d get there around midnight or so. the trip thru nevada and into california was uneventful up to the point where i’m in l.a. and closing in on beverly hills. the roads are really totally devoid of traffic so i’m going at a good clip when i see what i thought was my exit. i start to veer off to the right, and i realize it’s not the right exit. i jolt left back onto the road but in doing so i go through all the road-crap and gravel and rumble-strip stuff that accumulates in that triangular void of pavement that exists when there’s a verging off the highway. really soon after, the car starts driving odd and i’m pretty sure i ran over something and am developing a flat. i drive slow and now i’m sure it’s going flat, so i take the next exit and pull into a professional office park.
i get out of the car and my tire is shredded and smoking, and i’m thankful i didn’t wreck. i know it’s going to take a while to change the tire. i’m close to my friend who’s expecting me, and there’s a pay phone across the street (the days before everyone could afford a cell phone) so i call him up, tell him what happened, and he’s like see you soon. i cross the street to my car and i’ll be damned if the tire isn’t perfectly okay! i looked both ways in disbelief, like maybe i was going to see someone, but no one was there. for whatever reason that was the end of my puzzlement and i got back in, got on the road again and made it to my friends. when i arrive, he’s like ‘what took you so long?’ i have no clue, to me it’s like i took a ten-minute detour from a 4 hour ride and the time from there was another 20 minutes or so, so it can’t be past 1 a.m., right? wrong, it’s 4 o’clock and my friend is pissed because he gets up at 6. so this event gets rationalized as a my-mind-is-playing-tricks thing because it doesn’t make enough sense to be real.
fast forward a year and a half. it’s late fall of ’91, i’m married now and my wife and i are taking off from chicago to cedar rapids to visit a friend and his wife. we’re going to see the indiana university (my alma mater) vs. iowa (my friends’ alma mater) football game, so i know from googling it the exact date we leave is friday nov. 8. we leave after my wife gets off work, by about 7:30 we’re on the road. it should be a 4 hour trip and we’re making good time. about 3 hours into the trip the sky is glowing and i realize it’s the aurora borealis! my wife’s from britain, she’s never seen it, and i’m ecstatic because it’s so rare.
i pull over and get out of the car and look up; it’s like we’re in this cone of green aurora with the point directly overhead spreading all around this spot we’re at. she doesn’t really want to get out of the car because it’s really cold out, so i stand outside and look for another maybe 2 minutes. i get back in the car, and it’s off. i don’t remember turning it off, but it is, and it’s cold in the car. i start it and we’re back on our way. but it’s reallly cold in the car now, see-your-breath cold; we turn on the heat full blast and it isn’t working; cold air blows out. it doesn’t make sense and we talk about this for a few minutes, like it’s just plain weird, like how does this all-of-a-sudden happen? i’ve got mexican blankets in the car (oddly enough from tijuana a few years before…and the same car too, a dodge minivan) and we put them over us. the car doesn’t warm up all the way into cedar rapids. when we arrive, my friend is like, what took you guys so long? it’s 2 a.m.!!! in me and my wife’s minds it was mayyyybe midnight at the outside; but 2?? no way. i remember laying in bed thinking, ‘what..how the..’ but after sleeping and getting up it wasn’t even in our thoughts.
even now it doesn’t make sense, and there’s still nothing i can think of that explains the non-shredded tire, the suddenly freezing car, the chunks of missing time and arriving well past the expected time at a couple friends’ houses. the wujo concept makes the most sense, i guess. nothing has happened since then that’s remotely similar, but i’m glad i got to experience that kind of sheer weirdness not once but twice in my life. maybe there’s more to come?”
This one is for sure back-to-back missing time elements with a fair chance that somehow our reader was being tracked in some kind of experimental program (catch && release?). I think it would be extremely interesting if he could have some deep regression hypnosis done…because I’d bet a beer (cheap stuff, no imports) that he’s got some repressed memories going on there.. Especially the “Borealis” and cold mini-van engine…
There’s there’s that “things not where they should be” email bucket we’ve set up:
Morning, George – I’m reading the WUJO disappearing act of items like toilet paper, keys, etc. What I’ve been noticing lately, much more frequently, is when I’m looking for something on a shelf, in the cabinet, on the table, and it’s ALWAYS been there…..previously. When I look for something now it isn’t there.
I start searching – item nowhere to be found. You know how you search and search and finally end up where you started, in total befuddled exasperation, even though you know it’s futile because you already looked where the item is supposed to be? Well, now it’s back. It blinks out then blinks back in, so it seems.
George, the matrix format is becoming Swiss cheese! Or is it the toxic waste dump of chem trails, processed foods, radiation, fluoride, emp’s, causing our brains to short out? Seriously. The matrix or our brains ability to stay connected to this program? But if it’s only a program we’re experiencing, how could it affect us this way because physical reality is an illusion? Because even those of us who are awake and know it’s a program, at one time we used to believe ALL OF THIS was real; our bodies, what hurts us, what helps us, food, the education we received, medicine – most of our lives we’ve believed this, each tiny detail we accepted as real digging a deeper and deeper trench in our brains, and that fact is embedded in our virtual tissues, still working it’s false magic on the virtual US. What to do?
Boy, there’s a question for the weekend. Most folks find it a five-way split: Ignore it, try deep meditation, fast, vape up, or hit the sauce. Seem many select two out of three, but you’ll have to guess at which two.
The World’s Biggest Math Problem
A proper way to end the week’s investigations into the inner workings of the WuJo would be to flip over to the ars technica site where a reader spied the article “Quantum decision affects results of measurements taken earlier in time.”
“Read ‘em and weep. Causality works both ways on the timeline. I surmise we only see the macroscopic forward only version due to increasing entropy.”
Which gets us to the BIG Ponder for the weekend: So ask yourself, did religions have their basis in certain people figuring out a way to manipulate this quantum stuff? And, if yes, how come with all the tuition charged by all the world’s religious groups, we don’t have more ascending humans about able to replicate past miracles today? I’m still looking for someone to at least materialize a few rose petals under lab-controlled conditions.
The raw scientific method, absent controlled condition demonstrations comes back to some very difficult questions like “How much goes into collection plates before people get some of the more practical “How to…” details?” We’ve each got a soul/higher self, and we’re on the self-improvement track, right?
Not just “how to be nice,” “how to share,” or “how to love.” Got those, thanks…easy enough with practice.
Please put me down for the How to Do Levitations at Will course. I figure that with any luck I’ve got a few years left to pick up the “Bounce back to Life” course.
Unfortunately, practical application of math as some religions with thousands of years of history at looking a bit like Nigerian letter scams. Promise – pay. Promise – pay. But where’s the rose petals, levitations, and so forth?
I look at the world around me, at the divisiveness between even (especially) religious groups, and ask myself “How much longer does this introductory lesson chain letter go on, and how much more does it cost?” I won’t even recite the numbers of people killed in religious fighting especially when considered basis populations at the time.
I must apologize for asking such hard questions, but I’m cursed with a business school trained mind with a side order of engineering.
Every so often I look at Buddha and Jesus on the historical timeline just to consider some simple analysis.
The world population at the time of Buddha might be 100-million. And at the time of Jesus? 200-million.
A mid point between the two would be what? 150-million for 500-years call it.
So we multiply that out: 75-billion people-years. Which means what? The data could be very loosing interpreted as suggesting humans produce one enlightened person per 75-billion people-years? Possibly…let’s go with that for a minute:
Consider the number of people-years since: A mid-point between 200 million then and 7-billion now might be half of 6.8 billion – 3.4 billion times 2000 years to make it easy? That’s 6.8-trillion people-years.
So IF there’s just one Enlightened One every 75-billion people years, how many would we expect to have seen since year 0?
Check my math on this: I figure the correct number is 90 or 91.
Oh, and since we’re really racking up people-years here lately, we should be seeing an Enlightened One come along every 10.7 years now. We oughta be rolling in Enlightened beings, and most certainly enough of ‘em to put at least one into a good parapsychology lab, wire ‘em up and see whatzzup.
The problem (mathematically) is getting worse every year. And the problem for religion is that science is starting to get some traction into quantum physics emergent which does (at least so far) provide for other levels of existence – which is cool and in keeping with religious beliefs.
But we’re running into this “numbers problem” and if you look at the whole of human history with only a spreadsheet…well, that’s where my time goes. I can hardly wait for Excel to be burned at the stake; it would be a great relief and end of my numerical suffering.
Elsewise, I may be forced to write “The Dancing Wu Li Spreadsheet.” With apologies to Gary Zukav, of course, who charted this intersection between science and religion more than 25-years ago
Labor Department Gone Mad
Don’t know if you have followed this one, but the Labor Department is looking at rules which would legally prohibit the use of child labor (under 18) in working on family farms to produce goods made for sale in interstate commerce.
I wailed about this on Peoplenomics as one of the most dumb-headed moves I’ve ever seen government make. I was driving a tractor summers as a kid at age 11, a D-6 Cat at age 14, plinking with a .22 at 11, too, and killing rattlers with a shovel back then, too.
Government should be sending kids today out to farms to work so they learn about real life a bit – stupid has consequences out there, not do-overs. It’s also amazing how the barnyard makes sense when reading dispatches from Washington later in life.
Readers seem – by and large – to agree. Like this guy:
“I grew up on a farm George, and It taught me that the world didn’t revolve around me. One of the biggest problems I see now days is the me me me mentality.
Farming shows a kid how we all have a part, and it teaches common sense, rather than fantasy sense. A kid grows up actually doing something, rather just pretending to do something. For most kids, it’s a pretend world, and the pretending continues throughout the rest of the lives of many of them. On the farm, we learned the true meaning of “bailing wire and bubblegum”.
We learned to improvise, and we learned it well. I do regret not learning how to use money, because there just wasn’t much of it. I am thankful now that my dad grew up in the deprssion, and most of the money I never saw, got invested or just saved. I’ve had a bumpy ride in this life, and I won’t get into the details. I’ve learned the value that what ya got is what ya need to be happy.
I’ve finally got my sights on the right things now, and the bunch of money I’m about to inherit is going to make life pretty comfortable, which means buying some farmland out about as far as you can go in the boonies of Eastern Washington.
I’ll sure be glad to get away from the nutcases like I saw at the Silverdale Costco yesterday. I think it was the second one to ever be built. I actually worked on the original, which has been added onto since. I worked a swing shift and happened to have my dinner break right during one of the best auroura shows I’ve ever seen. It happened three nights in a row.
You couldn’t even see them from there now, because it’s turned into quite a city, all lit up now. The whole area is one big bullseye too, with the Trident Base, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Keyport Undersea Warfare Station, and the list goes on.
If the world turns into what I think it may turn into,; it’s going to be us farm boys and girls that bring things back. The days of my old Pappy are over. He was a timber faller and beaver and otter trapper, with an 8th grade education, that learned to play the stock market, and played it well. I’m proud of ya for writing what ya did, speaking of being farm raised.
A person who hasn’t put their hands in the dirt, or reaped a bounteous harvest, has missed a huge chunk of what Universe has to offer. There’s a time for spreadsheets and there’s a time to just sit back in awe of it all.
I know I’m getting older since I can appreciate both side’s of the Dance.
Write when you break even: george@ure.net
Of Interest to Readers:
Be Sure to Visit: The UrbanSurvival Amazon store. Books, computers, software, and outdoor gear. You’re going to buy things on Amazon, so use this handy portal…
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Decision-Time For Markets Next Week
Are global markets out of the woods for a while, since the Spanish bond sale this week didn’t result in the gates of hell opening? No, not hardly, and so in the ChartPack this morning we’ll try to discern what’s going on. Then, in the Coping section, some discussion of the real public service work involved in ham radio as we look at incident management and how to get more involved volunteering to help in community disaster response planning. Coffee ready? Let’s start with an odd-ball story and see where it leads us, shall we?
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(Also) The “Flip-Side” of Virtual
In Wednesday’s report on the future of virtual reality glasses, a new technology which I think had pretty good potential to “pop” (standing 10-feet from a virtual 102″ screen is pretty snazzy stuff) which qualifies it as one of our serial get-rich-slowly paths, which usually seems to take years instead of days, but that’s another matter. What matters this morning is that as a friend (Oilman2) told me this week, there’s a really horrible side of virtual and he’s been kind enough to share details of how virtual is getting ready to start whacking jobs down in the oil patch. As usual, before we wade into the grim, we can recap the market and some of the major week ending headlines to see where that points…
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Safer Computing: Swearing Off Cookies
It has been a while since I roared the praises of the Maxa Cookie Manager which you can download and install for a free test drive by clicking here.
To upgrade from the demo to full working is still less than $30 (During their Spring Sale) and one heck of a bargain at that, if I do say so.
I am a high-reliability computing kind of guy – and near as I have it figured, the road to a hassle-free computing experience is (like flying an airplane) a matter of going through a proper checklist before popping onto the web:
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You need an active cookie manager – because sites you visit can put small bits of code on your computer and some of these are designed for Flash, have no expiration, and can really bugger-up the computing experience. This part gets handled by Maxa Labs’ product which on my system says 184,380 cookies have been removed, 73,881 “web bugs” which can track movement from site to site and such, and I have only 10-active cookies.
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Second thing you need is a good antivirus program – and I happen to really like Avira’s Antivir pro.
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Then you need to deal with Malware so for this Malware bytes is updated and run daily.
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And last, though certainly not least is the firewall and the one in Win 7 works fine.
Like anything in computers, updates are critical so before work every morning, the computer does its update ritual – Check of Maxa (5.3.02 is current) Avira, and Malware bytes.
Toss in a good bit of common sense (example: Don’t open email purporting to be from UPS, IRS, the US Post Office, or anything else that even has a hint of fishy odor to it) and first thing you know, the internet’s actually a useful tool.
“Live on $10,000″ A Year
Having a hard time making ends meet? (Like who isn’t, right?) A good starting point to better match up income with outgo is our $10 e-book “How to Live on $10,000 a Year…or less!”
It’s an automatic download. It’s written in an information dense style: The whole thing runs about 65 pages, but it gives you a vision of how to not only live on the cheap, but also how to migrate up the economic foodchain if you have a little hustle left. A bonus section called “How to Build Anything” should instill confidence if you’ve never taken on a home improvement/home creation project before, too….. Click here for the index and details.
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