The Cactus Laser Trigger LV5

Having already participated as a beta tester during the final development phase of the Cactus V5 transceiver about 2 years ago, I wasn’t very surprised when I received a request in December 2012 to participate as a beta tester for a new product from Harvest One Limited. Initially I thought the new product would probably be a newer version of the V5 transceiver. But when I finally received a package with a pre-production model a few weeks later, I was surprised to find a completely new kind of product in the box — the Cactus Laser Trigger LV5.

One thing that was immediately obvious to me is that Harvest One put a lot of effort into the branding and packaging of the product, for which they hired a European marketing and design agency. The LV5 is the first product from Harvest One that features the newly designed Cactus logo, which is a nice improvement compared to the older one. I also liked the black matte finish of the LV5 box which makes the product look very professional, especially compared to the V5 transceiver packaging for example. I got the impression that Harvest One is taking the Cactus brand very serious and that we can probably expect a lot more from them in the near future. And if the LV5 is any indication, there may be more innovative new products on the horizon.

The Cactus Laser Trigger LV5 Box

I like how the LV5 builds upon the already very solid and reliable V5 wireless triggering system. Not only does this have advantages for the user, but from Harvest One’s (financial) perspective it is a very smart move.  Photographers who already use the V5 transceivers to trigger their cameras and flashes can now easily extend the functionality offered by the V5 by getting the new LV5 laser trigger and using them together. I can imagine a few other products that would fit right in this V5 triggering system, and I, for one, won’t be surprised when they’re announced in the future.

Box contents: The LV5 Emitter, the LV5 Sensor, LV5 Hood, 4 AAA Batteries, two cables: 3.5mm cable and a PC sync cable, a poster, user manual and delay/freeze stickers.

Harvest One appears to primarily market the LV5 laser trigger as a solution for taking wildlife photos. For example taking photos of animals that are difficult to photograph in the wild because you can’t get too close to them without scaring them off. In such a case you can set up the LV5 laser trigger to act as a laser trip-wire that triggers your camera automatically once an animal crosses the laser beam. However, I have found that the applications for the LV5 can be more diverse and only limited by your imagination.

Cactus Laser Trigger LV5 Poster. One of my images — picture #5 — is included on the poster that ships with the LV5 laser trigger. That image was taken using the V5 transceiver a while ago.

Even in a studio setting the LV5 can be a very handy tool to have to help you work more easily and efficiently. While testing the LV5 I did a photo shoot with a fish tank filled with water, where I dropped various objects in the water while trying to capture the exact moment when the objects would hit the water surface. Normally for a shoot like this you would have to work with at least one assistant who would either press the camera button at the right moment for you, or who would repeatedly drop the objects in the water while you tried to get the perfect shot each time with a lot of trial and error. But with the LV5 laser trigger, I could just put my camera on a tripod and pre-focus and pre-frame the shot, and then drop the objects in the water myself while letting the LV5 trigger the camera each time at the precise moment. Very easy and highly efficient. But I’ll get back to this later; let’s first take a look at the LV5 features.

Features / Controls

The Cactus Laser Trigger LV5 Emitter (left) and Sensor (right) ** Flash stands not included

In the above image you can see the LV5 Emitter (left) and the LV5 Sensor (right) next to each other. The way this works is that you place the emitter and the sensor on opposite sides of each other while you make sure that the laser from the emitter points into the sensor. The sensor has a confirmation LED that turns from red to green once the laser beam is aligned precisely to fall into the sensor. Here are some of the unique features of the LV5:

• Duo Mode Triggering (DMT). The LV5 can be triggered by blocking the transmission between the laser emitter and the sensor, or by removing the object between the laser emitter and the sensor.
• Works wirelessly with Cactus V5 and subsequent V5-compatible models. The LV5 has a built-in Cactus V5 transceiver in the sensor that is  used to trigger cameras and flashes wirelessly. Although it is possible to use a cable to connect the sensor directly to your camera or flash, being able to wirelessly trigger your camera or flash is a huge plus. It’s important to note here that the LV5 will also work with other radio triggers available on the market via the supplied sync cables.
• Long working distance. The working distance between the laser emitter and the sensor is up to 150 meters. In addition, if you use the wireless triggering capabilities with the Cactus V5, the distance between the LV5 sensor and the V5 transceiver that is connected to your camera or flash can be up to 100 meters.
• Works in sunlight. The LV5 not only works in-doors but it also works in sunlight. A hood is also provided which can be placed on the sensor to shield it from bright light.
• Supports single, continuous and bulb shots.
• Shutter Delay and Freeze. You can make use of the adjustable shutter delay functionality which delays triggering your camera or flash for a specific amount of time. Similarly the adjustable freeze functionality can be used in bulb mode to keep the shutter open for a specific amount of time, or it can also stop triggering your camera or flash for a specific amount of time depending on how you set it up. The delay and freeze functionalities were added by Harvest One during the beta testing phase based on feedback from photographers in the test group. This is one of the reasons why the channel select dial is used to configure these options, instead of having their own dedicated controls.

The Cactus Laser Trigger LV5 Sensor with and without hood

The LV5 emitter and sensor both have a 1/4″ tripod mount at the bottom as well as a hot/cold shoe mount. Having both of them is very handy.

Both the LV5 emitter and sensor accept 4 AAA type batteries, but can function with just 2 AAA type batteries installed in pairs.

The Cactus Laser Trigger LV5 Battery Compartment

A tilting mechanism allows the LV5 emitter and sensor to be tilted from 20 degrees down to 65 degrees up as you can see in the picture below. This helps a lot when positioning and aligning them so that the laser beam from the emitter hits the sensor. Personally I think a ball head design would have been more useful here.

The Cactus Laser Trigger LV5 Tilting Angle

The greater the distance between the sensor and the emitter, the more difficult it becomes to properly align them. In the LV5 user manual (downloadable on the Cactus website) there’s a great description of a method that can make this process easier which involves a black card (the LV5 box can be used for this).

The Cactus Laser Trigger LV5 Emitter Frequency Selector

On the LV5 emitter you’ll find a frequency selector switch, which normally should be placed on 1Khz. The 500Hz setting makes the sensor less sensitive to interruption, and should only be used when the laser beam is being interfered by other light sources in the environment or possibly by small particles moving through the beam.

The Cactus Laser Trigger LV5 Emitter

In the front of the LV5 emitter there’s a laser filter switch, which can be used to open or close the laser filter. In an indoor setting it’s recommended to close the laser filter which dims the laser beam a little for safety reasons. When working outdoors, especially in bright sunlight, you’ll want to open the filter for maximum power.

The Cactus Laser Trigger LV5 Sensor Controls

On the LV5 sensor you’ll find the Delay/Freeze switch and the Single Shot/Multi Shot switch. There’s also a shutter release port where you can connect a 3.5mm shutter release cable. As mentioned before, you can specify a time interval for the delay and freeze options using the channel dial.

Cactus Laser Trigger LV5 Delay Test. Left image has zero delay, right image has 50ms delay.

You can see the effect a delay setting of 50ms can have on the trigger in the above image. This can be very useful if you want to capture an object only once it has passed the LV5 emitter and sensor so that they don’t appear in the frame, or for very precise timing and tweaking. Another thing you can notice here is that even though the left image has a delay of zero seconds, the picture was taken when the pack of thee had already passed the emitter and sensor, instead of freezing it right between the emitter and sensor. This is due to the fact that the LV5 trigger was used to trigger the camera via a V5 transceiver unit. When the V5 unit sends the shutter release signal to the camera, there’s a small delay before the camera responds and takes the shot. The duration of this small delay depends on the camera brand and model. The Canon 5D Mark III body, which I used during this test, has a shutter lag of 59ms. This is why for really high speed photography, it is best to have the LV5 trigger the flashes instead, and to put the camera in bulb mode so that the flashes can freeze the subject instantly. This is also why a freeze setting exists on the LV5 sensor, which allows you to disable repeated triggering after the initial triggering event for a specific amount of time in order not to have multiple firings of the flashes during a single frame in bulb mode. Of course all of this is explained in the manual.

The Cactus Laser Trigger LV5 Emitter Frequency Selector

On the other side of the LV5 sensor you’ll find the channel dial, which looks and functions exactly like the channel dial on he V5 transceiver units. The only difference here is that on the LV5 the channel dial is also used to set the delay and freeze intervals for triggering the camera or flash. There’s a table included in the manual, and also on supplied stickers, where you can see which time interval corresponds to a selected channel.

The Cactus Laser Trigger LV5 Sensor Test Button

Above the channel dial on the sensor you’ll find the test button which can be  used to test the shutter release cable or wireless connection between the sensor and the camera. Half pressing this button activates autofocus on the camera (if enabled) and a full press releases the shutter.

Test Photoshoot

Introducing Dolly the green dolphin

I did a simple test photo shoot in a studio setting to test the capabilities of the Cactus LV5 laser trigger which involved Dolly the green dolphin. In the diagram below you can see how everything was set up.

Lighting Diagram

I  used a 100mm f/2.8L Macro lens attached to a 5D Mark III body with the Canon ST-E3-RT on the hot shoe, which I used to trigger the two Canon 600EX-RT flashes. A Cactus V5 transceiver was also connected to the 5D Mark III via a shutter release cable (sold separately by Gadget Infinity). The Cactus LV5 emitter and sensor were positioned on opposite sides of a small fish tank filled with water, with the laser beam passing through the glass of the fish tank about 1cm above the water level. Having pre-focused and pre-framed the 5D Mark III on a tripod, all I  had to do was stand next to the fish tank out of the frame and drop Dolly into the water. And I could keep doing this repeatedly essentially without having to worry about anything else. The LV5 took care of triggering the camera for me each time at the right moment. The wireless connection between the LV5 sensor and the V5 transceiver to trigger the camera also performed flawlessly.

As mentioned before, the benefit of working this way is that I didn’t need an assistant to either help me with the camera or with dropping Dolly into the fish tank; I could do the whole shoot on my own. In addition, using the Cactus LV5, I increased my chances of getting usable shots. If I didn’t have the LV5 I would have to time the shots myself and use the spray and pray technique with the camera in burst mode and hope that somewhere in between I got a shot that was timed just right. Not to mention the strain this would have put on the flashes, their power consumption and recycling times. It was just so much easier and so much more efficient, not to mention accurate, to use the LV5. You can see some more shots I took of Dolly in the gallery below.

I can imagine all kinds of applications for the LV5 apart from the obvious high speed photography and wildlife scenarios. For example, it could also be used in sports to automatically get the right shot at the right time. You could even have it trigger multiple cameras from different angles at once. Or how about photographing ballerinas in mid-air? That would be so easy once you set up your equipment; all you’d have to do then is have the ballerinas repeatedly jump in the air in the correct spot while you sit back, relax and review the shots in real time on your tethered tablet and taking sips of your piña colada. Don’t you just love automation?

Conclusion

Based on my experiences with testing the pre-production model of the Cactus LV5, and also using the final production model, I can say that it is a very useful product that can be used in various scenarios. The quality of the product is also very good, with the exception of the power button, which sometimes doesn’t respond when you press it too close to the edges. Also, sometimes a single press on the power button appears to have the effect of two presses; trying to turn the emitter or sensor on can cause it to quickly turn on and off again. But this is not something that happens very often.

Another thing is that it would have been better if the freeze and delay interval settings had their own dedicated controls, instead of having to use the channel dial for this. As mentioned before, the reason why this is the case is because the freeze and delay functionality was added last minute based on feedback from the beta test group. While I definitely prefer having this functionality on the LV5 as it is right now, as opposed to not having it at all, this is certainly one of the things that can be improved in a newer model in the future.

For a price of about $90, I think the Cactus LV5 offers very good value for the money and I can highly recommend getting one if you can see how it can benefit your work as a photographer. I personally have a few plans for photo shoots using the LV5 lined up already.

The Cactus LV5 can be ordered from the Gadget Infinity website here. For more information about the Cactus LV5 laser trigger, you can check out the product page on the Cactus website, where you can also download the  user manual. If you have any questions just post them in the comments below and I’ll be happy to answer them if I can.

HIV Does Not Cause AIDS

Why would at least two Nobel Prize winning scientists risk their careers and reputations and publicly state that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS? Why would one of the world’s foremost virologists risk his career and reputation and also publicly state that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS? And why is Magic Johnson still alive?

It turns out that the HIV=AIDS hypothesis is one of the biggest blunders in medical science of our time. I’m confident that future civilizations will look back at us in disgust as they wonder not only how it was that a few people could be so selfish to perpetuate such lies that would lead to the death of millions of others while they benefitted financially, but also how it is that these people were allowed to do this by the rest of the population. This will probably be very similar to how we look back today at civilizations from hundreds of years ago that believed that the Earth is flat and condemned those who would even dare to say that the Earth is in fact round. Consider how Galileo Galilei was convicted of heresy, and ultimately died in prison, for standing behind Copernicus’s theories that the Sun was the center of our solar system and not the Earth. In fact Copernicus refused to publish his work for many years because he didn’t want to risk the scorn “to which he would expose himself on account of the novelty and incomprehensibility of his theses.”

It seems that not a lot has changed since the days of Copernicus, because today even leading scientists who have already contributed a lot to our development, can still be ridiculed and condemned for expressing their views. And this while thousands and perhaps even millions of people die around the world who could otherwise be saved.

A multi-billion dollar industry now exists around the HIV=AIDS hypothesis and those who benefit from this aren’t willing to tell the truth and give up their lucrative business. The first HIV test is patented and owned by the US and French governments who have invested a lot in this scam. Scientists are bought by the industry with research grants that help to perpetuate the lies on which this industry is founded. The scientists who aren’t willing to go along and want to speak the truth are condemned, ridiculed, suppressed, marginalized, are called AIDS denialists, and lose their funding.

Take microbiologist Dr. Kary Mullis Ph.D. for example, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his invention called the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) technique, which ironically allowed scientists to analyze human tissue for the presence of HIV. When he expressed his views about HIV not causing AIDS, and not being able to find ANY evidence for this, all of a sudden his scientific views didn’t count anymore. Scientists backed by the AIDS industry are perfectly OK with using Mullis’s PCR technique to look for HIV in humans though, but anything he says that threatens their AIDS empire gets ignored. This isn’t unique in the medical scientific community as you can find this kind of behavior in many other areas in scientific research and even in other industries. For example, not too long ago I discussed how the true causes of hysteria among women in the 1800s were suppressed by physicians because they feared the consequences of being politically incorrect and losing business:

It’s important to note that those physicians knew exactly what was going on. They knew the cause of the symptoms that the women they were treating were suffering from, namely, sexual dissatisfaction. It’s also important to note that those women apparently had no idea what the causes were of the symptoms they were experiencing, because otherwise they’d probably know what to do and not need the physicians. But the physicians kept quiet about the cause because they were more interested in making money than doing society a favor by telling everyone exactly what was going on.

[...], instead they wanted to benefit financially from the psychological issues women were having and looked for better ways to be able to treat these women themselves. The money isn’t in the cure, but in the treatment (you’ll come across this more once you start investigating issues in the healthcare industry today).

Important scientific discoveries are often held back by the few in order to protect their financial interests, even at the expense of the vast majority of the global population.

In a foreword to the book “Inventing the AIDS Virus” by Dr. Peter Duesberg Ph.D., Mullis had the following to say:

In 1988 I was working as a consultant at Specialty Labs in Santa Monica, CA, setting up analytic routines for the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). I knew a lot about setting up analytic routines for anything with nucleic acids in it because I invented the Polymerase Chain Reaction. That’s why they hired me.

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), on the other hand, was something I did not know a lot about. Thus, when I found myself writing a report on our progress and goals for the project, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, I recognized that I did not know the scientific reference to support a statement I had just written: “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.”

So I turned to the virologist at the next desk, a reliable and competent fellow, and asked him for the reference. He said I didn’t need one. I disagreed. While it’s true that certain scientific discoveries or techniques are so well established that their sources are no longer referenced in the contemporary literature, that didn’t seem to be the case with the HIV/AIDS connection. It was totally remarkable to me that the individual who had discovered the cause of a deadly and as-yet-uncured disease would not be continually referenced in the scientific papers until that disease was cured and forgotten.

…

After ten or fifteen meetings over a couple years, I was getting pretty upset when no one could cite the reference. I didn’t like the ugly conclusion that was forming in my mind: The entire campaign against a disease increasingly regarded as a twentieth century Black Plague was based on a hypothesis whose origins no one could recall. That defied both scientific and common sense.

…

We have not been able to discover any good reasons why most of the people on earth believe that AIDS is a disease caused by a virus called HIV. There is simply no scientific evidence demonstrating that this is true. 

We have also not been able to discover why doctors prescribe a toxic drug called AZT (Zidovudine) to people who have no other complaint other than the fact that they have the presence of antibodies to HIV in their blood. In fact, we cannot understand why humans would take this drug for any reason.

Listen to the interview below where Dr. Mullis talks about what’s wrong with the HIV=AIDS hypothesis.

Along with Dr. Mullis, another Nobel Prize in Chemistry winning scientist, Dr. Walter Gilbert, also stated that HIV is not the cause of AIDS:

[Duesberg] is absolutely correct in saying that no one has proven that AIDS is caused by the AIDS virus. And he is absolutely correct that the virus cultured in the laboratory may not be the cause of AIDS. Hippocrates (Sept./Oct. 1988)

I would not be surprised if there were another cause of AIDS and even that HIV is not involved. As quoted in Omni (June 1993)

And from here:

Leading biochemical scientists, including University of California at Berkeley retrovirus expert Peter Duesberg and Nobel Prize winner Walter Gilbert, have been warning for years that there is no proof that HIV causes AIDS. [...] Viewers of ABC’s 1993 Day One special on the cause of AIDS-almost the only occasion on which network television has covered the controversy-saw Robert Gallo, the leading exponent of the HIV theory, stomp away from the microphone in a rage when asked to respond to the views of Gilbert and Duesberg.

Speaking of Dr. Peter Duesberg Ph.D., he’s a world renowned virologist who was the co-discoverer of the first viral cancer gene and also became famous for being the first to map the genetic structure of retroviruses. He publicly began speaking out about HIV not being the cause of AIDS about 3 years after Gallo announced it was at a press conference. Similar to Dr. Mullis, as soon as Duesberg began expressing his findings that opposed the lies being perpetuated by the AIDS industry, all of a sudden his views didn’t matter anymore. He was viewed as a threat to the AIDS establishment and was marginalized. Apparently being the first to map the genetic structure of retroviruses doesn’t give your scientific views any weight when you say that HIV — which is a retrovirus – doesn’t cause AIDS. Duesberg’s views on the HIV=AIDS hypothesis are explored in great detail in the documentary linked below titled “HIV=AIDS: Fact or Fraud.” I highly recommend watching it.

Duesberg’s website has a wealth of information on the HIV=AIDS fraud as well as a lot of research proving the HIV=AIDS hypothesis is a fraud. Duesberg’s research shows that HIV is a harmless retrovirus that has lived in humans for centuries without causing any disease. It also shows that the cause of AIDS can be linked to lifestyle/behavioral issues, drug abuse and malnutrition, which, when you think about it makes a ton of sense. Abuse of recreational drugs is bound to have serious negative consequences for your body, and especially your immune system. Similarly, not having access to healthy food, as the case is in African countries, also weakens your body and immune system.

The HIV=AIDS hypothesis also doesn’t agree with the germ theory of disease. This is explained in the above linked documentary titled “HIV=AIDS: Fact or Fraud”, but in the below video you can also watch a presentation by Duesberg on this subject:

The fact that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS is further evidenced by the fact that there are many people who are born with, or develop, disorders in their immune systems who develop AIDS-like symptoms but aren’t infected with HIV. The AIDS industry conveniently calls this Non-HIV AIDS and pretends that the HIV virus does cause AIDS but is just not detectable in these people for some reason:

Idiopathic CD4+ T-lymphocytopenia, or ICL, is an immunodeficiency syndrome in which human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, cannot be detected. Because HIV is the causative agent of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), ICL can be referred to as Non-HIV AIDS. As in AIDS patients, Non-HIV AIDS patients exhibit reduced numbers of CD4+ T-lymphocytes, and many Non-HIV AIDS patients have developed the opportunistic infections or otherwise rare cancers associated with AIDS.

If you just laughed out loud at the absurdity of this, I completely understand. Apparently there are a lot of people out there who suffer from Non-HIV AIDS, just take a look at this:

Why isn’t CFS/ME a reportable disease overseen by our public health department? Why are ME and CFS (i.e., the same exact disorder) suspiciously categorized as two separate illnesses on a worldwide level (i.e., by ICD codes)? Doesn’t anyone else but me, very clearly see, the catastrophic cover-up going on here?

Why are we not reading about Non-HIV AIDS cases (and/or the AIDS-like nature of CFS) on the front pages of every newspaper in the world? And if CFS/ME is Non-HIV AIDS, then, depending on who you believe, there are anywhere between 500,000 – 14,000,000 Americans out there with a transmissible illness. If that is what it truly is, our new form of AIDS dwarfs the ‘original’ AIDS epidemic — tenfold!

We’re not reading about these Non-HIV AIDS cases because it’s against the interests of the AIDS industry who want to sell their drugs to people. This is exactly what Duesberg’s research showed — that HIV couldn’t be the cause of AIDS because many people were suffering from AIDS but didn’t have the HIV virus in them! Instead of doing the logical thing and looking for another cause of AIDS, the AIDS establishment just went ahead and said, “No, no, HIV is the cause of AIDS, but it’s just not detectable in those people.” It’s hilarious and sad at the same time. Just imagine that because of the fraud committed by these people there are millions of people around the world who are dying because of toxic drugs that they’re sold to fight a harmless HIV virus – drugs which themselves cause AIDS!

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: Tell perfectly healthy people with HIV that they’re going to die from AIDS, even though HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and then sell them drugs that actually cause AIDS so they get sick and die anyway. Like I mentioned before, the money isn’t in the cure but in the treatment. The big pharmaceutical companies benefitting from this mess are happy to keep you coming to buy their poison. Indeed it appears that whatever you do, if you are found to be HIV positive, DO NOT use any medication against HIV if you want to live and not get AIDS.

If HIV was really as dangerous as these people claim, and if people infected with HIV have only 10 years to live, then why are there many people who continue to live longer and die a natural death? Just look at Magic Johnson, who was found to be HIV positive in 1991. At the time of this writing, 21 years have gone by and Mr. Johnson is still alive. Shouldn’t he have died already because of AIDS? Perhaps the reason why Johnson is still alive is due to the fact that he partnered with the AIDS industry and became an important spokesperson for them while advertising the use of certain drugs against AIDS, possibly putting him high enough in the chain and making him valuable enough to be allowed to know the truth about HIV not causing AIDS – and as a result not using the toxic drugs himself.

If HIV was really as dangerous as these people claim, then why would Dr. Robert Willner inject himself numerous times with HIV in front of the press? Just take a look at one of his presentations in the video below and listen carefully to what he has to say:

What’s taking place here right before our eyes is a tragedy on a global scale. A tragedy where millions of people are purposely and knowingly murdered by the AIDS industry, including the big pharmaceutical companies, in order to benefit from it financially. In the midst of this we fortunately have people like Dr. Mullis and Dr. Duesberg with a lot of courage, who are willing to risk their careers and reputation to fight this corrupt system. I hope future generations will recognize these men, and all others like them, as the heroes that they are. I have a lot of admiration and respect for them.

I hope that after reading this, watching the linked videos and doing some of your own research, you will act on your conscience and openly talk about the truth to everyone. Consider that this information could one day save the life of a friend, a loved one or even a family member, who might otherwise trust the wrong people and suffer and maybe even die because of totally unnecessary reasons.

Colorful Eyes See a Colorful World

The world we live in right now is a complete mess. I often spend a lot of time on my own thinking about how we got into this mess we’re in right now. It’s a god damned tragedy that I have to be here right now trying to live my life when everything around me is just seriously messed up and working against me. And it’s not just working against me, but against all of us, whether you realize it or not, and whether you like to admit it or not. And one of the important reasons why we’re in this mess right now, is because most of our ancestors were basically cowards who only thought about their own short term interests, instead of thinking about what would be good for the long term, not only for themselves but more importantly for their children and grandchildren. Even now when I look around me, I see people behaving like this on a daily basis. People become the biggest hypocrites being politically correct in public, while secretly being aware of the truth but being too afraid to speak out and act in accordance with their conscience. In doing so they’re not only helping to perpetuate this mess we’re in, but are even making the problem a lot worse as time goes on.

In defense of our ancestors, I have to admit that they were up against a system that is fundamentally flawed and specifically designed to work against them on many levels. And they were kept dumb and ignorant on purpose and often didn’t realize how they were being manipulated. And even though we face the same issues today, we have certain advantages that make it easier to fight this system and change the world we live in. One of the important advantages that we have right now that our ancestors didn’t have are technologies such as the Internet, which enables the Global Brain which will accelerate our mental evolution and really enable us to dramatically change the world we live in.

But even with those advantages nothing is going to change if we don’t actively start to tackle all the issues we’re facing in life right now. One of the most important things that we need to do is to start openly talking about all the things that are wrong in life, that are working against us and that make life difficult for us, instead of just accepting things as they are and trying to go along with it. It’s like Steve Jobs said in the video below:

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. But that’s a very limited life; life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life and that something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it, that’s maybe the most important thing: To shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. I think that’s very important. And however you learn that, once your learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, because it’s kind of messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

From early childhood we’re being taught that we shouldn’t question things in life too much. We’re being indoctrinated with all kinds of false beliefs, and we’re taught to be obedient to the system and that we should be afraid to think differently. It’s like Michael Moore said:

As a rule, we are instructed from childhood that serious consequences shall arise if we dare to rock the boat. We learn instinctually that it is always better to go along so that we get along. To slip off the assembly line of groupthink means to risk ridicule, rejection, banishment. Being alone sucks, but being alone while you are attacked, smeared, and scorned is about the same as picking up a hot poker and jamming it in your eye. Who in their right mind would want to do that? Especially when conformity to the community offers as its reward acceptance, support, love and the chance to be comfortably numb.

David Icke said the following about this:

We laugh at sheep because sheep just follow the one in front. We humans have out-sheeped the sheep, because at least the sheep need a sheep dog to keep them in line. Humans keep each other in line. And they do it by ridiculing or condemning anyone who commits the crime — and that’s what it’s become – of being different.

But like Steve Jobs said, if we want a broader life we have to be willing to “bash into the walls.” We have to “shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and we’re just going to live in it.” We have to change life and improve it, because “it’s messed up in a lot of ways.” We have to let go of fear, forget about our own short term interests, and we have to start thinking years ahead into the future and try to create a better world for our children. And the only way that we’re really going to be able to change this mess we’re in, is to be politically incorrect a lot of the time — openly challenge all the bullshit that exists around us, point at it and constantly talk about it so that it becomes painfully obvious to everyone. Admitting that all of the issues exist and talking about them is the first step towards finding solutions. And like Michael Moore said, it’s not easy; it takes courage to do this because you’ll be risking a lot and people will often get offended. People don’t like to be reminded of the fact that they’re hypocrites who stay politically correct in public in order to protect their own selfish interests.

Dr. Benjamin Carson, a very famous brain surgeon, said the following during a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in the USA in 2013:

I have discovered however in recent years that it’s very difficult to speak to a large group of people these days and not offend someone. [...] The PC (Political Correctness) police are out in force at all times. We’ve reached a point where people are afraid to actually talk about what they want to say because somebody might be offended. [...] We’ve got to get over this sensitivity. It keeps people from saying what they really believe. [...] What we need to do in this PC world is forget about unanimity of speech and unanimity of thought and we need to concentrate on being respectful to those people with whom we disagree. And that’s when I think we begin to make real progress. And one last thing about political correctness – which I think is a horrible thing by the way – I’m very very compassionate and I’m not ever out to offend anyone. But PC is dangerous. Because you see, one of the founding principles of this country was freedom of thought and freedom of expression. And it muzzles people; it puts a muzzle on them. And at the same time it keeps people from discussing important issues while the fabric of this society is being changed. And we cannot fall for that trick. And what we need to do is start talking about things, talking about things that are important. Things that were important in the development of our nation. One of those things was education. [...] Here we are at a time in the world – the information age, the age of technology – and yet 30% of people who enter high school in this country do not graduate, 44% of people who start a 4 year college program do not finish it in 4 years. What is that about? Think back to a darker time in our history 200 years ago when slavery was going on. It was illegal to educate a slave, particularly to teach him to read. Why do you think that was? Because when you educate a man, you liberate a man.

So what we see here is that if we want to change the world for the better, the only way we’re going to be able to do that is by being politically incorrect; by fearlessly identifying and openly discussing all the important issues we’re facing today, and start looking for solutions. We have to let go of our fears and dare to step off what Michael Moore calls “the assembly line of groupthink.” We have to step out of the herd of sheep if we want to make a difference. We have to forget about our own short term interests and start thinking about our long term interests and especially that of our children.

Never be afraid to do what’s right

Like I wrote before:

We all want to achieve things in life. But at the end, you’re going to have to ask yourself: “What personal sacrifices did I have to make to achieve all of this, and were they worth it?” And especially, you’re going to have to ask yourself what sacrifices you had to make in your personal integrity, in your beliefs and basically in the person you believed you were. How much did you have to change, perhaps to be accepted or to be regarded as part of the group, to be able to get what you wanted? And was it worth it?

Is it worth it to be afraid of what you have to lose, give up your personal integrity and stay politically correct in order to protect your interests and to be accepted in a seriously flawed society, while you look on as the world continues to deteriorate? Or would you rather like to be true to yourself, stand behind your beliefs and improve life? We have to take responsibility and clean up as much of this mess as we can right now in order for our children and grandchildren to be able to live in a much better world in the future. If we don’t, they’re going to look back at us one day and see us for the cowards that we were as they struggle to survive in a world that’ll be even more of a mess than it is right now.

Inner Glow

If you’ve read some of my previous posts on love and relationships, you can already logically derive an answer to those questions based on the information in those posts. And the answer to all of those questions, of course, is NO. And I’ll explain why.

I’ve already shown in a previous post that humans are naturally polygamists. With this in mind, it doesn’t make any sense for people to want to wait for a soul mate or for the perfect partner whom they can spend the rest of their lives with. Monogamy doesn’t work for humans; in fact, tying yourself to one single partner will only cause a lot of problems. There is evidence for that everywhere in societies around the world. One of the biggest issues is the fact that in monogamous relationships both partners limit each other’s freedom. Since freedom is one of the most important virtues to have in life, limitations in monogamous relationships inevitably lead to problems. Both partners may slowly and/or subconsciously develop the urge to want to break free as time passes. Another big issue here is that people who believe in soul mates or in one perfect partner often have highly unrealistic views and expectations about love, romance and relationships as a result of society’s brainwash. Consequently they eventually become disillusioned when they learn from experience what reality is like. Both of the aforementioned issues can ultimately lead to hostility and one or both partners (secretly) hating each other, as psychoanalyst Karen Horney M.D. indicated in her article “The Problem of the Monogamous Ideal”:

[...] the overestimation of love leads to disillusionment; the desire to possess the partner results in the partner wanting to escape; and the taboos against sex result in non-fulfillment. Disillusionment plus the desire to escape plus non-fulfillment result in a secret hostility, which causes the other partner to feel alienated. Secret hostility in one and secret alienation in the other cause the partners to secretly hate each other. This secret hate often leads one or the other or both to seek love objects outside the marriage or relationship.

In addition I’ve also shown in a previous post that humans are perfectly capable of loving more people at the same time. This is entirely consistent with the fact that humans are naturally polygamists. The fact is that during the course of a lifetime an individual can and often will develop strong romantic feelings towards a number of different people in their life – possibly even simultaneously. And contrary to what society’s brainwash suggests, this is perfectly natural. Therefore it doesn’t make sense to wait for a soul mate or a perfect partner because there will never be just one. And this is good because the fact of the matter is that every individual needs more people in their life with a variety of experiences to be able to grow in a balanced way. Just think about it; there can never be a single person out there that’ll be able to satisfy all your needs for the rest of your life. Imagine the huge burden that you put on the shoulders of a potential partner if you expect them to be able to meet your every requirement and satisfy your every need. Nobody can be expected to devote their entire lives to you; they have their own lives, their own dreams and their own desires just like you. There can be overlaps and that’s where you can enjoy each other’s company. However, where they can’t satisfy some of your needs you’re supposed to find others who can, and allow them the freedom to do the same. What makes matters even more complex here, is that people — including their dreams and desires in life — can naturally change over time. So relying too much on a single person isn’t a good idea. What works now with someone, might not work anymore later in life.

Finally I also want to make the point that, certainly in the case of a soul mate, you should not be looking for someone else to complete you or to make you happy. Every individual should strive to become as independent as possible in life, and should also try to be satisfied with their life on their own as much as possible. When this is the case, they can then allow other people into their life that can somehow make a positive contribution and with whom they can share their experiences with. Expecting a soul mate or a perfect partner to complete your life and to not only make you happy, but to also continuously put a considerable amount of effort into keeping you happy, is unrealistic and unwise and will only lead to problems in the long term. They might pretend to meet your high requirements in the beginning to win you over, or they might genuinely try their best to do so and try to keep it going, but they won’t be able to keep it up in the long term. Like I previously stated: Nobody can be expected to devote their entire lives to you; they have their own lives, their own dreams and their own desires just like you. At some point they’re going to want to pursue their own desires and if they’re being limited, it will cause issues.

People need to become more realistic about love and about what really matters in personal interactions between men and women. Like I wrote before in a previous post:

Men don’t need women for friendships. Men can satisfy all their desires for friendships with other men. What men really need women for are for the things that men can’t normally get from other men, namely sex and intimacy. If we want to be brutally honest about it, relationships between men and women essentially all really boil down to satisfying our natural sexual desires. Nothing else. So ultimately, the primary reason why men would spend time with women is to get sexual satisfaction.

And the same thing also applies to women – normal women, to be more precise, as explained in the fifth part of my article series on Understanding Women.

So instead of wasting time waiting for a soul mate or a perfect partner, and finding out every time that it doesn’t work out anyway, free yourself from society’s brainwash and the misconceptions that were taught to you about love, relationships and sexuality, and instead let people into your life that mean well, that you can trust, and that can make a positive contribution to your life without demanding too much from you. Most importantly, be realistic about your expectations and avoid making demands yourself.

Thomas Jefferson on Taxes

I’ve been meaning to write about income taxation for a long time now. Almost a year ago I had written a letter on the issues of income taxation to the President of my country, H.E. D.D. Bouterse, for whom I incidentally also did the official portrait in 2010 after he was inaugurated. It is an open letter which was also published online for everyone to read. However, the original letter is written in Dutch (download), so I decided to translate it and post it here on my blog, instead of writing an entirely new article on income taxation specifically for my blog.

This letter is the result of years of personal research and experience, and I encourage you to not only read it thoroughly, but also to check out all the footnotes in their entirety. I can guarantee you that after doing that you will have learned a lot more about the world we live in than you might have been taught growing up.

While most of the people in the world think they’re free, we are in fact very far from free. Slavery is still present everywhere around the world. The only thing that’s different is the way in which we are enslaved. Yes, people aren’t walking around in chains anymore, and countries have gotten their “independence.” But in reality what happened is that those in control have only moved away from a more in your face type of control and slavery, to a new kind where you think you’re free, but really aren’t. You see, when people think they’re free, there’s no reason for rebellion.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

But there’s one problem that they didn’t count on. In the new age that we are currently heading into where humankind moves into a higher state of awareness, no form of control and manipulation will be able to remain hidden, lies will be exposed and the truth will come out. So how exactly are we enslaved right now? Continue reading my letter below and find out.

Free Range Slaves

Letter to the President

To: The President of the Republic of Suriname, H.E. D. D. Bouterse
CC: The Vice President of the Republic of Suriname, H.E. R. Ameerali
The Speaker of the National Assembly, Drs. Jennifer Simons
The Minister of Finance, Drs. Adelien Wijnerman

Dear President Bouterse,

Not so long ago Mrs. Jennifer Simons published a few questions on her Facebook page having to do with employment. Apparently it was found by some policymakers that there are insufficient workers available for the private sector and that most people prefer a job inside the government. I had responded to these questions through a “note” on my own Facebook profile, and I had sent you a copy of my response via email[1]. In this letter I want to dive deeper into one of the most important issues that we’re dealing with for many years, an issue that currently lies at the root of many problems in society, including the problem of employment. And that problem has to do with unfair taxation.

I’d like to indicate in advance that this is not intended as criticism of the current government, since we all know that this system is inherited from previous governments and that these issues have been present for years. Furthermore, I suspect that many of the issues that I will discuss are perhaps known to the government. I assume that the proposed fiscal changes shortly after you took office came for a good reason. Hopefully those changes are coming due to the fact that the government is aware of things that need to be improved.

Nevertheless I will share my opinion as completely as possible in this letter in the assumption that you may not be aware of this information.

One of the things that I frequently come across in my personal research in many areas is that for hundreds, and even thousands of years, humankind has had the knowledge to not only solve many problems in the world, but more importantly, to avoid those problems entirely. If we had made good use of that knowledge in all the time we’ve lost up until now, then the world would today be much closer to being a paradise. However, every time I have to conclude that although the knowledge exists to solve a great deal of the problems that we’re facing, there are groups of people who instead want to abuse that knowledge for their own benefit, in most cases at the expense of the vast majority of society.

It’s been known for at least thousands of years that unfair taxes eventually lead to the destruction of a civilization. “The power to tax is the power to destroy” people often say, and not without good reasons. In the book “The Income Tax: Root of all Evil” by Frank Chodorov, he writes: “The income tax is not only a tax; it is an instrument that has the potentiality of destroying a society of humans.”[2]

There are indeed cases known in our history where the destruction of entire civilizations was the result of the negative spiral-effect in the economy caused by taxation (Ancient Egypt, Roman Empire etc.).

Egypt: ”The most impressive analysis of Egypt’s demise came from the great Russian scholar Rostovtzeff. He believed, after a lifetime of study, that the decay in Egyptian society was the result of lawlessness in the bureaucracy, especially the tax bureau. The king could not restrain it and his orders went unheeded. Rostovtzeff felt that the continual and unabated tyranny of Egyptian tax collectors produced a nationwide decline in incentive. Egyptian workers and farmers lost their desire to work – agricultural lands fell into disuse, businessmen moved away and workers fled. Sound money disappeared as a raging inflation destroyed what capital there was. The land became filled with robbers who wrecked commerce and brought fear and despair to the populace. Boating and sailing along the Nile became as dangerous as walking at night on the back streets of New York and Detroit. In the end, thieves were no longer only in the tax bureau – they were everywhere.”

Rome: ”The prevalence of crippling taxation prior to the fall of Rome has led many historians, in all ages, to suspect that Rome, like so many great empires, taxed itself to death. Recently, the tax theory of the Fall has become unfashionable among many scholars – perhaps because of our own tolerance for heavy taxation. No one likes to think we are writing our own obituary when we draft modern tax legislation. If our civilization is to be destroyed, we like to think it will happen Hollywood-style – a cataclysmic event like an atomic war, an ecological blunder, or some other dramatic happening. Certainly not something so simple and dull as everyday taxation.” [3]

Today this can be seen in the USA where the economy is getting worse while the government continues to increase taxes. But even in Suriname we can notice the problems that continue to get worse as time passes. It’s absolutely no coincidence that increasingly more and more people in the USA are now calling for abolishing the income tax. The Republican Ron Paul, who’s also running for the presidential nominations in 2012 in the USA, has the income tax as one of his important issues[4]. This is one of the reasons why his popularity continues to increase and why he appeals so much to the younger generation in the USA and also the army. There’s also an anti-income tax movement in the USA right now that continues to grow.

It’s important to realize that taxation is one of the things that led to the American Revolution (1775-1783). (And I think that you can probably still remember the issues in the early 80′s in Suriname that were caused by tax increases). In America people were against the tax measures that Great Britain (British East India Company) wanted to impose on the colonies via the Townschend Acts.[5] One of the more known issues was the fact that due to financial issues, the British Empire had imposed taxes on tea in order to generate more revenue. This was met with heavy opposition by the Americans (Boston Tea Party[6]) and this was the start of the American Revolution. In retrospect, it seems strange that an entire revolution was started only because of a “small” tax on tea, as Frank Chodorov mentions in his book[7], but it shows how much value the Americans attached to their freedom as human beings. Because, smart as they were, they could already see where this was leading to (their gradual enslavement by Great Britain through taxes). After having fought for their independence, the Americans ensured that the new American constitution of 1787 left no room for the introduction of an income tax, and they were very specific on the kind of taxes that would be allowed. However the “U.S. government” would later, by illegally passing the 16th amendment to the U.S. constitution[8] [9], succeed in opening the way for the introduction of an income tax. This was only possible after the passing of two generations of Americans, when the American people finally started to “forget” what their ancestors had fought against in the period between 1775-1783. [10]

It seems that humanity keeps forgetting its history and that as a result history keeps repeating itself. We keep repeating the same mistakes again and again, and use the same systems that ultimately lead to major problems and even to the end of entire civilizations. People often like to compare the USA of today with the Roman Empire hundreds of years ago and there are good reasons for that. The USA is heading off into a major economic crisis and ultimately the collapse of the entire economy because of the negative spiral effect of tax measures among other things.

“The history of taxation is also the history of the rise and fall of civilization. It is the history of economic rape.”[11]

That we are currently stuck with income and payroll taxes in Suriname, despite all this knowledge of negative effects that they cause, is beyond my comprehension. How is it possible that we’re stuck with this in Suriname after so much history of obvious negative effects that will ultimately be disastrous for our society?

Even Albert Einstein clearly indicated that he had a huge problem with income tax when he said: “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”

In a society where we may assume that we are all free individuals there is no room for an income tax. Because in fact it turns us all into slaves.[12]

“When the human is similarly deprived of what he has produced – which is the essence of income taxation – he is indeed degraded to the status of an ox.”[13]

Ron Paul calls it “involuntary servitude.”[14] Like he says: “An income tax is the most degrading and totalitarian of all possible taxes. Its implementation wrongly suggests that the government owns the lives and labor of the citizens it is supposed to represent.“[15]

In other words, the income tax turns us into the property of the government, it turns us into slaves, when in fact the government is supposed to represent us, not own us. In our own constitution Article 15 says: “Nobody should be compelled to perform forced or compulsory labor.” However, through income and payroll taxes we are being forced to cede a portion of our income to the government, and in effect we are forced to work for the government.

Every person has the right to freedom and to life. Where as a free man you should have the right to be able to make a living for yourself so that you can survive, you are being forced to cede a part of your income to the government, and it doesn’t matter to the government if you get in trouble because of that and eventually can no longer meet your daily needs. The government determines how much of your income you can keep:

“The government says to the citizen: “Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide.””[16]

And you have no choice in the matter – something that you’d expect to have as a free individual. You are required to pay, otherwise the government by intimidation and/or coercion and/or through the use of force, eventually still confiscates part of your income. This is in fact equal to stealing. Taking part of the income of citizens without their consent and against their will is theft. For years, stealing has apparently been completely legal for the government.

“Tax is theft, legalized robbery, crime. Some people use intimidation, fraud, coercion, force, threat of force, violence, and terror to rob other people of their property, the fruit of their labor. Tax is economic rape. In the final analysis, tax is collected at the point of a gun.”[17]

“The government can, under the law, take everything the citizen earns, even to the extent of depriving him of all above mere subsistence, which it must allow him in order that he may produce something to be confiscated. Whichever way you turn this amendment, you come up with the fact that it gives the government a prior lien on all the property produced by its subjects.”[18]

Ultimately we have no other choice but to pay, otherwise it happens by force. And you can’t say that you have a choice by not working if you don’t want to pay income tax, because then you die. That’s not a choice. This is why I say that we are all basically born as slaves. Slaves of the government and of this system.

Taxes = Theft

Article 14 of our constitution says: “Everyone has a right to life. This right is protected by law.” By imposing a claim on the income of citizens, the government interferes with the right to life of every citizen. As Frank Chodorov very nicely explains:

“The human being is the unit of all social institutions; without a man there cannot be a crowd. Hence, we are compelled to look to the individual to find an axiom on which to build a nonsocialistic moral code. What does he tell us about himself?

In the first place, he tells us that above all things he wants to live. He tells us this even when he first comes into this world and lets out a yell. Because of that primordial desire, he maintains, he has a right to live. Certainly, nobody else can establish a valid claim to his life, and for that reason he traces his own title to an authority that transcends all men, to God. That title makes sense.

When the individual says he has a valid title to life, he means that all that is he, is his own; his body, his mind, his faculties. Maybe there is something else to life, such as a soul, but without going into that realm, he is willing to settle on what he knows about himself-his consciousness. All that is “I” is “mine.” That implies, of course, that all that is “you” is “yours”-for, every “you” is an “I.” Rights work both ways.

But, while just wanting to live gives the individual a title to life, it is an empty title unless he can acquire the things that make life livable, beginning with food, raiment, and shelter. These things do not come to you because you want them; they come as the result of putting labor to raw materials. You have to give something of yourself-your brawn or your brain-to make the necessary things available. Even wild berries have to be picked before they can be eaten. But the energy you put out to make the necessary things is part of you; it is you. Therefore, when you cause these things to exist, your title to yourself, your labor, is extended to the things. You have a right to them simply because you have a right to life.

That is the moral basis of the right of property. “I own it because I made it” is a title that proves itself.”[19]

And further:

“[…] your ownership entitles you to use your judgment as to what you will do with the product of your labor-consume it, give it away, sell it, save it. Freedom of disposition is the substance of property rights.

Interference with this freedom of disposition is, in the final analysis, interference with your right to life. At least, that is your reaction to such interference, for you describe such interference with a word that expresses a deep emotion: you call it “robbery.”   What’s more, if you find that this robbery persists, if you are regularly deprived of the fruits of your labor, you lose interest in laboring. The only reason you work is to satisfy your desires, and if experience shows that despite your efforts your desires go unsatisfied, you become stingy about laboring. You become a “poor” producer.”[20]

“It is silly, then, to prate of human rights being superior to property rights, because the right of ownership is traceable to the right to life, which is certainly inherent in the human being. Property rights are in fact human rights. A society built around the denial of this fact is, or must become, a slave society-although the socialists describe it differently. It is a society in which some produce and others dispose of their output. “[21]

It makes no sense to say that everyone has a right to life, when the government then proceeds to confiscate part of the income of every individual that is supposed to keep them alive, and as a consequence interferes with the right to life of everyone!! Personally I didn’t need Mr. Chodorov, or anyone else, to explain the above to me. From the very beginning I felt all of this deep inside me. I felt how unfair the system is, and I felt the harm that was being done to me, all of it against my will. And because of what I felt I started to investigate what was happening and I encountered all this information. I also learned that I am not alone and that there are many who also feel this way. I think almost everyone is feeling the same way. And yet today we are still stuck with this system, while there is sufficient information available about the disastrous consequences this has for each individual and for our society. And those disastrous consequences are clearly noticeable and will only get worse if this continues. History predicts where all of this will eventually lead to. There is only one possible end to this, and we still have the chance to put a stop to it.

Right now the problems in our society in Suriname are already very noticeable. We can see exactly the same things happening in Suriname that were present in Egypt thousands of years ago. People aren’t motivated to work and produce because they no longer have faith in this system. People realize that they are being heavily penalized by taxation and this has a negative psychological effect on everyone. Production is declining, and to compensate, the government increases taxes and this continues until the private sector gets completely destroyed and the middle class disappears in society. People don’t want to study (even though it may be free) because ultimately it’s pointless, employers don’t pay employees a sufficient salary because a higher salary also means more taxes to pay, and in the end it means their bottom lines suffer. The quality of services is declining because workers are not adequately trained and are not motivated to work for their low salaries. Most people find a job in government, where they do not have to worry about their performance and yet are assured of an income. As a result the government keeps growing and the need for more tax revenue to pay all those people also grows. Poverty, crime and corruption are increasing. The negative spiral effect is obvious. And again, there is only one possible end to this and history predicts it for us.

Apart from the fact that the income tax enslaves us and interferes with our right to life, in itself quite a serious problem already, there are many other problems that it causes in society, including the following examples:

• The income tax makes it difficult to save and live economically. People are encouraged to spend as much of their income as possible. The more of your income you hold onto, the more taxes you pay, and the more you will be penalized.
• The income tax punishes people who produce. Like Ron Paul says, “Taxing success is the worst thing you can do!”[22] Why should I be motivated to produce more and earn more money, when that just means that I will have to give more of it to the government (and especially government in its current form)? Basically we discourage people to produce because that means they will only get taxed a lot more! A very inexplicable situation. No wonder that Einstein couldn’t understand it.
  

  Wisdom from the Raptor

  Chodorov wrote the following about this:

  “What’s more, if you find that this robbery persists, if you are regularly deprived of the fruits of your labor, you lose interest in laboring. The only reason you work is to satisfy your desires, and if experience shows that despite your efforts your desires go unsatisfied, you become stingy about laboring. You become a “poor” producer.”[23]

  The laborer is not stimulated by the prospect of satisfying his desires but by fear of punishment. When his ownership is not interfered with, when he works for himself, he is inclined to develop his faculties of production, because he has unlimited desires. He works for food, as a matter of necessity, but when he has a sufficiency of food he begins to think of fancy dishes, a tablecloth, and music with his meals. There is no end of desires the human being can conjure up, and will work for, provided he feels reasonably sure that his labor will not be in vain. Contrariwise, when the law deprives him of the incentive of enjoyment, he will work only as necessity compels him. What use is there in putting out more effort?”[24]

  When we know this, why then does it surprise us that people aren’t motivated to work? And that people are not motivated to start their own businesses? No wonder people prefer to work for the government! Given a choice, they choose to be the exploiter rather than being the one that is exploited. And where do you think that this ultimately leads to? What do you think happens when eventually hardly anyone is motivated to produce, and would rather sit in the government and consume?

  “… [W]hen it is no longer worth the producers’ while to produce, when they are taxed so highly to keep the politicians and their friends on the public payroll that they themselves no longer have a reasonable chance of success in any economic enterprise, then of course production grinds to a halt… When this happens, when the producers can no longer sustain on their backs the increasing load of the parasites, then the activities of the parasites must stop also, but usually not before they have brought down the entire social structure which the producers’ activities have created. When the organism dies, the parasite necessarily dies too, but not until the organism has paid for the presence of the parasite with its life. It is in just this way that the major civilizations of the world have collapsed.” — Professor John Hospers, 1975[25]

• The income tax is unfair, especially to the middle class and the poor. The impression is often given that the poor benefit more from an income tax because the rich pay more and thus contribute more. Nothing could be further from the truth.
  • Income is confiscated from people who produce and given to people who don’t produce. There is confiscation in the private sector for the benefit of the public sector. The public sector only consumes. And the trend is that the public sector keeps growing as more people flee from the private to the public sector because of all the problems. So while consumption grows, production declines. The taxes keep getting increased because of the growing public sector. Companies can’t pay employees enough and often can no longer afford them. The middle class becomes impoverished until it completely disappears.
    

    “Tax is parasitism. It involves some people living as parasites off the production of others. Tax penalizes the producer and rewards the destroyer – it takes from the producer and gives to the destroyer. Over time this leads to destruction of production.”[26]

  • The middle class and the poor have difficulty resisting taxation, while the rich more easily can.
    • The rich can pay expensive accountants and tax advisors that enable them to circumvent taxes and get maximum benefits out of the system. The poor and middle class are unable to do so, and an attack from the tax bureau can be fatal for them.
    • In addition, the rich are also able to use their power, wealth and influence to take advantage of the system, mainly because the system encourages corruption.
    • It’s also the case that projects in the public sector can never be carried out by the poor, but only by the rich who own all the companies. So the tax money from the poor and the middle class flows to the rich elite through public sector projects and the government.
    • Even while it may be the case that the rich pay more taxes compared to the poor, due to all of the above points they eventually get that money, and even more, back from the government.
    • The result of all the above is that eventually the poor become poorer while the rich get richer.
      
      

      The rich and the poor

• The income tax is designed so that maximum benefit is achieved for the government. The government is primarily interested in confiscating as much money as possible from everyone, regardless of the negative impact on the victims and society in general.
  • As an independent you’re only allowed to deduct a small part of the costs you incur as a result of illness from your gross income. This clearly indicates that the government couldn’t care less about whether you’re healthy or not. Not only that, but if you can pay your medical expenses you even have to pay taxes on those! Isn’t it strange that repair costs for equipment that you use for work may be deducted from your income as expenses, but that only a small portion of medical expenses may be deducted? Aren’t humans more important than their equipment? When you’re sick, you often can’t work. You would expect that the government would be happy that you can still provide for yourself and can ensure that you get better so you can start working and producing again. But instead the government even taxes you all while you’re incurring losses resulting from not being able to work (optimally). It’s like being able to pay for medical expenses is a luxury.
  • There are more examples I could give but I won’t mention them to keep this letter relatively short.
• And to think of how the money is ultimately used. That’s what makes it even harder to accept. Money taken from the poor and hard working people is confiscated in such an unjust manner and paid to government employees who perform very poorly and basically aren’t even needed. To people in government who earn too much. To people who are placed on the public payroll through politics and corruption. To people employed by the government who are told to stay at home and still receive money for doing absolutely nothing at all. To friends of politicians who get various grants in the public sector. Does it then surprise you that many people think “I’d rather go work for the government”? Would you like to be the exploiter or the one being exploited? That is a question I have personally answered with ”no” so far, but many (have no choice but to) say “yes”.
  Mr. Ronald Hooghart recently wrote: “Another form of inflationary interference on the production level of society is the fact that at least 50 former ministers receive a top salary of almost SRD 10.000 monthly for doing absolutely nothing at all, and then we talk about ‘I LOVE SU’, that’s criminal. Then there are a large number of officials, with exemptions sitting at home while still receiving a monthly salary, nobody that’s saying anything about that, while the lower official who appears every day at work must defend himself if he makes even a small mistake. The law is unjust.”[27]
  

  Government and the People

• The income tax enables the government to continue to increase its power. The government is supposed to represent the people and the power should be in the hands of the people, but instead we get the opposite situation. The government gets all the power and the people are dependent on, and slave of the government.
  

  “No kingship in the history of the world ever exercised more power than our Presidency, or had more of the people’s wealth at its disposal. We have retained the forms and phrases of a republic, but in reality we are living under an oligarchy, not of courtesans, but of bureaucrats.It had to come to that. The theory of republican government is that sovereignty resides in the citizen, who lends it to his elected representative for a specified time. But a people whose wealth is siphoned into the coffers of its government is in no position to stand up to it; with its wealth goes its sovereignty, its sense of dignity. People still vote, of course, but their judgment in the ballot booth is unduly influenced by handouts from their government, whether these be in the form of “relief,” parity prices, or orders for battleships. Though it is not exactly an over-the-counter transaction, the citizen’s conscience is bought. Nor are voters immune to the propaganda issued by the bureaucrats, in their own behalf, and paid for by the voters themselves.”[28]

  Not only does the government have a claim on the income of the individual, and thus the individual himself, but the government can even influence the thoughts of an individual. An example of this is the way in which supporters of a political party are accommodated in the government in exchange for their support, as has been the case for years in Suriname. People are bribed by the government, and the government is able to do so thanks to the resources which they confiscate from the people.

• Furthermore, the government has another means to keep its citizens in check, namely the tax bureau. As Chodorov explains:
  

  “The composition of the ruling regime makes no difference; the Internal Revenue Bureau is a self-operating inquisitorial body. It has the means of harassing, intimidating, and crushing the citizen who falls into its disfavor. In the two cases cited the starting point was a difference of opinion on the correctness of a bookkeeping entry. The Bureau could have sued for the recovery of taxes, a civil case; it chose to bring the criminal charge of “willful evasion.” The Bureau has that choice. The tax laws are so intricate, and made more so by Bureau rulings and Tax Court decisions, that it is virtually impossible for an accountant to be sure his method of arriving at a taxable income, or his computation of the tax, is beyond question. The technicalities that the Bureau may bring up are legion. Therefore, whenever the Bureau has reason to “get” somebody it has ample means at its disposal.”[29]

  And further:

  “Morally, tax is similar to a mafia protection racket – with the difference that the mafiosi operate in a simple, straightforward manner (“Pay up, or else!”); while tax collectors clothe their economic rape in high-sounding hypocrisy (“Pay your fair share!; for the good of society!; voluntary compliance!”). Tax laws, rules, and regulations grow in number and complexity to the point that any taxpayer can be prosecuted for being a tax criminal, no matter how much tax he or she pays.”[30]

  Especially the latter case is applicable in Suriname today. Strictly speaking, almost the total population in Suriname could be harassed by the tax bureau in one way or the other, if the bureau wanted to and if they had all the information needed.

  “Over time, in every taxed society, tax collectors tend to become more vicious, violent, and criminal – eventually becoming a terrorist Gestapo. In every taxed society the tax system develops into a social control mechanism that is particularly used against “dissidents” and “public enemies” who can’t be otherwise neutralized. In every taxed society the justice system becomes closely linked with the tax system. Judges become corrupt tax collectors. The police becomes a criminal class. People lose all respect for “the law.””[31]

  And here’s another example of a few hundred years ago:

  “”At first, the Muhammadans came as liberators and brought relief to the inhabitants of an over-taxed and enslaved Roman world,” writes Adams, but finally: “The Moslems had led the world right back to where it was before they had arrived on the scene. Only the names had changed. Moslem tax men ended up rivaling the worst of the Roman Empire. Perhaps this picture of Moslem tax chiefs, written centuries ago, best illustrates the end-product of their tax system: ‘They were cruel rascals, inventors of a thousand injustices, arrogant and presumptuous… They were the scourges of their age, always with a causeless insult ready in their mouths. Their existence, passed exclusively in oppressing the people of their time, was a disgrace to humanity.’””[32]

• The income tax stimulates corruption starting at the very base of society. It is easy to put the blame on the individual who ultimately decides if he wants to be honest or dishonest. But when we create such a situation in society where the livelihood and preservation of the people are at stake if they’re being honest,  then we cannot blame anybody for being dishonest from time to time in order for them to survive. Because like I argued above, the income tax is actually an attack on our right to life. I will reiterate what Chodorov said:
  

  “[…] your ownership entitles you to use your judgment as to what you will do with the product of your labor-consume it, give it away, sell it, save it. Freedom of disposition is the substance of property rights. Interference with this freedom of disposition is, in the final analysis, interference with your right to life.”[33]

  The choice that the government eventually gives to people is: do you want to be dishonest and live, or would you rather like to be honest and get disadvantaged, hurt and maybe even die? At first this seems extreme, but for many in society this isn’t as extreme as you might think because they’re confronted with this everyday. The more you’re honest to the tax bureau, the more they drive you into the ground and the more you are disadvantaged, to the point that it becomes hard and maybe even impossible for you to make a living. And here I’ll let Chodorov do the talking again, since he described decades ago what we are dealing with today:

  “The corruption of freedom on the individual level is bad enough. But the corruption of freedom on a mass scale is worse. When the political establishment undertakes to undermine the integrity of the people as a whole, to weaken their power of resistance to authority, and even to lure them into an acceptance of it, then freedom has no leg to stand on. This is exactly what income taxation does, particularly with its exemption device. Bribery through exemption is a most insidious form of corruption.”

  “The corruption of freedom is in proportion to the moral deterioration of the people. For a people who have lost their sense of self-respect have no need for freedom. And the income tax, by transferring the property of earners to the State, has disintegrated the moral fiber of Americans to such a degree that they do not even recognize the fact.

  Due to the revenues from income taxation, the government is now the largest employer in the country, the largest financier, the largest buyer of goods and services; and, of course, the largest eleemosynary institution. Millions of people are dependent upon it for a livelihood. They lean upon the State, the one propertied “person,” even as a bonded servant leans upon his master. They demand doles and subsidies from it, and willingly exchange their conscience (as at the ballot booth) for the gift of sustenance. Wardship under the State, by way of unemployment insurance, public housing, gratuities for not producing, and bounties of one kind or another, has become the normal way of getting along; and in this habit of accepting and expecting handouts, the pride of personality is lost.
  Moral deterioration is a progressive process. Just as a worn part of a machine will affect contiguous parts and finally destroy the entire mechanism, so the loss of one moral value must ultimately undermine the sense of morality.

  The income tax, by attacking the dignity of the individual at the very base, has led to the practice of perjury, fraud, deception, and bribery. Avoidance or evasion of the levies has become the great American game, and talents of the highest order are employed in the effort to save something from the clutches of the State. People who in their private lives are above reproach will resort to the meanest devices to effect some saving and will even brag of their ingenuity. The necessity of trying to get along under the income tax has made us a corrupt people.”[34]

  Chodorov talks about the Americans here, but this is also 100% applicable in Suriname, and the rest of the world, in every country with an income tax. I say this not only because of the research I’ve done, but from my own experience and that of others here in Suriname that I’ve heard:

  • It’s public knowledge that most people/companies maintain two financial administrations. A real administration for themselves, and one for the tax bureau. I have personally seen this at different businesses that are well known and very respected in society. Even software is developed specifically to take this into account and make it easier.
  • Companies pay employees an official salary, which is disclosed to the tax bureau, and an additional amount thereon which is kept outside the books. If they don’t do that the payroll taxes become so high that they can’t retain the employees and would have to stop offering their services.
  • There’s rampant corruption at the customs clearances. I have personally seen how money isn’t only offered below the table, but even above the table (while other waiting “customers” laugh and look on) only to avoid having to pay the high taxes so that people can survive in these increasingly difficult times. I had previously mentioned in my response to Mrs. Simons on Facebook[35] my personal experience where as an entrepreneur I was only disadvantaged even more while I was in fact already suffering losses. The government doesn’t care about this, since their only goal is maximum confiscation. So it doesn’t surprise me that people try to minimize the negative consequences of this for themselves. And not only does it not surprise me, but I can even understand them.
  • Officials make a lot of arbitrary decisions at the tax bureau because the laws are very vague about many things. A lot often depends on which tax official you’re dealing with, and even worse, in what kind of mood he or she is on that day, in order to get to a more positive end result for yourself. Even tax advisors admit this. Because of the uncertainty, there’s more room for corruption and for officials to abuse their power, which is something that is very common. No wonder that people offer to pay them money in order to stay on their good side.
  • I want to state very clearly that I am not judging anybody here. To me it’s obvious that it’s not the people who are the problem here, but it’s this system in which we live that corrupts every man at the very base. Again as Chodorov very clearly explains:
    

    “The income tax, by attacking the dignity of the individual at the very base, has led to the practice of perjury, fraud, deception, and bribery.”

    As a society we have to finally start admitting that all of us are responsible for creating a lot of these issues and we have to stop trying to combat the symptoms and instead focus on the root causes! We shouldn’t be making laws against corruption, or impose higher fines as if the people are the problem; instead we must make this system vanish from our society. Otherwise it’s already clear according to history what our fate will ultimately be, i.e. total destruction. Nobody is born a criminal; it’s our society and the systems that we use within our society that creates criminals.

    

    Walter Williams on Taxes

  • The income tax not only enables a “modern” form of slavery, as previously explained, but also enables a “modern” form of colonialism. We like to think that Suriname has been independent since 1975, but this is far from true. We’ve just made the transition from an obvious form of colonialism/slavery, one that everyone can see and can fight against, to a form of colonialism/slavery where people think they are free/independent but aren’t in reality. If you think you’re free, you have no reason to fight against it.
    The way in which the rich countries do this is described by economist John Perkins in his book “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”[36]. (See interview in the footnote!) What happens is that these countries lend large amounts of money to developing countries to carry out various projects. They intentionally make the requirements to execute those projects very high, in order to ensure that the projects can eventually only be carried out by companies from the rich countries themselves (local businesses in the developing countries can’t comply with the high requirements). In this way much of the loaned money flows right back to their own country. However, the developing country is still left with a huge debt which must eventually be paid back with interest. And of course that debt is paid back with the taxes paid by the local population. They make it particularly difficult for developing countries to repay the debt and the debt continues to rise. The resources of such a country are then bought up cheaply in order to pay the debt. And this is the way in which the developing country is exploited. The only people in the developing country that benefit from this are usually a small elite that help set all of this up at the expense of the total population, the majority of which only becomes more impoverished.
    This system to exploit the population via taxation is used by the IMF and was successfully implemented here in Suriname during the Nieuw Front government when the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) of the IMF was implemented. Whether the government back then was sufficiently aware of what they were doing, or if they were manipulated by the IMF, remains open for discussion.

    “In the period between 1992-1995 the government carried out a structural adjustment program. The main measures were a tax reform, devaluation of the Surinamese guilder and an assimilation of the different exchange rates. “[37]

    “In the first Protocol to the European Convention it states that no one may be arbitrarily deprived of his property, but that does not prevent a state to secure the payment of taxes. The imposition of a heavy tax burden could lead to involuntary servitude or slavery. In the context of structural adjustment programs, the IMF has often insisted on raising taxes in developing countries, which led to a lot of protests. The main problem in many (developing) countries however is not the amount of taxation, but the righteous collection thereof. It is especially the elite who can evade taxes.“[38]

    “Developing countries that got in financial trouble still had to turn to the International Monetary Fund for help in the eighties and nineties. Very often they got a structural adjustment program imposed on them as a condition to receive help. Its aim was to enable a country to repay its debts.
    The countries always got monetary policies to implement which devalued their currency​, government spending was drastically reduced and all economic efforts got focused on the export of goods.
    These heavy cuts often had devastating consequences for healthcare, education and agriculture. In fact they required these countries to stop all socio-economic policies and to forget about social politics.
    The big currency devaluation made life much more expensive and increased the debt in real terms. And when you impose these same policies on almost all poor countries, you put them all into a downward spiral of competition.
    Flaming criticism on these policies of the International Monetary Fund came from Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winner for economy in 2001 and former chief economist at the World Bank. Very convincingly he describes in his book published in 2002 titled “Perverse Globalization” how the IMF imposes the worst economic policies thinkable on many countries. The results are always a much deeper economic crisis than usual, a lot more unemployment, poverty and lost prosperity.“[39]

    “The structural adjustment programs were imposed in the early 80s in exchange for new loans or for the rescaling of old loans by the IMF and the World Bank. This adjustment was to secure the resumption of repayments of the foreign debt of the country (the payment of interest and repayment of loans).
    The structural adjustment in general relies on the following elements, in specific dosages:

    • devaluation of the national currency to reduce the price of export products and to bring in strong currencies for the repayment of the debt
    • increase of the interest rate to raise international capital
    • reducing public spending: layoffs in the public sector,
    • reduction of budgets for health and research, etc.
    • mass privatization
    • reducing public subsidies for the operation of certain companies or certain products
    • blocking of wages to avoid that the devaluation leads to an inflationary chain reaction.

    The structural adjustment programs have not only led to a continuously growing debt, but they have also led to a reduction in the income of the local population (as a result of the layoffs, the curtailment of public services, etc.) and price increases (as a result of increased VAT, liberalization of prices, etc.). “[40]

    Notice how the policies of the IMF are aimed at financially milking the population through taxes, devaluation of the currency (a hidden form of taxation), foreign acquisition through privatizations, keeping the people dumb and uneducated by cutting in education, blocking wages in order to have cheap laborers for multinationals who settle here, etc. etc. This is the takeover of a country through the economy, as John Perkins describes in his book. It’s a new form of colonialism and ultimately we become nothing more than slaves.

    

    Tolstoy on Taxes

    The banks in Britain eventually applied a similar system to the USA through the introduction of an income tax and the “Federal Reserve Act” in 1913. In the USA a large part of the population thinks that they are independent, while in fact the world banks operating from Britain have taken over again since 1913 through an economic coup d’etat. For more on this, I refer you to the work by Jordan Maxwell.[41] [42] [43] [44][45] Also read what Colonel Edward Mandell House told President Woodrow Wilson about this.[46]

    “[Very] soon, every American will be required to register their biological property in a national system designed to keep track of the people and that will operate under the ancient system of pledging.  By such methodology, we can compel people to submit to our agenda, which will effect our security as a chargeback for our fiat paper currency. Every American will be forced to register or suffer being unable to work and earn a living. They will be our chattel, and we will hold the security interest over them forever, by operation of the law merchant under the scheme of secured transactions.

    Americans, by unknowingly or unwittingly delivering the bills of lading to us will be rendered bankrupt and insolvent, forever to remain economic slaves through taxation, secured by their pledges. They will be stripped of their rights and given a commercial value designed to make us a profit and they will be none the wiser, for not one man in a million could ever figure our plans and, if by accident one or two should figure it out, we have in our arsenal plausible deniability. After all, this is the only logical way to fund government, by floating liens and debt to the registrants in the form of benefits and privileges. This will inevitably reap to us huge profits beyond our wildest expectations and leave every American a contributor to this fraud which we will call  “Social Insurance.” Without realizing it, every American will insure us for any loss we may incur and in this manner, every American will unknowingly be our servant, however begrudgingly. The people will become helpless and without any hope for their redemption and, we will employ the high office of the President of our dummy corporation to foment this plot against America.”

    It’s important to realize that it’s the same owners of the British East India Company, who wanted to impose taxes in America around 1767, that now stand behind the world banks. They are still trying to colonize and conquer countries but in a smarter, and more covert way. As I mentioned earlier, as long as people don’t know that they are slaves they won’t fight against the system.
    The IMF and other world banks are responsible for the economic mess in many countries around the world. Recently the crisis in Greece[47], and currently also in the USA, where exactly the same disastrous strategies are being implemented.[48] [49] I encourage everyone to read about the details in the footnotes.

President Bouterse, you often say it yourself, but we live in an important time period right now, not only for us in Suriname, but for humanity in general. There are major changes taking place very rapidly around the world. According to Professor Michio Kaku we are in the process of making the transition from a Type 0 civilization (barbaric, selfish, revengeful) to a Type 1 or planetary civilization[50] (tolerant, highly developed), and that transition is generally not easy. It can be a very turbulent time, similar to growing pains. Our human consciousness also changes and we grow spiritually. According to Professor Kaku the Internet is technology that belongs to a Type 1 civilization. It is one of the basic requirements that makes a Type 1 civilization possible. He compares it to a global telephone system. But the Internet is more than that, it’s also a global knowledge base, it enables a planetary consciousness (“The Global Brain“).[51] [52] [53] [54]

At the beginning of this letter I expressed my disappointment about the fact that for hundreds, and even thousands, of years humankind has had the information to be able to solve many problems we have in the world today. It’s sad that the Americans knew all the way back in 1787 about the disastrous consequences taxes could have on their society, but that this knowledge was forgotten after only two generations, after which an income tax could still be introduced in 1913.
I think that in all those years the time wasn’t yet right for us to be able to do something with that knowledge, mainly because we didn’t yet have the Internet. Now that we have many terabytes of information and history at our fingertips through the Internet, it’s easy to analyze and compare problems along with others, to recognize patterns, to find causes and to look for solutions. And we can share all of that with the whole world within seconds. And because of the quick availability and easy accessibility of all this knowledge, even from hundreds of generations ago, chances are very slim that we’ll keep forgetting in the future. We can now finally learn without forgetting and we can avoid repeating mistakes even after many generations go by. History does not have to repeat itself anymore.[55]

You are now in the position to be one of the first leaders in the world to do something positive with all the information in this letter. We must abandon this barbaric system of taxes that break down the individual, make him dependent and enslave him, and go to another system where the freedom, the independence and the rights of each individual are respected. Strong individuals form a strong society, just like individually strong links form a strong chain. The income and payroll taxes, and all taxes on property should be completely abolished. They are an attack on the individual, they weaken the individual, and the result of that is a weak society that can be heavily manipulated. In other countries, like the USA, they are already talking about getting off this system of taxes which gradually destroys a society from within. And not only do they talk about it, but the opposition continues to grow as more people “wake up” and realize what is really going on around them.[56] There is a large and constantly growing following behind Republican Ron Paul, despite the fact that the media, which are owned by the owners of the world banks, try their best to work against him.

It is now a global trend, mainly because of the “Global Brain,” that people “wake up” and get smarter and start to notice everything that’s wrong around us. This is especially the case among the younger generation; they will no longer tolerate that they are fooled, manipulated and enslaved by a small group of people. Your victory during the elections of 2010 is especially due to the younger generation. Similarly, despite the opposition, the Republican Ron Paul also enjoys tremendous support in the USA from the younger generation and the army[57] because of the solutions that he proposes.

Ron Paul

In closing, I hope that based on this information you will take the necessary steps very soon to improve life for all of us. If we do nothing about this, then according to history only one fate awaits us.

With kind regards,

Karel Donk
http://www.kareldonk.com

Updates

Be sure to also watch the following videos for more background information:

The following video contains an interview with John Perkins, you may want to read a summary here. Listen to how he explains how the world bankers operate these days to control and enslave entire countries.

I had mentioned the issues in Greece in my letter above with regards to the IMF and World Bank. Check out what they’re doing now in Portugal:

When these projects, their inept managers and corrupt, inefficient politicians plunged the country in debt, interest rates began to rise as a consequence of investors’ fears, mounting the country’s already high debt burden. As a response to this situation, Portugal’s government, with the guidance of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and (IMF) and the European Central Bank, decided to enact three rounds of austerity measures. These measures in return put the country’s economy further into deep recession, making the situation worse.

One of the conditions of the bailout by the troika was to implement sweeping fire-sale of state companies to privatize them. So far the sales include 21% of the state utility company Energias de Portugal  for €2.7bn, and a quarter share in electricity grid operator REN for €387million to China.

…

Meanwhile many state hospitals are closing. Many teachers are out of work. State benefits, public wages and pensions are being cut. By January 2012, the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s cut Portugal’s credit to junk status. By June, the country’s unemployment rate had jumped to 14.9 percent.

Standard operating procedure for the IMF and world bankers.

Footnotes

[1] Link to the note on Facebook.
[2] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, page 14.
[3] http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/rape8.shtml
[4] Website Ron Paul regarding taxes.
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Townshend_Acts
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party
[7] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil.
[8] The 16^th amendment was never properly ratified.
[9] Income Tax Fraud in the USA Video 1, Video 2, Video 3
[10] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, Chapter 4.
[11] http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/rape8.shtml
[12] The Story of your Enslavement.
[13] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, page 1.
[14] Ron Paul video on Youtube.
[15] Website Ron Paul.
[16] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, page 8.
[17] http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/rape8.shtml
[18] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, page 9.
[19] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, page 12.
[20] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, page 13.
[21] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, page 14.
[22] Ron Paul: Don’t tax success.
[23] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, page 13.
[24] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, page 14.
[25] http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/rape8.shtml
[26] http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/rape8.shtml
[27] http://www.starnieuws.com/?index.php/welcome/index/?nieuwsitem/9500
[28] http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/rape8.shtml
[29] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, page 14.
[30] http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/rape8.shtml
[31] http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/rape8.shtml
[32] http://www.buildfreedom.com/tl/rape8.shtml
[33] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, page 13.
[34] The Income Tax: Root of All Evil, page 52-53.
[35] https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150657739028974
[36] Interview with John Perkins.
[37] http://www.surinaminfo.com/htm/nederlands/handel.htm
[38] http://www.amnesty.nl/mensenrechten/encyclopedie/belasting
[39] http://www.pala.be/nl/woordenboek/structureel-aanpassingsprogramma
[40] http://users.skynet.be/cadtm/pages/nederlands/imfwereldbank.htm
[41] The Collapse of the American Dream.
[42] Slavery by Consent Pt4.
[43] Documentary “The Money Masters”
[44] Jordan Maxwell Interview.
[45] Presentation by Jordan Maxwell.
[46] http://www.gemworld.com/EdMandellHouse.htm
[47] Article on De Wereld Morgen.
[48] http://prisonplanetearth.com/is-the-imf-about-ready-to-muscle-u-s-taxpayers/
[49] http://www.wijwordenwakker.org/content.asp?m=P1071
[50] Explanation by Michio Kaku, Video 1, Video 2
[51] http://www.cyberguerrilla.org/?p=3571
[52] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain
[53] http://www.greattransitionstories.org/wiki/Story:Global_Brain
[54] The Global Brain – Peter Russell. 
[55] Interview with Peter Russell. 
[56] The Story of your Enslavement.
[57] Interview with Ron Paul and a Wall Street Journal Economist.

The Pirate Bay

Back in 2006 I recommended watching a movie titled “Steal This Film,” which is about file sharing on the Internet centering around the popular website The Pirate Bay. In that movie you can see how the US government got Swedish officials to raid the ISP where the Pirate Bay website was hosted, and how they brought down the website only for it to be brought back online within 3 days by the website administrators. The website remains online to this day.

A new movie has just been released titled “TPBAFK – The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard” which centers around the Swedish trial of the founders of the Pirate Bay website, Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, from the beginning of the trial up until today. The raid led by the US government, which was more prominently featured in “Steal This Film,” is also mentioned briefly in this new movie. You can download it, or watch it on Youtube.

I have no doubt in my mind that these guys will be recognized as heroes who fought for a free Internet. The last thing we need right now is for a small group of organizations, such as the Motion Picture Ass. of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) and the US government, to lock down and control the Internet. While organizations such as the MPAA and the RIAA are fueled by boundless greed, elements within the US government may have different motivations to want to lock down and control the Internet. One of those motivations could be restricting freedom of speech and stifling dissent. Their ongoing issues with Wikileaks and Julian Assange are a good example of this.

With regards to organizations such as the RIAA, I recently wrote:

What’s clear to me is that the record companies and their organizations, such as the RIAA et al., couldn’t give a flying fuck about the rights of the artists/authors. What matters to these people is making as much money for themselves as possible at the expense of the artists/authors. They’re nothing more than parasites. They pretend to fight for the artists/authors, while in reality they are screwing over the very group that they’re supposedly fighting for.

…

While I am against these organizations, I am not against copyright laws and protecting the rights of creatives around the world. As a photographer, graphics designer and software developer, it wouldn’t make sense for me to be against copyright laws. I want the artists/authors to be able to benefit from their work as much as possible. But these organizations are not enabling them to do that. On the contrary, as you can clearly see they’re making it worse and are exploiting artists/authors.

In the TPBAFK movie you’ll hear professor Roger Wallis, who was also questioned during the Pirate Bay trial, say the following in an interview around 23 minutes in:

I also made the point here that as a composer - which I am, I mean a song I wrote bought our first house - I support copyright, but only if copyright encourages creativity, economic incitement or an incentive to create. Not copyright as a huge control mechanism for people who sit on large swathes of rights.

And I couldn’t agree more. If you want examples and background information on how copyright laws are being abused far beyond their intended purposes by “people who sit on large swathes of rights,” watch the 4th part of a documentary series titled “Everything is a Remix.”

What these organizations are doing has NOTHING to do with protecting the rights of artists/authors/creatives; it has everything to do with control and greed. As I have discussed in my article on organizations such as the RIAA et al, very little of the money, if any at all, reaches the actual artists/authors/creatives. The money simply goes to a small controlling elite who benefits and gets richer and richer at the expense of everyone else. These people are destroying creativity. And the US government is simply using all of this as a way to forward their own agendas of getting more control over the Internet, limiting freedom of speech and stifling dissent.

Nobody should be allowed to control or restrict (freedom of speech on) the Internet. As I wrote in my article on the Global Brain, the Internet is one of the key technologies that enables humankind to finally accelerate its mental evolution. For this to head in a good direction it’s important to have absolute freedom on the Internet. This is why I applaud the founders of the Pirate Bay; a couple of months in prison is a small price to pay to keep the Internet free for future generations. They may have lost the battle, but we’ll win the war. Again, there’s no doubt in my mind that the founders of The Pirate Bay, along with others such as Kim Dotcom, will be remembered as heroes in the future.

Infinite Love

I came across the below interview with Associate Professor of Psychology at Yale University Dr. Laurie Santos, where she has the following to say:

So the human mating system is kind of in between, we’re sort of pair bonded, but there’s this push to polygamy. There’s this push towards males taking on multiple female partners. But there also seems to be a push towards polyandry, or in other words, females taking on multiple male partners [...].

Basically what Dr. Santos is saying in the interview is that if we look at the human reproductive system, and morphologically compare it to other primates, we can conclude that the human reproductive system is designed for balance when it comes to sexual interaction between men and women. Nature made it possible both for men to have multiple partners if desired, and for women to have multiple partners if desired.

In the fifth part of my article series on Understanding Women, I had already discussed research by University of Michigan psychology professor Terri Conley and her team, where they concluded that men and women naturally do not differ much from each other when it comes to their sexuality. And this is consistent with what Dr. Santos is saying in the interview above.

This is more evidence that supports the fact that when it comes to relationships between men and women, nature never intended a person to tie him/herself to just one partner for life and restrict their freedom in the process. In fact, humans are designed to have multiple partners. So indeed like I wrote before, we can love as many people as we like, and if we truly love someone, we should allow them to be free human beings who are able to give and receive love from as many people as they like. If we don’t do this and instead restrict people to love it will only cause a lot of problems.

Some of these problems are mentioned in the interview below with Dan Savage, where he explains why monogamy is ridiculous:

Here’s some of what he says in that interview:

Instead of deciding to allow women to have the same sort of freedom and leeway that men did, we decided to let men have the same limitations that women had and we put monogamous sexual commitment at the heart of all relationships, all long-term commitments, all marriages. And we’ve watched – we should now be able to recognize – the consequences of that, which are a lot of short term relationships, a lot of divorce. Because monogamy is ridiculous and people aren’t any good at it, they’re not wired for it, it’s unnatural, and it places a tremendous strain on our marriages and our long term commitments to expect them to be effortlessly monogamous.

[...]

But people understand [that] love means “I don’t want to fuck other people” because of these misconceptions pumped into people’s heads about romance, love and what it means. And so they meet somebody else that they’re attracted to and think “well I must not be in love with my partner anymore otherwise I wouldn’t be attracted to this person.” Or they feel threatened when their partners are attracted to other people, because it makes them feel insecure. And we just need to get past that.

I’ve written a lot about the “misconceptions pumped into people’s heads about romance and love” in my article series on Understanding Women where I’ve also explained why these misconceptions exist in societies around the world.

Another important issue that’s being caused by these misconceptions is that because society expects people to be monogamous, this leads people to have very high and often very unrealistic expectations for potential partners. And this is logical, because if you’re going to have to stick with a single partner for the rest of your life, then that person will have to be perfect. So people become very picky and waste a lot of time waiting and looking for the perfect partner that’ll be able to satisfy all of their needs and desires for the rest of their life. And these unrealistic and high expectations ultimately lead to people becoming disillusioned. Psychoanalyst Karen Horney M.D. indicated the following in her article titled “The Problem of the Monogamous Ideal”:

[...] the overestimation of love leads to disillusionment; the desire to possess the partner results in the partner wanting to escape; and the taboos against sex result in non-fulfillment. Disillusionment plus the desire to escape plus non-fulfillment result in a secret hostility, which causes the other partner to feel alienated. Secret hostility in one and secret alienation in the other cause the partners to secretly hate each other. This secret hate often leads one or the other or both to seek love objects outside the marriage or relationship.

Eventually people realize that all those misconceptions that were taught to them by society about love and romance, don’t agree with reality, and as Dr. Horney said, they become disillusioned. They start to see from experience what reality is and it leads to big issues. Apart from people becoming disillusioned, we can also see here that monogamy leads to issues because it requires two partners to want to possess each other. And because human beings naturally want to be free individuals, this results in their (subconscious) desires to want to break free and escape. And like Dan Savage said in the interview I linked to above, we can see the consequences of that everywhere around us. It’s not just the problems such as short term relationships and divorce, but also the more extreme cases of people murdering their lovers and children, people committing suicide, rape, child-abuse, incest, sexual perversion and generally a society full of jealous, untrustworthy, mentally ill and unstable people.

The time has come for us to finally recognize the root cause of all these issues and fix it so we can all look forward to a better future for humankind on Earth.

Towards the Light

We’re all born in this world as free human beings. We’re free to explore the world and enjoy what life has to offer, we’re free to choose our experiences and to learn, and we’re free to grow and become the person that we really want to be. Or at least, that’s how it was supposed to be. Because as it is right now, instead of being free we’re being severely limited by society in many different ways. Not only are we being limited, but we’re also being indoctrinated from early childhood with the wrong information and beliefs about almost all aspects of life. And one area where this is especially the case is when it comes to the concept of love.

People grow up to believe that when they love someone, they should want that person only for themselves. They learn that they should demand exclusivity in their relationships, even though that prevents the ones they supposedly love to be able to live their lives as they please. The comparison I often like to make is with the so called ”bird lovers.” These people supposedly love birds so much that they keep them in captivity for most of their lives. It’s as if they cannot understand that by keeping the bird captive in a small cage, they confine the bird to a limited and miserable life and deprive it of all the freedom and experiences it could otherwise have had in nature. Not only that, but in their selfishness, they also prevent other people from being able to enjoy the positive experiences the bird could have brought into their lives. If these people really loved birds, wouldn’t it be more logical for them to let the birds be free so they could enjoy everything nature has to offer them? There’s so much more for them to experience in nature than there is locked up in a small cage.

In a society that is based on scarcity, which is needed to control and manipulate people, people become motivated by greed, become selfish and start hoarding. They live in fear of what they have to lose. So when it comes to love, they desperately try to hold on to their loved ones, even while severely limiting and hurting them in the process. They claim the person they supposedly love as their property. “He’s my man,” or “she’s my girl,” they say, while demanding exclusivity. At the same time they remain blind to the fact that it’s exactly this behavior of locking someone inside an exclusive relationship and limiting their freedoms, that will eventually backfire and lead to big problems. People naturally want to be free and restricting them in any way will cause them to (subconsciously) rebel against those restrictions in the long term. As a result people who were once deeply in love start having big fights regularly and eventually break up, and in extreme cases even go on to hate each other and go to great lengths to hurt each other. Very few people ask themselves how it can be that lovers can grow to hate each other after getting married or being in a relationship with each other. You just have to look around you in society to see how many of such cases there are. In really extreme cases people are even driven into murdering their ex-lovers. What kind of a sick society are we living in?

Take a look at what psychoanalyst Karen Horney M.D. indicated in her article “The Problem of the Monogamous Ideal”:

[...] the overestimation of love leads to disillusionment; the desire to possess the partner results in the partner wanting to escape; and the taboos against sex result in non-fulfillment. Disillusionment plus the desire to escape plus non-fulfillment result in a secret hostility, which causes the other partner to feel alienated. Secret hostility in one and secret alienation in the other cause the partners to secretly hate each other. This secret hate often leads one or the other or both to seek love objects outside the marriage or relationship.

So the question of why it is that people that are so much in love with each other can slowly grow to hate each other after getting married or being in a relationship, gets answered here by Dr. Horney. And the evidence that this is indeed happening can be found all around us in society. People complain about how difficult it is to find love these days while they fail to realize that it’s exactly this behavior of demanding exclusivity and restricting people to love that is making love scarce.

We have to stop treating people we love like our property and we have to start respecting the freedom of each individual. It’s like Jacque Fresco says in the interview below: “Love is to stop climbing on people and making demands on them and give them space to live. And give them the opportunity to grow. And try to help them grow.”

Love is to let people live their lives in complete freedom and to even help them in any way you can along the way, even if they prefer to be with someone else. Like I wrote a few years ago, when you’re able to do that it’s a sign of true love:

This is the ultimate test of true love, because when you love someone, naturally you’re going to want to be with that person and be loved back by that person. You’re going to want it really bad. I don’t think that I have to explain how seriously strong this feeling can be; I’m sure you know. So if you can stand the fact that this person would prefer, and would in fact be happier, with someone else, then that is already an accomplishment. But if you can also truly feel happy for that person while you have to let him/her go with someone else, then, I think, that is more than enough proof of true love.

And if we allowed people the freedom to be able to love as many people as they like, and to be able to receive love from as many people as they like, then there would be an abundance of love in society. Not only that, but people would have a much richer life with many more experiences that would help them to grow and reach their full potential. They’d be able to receive love and help from as many people as they needed at any given time in order to have a fulfilling life:

Just think about it, do you really think there’s one person out there that can satisfy all your needs? Everyone is different, and in everyone you’ll find some things that you like. However, you’ll also find that they can’t give you certain things that you’re looking for. Instead of being unsatisfied and trying to make it work with one person and limiting yourself in the process, you’re supposed to go out and find others who can fill in the gaps. For example, if you’re a guy, today you can spend time with Sarah, who just likes to go out, party and have fun. But tomorrow you can spend time with Nicole, with whom you can have really deep conversations about important things that matter to you; the kind of conversations you simply can’t have with Sarah. If you couldn’t have Nicole, you’d be expecting Sarah to have the deep conversations with you and since she’s not very interested, it would cause trouble in your relationship with her. Since you can satisfy your need for deep conversations with Nicole, you don’t have to bother Sarah with that and can focus on doing the things that you can do together with her. When you’re not with Sarah, she’s also free to do things with others that you can’t do with her. And so on.

Think of how much richer your life might be in such a case, how many more experiences you’d be able to have, how many more people you’d be able to meet. You’d be completely free, without limitations with regards to who you can love and spend time with. You’d be able to love and be loved without limitations. You’d be able to reach out to all those different people to help to satisfy you and help you grow to what you want to be in life.

Like Osho says in the interview below, “I’ve been against marriage from the very beginning because it means cutting down your freedom. [...] freedom is the ultimate value in life. There’s nothing higher than freedom.”

So if you truly love someone, do not deprive them, and especially do not deprive yourself, of this ultimate value in life. Indeed absolute freedom is the basic and most essential thing a person should have to be able to live an enjoyable life. Instead of being selfish and locking someone in an exclusive relationship with you, let them be free to bring value into the lives of others as well. This means allowing them the freedom to choose who they want to love and spend their time with, how many people they want to love (apart from you) etc. etc. As far as true love is concerned, there’s no room for jealousy. Jealousy can only exist in a society that is based on fear and scarcity, where people are being restricted, where abundance is suppressed and where people become selfish and are taken over by greed in an effort to protect and retain the little bit of love that they are able to get from someone.

Like Elbert Hubbard said: “The love we give away is the only love we keep.” When we live in a society where people are free to love, there will eventually be an abundance of love for everyone, everywhere.

True Love

Barack Obama, The New Bush. Sich Heil.

I came across a quote from Obama regarding the recent attacks of Hamas against Israel and I couldn’t help but wonder what the fuck he was smoking:

“[T]here is no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders. So we are fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself from missiles landing on people’s homes.”

Noting that Israel increased its response after what the NY Times described as “persistent Palestinian rocket fire,” Obama said, “Let’s understand what the precipitating event here was that’s causing the current crisis, and that was an ever-escalating number of missiles that were landing not just in Israeli territory but in areas that are populated.”

Obama meanwhile conveniently ignores the fact that Israel has been ILLEGALLY occupying Palestinian land for decades now and keeps expanding its illegal settlements, bulldozing the homes of Palestinian families, walling them in and cutting them off from other parts of the land making it difficult for them to live their lives:

Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are now facing further problems due to the construction of the wall which will de facto annex 320 square kilometers (5.6% of the entire West Banks land mass) as it carves through Jerusalem. The wall is set to isolate more than 120,000 Palestinians from Jerusalem. … Israel is not only demolishing Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem. Between September 2000 and December last year 60,781 houses had been demolished or partly destroyed by Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza. In Oct 2001 Israel also renewed its activity of demolishing houses as punishment and has since destroyed at least 479 houses for this reason. This week the Israeli High Court of Justice took a decision against permitting judicial review for families of Palestinians whose homes are targeted for demolition because a family member has been involved in (or even suspected of) military attacks. Setting aside fundamental human rights in favor of military considerations which are mere extensions of the government’s political goals, the Court accepted the argument of the army that such demolitions take place as integral parts of military operations.

Such an operation occurred in the early hours of this morning when 200 Israeli soldiers invaded the Palestinian village of Sarra, west of Nablus and demolished the homes of Ghalib Abdullah and Jaser Owda. The sons of these men had been accused of plotting an attack against the illegal Har Bracha settlement yet they remain in prison without trail or judgment. When the Israeli army blew up their parents’ homes they allowed them just 10 minutes to evacuate before making 17 people homeless.

Where’s your empathy, Obama? Where the fuck is it?

From here:

“All of the people have had homes demolished before, but this time they had no warning. The people were very, very upset. They were running to get their things out of their homes, but the bulldozer just went on demolishing.”  Soldiers of the Israeli army arrived early in the morning in jeeps accompanied by a bulldozer and then demolished the buildings where the four families were living. The destroyed properties belonged to Mohammed Fahed Bani Odeh, Mohammed Ali Shaikh Bani Odeh, Ali Shaikh Musleh Bani Odeh and Omar ‘Arif Mohammed Bisharat and their families – at least 34 people, including some 26 children.

After destroying these homes, the soldiers moved on to destroy homes and livelihoods in Jiftlik and Furush Beit Dajan, where homes have previously been demolished in recent months.   “In Jiftlik, they are destroying a farm – it is one of the rare farms here and there is otherwise not much livelihood for the people. They first bulldozed the vegetable area a couple of months ago; then they bulldozed the home last month,” said Donatella Rovera.

“The family of Mahmud Mat’ab Da’ish, his wife and seven children were given a tent by the Red Cross and they started planting vegetables again. Today, the army has been bulldozing the green plants.

And listen to the info in this video:

And here are some Israeli soldiers speaking out:

Israeli soldiers in action:

The Palestinians are being oppressed by Israel in ways that make one wonder whether these people have any empathy at all. A lot of Israel’s actions here can be classified as war crimes and severe human rights violations:

Its current lethal assault on Gaza, with under-reported violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank as well, is the latest in a series of such criminal assaults. Like its predecessors this is killing many innocent children, woman and men and causing horrendous damage as well. Like its predecessors it will fail.

Israel is a democracy, undeniably. But a democracy that commits war crimes is still a war criminal. It has an exceptionally right wing government, with an overtly racist foreign minister. That government has taken office on the basis of an election. This means that the Israeli electorate is complicit in its government’s war crimes.

And this has been going on for decades. Just look at the map below and see for yourself how Israel has systematically annexed much of Palestinian land over the last few decades while the world just stood by and watched it happen.

Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land

The above ad also appeared in the videos below worth watching:

Palestine has effectively been turned into some kind of concentration camp. The UN has repeatedly asked Israel to get the fuck out of the illegally occupied Palestinian land without results. Israel has been able to keep occupying land and even grow their settlements largely because of the support it gets from the USA. This support not only includes political/diplomatic support, but also military (weapons, airplanes, technology) and financial support. The american tax payer for many years now has unknowingly funded a large part of Israel’s army:

The Israeli army’s chief of staff states that in the past three years, “US taxpayers have contributed more to the Israeli defense budget than Israeli taxpayers,” according to a report in the Jerusalem Post, a prominent Israeli newspaper.

According to the report, Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi made the statement during a speech on September 11th. In it he emphasized: “We must preserve ties with the United States. I believe this is a security necessity.”

Some of the other top recipients of US tax money, Egypt and Jordan, were provided this assistance in return for diplomatic recognition of the Israeli state.

According to the Congressional Research Service, Israel is given this money in a lump sum at the beginning of the fiscal year. Americans then pay interest on money they have given to Israel, while Israel makes interest on it. In recent years Israel has reported a lower unemployment rate than the US and a better account balance.

The fact that Obama is clearly taking the side of Israel shouldn’t be a surprise when you know that the people behind Obama, such as Emanuel Rahm, are all pro Israel. The USA and Israel have very close ties.

Don’t forget that Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, together with elements within the US government was also very much involved in the planning and execution of the attacks on 9/11 in the USA – a crime committed by the US government against its own people to motivate them to go to war in the Middle East.

Apparently Obama seems to be unaware of all the atrocities Israel has committed against the Palestinian people, and still is committing against them on a daily basis. Indeed Obama, in his own words, fails to ”understand what the precipitating event here was that’s causing the current crisis.” Because otherwise he would surely understand where all the extreme reactions from the Palestinians against Israel are coming from. I don’t care who you are, but if someone is going to come into your home suddenly one day and permanently starts living there and starts dictating to you how you should live your life, I doubt you’ll just let it happen and do nothing about it. It’s not the Palestinians who are the terrorists here but actually Israel who has been terrorizing these people for decades now, while most of the world sits in ignorance and the major media remains silent.

This article put it nicely:

Let’s address this lame excuse for a political argument. [...] What this argument omits is that Israel has Gaza in a stranglehold.  It has turned the enclave into a virtual prison having no economy, no exports, no ability to travel in or out.  Gaza is occupied in effect by Israel.  This occupation is illegal.  Any nation has a right to resist such an occupation. I do not support firing missiles from Gaza into Israel. But I do not support Israel’s occupation of Gaza either.  I do not expect Gazans to roll over and play dead for Israel’s benefit or for the benefit of a U.S. president who has his head up his ass.

It’s not so much that Obama has his head up his ass (though one could argue he’s a fucking moron); it’s more that he is knowingly misleading the people in the USA and indeed the entire world as to what exactly is going on between Israel and the Palestinians. Fortunately there are many people who aren’t falling for it including the writer of the above quoted article. He continues:

Barack Obama: go to Hell. You don’t give a damn.  You don’t have a moral bone in your body.  Give back that Nobel Peace Prize.  You don’t deserve it. In fact, you’ve pissed on it and turned it from gold to (cast) lead.

And to this I would like to add a final note:

Barack Obama: GO FUCK YOURSELF!

WordPress

If you’ve also been getting the infamous “Error: Twitter did not respond. Please wait a few minutes and refresh this page.“ error inside the Jetpack Twitter Widget for WordPress on your website there’s an easy fix. Just download the updated PHP file below (included in the zip archive) and replace the one in the plugins folder on your server (path: \wp-content\plugins\jetpack\modules\widgets).

Download: Twitter Widget Fix for Jetpack version 1.8 to 2.0

Note: Starting with JetPack 2.0 the Twitter Widget is fixed. So if you have version 2.0 or later you don’t need this fix.

This problem has existed for a long time since the earlier versions of Jetpack, as early as version 1.1.3. A search on Google reveals how many sites are suffering from this issue. I had posted a fix back then, but it took almost a year for the Jetpack programmers to actually include it in their official release starting with version 1.7. I got a nice thank you note in the changelog from the team.

I had implemented a simple fallback caching mechanism for those cases where Twitter did not respond to requests from the Twitter widget. With version 1.8 of Jetpack the Twitter widget has been completely rewritten, and although they implemented the fallback mechanism again, the programmer seemed to have forgotten to actually make use of it in case of a problem. This is what I corrected in the file you can download above. I hope the team includes this fix again soon because it’s a real pain to have to fix this by replacing the Twitter widget file every time a new update of Jetpack is available, especially if you have to do this on multiple websites.

In focus areas are highlighted in bright red (after Focus Peaking Lines Only action).

Focus peaking is a relatively new feature that is currently making its way into the newer digital cameras that are coming out. Peta Pixel reported on this feature appearing on the latest Sony cameras here:

One of the interesting technologies Sony introduced into its line of NEX mirrorless cameras last year (starting with the NEX-C3) was “focus peaking”, a feature from the video recording world that highlights in-focus areas of an image to aid in manual focusing. You know those colorful pixels that image editing programs use to indicate blown out or underexposed areas of photos? It’s like that, except for focus. What’s awesome is that you can adjust things like focus, focal length, and aperture, and then see the depth of field adjust on your screen in real time.

You can see a video below of how this works:

Basically the areas of the image that are in focus are being highlighted by the camera so that you can easily see what will be in focus when you take the shot. It enables you to fine tune the focus precisely the way you want.

It’s a very nice feature to have on the camera. But this got me thinking. When editing pictures in Photoshop, I often find myself wanting to edit only the parts of a picture that are in focus, or sometimes just the parts of a picture that are out of focus. For example, when applying noise reduction to images, I usually want to do this mostly for the out of focus areas (bokeh) of an image, and leave the detail inside the in focus areas intact. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had a selection feature in Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom where we could easily select only the areas of an image that are in focus? The way this would work is exactly like the “Color Range” selection process in Photoshop, but only instead of a range of colors, it would select a range of focus. It would start by selecting the areas that are sharply in focus, and you could then increase the range/radius to include more of the picture in your selection extending more to the out of focus areas.

To my knowledge there’s no such feature in Photoshop or in any plugins that I know of. So I decided to try and see if I could use the functionality that is currently in Photoshop to build a selection in an image of only the areas that are in focus. It turns out that it’s possible to do this, although it’s not quite perfect, and you can even create an action to automate the process. It should be relatively easy for Adobe to include such a focus selection option in Photoshop, but until they do, we’ll have to use a different way.

Method

The way I’ve tried to do this is by trying to detect the edges and details inside an image that are sharply in focus mostly by using a High Pass filter. Once you have the edges that are in focus selected, you can expand the selection around those edges and get a rough, sometimes even pretty accurate, selection of the areas in an image that are in focus. This method is by no means perfect, but it can help if you want to quickly and automatically select the areas of an image that are in focus. You can then refine the mask/selection afterwards if needed.

Some issues with this method:

• The high pass filter sometimes will also include areas of an image that are out of focus, but still contain high contrast, such as highlights in bokeh. These can easily be edited out of the mask in the end, but unfortunately right now I don’t know of any way to make this more accurate and would need more time to figure it out and experiment.
• Since the high pass filter detects contrast in images, parts of an image that are in focus but don’t contain a lot of detail or contrast won’t be detected as areas that are in focus.
• A lot depends on the size of the image when using the actions that are available for download below. For example, the Expand, Smooth and Feather options which are used in the actions have a radius set that is optimized for images between 10-21 megapixels in size. For smaller images this radius should be lower, otherwise the selection will expand to include out of focus areas of an image and possibly the entire image. The same can be said about the settings for the High Pass filter and the Color Range selection. The radius and ranges are optimized for 10-21 megapixel images. You can experiment with your own settings to see what gives you better results for a specific image.

Obviously trying to create this functionality in an action is limiting and won’t always give the best results. Only the Photoshop guys at Adobe or a plugin developer has the kind of low level access and flexibility to be able to make this better.

Below are some examples to show that it does work:

In focus areas are highlighted in bright red (after Focus Peaking Lines Only action).

In focus areas are highlighted in bright red (after Focus Peaking Lines Only action).

In focus areas are highlighted in bright green (after Focus Peaking Lines Only action).

In the examples below I used sample images from the Canon EOS 1DX from Canon Inc’s website.

In focus areas are highlighted in bright red (after Focus Peaking Lines Only action).

In focus areas are highlighted in bright red (after Focus Peaking Lines Only action).

In focus areas are highlighted in bright red (after Focus Peaking Lines Only action). On the left you can see the selection you end up with when using the Focus Peaking action.

Actions

You can download actions that automate the steps shown in the below tutorial by clicking on this link. There’s a .atn file in the zip file which you can open in Adobe Photoshop. There are 3 actions inside this file:

• Focus Peaking - This is the main action that uses the High Pass filter to create a mask with areas that are in focus. This action is explained in the tutorial below.
• Focus Peaking Custom Filter - This action uses the Custom filter instead of the High Pass filter to achieve roughly the same results.
• Focus Peaking Lines Only - This action only makes a new layer that contains the edges of areas that are in focus in bright red color.

PLEASE NOTE: Run these actions on the background layer after opening the image in Photoshop. These actions are optimized for images that are between 10-21 megapixels in size. For smaller images you may need to adjust certain settings as explained in the tutorial below. These actions only work for 8-Bits/Channel and 16-Bits/Channel images (the Color Range selection option is not available for 32-Bits/Channel images in Photoshop).

Tutorial

I’ve created a step by step tutorial below to show how to simulate focus peaking in Photoshop. You end up with a mask containing a rough selection of the areas in an image that are in focus. I’ll be using the image below in this tutorial. You can download a high resolution version here.

Sample Image

Updates

I will be posting updates here when there are bug fixes and/or improvements to the actions. If you run into any issues let me know. If you have suggestions for improvements also let me know. :) The latest update can be downloaded here.

• Sept. 03, 2012: Fixed an error in the Focus Peak Lines Only action that was causing a “Could not complete the command because the selected area is empty.” error.

Broken, but not beyond repair

Almost a year ago I wrote the first part of this article series on Understanding Women. Shortly after publishing the first part, I wrote three more parts where I dived into some of the background information and details that I left out of the first part in order to keep it relatively short. Since then I’ve discovered more information on the subject that I want to discuss in this fifth part of this series.

Not too long after publishing the fourth part of this series, I was surprised to find an interview online with, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant men to have lived on this planet: Nikola Tesla. If you don’t know who Nikola Tesla is, you may want to read up on him. Tesla has become somewhat of a legend especially on the Internet. A lot of the technology that we take for granted and use today is all due to Tesla’s groundbreaking work in the field of electromagnetism. But Tesla wasn’t just a physicist and engineer; he was also a futurist and philosopher. And this becomes clear in this interview he did in 1926 titled “When Woman is Boss” (PDF) where he also talked about women. In this interview Tesla mentions some very interesting things that reveal he must have thought about the subject of women for a long time during his life:

Mr.  Tesla regards the emergence of woman as one of the most profound portents for the future.

“It is clear to any trained observer,” he says, “and even to the sociologically untrained, that a new attitude toward sex discrimination has come over the world through the centuries, receiving an abrupt stimulus just before and after the World War.

“This struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior.  The modern woman, who anticipates in merely superficial phenomena the advancement of her sex, is but a surface symptom of something deeper and more potent fermenting in the bosom of the race.

“It is not in the shallow physical imitation of men that women will assert first their equality and later their superiority, but in the awakening of the intellect of women.

“Through countless generations, from the very beginning, the social subservience of women resulted naturally in the partial atrophy or at least the hereditary suspension of mental qualities which we now know the female sex to be endowed with no less than men.

The Queen is the Center of Life

“BUT the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose.  Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.

It is important to note that Tesla himself saw that the social subservience of women through countless generations and from the very beginning, resulted in the issues women are having today. This is exactly what I said in the first part of this series. Tesla’s genius goes so far as to realize that there’s a hereditary suspension of mental qualities in women. Although this is also the case (not just in women but humans in general, and details on this can be found in Michael Tellinger’s book “Slave species of god“), the suspension of mental qualities related to the issues I discuss in this article series have more to do with the system of brainwash that exists in society rather than any hereditary issues. I discussed in more details in the second part of this series how we’re being mentally manipulated through our sexual desires. But it is amazing that Tesla was able to detect that the issues with women were the result of mental problems, even though this was not his main field of research. He also correctly identified the “struggle of the human female toward sex equality,” which is something I also mentioned in the first part of this series when I said that:

Women are difficult to understand because they’re constantly struggling internally with the conflict between what they have been taught about themselves and their true nature.

The true nature of women is that they are equal to men, especially when it comes to their sexuality (more on this later below). In the fourth part of this series I showed how normal women behave just like men with regards to their sexuality. After being brainwashed from very early childhood to believe that they should behave differently and suppress their needs, women struggle most of their lives with the internal conflict this creates which further leads to mental problems and difficult, irrational and unpredictable behaviour.

Tesla predicted that “women will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.” And we can already see that happening today, especially with the younger generations of women. This is mostly due to the fact that we’re now in a phase of global awakening where a lot of (previously hidden) information is starting to become available and people start to change their thinking as a result of that. For details on this, read my article on the Global Brain. Keep in mind that a lot of the things Tesla said in this interview all the way back in 1926 have become reality today, including that which he said about planet Earth becoming a huge brain. I expect that much of what he said in that interview about women will also become reality in the very near future. I am already seeing much of it around me. Young women are becoming smarter and are starting to see the stupidity of the rules in society. However, I don’t think women will become superior to men, as Tesla says. I think there will be equality and mutual respect, and we’ll probably have a society similar to Iceland where women enjoy the same (sexual) freedoms as men (I wrote about this in the fourth part of this series).

What’s also interesting about Tesla’s interview is that he compares women with the queen in the civilization of a bee. A strange coincidence since I discussed the fairy queen from the movie “The Never Ending Story” in the third part of this series. And take note of the lyrics I discussed from one of the songs related to the movie where a young girl sings about wanting to become a fairy queen:

If I could be a fairy queen, then I would hold a magic key, to reveal the hidden secrets of the mind. Then I could see the darkest blue, the mystery that’s part of you, and I’d weave a spell to take away your sorrows.

So here we have a young girl singing about unlocking the hidden secrets of the mind if she could be a fairy queen, and we have Tesla mentioning how women, once they awaken their intellect, will become like the queen in the civilization of a bee. See the similarities? Is it just coincidence? Maybe you won’t think so once you read about the real deal behind the fairy queen in the third part of this series. Because, in fact, the movie “The Never Ending Story” is exactly about the “social subservience of women through countless generations, from the very beginning” that Tesla was talking about.

Broken, but not beyond repair

Another thing I want to discuss is a review article titled  ”Women, Men and the Bedroom” which was published in an issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This article, written by University of Michigan psychology professor Terri Conley and her team of graduate students, was published in October 2011 just a few months after I published the first part of this series on Understanding Women. The research discussed in this article leads to very interesting conclusions which show that there’s not much difference between men and women when it comes to their sexuality. This is something that I said in the very first part of this series, it is what Nikola Tesla claimed in the interview above, and now we have research showing this is the case:

The idea behind this subject occurred to Conley and her team who felt that psychology needed a more eclectic and representative perspective on contemporary relations between men and women. “In short, the driving force behind this article was that people typically think that men are sex-crazed and women are sexually-prudish; however, we believe that these descriptions may not paint the picture of how men and women typically behave,” says Conley and her co-authors.

After reviewing the various literatures, Conley and her co-authors arrived at several conclusions regarding gender differences in sexuality which demonstrated that none of the original assumptions people have had about how men and women engage in sex, think about sex and desire sex are not as compelling and well-founded as previously believed. “We expect people to be surprised by the small or, in some places completely absent gender differences,” says Conley and her co-authors.

What Conley and her team did, is that they also considered the influence that society has on people’s thoughts and decisions. And this is very important; I mentioned this in the fourth part of this series:

Now, you may say that many studies that have been done recently show that men have a greater sex drive than women. For example, in a talk by professor Roy F. Baumeister he says:

Look at research on the sex drive: Men and women may have about equal “ability” in sex, whatever that means, but there are big differences as to motivation: which gender thinks about sex all the time, wants it more often, wants more different partners, risks more for sex, masturbates more, leaps at every opportunity, and so on. Our survey of published research found that pretty much every measure and every study showed higher sex drive in men. It’s official: men are hornier than women. This is a difference in motivation.

And this is true. But would this still be true today if the system of brainwash and sexual repression that targets women had not been in place for thousands of years now? I think you know the answer to that question yourself. As I have discussed in the first part of this series, society still forces and brainwashes women into repressing their sexual desires leading to all kinds of psychological issues which makes women difficult to understand and difficult to live with. If you put a system into place that makes women repress their sexual desires for thousands of years, then OF COURSE if you’re going to do a survey today you’ll find that women have less sexual desire than men. Any survey about sex drive done today is essentially flawed because it doesn’t take this female sexual repression that is built into society into account. It has had a lot of impact on women. It’s like teaching kids in school that 1+1=3 and then a survey finding out 30 years later that most people think that 1+1=3. Well, duh!

If the influence that society has on people isn’t taken into account, the results from surveys won’t ever be fully and correctly understood.

I want to discuss a few of the conclusions from Conley’s review article below, but for all the details read the full article. The first conclusion:

Do Women Desire and Actually Have Fewer Sexual Partners Than Men Do?
Bottom line: Do women desire and actually have fewer sexual partners than do men? No, gender differences in reported sexual partners stem less from sexual appetites and more from inappropriate use and interpretation of statistics and social desirability.

It’s very important to note here that women apparently desiring less sexual partners is NOT because of less sexual appetite in women. It’s also not true that women desire less sexual partners compared to men. In fact, their conclusion shows that the majority of men and women desire a similar number of sexual partners, namely one.

The second conclusion:

Do Men Think About Sex More Than Women Do?
Fisher and colleagues suggested that men are more attentive to their own needs than women are. This is consistent with objectification theory, which suggests that women’s focus on others’ perceptions reduces women’s attention to their own physical needs (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) and with ample research demonstrating men’s socialization to be agentic and self-focused (Prentice & Carranza, 2002). Women are socialized to be both more attuned to others’ needs and are pressured to inhibit expression of their own desires (Helgeson & Fritz, 1999). Bottom line: Do men think about sex more than women do? Yes, but they also think more about their own physical needs, overall.

Here we see that the important reason why men think more about sex than women, is because society pressures women to inhibit (restrain) expression of their own desires. This is exactly what I have said from the very beginning in the first part of this series, namely that women are forced by society to suppress and even repress their sexual desires. And like I’ve shown in the fourth part of this series, normal women who aren’t influenced by society want sex just as much as men do. However, in that case they’re called nymphos and treated as if they’re sick.

The third conclusion:

Do Men Like Casual Sex More Than Do Women?
Most strikingly, when both proposer sexual capabilities and stigma associated with participation in casual sex are accounted for, the giant gender differences in acceptance evaporate completely. Bottom line: Do men like casual sex more than women do? Yes, but those differences can be explained by the proposers’ sexual capabilities and women’s anticipation of being stigmatized for accepting the offer.

Here we once again see the influence all the brainwashing and the rules of society have on women. If women weren’t afraid of being stigmatized by society and called whores, sluts or nymphos when they satisfy their sexual desires, then they would like casual sex as much as men do. I’ve discussed this in the fourth part of this series where I talk about the women from Iceland. But I’ve recently also touched upon this subject when I wrote an article titled “Why men and women can’t be just friends.” The fact that women are being stigmatized for having casual sex is one of the important reasons why it’s difficult for men and women to be just friends.

The fourth conclusion:

Are Women “Choosier” Than Men?
Men typically pursue women rather than vice versa, following a traditional gender-stereotyped (and culturally bound;Ryan & Jethå, 2010) social script (e.g., Laner & Ventrone, 2000; Rose & Frieze, 1989). Therefore, women are approached more often than men are. Assumptions about women’s choosiness have been based on our culture’s traditional gender dynamics. Bottom line: Are women choosier than men? Yes, but potentially only because they are approached more often than men are.

So the fact that men are expected to pursue women is something that is the result of “a traditional and gender-stereotyped and culturally bound social script.” It is important to realize that this has nothing to do with nature or the natural behaviour of men and women. In fact, in the fourth part of this series I discussed the situation in Iceland where it’s quite normal for women to pursue men. The fact that in some societies and cultures women spend their lives waiting for men to make the first move, or for the perfect man to turn up, is all due to the brainwashing that they received ever since their childhood of how things are supposed to be. These unrealistic expectations lead to all kinds of issues between men and women as discussed in the first part of this series.

And then there’s the overall conclusion of the article:

Within psychology, perspectives that draw upon adaptively evolved mechanisms (Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Eagly & Wood, 1999) are typically utilized to explain gender differences in sexuality. That is, the behaviors we see today are presumed to be relics of our evolutionary past. The research reviewed suggests that these gender differences are in fact rooted in much more mundane causes: stigma against women for expressing sexual desires; women’s socialization to attend to other’s needs rather than their own; and, more broadly, a double standard that dictates (different sets of) appropriate sexual behaviors for men and women.

So the truth is that men and normal women do not differ when it comes to their sexual desires. In fact, they have a very similar sex drive. Yes, surprise, surprise, men and women really are basically the same. All of us have the same basic needs as human beings. The differences we do see between men and women are due to the various issues and rules in society that influence women. And these are the root causes of all the (mental) issues women in general are exhibiting, which result in their difficult to understand behaviour, as discussed in the first part of this series.

Dr. Freud wondered his entire life about women:

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”

Well, Mr. Freud, women, normal women, to be precise, want exactly the same things as men.

Canon EOS 5D Mark III Review (Model credit: Carol Chen Poun Joe)

A few months ago when I wrote my thoughts on the Canon EOS 1DX, I wondered if 2012 could be the year where Canon makes a serious comeback in the professional photography industry. Some of what I wrote back then:

For the last 4 years I’ve been bashing Canon here on my blog for their poor quality control, poor product releases (50D, 5D Mark II, 7D, 60D) and questionable business practices (5D Mark II, 50mm f/1.2L). I’ve also often mentioned how it seemed like Canon was out of touch with the market and didn’t listen to what professionals were asking for. But with the announcement last year of the EOS 1DX, I think I’m starting to see the long awaited change we’ve been asking for.

Little did I know how much I would be blown away just a few months later when the Canon EOS 5D Mark III was announced along with an entirely new Speedlite system with RF (Radio Frequency) based wireless triggering capabilities. With all the new products in the EOS range that Canon has announced and is still going to announce this year, I really feel excited again to be using Canon equipment. Once again Canon not only has the most complete lineup of lenses, but they also have bodies capable of delivering great images and video. In fact, when you look at the entire EOS range for stills and since recently also for video, and the way in which you can mix these products and use them together, you quickly realize that Canon has an unbeatable ecosystem of professional products for creatives. Nobody else in this industry comes even close.

This review is going to be a long one as I have a lot of things I want to discuss, but for those of you who want the short version, I can tell you just stop reading and go buy the 5D Mark III. You will not be disappointed. In all honesty I can say that the 5D Mark III is currently the best DSLR on the market, apart from the 1DX. It’s a work of art. I bought two myself. And if you’re wondering about the Nikon D800, I can tell you that the 5D Mark III is a much better choice. I wouldn’t buy the D800 even if it was priced at $2000 and the 5D Mark III was still $3500. That is how good the 5D Mark III is. If you think I’m biased, think about the fact that I have recommended the Nikon D700 in the past instead of the 5D Mark II.

You may want to continue reading afterall.

Back when the 5D Mark II came out, I was one of the first persons, if not THE first, who pointed out that the autofocus system on that camera was too old and too inadequate for a camera like the 5D Mark II:

With the release of the EOS 5D Mark II camera by Canon recently, I have begun to wonder if the people in charge at Canon’s DSLR division know anything about photography at all. This camera had the potential of becoming a great hit for many different types of photography. But as it is now, it will only be really useful for studio and landscape photography, unless you can put up with its shortcomings.

One of the biggest problems with this camera is its old and outdated autofocus system. It appears Canon just took the 3 year old autofocus system from the old 5D, made some minor changes and put it into the 5D Mark II. The autofocus system has 9 autofocus points, of which ONLY ONE (the center one) is a crosstype point, sensitive at f/2.8. The other 8 surrounding points are less sensitive, being only horizontal-line sensitive at f/5.6.

This is a huge problem for event photographers and journalists who are looking to use this camera, but even studio photographers who want to use autofocus. In low light situations, it’s going to be a real problem using the 8 outer autofocus points to focus on a subject. Many people have complained in the past about the slow autofocus using the outer points on the old 5D, and you would have expected that Canon would have listened and made improvements.

—

So now you have a high resolution sensor, 21 megapixels, but guess what? You can’t easily take pictures that are in focus, eliminating the entire point of having that much resolution available! So now you have a sensor that is extremely capable for low light, high ISO photography, but guess what, you can’t quickly and accurately focus in low light conditions. But hey, you can shoot HD quality video!

When I wrote that, the camera was just announced and not even shipping yet. However, I could already see what was going to happen when it got out and people would start using it. It’s interesting to read the comments again in all my posts about the 5D Mark II, and see how in the beginning I was vastly outnumbered by people who thought I was wrong. But as people started using the camera in the following months, the issues with the autofocus system and soft pictures became painfully evident to a constantly growing number of photographers. The autofocus system on the 5D Mark II became famously known as an “out of focus system,” and along with the 1D Mark III it became somewhat of a running joke in the industry that Canon cameras couldn’t focus. Photographers like Zack Arias and others would frequently make jokes about it in blog posts and during workshops. Even Vincent Laforet, who single handedly launched the video hype around the 5D Mark II with his short film Reverie, would later mention, albeit in a more diplomatic way, that the autofocus system on the camera was old and in desperate need of replacement. Other well known photographers who complained about the 5D Mark II AF system include Lise Gagne, Thom Hogan and Ryan Brenizer. Many photographers who upgraded from the first 5D to the 5D Mark II were disappointed and many of them switched to the Nikon D700. I have documented some of these cases here on my blog. Fake Chuck also reported many of them and some comments from other photographers can be seen here and here. Not surprisingly, the people who were complaining the most about the poor autofocus system and image quality issues on the 5D Mark II were professional photographers who demand a lot from their equipment.

5D Mark II – Destined Evolution My Ass!

Not long after my initial post on the 5D Mark II autofocus system, Canon Inc.’s Masaya Maeda made an appearance on DPReview where he claimed that Canon couldn’t add a better autofocus system to the 5D Mark II because the body was too small to house a better one. I seem to have been the only one who wrote about this absurd statement, and the online press largely ignored it:

One of the most obvious cases of cluelessness or blatant lying can be seen in this part of the interview:

One of the most common complaints we’ve seen about the 5D Mark II is that it still has the same AF system as the original 5D. Why is this?

“Firstly the market’s evaluation of the 5D’s AF system has been very positive; there have been no complaints from users, with everyone saying it’s very good. Given that, to a certain extent, we think we shouldn’t change it. And also there’s some limitation with size; the AF sensor in the 50D is very big; the one in the 5D is much smaller. If we wanted to have all cross-sensors in the 5D Mark II, it would mean we might have to sacrifice the compactness of the body. It’s all a question of balance of features and benefits.”

This answer is simply a serious insult to our intelligence. Nothing more. It looks like Canon, in all its arrogance, thinks its users are so stupid they can tell them anything they want to. First take note of the fact that the DPReview question started by telling Mr. Maeda that “one of the most common complaints we’ve seen about the 5D Mark II is that it still has the same AF system as the original 5D.” If the 5D Mark II AF system was so good, as Mr. Maeda wants us to believe, then why would people be complaining about it not being improved in the 5D Mark II? This doesn’t make sense, ofcourse, but Mr. Maeda seems to be lacking the intelligence to understand this.

Maybe Mr. Maeda would care to explain to us how it is that the EOS 50D, which is roughly the same size as the EOS 5D Mark II, is still able to hold the “very big” AF sensor which can’t fit in the 5D Mark II. Maybe Mr. Maeda would care to explain to us, how it is that Nikon was able to include a 51-point AF sensor in the D700 an D300 cameras, which are roughly the same size as the EOS 5D Mark II. Maybe Mr. Maeda would care to explain to us, how much more room Canon would need to put an AF sensor like the one in the 50D in the 5D Mark II. 2cm? 3cm? Would it have hurt to make the 5D Mark II body 2cm wider to house a better AF sensor? Perhaps Mr. Maeda would also like to explain how it is that he heard no complaints from users, when the Internet is literally filled with complaints about the old 5D autofocus inaccuracy, especially of the outer focus points. The level of cluelessness and arrogance here reaches astounding levels.

—

I hope Mr. Maeda reads all of these posts and can get in touch with reality soon. What is going to make all of this even worse, is when Canon will be releasing the 5D Mark III in the future, or a similar sized body, with a much better AF sensor, something that is bound to happen. In hindsight, Mr. Maeda’s answer is going to look even more ridiculous.

And indeed today we have a 5D Mark III that is roughly the same size as the 5D Mark II, with a vastly more advanced autofocus system, proving how ridiculous Maeda’s claims were.

The Canon EOS 5D Mark III is a beautiful camera.

I spent countless hours blogging about the 5D Mark II and its issues, as well as issues on other cameras from Canon over the last 5 years. I ran email campaigns and literally spammed Canon executives and media all over the world with my complaints and criticism for years. I even got in trouble with Bryan Carnathan from The Digital Picture which got sorted out after photographer John Harrington intervened, and Phil Askey from DPReview who thought I “clearly have an axe to grind against Canon” and sent his lawyers from Amazon after me.

Years ago I wrote a very angry email to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer where I criticized some of Microsoft’s strategies at the time. Much to my surprise he personally replied to me within a day thanking me for my email. I didn’t even expect a reply, much less one thanking me for all the criticism. And I think this reveals one of the important reasons why Microsoft is so successful: They know how to take honest criticism and act on it to improve. And I can say the same thing about some executives at Canon, most notably Chuck Westfall from Canon USA. I’ve criticized Chuck personally in the past, sent some angry emails to him and others at Canon, but to this day Chuck still replies to me when I give feedback and helps me if he can. Everything people say about Chuck’s generosity and knowledge on the Internet is true. And I think it’s because of people like Chuck Westfall at Canon that today we’re seeing Canon making a huge comeback in this industry with products such as the 5D Mark III.

Shot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III.

When I look at the recent product launches starting with the 1DX, it amazes me how much of the things we asked for are turning up in the new products. With the 1DX, Canon actually went full frame and scaled back on the megapixels (something many photographers were asking for) and instead focused on speed and image quality. With the 5D Mark III, Canon essentially did the same. Fake Chuck ran a petition with feature requests (actually they were demands) for the 5D Mark III, and it’s remarkable how many of those features turned up in the 5D Mark III.

The sensor resolution remained roughly the same at 22MP, while they included the latest technologies (gapless microlenses etc.) on the sensor and improved the image quality instead. Compared to the 5D Mark II, the 5D Mark III has cleaner looking image quality (about 2 stops less noise), sharper images and the pattern noise and banding issues have been greatly reduced. To be sure, images from the 5D Mark III still suffer from pattern noise and banding mostly in the dark areas, but you only see it when you push the exposure in post. This is still something Canon needs to fix and this has been an issue in all Canon DSLR sensors at least since the EOS 40D. It’s probably an issue that is inherent to Canon’s current CMOS sensor designs. I’m hoping that Canon will find a way to completely eliminate this issue in future sensors and hopefully by the time the next 5D hits the market (or even before that) it won’t be an issue anymore. At Sony they appear to have a better sensor design as evidenced by the sensor used in the Nikon D800, which has no pattern noise and banding issues even while significantly pushing the exposure of an image in post. The noise in the dark areas of an image still looks pleasing to the eye. Canon needs to take notes here from Sony.

With the new DIGIC 5+ processor come features such as in-camera HDR and more importantly in-camera lens correction (chromatic aberration correction etc.). Especially the lens correction features are a huge benefit to the overall image quality you get with the 5D Mark III. I also like the fact that I can set up the camera so that pressing the magnify button while reviewing pictures automatically takes me to the autofocus point that achieved focus at actual size so that I can quickly check if the image is in focus. Speaking of the magnify button, Canon moved the button from the upper right corner to the left of the LCD, and it took some getting used to for me as I would constantly press the wrong button to try to zoom in. But after using the camera for a while I’m now used to the new location. I also like the new rate button, so I can rate an image while reviewing them with a client for later reference. Very very handy.

The 5D Mark III features excellent image quality.

The 5D Mark III got the same 63-zone dual-layer metering sensor from the 7D which works together with the AF system to make sure the subject that’s in focus is well exposed. However, my experience is that this doesn’t always work reliably. Sometimes images turn out darker than I would expect them to be, and when taking a few shots of the same subject while nothing in the scene changes, you can get a darker image in between. Fortunately the metering system works reliably most of the time (95%). Canon also added the ability to take multiple exposures in a single image and increased the amount of exposure bracketed shots to 7 (up from 3), which is also something I wanted for a long while now.

When I learned that the 5D Mark III would get the same 61-point AF system from the 1DX, I was blown away. I would have been satisfied with the same AF system from the 7D, but Canon went much further by including the AF system from the 1DX on the 5D Mark III. This is a huge improvement on the 5D Mark II and this alone justifies an upgrade if you own a 5D Mark II. This new 61-point AF system with 41 cross-type points is extremely fast and accurate and can even focus down to EV -2 which is equivalent to shooting in the light of the full moon (center point with f/2.8 lens). The autofocus points also cover a large area of the frame, allowing you to frame the exact composition you want at the time of taking the picture. You can even configure the multi-controller to be able to select the autofocus point that you want to use at any time.

What I really love about the AF system is that although it is very complex, Canon has simplified it a lot by including presets for various shooting conditions. You can customize many of the AF functionality to suit your exact needs. Ever since I started using the 5D Mark III, even using a 50mm f/1.2 L lens between f/1.2 and f/2, I hardly get any out of focus shots. Based on my experience so far, I would say that less than 5% of my shots are out of focus. It’s simply incredible. You have to keep in mind that I am very critical when it comes to focus issues, and this was one of the main things I complained about in the past. Now, with the 5D Mark III, I couldn’t be happier.

Ready to shoot.

Not only is the AF system fast, but even the camera reacts much faster with a shutter lag of 59ms (almost the same as 55ms on the 1DX). I will never forget the first time I pressed the shutter button on my 5D Mark III. I gently touched the shutter button and the camera instantly focused and took the shot even before I had a chance to think about it. It’s a world of difference between what I was used to on previous cameras from Canon that I used (40D, 7D, 5D Mark II). I feel so much more in control with the 5D Mark III and feel so much more confident using the camera. Canon also updated the lens microfocus adjustment feature of the AF system, and it is now able to detect the serial number of the attached lens so you can configure settings specific to that lens. So even if you own, for example, two 50mm f/1.2 L lenses, you’ll be able to configure different focus adjustment settings for each one. Previously this wasn’t possible.

The below review by The Camera Store shows how the 5D Mark III autofocus system even outperforms the Nikon D800.

Apart from the fast AF system, the maximum frame rate has also been increased to 6fps (up from 3.9fps on the 5D Mark II). While it’s not bad, I would have preferred at least 8fps. A welcome new feature is the silent shooting mode, where the speed drops to 3fps while the shutter operates very quiet. The shutter durability has also been increased to 150.000 shots. You can now also change the filenames and specify your own custom names on the camera. This custom filename feature also comes with a new firmware update for the EOS 7D and is one of the things Fake Chuck asked for a while ago.

For some reason the 5D Mark III feels so much better and so much more balanced in my hands compared to the 7D. It feels very solid in my hands and comfortable to hold, thanks to the way Canon placed the rubber grips on the camera. I’m not a fan of battery grips as it makes the camera that much bigger and heavier, so I’m happy with the fact that I can comfortably use the camera without one. I have to admit that it still doesn’t come close to, for example, the Nikon D200/D300/D700 etc. in this area.

I’m currently not much of a movie guy myself, although I have been fooling around with the movie recording feature on the camera. So I can’t comment on the movie recording functionality of the camera much. But from the reviews done by others such as Philip Bloom, I am convinced that the 5D Mark III is the better choice for video compared to the Nikon D800 and even the Nikon D4. Check out the below comparison by Philip Bloom.

I also found the below review of the video features very nicely done.

Compared to Nikon D800

As far as I’m concerned, the 5D Mark III is clearly the better choice compared to the Nikon D800. The images from the 5D Mark III are cleaner with less noise and JPEG images also appear to be sharper compared to the Nikon D800. Even the video quality is better on the 5D Mark III, as can be seen in the reviews I linked to above (for example the one done by Philip Bloom). There’s less noise at high ISO values, and there’s also no moiré and aliasing on the 5D Mark III, where this is an issue on the D800. I don’t know what got into Nikon to go all the way to 36MP on the D800. This is clearly an example of how you shouldn’t be doing something just because you can. Even Nikon users have indicated that they would rather have seen the 16MP sensor from the D4 in the D800, as can be seen from the poll below done by Nikon Rumors a few months ago.

People wanted a smaller sensor on the D800.

The extra resolution you get going from 22MP to 36MP isn’t worth the issues that come with that jump in resolution. For one, there is a lot more noise in images as can be seen from the screenshot below taken at DPReview.

5D Mark III VS D800 at ISO 6400. Source: DPReview.

You can clearly see that even the 5D Mark II image quality is better than the D800. The difference with the 5D Mark III appears to be almost 2 stops. And the noise on the D800 is an issue at all ISO values except perhaps ISO 100. I’ve seen ISO 320 pictures from the D800 with so much noise I thought it was probably ISO 1600. It’s just awful. In contrast the images from the 5D Mark III are much smoother and cleaner. Here’s another example with JPEG images taken from Camera Labs.

5D Mark III VS D800. Source: Camera Labs. (click image for larger view)

As you can see, again the D800 image quality is worse; there’s more noise while the images also look softer with less detail even at the higher 36MP resolution. This is probably due to the noise reduction that is going on inside the D800 to make the images look better with less noise. But this happens at the expense of image sharpness. This is a clear example of how the extra resolution on the D800 is pointless when there’s also more noise present. You’re going to have to apply noise reduction and this eliminates the advantage you had in resolution making all the extra megapixels pointless in the end, all while adding disadvantages such as the bigger files and slower framerate.

Even on DxOMark, it’s clear that the 5D Mark III images contain less noise compared to the D800, as can be seen from the graph below.

D800 VS 5D Mark III VS D4 on DxOMark

However, when it comes to the overall scores, strangely DxOMark gives the D800 a higher score compared to the 5D Mark III for low light (Sports).

D800 VS 5D Mark III VS D4 on DxOMark

How can it be that the D800 gets a better score for low light high ISO shooting (2853 ISO), while clearly the 5D Mark III has less noise at the high ISO values????? Clearly there’s something seriously wrong here, and DxOMark is misleading everyone with their overall scores. In the noise graph above the 5D Mark III is in the middle, and when it comes to the scores, suddenly the D800 performs better. But even from the sample pictures above, it’s clear that the D800 performs worse at the high ISO values. So how can it get a higher score for low light shooting on DxOMark?? It’s surprising to me that nobody other than Fake Chuck is talking about this.

The autofocus system of the 5D Mark III is also much better compared to the D800. The video review I linked to above from the Camera Store clearly shows this. But this is no surprise considering the fact that the 5D Mark III has the same autofocus system from the 1DX with 41 cross-type points which are spread apart. The D800 has only 15 cross-type points, which are all in the center. This is a significant difference.

Autofocus Points on D800 and 5D Mark III

I love how the cross-type points are spread out on the 5D Mark III, which is a huge benefit if you want to do off-center compositions and use autofocus, and not having to focus and recompose (with all the disadvantages of that). This was one of the things I complained about as soon as the 5D Mark II came out, and this time with the 5D Mark III, Canon just went all out and gave us the best they have. And it’s awesome!!

Not only does the D800 have an inferior autofocus system, but it’s also slower with a 4fps framerate compared to the 6fps on the 5D Mark III. This difference should not be underestimated if you want to capture the exact moment during an event.

So in summary, I think the 5D Mark III is the better choice compared to the D800 because:

• The 5D Mark III has much better image quality for both stills and video.
• Has a better autofocus system with LOTS more cross-type points that are spread apart.
• Is faster with 6fps framerate which gives you a better chance to capture the precise moment.
• The above 3 points are essential to any good camera. Image quality, Autofocus (speed AND accuracy) and Speed (framerate, viewfinder blackout etc.). The 5D Mark III has it all.
• I also consider the smaller files on the 5D Mark III to be a benefit especially since the bigger files on the D800 are big for nothing. Storage can be a real problem if you’re shooting a lot and doing lots of events.

Nikon needs to go back to the drawing board and listen to what people actually want. What the hell were they thinking? I feel sorry for all the D700 users out there for whom the D800 isn’t an option, and the D4 is too expensive. I also don’t think that the coming D600 is going to be a replacement for the D700. If even Ken Rockwell, who is passionate about his Nikon cameras, chooses the 5D Mark III instead, you know Nikon went seriously wrong with the D800:

The Canon EOS 5D Mark III is the world’s best digital SLR. It easily lets us create smooth, clean, beautiful and colorful images in any sort of light. It handles much better my cheaper Nikon D800 and D800E; my 5D Mark III handles and sounds smoother, quieter, feels better and makes better-looking images than my Nikon D800E. The 5D Mark III also has the best LCD ever put in a DSLR, while the LCD on my Nikon D800E is smaller in actual use, and most importantly, the Nikon’s LCD isn’t color-accurate. My 5D Mark III LCD is big, bold, bright, sharp, clear, colorful and accurate, and automatically varies its brightness brilliantly for use in any light. (My D800E also has auto LCD brightness control, but doesn’t work well enough to want to use it.)

…

To shooters upgrading from the Nikon D800 and D800E, the Mark III is greatly improved over the Mark II, while the Nikon D800 and D800E are a step backwards in ergonomics and LCD quality from the D700. Therefore the status quo has reversed; I used to prefer Nikon, while today with the 5D Mark III, I greatly prefer it to my D800E. Pixels impress amateurs, while guys like me who shoot every day for a living are more impressed at how my 5D Mark III lets me get more of the right pixels faster, not just more of the wrong ones. 

…

The 5D Mark III is the world’s best DSLR. It’s a huge improvement over the 5D Mark II due to the improvements from automatic color fringe correction, and the greatly improved power, depth-of-field and playback controls. If you shoot Canon, you deserve one of these.

I like how Rockwell remarks that “pixels impress amateurs” while professionals prefer to “get more of the right pixels faster, not just more of the wrong ones.” This is what I have been saying here on my blog for over 4 years now, and it’s what I kept hammering on in all my reviews of the 50D, 7D and 5D Mark II. I want smoother and cleaner image quality, not more megapixels. And let me get that smoother and cleaner image quality much faster and, above all, accurately, so I can make maximum use of the resolution I have available on the sensor. Fortunately Canon listened with the 1DX and 5D Mark III.

Room for Improvement

While the 5D Mark III is, at the time of this writing, the best DSLR on the planet right now, apart from the 1DX, there’s still room for improvement. Below are some of the things I hope Canon will consider for the 5D Mark IV and other cameras in the future:

• Please keep the sensor resolution on the 35mm sensor in the 21-24MP range. We don’t need more resolution!! It’s great where it’s at now. For people who want more resolution, consider introducing a medium format system. Or alternatively, introduce a new camera line, say a 4D, with more megapixels and more noise and slower framerate for the amateurs (as Ken Rockwell calls them) who go crazy about megapixels. But for us professionals, keep the 5D at 22MP.
• Instead of more megapixels, give us better usable dynamic range on the sensor. Sony can do it as demonstrated on the D800, so Canon should be able to do it. Get rid of the pattern and banding noise issues when pushing the exposure of an image in post.
• Instead of more megapixels, give us even lower noise and even higher usable ISO values. Make ISO 1600 the new ISO 100.
• Instead of more megapixels, give us even faster framerate. At least 8fps or higher.
• Instead of more megapixels, give us better image quality. I love the lens aberration correction features for example. Give us more of that. Use more DIGIC power to improve the image quality. Give us better pixels, not more!!!
• Better metering system. Perhaps we can get the 1DX metering system in the 5D Mark IV. Also, spot metering linked to the selected autofocus point.
• I like the new HDR features and extra exposure bracketing options. One thing that is missing is focus bracketing. Add this feature on the next 5D. Give us an option to specify how many images and how far to shift focus for each bracketed shot. And then, similar to the HDR feature, let the camera combine them into a single shot with combined dept of field, which is going to be a great feature for macro shooting. Let it be possible to shoot all focus bracketed shots in a single quick burst.
• Give us an articulating LCD screen. This is essential for video shooting, but also for stills to be able to get the more difficult angles.
• Better autofocus system with more cross-type points, spread out more to the edges (rule of thirds), and more sensitive. Autofocus needs to be extremely fast and especially accurate.
• It’s time for an electronic viewfinder with all the benefits that come with that, including real-time exposure simulation (what you see is what you get). While this isn’t very essential for the next 5D, the one after that should have one. And it should be high resolution and look almost like the optical viewfinder.
• Flash sync speed of 1/500s. Why is the 5D Mark III stuck at 1/200s???
• Much sharper HD video and 1080p at 120fps.
• Get rid of the jello effect in video mode.
• Faster contrast detect autofocus in live view shooting, and faster, smoother and automatic autofocus during movie recording.
• Quality control needs to improve much more. I bought two 5D Mark III cameras. One of them was perfect, while the other one came with a dirty sensor (dust spots visible at f/16) and two small black spots inside the viewfinder (fortunately at the edges). This is unacceptable for a brand new camera. It’s not the first time this is happening to me. Years ago a brand new 40D I bought came with a large particle on the sensor visible at f/11. Fortunately I was able to clean the sensor myself in all cases, although it took a while and at least 5 swabs to get the 5D Mark III sensor spotless because of the tiny particles that kept moving around instead of attaching to the swabs. A quick Google search reveals that these kinds of quality control problems are still occuring too often. Please improve.

Conclusion

Buy the 5D Mark III if it’s in the range of your budget. Seriously, buy it. It is the best there is right now. Unless you can afford a 1DX. In that case, get the 1DX. Like I said at the very beginning, it’s an exciting time to be a Canon shooter. Canon has made big improvements across the board and is coming out with exciting and innovative new products. Also consider the range of EF and EF-S lenses available from Canon, with such gems as the EF 8-15mm f/4 L Fisheye lens and others, and more coming in the near future. Canon’s EOS line of products for both stills and video is unparalleled in this industry. I hope that Canon continues on this new path they have set out and don’t repeat the mistakes they made a few years ago.

Gallery

The gallery below contains some sample images that I shot with the 5D Mark III. First there are some images I shot with model and paintress Carol Chen Poun Joe, whom I’ve worked with in the past while reviewing the Cactus V5 tranceiver among other projects. During the photoshoot with Carol, I actually used Canon’s new Speedlite system, the 600EX-RT flashes in Gr mode. I will be doing a separate review of the new flash system in the future, but I can already tell you that it freaking rocks!!! I have waited years for Canon to get rid of the ST-E2 and come out with a system based on radio frequency transmission instead of the old optical technology. The ease of  use and the way this new system works brought tears to my eyes.

Then there are some other shots that show off the smooth and clean image quality on the 5D Mark III especially in the bokeh areas. Some of those shots are ISO 3200 and ISO 6400 shots and it’s amazing how good the image quality is.

Updates

Update July 18th, 2012

I made the comment recently that the 22MP 5D Mark III images upsampled to 36MP using good software would look almost as good as the D800 images with regards to the resolution. It seems like people find it hard to believe this. So I took some images from DPReview here, from the D800 and 5D Mark III both at ISO 100 and put together the comparison below to make it convenient for you. Remember: the 5D Mark III image is upsampled to 36MP. See if you can tell which one of the two columns (Camera A and B) is the 5D Mark III and D800.

5D Mark III VS D800, 5D Mark III image upsampled to 36MP. Both at ISO 100.

The point of this comparison is that the difference in resolution on screen is marginal at best when properly upsampling the 5D Mark III images to 36MP. In print this would be even more marginal. Is this marginal difference in resolution worth the slow 4fps framerate on the D800? Is it worth the overall slower camera and workflow? Is it worth the big diskspace eating files and all the hassle that comes with that (memory consumption, slower PC, backups etc.)? In my opinion it’s not. Also, I’ll take a better autofocus system and better high ISO performance any day instead of this marginal advantage in resolution. The 5D Mark III is the better choice here.

Another thing I should mention is that I also had some trouble with the black focus points on the 5D Mark III while shooting at night. It’s difficult to see which focus point is selected in this case. Many have complained about this issue and Canon is currently working on a firmware update that is going to make this less of an issue.

Update July 19, 2012

I covered a wedding last saturday with both my 5D Mark III’s and after that experience I have some more comments. First, the AF system is amazing. In the over 2000 shots I took with both cameras, using lenses such as the 16-35mm f/2.8 L, 85mm f/1.2 L, 100mm f/2.8 L Macro and 8-15mm f/4 L Fisheye, I can tell you I have yet to find one that is out of focus and where it wasn’t my fault. It’s incredible. With previous cameras that I used, it was possible to get AF confirmation and finding out later the focus was off. Not with the 5D Mark III.

Wedding Coverage (ISO 1600)

Secondly, the metering system could use improvement. Someone asked in the comments below for spot metering linked to the selected AF point, and this is a very valid request. Using the center point to spot meter is difficult when taking action shots and doing events for off center compositions. There’s a thread on DPReview where this is discussed. During the wedding coverage I had to constantly check the LCD to see if the exposure was correct, or if I had to dial in exposure compensation (usually between 1 to 1.5 stops). This needs improvement. I’m hoping that Canon can release a firmware update where the exposure can be checked based on the selected autofocus point only. Right now this functionality is present in the evaluative metering mode, but this also checks other focus points that have achieved (near) focus:

To work with the iFCL metering sensor, the EOS 7D also features a specific metering algorithm. The EOS 7D always measures focus with all AF points regardless of the selected AF mode. During the exposure reading the EOS 7D looks to see which points, in addition to the selected point, have achieved or almost achieved focus. This information lets the camera know which part of the image is the subject. It then takes metering readings from the zones corresponding to the AF points that have achieved (or almost achieved) focus and combines them with readings from all the other zones. This allows for consistent shot-to-shot exposure, even in complex situations – for example, where there are reflections from a model’s glasses.

Canon could perhaps add a custom function that would enable readings just from the selected autofocus point, which would work as spot metering linked to the autofocus point. Not sure if I’m correct here but this is what it seems like to me.

I’ve also been having some discussions below and I want to thank everyone for their contribution in the comments. With regards to the DxOMark measurements, the 5D Mark III performs better with regards to noise, tonal range and dynamic range above ISO 800. You can check the results yourself on the “Measurements” tab on this link. Below are some screenshots for your convenience.

D800 VS 5D Mark III VS D4 on DxOMark

D800 VS 5D Mark III VS D4 on DxOMark

If the 5D Mark III has lower noise at all ISO values compared to the D800, better tonal range at all ISO values, and better dynamic range above ISO 800, then how can DxOMark give the 5D Mark III a lower score compared to the D800? Especially since these measurements do agree with real world data (stills and video). Yet, DxOMark, in their final score for low light/high ISO performance, give the D800 a higher score. How?

A graph of the Internet showing the millions of connections between computers. Source: Opte.org

For the first time in the history of humankind we’re reaching a point where we’ll finally be able to become united as a species and form a planetary civilization. We’re finally reaching a point where we’ll be able to mentally evolve a lot quicker than was previously possible. Due to recent advances in communication technologies, today we’re able to connect with each other instantly almost anywhere around the world. We’re able to talk to each other, share ideas, help each other and learn from each other very easily. And the key piece of technology that is allowing all of this to happen is the Internet.

The Internet is becoming the equivalent of the human brain for planet Earth - A Global Brain:

The global brain is a metaphor for the worldwide intelligent network formed by people together with the information and communication technologies that connect them into an organic whole. As the Internet becomes faster, more intelligent, more ubiquitous and more encompassing, it increasingly ties us together in a single information processing system, that functions like a “brain” for the planet Earth.  Although the underlying ideas are much older, the term was coined in 1982 by Peter Russell in his book The Global Brain. How the Internet might be developed to achieve this was set out in 1986 .

In fact, the Internet works very much like the human brain.

Interlinked neurons. Source: GE Healthcare

The picture at the top with a graph of the Internet looks very similar to the above picture of interlinked neurons and this is no coincidence. Connections on the Internet between computers are made based on need and relevance. The more a piece of information on the Internet is used, the more important it becomes and the more connections are made to it. This is exactly how the human brain works. This is why it’s possible to “train your brain” to be better at certain tasks. The more you use your brain for a certain task, the more connections are being made between neurons to facilitate that task and the better the brain becomes at carrying out that task. If certain parts of the brain aren’t used very often, connections to it are closed and become fewer so that the brain can focus on building other connections that are needed. Search engines, such as Google, use this, among other things, to determine how important a website is on the Internet. The more links (or connections) there are to a a piece of information, the more important or relevant the information probably is and the higher it appears in the search results. From here:

New research on how human memory and recall works suggests that the process is quite similar to Google’s PageRank in determining what things are more important and should be recalled first. Basically, Google’s PageRank looks at “popularity,” not just in terms of how many links a site gets, but also in terms of how popular those links are. Thus, if you get linked from a more popular site, that’s more valuable than getting linked by a bunch of non-popular sites. It turns out that the brain does something similar in linking concepts, judging not just the popularity, but the popularity of the concepts linked to the concepts. In fact, using Google’s PageRank turned out to be a better predictor of how a brain would prioritize words than more commonly known methods.

We also have a distributed system with built-in redundancy on the Internet, similar to our brain:

The Internet model would explain the brain’s ability to overcome much local damage, Swanson said.  ”You can knock out almost any single part of the Internet and the rest of it works.”  Likewise, Swanson said, “There are usually alternate pathways through the nervous system. It’s very hard to say that any one part is absolutely essential.”

So the Internet is very much on its way to becoming our Global Brain. With even more connections being made every day and even better software being written to make it all work together, the Global Brain will only improve in the future. It will finally allow humankind to develop a global consciousness. And this is very important because it will allow us to really begin our next step in evolution: Mental Evolution. Finally we’re going to be able to combine our brains, our mental capacities, to enable much faster and much bigger developments. Going forward, we’re going to see exponential improvements in our development as a species.

In the past we’ve lived very disconnected around the planet. It was very difficult to impossible for civilizations around the world to communicate with each other. As a result these civilizations couldn’t benefit from each other’s knowledge and experiences. In every civilization people would have to find out everything for themselves, make the same mistakes every time and learn things the hard way by trial and error. Not only that, but as time went on, even in the same civilization information would get lost, forgotten or become unclear and people would have to learn things all over again while making the same old mistakes their ancestors had made. And this is the reason why history has kept repeating itself in the past and why it was very easy to manipulate entire civilizations. Humankind kept forgetting and re-learning which really slowed down its development.

However, we have now reached a point where finally our technology enables us to avoid these problems and really accelerate our development as a species. Nikola Tesla, one of the most brilliant men to have lived on this planet, saw this coming way in advance. In fact, much of this is possible today due to Tesla’s groundbreaking work in the field of electromagnetism. Check out what Tesla said in this interview titled “When Woman is Boss” in 1926:

“From the inception of the wireless system,” he says, “I saw that this new art of applied electricity would be of greater benefit to the human race than any other scientific discovery, for it virtually eliminates distance.  The majority of the ills from which humanity suffers are due to the immense extent of the terrestrial globe and the inability of individuals and nations to come into close contact.

“Wireless will achieve the closer contact through transmission of intelligence, transport of our bodies and materials and conveyance of energy.

“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole.  We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance.  Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone.  A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

How the hell was Tesla able to foresee all of this all the way back in 1926? This shows just how much of an incredible genius Tesla was. Tesla may have been the first to predict the coming of the Global Brain.

Like Tesla said, as soon as wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will become a huge brain. And we’ve now indeed reached a stage in our technological development where wireless is perfectly applied. No longer are we disconnected, and no longer do we have to forget and re-learn the things we knew. The Internet now serves as a global consciousness for humankind. A global persistent knowledge base that allows us to store and share our ideas, our knowledge and our experiences so that we can all benefit from it. Not only is this knowledge base here today, but at least equally as important, we have instant (almost) global access to it. We no longer have to make the same mistakes our ancestors made hundreds of years ago because today we can easily and instantly search through history and see the mistakes they made and learn from them. We can discard things that were clearly a problem and improve on other things that might still work for us today. We can instantly search through a huge database of existing knowledge gained in the past to help us build the future. We can easily and instantly share ideas with each other around the world and help each other improve those ideas or help to determine if they are worth pursuing. More often than not there are people around the world with the same or similar ideas, perhaps in various stages of development, and instead of doing everything ourselves, we can learn from experiences of others and use the work others have already done. Good ideas and knowledge on the Internet will get reinforced by experiences of others and become more important, while bad ideas and knowledge will quickly become less relevant and disappear – much like the connections between neurons are made in the human brain. Tesla referred to all of this as the “transmission of intelligence.” And as we can clearly see today, this is resulting in the rapid mental and technological development of humankind. We’re becoming more efficient and we’re losing less time. We’re becoming smarter much faster and we’re beginning to come to new understandings about ourselves and the world that we live in.

It’s interesting that all of this is happening in our current lifetime because of the significance that is put on our current time period by a few different sources.

Scientific

First we’ve got a scientific perspective as explained by Professor Michio Kaku in the video below. According to Kaku we’re now living in a period where we’re making the transition from a Type 0 (zero) civilization (a bunch of savages) to a Type I civilization (a planetary civilization). But we’re just at the beginning of this transition. Kaku estimates that within 100 years we’ll have reached Type I status. In the video below you can see Kaku’s explanation:

Another video where Kaku explains our transition to a Type I civilization and the fact that the Internet is technology that enables a Type I civilization:

Also take note of how Kaku says that the transition between a Type 0 and a Type 1 civilization can be a turbulent or dangerous period, and how a lot will depend on our mental evolution and the development of our consciousness. This is important because this is exactly what Peter Russell says in the videos below.

Spiritual

Peter Russell’s approach is a little different from Kaku (a more spiritual approach mixed with science) but essentially and very interestingly, he comes to the same conclusions as Kaku. I highly recommend watching the below videos.

And here’s a very good video about the global brain by Peter Russell. Please be patient while watching as it builds up to the climax.

Mayan Calendar

You’ve probably heard about the Mayan Calendar and the fact that it ends on December 21st, 2012. This doesn’t mean that time stops or that the world is going to end on that day though. What will happen is that there will be a beginning of a new age or cycle, one in which humankind will make a leap into a higher state of awareness and consciousness. From here:

Several prominent individuals representing Maya of Guatemala decried the suggestion that the world ends on b’ak’tun 13. Ricardo Cajas, president of the Colectivo de Organizaciones Indígenas de Guatemala, said the date did not represent an end of humanity or fulfillment of the catastrophic prophecies found in the Maya Chilam Balam, but that the new cycle, “supposes changes in human consciousness”. Martín Sacalxot of Procurador de los Derechos Humanos (Guatemala’s Human Rights Ombudsman, PDH) said that end of the calendar has nothing to do with the end of the world or the year 2012.

And from here:

In 2012, of course, according to the Mayan calendar … [it comes] to an end on December 21, 2012. So, lots of people are expecting something to happen. Maybe the Mayans knew something we didn’t. Should we be worried about the end of the world? None of [the] Cayce material [indicates this]. Cayce talked about how we’d enter into a New Age that would be known for three things: purity, global consciousness, and a height of spiritual consciousness that we have yet to encounter.

And I don’t think this change in human consciousness will happen overnight, but there will be a gradual transition, much like what Professor Kaku said, perhaps of about 100 years. Notice how the time period and what will happen again match with what Kaku and Russell said in the videos above. Could this be coincidence?

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton calculated the “time of the end” to be in the year 2060 according to the bible. However, recently a new corrected calculation based on Newton’s notes has brought the year down to 2013:

In “Temple at the Center of Time: Newton’s Bible Codex Deciphered and the Year 2012,” by David Flynn, a book that has skyrocketed up the best-seller charts following its release this month, the author makes a correction to Isaac Newton’s research, pointing to the year 2013 as “the time of the end.”   In 2003, the Daily Telegraph in London published a front-page story declaring that, according to Isaac Newton, the world would end in 2060. This was the first time that this calculation of Newton became widely known. However, various biographers and researcher of Newton’s theology had encountered it since 1991 when most of his manuscripts were released on microfilm at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem.

…

Additional significance can be attached to this finding when considering that 2013 follows the end of the great cycle of the Maya calendar and the planetary cycle of the Aztec calendar, which concludes Dec. 21, 2012.

Whether the year is 2060 or 2013, it is still very close and within the transition period to the new age or cycle.

The Age of Aquarius

But it gets better. According to astrology we’re now in the transitional phase of entering the new age of Aquarius. And what exactly does that mean? Here’s what the age of Aquarius will bring:

Ever wonder why the word “Jesus” is sometimes shown inside a fish? Jesus was born in the Age of Pisces. The bible is more about astrology than the average christian realizes.

So, how does the Aquarian Age fit into this?  It takes a little over 2,100 years for our Solar System to travel through each of the Signs or constellations.  So far, humanity has recorded events in the astrological Age of Taurus, which was the time of Adam; followed by the Age of Aries, when Abraham came into the picture.  Just about the time the Roman Empire rose to power, our Sun entered the constellation of Pisces.  It was in this Piscean Age that Jesus was born.  

The Age of Aquarius is foretold in Jesus’ words in the Aquarian Gospel, ¹ “And then the man who bears the pitcher will walk forth across an arc of heaven; the sign and signet of the Son of Man will stand forth in the eastern sky.  The wise will then lift up their heads and know that the redemption of the Earth is near.” (Aquarian Gospel 157: 29, 30.)

When Yogi Bhajan came to the West, the Aquarian Age was already dawning.  A new consciousness was being born on Earth. We are now in the 21-year Cusp period (1991-2012), which is divided into three 7-year increments and leads up to the actual arrival of the Aquarian Age in 2012.  Yogi Bhajan explained back in November of 1991 that this period of transition from the Piscean to the Aquarian Age would bring increasingly greater turmoil and upheaval to the planet. All around us we can see the Piscean walls of misunderstanding and fear starting to crumble under the sheer weight of higher consciousness that is manifesting on this planet.  The old Piscean Age was dominated by machines and hierarchies.  The new Aquarian Age is ruled by awareness, information, and energy. Yogi Bhajan told us, “What worked before, won’t work now.” And, “Nothing can remain hidden.” We are now seeing that manifested every day.  People are waking up.  For some this brings fear, and for some, joy.  As the Aquarian Age comes closer, the contrast between those who live in fear and those who live In love becomes more obvious every day, for the two states are mutually exclusive.  As I write this, we are now less than 1000 days away from the true beginning of the Age of Aquarius.

And here’s more on what the age of Aquarius will bring:

Modern Mayan shamans and calendar specialists known as “day keepers” will tell you that the end of their ancient calendar is not the end of time, but the moment when humanity will be given the opportunity to make a cosmic leap into a “next-level” of higher awareness and consciousness. This sounds thematically identical to what we’ve heard about the Age of Aquarius, and just so happens to occur within the same cosmic moment! It should be noted here as well that, while the Aquarian Age has come to define a type of thinking, it is nonetheless a scientific, astronomical measurement of time. Each age of the zodiac lasts approximately 2,000 years, and we are currently in the final days of Pisces and entering Aquarius.

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This shift into being transparent (where we no longer try to hide who and what we really are) is a key element of the Aquarian philosophy. When we no longer mask our true feelings and desires, humanity as a race will literally “jump” into a type of collective consciousness that, at present, can barely be imagined. With the ability to sense what’s really going on inside one another, it will no longer be logical to even try to be deceitful.

So the age of Aquarius will bring us a higher state of awareness and consciousness. One that is based on love instead of fear. Since the age of Pisces started when Jesus was born, and it takes around 2156 years to enter a new age, we are now living exactly in the transitional period between the age of Pisces and the age of Aquarius. And again, give or take 100 years for the transition to be complete, as Professor Kaku indicated in the videos above. Again, I ask you, is this just coincidence?

The Dresden Codex

From here:

Dresden Codex

And here’s yet another striking piece of information: Most of what we know about Mayan prophecy regarding 2012 comes from an ancient Mayan book now known as the Dresden Codex. Here is the image contained on the last page of that book, which deals with the winter solstice of 2012 and “the end of time.” Take a look at the figure in the middle of the page: it represents a mythical water-bearer announcing the end of the age. How strange is it that, coincidentally, a mythical water-bearer also happens to be the sign that announces the arrival of the new age of Aquarius? And those four boxes over her head? They represent the four planets visible to the naked eye in alignment with each other on that day…. (hmmm, as in “When Jupiter aligns with Mars?”)

The Sumerian Tablets

Enki / Aquarius

And as far as I’m concerned, what binds all of this together are the Sumerian tablets some of which have been translated by Zacharia Sitchin who wrote a number of books based on his translations of the tablets. If you want to know more about this (and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you do), read “Slave Species of god” by Michael Tellinger, which contains a summary of Sitchin’s work in its 16th chapter, and also read “The Lost Book of Enki” and “The End of Days” by Zacharia Sitchin. The Sumerian tablets tell us about the origins of humankind, how we were created and for what purpose. About 445,000 years ago an alien race of beings that look much like us, called the Annunaki, traveled to Earth in order to mine gold. In the process they created humankind to work as slaves in the gold mines. The leaders of the Annunaki were seen by humans as “gods.” At some point each of the leaders was associated with one of the constellations of the Zodiac. Enlil, one of the Annunaki and the commander in charge, was associated with the bull (Taurus), while Marduk was associated with the ram (Aries), and Enki also known as EA, a half brother of Enlil and the one who was responsible for the creation of humankind, was associated with Pisces (not 100% sure) and Aquarius (most certainly). Also, the name EA means “He whose home is water.” The Sumerians depicted Enki as a god with water coming out of his hands.

When the age of Aries began, Marduk claimed that it was his turn to rule over the Earth. Eventually he got his way, but this means that his rule over the Earth probably ended when the age of Pisces began. Perhaps Enki or someone else took over then, but what is certain is that we’re now entering the age of Aquarius where Enki will be taking over again. Remember that this is also foretold in the Dresden Codex mentioned above, where the mythical water-bearer announces the new age of Aquarius. The sumerians tell us exactly who this mythical water-bearer is. And if you read “The lost book of Enki” by Zacharia Sitchin, you can get to know him a little better.

Apart from water, Enki is also associated with wisdom, intelligence and technology. Indeed if you read the Sumerian texts, Enki seemed to have been a great inventor/scientist and very wise. He was the one who, through genetic engineering, created humankind. It is also clear from the Sumerian texts that Enki more often than not wanted the best for his creation, even helping them in secret while the other Annunaki “gods” were opposed to it (Enki is said to have started the secret societies in order to share knowledge and help humankind). Seeing as how he’ll probably be taking over in this age of Aquarius, this could mean that humankind could get a big boost in evolution and further development. Could it just be coincidence that we’re seeing all these technological breakthroughs in the last few decades when Enki the inventor/scientist is taking over? Could it just be coincidence that we’re about to get a major boost in mental evolution now that Enki, the god of wisdom and intelligence, is taking over? And is this why we’ve been seeing all the UFO activity in the last few years with all the crop circles that reveal new information about energy and life to us (for more on this watch Thrive - Youtube Link)?

In closing I think all of this can’t be mere coincidence. It’s too real to be just coincidence. Can it be a coincidence that while a few different sources predict the coming of a new age of higher consciousness for humankind, at the same time we’re also seeing the development of a Global Brain which will allow a global consciousness that will accelerate our mental evolution? We can notice the evidence of some kind of transition everywhere around the world. We can also see how in the last few years there’s been an accelerated development of humankind, certainly with regards to our technology and, so far, a little less so when it comes to our awareness and consciousness. But people are waking up every day around the world as new information becomes available through the Global Brain and our global consciousness continues to develop. And this is only going to happen faster and faster. In the last few years, and especially more recently, I’ve been overwhelmed by the amount of information and answers I keep finding to important questions I’ve had all my life.  It’ll be interesting to see where this will take us. Certainly this is an interesting time to be alive.

Access Denied

A recently published article titled “Benefit or burden? Attraction in cross-sex friendship” in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships confirms what many of us have known for a long time now, namely that it’s quite difficult for men and women to be just friends. Here’s some from the abstract:

We propose that, because cross-sex friendships are a historically recent phenomenon, men’s and women’s evolved mating strategies impinge on their friendship experiences. [...] Our findings implicate attraction in cross-sex friendship as both common and of potential negative consequence for individuals’ long-term mateships.

And from here:

“Attraction in friendship is happening, and it’s persistent,” says lead author April Bleske-Rechek, associate professor of psychology. “I’d venture to say, based on all our data, that in the majority of (opposite-sex) friendships there’s at least a low level of attraction. And if it’s coming more from one friend than the other, it’s probably the guy.”

Because opposite-sex friendships are a novel concept, evolutionarily speaking, Bleske-Rechek believes people’s hardwired mating instincts impinge on them. Notably, this seems to occur even when both parties claim genuinely platonic intentions. To put it in When Harry Met Sally terms, “the sex part” gets in the way.

What clearly stands in the way between men and women in friendly relationships are our natural sexual desires. Normally our sexual desires wouldn’t be an issue here, but because of the fact that societies around the world have a lot of female sexual repression built into them, this causes an imbalance in relationships between men and women. I’ve written before about the female sexual repression that has been present for thousands of years in societies around the world. For all the details, read my article series on Understanding Women.

Because women get brainwashed by society from very early childhood to repress their sexual desires, they often withhold an important part of themselves in relationships with a man. So it’s no surprise to me that the research discussed in the above mentioned article shows that men reported more attraction to their friend than women:

In our first study involving pairs of friends, emerging adult males reported more attraction to their friend than emerging adult females did, regardless of their own or their friend’s current relationship status.

Female sexual repression has such a huge impact on women in societies around the world, to the point that all research on the female sex drive shows that women have a lower sex drive than men. I’ve discussed this in the fourth part of my article series on Understanding Women, and there I’ve also given an example (Iceland) of how women would normally behave if this female sexual repression wasn’t around in society. In fact, women would behave very similar to men in that case with regards to their sexuality. So if female sexual repression in society can have such a big impact on the female sex drive, then no wonder women report less attraction to their male friends in friendships. And the research in the above mentioned article clearly shows this.

In a normal society, our current society being abnormal, I think it would be possible for men and women to be friends because women would be more open about their sexual desires and more willing to satisfy them. In such a society our sexual desires would be treated as something totally normal and natural, and people would be encouraged to satisfy their desires whenever they feel like it. This would be very similar to the way in which we all acknowledge the fact that we get hungry every day and have to eat in order to survive. If we don’t eat enough and on time, we can grow weak and die. Similarly, to be a healthy human being also requires that our strong sexual desires get satisfied, or else we suffer the consequences. And we suffer the consequences not only as individuals, but also as a society. As I mentioned before in my article on Understanding Women, Dr. Sigmund Freud established our natural sexual desires as the primary motivational forces of human life. If we don’t adequately satisfy these desires it will lead to all kinds of problems in society. And in fact, Dr. Freud warned western societies about this:

What constitutes sexual repression is subjective and can vary greatly between cultures and moral systems. Sigmund Freud was the first to use the term widely, and argued that it was one of the roots of many problems in western society. Freud believed that people’s naturally strong instincts toward sexuality were repressed by people in order to meet the constraints imposed on them by civilized life.

So in a society without sexual repression, one that treats our natural sexual desires as something totally normal, women would be a lot more willing and free to satisfy their sexual desires and this would lead to more balance in relationships between men and women. As a result, friendships between men and women would have a greater chance to last (longer). Attraction to each other would certainly not be seen as a cost in this case. Just like people involved in a cross-sex friendship can go out and have lunch together without society objecting to it, so too would they be able to (casually) have sex with each other whenever they feel like it. It wouldn’t be such a big deal as is often the case right now in societies around the world.

But because women are currently brainwashed into repressing their natural sexual desires from very early childhood, they can’t easily satisfy these desires. They can’t allow themselves to be totally open and free, and can’t offer themselves completely in friendly relationships with men. As a result they can’t allow themselves to easily get attracted to men either and attraction is seen as a cost to the friendship. However, at the same time they continue to crave for male attention. And although they won’t admit it, and often don’t realize it, this craving for male attention is sexual in nature. If it wasn’t, they would be equally as satisfied having just female friends to talk to. Their natural sexual instincts drive them towards men. But since they can’t easily allow themselves to seek sexual attention from men because of the various rules in society and their own sexual repression, they have no choice but to stick mostly to emotional attention and use that as a substitute for satisfying their needs for sexual attention and intimacy with a man. Remember what Dr. Freud said:

The sexual instincts are remarkable for their plasticity, for the facility with which they can change their aim…for the ease with which they can substitute one form of gratification for another.

So guys often have to hear from their female friends that they want to be ”just friends” (they get “friend zoned“) and in the worst case even that they’re seen as ”a brother.” In reality what’s happening is that women use the emotional attention they get from ”friend zoned” men and “brothers” to gratify their needs for male sexual attention and intimacy. They’re essentially abusing guys to satisfy their craving for male attention and intimacy, without actually having sex. They often do this even while knowing that they’re leading guys on. The video below clearly illustrates this:

Men don’t need women for friendships. Men can satisfy all their desires for friendships with other men. What men really need women for are for the things that men can’t normally get from other men, namely sex and intimacy. If we want to be brutally honest about it, relationships between men and women essentially all really boil down to satisfying our natural sexual desires. Nothing else. So ultimately, the primary reason why men would spend time with women is to get sexual satisfaction.

So here’s my advice to guys:

The best way for guys to deal with this issue is to never be just friends with a woman. Slight acquaintances, sure, but friends, never. Establish very early on in interactions with a woman what you can expect from her, especially if she starts to use more of your time. If you’re attracted to her, let her know in plain english exactly what you want right from the start, and if she’s not sure move on immediately and break contact. Don’t allow yourself to be abused. Don’t play Mr. Nice Guy being there for her when she needs you, or else you’ll only have yourself to blame in the end. Your time is valuable so don’t waste it on trying to convince anyone of anything. If she doesn’t want a relationship, at the very least make it clear that you’re looking for a “friends with benefits” kind of relationship (friendship including sex, but without attachments). If that’s not possible, break contact and move on immediately. If she ever changes her mind, she knows where to find you.

The relationship between the RIAA, Buma/Stemra, CISAC et al. and artists/authors

A few days ago I saw a picture on Facebook posted by Lester Chambers, a member of the Chambers Brothers, where he holds up a written sign with his story of dealing with record companies. If you have access to Facebook and his profile, you can see the picture at this link including all the comments on it.

Lester Chambers tells us the truth about record companies

Chambers’ story isn’t unique. As a matter of fact, what Chambers describes there happens more often than you probably think. Record companies routinely screw artists/authors in bad deals, as explained by the video below:

You would have thought that with all the lawsuits organizations such as the RIAA (Recording Industry Ass of America) et al. are filing against copyright infringements, that they would themselves make every effort to pay the artists/authors who they or their members represent. But nothing could be further from the truth.

If you do even a slight amount of research, you’ll quickly find that there are many artists who have filed lawsuits against their record companies because they never see the royalties that they’re supposed to receive. And like Chambers mentions, these are just the 1% of the artists who can afford to sue!! And we’re talking big names like Dr. Dre (VS Death Row Records), Peter Frampton (VS A&M Records), Kenny Rogers (VS EMI), Eminem (VS Universal Music Group), Courtney Love (VS Universal Music Group) and many more. If these organizations can screw over such big names, then no wonder the other 99% of the artists don’t stand a chance to ever get (all of) their royalties. And in the case of Courtney Love, for example:

Musicians like the Eagles’ Don Henley, through the Recording Artists Coalition, believe record labels routinely fail to pay them millions of dollars in royalties due to flawed accounting and arcane contract language. Love’s case also questioned a California law that says record companies may bind a musician to a contract for more than the seven-year maximum under current California statutes.

And from here:

After Love sued Vivendi Universal’s Universal Music Group last year to break her band’s contract, the widow of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain complained about the “unconscionable and unlawful” business and accounting practices of the major record labels. Since then, dozens of stars have lined up to demand better contracts, health benefits and other reforms.

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To some musicians, Love’s settlement underscored how difficult it can be for them to take on the five major record conglomerates.

A few years ago when the RIAA was going after consumers for copyright violations, I had written a few posts on the subject. They were suing children and even dead people in an effort to go after piracy of their content and that of their members:

Death is no obstacle to feeling the long arm of the Recording Industry Ass. of America.

Lawyers representing several record companies have filed suit against an 83 year-old woman who died in December, claiming that she made more than 700 songs available on the internet.

“I believe that if music companies are going to set examples they need to do it to appropriate people and not dead people,” Robin Chianumba told AP. “I am pretty sure she is not going to leave Greenwood Memorial Park to attend the hearing.”   Gertrude Walton, who lived in Beckley, West Virginia hated computers, too, her daughter adds. An RIAA spokesperson said that it would try and dismiss the case.

However the RIAA’s embarrassment doesn’t end there. Chianumba said that she had sent a copy of her mother’s death certificate to record company lawyers in response to an initial warning letter, over a week before the suit was filed. In 2003 the RIAA sued a twelve year-old girl for copyright infringement. She’d harbored an MP3 file of her favorite TV show on her hard drive. Her working class parents in a housing project in New York were forced to pay two thousand dollars in a settlement.

And every time the RIAA claimed that they were doing this to protect the rights of the artists/authors. The RIAA filed many lawsuits and won many of them. But did the money they got from all of those lawsuits eventually reach the artists/authors that they were supposedly doing this for? If any of it did make it back to the artists, then it’s probably not a lot. You see, while the RIAA was happy to sue people and make money, they themselves don’t like to pay the money to the very artists/authors that they supposedly represent:

In the midst of their jury trial, the company behind the defunct LimeWire client and the RIAA settled their dispute out of court. Limewire will pay $105 million to compensate the major music labels for damages suffered. A moment of justice for the music industry, but not necessarily for the artists. The recouped money is destined for reinvestment in new anti-piracy efforts and will not be used to compensate any artists.

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Thus far the RIAA has not announced officially how the LimeWire settlement will be spent, but we don’t expect them to steer away from their previous course. This makes today’s decision on compensation a victory for the major labels, but certainly not one for musicians.

And this is how these organizations operate in this business. Here’s another example:

Then there’s the fact that Rogers wants his cut from the money Capitol has received in various lawsuits — those against Napster, Kazaa, AudioGalaxy, Grokster, BearShare and others. As we’ve noted in the past, the labels have bent over backwards to avoid paying out such money to the actual artists — but Rogers wants his piece:

Such lawsuits have resulted in Capitol Records receiving monies from entities such as Napster, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, Grokster, BearShare, and others. Capitol Records has refused to provide Kenny Rogers with an accounting regarding the amounts actually received. A portion of the monies received by Capitol Records is attributable to the Masters and Kenny Rogers is entitled to that portion of Capitol Records‟ receipts. Capitol Records‟ refusal to account to and pay that money to Kenny Rogers has resulted in Kenny Rogers suffering direct financial harm in an amount that cannot be determined until Capitol Records provides a full, fair, and accurate accounting.

There are a few other charges as well, but those are the big ones. None of this, of course, is to say that it’s “ok” to infringe because the major labels are somehow “bad.” But it does show just how ridiculous it is if anyone assumes the majors represent the best interests of artists in any way.

And if you’re still not convinced, here’s more:

What should be a black and white conversation about respecting copyright is mired in the fact that the RIAA’s credibility has eroded as quickly as its control of the music industry. Or said another way, the RIAA has become part of the problem of protecting copyright due to its occasional less than honest approach to things.  You just can’t take what the RIAA says at face value as their agenda is not clear—is it to protect copyright or is it to protect the interests of its label members at any cost?

After all, this is the same organization that had the RIAA employee Mitch Glazer attempt to sneak language into a bill on Capitol Hill changing the definition of “work for hire,” depriving artists of their rights (there’s a great article about this in the Austin Chronicle).

Now add to this that as the RIAA demands that its label members’ copyrights be respected and properly compensated, its members have knowingly taken hundreds of millions of dollars of other peoples’ songwriter royalties over the past few years.  Knowingly taking money generated from the copyrights of others—aka “Black Box Money”—sounds eerily like stealing.

What’s clear to me is that the record companies and their organizations, such as the RIAA et al., couldn’t give a flying fuck about the rights of the artists/authors. What matters to these people is making as much money for themselves as possible at the expense of the artists/authors. They’re nothing more than parasites. They pretend to fight for the artists/authors, while in reality they are screwing over the very group that they’re supposedly fighting for.

Before any of the royalties ever reach the artists/authors most of it is being spent on “operational costs” which can include very high salaries. Such was the case for example with Buma/Stemra, the Dutch equivalent of the RIAA:

A board member of rights management company Buma/Stemra which represents composers and music publishers has stepped down amid allegations of corruption, the Volkskrant writes on Thursday.

Broadcaster Powned recorded a conversation between Jochem Gerrits and the lawyer of composer Melchior Rietveldt who claims the organisation owes him at least €1m in lost copyright fees.

Rietveldt wrote a piece of music for an anti-piracy ad which was widely distributed without his knowledge. In spite of numerous requests he was never paid for the reproduction of his music.

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This is not the first time Buma/Stemra has been accused of violating authors’ rights. Singer and composer Rob Bolland has a long drawn out conflict with the company for distributing his work – including In the army now – abroad without payment.

Bolland, who claims the company owes him €2.5m has been forcibly removed from the Buma/Stemra premises by the police on more than occasion.

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Earlier this year, musicians Henk Westbroek and Hans Kosterman, who are also on the board, claimed there is a culture of secrecy and fear at the company. They also complained about the extravagant salaries paid out to some board members.

Notice how Mr. Rietveldt’s music, which was written for an anti-piracy ad, was then essentially pirated by the very same organization that claims to look after the rights of artists/authors like Mr. Rietveldt. You just can’t make this stuff up. And also take note of the fact that you have the exact same issues here with Buma/Stemra in the Netherlands, like you have with the RIAA in the USA with regards to refusing to pay out collected royalties! And the salaries the heads of these organizations award themselves are astronomical. In the case of Buma/Stemra you can read more about it here (Dutch):

Cees Vervoord, the former director of Buma / Stemra who left the organization in August 2010, was paid a salary of 379,000 euros for the first eight months of that year, including variable pay. The current director Hein van de Ree, who started on May 1, 2010, was paid 200 thousand euros for the remaining months of the year. Cees van Rij, Director of Legal Affairs, was paid 233,000 euros last year.

There simply cannot be any doubt about who these organizations really serve and whose rights they really protect.

And most of these organizations are united into one global organization called CISAC. From here:

Uniting worldwide creators, CISAC strongly asserts that they are the pilars of creative industries. If they are universally acknowledged for their contribution to world cultural landscape, their economic impact is often ignored.

The total amount of royalties collected by CISAC’s member societies, on their own national collection territories, amounted in 2010 to more than €7.5 billion. Despite the challenging environment (digital piracy, decline of CD sales, etc.), this represents an increase of 5.5% since 2009. CISAC members have strived to ensure that creators from around the world benefit from the ever-increasing popularity of their works and the development of new uses.

Pillars of the creative industry? If CISAC is anything like its members, I would describe them more as the fucking parasites of the creative industry. And keep the amount of €7.5 billion of collected royalties in 2010 in mind. From here:

To be able to carry out its missions, CISAC’s budget is based on the annual subscriptions of its members and the entry fees of new members. The subscription is based on a percentage of the gross royalties collected annually by a member society in the territories in which it operates.

So CISAC makes its money by confiscating a percentage of the royalties collected by its members that is supposed to go to the artists/authors. And in the case of the €7.5 billion collected in 2010, if they just confiscate 1% then they still have €75 million for just one year! What do they do with all of that money?? As you can see, this is a very lucrative business for these so called pillars of the creative industries. And ask yourself why they don’t publish on their website exactly what percentage of the royalties they confiscate.

What we have here is nothing but a pyramid scheme that is based on exploiting the artists/authors. You have all these record companies and labels in countries around the world, who pretend to value the rights of the artists/authors but are really screwing them over with really bad deals and stealing their royalties. And these record companies and labels are united in each country in organizations such as the RIAA, Buma/Stemra et al. (full member list can be downloaded here) who also burn up a huge amount of the royalties that’s supposed to go to the artists/authors in “operational costs.” And then all of these organizations in each country are again united into one global organization called CISAC, which also demands a percentage from the collected royalties that’s supposed to go to the artists/authors. Does it still surprise you that by the time the money finally reaches the artists/authors there’s nothing much left of it anymore? And do you still wonder why the CISAC supports all these member organizations in each country? It is in CISAC’s own selfish interest to support its members seeing as how they are positioned at the top of the pyramid to benefit from their members and the artists/authors as much as possible.

I don’t know about you, but these organizations don’t fool me. Knowing all of the above their purpose is very clear to me: Make easy money by exploiting artists/authors, all while pretending to fight for their interests.

While I am against these organizations, I am not against copyright laws and protecting the rights of creatives around the world. As a photographer, graphics designer and software developer, it wouldn’t make sense for me to be against copyright laws. I want the artists/authors to be able to benefit from their work as much as possible. But these organizations are not enabling them to do that. On the contrary, as you can clearly see they’re making it worse and are exploiting artists/authors.

The easiest way to realize that this is all a big scam to exploit artists/authors is to take note of the fact that in most cases these organizations don’t even know exactly whose work is being used at what time, and how much it is being used. For example, there are many instances where deals are made for the use of music for a flat monthly fee. Read this article for more on this. Now think about this: If these organizations don’t know, and don’t care, about whose work exactly is being used and how much, then how are they going to pay the artists/authors their fair share??? The answer to this question is very simple: They don’t care about actually paying the artists/authors; all they care about is making as much money as possible for themselves.

There should be a new system where artists/authors can get paid directly for their work, and where they are able to follow in real-time who’s buying/licensing their work and for what purposes. Can you still remember the MegaUpload controversy from a while back? Check this out:

The internet is up in arms over the federal crackdown of file-sharing website Megaupload, from irate blog posts to coordinated digital attacks on secure government servers. The move appeared to be a sort of governmental muscle flexing in the wake of the successful internet protest of SOPA and PIPA. But was there another reason? In the weeks before the crackdown, Megaupload was planning on launching a new music sharing website called Megabox that looked like it had the potential to completely transform music distribution, and even find a way to pay musicians in the process.

From TorrentFreak, via Digital Music News:

““UMG [Universal Music Group] knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations directly to consumers while allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings,” said MegaUpload founder Kim dotcom.

“We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free,” Dotcom said. “Yes that’s right, we will pay artists even for free downloads.  The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works.”

This smacks a little of conspiracy theory, but there may be some truth to the timing. MegaUpload no doubt looked like a good target for FBI attention even before this new development,  considering it was prime hacker territory and its founder was living like a Colombian drug lord in New Zealand. But the timing seems a little serendipitous, especially since MegaUpload had even begun to acquire legitimate partners in the form of 7digital, Gracenote, Rovi and Amazon.

It’s no surprise to me that the Universal Music Group and similar organizations would be against a solution as proposed by MegaUpload. Such a solution would take control away from them and put it in the hands of the artists/authors. Not only that, but they wouldn’t be able to screw these artists/authors out of their royalties anymore. It would mean the end of their parasitic empire. And their parasitic empire is certainly coming to an end. What we’re seeing now are their desperate attempts to fight the change while even abusing the legal system to try and put a stop to it. But as more and more people start to wake up to the facts, and more and more artists/authors speak up, like Lester Chambers did, things are going to become a lot more difficult for them, and soon they’ll have no choice but to accept their faith.

Update 14/5/2013:

Here’s a classic example of how these organizations screw over artists: Why Universal Music Sued Its Insurer Over a $14.4 Million Payment to Musicians (Analysis):

That class action was filed in 2008 in Canada and alleged that several record labels had participated in a scheme that was nicknamed “Exploit now, pay later.”

Until the late 1980s under Canadian law, when record labels put out compilation albums, they didn’t need to get the permission of artists. Instead, they merely needed to pay compulsory mechanical royalties. Then, the country changed its law to require the permission of song artists, but according to the 2008 lawsuit, the labels continued to put out compilation albums without getting approval. Not only did they not get permission, but the record labels allegedly held back royalties. Instead, the labels marked songs onto a “pending list” for later approval and payment.

…

In other words, UMG put out albums without artist permission, held back royalties from these artists, and then finally paid out when faced with a much bigger legal threat. Now, even though the settlement money seems to cover what was claimed and acknowledged to be owed to artists, UMG is using the guise of a copyright claim to recover the money from its insurer.

Just like Lester Chambers, mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, complained about, these organizations only care about their own bottom line, going through great lengths to not have to pay out any royalties. Finally when they are forced to do so or risk even greater damages, they then try to recover the money from their insurer. This is essentially getting oneself insured against the risks of stealing. Sometimes you can’t help but stand in awe at the kind of stuff these organizations are capable of doing when motivated by greed.

Hearts – What do they really mean?

In the above image you can see variations on the heart shape, which is usually associated with love or being in love. But it’s also associated with the (human) heart,  which is where I assume this shape gets its name from. At least, this is what is generally accepted by societies around the world. Lovers like to send this heart shape to each other, especially on Valentine’s day, to tell each other that they’re in love with one another. But what are you really saying to a person when you send this heart shape to him/her?

Doesn’t look like it to me

I can still remember being a little puzzled while looking at an image of the human heart back when I was in high school during a biology lesson, because of the fact that the human heart looked nothing like this shape. And yet I grew up with people and information around me suggesting that this is what a human heart looked like. I’m sure you can remember the cartoons and movies where people are in love and you see this heart shape coming out of their chests, or see little heart shapes floating around their heads. And I think the likely reason why this shape is associated with love and the human heart is because typically when you’re in love or “heartbroken”, there can be an intense feeling inside your chest. But this feeling has nothing to do with your real heart. And the heart shape also doesn’t look like a real human heart. So where does this shape really come from, and why is it associated with the feeling of love?

For the answers to these questions we have to go back a couple of hundreds of years ago to Greece:

Silphium Coins

Approximately 2,600 years ago– around 630 BCE– the Greek island of Thera was plagued by drought and overpopulation. According to legend, an assortment of settlers were selected to sail south to establish a colony in more hospitable climes. The men and women apprehensively put to sea, and the gaggle of enterprising Greeks eventually erected the city of Cyrene on Africa’s northern tip. There, the settlers encountered a local herb which would ultimately bring them and their progeny fantastic wealth.

The prized plant became such a key pillar of the Cyrenean economy that its likeness was stamped upon many of the city’s gold and silver coins. The images often depicted a regal-looking woman sitting in a chair, with one hand touching the herb and her other hand pointing at her genitals. The plant was known as silphium or laserwort, and its heart-shaped fruit purportedly brought the ancient world a highly sought-after freedom: the opportunity to enjoy sex with very little risk of pregnancy.

The silphium plants were giant fennels which grew wild along the dry hillsides of the Mediterranean coast. It didn’t take long for the Greek settlers to discover its value as a food source, and the vegetable flesh came to be prized as a delicious garnish, while pleasant perfumes were coaxed from its yellow blossoms. Over time further uses for the wild fennel were found, such as the resin extracted from its stalks and roots which was used to treat cough, sore throat, fever, indigestion, snake bite, “warts in the seat,” epilepsy, and a host of other disagreeable ailments. But of all of the plant’s virtues, the silphium was certainly most prized for its pregnancy-preventing properties.

As word of the birth-control wonder-herb spread through ancient Europe, Africa, and Asia, a market for the versatile fennel developed rapidly. The seeds became widely used among the world’s wealthier nations, including the citizens of ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and India. By some accounts the silphium seed was also a potent aphrodisiac, a property which considerably compounded its perceived value. The Roman bard Catullus famously alluded to its sexual properties in one of his love poems, where he declared that he and his lover would share as many kisses as there were grains of sand on Cyrene’s silphium shores. More plainly, “We can make love so long as we have silphium.”

More about silphium:

Long before hippies thought hemp could solve all the world’s problems, Romans used an alleged wonder plant of the carrot and parsley family called silphium. It was a sort of giant fennel that grew wild near Cyrene, an ancient coastal city in North Africa. Silphium had many uses — perfume from its flowers, food from its stalk, and medicine from its juice (or resin) and roots. The Romans didn’t discover the plant’s properties — there’s evidence the Greeks and Egyptians used it as a contraceptive as early as the seventh century BC on the advice of physicians, who recommended a monthly dose that mixed a lump of resin the size of a chickpea with water. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described use of the resin (called laser or laserpicium) “with soft wool as a pessary to promote the menstrual discharge.” Menstrual discharge, of course, means no pregnancy. One physician in the second century AD named Soranus claimed a special recipe using silphium had been used to terminate pregnancies. In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (1992), medical historian John Riddle claims that modern studies show the recipe and others like it would work.

It’s easy to see why silphium would be so important to the Greek and other civilizations back then. Sex is a very important in life, and this was most certainly also the case in these ancient societies. It’s clear that repression of sexual desires can be destructive not only for an individual, but also for society as a whole. Dr. Sigmund Freud established sexual desires as the primary motivational forces of human life. Silphium, used as a method for birth control, enabled these societies to be able to enjoy sex  and express their love for each other as much as they wanted without the risk of pregnancy. It was so important to them in fact, that images of the plant and its seed were stamped into their gold and silver coins.

A Cyrene coin bearing the image of a silphium seed

And if you look at the image of the Cyrene coin on the right, it shows what the seed/fruit of the silphium plant looked like. And that is an exact match with the shape of “the heart” that we’re all so familiar with and which is used to express the feeling of love these days. It should be clear to you, now that you have this information, why this “heart” shape is used as a symbol of love. Because of the fact that silphium was very important and used during the act of making love hundreds of years ago, it automatically became associated with love. And this is really the reason why love is associated with this “heart” shape, not because it represents a human heart!

I love you = I want to have sex with you

So from now on when you send a “heart” to someone, keep in mind what you are saying to that person: You are telling that person that you want to use silphium (birth control) with him/her, which means that you are essentially telling that person that you would like to have sex with him/her. And when you think about it, that makes a lot of sense!

This image is seriously in focus.

For the last few months I’ve been having a blast with the Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye lens. I wrote about my first impressions of the lens soon after I got it in August last year. I won’t be repeating that here, so you may want to go back to read it. Back then I hadn’t yet used the lens for work, but now after a few months of using the lens on assignments I have a much better idea of how the lens performs. And in short, my conclusion is: it absolutely rocks.

Keep in mind that this isn’t supposed to be a review where I’ll discuss all the technical aspects and features of this lens. For that you’ll have to look elsewhere. I’m just going to give you my personal opinion of this lens after using it for a while.

First of all, the lens is expensive, but I can assure you that it’s worth the money Canon is asking for it. It has quickly become one of my favorite lenses to use. You can get really creative with it and it just never gets boring. I’ve used the lens for a variety of purposes so far, but mostly I’m using it to shoot architecture, panoramic images and aerial shots. I absolutely love the effect this lens gives to aerial shots; it really exaggerates the roundness of the earth. You can see what I mean in some of the sample images in the gallery below.

I think that especially photographers who shoot images for 360 degrees panoramas and virtual tours are going to really love this lens. The reason for this is that the Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye lens allows a photographer to shoot both “low” resolution and high-resolution panoramas at the same time without having to change the camera or the lens. The nodal point of the lens is exactly the same at both 8mm and 15mm. Because of this, shooting at 8mm or 15mm doesn’t require you to recalibrate your setup to make sure that the nodal point is in the correct position. So at 8mm you can shoot a panorama consisting of about 4-6 images (approx. 65MP final resolution on a EOS 7D body), but at 15mm you can shoot a much higher resolution panorama of about 25 images (approx. 240MP final resolution on a EOS 7D body). This gives you the flexibility of shooting both resolutions on location at the same time very easily. You shoot first at 8mm, zoom to 15mm and then shoot again without changing anything else.

The panorama below was shot at 15mm and has a final resolution of approx. 240MP. You can zoom in all the way to view all the details.

The panorama below was shot at 8mm and has a final resolution of approx. 65MP. This was shot shortly after the one above, and all I had to do was move the camera and zoom the lens to 8mm.

When focusing this lens manually, you’ll have to look really carefully to make sure that your subject is in sharp focus. It is really difficult to see through the viewfinder if the lens is focused correctly. Everything pretty much looks in focus most of the time and it can be difficult to see slight changes in focus. I’ve found that using Live View on the camera in the greatest magnification possible to focus gives me the best and most reliable results. You’ll have to double-check your focus especially if you want to set the focus to infinity. Don’t rely on the infinity marker on the distance scale on top of the lens! Even Canon warn you to double-check your focus in the manual that comes with this lens. With autofocus this isn’t an issue.

The bottom line is that I am extremely satisfied with this lens and I can’t recommend it to you highly enough. I think this lens is a real gem in Canon’s assortment of lenses right now, and since it is so unique, it could influence a lot of people to choose a Canon DSLR just to be able to use this lens. When I had to choose which brand of DSLR I would buy 5 years ago, the wide assortment of Canon lenses (along with their lead in image quality at the time) was one of the important things that made me choose Canon. Traditionally Canon has always had the lead in the area of lenses, and this lens just strengthens their position even more. When the Canon EF 200-400 f/4L IS 1.4x (another brilliant design) hits the market later this year it’ll become even more difficult for the competition to catch up.

Canon EOS 1DX

Could 2012 be the year where Canon makes a serious comeback in the professional photography industry? Well, from the looks of it, it’s going to get very exciting for photographers using Canon equipment.

For the last 4 years I’ve been bashing Canon here on my blog for their poor quality control, poor product releases (50D, 5D Mark II, 7D, 60D) and questionable business practices (5D Mark II, 50mm f/1.2L). I’ve also often mentioned how it seemed like Canon was out of touch with the market and didn’t listen to what professionals were asking for. But with the announcement last year of the EOS 1DX, I think I’m starting to see the long awaited change we’ve been asking for.

On paper, the 1DX is a dream camera. Just reading the specifications will get you high in seconds. The most important thing to note, in my opinion, is the sensor size. Canon actually went back from 21 megapixels on the 1Ds Mark III to “just” 18 megapixels on the 1DX. If you’ve been keeping in touch with the industry, you’ll know that this was one of the important things photographers were asking for around the world: less megapixels and better image quality, especially at higher ISO values. To be sure, the priority was more on better image quality. And reducing the amount of megapixels is an easy way to achieve that (because of the photosites becoming bigger). While Canon appeared very stubborn in the past with regards to this issue and kept pushing the megapixels up at the expense of image quality, now all of a sudden even Canon acknowledge the fact that “there’s more to image quality than just resolution”:

The biggest specification change to the 1D X is its new sensor – an 18MP full-frame CMOS chip capable of shooting at 12 frames per second. This represents a big change over the 1D Mk IV (it represents a move away from the smaller APS-H format that Canon has previously used in its sports cameras), and a decrease in pixel count compared to the 1DS series. However, as Rick Berk, Technical Specialist in Canon USA’s Pro Engineering and Solutions Division says: ‘there’s more to image quality than just resolution.’

For years I’ve been having heated discussions in some of the posts here on my blog with many people about megapixels and noise in images, and I have to say that I’m happy to see that even Canon admit this now. More resolution in images is pointless when there’s also more noise present. Using any kind of noise reduction on those images eliminates the extra resolution you had in them as well. So I would rather have less megapixels with cleaner images that also have better dynamic range and colors.

I’m happy to see that Canon has finally listened to all the professionals who were asking for this, and after so many years, has finally made a camera that I can honestly say that I seriously, seriously want. In fact, I think this may be my dream camera. I just like everything about this camera. The sensor that promises (at least from the specs) great image quality, the insanely high frame rate of 12-14 frames per second, the 61-point autofocus system which is able to focus in EV -2 (equivalent to shooting under the light of the full moon!!), ISO range of 50 – 204800, 7D style viewfinder upgrades, built-in Ethernet port etc. etc. For a detailed overview, check out the technical information on the Canon Europe website. Pay attention especially to the capabilities of the Dual Digic 5+ processors and the functionalities that they enable such as being able to stack multiple exposures and correction of chromatic aberration, color fringes and halos. Image quality is taken to new heights with the 1DX.

And what’s crazy about this is that Canon actually announced the 1DX on my birthday on October 18th, 2011. What a strange coincidence. I mean here I was consistently bashing Canon for more than 4 years, and I mean seriously bashing them, and then they go ahead and announce what I consider a dream camera on my birthday – almost 6 months before it will really be available. Perhaps this is the present they’re giving me after all the effort I put into providing them with all the valuable feedback in the last 4 years.

But seriously, Canon has me excited again to be using Canon equipment and I’m hoping that with the 5D Mark III (if that’ll be its name) they will surprise us all again. With the announcement of the new EOS Cinema line (the C300 camera and the EOS C DSLR) things are looking to get very, very exciting in the near future for Canon users. I love the fact that we can use our L lenses on the C300 camera, for example. And of course, I also love the fact that the image quality of the C300 is currently the best out there in low light situations. This is why I chose Canon 5 years ago; they were the king of image quality and it looks like they’re on their way again to reclaim that title. Because when it comes down to it, all the bells and whistles on these cameras are nice to have, but nothing is more important than image quality. Nothing. And closely related to image quality is of course a working autofocus system. Because a clean image that’s out of focus is also bad image quality (poor resolution). So it’s image quality and great autofocus (in terms of speed and especially accuracy) that really matter in the end. And Canon appears to have nailed that with the EOS 1DX. I hope that this will also be the case with the next 5D camera.

Let me also mention that at this point I haven’t yet seen sample images from a production 1DX, so my assessment of the image quality is solely based on the specifications of the sensor, which theoretically should provide exceptional image quality. I’m hoping that this will be the case once the camera is released. Let us also hope that this camera won’t be plagued by quality control issues like the 1D Mark III (autofocus issues) and 5D Mark II (noise and banding in images, autofocus issues).

The only negative thing I can say about this camera is that the price is a bit too high at $6800. Many people have complained about this. Nikon recently also announced their D4, which is at least as good as the 1DX, with a price of $6000. In my opinion the 1DX should cost around $5800. Considering that the 1D Mark IV was priced at $5000 when it launched, and that the 1DX is essentially a 1D Mark IV with a full frame sensor, a price of $5800 for the 1DX would have seemed more reasonable to me. And as you can see, Nikon is closer to that price point as well with their D4.  Even with the C300 camera Canon appears to have been overconfident with their pricing. Many people also complained that the price of the C300, though it is an excellent camera, isn’t worth the $16000 Canon wants for it.

However, I’ve read somewhere that the price of the 1DX at $6800 is not a final price, so here’s hoping that Canon will lower the price to something more affordable, especially now since Nikon is selling the D4 at $6000.

The bottom line is that I’m very impressed and very satisfied with the 1DX and I look forward to being equally as impressed with the next 5D. I hope Canon continues to listen to us and keeps impressing us from now on.

Microsoft Flight Sucks!

Back in January 2009 Microsoft shut down ACES Studio, the team at Microsoft who were developing the Flight Simulator game. The announcement came as a surprise to everyone, especially the large community of fans, developers and hardware manufacturers that exists around the Flight Simulator franchise. Why would Microsoft want to shut down the team that’s responsible for arguably one of the most succesful gaming franchises in the history of the personal computer? At the time there was the ongoing economic crisis, and the shut down of ACES Studio was just part of a layoff of around 5000 people at Microsoft. It seemed to me that Microsoft was trying to cut expenses during the economic crisis, but it’s unclear why they would want to shut down such a successful game like Flight Simulator. Back in 2006 when Bill Gates was showing off Windows Vista, Microsoft Flight Simulator X was one of the important games he demoed to show the capabilities of Windows Vista and DirectX 10. Up until today, Microsoft has never given a clear reason as to why exactly they shut down ACES Studio and apparently stopped development of the Flight Simulator game.

As soon as I heard about them shutting down ACES Studio, I wrote an angry email to Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer complaining about this decision. Apparently he must have forwarded the email inside Microsoft and a few days later someone from Microsoft Game Studios responded as follows:

Thank you for writing to us about the closing of the Aces Studio and the future of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Closing the studio was not a reflection of the quality of the products Aces has developed, the sales performance of the games, or the quality of the team at Aces. This difficult decision was made to align Microsoft’s resources with our strategic priorities. Microsoft Flight Simulator X will remain available at retail stores and web retailers.  The Flight Sim community will continue to learn from and encourage one another, and we remain committed to the Flight Simulator franchise for the long term.

Microsoft Game Studios is investing significant resources in many exciting and new areas of gaming and entertainment, including Windows games. We believe these future investments will push innovation, community, and collaboration to unprecedented levels and will provide more synergy with our ongoing investments in Games for Windows – LIVE as well as other Windows entertainment technologies. We have nothing specific to announce at this time, but stay tuned for more information.

We are humbled and proud of the passion and support that the Flight Simulator franchise has developed over its more than twenty-five year history. This includes you, the large community of flight simmers, as well as the vibrant third-party ecosystem that has developed around the game. We will continue to produce, sell, and support the latest version of Flight Simulator as we plan for future versions of the franchise. Thank you for your understanding of our decision and for your continued support!

Pay attention to the section in bold letters. They already had plans to change the course of the Flight Simulator franchise and make some kind of a Windows Live game instead. It would not be until the 18th of August 2010 that Microsoft would announce the development of the Windows Live based Microsoft Flight game.

The decision to shut down ACES Studio and change the course of the Flight Simulator franchise was taken within Microsoft’s Internal Entertainment Business:

Microsoft has confirmed the closure of ACES Studio, with a spokesperson commenting to IGN that the decision was made within Microsoft’s Internal Entertainment Business “to align our people against our highest priorities.”

In addition, the company noted: “You should expect us to continue to invest in enabling great LIVE experiences on Windows, including flying games, but we have nothing specific to announce at this time.”

They shut down ACES Studio even while they were profitable. Even the ACES team didn’t understand why Microsoft’s Internal Entertainment Business did what they did:

Aces was steadily evolving a property established in 1982, one synonymous with the entire genre; it had a loyal following and turned a steady profit. At around the same time, Microsoft also closed Ensemble Studios, despite a long history of strong sales and great games. It wasn’t about talent. It was about “restructuring”.

More than a year later, former Aces employee Kathie Flood is still baffled. “We simply don’t know,” she admits. “Both studio closures were puzzling, given the rabid enthusiasm of their audiences and the consistent profitability of their titles. Microsoft is a big company. The decision was made outside of the Aces Studio itself, and we weren’t privy to the details [of] how or why the decision was made. In hindsight, it provided a tremendous opportunity for us to work on our own game designs, which we’re extremely excited about.”

Shutting down Flight Simulator development and apparently drastically changing the direction of the franchise is one of the worst decisions made at Microsoft in the last few years. I can’t imagine what they must have been thinking at the Internal Entertainment Business division. I wonder if they ran this by Steve Ballmer before they actually went ahead with the implementation, because I can’t imagine Ballmer signing off on something as stupid as this. Or else he must have been misinformed.

With this decision they’ve managed to shut down and ruin one of the most successful gaming franchises in the history of the personal computer, not to mention THE BEST flight simulator that has ever existed. Nothing comes even close to Flight Simulator X; none of the competitors out there are even half as good.

When Microsoft announced the new Flight game in August 2010, I was somewhat relieved and had hope that we’d possibly get something even better than the older Flight Simulator game. So I decided to wait and give it a chance. But I’ve recently had the chance to try out a beta version of the new Microsoft Flight game for Windows Live, and the impression I got was that this new title sets back the Flight Simulator series by at least 12 years. Not to mention that it is far from being as good a simulation as Flight Simulator is. The graphics and realism have taken a serious hit and the game has been limited to just a few locations, compared to being able to fly all over the world in Flight Simulator. There’s no real world weather simulation and no air traffic control. But the biggest set back has got to be the loss of backwards compatibility with all the content created by fans and third party developers for the Flight Simulator series. This includes thousands of aircrafts, scenery add-ons, plugins and other content. This was really the power of the Flight Simulator franchise and one of the most important reasons why it became so successful. This strategy is similar to why Windows became so popular in the early days, because of Microsoft encouraging  developers to develop for the platform providing them with free tools to develop applications for it, which in turn attracted users. In Flight Simulator, even though the original game may have lacked the content people were looking for, such as specific aircrafts to fly, there were many fans and third-party developers who filled in the gaps and created tons of additional content which in turn made the game bigger and more complete. For example, I’ve been wanting a crop dusting aircraft in Flight Simulator for many, many years. I even wrote the team about it a few times. Very early versions of Flight Simulator had a crop dusting functionality in them and this was left out of the game in later versions. In the end, this aircraft was created by a fan and I finally got what I wanted and spent countless extra hours playing Flight Simulator X just because of this. If I didn’t own Flight Simulator, I would have bought it just because it would allow me to fly this crop dusting aircraft. And this is all because of the strategy that was used during the development of the Flight Simulator franchise to not only allow, but also actively support users in generating more content and building on top of the game.

However, all of this, many years of work by thousands of fans and developers, this entire ecosystem around Flight Simulator, is now being destroyed by a couple of business executives at Microsoft who clearly know jack shit about the franchise. It is very sad to see this happening, and what is even sadder is that it is being replaced by something as pathetic as Microsoft Flight.

The technical beta forums at Microsoft are filled with people complaining about the direction Microsoft is heading with Microsoft Flight. People are very, very disappointed and are asking for Microsoft to bring back ACES Studio and start developing an upgrade to Microsoft Flight Simulator X. There’s also a petition online for this, please sign it, as well as a Microsoft Flight Sucks Facebook page. Please let your voice be heard and also personally write Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer to get him to pay attention to this. Not only is it in Microsoft’s best interest to not let Flight Simulator die, but it is also in the interest of the entire industry that exists around this franchise.

This year, 2012, would mark the 30th anniversary of Microsoft Flight Simulator which was first released in 1982. It is a shame that on the 30th anniversary of one of the biggest and most popular PC game franchises, Microsoft will launch Microsoft Flight, which is such a disgrace to what Flight Simulator represented and a huge disappointment.

Sunglasses (Model: Carol Chen Poun Joe)

I was hired recently by Art Design to create images for the 2012 calendar for Optiek Ninon and Instyle Optics. Optiek Ninon is an optician in Suriname that sells eyewear and related accessories. Instyle Optics is a special division by Optiek Ninon that focusses on the more exclusive eyewear and related accessories.

This was essentially a rush job as I had just about a week to deliver the images after I got the job. It wasn’t until four days before the deadline that I got an idea of what I wanted to do. I had gotten some sample eyeglasses from Optiek Ninon and after selecting two of them I decided that I wanted to do something with beautiful eyes that would complement the eyeglasses. I teamed up with model/artist Carol Chen Poun Joe, whom I worked with before to do the images in the Cactus V5 review and for the photo shoot with Natasha Benjamin, among other projects. I had two reasons for working with Carol again: number one is that she has very beautiful eyes, and number two is that she’s a very good make-up artist. I knew she’d be able to create what I needed.

Reading glasses (Model: Carol Chen Poun Joe)

We did the photo shoot two days before the deadline and because of the limited time we had, everything was done in a hurry. For example, the photo shoot took place late at night just so that Carol and I could match our schedules and work together on this.

The Optiek Ninon / Instyle Optics 2012 Calendar

While this looks like a fairly simple and easy photo shoot, there were some challenges. We had to prevent reflections in the glasses as much as possible, not only from the lights but also from the surroundings. It looks very unprofessional if you can see the studio and body of the model or photographer in the reflection in the sunglasses for example. Another challenge was to keep the glasses as clean as possible, free from fingerprints and dust.

Fortunately everything worked out and I was able to get exactly what I wanted in the end. The client was not only surprised, but also extremely happy with the results. Apart from the calendar, these images should also appear in at least one billboard design in the near future.

In search of food

The 2012 calendar for Historex is out featuring six of my macro/micro pictures. Historex is a brand of paint being made by Varossieau Suriname N.V. and is especially suitable for painting buildings in a tropical climate. The design and production of the 2012 calendar was being done by Henna Brunings of Art Design, who hired me to deliver six colorful macro photos for use on the calendar. The theme for the 2012 calendar is “The colours of detail.” In the end a selection was made by the client which included some of my older work as well as more recent pictures. You can see them on the calendar in the image below.

The HISTOREX 2012 Calendar

The months March and April feature a picture of a Crab Spider which is one of my more recent pictures. You can read more about how I took that picture by clicking here. Below are the images that were used in this calendar.

Crab Spider

It’s amazing how much exists around us that goes unnoticed every day while we go about living our busy lives. Everywhere around us are areas that, when closely focused in on, reveal a whole new world that can sometimes look very alien and different to what we’re used to. One of the things that I’ve learned while doing close-up/macro/micro photography is that once you zoom in on the world of the small, many surprises await you.

Flowers

Take this flower bouquet for example. I bought these flowers on a rainy afternoon at a flower stand for a photography project I was working on. I just randomly picked out flowers with different colors and the owner of the stand added some green leafs to make it all look better. In the snapshot to the right it looks quite normal and boring right? But once I set up some good lighting and zoomed in on them through my macro photography setup, it was as if I entered a whole new world. A world filled with beauty that you can only really notice once you start to pay attention and look closer at what’s in front of you. And in this case, the small world of the flower bouquet filled with beautiful colors, patterns and small (sometimes alien looking) creatures.

Where fairies live

I felt like an explorer in a new world that I had discovered. Every shot I took contained detail that you can’t really see that well with your naked eye. The challenge was to find nice angles to capture these details. Soon enough I encountered the first few very small insects. My jaw almost hit a hole in the ground when I came across the scene below.

Final Destination

It almost looks like a staged scene, but believe me, it’s not. There in the middle of one of the flowers lied a small lifeless insect. He was so small that I hadn’t noticed him until I took the first shot and saw him appear on the LCD on the back of my camera. It seems that he must have died shortly after reaching the middle of the flower. He was already in a state of decay as you can see from the white spots on his body. In the image below you can see how small this insect really is with some 100% crops from the image to be able to see the detail that was captured.

Final Destination (Close-ups)

Being able to see these small areas at such a scale really helps to visualize what life on a flower might be like for such a small creature. To us, this is just a small flower, but to such a tiny insect it’s a whole world to live in.

As it turned out, this bouquet of flowers was home to yet another creature. While I was busy taking pictures I suddenly noticed something moving. When I looked closer and focused on it, I saw a tiny Crab Spider walking on one of the flowers. But before I could take some good pictures of him he vanished deep into the bouquet. Being the patient guy that I am, I decided not to look for him but to continue shooting other things until he would appear again. It wouldn’t be until the next day that I would see him again while taking pictures. And this time, instead of hiding as soon as I came closer he just seemed to ignore me and went about his business. He literally traversed the whole bouquet, and I have to say, I had a blast following him around and trying to take shots of all the stunts he was performing. Later when I looked at the shots on my PC I found out that he was not just walking and jumping from flower to flower, but that he was actually spinning a web all the time. It was just difficult to see the very very thin strands of web through the viewfinder of my camera while I was taking pictures.

The Crab Spider lived on the bouquet for 5 days until all the flowers dried up. On the last day I searched for him in what was left of the bouquet and when I found him I released him outside before throwing away the flowers.

To be honest, it wasn’t all beauty that I came across while exploring the world of the bouquet as you can see from the image below.

Left Hanging

This guy was hanging in mid-air on a very thin, almost invisible, strand of web very likely from the Crab Spider. He was probably dead for more than a day at least and was already starting to decay. If you look closely you can also see that one of his eyes is busted. One can only wonder what happened to him and how he ended up hanging in the middle of the flowers like that.

So the next time someone brings you flowers, you may want to take a closer look at what exactly you’re getting along with the flowers. Chances are that you’re getting much more than just flowers. ;)

Queen of Sadness

This is the fourth part of my article on Understanding Women. The first part can be found here, the second part here and the third part here. If you haven’t yet read them, I recommend reading them first so that you can better understand the rest of this fourth part.

A lot of what we’ve been taught about the world we live in is simply wrong. Not only is it wrong, but in many cases we’ve been taught to believe the exact opposite of the truth. If you’ve read the previous 3 parts of this article, you already have a good idea about why we’ve been taught these things. Back in 2006 I wrote the following:

The world as we know it today is largely based on deception. Incredible amounts of deception going back even thousands of years. A lot of what I learned in school, for example, was just based on lies. The feeling you get when you start to realize what’s going on is like going crazy, but in reverse. You realize that you’ve really been crazy all your life, believing and accepting all kinds of nonsense as normal, and that now you’re realizing what’s been going on and are becoming a sane person, seeing things as they really are. It’s like growing up with everyone telling you the sky is red, and later finding out the sky is actually blue. Once you find out, you have no choice but to re-evaluate everything you know and view them in a totally new perspective. It’s almost like forgetting everything you know and starting from scratch again.

But re-evaluating everything you know and taking action based on that isn’t something everyone can do. It requires a lot of courage. Quite often people are so dependent on the way things are right now that they will refuse to accept anything else if it means they’ll have to change their lives or lose the things they depend on. It’s especially difficult when changing yourself means that you’ll be swimming upstream in society. In addition, those in control in our society will do everything they can to prevent any change that would be against their interests. After all, as I have shown in the previous parts of this series, they are the ones who benefit from this mess. In the second part of my article on understanding women, I mentioned the following:

Fortunately it’s often easy to detect disinformation because it will usually try to make you believe the exact opposite of the truth. It’s like Alice in Wonderland. In fact, that’s exactly what Alice in Wonderland is based on. ;)  Remember that in the Matrix movies, Neo had to “go down the rabbit hole” to get to the real world. Right now, we are not in the real world. The real world is the opposite of our understanding of our current world.

And one of the areas where this is especially true is when it comes to our understanding of love and our sexuality. Let me bring the following quote to your attention again:

For hundreds and maybe even thousands of years, people have been forced and brainwashed into accepting the opposite in order to frustrate their lives and make it easier for others to control and manipulate them. And this is just one of the areas where this is the case. If you look around you, it should be more than clear that what we’ve been taught about love, and the rules we’ve been told to live by only serve to frustrate our lives, hurt our relationships and make things more difficult for us.

In the first and especially the second part of this series I have shown exactly how we’re being manipulated with our sexuality. I’ve also shown, specifically in the first part, how and why women are the primary victims of this manipulation. In cases where women are unaffected by all the brainwashing for whatever reason, they behave normal as you’d expect. But strangely that’s when these women get labeled as being abnormal. An example of this are women (a.k.a. nymphos) who suffer from hypersexuality or nymphomania (excessive sexual desire by a female). This is how crazy the world we live in really is, so much so that people who’re behaving normal are treated as if they’re sick. If you read the description for hypersexuality on Wikipedia, it becomes apparent that essentially most men are suffering from it. Because most men masturbate and think about sex all day long and are constantly looking for sex. And for men that is considered normal by society. But strangely, when a woman behaves this way, it is wrong and is treated as some kind of disease. This is a prime example of the way in which women have been forced to repress their sexual desires for thousands of years. From Wikipedia:

Many Victorian era mental institutions treated nymphomania as an exclusively female mental illness. Women were classified as mentally ill for nymphomania if they were a victim of sexual assault, bore illegitimate children, “abused themselves” (i.e. masturbated), or were deemed promiscuous. Upon arrival at the asylum, doctors would give the woman a pelvic exam. If doctors felt that the woman had an enlarged clitoris, she would undergo treatments. These treatments included induced vomiting, bloodletting, leeches, restricted diet, douches to the head or breasts, and, at times, clitoridectomies.

While those women were behaving according to their true nature trying to satisfy their sexual desires just like men do, they were treated as victims of a made up disease. The only option these women had was to conform to the rules of society and repress their sexual desires, which led to all kinds of (mental and health) problems which I have discussed in the first part of this series. And not to mention the bigger issues this causes in society and which Dr. Freud warned us about. Just go back and read about female hysteria and vaginal massages. Even then it was clear to doctors what the real issue was, but they choose to benefit from it financially instead of doing the right thing. In addition, those in control who put this system of manipulation into place, would never allow the truth to become known. Doctors who would mention the truth would risk losing business and maybe even their license. This happens even today, for example with the HIV/AIDS fraud (if you want to know what I’m talking about watch a documentary called “HIV=AIDS: Fact or Fraud“, I highly recommend it).

This is how crazy the world we live in really is. And this is what I meant when I said that we’re conditioned to believe the opposite of the truth in order to frustrate our lives and make it easier to manipulate us. We grow up feeling that something is seriously wrong with the world that we live in. It’s largely due to big conflicts between what we are taught to believe about life and what we feel is right according to our true nature. Things don’t make sense, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what’s wrong until we start to do enough digging and find out that we’ve been living in wonderland all this time. A world where nothing is what it seems and where everything is upside down, inside out and the opposite of what it is supposed to be.

What is clear to me and what I want to really stress is that it’s really the women who behave like nymphos who are the normal women. In the beginning of this series I mentioned the following:

There was a time when women thought pretty much the same way about sex as men. During that time women had (and still have, although it is suppressed) a comparable sex drive to men, and they were after sex as much as men, if not more. Sexual desire is something we all get born with naturally. It would have made no sense for nature to put a greater need or desire for sex in men compared to women. In fact, if I look at how women are naturally capable of having sex a lot more often than men (they don’t get exhausted as quickly and are able to have multiple orgasms in a very short amount of time), then I would have expected nature to have given women a greater sex drive than men. It would have made sense, seeing as how they’re biologically capable of having it more often than men.

Now, you may say that many studies that have been done recently show that men have a greater sex drive than women. For example, in a talk by professor Roy F. Baumeister he says:

Look at research on the sex drive: Men and women may have about equal “ability” in sex, whatever that means, but there are big differences as to motivation: which gender thinks about sex all the time, wants it more often, wants more different partners, risks more for sex, masturbates more, leaps at every opportunity, and so on. Our survey of published research found that pretty much every measure and every study showed higher sex drive in men. It’s official: men are hornier than women. This is a difference in motivation.

And this is true. But would this still be true today if the system of brainwash and sexual repression that targets women had not been in place for thousands of years now? I think you know the answer to that question yourself. As I have discussed in the first part of this series, society still forces and brainwashes women into repressing their sexual desires leading to all kinds of psychological issues which makes women difficult to understand and difficult to live with. If you put a system into place that makes women repress their sexual desires for thousands of years, then OF COURSE if you’re going to do a survey today you’ll find that women have less sexual desire than men. Any survey about sex drive done today is essentially flawed because it doesn’t take this female sexual repression that is built into society into account. It has had a lot of impact on women. It’s like teaching kids in school that 1+1=3 and then a survey finding out 30 years later that most people think that 1+1=3. Well, duh!

Baumeister also mentions that men and women have about equal “ability” in sex but that there’s a difference in motivation. This isn’t entirely true, as women are physically more capable of having sex than men. And as I said at the very beginning of this series of articles, it would have made absolutely no sense for nature to give women less sexual desire compared to men, while at the same time making them physically more capable of having it. Especially not when you consider that the survival of our species essentially depends on the women since they are the only ones capable of bearing children. So making them less motivated to have sex doesn’t make sense. What does make sense is nature giving them an equal or greater sex drive compared to men, similar to how nature made them capable of having sex a lot more often than men (for good reasons). And when we look at nymphos, or in other words normal women, then that’s exactly what we see.

If you want an example of how women can be normal, behaving just like men with regards to their sexuality, just read up about the women in Iceland. Check out this article on women in Iceland and check out the video below.

Iceland seems to have been mostly isolated from the world and they’ve developed their own culture where you can essentially speak of gender equality. I think in a normal world, the relationship between men and women and the way women behave would be much like the way it is in Iceland but even better (it’s still far from perfect). They don’t have the kind of rules and brainwashing in society about love and sexuality that exists in the rest of the world. There aren’t any stupid dating games and rituals. Women don’t have the kind of unrealistic “romantic” fairy tale expectations that put a huge burden on them finding a partner. In Iceland, women behave very normal and realistic with regards to their sexuality and are even the ones who approach guys and take them home at the end of the night. And when reading and viewing the information I just linked to, keep in mind that these women would be labeled as nymphos, whores, sluts, etc. in other parts of the world where there’s a lot of female sexual repression in society. It’s no surprise to me when reading people’s comments that apparently Iceland is a very beautiful country and society to live in.

Professor Baumeister also mentions the following:

I have not exhausted all the ways that culture exploits men. Certainly there are others. The male sex drive can be harnessed to motivate all sorts of behaviors and put to work in a kind of economic marketplace in which men give women other resources (love, money, commitment) in exchange for sex.

This is essentially what I’ve also shown in the previous parts of this series, and I believe that this is the real purpose of all the manipulation that has been going on. All of this is to exploit men and motivate them to work. We’re really modern slaves being used by those who are in control. One of their attack vectors has been our women. I’ve written about this in more detail in the third part of this series and in the second part we’ve seen how our sexual energy is being harnessed when I discussed the documentary “The Century of the Self” and Dr. Freud’s theories. Remember how I discussed the movie “The Never Ending Story” where the hero, Atreyu, had to go through so much unnecessary (from his perspective) trouble just to get laid in the end? They’ve made our women sick in order to make it difficult for us to satisfy our sexual needs which creates sexual tension. This build up of energy then gets harnessed to motivate us to behave in a way that benefits those who are in control. We’re being manipulated into becoming slaves, or batteries like Morpheus explained to Neo in the movie “The Matrix.”

Dr. Freud said that “the sexual instincts are remarkable for their plasticity, for the facility with which they can change their aim…for the ease with which they can substitute one form of gratification for another.” And this is really the basis upon which all the manipulation I have discussed is founded. Dr. Freud is one of the most brilliant men to have lived, and people have just recently started to admit this. Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, used Freud’s ideas to create the field of public relations as we know it today, proving many of Freud’s theories about the unconscious in the process. I’ve discussed some of this in the second part of this series. Bernays essentially showed everyone that his uncle’s theories could be used to understand how to control and manipulate people by tapping into their unconscious desires. But looking at it in a positive way, Freud made some brilliant and groundbreaking discoveries that can today help us understand a lot of what’s going on in the world. It’s important to realize however, that although Freud may have discovered this knowledge by himself in the 20th century, this knowledge had to be known by others, mostly secret societies, for hundreds and even thousands of years. Not only that, but Freud may have discovered just a fraction of this knowledge. A lot of what we think we’re discovering today, and what we think is new to us, isn’t new at all. But this is a different subject.

Understanding women is something that also kept Freud busy as evidenced by this quote:

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”

I’m confident that if Freud had lived longer, he would eventually have been able to answer that question. But I think that with this series of articles I’ve been able to answer that question, mostly based on, and especially due to Freud’s groundbreaking work.

suriname360 - Visit Suriname from the comfort of your own home!

After many months of hard work I today finally launched suriname360 - a website that features high resolution 360 degrees panoramas and interactive virtual tours of places in Suriname. I’ve had the idea for this website for a few years now but due to other priorities it wasn’t until March of this year that I could start working on this project. And I did so mostly in my free time while also working on other projects for clients of mine (after all, the bills don’t pay themselves ).

Most of the websites that promote tourism in Suriname focus too much on text and on information. But nothing is capable of attracting people more than nice and interesting visuals. People don’t like to read; they want to see and experience things. People remember 80% of what they see, and only 20% of what they read. So there was a need for a website promoting tourism to Suriname that focuses on strong visuals and the experience of visiting Suriname. And so with suriname360 I’m hoping that I’ve filled a gap and that the website will deliver a significant contribution to the development of the tourism industry in Suriname.

I’ve enjoyed working on this website and I hope you’ll enjoy viewing the content that’s available so far. I’ve invested a lot of time, money and other resources in this website and I’m hoping I’ll be able to continue to further develop this website in the future. There’s a lot more content coming up and I have a lot of very exciting (long term) plans for suriname360 that I hope to be able to share with you soon.

Visit the suriname360 website and take a look. A good place to start is the tour of the City of Paramaribo.

Rainclouds - Picture taken with a Canon EOS 7D and Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye lens (click for larger view)

Ever since Canon announced the EF 8-15mm f/4L fisheye lens back in September 2010 I have been impatiently waiting for it. I knew that, at least in theory, it was going to be awesome and after having it for a few days now, I can say that it’ll blow you away. Whoever came up with the idea for this lens has to be a very brilliant designer. I know it may sound like I’m biased, but I’ve got plenty of negative posts here on my blog about Canon. The most famous are my posts on the EOS 5D Mark II autofocus issues. But with this lens, if I want to be honest, I have no choice but to praise Canon.

The lens is beautiful, extremely well built, feels very solid in your hands, focusing and zooming are very smooth and the image quality is simply awesome. The lens delivers very sharp images all the way to the edges. Even on an APS-C camera like the EOS 60D or EOS 7D you can now get a 180° view in your pictures with a full 180° circular fisheye view on full frame cameras such as the 5D Mark II. You can capture the entire sky with just one image on a full frame camera.

The picture above was taken two days ago just outside my house. I noticed some really scary looking rainclouds outside and grabbed my camera with the 8-15mm lens on it to capture them. The picture was shot at 8mm on an EOS 7D, and I did crop out the corners to remove the vignetting. But even then, just take a look at how much of the sky I was able to capture in just one shot!

The angle of view is so wide that it takes some getting used to because objects at the edges that you don’t want in the frame show up, such as tripod legs and even your own hands or feet.

Where dreams take me (click for larger view)

As you can see in the picture above, having a 180° field of view can give you interesting results. You can see my feet as I was standing outside while I took a picture of what was in front of me. I did crop out the corners again to remove the vignetting, but even then, it’s incredible how much you can get into a single frame.

The Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye lens attached to a Canon EOS 7D

I’m very satisfied so far with this lens. I have yet to do some real work with it, but so far I’m impressed. The only issue I had with this lens as soon as I started using it was the fact that the lens cap can easily come off. I’m not the only one complaining about it, you can find more info on this issue in the review at The Digital Picture. But next to the incredible awesomeness of the lens itself, the lens cap issue is a very minor problem.

Keep in mind that this post of mine is not meant to be a review of this lens. I’ve just used it for a few days and not yet on assignments. But my initial impressions are that you’ll be blown away by the results and the awesomeness of the lens itself. I’ll be posting more about this lens in the future once I have done more work with it.

With this lens Canon strengthens their lead in the area of lenses even more. All they need now is an update to the EF 16-35mm f/2.8L that can rival the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 G in sharpness, or a 14-24mm f/2.8 lens of their own. I hope that the 5D Mark III will be a significant upgrade to the 5D Mark II when it will be released soon and that everything we complained about will be addressed. If that happens I’m going to be a very happy Canon user.

Update January 31st, 2012: I’ve added another post about this lens after using it for a few months. You can read it here.

Timeless Stare

This is the third part of my article on Understanding Women. The first part can be found here and the second part here. If you haven’t yet read them, I recommend reading them first so that you can better understand the rest of this third part.

Humanity has been hijacked. To a very great degree we’ve lost our beautiful women who were both pure at heart and at mind. The kind of women we can now only read about in fantasy stories. This was done on purpose in order to frustrate our lives so that it would be easy to control and manipulate us. Believe it or not, we’ve been like this for thousands of years now. When you do enough research you’ll quickly discover old stories and legends that mention how humanity was deliberately divided in order to control us. There are ancient stories from Africa that mention how a long time ago “gods” came from the sky one day in large silver orbs and how they divided men and women in order to control them. Even in the bible you can read about how Eve was misled by a snake and how as a result life became a lot more difficult for both Adam and Eve. And there are many more examples, but this goes beyond the scope of this post. Check out David Icke’s work for more details on this. Suffice it to say that the issues between men and women go back many thousands of years.

What is clear is that their attack vector included our women and our sexuality, or in other words, the way men and women connect with each other at the highest level. When I mention sexuality, I don’t just mean the physical part of it, but also the emotional/mental aspect. And both of them are very important. We’re prevented from experiencing love to the fullest, without our minds being contaminated by all the brainwashing. Those who are responsible for these issues, and who are now in control, appear to be so confident of the control that they have over us that they even tell us exactly how they’re controlling us. They’re essentially saying “look, this is what we’re doing to you and there’s nothing you can do about it.” David Icke often mentions this during his talks. It’s like in the movies where the villain captures the hero, and before killing him, starts to elaborate on his plans first. Imagine the confidence they must have to be able to do this. When you consider that they’ve been controlling us for thousands of years now, it becomes easier to understand their confidence. If we haven’t been able to fight back for so long, we’re probably not going to succeed any time soon.

One way of how they’re showing us what they’re doing to us is through stories and movies. The movie “The Matrix” comes to mind, but there are also many “fairy tales” and “fantasy” stories that tell us what they’re doing to us, without most people realizing it. One of those “fantasy” stories is called “The Never Ending Story.”

I saw the movie based on The Never Ending Story when I was very young and loved it. But I never realized its true meaning until recent years. The Never Ending Story begins by showing exactly what they’ve done to us. When the story begins, we quickly learn that Bastian, a young boy who is the central character, lost his mother and is trying hard to deal with the loss. To a young boy the most important woman in his life at that age is his mother. So here they’re showing us right from the start that we’ve lost something very important to us, namely our women. Bastian is stuck being alone with his dad who doesn’t seem to care much about what Bastian is going through and only seems to be interested in reminding Bastian about his responsibilities – much like our society. Bastian needs to stop dreaming, stay on his feet and do what society demands of him. When Bastian walks on the street later on his way to school, he’s stopped by bullies who call him a weirdo and attack him. This is symbolic for when we’re on our way to learn about life and the rest of society seeing us as weirdoes and attacking or mistreating us in various ways. Once you start to learn about what’s going on, you automatically set yourself apart from the “normal” crowd and appear different or weird to them. It’s like Morpheus says to Neo in the movie “The Matrix”:

But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

In other words, if on your journey to learn about life you begin to wake up and start to point out what you see, you’ll be seen as a weirdo and will be attacked by society.

Bastian runs away from the bullies and tries to hide in a bookshop. The owner of the bookshop first tries to send Bastian away, telling him he shouldn’t be there because there’s nothing there that would interest him. Just “small rectangular objects called books, that will require effort on his part.” This is symbolic for the fact that most in our society aren’t really interested in reading and learning and prefer to party and play instead while staying in their ignorance. But Bastian proves to the owner of the bookshop that he’s very interested in books, and then asks about a specific book in the hands of the owner. The owner then explains to Bastian that it is a very special book, not like other books Bastian is used to. In other books you become the hero while reading, and then after reading it, you become yourself again and continue your own life. As the hero in the stories in those books, you can go through all kinds of dangerous situations and not worry because, after all, they’re just stories. But in this special book, that’s not the case. Why not? Because this book tells Bastian — tells us – about our own lives. When Bastian later reads the book, he is in fact reading about his own life. The hero, Atreyu, in the book is really Bastian himself. And while we look at the movie, we are in fact looking at a movie about our own lives – we’re both Bastian and Atreyu. This is mentioned again at the end of the movie, when Atreyu talks to the Empress and she says to him:

He (Bastian) doesn’t realize he’s already part of the Never Ending Story. Just as he (Bastian) shares all your (Atreyu’s) adventures, others (you and me) are sharing his (Bastian’s). They were with him when he hid from the boys in the bookstore. They were with him when he took the book with the Auryn symbol on the cover in which he’s reading his own story right now.

So it is made very clear to us that when we read The Never Ending Story we’re actually reading about ourselves. It’s a story about us, about our own lives. They’re showing us what they’re doing to us. And when we’re finished reading the book the story doesn’t end for us because our lives are the story. That’s why the owner of the bookstore mentions to Bastian that the other books he knows are “safe”, but that this special book wasn’t. There’s no escaping back to reality from the dangerous situations in this book. We’re living those situations every day. So if you had any doubt about whether the story in the book was about our reality, then this should remove all doubts.

When Bastian starts reading The Never Ending Story, he finds out at the very beginning that the Empress of Fantasia, the world in which the story takes place, has become deadly ill. This is again symbolic for the fact that they’ve made our women sick with all the brainwashing. It’s also interesting that the Empress in the story is a child, a young girl, no doubt showing us that they’ve been making our women ill starting from early childhood. Remember that in the first part of this article, I mentioned how the brainwashing starts from very early childhood. And so the hero in the story, Atreyu, spends the rest of the story trying to deal with the problems this creates for the world of Fantasia, and tries to find a solution to what is causing all the problems. On his journey he goes through places like “the Desert of Shattered Hopes” and “the Swamps of Sadness” no doubt symbolism for what we go through in our daily lives because of all the frustrations we have to deal with in search for answers. At the same time, we’re constantly kept in fear, symbolized in the story by the Creature of Darkness who follows Atreyu everywhere. War, terrorists, AIDS, religion, financial crisis, Justin Bieber etc. – there’s a lot to fear in our world. Throughout the years, fear has been one of the primary tools used by those in control to motivate and manipulate the masses.

And in the end, like most fairy tales, Atreyu finds his way back to the Empress and finally has sex with her, after essentially having gone on a wild goose chase. Because, and I couldn’t make this up, when Atreyu finally gets back, the Empress tells Atreyu that she knew what the solution to the problem was all along. So Atreyu, realizing that he unnecessarily went through a great deal of trouble, rightfully gets angry and goes:

You knew about this all along?? My horse died, I nearly drowned, I just barely got away from the Nothing!! For what???!! To find out what you already knew??

Like I said in the first part of this series on Understanding Women, women are being programmed to make it especially difficult for a man to get closer to them. Even if there’s absolutely no logical reason for it. You’ll come across this everywhere. This is similar to when a guy really goes out of his way to impress a girl, only for her to tell him in the end that she was interested in him all along but said nothing on purpose just to see how far he would go for her. Only after Atreyu went through all kinds of difficulties for the Empress that weren’t necessary did he, at last, get to have sex with the Empress. And yes, he has sex with her, though that’s not what you explicitly see in the movie. But all the symbolism points to sex. First of all, the entrance to the Empress’s Ivory Tower looks like a giant vagina. Just take a look at the picture below.

If I ever build another house for myself, this is what the main entrance will look like

Atreyu enters the vagina and then arrives in the uterus where the Empress sits on her throne. Now, in case you’re still in doubt of where we are at this point, the walls around the throne are decorated with figures that clearly resemble vaginas, leaving us with absolutely no doubt whatsoever that we have, in fact, penetrated into a vagina.

I think I may have to decorate the walls in my house like this

As if all this isn’t enough, during what appears to be the orgasm when the entire uterus is shaking and cracking and lightning strikes outside because of all the energy building up to the climax, Bastian has to call out the Empress’s name. And of course, it’s raining during the climax while Bastian yells out her name. I don’t have to explain the rain to you, do I? Have you heard about the concept of rain impregnating mother earth? Alrighty then. Just seconds after the rather violent climax, everything quickly calms down again, exactly like you would expect. Bastian then replaces Atreyu, because they’re really the same person in the story (remember we’re reading about ourselves), and the Empress gives a small glowing grain of sand to Bastian, resembling a seed. And then a new life is born and there’s a new beginning. Bastian then heads out again temporarily experiencing how great life feels when you’ve just unloaded all your sexual energy, only to prepare himself for another round of manipulation ahead. Because like the narrator says at the end, Bastian will have to return to the ordinary world. And once he’s there, the cycle starts all over again. This is why the story is called The Never Ending Story (it really never ends) and why on the cover of the book you have the Auryn symbol of the snakes that are eating themselves in an endless loop. The Auryn symbol is a complexer version of the Ouroboros:

The Ouroboros often represents self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things perceived as cycles that begin anew as soon as they end (the mythical phoenix has a similar symbolism).

The Auryn

What they’re telling us here is first that we’re reading a story about ourselves (self-reflexivity or self-reference). The fact that there are 2 Ouroboros symbols intertwined tells us that there are 2 levels of self-reference here: Bastian is reading about himself, but we’re also reading about ourselves at the same time. Secondly, the cyclicality of the Ouroboros tells us that we’re in an endless loop of control and manipulation. This concept was also clearly present in the Matrix movies and explained in much more detail there. When Neo finally meets the Architect in the movie, the Architect explains to Neo that this was not the first time that they met, and that in fact there were many Neos before him. Neo then sees the Neos that came before him in small screens on the wall. This same concept can also be seen in The Never Ending Story at the end, when Atreyu enters a place where he sees drawings on the walls around him depicting him in every situation that he had experienced – the whole story up until that point. This is only possible when there were many Atreyus before him and his path was pretty much planned and set in stone even before he began his journey. And that’s what the Architect explains to Neo in the Matrix when they meet. There can be slight variations, but overall the same cycle keeps repeating itself. The system of control and manipulation was designed to give us a limited amount of freedom to maintain the illusion of choice, but as a result (and by design), in the long term this would eventually lead to more and more people waking up and getting behind what was really going on. So measures were built into the system to effectively deal with this process and control it once it would inevitably happen. Neo was essentially created by the Matrix itself to deal with the problem of people waking up. By “prophesizing” to everyone that he would be the One, the messiah who would save them all, everyone would follow him when he arrived and as a result, the Matrix would have control over the process because they controlled Neo. This is why Neo was able to stop Sentinels in the real world. He was part of the machines. He was part of the plan to lead humanity back to the beginning of the cycle of control and that’s how the Matrix trilogy ends. And since this cycle has happened so many times, it has constantly been perfected. As the Architect explains to Neo, they’ve destroyed Zion (the resistance) so many times that “they have become increasingly efficient at it.” Perhaps this also explains their confidence in showing us what they’re doing, because they think we’re not going to be able to do much about it.

The fact that these days so much information is becoming available and many more people begin to realize that there’s something seriously wrong with the world we live in should worry us. It should worry us because when this happens, it means that a “reboot” isn’t far away. The current situation gets destroyed and we’re set back at the beginning to start the journey all over again. Maybe the theories about the end of the world as we know it in 2012 do have some validity after all? It’s interesting that the first Matrix movie, where they show us how we’re being controlled, was released in 1999 — 13 years before 2012. The number 13 is a special number in Freemasonry. When you do enough research you’ll discover that the people who are behind all of this control and manipulation go by the name of the Illuminati and/or Freemasons. Check out the works of Jordan Maxwell, David Icke and Alex Jones on this subject.

If you think sex in children’s stories is unique to The Never Ending Story, then I’ve got news for you. It’s not. The Illuminati and/or Freemasons seem to be fixated on human sexuality. And this should come as no surprise to you having read the first two parts of this article. Check out the movie below on YouTube for a few examples of sexual messages in some of Disney’s animations.

Subliminal Message

These are called subliminal messages and they work on our subconscious. They influence us without us consciously realizing that we are being influenced. This is yet another example of their sexual manipulation. Disney was a 33° Freemason, and all of these messages in their animations serve a purpose, read about it here.

There’s a lot of energy in human sexuality. A lot of the rituals the Illuminati and/or Freemasons perform involve men, women and even children in sexual acts. Again, do your own research and check out the works of Jordan Maxwell, David Icke and Alex Jones. Alex Jones has a couple of documentaries on this with live footage. In public these people remain politically correct, but behind closed doors is where they put their sexual perversions into practice. I already mentioned the book “Trance: Formation of America” in one of the previous parts of this article, but I’m going to recommend it to you again. Get it and find out what’s happening.

But getting back to the subject of women, The Never Ending Story is a clear example where they’re showing us what they’ve done to us with regards to our women. They have corrupted our women in order to frustrate our lives so that we become easier to control and manipulate. It is very interesting that simultaneously with the release of the movie based on The Never Ending Story, the young actress Tami Stronach who plays the Empress in the movie, released an album with two songs titled “Fairy Queen” and “Riding on a Rainbow.” If you listen to these two songs, the text also tells you a lot about the issues we’re dealing with right now. Let’s look at the lyrics for the song “Fairy Queen”:

If I could be a fairy queen, then I would hold a magic key, to reveal the hidden secrets of the mind. Then I could see the darkest blue, the mystery that’s part of you, and I’d weave a spell to take away your sorrows.

It’s very cruel that they had a young girl sing this song to us, and more so because it’s the same girl who played the sick Empress in the movie. It’s like chopping off someone’s hands and then letting that person sing about wishing to have a pair of hands. First they brainwash these young girls everywhere making them become much less of the person that they could really be. Then they have this young girl sing to us how she wishes that she could be a fairy queen, or in other words, how she wishes that she could be a real woman — the kind of woman that we’ve lost and can now only read about in fantasy stories. She tells us that if she could be such a woman, she would be able to reveal the hidden secrets of the mind. This makes sense, since without all the brainwashing going on from early childhood, women would realize their true nature and their true desires – the  secrets of the mind that are now hidden behind all the brainwashing. And if women were capable of breaking out of the mind control and see the hidden secrets of the mind, they’d see the world so much better, their minds would become pure again, free from all the deep-seated feelings of anger and frustration. They’d understand us and would most certainly be able to take away our sorrows.

Fairy queen, changing teardrops to a smile, holding daydreams for a while. Fairy queen, she’s your shelter in the night, the guardian angel by your side.

Such a woman would indeed be able to change teardrops to a smile and enable us to dream again. And she would most certainly be our shelter in the night and a guardian angel by our sides, looking after us and caring for us.

If I could be a fairy queen, I’d find the long forgotten dream, that is deep inside the memory of a child. If I could hear what words don’t tell from way down in the wishing well, then reality would turn into illusion.

Again, they couldn’t have made this text clearer for us to understand. The long forgotten dreams deep inside the memory of a child are our repressed desires due to all the brainwashing starting from early childhood. The wishing well is a metaphor for our subconscious which resides way down in our minds. If women could hear the message from their subconscious, if they could hear what their subconscious desired and wished for, then reality would indeed turn into illusion. They’d find out about their true nature and realize that they have been living an illusion all this time; an illusion that they thought was reality.

If I could be a fairy queen, I’d take a walk behind the scene, where the puppet acting plays that never ends. I’d pull their strings to set them free, they’d play their parts most perfectly, and my magic wand would make them live forever.

If we wake up and start to see the illusion, we get a glimpse behind the scenes where all the control takes place. We start to recognize and see how we’re being controlled and manipulated. And so indeed, a fairy queen would be able to go behind the scenes to see how the puppets (all of us) are being controlled. Not only that, she’d also be able to set us free from all the control and manipulation.

But sadly, all of that, only IF women could be fairy queens again. Will we ever get back our fairy queens?

Arigato Mrs. Roboto

This is the second part of my article on Understanding Women. The first part can be found here. If you haven’t yet read it, I recommend reading it so that you can better understand the rest of this second part.

I want to use this second part of my article on Understanding Women to go into more detail on some of the things I discussed in the first part. For people who are new to the theories of Dr. Freud and psychoanalysis, it may have been difficult to understand the connections I was making in my first article. I would totally understand if people would think what I was saying there was too far fetched or if they thought I was probably high on crack when I wrote that. Now, I’m not saying I wasn’t high on crack while writing the first part, but even if I was, my arguments there are still based on some very interesting facts.

Let me first bring your attention to the following quote from the first part:

Thank god that vibrators (“massaging devices” LMAO) were invented or else those poor physicians would have to work a lot harder for their money. Couldn’t they just tell those women to go have (a lot more) sex? I guess not, that would mean “a loss of business” for the physicians. Better to have the women come in regularly to get “massaged.” This is a good example of how protecting the financial interests of a few often holds back important progress in our society for the many.

It’s important to note that those physicians knew exactly what was going on. They knew the cause of the symptoms that the women they were treating were suffering from, namely, sexual dissatisfaction. It’s also important to note that those women apparently had no idea what the causes were of the symptoms they were experiencing, because otherwise they’d probably know what to do and not need the physicians. But the physicians kept quiet about the cause because they were more interested in making money than doing society a favor by telling everyone exactly what was going on. You’ll probably say that they kept quiet maybe because it wouldn’t have been politically correct to send women out to have more sex at the time, and that the physicians were afraid of putting their jobs in jeapardy. But I think the financial motives had a lot more influence in keeping them quiet about the real cause. Why? Because they had at least one other alternative, namely, sending those women to midwives for treatment:

The technique was difficult for a physician to master and could take hours to achieve “hysterical paroxysm.” Referral to midwives, which had been common practice, meant a loss of business for the physician.

A solution was the invention of massage devices, which shortened treatment from hours to minutes, removing the need for midwives and increasing a physician’s treatment capacity.

And though they had that option, instead they wanted to benefit financially from the psychological issues women were having and looked for better ways to be able to treat these women themselves. The money isn’t in the cure, but in the treatment (you’ll come across this more once you start investigating issues in the healthcare industry today).

And that was around 1870. So some people had a pretty good idea of what was going on in society even at that time. Freud came up with his theories in the early 1900s. You’d think that if we knew this long about these issues that we’d already have done something about them after all this time. But as I’ve shown with the physicians, people seem to be more interested in exploiting the problems, instead of solving them. And there are more examples of that.

Years ago I saw a documentary titled “The Century of the Self.” If you haven’t seen it yet, I can’t recommend it to you highly enough. You can watch it here on YouTube. It explains the theories Freud came up with (which I’ve used to explain women’s irrational behavior in the first part of this article) and it shows you how these theories are now being used by the few to exploit the many and benefit from it. Instead of addressing the problem of large scale sexual repression in society, these people choose to keep it the way it is so that they can tap into the irrational forces it creates inside individuals to control and manipulate them to forward their agendas and/or for economic profit. That’s where the term “social engineering” discussed in the first part of this article comes from.

For example, you’ll learn from the documentary how women were manipulated into smoking in public:

Bernays believed that there is a lot more going on in human decision making, than just the clear presentation of accurate information about the product or service.  He believed that businesses should play to peoples’ irrational emotions, in order to convince them that they must buy a company’s product or service.   His first big success was persuading women that it was OK to smoke in public. At that time, in the early 20th Century, men had made it taboo for women to smoke in public. George Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Corporation, asked Eddie Bernays if he could find a way to break this taboo, and encourage women to smoke in public. George Hill thought his company could double the number of its customers in this way.

Edward Bernays consulted with his uncle, who told him what cigarettes mean to women. The psychoanalyst told Bernays that the cigarette represented male sexual power (cigarettes were a symbol of the penis), and that if he could find a way to link cigarettes to women, as a challenge to male power, they would begin smoking in public.

Every year, New York City held an Easter’s Day Parade to which thousands of people came. Bernays decided to stage an event there. He persuaded a group of rich debutants, to hide cigarettes under their clothes, and join the parade. Then, at a given signal from him, they were to light up the cigarettes dramatically. He then told the press, that he had heard a rumor, that a group of suffragettes were going to protest the unequal rights of women, by lighting up cigarettes which they called “torches of freedom”.

Edward Bernays knew that this would cause a controversy, and that all of the newspaper photographers would be there to capture the moment, so he was ready with a propaganda slogan which was; TORCHES OF FREEDOM. The idea worked exactly as planned, and the next day the photographs and story were in not just the New York newspapers, but in newspapers all across America, and around the world.

After that, the sales of cigarettes to women began to rise rapidly, because Bernays had made them socially acceptable. In the minds of the women who began smoking in public, they thought of themselves as being more powerful and independent. An idea that still persists to this very day.

In the documentary it is made very clear that the hidden irrational emotions that are being tapped into, are linked to the “primitive sexual forces” (our natural sexual desires) in every individual. And as I have argued in the first part of this article, if these “primitive sexual forces” get suppressed, strange things start to happen. People start to behave strange and irrationally. And as I have also argued, all of us, but especially women, get trained and brainwashed from early childhood to suppress our sexual desires to the point where we don’t even realize anymore that we are actually suppressing our sexual desires – something that is referred to as sexual repression.  So we unconsciously suppress these sexual desires and though we’re suppressing them, these desires are still there. We just aren’t (fully) aware of them anymore. They’re often driving us crazy, but we don’t know or realize what’s driving us crazy (such as in the case of women). And the documentary shows how the few in the know and in control tap into these unconscious desires to, for example, make people want to buy things that they don’t need, or do things that they wouldn’t normally do. Remember what I said about women’s seemingly insatiable desire for clothes, shoes, jewelry and related items?

And before I end this post, did you ever wonder what’s up with women’s seemingly insatiable desire for clothes, shoes, jewelry and related items? It’s like they can never have enough of those. By now you probably already have a pretty good idea why this is the case. But in case you don’t, here’s the answer: They’re simply compensating for their chronic lack of sexual satisfaction. Because it’s very difficult for them to satisfy their sexual desires, they try to compensate for it by focusing their attention on other things that make them feel better about themselves in order to get some kind of feeling as if they’re getting the satisfaction they need. But this never works for the long term because the root problem keeps existing, namely, their repressed sexual desires keep longing for satisfaction. So women find themselves in a situation of perpetual discontent. So by the time they get the new shoes they’ve been longing for, they’re already looking to get the next pair.

So this whole fucked up mess (scientific term) in our society is being kept in place, on purpose, so that the few who are in the know and in control can easily control and manipulate us so that ultimately they can benefit from it.

I didn’t come up with the theory about understanding women (first part) myself. All I did was put together information that’s been around for hundreds of years already and try to make sense of it. So essentially we’ve known for a very very long time now exactly what the causes are of all the issues we’re having in our society. But we’re just not willing to fix those issues. Benefiting from them seems to be more important to us. Or at least to the few who know and are in control. They’re using the rest of us who don’t know about this as resources. So essentially we’re their slaves in these modern times.

One thing that you have to keep in mind is that though the documentary “The Century of the Self” talks about Dr. Freud’s theories and about propaganda, the documentary itself is also propaganda and also contains lots of disinformation. For example, in the beginning of the documentary the narrator says:

A hundred years ago a new theory about human nature was put forward by Sigmund Freud. He had discovered primitive sexual and aggressive forces hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings. Forces that if not controlled led individuals and societies to chaos and destruction.

This, of course, is bullshit. The natural sexual desires that every individual is born with don’t lead to chaos and destruction themselves. It’s the suppression and repression of these desires that is dangerous and that can lead to chaos and destruction! It is the desire to manipulate these forces that leads to chaos and destruction. And our society is proof of that. From here:

The history books have shown us that repressing human sexuality very often leads to a loss of perspective, dangerous compulsions and inhuman behavior. For centuries, the Catholic Church has sought to repress human sexuality and encouraged its brethren to abstain from sex. Millions of priests and members of the clergy have been forced to suppress their natural sexual urges over the years, which has undoubtedly led to an untold numbers of cases of sexual abuse against vulnerable children.

The act of sex, whether through masturbation or intercourse, helps to dissipate sexual energy, which is why a person usually feels a great sense of serenity and relaxation in the aftermath of an orgasm. Victims of sexual repression, or anyone who is unable to have an orgasm, will be unable to find relief, and over time their sexual energy builds up and can cause deep-seated feelings of frustration and anger.

In that same documentary you’ll see how they used these forces to manipulate people into going to war causing lots of death and destruction. They would have us believe that they’re doing a good thing for us by controlling these forces, when in fact, it is their control and manipulation of these forces that causes a lot of the suffering that we see around the world today. The way Edward Bernays manipulated Americans into going to war by telling them it was to spread democracy (you’ll see this in the documentary), is still being used today to fight wars.

You’ll also hear the narrator saying:

But what frightened the rulers of the empire even more was Freud’s idea that hidden inside all human beings were dangerous instinctual drives. Freud had devised a method he called psychoanalysis. By analyzing dreams and free association, he had unearthed, he said, powerful sexual and aggressive forces which were the remnants of our animal past. Feelings we repressed because they were too dangerous.

This, again, is nothing but a big pile of bullshit. Disinformation at its finest. First, they again want us to believe that the sexual forces inside us are dangerous. The sexual forces themselves aren’t dangerous, it’s the suppression and repression of those forces that is dangerous. If people can’t satisfy their natural sexual desires, they’re going to start acting strange and in extreme cases become violent. The same thing would happen when people wouldn’t be able to satisfy their hunger because of limited food supplies. They would start getting violent to satisfy their hunger in extreme cases. They also want to brainwash us into believing that we’re repressing these sexual feelings ourselves because they are too dangerous. This is of course to make us believe that it’s actually a good thing that we are repressing our sexual desires, just in case we find out about it. Because if we know that it’s bad to repress those feelings, then we stop repressing those feelings, and then as a result, they can’t manipulate us anymore. In addition, we’re not repressing our sexual desires ourselves, THEY ARE MAKING US do it by keeping in place, and even enhancing, the system of brainwash that exists to do it. Do you start to see the connections and why they are spreading all of this disinformation?

In fact, Freud himself WARNED THEM about the serious consequences of repressing our sexual desires:

What constitutes sexual repression is subjective and can vary greatly between cultures and moral systems. Sigmund Freud was the first to use the term widely, and argued that it was one of the roots of many problems in western society. Freud believed that people’s naturally strong instincts toward sexuality were repressed by people in order to meet the constraints imposed on them by civilized life.

See the disinformation again? In the documentary they’re telling us that Freud thought the sexual desires/forces themselves were dangerous, but what we see here, in fact, is that in reality Freud thought that repressing these desires/forces is what was dangerous. And if you think about it, that makes sense. When our desires get satisfied as human beings, there’s no need for conflict and all is well. It is when we can’t satisfy these desires, and especially when our lives depend on the satisfaction of these desires, when all hell breaks loose. And nothing is more threatening to us as a species, as denying us our rights to satisfy our sexual desires, which threatens reproduction, which is essential to our survival. Remember that Freud established sexual drives as the primary motivational forces of human life. So if you mess with that, things will indeed get dangerous.

So be careful with how you interpret the information in the documentary, and in fact, from everywhere around you. There’s a lot of  disinformation everywhere around us these days and that’s just something you have to keep in mind constantly. Fortunately it’s often easy to detect disinformation because it will usually try to make you believe the exact opposite of the truth. It’s like Alice in Wonderland. In fact, that’s exactly what Alice in Wonderland is based on. Remember that in the Matrix movies, Neo had to “go down the rabbit hole” to get to the real world. Right now, we are not in the real world. The real world is the opposite of our understanding of our current world. It’s interesting that in the MK ULTRA mind manipulation program they had a theme based on Alice in Wonderland. Read the book “Trance: Formation of America” for a detailed explanation of how that worked. Remember how I said that fairy tales were used to brainwash and control us in the first part of this article?

Isn’t it interesting how far research can lead us when we just wanted to explain the irrational behavior of women?  As you can see, there’s a lot more to explore, but I’ll leave those for follow up posts in the future. Meanwhile I encourage you to do your own digging to find out just how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

Sad for Life

You’ve probably heard men complaining about how women are difficult to understand. Even women complain about having difficulty understanding other women, and in many cases, even themselves. This has been a topic that has interested me for years. Not just the question of why women behave the way they do sometimes, but also how this is related to society’s understanding of love and relationships. I don’t think you can look at all of these things separately because they’re all related and they all influence each other. And the issues we’re experiencing with all of them might have the same root causes. In the past I’ve written about love and about relationships. And now it’s time to look at women.

I believe that women, more than men, are the victim of the rules of our society. Stupid rules that we’ve lived by for centuries. In one of my previous posts on relationships I mentioned the following:

For hundreds and maybe even thousands of years, people have been forced and brainwashed into accepting the opposite in order to frustrate their lives and make it easier for others to control and manipulate them. And this is just one of the areas where this is the case. If you look around you, it should be more than clear that what we’ve been taught about love, and the rules we’ve been told to live by only serve to frustrate our lives, hurt our relationships and make things more difficult for us.

Women are difficult to understand because they’re constantly struggling internally with the conflict between what they have been taught about themselves and their true nature. There was a time when women thought pretty much the same way about sex as men. During that time women had (and still have, although it is suppressed) a comparable sex drive to men, and they were after sex as much as men, if not more. Sexual desire is something we all get born with naturally. It would have made no sense for nature to put a greater need or desire for sex in men compared to women. In fact, if I look at how women are naturally capable of having sex a lot more often than men (they don’t get exhausted as quickly and are able to have multiple orgasms in a very short amount of time), then I would have expected nature to have given women a greater sex drive than men. It would have made sense, seeing as how they’re biologically capable of having it more often than men.

Just like we have to eat every day to satisfy our hunger, so too do we have to satisfy our sexual urges/desires. If we don’t eat enough and on time, we become weak and sick. And in the same way, if we fail to satisfy our sexual desires adequately, we also become sick and it becomes difficult to function as a human being. It’s foolish to think that suppressing and neglecting our sexual needs won’t have an impact on us in the long term. In fact, it can and will lead to issues. And that’s exactly the problem we’re experiencing with women. You just have to look at the work of Dr. Freud where he made the connection between the suppression of sexual desires and psychological issues. Freud went so far as to say that sexual desires are the primary motivational forces of human life. So you can choose to neglect and suppress them if you want to, but not without consequences.

A long time ago some “brilliant” minds decided that they should go ahead and regulate human sexuality. One of the reasons why they decided to regulate human sexuality is to prevent overpopulation which was putting a serious pressure on the available resources (birth control was not always available). Indeed entire civilizations have come to an end in the past because of the problems caused by overpopulation. But a more important reason why they did this was to be able to control and manipulate people.

Today, thousands of years later, we’re still stuck with many of those rules and the system of brainwash that they’ve created for us. From very early childhood women are being taught to suppress their sexual desires. Men too, but women a lot more so than men because apparently women can be influenced a lot easier when it comes to their sexuality. In a paper titled “Gender Differences in Erotic Plasticity: The Female Sex Drive as Socially Flexible and Responsive” by professor Roy F. Baumeister, he writes:

The gender difference in erotic plasticity suggests that women present a better prospect for achieving cultural progress than men, at least with regard to sexuality. To be sure, the differences are relative rather than absolute, but, on both individual and collective measures, there was consistent evidence that women’s sexuality can adapt and change more effectively than men’s. To the extent that the road to Utopia runs through the bedroom, social engineers may find that male inflexibility presents the greater problem whereas female plasticity represents the more promising opportunity.

So because women have a much greater erotic plasticity, meaning they can be manipulated a lot easier when it comes to their sexuality, these so called ”social engineers” targeted them much more compared to men because they could more easily achieve the results they were looking for that way. And if you ask me, they were very successful. However, I don’t think they achieved “cultural progress.” On the contrary, as a result of their “social engineering” I would say that our society is a fucked up mess (scientific term).

Our whole society is set up in such a way where women are being programmed with the wrong (often contradictory) information and the wrong assumptions about life and about their sexuality. They learn these things from their parents, their family, in school, from books, television, religion, you name it. It’s all around us and there’s no escaping it. Because of this it often appears as if women have a weaker sex drive compared to men and don’t desire or think about sex as much. But this is just because women have essentially been trained and brainwashed from early childhood to suppress their sexual desires and to think differently about sex. In the worst (and I think most) cases women aren’t even consciously aware that they are suppressing their sexual desires - something that is referred to as sexual repression:

Sexual repression, also known as sexual ethics, is a state in which a person is prevented from expressing their sexuality. Sexual repression is often associated with feelings of guilt or shame being associated with sexual impulses. What constitutes sexual repression is subjective and can vary greatly between cultures and moral systems. Sigmund Freud was the first to use the term widely, and argued that it was one of the roots of many problems in western society. Freud believed that people’s naturally strong instincts toward sexuality were repressed by people in order to meet the constraints imposed on them by civilized life.

It’s not that women don’t want to have sex or have no desire for it, it’s just that they’ve been conditioned to believe that there’s a procedure that they need to follow, and certain requirements that have to be met, in order for them to have meaningful (to them) sex, and in order for society to approve of it. For example, women are taught that they should make it especially difficult for a man who’s interested in them to get closer to them. Just to give you an idea of how far this brainwashing goes, you can find this even in fairy tales that we tell our children and which they grow up with (thanks Disney!). Why is it that a prince always has to go through great difficulty before he can reach the princess? And why is it that the prince has to go through great lengths to please the princess and show a lot of patience before he can finally kiss her and/or sleep with her? Children read this and are being programmed to believe that this is how it’s supposed to be in life; that this is the process which leads to happiness in the end and that this is “romantic.” When these children become adults, these stories and experiences are what they’re going to expect from their relationships in reality. A woman then suppresses her sexual urges and waits for that one man who will go through great lengths for her to change her mind from “no,” to “yes.” It’s often the case that women know from the very beginning if they’re interested in a man or not, but playing the game is what they’re after and what makes them feel as if they’re getting the “romantic” fairy tale experience. So though they may also be interested in a guy, they’re still going to play games and not give in too quickly. This behavior causes a lot of problems. For one, reality is nothing like what they’ve been taught in fairy tales. Once the guy wins their approval and gets what he came for, the game is essentially over and “happily ever after” depends on their willingness to deal with the hard reality of maintaining a relationship. In addition, the whole fairy tale experience of relationships gets so overhyped to women that reality stands in stark contrast next to it and women inevitably get disappointed. Secondly, due to the fact that they’re making it difficult for guys to get closer to them, they often force guys to mislead them in order to get what they want. Guys will tell them what they want to hear, and do what they expect, just to get in their panties. Even if guys don’t mislead them but really go out of their way to please them, all this extra effort isn’t likely to last in the long term. It’s not hard to imagine how it ends once the guys get what they wanted. This is one of the causes of all the relationship issues we’re having today, and one of the reasons why it’s so difficult for men to approach women. When women get hurt in the end, they’ll blame it on the men, but fail to see how their own difficult behavior based on expectations that are inconsistent with reality caused a lot of the issues.

Access Denied

The various rules in our society also play an important role in women repressing their sexual desires. For example, a woman is expected not to give in too quickly when a guy is interested or else she may risk being labeled as too easy, or, in the worst case, a whore. Somehow society thinks it’s positive for a man to have more women (he’s a “playboy” then, enhancing his macho status), but very negative for a woman to have more men in her life (in which case she’s a whore/slut/etc.). But when it comes down to it, all these rules and assumptions in our society are essentially bullshit. None of it really matters. When you do even a little bit of research, you’ll quickly discover that these rules differ based on religion, culture, era, civilization etc. What’s considered normal now according to the rules in our society, may not have been normal a couple of hundreds of years ago, and vice versa. For example, incest was tolerated and quite normal thousands of years ago in Egypt. Today, in our society, it’s viewed differently. In some cultures it’s perfectly OK for a man to have more than one woman. In other cultures that’s a sin. People grow up with all this stupidity around them when it comes to sex, love and relationships, and in the end it shouldn’t surprise us to find that we have so many issues in these areas in our society.

After being programmed with all this stupidity from early childhood to early adulthood, it becomes very difficult to function in society when, through trial, error and experience,  women start to see that reality doesn’t match with what they’ve been taught. In addition they start to realize, eventually, that a lot of what they’ve been taught about their sexuality and the many rules in our society, have served only to frustrate them and to make their lives more difficult. And it takes a lifetime for most women to deprogram themselves from these assumptions. This is why most women think and behave very different once they start reaching the age of 40 or 50. One might say that they’ve become “wiser.” But the truth is that they’ve managed to finally deprogram themselves from all the stupidity they learned in their early life by experiencing reality themselves and finding out the hard way what works and what doesn’t, and what’s real and what’s not. Unfortunately, by that time it’s also too late to go back and experience the things they’ve missed out on. While they might be wiser now, they’ve lost their youthfulness and a lot of their beauty. That, however, doesn’t stop many of them to still go out to seek younger guys in an effort to make up for lost opportunities and missed experiences.

Most guys, myself included, would prefer the mind of a woman in her 50s, in the body of a woman in her 20s. That would be a young woman freed from all the fairy tale programming, with very realistic expectations regarding potential mates and regarding life in general. Unfortunately this is fantasy in the world we live in today. And this is mostly because of all the brainwashing and rules in our society which I discussed earlier. Under normal circumstances, our current situation being abnormal, the 22 year old girl with the mind of a 50 year old woman (at least on the subject of their sexuality) would be found everywhere around us.

But let’s get back to understanding women. The answer to the question of why women are so difficult to understand is very simple: They suppress, and more often even repress, their sexual desires because of the reasons previously mentioned, which leads to various psychological issues. Dr. Freud had all the answers all along. I strongly believe that the type of irrational behavior exhibited by women, where they are very difficult to understand and where their (often mean, angry, hostile and sometimes even violent) behavior defies all kinds of logic, is the result of psychological problems caused by the suppression or repression of their natural sexual desires and needs. Because they suppress or repress these very important needs, the lack of satisfaction in that area leads to psychological issues which manifest themselves in strange and unpredictable behavior in seemingly unrelated areas. As a result, men find it difficult to understand what’s wrong when women start to act up, and even women will often admit that they don’t understand other women or even themselves. Women will often make a big deal out of nothing, or in the best case out of something very small, leaving guys, and incredibly even themselves, to wonder where all of that is coming from. Well, now you know. It’s coming from their subconscious struggle to want to satisfy their natural sexual desires but not being able to due to the rules of society and due to the difficult and cumbersome process that they believe they must follow in order to find a mate and satisfy their needs. Most of the time, women aren’t even consciously aware of the fact that they are suppressing their sexual desires (sexual repression), which makes it a lot more difficult for them to do something about it. Here are some of the symptoms of sexual repression:

Victorian doctors recorded all kinds of symptoms in women who were evidently suffering from some kind of sexual repression, including a nervous disposition, insomnia, irritability, faintness, heaviness in the abdomen, muscle spasms, a tendency to cause trouble, and no appetite for food. Many physicians believed that “hysteria” led to an increased likelihood of developing nervous disorders and problems with the reproductive tract.

Water massages as a treatment for hysteria c. 1860.

Pay special attention to “irritability” and “a tendency to cause trouble.” Does that sound familiar? But it gets better, what do you think the treatment was for all of these symptoms? Answer: Vaginal massages (can it get any more obvious than this? ):

Rachel P. Maines has observed that such cases were quite profitable for physicians, since the patients were at no risk of death, but needed constant treatment. The only problem was that physicians did not enjoy the tedious task of vaginal massage (generally referred to as ’pelvic massage’): The technique was difficult for a physician to master and could take hours to achieve “hysterical paroxysm.” Referral to midwives, which had been common practice, meant a loss of business for the physician.

A solution was the invention of massage devices, which shortened treatment from hours to minutes, removing the need for midwives and increasing a physician’s treatment capacity. Already at the beginning of the 19th century, hydrotherapy devices were available at Bath, and by the mid-19th century, they were popular at many high-profile bathing resorts across Europe and in America. By 1870, a clockwork-driven vibrator was available for physicians. In 1873, the first electromechanical vibrator was used at an asylum in France for the treatment of hysteria.

While physicians of the period acknowledged that the disorder stemmed from sexual dissatisfaction, they seemed unaware of or unwilling to admit the sexual purposes of the devices used to treat it.

Thank god that vibrators (“massaging devices” LMAO) were invented or else those poor physicians would have to work a lot harder for their money. Couldn’t they just tell those women to go have (a lot more) sex? I guess not, that would mean “a loss of business” for the physicians. Better to have the women come in regularly to get “massaged.” This is a good example of how protecting the financial interests of a few often holds back important progress in our society for the many. And take a good look at the water massaging treatment for hysteria. I’d say that there are certainly more effective ways to “massage” that area of a female’s body and treat “hysteria.” This is a testament to the crazy fucked up world that we live in. You just can’t make this stuff up.

To be sure, women are not the only ones suffering from all of this. Men are too, not only directly from the rules of society themselves, but also as a result of the behavior of women caused by these rules. Women are just suffering from it a lot more than men because they’ve been the primary target. In addition, since we’re living in a male dominated society, men can get away with breaking certain rules. For women that’s nearly impossible, causing them much more stress. Our whole society is fucked up (scientific term) in a very serious way with people struggling with the psychological effects of suppressed sexual desires without them even realizing it. Many issues in our society are caused by this, a lot of them seemingly unrelated. It influences the behavior of people in a very significant way and issues caused by this show up in all parts of life. It’s also interesting to note that sexual repression can lead to perversions of desire. And there’s a lot of that in our society.

One of the biggest issues we’re having is that men and women don’t know anymore how to approach each other and this is becoming increasingly more difficult and frustrating. There are too many unrealistic expectations and too many wrong assumptions, mostly on the part of the women, when all it really comes down to in the end is simply satisfying our sexual desires. There’s a trend going on right now where both men and women are giving up and start looking for satisfaction among themselves. I see more women seeking intimacy with other women, and I see more men seeking intimacy with other men. The reason for this is that right now, there aren’t any rules and procedures in society that interfere with our natural behavior in those areas. For example, there aren’t any predefined expectations and procedures for women partnering with other women in society’s system of brainwash, as compared to when women would partner with men (there aren’t any fairy tales that tell us how a princess has to go through great lengths before she can finally kiss or sleep with the other princess… at least, not yet). For this reason it is so much easier for women to find intimacy among themselves. It’s like a huge burden gets taken off of their shoulders; all the expectations, requirements and procedures that would normally apply with men, don’t matter anymore when another woman is involved. The same is true for men. When looking for sexual satisfaction among themselves, men don’t have to expect to go through a long and cumbersome process just to have the woman change her mind from “no” to “yes” and most certainly don’t have to deal with the weird, difficult to understand female behavior as a result of psychological issues caused by their suppression of their own sexual desires.

And before I end this post, did you ever wonder what’s up with women’s seemingly insatiable desire for clothes, shoes, jewelry and related items? It’s like they can never have enough of those. By now you probably already have a pretty good idea why this is the case. But in case you don’t, here’s the answer: They’re simply compensating for their chronic lack of sexual satisfaction. Because it’s very difficult for them to satisfy their sexual desires, they try to compensate for it by focusing their attention on other things that make them feel better about themselves in order to get some kind of feeling as if they’re getting the satisfaction they need. But this never works for the long term because the root problem keeps existing, namely, their repressed sexual desires keep longing for satisfaction. So women find themselves in a situation of perpetual discontent. So by the time they get the new shoes they’ve been longing for, they’re already looking to get the next pair.

All of this is because we choose to live according to the stupid rules of our society and against nature. So can we change any of this? I’m not sure, but that won’t stop me from trying. One of the first things that we have to do to change this is to admit the problem and to start talking about it openly, which is what I’ve done here.

This really puts the “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” bullshit in a whole new light, doesn’t it?

Shiny and Black

I launched a new design for my blog today after launching a re-design of my website weeks ago. Visually the new blog design matches more with my new website. I think this is a nice improvement on the older design while still using a similar layout. As usual I’ll still be doing some tweaking in the background in the coming days. Any feedback you have is very welcome, and if you notice issues or broken links, please let me know.