Are features offered by Dish TV making its Satellite TV service a valuable alternative? With interactive tools, guides, and myriad options made available to every subscriber, the offerings made by Dish TV cannot be surpassed. Moreover, the affordability of Dish TV’s services seems almost criminal when one considers all of the incredible options made available to them with Dish TV’s amazing features! In fact, it is no surprise that Dish TV has been deemed the number one Satellite TV company in terms of customer service by J.D. Power and Associates.

First, Dish TV provides a Satellite TV installation screen that puts the subscriber in control of the installation process. A Dish TV subscriber can change satellite transponders, and detect the strength of their satellite signal with a satellite signal meter. Moreover, the satellite signal meter is accompanied by a special audio sound that lets the subscriber know when they have aligned their Satellite TV dish properly&ndashleaving no question that the installation has been performed correctly. Finally, the satellite signal meter allows subscribers to easily determine if there is a problem with their satellite signal and to maintain the signal by removing any obstructions and retesting the signal.

Next, every single Satellite TV program broadcast through Dish TV services is accompanied with a complete description of the program. With a click of the Dish TV remote, subscribers are provided with a brief description of the current program, the time the programs starts and ends, the date the program is being aired, a parental rating of the program and a stars critique of the program in question. What’s more, the program information can be viewed with a white background or a clear background, whichever the subscriber prefers at the moment.

Additionally, Dish TV services offer Dish TV Interactive. Dish TV Interactive gives subscribers access to news, sports, horoscopes, games, instant weather reports for the local area, account information, access to special shopping offers and myriad miscellaneous entertainment including Karaoke and Rapzit. Along with the Dish TV Interactive features, subscribers are free to order Pay-Per-View films anytime they desire and Pay-Per-View shows can, in some instances, be ordered well in advance of the event.

With all of the features listed above, it is certainly surprising to discover that there are even more fantastic Dish TV services available. In fact, when subscribers first receive Dish TV services they will find themselves pleasantly surprised&ndashDish TV often offers installation promotions and a typical promotion will include a free Satellite TV dish and anywhere from 1 to 4 satellite receivers! What does this mean for the subscriber? It means Satellite TV access in up to 4 rooms of their home!

The channel selection offered to subscribers, of course, depends upon the programming they have purchased. Nonetheless, what is made available to the subscriber is a diverse array of programming. Packages are offered that include America’s Top 60, America’s Top 120, America’s Top 180, and the America’s Everything Pak. Adult programming can also be ordered for additional fees.

The America’s Everything Pak includes all of the programs offering in any other package along with all of the Cinemax, Starz! Showtime and HBO channels. So, if a subscriber wants the complete Dish TV experience, the America’s Everything Pak is definitely the package to order.

In essence, Dish TV offers diverse programming. Subscribers can choose from 10 Showtime stations, 8 Starz! Stations, 8 HBO offerings, and 5 Cinemax offerings. Moreover, sports lovers will truly get a kick out of Dish TV’s features&ndasha selection of sports programming is provided by Dish TV that can’t be beat. You can watch the Multi Regional Sports channels, The Outdoor Channel, MLB Extra Innings, ESPN College Grand Slam, NBA League Pass, ESPN Game Plan, NHL Center Ice, MLS Direct Kick, and English Premier League programming. Finally, those individuals that prefer adult programming can easily get access to ECLIPSE, The Erotic Network, Extasy, Hot Zone and Play boy programming, respectively.

Along with all of the fantastic Satellite TV channels, Dish TV subscribers also get access to Sirius satellite radio channels. Music lovers can listen to theme orient music like New Age, Pop, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, Jazz, Rap, Classic Rock, Hard Rock, Christian Music, and more. It certainly appears that Dish TV goes beyond the call of customer service to offer subscribers Satellite TV and radio entertainment.

Did you know that Dish TV is now offering Internet services? In conjunction with Earthlink, Dish TV is now providing high-speed Internet access. For as little as 19.95 per month, subscribers can get high-speed Internet service, Earthlink DSL service, DSL equipment and free activation. Thus, for those dialup users formerly without high-speed Internet connection, Dish TV has created an additional service for you! Downloads are significantly faster with Dish TV’s Internet services and Dish TV offers all of the software applications and security features that the top Internet Service Providers offer.

Alternatively, the quality of customer service supplied by Dish TV cannot be overstated. Dish TV representatives are available every day of the week, 24 hours a day either by phone or a subscriber can use the customer support option provide by Dish TV Interactive. Either way, friendly service is readily available. Furthermore, if a subscriber has any difficulties whatsoever using their Satellite TV equipment, there are technicians readily available to assist them. Finally, calling Dish TV at any time is always free.

What is clear is that Dish TV strives to provide outstanding customer service. In every way possible, Dish TV offers features that make Satellite TV entertainment an enjoyable experience for the viewer. With fantastic features, programming and services, it is clear that Dish TV will remain one of the leading companies in Satellite TV service for many years to come. Subscribing to Dish TV’s offerings is as easy as making one toll free phone call. A free installation can be planned for you and a skilled technician will come to your home and install your service for free. Once the service is installed, the technician will show you the ropes and you will be well on your way to enjoying the same features supplied to every Dish TV subscriber: unbelievable features that you will thoroughly enjoy for many months to come. How’s that for truly fantastic customer service?

If you have limited mobility, or if you are caring for someone with limited mobility, then perhaps a wheelchair lift would be a benefit. Wheelchair lifts are ideal for people who need to reach higher areas, for instance in a two-story home. Wheelchair lifts come in different types for different uses.

The two most commonly used types are the stair wheelchair lift and the van or automobile wheelchair lift. The stair wheelchair lift is used in the home to transport the user to a higher floor. They aid in the climbing of stairs by transporting the user and the wheelchair up and down the stairs. Stair lifts are also used in this aspect, however, stair lifts do not allow for the wheelchair to be moved. Wheelchair lifts are more suited for people constrained to a wheelchair because they allow the user to move up and down the stairs without help, and do not require that the user be removed from the wheelchair.

Automobile wheelchair lifts are used to aid in getting the person into a vehicle, normally a van, although the lift can be fitted to most vehicles, whether it is a van, truck, or car. These lifts help the individual into the vehicle without removing them from their wheelchair. It makes it much easier for the person to travel, because they are not constantly being lifted and placed in and out of their wheelchair. It also helps the caregivers, simply because they do not need to lift and carry the individual.

Having a wheelchair lift means more mobility and independence. Not having to be lifted and carried upstairs, or lifted and placed into vehicles helps handicapped people feel that they have more freedom to come and go as they please. Needing to go to an upstairs room means not waiting for someone to have time to lift and carry them upstairs. Not to mention the ease of not having to fold the wheelchair and carry it upstairs also.

Determining what use you have for it is the main factor when choosing the type of wheelchair lift that you need, although some people have lifts for their homes and their vehicles. This simply makes the every day tasks easier, and gives the handicapped individual more freedom and more mobility. Having more independence can mean the difference between feeling like a burden and living life to its fullest.

Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on January 7. Their “old new year” is a week later, on January 14. It is all Julius Caesar’s fault …

The Romans sometimes neglected to introduce an extra month every two years to amortize the difference between their lunar calendar and the natural solar year. Julius Caesar decreed that the year 46 BC should have 445 days (some historians implausibly say: 443 days) in order to bridge the yawning discrepancy that accumulated over the preceding seven centuries. It was aptly titled the “Year of Confusion”.

To “reset” the calendar, Julius Caesar affixed the New Year on January 1 (the day the Senate traditionally convened) and added a day or two to a few months.

He thus gave rise to the Julian Calendar, a latter day rendition of the Aristarchus calendar from 239 BC. After his assassination, the month of Quintilis was renamed Julius (July) in his honor.

The Julian calendar estimated the length of the natural solar year (the time it takes for the earth to make one orbit of the sun) to be 365 days and 6 hours. Every fourth year the extra six hours were collected and added as an extra day to the year, creating a leap year of 366 days.

But the calendar’s underlying estimate was off by 11 minutes and 14 seconds. It was longer than the natural solar year. The extra minutes accumulated to one whole day. By 325 AD, the Spring Equinox was arriving on March 21st on the Julian Calendar - instead of March 25.

The First Ecumenical Council met in Nicea in 325 and determined that the date to celebrate Pascha was on the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the Spring Equinox on March 21st. In other words, it enshrined the Julian calendar’s aberration.

Thus, by 1582, the Spring Equinox was arriving on March 11. Half-hearted measures by Popes Paul III and Pius V failed to restore the essential correspondence between the calendar and the seasons.

Pope Gregory XIII decided - in his tenth year in office - to drop 3 leap years every 400 years by specifying that any year whose number ended with 00 must also be evenly divisible by 400 in order to have a 29-day February.

This would have the effect of bringing the Julian calendar closer to the natural length of the solar year - though an error of 26 seconds per year would still remain.

To calibrate the Julian calendar with the Gregorian one and to move the Spring Equinox back to March 21, 10 days were dropped from the civil calendar in October 1582. Thursday, October 4 was followed by Friday, October 15. People rioted in the streets throughout Europe, convinced that they have been robbed of 10 days.

But this was merely a convenient fiction. The Spring Equinox in the Gregorian calendar was, indeed, celebrated on March 21 in perpetuity. But, according to the Julian calendar, in the 17th century it arrived on March 11th, in the 18th century on March 10th, in the 19th century on March 9th, and in the 20th century on March 8th - 13 days earlier that even the erroneous date adopted by the Nicea Council.

The Gregorian calendar was controversial in Protestant countries. Britain and its colonies adopted it only in 1752. They had to drop 11 days from the civil calendar and move the official new year from March 25 to January 1. For centuries, dates followed by OS (”Old Style”) were according to the Julian calendar and dates followed by NS (”New Style”) according to the Gregorian one. Sweden adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1753, Japan in 1873, Egypt in 1875, Eastern Europe between 1912 to 1919 and Turkey in 1927. In Russia it was decreed by the (bourgeois) revolutionaries that thirteen days would be omitted from the calendar, the day following January 31, 1918 becoming February 14, 1918.

It was Pope Pius X who, in 1910, changed the beginning of the ecclesiastical year from Christmas Day to January 1, effective from 1911 onwards.

All that time, the Christian Orthodox continued to observe the Julian calendar. In 1923, a Conference of Orthodox Churches in Constantinople reduced the number of leap years every 900 years and attained a discrepancy between the calendar and the natural solar year of merely 2.2 seconds per year.

According to this calendar, the Spring Equinox will regress by one day every 40,000 years.

They, too, had to drop 13 days to bring the Spring Equinox back to March 21st. Hence the gap between December 25 (Gregorian calendar) and January 7 (revised Julian-Orthodox calendar).

What shape are ball bearings? They are shaped like a ball, as everyone knows, right?

The funny thing about what everyone knows is that everyone can be wrong. For instance, everybody thinks that the America’s Cup is an ocean-sailing race, and yet the Swiss managed to win the Cup. For those readers who are geographically-challenged, Switzerland is a land-locked country comprised entirely of mountains.

What does this have to do with ball bearings. Very little, I suspect, but balls have very little to do with ball bearings, either. Ball bearings look more like hula hoops. But don’t try using them for that &ndash you will find them inconveniently heavy and painfully small.

You can view a picture of a ball bearing in the middle of this ball bearing supplier’s page.

So what are those stunted metal tube donuts called ball bearings for anyway? Are they used as a spare wheel? Do they hold in evil shop-floor spirits? No, they help things move more efficiently. In an early demonstration of bearing usage, three ladies pulled a locomotive (It was just a demonstration, not a career development).

Many bearings look very similar, whether they are ball bearings, roller bearings or other bearings. What?! Other bearings?

What is a ball bearing, anyway?

Ball bearings are formed with an outer ring, an inner ring, a cage or a retainer inside, and a rolling element inside, typically a ball (which is why they are called ball bearings). Roller bearings are formed using a roller instead of a ball, which is why they are called roller bearings (Yes, finally something that makes sense!). Other bearings look just like metal tubes, called plain bearings or bush bearings. They look like sawed off pipe or tube (something my metal tube bending client would be turning into architecturally glamorous structural supports).

The principle of bearings is the same principle behind the wheel: things move better by rolling than by sliding. They are called “bearings” because they bear the weight of the object, such as an inline skate or the head of dentist’s drill, allowing the object to glide over them with incredible ease and speed. Unlike wheels, they don’t turn on an axel; they turn on themselves.

You can see this in action with some great cut-away pictures of bearings.

The balls or rollers spin on themselves inside the bearing, reducing friction for the machine parts attached to them. It’s much neater than using a bucket of oil, especially in dental equipment, and significantly more reliable than hamsters on a wheel.

Once upon a time, all bearings were metal &ndash like a metal tube or pipe with metal balls stuck inside. These days, more and more are made of ceramic or even plastic (like everything else in this world!).

If you are still confused about why ball bearings are not shaped like balls, just remember that you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway. And you can even try sailing your sea-craft through the Swiss Alps. But don’t try playing a game of one-on one basketbearing.

As modern society searches around for alternative energy sources, wind farms are getting mention. There are, however, limitations regarding wind farms as major energy alternatives.

Wind Farms &ndash Limitations as Energy Platforms

Wind power is an enticing energy platform compared to fossil fuels. The process works by using the inherent energy in wind as a method for producing electricity. The actual methodology is much like hydropower, but with wind used in place of water. Wind turbines catch the wind, which turns their blades. This turning motion cranks a generator that produces electricity. The electricity is stored in batteries or fed into the electrical grid of a utility. Walla, you have power!

Using wind power for localized needs has been around for a long time. The Persians are believed to be the first to use it with the purpose being to turn grain grinding stones. In modern times, the sole purpose is to generate electricity. On a large scale, this means wind farms.

Wind farms are simply large collections of wind turbines in a defined area. If you have ever driven east out of San Francisco, you have seen the wind farm along the freeway. While it is both intoxicating and a pollution free source of electricity, a wind farm has definite limitations.

The biggest limitation of wind farms is the electricity produced. Simply put, they do not produce massive amounts, certainly not on the scale needed in most cities in industrialized nations. Obviously, each location is different, but wind is simply not a constant occurrence in most places. Even when it is, the number of turbines required to produce enough energy for a city is mind boggling. This, of course, leads to a second limitation.

Wind farms need to cover a lot of physical space to produce large amounts of electricity. In many industrialized countries, space is at a premium. As a result, the sheer cost of purchasing land for wind farms is prohibitive. This issue, however, is losing some of its grit as offshore wind farms are becoming more prevalent.

To some, one of the limitations of wind farms is they are eyesores. Personally, I think they are mesmerizing and have an artistic appearance. Others, however, definitely do not agree. The Cape Wind offshore wind farm project has met with massive resistance for just this reason.

The limitations of wind farms are fairly significant at this point in time. As technology and new approaches, such as offshore wind farms, come to the forefront, these problems may fall the wayside.

I have always been a naturally curious person. Ever since I was a little girl, I have always been full of questions. My mother and father frequently tell me and my family stories about how they could never make it through a car ride, a grocery trip or almost anything without me stopping them at least once with a question. For me, everything holds a little bit of mystery and magic. One of the biggest things that is mysterious to me is marine life.

I became interested in marine life upon my family’s first vacation to Florida during my elementary years. We visited a couple of large aquariums and zoos that contained a lot of marine life and I was hooked. I didn’t know such a thing as marine life existed before that trip to Florida, but my curiosity couldn’t be stopped from that day on. I asked my parents for books about marine life, for stuffed marine life animals, and for trips to the zoo as often as I had the opportunity.

I think the main thing that first intrigud me about marine life is the fact that is takes place mostly under water. Marine life is a totally different kind of life, and that’s why I am full of wonder about it. When it came time for me to choose a college and to prepare for a career, the choice was obvious. I went to university in Florida and studied Marine Biology. I chose this subject because it meant that I got to spent four years studying marine life. I couldn’t be happier.

Even if you have no desire to study marine life for a profession, there are many ways for you to curb or entice your curiousity about it. Get online and see what you can learn or get off to your local library and check out a few books or magazines about marine life. See what can be learned and see if you can even narrow your interest further to include a particular variety of marine life.

If you are full of mysterious wonder about marine life, one of the best things you can do is to make a visit to an aquarium that is full of marine life. There is nothing like seeing your favorite species of marine life live. So make plans to explore the wonders of marine life on your next vacation. You’ll be so glad you did.

One of the most important symptoms of pathological narcissism (the Narcissistic Personality Disorder) is grandiosity. Grandiose fantasies (megalomaniac delusions of grandeur) permeate every aspect of the narcissist’s personality. They are the reason that the narcissist feels entitled to special treatment which is typically incommensurate with his real accomplishments. The Grandiosity Gap is the abyss between the narcissist’s self-image (as reified by his False Self) and reality.

When Narcissistic Supply is deficient, the narcissist de-compensates and acts out in a variety of ways. Narcissists often experience psychotic micro-episodes during therapy and when they suffer narcissistic injuries in a life crisis. But can the narcissist “go over the edge”? Do narcissists ever become psychotic?

Some terminology first:

The narrowest definition of psychosis, according to the DSM-IV-TR, is “restricted to delusions or prominent hallucinations, with the hallucinations occurring in the absence of insight into their pathological nature”.

And what are delusions and hallucinations?

A delusion is “a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary”.

A hallucination is a “sensory perception that has the compelling sense of reality of a true perception but that occurs without external stimulation of the relevant sensory organ”.

Granted, the narcissist’s hold on reality is tenuous (narcissists sometimes fail the reality test). Admittedly, narcissists often seem to believe in their own confabulations. They are unaware of the pathological nature and origin of their self-delusions and are, thus, technically delusional (though they rarely suffer from hallucinations, disorganised speech, or disorganised or catatonic behaviour). In the strictest sense of the word, narcissists appear to be psychotic.

But, actually, they are not. There is a qualitative difference between benign (though well-entrenched) self-deception or even malignant con-artistry &ndash and “losing it”.

Pathological narcissism should not be construed as a form of psychosis because:

The narcissists is usually fully aware of the difference between true and false, real and make-belief, the invented and the extant, right and wrong. The narcissist consciously chooses to adopt one version of the events, an aggrandising narrative, a fairy-tale existence, a “what-if” counterfactual life. He is emotionally invested in his personal myth. The narcissist feels better as fiction than as fact &ndash but he never loses sight of the fact that it is all just fiction.

Throughout, the narcissist is in full control of his faculties, cognisant of his choices, and goal-orientated. His behaviour is intentional and directional. He is a manipulator and his delusions are in the service of his stratagems. Hence his chameleon-like ability to change guises, his conduct, and his convictions on a dime.

Narcissistic delusions rarely persist in the face of blanket opposition and reams of evidence to the contrary. The narcissist usually tries to convert his social milieu to his point of view. He attempts to condition his nearest and dearest to positively reinforce his delusional False Self. But, if he fails, he modifies his profile on the fly. He “plays it by ear”. His False Self is extemporaneous &ndash a perpetual work of art, permanently reconstructed in a reiterative process designed around intricate and complex feedback loops.

Though the narcissistic personality is rigid &ndash its content is always in flux. Narcissists forever re-invent themselves, adapt their consumption of Narcissistic Supply to the “marketplace”, attuned to the needs of their “suppliers”. Like the performers that they are, they resonate with their “audience”, giving it what it expects and wants. They are efficient instruments for the extraction and consumption of human reactions.

As a result of this interminable process of fine tuning, narcissists have no loyalties, no values, no doctrines, no beliefs, no affiliations, and no convictions. Their only constraint is their addiction to human attention, positive or negative.

Psychotics, by comparison, are fixated on a certain view of the world and of their place in it. They ignore any and all information that might challenge their delusions. Gradually, they retreat into the inner recesses of their tormented mind and become dysfunctional.

Narcissists can’t afford to shut out the world because they so heavily depend on it for the regulation of their labile sense of self-worth. Owing to this dependence, they are hypersensitive and hypervigilant, alert to every bit of new data. They are continuously busy rearranging their self-delusions to incorporate new information in an ego-syntonic manner.

This is why the Narcissistic Personality Disorder is insufficient grounds for claiming a “diminished capacity” (insanity) defence. Narcissists are never divorced from reality &ndash they crave it, and need it, and consume it in order to maintain the precarious balance of their disorganised, borderline-psychotic personality. All narcissists, even the freakiest ones, can tell right from wrong, act with intent, and are in full control of their faculties and actions.

“The more I became interested in psychoanalysis, the more I saw it as a road to the same kind of broad and deep understanding of human nature that writers possess.”

Anna Freud

Towards the end of the 19th century, the new discipline of psychology became entrenched in both Europe and America. The study of the human mind, hitherto a preserve of philosophers and theologians, became a legitimate subject of scientific (some would say, pseudo-scientific) scrutiny.

The Structuralists - Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Bradford Titchener - embarked on a fashionable search for the “atoms” of consciousness: physical sensations, affections or feelings, and images (in both memories and dreams). Functionalists, headed by William James and, later, James Angell and John Dewey - derided the idea of a “pure”, elemental sensation. They introduced the concept of mental association. Experience uses associations to alter the nervous system, they hypothesized.

Freud revolutionized the field (though, at first, his reputation was limited to the German-speaking parts of the dying Habsburg Empire). He dispensed with the unitary nature of the psyche and proposed instead a trichotomy, a tripartite or trilateral model (the id, ego, and superego). He suggested that our natural state is conflict, that anxiety and tension are more prevalent than harmony. Equilibrium (compromise formation) is achieved by constantly investing mental energy. Hence “psychodynamics”.

Most of our existence is unconscious, Freud theorized. The conscious is but the tip of an ever-increasing iceberg. He introduced the concepts of libido and Thanatos (the life and death forces), instincts (Triebe, or “drives”, in German) or drives, the somatic-erotogenic phases of psychic (personality) development, trauma and fixation, manifest and latent content (in dreams). Even his intellectual adversaries used this vocabulary, often infused with new meanings.

The psychotherapy he invented, based on his insights, was less formidable. Many of its tenets and procedures have been discarded early on, even by its own proponents and practitioners. The rule of abstinence (the therapist as a blank and hidden screen upon which the patient projects or transfers his repressed emotions), free association as the exclusive technique used to gain access to and unlock the unconscious, dream interpretation with the mandatory latent and forbidden content symbolically transformed into the manifest - have all literally vanished within the first decades of practice.

Other postulates - most notably transference and counter-transference, ambivalence, resistance, regression, anxiety, and conversion symptoms - have survived to become cornerstones of modern therapeutic modalities, whatever their origin. So did, in various disguises, the idea that there is a clear path leading from unconscious (or conscious) conflict to signal anxiety, to repression, and to symptom formation (be it neuroses, rooted in current deprivation, or psychoneuroses, the outcomes of childhood conflicts). The existence of anxiety-preventing defense mechanisms is also widely accepted.

Freud’s initial obsession with sex as the sole driver of psychic exchange and evolution has earned him derision and diatribe aplenty. Clearly, a child of the repressed sexuality of Victorian times and the Viennese middle-class, he was fascinated with perversions and fantasies. The Oedipus and Electra complexes are reflections of these fixations. But their origin in Freud’s own psychopathologies does not render them less revolutionary. Even a century later, child sexuality and incest fantasies are more or less taboo topics of serious study and discussion.

Ernst Kris said in 1947 that Psychoanalysis is:

“…(N)othing but human behavior considered from the standpoint of conflict. It is the picture of the mind divided against itself with attendant anxiety and other dysphoric effects, with adaptive and maladaptive defensive and coping strategies, and with symptomatic behaviors when the defense fail.”

But Psychoanalysis is more than a theory of the mind. It is also a theory of the body and of the personality and of society. It is a Social Sciences Theory of Everything. It is a bold - and highly literate - attempt to tackle the psychophysical problem and the Cartesian body versus mind conundrum. Freud himself noted that the unconscious has both physiological (instinct) and mental (drive) aspects. He wrote:

“(The unconscious is) a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the physical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind” (Standard Edition Volume XIV).

Psychoanalysis is, in many ways, the application of Darwin’s theory of evolution in psychology and sociology. Survival is transformed into narcissism and the reproductive instincts assume the garb of the Freudian sex drive. But Freud went a daring step forward by suggesting that social structures and strictures (internalized as the superego) are concerned mainly with the repression and redirection of natural instincts. Signs and symbols replace reality and all manner of substitutes (such as money) stand in for primary objects in our early formative years.

To experience our true selves and to fulfill our wishes, we resort to Phantasies (e.g., dreams, “screen memories”) where imagery and irrational narratives - displaced, condensed, rendered visually, revised to produce coherence, and censored to protect us from sleep disturbances - represent our suppressed desires. Current neuroscience tends to refute this “dreamwork” conjecture but its value is not to be found in its veracity (or lack thereof).

These musings about dreams, slips of tongue, forgetfulness, the psychopathology of everyday life, and associations were important because they were the first attempt at deconstruction, the first in-depth insight into human activities such as art, myth-making, propaganda, politics, business, and warfare, and the first coherent explanation of the convergence of the aesthetic with the “ethic” (i.e., the socially acceptable and condoned). Ironically, Freud’s contributions to cultural studies may far outlast his “scientific” “theory” of the mind.

It is ironic that Freud, a medical doctor (neurologist), the author of a “Project for a Scientific Psychology”, should be so chastised by scientists in general and neuroscientists in particular. Psychoanalysis used to be practiced only by psychiatrists. But we live at an age when mental disorders are thought to have physiological-chemical-genetic origins. All psychological theories and talk therapies are disparaged by “hard” scientists.

Still, the pendulum had swung both ways many times before. Hippocrates ascribed mental afflictions to a balance of bodily humors (blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile) that is out of kilt. So did Galen, Bartholomeus Anglicus, Johan Weyer (1515-88). Paracelsus (1491-1541), and Thomas Willis, who attributed psychological disorders to a functional “fault of the brain”.

The tide turned with Robert Burton who wrote “Anatomy of Melancholy” and published it in 1621. He forcefully propounded the theory that psychic problems are the sad outcomes of poverty, fear, and solitude.

A century later, Francis Gall (1758-1828) and Spurzheim (1776-1832) traced mental disorders to lesions of specific areas of the brain, the forerunner of the now-discredited discipline of phrenology. The logical chain was simple: the brain is the organ of the mind, thus, various faculties can be traced to its parts.

Morel, in 1809, proposed a compromise which has since ruled the discourse. The propensities for psychological dysfunctions, he suggested, are inherited but triggered by adverse environmental conditions. A Lamarckist, he was convinced that acquired mental illnesses are handed down the generations. Esquirol concurred in 1845 as did Henry Maudsley in 1879 and Adolf Meyer soon thereafter. Heredity predisposes one to suffer from psychic malaise but psychological and “moral” (social) causes precipitate it.

And, yet, the debate was and is far from over. Wilhelm Greisinger published “The Pathology and Therapy of Mental Disorders” in 1845. In it he traced their etiology to “neuropathologies”, physical disorders of the brain. He allowed for heredity and the environment to play their parts, though. He was also the first to point out the importance of one’s experiences in one’s first years of life.

Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist by training, claimed to have cured hysteria with hypnosis. But despite this demonstration of non-physiological intervention, he insisted that hysteroid symptoms were manifestations of brain dysfunction. Weir Mitchell coined the term “neurasthenia” to describe an exhaustion of the nervous system (depression). Pierre Janet discussed the variations in the strength of the nervous activity and said that they explained the narrowing field of consciousness (whatever that meant).

None of these “nervous” speculations was supported by scientific, experimental evidence. Both sides of the debate confined themselves to philosophizing and ruminating. Freud was actually among the first to base a theory on actual clinical observations. Gradually, though, his work - buttressed by the concept of sublimation - became increasingly metaphysical. Its conceptual pillars came to resemble Bergson’s

Thought experiments (Gedankenexperimenten) are “facts” in the sense that they have a “real life” correlate in the form of electrochemical activity in the brain. But it is quite obvious that they do not relate to facts “out there”. They are not true statements.

But do they lack truth because they do not relate to facts? How are Truth and Fact interrelated?

One answer is that Truth pertains to the possibility that an event will occur. If true &ndash it must occur and if false &ndash it cannot occur. This is a binary world of extreme existential conditions. Must all possible events occur? Of course not. If they do not occur would they still be true? Must a statement have a real life correlate to be true?

Instinctively, the answer is yes. We cannot conceive of a thought divorced from brainwaves. A statement which remains a mere potential seems to exist only in the nether land between truth and falsity. It becomes true only by materializing, by occurring, by matching up with real life. If we could prove that it will never do so, we would have felt justified in classifying it as false. This is the outgrowth of millennia of concrete, Aristotelian logic. Logical statements talk about the world and, therefore, if a statement cannot be shown to relate directly to the world, it is not true.

This approach, however, is the outcome of some underlying assumptions:

First, that the world is finite and also close to its end. To say that something that did not happen cannot be true is to say that it will never happen (i.e., to say that time and space &ndash the world &ndash are finite and are about to end momentarily).

Second, truth and falsity are assumed to be mutually exclusive. Quantum and fuzzy logics have long laid this one to rest. There are real world situations that are both true and not-true. A particle can “be” in two places at the same time. This fuzzy logic is incompatible with our daily experiences but if there is anything that we have learnt from physics in the last seven decades it is that the world is incompatible with our daily experiences.

The third assumption is that the psychic realm is but a subset of the material one. We are membranes with a very particular hole-size. We filter through only well defined types of experiences, are equipped with limited (and evolutionarily biased) senses, programmed in a way which tends to sustain us until we die. We are not neutral, objective observers. Actually, the very concept of observer is disputable &ndash as modern physics, on the one hand and Eastern philosophy, on the other hand, have shown.

Imagine that a mad scientist has succeeded to infuse all the water in the world with a strong hallucinogen. At a given moment, all the people in the world see a huge flying saucer. What can we say about this saucer? Is it true? Is it “real”?

There is little doubt that the saucer does not exist. But who is to say so? If this statement is left unsaid &ndash does it mean that it cannot exist and, therefore, is untrue? In this case (of the illusionary flying saucer), the statement that remains unsaid is a true statement &ndash and the statement that is uttered by millions is patently false.

Still, the argument can be made that the flying saucer did exist &ndash though only in the minds of those who drank the contaminated water. What is this form of existence? In which sense does a hallucination “exist”? The psychophysical problem is that no causal relationship can be established between a thought and its real life correlate, the brainwaves that accompany it. Moreover, this leads to infinite regression. If the brainwaves created the thought &ndash who created them, who made them happen? In other words: who is it (perhaps what is it) that thinks?

The subject is so convoluted that to say that the mental is a mere subset of the material is to speculate

It is, therefore, advisable to separate the ontological from the epistemological. But which is which? Facts are determined epistemologically and statistically by conscious and intelligent observers. Their “existence” rests on a sound epistemological footing. Yet we assume that in the absence of observers facts will continue their existence, will not lose their “factuality”, their real life quality which is observer-independent and invariant.

What about truth? Surely, it rests on solid ontological foundations. Something is or is not true in reality and that is it. But then we saw that truth is determined psychically and, therefore, is vulnerable, for instance, to hallucinations. Moreover, the blurring of the lines in Quantum, non-Aristotelian, logics implies one of two: either that true and false are only “in our heads” (epistemological) &ndash or that something is wrong with our interpretation of the world, with our exegetic mechanism (brain). If the latter case is true that the world does contain mutually exclusive true and false values &ndash but the organ which identifies these entities (the brain) has gone awry. The paradox is that the second approach also assumes that at least the perception of true and false values is dependent on the existence of an epistemological detection device.

Can something be true and reality and false in our minds? Of course it can (remember “Rashomon”). Could the reverse be true? Yes, it can. This is what we call optical or sensory illusions. Even solidity is an illusion of our senses &ndash there are no such things as solid objects (remember the physicist’s desk which is 99.99999% vacuum with minute granules of matter floating about).

To reconcile these two concepts, we must let go of the old belief (probably vital to our sanity) that we can know the world. We probably cannot and this is the source of our confusion. The world may be inhabited by “true” things and “false” things. It may be true that truth is existence and falsity is non-existence. But we will never know because we are incapable of knowing anything about the world as it is.

We are, however, fully equipped to know about the mental events inside our heads. It is there that the representations of the real world form. We are acquainted with these representations (concepts, images, symbols, language in general) &ndash and mistake them for the world itself. Since we have no way of directly knowing the world (without the intervention of our interpretative mechanisms) we are unable to tell when a certain representation corresponds to an event which is observer-independent and invariant and when it corresponds to nothing of the kind. When we see an image &ndash it could be the result of an interaction with light outside us (objectively “real”), or the result of a dream, a drug induced illusion, fatigue and any other number of brain events not correlated with the real world. These are observer-dependent phenomena and, subject to an agreement between a sufficient number of observers, they are judged to be true or “to have happened” (e.g., religious miracles).

To ask if something is true or not is not a meaningful question unless it relates to our internal world and to our capacity as observers. When we say “true” we mean “exists”, or “existed”, or “most definitely will exist” (the sun will rise tomorrow). But existence can only be ascertained in our minds. Truth, therefore, is nothing but a state of mind. Existence is determined by observing and comparing the two (the outside and the inside, the real and the mental). This yields a picture of the world which may be closely correlated to reality &ndash and, yet again, may not.

When asked, “If you could wish for one thing only, what would that wish be?” almost everyone; from beauty pagent contestants, to politicians, to religious leaders, to children, to the average person on the street states, “Peace On Earth” or “An end to all wars”. Those wishes, while exemplary, are meaningless. As long as humans exist there will never be peace on earth.

Throughout the history of humankind there has never been peace on earth. Cavemen fought other cavemen over territory, food and even women. Cain killed Abel over God’s respect. Gabriel blew down the walls of Jericho. America fought the Revolutionary War for freedom and brother fought against brother in our Civil War for more freedom. There have always been wars and there will always be wars.

As long as humans can think, there will be wars. Wars over such concepts as freedom, honor, dignity, etc.. Wars over territory, greed, power, prejudice, etc.. War is a part of human nature. For example, every human being is prejudiced. If they don’t like some race, nationality or religion, they don’t like short or tall or fat or skinny or smart or not smart or loud or quiet people. Some people don’t like children, some people don’t like old people, some people don’t like people with pets, or people that play their music too loud, or bad drivers, or people that believe in God or people that don’t believe in God. What is right and proper to some people can be wrong or even enraging to other people.

Religion can not stop wars, in fact many wars are fought over religion (Note: I believe that religion is used as an excuse for war not the real reason for war.). Christians fought against Muslims during the Crusades, Many Muslims want death for all non believers. The Catholic Church killed heretics during the Inquisition. The Nazis killed millions of Jews and then started killing Catholics. The Russians under Stalin killed anyone even remotly religious. Protestants killed other Protestants for being the wrong type of Protestant. Muslims killed Muslims for being the wrong type of Muslim. Don’t forget about Atheists (I believe that Atheism is also a religion, it is a religion of non belief.), Stalin was an Atheist and wanted to get rid of all religion. Most of China’s leaders are Atheists and have jailed and killed huge numbers of religious people. History is rife with various types of religious battles.

The main reason for war, however, is the lust for power. The power to make others do and believe as you do and believe, the power to make other people render unto you what you believe is rightfully yours, the power to make other people treat you as you believe you should be treated, the power to gain what you want (ie: money, love, respect, etc.), the power to punish others for doing things that you don’t believe they should do, the power to keep other from having things or thoughts that you don’t have. In other words, the power to be, in some ways God, to make everyone else in your image with you as their ruler.

As long as people have the ability to think, there will be greed, envy, prejudice and anger. As long as those things exist, there will be wars. Most people believe, either religiously or secularly, in the rules set down in the Ten Commandments, but very few people can follow those rules all of the time because our ability to think causes us to want. Wanting causes us to break some or all of the rules. Humans are not perfect. If they were they would not be human.