image dump (warning: disturbing/annoying objects present)

[Perelandra]

.
That's great. Your country sounds and looks very beautiful.
You can do lettuce and potatoes in containers too.

[Penguin]

I was shocked when I first heard that everymans rights dont really exist in most places - and in many places, the land owner can actually shoot you for trespassing!

I guess this cultural difference is one reason that many finnish immigrants to Canada and USA (mostly during early 1900s when Finland was very poor - my great-grandfather worked as a logger in Canada for couple years to get money) settled mostly in areas not liked by others, and in their own communities, where they could speak their own language. Ive also heard claimed that they got along better with the natives than the born-Americans.

And finns are somewhat quiet and seemingly grumpy, perhaps - a friend who was in Denver as an exchange student, said that people were asking if his ok all the time and wondering why he is so quiet. He said he started to get tired of that real quick

http://www.folkstreams.net/context,127

Cultural Tracks: Finnish Americans in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula


By Michael M. Loukinen

Professor Sociology

Northern Michigan University


Published in: A Sense of Place, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: Essays in Honor of the Career of William Vandament editors: Michael Marsden and Russell Magnaghi,

Copyright Northern Michigan University Press, 1996


Due to its remarkable geographical isolation, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the “UP,” has remained a well-kept secret. Surrounded on three sides by lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron, the UP had long remained inaccessible. After 1900, railroads finally forged economic and passenger links through Wisconsin, yet only when the seven-mile long Mackinac Bridge was completed in 1957, did a more sustained degree cultural contact occur between UP residents and the rest of the nation. It is a wilderness area still approximately 85 percent forested. People work in mining, forestry, commercial fishing, farming, tourist services, universities, hospitals, and clinics. New growth industries are Indian gambling casinos and prisons.

The UP has always been a tough place to make a stand. It is known for its endless winters with gloomy-gray skies, deep burrowing black flies, mosquitos, ticks, bone-breaking ice under a thin snow powder cover, and white-outs in the passing lanes. Childrens’ boots and mittens are put on and taken off in a cycle of perpetual motion that is rumored to give kindergarten teachers a regionally specific carpal-tunnel syndrome. Wages and population density have something in common: they are low. Some of the counties are so sparsely populated that they come close to Frederick Jackson Turner’s definition of the American Frontier that was supposed to have ended by 1890 (less than two persons per square mile). In virtually all UP counties, deer outnumber people. Nevertheless, those who stay, and many who had to leave to find careers, maintain a profound love for this place.

Strange things happen in the UP that make headlines elsewhere. An Ann Arbor newspaper reported during the week of June 16, 1996 that a tourist had to explain to an Avis clerk in Detroit that he shouldn’t be charged for the damage to his rental car because an eagle dropped an eight pound sucker that whomped his roof, leaving an impressive dent. That same week, a retiree stepped out of his morning shower to find a doe crashing through his picture window. Grabbing a butcher knife, he wrestled the dazed animal through the hallway into the living room where the craziness ended in a pool of blood. This land is different, and its people are different.

A distinctive feature of this region is that one of the smallest of the Euro-American ethnic groups in America is one of the largest ethnic groups in the UP. Americans reporting “Finnish Ancestry” in the 1990 U.S. Census totaled 658,870, about three-tenths of one percent the national population. In the UP, the corresponding figure was 51,214 persons, amounting to 16.3 percent of the UP’s population of 313,915 people. Hence, the UP has more than fifty times the proportion of Finnish Americans as the nation. Finnish Americans in the UP are concentrated primarily in the northern central and northwestern counties, starting from Marquette County westward along the southern shore of Lake Superior. As one moves west, the proportion of Finnish Americans increases such that in Marquette County 22.1 percent are Finnish Americans, in Baraga County it is 34.6 percent, and in Keweenaw county it increases to 49.9 percent.

These 51,214 Finnish Americans in the UP are actually nested in a regional “Sauna Belt” stretching from the north central UP around the western shore of Lake Superior to include another 8,177 Finnish Americans in the five northernmost counties in Wisconsin, and 41,533 in five counties of northwestern Minnesota. Historically, the UP has been and still is the nation’s primary settlement area for Finnish Americans, and they have left their cultural tracks on the region.

The folklorist, Richard Dorson, came to the UP in 1946 to interview ethnic storytellers and noticed the strong cultural presence of the Finns. He wrote in his classic Blood Stoppers and Bear Walkers,

The coming of the Finn has rocked the north woods country. He is today what the red man was two centuries ago, the exotic stranger from another world. In many ways the popular myths surrounding the Indian and the Finn run parallel. Both derive from a shadowy Mongolian stock - ‘just look at their raised cheek-bones and slanting eyes.’ Both possess supernatural stamina, strength, and tenacity. Both drink feverishly and fight barbarously. Both practice shamanistic magic and ritual, drawn from a deep well of folk belief. Both are secretive, clannish, inscrutable, and steadfast in their own peculiar social code. Even the Finnish and Indian epics are supposedly kin, for did not Longfellow model ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ on the form of the Kalevala?


But where the Indians lost, the Finns have won the Peninsula. Streaming into America after the Civil War, Finns today live in every northern state from Massachussets to Oregon, but cluster most thickly in Michigan and Minnesota. Michigan has more Finns than any other state, 63,671 and four-fifths of them live in the Upper Peninsula. (Dorson 1952:122)


Between 1880-1920 in rural Finland, life was difficult for the many landless people. Rapid population growth among the rural poor, technological and crop changes that reduced the need for farm labor, the breakdown of the traditional labor exchange and bartering system, and the periodic threat of starvation left only a few bad choices for them. One could: starve; work long hours for meager benefits in a sharecropping-like arrangement with a rich, often authoritarian farmer; join a movement to overthrow the exploiting system; migrate to a Finnish city where many were unemployed; or emigrate to America (Kolehmainen 1951:3-21). When they emigrated, they were often accused by religious and political authorities of being unpatriotic (Hoglund 1977). Hence, a considerable number of immigrants carried a deep, life-long resentment toward the rich, the church, and the state. Nevertheless, most emigrated with the intention of earning enough money to return to Finland to buy a farm. A farm signified more than a way to make a living but also a strong psychic attachment to landscapes blended with meadows, lakes, rivers, and forests.

The first traces of Finnish immigration to the UP began in 1864 when a copper mining consortium recruited a dozen or more Finns who had been working as miners in northern Norway. Many of these miners had been inspired by the charismatic botanist-ethnographer-preacher, Lars Levi Laestadius, who preached hard core remorse and personal repentance within the congregation and urged separation from the world of alcohol, card play, and fleshly mire. Descendants of this group are found throughout the UP, with their largest congregation being the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church in Hancock, Michigan.

These miners had an unusually high literacy rate, and they wrote numerous letters to friends and relatives in their rural villages in Finland telling of “American Gold” which precipitated a chain migration initially dominated by single males, and later including females and families. By 1880, an estimated 1,500 Finns lived in Keweenaw and Houghton counties, the northwestern most part of the UP. Two decades later this area would become America’s foremost copper mining region (Alanen 1975; Kaups 1975). Erkki Vuorenmaa, who was featured in the film FINNISH AMERICAN LIVES (Loukinen 1984), emigrated from Töyssä in 1910 and joked on his 92nd birthday in Ironwood, Michigan that he had thought that he “could just come here and shake dat money tree, shovel dat money and haul it home in a wheelbarrow.” Edward Loukinen, who left Kittalä in 1903, was so obsessed with the Amerika Fever that villagers had joked that when he emigrated, he had left behind a wake of broken spruce limbs.

Subsequent Finnish immigrants also settled in the copper mining communities, especially in and around the boom town of Calumet in Houghton County. Although originally named “Calumet” after the Native American peace pipe, to the Finnish immigrants the town became known as “pesapäikka” (nesting place). It was a place where they had first planted American roots, where they had felt at home, where they would later return while between jobs. Many Finnish immigrant institutions such as churches, temperance societies, Finnish language newspapers, mutual benefit organizations, athletic teams, and other cultural organizations began in the Calumet area.

Finnish immigrants in Calumet found themselves in a very complex multiethnic environment that included thirty-two different language groups in 1880. According to the United States Census of 1880, in Michigan's Houghton and Keweenaw counties, which circumscribed most of the copper mining activity at the time, 48.9 percent of the population were immigrants, of whom 5.8 percent were Finns. By 1900, in Houghton County, the area of most of the copper mining activity: 42.6 percent of the total population were immigrants, 25.7 percent of whom were Finns (Kaups 1974:58). Hence, in the last two decades of the 19th century, the Finnish immigrant population increased fivefold in these copper mining counties.

Reaction to the growing immigrant population was mixed: mining companies welcomed them as inexpensive workers, while the English-speaking Americanized population were feeling some anxiety. Anti-foreigner sentiments, such as “fearing race suicide,” appeared in the local English language newspapers, especially when immigrant workers joined labor unions and went on strike (Thurner 1984:21; Lankton 1991:212). Consider a comparison with contemporary American society. In 1900, almost half of the population in Michigan’s Copper Country were immigrants. Today, we are currently witnessing a wave of public hostility toward immigrants, and some immigrant bashing legislative initiatives, when U.S. Census estimates suggest that, in 1995, only 8.7 percent of the U.S. population were foreign born, with higher levels in California (25 percent), Florida (15 percent), and New York (16 percent). One can understand the anxiety felt by the Anglicized natives in the UP’s mining communities, and Finnish immigrants felt it. They knew that they were not universally welcomed in their new land.

During the latter half of the 19th century, Finnish immigrant settlement extended to three iron mining ranges in the UP, all within about seventy-five miles of Calumet. This included the Marquette Iron Range towns of Ishpeming, Negaunee, Palmer, Champion, Republic, Humboldt, and the port city of Marquette (north central UP). In the early 1870s, Finns migrated southwest to the Menominee Iron Range towns: Iron River, Crystal Falls, Amasa, Stambaugh, Quinnesec, Norway, and Iron Mountain. By 1885, Finns were moving into the Gogebic Range towns in the western UP along the Wisconsin boundary: Ironwood, Bessemer, and Wakefield.

Between 1864 and 1924, an estimated 350,000 Finns immigrated to America. The 1930 U.S. Census documents the first drop in the number of Finnish immigrants, reflecting the sharp declines in immigration after the 1924 immigration restriction laws were enacted, when Finnish immigration fell to a trickle. This decline is also caused by the increasing mortality rates of the aging immigrant population, the largest portion of whom emigrated as teenagers and young adults during the period 1880-1924.

Other than for the early immigration of a small number of Finnish miners recruited from Norway, mining had been totally unknown to Finnish immigrants. Virtually all historians acknowledge an ethnic hierarchy in the mines between 1870s to the 1950s (Puotinen 1977; Lankton 1991:211). Foremen, security guards, and the higher-paid miners were usually English speaking Americans or Cornishmen. Finns, Croations, Italians, Hungarians, and more recently arrived immigrants were more likely to work as “trammers,” the poorly paid human mules who manually loaded copper and iron ore into steel cars. The work was dangerous, dirty, and incredibly exhausting; and, it was all too frequently interrupted by cave-ins, explosions, and strikes. Violence begot violence; and threats produced counter-threats. Labor law during this period was “the law of the jungle” determined by the security guards’ club or the barrel of the gun. Mainstream labor unions, such as the A.F.of L. ignored miners’ requests for support because they were too busy organizing skilled workers in urban factories; hence the more radical Western Federation of Miners from Montana moved into the vacuum to organize the unskilled immigrant miners (Thurner 1984). As compared to other immigrants, an usually high percentage of Finnish immigrants supported radical leftist organizations.

Between l900 and l920, an extensive back-to-the-land migration occurred from UP mining towns into the cut-over lands of the forested interior. During this period, there also began a migration to copper mining areas of Arizona and Montana. UP Finns moved to major cities in the Midwest, especially Detroit, when in 1905 Henry Ford announced that he would pay workingmen $5 a day. In Detroit, a “Finn Town,” with a rich array of immigrant institutions, eventually developed in the inner city during 1920-1950 (Loukinen 1982).

The Michigan Copper Country in the strike of 1913-1914 fueled the migration to the countryside as thousands of the disenchanted Finnish miners, many of them blacklisted, swarmed into the cut over forest lands with hopes of clearing the enormous White Pine stumps and establishing a farm (Loukinen 1979). Recall that Finns initially emigrated with the idea of earning money to buy a farm. The world somehow seemed right close to the forests; they felt at home near lakes and rivers surrounded by trees. Land fever spread quickly among the miners. Railroad companies that had been given enormous tracts of land to build railroads, and lumber companies who had cut their timber wanted to dump their lands. Much of the topsoil was thin and rocky, yet slick Finnish-speaking real estate agents promoted its agricultural potential to the frustrated Finnish miners. The leading Finnish-American historian, A. William Hoglund, concluded that many of the Finnish immigrants who bought farms in the cut-over regions of the UP on the periphery of the mining towns were essentially deceived by a clever promotional campaign (Hoglund 1978).

Throughout the UP, Finnish immigrants carved farms out of the forests and built rural "language island" communities. They established dairy farms and worked as lumberjacks during the winter months. Some observers in Finland, writing in Finnish language newspapers in America, encouraged this back-to-the-land migration since it offered the only hope of saving the Finnish language and nationality (Kolehmainen and Hill l95l:42). They had recognized that homogeneous Finnish rural communities would serve as bastions of support for immigrant culture, as it had for Norwegian and German farm communities. The Finnish language was spoken regularly in the homes, churches, labor halls, and cooperative stores until the l950s (Loukinen 1980).

Many of these rural hamlets have Finnish names, indicating the preponderance of saunas next to farmhouses: Aura, Nisula, Kiva, Yalmer, Tapiola, Little Finland, Suomi, Toivola, Paavola, Elo, and Askel. Others have mostly Finnish residents but their names give no such clue: Pelkie, Baraga, Klingville, Arnheim, Chassell, Winona, Twin Lakes, Green, Mass City, Ontonogan, Trenary, Eben, Sundell, Rumley, Rock, and Chatham. Lake Linden, Traprock, Ahmeek, Traverse Bay, Mud Lake, Bootjack, Princess Point, Jacobsville, Rabbit Bay, Rudyard, Newberry, Sugar Island, and Neebish Island. These communities served as cultural oases sustaining Finnishness until the second, third, and fourth generation migrations to urban areas gradually diminished the presence of immigrant culture (Loukinen 1992).

By l920, 47 percent of the Finnish immigrants in the U.S. lived in rural communities (defined as those having less than 2,500 people); and, in l940, 61 percent of the Finnish immigrant farmers lived in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota (Hoglund l978:4). Finnish settlement in the remote mining regions in the Western Lake Superior Region, and their subsequent migration into adjacent farming communities, made them the “most rural” of all of the Euro-American immigrant groups, with the exception of the Anabaptist Amish and Mennonite ethnoreligious enclaves (Fishman 1966). What were some main sociological characteristics of the Finnish immigrant population in the Western Lake Superior Region? Most of the men went through a similar occupational pattern: (1) Their childhood was spent on an economically impoverished, rural, labor-intensive farm in Finland. (2) Grueling underground copper or iron mining work was their first job in America, for which they were unprepared from previous occupational experience. (3) Accustomed to living in culturally homogeneous rural villages in Finland, in UP mining towns, they found themselves suddenly thrust into an extremely multicultural environment. (4) They participated in a secondary migration to a rural community on the outskirts of a mining town and worked dreadfully long hours clearing fields in cut over forested areas, established small scale dairy farms. Men left home to work as lumberjacks or part-time miners during the winter months. (5) The immigrant community was split into a political-religious schism: Church Finns were pro-company, anti-union, while “Red Finns” were anti-clerical and pro-union. (6) Single and some married women in towns worked as domestic workers for wealthier families; they were slower than the men to learn the English language, and they raised large families. On the farms, women worked in the barns and fields and cared for even larger families. During the winter months, while their husbands were working in lumber camps, they milked and butchered cows, chopped wood, cooked, washed, cleaned, read to their children, and did nearly everything that was to be done on a small dairy farm covered with three feet of snow.

Depending upon the exact time period of measuring immigrants’ literacy, the Finns were the first or second “most literate” of all of the immigrants from Europe, surpassing and sometimes losing by a percentage point to eastern European Jews (Fishman 1966). Literacy (in Finnish) among these immigrants was 96 to 99 percent. One scholar estimates that by 1930, three-hundred fifty different Finnish language newspapers and periodicals were published in America (Hoglund 1979). Aside from this exceptionally high literacy rate, a large Finnish language print industry was due to the tendency for Finns to get into bitter religious and political internecine quarrels. Following a dispute, a faction would leave to start a new group and establish their own newspaper (Ollila 1975). Curiously, these “most literate” Finnish and Jewish immigrants also placed first and second, respectively, in the proportion of their group that supported the American Workers’ Communist Party (Kostianen 1978; Kivisto 1984).

Americanized neighbors thought the Finns were clannish and secretive. They were distinctive with respect to the different immigrant groups in the mining town environments in the UP insofar as they had found it far more difficult and less necessary (since there were so many of them) to learn to speak English. “After having lived in America for ten years, nearly all of the other immigrant miners had learned to speak English, but there were still 25.9 percent of the Finnish miners [in Calumet, MI] who were speaking only their ancestral language” (Loukinen1982:170). This linguistic distance from other European immigrants and assimilated Americans made them socially distant as well. Americanized English speakers disliked their clannishness, and this became a central feature of the stereotype of the Finns, who in turn, referred to all other immigrants with the words “toisenkielliset” (other tongues). Their language served to define themselves as different and separate from others.

This social distance from non-Finnish immigrants and English-speaking American-born persons contributed to the exceptionally high endogamy rate within the Finnish immigrant community. Although their are no studies of intermarriage of Finns in UP mining towns, other studies can inform us. An 1895 count of 176 married Finns in Duluth, Minnesota revealed only 46 (26.1 percent) were married to non-Finns (Kaups 1982:78). A study in New York City in 1921 reported a 92 percent endogamy rate among immigrants. A study in rural Minnesota in 1942 found an 87 percent rate (Nelson 1943). Using a sample of 1980 Census, “single Finnish ancestry” reports of respondents and their year of birth (before 1920) to infer that these persons were likely to have had both parents who were Finnish immigrants, it is estimated that there was an 84 percent immigrant endogamy rate in America (Stoller and Karni 1992). Community studies, combined with estimates based upon census ancestry reports, suggest an extremely high degree of endogamy among Finnish immigrants, higher than that of practically all other European immigrant groups. When a second ancestry was reported, it was usually of another Scandinavian group. Ten percent said they were Swedish and Finnish (Stoller and Karni 1992).

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/legacies/CT/200002819.html

Sisu and Creativity - The Essence of the Finnish Immigrants in Eastern Connecticut

Their yearning for open space and property led Finns to Connecticut, many settling in the Canterbury area and buying cheap and available land from Yankee farmers. Arriving in Connecticut with carpentry skills, enterprising Finnish men constructed social halls where immigrants could meet others of common background and language. A group called the Finnish American Education Association purchased a piece of land on Bacon Hill in Canterbury prior to 1924 on which they erected a social hall, followed by other halls in eastern Connecticut, including the Finnish Hall in Brooklyn, the Aura Hall in Voluntown, and the Finnish Hall in Waterford. All were centers for political discussion and activism, especially of the Socialist persuasion. When Russia invaded Finland in 1939, these halls were the centers for fund-raisers and collecting donated clothing and other supplies for the Finnish people.

Early Finns in Connecticut also built their own homes, each one with an essential sauna, demonstrating the Finnish saying: "It is possible to have a sauna without a house, but never a house without a sauna." Not only important to the Finns for bathing, saunas were also for socializing: the women and children used the sauna first, then retired to the house while the men used it.

Finnish sisu allowed the immigrants to farm very rocky land and pour cement foundations for their homes and other buildings by hand, always demonstrating talkoot, the spirit of cooperative effort that multiplied the hands and lightened the work. Many engaged in poultry farming, and made a decent living selling chickens and eggs; farming cooperatives were quickly established.

http://ethnicity.lib.mtu.edu/groups_Finns.html

Abstract
Finnish immigration to Michigan’s copper district grew to become the most populous ethnic group with an enduring cultural identity. Kuparisaari, “copper island,” went beyond the Finnish immigrant identification of the island that comprises the northern half of the Keweenaw Peninsula to a symbolic island of landing, an Ellis Island. Michigan’s Copper Country is recognized as focal to Finnish immigration to America, the birthplace of many Finnish-American institutions religious, political and educational. This “island” includes both settlements in growing industrial urban communities like the Quincy, Calumet & Hecla and Champion mining settlements, and cleared forestland for traditional Finnish agriculture as in Toivola, Tapiola, Elo, Pelkie, and Waasa; Finns settled north and south of the Portage Waterway that bisects the peninsula. Perhaps more than any other immigrant group, the Finnish communities in the district were bisected into divisions of politics and faith. The Finns who immigrated to the copper mining district held to a pietistic Laestadian (Apostolic) Lutheran belief, to the state-sanctioned Lutheranism of Finland (Suomi Synod) or rejected faith altogether. Within these divides of conscience of faith was a wide political spectrum: conservative to liberal adherents, resolute temperance advocates and active radical socialists. The social and economic conditions that emigrants left in northern Scandinavia and the Duchy of Finland influenced these allegiances and beliefs.

I remember, though a child
When frost stole the harvest.
We suffered hunger then,
There was no food to be blest.
Mother cried until her death,
Father sank, sorrowed,
Tears streaked his furrowed cheeks,
As bread in vain we begged and borrowed (Finn 1).

But failed crops were just one cause of famine and poverty. In the 1890’s, a Russian Prince Kropotkin described the Finnish tenant farmers’ desperate poverty, a poverty from rent and taxes:

He gnaws at his hard-as-stone rye-flour cake which he bakes twice a year; he has with it a morsel of fearfully salted cod and a drink of skimmed milk. How dare I talk to him of American machines (presumably for farming efficiency), when all that he can raise must be sold to pay rent and taxes (Finn 2)? (rock hard rye bread keeps for years!)

(In the village where my family has farmed for over 500 years, and relatives still farm the same land, in one house of 13 kids and parents and elderly, 12 kids and the mother died, all in one year, of malnourishment and disease - in the end on the 1800s.)

[OP ED]

I was shocked when I first heard that everymans rights dont really exist in most places - and in many places, the land owner can actually shoot you for trespassing!

(welcome to America)

be right back.

[OP ED]

Oh wow, I had such a nice dream that I felt good from the moment I woke up...

In the dream I was in a shop with my brother. While were at the cashiers, little baby chicklets, all yellow, puffy and squeaking, start to jump out of my brothers pockets. They jump on the floor and scamper around everywhere happily, while my bro smiles and shouts Oh noo, hey man help me catch them before they all get lost!

And then I kneel on the floor trying to scoop up the little soft ones, very carefully, and they feel so small and soft and furry and fun as they peck my fingers with their tiny beaks...And put them back in my brothers pockets, and my own...

Not a precog dream I think

all dreams are -coged, karma is both very simple and very complicated and runs forwards and backwards

Where is OP ED? Come on, I want to hear about his psychotronics

jesus nathan. i've only been gone a few minutes. ::kisses::

i can get to that in a second i guess. i'm only doing like seven things at once right now, so it shouldn't be that difficult to summarise.

...

i once had a similar dream, with bunnies, Penguin, back when i was still doing stage magic, about a performance either not working or working too well depending on how you want to look at it.

[OP ED]

There are a plethora of ways to reach any effect desired.
The choice is only about personal choice, preferences, character -
what works for you (in my - hopefully humble - opinion)
What practical value? It depends.
Why do I want to know? Why am I curious? Why do I seek so?
What is it that I seek?

practical value depends on what one's practition is.
i want to know everything.
i do not know why i am curious. i have theories. i have no theories as to why you, Penguin are curious. I accept it on faith, generally for what it is as i see it.

i have no idea what you're looking for. let me know if you find out.

I know--I just want to know OP ED's technique, partly because it sounds like it involves the possibility of electrocution, and danger = awesome. I mean I could build a home eeg machine: OpenEEG, or I could just sit on a cushion. etc.

heh.

awesome? (you have actually been electrocuted before, right?)

i always try to be extremely careful myself. see: the electrical engineering equivalent of ye olde carpenter's ruule number 1, a.k.a. "measure twice, cut once" which is to say, double check to make sure you do not kill yourself.

children do not try at home, etc.

in general, i reiterate that i do not neccessarily advocate my own actions for everyone.

specifics following...

[Penguin]

Those were actually rhetorical questions, so no need to answer them.
Of course Ill be delighted if you can...Was rather asking myself, aloud.

Yeah, plan thrice, and still manage to screw something up, curse hard, strike the knife in the table, wipe off the blood, and try again. Last time my bro, an electrician nonetheless, destroyed my volt meter by shorting it, and blew my main fuse...Pros at work, hell yeah! He has also managed to get a good jolt while installing wiring...From hand to hand too, the most dangerous after right leg to left hand (passes thru the heart).

Ive tried electrocution on a very small scale - using an old cars voltage converter and a small battery, convert the batterys voltage to several thousand, and hit the contacts with your finger. It was numb for a good while afterwards. Also not necessarily recommended

[OP ED]

i non-answered for the fun of it.

i've been zapped several times. occassionally it has even been my own fault. (sometimes we can blame it on god, though i'm still usually responsible for standing where i am)

never particularly enjoyable.

i especially hate electric fencing.

...

[nathan28]

i non-answered for the fun of it.

i've been zapped several times. occassionally it has even been my own fault. (sometimes we can blame it on god, though i'm still usually responsible for standing where i am)

never particularly enjoyable.

i especially hate electric fencing.

...

I grounded out a wall socket once and got a pretty firm zap across the right hand-right leg; it left me weak in the arm and leg for a few minutes. i imagine that's what being tasered is like different in degrees. Also have gotten zapped by christmas lights against bare skin, but that's not as painful as even a horsefly bite.

Be sure to answer eventually, otherwise this post is liable to inspire me to buy a light/sound machine (super-lame), or turn my armoire into a Faraday cage, or both.

[zhivkov]

[OP ED]

hello folks.

apologies.

i really thought i'd get back to this last nite. my girl got in a bit earlier than anticipated, so i had other things on my plate. (though the night largely consisted of me watching her smoke all my dope and then passing out on the couch, it was still good to see her again) i'll likely be gone again tonight, as we discussed seeing Coraline (again, for me, and somehow i'd imagine i'll end up paying for it, but whatever) around midnight as she'd mentioned it to me earlier in the week, and expressed increased interest after i acknowledged my enjoyment of the film.
(first i need more dope)

i'll be back here after lunch, though, and can probably catch up while she makes the rounds of her other associates she hasn't seen in months.

...

[OP ED]

lunch becomes dinner. i'd apologize for taking so long, but honestly, i'd be lying anyhow. i get all sorts of things from her that i can't get here(sex, drugs,etc), so it is always worthwhile to abandon the internet for a bit whenever the opportunity, er, arises.


anyhow. onward.

i non-answered for the fun of it.

i've been zapped several times. occassionally it has even been my own fault. (sometimes we can blame it on god, though i'm still usually responsible for standing where i am)

never particularly enjoyable.

i especially hate electric fencing.

...

I grounded out a wall socket once and got a pretty firm zap across the right hand-right leg; it left me weak in the arm and leg for a few minutes. i imagine that's what being tasered is like different in degrees. Also have gotten zapped by christmas lights against bare skin, but that's not as painful as even a horsefly bite.

Be sure to answer eventually, otherwise this post is liable to inspire me to buy a light/sound machine (super-lame), or turn my armoire into a Faraday cage, or both.

i wouldn't do that. not unless you really want to anyhow. superlame, i mean.

like i said, the electric fence was the worst. avoiding large animal. didn't notice electric strands in the barbed wire. worse, it was cycling so it didn't hit until i had both hands on it and was halfway through the fence. also, it was raining.

(lesson: look first)

fortunately the large animal was afraid of the fence. also i think it may have unnerved it to see a human take the fence and go through it. (i was already halfway so it was as easy as going back) burned my hands. muscles twitchy for days. should put a sign up.



there's a lot to catch up to, and i'll do my best to touch the majority of what i missed at least briefly before i run away again...

I had always wondered if those dream machines worked -I had heard of Puahrich before -but apparently my memory is faulty again (most likely) or I had not heard everything about him-well at any rate I need to go way back in the thread and start where I left awhile ago-best to all of you!Z that is interesting about being able to wear the cap cept while demonstrating -I did not realize Finland had laws such as these-I do remember something about the Swedes voting for internet spying or the like-but I have never been so out of touch with the news as I have been the last month or so -perhaps I even have that wrong

the dream machine does all sorts of things. it is really a fascinating piece of equipment, and the possibilities for subliminal work remains, at least in the non-MK-mainstream, largely untapped.

Hmm, maybe Ill make one myself...All youd need is a cage made of chicken wire, grounded to the central heating pipes...Ill need to look into this.
Has anyone of you made one?

Indeed. I've made more than one. Also big ones. You can ground it to almost anything actually...

there is an obvious synthesis of these two ideas which i've been working on for some time. ***

The Esoteric basis, rather than the physical ones alluded to above, has been, in fact, the non-subject of this thread to begin with. That is, the centrality in my religious philosophy of the need to learn to breakdown and buildup the split/dual-brain properties of our nervous system.

*** by which i mean an engineering transynthesis.

it is an hobby of mine.

Well, besides building a Faraday cage in my 400' sq. apartment (no central heat) and setting a strobelight outside of it, what's the practical injunction, i.e., what can one do? And is that really a divergence from the effects of say, kundalini yoga, or vipassana, or liber samekh?

the cage only blocks things. and NO amount of yoga and/or etc. is going to keep EM transmissions out. that is obvious i'm sure. if your living space is tight, i'd rather suggest going away from urbanized areas for scheduled vacations than building the cage, as rural areas minimize these transmissions without the need of a cage.

if you intend to build indoors, you may be better off using the newer-space-agey materials that large computer based companies use to keep transmissions from going through their walls. available commerically in a variety of forms and at ever-decreasing costs. it'd work as well, or better if you wallpaper with it. and it doesn't look like a chicken coop. works much better than a tinfoil hat for keeping out psychotronics.
(these transmissions would likely be better received by tinfoil actually, like your TeeVee is)

it is significant in its divergence from tradtional processes, such as yoga, in a number of ways, depending on which piece of psychotronics we're discussing.

in the case of the very basic binaural audios and Flicker-type dissociating machinery, i'd suggest, from my experience, that Yoga (&etc) largely UNDO the sort of things the machinery does. It breaks down consciousness. like any apparatus that has this function, its potential for abuse is massive.

my interest in these sorts of techniques are one reason i am at Uni studying neuroscience as i require liscensing and funding to conduct the next generation of experimentation i have in mind.


my ultimate goals with it are something i'm really not sure i'd wish to discuss here, really. for several reasons.

all of these little toys have always fascinated me, and a lot of future-mainstream-neuroscience can be hypothesized based on the mere existence of some of the government devices i've seen declassified in the last two decades. (they're so far ahead)


the potential of some of the technology, properly applied, actually changes the question somewhat. it isn't "what can it do?" so much as "what do you want to be able to do?".

basically, what i am getting at, is that for a long time now, armies and whatnots have been applying these bits of information in ways that can deconstruct and hamper extraordinary consciousness. i am implying that it could easily be used to do the opposite and that most of the actual technology already exists, just no one has assembled it yet.

televisons could be made that would make you smarter, for starters.

[without even having to bind demons to their tubes]



(i'll build one for you if you got 1.6 million laying around)

what parts of theory are you interested in, in particular, nathan/Penguin, or is it just a general interest, because there really is way too much available information today for me to go into details on everything...

(more later)

[nathan28]

okay, before I disappear into a cloud of smoke.

I'm not a big fan of psychotronics. Certain drugs, and, additionally and like I always mention, yoga (and, for that matter, I always found breathing techniques more potent than hemisync stuff), makes more sense to me. But I would love to hear more, because it sounds like you have something innovative in mind.

So. What is the ends of what you are trying to do? From what I gather from an older image-heavy post of yours you want to unify the nervous system so that the two "channels" are brought into one, though that clearly is quite unsophisticated a synopsis and possibly a total misunderstanding. You made some comment about unifying the pillars of judgment and mercy, which produces 7, not 10 sephira, just like some yogic schools say. There was some bit about diurnal cycles you had somewhere, as well, that I couldn't decode.

So, what is the ends, then, because that unification, if i'm at all right in my understanding (and i'm likely not), is only a "what", not a "why" or "how"?

and can you point to one or two examples of the so-far-ahead declassified gov't tech?

and how does can my TV make me smarter? Will it cure cancer? got any suggestions for an old stereo deck before it gets re-fitted as a woo-woo radionics box? those are serious questions.

[OP ED]

fair.

i'm much too intoxicated at present to give you a serious answer tonight, so you'll have to wait till tomorrow.

[took me three tries to type that sentence and i'm still not sure everything is spelled correctly]

[two tries for that sentence, you see my problem]

:: ::

[Penguin]

Mm. Ill get back to this later, need to get out for a while now. Im really interested, in general..
I just happened to bump into a person yesterday in a bar, friend of a friend, who told he has trouble sleeping in cities due to the EM radiation - also does not use a cell phone..I suggested covering the bedroom with some conductive film, and grounding it..Do you have any specific manufacturer in mind, perhaps...Reynolds / 3M I think makes conductive plastic films at least, but if you have some better option in mind, do tell..

More later,
Love

[OP ED]