I’m working on new documentation for my company. Sprinkled throughout them are constant references to something known as an “end-user.”

Exactly what is an “end-user?” How does one differ from a “user?”

Phrases like “end-user” come from the same ilk as “pre-existing.” They are an attempt by the speaker or writer to sound important. One of my first changes to the documentation will be to banish “end-user” from the company vernacular. If only it were that easy to banish it from the software industry.

I Googled a link which led me to a very nice resource on remote viewing, called the Firedocs Collection. It includes the original DIA manual for remote viewing.

A sample from the introduction:

The second [trainee], Tom “Nance” … completed all training through Stage VI as the proof-of-principle “guinea pig.” His results were not just impressive. Some could even be considered spectacular.

This is apparently the manual on which all the RV courses are based, and it’s available for free online. I was looking for a way to evaluate this stuff and it looks like I found it.

It even references a “Matrix,” too (though not the movie type).

Dave Dobson’s past is not a secret. Not technically, anyway – not since the relevant US government intelligence documents were declassified and placed in the vaults of the National Security Archive, in Washington DC. But Dobson, now 65, is a modest man, and once he had discovered his vocation – teaching physics at Beloit College, in Wisconsin – he felt no need to drop dark hints about his earlier life. You could have taken any number of classes at Beloit with Professor Dobson, until his recent retirement, without having any reason to know that in his mid-20s, working entirely as an amateur and equipped with little more than a notebook and a library card, he designed a nuclear bomb.

This morning as I was getting ready for work, I became aware of how aware I was to my location. Whenever I’m in a hurry to go somewhere and have to retrieve stuff scattered around the house, the place where I think a thought seems to become significant. It is as if the thought and the place are connected.

An age-old speaker’s trick for organizing one’s thoughts is to do it by place. “In the first place…” begins countless speeches or points.

When someone tries to recall a long-lost fact, their eyes will often focus (or unfocus, rather) on a particular point in front of them. Science has shown some evidence of a mental “lost and found” which corresponds to this point in space. Interestingly, people seem to have a favorite spot for this look, their eyes returning to it again and again.

While all this isn’t new to me, I thought of how it could be applied to so-called metaphysical concepts. Matter is nothing but thought cloaked in energy. Highly energetic thoughts can indelibly imprint matter and place. Thoughts with enough energy can organize matter.

There is much more I could write about this topic, but work gets in the way once again. Maybe I can straighten these concepts out with a little more thought.

Yesterday afternoon marked the summer solstice, the point where the Northern Hemisphere is closest to the sun. It was the longest day of the year and the official start of summer. I hope you celebrated this celestial event by soaking up the absolutely gorgeous weather we had yesterday.

Though today isn’t quite as long as yesterday, it still promises to be a fantastic one, weather-wise. Having spent most of last summer in the ICN at WakeMed, I intend to get out and enjoy this summer!

I promised to write about attending the talk at the Rhine Institute by the remote viewing expert. Said expert goes by the name of Dale Graff, one of the founders of Project Stargate, the CIA-funded effort to harness psychic abilities for use in intelligence.

Needless to say, STARGATE was a controversial project – a hot potato when word leaked out about it in 1984. After the plug was officially pulled on the project in 1995, Graff and others could come forward with news of its activities.

Graff is a physicist by training and portrays the bookish mannerisms of a lifelong scientist. Working for the CIA as an analyst of Soviet technology, he gets word that the Soviets have invested in research of psychic phenomena. Graff writes up a proposal for funding which mentions a “psychic gap” between the Cold War nations and the project was born.

Graff’s background is most intriguing to me. He is a trained scientist – quite used to working within the boundaries provided by conventional science. Yet somehow he saw beyond those boundaries and created a career in an area of knowledge most consider to be voodoo. Graff told us that he actively kept a dream journal and discovered that his dreams were often prophetic. Buttressed by his own experience in so-called psychic phenomena, he felt confident he could work to improve understanding in this area.

And that is exactly what he did. I’m not sure who coined the phrase “remote viewing,” but by doing so, he or she removed the biggest obstacle in its understanding. Suddenly it is no longer taboo – it is a technique. Along with researchers at the Stanford Research Institute, Graff’s team helped to refine mental capabilities that once seemed like so much fantasy.

Graff narrated a slideshow where he highlighted the often stunning success of his remote viewing team. His team played a role in locating downed pilots, hostages, fugitives, and secret projects hidden away behind the Iron Curtain. The details provided were so jaw-droppingly precise that one’s mind boggles at the odds they came about simply through chance. After a half-dozen success stories, I became convinced.

While Graff didn’t detail his team’s failures (other than their advice being neglected in the Col. William Higgins hostage case), the successes are too impressive to dismiss.

I left the talk wanting to learn more about this skill, including how to use it myself. If it really can be done, I want to see for myself.

I was reading Lady Sun’s blog entry with some of her views on Bush. In it was this link showing the “freedom” that Operation Iraqi Freedom brought to Iraqi civilians, including infants liberated from their arms.

As an American, I am ashamed of these pictures. As a father, I am absolutely sickened. I cannot help but look into the faces of these innocent children and see the face of my daughter. They are children, for God’s sake!! Children just like my daughter. Children my daughter would be proud to call friends.

And we killed those kids. The lucky ones were only scarred for life.

How do I explain to my daughter why those innocent kids were bombed? How can anybody explain this? Why, after centuries plagued by the horrors of war, do we continue this madness?

Update at 2214:

Here are a few more galleries to shock and awe you:
March For Justice – Shock & Awe
Wade Hudson – Baghdad Journal
Iraq Peace Team

I was browsing the site of my favorite sound editing software, Cool Edit Pro when I saw news that Adobe purchased Cool Edit’s parent company, Syntrillium.

Cool Edit has always been the best damn shareware sound-editing software out there. In fact, I consider it among the best shareware ever! I certainly hope that Adobe treats it with respect and doesn’t mess with a good thing.

While all the attention is focused on Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle, Adobe quietly snaps up the coolest companies. You gotta hand it to them for having good taste, eh?

I’m in Durham this evening on my way to a last-minute talk given at the Rhine Research Center by the guy who ran the CIA’s remote viewing program. This is the program which attempted (with mixed results) to use psychics to locate military booty.

I don’t have an opinion on the program, one way or another, but since it touches on spook stuff (both in the military as well as the psychic use of the word), naturally I’m interested. I probably wouldn’t have made the trek out here, though, if it wasn’t for that unusual experience I had in Asheville a few weeks back. I’d like to find out more about what that was.

I’ve long been interested in the Rhine Institute, it being “ground zero” for serious scientific study of as-yet-unexplained phenomena. I get spammed by their mailing list about once a week, so I figure it’s “put up or shut up” time for them, too!

I’ll write a report after the talk ends tonight.