Slashdot Mirror

It happened that there were three monkeys in a cage. Suspended at the top if the cage was a bunch of bananas. There was a ladder from the floor of the cage up to the bananas. One of the monkeys, who was both clever and agile and also liked bananas, decided to head up the ladder to grab a banana.

Imagine his surprise (not to mention that of the other two monkeys) when suddenly a fire hose washed down the cage, blasting all three monkeys over to one side. Cold and shivering, the three monkeys regrouped and thought about what had happened.

Monkeys don’t have a real long memory and, after awhile, a second monkey thought again about the bananas and headed up the ladder. Same thing—a fire hose washed all three monkeys over to the side of the cage. They picked themselves up, shook themselves off and hoped the sun would come out to warm them up.

After another couple of hours, the third monkey couldn’t resist and he went for it. Sure enough, same result—fire hose and cold, wet, miserable monkeys.

Finally, all three monkeys became convinced that going for the bananas was a bad idea, and went on with the rest of their lives.

Then the zookeeper drafted one of the monkeys for another exhibit and replaced him with a new monkey. The new monkey arrived, looked up at the bananas, looked over at the ladder and couldn’t figure out why the other monkeys hadn’t gone for the bananas. He headed for the ladder and got about 1 rung up when the remaining "experienced" monkeys tackled him, dragged him to the floor and pummeled him into submission. He quickly concluded that climbing the ladder wasn’t a good idea.

A week later, the zookeeper replaced the second monkey. Monkeys are somewhat single-minded. The new monkey spied the bananas, headed for the ladder, and the remaining two monkeys tackled him and pummeled him into submission.

Finally the third monkey was replaced and, you guessed it, the same thing happened. So life went on among the monkeys and after some time the first of the "new" monkeys was replaced with yet another monkey. Sure enough, the new guy saw the bananas, went for the ladder and his two peers then tackled him and beat him into submission.

Why was that? None of these monkeys knew anything about the fire hose. None of them had ever gotten wet for having climbed the ladder in the quest for bananas. Yet the monkeys had been fully culturalized to know that it was a bad idea. And you could likely go on individually replacing monkeys one at a time forever and expect the same result.

The Parable of the Monkeys can be readily applied to just about every organizational community structure in the human sphere. We can laugh at the silly monkeys, but humans are the only creatures on Earth capable of amassing and arming themselves to fight and die by the tens and hundreds of thousands because another human claims yet another human is building firehoses to keep all the bananas for himself.

...., stopping the theft of money from the people that they could otherwise channel their resources to where the market needs those resources to go at the time,....

The purpose of public education was to have an educated electorate - see Jefferson quote.

Somehow, the business elite lobbyied to have public - taxpayer funded - education turned into vocational training.

Business should do their OWN training, STFU, and pray to their personal God for their future.

Because the pitchforks and fire is coming and it's THEIR fault.

Because an educated electorate would have seen through the propaganda (mostly for-profit propaganda whose goal was to inflame for ratings) and voted appropriately. Instead they fall for nonsense and more than likely shoot themselves in the foot - with pitchforks and fire and ....

You have to rely on forensics not doing things that would put them into jail for many years if found out. First, because they would go to jail, second because they are decent people.

Yes, the same way you have to rely on police labs not to make things up.

No, wait...

In quite the ironic perversion of intent, a nonprofit seed exchange organization designed to promote independent varieties, has been co-opted by a Monsanto-connected board member. In the near future, we may see previously heirloom-designated subspecies patented.

None of this means the current system is ideal or even good. Too many rules, loopholes, some corporations getting out of taxes, etcetera.

The APT-TAX. It was devised by University of Wisconsin Economics Professor. He calculated that if you taxed each and every transaction in the economy at 0.3% rate, you would get enough to abolish every other tax in the land from the federal to local level.

To give you an idea, someone gives you $1,000, you pay $3. Someone gives you $100,000, you pay $300. $1M, $3K. $1B, $3M.

Now, how does this bring in enough income? Well, it is based on every transaction on the economy. There are no loopholes, whether it's: Timmy getting lunch money from mom/dad, charity, business, stock sales or purchases, home sales, or billion dollar transfers between companies. Yet, it is so low, it doesn't create friction.

Of course, on a personal level, the government would miss out on everyday transactions between people. But that's not much of the economy anyway. Based on every $10k income level, the could charge $10 on these missed on April 15th. So a $100K income person would be $100 on this assumption. Or something like that.

After that point, employers, businesses, banks, etcetera would have to track all their transactions (they already do) and charge them automatically and forward them to the government. Point of Sales like 7-Eleven or your supermarket would do the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat...ransaction_tax

http://proliberty.com/observer/20010904.htm

With such a simple tax code, imagine much of the IRS, accountants, and everyone else that would go out of business. And the boom in the economy without all that drag.

The last story that they ran on here regarding EM allergies was in Africa.

    I went looking around for history on this. The oldest I could find online was a 2003 case where a school in Chicago refused to use wifi because it could potentially harm students.

    this story references Canada and the UK.

    Oddly enough, I found this story from Santa Fe (the same city as this case in this story), where Arthur Firstenberg, the leader of a group of wifi sensitives, sued the city to not allow wifi to be installed throughout the city. He lost.

    Coincidentally, this came up again in January 2010 in this story, where Mr. Firstenberg sued his neighbor for using wifi.

    And coincidentally, he's the same guy in today's article.

    So, if you follow the trail back, you'll find that he's been making noise about this for a long time.

    In this 2007 article is mentioned for forming the Cellular Phone Task Force

    He is in the citations with:
Electromagnetic Fields, (EMF) Killing Fields," Arthur Firstenberg, The Ecologist, v. 34, n. 5, 6-10-2004.

"Radio Wave Packet," Arthur Firstenberg, Cellular Phone Task Force, Sept 2001

    In 1997, his group published this mortality report. Obviously cell phones kill people. Everyone repeat after me "Correlation does not imply causation".

    But hey, who am I to call a guy an attention seeking lunatic. Just because it's been spouting crap for over a decade *AND* getting published for it (drama queens love their attention), doesn't mean that he's all wrong. Talk to the guy yourself. On his site, http://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/, he asks you to contact him. e-mail: info@cellphonetaskforce.org phone: (505) 471-0129 .

    Yes, those were copy & pasted directly from his site. If he didn't want to call, he wouldn't have put the details up there.

Google phonebook reverses the number to his name.

    When you call, remind him that there's electromagnetic fields around everything electrical. That includes the wires running inside the walls of his house. Yes Mr. Firstenberg, you're allergic to your own house. Run, run for the Faraday cage in the mountains. It's the only place you'll be safe. Well, kinda safe. You gotta watch out for the government using their ELF radios. I saw a X-Files once, where a guys head exploded because of ELF experiments. If it was on TV, it must be true.

I googled it and found this story:

http://www.proliberty.com/observer/prt0497a.htm

I never heard the term prior.

What about counting the people poisoned with plutonium injections during the Cold War? The U.S.A government has a web site about it. Of course, you could read this too. The victims of this testing are mostly dead now, but might have lived long, healthy lives if not for the United States need to know what radition does to people.

And, if we go back to the 19th century, what about the many thousands of Confederate fighters who were killed by the Union forces? I'd say they deserve to be counted as citizens killed by the United States.

Our government has relied upon force to keep itself in control of everything it wants to, and only the peoples' right to challange uncontrolled government authority in court has kept us from becoming a completely facist state. I still love our country, and see it has made progress toward peace and justice for all, but let's not ignore that some people in power want to corrupt the system with facist tendancies, and they need to be stopped now!

like the FBI has never killed anyone whom they were snooping on?

It would appear that the legislature passed into law a powerful incentive for county governments to foreclose upon private property by giving them the authority to keep all the "profit" realized from such sales for government activities.

Actually, there was a case not too long ago where a kid who was a photography buff was arrested for posession of... film canisters. Apparently, someone found them in his locker or on his person and assumed that he was using them to transport drugs. He was arrested, and eventually tried, for possession of drug paraphenalia.

The punchline? Possession of paraphenalia isn't a crime where he lives. (Of course, he wasn't convicted, either.)

Full story here.

-FL

Some people get upset when other people say that people may not be entirely responsible for their actions. This means that significant parts of our goverment, society, and justice system are flawed

The interesting thing about case law is it does not necessarily reflect the original intent of our founding fathers. Case law is a documentation of the modern interpretation of facts as presented in that particular time, by a particular lawyer who argued pursuasively his/her view. An individual lawyer can successful in his/her argument without being "right." They were simply successful in arguing their point.

The issue here is about what did our forefathers intend? See http://proliberty.com/observer/20000313.htm for another bit of "case law."